This work is an assessment of changes in magnetic properties of magnetic nanoparticles in various biological environments. To mimic variations in biological conditions, we have evaluated magnetic performance of Synomag® nanoparticles in two experiments: the effect of viscosity by varying the ratio of glycerol/water mixture and the effect of immobilization after blocking the Brownian relaxation by freeze-drying (to mimic uptake in macrophages). The magnetic response was measured with the Superparamagnetic quantifier. Synomag® exhibits a slight decrease (7.9%) of magnetic response under increased viscosity from η1=0.95 to η6=259.71 mPa.s, and a dramatic magnetic signal drop (78.2%) after freeze-drying. Synomag® nanoparticles are less sensitive to viscosity due  to an additional  relaxation mechanism of disordered spins within the nanoflowers. However, the magnetic performance has been reduced due to the blocking of Brownian relaxation after immobilization.   Int. J. Mag. Part. Imag. 6(2), Suppl. 1, 2020, Article ID: 2009022, DOI: 10.18416/IJMPI.2020.2009022

This research presents the epileptic focus region localization during epileptic seizures by applying different signal processing and ensemble machine learning techniques in intracranial recordings of electroencephalogram (EEG). Multi-scale Principal Component Analysis (MSPCA) is used for denoising EEG signals and the autoregressive (AR) algorithm will extract useful features from the EEG signal. The performances of the ensemble machine learning methods are measured with accuracy, F-measure, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). EEG-based focus area localization with the proposed methods reaches 98.9% accuracy using the Rotation Forest classifier. Therefore, our results suggest that ensemble machine learning methods can be applied to differentiate the EEG signals from epileptogenic brain areas and signals recorded from non-epileptogenic brain regions with high accuracy.

U ovome ćemo radu nastojati opisati umetnute nerestriktivne relativne rečenice kao tipične parentetičke strukture. Opis će podrazumijevati njihovu sintaksičku i semantičku interpretaciju, ali i naznake o njihovoj pragmatičkoj ulozi i zasnivat će se na analizi primjera pronađenih u korpusu tekstova koji pripadaju različitim stilovima bosanskoga jezika. Rad je podijeljen u tri dijela. U prvom ćemo dijelu definirati parentetike i dati pregled dosadašnjih pristupa u analiziranju te pojave. U drugome dijelu rada fokusirat ćemo se na definiranje i analizu umetnutih nerestriktivnih relativnih rečenica, a u trećem će se dijelu izdvojiti najznačajnija zapažanja.

Abstract Objectives The aim of the study was to determine carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) values in patients who developed and did not develop preeclampsia (PE), and to determine whether CIMT values could be predictors of PE development. Methods The study included pregnant women who were examined by regular ultrasound examination at the Materno-Infantil Presidente Vargas Hospital (HMIPV) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from April 2016 to September 2017. The examinations were performed every three months. Patients were divided into two groups. The first group included patients diagnosed with PE (n=21) and second group included patients who did not have PE (n=199). A high frequency ultrasound device (12 MHz) with a semi-automatic method was used to estimate CIMT. Results CIMT was significantly higher in pregnant women with PE than in women without PE (55±0.11 vs. 0.44±0.06, respectively; p<0.001). Using a cut-off value of 0.51 mm, CIMT had a specificity of 77.9% and sensitivity of 81% in the diagnosis of PE. With CIMT ≥0.6 mm, the probability of a patient developing PE was 44.4%; with CIMT >0.42 mm, the probability was only 4.2%. Conclusions An increase in CIMT was associated with the onset of PE. CIMT values were significantly higher in patients who develop PE.

Introduction Both diabetes mellitus and being female significantly increase the risk of being diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). The diagnosis of MDD, combined with diabetes mellitus, can be detrimental in terms of mortality and morbidity. We aimed at investigating the impact of diabetes mellitus on the gender gap in MDD over the course of a human lifetime. Research design and methods In a cross-sectional study over the course of 17 years, medical claims data of the general Austrian population (n=8 996 916) between 1997 and 2014 was analyzed. Of these, 123 232 patients with diabetes mellitus were extracted and compared with non-diabetic controls. Results In a cohort of 123 232 patients with diabetes mellitus and 1 933 218 controls (52% females, 48% males), women with diabetes had 2.55 times increased ORs to be diagnosed with MDD compared with women without diabetes (95% CI 2.48 to 2.62, p<0.001) between the age of 30 and 69 years. The effect of diabetes mellitus on the prevalence of MDD was significantly smaller in men (OR=1.85, 95% CI 1.80 to 1.91, p<0.001). Between 0 and 30 years and after age 70 years, the gender gap of MDD was not different between patients with and without diabetes mellitus. The peak of the gender gap in MDD in patients with diabetes mellitus was around the age of 40–49 years. A sensitivity analysis identified overweight, obesity and alcohol dependence as the most potent influencing factors of the widening of the gender gap among patients with diabetes mellitus. Conclusions Diabetes mellitus is a stronger risk factor for MDD in women than in men, with the greatest width of the gender gap between 40 and 49 years. High-risk patients for MDD, such as overweight female patients with diabetes, should be more carefully assessed and monitored.

