The methanol extract of leaves of Mimosa pudica (Mimosaceae) was screened for diuretic and laxative activities in wistar albino rats. The study suggested that the extract was found to produce significant diuretic as well as laxative activities in dose dependant manner (200 and 400mg/kg p. o.). These activities were comparable with the standard drugs such as Furosemide (10mg/kg p. o.) and Agar-agar (300mg/kg p. o.) respectively. The preliminary phytochemical analysis of methanol extract of leaves of Mimosa pudica revealed the presence of phytoconstituents such as alkaloids, tannins, mucilage and flavonoids. The present study indicates that the observed significant diuretic and laxative activities of Mimosa pudica leaves may be contributed to the phytoconstituents present in it. Further work is in progress to identify the possible mechanisms of action and to identify the lead molecules responsible for diuretic and laxative activities.


The author presents an overview of American business periods since the Stock Market Crash in 1929. He has thoughtfully provided titles of books significant to each period that depict the concerns and changing focus of the Christian faith on the issues of the time.


Objective To evaluate the effective of emergent endoscopic injection sclerotherapy ( EIS) for lethal bleeding from esophagogastric varices. Methods In this study, endoscopic injection of 5% sodium morrhuate was used to control esophagogastric variceal bleeding in 176 patients. In all 209 cases, 181 cases suffered from acute lethal bleeding from esophagogastric varices received endoscopic variceal sclerotherapy under the modified Senstaken-Blakemore tube compression. Results The exact bleeding site at the first procedure could be visualized in 166(94. 3% ) patients. The effective rate of EIS was 96. 2% . Multiple procedures were required in the 21 cases of relapsed bleeding. Complications of EIS occurred in 15 cases (8. 5% ) , of which 3(1. 7% ) died. Conclusion Endoscopic injection sclerotherapy under the modified Senstaken-Blakemore tube compression is relatively safe and effective procedure in the treatment of lethal bleeding from esophagogastric varices.


The project management system of current water conservancy and hydropower projects with design-construction separation pattern,the project management arrangement with general contract mode and related national regulations of monitoring water resources and hydropower projects were analyzed.The management system of general contract projects was studied.Various management systems of engineering contract projects were compared.The basic requirements for selection of management system were proposed.At present,the management system of commissioned consultation by general contractor was suggested for the general contract projects of water conservancy and hydropower in China.


A new hydraulic power manipulator is currently undergoing extensive trials for processing radioactive waste in a full scale test rig for a major UK nuclear facility. This manipulator can be also be used for a range of remote handling decommissioning and waste retrievals tasks. The key design objectives were to produce a reliable, high payload manipulator that could be deployed through ports or other narrow access points in a shield or containment wall and could accommodate a range of tooling to undertake decommissioning tasks with a high degree of dexterity. ModuMan 100 was the result of the development and is a, six degree of freedom (DOF) manipulator, with a 2.54 metre reach and a payload capacity of 100kg at full reach. The materials of construction have been selected for a harsh operating environment and the link lengths were specifically designed to allow optimum dexterity to navigate restricted environments. The manipulator is modular and makes best use of "off-the-shelf" solutions to provide value-for money solutions in term of system and lifetime support costs. The system has been designed with "in-cell" (inaccessible area within harsh environment) and "out-cell" components. In-cell multiple hydraulic actuators power the joint motion and a dual servo motor arrangement drives the shoulder rotate. All the hydraulic sensors and drives are located out-cell to allow ease of maintenance and to effectively minimise any down-time. At the end of the arm a jaw is used to pick out debris or clamp and utilise tools such as a shears, drills and wash-down equipment to aid decommissioning. The manipulator uses reliable and proven technology notably conventional hydraulic actuators coupled with proven industrial instrumentation and control elements to ensure robustness and optimise maintainability. This paper describes the design and control system of ModuMan and the functionality and features these provide and how they can support a wide range of remote handling challenges requiring a hydraulic power manipulator. INTRODUCTION The ModuMan 100 manipulator, Figure 1, draws on James Fisher Nuclear's thirty years' experience of engineering dependable remote handling solutions and manipulators for the nuclear sector. It is the latest manipulator development and has been designed to meet the requirement of waste retrievals and/or decommissioning projects. The manipulator may also serve as a general purpose heavy duty manipulator which can be used for a range of tasks in the nuclear industry and any other industries with hazardous environments which prevent man entry and require a remote handling manipulator solution. JFN has undertaken all aspects of the ModuMan manipulator development and on going support in house, from the specification development, conceptual design, detailed design, through to manufacture, testing, commissioning and through life support. The design is modular and uses standard engineering principles so the base ModuMan system can be efficiently modified to suit individual project requirements without the high costs associated with a truly bespoke manipulator. This modular approach to design has also been used during the development of the control system software. The addition of additional limbs and/or the reconfiguration of the existing joints can be provided without reworking the entire code.


Haloalkane dehalogenase (DhlA) hydrolyzes short‐chain haloalkanes to produce the corresponding alcohols and halide ions. Release of the halide ion from the active‐site cavity can proceed via a two‐step and a three‐step route, which both contain slow enzyme isomerization steps. Thermodynamic analysis of bromide binding and release showed that the slow unimolecular isomerization steps in the three‐step bromide export route have considerably larger transition state enthalpies and entropies than those in the other route. This suggests that the three‐step route involves different and perhaps larger conformational changes than the two‐step export route. We propose that the three‐step halide export route starts with conformational changes that result in a more open configuration of the active site from which the halide ion can readily escape. In addition, we suggest that the two‐step route for halide release involves the transfer of the halide ion from the halide‐binding site in the cavity to a binding site somewhere at the protein surface, where a so‐called collision complex is formed in which the halide ion is only weakly bound. No large structural rearrangements are necessary for this latter process.


Numerous studies have found that ethnic diversity is negatively associated with the provision of local public goods. However, these accounts neglect both the strong role of central institutions in the provision of many "local" public goods and the frequently positive correlation between diversity and the presence of less politically powerful ethnic groups. These factors suggest that existing diversity findings may be explained in some cases by central governments discriminating against areas inhabited by less powerful groups. This hypothesis is tested using data in village-level public goods provision in Northern India, supplemented by data on service provision in Kenyan villages and American cities. While there is evidence that the presence of socially powerful groups is positively associated with service provision, evidence for the diversity hypothesis is weak. The results suggest that failures of public services in diverse areas may reflect larger inequalities within the political system rather than local problems in cooperation.


This study was conducted to inve stigate the effects of dietary crude protein(CP) level on the performance,egg quality and serum biochemical indices in laying ducks and to explore the CP requirement of laying ducks during early laying period. A total of 200 Linwu variety laying ducks 21-weeks-old were randomly allocated to 5 groups with5 replicates per group and 8 ducks per replicate during the early laying period. Each group was fed with five CP levels at 15%, 16%, 17%, 18% and 19%, and the experiment lasted for 9 weeks.The results showed that compared with the group CP level 15%, ducks fed the diet with CP level 16%, 17%, 18%, 19% had higher laying rate of 8 weeks,average egg weight, average qualified egg weight, average daily egg weight and had lower feed/egg rate( P0.05); The egg-shaped index increased and egg yolk color lightened with the adding of CP. Compared with the control group, the albumen height and Haugh unit were increased in 17% CP group and were the highest of all group in 18% CP group;The level of CP did not significantly affect the content of total protein, albumin, urea nitrogen, uric acid in serum of laying ducks. Serum creatinine content in 19% CP group was significantly higher than that in 17% and 18% CP group. The dietary CP level was regarded as dependent variable, laying rate of 8 weeks, average egg weight, average qualified egg weight, average daily egg weight and feed/egg rate were regarded as independent variable, then multiple quadratic regression were made and the results showed as follows, the appropriate dietary CP level were 17.69%, 18.57%,18.77%, 17.86%, 17.54%. The results suggested that although supplementing the diet with 16% ~18% CP level can promote production performance of laying ducks, 18% CP level improved the quality of the egg. The optimal CP level in corn-soybean meal diet of laying ducks is 18%.


An experiment was conducted at Kabete field station, University of Nairobi between March and July 2000 (season I) and between June and September 2000 (season II) to determine the effect of different rates of nitrogen (N) fertilizer application on growth and yield of snowpea. Snowpea variety "Oregon sugar pod II" was used. The experiment was laid out in a complete randomized block design with three replicates. Four N levels (0, 50, 100 and 150 kg N ha-1) were split applied in equal halves as CAN (26% N) at 29 and 58 days after planting (DAP). Plant height, leaf area index, above ground dry mass, number of pods and pod dry weight were determined overtime. All the growth and yield parameters studied did not substantially benefit from N fertilizer application. It was therefore recommended that less N be applied for growth and yield of snowpeas.


The principal colouring components of the natural food colouring material annatto, the 9'-cis- and all-trans- isomers of bixin and norbixin, have been prepared in pure form. A reverse-phase HPLC method utilizing photodiode-array detection has been developed to enable their chromatographic and spectroscopic characterization. One minor component, a di-cis-isomer of norbixin has also been identified and characterized.


ecclesiastical changes in the transformations he perceives in the idea of acedia. The transferral of acedia from the desert of Evagrius Ponticus to the monastery of Cassian; the fact that the term acedia did not have the biblical authority in the West that it had in the East; the impact of the twelfth-century translation of John of Damascus' De fide orthodoxa; the distinctions and yet connections between scholastic speculation on acedia and its treatment in penitential, confessional, and homiletic handbooks which became so numerous in the wake of the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council—these and many other elements contribute to Wenzel's convincing story of "a continuing process of de-monasticization or secularization in the sense that the concept was carried from the monastery to the saeculum, the world outside the cloiser" (p. 179). The author is at the same time always careful to indicate the qualifications that must be entered against a picture of steady development in a single direction. Wenzel shows himself at home with patristic literature as well as with St. Thomas and Piers Plowman. Illustrative passages are numerous, and judiciously selected. The book's tightly argued pages illustrate time and again the diversity within Christian thought and practice. This English professor's sense for the varieties of ecclesiastical experience is worth the serious attention of us church historians, and perhaps even of our emulation.


