At any one time, some of its member countries will have arrangements with the IMF and others will not. What determines the pattern of arrangements? This is an important question for a number of reasons. Not least, by understanding the circumstances under which countries enter into arrangements it may be possible to redesign IMF conditionality and financing as well as the structure of the IMF’s ...

The effects of the iron chelator desferrioxamine (DFx) on liver iron accumulation, malondialdehyde (MDA) production, porphyrin accumulation and uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase (URO-D; EC 4.1.1.37) activity were investigated over a period of 14 weeks in C57BL/10 mice, made porphyric by the administration of hexachlorobenzene (HCB) and iron-dextran (Imferon, IMF) or IMF alone. In addition, we meas...

BACKGROUND The mechanisms by which α-thalassemia and sickle cell traits confer protection from severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria are not yet fully elucidated. We hypothesized that hemoglobinopathic erythrocytes reduce the intraerythrocytic multiplication of P. falciparum, potentially delaying the development of life-threatening parasite densities until parasite clearing immunity is achieved....

Intramuscular fat (IMF) content is an important trait affecting the quality of pork. Two Duroc populations, one under positive selection for IMF and the other selected for decreased backfat but under stabilizing selection for IMF, were used to identify signatures of selection associated with IMF using 60,000 single-nucleotide polymorphism data. The effects of selection were analyzed between 2 l...

Many recent works have attempted to constrain the stellar initial mass function (IMF) inside massive clusters by comparing their dynamical mass estimates (found through measuring the velocity dispersion and effective radius) to the measured light. These studies have come to different conclusions, with some claiming standard Kroupa-type [11] IMFs (e.g. [14], [13]) while others have claimed extre...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the concentrated expression of physiological activity of the brain. Effective EEG feature extraction methods are key to improving different EEG recognition rates, which is a significant issue in EEG studies. A new feature extraction method is proposed in this paper based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), which can decompose nonstationary EEG into a series of I...

This study was carried out to identify SNP associated with fatness traits on pig chromosome 6. In total, 11,067 putative genomic variations were detected in 125 complete bacterial artificial chromosome sequences corresponding to the region between SW2098 and SW1881, which harbors multiple QTL affecting intramuscular fat content (IMF) and backfat thickness (BFT). Among 173 putative SNP validated...

Cattle behavior, including measures of docility, is important to beef cattle producers not only from a human safety perspective but also due to potential correlations to economically relevant traits. Field data from the American Hereford Association was used to estimate genetic parameters for chute score (CS; = 25,037), weaning weight (WW; = 24,908), yearling weight (YW; = 23,978), and intramus...

This paper further addresses the issue of nightside flow bursts which occur during intervals of northward but strongly BY -influenced IMF. Recent discussions of such bursts concerned intervals during which the IMF BY component was negative. The present study concerns an interval of BY -positive IMF which occurred on 20 March 2002 (01:00– 12:00 UT). During the interval BY increased steadily from...

Introduction Automatic human emotion recognition is one of the most interesting topics in the field of affective computing. However, development of a reliable approach with a reasonable recognition rate is a challenging task. The main objective of the present study was to propose a robust method for discrimination of emotional responses thorough examination of heart rate variability (HRV). In t...