Few researchers have sought to examine the consequences of psychological contract breach in the particular case of professional employees working for nonprofessional organizations. To increase our understanding, the purpose of this article was to test an original research model encompassing psychological contract breach, psychological contract violation, perceived organizational support, organizational and professional commitment, and intention to leave the organization. A study was conducted among a sample of 329 professional employees working in nonprofessional organizations. As predicted, this research shows a positive relationship between psychological contract breach and psychological contract violation, a negative relationship between breach and organizational commitment, and a negative relationship between organizational commitment and the intention to leave the organization. However, contrary to expectations, the results indicated that perceived organizational support has no moderating effect on the relationship between breach and violation. This finding does not confirm previous findings from the study by Suazo and Stone-Romero (2011). This unexpected result led to testing a different combination between perceived organizational support and PC-breach and PC-violation, which is documented in the literature on nonprofessional employees. Thus, in accordance with previous results by Suazo (2009), the data from our research indicate that the relationship between PC breach and perceived organizational support is mediated by PC violation. This alternative research model suggests testing a long mediation process by which the breach influences the intention to leave the organization via the violation, the perceived organizational support, and professional and organizational commitment. This long mediation process has been confirmed by our data. Finally, the results of this research suggest that when working in a non-professional context, professional employees tend to react to breaches of the psychological contract in a similar way to non-professional employees.


Critical analysis of the evolution and conception of critical thinking reveals the establishment of three thinking enterprises which underpin any critical thinking operations: the possession of in-depth knowledge structure, adroitness in operating cognitive as well as metacognitive operations and critical thinking dispositions. Not denying the significant role play by the first two, any critical thinking operation is intrinsically motivated by the critical thinking dispositions. Therefore, the examination of science student teachers' critical thinking dispositions will inform us the possibility of integrating the critical thinking skills in a science classroom, which may then lead to the development of these skills among the pupils. The critical thinking attitudinal profile is built by using information garnered by the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory Test (CCTDI). In this paper, the attitudinal profile of the science student teachers will be revealed and suggestions are then proposed on the attitudes that need to be developed. The information revealed from the attitudinal profile will be used as a guideline on how the teacher education programme should be tailored towards the nourishment of these attitudes so that the aspiration of the inclusion of critical thinking skills in the science classroom will be realised.


Why did Britain vote for Brexit? What was the relative importance of factors such as education, age, immigration and ethnic diversity? And to what extent did the pattern of public support for Brexit across the country match the pattern of public support in earlier years for eurosceptic parties, notably the UK Independence Party (UKIP)? In this article we draw on aggregate-level data to conduct an initial exploration of the 2016 referendum vote. First, we find that turnout was generally higher in more pro-Leave areas. Second, we find that public support for Leave closely mapped past support for UKIP. And third, we find that support for Leave was more polarised along education lines than support for UKIP ever was. The implication of this finding is that support for euroscepticism has both widened and narrowed—it is now more widespread across Britain but it is also more socially distinctive.


Fitness landscapes provide a prospective understanding of chance and necessity in evolution The field of molecular evolution is concerned with evolutionary changes in genes and genomes and the underlying driving forces behind those changes. Current studies in molecular evolution are almost entirely retrospective, with a focus on the mutations that were fixed during evolution, and the conclusions are often explanatory, offering no predictive insights. Because only a tiny fraction of all mutations that have ever occurred during evolution have been fixed, the "successes" that we see today provide an incomplete or even biased understanding of the evolutionary process. One way to circumvent this problem is to obtain the whole fitness landscape of a gene to understand, prospectively, chance and necessity in evolution (see the figure). Two studies in this issue, by Li et al. on page 837 (1) and Puchta et al. on page 840 (2), each take on this challenge by characterizing the in vivo fitness landscape of two RNA genes.


This paper proposes the first tracklet proposal network, named PC-TCNN, for Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) on point clouds. Our pipeline first generates tracklet proposals, then refines these tracklets and associates them to generate long trajectories. Specifically, object proposal generation and motion regression are first performed on a point cloud sequence to generate tracklet candidates. Then, spatial-temporal features of each tracklet are exploited and their consistency is used to refine the tracklet proposal. Finally, the refined tracklets across multiple frames are associated to perform MOT on the point cloud sequence. The PC-TCNN significantly improves the MOT performance by introducing the tracklet proposal design. On the KITTI tracking benchmark, it attains an MOTA of 91.75%, outperforming all submitted results on the online leaderboard.


was achieved by slowly varying the current. The rate of evaporation was properly controlled and maintained constant during all the evaporations. The thicknesses of the films were 150 nm, 300 nm and 450 nm. Dielectric and conduction properties of Lead Phthalocyanine thin films have been studied. The capacitors were formed on a substrate with the dielectric layer in between the two metal electrodes so as to form an MSM structure. The variation of capacitance with frequency at different temperatures of PbPc films for thickness 450 nm was observed. This dependence of conductivity on frequency can be explained by the predominance of the hopping mechanism, as the conductivity increases with increasing frequency


Abstract. The early Albian to mid-Albian cosmopolitan genus Douvilleiceras is represented in the Haida Gwaii archipelago of western British Columbia by five species, D. mammillatum (Schlotheim), D. offarcinatum (White), D. scabrosum Casey, D. spiniferum (Whiteaves), and D. aff. spiniferum (Whiteaves). Specimens of one of these taxa, D. spiniferum, are particularly abundant on Haida Gwaii and the species is discussed with respect to its morphological variability and ontogenetic development. The important morphological features for taxonomic criteria of the genus Douvilleiceras are the mode of tuberculation, the pattern of ribbing, and the proportions of the shell in the middle growth stage.


Recording of Ruqayya sharing a recipe for "Diram Phiti", or a sweet bread cake, in the Nagar dialect. Grain is germinated, then ground into flour and fermented. This flour is made into dough, and cooked o an iron pan in individual patties.


The aim of this study was to describe the high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) appearances of pulmonary abnormalities in 34 cases of type I sarcoidosis according to radiographic classification--lymphadenopathy only). Abnormalities were seen in 56% cases in which the pulmonary parenchyma appeared on radiographs. Nodules (1-4 mm) were seen in 41%. Other lesions as linear network were--present in 11.8% and ground-glass opacities--in 8.8%. The opacities are clustered in the peribronchovascular spaces, with relative sparing of the lung periphery and predominate in upper and middle lung zones. This study demonstrated the usefulness of HRCT in the correct diagnosis of type I sarcoidosis.


Sparse Sinkhorn. A common way of achieving a high p1 and low p2 in LSH is via the AND-OR construction. In this scheme we calculate B · r hash functions, divided into B sets (hash bands) of r hash functions each. A pair of points is considered as neighbors if any hash band matches completely. Calculating the hash buckets for all points with b hash buckets per function scales as O((n +m)dBbr) for the hash functions we consider. As expected, for the tasks and hash functions we investigated we obtain approximately m/b and n/b neighbors, with b hash buckets per band. Using this we can fix the number of neighbors to a small, constant β in expectation with b = min(n,m)/β. We thus obtain a sparse cost matrix Csp with O(max(n,m)β) non-infinite values and can calculate s and t in linear time O(Nsink max(n,m)β), where Nsink ≤ 2+ −4 ln(mini,j{K̃ij |K̃ij>0}mini,j{pi,qj}) ε (see Theorem 4) denotes the number of Sinkhorn iterations. Calculating the hash buckets with r = logmin(n,m)−log β log b takes O((n +m)dBb(logmin(n,m) − log β)/ log b). Since B, b, and β are small, we obtain roughly log-linear scaling with the number of points overall, i.e. O(n log n) for n ≈ m.


Summary

1. A Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) has been developed as a new feature of the NASA-CASA (Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach) ecosystem production and trace gas model. This DGVM includes seasonal phenology algorithms calibrated using historical interannual data sets derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution (AVHRR) satellite 'greenness' index.

2. The coupled CASA-DGVM design is based conceptually on two main elements of Tilman's resource-ratio hypothesis of vegetation change, namely: 1) plant competition for resources (water and light) over relatively short time periods of months and seasons; and 2) the long-term pattern in the supply of growth-limiting resources such as water and nutrients, i.e. the resource-supply trajectory. This simulation model generates global gridded estimates of primary production, above and below ground biomass, leaf area index (LAI), and trace gas fluxes from soil.

3. Eight distributed test locations for the DGVM were evaluated initially to represent a variety of climate conditions ranging from Arctic (64°N Alaska) to tropical and subtropical (24°S southern Africa) latitude zones. At all test locations, the predicted plant functional type (PFT) matched closely with the actual reported PFT.

4. In the process of running the model to steady state PFTs, most forest locations showed a rapid progression of transient states, from bare ground to grassland, to grasses with shrub cover, and finally to the forest PFT. From this first global application, the DGVM correctly predicts the presence of forest classes in approximately 75–95% of all cases worldwide, and grasslands in approximately 58% of all cases.

5. The effects of two hypothetical climate change scenarios were evaluated. Scenario I was set by warming air surface temperatures linearly to 4 °C above average over a 25-year simulation period. Scenario II was set by decreasing annual rainfall amounts linearly to 50% below average over a 25-year simulation period.

6. The warming scenario I resulted in PFT at high-latitude forest and boreal forest sites changing to mixed coniferous forest, accompanied by increase in canopy LAI. The drought scenario II resulted in PFT at the boreal forest and savanna sites changing to grasslands. At locations where PFT did not change with climate, however, soil water and canopy LAI were predicted to decline progressively under the warming scenario, beginning from steady-state temperate and tropical zone PFTs. They also declined under the drought scenario beginning from practically any steady state PFT.


