Eighth Time Research Articles

Abstract 13039: A Rare Case of Anomalous Aortic Origin of Right Coronary Artery From Left Coronary Cusp Presenting With Recurrent Atypical Chest Pain

Background: The incidence of anomalous aortic origin of the right coronary artery (AAORCA) is between 0.026% and 0.25%. There is limited data regarding medical versus surgical management. We present a case of AAORCA which did not “qualify” for surgical intervention but remained symptomatic on medical management. Presentation: A 58-year-old female with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation presented for the eighth time in the past two years with recurrent atypical chest pain and lightheadedness. Vital signs and cardiac biomarkers were normal. Work-up: EKG showed normal sinus rhythm. TTE revealed EF 68%. Myocardial perfusion imaging was normal but exercise stress test showed ventricular ectopy, ventricular bigeminy, short bursts of ventricular tachycardia (VT) at peak exercise, and a 7-beat run of VT. A 30-day event monitor revealed a 17-beat run of VT at a rate of 173 bpm (Figure A). Management: Cardiac catheterization showed the dominant right coronary artery (RCA) arising from the left coronary cusp with a shared ostium to the left coronary system (Figure B-D). A coronary CT scan confirmed dominant RCA arising from left coronary cusp (Figure E) with an interarterial course (Figure F) and slit-like appearance of the proximal RCA, with a likely intramural course (Figure G).She was managed conservatively with restriction of vigorous exercise, up-titration of beta-blockers, addition of anti-anginal agents and implantation of loop recorder. Conclusion: The most updated consensus statement for AAORCA recommends surgical intervention for those with signs or symptoms of myocardial ischemia (true angina, findings on provocative testing, aborted sudden cardiac arrest or non-vagally-mediated arrhythmia).Although our patient did not “qualify” for surgical intervention, she continued to experience refractory symptoms. Hence, it is of utmost importance to consider surgical intervention in patients who have failed medical management, for improved quality of life.

Preface

The annual International Conference “Actual Problems of Engineering Mechanics” is held for the eighth time. The conference is organized by the Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture (Ukraine, Odessa). As partners involved colleagues from Ukraine (G.S. Pisarenko Institute for Problems of Strength of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), Greece (University of West Attica) and Croatia (University «North»).Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, the conference participants were unable to get together, as in previous years, and were forced to limit themselves to online communication. Nevertheless, the conference in this format of the meeting aroused great interest.The scientific program of the conference included plenary and sectional reports in the following areas:1. Fundamental research in mechanics.2. Computer mechanics.3. Building structures.4. Machine building structures.5. Construction materials.More than 500 participants were registered, 140 reports were submitted. The conference was attended by scientists from 14 countries of the world - Ukraine, Greece, Spain, USA, France, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, Croatia, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Uzbekistan.Conference materials are available in pdf format.List of committees are available in the pdf

Hydrogen absorption properties of Ce23Mg4Ni7 alloy at medium vacuum

Ce–Mg–Ni alloys have a high affinity for hydrogen, and are typical examples of compounds that form hydrides. These hydrides may be formed in medium vacuum by using a hydrogen getter. In this study, Ce23Mg4Ni7 ternary alloy was fabricated by vacuum induction melting. The hydrogen absorption kinetics of the alloy were tested using an automatic Sievers device, and its hydride microstructure was observed via a transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results indicate that the ternary phase, Ce23Mg4Ni7, is the main phase of the alloy, and the alloy absorbed hydrogen to form a Ce23Mg4Ni7Hx hydride. Under a hydrogen pressure of 5000 Pa at 50 °C, the equilibrium pressure of the system can be reduced to less than 10 Pa. By the eighth time of backfilling to compensate for hydrogen, the equilibrium pressure is reduced to 1 × 10−2 Pa. The Langmuir absorption equation was used to fit the hydrogen absorption results of the alloy, and it was shown that the saturated hydrogen absorption capacity of the alloy is 55.72 mL, and the absorption coefficient is 0.0078 at 50 °C.

