Burden sharing in NATO

During the period of cold war, NATO alliance was producing defence commodity to protect its members from the common threat of ex-Soviet Union. The paper examines the problem of burden sharing among NATO allies. It is shown that larger countries are benefited more than smaller countries from the production of the public good i.e defence, if the income elasticity of marginal utility of income is greater than one in absolute value. Complete demand systems are employed for estimating the income elasticity of marginal utility of income.peer-reviewe

TPSDicyc: Improved deformation invariant cross-domain medical image synthesis

Cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) has been widely used for cross-domain medical image systhesis tasks particularly due to its ability to deal with unpaired data. However, most CycleGAN-based synthesis methods can not achieve good alignment between the synthesized images and data from the source domain, even with additional image alignment losses. This is because the CycleGAN generator network can encode the relative deformations and noises associated to different domains. This can be detrimental for the downstream applications that rely on the synthesized images, such as generating pseudo-CT for PET-MR attenuation correction. In this paper, we present a deformation invariant model based on the deformation-invariant CycleGAN (DicycleGAN) architecture and the spatial transformation network (STN) using thin-plate-spline (TPS). The proposed method can be trained with unpaired and unaligned data, and generate synthesised images aligned with the source data. Robustness to the presence of relative deformations between data from the source and target domain has been evaluated through experiments on multi-sequence brain MR data and multi-modality abdominal CT and MR data. Experiment results demonstrated that our method can achieve better alignment between the source and target data while maintaining superior image quality of signal compared to several state-of-the-art CycleGAN-based methods

Tourists' Preferences for Quality of Services: Empirical Investigation of Lesvos, Samos and Chios Islands

Since tourism is an important source of economic prosperity for Aegean islands, it is interesting to discover the factors affecting the preferences of Greek and foreign tourists to visit and stay on these islands. Using annual data from 1985 to 1996 for the islands of Lesvos, Samos and Chios, the present paper investigates empirically whether quality of services is one of these factors. Specifically, we consider an econometric model drawing from the switching regime literature, to examine causality effects between visitor’s preferences for services’ quality, the number of Greek and foreign tourists arriving at the islands and the duration of their residence

Electronic recording of lifetime locomotory activity patterns of adult medflies.

Age-specific and diurnal patterns of locomotory activity, can be considered as biomarkers of aging in model organisms and vary across the lifetime of individuals. Τhe Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), Ceratitis capitata, is a commonly used model-species in studies regarding demography and aging. In the present study, we introduce a modification of the automated locomotory activity electronic device LAM25system (Locomotory Activity Monitor)-Trikinetics, commonly used in short time studies, to record the daily locomotory activity patterns of adult medflies throughout the life. Additionally, fecundity rates and survival of adult medflies were recorded. Male and female medflies were kept in the system tubes and had access to an agar-based gel diet, which provided water and nutrients. The locomotory activity was recorded at every minute by three monitors in the electronic device. The locomotory activity of females was higher than that of males across the different ages. For both sexes locomotory rates were high during the first 20 days of the adult life and decreased in older ages. The activity of males was high in the morning and late afternoon hours, while that of females was constantly high throughout the photophase. Negligible locomotory activity was recorded for both sexes during the nighttime. Males outlived females. Fecundity of females was higher in younger ages. Our results support the adoption of LAM25system in studies addressing aging of insects using medfly as a model organism

Chapter Metallic nanowire percolating networks: from main properties to applications

There has been lately a growing interest into flexible, efficient and low-cost transparent electrodes which can be integrated for many applications. This includes several applications related to energy technologies (photovoltaics, lighting, supercapacitor, electrochromism, etc.) or displays (touch screens, transparent heaters, etc.) as well as Internet of Things (IoT) linked with renewable energy and autonomous devices. This associated industrial demand for low-cost and flexible industrial devices is rapidly increasing, creating a need for a new generation of transparent electrodes (TEs). Indium tin oxide has so far dominated the field of TE, but indium’s scarcity and brittleness have prompted a search into alternatives. Metallic nanowire (MNW) networks appear to be one of the most promising emerging TEs. Randomly deposited MNW networks, for instance, can present sheet resistance values below 10 Ω/sq., optical transparency of 90% and high mechanical stability under bending tests. AgNW or CuNW networks are destined to address a large variety of emerging applications. The main properties of MNW networks, their stability and their integration in energy devices are discussed in this contribution