A VLSI architecture is proposed for the realization of real-time two-dimensional (2-D) image filtering in an address-event-representation (AER) vision system. The architecture is capable of implementing any convolutional kernel F(x,y) as long as it is decomposable into x-axis and y-axis components, i.e., F(x,y)=H(x)V(y), for some rotated coordinate system {x,y} and if this product can be approximated safely by a signed minimum operation. The proposed architecture is intended to be used in a complete vision system, known as the boundary contour system and feature contour system (BCS-FCS) vision model, proposed by Grossberg and collaborators. The present paper proposes the architecture, provides a circuit implementation using MOS transistors operated in weak inversion, and shows behavioral simulation results at the system level operation and some electrical simulations.


ABSTRACT Background: Agents of opportunity (AO) are potentially harmful biological, chemical, radiological, and pharmaceutical substances commonly used for health care delivery and research. AOs are present in all academic medical centers (AMC), creating vulnerability in the health care sector; AO attributes and dissemination methods likely predict risk; and AMCs are inadequately secured against a purposeful AO dissemination, with limited budgets and competing priorities. We explored health care workers' perceptions of AMC security and the impact of those perceptions on AO risk. Methods: Qualitative methods (survey, interviews, and workshops) were used to collect opinions from staff working in a medical school and 4 AMC-affiliated hospitals concerning AOs and the risk to hospital infrastructure associated with their uncontrolled presence. Secondary to this goal, staff perception concerning security, or opinions about security behaviors of others, were extracted, analyzed, and grouped into themes. Results: We provide a framework for depicting the interaction of staff behavior and access control engineering, including the tendency of staff to "defeat" inconvenient access controls. In addition, 8 security themes emerged: staff security behavior is a significant source of AO risk; the wide range of opinions about "open" front-door policies among AMC staff illustrates a disparity of perceptions about the need for security; interviewees expressed profound skepticism concerning the effectiveness of front-door access controls; an AO risk assessment requires reconsideration of the security levels historically assigned to areas such as the loading dock and central distribution sites, where many AOs are delivered and may remain unattended for substantial periods of time; researchers' view of AMC security is influenced by the ongoing debate within the scientific community about the wisdom of engaging in bioterrorism research; there was no agreement about which areas of the AMC should be subject to stronger access controls; security personnel play dual roles of security and customer service, creating the negative perception that neither role is done well; and budget was described as an important factor in explaining the state of security controls. Conclusions: We determined that AMCs seeking to reduce AO risk should assess their institutionally unique AO risks, understand staff security perceptions, and install access controls that are responsive to the staff's tendency to defeat them. The development of AO attribute fact sheets is desirable for AO risk assessment; new funding and administrative or legislative tools to improve AMC security are required; and security practices and methods that are convenient and effective should be engineered. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2010;4:291-299)


Although the first observations of the inhibitory effect of methylation on gene activity were made almost a decade ago, the mechanism by which methyl groups affect transcription is still obscure. Here we use engineered promoters methylated in vitro in transient transfections to study the mechanism by which methylation mediates promoter repression. The results clearly show that the location of the methyl groups within the promoter region determines the extent of promoter repression. The most effective suppression was observed when methylation was in the preinitiation domain. The results also support a previous suggestion that a mediator protein is involved in the mechanism of promoter inhibition. The suppressor effect of methylation at sequences flanking the TATA box can be partially overcome in the presence of the simian virus 40 enhancer. In addition, results obtained by transient thymidine labeling of Ltk- cells that were transfected with a methylated thymidine kinase gene from herpes simplex virus, at the level of approximately one template per cell, further support the conclusion that methylation affects primarily transcription preinitiation.


The prevalence of helminth parasites infection in six fish species (Salmo gairdneri, Salmo trutta, Thymallus thymallus, Anguila anguila, Gasterosteus aculeatus, and Cottus gobio) showed a maximum 100% infection rate in the salmon fishes and a minimum 25% infection rate in Gasterosteus aculeatus. The intestinal parasites recorded were Cyathocephalus truncatus (tapeworm), Echinorhynchus truttae (Acanthocephalan), Crepidostomum metoecus (trematode) and Cucullanus truttae (nematode). Another nematode, Cystidicola farionis was also recorded in the swim bladder. The amphipod, Gammarus pulex was found to habour the development stages of all the helminth parasites. Journal of Aquatic Sciences Volume 15, April 2000, pp. 41-46

 KEY WORDS: Helminth parasite fauna, Freshwater fish, amphipod, Gammarus pulex.


STUDY OBJECTIVE
Irrigation, a critical component of wound management, is commonly performed with sterile normal saline solution. The purpose of this study was to compare the infection rates of wounds irrigated with normal saline solution versus those of wounds irrigated with running tap water.

METHODS
A prospective trial was conducted in an urban pediatric emergency department. Tap water pressure and flow rates were measured, and cultures were obtained before the study and at 5 months after study initiation. Patients 1 to 17 years of age presenting to the pediatric ED with a simple laceration were eligible. Exclusion criteria included immunocompromise, complicated lacerations, or current use of or need for antibiotics. Patients were allocated to the running tap water group or the standard normal saline solution irrigation group. Wounds were closed in standard fashion. Patients returned to the pediatric ED in 48 to 72 hours for evaluation.

RESULTS
Two hundred seventy-one patients were enrolled in the normal saline solution group and 259 in the tap water group. Tap water and normal saline solution pressures and flow rates differed. The groups did not differ in terms of patient demographic characteristics or wound characteristics. However, more wounds were located on the hand in the tap water group (21.3%; 95% confidence interval [CI] 16.3% to 27.1%) compared with those in the normal saline solution group (9.2%; 95% CI 5.9% to 13.4%). The wound infection rates were similar in the 2 groups (normal saline solution group: 2.8% [95% CI 1.1% to 5.7%] versus running tap water group: 2.9% [95% CI 1.2% to 5.9%]).

CONCLUSION
There were no clinically important differences in infection rates between wounds irrigated with tap water or normal saline solution. Tap water might be an effective alternative to normal saline solution for wound irrigation in children.


This research was conducted to examine the impact of some essential heavy metals used as a supplement during animal feed formulation and the toxic from unregulated discharges of untreated poultry waste into water bodies on man and aquatic organisms. During the processing of poultry feed, certain heavy metals are used as a supplement such as selenium, copper, zinc, iron etc. to enhance poultry meat and egg yield which is also increase the daily discharge of anthropogenic wastes into our environment that contain high concentration of heavy metals discharges into aquatic environment globally, especially in underdeveloped where this waste are not treated before discharge or used in agriculture as an organic fertilizer in planting crops as a result of this it become absorb by plants and could pose a serious health risk to man and aquatic species as well as affect the ecological balance that can be transfer to humans via the food chain. Some organisms are kills as a result of the toxic heavy metals in water and can affect their growths. Bio-accumulated in the body of certain species, such as fish, which are eaten by humans that causes devastating diseases such as Minamata and Itai-Itai. Regulation of the use some heavy metals as a supplement in feed production or complete removal of it in animal feed should be adopt in order to minimize the human health risks and environmental contamination associated with these animal waste.


This paper aims to investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through pollution -haven hypothesis modelfor original ASEAN5 (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines) countries by using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach also known as Bound test. Annual time series data is employed for the period spanning from 1970 -2008 comprising 39 years of observation. The ARDL technique has the advantage of not requiring a specific identification of the order of the underlying data besides this technique is suitable for small or finite sample size. The results of ECM-ARDL for short run analysis are indicated that in the Philippines case, most of the coefficients in the short run are significant except for gross national income per capita (GNI). In the short run, GNI has showed positively relationship with the CO2 while the manufacturing value added (MV) has negative relationship with the CO2.Other countries in this study; Thailand and Indonesia show a mix evidence of relationship between their independent variables and the dependent variable. Moreover, the results of the long run elasticities show that for GNI, MV, and FDI have significantly and positively influenced the level of CO2 in Indonesia and Thailand. As compared to Philippines, only FDI inflow is positively influence the level of CO2 in this country. ASEAN5 countries should carefully monitor the level of CO2 in the nation as they received more FDI inflow in the countries.


Randomised controlled trials can provide strong evidence of the efficacy (or lack) of new drug treatments as well as the occurrence of common side effects.1 However, clinical safety issues can arise after new medications receive regulatory approval, particularly in relation to rare serious adverse events.2 Investigation of rare adverse events is often fraught with difficulty, leading to uncertainty, particularly when there is conflicting evidence from research utilising different methodologies. One recent example is the observed association between leukotriene receptor antagonist (LTRA) therapy, used in the treatment of asthma, and Churg–Strauss syndrome (CSS), a vasculitis of uncertain aetiology (also known as allergic granulomatous angiitis). CSS is certainly both rare and serious, with a background incidence of 3 per million per year in the general population, and a 1 year mortality rate of 7%.3–5

Soon after the introduction of LTRAs (zafirlukast, pranlukast and montelukast), numerous case reports and case series were published of patients who developed CSS after starting this therapy.6–13 The temporal relationship between the introduction of LTRA therapy and the development of CSS suggested a possible causal relationship. An underlying mechanism was proposed whereby LTRA therapy may lead to an imbalance in leukotriene receptor stimulation, resulting in unopposed activity of LTB4, a potent chemoattractant for eosinophils as well as neutrophils, which could potentially lead to eosinophilic tissue infiltration and the initiation of systemic vasculitis.14 15

A feature of a number of the case reports was that the introduction of the LTRA allowed significant oral steroid reduction, suggesting that this therapy may have unmasked previously existing CSS that had been suppressed by the steroids prescribed for asthma. Another observation was that some cases had severe or unstable asthma at the time LTRA therapy was introduced, which arguably may have represented …


Constructing the capacity bound of a multiple-input multiple-output wireless system is often performed by assuming specified antenna configurations and a propagation environment and determining the signaling strategy which maximizes throughput. This paper extends this approach to further determine the optimal antenna characteristics which maximize the capacity for the propagation scenario, with the resulting capacity bound representing the ultimate maximum achievable value if optimal antenna design and signaling are used. In this approach, the spatially-continuous transmit currents and receive fields are represented using eigenfunctions of appropriate operators. It is shown that, except under certain conditions where array supergain solutions emerge, the capacity remains bounded for finite transmit power. The approach also shows how to limit supergain effects using practical constraints. Model problems and numerical computations are provided for different power constraints at the transmitter and noise characteristics at the receiver.


