Emergence Of New Classes Research Articles

Emergence of New Classes of Recreational Drugs—Synthetic Cannabinoids and Cathinones

Designer drugs represent an increasingly popular form of recreational substance abuse, especially amongst young adults. The two classes of designer drugs that have recently risen to prominence are the synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones. These substances are not detected by conventional drug screening methods and can often be associated with serious health consequences, including seizures, renal failure and death. Thus, clinicians should be familiar with the signs, symptoms, and toxicities associated with the use of these substances, and maintain a high level of suspicion for synthetic drugs as an alternative means of "getting high." We present a case of a 20-year-old college student who presented to the emergency department with altered mental status and severe agitation who later admitted to using bath salts. The goal of this article is to raise awareness about these new designer drugs, their clinical presentation, and management of their intoxication.

Emerging technologies for the integration and intensification of downstream bioprocesses

Downstream processing is currently the major bottleneck for bioproduct generation. In contrast to the advances in fermentation processes, the tools used for downstream processes have struggled to keep pace in the last 20 years. Purification bottlenecks are quite serious, as these processes can account for up to 80% of the total production cost. Coupled with the emergence of new classes of bioproducts, for example, virus-like particles or plasmidic DNA, this has created a great need for superior alternatives. In this review, improved downstream technologies, including aqueous two-phase systems, expanded bed adsorption chromatography, convective flow systems, and fibre-based adsorbent systems, have been discussed. These adaptive methods are more suited to the burgeoning downstream processing needs of the future, enabling the cost-efficient production of new classes biomaterials with a high degree of purity, and thereby hold the promise to become indispensable tools in the pharmaceutical and food industries.

ChemInform Abstract: Kdo: A Critical Monosaccharide for Bacteria Viability

AbstractReview: ca. 150 refs.

The Modernization of Iran and the Development of the Persian Carpet Industry: The Neo-Classical Era in the Persian Carpet Industry, 1925–45

The two decades, 1925–45, witnessed a dramatic transformation and revitalization of the Persian carpet industry in response to developments in Iranian governance, society and economy. Two historical watersheds were covered by that period, notably the replacement of the Qajar dynasty by a modernizing administration under Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the subsequent wartime occupation of Iran jointly by the Soviet Union and Great Britain. It was during those two decades that Iran acquired a centralized system of government and the beginnings of a modern industrial base. The accompanying social transformation brought about the emergence of new classes of administrators and managers who constituted the dominant elite of the Reza Shah era. This twin process of centralization and modernization had a telling impact on Iranian culture and the arts, including the carpet arts.

Kdo: a critical monosaccharide for bacteria viability

Covering: 2000 to 2010

Is the counterurbanization process a chaotic concept in academic literature?

Counterurbanization has been considered as a chaotic concept in the academic literature. It entails demographic movement and deconcentration in some urban areas and appears to be a new process of popu­lation's spatial distribution and the definition of a new settlement pattern which may exceed the Central Place Theory. The results of this process and demographic movement have led to societal diversification and even to the emergence of new classes in the countryside and new urban-rural relationships. We can ask ourselves if there are similarities to the Theory of Even Polycentric Development and if counterurbanization is really an opportunity for peripheral and rural areas. Academic literature about the development of the new economy tied to the III Technological Revolution demonstrates that the obstacle within economic development of spatial dimension and geographical distance is abating. In such circumstances it is not surprising that both problems and opportunities arise when it comes to making territory planning policies. This paper focuses on analyzing the international scientific literature on counterurbanization -particularly that of Anglosaxon and Latin-America countries- with an aim to contribute to the search of meaning in the arguments which support the definition of counterurbanization and to foster its research. .

Diversification in the internet economy

We investigate market forces that would lead to the emergence of new classes of players in the sponsored search advertising market. We report a multi-fold diversification triggered by an inherent feature of the sponsored search market, namely, capacity constraints, arising from the fact that there is a limit on the number of available advertisement slots, especially for the popular keywords. As a result, a significant pool of interested advertisers are left out. We present a comparative study of two scenarios motivated by capacity constraints - one where the additional capacity is provided by for-profit agents (or, mediators), who compete for slots in the original auction, draw traffic, and run their own sub-auctions, and the other, where the additional capacity is provided by the auctioneer herself, by essentially acting as a mediator and running a single combined auction. The quality of the additional capacity is measured by its fitness factor. We observe that the single combined-auction model seems inferior to the mediator-based model and market becomes more capacity efficient in the latter. For instance, the revenue of the auctioneer always increases when mediators are involved, unlike the auctioneer based scenario where often there is a tradeoff between the revenue and the capacity. Further, the social value (i.e. efficiency) always increases when mediators are involved. Thus, our analysis indicates that there are significant opportunities for diversification in the internet economy and we should expect it to continue to develop richer structure, with room for different types of market entities and mechanisms to coexist.

