. A new theoretical framework, based on wake analysis in the moving and fixed frames of reference (MFOR and FFOR), is proposed to break down the velocity and turbulence fields in the wake of a wind turbine. This approach adds theoretical support to models based on the dynamic wake meandering (DWM) and opens the way for a fully analytical and physically-based model of the wake that takes meandering and atmospheric stability into account, which is developed in the companion paper. The mean velocity and turbulence in the FFOR are broken down into different terms, which are functions 5 of the velocity and turbulence in the MFOR. These terms can be regrouped as pure velocity, pure meandering, pure turbulence and cross-terms, the last ones being implicitly neglected in the DWM. The shape and relative importance of the different terms are estimated with the large eddy simulation solver Meso-NH coupled with an actuator line method. A single wind turbine wake is simulated on flat terrain, under three cases of stability: neutral, unstable, and stable. In the velocity breakdown, the cross-term is found to be relatively low. This is not the case for the turbulence breakdown equation where even though they 10 are overall of a lesser magnitude than the pure terms, the cross-terms redistribute the turbulence and induce non-negligible asymmetry. It is also found that as atmospheric stability increases, the pure turbulence contribution becomes relatively larger and pure meandering relatively smaller.


Elemental iron powders are widely used to fortify flour and other cereal products. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that baking enhances the bioavailability of elemental iron powders by oxidizing Fe(0) to Fe(2+) or Fe(3+). An in vitro digestion/Caco-2 cell culture model and a piglet model were used to measure bioavailability. Bread flour, either unfortified or fortified with hydrogen-reduced (HR) iron powder or FeSO(4) (300 mg Fe/kg flour), was baked into bread. For the in vitro studies, bread samples were treated with pepsin at pH 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 and subsequently incubated with pancreatic enzymes at pH 7 in a chamber positioned above monolayers of cultured Caco-2 cells. Ferritin formation in the cells was used as an index of iron bioavailability. Ferritin formation in cells fed HR Fe bread was similar to cells fed FeSO(4) bread when the peptic digestion was conducted at a pH 2 but lower when the peptic phase was conducted at pH 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 (P < 0.05). Pig diets containing 35% dried bread were prepared and fed to cross-bred (Hampshire x Landrace x Yorkshire) anemic pigs in two studies. The rate of increase in hemoglobin Fe over the feeding period was used to calculate relative biological value (RBV), an index of iron bioavailability. In the first pig study, RBV of HR Fe added to flour prior to baking was 47.9% when compared to FeSO(4) fortified flour (P < 0.05). In the second pig study, a third treatment consisting of unfortified bread with HR iron added during diet mixing (after bread baking) was included. RBVs of the HR Fe diet (Fe added after baking) and HR Fe diet (Fe added before baking) were 40.1% and 53.5%, respectively, compared to the FeSO(4) diet. Differences in RBV between the HR Fe (before and after baking) and FeSO(4) (before baking) treatment groups were significant, but the difference between the before and after HR treatment groups was not significant. We conclude that bread baking does not enhance the bioavailability of elemental iron powders.


Objective: The aim of this retrospective study was to assess epidemiologic, demographic characteristics and clinical findings of Henoch-Schonlein purpura (HSP) in the Taif region of Saudi Arabia.
Methods: Records of 27 patients who were followed-up with the diagnosis of HSP between January 2012 and December 2015 in the department of pediatrics in Alhada armed forces hospital of Taif region. Demographic characteristics of the patients, season of presentation, clinical findings, triggering factors, laboratory data, and the duration of follow-up periods were evaluated.
Results: Of the 27 patients, 14 were boys (52%) and 13 were girls (48%), with a ratio of 1.1:1. Ages ranged from 2 years to 18 years, with a mean of 8.3 years. About 45% of the patients had a history of preceding upper respiratory infection. All of them had the typical skin rash. The percentages of joint, gastro-intestinal and renal manifestations were 85.2%, 77.8% and 37%, respectively. Testicular involvement was found in two patients, while no involvement was recorded for the central nervous system.
Conclusion: It is obviously that HSP patients could have various clinical symptoms and exceptional complications; however, it can lead to long-term illness particularly in patients with severe kidney involvement. In this study, there were mean age and season distribution differences for the HSP patients in Taif region comparing to other area in KSA.


The detections of 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov within just two years of each other impressively demonstrate that interstellar objects (ISOs) must be common in the Milky Way. Once released from their parent system, these ISOs travel for billions of years through interstellar space. While often imagined as empty, interstellar space contains gas and dust most prominent in the form of molecular clouds. Performing numerical simulations, we test how often ISOs cross such molecular clouds (MCs). We find that the ISOs pass through MCs amazingly often. In the solar neighborhood, ISOs typically spend 0.1%–0.2% of their journey inside MCs, for relatively slow ISOs (<5 km s−1) this can increase to 1%–2%, equivalent to 10–20 Myr per Gyr. Thus the dynamically youngest ISOs spend the longest time in MCs. In other words, MCs must mainly contain relatively young ISOs (<1–2 Gyr). Thus the half-life of the seeding process by ISOs is substantially shorter than a stellar lifetime. The actual amount of time spent in MCs decreases with distance to the Galactic center. We find that ISOs pass through MCs so often that backtracing their path to find their parent star beyond 250 Myr seems pointless. Besides, we give a first estimate of the ISO density depending on the distance to the Galactic center based on the stellar distribution.


Statement of purpose Falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries among adults 65 and older, and the risk of falling increases with age. The Otago Exercise Program, administered by physical therapists in patients' homes, reduces fall risk in the highest risk age group, adults 80 and older, but wide-scale implementation is challenging in geographic areas with an inadequate number of PTs. To address this barrier, Oregon is pilot testing an alternative delivery model. These activities are integrated into the CDC-funded Oregon Senior Fall Prevention Program and in collaboration with the University of North Carolina/Carolina Geriatric Education Centre. Methods/Approach The alternative Otago model was launched in July 2014, among a target population of 75 home meal delivery clients. Over the course of a year, a minimum of 8 home visits are conducted by personal trainers. Participant progress is reviewed weekly with the project team, which includes a physical therapist. Functional tests are conducted at program onset, 6 months and 12 months; fall-related outcomes and compliance to the exercise program are also recorded for the same intervals. Patients from a simultaneous implementation of the traditional PT-led Otago program will serve as a comparison group. The implementation assessment is ongoing. Results Preliminary results will be assessed to compare patient outcomes between the alternative and traditional Otago models. Conclusions Project findings will help determine whether an alternative delivery model can demonstrate equivalency with the traditional Otago program, potentially supporting wider service-delivery. Significance and contribution to the field The success of an alternative delivery model to traditional Otago could be of national significance for reaching older adults in rural areas or areas that lack home physical therapists.


Using 1988-95 data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, risk of death was compared among front- and rear-seated passengers ages 12 and younger involved in fatal crashes, controlling for restraint use, passenger airbags, and other variables. Among children sitting in the rear, risk of death was reduced about 35% in vehicles without passenger airbags and about 50% in vehicles with passenger airbags (difference was not statistically significant). Rear seats were protective for both restrained and unrestrained children. Children were about 10-20% less likely to die in rear center than in rear outboard positions.


Background: Receiving Oxygen during Cesarean section under spinal anesthesia can be a good way to prevent from nausea and vomiting of mothers and hypoxemia of fetus. This study aimed to compare the effect of two treatment methods of Oxygen therapy with facemask and nasal catheter on vomiting and nausea and patient's comfort during Cesarean section under spinal anesthesia. Methods: This clinical trial study was conducted on 50 candidate patients for elective cesarean section, recruited via convenience sampling , were divided into two groups. For the first group, 8 liters of Oxygen per minute with face mask and for the second one, 4 liters of Oxygen per minute with nasal catheter was administered during cesarean section and after that in recovery unit. Nausea, vomiting and comfort were recorded during the first 30 min of surgery and in recovery unit. Data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney test, independent t test, Fisher's exact test and Chi-square tests. Results: No significant difference was observed between two groups in terms of nausea and vomiting during surgery and after that. Moreover, there was no significant difference between two groups in terms of comfort during (p=0.14) and after surgery (p=0.12). In terms of clinical treatment, patients who received Oxygen through nasal catheter felt more comfort. Conclusion: Nasal catheter by administering lower dose of oxygen had a similar effect to face mask on nausea and vomiting. Therefore, since patients feel more comfort when using nasal catheter, it is preferable in preventing the nausea and vomiting in Cesarean section during spinal anesthesia.


Abstract Background: Established general risk score models for intensive care patients incorporate several clinical and laboratory data. However, the collection, documentation and classification of clinical data are time-consuming, incur labor-related costs, and are dependent on the experience of the examiner. Therefore, in the present study a general score for medical intensive care patients based solely on routine laboratory parameters is presented. Methods: Parameter selection was performed using stepwise logistic regression analysis. The maximum likelihood estimate of variable influence on mortality provided a relative weighting for each variable. The new score was compared to two established risk models (Acute Physiology And Chronic Health Evaluation II, APACHE II; and Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, SAPS II). Results: The study included 528 medical intensive care patients with a mean age of 65.4±0.7 years. The in-hospital mortality was 16.5% (87/528). Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed eight parameters with significant prognostic power: alanine aminotransferase, cholesterol, creatinine, leukocytes, sodium, thrombocytes, urea, and age. These parameters were used to build a new laboratory score called Critical Risk Evaluation by Early Keys (CREEK). The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was 0.857 (0.814–0.900). Pearson correlation analysis showed significant correlation between CREEK and APACHE II (r=0.550) and SAPS II (r=0.516; p<0.001; n=387). The areas under curve of the APACHE II and the SAPS II were 0.869 and 0.874, respectively. Conclusions: We show that a general risk score for medical intensive care patients on admission based solely on routine laboratory parameters is feasible. The quality of risk estimation using CREEK is comparable to established risk models. Furthermore, this new score is based on quality controlled low-cost laboratory parameters that are routinely measured on admission to the intensive care unit. Therefore, no additional costs are involved. Clin Chem Lab Med 2008;46:855–62.