Between the treatise and epiphany, that is, about Leszek Szaruga for the eighth time

The article, written on the occasion of the jubilee of an outstanding polish poet, prose writer, essayist, literary critic and literary scholar, possessing enormous achievements in each of these fields, is an attempt to determine his creative personality. The author wrote about him 8 times reserving individual books and now tries to merge his recognition into the overall portrait of the writer. He states that Szaruga is a linguistic poet and at the same time well-versed in literary tradition, as evidenced by numerous intertextual references, among others to the works of Borges in short stories and Lec in aphoristics. He perfectly accomplishes both classical forms: poetic treatise, lyrical miniature, sonnet as well as experimental: linguistic poems and concrete poetry. Finally, an experimental interpretation of one short poem is presented.

An end and a beginning

The phone rang 30 minutes before my talk. It was a familiar number—my fertility doctor's office—and I picked up, expecting a nurse to tell me that my pills and injections were ready for my next treatment. Instead, the nurse asked me to hold for the doctor, who told me I was pregnant. It should have been joyous news, but he quickly tempered my enthusiasm by telling me that, given the results of other tests, he wasn't sure the pregnancy would go to term. I felt a complicated wave of emotions: relief that our fertility treatment worked, anxiety at the prospect of starting my new job pregnant, worry that I'd have a miscarriage—and stress about my imminent talk. > “It was a macabre preview into parenthood as an academic.” My husband and I had started fertility treatments during my postdoc years, unable to conceive on our own. The process was exhausting. I had to go into the doctor's office a few times per week for blood tests and appointments—all before my hourlong commute to work. The costs stretched our finances. I began to convert every price tag I saw to a portion of a doctor's visit. During the same time period, my professional life had started to fall into place. I completed my postdoc and landed a faculty job in the same city where we were living. When the doctor's office called that day, I was 1 month away from starting my new position and changing my email signature to “Assistant Professor.” Somehow, I managed to give my talk. But as I delivered my practiced monologue, I was having a very different conversation in my mind. I tried to imagine taking maternity leave during my first year as a professor. I also fretted about the viability of the pregnancy. Follow-up doctor's visits didn't yield positive news. The pregnancy would almost certainly end in a miscarriage. I contemplated termination. But because we'd had such a tough time getting pregnant, my husband and I decided to wait to see what happened. Over the next month, my appointments for blood draws and invasive ultrasounds increased to nearly every other day. During one appointment, we heard a heartbeat. My stomach sank all the way down to the stirrups holding my feet. It was painful to hear that heartbeat—because it provided a glimpse into the excitement of pregnancy that I knew would likely be cut short. We left the office still waiting for the supposedly imminent miscarriage. But I wasn't waiting at home. I was waiting during my first faculty meeting. I was waiting in the lab while teaching interns how to prepare samples. I tried my best to silo my personal and professional lives. As time wore on, though, the barrier between “waiting for miscarriage Logan” and “shiny new professor Logan” became less and less distinct. I was worn out physically and emotionally. It was a macabre preview into parenthood as an academic. I found myself constantly struggling to balance my career goals with my personal life, which featured many more doctor's appointments than visits with friends. I missed deadlines and meetings. I had trouble focusing. And I cried in my office, worried that I was already failing as a professor—feelings intensified by hormones that would bear no fruit. Then, roughly 7 weeks into my pregnancy, I went into the doctor's office—and this time there was no heartbeat. I'd never experienced such a visceral combination of sadness and relief. I swallowed two doses of the abortion pill and waited for my pregnancy to be officially over. I dealt with my grief, in part, by speaking openly with trusted colleagues, including my postdoc adviser and others who'd known me for years. And I'd had time to prepare. Difficult as my experience was, I can't imagine how someone feels when a miscarriage catches them totally off guard, or it happens for the second, third, or eighth time. Ten months have passed, and my husband and I are still working with the fertility doctor. It isn't easy to be open about my personal struggles. But I know many academics are in the same boat: starting their first faculty appointment while trying to start a family, and dealing with the conflicting emotions that even a better outcome can bring. I want them to know they're not alone.

VIII Międzynarodowy Festiwal Brunona Schulza w Drohobyczu

For the eighth time, the town of Drogobych hosted International Bruno Schulz Festival. The topic was the place, approached by participants in a number of original and unique ways. The town itself was an important, but by no means the only place taken into consideration. During the festival, Drogobych became not just the site or background of many events, such as presentations, concerts, performances, and meetings with writers, but it was indeed much alive. The very fact that the participants could visit Schulz’s hometown must have been an extraordinary experience for them.