QUANTUM SIMULATIONS OF DUAL GATE MOSFET DEVICES: BUILDING AND DEPLOYING COMMUNITY NANOTECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE TOOLS ON NANOHUB.ORG

Undesirable short-channel effects associated with the relentless downscaling of conventional CMOS devices have led to the emergence of new classes of MOSFETs. This has led to new and unprecedented challenges in computational nanoelectronics. The device sizes have already reached the level of tens of nanometers where quantum nature of charge-carriers dominates the device operation and performance. The goal of this paper is to describe an on-going initiative on nanoHUB.org to provide new models, algorithms, approaches, and a comprehensive suite of freely-available web-based simulation tools for nanoscale devices with capabilities not yet available commercially. Three software packages nanoFET, nanoMOS and QuaMC are benchmarked in the simulation of a widely-studied high-performance novel MOSFET device. The impact of quantum mechanical effects on the device properties is elucidated and key design issues are suggested.

Pediatric CI therapy for stroke-induced hemiparesis in young children

In this laboratory we have developed a set of techniques that randomized controlled studies and a multisite randomized controlled trial have shown can substantially reduce the motor deficit of adult patients with mild to severe chronic strokes. Equivalent results have been obtained with adult patients after traumatic brain injury and brain resection. The basic technique, termed Constraint-Induced Movement therapy or CI therapy was derived directly from basic research with monkeys with mature motor systems and with monkeys given surgical intervention either on their day of birth or prenatally by intrauterine surgical procedures. We report here the results of two randomized controlled trials of CI therapy with young children with asymmetric upper extremity motor deficits of varied etiologies from 8 months to 8 years of age in one study and with children with hemiparesis consequent to prenatal, perinatal, or early antenatal stroke from 2 to 6 years old in a second study. The procedures used with children are very similar to those used with adults and diverge simply to make the basic techniques age-appropriate. All forms of CI therapy for the upper extremity to date involve 3 main elements: (1) intensive training of the more affected extremity, (2) prolonged restraint of the less affected extremity, (3) a ‘transfer package’ of techniques to induce transfer of therapeutic gains achieved in the laboratory to the life situation. The results in children with cerebral palsy are considerably better than those obtained in adults. Marked changes were observed in the quality of movement in the laboratory scored by masked observers from videotape; actual amount of use of the more affected arm in the life situation; active range of motion; and emergence of new classes of behaviour never performed before, such as in individual cases, fine thumb-forefinger grasp, supination, and use of the more affected extremity in crawling with palmar placement and rhythmic alteration. In the second experiment, the control group, after receiving usual and customary care for 6 months, was crossed over to receive CI therapy and exhibited results that were as good as those for the children receiving CI therapy first. Retention of treatment gains was approximately 70% at 6 months after the end of treatment. For some children there was no decrement in retention while for others there was a marked drop-off. One of the important factors contributing to good retention was the compliance of parents with the recommended post-treatment regimen. When retention is poor, brush-up periods may be of value. In the first experiment children were treated for 6 hr/day for 21 consecutive days, while in the second experiment treatment occurred only on the weekdays of the 3-wk treatment period (15 days). The results were at least as good with 15 days of treatment as with 21 consecutive days, thereby allowing the protocol to be fit into the usual therapist work week and making it more practical and less expensive for clinical use. CI therapy does not make movement normal in children with cerebral palsy with asymmetric upper extremity motor disorders. However, as carried out in this laboratory, it can produce a substantial improvement in a majority of cases.

Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library for High-Speed Wide Area Networks

The growth of high-speed wide area networks (WANs) has enabled the emergence of new classes of data intensive, wide area computing applications, such as the remote analysis and exploration of data and distributed data mining. The de facto standard for reliable data transfers is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Despite improvements in TCP over the years (to reduce overhead and achieve higher throughput), it is still a common experience for the end-to-end data rates of wide area data mining and data analysis applications to be inefficient. This paper introduces a library called SABUL (Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library) which merges features of UDP and TCP to produce a light-weight protocol with flow control, rate control and reliable transmission mechanisms that is designed for data intensive applications over wide area high performance networks. In this paper, we describe the library and give experimental evidence of its effectiveness.

Pleonastic exclusion in the European Information Society

The dramatic changes in communication technology and the media this last decade of the century have inspired enthusiasm among business community, policy makers and academic scholars. Visions of prosperity and social wealth have become the core arguments for defending the strong emphasis on the Information Society “project”. Europe is working hard towards research and development but is it taking the right way? A lot can be said about the differences of the communication infrastructure between the rich North and the poor South (Vincent, 1998), but not much attention is paid to the situation in the countries of the Periphery. This paper intents to focus specifically on this area and to take a look at the Greek experience. Greece is an EU member State but at the same time is part of the Periphery standing inbetween the rich industrialised North and the poor developing South. The paper argues that, despite the citizens’ needs and wishes, the promotion of the European Information Society (IS) in Greece is characterised by disproportionality. Another kind of capital difference between groups with different socio-economic status is emerging. The `Knowledge-Gap' phenomenon becomes evident in that a high percentage of the population is excluded as users of the new media, due to reasons related to their educational and financial status. Additionally, a new phenomenon of “pleonastic exclusion” is taking place, as a result of the enormous numbers of channels of communication, which forces audiences to a continuous selection-exclusion of information sources. The paper investigates the consequences of the IS as it is currently planned departing from data of a local level, exploring the Greek experience, and relating them to issues of global significance such as the emergence of new classes.

A framework for optimizing the cost and performance of next-generation IP routers

The explosive growth of Internet users, the increased user demand for bandwidth, and the declining cost of technology have all resulted in the emergence of new classes of high-speed distributed IP-router architectures with packet-forwarding rates of the order of gigabits, or even terabits, per second. This paper develops an analytical framework for modeling and analyzing the impact of technological factors on the cost-performance tradeoffs in distributed-router architectures. The main tradeoff in a distributed router results naturally from moving the main packet-forwarding and processing power from a centralized forwarding engine to an ensemble of smaller forwarding engines, either dedicated to or shared among the line cards. Processing packets in these smaller engines can be much cheaper (by as much two to three orders of magnitude) than in a centralized forwarding engine. Therefore, the main goal of our modeling framework is to determine an optimal allocation of processing power to the forwarding engines (in a distributed router) to minimize overall router cost while achieving a given level of packet-forwarding performance. Two types of router models are analyzed using the proposed framework: a distributed-router architecture and parallel-router architecture.

Ovarian cancer, from the laboratory to the clinic: Challenges for the future: ESMO-Award Lecture, ECCO-8 Paris, 28 October - 2 November 1995

