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The expediency of allowance for the links in the georesource-open pit-preparation plant chains as an integral information, technology and management space is considered. The methodical approaches to improvement of useful qualities of coal, in the first turn, its ash content graded as a rank of components are substantiated. In terms of the Elga deposit in South Yakutia, potentiality of increase in completeness and quality of coal extraction based on the studies into structure and contact zones of seams is illustrated. The schemes are proposed for ash content control in coal mining through extraction of dirt and high-ash interbeds of various thickness. The process charts for mining thin coal and dirt interbeds are proposed. The recommendations are provided for development of coal seams composed of bands of different ash content and washability.

International audience; Structural biology and functional studies are a powerful combination to elucidate fundamental knowledge about the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). Here, we discuss the latest findings, including how clinically-approved drugs restore function to mutant CFTR, leading to better clinical outcomes for people with cystic fibrosis (CF). Despite the prospect of regulatory approval of a CFTR-targeting therapy for most CF mutations, strenuous efforts are still needed to fully comprehend CFTR structure-and-function for the development of better drugs to enable people with CF to live full and active lives.

The aim of the paper is focused on the analysis of the mechanical properties of the concrete specimens with plasticizer at three point bending test by the signal analysis of the acoustic emission signal. The evaluations were compared the measurement and the results obtained with theoretical presumptions. The Joint Time Frequency Analysis applied on measurement data and its evaluation is described. It is well known that the Acoustic Emission Method is a very sensitive method to determine active cracks into structure. However, evaluation of acoustic emission signals is very difficult. A non-traditional method was used to signal analysis of burst acoustic emission signals recorded during three point bending test.

Non Destructive Testing is a powerful tool for determination of properties, durability and lifetime of concrete structures. Acoustic Emission Method is an unusual technique which describes only active defects or changes into structure arising as a consequence dangerous tension into structure. The method is appropriate to be used in homogenous structures as metal structures when cracks are highly active (generates sound). Its application in civil engineering is not so much used because building structures are inhomogeneous. This article shows possible application of Acoustic Emission Method for monitoring of concrete structure changes during its lifetime. The main aim of the article is to show the application of Acoustic Emission Method during the early age to 28 days after mixing. It is believed that early age of concrete structure is very important for its quality. Common concrete cube specimens have been tested after the production by Acoustic Emission Method with using waveguides. The results of acoustic emission method will be compared to classical parameters of fresh concrete e.g. the value water-cement ratio, air void content measured by different methods (pressure methods, AVA) and similar. In the results will be compared four mixtures when two mixtures were aerated and two mixtures were without aeration.

This chapter explains the administrative structure of Sri Lanka, the proliferation of administrative institutions since the 1970s, and the power and relationships between the present administrative institutions at various levels of the bureaucracy. It examines the management and performance of the public sector, the recent reforms introduced by the government, their impact, and emerging issues in the sector. The chapter is based on a document review and a survey of literature on public administration, public sector reforms, New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM ideas. The chapter fills a gap in the existing literature on public administration and management in Sri Lanka and identifies flaws in its NPM reforms, how they have been put into practice, and prospects for future reforms.

Visible watermarking has been an important research area, widely studied and used for copyright protection over the years. However, new visible watermark removal-oriented attacks and techniques have emerged. Although these methods provide high quality resultant images, the main part of the attack consists of manual detection of the watermark pattern. Considering that visible watermark pattern can be different in each watermarked image, time-consuming human intervention is required, making these attacks inefficient in practice. In this paper, we propose an automatic detection method of visible watermark pattern, which can combine with conventional watermark removal attacks to make them more efficient. To accomplish it, the visible watermarked image is decomposed into structure image and texture image using Total Variation L1 (TV-L1) method. In the structure image, the watermark edge is discriminated from the edges present in the host image to automatically detect the visible watermark pattern.

