Will current electric vehicle policy lead to cost-effective electrification of passenger car transport?

Encouraged by the falling cost of batteries, electric vehicle (EV) policy today focuses on expediting electrification, paying comparatively little attention to the cost of the particular type of EVs and charging infrastructure deployed. This paper argues that, due to its strong influence on EV innovation paths, EV policy could be better designed if it paid more attention to cost and technology development risk. In particular, using a model that estimates the incremental cost of different EV and infrastructure mixes over the whole passenger car fleet, we find that EV policy with a strong bias towards long-range battery electric vehicles (BEVs) risks leading to higher costs of electrification in the medium term, possibly exceeding the ability of governments to sustain the necessary incentives until battery cost drops sufficiently. We also find that promoting a balanced mix of BEVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) may set the electrification of passenger cars on a lower risk, lower cost path. Examining EV policy in the UK and in California, we find that it is generally not incompatible with achieving balanced mixes of BEVs and PHEVs. However some fine tuning would allow to better balance medium term risks and long term goals

Subsequent Fertility of Goats with Prenatal Mortality Diagnosed by Ultrasound and Treated by PGF 2 α

Thirteen Saanen and Saanen crossbred female goats, between the ages of 6 months and 7, years were presented to the clinic, College of Veterinary Medicine, Sudan University of Science and Technology, for sonographic pregnancy diagnosis. Transabdominal ultrasound was performed using 3.5 MHz probe which revealed non-viable fetuses as judged by absence of heart beats and movements. Twelve goats were given single i/m injection of PGF2α analogue and 5% oxytetracycline. Ten goats responded to the treatment and six of them became pregnant and gave birth within the normal gestational period. One goat was diagnosed as non-pregnant, one goat developed hydrometra, and the subsequent fertility of two goats was unknown. Two full-term goats did not respond to treatment. Another dose of PGF2α was administered to them and again they did not respond. Manual attempts were done to deliver the full-term goat with dilated cervix and they were unsuccessful. Cesarean section and hysterectomy were then performed for the three full-term goats with unfavorable outcome. It can be concluded that ultrasound is a rapid, reliable, and nonhazardous procedure for the diagnosis of fetal mortality in goats and PGF2α treatment in conjunction with oxytetracycline is an efficient treatment

Recombinant human adenovirus-p53 therapy for the treatment of oral leukoplakia and oral squamous cell carcinoma: a systematic review

Background and Objectives: Oral cancer is the 6th most common cancer in the world and oral leukoplakia is an oral potentially malignant disorder that could develop into oral cancer. This systematic review focusses on randomized clinical trials for recombinant adenovirus p-53 (rAD-p53) therapy for the treatment of oral leukoplakia and cancer. Materials and Methods: We searched for research articles on various databases such as Pubmed/Medline, Embase, CNKI (China National Knowledge Infra-structure), Springerlink, cochrane andWeb of sciences from 2003 to 2020. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms were used for the search. Inclusion criteria included original research, randomized clinical trials and articles only in English language. Exclusion criteria were any articles that were not research articles, not randomized trials, non-human studies, etc. The articles were further graded on the Jadad scale. Results: 578 articles were assessed from various databases; only 3 articles were found to be appropriate for this review. Thus, meta-analysis was not performed because of heterogeneity and lack of data. In the three studies, whether rAD-p53 was used as a standalone therapy or with other therapies, there was a beneficial effect of the therapy. Furthermore, there were no serious adverse events and the only adverse events reported were fever, pain at the local injection site, flu-like symptoms and lowered WBC count. Conclusions: Thus, we can conclude that this therapy has a potential for beneficial therapeutic effects and further clinical trials with more patients need to be performed to get better understanding of the effect of rAD-p53 therapy, which probably will pave the way to its approval in other parts of the world

Effect of Nitrogen and Spacing in Growth, Yield and Quality of Celocia cristata

This study was carried out at the demonstration Farm of the Department of horticulture, College of Agricultural Studies during summer season. Experiment one: nitrogen (as urea)at level of 0,25 and 50kgN/fed fifteen days after transplanting of seedlings. Experiment two: manure added at the rate of 0,150 and 300kgN/fed during land preparation. The results revealed that, application of sources of nitrogen (urea or nitrogen) promoted growth of Celosia cristata .It gave the highest values of growth .addition(50kgN) of urea or 300kg/fed manure gave the best vegetative growth of Celosia cristata compared to 25kgN/fed of urea and 150kgs manure. High doses of both urea and manure delayed flowering in plant C.cristata. Moreover, flowers yield and quality, seed yield and quality were affected positively by addition of nitrogen. Increasing of plant spacing decreased plant height but increased number of branches/plant in the season .However, there were no significant effects on flower initiation of C. cristata. Maximum flowers yield and quality (number of flowers /plant or inflorescences, flower diameter and flower age) of celosia were recorded at spacing of 30and 40cm.Maximum number of seeds germination rate and uniformity of Celosia cristata were recorded at closer spacing (20,30cm)