Construction project management usually has a high risk of safety-related accidents. An opportunity to proactively improve safety performance is with near-miss information, which is regarded as free lessons for safety management. The research status and practice; however, presents a lack of comprehensive understanding on what near-miss information means within the context of construction safety management. The objective of this study is to fill in this gap. The main findings enrich the comprehensive understanding of the near-miss definition, the near-miss causation model, and the process of near-miss management. Considering that near-misses are more tacit and obscure than accidents, the process for near-miss management involves eight stages: discovery, reporting, identification, prioritization, causal analysis, solution, dissemination, and evaluation. The first three stages aim to make near-misses explicit. The other five are adopted to better manage near-miss information, compiled in a well-designed near-miss database (NMDB). Finally, a case study was conducted to show how near-miss information can be utilized to assist in construction safety management. The main potential contributions here are twofold. Firstly, corresponding findings provide a knowledge framework of near-miss information for construction safety researchers who can go on to further study near-miss management. Secondly, the proposed framework contributes to the guidance and encouragement of near-miss practices on construction sites.


Forty-five female outpatients sexually abused in childhood were offered a two-year-long trauma-focused group therapy. Questionnaires were given before and after treatment concerning social interaction (ISSI), social adjustment (SAS-SR), perceived family climate (Family Climate Test, Questions of Family Members). Both the level of social interaction and social adjustment were significantly improved after treatment. There were no significant changes in family climate except for the expressed emotion subscale perceived criticism in relation to the partner that showed a reduction. We conclude that trauma-focused group therapy seems to be useful in improving the relationships and social life of women who were sexually abused as children.


Abstract: The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the levels of emotional intelligence and decision-making of the gifted students in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades in the secondary education level. Relational survey model was used in the study. The data was obtained through the implementation of 'Emotional Quotient Inventory' and 'Decision Strategies Scale'; the obtained data was compared and analyzed through SPSS program to determine the relations between the levels of emotional intelligences and decision-making of gifted students. A total of 141 students from 14-19 years of age from the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades of the Science Art Center in a medium-sized province of Turkey during the 2015-2016 academic year participated in the study. The study group consisted of 79 male and 62 female students. The average of gifted students as a result of the implementation of 'Emotional Intelligence Scale' is determined within the limits of 'I agree'. While there was no significant difference between interpersonal relations and adaptation to environmental conditions according to the levels of emotional intelligence of the gifted students and their grades, a significant difference was found between the personal awareness, stress management and general mood sub-scales. As a result, it was determined that there is a significant positive relationship between emotional intelligence levels and decision-making levels of gifted students. Individuals with high emotional intelligence are expected to be positive and happy individuals who can have positive communication with individuals around them, who are respectful to themselves and their environment, know their boundaries, have empathic skills; they are independent in their decisions and they are aware of their social responsibilities, looking at life with hope and affection.   This research finding reveals that as a type of intelligence that can be promoted, the improved levels of emotional intelligence may directly help improve the levels of decision making of students. For this reason, it is suggested that parents are educated about the development of emotional intelligence and the improvement of emotional intelligence. Keywords: Gifted Students; Emotional Quotient Inventory; Decision Strategies Scale.


Language and its relationship to political culture unexpectedly dominate this issue of Early American Studies. Taken together, the five articles that focus on the persuasive power of speech and writing demonstrate how words effect and affect social change. In his article on James Fenimore Cooper's maritime novels, Bryan Sinche shows how an artfully constructed turn of phrase could mold shipboard hierarchies at sea, while Michael Besso's revisionist essay reveals how Hooker's sermon advanced God's will (rather than popular sovereignty) on land. Whose words resonate most powerfully? Despite the Puritan insistence on the force of divine intervention, Robb Haberman maintains that print culture in the form of magazines was equally responsible for nation building in the early republic. In the same postrevolutionary decades, as G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, the concept of sensibility relied on a language to define it as well as a gendered subtext to communicate it. These ideas made their way into the correspondence of national figures such as Abigail and John Adams. Not only did that same gendered language reinforce sensibility, but, as Catherine Allgor concludes in her analysis of Margaret Bayard Smith's travel diary, Smith made it a useful political tool: she used the language of domesticity to ease the transition from one presidential administration to another. The two remaining essays in this issue build on previous scholarship about race and religion in unusual and compelling ways. Felicity Donohoe explores the sexual attitudes of southeastern Indians and how they were distorted by Euro-Americans who interpreted a series of sexual attacks within the Indian community from their own perspective. And in a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between Catholicism and slavery in the United States, Maura Jane Farrelly considers the possibility that slavery might have been integral to the formation of a unique Catholic identity because of their symbiotic development in an American context. Lots of good cold-weather reading between the covers of this issue of Early American Studies!


Haze removal also known as contrast improvement mention unique procedures that focus to minimize or eliminate the degradation that have arises while the digital image was captured. The degradation may be owing to different factors like respective target-camera motion, blur becouse of camera miss-focus, respective atmospheric instability and others. This paper has concentrated on the variety of contrast improvement techniques. Since haze depends on the informaion of scene depth which is unknown factor so dehazing is dificult task. Efficacy of fog is the function of distance between the camera and target. Thus, air light map estimation is needed to haze removal. The present dehazing techniques can be classified as: image enhancement and image restoration Although, the image enhancement does not consolidate the cause of fog degrade the class of image.


This study aims to identify and assess the feasibility of fixed asset investment in buildings and machinery business of the Tofu Sumedang H. Ateng using the method capital budgeting and to find out investment plans for fixed assets of buildings and waste screening machines. The methodology used is descriptive analysis. The results of the study are the feasibility of investing in fixed assets of buildings and machinery in the Tofu Sumedang H.Ateng business by using the method capital budgeting is feasible.By converting tofu liquid waste into biogas, tofu factory owners not only contribute to protecting the environment but also increase their income by reducing fuel consumption in the tofu making process.


3,3′-Bis(5,6-dibromomethyl-1,2,4-triazine), a new polyfunctional bipyridine analogue for constructing supramolecular structures, has been synthesized from 2,3-butanedione and oxylhydrazidine by two routes in moderate to high yields.


The present study was done in October 2008 and March 2009 to explore the seasonal effects on soil physico-chemical properties and fungal population found at different depth (that is, 5, 10 and 15 cm) as well as on plant parts. Results indicate that in both seasons, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium was higher in the top 5 cm followed by lower depths (10 and 15 cm). Fungal species isolated from different soil depths indicate a decline in number of fungal species with an increase in soil depth, except in the rhizospheric region where the number of fungal species was higher due to highest microbial activity in this region and higher nutrient contents (due to degradation of organic compound into simpler one). In case of isolation from plant parts, it indicates that the population of fungal sp. was higher in root region compared to shoot region.

 Key words: fungal species, physic-chemical properties, organic soil.


Acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGIB) is a common disorder and a gastroenterological emergency. With the development of new techniques and devices, the survivability after gastrointestinal bleeding is improving. However, at the same time, we are facing the difficulty of severely complicated cases with various diseases. For example, while endoscopic examination with a normal diameter endoscope is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of UGIB, there are several cases in which it cannot be used. In these cases, transnasal endoscopy (TNE) may be a viable treatment option. This report reviews current hemostatic devices for endoscopic treatment and the safety and efficiency of using TNE in complicated cases. The latter will be demonstrated in a case report where TNE was employed in a patient with severe esophageal stenosis. This review summarizes the advances made in the devices used and will provide further ideas for the physician in terms of combining these devices and TNE.


This chapter investigates how, within a number of European Union (EU) Member States, competition law has been used to address problems of market power in the healthcare services sector. It summarizes the relevant EU and national competition laws and considers the experience of applying those laws to providers of healthcare services. The chapter is chiefly concerned with healthcare services in England, although examples are drawn for other EU Member States. Examination of the English experience provides a view of the use of competition law to address market power problems in most elements of the health system matrix. The chapter then considers three challenges that emerge from that experience of using competition law to address problems of market power in healthcare service markets. The first challenges the applicability of competition law to healthcare service providers operating in each or every element of the healthcare system matrix. The second, accepting applicability, questions the appropriateness of the substantive rules to healthcare services. The third, a battle of authority and autonomy, considers whether decisions made by healthcare service providers should be subject to external review and the type of review that competition law offers.


