Where on Earth Are the Best-50 Time Servers?

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. We present a list of the Best-50 public IPv4 time servers by mining a high-resolution dataset of Stratum-1 servers for Availability, Stratum Constancy, Leap Performance, and Clock Error, broken down by continent. We find that a server with ideal leap performance, high availability, and low stratum variation is often clock error-free, but this is no guarantee. We discuss the relevance and lifetime of our findings, the scalability of our approach, and implications for load balancing and server ranking

Birthing practices of traditional birth attendants in South Asia in the context of training programmes

Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA) training has been an important component of public health policy interventions to improve maternal and child health in developing countries since the 1970s. More recently, since the 1990s, the TBA training strategy has been increasingly seen as irrelevant, ineffective or, on the whole, a failure due to evidence that the maternal mortality rate (MMR) in developing countries had not reduced. Although, worldwide data show that, by choice or out of necessity, 47 percent of births in the developing world are assisted by TBAs and/or family members, funding for TBA training has been reduced and moved to providing skilled birth attendants for all births. Any shift in policy needs to be supported by appropriate evidence on TBA roles in providing maternal and infant health care service and effectiveness of the training programmes. This article reviews literature on the characteristics and role of TBAs in South Asia with an emphasis on India. The aim was to assess the contribution of TBAs in providing maternal and infant health care service at different stages of pregnancy and after-delivery and birthing practices adopted in home births. The review of role revealed that apart from TBAs, there are various other people in the community also involved in making decisions about the welfare and health of the birthing mother and new born baby. However, TBAs have changing, localised but nonetheless significant roles in delivery, postnatal and infant care in India. Certain traditional birthing practices such as bathing babies immediately after birth, not weighing babies after birth and not feeding with colostrum are adopted in home births as well as health institutions in India. There is therefore a thin precarious balance between the application of biomedical and traditional knowledge. Customary rituals and perceptions essentially affect practices in home and institutional births and hence training of TBAs need to be implemented in conjunction with community awareness programmes

Phase separation and the effect of quenched disorder in Pr0.5Sr0.5MnO3Pr_{0.5}Sr_{0.5}MnO_3

The nature of phase separation in $Pr_{0.5}Sr_{0.5}MnO_3$ has been probed by linear as well as nonlinear magnetic susceptibilities and resistivity measurements across the 2nd order paramagnetic to ferromagnetic transition ($T_C$) and 1st order ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic transition ($T_N$). We found that the ferromagnetic (metallic) clusters, which form with the onset of long-range order in the system at $T_C$, continuously decrease their size with the decrease in temperature and coexist with non-ferromagnetic (insulating) clusters. These non-ferromagnetic clusters are identified to be antiferromagnetic. Significantly, it is shown that they do not arise because of the superheating effect of the lower temperature 1st order transition. Thus reveals unique phase coexistence in a manganite around half-doping encompassing two long-range order transitions. Both the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic clusters form at $T_C$ and persist much below $T_N$. Substitution of quenched disorder (Ga) at Mn-site promotes antiferromagnetism at the cost of ferromagnetism without adding any magnetic interaction or introducing any significant lattice distortion. Moreover, increase in disorder decreases the ferromagnetic cluster size and with 7.5% Ga substitution clusters size reduces to the single domain limit. Yet, all the samples show significant short-range ferromagnetic interaction much above $T_C$. Resistivity measurements also reveal the novel phase coexistence identified from the magnetic measurements. It is significant that, increase in disorder up to 7.5% increases the resistivity of the low temperature antiferromagnetic phase by about four orders

Challenges in oncology career: are we closing the gender gap? Results of the new ESMO Women for Oncology Committee survey

Discrimination; Gender equity; OncologyDiscriminació; Equitat de gènere; OncologiaDiscriminación; Equidad de género; OncologíaBackground Following a European Society for Medical Oncology Women for Oncology (ESMO W4O) survey in 2016 showing severe under-representation of female oncologists in leadership roles, ESMO launched a series of initiatives to address obstacles to gender equity. A follow-up survey in October 2021 investigated progress achieved. Materials and methods The W4O questionnaire 2021 expanded on the 2016 survey, with additional questions on the impact of ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion on career development. Results were analysed according to respondent gender and age. Results The survey sample was larger than in 2016 (n = 1473 versus 482), especially among men. Significantly fewer respondents had managerial or leadership roles than in 2016 (31.8% versus 51.7%). Lack of leadership development for women and unconscious bias were considered more important in 2021 than in 2016. In 2021, more people reported harassment in the workplace than in 2016 (50.3% versus 41.0%). In 2021, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion were considered to have little or no impact on professional career opportunities, salary setting or related potential pay gap. However, gender had a significant or major impact on career development (25.5% of respondents), especially in respondents ≤40 years of age and women. As in 2016, highest ranked initiatives to foster workplace equity were promotion of work–life balance, development and leadership training and flexible working. Significantly more 2021 respondents (mainly women) supported the need for culture and gender equity education at work than in 2016. Conclusions Gender remains a major barrier to career progression in oncology and, although some obstacles may have been reduced since 2016, we are a long way from closing the gender gap. Increased reporting of discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in the workplace is a major, priority concern. The W4O 2021 survey findings provide new evidence and highlight the areas for future ESMO interventions to support equity and diversity in oncology career development.This work was supported by the European Society for Medical Oncology (no grant number)

Genetics of resistance to P3 isolate of Phytophthora blight in pigeonpea

Seedlings from six crosses between susceptible × resistant and two between susceptible parents were screened against P3 isolate of Phytophthora drechsleri f. sp. cajani in the glasshouses. Disease reaction was scored on a rating scale of 1–5. Resistance was found to be controlled by one dominant gene and some minor genes and is affected by ontogeny. The resistance gene appeared to be different from the one reported earlier (Pd1) and is designated here as Pd