Blockchain-Enabled Provenance Tracking for Sustainable Material Reuse in Construction Supply Chains

The growing complexity of construction supply chains and the significant impact of the construction industry on the environment demand an understanding of how to reuse and repurpose materials. In response to this critical challenge, research gaps that are significant in promoting material circularity are described. Despite its potential, the use of blockchain technology in construction faces challenges in verifiability, scalability, privacy, and interoperability. We propose a novel multilayer blockchain framework to enhance provenance tracking and data retrieval to enable a reliable audit trail. The framework utilises a privacy-centric solution that combines decentralised and centralised storage, security, and privacy. Furthermore, the framework implements access control to strengthen security and privacy, fostering transparency and information sharing among the stakeholders. These contributions collectively lead to trusted material circularity in a built environment. The implementation framework aims to create a prototype for blockchain applications in construction supply chains

Prolonging of the Vase Life of Gerbera Jamesonii Treatment with Sucrose Before and, During Simulated Transport.

We provided this study to investigate the effects of treatment with sucrose plus MI/MI (an isothiazolinonic germicide) in combination with aluminum sulfate (CMI/MI-AS) and abscisic acid (ABA) before and. during simulated transport on the vase life of Gerber

BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting

The BLOOM model is a large publicly available multilingual language model, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To extend the benefits of BLOOM to other languages without incurring prohibitively large costs, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM to new languages not seen during pretraining. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages in a resource-constrained setting. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, we find that adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling.Comment: ACL 202

Teleworking Survey in Saudi Arabia: Reliability and Validity of Arabic Version of the Questionnaire

Objectives: This study aimed to adapt the survey questionnaire designed by Moens et al. (2021) and determine the validity and reliability of the Arabic version of the survey in a sample of the Saudi population experiencing teleworking. Methods: The questionnaire includes 2 sections. The first consists of 13 items measuring the impact of extended telework during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. The second section includes 6 items measuring the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on self-view of telework and digital meetings. The survey instrument was translated based on the guidelines for the cultural adaptation of self-administrated measures. Results: The reliability of the questionnaire responses was measured by Cronbach’s alpha. The construct validity was checked through exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to further assess the factor structure. CFA revealed that the model had excellent fit (root mean square error of approximation, 0.00; comparative fit index, 1.0; Tucker-Lewis index, 1; standardized root mean squared residual, 0.0). Conclusions: The Arabic version of the teleworking questionnaire had high reliability and good validity in assessing experiences and perceptions toward teleworking. While the validated survey examined perceptions and experiences during COVID-19, its use can be extended to capture experiences and perceptions during different crises

Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. We find finetuning large multilingual language models on English tasks with English prompts allows for task generalization to non-English languages that appear only in the pretraining corpus. Finetuning on multilingual tasks with English prompts further improves performance on English and non-English tasks leading to various state-of-the-art zero-shot results. We also investigate finetuning on multilingual tasks with prompts that have been machine-translated from English to match the language of each dataset. We find training on these machine-translated prompts leads to better performance on human-written prompts in the respective languages. Surprisingly, we find models are capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks in languages they have never intentionally seen. We conjecture that the models are learning higher-level capabilities that are both task- and language-agnostic. In addition, we introduce xP3, a composite of supervised datasets in 46 languages with English and machine-translated prompts. Our code, datasets and models are freely available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/xmtf.Comment: 9 main pages (119 with appendix), 16 figures and 11 table

Bisphosphonate-Associated Osteonecrosis of the Jaw: Are We Dealing with a Localized Non-Traditional Calciphylaxis?

The bisphosphonate (BP) family of drugs has been used as a vital component in cancer therapy and many other diseases. One of the main adverse effects related to (BP) is BP-associated osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ). Although this condition was first recognized in 2003, the pathophysiologic mechanism remains undefined. Our hypothesis is that ONJs clinical course and delayed wound healing is in part correlated to a localized non-traditional calciphylaxis. This effect is identified by the evidence of calcium deposition in the connective tissue and around small blood vessels in the soft tissues immediately adjacent to ONJ lesions. This phenomenon helps to fill gaps in the cascade of events which leads to soft tissue ischemia, necrosis, and non-healing ONJ lesions. Our finding adds to the current knowledge of the potential pathophysiologic mechanisms related to ONJ