Virtual screening (VS) methods can be categorized into structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) that involves knowledge about the target’s 3D structure and ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS) approaches that utilize information from at least one identified ligand. However, the activity prediction of new bioactive molecules in highly diverse data set is still less accurate and the result is not comprehensive enough since only one approach is applied at one time. This paper aims to recommend the boosting ensemble method, MultiBoost, into LBVS using the well-known chemoinformatics database, the MDL Drug Data Report (MDDR). The experimental results were compared with Support Vector Machines (SVM). The final outcomes showed that MultiBoost ensemble classifiers had improved the effectiveness of the prediction of new bioactive molecules in high diverse data.

This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach for localizing damage in plate-like structure. Diagnostic Lamb wave is excited into structure before and after damage to obtain scattered wave that contain characteristic information of the damage. After the time-of-flight (ToF) of the scattered wave in each actuator-sensor path is measured by continuous wavelet transform (CWT), a GA optimization procedure is developed to adaptively identify the location of damage without knowing the material properties a priori. It is achieved by minimizing the difference between the measured and calculated ToF of the scattered Lamb wave. Experimental study for an aluminium plate is conducted to validate the proposed damage localization approach.

According to one three-story RC frame structure, the results of time-history analysis of using re-centring SMA damper to seismic retrofitting are introduced in detail. Damping effect of dampers is studied by index such as floor displacement, story drift, story shear force, energy dissipation, etc., and optimal layout of dampers is also discussed. The analysis results indicate that floor displacement and story drift are decreased greatly after strengthening, and story shear force is controlled to some extent with good effect. The damper dissipates most of the total energy inputting into structure and also has good ability to re-centring. The damper can obtain good energy dissipation when arranged at the maximum story drift, and less energy dissipation when arranged at the smaller story drift.

After billions of years of evolution, the form, structure, function, behavior and other aspects of living things in the nature have been optimized, designers imitate this advantages to make the bionics melt into structure, then biomimetic structure came to being. On the basis of some examples, this paper establishes two different classification methods of biomimetic structure--according to different imitating objects and different imitating aims, and presents the conception of form-finding bionics, takes tree structure as an example to analyze.

Echocardiography is the work horse of clinical cardiac imaging, not only because it is relatively cheap to operate, mobile, and versatile, but also because it combines insight into structure and function as well as into hemodynamics through the use of Doppler. This feature of echocardiography was

Many recent breakthroughs in our understanding of termite biology have been facilitated by “omics” research. Omic science seeks to collectively catalog, quantify and characterize pools of biological molecules that translate into structure, function and life processes of an organism. Biological molecules in this context include genomic DNA, messenger RNA, proteins and other biochemicals. Other permutations of omics that apply to termites include sociogenomics, which seeks to define social life in molecular terms (e.g., behavior, sociality, physiology, symbiosis, etc.) and digestomics, which seeks to define the collective pool of host and symbiont genes that collaborate to achieve high-efficiency lignocellulose digestion in the termite gut. This review covers a wide spectrum of termite omic studies from the past 15 years. Topics covered include a summary of terminology, the various kinds of omic efforts that have been undertaken, what has been revealed, and to a limited degree, what the results mean. Although recent omic efforts have contributed to a better understanding of many facets of termite and symbiont biology, and have created important new resources for many species, significant knowledge gaps still remain. Crossing these gaps can best be done by applying new omic resources within multi-dimensional (i.e., functional, translational and applied) research programs.

Human platelet alloantigens (HPAs) and their corresponding alloantibodies (alloabs) play an essential role in fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia, posttransfusion purpura and platelet transfusion refractoriness. Emerging genotyping methods (e.g. microarray technology) will allow an automated throughput for HPA typing of large donor cohorts in the near future. For the clinical diagnosis of alloimmune thrombocytopenia, however, the proof of pathogenic alloabs still remains a prerequisite. Nowadays, monoclonal antibody-based antigen capture assays are the state of the art in many laboratories. This technique seems to come up against limiting factors. In a certain number of cases that are highly suspicious for alloimmune thrombocytopenia, platelet-specific alloabs are not detectable. Current observations indicate that these alloabs are heterogeneous in terms of their alloantigenic determinants as well as the consequences on platelet function. This heterogeneity may correlate to the severe bleeding complications sometimes seen in patients with alloimmune thrombocytopenia. New insights on the role of pathogenic alloabs will help us to improve diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for the adequate treatment of affected patients.