Loss of DLX3 tumor suppressive function promotes progression of SCC through EGFR-ERBB2 pathway

Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) ranks second in the frequency of all skin cancers. The balance between keratinocyte proliferation and differentiation is disrupted in the pathological development of cSCC. DLX3 is a homeobox transcription factor which plays pivotal roles in embryonic development and epidermal homeostasis. To investigate the impact of DLX3 expression on cSCC prognosis, we carried out clinicopathologic analysis of DLX3 expression which showed statistical correlation between tumors of higher pathologic grade and levels of DLX3 protein expression. Further, Kaplan-Meier survival curve analysis demonstrated that low DLX3 expression correlated with poor patient survival. To model the function of Dlx3 in skin tumorigenesis, a two-stage dimethylbenzanthracene (DMBA)/12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol 13-acetate (TPA) study was performed on mice genetically depleted of Dlx3 in skin epithelium (Dlx3cKO). Dlx3cKO mice developed significantly more tumors, with more rapid tumorigenesis compared to control mice. In Dlx3cKO mice treated only with DMBA, tumors developed after similar to 16 weeks suggesting that loss of Dlx3 has a tumor promoting effect. Whole transcriptome analysis of tumor and skin tissue from our mouse model revealed spontaneous activation of the EGFR-ERBB2 pathway in the absence of Dlx3. Together, our findings from human and mouse model system support a tumor suppressive function for DLX3 in skin and underscore the efficacy of therapeutic approaches that target EGFR-ERBB2 pathway

Filled carbon nanotubes as anode materials for lithium-ion batteries

Downsizing well-established materials to the nanoscale is a key route to novel functionalities, in particular if different functionalities are merged in hybrid nanomaterials. Hybrid carbon-based hierarchical nanostructures are particularly promising for electrochemical energy storage since they combine benefits of nanosize effects, enhanced electrical conductivity and integrity of bulk materials. We show that endohedral multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNT) encapsulating high-capacity (here: conversion and alloying) electrode materials have a high potential for use in anode materials for lithium-ion batteries (LIB). There are two essential characteristics of filled CNT relevant for application in electrochemical energy storage: (1) rigid hollow cavities of the CNT provide upper limits for nanoparticles in their inner cavities which are both separated from the fillings of other CNT and protected against degradation. In particular, the CNT shells resist strong volume changes of encapsulates in response to electrochemical cycling, which in conventional conversion and alloying materials hinders application in energy storage devices. (2) Carbon mantles ensure electrical contact to the active material as they are unaffected by potential cracks of the encapsulate and form a stable conductive network in the electrode compound. Our studies confirm that encapsulates are electrochemically active and can achieve full theoretical reversible capacity. The results imply that encapsulating nanostructures inside CNT can provide a route to new high-performance nanocomposite anode materials for LIB

Assessing the Impact of Blood Pressure on Cardiac Function Using Interpretable Biomarkers and Variational Autoencoders

Maintaining good cardiac function for as long as possible is a major concern for healthcare systems worldwide and there is much interest in learning more about the impact of different risk factors on cardiac health. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of systolic blood pressure (SBP) on cardiac function while preserving the interpretability of the model using known clinical biomarkers in a large cohort of the UK Biobank population. We propose a novel framework that combines deep learning based estimation of interpretable clinical biomarkers from cardiac cine MR data with a variational autoencoder (VAE). The VAE architecture integrates a regression loss in the latent space, which enables the progression of cardiac health with SBP to be learnt. Results on 3,600 subjects from the UK Biobank show that the proposed model allows us to gain important insight into the deterioration of cardiac function with increasing SBP, identify key interpretable factors involved in this process, and lastly exploit the model to understand patterns of positive and adverse adaptation of cardiac function

Automated Analysis of Cryptococcal Macrophage Parasitism Using GFP-Tagged Cryptococci

The human fungal pathogens Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii cause life-threatening infections of the central nervous system. One of the major characteristics of cryptococcal disease is the ability of the pathogen to parasitise upon phagocytic immune effector cells, a phenomenon that correlates strongly with virulence in rodent models of infection. Despite the importance of phagocyte/Cryptococcus interactions to disease progression, current methods for assaying virulence in the acrophage system are both time consuming and low throughput. Here, we introduce the first stable and fully characterised GFP–expressing derivatives of two widely used cryptococcal strains: C. neoformans serotype A type strain H99 and C. gattii serotype B type strain R265. Both strains show unaltered responses to environmental and host stress conditions and no deficiency in virulence in the macrophage model system. In addition, we report the development of a method to effectively and rapidly investigate macrophage parasitism by flow cytometry, a technique that preserves the accuracy of current approaches but offers a four-fold improvement in speed

Type-2 fuzzy linear systems

Fuzzy Linear Systems (FLSs) are used in practical situations where some of the systems parameters or variables are uncertain. To date, investigations conducted on FLSs are restricted to those in which the uncertainty is assumed to be modeled by Type-1 Fuzzy Sets (T1FSs). However, there are many situations where considering the uncertainty as T1FSs may not be possible due to different interpretations of experts about the uncertainty. Moreover, solutions of FLSs are T1FSs which do not provide any information about a measure of the dispersion of uncertainty around the T1FSs. Therefore, in this research a model of uncertain linear equations system called a type-2 fuzzy linear system is presented to overcome the shortcomings. The uncertainty is represented by a special class of type-2 fuzzy sets – triangular perfect quasi type-2 fuzzy numbers. Additionally, conditions for the existence of a unique type–2 fuzzy solution to the linear system are derived. A definition of a type-2 fuzzy solution is also given. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated using examples in the pulp and paper industry, and electrical engineering