Metallic Nanowire Percolating Network: From Main Properties to Applications

There has been lately a growing interest into flexible, efficient and low-cost transparent electrodes which can be integrated for many applications. This includes several applications related to energy technologies (photovoltaics, lighting, supercapacitor, electrochromism, etc.) or displays (touch screens, transparent heaters, etc.) as well as Internet of Things (IoT) linked with renewable energy and autonomous devices. This associated industrial demand for low-cost and flexible industrial devices is rapidly increasing, creating a need for a new generation of transparent electrodes (TEs). Indium tin oxide has so far dominated the field of TE, but indium’s scarcity and brittleness have prompted a search into alternatives. Metallic nanowire (MNW) networks appear to be one of the most promising emerging TEs. Randomly deposited MNW networks, for instance, can present sheet resistance values below 10 Ω/sq., optical transparency of 90% and high mechanical stability under bending tests. AgNW or CuNW networks are destined to address a large variety of emerging applications. The main properties of MNW networks, their stability and their integration in energy devices are discussed in this contribution

Synthesis of diphenoxyadamantane alkylamines with pharmacological interest.

In this work, the synthesis and the pharmacological evaluation of diphenoxyadamantane alkylamines Ia-f and IIa-f is described. The new diphenoxy-substituted adamantanes share structural features present in trypanocidal and antitubercular agents. 1-Methylpiperazine derivative Ia is the most potent against T. brucei compound, whilst its hexylamine congener IIf exhibits a significant antimycobacterial activity

Flows of granular material in two-dimensional channels

Secondary cone-type crushing machines are an important part of the aggregate production process. These devices process roughly crushed material into aggregate of greater consistency and homogeneity. We apply a continuum model for granular materials (`A Constitutive Law For Dense Granular Flows', Nature 441, p727-730, 2006) to flows of granular material in representative two-dimensional channels, applying a cyclic applied crushing stress in lieu of a moving boundary. Using finite element methods we solve a sequence of quasi-steady fluid problems within the framework of a pressure dependent particle size problem in time. Upon approximating output quantity and particle size we adjust the frequency and strength of the crushing stroke to assess their impact on the output

Identification of Giardia lamblia DHHC Proteins and the Role of Protein S-palmitoylation in the Encystation Process

Protein S-palmitoylation, a hydrophobic post-translational modification, is performed by protein acyltransferases that have a common DHHC Cys-rich domain (DHHC proteins), and provides a regulatory switch for protein membrane association. In this work, we analyzed the presence of DHHC proteins in the protozoa parasite Giardia lamblia and the function of the reversible S-palmitoylation of proteins during parasite differentiation into cyst. Two specific events were observed: encysting cells displayed a larger amount of palmitoylated proteins, and parasites treated with palmitoylation inhibitors produced a reduced number of mature cysts. With bioinformatics tools, we found nine DHHC proteins, potential protein acyltransferases, in the Giardia proteome. These proteins displayed a conserved structure when compared to different organisms and are distributed in different monophyletic clades. Although all Giardia DHHC proteins were found to be present in trophozoites and encysting cells, these proteins showed a different intracellular localization in trophozoites and seemed to be differently involved in the encystation process when they were overexpressed. dhhc transgenic parasites showed a different pattern of cyst wall protein expression and yielded different amounts of mature cysts when they were induced to encyst. Our findings disclosed some important issues regarding the role of DHHC proteins and palmitoylation during Giardia encystation.Fil: Merino, Maria Cecilia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra; ArgentinaFil: Zamponi, Nahuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra; ArgentinaFil: Vranych, Cecilia Verónica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra; ArgentinaFil: Touz, Maria Carolina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra; ArgentinaFil: Ropolo, Andrea Silvana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martín Ferreyra; Argentin