In this paper, we consider a cooperative multiuser wireless cellular system under multipath fading channels. All base stations (BSs) and mobile stations (MSs) are equipped with multiple antennas. The multiuser interference in such a system is inherently asynchronous due to different path distance of BS to MSs. Theoretically we can at best synchronize the desired signal component but not the interference components. We propose a new precoding design in order to curb the impact of asynchronicity of interference, and the effect of interference is mitigated by introducing second-order statistics of interference into the linear precoding design. It has been shown that the proposed design improves the system performance significantly and outperforms Joint Wiener Filtering scheme consistently. Intensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate its superior performance.


It has been 18 months since the advent of the Fukishima plant disaster, when a cataclysmic sequence of natural events descended upon an ageing nuclear power station, sweeping away all safety measures and back-up systems, and sending several of its reactors into meltdown. But what are the prospects and dangers that remain for the residents of Fukushima? After the headlines and the donation pledges have subsided, how successfully have other disaster zones managed to recover from nuclear catastrophe?


As various media have developed in modern society, frequency of use of interactive media has increased which makes interactive function that uses and handles projection mapping and LED screen in set design of broadcasting, concert, play, musical and EDM(Electronic dance music) in real time possible. Development of various media led today's viewers to have higher cultural desire and the need of various interactive performance contents to receive more attention.[1]. This thesis implemented real time VJing that responds to user's motion based on existing H/W by utilizing real time interactive elements.


This paper presents the current status and challenges of the La Sfera Project, a collaborative effort to transcribe, translate, and create a digital interface for Gregorio Dati's early 15th century treatise La sfera (The Globe). The treatise's survival in over 150 manuscript copies, many of them illustrated, provides a rich corpus for spatial analysis, but also presents numerous challenges, among them: how can we create a nimble digital interface showcasing the work's unique combination of text, maps, and images? How can digital techniques document vague, anachronistic, or imaginary places? How can we make the interface user-friendly while respecting each manuscript's idiosyncrasies of labeling, orthography, and visual representation? While researchers are increasingly interested in understanding how geographical knowledge and cartography developed in and around the Mediterranean in the 14th and 15th centuries, few reference resources exist which summarize that knowledge or help scholars identify toponym variants. Dati's treatise is unique in how it spans the practical world of cartography (specifically, the history of portolan charts) and the more impressionistic world of travel literature (such as the works of Marco Polo or Ibn Battutah). The La Sfera Project will thus create a multifunction, multimedia interface that can be used both for reference purposes and for teaching---presenting Dati's integrated world of cosmology, geography, and cartography using visual, textual, and spatial data.


A first experimental work was previously carried out to study the dynamic behavior of a tube simply supported at both ends in interaction with an anti-vibration bar at mid-span. This paper presents modifications to the previous setup with the aim of improving the accuracy of the results. A comparison of the dynamic behavior of the tube is made between both setups. The objective of this experimental study is to characterize the vibration behavior of U-tubes found in steam generators of nuclear power plants. Indeed, two-phase cross-flow in the U-tubes section of steam generators can cause many problems related to vibration. In fact, flow-induced vibration of the U-tubes can cause impacts or rubbing of the tubes against their flat bar supports. Variation of the clearance between the AVB and the U-tubes may lead to ineffective supports. The resulting in-plane and out-of-plane motions of the tubes are causing fretting-wear and impact abrasion. In this study, the clearance between the tube and the AVB, as well as the amplitude, form and frequency of the excitation force are controlled parameters. The first two modes of the tube are studied. The modifications made to the setup lead to significant improvements in the results. The natural frequencies of both setups are compared to theoretical values. The difference between experimental and theoretical frequencies confirms that the new setup better represents the theoretical model of a simply supported tube. The damping of both setups is also compared to values found in literature. The results show that the new setup is more representative of realistic steam generator situations. Compared to the first setup, the displacements of the new setup clearly indicate that the movement of the tube is mostly parallel to the flat bar and in the same direction as the excitation force. The whirling motion of the tube is prevented in the new setup. The accuracy of the contact force as a function of clearance was also improved. The use of more sensitive force sensors helped to reduce the noise level of the contact force. Finally, the dynamic interaction between the tube and the AVB, defined by the fretting wear work-rate, presents a more consistent behavior. The maximum work-rate occurs when the tube is excited around the second mode for clearance between −0.10 and 0.00 mm. Such clearance between the tube and the AVB should then be avoided to minimize fretting damage.Copyright © 2010 by ASME


SummaryAn investigation of the factors influencing honey production was conducted using 12 colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera), with 3 replications in time. Brood areas, colony populations and weights of honey produced were measured.On the average, adult worker populations amounted to only 40–60% of the numbers that should have emerged, based on brood-cell estimates for the preceding 42-day period. Correlation coefficients (r) between numbers of brood and resulting numbers of adult bees varied from +0·20 to +0·86, and values of r for population and length of worker life from −0·39 to +0·92. Average length of productive life of workers varied from 21 to 25 days and average number of larvae reared per worker bee from 0·8 to 1·5. Workers rearing more brood were shorter-lived (r = −0·71 to −0·94).Individual colonies produced between 4 and 26 kg honey. Production was related in varying degree to number of brood reared (r = +0·20 to +0·85) and to colony population (r = +0·38 to +0·70). Individual productivit...


Physical workspace is distinguished from workplace. The latter embodies culture and should become the greater concern of FM. In the field of individual and group development spaces can add an extra gear to stimulate cognitive processes. We provide various examples and suggest modern workplaces, with their emphasis on interaction need to also focus on environments and spaces for individual and collective reflection.


Abstract The Brazilian brown spider Loxosceles similis (Moenkhaus, 1898) is, like others from the same genus, an arachnid that can cause serious accidents, which is called loxoscelism. Here, we present the complete mitochondrial genome sequence (mtDNA) of L. similis. The whole DNA molecule is 14,683 bp long, contains 13 protein-coding genes, two rRNA genes, 22 tRNA genes, and a non-coding Control Region (D-loop) of 851 bp. The majority of the protein-coding genes (PCGs) were found on the heavy strain, with the exception of the genes ND1, ND4, ND4L, and ND5. Six different start codons were found. Seven of the PCGs contained a TAG termination codon, and one (ND4) contained an incomplete 'T–' stop codon.


. Observations of the stellar cluster in the central 10 pc of the Galaxy are reviewed. The stellar density law derived from the observed light distribution and the effects on this density law of variable extinction, the possibility of a varying mass-to-light ratio, and the current debate as to the. core radius of the cluster are all important for establishing the true mass distribution of the stellar cluster. The presence of the supergiant 1RS 7 in the Galactic Center establishes that some recent star formation has occurred, but the age and extent of a possible starburst are still being established. The kinematics of the stellar cluster show predominantly velocity dispersion, in contrast to the systematic gas motion observed, yet the total mass distributions derived from stellar and gas kinematics agree reasonably well. The core radius of the cluster is critical to establishing whether or not a central dark mass is required to explain the total mass distribution.


Considering the importance of project management to the practice of consulting engineering and the fact that most engineers are expected to be able to manage projects at some point in their careers, it is surprising that so little formal attention is given to the matter. Either it is assumed that project management requires no particular skills, or that engineers will somehow develop whatever skills may be necessary on their own. In truth, good project managers do possess very definite skills and they often follow certain procedures. This article identifies 12 basic elements of good project management and offers some explanations as to why these elements are so important. The suggestions for effective project management are steeped in common sense and trace back to planning, communication and coordination.


In the UK it is standard procedure for seminal fluid to be examined both 12 and 16 weeks after vasectomy and every 4 weeks thereafter until two consecutive azoospermic samples are collected. This retrospective study evaluated the potential for reducing the number of post-vasectomy semen samples required without any concomitant reduction in the ability to detect men with continuing fertility. Reviewed were the records of the 574 men who underwent vasectomy at the Edinburgh (Scotland) Healthcare Trusts family planning clinic in a 12-month period in 1994-95. 510 men (88.9%) submitted two consecutive samples showing azoospermia while the remaining 64 defaulted. In 444 (87%) of these men only two samples were necessary. All those whose first semen sample was azoospermic remained azoospermic at the time of the second sample. In men with documented azoospermia the cumulative time to sterility was 16 weeks or less in 55% 17-20 weeks in 78% 21-24 weeks in 89% 25-28 weeks in 96% and 29-32 weeks in 99%. Of concern was the finding of early recanalization in 3 men (0.6%) who had at least one azoospermic sample. Although earlier testing would allow more rapid confirmation of azoospermia in the vast majority of cases continuation of the current protocol of two azoospermic samples is recommended to exclude early recanalization. Moreover a postoperative interval of 18 rather than 16 weeks is suggested to confirm azoospermia.


In the present study,distant hybridizations between Paralichthys olivaceus and Verasper variegatus were carried out.The development of fertilized eggs and larvae were observed and the morphological characteristics of each period were described.The fertilized eggs were pelagic with one oil vacuole.The fertilization rate,hatching rate,emergent rate and survival rate of the hybrid were(71.18±0.14)%,(61.65±0.19)%,(58.63±0.19)% and(57.08±0.20)%,respectively.And abnormality rate was(17.00±0.06)% on an average.Under water temperature(15±0.5)?℃ and salinity 29~30,the larvae hatched out on about the 74th hour after fertilization and the larval mouths opened on the 4th day after hatching.The metamorphosis was completed on about the 35th day after the hatching.In the process of metamorphosis,eye position of the hybrid was mixed with both dextral(37%) and sinistral type(63%).The results show that the gametes from Paralichthys olivaceus and Verasper variegatus are compatible,the fertilized eggs can develop normally,the larvae live and grow normally.


