Abstract Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is a malignant soft tissue tumor of skeletal muscle origin. The head and neck, urinary tract, and extremities are the common sites of origin. Embryonal, alveolar, pleomorphic, and spindle/sclerosing are subtypes. It is more common in childhood and rare among adults. The incidence and risk factors for this disease are mainly largely unknown. RMS is sporadic in most instances; however, it is attributed to familial syndromes in some situations—its metastasis to the lungs, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. Breast and ovary involvement is scarce. Diagnostic workup mainly includes contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CECT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, 18 F-fluro-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography ( 18 F-FDG-PET/CT) and PET/MRI are increasing contribution to providing functional insights about tumor biology and improving the diagnostic accuracy of the imaging workup. This report presents a case of the neck's embryonal RMS metastasizing simultaneously to the breast and ovary. PET/CT imaging revealed the unusual pattern, further validated by histopathology.


Conclusions of the report of the panel discussion about the future of the scholarly communication "Organisational support for the EU platform level action to support innovative efforts for a new scholarly communication framework"


The Lithium Tokamak eXperiment is a small, low aspect ratio tokamak [Majeski et al., Nucl. Fusion 49, 055014 (2009)], which is fitted with a stainless steel-clad copper liner, conformal to the last closed flux surface. The liner can be heated to 350 °C. Several gas fueling systems, including supersonic gas injection and molecular cluster injection, have been studied and produce fueling efficiencies up to 35%. Discharges are strongly affected by wall conditioning. Discharges without lithium wall coatings are limited to plasma currents of order 10 kA, and discharge durations of order 5 ms. With solid lithium coatings discharge currents exceed 70 kA, and discharge durations exceed 30 ms. Heating the lithium wall coating, however, results in a prompt degradation of the discharge, at the melting point of lithium. These results suggest that the simplest approach to implementing liquid lithium walls in a tokamak—thin, evaporated, liquefied coatings of lithium—does not produce an adequately clean surface.


The recent introduction of Find My app by Apple will open a large window of opportunities for whistleblowers. Based on a short range Bluetooth signals, an EC P-224 encryption, and an end-to-end encrypted manner using iCloud Keychain, Find My app is probably the first application broadcasting a large number of anonymous public key on this scale. Hence, this new Apple's application may introduce a revolution in secret communication, if we divert it from its primordial use and transform it into a powerful tool to put in the hands of whistleblowers. By using Find My app and an entity authentication protocol based on artificial intelligence, our goal is to make mass surveillance and kleptographic backdoors ineffective in the lifting of the whistleblower's anonymity. However, in some case, Find my app may also be a powerful tool in the hands of dictatorships governments in their fight against whistleblowers and political adversaries. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show with simple examples, how these two previous situation can happen.


The article consists of a contextualized reflection on the communication in palliative care with the purpose of explaining strategies used for effective communication among the nursing, terminally ill and his family. In that sense, it was observed that for the nurse to assist the terminally ill is a difficult task, which raises sensation of sadness, frustration, impotence and even failure in the rendered attendance. This way, many professionals use denial, escaping, and the apparent coldness as defense mechanisms to cope with situation. Throughout this discussion are exposed some aspects that enable developing empathic communication skills, perceived as a task that requires nursing staff a shift in focus and attitude. Apart from careful listening, truthfulness, good humor and therapeutic touch, forming strategies for effective communication in the terminally ill life.


In this paper, we propose an effective variational model for multiplicative noise removal problem with joint nonlocal low rank and high-order total variation (HTV) priors. Specifically, the proposed model fully exploits the good capacity of reducing staircase effect of HTV prior as well as the good capacity of preserving structures and textures of nonlocal low rank prior. Moreover, an alternating minimization algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model. Finally, the experiments show that the proposed method performs better image quality than the compared methods for multiplicative noise removal problem.


The dc–ac conversion in microgrids leads to second-order oscillations in the dc side voltages and source currents. These oscillations are mitigated using either active or passive filters. Active filters are preferred, as they mitigate oscillations with lesser component size than passive filters. The active filters are regulated to absorb the harmonic ripples at the ripple frequency, and do not provide any voltage support during dc bus voltage fluctuations due to load changes. In this article, a robust integral sliding mode control (RISMC) is proposed to regulate bidirectional converter (BDC)-based dc active filters to facilitate voltage conditioning along with reduction of second-order harmonics which are caused due to dc–ac conversions. The proposed RISMC enhances capability of the BDC active filters to provide dc bus voltage conditioning in case of transience during load variations and uncertain voltage fluctuations. The proposed control consists of a nominal dual-loop PI control which regulates the voltage of the storage capacitor of BDC and a nonlinear integral sliding mode control which regulates dc bus voltage. The proposed control mitigates voltage and current ripples hence preventing them to propagate toward the sources while providing additional voltage support functionality. The proposed control is verified through simulations and experimentation.


A metal-organic coordination compound formulated as [Co(tdc)(phen)(H2O)]n 1(H2tdc = thiophene-2,5-dicarboxylic acid,phen =1,10-phenanthroline) has been hydrothermally synthesized and structurally characterized by elemental analysis,IR,TG and single-crystal X-ray diffraction.The compound crystallizes in the monoclinic system,space group P21/n with a = 1.0916(2),b = 1.5713(3),c = 1.1333(3) nm,β = 115.943(4)°,V=1.7480(7)nm3,C18H12CoN2O5S,Mr=427.29,Dc=1.624g/,μ(MoKα)=1.135mm-1,F(000)=868,Z=4,the final R = 0.0458 and wR = 0.0941 for 2445 observed reflections(I 2σ(I)).


Background music (BGM) can enhance the video's emotion. However, selecting an appropriate BGM often requires domain knowledge. This has led to the development of video-music retrieval techniques. Most existing approaches utilize pretrained video/music feature extractors trained with different target sets to obtain average video/music-level embeddings. The drawbacks are two-fold. One is that different target sets for video/music pretraining may cause the generated embeddings difficult to match. The second is that the underlying temporal correlation between video and music is ignored. In this paper, our proposed approach leverages a unified target set to perform video/music pretraining and produces clip-level embeddings to preserve temporal information. The downstream cross-modal matching is based on the clip-level features with embedded music rhythm and optical flow information. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.


The effect of neutron irradiation on commercial vertical high voltage normally-OFF SiC power N-JFETs was investigated. JFETs were irradiated with 1 MeV neutron equivalent fluences up to 4×1014 cm-2. Measurement showed that fast neutrons introduce deep levels acting mostly as deep acceptor centers. These centers gradually compensate lightly doped channel and drift regions of JFETs. As a result, characteristics are deteriorated, the JFET threshold voltage gradually increases and transconductance is lowered. At fluences higher than 4×1014 cm-2, the low doped n-regions are fully compensated and transistor loses its functionality. The 2D physical model of JFET in ATLAS simulator was developed and calibrated including the neutron irradiation effects. Simulation showed a good agreement with experimental data. This confirmed that carrier removal in the channel and drift region by acceptors centers introduced by neutrons is a dominant reason of SiC JFET degradation.


The role of optical switching within transparent optical transmission networks is discussed. Particular attention is paid to the need for wavelength switches within wavelength routed optical networks. A wavelength switch based on the absorptive nonlinearity within multi-contact semiconductor optical amplifiers is described. The authors demonstrate wavelength conversion of 400 Mbit/s data between 1.3 mu m and a wavelength over a 30 nm range centered on 1.55 mu m. This shows the suitability of such a device for linking the present 1.3 mu m network to future 1.55 mu m wavelength networks.


GRB 091003 was discovered by INTEGRAL and Fermi GBM/LAT (Rau GCN Circ. 9983; McEnery, Chiang & Hanabata GCN Circ. 9985) and was also detected by Konus-Wind (Golenetskii et al. GCN Circ. 9994) and Suzaku-WAM (Kono et al. GCN Circ. 9998). The Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) and UV/Optical Telescope (UVOT) observed GRB 091003 on 2009 October 3 beginning at 20:07:28 UT, 15.5 hours after the Fermi trigger. This was a long, multipeaked burst with duration of order 20 s.


Three-dimensional unsteady RANS computations are performed for the flow past a pure heaving/plunging rectangular wing to study the effect of reduced frequency and heaving amplitude on the thrust generation and propulsive efficiency. The numerical solution has been obtained by using an implicit Reynolds-averaged NavierStokes solver IMPRANS that employs finite volume nodal point spatial discretization scheme with dual time stepping. The results are obtained in the form of aerodynamic coefficients, thrust coefficient and propulsion efficiency and compared with the available data in the literature.


