INTRODUCTION Acid reaction and nutritional unbalances, mainly low level of plant available phosphorus (P) as well as unfavorable physical properties are limiting factor of soil fertility in Bosnia (Okiljevic et al., 1997; Resulovic and Custovic, 2002). It is estimated that about 25% of agricultural land of Bosnia and Herzegovina are pseudogley or similar soils (Markovic and Supic, 2003). P as a limiting factor of the field crop yield under conditions of the northwern Bosnia was object of survey article Markovic et al. (2006). Liming and increased fertilization (mainly with P) are usually recommendations for these soils improvement (Kovacevic et al., 2004, Petosic et al., 2003, Komljenovic et al., 2006, 2008). Aim of this study was testing maize response to ameliorative P fertilization on acid hydromorphic soil in Bosnian Posavina (Sava river valley) area.

Starting from methyl salicylate and 2-amino-2-(hydroxymethyl)propane-1,3-diol 1a , or 2-amino- 2-methylpropane-1-ol 1b , the 2-oxazoline derivatives 2a , 2b or 3, as well as mono- 4a and 4b and bis- 5a and 5b derivatives of salicylic acid were synthesized. Reactions were performed by microwave irradiation in the presence of tetrabutylammonium bromide or metallic sodium as catalyst, as well as by conventional heating. Microwave-induced reaction of some diols, diamines and amino alcohols with methyl salicylate gave mono- and/or bis- derivatives of salicylic acid 4c, 5c, 5d, 6c, 8c, 7a, 7b, 8a and 8b . The mono- and bis-salicyloyl derivatives 4c , 5c and 5d were transformed to the corresponding phenyl-azo derivatives 9, 10c and 10d . The structure of compound 3 was proved by the X-ray analysis and the R-configuration on its stereocenter was confirmed. The antioxidant and cytotoxic activities of the synthesized derivatives were evaluated in a series of in vitro tests. Compounds 5d , 8b and 8c exhibited very strong activity against hydroxyl radical. Six 4c , 5d , 8a-c , 10c of 16 tested compounds inhibited growth of MDA-MB-231 cells at a nanomolar concentration. Compounds 8c and 10c showed high cytotoxicity against MCF7 cells, whereas compounds 4c , 5d , 8a-c and 10d showed high activity against K562 cells.

Summary Background: A gap exists between evidence-based medicine and clinical-practice. Every day, healthcare professionals (HCPs) combine empirical evidence and subjective experience in order to maximize the effectiveness of interventions. Consequently, it is important to understand how HCPs interpret the research evidence and apply it in everyday practice. We focused on the prevention of falls, a common cause of injury-related morbidity and mortality in later life, for which there is a wide range of known risk factors. Objectives: To use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to investigate the opinions of HCPs in prioritizing risk factors for preventing falls. Methods: We used the AHP to develop a hierarchy of risk factors for falls based on the knowledge and experience of experts. We submitted electronic questionnaires via the web, in order to reach a wider number of respondents. With a web service, we pooled the results and weighted the coherence and the experience of respondents. Results: Overall, 232 respondents participated in the study: 32 in the technical pilot study, nine in the scientific pilot study and 191 respondents in the main study. We identified a hierarchy of 35 risk factors, organized in two categories and six sub-categories. Conclusions: The hierarchy of risk factors provides further insights into clinicians’ perceptions of risk factors for falls. This hierarchy helps understand the relative importance that clinicians place on risk factors for falls in older people and why evidence-based guidelines are not always followed. This information may be helpful in improving intervention programs and in understanding how clinicians prioritize multiple risk factors in individual patients. The AHP method allows the opinions of HCPs to be investigated, giving appropriate weight to their coherence, background and experience.

Language is among the most fascinating and complex cognitive activities that develops rapidly since the early months of infants' life. The aim of the present work is to provide a humanoid robot with cognitive, perceptual and motor skills fundamental for the acquisition of a rudimentary form of language. We present a novel probabilistic model, inspired by the findings in cognitive sciences, able to associate spoken words with their perceptually grounded meanings. The main focus is set on acquiring the meaning of various perceptual categories (e.g. red, blue, circle, above, etc.), rather than specific world entities (e.g. an apple, a toy, etc.). Our probabilistic model is based on a variant of multi-instance learning technique, and it enables a robotic platform to learn grounded meanings of adjective/noun terms. The systems could be used to understand and generate appropriate natural language descriptions of real objects in a scene, and it has been successfully tested on the NAO humanoid robotic platform.

Imitation learning has been recognized as a promising technique to teach robots advanced skills. It is based on the idea that robots could learn new behaviors by observing and imitating the behaviors of other skilled actors. We propose an adaptive probabilistic graphical model which copes with three core issues of any imitative behavior: observation, representation and reproduction of skills. Our model, Growing Hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Network (GHDBN), is hierarchical (i.e. able to characterize structured behaviors at different levels of abstraction), and growing (i.e. skills are learned or updated incrementally - and at each level of abstraction - every time a new observation sequence is available). A GHDBN, once trained, is able to recognize skills being observed and to reproduce them by exploiting the generative power of the model. The system has been successfully tested in simulation, and initial tests have been conducted on a NAO humanoid robot platform.