The aim of the Stat Log project is to compare the performance of statistical, machine learning, and neural network algorithms, on large real world problems. This paper describes the completed work on classification in the StatLog project. Classification is here defined to be the problem, given a set of multivariate data with assigned classes, of estimating the probability from a set of attributes describing a new example sampled from the same source that it has a pre-defined class. We gathered together a representative collection of algorithms from statistics (Naive Bayes, K-nearest Neighbour, Kernel density, Linear discriminant, Quadratic discriminant, Logistic regression, Projection pursuit, Bayesian networks), machine learning (CART, C4.5, NewID, AC2, CAL5, CN2, ITrule — only propositional symbolic algorithms were considered), and neural networks (Backpropagation, Radial basis functions, Kohonen). We then applied these algorithms to eight large real world classification problems: four


Seedling fruit formation is an important stage of fruit production, this also being true for citrus cultivation, especially for producing quality seedlings. The use of alternative sources of mineral nutrients could offer novel fertilizer options for modern agriculture. The objective of this study was to evaluate the growth and development of Rangpur seedlings subjected to water-soluble complex application at different concentrations as an alternative source of mineral nutrients. The experiment was developed from November 2012 to April 2013, and the Rangpur seedlings were stored in plastic tubes during 150 days. The water-soluble complex (WSC) was applied as dressing through monthly irrigation with solutions at concentrations of 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 g L -1 on seedlings with or without conventional chemistry fertilization. The characteristics evaluated were seedling height, stem base diameter, number of leaves, root length, fresh and dry mass of the aerial part as well as of the root system, total root length, and root volume. The WSC influenced the height and diameter of Rungpur seedlings, whose estimated concentrations between 4 and 8 g L -1 tended to have better results. The dressing with WSC, when compared to conventional chemistry fertilization showed better root formation both in length and volume, except when 8 g L -1 was applied.


Gossypol was shown to be a male antifertility agent with a fairly good prospect. Clinical trials indicated that the antifertility effect of gossypol was excellent, but occasional cases of hypokalemic paralysis might occur in the course of its administration. As to the part played by gossypoi in the development of such hypokalemia there are contradictory opinions. In isolated heart it has been noticed that gossypol Could deplete myocardial K, but in intact animals most authors believe that gossypol may have no effect on K metabolism.In the present work the effect of gossypol on the concentrations of some of the extracellular and intracellular ions, the level of exchangeable potassium, certain renal functions, and some other aspects of the K metabolism are observed in rats fed regular diet, low-K diet, and low-Mg diet. Results indicate:1. In low-K fed animals large dose of gossypol decreases the intracellular K and Mg ion concentrations in all the four skeletal muscles in consideration, while in regularly fed animals it only decreases the intracellular K ion concentration of a single muscle. It may thus be concluded that in rats gossypol may affect K metabolism, and that low-K intake may be a contributing factor in the gossypol-induced disturbance of K metabolism.2. In low-K fed animals small dose of gossypol decreases the intracellular Mg ion concentration in two of the skeletal muscles; although large dose of gossypol decreases the intracellular K and Mg ion concentrations in all the muscles, it does not alter the serum K ion concentration, and at the same time the renal concentrating, ability remains unimpaired. These facts suggest that the gossypol-indueed disturbance of K metabolism might be the result of a perturbed Mg metabolism.3. Large dose of gossypol may bring about atrophic changes of the skeletal muscles, as evidenced by a decrease of the body weight and the weight of the muscles, a lowering of the urinary creatinine coefficient, and a decrease of the level of exchangeable potassium per unit length of the. body.


Abstract Around 2010, the alien copepod Oithona davisae was introduced to the Marmara Sea and Golden Horn Estuary to live alongside the native species, Oithona nana. By October 2015, the population number, including nauplii, of the introduced species (213,600 ind m−3) was higher than that of the native species (54,900 ind m−3) and close to that of O. davisae in Sevastopol Bay of the Black Sea (342,000 ind m−3) where it appeared 14 years ago. A high percentage of O. davisae females with ovisacs (up to 30% of total female number) carrying up to 15.1 ± 2.1 eggs in the sac and the predominance of nauplii in the population (up to 95% of the total population number) indicate that this alien copepod has become a permanent component of the Marmara Sea and Golden Horn Estuary ecosystem. Our experiments showed that in comparison with widely euryhaline O. davisae, O. nana is a stenohaline species. It has a salinity tolerance in the range of 13–27 psu and, in spite of having a larger body, a lower body density (1.037  ±  0.007 g cm−3) and sinking speed. Carbon-specific respiration rates of both species were close (0.32–0.38 μL O2 μgC−1 day−1) and similar to that of O. davisae from the Black Sea during this period but the frequency and speed of routine jumps, and the maximum escape reaction speed (up to 23.3  ±  1.7 cm s−1) in O. davisae from the Marmara Sea were significantly higher. This indicates the higher adaptive potential of O. davisae in this situation compared to that of O. nana.


Abstract Less than 50% of patients with diabetes achieve the glycaemic goals recommended by the American Diabetes Association. The set of factors associated with adherence to treatment is very broad. Evidence suggests that psychosocial factors are related to medication adherence of patients with type 2 diabetes. Due to the lack of a clear statement from researchers regarding the relationship of psychosocial factors to adherence, an electronic search was conducted in PubMed, MEDLINE, Academic Search Ultimate, CINAHL Complete, Edition and Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition using the following keywords "adherence", "diabetes", "social support", "stress", "anxiety and depression", "beliefs about medicine", "communication", "older age", "frailty", "cognitive impairment", "addiction", "acceptance of illness", "sense of coherence" obtaining 2758 results. After a narrowing of searches and reference scanning, 36 studies were qualified. The studies analysed showed negative effects of anxiety, diabetes distress, older age, poor communication with physicians, stress, concerns about medicines and cognitive impairment on levels of self-care and medication adherence. One study did not confirm the association of depression with adherence. Self-efficacy, social and family support, and acceptance of illness had a beneficial effect on medication adherence. In conclusion, the current evidence suggests that the relationship between psychosocial factors and adherence has reliable scientific support.


Orientia tsutsugamushi, a causative agent of scrub typhus, is an obligate intracellular parasite and usually propagates in the cytoplasm of host endothelial cells and macrophages. Macrophages are the first defense line against bacterial infection and NF-κB is activated upon contact with bacteria, resulting in the transcription of inflammatory cytokine to control bacterial infection. In this study, we investigated whether O. tsutsugamushi modulates NF-κB activation in the macrophages. We examined the changes of NF-κB proteins upon infection with O. tsutsugamushi and found that NF-κB is activated at a slow rate as judged with EMSA and immunoblot analysis. Interestingly, we found that p65 was cleaved generating a 45 kDa fragment. In addition, fragment of p65 is generated only by the virulent serotype strain of O. tsutsugamushi, suggesting this cleavage may be associated with the mouse virulence. It is still unknown whether this is a direct result of O. tsutsugamushi proteins or enzymes of host cell. Further exploration of the mechanism that modulates NF-κB activity by O. tsutsugamushi could contribute to a better understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of O. tsutsugamushi infection.


The present embodiment relates to an oxygen gas and a hydrogen gas micro-bubbles containing oxygen to the number of the small number of the minute-bubble producing device can contain the same time using a parallel production apparatus and a hydrogen gas using a small number. Examples of oxygen-containing gas with fine bubbles of oxygen and can be a small number of simultaneous parallel manufacture of a device using a hydrogen gas according to the, to generate oxygen gas and hydrogen gas from the water supplied oxygen gas and a hydrogen gas generating unit; The resultant oxygen gas and the water, the first mixing section to mix to generate the minute bubbles through a porous element; The hydrogen and water generated the second mixing unit to mix to generate the minute bubbles through a porous element; The first being connected to the mixing section, anatomy for the first to press the oxygen gas and water mixed fluid of fine bubbles to increase the solubility of the oxygen gas; The second is connected with the mixing portion, and the second for dissection to increase the solubility of the hydrogen gas and water mixed fluid is pressurized by the oxygen gas fine bubbles; And it is connected to the respective anatomy for include a first reservoir tank and a second storage tank for storing oxygen, and can be discharged from the small number of the anatomy for each, respectively. Oxygen, hydrogen


Paspalum conspersum Schrad. ex Schult. is a leafy, robust, warm season perennial bunchgrass native to South America. A cytogenetic investigation was conducted to determine the feasibility of using the grass in an interspecific hybridization program. Four introductions were studied and each had a chromosome number of 2n = 4x = 40. During meiosis, the chromosomes paired primarily as bivalents with an occasional quadrivalent and a limited number of univalents. A study of megasporogenesis and embryo sac development revealed that the plants were sexual. Eighty hybrids were obtained from yellow-anthered P. dilatatum Poir, 2n = 4x = 40, × P. conspersum. Thirty of these were examined cytologically. All had a chromosome number of 2n = 4x = 40. Mean meiotic pairing was 19.87 I, 9.94 II, 0.12 III, and 0.004 IV. Because of segmental homology between the P. conspersum genomes, it was difficult to determine the relationship between the two species. Thus, P. conspersum was crossed with autotetraploid P. malacophyllum Tr...