Proceedings: AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011‐‐ Apr 2‐6, 2011; Orlando, FL

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) is the most common form of leukemia found in adults in Western countries. Approximately 2 out of every 100,000 people develop CLL annually, with 90% being older than age 50. CLL arises from accumulation of CD5+ B lymphocytes. CLL cells have defective apoptotic pathways and are characterized and distinguished from other leukemic cells by expression of CD19, CD20, and CD23 along with CD5. Current targeted therapy for treatment of CLL includes monoclonal antibodies against CD20 or CD52. However, these are often either not very effective against CLL cells due to low target expression, or are associated with severe side effects due to expression of target on other immune cells. Thus, more specific and efficacious treatments of CLL are warranted.

Due to its relatively specific expression on CLL cells, CD5 is an obvious target for antibody based therapeutics. However, earlier attempts to develop antibodies against CD5 for treatment of CLL have failed to show significant therapeutic activity in patients. As in vivo studies with murine antibodies against CD5 showed no direct effect of the antibodies, activation of secondary effector functions might be important to obtain therapeutic activity with antibodies targeting CD5. Recently, it has been shown that mixtures of monoclonal antibodies against the same target increase complement-dependent cytotoxicity. Hence, it could be relevant to target CD5 with more than one monoclonal antibody to increase activation of complement-dependent cytotoxicity.

In the current work, sixty-eight chimeric IgG1 antibodies against human CD5 were cloned from CD5 immunized mice using our mSymplex™ technology. Fifteen unique clonotypes were selected for further characterization and functional analyses. The selected antibodies were epitope binned using Biacore analysis to identify antibodies with non-overlapping epitopes. Using confocal microscopy, the level of internalization of CD5 upon binding of the single antibodies and antibody mixtures to CD5 was investigated and it was shown that some combinations of two non-overlapping antibodies induce internalization of CD5, while mixtures of two other non-overlapping antibodies remain on the surface bound to CD5. Subsequently, the direct cytotoxic effect of CD5-specific antibody mixtures and the ability to mediate ADCC and CDC was investigated in vitro using CLL cells isolated from human patients. An update will be presented.

Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2011 Apr 2-6; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2011;71(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4585. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2011-4585


Major pulmonary embolism (MPE), defined as a large central PE with hemodynamic instability, has been shown to carry a crude mortality rate of 17.4-28%.12 Despite this high mortality rate, the treatment of major PE has not been well-standardized and remains controversial. Surgical embolectomy, once viewed as a procedure of last effort, has recently become incorporated into the pulmonary embolism algorithm of some tertiary medical centers.3456 However, this procedure, to our knowledge, has not yet been reported in a community hospital. We present a successful case of pulmonary embolectomy for a major pulmonary embolism performed at a community hospital, review of the literature, and propose an algorithm for the treatment of a major pulmonary embolism. Work was done at Memorial Hospital, South Bend, IN.


1 The disposition kinetics of lignocaine and antipyrine were compared in eight normal subjects and in eleven patients receiving chronic therapy with antiepileptic drugs. The urinary excretion of D-glucaric acid (D-GA) was measured in 16 subjects. 2 In patients treated with antiepileptic drugs antipyrine clearance and D-GA excretion were significantly increased, whereas lignocaine biovailability was significantly reduced. 3 When all the subjects included in the study were considered, a significant positive correlation could be found between the apparent oral clearance of lignocaine (Dose/area under the blood concentration curve) and both antipyrine clearance (r = 0.73) and D-GA excretion (r = 0.74). 4 When normal subjects and epileptic patients were considered separately, a significant positive correlation could be confirmed between the apparent oral clearance of lignocaine and both antipyrine clearance (r = 0.71) and D-GA excretion (r = 0.76) in normal subjects, and between antipyrine clearance and D-GA excretion (r = 0.75) in epileptic patients. 5 These results suggest that the reduction of the oral availability of lignocaine in epileptic patients is secondary to induction of first-pass metabolism of the latter drug.


We fabricated fully epitaxial magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) with full-Heusler Co2FeAl0.5Si0.5 (CFAS) electrodes using the sputtering method. We changed the MgO barrier thickness, the thickness of an Mg layer inserted between the CFAS and MgO layers, and a post-annealing process for CFAS layers in order to obtain conditions necessary for achieving a high tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) ratio. We found that both the MgO barrier thickness and the post-annealing temperature directly influenced the TMR ratio while the thin Mg layer insertion did not. Post-annealing at higher temperatures above 873 K suppresses the TMR ratio due to degradation of the structure of top CFAS layer during the post-annealing. In addition, a large effective tunnel barrier height was observed in our MTJs because of the poor quality of MgO barrier layer. These facts indicate that the tunneling spin polarization of CFAS/MgO interface is sensitive not only to the degree of ordering of L21 or B2 in CFAS but also to the quality of the MgO barrier and CFAS/MgO interfaces.


The discovery of America was followed by the discovery of her silver and gold. Year after year these precious metals were mined and sent to Spain and to Portugal and from there throughout the world. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, historians and economists have accorded great importance to these movements of treasure. The whole of European economic development has been linked to them by way of increases in prices (the quantitative theory). Nevertheless prior to this work, no exhaustive documentation of the actual volumes transferred was undertaken: the well-known work of E. J. Hamilton covers only a part of the period; that of Soetbeer is imprecise and out of date. The primary object of this book, written in French, is thus to establish complete and reliable statistics. Morineau has finally located these in the Dutch gazettes, faithful observers of the Spanish Carerra. His reconstruction of actual movements has led him to question many widely accepted hypotheses and concepts.


People who ascend rapidly to altitudes greater than 3,000 meters (10,000 ft) may become ill; rarely, some may die from an inability to adapt to hypoxia. Age, pre-existing cardiopulmonary or hematologic disease, and the rate and degree of ascent are known to limit man's adaptation to high altitudes. Other factors, such as blunted hypoxic respiratory drive and sublinical disease of the pulmonary vascular bed are probably also important. Pre-exposure with acetozolamide (Diamox) helps, but once symptoms of high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) occur, supplemental oxygen and rapid descent to lower altitudes are the only known remedies. In view of the steady increase in the number of people who work and play at high altitudes, physicians must understand the pathophysiologic mechanisms involved in order to treat properly and to counsel patients.


Islam requires its adherents to study and develop science. Human knowledge continues to evolve with the times and the discovery of the secrets of nature. The Qur'an applies to all ages, even many things that can not be understood by man today, as many things also have begun to be understood over the course of time. All human beings have an interest in knowing the basics of natural science, because starting from the oxygen gas to breathe, the food and the necessary medicines, the environment and the natural disasters all are related to the natural sciences. Without the power of science how can humans can understand the universe to see the greatness of Allah swt. Therefore, the increase of human resources in Islamic society becomes a necessity.


Deserving protection: The selective process of humanitarian admission for Syrian refugees in Germany. Abstract The often praised temporary humanitarian admission programme through which Germany grants two year residence permits to Syrian refugees in Syria and its neighbouring countries Egypt and Libya, uses several criteria, such as family and other ties to Germany, vulnerability, and useful skills for the reconstruction of Syria, in its admission selection process. This paper argues that these criteria and the temporary character of the programme allow the German state to carefully select refugees in order to minimize its legal and economic responsibilities towards them. Though some aspects of the programme facilitate the application process and economic integration of refugees and encourage a more flexible approach taking into account transnational ties and mobile solutions, the programme also risks enabling tendencies in the global refugee regime which could lead to a reduction of assumed responsibility among Northern states and to more inequality among states and refugees. Keywords: Syrian refugees, humanitarian admission, temporary protection, durable solutions, burden sharing, migrant-refugee dichotomy, transnationalism, mobility, repatriation ----- Schlagworte: syrische Fluchtlinge, humanitare Aufnahme, temporarer Schutz, dauerhafte Losungen, Lastenteilung, Migrant-Fluchtlings-Dichotomie, Transnationalismus, Mobilitat, Ruckfuhrung ----- Bibliographie: Maaroufi, Mouna: Selektiver Schutz. Das humanitare Aufnahmeprogramm fur syrische Fluchtlinge in Deutschland, PERIPHERIE, 2-2015, S. 212-234. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v35i138-139.24297


This study investigated the cooperation between municipalities and other parties in the construction of 60 km/h zones. For various reasons it is advisable that municipalities cooperate with for example road authorities and road users like citizens, companies, emergency services, public transport companies et cetera. In the study we examine the effect of this cooperation for the road's safety. The study poses the following question: To which extent did the organization of the cooperation between the parties involved contribute to the policy's effectiveness in the first phase of Sustainable Safety (more concretely the construction of 60 km/h zones by municipalities) and, based on the findings, what can be said about the second phase of Sustainable Safety in a prescriptive sense? This report presents the data that was collected for the study in the municipality of Waalwijk. The study measured two things. Firstly, the cooperation between the parties involved in the decision-making about the construction of 60 km/h zones was measured. Secondly, the effectiveness of the policy was measured. To measure the cooperation we made an inventory of who maintained contact with each other and the frequency of that contact. This was done in interviews with the municipal employee and a survey among the parties with who contact had taken place or should have taken place. The data was translated into a graphic representation: a diagram of the network. We specifically looked at the cooperation with three groups. In the first place we looked at the cooperation with neighbouring municipalities and other road authorities with whom the municipality shares 60 km/h roads with adjoining boundaries. Secondly, the cooperation was investigated with emergency services (police, fire brigade, ambulance) and public transport companies (for as far as their routes make use of the 60 km/h roads). Finally, the contacts with citizens, companies, and interest groups were studied. To measure the effectiveness of the policy we operationalized the results of the decision-making process as the Sustainable Safety level of the 60km/h roads. All 60 km/h roads and intersections were inspected visually and rated with the Sustainable Safety Indicator. This instrument was used to measure certain road features such as edge markings, centre line markings, and direction separators for road sections, and priority arrangements and physical speed reduction measures for intersections. Based on these measurings the Sustainable Safety rating for the 60 km/h zone was determined. Next the roads were assessed on specific characteristics that are connected with the parties that were involved in the consultations. This approach was used to rate the transitions of municipal roads to neighbouring municipalities and the number of measures that are 'friendly' for emergency services and transport companies. In Waalwijk the cooperation with other road authorities has been moderate. However, cooperation with emergency services and public transport companies was good, there have been contacts with all parties, mostly bilateral. The municipality of Waalwijk is very active in its communication with citizens, companies and interest groups and organizes consultation meetings at an early stage. Measured with the Sustainable Safety Indicator, the municipality of Waalwijk rates 90% on infrastructural characteristics for the road sections, but only 76% for the Sustainable Safety of intersections. Road sections had a less than optimal score on the characteristics edge marking and centre line marking, and scored 'bad' on the characteristic 'obstacle-free zone'. The scores for intersections were negatively affected by the presence of priority regulations and the absence of physical speed reduction measures. The majority of border roads did not show any discontinuities at the transition from a Zone 60 to a different municipality. Finally, the 'emergency service and public transport friendliness' of the Zones 60 in Waalwijk was rated 'just sufficient'. Generally it can be concluded that the roads that were included in the inventory, and particularly the intersections, do not yet entirely meet the Sustainable Safety requirements.