In this chapter we have described some of the experiences of a special psychiatric clinic for children with epilepsy, drawing our examples from a series of 50 children. The behavioral consequences of epilepsy cannot be adequately described within the limited nosology available for classifying the behavior disorders of children. As an alternative, a series of behaviors which children actually require in order to maintain their social existence have been identified; furthermore, impairments of those behaviors have been pointed to, and consequences of these behavioral impairments have been outlined. The behavioral consequences of epilepsy are often multiple and are sometimes mutually interactive. The extent to which these behavioral deviations depend both upon the exhibition of seizures and the presence of structural abnormalities in the brain is made most evident by the marked changes in behavior which can be achieved when epilepsy is relieved and a lesion is removed. Unfortunately, such a stratagem is not available to the majority of children with epilepsy. For the time being, their cerebral impairment and the continuation of their epilepsy have to be taken for granted, and intervention then consists of the best possible management of their impairments and their distressing behaviors. Such management clearly requires psychiatric and psychological skills, although these skills do not necessarily lead to greater success than does the use of anticonvulsants or the use of surgery. Success is not an adequate measure of the appropriateness of the endeavor. It goes without saying that not all children with epilepsy suffer behavioral consequences along these lines, and indeed behavioral disturbances were not universal even in this highly selected series. Some children were seen merely as a way of improving their medical status or achieving surgical treatment. These more traditional medical maneuvers are easier to undertake and are more understandable to parents than are complex strategies of psychiatry. In any event, parents deserve considerable support. The language of psychiatry for children with organic cerebral impairments is extremely limited; this chapter has been an attempt to improve our vocabulary, which will be a necessary underpinning in order to improve the quality of our classification. Finally, we return to Bridge's statement. Firstly, we do not regard epilepsy as a disease any more than we would regard cough as a disease, and we find that orientations in that direction are likely to thwart our attempt at piece-by-piece dismantling of the many sorts of disease which might be associated with seizures.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


With the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy, there has been a significant change in the epidemiology of pulmonary disease in HIV/AIDS. The relative prevalence of non-infectious manifestations is likely to rise. HIV associated pulmonary hypertension (HIV-PH), albeit low prevalence, is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Presently, despite having scanty evidence on the management modalities of HIV-PH, evidence extrapolated from idiopathic pulmonary hypertension is being utilised to effectively manage some of these patients. Efforts should therefore be made to screen, diagnose and treat these patients. A case of a thirty year old female with HIV disease and severe pulmonary hypertension is presented.


The behaviour of gas-sensitive resistors based on WO3 towards small concentrations of ozone in air can be understood with a simple model involving the reaction of ozone with surface oxygen vacancies. This model has been validated by comparison with experimental results for the effects of varying oxygen partial pressure on the ozone response. A complete description of the behaviour of devices constructed by printing WO3 as porous layers onto an impermeable substrate requires consideration of the effects of the microstructure of such a device upon its response. A very simple series-parallel equivalent circuit model captures the effects and allows a simple interpretation of the sensor behaviour, including the quadratic limiting steady state resistance response to ozone and the effects of variation of device thickness. An important fact that allows WO3 to be used at rather high temperatures as an effective ozone sensor is that ozone does not decompose at any discernible rate on the oxide surface. Saturation of the oxide surface at ambient temperature with water vapour inhibits the ozone response when the sensor is subsequently heated. The effect can be removed by heating at sufficiently high temperature. Water vapour also gives a high-temperature sensor response, but appears to act at sites different to those that mediate the response to ozone.


We consider the computation of the surface tension of the fluid-fluid interface for the Widom-Rowlinson [J. Chem. Phys. 52, 1670 (1970)] binary mixture from direct simulation of the inhomogeneous system. We make use of the standard mechanical route, in which the surface tension follows from the computation of the normal and tangential components of the pressure tensor of the system. In addition to the usual approach, which involves simulations of the inhomogeneous system in the canonical ensemble, we also consider the computation of the surface tension in an ensemble where the pressure perpendicular (normal) to the planar interface is kept fixed. Both approaches are seen to provide consistent values of the interfacial tension. The issue of the system-size dependence of the surface tension is addressed. In addition, simulations of the fluid-fluid coexistence properties of the mixture are performed in the semigrand canonical ensemble. Our results are compared with existing data of the Widom-Rowlinson mixture and are also examined in the light of the vapor-liquid equilibrium of the thermodynamically equivalent one-component penetrable sphere model.


It has been established by method of fluorescentive spectroscopy with using of zond FNA (N-phenilnaftilamine) that under incubation of human erythrocytes in Fenton's system (under intensive generation of oxygen active forms) the hydrophobicity of major hemoglobin fraction is lowered. The changes in the state of hemoglobin A intramolecular structure are correlated with formation of oxidative modification products. It has been shown that aldehydes and ketones of neutral character, which may be oxidative modification products of hydrophobic aminoacid residues, have the highest coefficient of correlation (r =-0.95).


Internal auditing has evolved from accounting oriented to management oriented. The past role of internal auditor as the 'watchdog' now has evolved into internal consultant, which gives input for organization's improvement, and also as a catalyst for the organization. The scope of auditing has become broader, not only focusing on financial audit and compliance audit, but also on risk management, and on every aspect that influenced organizations' performance. The audit orientation now has moved toward auditing based on risks. By applying risk based internal auditing, internal auditors are expected to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in doing audit. In designing Risk Based Internal Auditing (RBIA), internal auditors are expected to cooperate with the organization's committee, in order to obtain clear understanding about the expectation of auditing and monitoring, and how these activities can be grouped to minimalize risks in the organization. Risks triggered RBIA, and the function of RBIA is to report whether those risks have been controlled. Key Words : internal auditing, Risk Based Internal Auditing, inherent risk, residual risk, risk appetite


The previously started experiments to verify the feasibility of obtaining molybdenum and molybdenum carbide coatings from oxide-based melts were continued. A molten salt bath consisting of an equimolar mixture of Na{sub 2}WO{sub 4} and K{sub 2}WO{sub 4} was used. The molybdenum and carbon species were introduced as alkali molybdate and carbonate. The coating morphology depends strongly on melt composition, temperature and moisture content. Application of initial pre-electrolysis significantly changes the composition and morphology of the coatings. Using non-lithium alkali salts, coatings of better quality were obtained. Adding 3-8 mol% Na{sub 2}B{sub 4}O{sub 7} to the basic non-lithium bath composition was observed to cause significant morphology and quality changes. Bath compositions produce a more uniform small-grain-size coating and they do not require extensive purification. Constant current and reverse and/or pulse current patterns were applied during plating. The latter produces smaller-grain-size coatings at the same working temperature. Research was undertaken to deposit Mo and Mo{sub 2} C films on a substrate 2.5 cm by 3.8 cm in area. Using an orthogonal factorial design, a new series of experiments has been carried out to investigate the effect of the evaporation rate of Mo(CO){sub 6} as a precursor. From the weight gain of themore » substrate, initial conclusions have been drawn about the optimal conditions for maximum evaporation rate, deposition rate and thickness. Thicker coatings (a few {mu}m) have been obtained which show two different types of crystallites growing on an initially amorphous film. A two dimensional transport and reaction kinetics model for a parallel-plate PECVD reactor was outlined. The PECVD results will be used to verify the model. The primary parameters to be explored are those representing the deposition kinetics of Mo and C.« less


OBJECTIVE
To investigate the physician sex preference of male adolescents and to explore the factors that may moderate this preference.

DESIGN
Anonymous survey.

SETTING
An adolescent clinic associated with a large pediatric hospital centrally located within a metropolitan Midwestern city.

PARTICIPANTS
The 67 male adolescent patients in the convenience sample ranged in age from 10 to 18 years, and 43.3% were African American, 40.3% were white, and 16.4% were classified as "other." More than half of the subjects reported being raised by a single mother with just enough money to meet their basic needs.

INTERVENTION
None.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Among the variables investigated were expressed physician sex preference and participant connectedness to a male and/or female parent or role model.

RESULTS
More subjects reported a preference for a female physician (50.8%) than for a male physician (39.4%) when the examination was a physical or medical checkup. The preference for a female physician during a genital examination was also higher (49.2%) than preference for a male physician (39.1%). Analysis of variance revealed significant ethnic group differences in physician sex preference (F2,64 = 12.02, P<.001). African American males had a significantly higher preference for a female physician than did whites or those who identified themselves as other. Neither socioeconomic status nor age demonstrated a statistically significant effect.

CONCLUSIONS
This preliminary investigation has provided evidence that ethnicity of the adolescent and the sex of the examining physician may contribute significantly to the success of the health care interaction.


The social networking is the high priority media sites in the present era. Among the social networking media sites, Facebook has gained a high popularity in youth. Therefore the aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between Facebook addiction and depression of the students and to identify the gender differences in the depression due to Facebook addiction. The sample consists of 200 students from different colleges and universities in Peshawar selected through purposive sampling. Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS) and Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) were used for data collection. The results showed that level of depression is high among Facebook addicts than in normal Facebook users. Analysis showed a significant positive correlation between Facebook addiction and depression among students but a non-significant gender difference in the depression level of addicts was indicated.