This paper studies the causal e¤ect of individuals'overcon…dence and bounded rationality on asset markets. To do that, we combine a new market mechanism with an experimental design, where (1) players'interaction is centered on the inferences they make about each others'information, (2) overcon…dence in private information is controlled by the experimenter (i.e., used as a treatment), and (3) natural analogs to prices, returns and volume exist. We …nd that in sessions where subjects are induced to be overcon…dent, volume, price errors and volatility analogs are higher than predicted by the fully-rational model. However, qualitatively similar results are obtained in sessions where there is no aggregate overcon…dence. To explain this, we suggest an observationally equivalent possibility: participants strategically respond to the errors contained in others'actions by rationally discounting the informativeness of these actions. Estimating a structural model of individuals'decisions that allows for both overcon…dence and errors, we are able to separate these two channels. We …nd that about 40% of excess volume is attributable to strategic response to errors, while the remaining is attributable to overcon…dence. If one looks at price errors or price volatility, similar results are obtained. Further, we show that the distribution of estimated individual level overcon…dence is linked to the observed price reversals, present only in the overcon…dence-induced sessions. Additional …ndings are discussed.


The articles in this issue of Variations address a particularly complex and vexing area of ocean-atmospheric coupling in the western boundary ocean current regions. The articles describe some of the difficulties in replicating western boundary currents in coupled climate models, summarize new findings of local and remote effects of the Kuroshio on the ocean and atmosphere, and point out some potential downstream impacts of western boundary currents. These articles highlight just a few of the results of the successful Western Boundary Current Workshop (held in January in Phoenix). More are underway (see article by Cronin in this issue).


We present our results on an experimental and theoretical investigation into a glass microsphere laser emitting at 2 μm wavelength. First, we fabricated Ho3+-doped tellurite glass fiber and measured the absorption and emission spectra, and the fluorescence lifetime. Using this fiber, a tellurite glass microsphere with a Q-factor of 2 × 106 was also prepared, and a single-mode laser output with a low threshold of 342 μW was observed using a 1150 nm laser as the pump source. The dynamic characteristics of the microsphere laser were studied theoretically by considering rare-earth ion spectroscopy, the rate equation of the rare-earth energy level, and the light-matter interactions in the microsphere. This work can be used to study laser emissions with low thresholds in rare-earth doped compound glass microresonators for a wide range of applications, such as gas sensing, integrated photonics, and medical surgery.


Firms have to analyze, monitor and make improvements of their existing SCM processes in order to beat market competition and stay competitive. Six Sigma's analytical emphasis would steer the improvement projects to investigating and resolving root causes, rather than mere symptoms of SCM problems. Six Sigma is a customer focused improvement strategy. With Six Sigma deployment, improvement in the quality of all supply chain processes leads to the simultaneous reduction of costs and enhancement of services. Both Six Sigma and SCM are complementary in nature and hence considered as two pillars of business improvement. An integrative framework as well as the business value-added framework developed in this paper focuses on how efficiency and effectiveness drivers of SCM and accompanying business values generated by Six Sigma deployment in SCM may affect an organization's business performance.


In supplementary material, we conduct additional experiments, including a comparison to additional baselines, an ablation study, and analysis of individual modules. Also, we include implementation details and additional qualitative results to help further understand of our framework.


This paper presents a design of a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag antenna in the ultra-high-frequency (UHF) range, which is applicable to a vehicular license plate attached to a vehicle bumper. The main goals are to first improve the identification ratio by controlling the radiation beam pattern and, second, to control the beam direction. Since every vehicle has a license plate, the available plate structure is used to design the antenna. The shape of the tag is rectangular and has a dimension of 525 mm × 116 mm, which is smaller than the typical size of standard plates, 540 mm × 120 mm, used in Europe and Korea. The fabricated tag antenna, the license plate, and the vehicular bumper are fixed by volt and nut. For vehicle tracking and identification, RFID readers are deployed on the road side. For efficient identification, a long distance passive UHF RFID license plate with a patch antenna is proposed to provide not only line-of-sight identification but also left and right beams. Unlike the general UHF tag antennas, in this paper, the patch antenna is designed to attach to the metal part of the car, the license plate holder. The beam patterns of the RFID tag antenna can be controlled by the patch antenna parameter values. The simulation result demonstrates that the proposed UHF RFID tag antenna has a beam radiation pattern as required at 920 MHz. In addition, the estimated read range of the proposed plate meets the requirement of RFID systems.


Quantity of Water and Sewage. Hydraulics. Rainfall and Runoff. Groundwater. Aquaducts and Water Pipes. Collection and Distribution of Water. Quality of Water Supplies. Clarification of Water. Filtration of Water. Miscellaneous Water Treatment Techniques. Sewerage - General Considerations. Storm Water Flow. Sewer Materials. Sewer Appurtenances. Design of Sewer Systems. Sewer Construction and Maintenance. Characteristics of Sewage. Sewerage Disposal. Preliminary Treatment Systems. Secondary Treatment Systems. Sludge Treatment and Disposal. Advanced Wastewater Treatment. Miscellaneous Wastewater Treatment Techniques. Financial Considerations.


The UDDI registry model of Web service suffers from users find services voluntarily, and deploy it in time. This paper presents a recommended discovery model of Web services using publish/subscribe technologies. The services resource way to message is published to the distributing model system; the users' personalized requests are stored in local as subscribe ways. The system gives an approach to realize the Web services change from users searching services to server pushing personalized content, which implements services matching content-based. Both public UDDI and private UDDI can be applied to the model. Experiment results show that the distributing model system gives good performance by lab condition.


This article (i) uncovers a foundational relationship between the 'gauge symmetry' of a Newton-Cartan theory and the celebrated Trautman Recovery Theorem and (ii) explores its implications for recent philosophical work on Newton-Cartan gravitation.


Cities in the Spanish Mediterranean regions have undergone an extensive process of urban growth in recent decades. This urban transformation has often failed to consider the variable of flooding in its planning. Such a situation, combined with the current meteorological changes derived from climate change phenomena that increasingly cause less frequent but more extreme rainfall events in this part of the planet, has caused a sharp increase in the vulnerability of many urban areas against flooding. This research aims to analyze, from a spatiotemporal approach, in the case study of Murcia, a Mediterranean city in southeastern Spain, the existing spatial statistical correlation between urban planning patterns of growth of the city and the increase in risk due to its current vulnerability to flooding. Using GIS-based multivariate indicators and geostatistical analysis, the behavior patterns of said correlation will be numerically evaluated, and possible future trends and scenarios for this problem will be raised.


Much of the debate about human embryonic stem cell research involves an effort to persuade the public that such use is ethical. Certainly not all human embryonic stem cell research is fallacious, but I will focus on certain works which contain such errors in thinking. Higher education is keenly aware that most students lack critical thinking skills. I have perceived this lack among my own students over the past fourteen years, and I can testify to students' lack of critical thinking skills on controversial issues, such as the use of stem cells derived from abortions.


The article is concerned about using the resistivity simulation to construct a theory model which reflects relationship between hole or fracture parameter(such as fracture azimuth,density and stretch,etc.) and stratum resistivity, and also about using 3D finite element analysis software ANSYS to simulate fractured-stratum anisotropy resistivity model and tackle fractured-stratum anisotropy resistivity forward problem.The model is very helpful to research the relationship between liquid property, saturation and tensor of stratum conductance, and the relationship is also helpful to guide 3D electromagnetic propagation logging tool design and field log data processing.


The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR)[1] plasma control system (PCS) is defined as a system consisting of electronic devices and control software, which identifies and diagnoses various plasma parameters and calculates appropriate control signals to each actuator to keep the plasma sustained in the KSTAR operation regime. The KSTAR PCS consists of a linux system with 8 processors and both analog and digital data acquisition methods are adapted for fast realtime data acquisition up to 20 kHz. The digital interface uses a reflective memory (RFM) technology to share data among various subsystems of KSTAR. RFM technology has been adopted as the real time communication method to enable PCS to interface with the actuators and to do interprocessor communications inside the cluster. To handle the fast control of the RFM data transfer, the communication using the RFM with the actuators and diagnostics system is implemented as a thread which is assigned to a separate process.


region has gained global attention in recent years. Against the backdrop of a shifting political landscape and economic uncertainty, new firms and entrepreneurs are being increasingly cited as a vanguard of economic development. However, if this vibrant population of young businesspeople and the institutions that support their efforts are to make their mark on the region, they must be able not just to start businesses but to scale them as well. To identify the specific factors that impinge on efforts to scale, the Wamda Research Lab conducted the largest study on entrepreneurship and scale in the MENA region to date, which included a survey of over 900 entrepreneurs and experts in the region.


OBJECTIVE:To determine the content of emodin in Changtong oral liquid.METHODS:HPLC was used.The stationary phase was Nova-Pak C 18 column and the mobile phase was methanol-0.1%phosphoric acid solution(85∶15).The UV detection wavelength was254nm.RESULTS:There was a good linear relationship within the concentration range of0.48~2.4μg/ml of emodin in Changtong oral liquid(r=0.9998).The average recovery was99.73%(n=5),RSD=1.42%. CONCLUSION:This method is simple,fast and accurate.