N400 amplitude does not recover from disappearance after repetitions despite reinitiated semantic integration difficulty.

It remains an open question whether the amplitude of N400 reflects combinatory postlexical semantic integration processing. To examine the issue, we repeatedly presented strictly simplified, N400-eliciting three-word structures for seven times, mixed with their plausible counterparts, followed immediately by a much more enriched and informative sentence containing two keywords of the incongruous structure, for the purpose of reinitiating semantic integration processing. Event-related potentials were recorded and compared at the first, fourth, seventh, and eighth time. It was found that multiple repetitions attenuated the N400 effect to almost nonexistent and that the follow-up semantic integration reinitiating sentence did not recover N400 amplitude. The results suggest that combinatory postlexical semantic integration does not significantly modulate N400 amplitude, and provide evidence for noncombinatory processes underlying N400 such as automatic spreading activation and expectancy/prediction.

Ethical Behaviour Integrated in CSR: How to create and maintain the Corporate Reputation

The objective of this study is to point out how the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the Ethical Behaviour are linked and represent the conditions of existence for the corporate system, understood as a long-lasting organization of individuals or institutions which produces outcomes for the external stakeholders. We think that ethical behaviours are pivotal in determining the success or failure of an organization. They affect a company’s reputation and help to define a business model that will thrive even in adversity. Organizations can consider ethical behaviour a way to differentiate themselves through the relationships that they create with stakeholders. This study aims to describe ways of identifying the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility that allow a more meaningful understanding of the Ethical behaviour of modern corporations. The interest in the researches in all areas of ethical behaviour and CSR is growing. Ethical behaviour and CSR drive the activities of an organization and the value systems that underlie their business activities. We have studied CSR through the framework of the stakeholder theory of the organizations and posit that CSR as practiced today is connected with ethical behaviour with other dimensions of an overall reputation framework still uncovered. The analysis of the international literature will be accompanied by the case study of the company L’Oreal. The L’Oreal company's behaviour is as important as its economic performance or the quality of its products. In these regards, L’Oreal’s ambition is to be an exemplary company worldwide and integrates ethics into the very heart of its business practices. In 2017, the group was recognized for the eighth time by the Ethisphere Institute as one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies”. The values of L’Oreal and ethical principles guide the company in the every-day actions. L’Oreal is also in 1st place of France’s CAC 40 companies ranks for the Observatory on corporate reputation.

IWGS 2017 workshop report: the 8th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geostreaming

The ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geostreaming (IWGS) was held for the eighth time in conjunction with the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACMGIS 2017). The workshop has been a successful event that attracted participants from both academia and industry. The workshop addressed topics that are at the intersection of data streaming and geospatial systems. The workshop fostered an environment where geospatial researchers can benefit from the advances in geosensing technologies and data streaming systems.