— Understanding and comparing distributions of data (e.g., regarding their modes, shapes, or outliers) is a common challenge in many scientific disciplines. Typically, this challenge is addressed using side-by-side comparisons of histograms or density plots. However, comparing multiple density plots is mentally demanding. Uniform histograms often represent distributions imprecisely since missing values, outliers, or modes are hidden by a grouping of equal size. In this paper, a novel type of overview visualization for the comparison of univariate data distributions is presented: AccuStripes (i.e., "accumulated stripes") is a new visual metaphor encoding accumulations of data distributions according to adaptive binning using color coded stripes of irregular width. We provide detailed insights about challenges of binning. Specifically, we explore different adaptive binning concepts such as Bayesian Blocks binning and Jenks' Natural Breaks binning for the computation of binning boundaries, in terms of their capabilities to represent the datasets as accurately as possible. In addition, we discuss issues arising with the representation of designs for the comparative visualization of distributions: To allow for a comparison of many distributions, their accumulated representations are plotted below each other in a stacked mode. Based on our findings, we propose three different layouts for comparative visualization of multiple distributions. The usefulness of AccuStripes is investigated using a statistical evaluation of the binning methods. Using a similarity metric from cluster analysis, it is shown, which binning method statistically yields the best grouping results. Through a user study we evaluate, which binning strategy visually represents the distribution in the most intuitive form and investigate, which layout allows the user the comparison of many distributions in the most effortless way.


ABSTRACT We explored the properties of corallopyronin A (CorA), a poorly characterized inhibitor of bacterial RNA polymerase (RNAP). It displayed a 50% inhibitory concentration of 0.73 μM against RNAP, compared with 11.5 nM for rifampin. The antibacterial activity of CorA was also inferior to rifampin, and resistant mutants of Staphylococcus aureus were easily selected. The mutations conferring resistance resided in the rpoB and rpoC subunits of RNAP. We conclude that CorA is not a promising antibacterial drug candidate.


We analyse properties of non-Hermitian matrices of size M constructed as square submatrices of unitary (orthogonal) random matrices of size N>M , distributed according to the Haar measure. In this way we define ensembles of random matrices and study the statistical properties of the spectrum located inside the unit circle. In the limit of large matrices, this ensemble is characterized by the ratio M=N. For the truncated CUE we analytically derive the joint density of eigenvalues and all correlation functions. In the strongly non-unitary case universal Ginibre behaviour is found. ForN M fixed and N to1 the universal resonance-width distribution with N M open channels is recovered.


Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most successful domesticated plant species in the world. The majority of wheat carries mutations in the Puroindoline genes that result in a hard kernel phenotype. An evolutionary explanation, or selective advantage, for the spread and persistence of these hard kernel mutations has yet to be established. Here, we demonstrate that the house mouse (Mus musculus L.) exerts a pronounced feeding preference for soft over hard kernels. When allele frequencies ranged from 0.5 to 0.009, mouse predation increased the hard allele frequency as much as 10-fold. Studies involving a single hard kernel mixed with ∼1000 soft kernels failed to recover the mutant kernel. Nevertheless, the study clearly demonstrates that the house mouse could have played a role in the evolution of wheat, and therefore the cultural trajectory of humankind.


Humans can easily recognize actions with only a few examples given, while the existing video recognition models still heavily rely on the large-scale labeled data inputs. This observation has motivated an increasing interest in few-shot video action recognition, which aims at learning new actions with only very few labeled samples. In this paper, we propose a depth guided Adaptive Meta-Fusion Network for few-shot video recognition which is termed as AMeFu-Net. Concretely, we tackle the few-shot recognition problem from three aspects: firstly, we alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem by introducing depth information as a carrier of the scene, which will bring extra visual information to our model; secondly, we fuse the representation of original RGB clips with multiple non-strictly corresponding depth clips sampled by our temporal asynchronization augmentation mechanism, which synthesizes new instances at feature-level; thirdly, a novel Depth Guided Adaptive Instance Normalization (DGAdaIN) fusion module is proposed to fuse the two-stream modalities efficiently. Additionally, to better mimic the few-shot recognition process, our model is trained in the meta-learning way. Extensive experiments on several action recognition benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.


Edward Pusey's 'Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament' remain unpublished and little known. Despite this they contain important insights exploring prophecy and sacramental theology based on the philosophical assumptions of moderate realism expressed through the notions of 'type' and 'archetype'. This article explores Pusey's 'Lectures' with particular emphasis on sacramental realism. Pusey's philosophical insights concerning a moderate realist view of the Eucharist are discussed and links with eucharistic theology in the wider Anglican and other traditions are made. Links with the reflections of theologians and philosophers are also drawn out in an effort to establish that the 'Lectures' continue to be of value in the present and so deserving of wider appreciation and use.


One striking feature of the integrin alpha(v) subunit is its ability to associate with at least five different beta subunits (beta1, beta3, beta5, beta6 and beta8) to form functional receptors. These receptors are involved in diverse biological processes, such as differentiation, cell adhesion and migration. Here we report the cloning of the Xenopus homolog of the integrin alpha(v) subunit. Integrin alpha(v) mRNA and protein are maternally supplied and present throughout development. During gastrulation and neurulation alpha(v) protein appears on cell membranes of all three germ layers. In tailbud stage embryos great amounts of the alpha(v) protein can be observed in the inner layer of the ectoderm and in the endothelial cells lining the pharynx and gut.


Abstract : This work describes a scaleable, high performance, pipelined, vector processor architecture. Special emphasis is placed on performing fast Fourier transforms with mixed-radix butterfly operations. The initial motivation for the achitecture was the computation of cyclostationary algorithms. However, the resulting architecture is capable of general purpose vector processing as well. A major factor affecting the performance of the architecture is the memory system design. The use of pipelining techniques, coupled with vector processing, places a substantial burden on the memory system performance. The memory design is based on an interleaved memory philosophy with a buffering technique referred to as split transaction memory (STM). A crucial aspect of the memory design is the memory decoding scheme. A design methodology is described for the specification of permutation matrices that yield near optimal performance for the memory system. Another important aspect of this work is the development of a software based simulator that allows a STM to be specified. The simulator, operating at the register transfer level, emulates the processing of an address stream by STM and records the events for post-processing. The STM simulator was used to evaluate three types of


2253 The oxidation of nucleic acids plays a significant role in the development of cancer. The direct products of oxidative events are derived from all nucleic acid constituents: the base, sugar and the phosphate linkage. It has long been accepted that base adduction is a primary player resulting from the reaction of endogenous and exogenous substrates with DNA. Evidence has accumulated which reveals the formation of several electrophilic substrates from the oxidative damage of DNA when the target is the 2-deoxyribose moiety. The degradation of sugar based radicals; especially in the presence of oxygen, often results in the formation of small molecules capable of reacting with cellular nucleophiles. Through the study of the C-3'-thymidinyl radical in ssDNA using photocleavable precursors, we have determined that the aerobic degradation of this reactive intermediate results in the formation of several DNA damage fragments capable of forming adducts with nucleophilic cellular inhabitants. This work revealed that due to the flexibility of the single stranded oligonucleotide and the reactivity of the peroxylradical formed by the trapping of oxygen, several different degradation pathways are observed, each leading to a unique electrophilic sugar fragment. The work presented here will elucidate the reactions of several of these fragments with DNA bases and other cellular nucleophiles. The utility of these DNA adducts as biomarkers of oxidative stress will also be investigated.