The purpose of this study is to settle the world-class traffic culture in Korea in preparation of the G20 Seoul Summit in 2012. This study reviews the present status of traffic culture and analyses the causes of immature traffic culture. This study finally proposes the measures to improve the traffic culture in Korea. The first measure to improve the traffic culture is to change the present traffic laws and rules toward the global standards in the world. The next measure is to improve the road facilities and to increase the enforcement of traffic violations. The essential measure to improve the traffic culture is to make the new drivers who keep the traffic rules well and give way his rights to others on the road. The final goal through these measures is to make the foreign visitors impressed by the Korean traffic culture on the road and to make Korea respected from other countries in the world.


The magnetic moment of single-crystal Gd was measured in fields from 0 to 18 kOe along the (0001), (1010), and (1120) directions at temperatures from 1.4 to 900 deg K. Small anisotropy was observed below the Curie temperature and the easy direction of magnetization was found to be a function of temperature. The absolute saturation magnetic momnent was found to be 7.55 Bohr magnetons/ atom. The saturation magnetization was observed to follow the T/sup 3/2/ law from 200 to 50 deg K with a deviation from this law observed below 50 deg K. A ferromagnetic Curie temperature of 293.2 deg K is reported. The effective Bohr magneton number in the paramagnetic region is 7.98 and the paramagnetic Curie temperature is 317 deg K. Electrical resistivity measurements were made from 4.2 to 380 deg K on the b-axis and c-axis crystals. For the b axis, the resistivity changes slope at 293.2 deg K. The c axis exhibits a small maximum at 292 deg K and a shallow minimum at 340 deg K. (auth)


A close father child relationship is apotent cultural ideal in western, post-industrialsocieties. This
paperposes physical activity as a practice through which fathers display intimacy in their
relationships with their children.Utilising the premiseof family display,this paperrevealsthe
conduct of contemporary fathersto be suffused withmeaning fromthe social convention that
intimate fathers are 'good fathers'. It arguesthat intimate fatherhood represents adiscourse,
serving to shape whatfathers do and how they and their children display and give meaning to
fatheringpractices.


The teaching mode of programmed basic tennis skills can enhance the systematic and scientific features of the teaching content and increase the students' learning interest,creativity,intellect and independent learning ability.


This work describes a fast Monte Carlo Machine for dose calculation in radiotherapy treatment planning on FPGA based hardware. When performing Monte Carlo simulations of the radiation dose delivered to the human body, the Compton interaction is simulated. The inputs to the system are the energy and the normalized direction vectors of the incoming photon. The energy and the direction vectors of the scattered photon and the scattered electron are calculated. The energy distribution by the scattered electron along its path in a voxel space is then calculated which can be used to construct maps of dose distribution in real time.


Human pelvis is a very stable structure. It achieves its stability from the surrounding musculature and ligaments. Hence, pelvic disruption requires high energy trauma specifically in young people. It is usually associated with multisystem injuries due to its close proximity to the vital structures. Mortality in pelvic injuries is mostly due to the uncontrolled hemorrhage and the late mortality due to associated multisystem injuries, multiorgan failure, and sepsis. Acute management focus on the complex pelvic trauma it includes the systemic control of hemorrhage, pelvic stabilization with external pelvic binder or external fixator, use of pelvic angiography, and embolization and preperitoneal packing. Every institute should develop its own protocol depending on facilities available.


In 1921,Banque Industrielle De Chine stopped its business.The native-bankers organized their members to cash its bank notes.Bank of China joined the progress actively.But this acting affected Bank of China's fund utilization gravely because of the money advanced for cashing Banque Industrielle De Chine's notes returned too late.And the only aim for Bank of China was to keep financial sequence in perfect order.


Future making is the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones. Practices of making futures are increasingly online. Yet, as organizational participants come together online – organizing remotely to make offline futures – they lack the shared experiential knowledge that is gained through embodied and situated practices. In this essay, we argue that the lack of experiential knowledge makes future making online difficult to organize and vulnerable to excluding relevant expertise; dialogue may become inward-looking and self-referential within the online environment, with an emotional and cognitive distance from the futures being made outside of such representations. We draw on the pragmatist tradition to theorize online future making, to articulate its dynamics and the challenges that arise, and to suggest remedial actions. By conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry – as a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future – we identify three remedial actions for online future making: to solicit feedback, juxtapose alternatives and change medium. These remedial actions seek to compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge by both sustaining the online involvement of heterogeneous remote participants and by bringing in relevant (offline) places, people and materials to online future making.


High performance computing (HPC) workflows are undergoing tumultuous changes, including an explosion in size and complexity. Despite these changes, most batch job systems still use slow, centralized schedulers. Generalized hierarchical scheduling (GHS) solves many of the challenges that face modern workflows, but GHS has not been widely adopted in HPC. A major difficulty that hinders adoption is the lack of a performance model to aid in configuring GHS for optimal performance on a given application. We propose an analytical performance model of GHS, and we validate our proposed model with four different applications on a moderately-sized system. Our validation shows that our model is extremely accurate at predicting the performance of GHS, explaining 98.7% of the variance (i.e., an R2 statistic of 0.987). Our results also support the claim that GHS overcomes scheduling throughput problems; we measured throughput improvements of up to 270× on our moderately-sized system. We then apply our performance model to a pre-exascale system, where our model predicts throughput improvements of four orders of magnitude and provides insight into optimally configuring GHS on next generation systems.


Soft cooler 10 of the present invention includes a rigid liner 38 that is configured to fit removably into soft cooler 10, the liner 38 includes a rigid panels 40,42,44,46,48, panels of rigid comprising a seam S consisting arranged flexible material between the panel of these rigid, foldable along the seam S, both liner 38 to retain the water resistance, has a foldable, further, the liner 38 further comprises a drainage member 70 for communicating fluid between the outer soft cooler 10. .The 10


Power-aware systems are those that must make the best use of available power. They subsume traditional low-power systems in that they must not only minimize power when the budget is low, but also deliver higher performance when required. This paper presents a new scheduling technique for supporting the design and evaluation to a class of power-aware systems in mission critical applications. It computes a schedule that satisfies stringent min/max timing and max power constraints at all times. Furthermore, it also makes the best effort to satisfy min power constraint in an attempt to fully utilize free solar power or to control power jitter. Experimental results show that our automated technique yields designs that improve performance and reduce energy cost simultaneously compared to hand-crafted designs used in previous missions. This tool forms the basis of the IMPACCT system-level framework that will enable designers to aggressively explore many more power-performance trade-offs with confidence.


The genus Euhemicera Ando, 1996 (Tenebrionidae: Cnodalonini) is recorded from Myanmar for the first time. The newly identified representatives of this genus are described herein as Euhemicera amicorum sp. n.. An updated species catalogue of Euhemicera with distributional data is provided. Currently, one hundred species are known to represent this genus. Available data reveals that Euhemicera is widely distributed throughout the oriental region, with the highest diversity in South East Asia.


Hydatid disease, is an infection caused by the larval stage (metacestode) of the cestode Echinococcus granulosus. In humans it may result in a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations ranging from asymptomatic infection to severe, even fatal disease. Echinococcal cysts are found in the liver in approximately 70 % of cases, and the lungs in approximately 25 % of cases. Cardiac hydatid disease is seen in 0.5–5% of total hydatid disease patients, the present case highlights the unusual presentation of Hydatid cyst in a different clinical scenario.


A Testbed for Simulation-based Analysis of Forwarding Plane
- Faras Mohan Dewal
Master of Applied Science (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Concordia University, Montreal QC, 2016

This thesis presents a testbed capable of generating scalable realistic network traffic on a standalone machine. The functionality of the proposed testbed is to model a scalable network of client and server instances and generate network traffic to perform simulation based-analysis of forwarding plane designs. The testbed enables the designer to successfully conduct experiments on the design under test using realistic traffic profiles and assess the performance for multiple use cases.
The proposed testbed defines simulation models for client and server nodes. The testbed modeling has been abstracted to three different levels. First, a base node design allows us to instantiate and manage multiple instances within the node. Second, a transmission protocol is implemented to enable data transfer between client and server instances. The final stage is the Internet application modeling stage. Our experiments show that we are able to reliably generate network traffic for up to 400 client and server instances on a standalone machine.


In the Amami archipelago, we have established a system to introduce telephone re-examination at Oshima Hospital and support an insurance pharmacy. When a new coronavirus patient occurred on the island, 15 out of 32 facilities (47 % ) in the Amami Oshima Insurance Pharmacy were able to handle corona-compatible prescriptions. After 14 days, all the pharmacies in Amami Oshima had responded by telephone, and the local pharmacist association played an important role in establishing the system.


Collaboration is rarely emphasized in the standard, highly individually oriented education in architecture schools, even though most building projects require greater or lesser amounts of collaborative effort. This paper explores a two year program at the Bartlett School in London to encourage collaboration in the design studio. With three different projects, and a variety of subgroups and divisions of responsibilities, students gained valuable experience in working on urban planning, as well as on the development of individual buildings. In the end, faculty determined that collaboration produced far richer and stimulating results in the studio than did the customary emphasis on competition among students.


Golden Formula in Medical Department for Women is the Zhen's family copy in medical department for women. Decoction of Four Drugs in it was applied actively, and modified according to symptoms and full of special feature in treating emmeniopathy, pregnancy disease and puerperal disease. Especially in Chapter of menstruation original opinions were much more. And they were worthy of using for reference for doctors of traditional Chinese medicine and full of literature value.


The present project proposes to explore of what way the significant content of the rumor, in the measure in which generates resonances in the universe of the meanings internalized of a collective social anonymous one, to level of the primary processes of its subjectivity, is capable of generating effects on the order of the behaviors or practical social. Though in the companies of oral culture the vehicle of the news was the gossip that ran of person to person, with the generalization of Internet they assume other characteristics and other media of circulation but they do not present sidereal differences as for the mechanisms of their subjective operation.