As part of the research project Co-operatives in Context: Race, Ethnicity, Displacement and Exclusion, Dr. Jo-Anne Lee at the University of Victoria partnered with community elder Nora Curry to document how, following two decades of systematic efforts by the City of Vancouver to destroy the Strathcona neighbourhood under the guise of "urban renewal", the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) worked through the 1970's to renew, rebuild and restore the residential character of their community, making use of the co-operative housing model.
- This is a historical study of the low income, working-class men and women from non-English speaking, Chinese and other ethnic minority backgrounds who worked to reclaim and rebuild Strathcona, using culturally hybrid models, principles and practices to achieve their goals and to leverage power.
The co-operative model directly helped SPOTA to:
• Stabilize and restore the residential character of the neighbourhood by building new, affordable family houses on vacant land.
• Ensure the city did not sell expropriated lots to commercial property developers and set off speculation.
• Build affordable housing for former residents and tenants, in turn helping to ensure the survival of adjacent Chinatown.
• Claim the right of non-mobility as citizens, the right to participate in decisions affecting their community, and the right to have their neighbourhood treated the same as any other residential neighbourhood in Vancouver.

This document provides an overview of the research findings.


Doppler frequency estimates generated by a GNSS receiver are essential for the evaluation of the user velocity. In this paper, a theoretical framework allowing the evaluation of Doppler measurement accuracy is introduced. The variance of Doppler estimates is related to the Carrier-to-Noise density power ratio (C/N0) and the type of processing adopted by the receiver. Both standard sequential and highsensitivity receivers adopting block processing techniques are considered. A general formula quantifying the Doppler variance is derived and applied to these two receiver architectures. Moreover, the concept of Doppler bandwidth is introduced for quantifying the amount of input noise transferred to the final Doppler estimates. The generality of the theory is validated using live GPS data and a good agreement between theoretical and empirical results is found.


Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease characterized by demyelination of neurons in the central nervous system. In order to study the mechanisms underlying MS, we use the well-described mouse model, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), during which, the CD4 T cell subsets, TH1 and TH17, are associated with immunopathology. STAT4 is an important TH1 transcription factor that, when activated by IL-12, results in the production of IFNγ. Deletion of STAT4 protects mice from EAE; in contrast, deletion of IL-12 and IFNγ does not ameliorate disease. This disconnect raises the question about the role of STAT4 in EAE. The IL-18R complex is thought to be regulated by STAT4, and it has been shown that IL-18R-/- mice are not susceptible to EAE indicating the importance of this receptor during disease. Due to the association between STAT4 and IL-18R, we have investigated the regulation of the IL-18R complex in vitro as well as during disease and the requirement of STAT4 for its expression. Interestingly, we find that in vitro maximal IL-18R levels are detected on WT TH1 CD4 T cells and that this expression is dependent on STAT4. However, in vivo, we find the IL-18Rα expression is similar on WT and STAT4-/- CD4 T cells during EAE. Taken together, these data indicate an important role for STAT4 in IL-18R expression. Nevertheless, during autoimmune chronic inflammation, other factors promote IL-18R independent of STAT4 signaling.


The aim is to conduct the culturological analysis of circus industry in modern Ukraine in the context of the state culture policy, define and substantiate the essential contents of the state regulation of circus industry in the context and within its legislative and normativelegal field.
The relevance of the main provisions of this study in the formation of the latest scientific discourse in the field of circus art is substantiated. The basic concept of circus industry was updated, which lies in formation of a legislative and regulatory framework for the development of national circus art. The culturological analysis of the circus development program is carried out. It is emphasized that the legislative and regulatory framework of the sphere of culture has universal, on the one hand and on the other hand specific provisions, inherent only in a particular art form. Emphasis is made on the need to introduce a modern, civilized paternalistic state policy for the development of circus art, in particular. It is emphasized that modern civilized paternalism will allow to maintain a stable presence of the national circus product at the national and world market of cultural and artistic services, and through this — to provide the stable development of domestic circus industry. It is updated that thanks to modern paternalism and enhanced budget support for all components of the circus industry, such as: training systems for creative and managerial staff, amateur circus art system, stationary circuses system, will ensure sustainable development of the national circus industry in its entirety.
Therefore, the purpose of the article is to carry out a culturological analysis of circus in modern Ukraine in the context of state culture policy, to determine and justify the essence of state regulation of circus, in the context and within its legislative and regulatory framework.
As the most scientific ones for the study of circus industry in the context of state culture policy can be considered the following methodological approaches: culturological analysis of the legislative and regulatory field of culture; convergentdivergent approach, which considers the legislative and regulatory framework in a dynamic aspect as an integral system that normalizes the relations between the state and the sphere of culture and creates conditions for the development of arts; the principle of comparative analysis, aimed at identifying specific components and finding universal, peculiar to the entire artistic sphere legislative and regulatory documents.
Thus, the scientific novelty of the represented work is that the state culture policy in the field of circus industry is considered as an integral, systemic phenomenon, the basic component of which is the legislative and regulatory field.
Conclusions. Since Ukraine's independence, the state has formed and pursued a culture policy that regulates the relationship between the cultural and artistic spheres and the state. After all, the state provides the development of culture and art, free access to cultural heritage, provides comprehensive artistic and aesthetic education of the population, supports the activities of cultural industries. The basic component of the state culture policy is the legislative and regulatory field.
Ukraine has formed a meaningful and extensive legal framework for all types of art that are developing in our country. The legislative base of the culture sphere ensures the sustainable development of culture and art, the formation of an integral system of institutions and institutions that produce cultural and artistic products, train artistic personnel for the field of culture and art.
It can be stated that the circus industry in Ukraine, unfortunately, was left out of the attention of culture sphere politicians and statesmen, because currently not developed and adopted the Law of Ukraine "On Circus Industry and Circus Art", which would ensure further development of circus and circus art. The adoption of this law is timely and extremely relevant in the current sociocultural realities.
Prospects for further research. Cultural theorizing of circus, in particular in the context of state culture policy, creates the preconditions for the emergence of the latest humanities — circology, a science that will carry out an integral analysis of circus. A new scientific discipline — circology, will provide a harmonious combination of theory and practice of circus, both within the national boundaries of scientific discourse and in the field of international scientific theorizing of art in general.


Malware authors modify, reuse, tweak, share, and maintain code, libraries. It results in malware derivation, polymorphism leading to millions of malwares. Hence, there is need for automatic identification, categorization, and classification of various species and families of malware. Many machine learning techniques such as Decision tree, Support Vector Machine, Perceptron training, K-Nearest Neighbour, Neural network, Linear Regression, Logistic regression has been applied directly to identify and categorize malware without manual intervention. However, these were not efficient. Hence, new models have been used by various authors to apply machine learning techniques to improve efficiency in automatic detection and classification of malware. Here, we review few models used to identify and categorize malware using machine learning techniques. The models summarized are combination of two or more machine learning techniques, combination of classification and clustering, generation of malware instruction sets to create data sets for efficient processing of voluminous malware analysis reports, application of phylogeny concepts to malware evolution, derivation, and detection etc. Phylogeny is biological evolution, derivation of relationship between set of species. It is extended to classification and detection of malware as well.


The European Union (EU) has committed itself to the promotion and the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in political statements, most recently in the EU Global Strategy. When taking a closer look at the activities of the EU in the context of humanitarian crises that can be brought within the R2P framework, the strength and effectiveness of the EU's support might be questioned. This article examines the EU's interest in the R2P by addressing the factors that inspired the EU's openness towards the concept and by examining whether the EU's commitment to the R2P falls within its general ambitions to contribute to international security or whether the EU is placing human suffering at the core of its considerations. In addition, this article questions to what extent the EU is capable of pursuing its own interest in the R2P and to what extent the EU is held back in implementing its commitment to the R2P by differing EU Member State approaches. It will be shown that the EU is strongly committed to fulfilling its collective responsibilities in partnership with the United Nations and that the focus of the EU's activities has been put on atrocity prevention.


Numerous efforts in balancing the trade-off between power, area and performance have been done in the medium performance, medium power region of the design spectrum. However, not much study has been done at the two extreme ends of the design spectrum, namely the ultra-low power with acceptable performance at one end (the focus of this paper), and high performance with power within limit at the other. One solution to achieve the ultra-low power requirement is to operate the digital logic gates in the subthreshold region. We analyze both CMOS and Pseudo-NMOS logic families operating in the subthreshold region. We compare the results with CMOS in the normal strong inversion region and with other known low-power logic, namely, energy recovery logic. Our results show an energy per switching reduction of two orders of magnitude for an 8/spl times/8 carry save array multiplier when it is operated in the subthreshold region.


The law of wills is steeped in tradition, including what is required for the valid execution of a document purporting to contain a testator's intention for the distribution of her or his estate upon her or his death. This is reflected in the need to comply with certain formalities for a will to be valid. Although these formal requirements differ in extent and form throughout the world, their purposes, in common law jurisdictions such as Australia and the United States of America, are fourfold: they serve evidentiary, cautionary or ritual, protective, and channeling functions. The evolution of society, and particularly the pace of technological advancements, has arguably called the need for such formalities into question—both as to the extent to which they should exist and be enforced. The role of the wills formalities has also been called into question in the context of access to will-making: for some the very act of making a will can be problematic as the associated legal costs can be prohibitive. In response to the cost of will-making, in Australia at least, there has been a rise in "homemade" wills, wills prepared using "will-kits," and online forms which use artificial intelligence (AI). However, such "do-it-yourself" wills often fall foul of the aforementioned formalities and may not be upheld. Consequently, although well-intentioned, such homemade wills can actually negatively affect testamentary freedom because wills evidencing a clear testamentary intention can be found to be invalid or uncertain owing to a lack of technical know-how if strict or substantial compliance is required.