The main purpose of Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) systems is to restrict the access of vehicles to certain city areas, named Low Emission Zones (LEZ), for which a toll is assessed according to traffic conditions and vehicle emissions. Since their adoption, these solutions have proven to be quite promising. However, current proposals are still far from being ideal. While reducing congestion to some extent, they exhibit several shortcomings. They still introduce a significant error percentage in the detection of fraudulent drivers. Moreover, they usually require toll systems to be equipped with cameras that take pictures of all the vehicles that pass through the control points, which may represent a serious privacy threat. This thesis aims at providing security and privacy to new LEZs. Two new urban ERP systems have been proposed with the aim of detecting fraud while preserving drivers' privacy. They provide a deterministic fraud control and revocable anonymity for vehicles that misbehave. Both proposals allow to disperse traffic from areas with high traffic density with the aim of reducing the pollutant emissions. In the first proposal, drivers pay depending on the duration of the stay in the LEZ. In the second proposal, drivers pay according to the path they have covered. They include a study of security, privacy and feasibility.


The interaction of tunnel boring machines with the rock mass is highly influenced by human, technical and geological factors. Interpretation of geological observations and TBM data is currently done on a subjective basis. Technologies based on Artificial Intelligence research, can be used to automatically classify TBM data into rock mass behaviour types. Albeit first results look promising, any technology poses the threat of malicious use that deliberately harms / benefits one or another party.


This paper traces the history of the first 25 years of the European Economic History Review (EREH) comparing its initial agenda with its actual publication record and measuring its success with citation data. We rely on a database of all articles published in the EREH and in the four other top field journals from 1997 to 2020. The EREH has been a great success becoming, as planned at its establishment, the main outlet for continental European scholars and expanding somewhat its remit. Nonetheless, EREH needs to do an extra mile to fill the remaining gap with the more established field journals.


This article deals with a type of coaster from the northwest Mediterranean called tartane . This emblematic coaster is generally presented as the most commonly utilised boat for cargo transport from the 16 th century until the end of sailing ship coastal trade in this area at the very beginning of the 20 th century. Although it is often described as a wide-bottom one-masted lateen ship, we can count at least four different rigging systems in various iconographic resources portraying tartanes , dating from 1679 to the very first decades of the 20 th century. These diverse rigging systems reveal some developments to and influences on the tartane -type vessel, and they add complexity to our vision of a maritime cultural lands-cape in a coherent sailing space that includes the Gulf of Lion and Liguria.


The causes to the low efficiency of the leased land in the country include that the legal property right is not explicit,and means of leases unidentifiable.The market mechanisms are not well established and hard to operate.Furthermore,local governments fail to clarify the leases by abuse of administrative power,with social security system incomplete.


Philadelphia, Sept. 8, 1906. To the Editor: —A valuable service to the cause of good medical education was done by your editorial August 25 concerning the extent of teaching of medical jurisprudence In American medical schools. During a considerable part of my active professional life, I was chemist to the coroner and district attorney of this city, and had, therefore, much opportunity to see the necessity of instruction in the determination of causes of death. It seemed sad to see the vast amount of valuable material that was allowed to go to waste in connection with numerous and varied forms of violent death. In this city the coroner appoints one or more physicians, who make the necessary postmortems and report to the office. As is known throughout the nation. Philadelphia has been for many years in the grip of a political ring, which has no superior in the world for


The problem of taking into account a non-stationary inhomogeneous temperature field in the analysis of the stress-strain state of inductor systems for magnetic-pulse processing of materials is considered. It follows from the analysis of open information sources that the problem of analyzing a non-stationary temperature field arising from the presence of a non-uniform electromagnetic field and its effect on deformation has been sufficiently studied in relation to induction heating. At the same time, during other operations of magnetic-pulse processing of materials, heating of equipment can cause additional deformations of a significant magnitude, which, in turn, can lead to a loss of equipment performance due to destruction or irreversible deformation. A general approach to the analysis of such problems is proposed, which involves the determination of the spatial-temporal distributions of the quantitative characteristics of the electromagnetic field, temperature field and stress-strain state. The necessity of using numerical methods for carrying out such an analysis has been substantiated. The most effective numerical method is the finite element method, which makes it possible to analyze the unsteady electromagnetic field, temperature field, and stress-strain state within the same calculation scheme. In this case, within the framework of the finite element method, iterative schemes can be created that allow taking into account nonlinear effects. Here, nonlinear effects can be due to the dependence of the mechanical and electro-physical properties of the material on temperature, the plastic nature of deformation, and the need to take into account contact phenomena. The results of complex analysis for a composite single-turn inductor with a dielectric band are presented. The features of contact interaction were taken into account by introducing layers of contact finite elements. The stress-strain state of the inductor is estimated for two variants of the materials used: copper and non-magnetic steel.


Abstract Methods have been developed for air sampling of gaseous tertiary amines on solid sorbents. Sampling was performed at three different air levels and at 20 percent and 85 percent relative air humidity, respectively. Desorption was carried out by solvent extraction prior to high-resolution gas chromatographic analysis with flame ionization or nitrogen-phosphorus detection. Seven amines, differing in the length and shape of the carbon chains, were selected for the study and divided into three groups. The members of the first group, consisting of dimethylethylamine (DMEA), methyldiethylamine (MDEA), and triethylamine (TEA) were collected using charcoal tubes and desorbed with 5 percent ethanol in dichloromethane. The amine air levels were 1, 10, and 50 ppm. The recoveries of these amines were 92–100% (n = 6, RSD = 1–4%). Storage studies (5 days at room temperature followed by 9 days in a freezer) showed recoveries of 87 percent (DMEA), 89 percent (MDEA), and 82 percent (TEA). Determination of DMEA in ...


Abstract In a greenhouse experiment, the effect of salinity and Fe chelate on growth and mineral uptake of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L. c.v. Record) was studied. Sunflower plants were grown in nutrient solution with four levels of salinity (0, 1.5, 3.0 and 4.5 atm), induced by NaCl and four rates of Fe chelate (0, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5, ppm Fe) as FeEDDHA. The experiment was a completely randomized design with treatment combinations arranged in a factorial manner with three replications. Dry matter yield, shoot‐root ratio, leaf area, plant height and transpiration decreased as salinity increased, the effect of salinity being depressed by iron applications. Salinity reduced P, K, Ca and Mg uptake by roots as well as that of N, P, K, Ca, Mg by shoots, while Fe applications increased uptake of these elements in roots and shoots. Both salinity and iron applications increased Cl, Na and Fe uptake by roots and shoots, as expected. In most instances salinity reduced uptake of Fe, Mn and Zn by the plants while iron...


Detection and quantification of atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries is important in cardiovascular risk analysis. Atherosclerotic plaque can be visualized using coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA). Manual identification and segmentation of plaque is a complex task that requires high level of expertise. Hence, several automatic approaches have been designed. Automatic methods employing deep learning have shown to outperform conventional approaches, but they are hampered by the requirement on the availability of large and diverse training data. To address this, we designed a method that synthesizes calcified and non-calcified atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries. First, we generate plaque geometry using conventional image analysis approach that varies the radius, length and angle of a plaque and we use this to generate a crude inpainting of a plaque on a target artery. Thereafter, we employ a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) to synthesize the plaque texture in CCTA. The generator is trained to generate fake images with realistic appearance. The discriminator is trained to distinguish the synthesized fake and the real images. The data set for training and evaluation of the plaque synthesis contained CCTA scans of 102 patients (50 training, 52 testing) with manually annotated calcified and non-calcified plaque. To evaluate performance of the synthesis method, we compared CCTA patches with real and synthesized plaque. The evaluation resulted in mean (standard deviation) structural similarity index of 0.99 (0.01), peak signal noise ratio of 73.99 (5.52) and mean absolute error of 5.56 (3.23) HU. To evaluate whether synthesized data enables plaque segmentation, an additional set of CCTA scans of 92 patients without visible plaque was collected. In these scans, plaque was synthesized using the developed approach, containing in total 615 calcified and 544 non-calcified plaque lesions. The synthesized data was used to train a 3D UNet for segmenting calcified and non-calcified plaque lesions. Automatic segmentation which was trained with real data only resulted in Dice coefficients of 0.68 and 0.35 for calcified and non-calcified plaque, respectively. This was significantly improved by pretraining the network with synthetic data and refining it with real data, which resulted in a Dice coefficients of 0.70 (p=0.03) and 0.36 (p=0.02) for calcified and non-calcified plaque, respectively. The results demonstrate that training with CCTA scans with automatically synthesized calcified and non-calcified plaque improves the performance of plaque segmentation.


Peter House, Franco Berruti, Murray R. Gray, Edward Chan, and Cedric Briens. (1) Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada, (2) Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A5B9, Canada, (3) Chemical & Materials, University of Alberta, T6G 2G6, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G6, Canada, (4) Research Centre, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Edmonton, AB T6N 1H4, Canada


Letter from John Van Dyk to James J. Dinsmore regarding summer bird sightings in northwest Iowa, summer 1989. This item was used as supporting documentation for the Iowa Ornithologists' Union Quarterly field report of summer 1989.