Introduction
 Response criteria for judging the success of PV therapeutic interventions put forth by the ELN (Barosi Blood 2013 ) require normalization of blood counts and splenomegaly for 3 months following the administration of an agent. These criteria are frequently employed as a primary outcome in clinical trials, yet, the clinical significance of meeting these criteria have not been established. The goal of this study is to evaluate the prognostic impact of ELN response criteria in a large US retrospective database of PV patients (Ronner Blood 2020).
 Methods
 Included patients were age ≥18 years at diagnosis, met 2016 WHO diagnostic criteria for PV, and were treated with a cytoreductive agent including hydroxyurea (HU), pegylated-interferon or ruxolitinib for at least 12 weeks. Laboratory and spleen measurements were collected throughout the treatment course. Attaining an ELN response throughout the study period was defined as concurrent WBC <10 x 10^9/L, hematocrit <45%, platelet <400 x 10^9/L, and lack of palpable splenomegaly for a minimum of 12 consecutive weeks.
 Multivariable Cox proportional hazards methods were used to determine the associations between achieving an ELN response and events such as thrombosis, disease progression (development of myelofibrosis [MF], myelodysplastic syndrome [MDS], or myeloproliferative neoplasm in blast phase [MPN-BP] as clinically determined by treating physician) and death. Time-dependent Cox proportional hazards models were also assessed to examine the relationship between duration of response and these outcomes. All models were adjusted for age, gender, history of prior thrombosis, and the presence of cardiovascular (CV) risk factors.
 Results
 A total of 398 of the 527 patients received cytoreductive therapy for at least 12 weeks and were included in the current analysis. Baseline characteristics are shown in the Table. HU was the most common initial cytoreductive agent employed. The median maximum dose of HU was 1000mg daily (IQR 714-1500).
 During a median follow-up of 52.3 months, 249 (63%) patients attained an ELN response and 149 (37%) did not. The median duration of response was 37 weeks (IQR 16-74). Forty-five patients (11%) experienced a new thrombosis, including DVT (n=15), CVA/TIA (n=14), PE (n=5), MI (n=6), and splanchnic vein thrombosis (n=6). Disease progression occurred in 51 (13%) patients, including MF (n=47), MDS (n=3), and MPN-BP (n=1). Thirteen patients (3%) died during follow up.
 In our Cox-proportional hazards model, meeting an ELN response was not associated with a reduced risk of developing a thrombosis (p=0.86), but having a prior thrombosis was associated with acquiring a subsequent thrombosis (HR 3.3, 95% CI 1.80-6.05). Similarly, ELN responses were not associated with reduction in hazard of death (p=0.80). However, an ELN response was associated with a significant decrease in the hazard of progression (HR 0.47, 95% CI 0.27-0.83) (Figure). Advanced age at diagnosis was also associated with an increased hazard of progression (HR 1.03, 95% CI 1.01-1.05). Similar results were observed when examining the relationship of ELN response duration as a time-dependent covariate as it relates to thrombosis (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.41-1.65), progression (HR 0.39, 95% CI 0.17-0.90) and death (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.23-2.88).
 We also evaluated the contribution of individual ELN response components using a multivariable Cox model adjusted for age, sex, prior thrombosis, and CV risk factors. The decrease in hazard of progression was largely driven by two components: WBC <10 x 10^9/L (HR 0.28, 95% CI 0.14-0.56) and absence of splenomegaly (HR 0.25, 95% CI 0.12-0.52). Interestingly, achieving a platelet count of <400 x 10^9/L was associated with a significant increase in the hazard of progression (HR 2.70, 95% CI 1.26-5.80) while achieving a hematocrit response was not associated with progression (HR 1.91, 95% CI 0.80-4.55).

 Conclusions
 Achieving an ELN response in PV patients is not associated with a reduction of risk for thrombosis or death but may be a surrogate endpoint for delaying disease progression. When evaluating new therapeutic strategies with the primary goal of reducing thrombotic burden in PV, the present ELN response criteria are not informative. The development of new reliable surrogate endpoints for predicting thrombotic risk are required in order to rapidly evaluate interventions that can prevent thrombosis in PV patients.
 Figure 1 Figure 1.

 Podoltsev: Incyte: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria; Blueprint Medicines: Honoraria; Pfizer: Honoraria; PharmaEssentia: Honoraria; CTI BioPharma: Honoraria; Bristol-Myers Squib: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria. Gotlib: Allakos: Consultancy; Cogent Biosciences: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Chair for the Eligibility and Central Response Review Committee, Research Funding; PharmaEssentia: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Kartos: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; BMS: Research Funding; Abbvie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Deciphera: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Incyte: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Blueprint Medicines: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Heaney: Cogent: Research Funding; CTI: Honoraria, Research Funding; BMS: Research Funding; Blueprint: Honoraria, Research Funding; Sierra Oncology: Research Funding; Kartos: Research Funding; Novartis: Honoraria. Kuykendall: Abbvie: Honoraria; Blueprint: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Incyte: Consultancy; Protagonist: Consultancy, Research Funding; Pharmaessentia: Honoraria; Celgene/BMS: Honoraria. Shammo: Incyte: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; CTI pharma: Research Funding; Stemline therapeutics: Research Funding; Kartos Pharma: Research Funding; Takeda: Consultancy, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Current holder of individual stocks in a privately-held company, Honoraria, Research Funding; Abbvie: Current holder of individual stocks in a privately-held company, Research Funding; Baxter: Current holder of stock options in a privately-held company; sanofi: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; NS Pharma: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Alexion: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Apellis: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Astra zeneca: Research Funding. Mesa: La Jolla Pharma: Consultancy; Incyte Corporation: Consultancy, Research Funding; CTI: Research Funding; Samus: Research Funding; Pharma: Consultancy; Sierra Oncology: Consultancy, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy; AOP: Consultancy; Promedior: Research Funding; Constellation Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Research Funding; Abbvie: Research Funding; CTI: Research Funding; Gilead: Research Funding; Celgene: Research Funding; Genentech: Research Funding. Yacoub: Incyte: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; CTI Biopharma: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; ACCELERON PHARMA: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Agios: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Dynavex: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Cara: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Ardelyx: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Seattle Genetics: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Hylapharm: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Hoffman: Protagonist Therapeutics, Inc.: Consultancy; Kartos Therapeutics, Inc.: Research Funding; Novartis: Other: Data Safety Monitoring Board, Research Funding; AbbVie Inc.: Other: Data Safety Monitoring Board, Research Funding. Mascarenhas: AbbVie: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Merck: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Kartos: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Constellation: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Geron: Consultancy, Research Funding; Merus: Research Funding; Roche: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; PharmaEssentia: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Incyte: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Sierra Oncology: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene/BMS: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Genentech/Roche: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Geron: Consultancy; Gilead: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Prelude: Consultancy; Promedior: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Galecto: Consultancy; CTI Biopharm: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Re


The utility model is a Jiang's reconciling qi traditional medicine cupping, providing a medical treatment and health care apparatus. The utility model inherits the advantages of the traditional Jiang's reconciling qi traditional medicine cupping, promotes one scientific aspect of the Monteggia negative pressure cupping in theory, and further creatively employs the negative pressure to absorb disease-causing flatus discharged. By warming or Chinese medicine fumigating to make into reconciling qi, and the reconciling qi is transmitted, convected and emanated back to human body to achieve the effect of healing via outstretched pores. The scheme points resolving the technical problems are that a shaft portion of a piston is connected with a head portion of the piston in one, the inner portion of the piston is provided with a heat source, a thermometer, a temperature probe and a filter via fixedly sealing connection. The lower portion of a shaft bearing is sleeved on the neck portion of the piston which is glidingly connected with the outer upper portion of a tank, and the outer upper portion is glidingly connected with the lower portion of a hand wheel. The top portion out of the piston is connected with an automatic temperature controller and a low-voltage power supply, then which forms control system of the reconciling qi. The utility model finds the way of healing, health care and prolonging life, wherein the diseases are caused by six exopathogens (commonly known as six climates).


Selected Contribution: Limiting Na (cid:1) transport rate in airway epithelia from (cid:2) -ENaC transgenic mice: a model for pulmonary edema. J Appl Physiol 93: 1881–1887, 2002. First published July 12, 2002; 10.1152/japplphysiol.00413.2002.—The amiloride-sensitive epithelial Na (cid:1) channel (ENaC) is essen-tial for fluid clearance from the airways. An experimental animal model with a reduced expression of ENaC, the (cid:2) -ENaC transgenic rescue mouse, is prone to develop edema under hypoxia exposure. This strongly suggests an involvement of ENaC in the pathogenesis of pulmonary edema. To investigate the pathogenesis of this type of edema, primary cultures of tracheal cells from these mice were studied in vitro. An (cid:3) 60% reduction in baseline amiloride-sensitive Na (cid:1) transport was observed, but the pharmacological char-acteristics and physiological regulation of the channel were similar to those observed in cells from wild-type mice. Aprotinin, an inhibitor of serine proteases, blocked 50–60% of the basal transepithelial current, hypoxia induced downregulation of Na (cid:1) transport, and (cid:4) -adrenergic stimulation was effective to stimulate Na (cid:1) transport after the hypoxia-in-duced decrease. When downregulation of ENaC activity (such as observed under hypoxia) is added to a low "consti-tutive" ENaC expression, the resulting reduced Na (cid:1) transport rate may be insufficient for airway fluid clearance and favor pulmonary edema.