The Pickers

The Pickers Ernest J. Finney (bio) Scott & edwards, antiques, paintings, prints, furniture, oriental rugs, silver, porcelain, books. She stepped back a little so the receptionist could see who she was and buzz her in. auctions, estates, appraisals. It was like being admitted into a fantasy world. Anything was possible in this building. The receptionist, still on the phone, nodded her back through the second security door to Bernard’s office. She was a minute or so early for her appointment. “And what do we have today, Tracy?” She could hear the usual sneer in his voice, as if her being there at all was somehow laughable. [End Page 108] Click for larger view View full resolution Caryatid, Amedeo Modigliani, The New Art Gallery Walsall [End Page 109] She took her time unlocking her briefcase and then arranging the five drawings, each in its archival sleeve, on his desk. Bernard was good; he didn’t lean forward: moving just his eyes, he studied each sketch in turn. He didn’t break a smile. Too stunned at what he was seeing? The expert on twentieth-century art. They had been playing at this for the last sixteen years. It had taken all her nerve to walk into this place that first time, when she was twenty years old. She hadn’t established herself yet. No, hadn’t defined herself yet; that was more accurate. Worse, she hadn’t understood it was just another game with pages of rules that got more complicated as the years went on. That what happened between Bernard and Mrs. Scott and herself would keep changing as the risks increased, so none of them could predict the pattern of the next encounter. But with all their knowledge and experience and degrees, they were still sitting ducks. And the best part was they wouldn’t let themselves understand that. Bernard’s office was as huge as most living rooms, one wall covered with framed degrees and awards and photos, another with shelves filled with books, porcelain, and carvings. She had not tried to imitate this decor, rich people’s decor, in her town house. What their own homes were like she couldn’t imagine. “Tracy, I’ll have to check these out, of course.” “Be my guest. I’ll give you until this Friday; today is Tuesday. I have an appointment to show them to someone else on Saturday. And I’ll need a receipt. That’s right. Just write on my pad here,” and she spelled the name to piss him off. “A-m-e-d-e-o M-o-d-i-g-l-i-a-n-i, five sketches. Now sign it and date it. Very good, Bernard.” She picked up her briefcase and walked out. What a surge of strength she felt, reaching the street. She could lift their building up by one corner, given the right grip. And it wasn’t just her CDs and investments that made her feel rich, powerful. Though why was she still doing this, if not for the money? Because she was clever? For more money? She had to admit she wasn’t sure. She’d only allowed herself the challenge of engaging with Mrs. Scott half-a-dozen times. No, this was the eighth time: once every two years. ________ Later that morning, unsettled, she stopped by her mother’s new place. These visits were always by whim, never from a sense of duty. Her mother’s [End Page 110] current shop, one of a dozen or so through the years, was in a half-filled strip mall between a Chinese buffet and a beauty salon. Wheeled racks of clothes lined the sidewalk out front. A group of kitchen chairs, red vinyl, patched with duct tape. A trike, a plastic rocking horse. Her mother knew her customers. She’d been ashamed to be seen in any of her mother’s places when she was a kid. But she’d had no choice but to work there then. Her mother, slim as ever, hair dyed carrot orange this time, was watching her though one of the pristine front windows: she cleaned them herself with vinegar and crumpled newspapers. The...

Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer

Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer Stephen Berry (bio) Last year's annual meeting in Dallas marked the eighth time the Association has met in Texas and the second time in Dallas (1974). We have also met in Houston (2003, 1985, 1971, and 1957) and in Fort Worth (1999 and 1991). Program Committee chairs Daniel C. Littlefield and Mark M. Smith worked with President John B. Boles and Local Arrangements Committee chair Stephanie Cole to put together a stellar opening plenary on Texas as a demographic, social, and political bellwether for the South. Other notable features of the program included President Boles's retrospective on his thirty-year tenure as editor of the Journal of Southern History; a panel, sponsored by the Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, amusingly titled, "How Many Committees Do I Have to Be On?: Strategies for Professional Advancement"; a roundtable, sponsored by the Committee on Minorities in the SHA, on the long history and future prospects of historically black colleges and universities; and the now traditional "Southern History in the Headlines" panel, which featured Jim Downs, Nell Irvin Painter, Karen L. Cox, and Marjorie J. Spruill and focused on Trumpism, women's rights, guns, and policing in the South. Darlene Clark Hine received a standing ovation in accepting the Association's John Hope Franklin Lifetime Achievement Award on Friday night. In recent years, the Association has also hosted a marquee event on Saturday evening; in Dallas we held a magnificently catered reception at the Sixth Floor Museum, cosponsored by Southern Methodist University and made possible by Stephanie Cole's creativity and fund-raising prowess. She and her committee set a fund-raising record in support of the Dallas meeting, and we should all be very grateful. The strength of both the program and the local arrangements was reflected in a strong number of conferees. Attendance in Dallas was 1,125—a robust showing for a meeting west of the Mississippi River. [End Page 413] The Executive Council convened in Dallas on Wednesday, November 8, and welcomed aboard new Council members Nancy Bercaw, Craig Thompson Friend, and Joseph P. Reidy. Elisabeth Cawthon and Robert Smale joined in their first years as representatives of the European History Section and Latin American and Caribbean Section, respectively. The Council had a relatively short agenda. Topics of note included the adoption of lowered annual membership rates for K–12 teachers ($15) and contingent faculty ($20); the commitment to explore the possibility of a joint meeting with the Western History Association in 2022; and the election of Edward E. Baptist, Gaines Foster, Cherisse Jones-Branch, and Randy J. Sparks to the Nominating Committee. (Lesley J. Gordon will continue over from last year to serve as chair.) During the Council meeting, Journal editor Randal L. Hall reported two welcome developments. First, downloads of Journal content through our new Project Muse portal have been brisk, indicating a solid new revenue stream for the Association. Second, the Rice University history department has arranged to fund a sixth-year graduate student editing fellowship at the Journal; Rice has named the position the Boles Editing Fellow in honor of Journal editor emeritus John B. Boles. The Association is now accepting nominations for one of its most significant awards: the John W. Blassingame Award for distinguished scholarship and/or mentorship in African American history. Committee members are Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University, chair; Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg; and J. William Harris, University of New Hampshire. Letters of nomination should be sent to manager@thesha.org by June 1, 2018. The SHA has upgraded its website, which now features a sleeker design and easier checkout process. Recurring memberships are now available for new members, and current members can switch to recurring to avoid the annual headache of renewal. Members can change their address (see thesha.org/update-your-address), and those who want to save trees or shelf space can now opt for a digital-only subscription to the Journal. The website's more sophisticated administrative backend also allows us to host affiliate websites, including the European History Section (thesha.org/ehs) and the Journal itself (thesha.org/jsh). We are greatly...

