Updated Profile Research Articles

Estimation of relative permeability and capillary pressure for tight formations by assimilating field production data

A novel EnKF technique together with its detailed workflow has been developed and successfully applied to simultaneously evaluate relative permeability and capillary pressure for tight formations by history matching the field production data. The power-law model is firstly used to represent the relative permeability and capillary pressure curves, while its parameters are tuned automatically and finally determined once the production data have been assimilated completely. This technique has been validated by using a synthetic 2D reservoir model with two scenarios, where two-phase and three-phase relative permeabilities together with capillary pressure curves are evaluated, respectively. The estimated relative permeability and capillary pressure have been found to improve progressively and their corresponding uncertainties are mitigated gradually as more production data are assimilated. Finally, there exists an excellent agreement between both the updated relative permeability and capillary pressure curves and their corresponding reference curves, leading to excellent history matching results. As such, the uncertainties associated with both the updated relative permeability and capillary pressure curves and the updated production profiles are reduced significantly. The capillary pressure cannot be determined as accurately as the relative permeability due to its less sensitivity to the production data.

JASPAR 2014: an extensively expanded and updated open-access database of transcription factor binding profiles.

JASPAR (http://jaspar.genereg.net) is the largest open-access database of matrix-based nucleotide profiles describing the binding preference of transcription factors from multiple species. The fifth major release greatly expands the heart of JASPAR—the JASPAR CORE subcollection, which contains curated, non-redundant profiles—with 135 new curated profiles (74 in vertebrates, 8 in Drosophila melanogaster, 10 in Caenorhabditis elegans and 43 in Arabidopsis thaliana; a 30% increase in total) and 43 older updated profiles (36 in vertebrates, 3 in D. melanogaster and 4 in A. thaliana; a 9% update in total). The new and updated profiles are mainly derived from published chromatin immunoprecipitation-seq experimental datasets. In addition, the web interface has been enhanced with advanced capabilities in browsing, searching and subsetting. Finally, the new JASPAR release is accompanied by a new BioPython package, a new R tool package and a new R/Bioconductor data package to facilitate access for both manual and automated methods.

Virtual private social networks and a facebook implementation

The popularity of Social Networking Sites (SNS) is growing rapidly, with the largest sites serving hundreds of millions of users and their private information. The privacy settings of these SNSs do not allow the user to avoid sharing some information (e.g., name and profile picture) with all the other users. Also, no matter the privacy settings, this information is always shared with the SNS (that could sell this information or be hacked). To mitigate these threats, we recently introduced the concept of Virtual Private Social Networks (VPSNs). In this work we propose the first complete architecture and implementation of VPSNs for Facebook. In particular, we address an important problem left unexplored in our previous research—that is the automatic propagation of updated profiles to all the members of the same VPSN. Furthermore, we made an in-depth study on performance and implemented several optimization to reduce the impact of VPSN on user experience. The proposed solution is lightweight, completely distributed, does not depend on the collaboration from Facebook, does not have a central point of failure, it offers (with some limitations) the same functionality as Facebook, and apart from some simple settings, the solution is almost transparent to the user. Thorough experiments, with an extended set of parameters, we have confirmed the feasibility of the proposal and have shown a very limited time-overhead experienced by the user while browsing Facebook pages.

Rental Real Estate Ownership Prior to the Great Recession

The purpose of this study was twofold: To provide an updated profile of rental real estate investors and to investigate household characteristics associated with investment in rental real estate prior to the Great Recession. Based on the Life Cycle Hypothesis of Savings, analyses were conducted using data from the 2004 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Multivariate results indicated that household net worth was the most significant correlate of rental real estate ownership. Controlling for demographic and economic factors, Black householders were more likely to own rental property than White householders, and householders aged 55–64 years were more likely to own rental property than householders aged 25–34 years Homeowners and those who were housing‐cost burdened on their primary homes were more likely to own rental property. The result showing that housing‐cost burdened homeowners were more likely to own rental real estate compared with those who were not housing‐cost burdened raises questions about overreliance on real estate as an investment prior to the Great Recession.

Hybrid Scheme with Adaptive Replication and Mobility Anchoring Point (MAP) in Wireless Networks

Replication strategy is mostly useful for replicating the mobile user's profile at selected locations from which some callers have higher calling rate. Location management scheme also include replication strategy to reduce the location lookup cost of called mobile user. It plays important role in personal communication services in order to reduce call setup cost, call setup time, and increases the QoS (quality of service). In prior replication schemes, called user's location profile is placed at some fixed and limited number of visitor location registers (VLRs) based on call history of the caller. In prior hybrid schemes location update and replication strategies are combined together. These prior hybrid schemes apply pointer forwarding strategy and replication. But these schemes have limitations like holding "loose" form of location profile and higher location update cost. We have proposed a new hybrid scheme which includes adaptive replication of updated user's location profile and mobility anchoring point (MAP) for location update. The main objective of the proposed scheme is to reduce call setup cost and call setup time. In order to achieve the objective, adaptive replication is applied at certain visitor location registers (VLRs) according to movement of caller. The replica is kept updated at MAP and replicated to neighbor VLRs as per movement of the caller. We have presented fluid-flow based analytical modeling which shows that proposed scheme outperforms the prior hybrid scheme.