Interleukin-5 contributes both in eosinophilopoiesis and neural development. Serum interleukin-5 levels were measured with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technique in 68 children with epilepsy receiving sodium valproate monotherapy and compared with the levels of 60 healthy controls and 14 children with epilepsy receiving carbamazepine. Eosinophilia was observed in 35.3% of children receiving valproate. Interleukin-5 in valproate users was significantly higher compared with children receiving carbamazepine and controls. Valproate users who exhibited eosinophilia had higher interleukin-5 levels compared with those without eosinophilia. However, the interleukin-5 level was also elevated, although to a lesser degree, in children without eosinophilia. The majority of valproate responders had high interleukin-5 levels. A positive correlation between interleukin-5 levels and the eosinophil count was also noted. We postulate that valproate contributes to the pathogenesis of eosinophilia, probably inducing interleukin-5 production. The finding that serum interleukin-5 was significantly elevated in valproate responders and even in valproate users without eosinophilia suggests that the increase in interleukin-5 might represent one of valproate's antiepileptic mechanisms. (J Child Neurol 2005;20:150—152).


Introduction:GOLD guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of COPD are widely spread. Some simple tools such as a positive smoking history, spirometry measurements and blood gases evaluation are fundamental to establish the diagnosis and evaluate disease severity.Objective:to verify to whether these fundamental issues are present in the medical records of patients hospitalized with diagnosis of COPD in a general hospital in Brazil. Methods:electronic medical records from 236 hospitalized from April 2011 to March 2012 with diagnosis of COPD were evaluated retrospectively.Patient9s characteristics and data related to hospitalization,smoking status,spirometry measurements and blood gases were collected.Results:236 patients were admitted,50% male, mean age:68+11.3y.Mean hospitalization time was13.4+17.1 days.8.9% were hospitalized more than once,22.5% received intensive care treatment and 25% deceased.Most frequent comordities were diabetes mellitus(17.8%) and systemic arterial hypertension(43%).Active smoking was present in 41.5%; however,previous smoking status was not available.All patients had chest X-ray; however, only 46.6% had spirometry evaluation and for 65.7% blood gases values were registered.Data on oxygen saturation was not found in the medical records.COPD diagnosis was not confirmed in 8% those with spirometry evaluation.Conclusions:Even in hospital where tools for diagnosis and treatment of COPD are available, a large number of patients did not have confirmation of disease diagnosis and staging.Reinforcement of the importance of COPD diagnosis and staging for adequacy of the treatment and the control of the disease is still needed.


Surfaces are responsible for many unique features exhibited by the nanoclusters. Even though numerous theoretical and experimental studies have been done to understand the nature of free surfaces, much emphasis has not been put on understanding the dynamics of free boundaries at the fundamental atomistic scale of length and time. In the present work we use the techniques of molecular dynamics to filter out the dynamics of the boundaries from that of the entire nanocluster. We show that at a given thermodynamic temperature, the effective statistical temperature is different for the free boundaries. Despite this observation, the surface dynamics seems to be in strong correlation with the rest of the system. This uniqueness of the surface in terms of its kinetics is expected to be crucial in the phenomena of melting and mechanochemical synthesis.


OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Delirium, a form of acute brain dysfunction, characterized by changes in attention and alertness, is a known independent predictor of mortality in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). We sought to understand whether catatonia, a more recently recognized form of acute brain dysfunction, is associated with increased 30-day mortality in critically ill older adults. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We prospectively enrolled critically ill patients at a single institution who were on a ventilator or in shock and evaluated them daily for delirium using the Confusion Assessment for the ICU and for catatonia using the Bush Francis Catatonia Rating Scale. Coma, was defined as a Richmond Agitation Scale score of −4 or −5. We used the Cox Proportional Hazards model predicting 30-day mortality after adjusting for delirium, coma and catatonia status. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: We enrolled 335 medical, surgical or trauma critically ill patients with 1103 matched delirium and catatonia assessments. Median age was 58 years (IQR: 48 - 67). Main indications for admission to the ICU included: airway disease or protection (32%; N=100) or sepsis and/or shock (25%; N=79. In the unadjusted analysis, regardless of the presence of catatonia, non-delirious individuals have the highest median survival times, while delirious patients have the lowest median survival time. Comparing the absence and presence of catatonia, the presence of catatonia worsens survival (Figure 1). In a time-dependent Cox model, comparing non-delirious individuals, holding catatonia status constant, delirious individuals have 1.72 times the hazards of death (IQR: 1.321, 2.231) while those with coma have 5.48 times the hazards of death (IQR: 4.298, 6.984). For DSM-5 catatonia scores, a 1-unit increase in the score is associated with 1.18 times the hazards of in-hospital mortality. Comparing two individuals with the same delirium status, an individual with a DSM-5 catatonia score of 0 (no catatonia) will have 1.178 times the hazard of death (IQR: 1.086, 1.278), while an individual with a score of 3 catatonia items (catatonia) present will have 1.63 times the hazard of death. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Non-delirious individuals have the highest median survival times, while those who are comatose have the lowest median survival times after a critical illness, holding catatonia status constant. Comparing the absence and presence of catatonia, the presence of catatonia seems to worsen survival. Those individual who are both comatose and catatonic have the lowest median survival time.


Background: Surface waters are habitats for aquatic plants and animals and source of nations' development. Particularly, rivers are important source of drinking water supply and they have a remarkable role to nations' development. However, currently, rivers face pollution due to rapid agricultural expansion, urbanization, industrialization and land use change.
Objective: the current study was carried out during February to August 2014 to assess the status of physico-chemical parameters of Kaha River water. Some of the main physico-chemical parameters: pH, temperature, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solid (TDS), salinity and dissolved oxygen (DO) measured on site while others like NO3 and PO4were determined in lab.
Methods: Water samples were collected monthly during dry (February to May, 2014) and wet (July to August, 2014) seasons from four representative sites. At the same frequency, duration and sites in situphysico-chemical parameters measurements were deployed.
Results: The pH of Kaha River water varied from 4.86 to 8.06 with mean value 7.15; the surface water temperature from 19oC to 29oC with mean 24oC; conductivity from 2.50mS/cm to 6.10mS/cm and mean value 3.74; total dissolved solid from 148.88mg/l to 360mg/l and mean value 203.71mg/l. The minimum salinity recorded was 0.99mg/l and the maximum 3.10mg/l with value 1.70mg/l and dissolved oxygen between 4.98mg/l to 8.15mg/l with mean value 6.77mg/l. In addition, nitrate was varied from 0.06mg/l to 2.60mg/l with mean value 0.74mg/l and phosphate from 0.04mg/l to 7.13mg/l with mean value2.28mg/l.
Conclusion: in this study, the mean value of pH was within the permissible limit of EEPA and World Bank standard values. The values of DO are within the permissible limit of Canadian water quality guidelines for the protection of aquatic life. Moreover, temperature, TDS and nitrate are below the limit of WHO and EC and phosphate are beyond the limit.


Pre-trained models have achieved excellent performance on the dialogue task. However, for the continual increase of online chit-chat scenarios, directly fine-tuning these models for each of the new tasks not only explodes the capacity of the dialogue system on the embedded devices but also causes knowledge forgetting on pre-trained models and knowledge interference among diverse dialogue tasks. In this work, we propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy the dialogue skills continually and efficiently. First, we introduce the adapter module into pre-trained models for learning new dialogue tasks. As the only trainable module, it is beneficial for the dialogue system on the embedded devices to acquire new dialogue skills with negligible additional parameters. Then, for alleviating knowledge interference between tasks yet benefiting the regularization between them, we further design hierarchical inductive transfer that enables new tasks to use general knowledge in the base adapter without being misled by diverse knowledge in task-specific adapters. Empirical evaluation and analysis indicate that our framework obtains comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity.


We resolve the observed magnetic field‐dependent relaxivity of Gd (DTPA)2− into inner and outer sphere contributions by comparison with theory. After noting that the outer sphere part, which contributes comparable to both 1/T1 and 1/T2, is identical to the "susceptibility" effect, we demonstrate the transition from the outer sphere relaxivity of small complexes, e. g. Gd(DTPA)2−, to that of large magnetic particulates, e. g., magnetite, used as T2 agents. This transition is expressed as a shift from a quantum to a classical mechanical description of relaxivity. We next show how to extrapolate the inner sphere contribution of Gd(DTPA)2− to similar small agents with greater structural symmetry, e. g., Gd(NOTA)−, by lengthening the electronic relaxation time and to ternary macromolecular complexes of small agents with protein by lengthening the rotational relaxation time. Finally, we indicate how relatively large lipid vesicles containing either small paramagnetic complexes or magnetized particulates may be considered analogs of Gd(DTPA)2−, with analogous inner and outer sphere contributions. © 1991 Academic Press, Inc.


Kolmogorov‐type cascade processes have long been postulated to explain power‐law falloff of the spectrum of gravity wave autocorrelations. In an effort to understand these processes more deeply, simplified models of the nonlinear Hasselmann resonant four‐wave interaction have been introduced. These models respect the fundamental structural aspects of that interaction, but are otherwise chosen for computational simplicity. In this paper the concept of quasilocality within the context of such models is extended to its logical limit in one spatial dimension. This results in differential rather than integral equations for the wave fields. One scaling solution to the new equations has a spectral exponent independent of the details of the model interaction, and is stable to small perturbations. In addition, under weak restrictions on the first and second derivatives of the model interactions, a further pair of two‐parameter families of scaling solutions exist. The spectral exponents in this case depend on the d...