Dynamic panel-data-based groundwater level prediction and decomposition in an arid hardrock–alluvium aquifer

The comprehensive recognition of groundwater level, especially in arid and semiarid areas, is important in many hydrogeological and hydrological studies. This research aims at predicting and decomposing groundwater level using dynamic panel-data (D-PD) method in an arid hardrock–alluvium Al-Buraimi region, Oman–UAE border. The D-PD method incorporates temporal and spatial variations to predict groundwater level and detects effects that are not simply computable in pure cross-sectional or pure time-series methods. Monthly rainfall, potential evapotranspiration and artificial abstraction, as independent variables, were calculated for 39 Thiessen polygons. The D-PD model was developed to predict groundwater level for the calibration (October 1996 to September 2008) and validation (October 2008 to September 2012) periods. The calibrated D-PD model was then used to decompose the groundwater level hydrograph and to quantify the influence of climate, artificial abstraction, “unobservable spatial-specific effect” and “unobservable time-specific effect” components. The results show significant effect of rainfall on the second time lag, while artificial abstraction and potential evapotranspiration as surrogate of natural groundwater abstraction have influence on the fourth and eighth time lags on the groundwater level prediction. It is found that “unobservable spatial-specific effects” and “unobservable time-specific effects” components of the D-PD model highly influence groundwater level prediction in the study area. The proper match obtained from D-PD method between computed and observed groundwater levels in the study area indicates that the method is efficient and robust and proposes its application to predict and decompose groundwater level variations in regions with complex hydrogeology.

The KGB and Its Enduring Legacy

ABSTRACTThe creation of the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti in 1995 represented the eighth time that the Russian secret police underwent an organizational transformation since the contemporary service was created in the form of the Cheka in 1917. The post-Soviet Russian security services have been shaped by the early Soviet secret police’s identity as a domestic security service protecting the Bolshevik Party. After the USSR collapsed, the KGB did not die; its power increased to a level not seen since the Andropov era. The FSB is the most direct successor to the KGB’s domestic apparatus and functions as both an intelligence agency and the extrajudicial political police of the Russian Government. The FSB has become the dominant security institution in Russia, which is emblematic of the Russian state’s continuing and historical obsession with domestic security and the use of extrajudicial force to maintain political stability.

25-Year Anniversary of Yudin Readings

The article describes the history of the library, its collections and the owner - Siberian manufacturer Gennady Vasilyevich Yudin. Uneasy fate of the Yudin’s Collection, his relationship with domestic and foreign counterparts had led to the ambiguity of his contribution and recognition of his achievements. However, since 1990, there are conducted Yudin Readings, and in 2015 the Readings were held for the eighth time. His heritage is being studied, catalogued, contributing to the reconstruction of the past of Siberia and Russia.

Cooperation between Polish and French Pneumonologists.

A conference jointly organised by Polish and French pneumonologists was held for the eighth time [...]