Double-loop networks have been widely studied as an architecture for local area networks.It is well known that the minimum distance diagram of a double-loop network yields several methods.Given a positive integer N,it is desirable to find a double-loop network with its diameter being the minimum among all double-loop networks with N nodes.Since the diameter of a double-loop network can be easily computed,provide a simple and efficient algorithm to simulate the regulations of diameter between directed and undirected double-loop networks.


Lightweight encryption is an interesting field that strikes the perfect balance in p roviding security, low-power consumption, and compactness. In this paper, we present the design of a lightweight encryption based on the grouping permutation(GRP).In the s-box we have added the confusion property for GRP.The existing S boxes with DESXL, CLEFIA, and AES algorithms are compared and a new lightweight encryption system is proposed in this paper that provides compact results which reduces gates and memory size.GRP not only adds strength to the cipher it also reduces the power consumption and memory requirements. By using the S box of PRESENT the gate complexity is reduced.A lightweight S box that can be mapped into the GRP to have efficient cryptographic structure and to strengthen the security. IndexTerms Lightweight cryptography, PRES ENT, GRP,embedded security, encryption, bi t permutation . ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I. INTRO DUCTION The use of pervasive devices in the field of electronics has raised the concerns about security. The main criterion for the lightweight cipher is to have less memory space and that which would result into a less Gate Equivalent count. In the security environment, there are two types of instructions, one is the ―SP-network‖ Substitution Permutation network like AES, PRESENT, etc. and other is the―Feistel network‖. Feistel structure with a substitution box. The disadvantage of generalized Feistel structure is that it requires larger number of rounds to make the cipher secure. In the GRP the results of a design of a cipher with a dequate security for applications like pervasive computing. Block ciphers should be limited to less GEs in o rder to fit in lightweight applications. Ciphers like AES [3], DES [4] would result in high GEs that make them infeasible for small scale real time applications. Light variants of DES such as DESL [6] have been proposed by slightly modifying the algorithms, by reducing the S-boxes and by using key whitening to increase security levels. Alternative to this approach of modify ing an existing block cipher and to have an efficient hardware model, is an entirely new structure that has been designed called ―PRESENT.‖ PRESENT is a Substitution Permutation network based on 80 bit or 128 bit key size and 64 b it block size. PRESENT [8] is a block cipher with 31 rounds and its various variants need 2520 to 3010 GEs to provide adequate security levels. CLEFIA [9], [10] is one more compact algorithm GEs and has two confusion and two diffusion properties that results in a higher memory requirement. In the cryptographic environment, there are two types of instructions, one is the ―SPnetwork‖ (Substitution Permutation network) like AES, PRESENT, etc. and other is the ―Feistel network‖ like TEA, XTEA, etc. In this paper, we have focused on SP-network only, as they provide good resistance against most of the attacks. Stream ciphers are also widely studied in the cryptographic environment because of its faster execution, but they are susceptible to attacks compared to SP network block ciphers. CLEFIA [9], is a generalized Feistel structure with a s ubstitution box. The aim of this paper is to describe the results of a design of a compact cipher with adequate security for applications like pervasive computing. They are complex in nature which gives them an edge in cryptographic environment. Bit permutations are popularly known to be used in permutation block known as diffusion property. Among all bit permutation instruction GRP proved to be an efficient instruction in terms of cryptographic properties, memory size and total number of gate counts. Bit permutation instructions are widely studied and currently supported by all word oriented processors. GRP is an extensively researched instruction set, its cryptanalysis is well known, and many attacks have been tried in the past on bit permutation instruc tions. GRP is known for fast bit permutation. GRP is complex in nature that makes it more suitable for cryptographic environment as compared to operations like shifting, mult iply or addit ion. GRP is suitable specifically for encryption in an application li ke remote sensor continuously encrypting data and sending it to a server location [9]. Moreover, GRP has good differential properties because the paths of data bits totally depends on control bits applied to the structure. Change of even a single control b it will cause all the data bits to change at the output [5]. Th is property helps to achieve desired avalanche effect and makes design more robust against attacks. Algorithms like DES [4], [5], SERPENT [14] and TWO FISH [9] use bit permutation instructions in their operations which helps to resist against linear and differential cryptanalysis. Bit permutat ion instructions lack confusion property tha t is an Sbox. According to Shannon having only the diffusion property is not sufficient to provide a secure cipher [2]. GRP uses sub word permutation that not only does permutation efficiently but also accelerates the software cryptography [6]. www.ijcrt.org © 2017 IJCRT | Volume 5, Issue 4 November 2017 | ISSN: 2320-2882 IJCRT1704173 International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) www.ijcrt.org 1332 The rest of the paper is organized as fo llows. Section II d iscusses about GRP Algorithm which is a universal design wh ich generates code word for n integers. Section III discusses about Lightweight Cryptography in which GRP key generation, inputs is given by user, and based on that GRP generates a sequence of 0's and 1's which serve as key to the encryption and decryption process. Section IV discusses about GRP: A New Hybrid Lightweight Design Bit permutation instructions increases strength of a block cipher. It performs fast bit permutation and uses sub word sorter that makes the operation faster and can increase the throughput .Section V. Result And Discussion for 128 b it permutation and finally encrypted the data. Finally the conclusion is drawn in Section VI. II. GRP ALGORITHM By providing integer sequence GRP algorithm generates the different keys at different rounds where the user has to give an 128 b it input and GRP performs the exact same operations for 128 bits which is performed for an 8 b it encryption the basic GRP encryption operations in terms of AND, OR and NOT gates. key register generates the key according to GRP algorithm that is based on the user defined integer sequence and that key is applied as code word to each of the permutations to do the encryption. The algorithm and the steps involved while deigning permutation box by using GRP .In a scenario, let us assume that the input is a plain text with a bit length w = 128 that needs to be permuted with the help of GRP. To permute 128 bits, the operation needs total 7 stages as 2^7 = 128 bits. 7 stages means GRP 128 will perform up to 7 rounds as 27 = 128.Si milarly, for 64 b it and 8 bit permutations, we need total of 6 and 3 stages ,respectively. w indicates word length and n indicates number of stages, wh ere 2n = w.P = w/2 indicates pairing bits in which if word length is 128 bits then P value will be 64 which depicts in the first stage of permuting 128 bits, first group is the 0th bit and 64th bit second will be 1st and 65th bit, third group will be 2nd and 66th bit and similarly last will be 63rd and 127th bit. C represents combination of pairing bits. For example, for P = 64, C value will be 1, for second stage where P = 32, C value will be 2 and for last stage P = 1, C value will be 64 which means we will be having 64 combinations of single pair. By providing integer sequence GRP algorithm generates the different keys at different rounds . Key generation for respective integer sequence is illustrated with an example in paper [8]. where the user provides an 128 bit inputs and Groupi ng permutation performs the same operations for 128 b its which is performed for an 8 bitin Fig. 1. It is a universal design which generates code word for n integers. Fig. 1 indicates the basic GRP encryption operations in terms of AND, OR and NOT gates.In Fig. 1, key register generates the key according to GRP algorith m [6], that is based on the user defined integer sequence The algorithm and the steps involved while deigning permutation box by using GRP are outlined in Fig. 1. Fig. 1. GRP implement ing encryption for 8 b it www.ijcrt.org © 2017 IJCRT | Volume 5, Issue 4 November 2017 | ISSN: 2320-2882 IJCRT1704173 International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) www.ijcrt.org 1333 III. LIGHTWEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPHY Internet of things (IOT) is one of the most discussed topics today in the digital world. Focus area of researchers is to implement lightweight design to avoid high power dissipation and large memory requirement. RFID tag is one of the fast growing technologies that would be useful for IOT [1], [3]. To provide a security at RFID level, there is need to have a lightweight crypto algorithm whose coverage area would be nearly 2100 GE. The standard algorit hm like AES [3], DES [4], [5] have huge memory requirement and would not be feasible to be implemented for embedded system design. Many lightweight algorithms have been designed in the past and various attacks have been proven on them. Fig. 2. Block Diagram For GRP Permutation In GRP module, 64 bit/128 bit blocks were passed through the S-box of PRESENT and after mapping according to PRESENT, the output was passed to the permutation layer which performed encryption based on GRP algorithms. Keys at each stage were applied based on key generation method of GRP. In GRP key generation, inputs will be the bit positions given by user, and based on that GRP generates a sequence of 0's and 1's which serve as key to the encryption and decryption process. Grouping permutation has very robust mechanism for generatio n of key which is the necessity in cryptographic environme


The geochemical compositions for obsidian from two of the most important sources on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, Shirataki and Oketo, are presented. This work represents the first systematic study of obsidian geochemistry on Hokkaido from the view of modern methodological standards. The study was performed with the help of neutron activation analysis to determine the concentrations for 28 elements. The results obtained allow us to subdivide both sources into two geochemical groups (Shirataki-A and -B; and Oketo-A and -B), with each representing an individual sub-source. Obsidian from both Shirataki and Oketo sources is identified at archaeological sites located on Hokkaido, on the neighbouring Sakhalin Island and Kurile Islands, and in the lower course of the Amur River basin. The distance of obsidian transport during the Upper Palaeolithic was up to ∼250 km, and in the following Neolithic and Palaeometal periods up to ∼1200 km. This testifies to the wide distribution of Hokkaido obsidian to archaeological complexes in North-East Asia and its active transport/exchange in prehistory. The data presented here should be used as a reference for the obsidian geochemistry of Shirataki and Oketo sources from now on.