In the present study the level of cAMP was measured during in vitro chondrogenesis of wing mesenchyme of stage 24 chick embryos and was found to increase significantly from 6.3 pmol/mg protein at the end of the first day of culture to 9.7 pmol/mg protein on the second day, when chondrogenic expression is first detected by the appearance of an Alcian blue staining extracellular matrix. Nonchondrogenic cultures derived from wings of stage 19 embryos had a lower level of cAMP (4.4 +/- 0.07 pmol/mg protein). The level of cAMP in intact wings was 4.5 +/- 0.4 pmol/mg protein and did not change between stages 19 through 25. The correlatin between increased levels of cAMP and the onset of chondrogenesis is consistent with a role of cAMP in the expression of differentiated functions in chondrocytes, as well as in some other cell types.


The tripartite motif (TRIM) family member, TRIM21, is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that functions in both innate and acquired immunity. It is also an autoantigen known as Ro52/SS-A. While TRIM21 is thought to be ubiquitously expressed, its precise distribution patterns among various tissues and cells are largely unknown. To analyze detailed expression patterns of TRIM21, we generated mice with the Trim21 gene replaced by an EGFP reporter. Western blot data showed that EGFP is expressed particularly at high levels in lymph nodes, spleen and thymus. Flow cytometric analyses using splenocytes demonstrated that EGFP expression was generally high in T cells, macrophages and DCs, but lower in B cells and granulocytes. During B-cell development in bone marrow and spleen EGFP levels were high in pro-B cells, but fell in the subsequent stages until small pre-B cells and then rose again in later stages of development. During T-cell development in thymus EGFP expression was high in early CD4-CD8- double negative cells, and the expression gradually decreased as cells moved through mid to late stages of double negative cells and became much lower in double positive cells. Then EGFP expression rose again during the subsequent stages of single positive cells. These data suggest that TRIM21 may have a functional role during lymphocyte development.


While Physics-Based Simulation (PBS) can accurately drape a 3D garment on a 3D body, it remains too costly for real-time applications, such as virtual try-on. By contrast, inference in a deep network, requiring a single forward pass, is much faster. Taking advantage of this, we propose a novel architecture to fit a 3D garment template to a 3D body. Specifically, we build upon the recent progress in 3D point cloud processing with deep networks to extract garment features at varying levels of detail, including point-wise, patch-wise and global features. We fuse these features with those extracted in parallel from the 3D body, so as to model the cloth-body interactions. The resulting two-stream architecture, which we call as GarNet, is trained using a loss function inspired by physics-based modeling, and delivers visually plausible garment shapes whose 3D points are, on average, less than 1 cm away from those of a PBS method, while running 100 times faster. Moreover, the proposed method can model various garment types with different cutting patterns when parameters of those patterns are given as input to the network.


Most of the 60+ developing countries that have established social funds (SFs) are decentralising their governments as well. But the question of how to tailor SFs - originally a highly centralised model - for a decentralising context has received relatively little attention in the literature. We first examine evidence on the ability of SFs to adapt to a decentralised context. We then lay out the implications of decentralisation for SF institutional design step-by-step through the project cycle. The topic is doubly important because social funds can increase their effectiveness, and the sustainability of their investments, by reorganising internal processes to take advantage of the political and civic institutions that decentralisation creates. Local government has an informational advantage in local needs and characteristics (time and place), whereas SFs have access to better technology and knowledge of sectoral best practice. The key is to create institutional incentives that best combine these relative advantages.


Purpose: To describe the environmental context, physical activity, and inactivity levels in Girl Scout Junior troop meetings. Methods: Forty-two girls (mean age 10.8 ± 1.2) from four troops wore accelerometers during 28 meetings. Physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SED) were assessed during a six-month period. Minutes spent in sedentary, light, moderate, and vigorous PA were summed and averaged. Direct observation measures assessed the environmental context of activity/inactivity. Results: In an average troop meeting, girls spent 94.4 min of time in SED, 26.3 min in light physical activity (LPA), and 2.0 min in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). There was no significant difference for time spent in PA at various levels among girls of different socio-economic status, racial/ethnic background, or weight status (F [3,238] .05). Troop leaders were more likely to discourage PA (0.6% of time) than to promote PA (0.0%), and no PA related educational content was observed. Conclusion: Girls accumulated two min MVPA, and >90 min SED per meeting. Based on our observations, these troop meetings currently are missing opportunities to contribute positively to the health and fitness of attending girls. Interventions providing opportunities for enjoyable PA specifically catering to needs and interests of girls are warranted.


In order to pursue measurements of parity violating effects of the neutral weak current, we have developed a polarized electron source suitable for installation at the MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator. The source is designed to provide a high peak-current pulsed beam that has a approx. 1% duty factor and that is extremely stable under helicity reversal. 34 references, 6 figures, 1 table.


Phospholipase A2 (Naja mocambique) catalyzed release of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) and 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (20-HETE) from phospholipids of isolated human platelets. The amount of EETs released by phospholipase A2 measured by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) was 4.3 +/- 0.9 pmol/10(6) platelets. No EETs were detected when phospholipase A2 was omitted from the incubations. The relative abundance of EET isomers (14,15-EET, 11,12-EET, 8,9-EET, and 5,6-EET) from human platelets was 5.4:4.5:3.7:1, respectively, as established by a new method based on particle-beam liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). Fractionation of platelet phospholipids by normal-phase high-performance liquid chromatography followed by hydrolysis and GC/MS analyses indicated that the amount of EETs was highest in fractions containing phosphatidylinositol and phosphatidylserine (142 and 61 pmol/nmol of phosphorus, respectively) while low in phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine (19 and 11 pmol/nmol of phosphorus, respectively). The majority of EETs associated with phosphatidylcholine was found in fractions containing 1-O-alkylphosphatidylcholine. Human platelet phospholipids also released 20-HETE on phospholipase treatment (9.7 +/- 1.6 fmol/10(5) cells) and at least three other HETEs, one of which was tentatively identified as 16-HETE. Activation of human platelets by thrombin or platelet-activating factor released 5 to 7 fmol EET/10(6) cells. Receptor-mediated hydrolysis of phospholipids containing EETs and 20-HETE may play a role in stimulus-response coupling in platelets.


The valve monitoring system is a stand alone unit with network capabilities for integration into a higher level health management system. The system is designed for aiding in failure predictions of high-geared ball valves and linearly actuated valves. It performs data tracking and archiving for identifying degraded performance. The data collection types are: cryogenic cycles, total cycles, inlet temperature, outlet temperature, body temperature, torsional strain, linear bonnet strain, preload position, total travel, and total directional changes. Events are recorded and time stamped in accordance with the IRIG B True Time. The monitoring system is designed for use in a Class 1 Division II explosive environment. The basic configuration consists of several instrumentation sensor units and a base station. The sensor units are self contained microprocessor controlled and remotely mountable in three by three by two inches. Each unit is potted in a fire retardant substance without any cavities and limited to low operating power for maintaining safe operation in a hydrogen environment. The units are temperature monitored to safeguard against operation outside temperature limitations. Each contains 902-928 MHz band digital transmitters which meet Federal Communication Commissions requirements and are limited to a 35 foot transmission radius for preserving data security. The base-station controller correlates related data from the sensor units and generates data event logs on a compact flash memory module for database uploading. The entries are also broadcast over an Ethernet network. Nitrogen purged National Electrical Manufactures Association (NEMA) Class 4 Enclosures are used to house the base-station.


Purpose: To evaluate tear film osmolarity in patients treated with intraocular pressure–lowering medications. Methods: Forty patients treated for glaucoma or ocular hypertension (OHT) were consecutively recruited for the study. Each patient was asked to complete an evaluation of ocular surface disease symptoms, the Ocular Surface Disease Index, and underwent a complete evaluation of the ocular surface including measurement of tear film osmolarity, Schirmer test, tear breakup time (TBUT), and corneal and conjunctival staining. Results: Twenty-four patients (60%) reported ocular surface disease symptoms. Nineteen patients (47.5%) had a tear osmolarity ⩽308 mOsms/L, 11 (27.5%) between 309 and 328 mOsms/L, and 10 (25%) >328 mOsms/L. A tear deficiency was observed in 20 patients (50%). Twenty-seven patients (67.5%) had an abnormal tear quality analyzed with TBUT, and 16 patients (40%) showed positive staining using the Oxford schema. Tear osmolarity was significantly correlated to Ocular Surface Disease Index (r = 0.486; P = 0.002) and TBUT (r = −0.49; P = 0.009). There was a statistically significant correlation between tear osmolarity and the number of drugs (r = 0.409; P = 0.009), the number of instillations (r = 0.405; P = 0.01), and the number of instillations of preserved eye drops (r = 0.629; P < 0.0001). Using the multiple regression method, tear osmolarity remained significantly correlated to the number of instillations of preserved eye drops (P = 0.004). Conclusion: Tear osmolarity was increased in patients treated for glaucoma or OHT, particularly in those using multiple preserved eye drops. The evaluation of the ocular surface of patients treated for glaucoma or OHT may benefit from such analysis, and future trials for new intraocular pressure–lowering eye drops should thus evaluate tear osmolarity.


It is shown that three-dimensional (3D) acoustic gravity waves (AGWs) in the atmosphere can appear in the form of acoustic gravity tornadoes (AGTs) characterized by twisted density structures or density ropes carrying orbital angular momentum. For our purposes, we use a previously obtained 3D wave equation for AGWs, and show that this equation in the paraxial approximation admits solutions in the form of Laguerre–Gauss acoustic gravity vortex beams or AGTs/AG whirls with twisted density structures supporting the dynamics of the AGTs.


Ruddlesden-Popper phase, La(n+1)Ni(n)O(3n+1 (n=1, 2, and infinity) compounds were prepared by citrate sol-gel method. We revealed the origin of the variation of the electrical conductivities in La(n+1)Ni(n)O(3n+1 (n=1, 2, and infinity) using resistivity measurements, Rietveld analysis, and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. According to the XANES spectra, it is found that the degree of 4p(pi) - 4psigma energy splitting between 8345 eV and 8350 eV is qualitatively proportional to the elongation of the out-of-plane Ni-O bond length. With the decrease of 4p(pi) - 4psigma splitting, the strong hybridization of the sigma-bonding between Ni-3d and O-2p orbitals creates narrow antibonding sigma* bands, which finally results in the lower electrical resistivity.


