Long-range potential fluctuations and 1/f noise in hydrogenated amorphous silicon

We present a microscopic theory of the low-frequency voltage noise (known as "1/f" noise) in micrometer-thick films of hydrogenated amorphous silicon. This theory traces the noise back to the long-range fluctuations of the Coulomb potential produced by deep defects, thereby predicting the absolute noise intensity as a function of the distribution of defect activation energies. The predictions of this theory are in very good agreement with our own experiments in terms of both the absolute intensity and the temperature dependence of the noise spectra.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, several new parts and one new figure are added, but no conceptual revision

A snapshot of the organization and provision of primary care in Turkey

Contains fulltext : 96599.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: This WHO study aimed to support Turkey in its efforts to strengthen the primary care (PC) system by implementing the WHO Primary Care Evaluation Tool (PCET). This article provides an overview of the organization and provision of primary care in Turkey. METHODS: The WHO Primary Care Evaluation Tool was implemented in two provinces (Bolu and Eskisehir) in Turkey in 2007/08. The Tool consists of three parts: a national questionnaire concerning the organisation and financing of primary care; a questionnaire for family doctors; and a questionnaire for patients who visit a family health centre. RESULTS: Primary care has just recently become an official health policy priority with the introduction of a family medicine scheme. Although the supply of family doctors (FDs) has improved, they are geographically uneven distributed, and nationwide shortages of primary care staff remain. Coordination of care could be improved and quality control mechanisms were lacking. However, patients were very satisfied with the treatment by FDs. CONCLUSIONS: The study provides an overview of the current state of PC in Turkey for two provinces with newly introduced family medicine, by using a structured approach to evaluate the essential functions of PC, including governance, financing, resource generation, as well as the characteristics of a "good" service delivery system (as being accessible, comprehensive, coordinated and continuous)

Functionalized Poly(3-hexylthiophene)s via Lithium–Bromine Exchange

Poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) is one of the most extensively investigated conjugated polymers and has been employed as the active material in many devices including field-effect transistors, organic photovoltaics and sensors. As a result, methods to further tune the properties of P3HT are desirable for specific applications. Herein, we report a facile postpolymerization modification strategy to functionalize the 4-position of commercially available P3HT in two simple steps–bromination of the 4-position of P3HT (Br–P3HT) followed by lithium−bromine exchange and quenching with an electrophile. We achieved near quantitative lithium–bromine exchange with Br–P3HT, which requires over 100 thienyl lithiates to be present on a single polymer chain. The lithiated-P3HT is readily combined with functional electrophiles, resulting in P3HT derivatives with ketones, secondary alcohols, trimethylsilyl (TMS) group, fluorine, or an azide at the 4-position. We demonstrated that the azide-modified P3HT could undergo Cu-catalyzed or Cu-free click chemistry, significantly expanding the complexity of the structures that can be appended to P3HT using this method.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (ECCS-0939514

Nanooptics of molecular-shunted plasmonic nanojunctions.

Gold nanoparticles are separated above a planar gold film by 1.1 nm thick self-assembled molecular monolayers of different conductivities. Incremental replacement of the nonconductive molecules with a chemically equivalent conductive version differing by only one atom produces a strong 50 nm blue-shift of the coupled plasmon. With modeling this gives a conductance of 0.17G(0) per biphenyl-4,4'-dithiol molecule and a total conductance across the plasmonic junction of 30G(0). Our approach provides a reliable tool quantifying the number of molecules in each plasmonic hotspot, here <200.We acknowledge financial support from EPSRC grant EP/ G060649/1, EP/I012060/1, EP/L027151/1, EP/K028510/1, ERC grant LINASS 320503. F.B. acknowledges support from the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability. C.T. and J.A. acknowledge financial support from Project FIS2013- 41184-P from MINECO, ETORTEK 2014-15 of the Basque Department of Industry and IT756-13 from the Basque consolidated groups.This paper was originally published in Nano Letters under a CC-BY licence (F Benz, C Tserkezis, LO Herrmann, B de Nijs, A Sanders, DO Sigle, L Pukenas, SD Evans, J Aizpurua, JJ Baumberg, Nano Letters 2015, 15, 669−674

New Hybrid Properties of TiO2 Nanoparticles Surface Modified With Catecholate Type Ligands

Surface modification of nanocrystalline TiO2 particles (45 Å) with bidentate benzene derivatives (catechol, pyrogallol, and gallic acid) was found to alter optical properties of nanoparticles. The formation of the inner-sphere charge–transfer complexes results in a red shift of the semiconductor absorption compared to unmodified nanocrystallites. The binding structures were investigated by using FTIR spectroscopy. The investigated ligands have the optimal geometry for chelating surface Ti atoms, resulting in ring coordination complexes (catecholate type of binuclear bidentate binding–bridging) thus restoring in six-coordinated octahedral geometry of surface Ti atoms. From the Benesi–Hildebrand plot, the stability constants at pH 2 of the order 103 M−1 have been determined