The commissioning of a control system can give fresh insight into the operating characteristics of the driven machinery and thus provide both supplier and user with essential data on the desired control specification for the turbine driver. It can also provide a better understanding of the interaction of the power characteristics of driver and driven machines and the capabilities of the steam turbine.


Background: Capsular contracture is the most common complication of breast implantation surgery. Bacterial contamination was considered to play an important role in the occurrence of capsular contracture, and Gram-positive bacteria such as Staphylococcus epidermidis were discovered in the clinical specimens. Lipoteichoic acid (LTA) was a component of the cell wall of Gram-positive bacteria and was sufficient in the pathogenicity of the bacteria. The authors assumed that LTA could trigger the immunologic response against the implant and cause capsular contracture. Methods: The authors developed a rat model of capsular contracture by repeated injection of 10 μg/mL LTA. The histologic changes of the capsule tissue were measured by hematoxylin and eosin, sirius red, Masson, and immunohistochemical staining. The expression of related cytokines was measured by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The downstream pathway activation was shown by Western blot. The authors also applied tocilizumab, an interleukin (IL)-6 receptor antagonist, to verify the role of IL-6 in this pathologic process. Results: The authors discovered that repeated LTA injection, at a low concentration, could induce the thickening of capsule tissue, the deposition of collagen fiber, and the activation of myofibroblasts. The IL-6/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 signaling pathway was activated in this process, and the inhibition of IL-6 receptor could relieve the symptoms. B cells and T-helper cells, especially T-helper type 1, could be related to this phenomenon. Conclusions: The authors' research corroborated that subclinical infection could trigger capsular contracture, and the immune system played an important role in this process. The authors' results provided a possible research direction for the mechanism of bacterial infection-induced immune response against breast implants. Clinical Relevance Statement: The authors' research provides a possible research direction for the mechanism of bacterial infection-induced immune response against breast implants, and a potential target for predicting the prognosis of capsular contracture.


The power of the Commonwealth Parliament to impose duties of excise is made exclusive by section 90 of the Constition. The High Court's exposition of the meaning of "duties of excise" cannot be counted as one of the successes of Australian constitutional interpretation. The question of what constitutes a duty of excise has been extensively litigated without the Court being able to settle a definition of excise which is capable of consistent and predictable application or which conforms with any coherent notion of the constitutional purpose of section 90.' The search for a satisfactory definition of excise also involves issues of considerable practical importance. Allocation of power to impose duties of excise plays a significant role in contemporary Australian federal fiscal relations. The significance of the challenge facing the High Court in relation to the interpretation of section 90 is reinforced by the reluctance of the electorate to support constitutional reforms which would provide an alternative means of resolving the problems currently associated with the interpretation of this sectioa2 In the recent case of Hematite Petroleum Pty. Ltd. v. Victors the High Court held, by a four/two majority, that a pipeline operation fee imposed by the Victorian Government upon transportation of hydrocarbons produced in Bass Strait was a duty of excise. In this case, two judicial initiatives were taken which added new dimensions to the High Court's exposition of the concept of excise. First, some members of the Court investigated and placed overt reliance upon the constitutional purpose of section 90 to an extent not evident in previous excise duty cases. Secondly, some members of the court accepted that the taxation power of the Commonwealth (section 51(2)) could be exercised so as to attract the general inconsistency provision of the Constitution (section 109) and render State taxation invalid.


201Background: Monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (CCL2 or MCP-1), a chemokine secreted by monocytic cells, is critical in recruiting Treg and MDSCs into the tumor microenvironment and in regulatin...


Basalt fibers are one of the most interesting reinforcement which are being used in last few decades. The fibers are manufactured from basalt raw materials. In order to determine their process ability for the production of basalt fibers their composition was investigated and based on material modeling, the viscosity of several samples was calculated. The results show that, the Indian basalt composition varies from location to location. The Indian basalt composition shows the viscosity profile similar to the commonly used basalt for fiber production. Introduction The Deccan-Trapp in the region of Deccan in western-central India is one of the largest volcanic basalt deposition regions on earth. It consists of a stair-like formation (Trapp) of flood basalt formed by an overlay of flat-lying basalt layers and it covers an area of more than 500,000 square kilometers [1]. (Fig 1) Fig. 1: Map of the Deccan Plateau The original Deccan plateau extension prior erosion reached 1.5 million square kilometers and spreads up to the Arabian Sea. The Deccan plateau formation is estimated by paleontology in both Late Cretaceous eruptions and eruptions during the Eocene and Oligocene. By using radiometry it has been reported that the formation was in between 102 and 30 million years ago.[1] [2] [3] The Deccan plateau is divided in several regions. The most relevant region are Kalsubai, Lonavala and Wai. Those regions are than divided into sub regions. In Fig. 2 are describes d the Deccan's subdivisions. Fig. 2: Deccan Subgroup definition Kalsubaiflow is divided into Jawhar, Igatpuri, Neral, Thakurvadi and Bhimashankar formations. These formations are having high MgO content and traces amygdules. These flows are separated by others which contain giant plagioclase phenocrysts. The Lonavala Subgroup overlies the Kalsubai and is composed of two formations, the Khandala and the Bushe. The Wai Subgroup includes the three formations, Poladpur, Ambenali, and Mahabaleshwar. The whole subgroup is composed of simple flows with well-developed flow tops, small phenocrysts of plagioclase, pyroxene and olivine, and relatively evolved bulk. [1] For this study the author used the analysis of the chemical composition made by Beane et al.. In his work all the Deccan region basalt was analyzed and categorized (Fig. 2) based on the chemical composition. Basalt Viscosity Basalt fibers, as well as glass fibers require a forming viscosity ranging from 100 Pa∙s to 36 Pa∙s. The viscosity of a basalt melt depends on the temperature (Fig. 3). The Basalt fiberization strongly depends on the temperature gradient between the two viscosity points (100 Pa∙s to 36 Pa∙s ) [4]. A wider temperature interval indicate the higher stability of the fiberization process. Fig 3. Plot of viscosity vs. temperature. Examples of melts with wide (left) and narrow (right) temperature interval of fiberization and their dependency with the viscosity. In order to determine the viscosity, the authors applied the model described by Giordano et. al. [5] for predicting the non-Arrhenian temperature dependence of viscosity for naturally-occurring silicate melts at atmospheric pressure (10 Pa) that is based on the chemical composition of the raw materials. Temperature dependence of viscosity (η) is modelled by the following equation


We propose a hierarchical clustering approach designed to group linguistic features for supervised machine learning that is inspired by variationist linguistics. The method makes it possible to abstract away from the individual feature occurrences by grouping features together that behave alike with respect to the target class, thus providing a new, more general perspective on the data. On the one hand, it reduces data sparsity, leading to quantitative performance gains. On the other, it supports the formation and evaluation of hypotheses about individual choices of linguistic structures. We explore the method using features based on verb subcategorization information and evaluate the approach in the context of the Native Language Identification (NLI) task.


A synthesis of the four stereoisomeric 1,4-oxido-3-oxa-A-homo-androstane-derivatives 3, 9, 13, and 19 is described, starting from the lactones 1, 11, and 15.


ABSTRACT The records of 145 Saudi children (78 male and 67 female with a mean age = 3.3 years) evaluated at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre for suspected hearing impairment ...


The deliberation underlying this research was the launching of the Making Indonesia 4.0 by President Joko Widodo as a roadmap for entering the IR 4.0. In the university environment, there is a growing thought about various strategies in preparing students for the 4IR, such as dynamism, diversity of developed programs and the practices of the management, which are being applied at Padang State University (UNP). This research aims to explore the role of University-Based Entrepreneurship Ecosystems (UBEE) in UNP in getting millennial generations ready for the IR 4.0. The research applies the descriptive qualitative method and case study method. The result of the research concludes that UNP possesses the environment of technopreneurship in carrying out an identity as UBEE. Besides that, eight other strategies applied by the universities to face the 4IR: (1) university vision that leads to student entrepreneurship development, (2) create an academic community that have perspective as entrepreneur, (3) employ link and match strategy with the government and industry, (4) implement entrepreneurship programs both held by universities and Kemenristekdikti, (5) commit to the continuous program in long period, (6) commit to large financial resources, (7) commit to continuous innovation of curriculum, and (8) organize the infrastructures with the institution and entrepreneurial programs.