BACKGROUND: Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is characterized by a rise in acute phase reactants (APRs) during the attacks and occasionally in between the attacks. Although mean platelet volume (MPV) is generally not changed, low MPV could be used as an inflammatory marker in FMF and as an indicator of other diseases. This prospective case–control study was carried out in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, to assess MPV in Kurdish children with different FMF mutations during and in-between the attacks versus healthy controls. PATIENTS AND METHODS: From 2011 to 2020, 56 gene-positive FMF patients (Group I) and 60 healthy controls (Group II) were enrolled. Besides the routine APRs, MPV was measured in both groups and categorized into low (<7 fl), normal (7–11 fl) and high (>11 fl). Informed consents from all participants and ethical institutional approval were obtained. RESULTS: Group I age range was 23 months to 16 years with a male to female ratio of 1.8:1 while Group II age ranged from 21 months to 15 years with a male to female ratio of 1.4:1. MPV was normal in (n = 44, 78.6%) of Group I versus (n = 44, 73.3%) of Group II (P = 0.05); low in (n = 8, 14.3%) of Group I versus (n = 4, 6.7%) of Group II (P = 0.05) and high in (n = 4, 7.1%) of Group I versus (n = 4, 6.7%) of Group II (P = 0.05). Low MPV values were relatively more frequent among the homozygotes (n = 4, 50%) and complex heterozygotes (n = 2, 25%) (P = 0.003). CONCLUSION: The current study showed that MPV was not statistically different between FMF patients and controls, while abnormal MPVs were associated with specific genotypes that may indicate coexistent problems.


Abstract Standardization of noninvasive prenatal diagnosis (PND) method that can identify common mutations in the population is of great value. The purpose of this study was to find the paternal HBB gene IVS-II-1 (G>A) (HBB: c.315+1G>A) mutation in maternal plasma cell-free DNA using the co-amplification at lower denaturation temperature-polymerase chain reaction (COLD-PCR) method. We designed simulated circulating free DNA (cfDNA) in maternal plasma to optimize the COLD-PCR assay. Peripheral blood samples were collected from normal and IVS-II-1 heterozygous individuals as well as five heterozygous pregnant women whose husbands were carriers of IVS-II-1. The cfDNA was extracted from the plasma and subjected to optimized COLD-PCR followed by Sanger sequencing. The optimized protocol was tested on simulated cfDNA samples with proportions of 8.0, 6.0, 4.0 and 2.0%, and the results showed that the COLD-PCR is informative on samples containing 8.0% mutant alleles and above. The patients were undergoing invasive PND procedures via chorionic villi sampling (CVS) as scheduled at the 12th week of gestation. Paternal IVS-II-1 was detected in cfDNA samples of three patients who were in complete concordance with the outcome of CVS. Despite the limitations of the COLD-PCR method in noninvasive PND, it can be considered as a cost-effective screening option. The use of this approach for screening at-risk patients can prevent unnecessary invasive procedures identifying common mutations in high-prevalence diseases.


We review the recent development of chiral sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy and its applications to study chiral vibrational structures at interfaces. This review summarizes observations of chiral SFG signals from various molecular systems and describes the molecular origins of chiral SFG response. It focuses on the chiral vibrational structures of proteins and presents the chiral SFG spectra of proteins at interfaces in the C-H stretch, amide I, and N-H stretch regions. In particular, a combination of chiral amide I and N-H stretches of the peptide backbone provides highly characteristic vibrational signatures, unique to various secondary structures, which demonstrate the capacity of chiral SFG spectroscopy to distinguish protein secondary structures at interfaces. On the basis of these recent developments, we further discuss the advantages of chiral SFG spectroscopy and its potential application in various fields of science and technology. We conclude that chiral SFG spectroscopy can be a new approach to probe chiral vibrational structures of protein at interfaces, providing structural and dynamic information to study in situ and in real time protein structures and dynamics at interfaces.


Abstract. We outline six important hazards that can be encountered in econometric modelling of time-series data, and apply that analysis to demonstrate errors in the empirical modelling of climate data in Beenstock et al. (2012). We show that the claim made in Beenstock et al. (2012) as to the different degrees of integrability of CO2 and temperature is incorrect. In particular, the level of integration is not constant and not intrinsic to the process. Further, we illustrate that the measure of anthropogenic forcing in Beenstock et al. (2012), a constructed "anthropogenic anomaly", is not appropriate regardless of the time-series properties of the data.


This work deals with the damage identification in polymeric foams through the monitoring of the electrical resistance of the system. To assess this idea electrically conductive rigid Poly-Urethane (PUR) foams at various densities were prepared. Multi-Wall Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNT) were dispersed in the host polymer at various concentrations through high shear mixing to provide electrical conductivity to the system. The PUR/MWCNT foams exhibited varying electrical conductivity on a wide range of densities and nano-filler contents. The prepared foams were subject to compres- sion tests. Electrical resistance was recorded online during the tests to monitor the change of the bulk property of the mate- rials. A structural-electrical cross-property relation was exhibited. The distinctive phases of foam compression were successfully identified from the electrical resistance profile recorded during the tests. A characteristic master curve of the change of electrical resistivity with respect to load and damage is proposed and analyzed. It was shown that the found elec- trical resistance profile is a characteristic of all the MWCNT contents and depends on density and conductivity. MWCNT content contributes mainly to the sensitivity of electrical sensing in the initial stage of compression. Later compression stages are dominated by foam microstructural damage which mask any effect of CNT dispersion. Micro-structural observa- tions were employed to verify the experimental findings and curves.


Objectives: One of the most common treatment modalities for patients with a diagnosis of reduced disc displacement is occlusal splinting. Stabilization splints (SS) and anterior repositioning splints (ARS) are frequently used in such cases. Materials and Methods: The effects of these two splint types on patient satisfaction were evaluated in patients with temporomandibular disorder (TMD). 25 healthy people with no pathology of the temporomandibular joint were included as a control group. ARS's were used in 18 patients; all patients used the splints for 2 months. The splint was then converted into a stabilization splint for use for 1 further month. In the other 32 patients, a SS was used for 1 month. All the patients filled out the same temporomandibular questionnaire (TQ) again after the ARS was converted into a SS and had been used for 1 month. Results: The use of both types of splint significantly affected scores on the TQ (p < 0.05). There was a significant difference in questionnaire results among the control group, SS group, and ARS group before treatment (p < 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference in questionnaire results among the three groups after treatment (p > 0.05). Conclusion: These results indicate that the use of both ARS and SS significantly increased satisfaction among patients with TMD.


42.000 1+smolts of Atlantic salmon were size graded into two size groups and released during three weeks in spring 1993; one group of small and one of large smolts on each of the four release days. Approximately 25% of the fish had been individually tagged using Carlin-tags. The fish were transferred to net pens in a small marine bay in which estuarine salinity gradients had been established by a tarpaulin barrier. The smolts were held in the net pens for three days prior to the first and third release day and seven days before the second and fourth release day. Total recoveries of Carlin-tagged grilse in 1994 showed higher return rates for smolts acclimatized for three days compared with seven days. Tbe difference was small for large smolts, but significant for small smolts, as return rate for the three days acclimatization was twice that of seven days acclimatization. The • return of precocious mature males, males that were mature prior to release, were clearly higher than that of other smolts. Possible causes for these differences are discussed.


The subxiphoid approach for mediastinal tumors involves resecting the tumor via incisions made below the xiphoid process (1). Because the camera is inserted through the midline subxiphoid region, the operative view of the neck region and locations of the bilateral intercostal nerves are easily accessible, especially with the help of a sternum retractor. Here, we introduce a case of mediastinal tumor cephalad to the brachiocephalic vein resected via the subxiphoid approach.


The aim of study was providing researchers, doctors, governing bodies such as Kerbala Health Directorate, Ministry of Health and National IHR Focal Point with a comprehensive statistical analysis of the prevalence of diarrhoea at Al Husseiny Teaching Hospital in the holly city of Karbala in 2015. The study identify the etiology of diarrhoea in adults across four age groups ranging from 15 and over, examining the variation to gender and age and month /season of the year.           The study involves a total of 2583 cases of diarrhoea report as a chief complain to the hospital from January to December 2015.            The statistical data analysis reveals that diarrhoea is still a major complain for all age groups as the hospital received approximately 7 cases on daily bases all over the year 2015. Female Patients were the most disadvantaged over male in a ratio of 5:3. Young adults between 20-44 years of age were the worst affected and represent %46 from the overall patient number. The study consolidates that more incidences have happened in the season of warm summer in June due to , yet even higher in cold January and December as more than two third of infection was viral.  Entameba histolytic was the predominant parasitic cause to diarrhoea with 23% of the cases and Giardia lamblia. Main bacterial cause represented in Vibrio Cholera of 2.9% and very few cases of E. Coli.


