The botany and macroscopy of chinese materia medica: sources, substitutes and sustainability

Interest in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is global. The burgeoning international trade in its crude and processed plant ingredients (Chinese materia medica - CMM) reflects demand across all sectors of healthcare, yet the identification of source plants and CMM has been overlooked for many years leading to problems in safety, quality, efficacy and sustainable sourcing. The Guide (Chinese medicinal plants, herbal drugs and substitutes: an identification guide, Leon & Lin, Kew Publishing, 2017), which forms the core of this dissertation by publication, presents a fresh approach to the identification of 226 internationally traded CMM (officially recognised in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, CP2015) along with their 302 official source plants. Identification criteria are developed using macroscopy, and are based on authentic reference specimens created as a result of extensive fieldwork in China. Inclusion of 99 comparative descriptions of unofficial substitute plants and drugs (including adulterants and counterfeits), with their counterparts for official species, enable key distinguishing characters to be highlighted and thereby strengthen the rigour of identifications made. The approach demonstrates that macroscopy can be used to reliably identify and differentiate over 70% of official (CP2015) CMM from common substitutes and that macroscopy is a fast and cost-effective authentication method with many applications. The research highlights the essential role of herbarium-vouchered reference drugs in CMM authentication as opposed to the use of market-obtained drugs whose botanical identity is inherently uncertain. The research’s taxonomic review of all official species in the Guide demonstrates a significant disparity (16%) between the taxonomy adopted in the CP2015 and current plant taxonomic opinion, while a review of species conservation rankings and causal effects found that the wild populations of 23% of official species native to China (63 of 270 official species in the Guide) have become threatened as a direct result of over-harvesting for medicinal use. In addition, the research reveals the underlying causes of CMM substitution are dominated by clinician preference, followed by supply problems arising from over-harvesting of official species with unregulated markets trading in inferior or inappropriate look-alike items, together with issues of confused identification and nomenclature. Direct consequences of the inadvertent use of CMM substitutes include misleading clinical and research outcomes, serious adverse reactions and, in some cases, fatalities. Reliable identification of CMM therefore remains paramount for high quality research as well as safe and efficacious clinical practice. While for some CMM (ca. 30% of CMM in the Guide) robust identification requires analytical methods (e.g. chemical- and DNA-based ones), the research concludes that macroscopy continues to be a powerful tool for reliable and cost-effective identification of CMM in international trade

Integrated Expert Management Knowledge on OSI Network Management Objects

The management of modern telecommunications networks must satisfy ever-increasing operational demands. We propose a study for the improvement of intelligent administration techniques in telecommunications networks. This task is achieved by integrating knowledge base of expert system within the management information used to manage a network. For this purpose, an extension of OSI management framework specifications language has been added and investigated. For this goal, we shall use the language Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects (GDMO) and a new property named RULE which gathers important aspects of the facts and the knowledge base of the embedded expert system. Networks can be managed easily by using this proposed integration

Reducing bias and quantifying uncertainty in watershed flux estimates: the R package loadflex

Many ecological insights into the function of rivers and watersheds emerge from quantifying the flux of solutes or suspended materials in rivers. Numerous methods for flux estimation have been described, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. Currently, the largest practical challenges in flux estimation are to select among these methods and to implement or apply whichever method is chosen. To ease this process of method selection and application, we have written an R software package called loadflex that implements several of the most popular methods for flux estimation, including regressions, interpolations, and the special case of interpolation known as the period-weighted approach. Our package also implements a lesser-known and empirically promising approach called the “composite method,” to which we have added an algorithm for estimating prediction uncertainty. Here we describe the structure and key features of loadflex, with a special emphasis on the rationale and details of our composite method implementation. We then demonstrate the use of loadflex by fitting four different models to nitrate data from the Lamprey River in southeastern New Hampshire, where two large floods in 2006–2007 are hypothesized to have driven a long-term shift in nitrate concentrations and fluxes from the watershed. The models each give believable estimates, and yet they yield different answers for whether and how the floods altered nitrate loads. In general, the best modeling approach for each new dataset will depend on the specific site and solute of interest, and researchers need to make an informed choice among the many possible models. Our package addresses this need by making it simple to apply and compare multiple load estimation models, ultimately allowing researchers to estimate riverine concentrations and fluxes with greater ease and accuracy

Hydrostatic Equilibrium of a Perfect Fluid Sphere with Exterior Higher-Dimensional Schwarzschild Spacetime

We discuss the question of how the number of dimensions of space and time can influence the equilibrium configurations of stars. We find that dimensionality does increase the effect of mass but not the contribution of the pressure, which is the same in any dimension. In the presence of a (positive) cosmological constant the condition of hydrostatic equilibrium imposes a lower limit on mass and matter density. We show how this limit depends on the number of dimensions and suggest that $\Lambda > 0$ is more effective in 4D than in higher dimensions. We obtain a general limit for the degree of compactification (gravitational potential on the boundary) of perfect fluid stars in $D$-dimensions. We argue that the effects of gravity are stronger in 4D than in any other number of dimensions. The generality of the results is also discussed

Developing a multi-metric habitat index for wadeable streams in Illinois (T-25-P-001), annual segment report to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

USFWS through IDNR State Wildlife Grant Grant/Contract No: T-25-P-001INHS Technical Report Prepared for USFWS through IDNR State Wildlife Gran

Leibniz algebroid associated with a Nambu-Poisson structure

The notion of Leibniz algebroid is introduced, and it is shown that each Nambu-Poisson manifold has associated a canonical Leibniz algebroid. This fact permits to define the modular class of a Nambu-Poisson manifold as an appropiate cohomology class, extending the well-known modular class of Poisson manifolds