This paper provides an overview of recent developments concerning mechanisms for predicting the outcome of complex processing tasks. Mechanisms describe procedural patterns of information processing resulting from processing demands, processing limitations, and various processing constraints in completing tasks with a high degree of processing complexity. Since the available mechanisms refer either to structural models or describe processes, they can be divided into structure- and process-based mechanisms. The proposed mechanisms fit a framework that enables one to distinguish between decay, overflow, and trade-off mechanisms. The results available so far demonstrate the usefulness of mechanisms for predicting the outcome of complex processing tasks.

After a discussion of the historical background and of the properties of structural descriptors, the concept of mappings is applied to establish and quantify geometrical relationships among crystal structures. Mappings that lead to relationships are called similarity operators. Thus, all structures belonging to the same structure type can be collected, e.g. from the data of a data bank, by suitable similarity operators. Moreover, different structure types may be grouped into structure families using the same technique. A procedure is described to complete a similarity operator for a pair of structures if a relationship is present. A practical example is presented; further applications will be given in a separate paper.

Over the last decade important progress has been made towards the understanding of the molecular pathobiology of Alzheimer’s Disease. One of the major breakthroughs was the identification of presenilin and its crucial role in the gamma-Secretase processing of APP and Notch. Ever since, it has been a major aim to block gamma-Secretase in a safe way. Recent results of trials, in particular the semagacestat trial of Ely-Lilly, indicate that blocking gamma-Secretase in Alzheimer patients can cause important side effects. Significantly, the cognitive condition of patients under semagacestat treatment worsened, suggesting an important role of one of the gamma-Secretase substrates in cognition. The outcome of this trial raises the question whether it will be possible to identify a therapeutic window for gamma-Secretase inhibition in AD. We will show in the current presentation that our knowledge on gamma-Secretase function and regulation has dramatically progressed in the last years. We will explain how different gamma-Secretase complexes have different biological roles, and that selectively targeting them could provide safer drugs. Also increasing insights into structure and function could lead to safer drugs, such as gamma-secretase modulators, but also drugs that specifically interfere with docking of specific substrates to the different gamma-Secretases. Finally insight into the regulation of the gamma-Secretase complex only starts to emerge, which also could open new opportunities for safer drugs.

This chapter focuses on a connectionist model called the fractal learning neural network (FLNN). The FLNN model's account is appealing because it (a) uses a simple learning mechanism and thus corresponds to a theory that links development and learning; (b) predicts stagewise behavior with progressive quantitative changes occurring within the stages, a phenomenon also observed in development; (c) derives phase transitions from the learning, thus predicting, rather than stipulating, the stages; (d) shows highly structured, domain-specific behavior arising from a mechanism which is capable of a wide variety of behaviors, not all of which are highly structured (thus, in some sense, deriving the structure where no structure was apparent); and (e) generalizes beyond its input in a way that is, at least partially, consistent with human generalization in the comprehension and production of recursive sentence structures.