Online Enrollment System of Liceo de Cagayan University

The Online Enrollment System was proposed for the enhancement of the current enrollment system of Liceo de Cagayan University. The study aimed at creating a system that would provide another option for enrolling and that would compensate for the school’s lack of manpower and time-consuming system. The database of the system is the dbEnrollment. It contains many tables and stores information such as student’s academic records, secretary’s files and records, class schedules, pre-requisites, subjects, curricula and other essential data needed in the system. The proposed system caters to old, freshmen, transferees and shiftees with the following services: subject evaluation, posting of grades, viewing of curriculum, add and update profile. The system lessens the enrollment time, speeds up file management, and minimizes inaccuracies and errors.  Keywords - Enrollment, Evaluation, Interface, Online, Academic load

An Improved Tool Path Model Including Gyroscopic Effect for Instantaneous Cutting Force Prediction in High-Speed Milling

The efficiency of the high-speed milling process is often limited by the occurrence of chatter. In order to predict the occurrence of chatter, accurate models are necessary. With the speed increasing, gyroscopic effect plays an important pole on the system behavior, including dynamic characteristic and rotating behavior. Considering the influence of gyroscopic effect on rotating behavior, an updated model for the milling process is presented which features as model of the equivalent profile of tool. In combination with this model, a nonlinear instantaneous cutting force model is proposed. The use of this updated equivalent profile of tool results in significant differences in the static uncut thickness compared to the traditional model.

A National Profile of Teacher Education Faculty: The Construction of an Online Survey

Physical education teacher education faculty are responsible for educating the next generation of teachers. Despite their significant role, little is known about their characteristics, work preferences, or role responsibilities. The last comprehensive study undertaken to examine these variables was conducted approximately 25 years ago by Metzler and Freedman (1985). The purpose of the current investigation is to describe and validate an instrument for obtaining an updated comprehensive profile of physical education teacher education faculty in the United States. An online survey consisting of six sections was developed. To establish validity and confirm the psychometric quality of the instrument, test–retest was conducted with a subsample of 40 participants. In addition, Cronbach alpha analysis was conducted to provide support for the internal structure of the instrument. The survey accurately identifies and discriminates between the current characteristics and work responsibilities of today's teacher educators and facilitates comparison between teacher educators today to those who completed the survey nearly 25 years ago.

ChemInform Abstract: The C19‐Diterpenoid Alkaloids

AbstractReview: 1100 refs.

Ontological content‐based filtering for personalised newspapers

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe a new ontological content‐based filtering method for ranking the relevance of items for readers of news items, and its evaluation. The method has been implemented in ePaper, a personalised electronic newspaper prototype system. The method utilises a hierarchical ontology of news; it considers common and related concepts appearing in a user's profile on the one hand, and in a news item's profile on the other hand, and measures the “hierarchical distances” between these concepts. On that basis it computes the similarity between item and user profiles and rank‐orders the news items according to their relevance to each user.Design/methodology/approachThe paper evaluates the performance of the filtering method in an experimental setting. Each participant read news items obtained from an electronic newspaper and rated their relevance. Independently, the filtering method is applied to the same items and generated, for each participant, a list of news items ranked according to relevance.FindingsThe results of the evaluations revealed that the filtering algorithm, which takes into consideration hierarchically related concepts, yielded significantly better results than a filtering method that takes only common concepts into consideration. The paper determined a best set of values (weights) of the hierarchical similarity parameters. It also found out that the quality of filtering improves as the number of items used for implicit updates of the profile increases, and that even with implicitly updated profiles, it is better to start with user‐defined profiles.Originality/valueThe proposed content‐based filtering method can be used for filtering not only news items but items from any domain, and not only with a three‐level hierarchical ontology but any‐level ontology, in any language.