The industrial stretch of the Tyne, comprising the areas of fourteen local authorities, has a population of some 800,000, rather more than one-third of which is concentrated in Newcastle. It has three rich and eleven poor towns, and conditions have been so unfavourable on Tyneside that during the ten years before the war it lost 50,000 people by migration. Mr. David M. Goodfellow, Ph.D., a lecturer in the University of Durham, has published in Tyneside: The Social Facts* an analysis of the health and educational services in this area. Taking the indices of tuberculosis and infant mortality, he shows that in both respects progress on Tyneside has been slower than in the country generally or even in comparable industrial regions. The death rate from tuberculosis in Newcastle in 1935-7 was 59% of what it had been in 1912-13, in South Shields 63%, in Gateshead 66%, and in Wallsend, which, save for a purely artificial barrier, is continuous with Newcastle, 77%, whereas in England and Wales as a whole the tuberculosis mortality just before the present war was only 52% -of what it was just before the last. How bad the figures are for Tyneside is shown in another way, by taking the tuberculosis death rate for Greater London in 1935-7 as 100, when the average death rate in the fourteen local government units in Tyneside is revealed as 172. As for infant mortality, both absolutely and by comparison with the rest of England, progress in Tyneside has been even slower than it has been in respect of tuberculosis mortality. During the last war a marked setback took place on the Tyne, although previously its four big towns had a better rate than the average for English county boroughs. In 1935-7 the death rate per 1,000 b,rths for children under 1 year was still 82, as compared with 58 for England and Wales, although in 1938 a very striking improvement was effected, the rate in Newcastle falling to 66, and similar figures obtaining in the other towns.


Motivation Epitopes are the immunogenic regions of antigen that are recognized by antibodies in a highly specific manner to trigger an immune response. Predicting such regions is extremely difficult yet contains profound implications for complex mechanisms of humoral immunogenicity. Results Here, we present a BERT-based epitope prediction model called EpiBERTope, a pre-trained model on the Swiss-Prot protein database, which can predict both linear and structural epitopes using protein sequences only. The model achieves an AUC of 0.922 and 0.667 for linear and structural epitope datasets respectively, outperforming all benchmark classification models including random forest, gradient boosting, naive Bayesian, and support vector machine models. In conclusion, EpiBERTope is a sequence-based model that captures content-based global interactions of antigen sequences, which will be transformative in epitope discovery with high specificity. Contact firstname.lastname@example.com


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is highly effective, but uptake in Australia is low. The aim of this study was to establish general practice registrars' LARC training/insertion experience, as well as frequency of and factors associated with choosing LARC in response to clinical vignettes.

METHOD
This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study of general practice registrars in NSW or ACT. The questionnaire elicited a contraceptive management response to three clinical vignettes. The outcome factor in each of three multivariate logistic regression analyses was: 'LARC chosen' or 'LARC not chosen'.

RESULTS
Of 223 registrars, 18.5% had received intrauterine device (IUD) insertion training, and 9.4% had inserted IUD in general practice. For contraceptive implants, these figures were 64.3% for training and 50.3% for insertion. Significant multivariate associations (all odds ratios >2.5) of choosing LARC in at least one vignette included Australian medical graduate, female gender and confidence in knowledge regarding IUD/implant.

DISCUSSION
Modest proportions of general practice registrars have training in, and in-practice experience of, LARC insertion. The most notable association with choice of LARC was confidence in knowledge regarding LARC.


In this paper, an intelligent model is constructed to facilitate real-time dynamic analysis of the factors affecting the export of film and television copyrights and to track the process of spatiotemporal context. The algorithm analyzes the factors affecting the export of film and television copyrights according to actual needs. Through the comparative analysis of experimental models, the influence and optimization of gamma correction and Laplace distribution weighting on spatial context information and confidence map update are verified. In addition, this paper uses the gray relational algorithm to construct an analysis system of factors affecting the export of film and television copyright. The research shows that the analysis model of the influencing factors of film and television copyright export based on the gray relational algorithm can play a very good role in the analysis of these factors.


As a major medical imaging technology, medical ultrasound imaging with its many advantages, such as no harm to the human body, real-time, cheap and easy to use, is widely used in clinic. But the ultrasonic imaging speckle noise make it difficulties to distinguish between normal tissue and pathological tissue. According to the character of noise in the medical ultrasonic image, an new method of the medical ultrasonic imaging filter based on mathematics morphology and adaptive filtering is proposed after analysis of speckle noise and general filter, and an experiment is made to validate. The experimental method is as follows : Firstly the Rayleigh noise is imposed on the original image, and then the median filter and the adaptive median filter are used on the contaminated image. Secondly the morphological filter is used to improve image quality and enhance the contrast, after the adaptive median filter is used on the image, to retain more necessary details. Finally the three noise filtering methods are compared from the images denoising and evaluation. And the results indicate that the new method is superior to other ones.


Here, we have successfully developed a novel contact mode between MoS2 and graphene, where graphene rolls up into a hollow nanotube and thin MoS2 nanosheets are uniformly standing on the inner surface of graphitic nanotubes, thus forming mechanically robust, free-standing, interwoven MoS2@graphene nanocable webs (MoS2@G). Such a hybrid structure can maximize the MoS2 loading in the electrode in which over 90% of MoS2 nanosheets with stacked layer number of less than 5 can be installed. Remarkably, when calculated on the basis of the whole electrode, this binder free electrode not only shows high specific capacity (ca. 1150 mA h g−1) and excellent cycling performance (almost 100% capacity retention even after 160 cycles at a current density of 0.5 A g−1) but exhibits a surprisingly high-rate capability of 700 mA h g−1 at the rate of 10 A g−1 despite such a high MoS2 loading content, which is one of the best results of MoS2-based electrode materials ever reported thus far.


Background STDPreventionOnline.org (STDPO) is an online professional networking site for the sexually transmitted diseases/infections (STD/STI) work force, including researchers, clinicians, epidemiologists, disease intervention specialists, and programme managers. The site was developed by the internet and STD Center of Excellence, originally funded by a grant from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and currently sponsored by the American Sexually Transmitted Disease Association (ASTDA). The site was conceived as two-way clearing house of current STD/STI information and resources, where members could both download and upload information in a variety of formats including text, audio, and video files as well as blog and forum postings. Membership is free. Objective To describe current users and usage of STPDPO. Methods Descriptive statistics were obtained from embedded website metrics and Google Analytics©. Results Since its inception in 2007, the site has registered 3500 members and the site's monthly newsletter has over 4000 subscribers. The predominance of site members (92%) live/work in the US, however a substantial number (n=258 as of January 2012) are non-US users with 47 countries represented. Most members (58%) work in STD/HIV programmes in state/local health departments, 13% in community or private clinics, 11% in a university setting, 8% in federal government, and 8% in community organisations. During 2011, the site logged 14 778 individual site visits and 61 205 page views; respectively 284 and 1177 per week. To date, over 1150 resources have been uploaded to the site which, have been downloaded over 40 000 times, an average of 35 downloads per resource. Topics related to internet use and online interventions are particularly popular, followed by clinical slide sets, and podcasts. Conclusion During the 4 years of its existence, STDPO has demonstrated to meet a need in the STD/STI professional community for an interactive, two-way, clearing house of STD/STI-related information.


Mammalian sperm have to undergo several physiological and biochemical changes to be fertilization-competent. These changes are collectively called "capacitation". Capacitated sperm show frantic whiplash-like flagellar movement called "hyperactivation". Recently, it has been reported that treatments of sperm to enhance hyperactivation improve in vitro fertilization (IVF) and development of the fertilized embryos. This fact indicates that hyperactivation is an attractive target to improve assisted reproductive technologies. However, the detailed mechanisms which regulate hyperactivation have not been fully elucidated. Recently, it was found out that Na+ and K+ concentration of the oviductal fluid considerably differs from those in the medium used for IVF. Thus, the effect of the Na+ and K+ concentration on sperm hyperactivation was investigated using hamsters as a model. The results revealed that hamster sperm hyperactivation was suppressed by extracellular Na+ via an action of Na+/Ca2+ exchanger. Moreover, it was shown that the activity of testis specific isoform of Na+/K+ ATPase (NKA) α subunit, α4, is necessary for the hyperactivation-associated change of the flagellar movement. By contrast, there was no significant effect of raising the K+ concentration up to 20 mM on sperm hyperactivation although it significantly depolarized the membrane potential. These results suggests that transporters involved in primary and secondary active transport which regulates cellular Na+ homeostasis has a crucial role in the regulation of hyperactivation, and these transporters can be an attractive target for the improvement of assisted reproductive technologies.