The board of the Dutch Paediatric Association requested a survey of the scientific research performed in all academic and non-academic paediatric hospitals, authorized to train medical doctors in paediatrics in the Netherlands. Contributions to the international and the Dutch scientific literature, in the form of regular publications, chapters in books, contributions to proceedings and Ph.D. theses were counted over two 5-year periods, i.e. 1981–1985 and 1986–1990. The quality of publications in the international journals was assessed using the average impact factor of the journals over the 10-year period. The number of publications in the international literature doubled during the observation period 1986–1990 compared to the period 1981–1985. Nevertheless, the quality of the publications remained the same. Metabolism, oncology/ haematology, immunology/infectious diseases and cardiology are the subspecialisations in which scientific research takes place in four or more academic paediatric hospitals. In total, 84 Ph.D. theses were produced in which a paediatrician was either the project leader (mostly a professor in paediatrics) or the investigator-in-charge. Insight into structure and major research efforts of paediatric hospitals in other countries of Europe may lead to exchange of views and, maybe, profitable co-operation.

The structure-oriented, numerical, factual database, B-Base, is described as an application of the database management system ChemBase. The constructive work within the last two years resulted in a database, B-Base, which at present incorporates approximately 9,400 document units. Today the database covers primary literature up to the middle of 1988 and will be updated continuously. In general, data concerning boron compounds with 1–4 B atoms of co-ordination number 2–4 are stored. A concept for Lewis adduct compounds has been developed. In addition, this concept has been expanded for metal complexes and cluster compounds. Data fields for dividing B-Base into structure related file segments and for indexing multistructural graphs have been newly added. Evaluation of structure-shift relations by means of ChemBase software and the suitable PlotIT program for statistics resulted in about 60 basic graphs, visualising shift ranges of indicated substructures. These graphs are accessible within the application B-Base by using an alternative form when viewing a document unit.

Cancer patients, in particular, have a need to communicate with care-givers on their own terms. To meet this demand, we created an individual “patient's book” based on; (A) objective, written information dealing with diagnostic procedures, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, surgery and discharge. We followed the quality assurance process, dividing the information problems into structure, process and outcome. (B) an artistic lay-out to meet the patient's feelings of distress. To add a psychological dimension to the book, an authoress, a nature photographer and a painter were engaged. Patients in the ward evaluated A in 1993/94. This time patients evaluated both A and B one week after discharge, by filling in an anonymous questionnaire with four-level scales or yes/no questions. Preliminary results show that patients now are more aware of side-effects of their treatment. Other results may indicate that patients receive written information alone, not in combination with oral, as clearly was the intention. Furthermore, the evaluation reveals that the patients are very happy with our “patient's book”.

For well over 3000 years, members of our species have talked, written, and at times even thought long and hard over questions like "Why do we name things/ behaviors good?" or "What is it to be moral?" Before and since Plato, classical philosophers have not had to bother with the present explosion of knowledge in the various fields of science. It now seems obvious to most of us in biomedical science that many of these new insights into structure and function do have relevance to human behavior and morality. Dr Hoverman in this short book has modest goals, but they are directed toward integrating some of this new science into a better understanding of morality. His thesis is that the biological "landscape within" may contain one or more structures upon which nature and nurture play to generate moral thought and behavior. Since the universe works according to causal laws and

Everyone subtly molds his behavior for what appear to be rational goal-oriented reasons; actually, we are also satisfying psychological needs. In the case of managers, this universal mechanism often interferes seriously with the enterprise. The author describes how managers escape anxiety provoking situations through perceptual distortion and counter-productive behavior. The claim of “doing all I can” and denial of certain facts are examples of the first; busyness, the manager's “Linus blanket,” and escapes into structure are examples of the second. An understanding of these forces can help management. The author lists the principles that underlie three strategic concepts: the use of multivariate strategies for change, imposition of work disciplines on the management job, and maintenance of tough achievement goals.

Within a large & full scale study on wave impact induced pressures on coastal structures (BWIMCOST) an investigation of impact pressure propagation into structure cracks and fissures was carried out. The mechanism, which is held responsible for localized damage to existing blockwork breakwaters, had previously been verified in small scale model tests and a numerical model had been developed. The current investigation is the first which describes the effect at full scale, with recorded pressures of up to 199 kPa found within the cracks. The experimental results are related to their possible impact on coastal structural integrity.