The word “optimization” is cropping up in a wide variety of settings, especially advertisements for decision support and enterprise resources planning software. The problems being addressed are extremely complex and consequently the models being optimized can be at best an approximation of the goals of the organization and its shareholders. In such an environment, a decision maker would often b...

A case of a 25 year old man with the black variety of trichomicosis pubis is presented on account of its extreme rareity. Scanning electron microscopy confirms that trichomicosis pubis is caused by bacterial colonisation of the pubic hair and shows that bacteria are able to penetrate cuticular horny cells directly through their free plasma membrane.

This issue of Neurology ® : Neuroimmunology and Neu-roinflammation (N2) includes a wide variety of exciting articles. As usual, I had difficulty selecting the articles to highlight in this Editor's Corner, which is aimed to reflect the range of topics rather than imply a higher quality of the selected manuscripts. One of the treatments frequently used in neuro-myelitis optica (NMO) is rituximab...

*Extension Crop Specialist, Professor of Forage Genetics and Research Associate in Forages, respectively, Department of Plant & Soil Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 Alfalfa—the most productive and most widely adapted forage species—is indeed “Queen of the Forages.” A grower’s initial decision to produce alfalfa and subsequent choice of varieties have long-term consequences...

We introduce a novel computational framework, Principal Variety Analysis (PVA), for primarily nonlinear data modeling. PVA accommodates algebraic sets as the target subspace through which limitations of other existing approaches is dealt with. PVA power is demonstrated in this paper for learning kinematics of objects, as an important application. PVA takes recorded coordinates of some pre-speci...

BACKGROUND Multiple economic factors and social relationships determine dietary behaviours, but the inter-relations between determinants is unknown. Whether women and men differ in the vulnerability to, and impact of, combined disadvantages is also unclear. We examined associations between diverse combinations of economic resources and social relationships, and healthy eating in British older w...

In this paper, the concept of toric difference varieties is defined and four equivalent descriptions for toric difference varieties are presented in terms of difference rational parametrization, difference coordinate rings, toric difference ideals, and group actions by difference tori. Connections between toric difference varieties and affine N[x]-semimodules are established by proving the corr...

*Extension Crop Specialist, Professor of Forage Genetics and Research Associate in Forages, respectively, Department of Plant & Soil Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 Alfalfa—the most productive and most widely adapted forage species—is indeed “Queen of the Forages.” A grower’s initial decision to produce alfalfa and subsequent choice of varieties have long-term consequences...