ABSTRACT As a continuation of the previous study on the thermal degradation behavior of tobacco stem, this work is focused on the kinetics of pyrolytic decomposition. Thermogravimetric analysis of tobacco stem samples was conducted under nitrogen atmosphere at different heating rates of 5, 10, 15, and 20°C/min at a temperature range of 25–1,000°C. The kinetic parameters, such as activation energy, pre-exponential factor, and reaction order, were determined by applying the Coats–Redfern method for the main pyrolysis occurred in the second zone by means of the decomposition of hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin at a temperature range 180–540°C. In addition, the activation energy was calculated using various degradation models, including Kissinger, Friedman (FR), Flynn–Wall–Ozawa (FWO), and Kissinger–Akahira–Sunose (KAS). The average activation energy of tobacco stem was calculated to be 150.40, 230.76, 216.97, and 218.56 kJ/mol by the Kissinger, FR, FWO, and KAS models, respectively.


A series of monomeric clusters [(CpMo)2{SC(R)CS[C4HS(C4H3S-2)2-2,5]}2]s were prepared by the reaction of 3'-(alkynyl)-2,2':5',2' '-terthiophenes with (CpMo)2(SC3H6S)2. The polymer hybrids prepared by the electropolymerization of the monomeric clusters show unusual electrochromism resulting from a synergistic interaction between the organomolybdenum sulfide cluster unit and the polythiophene π-backbone.


The dc, small-signal microwave, and large-signal switching performance of normally off and normally on Al<inf>0.5</inf>Ga<inf>0.5</inf>As gate heterojunction GaAs field-effect transistors (HJFET) with submicrometer gate lengths are reported. The structure of both types of devices comprises an n-type 1017-cm-3Sn-doped active layer on a Cr-doped GaAs substrate, a p-type 1018-cm-3Ge-doped Al<inf>0.5</inf>Ga<inf>0.5</inf>As gate layer and a p+-type 5 × 1018-cm-3Ge-doped GaAs "contact and cap" layer on the top of the gate. The gate structure is obtained by selectively etching the p+-type GaAs and Al<inf>0.5</inf>Ga<inf>0.5</inf>As. Undercutting of the Al<inf>0.5</inf>Ga<inf>0.5</inf>As layer results in submicrometer gate lengths, and the resulting p+-GaAs overhang is used to self-align the source and the drain with respect to the gate. Normally off GaAs FET's with 0.5- to 0.7-µm long heterojunction gates exhibit maximum available power gains (MAG) of about 9 dB at 2 GHz. Large-signal pulse measurements indicate an intrinsic propagation delay of 40 ps with an arbitrarily chosen 100-Ω drain load resistance in a 50-Ω microstrip circuit. Normally on FET's with submicrometer gate lengths (∼0.6 µm) having a total gate periphery of 300 µm and a corresponding dc transconductance of 20-30 mmhos exhibit a MAG of 9.5 dB at 8 GHz. The internal propagation delay time measured under the same conditions as above is about 20 ps.


The vibration problem of a fluid-filled pipe is very important in many fields. When the pipe is long or the pipe passes through the structure inner, collar-stiffened, flanges or the internal structure will be used to connect and support the pipe, which will be simplified as some radial constraint. Pipe with radial constraint is also commonly used to control pipe noise and vibration in practical engineering applications. This work is aimed at the pipe with uniform flow, and the transmission loss of different wave in pipe wall with radial constraint will be studied. Radial constraint, such as collar-stiffened, flanges or the internal structure, is simplified as radial line force along circumference. The harmonic motion of the outer shell and the pressure field in the inner fluid are described by Flugge shell equations and Helmholtz equation, respectively. Vibrational power flow inputting into the coupled system and propagating along the shell axial direction are both studied. Characteristics of various vibrational waves in a fluid-filled pipe and the effect of radial constraint are analyzed by numerical results. The influence of frequency, pipeline parameters, boundary conditions and etc, are discussed, respectively. In order to verify the calculation, the results of a fluid-filled pipe without radial constraint are shown as references. The conclusion may be valuable to evaluate the effect of vibration isolation and vibration control design of pipelines.


Background: Laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) is gaining in popularity and has become the fastest growing bariatric operation at this time. However, there is a lack of studies that help to predict optimal outcomes. Our study is aimed at identifying preoperative factors that are predictive of successful weight loss after LSG. Methods: A total of 100 consecutive patients undergoing LSG were enrolled over 36 months. Socioeconomic and demographic factors were prospectively collected for patients undergoing LSG. The primary endpoint was percent of excess weight loss at 1 year (EWL1). The cutoff point to define inadequate weight loss was set as mean 1 year EWL−1 SD. Logistic regression was used to identify independent preoperative factors associated with successful weight loss. Results: Mean EWL1 was 65.7±23.5%. Therefore, adequate weight loss was defined as EWL>42.2%. According to this cutoff, 82 patients (82%) achieved successful weight loss 1 year after LSG. Age, sex, marital status, number of children, ...


In a sector growing at an unprecedented rate and historically lagging behind in its adoption of technology, how is Atkins addressing today's challenges by embracing tomorrow's technologies? Atkins Transportation division is developing a number of software tools to assist the design of railway electrification overhead line equipment. The interlinked suite of programmes, known collectively as TADPOLE (Tools Aiding the Design and Production of Overhead Line Equipment), uses automation and common data sources to meet current technical and programme demands in the UK marketplace. Additionally, Atkins was joint lead partner with Laing O'Rourke in the Digitally Enabling Electrification (DEE) Research Project, along with dhp11 and Imperial College London. The project was funded by Innovate UK to research applying Digital Engineering in the Railway Industry. The two year project, which is part of the Government innovation strategy for digitising the railway, focused on railway electrification. The team has developed approaches that increase the efficiency and validity of data through all stages of the asset lifecycle. By exploiting digital technologies the project team has demonstrated how the industry can achieve and benefit from an integrated BIM compliant environment through common methods of exchanging and structuring data throughout the lifecycle of an OLE asset.


This paper presents an experimental study on the punching shear behavior of reinforced concrete flat slabs fabricated using recycled coarse aggregate (RCA) in addition to the presence of steel fibers strengthened by carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP). The ratios of replacement natural coarse aggregate by RCA were (0, 35, 55, and 75%) and the volume fraction of the steel fiber used in this study was 1.2%. Two strengthening methods were used, namely, externally bonded reinforcement (EBR) and externally bonded reinforcement on groove (EBROG). 16 square slabs were cast with overall dimensions of 800 mm by 800 mm by 80 mm thickness. The slabs were designed to fail in punching shear only. All the slabs were simply supported on four edges and tested for punching via a vertical load applied through the square central column. The test results showed that the mechanical properties, ultimate loads, and first crack loads decreased with increasing proportion of RCA replacement, while the incorporation of steel fibers improved the compressive strength and ultimate loads by the ranges of 12%–17% and 16%–25%, respectively. Strengthened slabs lead to considerable improvements in the punching behavior of slabs, with an increase in punching load ranging from 22–30% compared to unstrengthened slabs when using the EBR technique, while the increase in the punching loads ranged between 40 and 55% when using EBROG strengthening technique. However, using half amount of CFRP with the EBROG method led to an increase in punching shear of 20–28%. This research indicates the particular improvement offered by the EBROG with regard to the punching shear capacity of fibrous recycled coarse aggregate concrete (RCAC) slabs compared to the EBR method. In addition, the mode of failure of reinforced concrete (RC) slabs changed from one of debonding failure to concrete cover separation when using the EBROG method.


AbstractThe immunohistological staining with polyclonal antibodies of bone biopsies from patients with osteitis fibrosa due to secondary hyperparathyroidism was tested in methyl methacrylate embedded bone samples. The embedding medium preserved the expression of several antigens. Type I collagen was lightly stained in the bone marrow fibrous tissue and stained intensely in non-mineralized osteoid seams and in woven bone. Type III collagen stained throughout the fibrous tissue of the bone marrow as well as in non-mineralized osteoid matrix. Intense immunostaining for basement membrane type IV collagen was evident within the fibrous mat-row tissue next to capillaries and sinusoids. Non-collagenous glycoproteins, such as fibronectin and laminin, appeared evenly distributed throughout the fibrous bone marrow tissue. After decalcification, mineralised trabecular bone matrix became strongly positive for type I collagen and fibronectin. Light, patchly distributed immunostaining was observed for tenascin. The res...


The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine how a service learning literacy course impacted preservice teacher perceptions of intermediate-aged high-ability children in a mid-high poverty school, and how the educators in the partnering school viewed the experience. Preand post-experience responses from preservice teachers and open-ended survey responses from participating educators at the partnering school helped evaluate service learning and measure the impact of the partnership. Results indicated that, after the service learning program, preservice teachers better understood both the developmental literacy needs of intermediate students as well as how to lead a novel study while challenging and mentoring gifted students. Using engaging, diverse books with strong themes and rich vocabulary, the school received formerly lacking literacy curriculum and instruction for gifted children that seemed to contribute to improved student test scores and building a school community of readers. Connections between the university and school were established through email, texts, face-to-face interactions, and Google Docs. This led to a university and school partnership that was mutually beneficial because the program planning was intentional, developed by leaders of both entities, and continually assessed.