COMA server for protein distant homology search

Detection of distant homology is a widely used computational approach for studying protein evolution, structure and function. Here, we report a homology search web server based on sequence profile-profile comparison. The user may perform searches in one of several regularly updated profile databases using either a single sequence or a multiple sequence alignment as an input. The same profile databases can also be downloaded for local use. The capabilities of the server are illustrated with the identification of new members of the highly diverse PD-(D/E)XK nuclease superfamily. http://www.ibt.lt/bioinformatics/coma/

Updated profile of Russia paint industry released

Updated profile of Russia paint industry released

Social Change and Social Policy in Taiwan: New Poverty, M‐shaped Society and Policy Implications

AbstractAlong with radical changes in the global economy and family structure, Taiwan has experienced the re‐emergence of the poverty problem that was thought disappearing after remarkable economic growth in the 1980s. This article would like to provide an updated profile of social changes in Taiwan, with special reference to the related poverty issues like new poverty and the M‐shaped society, as Ohmae defines it in his well‐known book. To begin with, we place some of the most recent developments in the context of unbalanced growth and increasing family crises. Ironically, people in Taiwan have widely used the terms of new poverty and M‐shaped society since the end of 1990s, while the “economic miracle” the island wrought still remains a fond memory. Official statistics on poverty, unemployment, divorce, mental disease, and child abuse have all shown increases. The trend is a matter of serious concern. Unlike in Japan, the earnings of workers in Taiwan did not significantly decrease in recent years. Taiwan seems to deviate from the M‐shaped society. We have developed two tentative but handy yardsticks for examining the shift of the middle class: the “balance index” and the “M‐ratio”. The former provides as a relative measure among different income groups, while the latter is designed to indicate the change of the middle class relative to the overall contribution of the people. Finally, we also discuss its implications to social policy in Taiwan.

2008 Practice Analysis Study of Hand Therapy

In 2008, the Hand Therapy Certification Commission (HTCC), in consultation with Professional Examination Service, performed a practice analysis study of hand therapy, the fourth in a series of similar studies performed by HTCC over a 23-year period. An updated profile of the domains, tasks, knowledge, and techniques and tools used in hand therapy practice was developed by subject-matter experts representing a broad range of experiences and perspectives. A large-scale online survey of hand therapists from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand overwhelmingly validated this profile. Additionally, trends in hand therapy practice and education were explored and compared with the previous studies. The results led to the revision of the test specifications for the Hand Therapy Certification Examination; permitted refinement of the definition and scope of hand therapy; identified professional development and continuing education opportunities; and guided HTCC policy decisions regarding exam and recertification eligibility requirements.

Measuring Child Poverty in South Africa: Sensitivity to the Choice of Equivalence Scale and an Updated Profile

This paper offers evidence on the sensitivity of child poverty in South Africa to changes in the adult equivalence scale (AES) and updates the child poverty profile based on the Income and Expenditure Survey 2005/06. Setting the poverty line at the 40th percentile of households calculated with different AESs the scope and composition of child poverty are found to be relatively insensitive to the scale used. The rankings of children of different ages, girls versus boys, racial groupings and children living in rural versus urban areas are unaffected by choice of AES, although some provincial rankings on the poverty headcount measure are. The proportions of children and households ‘correctly’ identified as poor for the full range of scales is extremely high. These findings support the argument that it may be appropriate for profiling poverty in South Africa to use a poverty line based on a per capita welfare measure. For the construction of the child poverty profile, per capita income is used as the welfare indicator with the poverty line set at the 40th percentile of household. The profile suggests that poverty amongst children is more extensive than amongst the population or adults even after the massive injection of transfers into households with poor children through the child support grant. The child poverty headcount, depth and severity are all highest amongst children age 0–4 and lowest amongst those aged 15–17, who are not yet beneficiaries of the grants. They are also highest amongst African and Coloured children. Large variations across provinces remain. The analysis underlines the importance of prioritising children in the fight against poverty, particularly in their earliest years.

416 POSTER Phase I trial of ixabepilone administered as a 24-hour infusion in patients with advanced solid malignancies: updated safety profile and maximum tolerated dose

416 POSTER Phase I trial of ixabepilone administered as a 24-hour infusion in patients with advanced solid malignancies: updated safety profile and maximum tolerated dose

A new species of Australian freetail bat Mormopterus eleryi sp. nov. (Chiroptera: Molossidae) and a taxonomic reappraisal of M. norfolkensis (Gray)

The species-level taxonomy of Australian Mormopterus has a long history of uncertainty. In this paper we review in detail the historic problems associated with determining the relationship between the norfolkensis holotype (allegedly from Norfolk Island) and forms occurring on mainland Australia. Using external and cranial characters, we establish that the holotype is conspecific with mainland specimens and we provide a redescription of the species. We also describe a new species, Mormopterus eleryi sp. nov. from central Australia. Updated allozyme profiles (a total of 40 putative loci) show that M. norfolkensis and M. eleryi sp. nov. diverge from one another at an average of 49% fixed differences and each diverge from the ‘planiceps-beccarii-loriae’ complex at an average of 48% and 45% fixed differences respectively. While both species are readily diagnosable by external and cranial features, they are especially distinctive in the morphology of the upper molars and glans penis. Echolocation call profiles as recorded by ANABAT bat detectors also show both species to have unique search phase calls compared to other Australian Mormopterus species. Both M norfolkensis and M. eleryi sp. nov. are known from less than 30 museum specimens each.