Part 1 National experiences and West-European capital: foreign capital in the Bulgarian banking system, 1878-1944-1997, Ljuben Berov foreign banks in Romania - a historical perspective, Cristian Bichi the Imperial Ottoman Bank - actor or instrument of Ottoman modern-isation?, Edhem Eldem Western capital and the Bulgarian banking system - late 19th century-Second World War, Alexandre Kostov foreign banks in Serbia, 1882-1914, Andrej Mitrovic the Greek banking system and its deregulation - history, structure and organisation in a European context, George Pagoulatos the history of Nova Lubljanska Banka (NLB) in the frame of Slovene experience with West-European capital, Franjo Stiblar. Part 2 The formation of an economic area: the changing nature of internationalisation of the Greek financial sector, Tassos Giannitsis issues of management control and sovereignty in transnational banking in the Eastern Med-iterranean before the First World War, Christos Hadziiossif banking and politics in Austria-Hungary, Gunther Kronenbitter Capital markets and economic integration in South-East Europe, 1919-89 lessons from western banking in the two Yugoslavias, John R. Lampe the role of Jews in Serbian banking until the First World War, Danica Milic the position and role of French finance in the Balkans from the late 19th century until the Second World War, Alain Plessis and Olivier Feiertag.


Metop Second Generation (MetOp-SG) is a mission that will ensure the delivery of continuous, high-quality global meteorological data starting from 2020 onwards, providing weather data services for monitoring the climate and improving weather forecasts. The program is a continuation of current EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS), and is jointly funded by the EUMETSAT and ESA. MetOp-SG forms the space segment of EPS. In the framework of the Phase A study for MetOp Second Generation mission (MetOp-SG), CORISTA developed an instrument performance model for a Microwave Imaging Radiometer (MWI) and Ice Cloud Imaging radiometer (ICI)). The corresponding algorithms for the analysis of the performances of these two instruments have been implemented by means of dedicated software. Analysis tool was developed for instrument channels performances analysis as well as overall system performance parameters. The software tool was developed in MatLab language.


We propose a non-contact method for measuring the film thickness of various materials based on the photothermal effect. It involves irradiating a film surface with a nanosecond laser pulse. Various kinds of elastic waves that have a maximum frequency of several hundred MHz are excited by the photothermal effect. However, only those elastic waves which are dependent on the film thickness are sustained in the film, as a result of the resonance phenomena that occur between boundary surfaces having acoustic impedance. The film thickness can be calculated from the detected resonance frequency. Previously, we established a non-contact measurement technique which can measure the thickness of a single-layer film. In this report, we describe a measurement technique for measuring the thickness of a multilayer film. There are three kinds of modes excited by resonance. The frequencies of these resonance modes depend on the differences between the relative acoustic impedances of the materials in the film. We were able to measure the thickness of the layers in a multilayer film by analyzing these resonance modes in each layer. This was done by selecting the frequency analysis window for which the resonant wave was stable.


A well functioning and efficient corporate bond market is necessary for any economy. While most developed markets like the US have one in place, emerging economies are slowly realizing the importance of one. The need was especially highlighted post the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. India, a predominantly bank based economy, has been taking numerous measures to deepen its corporate bond markets over the last decade. The Patil Committee Report published in 2005, brought to light the various areas in which the regulators, RBI and SEBI, needed to concentrate to increase the traded volumes in this market. Some of the areas brought out by this report were the lack of demand and supply of bonds, weak infrastructure, lack of retail participation etc. This paper seeks to establish through the 7i Framework of the RBI, the strides the market has already made in this regard and the possible areas that still need a push. The researchers have relied on the published news reports pertaining to the corporate bond markets in India to collect data on the issuances for the calendar year 2015 as well as other material information concerning the markets. These have been discussed in detail to identify which of the 7i's is the focus area for policy development and where there remains further room for action.


This paper presents a method that a control Lyapunov functions of linear systems can be constructed by solving a Lyapunov function. It proves that the method can provide all quadratic control Lyapunov functions for a given linear system. Moreover, by using the control Lyapunov function a linear feedback is established to stabilize the linear system.


Recently,the relationship between telomerase and cancer has become a heated issue in the field of cancer research.Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme,which is positively expressed in most malignant tumor cells,while negatively expressed in normal somatic ones.And the transcriptional regulation of human telomerase reverse transcriptase(hTERT)promoter is the main mechanism for telomerase expression,which plays a significant role in the developmet of tumor as well as cell aging and immortalization.hTERT promoter has become a new target for the early diagnosis,prognostic evaluation and gene therapy of cancer.


Abstract Isothiocyanato-functionalized cyanine dyes 7 and 11 for labelling of proteins at amino groups have been synthesized. The dyes and their adducts with amines show strong absorbance and fluorescence in the near-infrared region of 750-850 nm.


The latest progresses of TSP research are Skeleton Computation and Fat Computation. The novelty of the two algorithms is that they shrink the search-space continually in the iterative processes, so as to achieve the purpose of reducing the computational complexity of TSP. Research of this article finds that union-iteration algorithm based on some Hamiltonian circuits could inosculate the advent-ages of the two computations. Typical examples show that this new Skeleton-Fat Inosculation Algorithm (SFIA) is feasible.


Recent research in developed countries shows an adverse effect of natural disasters on the economy. This paper aims at examining whether this is also relevant for developing countries. Applying a counterfactual approach to provincial data for Indonesia and Thailand, we find that the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 negatively affects the economy of the exposed provinces. Specifically, it is shown that the Aceh province of Indonesia experiences a larger decline in per capita GDP compared to the Phang Nga province of Thailand. These results seem straightforward to reconcile with previous evidence using developed countries data.


ABSTRACT Regional science has long been concerned with measuring the spatial distribution of innovation activity. We introduce trademarks as a new indicator for regional innovation and argue that they are particularly useful to measure the 'soft' side of innovation that is difficult to capture with conventional indicators. We explore the spatial distribution of trademarks using a detailed and comprehensive dataset of 47 Japanese prefectures from 1999 to 2012. In addition to mapping differences in trademarking across regions, we identify correlates at the regional level that provide insights into determinants of regional innovation measured via trademarks. For example, regional trademark activity positively correlates with population density, income per capita, entrepreneurship rate, the number of universities, and strong private service and finance sectors. Overall, the results reveal associations unique to trademarks that other measures of innovation cannot uncover. Our findings contribute to research in regional science and the evolving literature on trademarks.


Aseptic necrosis is a commonly discerned degenerative condition of the bone characteristically constituted of deteriorated cellular components. Generally, the condition arises secondary to discontinuity of subchondral vascular effusion. The disorder is additionally designated as avascular necrosis, osteonecrosis or ischemic bone necrosis and no bone is exempt. Specific sites incriminated are the tibial tuberosity as encountered in Osgood-Schlatter's disease or proximal femoral epiphysis as denominated in Legg-Calve'-Perthes disease.


Mixed-orientation relationships can be mutually satisfying and unproblematic. They may become challenging when one partner's gay, lesbian, or bisexual orientation is revealed unexpectedly during a long-term relationship, and the G/L/B partner wishes to act on his or her same-sex attractions, or the straight partner cannot come to terms with the revelation. Awareness and disclosure of same-sex attractions are often delayed due to the cultural and personal effects of homophobia and biphobia. Couple therapy can help these couples by helping them to understand the different experiences and therapeutic needs of the partners, sorting through and addressing the underlying relational issues brought out by the conflict, providing education and resources, and offering possibilities for redefining the relationship. The therapist should be aware of the diverse outcomes that can result and be prepared to facilitate the negotiation of changes. Successfully creating a sustainable relationship depends on the quality of the relationship before disclosure and both partners' willingness to focus on reconstructing the relationship.


In the Indian state of West Bengal, key districts popularly known for varieties of ornamental fish breeding & culture are Howrah and South 24 Parganas. However, the only wholesale market for ornamental fish trade is in CTI bazaar, Dasnagar, Howrah. From the present study it is revealed that about 3000 - 4000 pieces of fishes everyday which fetch them approximately 3000 INR/day. Almost 1500-1800 such collectors work in the business in the state among which 85% are concentrated in Howrah district alone. More than 1500 rural youths are occupied in the trade as collectors and earn livelihood. On the other hand ornamental fish farmers are constricted to breeding and culture operations. They are unaware about wholesale prices, demand pattern and quality requirement. It is observed that collectors have higher bargaining power and negotiate very low price. Farmers are thus affected by lower margins and sustainable growth of OFT in the state is at a stake. The document presents major varieties of fishes traded, the sales channels in OFT and its operations and reasons for poor economic growth of farmers (also referred as breeder and rearers) using a survey based methodology. A three prong approach of Developing farmers, Adopting new technologies and Channel design can ensure sustainable growth of the trade and inclusive development.