Ventricular congenital heart defect (VSD) may be a common congenital heart condition in children. There are two methods to treat VSD in China, surgical operations and interventional operations using occluders produced in China. In our department, we've treated 1500 cases using occluders produced in China from 2005 to 2017. The technique success rate is above 99.8%. The speed of complications is a smaller amount than 1%. The complications include Adams-Stokes syndrome, occlude transposition, femoral arteriovenous fistula and thrombosis in arteria femoralis and vein. We followed up these cases after the operation, which showed that the long-term effects are definite. There's no case evidence of death thanks to this procedure. We concluded that children with VSD are often cured with interventional therapy using occluders produced in China with satisfactory results. A ventricular congenital heart defect (VSD), a hole within the heart, may be a common heart defect that's present at birth (congenital). the opening (defect) occurs within the wall (septum) that separates the guts 's lower chambers (ventricles) and allows blood to pass from the left to the proper side of the heart. The oxygen-rich blood then gets pumped back to the lungs rather than bent the body, causing the guts to figure harder. A little ventricular congenital heart defect may cause no problems, and lots of small VSDs close on their own. Medium or larger VSDs may have surgical repair early in life to stop complications. Congenital heart defects arise from problems early within the heart's development, but there's often no clear cause. Genetics and environmental factors may play a task. VSDs can occur alone or with other congenital heart defects. During fetal development, a ventricular congenital heart defect occurs when the muscular wall separating the guts into left and right sides (septum) fails to make fully between the lower chambers of the guts (ventricles). Normally, the proper side of the guts pumps blood to the lungs to urge oxygen; the left side pumps the oxygen-rich blood to the remainder of the body. A VSD allows oxygenated blood to combine with deoxygenated blood, causing the guts to figure harder to supply enough oxygen to the body's tissues. VSDs could also be various sizes, and that they are often present in several locations within the wall between the ventricles. There could also be one or more VSD. It is also possible to accumulate a VSD later in life, usually after attack or as a complication following certain heart procedures. Ventricular septal defects may run in families and sometimes may occur with other genetic problems, like mongolism. If you have already got a toddler with a heart defect, a genetic counselor can discuss the danger of your next child having one. The foremost common explanation for a VSD may be a congenital heart defect, which may be a defect from birth. Some people are born with holes already present in their heart. They'll cause no symptoms and take years to diagnose. A rare explanation for a VSD is severe injury to the chest. Ventricular septal defects (VSD) are usually considered non-life-threatening, usually closing spontaneously or causing symptoms of congestive coronary failure, which may be surgically treated in time to save lots of the patient's life. Ventricular septal rupture (VSR) may be a rare but lethal complication of myocardial infarct (MI). The event occurs 2-8 days after an infarction and sometimes precipitates shock. Ventricular congenital heart defect (VSD) is defect in interventricular septum (wall dividing left and right ventricles of heart). What's it? VSD may be a hole within the wall separating the 2 lower chambers of the guts. In normal development, the wall between the chambers closes before the fetus is born, in order that by birth, oxygen-rich blood is kept from mixing with the oxygen-poor blood. An outsized VSD is a smaller amount likely to shut completely on its own, but it's going to get smaller over time. Large VSDs often cause symptoms in infants and youngsters, and surgery usually is required to shut them. VSDs are found in several parts of the septum. Medicines could also be used temporarily to assist with symptoms, but they do not cure the VSD or prevent permanent damage to the lung arteries. Closing an outsized VSD by heart surgery usually is completed in infancy or childhood even in patients with few symptoms, to stop complications later. Ventricular septal defects happen during fetal heart development and are present at birth. In some cases, the tendency to develop a VSD could also be thanks to genetic syndromes that cause extra or missing pieces of chromosomes. Most VSDs, though, haven't any clear cause. For many people with a ventricular congenital heart defect, good oral hygiene and regular dental checkups can prevent endocarditis. Follow exercise recommendations. Children with small defects or a repaired hole within the heart will usually have few or no restrictions on activity or exercise. A rise in blood flow across the opening to the lungs can cause the lungs to become congested. Because the guts and lungs need to work harder, a baby with a ventricular congenital heart defect will become in need of breath, particularly with the exertion of feeding (which is that the most exercise a baby does). A further weakness is that although all newborns had a neonatal echocardiogram, the sort of VSD wasn't recorded in many. Since none had mongolism, this doesn't affect our overall conclusion that a prenatally visualized VSD isn't related to a big risk for mongolism. A ventricular congenital heart defect is an abnormal opening within the interventricular septum that leads to the shunting of blood from the ventricle to the proper ventricle during systole. This shunting of blood causes a loud, harsh, pansystolic murmur that's best heard at the left lower sternal border. VSDs are usually diagnosed with an echocardiogram, or ultrasound of the guts. VSDs defects are often diagnosed as early as 12 weeks gestation. This will be dis- covered before birth, but is usually overlooked until after birth. There could also be a murmur (abnormal heart sound) or other abnormality that indicates the matter.


Since the end of the Cold War, Western powers have frequently used sanctions as a reaction to declining levels of democracy and human rights violations in authoritarian regimes. However, some of the world's most repressive authoritarian regimes have never been subjected to sanctions, while other more competitive autocracies have been exposed to repeated sanction episodes instigated by Western democracies as an attempt to enhance democracy and human rights. In this paper, we investigate how the United States and the European Union have selectively used sanctions as a tool to improve the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian states. Using a new dataset on democratic sanctions between 1990 and 2010, time - series–cross-sectional logistic regression and a number of strategically selected case studies, we find strong support for the suggestion that senders select economically and politically vulnerable targets where the expected probability of sanction success is high.


Layers of Si nanocrystals in a dielectric matrix have promising properties to be implemented as the absorber layer in a top cell of a Si-based tandem solar cell. Si nanocrystals in SiC are produced by plasma deposition of Si rich a-SiC:H and subsequent solid phase crystallization by thermal annealing at temperatures between 800°C and 1000°C. The Si rich a-SiC:H films were doped with boron by addition of diluted diborane (B2H6 in H2) to the plasma process. The microstructure was investigated for different gas fluxes and annealing procedures and the films were found to consist of amorphous or polycrystalline SiC with embedded Si nanocrystals. The microstructural results are then correlated with the electrical and optoelectronic properties. By choosing appropriate deposition parameters, the films micro-structure could be modified such that the crystallization of both Si and SiC nanocrystals is favoured and the conductivity is enhanced. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns show the formation of both Si and SiC nanocrystals after annealing at 900 °C, if the hydrogen flux in the plasma is large enough. The formation of SiC nanocrystals is confirmed by Fourier Transformed IR (FTIR) spectra where a transition from a Gaussian shaped peak of the amorphous SiC-phase to a blueshifted Lorentzian peak of nanocrystalline SiC is observed. Dark dc IV measurements reveal the increase of conductivity with diluted diborane flux from 9.32 10–6 Ω–1cm–1 to 1.98 10–2 Ω–1cm–1 for a 1000 °C anneal. Increase of annealing temperature at constant doping also increases conductivity by about two orders of magnitude. (© 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)


The performance of trellis coded-8PSK in the presence of cochannel interference is analyzed and compared with the performance of uncoded QPSK. The analytical expressions are derived and supported by simulating the bit error rate performance of different TC-8PSK systems. The analytical and simulation results show that TC-8PSK is slightly more robust to cochannel interference than uncoded QPSK. >


This paper lays out a unified framework of the ergodic animage, the rule-based and interactiondriven part of visual representation in video games. It is the end product of a three-year research project conducted by the INTEGRAE team, and is divided into three parts. Part 1 contextualizes the research on graphics and visuality within game studies, notably through the opposition between fiction and rules and the difficulties in finding common vocabulary to discuss key visual concepts such as perspective and point of view. Part 2 discusses a number of visual traditions through which we frame video game graphics (film, animation, art history, graphical projection and technical drawing), highlighting their relevance and shortcomings in addressing the long history of video games and the very different paradigms of 2D and 3D graphics. Part 3 presents the Game FAVR, a model that allows any game's visual representation to be described and discussed through a common frame and vocabulary. The framework is presented in an accessible manner and is organized as a toolkit, with sample case studies, templates, and a flowchart for using the FAVR provided as an annex, so that researchers and students can immediately start using it.


The authors report their experience with the use of Tc-99m DTPA aerosol following a perfusion lung scan. The study includes 422 consecutive patients with suspected pulmonary embolism. The final diagnosis was determined by (a) clinical follow-up for 2 months or more, (b) pulmonary angiography, or (c) autopsy. There were 79 patients (19%) who had a normal or near-normal perfusion study and in whom no aerosol study was required. Interpretation groups were classified and divided as follows: Normal or low probability 281 (66.5%) High probability 75 (18.0%) Intermediate 60 (14.0%) Technically inadequate 6 (1.5%) There was autopsy or angiographic confirmation of 72 patient studies with confirmation of the scan diagnosis in 29 of 31 classified as normal or low probability and 24 of 25 classified as high probability. The background perfusion albumin activity was not computer-subtracted from the combined aerosol-perfusion image. Technical improvements included the use of eight standard views for both the perfusion and the subsequent aerosol scan, and the use of 75 mCi (2,775 MBq) of Tc-99m DTPA in the radioaerosol nebulizer. This allowed for easy accumulation of more than three times the count rate in a posterior aerosol image when compared with the previous posterior perfusion image. The authors' experience shows that the perfusion lung scan followed by this radioaerosol technique is a reliable means to evaluate suspected pulmonary embolism.


This article intends to make a reflection on the topics and methodologies used in the Doctor theses development, carried out in the Sciences of Education Doctorate RUDECOLOMBIA. It is important to recall that the Doctorate Formation program basis was the research project, "History of the Colombian University, 1774 – 1992", which has been enriched with both research and doctor theses contribution. Thus the University, the study object, has been studied from various historiography trends, in which its role in the national and local context is highlighted. This has allowed to identify several trends such as institutional history, social history of education, elites and political power, socio-cultural history, school knowledge history, all of which have also allowed to identify new problems, new methodologies, new characters, new sources. In turn, they have allowed to identify new problems, new methodologies, new actors, and new sources that are opposed to the historicism.


This paper is concerned with estimating the effects of actions from causal assumptions, represented concisely as a directed graph, and statistical knowledge, given as a probability distribution. We provide a necessary and sufficient graphical condition for the cases when the causal effect of an arbitrary set of variables on another arbitrary set can be determined uniquely from the available information, as well as an algorithm which computes the effect whenever this condition holds. Furthermore, we use our results to prove completeness of do-calculus [Pearl, 1995], and a version of an identification algorithm in [Tian, 2002] for the same identification problem. Finally, we derive a complete characterization of semi-Markovian models in which all causal effects are identifiable.


This paper will introduce some of the developments in 'Smart Housing' that seek to reduce risk and enable independent living for older, more frail people. However, these developments will be critiqued in the context of an older person's wish to live in their chosen environment in their own chosen way. The paper will rehearse recent work on information and advice giving to enhance housing choice, and the importance of minor acts of kindness as urban repair, as part of civil society, and representing the key underlying philosophy to embed before smart housing is imposed as a received social good. The paper will introduce a housing initiative in Dorset that is building around these concepts. The paper will consider the following areas: • The context of our ageing populations • 15 years of smart technology in homes • Benefits of smart technology and the future • Problematizing smart technology • The importance of information and advice giving – recent research and gaps • Minor acts of kindness as urban repair and good living