Repeated hormonal treatment and laparoscopic ovum pick-up followed by in vitro embryo production in goats raised in the tropics

The objectives of this study were to evaluate the ovarian response of oocyte donor goats which underwent seven repeated ovulation hormonal treatments and laparoscopic ovum pick-up (Experiment 1), and to compare the In vitro production (IVP) of embryos from goats hormonally treated for eighth time to IVP of embryos from females with a single hormonal treatment (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 12 goats were subjected to 7 repeated hormonal treatments and laparoscopic ovum pick-up (LOPU) every 2–3 weeks, and the following variables were recorded: number and size of punctured follicles, number of recovered cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs), recovery rate and COCs quality. In Experiment 2, IVP of embryos from goats hormonally treated for eighth time (repeated-treated group, RT) was compared with IVP of embryos from 10 other goats with only one hormonal treatment (single-treated group, ST). In this step, in addition to variables observed in Experiment 1, cleavage, blastocyst rates at Days 7 and 8 of culture, hatched rate and the number of blastomeres per embryo were also evaluated. In Experiment 1, when comparing LOPU sessions, no difference (P>0.05) was verified for number of punctured follicles, number of recovered COCs and recovery rate. However the percentage of large follicles was different (P<0.05) between LOPU 1 (27.7±10.5) and 7 (12.4±12.1), the latter being similar to sessions 2 (13.9±10.9), 3 (13.4±7.9), 4 (13.2±10.7), 5 (22.4±14.7) and 6 (17.7±15.8). The percentage of COCs suitable for IVM was lower (P<0.05) for LOPU 1 (80.6%), 2 (82.4%) and 3 (79.7%) than LOPU 6 (91.3%) and 7 (95.2%). In Experiment 2, total number of follicles aspirated/goat and total number of COCs recovered were similar (P>0.05) for RT (18.0±5.8 and 12.3±3.7, respectively) and ST (19.4±7.8 and 15.8±7.7, respectively) groups. However, the recovery rate was lower (P<0.05) in the RT vs the ST group (68.5% and 81.4%). The percentage of small, medium and large follicles was similar (P>0.05), respectively, for RT (28%, 55% and 17%) and ST (20%, 65% and 15%) groups. The percentage of COCs suitable for IVM had no difference (P>0.05) for RT (96.6%) and ST (93.7%) groups. No significant difference was observed between RT and ST groups for: cleavage rate (68.6% vs 67.0%), blastocyst rate at Days 7 (27.9% vs 31.8%) and 8 (27.9% vs 34.1%), hatched rate (33.3% vs 53.3%), and blastomeres/embryo (252.9 vs 229.8). In conclusion, in goats raised in tropical climate, the IVP of embryos from oocytes obtained by LOPU could be an efficient and suitable method for rapid propagation of genetically superior animals. Donor goats, even after repeated hormonal treatments followed by LOPU, maintained the ovarian response for oocyte and embryo production, becoming close to reality the term “oocyte permanent donors”.

Würdigung der Preisträger des "GMA-Preis für junge Lehrende 2013"

At the annual meeting of the German Society for Medical Education 2013 in Graz, the winners of the GMA award for young medical educators were awarded for the eighth time for outstanding achievements in medical university teaching by the board of the German Society for Medical Education (GMA). This prize is set up by the working group young medical educators of the German Society for Medical Education, which has set itself the goal of improving and strengthening the appreciation, support and training opportunities for young professionals in higher education. A total of six applications from 6 locations were submitted for the competition (Zurich/Frankfurt, Bonn, Giessen, Frankfurt, Erlangen, Hamburg). For the first time a proposal from Switzerland was submitted.

Mediation and Culture: The Example of the ICC International Commercial Mediation Competition

The International Commercial Mediation Competition is organized by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris, which held the event for the eighth time in February 2013. As the competition has grown, participation has become more and more diverse and thus mediation and negotiation have become more and more cross‐cultural. This led the ICC to invite external research on culture at the competition in February 2011. In this article, I discuss this student competition, the external research project question, and the culture of the competition. I also identify some of the further cultural issues raised by referring to relevant research on conflict and mediation across cultures, and conclude with some thoughts on how better to conceptualize the field of cross‐cultural mediation in terms of a systems approach.