The purpose of this research is to identify the community empowerment which was held in the Buru Regency since the year 2005 to 2014. The results of the identification into a material formulation to find the model of empowerment that is more flexible and the substance. The approach used in this research using methods qualitative with the approach of the description, determination of informants using purposive with consideration of the informants is considered as related parties to achieve the research objectives. The research was conducted in 8 villages randomly selected by considering the characteristics of the community in the Buru Regency. This study uses data collection techniques of observation, in-depth interviews and focuses group discussions. Data analysis technique used to follow the concept of Miles, Huberman, and Spradley. The results of the analysis of the data shows during the period 2005-2014 the implementation of empowerment in Buru Regency has not yet reached the value of the substance is visible of the low level of community understanding of the program overlapping the implementation of the program and the regional center as well as the dependence of the program on the system of budgeting. The results of the formulation of the empowerment model indicate there need to be changed in the pattern of implementation of the empowerment program, namely the integration of community empowerment programs at the level of structure and operation. Hall program becomes central to the implementation of the program in a top-down and vice versa as well as have channels to avoid the buildup of empowerment programs in the area. Thus, the expected empowerment program more flexible to achieve the values of substantial and able to provide a solution to the problem of poverty.


The rates of gas-phase thermal elimination reaction of esters of 2-pyridine sulfonic acid and 8-quinoline sulfonic acid have been measured over at least 50° for each compound. The relative rates of the first-order unimolecular decomposition at 500 K for the primary:secondary esters suggest that CO bond breaking is kinetically more significant than CH bond breaking, leading to a transition state of carbocationic character. This is consistent with the electron-donating effect provided by the methoxy substituent in 2-p-methoxyphenylethyl of 2-pyridine and 8-quinoline sulfonate esters stabilizing the carbocation center. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Chem Kinet 32: 771–775, 2000


Particulate matter (PM) is regarded a major problem worldwide because of the harm it causes to human health. Concentrations of PM with particle diameter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) and with particle diameter less than 10 µm (PM10) are based on various emission sources as well as meteorological factors. In Bangkok, where the PM2.5 and PM10 monitoring stations are few, the ability to estimate concentrations at any location based on its environment will benefit healthcare policymakers. This research aimed to study the influence of land use, traffic load, and meteorological factors on the PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations in Bangkok using a land-use regression (LUR) approach. The backward stepwise selection method was applied to select the significant variables to be included in the resultant models. Results showed that the adjusted coefficient of determination of the PM2.5 and PM10 LUR models were 0.58 and 0.57, respectively, which are in the same range as reported in the previous studies. The meteorological variables included in both models were rainfall and air pressure; wind speed contributed to only the PM2.5 LUR model. Further, the land-use types selected in the PM2.5 LUR model were industrial and transportation areas. The PM10 LUR model included residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural areas. Traffic load was excluded from both models. The root mean squared error obtained by 10-fold cross validation was 9.77 and 16.95 for the PM2.5 and PM10 LUR models, respectively.


This paper aims to study the planning, training and development of human resources and its impact on the organizational performance of the Iraqi oil companies. Factors affecting HR planning, training and development were examined. The study population, composed of staff from the Human Resources Department of the Ministry of Oil, included 100 people surveyed. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researcher developed and distributed a survey and data collection and analysis using EXCEL. The overall analysis was carried out based on meta-statistics and correlation analysis. The results showed that human resource management, training and development planning are closely related to organizational performance in the Ministry of Oil. Paper presented recommendations for improving human resources in the Iraq Ministry of Oil.


ABSTRACT A distinction between facts and values is often assumed when people in the modern West talk about science. The biologist Stephen Gould, for example, famously argued that religion covers questions of meaning and moral value, but science deals with empirical facts. This paper challenges the traditional fact/value distinction by questioning the presuppositions about science upon which it depends. It begins by describing the origins of the fact/value distinction in the Scientific Revolution and then gives three reasons for the inseparability of facts and values in scientific inquiry, drawing upon themes from the "practice turn" in recent scholarship on the sciences.


ABSTRACT Objective: Intrauterine environment can induce fetal metabolic programming that predisposes to adiposity-related chronic diseases in its lifespan. We examined the associations of parental nutritional status and gestational weight gain with offspring body composition in early adulthood. Materials and methods: This is cross-sectional analysis of female participants of the NutriHS who were submitted to questionnaires, clinical examinations and body composition assessed by DXA. Association of pre-conception parental BMI and maternal gestational weight gain (exposures) with body composition measurements (outcomes) were analyzed using multiple linear models adjusted for Directed Acyclic Graphs-based covariables (maternal and paternal educational level, maternal age, and tobacco, alcohol and/or drugs use). The sample included 124 women (median 28 (24-31) years) with a mean BMI of 25.4 ± 4.7 kg/m2. Results: No association between previous paternal BMI and offspring's body composition was detected. In the fully adjusted linear regression model, maternal BMI was associated with offspring's total lean mass (β = 0.66, p = 0.001), appendicular skeletal muscle mass index (ASMI) (β = 0.11, p = 0.003) and fat mass index (FMI) (β = 0.03, p = 0.039). Gestational weight gain was associated with increased offspring's BMI (OR 1.12 [95% CI 1.02-1.20], p = 0.01). The linear regression model adjusted for maternal age and maternal and paternal education levels showed associations of gestational weight gain with offspring's ASMI (β = 0.42, p = 0.046), FMI (β = 0.22, p = 0.005) and android-to-gynoid fat ratio (β = 0.09, p = 0.035). Conclusion: Our findings suggest that preconception maternal BMI could influence lean mass and general adiposity of young adult female offspring and that gestational weight gain could be useful for predicting centrally distributed adiposity.


Abstract A powder diffraction pattern and unit cell data for nitroguanidine, C(NH2)2NNO2 are presented. The orthorhombic space group Fdd2 (43) has been confirmed by single crystal methods.


The pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has proven challenging clinically, and at the population level, due to heterogeneity in both transmissibility and severity. Recent case incidence in Ontario, Canada (autumn 2020) has outstripped incidence in seen during the first (spring) pandemic wave; but has been associated with a lower incidence of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions and deaths. We hypothesized that differential ICU burden might be explained by increased testing volumes, as well as the shift in mean case age from older to younger. We constructed a negative binomial regression model using only three covariates, at a 2-week lag: log10(weekly cases); log10(weekly deaths); and mean weekly case age. This model reproduced observed ICU admission volumes, and demonstrated good preliminary predictive validity. Furthermore, when admissions were used in combination with ICU length of stay, our modeled estimates demonstrated excellent convergent validity with ICU occupancy data reported by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Our approach needs external validation in other settings and at larger and smaller geographic scales, but appears to be a useful short-term forecasting tool for ICU resource demand; we also demonstrate that the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 infection has not meaningfully changed in Ontario between the first and second waves, but the demographics of those infected, and the fraction of cases identified, have.


A substantial proportion of patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) who do not fit into any of the usual immune states are considered to be in the 'grey zone (GZ)'. We aimed to investigate the distribution and characteristics of GZ in a large cohort of CHB patients. Four thousand seven hundred and fifty‐nine consecutive treatment‐naïve CHB patients were enrolled. The immune states were defined based on AASLD 2018 Hepatitis B Guidance. GZ CHB patients were classified into four groups: HBeAg positive, normal ALT levels and serum HBV DNA ≤106 IU/ml (GZ‐A); HBeAg positive, elevated ALT levels and serum HBV DNA ≤2 × 104 IU/ml (GZ‐B); HBeAg negative, normal ALT levels and serum HBV DNA ≥2 × 103 IU/ml (GZ‐C); HBeAg negative, elevated ALT levels and serum HBV DNA ≤2 × 103 IU/ml (GZ‐D). The distributions of different immune states were: 233 (4.90%) patients in immune‐tolerant phase, 941 (19.77%) patients in HBeAg‐positive immune active phase, 1,717 (36.08%) patients in inactive phase and 546 (11.47%) patients in HBeAg‐negative immune active phase. Of note, 1,322 (27.78%) patients did not fit into any of above phases and were defined as the GZ. A high proportion of patients in GZ‐B had advanced fibrosis (33.3%) or cirrhosis (25.8%). Older age, HBeAg‐positive status and higher ALT levels were independently risk factors of advanced disease in GZ CHB patients. Therefore, our results revealed that more than a quarter of CHB patients were classified into the GZ and a high proportion of patients in GZ‐B had advanced fibrosis or even cirrhosis.


This article seeks to demonstrate that the concept of situated cognition can be fruitful for teacher training processes and therefore to the pedagogical practice of teaching courses. Thus, we present the theoretical frameworks and approaches brought by this concept and, through them, point out that the national guidelines for training teachers of basic education, both set by the CNE/CP 09/2001 and by the
CNE/CP 01/2002, may be more richly operationalized when taking into account the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. We bring further examples of best teaching practices that suggest how this operationalization can happen in practice.


In this paper, a methodology for the risk probability map generation of the crime prevention to be subject to the urban area in the group residential area is presented. The interpretation key is set up to the distinctive feature distinguishing with the unaided eye based on the object composing with the urban area information such as the topology, the facility, and the characteristic information of the corresponding area by analyzing the crime prevention case occurred by gone. This interpretation key is generated, and this information is applied to another area equally, and so, the risk probability map for the crime prevention and the disaster prevention is generated. At this time, the object interpretation key for the urban area information is divided into the various size cell by the crime prevention case. and the risk index according with this cell is set up. Also, the generated various risk probability map is unified, and the integration risk probability map is generated.