Over the past 20 years ovarian cancer has provided a vivid illustration of the successes, failures and challenges for the medical oncologist. During that time the results of treatment have substantially improved; in the West of Scotland for example, for women aged under 55, 3-year survival rates have increased from 36% to 50%. One reason for this was probably the introduction of effective agents such as cisplatin in the mid-1970s and then carboplatin in the mid-1980s. The recent introduction of taxoids promises further improvement in the future. It is important to remember, however, that the best results will be obtained by an optimal organization for the delivery of treatment; national audit studies have shown that factors such as management in integrated clinics can have a major impact on outcome. Nevertheless, the majority of patients still die from the disease; when relapse occurs, clinical drug resistance eventually proves fatal despite further treatment. What are the fundamental mechanisms by which this resistance develops, and what means are available to attempt its circumvention? Factors involved could be described as pharmacological or cellular. Pharmacological resistance might best be addressed by increasing the doses of the drugs used, particularly, cis- or carboplatin. Three years ago we published the results of a randomized trial of 2 doses of cisplatin in 191 patients. At that stage a highly significant median survival advantage for the higher dose (100 mg/m2) of cisplatin was seen. However, a recent updated analysis with a median follow-up of 4 1/2 years shows a reduction in the survival benefit, with 4-year overall survival rates for high- and low-dose cisplatin of 32.4% and 26.6%, respectively. This suggests that a population of drug resistant ovarian cancer cells will eventually emerge despite the use of initial higher doses of cisplatin. A more dose-intensive approach is being pursued with carboplatin, and it seems clear that dose-increments over standard therapy of at least 4-fold will be necessary, to justify further randomized trials. Meanwhile, the alternative approach to delivering high drug concentrations, i.e. intraperitoneal (i.p.) chemotherapy, clearly merits further study, particularly in the light of a recently reported study in patients with minimal disease, which showed a significant survival benefit for i.p. cisplatin treatment. Cellular factors will probably prove to be crucial; studies using various cell lines suggest that multiple mechanisms are likely to be involved and these will need to be examined in relevant clinical material. After DNA damage induced by a range of cytotoxic agents has taken place in ovarian cancer cells, the key to sensitivity/resistance may well be the ability of these cells to engage the process of apoptosis. Several genes are involved in control of this process; these include the p53 gene, mutations of which have been linked to cisplatin resistance in our laboratory studies, as well as in clinical trials with carboplatin. We have also demonstrated an association in ovarian cancer cell lines between cisplatin resistance and microsatellite instability (indicative of defective mismatch repair) and the clinical relevance of this link is also being pursued. A thorough understanding of underlying mechanisms may lead to the rational development of therapeutic means for circumventing cisplatin-resistance in ovarian cancer; the emergence of new classes of drug such as taxoids as topoisomerase I inhibitors offers further promise of improvement in outcome in the next few years.

The computer spectrum: a perspective on the evolution of computing

A report from the IEEE Scientific Supercomputer Subcommittee traces and analyzes the evolution of computer classes and offers near-term projections. It examines business and scientific computers, the emergence of new classes, the supercomputer and the minicomputer, the evolution of the supercomputer, the emergence of the minisupercomputer, and the personal computer and the applications workstation. It provides a historical analysis of these trends and discusses the lack of comparable software developments.

Development and Crisis in Brazil, 1930-1983.

In this first English-language edition of a book that has seen thirteen printings in Brazil, Dr. Bresser Pereira analyzes Brazil's economy and politics from 1930, when the Brazilian industrial revolution began, up to July First addressing the period of strong development in Brazil between 1930 and 1961, he discusses at length the import-substitution model of industrialization; the emergence of new classes—industrialists, industrial workers, and especially the new technobureaucratic middle classes; the conflict between the traditional agrarian ideologies of coffee planters and the nationalistic and industrializing ideologies of the new classes; and the new realities of the 1950s that led to the crisis of the populist alliance between the industrial bourgeoisie and the workers. Next he explores the economic and political crisis of the sixties, centering on the Revolution of 1964, when an industrialized and fully capitalist— but still underdeveloped—Brazil experienced the cyclical movements of capitalism. The final chapters of the book examine the Brazilian miracle of 1967-1973, the economic slowdown of the 1970s that culminated in the severe recession of 1981, the dialectics between the process of abertura led by the military regime established in 1964 and the redemocratization process demanded by civil society, and the total crisis of 1983.

Naissance des bourgeoisies latino-américaines au XIXe siècle : le cas de l'Equateur

L'insertion des pays latino-américains dans la division du travail et le marché mondial, sous l'impulsion de la Révolution Industrielle, a provoqué pour bon nombre d'entre eux le développement de certains produits agricoles et artisanaux destinés à l'exportation. Il en résulte des phénomènes régionaux d'accumulation capitaliste et l'apparition de nouvelles classes, en un processus complexe, où les structures sociales ne sont pas forcément le produit de la dissolution des formes héritées de la colonisation ibérique.

Social Differentiation in Colonial Brazil

To the extent that the social sciences have been concerned with thestratification of Latin American societies they have shown a well-knowntendency to dichotomize their structures into a small upper class of wealthy and powerful landowners and a poor and powerless lower class hetero-geneously composed of rural workers, urban proletarians, petty traders, artisans, and the like. As a rule, the emergence of new classes and thegrowing internal differentiation of emergent or traditional classes are somewhat reluctantly admitted only as the societies of Latin America have demonstrated the ability to depart from their agrarian tradition and topursue the irreversible course of modernization. There has been a strong inclination to ignore or to minimize those aspects of the social structure which suggest a higher degree of complexity than the stereotype of a two-class system seems to indicate.