Dual amplitude with arbitrary trajectories

A crossing-symmetric amplitude with Regge behavior is proposed. With arbitrary Regge trajectories, it avoids ancestor and ghost difficulties and possesses second-sheet resonances which may be finite in number. The N-point and ππ amplitudes are given

Polyorchidism: case report and literature review

Polyorchidism is a rare congenital anomaly frequently associated with maldescent testis, hernia, and torsion. Reports in the literature show an increased risk of testicular malignancy in the presence of polyorchidism. This entity has characteristic sonographic features and the diagnosis is often made on the basis of sonography. A conservative approach is the treatment of choice in uncomplicated cases. We report a male of 26-years old with 2 testicles in right side diagnosed by ultrasound. A brief history and review of the literature is also presente

Castro\u27s Shifters: Locating Variation in Political Discourse

In his trademark speeches, Fidel Castro casts himself in a variety of roles: supreme leader, member of government, revolutionary, worker, member of the Cuban populace, and the embodiment of the Cuban nation. Transcripts of Castro’s major speeches provide a rich data set that spans five decades (1959-present). Initial readings reveal his prominent use of the first person plural nosotros , which suggests an intriguing discourse of inclusiveness for this long-time authoritarian leader. In this poster, we identify Castro’s variable discursive referents for nosotros verbs in relation to era and topic of speech (i.e., history of the revolution, national goals and progress, or trouble talk). Variable rule analysis shows that in Castro’s earlier speeches, use of the royal we variant is favored: Llamábamos al Partido por la noche, y le preguntábamos si había llovido o no ( We called the Party the other night, and we asked if it had rained or not ). In contrast, the use of what we term the collective we is favored most heavily in speeches after the fall of the Soviet Union: No estamos produciendo para los burgueses, estamos produciendo para el pueblo ( We’re not producing for the bourgeoisie, we’re producing for the people ). The variation we encounter reflects Castro’s positioning of self relative to the people he is addressing. Castro, as leader of the perpetual revolutionary state, ostensibly erases the possibility of a public sphere existing apart from the government by constructing what the public thinks/expresses/wants as what the government [naturally] does. This is as we might expect in a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. Castro, however, achieves this conflation of public sphere and public authority in two ways in his speeches: first, he relocates public authority outside of the immediate social context, so that the role played by the Cuban public and the revolutionary government is one and the same when viewed in opposition to Yankee imperialism or memories of the Batista regime, for example. Second, by including himself in nosotros talk about workers and revolutionaries while standing over and addressing the Cuban public, Castro projects himself into the crowd. The effect of such talk is to offer an answer to the question, Who mediates between the private sphere and the government in a socialist society where each one is identified with the other? Castro proposes himself as the answer; he, not any autonomous, Habermasian sphere of rational debate, mediates between people’s private lives and the actions of state authority. Thus, what we term a personal public sphere provides a context for understanding the pattern of variation we observe in Castro’s speeches

Esophageal perforation following foreign body ingestion in children: report of three cases

We report three cases of foreign body esophagus, in two of them the foreign body was a coin, and the third child ingested a disc battery. In all three cases the foreign body was impacted in the mid esophagus. All were initially  evaluated by chest X ray which confirmed the diagnosis.One underwent flexible endoscopic extraction initially followed by rigid esophagoscope later and in the other two extractions was performed using rigid esophagoscope, two of them ended with perforation of the esophagus and treated  conservatively with only chest tube insertion and supportive management.In the third child who ingested a disc battery, esophagoscopy revealed  necrosis and perforation at the site of impaction with formation of trachea-esophageal fistula, extraction was performed but the fistula necessitated surgical closure which failed and therefore underwent stent placement to end with complete cure.Keywords: Foreign body; esophageal perforation; children; rigid endoscope

Arabic Reading Fluency Rates: An Exploratory Study

Reading fluency has been defined as the process of automatically associating graphemic and phonetic information in a text with minimal conscious attention if any at all. Research has found that the effect of fluency on reading proficiency is of importance to student learning and that increasing oral reading fluency (ORF) rates has been correlated in several studies to improved comprehension. However, no reading fluency rates (FR) or standards in Arabic have been established to date. This exploratory study begins to examine Arabic language ORF and proposes an initial Arabic reading fluency scale. Thirty-five teachers from six private bilingual schools across three Arabian Gulf countries (KSA, the UAE, and Kuwait), administered ORF tests that comprised of authentic, vowelized, and leveled Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) connected texts on 1003 students in Grades 1–6 in Fall and Spring of the same academic year. Results of independent samples t-test revealed changes in reading fluency between Fall and Spring. Furthermore, the range of FR for these initial data within each grade level was significant. Results obtained, however, appeared to be lower than several of the international ORF charts used for English and Arabic languages. Girls outperformed boys in Grades 1–3, while boys outperformed girls in Grades 4–6. The study has several limitations and several likely implications that extend to languages other than Arabic possibly including the potential importance of extended reading practice and early exposure to text

Stream Fusion, to Completeness

Stream processing is mainstream (again): Widely-used stream libraries are now available for virtually all modern OO and functional languages, from Java to C# to Scala to OCaml to Haskell. Yet expressivity and performance are still lacking. For instance, the popular, well-optimized Java 8 streams do not support the zip operator and are still an order of magnitude slower than hand-written loops. We present the first approach that represents the full generality of stream processing and eliminates overheads, via the use of staging. It is based on an unusually rich semantic model of stream interaction. We support any combination of zipping, nesting (or flat-mapping), sub-ranging, filtering, mapping-of finite or infinite streams. Our model captures idiosyncrasies that a programmer uses in optimizing stream pipelines, such as rate differences and the choice of a "for" vs. "while" loops. Our approach delivers hand-written-like code, but automatically. It explicitly avoids the reliance on black-box optimizers and sufficiently-smart compilers, offering highest, guaranteed and portable performance. Our approach relies on high-level concepts that are then readily mapped into an implementation. Accordingly, we have two distinct implementations: an OCaml stream library, staged via MetaOCaml, and a Scala library for the JVM, staged via LMS. In both cases, we derive libraries richer and simultaneously many tens of times faster than past work. We greatly exceed in performance the standard stream libraries available in Java, Scala and OCaml, including the well-optimized Java 8 streams