For a long time, imaging methods have played a secondary role in the diagnosis and therapeutic planning in cases of renal parenchymal tumors, considering that excretory urography could only detect large lesions causing bulging of the renal contour or distortion of the calyceal system, generally in symptomatic patients with advanced disease. In this scenario, the arrival of ultrasonography (US) has represented a landmark, considering that small lesion started being incidentally diagnosed (incidentalomas), resulting in a significant improvement in survival rates, since patients diagnosed with incidental tumors with < 4 cm (T1 stage) present 95% probability of ten-year survival. In the last years, the higher availability of Doppler and ultrasonographic contrast agents has contributed to increase the US applicability in the detection, therapeutic planning and post-treatment follow-up of focal renal lesions. On its turn, computed tomography (CT) with intravenous iodinated contrast enhancement has become the method of choice in the evaluation of the greatest majority of focal renal lesions, because, besides allowing a better characterization of lesions detected by US, this method also allows an accurate pretherapeutic staging of these lesions. The current technologies, with multidetector helical CT (MDCT or multislice CT) utilizing dedicated protocols with four-phase studies (precontrast, corticomedullary, nephrographic and excretory phases) have increasingly widened the CT applicability, with shorter acquisition times, higher spatial resolution and possibility of 3D and multiplanar images reconstruction. Finally, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), with exceptional contrast resolution and digital subtraction capability, has brought a positive contribution to the evaluation of focal renal lesions particularly in patients presenting allergy to iodinated contrast agents, along with characterizing lesions indeterminate at CT.


Abstract Early onset Marfan Syndrome (eoMFS) is a rare, severe form of Marfan Syndrome (MFS). The disease has a poor prognosis and most patients present with resistance to heart failure treatment during the newborn period. This report presents two cases of eoMFS with similar clinical features diagnosed in the newborn period and who died at an early age due to the complications related to the involvement of the cardiovascular system.


State-based models of concurrent systems are traditionally considered under a variety of notions of process equivalence. In the particular case of labelled transition systems, these equivalences range from trace equivalence to (strong) bisimilarity, and are organized in what is known as the linear time -- branching time spectrum. A combination of universal coalgebra and graded monads provides a generic framework in which the semantics of concurrency can be parametrized both over the branching type of the underlying transition systems and over the granularity of process equivalence. We show in the present paper that this framework of graded semantics does subsume the most important equivalences from the linear time -- branching time spectrum. An important feature of graded semantics is that it allows for the principled extraction of characteristic modal logics. We have established invariance of these graded logics under the given graded semantics in earlier work; in the present paper, we extend the logical framework with an explicit propositional layer and provide a generic expressiveness criterion that generalizes the classical Hennessy-Milner theorem to coarser notions of process equivalence. We extract graded logics for a range of graded semantics on labelled transition systems and probabilistic systems, and give exemplaric proofs of their expressiveness based on our generic criterion.


The safety profile of booster doses of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine is reassuring and comparable with that of primary COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant people. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate and summarize reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a national spontaneous reporting system, in pregnant people who received a booster dose of mRNA coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine. METHODS: We searched VAERS for U.S. reports of adverse events in pregnant people who received a booster dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine from September 22, 2021, to March 24, 2022. Clinicians reviewed reports and available medical records. RESULTS: The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System received 323 reports of adverse events in pregnant people who received a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine; 178 (55.1%) after BNT162b2 from Pfizer–BioNTech and 145 (44.9%) after mRNA-1273 from Moderna. Seventy-two (22.3%) reports were coded as serious. One neonatal death was reported, but no maternal deaths occurred. Pregnancy-specific outcomes included 56 (17.3%) spontaneous abortions (before 20 weeks of gestation), eight (2.5%) episodes of vaginal bleeding, five (1.5%) stillbirths (at or after 20 weeks of gestation), four (1.2%) episodes of preeclampsia, and two (0.6%) preterm deliveries. Reporting rates for stillbirth and preterm delivery were below background rates. Ten instances of adverse events in neonates were reported, which included two reports of birth defects. Non–pregnancy-specific adverse events (n=207; 64.1%) were mostly systemic (eg, headache, fatigue) and local reactions and occurred in proportions comparable with those seen in pregnant people who received the primary COVID-19 vaccination series and reported to VAERS during the same period. CONCLUSION: Review of reports after a booster dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant people in VAERS found their safety profile was comparable with that of published reports after primary COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant people.


This article addresses courtier‐poet Puttenham's sprawling 1589 treatise on English poetics, focusing especially on one of the text's central tensions: the relationship between poetry as constructed commodity and the receptive body as natural, sensual, universal in its responses and affinities. I suggest that Puttenham's treatise is not merely a guide for poetic composition but also a sustained exploration of what it means to be a hearer and reader of poetry. The Art of English Poesy is as interested in theorizing the physiological and social dimensions of the poetic encounter as it is in offering a set of instructions to aspiring courtier‐poets. Puttenham analyses this encounter in terms of an aesthetic ideal of proportionate composition and response; as a partnership flourishing under the conditions of a universal natural order; and as a crucial social tool, essential to decorum and courtly success. Yet Puttenham's central claim is for the supremacy of the receptive body as the ultimate arbiter of poetic quality.


A double-blind cross-over randomized study was performed in 10 selected adult overweight and obese (body mass index greater than 27) women who had been adapted to low-energy intake for a long period of time and who had shown difficulty in losing weight with conventional hypocaloric treatment. Combined with diet therapy (1000-1400 kcal/day), l(-)ephedrine hydrochloride (50 mg three times a day per os) or placebo were administered daily before each meal, after a period of stabilization with diet only for 1 month. Each pharmacological treatment lasted for 2 months. Weight loss was significantly (P less than 0.05) greater during the ephedrine period (2.41 +/- 0.61 kg) than during the placebo period (0.64 +/- 0.50 kg). None of the patients presented clinically important side-effects. These preliminary results seem to suggest a possible role for a thermogenic compound such as ephedrine in promoting weight loss in low-energy-adapted obese women.


The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act introduced a regulation on debit card interchange fees, which went into effect in October 2011. Based on a merchant survey conducted two years after the regulation, we investigate the impact of the regulation on merchants' costs of accepting debit cards. We also examine merchants' reactions to the regulation in terms of changing prices and debit card restrictions.


This article is devoted to modelling of contamination of air medium of industrial center evolve three phylum of sources of influence: the industrial enterprises, motor transport and private sector. In this article process of mapping of contamination of air basin by the industrial exhausts, leading the greatest contribution to contamination of city air is described on the example Karaganda. Exhausts from the industrial enterprises are considered as set of point sources, each of which has the characteristics on frame and volumes of exhausts. The chosen mathematical model calculating diffusion of pollutants in atmosphere is based on use of the equation of conduction. Prevalence of pollution for enterprise limits is predicted. The Gauss model is used at calculation of dispersion of admixtures in the conditions of local weather conditions. The forecast of volume of concentration of contaminants in a ground layer of a free air is carried out.


Colour photographs now represent almost all the images produced with the new reality capture tools, mobile phones, which in 2020 'took' 90% of all photos of that year. Black and white is relegated to artistic expression, even newspapers have converted to colour for some years. In the history of photography, although research on colour is attempted from the early stages, it is necessary to wait until 1861 with the experiences of James Clerk Maxwell who created a stable colour image. However, it is from the fifties of the twentieth century that the use of colour becomes 'popular' even in a more aesthetic dimension than an objective reproduction of reality. Part of the ethnographic, anthropological, archaeological and field research, on the other hand still makes use of consolidated and inexpensive black and white for a long time. On these images largely available online and open source you can conduct automatic colouring experiences. The procedure, managed with artificial intelligence algorithms with deep learning processes, is always more widely used with free applications and allows to obtain qualitatively more and more relevant results, even if some critical analysis is still necessary. This article presents the state of the art to 2021 of automatic colouring, with the comparison between algorithms developed since 2016 and showing with experimental examples both the possibilities of rendering and even the critical issues that emerged with the application in anthropological photographs, with the aim of extracting information that is not very evident in the originals in black and white.


Streamflow recession analysis characterizes the storage‐outflow relationship in catchments. This relationship, which typically follows a power law, summarizes all catchment‐scale subsurface hydrological processes and has long been known to be a key descriptor of the hydrologic response. In this paper, we tested a range of common recession analysis methods (RAMs) and propose the use of an analytic streamflow distribution model as an alternative method for recession parameter estimation and to objectively compare different RAMs. The used analytical model assumes power law recessions, in combination with a stochastic process for streamflow triggering rainfall events. This streamflow distribution model is used in the present framework to establish reference values for the recession parameters via maximum likelihood estimation. The model‐based method has two main advantages: (a) joint estimation of both power law recession parameters (coefficient and exponent), which are known to be strongly correlated, and (b) parameter estimation based on all available streamflow data (no recession selection). The approach is applied to five rainfall‐dominated catchments in Switzerland with 40 years of continuous streamflow observations. The results show that the estimated recession parameters are highly dependent on methodological choices and that some RAMs lead to biased estimates. The recession selection method is shown to be of prime importance for a reliable description of catchment‐scale recession behaviour, in particular in presence of short streamflow records. The newly proposed model‐based RAM yields robust results, which supports the further development of this method for comparative hydrology and opens new perspectives for understanding the recession behaviour of catchments.


A 300-mm wafer-level three-dimensional integration (3DI) process using tungsten (W) through-silicon vias (TSVs) and hybrid Cu/adhesive wafer bonding is demonstrated. The W TSVs have fine pitch (5 mum), small critical dimension (1.5 mum), and high aspect ratio (17:1). A hybrid Cu/adhesive bonding approach, also called transfer-join (TJ) method, is used to interconnect the TSVs to a Cu BEOL in a bottom wafer. The process also features thinning of the top wafer to 20 mum and a Cu backside BEOL on the thinned top wafer. The electrical and physical properties of the TSVs and bonded interconnect are presented and show RLC values that satisfy both the power delivery and high-speed signaling requirements for high-performance 3D systems.