Abstract : Contents: Collision Cross Sections: Formal Theory for Distinguishable Spinless Particles, by Edward GerjuoyAtomic Scattering Processes: Survey of Recent Progress, by Edward Gerjuoy High Resolution Ground-Based Simultaneous Meas urement of Ionospheric Electron Density and Collision Frequency, by Francis Richey and R. S. Wehner


The quality of coffee is determined from 60% when planted, 30% when roasted and 10% when brewed. This research examines more deeply the process of sorting the coffee cherries using the dry method. The technology that is possible to solve this coffee cherry fruit sorting problem is image processing, this is seen because the current conventional method uses human eyes and hands in sorting. This sorting process aims to separate superior fruit (red, half red, broken red, brown)., black, half black, orange, yellow, and green) of inferior fruit (spotted, moldy, with 1 hole, and more than 1 hole) and coffee cherries (round, oval, broken, perfect).The purpose of this study was to develop a coffee cherry sorting machine technology with faster and more accurate results so that it could replace the conventional coffee cherry sorting process. The coffee cherries are categorized into ripe, undercooked, raw, and damaged cherries using the GLCM (Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix) algorithm for feature extraction and the KNN (k-Nearest Neighbor) and ANN (Artificial Neural Network) classification algorithm. newrb. The success obtained from this research is ANN accuracy of 24.41% and using the KNN method of 72.12%. With the simulation carried out, the coffee cherries classification process with an amount of 1,885 can be carried out in a total time of 356.02 seconds or the equivalent of 6 minutes. Author identifies indicators of coffee cherries as skin color (red, half red, cracked red, brown, black, half black, orange, yellow, and green), cherri shape (round, oval, broken, perfect), and cherries skin defects (speckled -button, moldy, with 1 hole, and more than 1 hole). It is hoped that the results of this study can serve as a consideration for developing a more advanced national coffee industry.


Stentolith also known as stent-stone complex of the common bile duct (CBD), is an extremely rare long term complication of a forgotten or retained stent in the CBD, with only a handful of cases reported. A high index of suspicion is required to diagnose stentolith especially in patients presenting with cholangitis, with a history of ERCP done long before. We report a total of 3 patients, who presented with either non specific pain abdomen or features of biliary obstruction, admitted in the Department of General Surgery at KIMS, PBMH. They were diagnosed with choledocholithiasis on imaging (USG abdomen / MRCP). Intra operatively all the patients were found to have retained stents with de novo stone formation


This paper proposes a novel approach to approximate the Kullback-Leibler distance rate (KLDR) between two hidden Markov models (HMMs). The proposed approximation is based on the stationary observation distribution and the first order observation-transition probability distribution. It gives a closed form approximation of the KLDR in terms of the model parameters of the given HMMs. The performance of the proposed method matches well with commonly used Monte Carlo approaches as well as other previously proposed methods in the literature, and provides some computational advantages. I. INTRODUCTION Markov models (HMMs) have been widely adopted in speech recognition (1) and signal processing as well as some other areas. Their success mainly comes from their efficient modeling of a wide range of stochastic processes using a small set of parameters and the existence of efficient algorithms to estimate the models. In many situations, one often needs to compare different HMMs using certain distance measures. Some of these scenarios include evaluation of the reestimation processes or classifying estimated models (2), image retrieval applications (3), model clustering (4), handwriting recognition (5), evaluation of acoustic level complexity (6), and objective speech quality estimation (7, 8). The Kullback-Leibler distance (KLD) or the relative entropy (9) provides a measure of average discriminating information contained per observation symbol between two probabilistic models. The KLD between two probability density functions (pdf) f1 and f2 is given by ∫


This article is intended to contribute to debate over how development agencies should respond to what they perceive to be a new Washington-based policy agenda, and particularly with the question of whether collaboration with official agencies implementing that agenda may weaken more radical or alternative visions of development. The approach adopted is to locate these general arguments within a more narrowly defined policy arena—subsidization of credit. The second and third sections distinguish between a range of different points of view over credit subsidies within the World Bank and international NGOs, respectively. The fourth section then discusses opportunities and threats arising from NGO-donor collaboration, particularly co-finance agreements. The article also illustrates the need (a) to distinguish carefully between different elements of the new policy agenda, and (b) to analyse the diversity of views within development agencies as well as between them. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Abstract The reaction of cyclooctatetraene oxide ( 1 ) with several organometallic reagents and metal salts were investigated with reference to skeletal change of the ring. LAH causes ring cleavage to yield octa-2,4,6-trienal along with the formation of cycloocta-3,5-dienol. Ethylmagnesium bromide and triethylaluminum afford ethyl(cyclohepta-2,4,6-trienyl)methanol in good yields, but the addition of HMPA in the Grignard reaction results in reduction of the reactivity and formation of the isomerized cyclic trienone. A similar medium effect by HMPA or solvent is found in the reaction of 1 with ethyllithium which affords 5-ethylcycloocta-2,6-dienone (70·2%) in ether, and also in the metal salts (MgBr 2 , LiBr, and LiClO 4 ) induced isomerization giving cycloheptatrienylcarboxyaldehydes and phenylacetaldehyde. The diverse nature of the products in the reactions is accounted for by the formation of homotropylium cation intermediates.


In this article I argue for the acceptance of artistic outputs as equivalent or congruent to research outputs when these artistic outputs are generated by lecturers at tertiary institutions. Central to the argument is the implementation of critical peer-review mechanisms. I argue that, whereas in research outputs the justification and substantiation of the research takes the form of an article, thesis / dissertation or book, for example, and the further justification and substantiation is confirmed in the publication peer review, for artistic outputs the presentation of the article equivalent - the artwork - requires the justification and substantiation to be carried out by the peer-review process itself. The article then suggests how this might be carried out in practice.


The Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin film solar cell technology has made a steady progress within the last decade reaching efficiency up to 22.3% on laboratory scale, thus overpassing the highest efficiency for polycrystalline silicon solar cells. High efficiency CIGS modules employ a so-called buffer layer of cadmium sulfide CdS deposited by Chemical Bath Deposition (CBD), which presence and Cd-containing waste present some environmental concerns. A second potential bottleneck for CIGS technology is its window layer made of i-ZnO/ZnO:Al, which is deposited by sputtering requiring expensive vacuum equipment. A non-vacuum deposition of transparent conductive oxide (TCO) relying on simpler equipment with lower investment costs will be more economically attractive, and could increase competitiveness of CIGS-based modules with the mainstream silicon-based technologies. In the frame of Novazolar project, we have developed a low-cost aqueous solution photo assisted electrodeposition process of the ZnO-based window layer for high efficiency CIGS-based solar cells. The window layer deposition have been first optimized on classical CdS buffer layer leading to cells with efficiencies similar to those measured with the sputtered references on the same absorber (15%). The the optimized ZnO doped layer has been adapted to cadmium free devices where the CdS is replaced by chemical bath deposited zinc oxysulfide Zn(S,O) buffer layer. The effect of different growth parameters has been studied on CBD-Zn(S,O)-plated co-evaporated Cu(In,Ga)Se2 substrates provided by the Zentrum für Sonnenenergie-und Wasserstoff-Forschung (ZSW). This optimization of the electrodeposition of ZnO:Cl on CIGS/Zn(S,O) stacks led to record efficiency of 14%, while the reference cell with a sputtered (Zn,Mg)O/ZnO:Al window layer has an efficiency of 15.2%.


E. L. Turcotte and Carl V. Feaster IN I960 two aberrant plants, identical in appearance, were observed in an experimental strain of Pima cotton, Gossypium barbadense L. The abnormal plants had small, shrivelled, and empty bolls with sunken tips, indicating sterility. These plants were pruned and transplanted to the greenhouse where subsequent observations revealed several floral abnormalities. The stigmas and styles were dwarfed and did not emerge from the androecium (Figure 1).


Prolanis gymnastics is a new program from the government with the aim of one of which is to control blood sugar in DM II patients, so many people do not know about it, even most of the people who already know but are less compliant in participating in the Prolanis program and as health workers have an obligation to socialize and activators in activities. This type of quantitative research design is a Quasi Experiment with a one group pre test and post test design approach. The population in this study were diabetes mellitus patients in the working area of the Seputih Banyak Health Center, Central Lampung Regency, as of January - March 2020, totaling 48 people with a total sample of 48 people. In this study the sampling technique used was the total population. In this study, the paired T test was used. Based on statistical tests, it is known that the p-value is 0.000 or p-value <0.05, which means that there is an effect of Prolanis Exercise on Changes in Blood Sugar Levels in Diabetes Mellitus Patients in the Working Area of the Seputih Banyak Health Center, Central Lampung Regency in 2020, it is hoped that this will increase family insight and knowledge about how to improve hemodynamic conditions in diabetic patients and as a basis for providing information to reduce the percentage of people with diabetes


The invention discloses a method for hoisting and mounting steel tube column casings. The method is characterized by comprising the following steps: hosting a steel tube column casing to be mounted to be at a suspended state through a tower crane, reserving a welding line between the lower end surface of the steel tube column casing and the upper end surface below which the steel tube column casing is mounted, and then accomplishing the butt welding on the welding line, so as to accomplish the mounting construction. The method has the advantages that the construction efficiency can be properly enhanced, and the construction quality is guaranteed.


For a solar-like star, the surface rotation evolves with time, allowing in principle to estimate the age of a star from its surface rotation period. Here we are interested in measuring surface rotation periods of solar-like stars observed by the NASA Kepler mission. Different methods have been developed to track rotation signals in Kepler photometric light curves: time-frequency analysis based on wavelet techniques, autocorrelation and composite spectrum. We use the learning abilities of random forest classifiers to take decisions during two crucial steps of the analysis. First, given some input parameters, we discriminate the considered Kepler targets between rotating MS stars, non-rotating MS stars, red giants, binaries and pulsators. We then use a second classifier only on the MS rotating targets to decide the best data-analysis treatment.