In a symbolic sense, this region may be burdened with a kind of negative ontology that is very difficult to change. Extremist ideologies are, in fact, just a continuation of the war by other means. They have entered education, and beginning to metastasize and affect the entire social tissue, becoming "naturalness", supported by different mythopoetic narratives of a particular nation. In an environment where politics is extreme, many avoid concerns the very nature of extremism and the process of radicalization within the discourse of „peacetime“ extremism. Extremism stems from finding two basic human needs: the need for cognitive closure and personal significance. Subordination of the individual to the national community, i.e., the leader, is a psychological form of political behavior marked by an obsessive preoccupation with the decline of the community; sacrificing the process of compensatory, the cult of unification while abandoning democratic freedoms with redemptive violence and, regardless of moral and legal constraints, seeks to achieve ethnoreligious threatening collectivity (tribal identity). Extremism uses the properties of consciousness: ethnicity, religiousness, and thinking in absolute categories (in a destructive aspect to add naturalness to its ideas) to justify activities with a sacred or „patriotic“ will. Although the violent potential of nationalism in the Balkans should be overlooked by no means, the inflammatory rhetoric is just a method used by political elites to manipulate the public.

In post-Yugoslav spaces, democracy has not been won by independent and robust social groups that can act as a counterweight to the state structure, with formed interests that act "transformatively"; not directing political change and form the basis of political pluralism. In the processes of political and social transformation of society, pragmatism is a dangerous thing, and the apparent tendency of key political actors to follow the "speech of Europe" in their daily political practice without taking into the content. Ethnonationalism does not bring political scenes a socioeconomic system that would already be independently formed, with appropriate bearers of transformative interests and competing "projects" of the new order. Therefore, the worst uncertainty and fragility can slow down the normalization process and other unplanned consequences. The class of nationalist capitalists, political-economic oligarchies, during the conflicts, takes control of the state apparatus and ownership of economic resources, constituting "nation-states"; unilateral expropriation presented as a self-legitimizing act by which the whole society realizes its being in the form of sovereignty and embodies itself by constituting its "nation-state". Within the notion of "captured states," we can speak from the social property, which is privatized by post-war "tycoons;" supporting authoritarian rulers linked to kleptocracy as a strategy to maintain stability undermines the EU accession process. Civil resistance is not progressive, and all should define life in a democratic society. It is an urgent task of building a civic or democratic political culture, which is inconceivable without a built civil society. Even the banal level of democracy will not survive for a long time, and more countries are moving towards unequivocal authoritarianism and pure illiberalism. Keywords : Former Yugoslavia, kleptocracy, authoritarianism, defective democracy, political culture, civil society DOI : 10.7176/IAGS/86-04 Publication date :September 30th 2020

This paper focuses on the design of an adaptive controller for read/write (R/W) head servo system in a hard disk drive (HDD). In this control system a reference model-based adaptive loop is added to the inner feedback loop with the PID controller. The parameters of the PID controller are computed using PID tuner within Matlab/Simulink. The normalized MIT rule is then used to tune the controller parameters in order to reduce an error between the reference model and actual system. The main objective is to provide accurate and fast positioning of the R/W head and to ensure a fast response of the arm actuator. The performance of the designed system is evaluated through simulations taking into account an influence of changes in the system parameters as well as the effect of external disturbances acting.

The paper deals with the moving object tracking in dynamic environments, which is one of the most important problems in the field of computer vision. Over the last decade, an intensive work has been extensively done to create smart, autonomous vehicles that provide very precise and fast algorithms for the object detection and tracking. Our paper elaborates and demonstrates how it can be possible to monitor the trajectory of moving objects with high precision using sensor data, where the detection has been previously done. The standard Kalman Filter is described as an introduction to the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) which was used for the algorithm implementation. Therefore, a problem of choosing model equations is also described, as well as the KITTI dataset used for the object detection. The main contribution of this paper includes an algorithm for the trajectory tracking that is capable to predict the position of moving objects. This algorithm is verified by experiments using realistic dataset.

Abstract In this paper, changes in the content of photosynthetic pigments during the vegetation season in the leaves of Phragmites communis Trin., Salvinia natans (L.) All., Trapa natans L. and Utricularia vulgaris L. in the area of Bardača fishpond (Sinjak pond) were monitored. Physical and chemical characteristics of water are defined in order to determine their association with the content of photosynthetic pigments. The obtained results indicate the specificity in the content of photosynthetic pigments between aquatic macrophytes and significant variations during the vegetation season. The maximum content of pigments was determined in the leaves of the emerged species, while the minimum content was measured in the submerged and floating leaves. The investigated macrophytic species showed a similar trend in the total chlorophyll content during the vegetation period; with two maximums recorded – May and September, while the minimum values were recorded with the senescence process (October). Total chlorophyll and carotenoids were in a negative correlation with temperature, pH, saturation, water transparency and orthophosphate content in water. On the other hand, they were in a positive correlation with the content of nitrates in water. The correlation analysis of the physical and chemical parameters of water quality and the concentration of macrophytes photosynthetic pigments showed a significant influence of certain abiotic factors on the photosynthetic pigments’ content in the leaves of Phragmites communis Trin., Salvinia natans (L.) All., Trapa natans L. and Utricularia vulgaris L.