Liberation psychology prioritizes the needs and experiences of those who suffer oppression and have been locked out of the commons. Upstream in the United States, those with stolen and excess wealth, land, and resources remain within "gated" communities, protected by ideologies, false narratives, laws, and policing practices. Without leaving a roadmap, liberation psychologist Martín-Baró urged psychologists to reorient their work with the economically privileged to include disrupting compulsive consumption. Excess wealth is largely accumulated through histories of stolen land, extraction of resources, abuse of labor, hoarding, and intergenerational inheritance. This accumulation has benefited White people at the expense of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals and communities. The tasks of conscientization, de-ideologization, and prophetic imagination that liberation psychology engages with those suffering oppression need also to be deployed with willing elites to assist in returning assets, land, and power to the commons. This article addresses the psychosocial tasks that are part of this return of excess and stolen wealth and privilege, a return that opens possibilities for mutual accompaniment and solidarity for the sake of justice and peace. This work seeks to contribute to the pedagogy of the nonpoor and the potential role of the helping professions in this pedagogy.


The Department for International Development (DFID) Animal Health Programme (AHP) is to fund a project (R8151) in South Africa from April 2002 for three years. It will test the hypothesis that under the farm management and agro-ecological conditions found in the resource-poor areas of the Republic of South Africa (RSA), the holistic approach of strategic anthelmintic treatment of gastro-intestinal nematode infections of goats and, or, additional supplementation of their diet with urea-molasses blocks will lead to sustainable and costeffective improvements in health and the value of livestock products. The study will include an ex ante analysis to collect baseline socio-economic data, and on-station and on-farm trials. The first hypothesis is that a strategic treatment administered before the peak in faecal egg counts will lead to a lower worm burden and hence better production. The second hypothesis being tested is that supplementation with urea-molasses blocks leads to increased microbial protein post-ruminally. Less protein is then diverted from bone, muscle and fat deposition towards the processes of regeneration, repair and mounting of an immune response (in parasitised animals) and hence body weight is maintained. The third hypothesis to be tested, and which will provide particularly novel information, is that the interaction between appropriate nutritional supplementation with molasses-urea blocks and strategic anthelmintic treatments for gastro-intestinal parasitism will lead to measurable improvements in goat productivity. These three hypotheses will be investigated at Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute during the first year of the trial. The results of this trial will then be tested in the field and will investigate the fourth hypothesis that the benefit to production of the improved feeding and drug treatments will not be unduly affected by extrinsic management practices in a selected agro-ecological zone. The project includes the dissemination of current information on worm control during the course of the project as well as the results of the proposed research programme towards the end of the project.


The importance of locating the slip surfaces of landslides is emphasized in connection with their investigation and instrumentation, their analysis and their stabilization. The available methods are divided into two groups, those applicable only to moving landslides and those applicable to stationary ones. The first group comprises inferences from surface movement observations, direct measurements of sub-surface displacements, and geoacoustic sensing. In the second group the methods reviewed include in situ observations from access holes, observations on recovered samples and surface and sub-surface geophysical techniques. It is concluded that it is advisable to employ a variety of methods and to pursue first the more easily accessible and hence more cheaply gained information. It should also be borne in mind that multiple slip surfaces often exist and that it is important to ensure that the lowest of these is found. An extensive list of references is provided.


This paper is concerned with the application of perturbation method to the dynamic analysis of space structure floating in space. In dealing with the dynamics of space structure, the use of Lagrange's equations of motion in terms of quasi-coordinates were suggested to derive hybrid equations of motion for rigid-body translations and elastic vibrations. The perturbation method is then applied to the hybrid equations of motion along with discretization by means of admissible functions. This process is very tiresome. Recently, a new approach that applies the perturbation method to the Lagrange's equations directly was proposed and applied to the two-dimensional floating structure. In this paper. we propose the application of the perturbation method to the Lagrange's equations of motion in terms of quasi-coordinates. Theoretical derivations show the efficacy of the proposed method.


Softmax loss is arguably one of the most popular losses to train CNN models for image classification. However, recent works have exposed its limitation on feature discriminability. This paper casts a new viewpoint on the weakness of softmax loss. On the one hand, the CNN features learned using the softmax loss are often inadequately discriminative. We hence introduce a soft-margin softmax function to explicitly encourage the discrmination between different classes. On the other hand, the learned classifier of softmax loss is weak. We propose to assemble multiple these weak classifiers to a strong one, inspired by the recognition that the diversity among weak classifiers is critical to a good ensemble. To achieve the diversity, we adopt the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). Considering these two aspects in one framework, we design a novel loss, named as Ensemble Soft-Margin Softmax (EM-Softmax). Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted to show the superiority of our design over the baseline softmax loss and several state-of-the-art alternatives.


In this study, we present a new estimator of transients built from the extrema of a signal decomposition first introduced by Berkner. We study the performance of the new estimator of transients both for a variation of amplitude and a variation of frequency of the signal. We show that the time localization of transients is better estimated with the maxima lines made by the extrema in the time scale-space than with the wavelet coefficients computed with the CWT. We also verify that this improvement is not to the detriment of detection performance. Keywords- estimation of transients, wavelet decomposition, maxima lines


Separate in-depth interviews were conducted with two groups of highly stressed 4th-6th grade urban children classified as stress-affected (SA) and stress-resilient (SR), and their parents. Judges identified interview items reflecting three components of a good parent-child relationship, i.e. positive parental attitudes, involvement and guidance. SR parents and children scored higher than their SA counterparts on all three relational dimensions. Additionally, SR parent-child dyads had more congruent views of their relationship than SA dyads. These findings suggest that positive parent-child relationship qualities play an important protective role that favors resilient outcomes, at ages 10-12, among children who have experienced major life stress.


Daft, F. S. (1947), "Folic Acid: Physiological Aspects", Annal8 of the New York Academy of Science, Volume XLVIII, page 299. Kornberg, A., Daft, F. S., and Sebrell, W. H. (1943), "Production and Treatment of Granulocytopenia and Anemia In Rats Fed SUlfonamides in Purified Diets", Science, Volume XCVIII, page 20. --(1945), "Dietary Granulocytopenia in Rats Corrected by Crystalline L. Casel Factor ('Folic Acid')", Proceedings of the 80cietll for Experimental Biology and Medicine, Volume LVIII, page 46. Spicer, S. S., Daft, F. S., Sebrell, W. H., and Ashburn, L. L. (1942), "Prevention and Treatment of Agranulocytosis and Leukopenia in Rats Given Sulfanllylguanidine or Succinyl Sulfathiazole In Purified Diets", Public Health REiPort8, Volume LVII, page 1559.


Scheduling subjects in a school can support, facilitate and enhance the quality of a school. Subject scheduling generally functions for activities in facilitating the quality of teaching teachers and students in order to create discipline in school performance activities. Along with increasing hours of subjects that require precise and fast accuracy in processing data can also speed up time. In general, the data processing of scheduling subjects at Adi Luhur 2 Vocational School 2 is still done manually and there is often a lack of schedule due to the teacher being absent or teaching in school, so a computerized information system is needed where everything can be done correctly. For that we need a system that can determine the scheduling of subjects so that there is no conflict with other teaching schedules. In this study, Mamdani's fuzzy infrence system (fis) logic is used. With the existence of a teaching schedule management system with fuzzy mamdani method approach more accurately in accordance with the best conditions of the teacher concerned. The results of this study are in the form of a prototype that can process input in the form of teacher's willingness to arrange teaching schedules at Adi Luhur 2 Vocational School Jakarta.


Primary bone lymphoma is a rare presentation of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It accounts for a maximum of 1–2% of all non-Hodgkin lymphomas in adults. Primary bone lymphoma is diagnosed in focal lesions of one or more bones; soft tissue and regional lymph nodes may be involved too. The exclusion criteria are only bone marrow damage and involvement of distant lymph nodes. The first symptoms include intractable bone pain often accompanied by local edema, the formation of a tumor mass in the affected area; B symptoms occasionally join. Local lesions of long tubular bones in the diaphysis and metadiaphysis regions are more common (80%), while multifocal lesions are less frequent (20%). Diagnosis of lesions of the bone tissue in its primary and secondary involvement is based on the use of all available research methods (radiography; computed, magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography). Differential diagnosis requires an immunohistochemical study with determination of the expression of total leukocyte antigen, B-cell and T-cell markers, and clonality in one of immunoglobulin light chains κ or λ, bcl 2 and bcl 6, ALK, proliferative activity of Ki-67. Evaluation of the effectiveness of various treatments for primary bone lymphoma is complicated by a small number of observations and the absence of a uniform treatment strategy. CHOP-like chemotherapy cycles are often used as first-line therapy. Personalized therapy involves immunochemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgical treatment — endoprosthetics.


: Place is a very important geographical concept. Scholars especially geographers have conducted extensive studies on place. Focusing on the issues and theories of place, this article explores how to couple human geography with Geographic Information System (GIS), with a focus on geographic issues in large-scale urban space and small-scale communities. This is particularly critical for geographic study in China. The main title of this article, "rebuild place", has three meanings. First, it is necessary to break disciplinary boundaries in order to rediscover the new field of "place", especially based on complex and changing theories and practice of place. Second, we should strive to change the "place" in everyday life according to the new theories. Last but not least, rebuilding place in our lives or minds will be achieved by means of coupling theories and practice, thoughts and technology, as well as human geography and GIS. Through using volunteered geographic information (VGI), 3D-VQGIS, and other new GIS methods, the theories and methods on place research can be enriched with big data and other types of data. The combination of human geography and GIS not only has practical significance, but also helps developing new methodologies. Place and scale are complex in reality and in research. For instance, issues in community and in city interact and can be transformed because some micro-scale individual or community events can affect the whole city or urban culture. Interactions at city level or community level are the same to some extent but often different. In the study of China's urbanization and rural-urban relations, it is urgent to introduce, use, and recreate the theories on place with GIS and multi-scale cases. In terms of methodology, combining human geography with GIS will reshape geography. In addition to being an indispensable concept of geography, place is also closely related to everyday life. Dealing with the challenges from evolving globalization and information and communication technologies, place is changing, and the concepts on place or placelessness are also evolving correspondingly. It is significant in geographic research and practice to couple human geography with GIS and explore the way to apply the methodology to explain changing issues in the real world with different temporal, spatial, and social scales, so as to rebuild the place theoretically and practically.