Medical education and communication companies involved in CME: An updated profile

Medical Education and Communication Companies (MECCs) represent approximately 21% of the providers accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), yet relatively little is known about these organizations in the greater continuing medical education (CME) community. Two prior studies described them, but powerful changes in the regulatory environment have impacted the structure and organization of these companies. The investigators administered a 32-item questionnaire to a select sample of 157 MECCs involved in CME, achieving a response rate of 50.3%. Of the responding organizations, 87% were accredited by the ACCME, with 27% also holding accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education and the American Nurses Credentialing Center Commission on Accreditation. Eighty-six percent reported no immediate involvement of the company in promotional activities. Fifty-three percent of the survey responders reported being part of a larger organization that included companies involved in promotion, and 88% of these organizations reported implementation of firewalls designed to protect the independence of certified education. The survey reveals a sector that is largely privately held and moving from an organizational model that included both certified and promotional activities to one that includes only certified education. These changes, along with the implementation of firewalls to protect certified education from the promotional interests of other companies within their own corporate structure, may help to alleviate concerns about the independence of CME produced by MECCs. However, because MECCs continue to receive the majority of their support from commercial interests, the influence of funding is likely to be an area of lingering concern.

Provider feedback improves reporting on quality measures: National profile reports for adjuvant chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer

6572 Background: The National Quality Forum recently announced accountability measures including use of chemotherapy (ACT) with Stage III colon cancer. This study examines the impact of performance reporting using cancer registry data to assess the quality of care for Stage III colon cancer patients using the Commission on Cancer's (CoC) Cancer Program Practice Profile Reports. Cancer registries are the primary source for measurement but adjuvant treatment may be incomplete. Methods: In January 2005 the CoC provided reports to 1,337 hospitals using registry data on over 80,000 Stage III colon cancer patients diagnosed from 1998–2003. Each hospital received a weighted performance rate (PR) and comparison to hospitals of similar types, nationally and regionally. Hospitals could review and correct missing or inaccurate data to provide an updated profile. Results: The initial overall hospital-level PR was 66.2%, hospitals in the top quartile had PRs =80.1%. After 24 months 603 hospitals had corrected data. The mean PR was 74.9%, an increase of 8.7%. The top quartile PR was =89.7%. The PRs for hospitals in the top quartile increased on average by 4.3%, and for hospitals outside this group by 22.7%. The proportion of hospitals with PRs =90% increased from 7.9% to 23.9%. Conclusions: With over two-fifths of hospitals correcting data, the concordance rate with ACT in Stage III colon cancer has significantly increased compared to initial registry data. Reporting quality data and allowing auditing and correction on key quality indicators corrects the data gap in cancer registry out-patient treatment data. Exposure to profile reports can spur local providers to promote better communication with centralized data repositories, significantly contributing to the assessment of care provided to cancer patients. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

Clinical and pharmacoeconomic profile of esomeprazole in acid-related diseases

Protonic pump inhibitors (PPIs) are the most prescribed drugs for acute and maintenance therapy of gastroesophageal reflux disease, H. pylori-eradication (in association with antibacterial therapy), for ulcers prevention and cure and, recently, for prevention of NSAIDs-induced gastropathy. The high prevalence of these acid-related disorders induces a large consumption of PPIs; actually, they are the first drug class in terms of National Health Service pharmaceutical expenditure. This widespread and gradually increasing use enforces the need of a rational assessment of their impact on health care resources. This paper provides an updated profile of esomeprazole, the first PPI developed as a pure isomer, which property involves an advantageous metabolism, resulting in enhanced delivery to the proton pump compared with racemic omeprazole. Several studies showed that the success rate for healing reflux esophagitis is greater for esomeprazole than for omeprazole and some other PPIs. According to an Italian pharmacoeconomic model, esomeprazole therapy for erosive esophagitis is associated with higher benefits and lower costs as compared to omeprazole and pantoprazole. For long-term management of non-erosive gastroesophageal reflux disease, on-demand approach with esomeprazole shows clinical outcomes similar to daily treatment regimens, with substantial cost-saving. Furthermore, esomeprazole is the only PPI approved for 1-week triple therapy for both the eradication and the healing of H. pylori-associated duodenal ulcer, while the other PPIs registered the indication for H. pylori-eradication and, separately, a dosing scheme for ulcer healing (independently from etiology).