The development on the leaf was studied by paraffin sectioning and microexamination to explore the structural features of the leaf and the development characteristics of secretory cavity of Magnolia grandiflora in different developmental stage and provide anatomical data for research and development of secretion structure and chemical composition.The results showed that its growth stage was divided into three stages,meristem stages,young leaves and mature leaves.The characters in different physical stages were that some secretory cavities were discovered in the leaves,the lower epidermis surface of the young leaves had a lot of fluffy and the secretory cavity disappeared,the meat of the mature leaves were differentiated into palisade and spongy parenchyma with no trichomes.


Information now become an absolute necessity for an organization or company to win a competition Along with the development of information needs, especially for restaurant owners to make decisions and to find out problems that occur in the restaurant, then developed an information system called decision support system. With decision support system information can be displayed in the form of a brief and displays the data in accordance with the needs so as to facilitate a restaurant owner in making decisions effectively, Problems that appear on Mubarok Resto that is not a system to help restaurant owners in making decisions on problems that occur in restaurants covers of internal and external factors of the restaurant.To overcome these problems is by applying SWOT analysis as a tool to analyze internal and external conditions in the development of decision support systems that specifically manage data information internal and external problems that occur in Mubarok Resto, the expected results of this research is to make a SWOT analysis application that can facilitate restaurant owners in making effective restaurant decisions.Keywords : Decision support system, SWOT, Management, Web applications.


Implicit large eddy simulation results are compared to investigate the effects of wall-heating and wall-cooling on shock–boundary layer interaction over an airfoil. Heat flux is provided on the suction surface of the airfoil from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] for a Mach number of 0.72 and a Reynolds number based on chord of [Formula: see text]. Flow quantities are compared for the effects of heating and cooling. Numerical Schlieren snapshots reveal an oscillation of the shock wave and its interaction with upstream propagating Kutta waves generated from the trailing edge of the airfoil. Quantitative data obtained from these Schlieren snapshots and the mean aerodynamic load values indicate a reduction in frequency of oscillation of shock wave and a decrease in shock strength for the case of heating. Flow control by heating shows higher fluctuations in flow features evident from instantaneous quantities. Both imposed excitations lead to a marginal increase in aerodynamic efficiency (lift/drag). We also compare the integral aerodynamic parameters, such as lift and drag coefficients, and their ratio, [Formula: see text]. The simulations reported here follow the techniques used in Sengupta et al. ["Thermal control of transonic shock–boundary layer interaction over a natural laminar flow airfoil," Phys. Fluids 33(12), 126110 (2021)].


This paper proposes a multi- network auto- learning control structure of the unknown nonlin- ear dynamic system. The generalized Delta rule of the controller network has been developed based on the i- dentifier of the inverse dynamics.The controller architecture is presented with simulations demonstrating itsadaptive and learning abilities.It is also shown in the simulation that the maximum tracking error is within1%after 100 periods.


This paper examines the political complexity, which is at the heart of current cross-strait relations. The view of cross-strait issues from a Taiwan perspective sees a mixed picture with two major trends at work, the momentum for democratic consolidation and challenges to regional security. These trends appear to be merging and could possibly pose the greatest challenge to regional stability if an applicable mechanism of crisis management is not developed. Against this backdrop, the United States plays the most critical role in maintaining the status quo and the balance. The U.S. has encouraged both sides to make efforts to facilitate talks across the strait. Despite the change in rhetoric after President Chen won the 2004 re-election and an offering of an olive branch to China, cross-strait relations have not improved. After the Legislative Yuan's election in December 2004, the next big challenge for the US, China, and Taiwan will be Chen's drive for "2006 constitutional reform." Near-term challenge however appears on China's attempt to issue anti-secession law. The first direct flights deal for Lunar New Year holidays, which was agreed on January 15, 2005, was an overdue but encouraging signal. The mix feeling would be major part of near-term prospect for the cross-strait relation.


A computer program chat simulates the fault-free behavior of logic circuits using a variable delay timing model is Implemented on the HP 21M-series minicomputer under the Hewlett-Packard RTE-III operating system. The circuit is described as an interconnection of logic gates, each of which may be assigned its own propagation delays: its nominal high-to-low delay and its nominal low-to-high delay. The simulation program reports circuit oscillations, spikes, and critical races in flip-flops. Considerations of implementation of such a program on a minicomputer are discussed. These include low computer cost, limited memory, slower machine cycle time, efficient data structure, and slower input-output on secondary storage. Software engineering considerations are discussed. The simulator is a FORTRAN program which is modular, uses data access routines, and is structured by pseudo-language comments. The work reported here was the author's work assignment carried out at Bell Laboratories, Allentovn, Pennsylvania, during 1977-1978.


Limited by experimental situations and some other factors,the data obtained in life test are possibly contaminated,and it is extremely difficult to separate contaminated items through traditional means at this time.Upon the situation that an exponential life model is often contaminated normally,this thesis establishes a data model through Type Ⅱ censoring,analyses the model by means of Bayes and points out adopting Bootstrap methods to figure out the super-parameters,the practical experiment proves that Bayes means is effective toward statistical inference of contaminated life data.


ABSTRACT Conventional and phototransferred thermoluminescence of crystalline synthetic quartz implanted with 70 keV Ar ions at fluences in the range 1 × 1014–5 × 1015 ions/cm2 is reported. The glow curves, recorded at 5°C/s from beta-irradiated samples of similar mass, show a prominent peak between 100°C and 120°C. The thermoluminescence intensity of all implanted samples was greater than that of the unimplanted one. The increase in sensitivity is attributed to a corresponding increase in the concentration of point defects, as a result of the implantation, which act as electron traps or recombination centres. Kinetic analysis carried out using the peak shape, whole glow-peak and curve-fitting methods produced values of the activation energy, frequency factor and order of kinetics that are generally independent of implantation fluence. This result suggests that implantation did not necessarily affect the nature of the electron traps. With respect to phototransferred thermoluminescence, it was observed that it only appeared in the sample implanted at the highest fluence of 5 × 1015 ions/cm2. This may be so because the concentration of deep traps produced as a result of implantation at low fluence is too low to give rise to phototransferred thermoluminescence. The intensity of the phototransferred thermoluminescence goes through a peak with illumination time. We attribute this behaviour to the relative concentration of holes at recombination centres and phototransferred electrons at shallow traps.


In hyperspectral image, the variation of endmember may significantly alter the signature of corresponding endmember, which influences the detection of anomaly target. In order to distinguish the endmember variability and outlier effectively, a Bayesian anomaly detection being considered the endmember variability unmixing is proposed. The parameters priors are built according to the perturbed linear mixing model. At the same time, outliers usually have high correlations in the spatial domain. So as background. Moreover, the anomaly prior is developed by combining the nonlocal self-similarity and Markov random field priors for a Boolean label map which takes the spatial correlations of the image into consideration. Compared with some classical anomaly detection methods, the experiments on datasets show that the proposed method can effectively improve the detection accuracy and enhance the visual effect.


The chemical weathering of silicate rocks in continents as an important sink of atmospheric CO2 is of great signicance for global environmental change.The chemical index of alteration( CIA) has been widely used as a proxy for chemical weathering in sediment source area. This study presents combined clay minerals and major elements analyses on bulk sediments from a 71-m-long core with high sedimentation rate from northern South Yellow Sea and containing a Late Pleistocene record. After examining the variations of clay minerals and major elements compositions of the core sediment,we develop clay minerals and geochemical proxies to identify the origins of the DLC70-3 Core sediments,especially to discriminate the Yangze River-derived and Yellow River-derived sediment provenances. Furthermore,CIA indices are also applied to decipher the chemical weathering record in sediment source area.Results show that combination of clay minerals is given priority to illite,followed by smectite,with low chlorite and kaolinite. In the vast majority of samples the ratios of illite to smectite is less than 6,indicating that the sediments are mainly transported by the Yellow River.The research suggests that the chemical weathering index( CIA) of the sediment in DLC70-3Core is controlled together by the sea level change and the climate change of the source area,of which the latter one is the major controlling factor. However,the mechanical sedimentary differentiation caused by the sea level change might have affects CIA values at the depth of 27.80 ~ 38.00 m corresponding to MIS 4 of coarse grained sediments greatly. CIA values reveal that during MIS 5 and MIS 3 the continental chemical weathering is relatively strong,which is consistent with the trend of summer monsoon and chemical weathering index of the inland Loess Plateau area,especially in the early stage of the MIS 3( 40 ~ 60 ka),the record of chemical weathering is very strong,which reflects a strong summer monsoon rainfall process in the Yellow River basin. Although the high resolution paleoenvironmental changes can not be easily reconstructed due to ubiquitous unconformity in the sedimentary strata and weak age controls compared to the deep sea sedimentation,the present study sheds new lights on the understanding of the East Asian palaeomonsoon activity in the Yellow River Basin.