Background: Traditionally, a laparoscopic approach is used for treatment of congenital hypertrophic pyloric stenosis (CHPS) in newborns and infants. The novel technique-Gastric Per Oral Endoscopic Myotomy (G-POEM) had been proposed as an alternative method. G-POEM is a procedure that is recently being used for treatment of gastroparesis in adults. For the first time, in this study, we demonstrate the performance of G-POEM in an infant and its short-term results. Materials and Methods: G-POEM was performed in the Center of Newborn Surgery in Irkutsk (Russia) in August 2018 for a 1-month-old infant, whose weight was 4,200 g. The patient had vomiting for 5 days before admission and a slight deficiency of body weight. The diagnosis of CHPS was confirmed by ultrasound examination of the abdominal cavity. The pyloric muscle thickness was 7 mm. The operative technique of the performed G-POEM was carried out by creation of a submucosal tunnel with a distance of 4 cm toward the pylorus and dissection of the hypertrophied muscle layer in a form of the Ramstedt's incision by using an electrocautery knife. At the end of the procedure, the mucosal membrane incision was closed by special clamps. Results: The operating time was 65 minutes. There were no intraoperative complications such as bleeding and/or mucosal perforation. The patient began to eat 6 hours after the procedure. The transition time to full enteral nutrition was 24 hours. The infant was discharged from the hospital the next day in good condition. We did not observe early or late postoperative complications such as recurrence of pyloric stenosis and incomplete myotomy during postoperative observation. There were not even minimal scars on the patient's body. Conclusions: G-POEM is a technically feasible, safe, and successful procedure for treatment of CHPS in newborns and infants. An additional study is needed to perform the comparison between this technique and laparoscopic pyloromyotomy.


Language research is particularly concerned with un derstanding the interplay between syntactic structure, variable aspects of linguistic form and language processing mechanisms. This paper discusses some recent result s from Basque, an ergative language, that appear incompatible with the assumpt ion that there are universal subjectgap advantages in relative clause processing. I arg ue that, given the incremental nature of language processing, the relative ease of proces sing structures involving subject or object gaps results from the combination of morphol ogical specifications such as the ergative/nominative divide, and input-initial proce ssing choices. This suggests that processing effects directly stated over notions lik e "subject of" or "object of", widely considered derivative and not universal in Linguist ics, are not sufficiently general. Abstracting away from these descriptive labels, and seeking alternative explanatory primitives that are not language-dependent is likel y to yield a more parsimonious picture of processing complexity in language.


There is a paucity of studies in the literature regarding the nutrient content and costs of school meals provided across West Africa. Where studies exist, comparative analysis is constrained by inconsistencies in measurements of portion sizes, meal composition and costs. This study reviews the available literature on the nutritional value of school meals in West Africa and reinterprets the meal contributions to the recommended daily intake for the 9-10 year old age group. The nutritional content of school meals from the Ghana School Feeding Programme is then analyzed through a linear modelling analysis of menus obtained from 34 districts in the country. Meal composition and associated nutritional content were constrained by the Government per child budget allocation of GHS 0.40 (USD $0.26) per meal. Prices were compiled from two of Ghana's major markets including Tamale in the north and Accra in the south. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze regional and seasonal variations with respect to energy, protein, fat, vitamin A and iron content. Adequacy was set at 30 % of daily requirements for the relevant age group. The combined mean nutritional values of meals, using the mean yearly price of ingredients in each market, were as follows: energy – 654 kcal, protein -13g, fat – 24g, iron – 4mg and vitamin A – 19mcg. The corresponding mean weight of the raw ingredients used to prepare a meal was 208g. The findings suggest that the majority of meals provided adequate amounts of protein and additionally in the North, most meals also had sufficient calories. However, meals were found to contain insufficient amounts of vitamin A and iron. Seasonal variations in the nutritional value of meals were not identified. This analysis shows that the current per child per day budget allocation is likely sufficient to meet some, but not all, of the nutritional adequacy targets for the programme. In the short term, there are opportunities to optimize the nutritional content of school meals in Ghana, including the use of fortification, although in the medium term, fostering healthy eating habits and consuming diets composed of nutrient rich varieties will see more enduring results. Strengthening both the meal planning and the monitoring of the school meal service provision could enhance programme implementation.


BACKGROUND
Percutaneous nephrolithotomy has become the standard procedure for large renal stones but still remains highly challenging due to complications such as bleeding and sepsis, even though it has high stone free rate (SFR). We report the early outcomes of more than 1000 percutaneous nephrolithotomys done in our center.

METHODS
A retrospective study of all patients undergoing percutaneous nephrolithotomy from January 2010 to December 2017 in single institution was conducted. All cases were stratified into three groups based on tract size; standard percutaneous nephrolithotomy with tract size ? 22 F, mini percutaneous nephrolithotomy with tract size 15 - 20 F and ultramini percutaneous nephrolithotomy with tract size ? 14 F. Age, gender, stone complexity using Guy's stone score, stone size, operative time, hemoglobin drop, hospital stay, early major and minor complications were reviewed.

RESULTS
A total of 1074 patients had undergone percutaneous nephrolithotomy among which, 578 patients were standard percutaneous nephrolithotomy, 433 mini percutaneous nephrolithotomy and 63 had undergone ultramini percutaneous nephrolithotomy. There was even distribution of patients with Guy's stone score 1 and 2 in all three groups. However, majority of patients with Guy's stone score 3 underwent standard percutaneous nephrolithotomy or mini percutaneous nephrolithotomy and no patients with Guy's stone score 4 underwent ultramini percutaneous nephrolithotomy. Age group, gender and operative time were comparable between the groups; however, significant difference was noted in terms of less hemoglobin drop and shorter hospital stay (p-value < 0.05) in the miniaturized percutaneous nephrolithotomy group. Complications were found to be fewer in mini percutaneous nephrolithotomy and ultramini percutaneous nephrolithotomy group in comparison to standard percutaneous nephrolithotomy.

CONCLUSIONS
Miniaturization of tract size significantly decreases post-operative complication rates, blood loss and hospital stay while maintaining high stone free rates in well selected patients undergoing Percutaneous nephrolithotomy.


Inhibition of photosynthesis by excess excitation energy is initiated in the reaction center of photosystem II. The primary site of photoinhibition in the reaction center (components of primary charge separation or secondary electron acceptor QB) is still disputed. Photoinhibition is characterized by quenching of variable chlorophyll flurescence (Fv), resulting from increased thermal dissipation of excitation energy. Varying responses of initial fluorescence (F0), however, seem to indicate involvement of different mechanisms. As far as photoinhibition is reversible within minutes to hours, it can be viewed as a controlled protective mechanism that serves to dissipate excessive energy, Supposedly, another dissipative mechanism, distinguished by its faster kinetics (response within seconds), is related to the energy-dependent fluorescence quenching.


Detecting the relations among objects, such as "cat on sofa" and "person ride horse", is a crucial task in image understanding, and beneficial to bridging the semantic gap between images and natural language. Despite the remarkable progress of deep learning in detection and recognition of individual objects, it is still a challenging task to localize and recognize the relations between objects due to the complex combinatorial nature of various kinds of object relations. Inspired by the recent advances in one-shot learning, we propose a simple yet effective Semantics Induced Learner (SIL) model for solving this challenging task. Learning in one-shot manner can enable a detection model to adapt to a huge number of object relations with diverse appearance effectively and robustly. In addition, the SIL combines bottom-up and top-down attention mech- anisms, therefore enabling attention at the level of vision and semantics favorably. Within our proposed model, the bottom-up mechanism, which is based on Faster R-CNN, proposes objects regions, and the top-down mechanism selects and integrates visual features according to semantic information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over other state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale data sets for object relation detection.


Carbon-supported nickel selenide (Ni0.85 Se/C) hollow nanowires are prepared from carbon-coated selenium nanowires via a self-templating hydrothermal method, by first dissolving selenium in the Se/C nanowires in hydrazine, allowing it to diffuse out of the carbon layer, and then reacting with nickel ions into Ni0.85 Se nanoplates on the outer surface of the carbon. Ni0.85 Se/C hollow nanowires are employed as anode materials for sodium-ion batteries, and their electrochemical performance is evaluated via the cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy combined with ex situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction measurements. It is found that Ni0.85 Se/C hollow nanowires exhibit greatly enhanced cycle stability and rate capability as compared to Ni0.85 Se nanoparticles, with a reversible capacity around 390 mA h g-1 (the theoretical capacity is 416 mA h g-1 ) at the rate of 0.2 C and 97% capacity retention after 100 cycles. When the current rate is raised to 5 C, they still deliver capacity of 219 mA h g-1 . The synthetic methodology introduced here is general and can easily be applied to building similar structures for other metal selenides in the future.