Emil Filla (1882-1953) was one of the leading modernist painters working in Prague before the First World War. Following a conventional artistic training at the Academy of Fine Art in the city at the beginning of the twentieth century he was, like many of his generation, deeply impressed by an exhibition of work by Edvard Munch in Prague staged in 1905 by the Mánes Union of Fine Artists, the leading artistic association of the time. The impact of Munch was evident almost immediately, and starting from 1907, when he painted The Reader of Dostoyevsky, Filla produced a series of works that mirrored the visual lexicon and formal language of the Norwegian artist, intensifying the gloomy symbolist themes of the latter to an almost unbearable degree. Anxious to avoid the limitations of the provincial art world of Prague, he avidly consumed the most advanced artistic practices of the major art centres of the time, culminating in a quite personal appropriation and interpretation of Cubism. He was also a author of essays in art history and criticism, writing on subjects as diverse as Byzantine art, Caravaggio, Daumier, Rembrandt, Impressionism, Munch and, of course, El Greco.2 Although a member of the Mánes Association, Filla was active in the formation of other avant-garde artistic groups, which eventually led to open conflict with Mánes. The first was Osma (The Eight), which he helped found in 1907, and which included other prominent exponents of Czech Cubism, including Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918) and Antonín Procházka (1882-1945). Later, in 1911, he formed a successor group called the Skupina výtvarných umělců (The Group of Fine Artists). Skupina also published its own journal, the Umělecký Měsíčník (Art monthly) between 1911 and 1914, and it is from the first volume of that journal that Filla's article on El Greco is taken. The artists of Skupina did not have a coherent ideology, and this is clear from the pages of the journal, which feature an eclectic range of articles on contemporary by Czech and foreign authors, as well as essays on art history, literary reviews and poems. The choice of visual material in the journal was equally broad, ranging from contemporary art, architecture and design to old masters, African, pre-Columbian and prehistoric art. For all its lack of coherence, this eclecticism revealed how the artists positioned themselves, as exponents of art as a global


It provides an ultrasonic probe and a method of manufacturing the same. This is the ultrasonic probe includes a piezoelectric section and a connecting portion for electrically connecting the chip module substrate, and all of the pressure while supporting the piezoelectric unit for converting from the ultrasonic vibration and an electric signal while a chip module substrate.


The N-methoxy-N-methylamides (Weinreb amides) are widely recognized as effective acylating agents since they react with organometallics (RM, M=MgBr, Li) to produce ketones without side products. 1 Preparation of N-methoxyN-methylamides is accomplished generally by condensation of carboxylic acids and N,O-dimethylhydroxylamine hydrochloride, using coupling reagents. The treatment of carboxylic acids with coupling reagents such as oxalyl chloride, 2


In this paper we present a novel mathematical model to describe the permeation of a fluid through a polymeric matrix, loaded with drug molecules, followed by its subsequent desorption. Both phenomena are enhanced by temperature. We deduce energy estimates and stability estimates for the weak solution of the model, showing that this solution of the problem is stable in bounded time intervals. Numerical simulations illustrate how the coupling effects, of viscoelastic properties and thermal external assistance, can have a central role in the design of drug delivery devices


The patient was a boy, aged 11 years, who was seen at the Stanford Clinic. The parents said that he had been born with the left shoulder higher than the right, and that the deformity had steadily grown worse. They had noticed a curvature of the spine. No pain other than an occasional dull ache had been felt. Examination showed a very high left scapula, very close to the spine, with a lateral curvature in the cervical region, and an asymmetry of the face. The scapula evidently was attached at its superior angle, and at this point there was a distinct prominence. A bony growth ran from it to the spine. The elevation amounted to about 10 cm. The motions of the head were limited. The boy was photographed. Roentgenograms showed the high scapula and a bony growth like a short rib running from it to the spine at about


Mathematical and numerical models for the dissipative particle dynamics were introduced, including the governing equations for the motions of fluid particles, boundary conditions and numerical methods. The codes were programmed to simulate the particle sedimentation under the force of gravity. The effects of the particle's mass and gravity force on the particle's movement trace were revealed. The results show that, the less the mass and gravity force are, the stronger the randomness of particle's movement is. The adopted mathematical model and calculation algorithm were validated. This shows the feasibility and potential predominance of the method proposed in the paper for the numerical simulation of complex fluid flow.


The first Japanese tunnel boring machine to be operated in Europe has been chosen to drive a 240 M long, 1.4 M diameter sewer in northern Bordeaux. Geolgoical conditions comprise a plastic clay containing 20% sand and silt, with 4 M of cover over the bore. The machine, a mechanical counter-balanced tunnelling slurry shield manufactured by Iseki Poly-Tech of Tokyo, is said to be capable of withstanding an active earth pressure thrust at the cutter head of 14 tonnes/sq M. No bentonite is used in the shield system, which relies on viscosity of the spoil/water mix to maintain slurry pressure at the face. (TRRL)


IntroductionThe Korean Peninsula remains a hot spot in international security. A puzzling North Korea has turned its back on the world by its incessant pursuit of nuclear weapons, and despite recent reconciliatory developments, tension remains between the two Koreas that may erupt into military conflict at any time. One area with the greatest potential for conflict is in the West Sea near the Northern Limit Line (NLL).2 South Korea is blaming North Korea for sinking one of its navy ships in the waters near the NLL in March 2010. More recently, South and North Korea exchanged artillery fire soon after North Korea fired on Yeonpyeongdo Island, near the NLL, in November 2010. The causes of these military conflicts remain a riddle. Though the NLL is considered a major factor, it alone is not sufficient to explain what brought the two Koreas into conflict.One interpretation posits that North Korea's provocative posture is attributable to South Korea's punitive policy against North Korea. The current Lee Myung-bak government has taken a hard-line policy toward North Korea, making its North Korea policy distinguishable from the unilateral engagement policy of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun governments. The current government has emphasized reciprocity and thus has showed little tolerance against North Korea's provocations. With this shift in policy toward North Korea, fears of a new conflict with North Korea are growing. As a consequence, some critics now speak about the need to ease military tension in the Korean Peninsula by reintroducing a peace and reconciliation policy with North Korea.3 Then, it is relevant to ask whether the unilateral engagement policies of the Kim Dae-j ung and the Roh Moo-hyun governments have reduced North Korea's provocations in the West Sea.4With these concerns in mind, this paper challenges the widespread belief that "conflicts of interest are reduced by interdependence, and that cooperation alone holds the answer to world problems."5 The main argument here is that North Korea's NLL violations do not rise and fall based on South Korea's engagement or containment policy toward North Korea, but rather on North Korea's need to catch more marine products. In order to support the argument of this paper, the second section evaluates the inter-Korean reconciliation process and its impact on North Korea's NLL violations. The third section analyzes why North Korea's economic crisis in the 1990s was conducive to a rise in North Korea's NLL violations. A summary and some policy implications are given in the final section.The Inter-Korean Reconciliation Process and North Korea's NLL ProvocationsThe 1953 Armistice Agreement to end the Korean War included only the landbased military demarcation line (MDL), leaving a maritime border as an unsettled question among the concerned parties, including the U.S.-led United Nations, North Korea, and China. The United Nations military forces, with superior naval and air power, felt urged to control their operations in the West and East Sea, and thus the NLL was set up in 1953 by a unilateral measure of the U.S.-led United Nations military forces. From then on, the NLL became the de facto maritime border between the two Koreas, but the cease-fire did not end military conflicts on the Korean Peninsula and in its surrounding waters.6 Arguing for the need to redraw the maritime border, North Korea has instigated numerous provocations around the waters near the NLL by kidnapping or sinking South Korean fishing boats and navy vessels.As the Cold War drew to a close in the 1980s, a turning point was reached in the relations between the two Koreas. In 1991, South and North Korea signed the "InterKorean Basic Agreement"-the Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and North-opening a new era of inter-Korean economic cooperation. As for the NLL, the agreement provides that "until the decision on the maritime demarcation line is final, the nonaggression areas of the sea shall be those that have been followed by each side until the present time. …


This article describes a new automatic transcription system in the Japanese Parliament which deploys our automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and has been in official operation since April 2011. The speaker-independent ASR system handles all plenary sessions and committee meetings to generate an initial draft, which is corrected by Parliamentary reporters. To achieve high recognition performance in spontaneous meeting speech, we have investigated an efficient training scheme with minimal supervision which can exploit a huge amount of real data. Specifically, we have proposed a scheme of statistical language model transformation, which fills the gap between faithful transcripts of spoken utterances and final texts for documentation. Once this mapping is trained, we no longer need faithful transcripts for training both acoustic and language models. The scheme also realizes a sustainable ASR system which evolves, i.e. update/re-train the models, only with speech and text generated during the system operation. After its initial deployment in 2010, the system has been improved with accumulated data of 1000-hour speech, consistently achieving character correctness of approximately 90%.


Closed form solutions of free vibration problems in simply supported multilayered plates made of Functionally Graded Material (FGM) are dealt with in the present paper. Various refined plate theories are compared in the cases of both equivalent single-layer and layer-wise variable descriptions. Classical theories are compared to advanced ones, in which higher orders of expansion in the thickness direction are used for the transverse displacement. The plate governing equations are provided by applying Carrera's Unified Formulation (CUF) which, in this paper, is extended to the dynamics and free vibration response of plates embedding FGM layers. CUF permits one to handle the governing equations of the whole theory in a unified manner and a hierarchical evaluation of the natural frequencies of plates is therefore obtained. The results are given for one-layer and multi-layer plates embedding FGM layers. Conclusions are drawn regarding the accuracy of classical and advanced plate modelling for various vibration modes.


This work presents a multi-rate fusion model, which exploits the complimentary properties of visual and inertial sensors for egomotion estimation in applications such as robot navigation and augmented reality. The sampling of these two sensors is described with size-varying input and output equations without assumed synchronicity and periodicity of measurements. Data fusion is performed with two different multi-rate (MR) filter models, an extended (EKF) and an unscented Kalman filter (UKF). A complete dynamic model for the 6D-tracking task is given together with a method to calculate the dependencies of the covariance matrices. It is further shown that a centripetal acceleration model and the precise description of quaternion prediction for a constant velocity model highly improve the estimation error for rotary motions. The comparison demonstrates that the MR-UKF provides better estimation results at higher computational costs.


Based on an analysis of the characteristics of college computer course, this paper attempts to present some tentative views on college computer teaching reform in China,with a stress on the combination of both theory and practice.