Quickly quantifying the dissolution fingerprints of compound Danshen dropping pill by HPLC.

To firstly accurately overall determine the all components of Compound Danshen Dropping Pills (CDDP) and assess how about the authentic quality is for each bath of samples through a quantified fingerprint that only can qualitatively identified which kind of a herbal or Traditional Chinese Medicine may be. The systematically quantified fingerprint method (SQFM) was employed to identify that the qualities of S4 and S6 were belong to best (grade 1), those of S3, S5, S7, S8 and S9 belong to better (grade 2), those of S2 and S10 belong to good (grade 3), and only S1 falling to fine (grade 4) where those were all with 19 fingerprint peaks. On the basis, the important HPLC dissolution fingerprints (DFPs) of CDDPs were meticulously established to investigate the dynamic process in water, 0.1 mol/L hydrogen chloride (HCl) and 0.5% sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS), respectively, in which SQFM executed the excellently quantified analyses for the DFPs. During the evaluation, the eighth time points of DFPs were selected as the standards for all dissolving to calculate how high are the macro quantitative similarity ( P m ) of DFPs for the other different time points. Finally in terms of Weibull function, lnln [1/(1- P m )]=-0.5951 x (2)+3.8146 x -4.5195 ( r =0.9974), lnln [1/(1- P m )]=-0.5555 x (2)+3.5814 x -4.6126 ( r =0.9972) were acquired in water and in 0.1 mol/L HCl solution respectively, but without in the SDS solution. In order to specially monitor the dissolution dynamic changes of the important fingerprints to guide the preparation technology and improve their bioavailability, We investigated the four strong peaks of CDDP-DFP and calculated out the fitting equations as follows, lnln [1/(1- A i / A max )]= y , the first one (No.6, Protocatechualdehyde), y =-0.5603 x (2)+3.4516 x -3.8974 ( r =0.9988); the second one (No.19, Salvianolic acid B), y =-1.7127 x (2) +9.6655x-11.947 ( r =0.9897); the third one (No.4, Danshensu), y =-0.4239 x (2)+3.0436 x -3.6276 ( r =0.9985); the forth one (No.17, unkown), y =-0.5019 x (2)+3.3706 x -4.1053 ( r =0.9979), which indicated Salvianolic acid B with a prominent discrepancy from others. The quantified HPLC fingerprint can perfectly both quantitatively reflected the authentic quality of CDDPs and accurately overall quantitatively measure the dissolution dynamic varieties in vitro to provide the important information for bioavailability, in which water is proven to be the best dissolution medium for CDDP whose T 50 =4.1 min (released 50%) and T 90 =8.0 min (released 90%).

Mišljenje pčelara o važnosti manifestacija meda i zaštiti zemljopisnog porijekla meda, primjer Istre (Hrvatska)

Events dedicated to agricultural products are becoming increasingly attractive to visitors and / or tourists and an important part of destination promotion. "Honey Days" in Pazin is the annual regional exhibition of honey that was most recently in February 2013, held for the eighth time. The purpose of the study was to determine participants’ (beekeeper’s) opinions on this exhibition in order to plan future exhibitions that will meet the demands of participants and to become a better tourist product of the destination, Istria. The survey was conducted during the exhibition in February 2012 by pupils of Gymnasium and Vocational School Juraj Dobrila in Pazin. A total of 34 beekeepers, all participants of the exhibition, were included in the survey. The survey contained a total of 31 open and close-ended questions. Questions were related to socio-demographic characteristics, beekeeping methods, and motives of participation. The dates about the protection of geographical origin of honey obtained by this primary research were compared with research conducted in 2011 and 2012 with the attendees of the school of beekeeping held in Pazin in May 2011 (when 40 questionnaires were collected) and in May 2012 (when 29 questionnaires were collected). The conclusion is that participants generally consider participation in this or similar exhibitions very important. The majority of respondents expressed that building relationships with other producers and promotion were the most important motives for making decisions about participation in this event. Protecting the geographical origin of honey, according to participants in the study, is very important for beekeepers. It could be concluded that the exhibition "Honey Days" in Pazin plays an important role in the promotion of honey and other bee products and beekeeping in general, but also that this event can be developed into an attractive and interesting product for rural tourism.