Inference of development activities from interaction with uninstrumented applications

Studying developers’ behavior in software development tasks is crucial for designing effective techniques and tools to support developers’ daily work. In modern software development, developers frequently use different applications including IDEs, Web Browsers, documentation software (such as Office Word, Excel, and PDF applications), and other tools to complete their tasks. This creates significant challenges in collecting and analyzing developers’ behavior data. Researchers usually instrument the software tools to log developers’ behavior for further studies. This is feasible for studies on development activities using specific software tools. However, instrumenting all software tools commonly used in real work settings is difficult and requires significant human effort. Furthermore, the collected behavior data consist of low-level and fine-grained event sequences, which must be abstracted into high-level development activities for further analysis. This abstraction is often performed manually or based on simple heuristics. In this paper, we propose an approach to address the above two challenges in collecting and analyzing developers’ behavior data. First, we use our ActivitySpace framework to improve the generalizability of the data collection. ActivitySpace uses operating-system level instrumentation to track developer interactions with a wide range of applications in real work settings. Secondly, we use a machine learning approach to reduce the human effort to abstract low-level behavior data. Specifically, considering the sequential nature of the interaction data, we propose a Condition Random Field (CRF) based approach to segment and label the developers’ low-level actions into a set of basic, yet meaningful development activities. To validate the generalizability of the proposed data collection approach, we deploy the ActivitySpace framework in an industry partner’s company and collect the real working data from ten professional developers’ one-week work in three actual software projects. The experiment with the collected data confirms that with initial human-labeled training data, the CRF model can be trained to infer development activities from low-level actions with reasonable accuracy within and across developers and software projects. This suggests that the machine learning approach is promising in reducing the human efforts required for behavior data analysis.This work was partially supported by NSFC Program (No. 61602403 and 61572426)

Effectiveness and safety of opicapone in Parkinson's disease patients with motor fluctuations: The OPTIPARK open-label study

BACKGROUND: The efficacy and safety of opicapone, a once-daily catechol-O-methyltransferase inhibitor, have been established in two large randomized, placebo-controlled, multinational pivotal trials. Still, clinical evidence from routine practice is needed to complement the data from the pivotal trials. METHODS: OPTIPARK (NCT02847442) was a prospective, open-label, single-arm trial conducted in Germany and the UK under clinical practice conditions. Patients with Parkinson’s disease and motor fluctuations were treated with opicapone 50 mg for 3 (Germany) or 6 (UK) months in addition to their current levodopa and other antiparkinsonian treatments. The primary endpoint was the Clinician’s Global Impression of Change (CGI-C) after 3 months. Secondary assessments included Patient Global Impressions of Change (PGI-C), the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-8), and the Non-Motor Symptoms Scale (NMSS). Safety assessments included evaluation of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) and serious adverse events (SAEs). RESULTS: Of the 506 patients enrolled, 495 (97.8%) took at least one dose of opicapone. Of these, 393 (79.4%) patients completed 3 months of treatment. Overall, 71.3 and 76.9% of patients experienced any improvement on CGI-C and PGI-C after 3 months, respectively (full analysis set). At 6 months, for UK subgroup only (n = 95), 85.3% of patients were judged by investigators as improved since commencing treatment. UPDRS scores at 3 months showed statistically significant improvements in activities of daily living during OFF (mean ± SD change from baseline: − 3.0 ± 4.6, p < 0.0001) and motor scores during ON (− 4.6 ± 8.1, p < 0.0001). The mean ± SD improvements of − 3.4 ± 12.8 points for PDQ-8 and -6.8 ± 19.7 points for NMSS were statistically significant versus baseline (both p < 0.0001). Most of TEAEs (94.8% of events) were of mild or moderate intensity. TEAEs considered to be at least possibly related to opicapone were reported for 45.1% of patients, with dyskinesia (11.5%) and dry mouth (6.5%) being the most frequently reported. Serious TEAEs considered at least possibly related to opicapone were reported for 1.4% of patients. CONCLUSIONS: Opicapone 50 mg was effective and generally well-tolerated in PD patients with motor fluctuations treated in clinical practice. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered in July 2016 at clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02847442)

Recent advances in Pichia pastoris as host for heterologous expression system for lipases : a review

The production of heterologous lipases is one of the most promising strategies to increase the productivity of the bioprocesses and to reduce costs, with the final objective that more industrial lipase applications could be implemented. In this chapter, an overview of the new success in synthetic biology, with traditional molecular genetic techniques and bioprocess engineering in the last 5 years in the cell factory Pichia pastoris, the most promising host system for heterologous lipase production, is presented. The goals get on heterologous Candida antarctica, Rhizopus oryzae, and Candida rugosa lipases, three of the most common lipases used in biocatalysis, are showed. Finally, new cell factories producing heterologous lipases are presented