The transgressive basal unit of the Early Cambrian black-shale sequence along the rifted margin of the southeastern Yangtze platform hosts a wide spectrum of marine sedimentary rocks distributed over more than a length of 1,000 km. A few-centimeter-thick sulfide-rich black shale units have spectacular metal tenors (Mo and Ni in the percent range, PGE + Au around 1 ppm) and consist of submillimeter-scale laminated sulfide and carbonaceous material and centimeter-sized pebble-like rip-up clasts of Mo-S-C compounds, pyrite, and Ni-rich polymetallic sulfides in carbonaceous and phosphate-rich matrix. The δ 53/52 Cr authigenic values of Mo-Ni sulfide-rich black shale samples from the Zunyi mining district (Guizhou province), as well as from the Sancha district (Hunan province), 400 km northeast, have a mean of 0.96 ± 0.22‰ ( n = 8), while V-rich black shale from both districts has a mean of 1.34 ± 0.46‰ ( n = 5). These data indicate significantly positively fractionated values compared to igneous silicate Earth. The Cr isotope values of the studied shales compare with recent findings of positively fractionated δ 53/52 Cr values in Late Neoproterozoic-Phanerozoic marine carbonates and shale/mudstones and attest for the operation of an intensified oxidative surface Cr cycle from at least around ~0.75 Gyr ago. We propose that the major change in Cr cycling around the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary was caused by a significant rise of atmospheric oxygen levels. The Cr isotope data confirm earlier conclusions from Mo and Os isotopes, which indicate a seawater metal source with ultimate metal supply by oxidative weathering of continental crust. In particular, covariation trends of Re-Os and of platinum-group elements display a distinct seawater signature, and a degree of metal enrichment which is an extension of the normal black shale pattern. The Mo-Ni sulfide-rich black shale units are probably produced by winnowing of subaquatic hardground deposited under euxinic conditions. The same stratigraphic level also hosts anoxic/suboxic V-rich black shale (V in illite) and huge phosphorite deposits in oxic/suboxic settings, bedded barite, as well as 10s of meter-thick sapropelic alginite (combustible shale). We show that the extreme metal enrichment of the Mo-Ni sulfide-rich black shale can be understood as a combination of redox cycling and bottom-water/sediment-interface scavenging under euxinic conditions (Mo, noble metals), and of oxidation (remineralization) of organic matter settling from the photic zone, with sulfide fixation of Ni and other biophile elements under denitrifying and sulfate-reducing conditions. High biological activity (as in coastal upwelling settings with high nutrient supply), very low clastic accumulation rate (as in protected basins), and low organic matter deposition (high rate of remineralization) in stratified oxic-suboxic-euxinic basins are requirements for advanced metal enrichment in black shales. A special bathymetric condition of slope deposition with intrabasinal olistostrome-like mass movement and gravitational winnowing explains both the peculiar ore textures and the further metal enrichment to ore grade in the Early Cambrian rock units on the Yangtze platform. The Mo-Ni sulfide-rich sediments can be regarded as the euxinic variant of the marine hydrogenous ore deposit spectrum, where ferromanganese nodules/crusts represent the oxic variant of extreme fractionation from seawater.


This study examines the local tradition of Buginese tribe community in South Sulawesi that is death ritual, precisely in Tadang Palie village. The death ritual is named Makkuluhuwallah taken from the first verse of Surat al-Ikhlās. The surat is usually recited about 15,000 times to 100,000 times in seven days. The uniqueness of Makkuhuwallah is the medium used to calculate the number of recitations by using gravel. After a seventh day, the pebbles will be placed above the grave or gravestone. This research type is qualitative research which its data processing system used is descriptive-analytic. The working instrument combines library studies and field studies. This study also wants to see how the Qur'an is responded by a popular society with the term Living Qur'an Study. The author finds the reason behind the use of the surah al-Ikhlās in Makkuluhuwallah procession. It is based on the public receptions of al-Ikhlās. Surat al-Ikhlās includes the shortest letter in the Qur'an and has a great prominence (faḍīlah). The prominence of al-Ikhlās is often found in a hadith which states that reciting surat al-Ikhlās is equal with the whole of the Qur'an. Logically, reciting al-Ikhlās three times already completes the whole al-Quran especially when reciting it thousand times. The writer suspects that motivation is the basis of the implementation of Makkuluhuwallah.


Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.


According to the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey-Nutrition, the majority of Canadians are consuming fibre below the adequate intake (AI) level. Although an intervention by Health Canada to improve fibre intakes may seem appropriate, there is insufficient evidence to warrant an intervention given the methodological flaws for assessing fibre intakes in the Canadian population. This paper explores these limitations by reviewing how the AI for fibre was developed, by examining how fibre intakes are assessed by the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey-Nutrition, and by outlining the limitations of using an AI to draw conclusions about fibre inadequacy. Recognizing the pitfalls of this methodology is the first step to improving the assessment of fibre intakes in Canada, which is needed before any intervention by Health Canada is implemented.


Correspondence: Hector O Chapa Women's Specialty Center Dallas, Chapa Medical Consulting, 2042 Marydale Rd, Dallas, TX 75208, USA Tel +1 214 334 8116 Email email@example.com Objective: The aim of this study was to compare maternal morbidity at repeat cesarean section (CS) between use of a Gynecare InterceedTM Absorbable Adhesion Barrier (Gynecare, Somerville, NJ, USA) and non-use at primary cesarean delivery. Design: This was a retrospective study of patients in whom an absorbable adhesion barrier was/was not used at their primary CS. Methods: Mean and excessive blood loss, the need for adhesiolysis, and postoperative fever were compared between those in whom a barrier was used at first CS and those in whom a barrier was not used. Visceral injury at repeat cesarean was also compared between the two groups. Results: No statistically significant difference in mean blood loss was noted between the two groups. However, significantly more patients in whom a barrier was not used had excessive intraoperative blood loss (barrier group, 1/53 [1.9%]; no-barrier group, 6/59 [10.1%]; P = 0.04). All seven cases of excessive blood loss had adhesiolysis. Significantly more patients in the no-barrier group underwent adhesiolysis (no-barrier group, 35/59 [59.3%]; barrier group, 7/53 [13.2%]; P = 0.03). No statistical difference in postoperative metritis was noted (1/59 [1.8%] in the barrier group and 1/59 [1.7%] in the no-barrier group; P = 0.99). Only one deserosalization of the bladder dome occurred in a patient in the no-barrier group. Conclusion: Those in whom a barrier was not used at primary CS were more likely to have adhesiolysis and excessive blood loss (.1250 mL) at repeat CS. No significant difference in postoperative metritis/fever was noted between groups. Adhesion barrier at primary CS may reduce some aspects of maternal morbidity at repeat CS.


Background: Management of pain in the prehospital setting is an important priority for prehospital clinicians, yet is often underestimated, either due to poor pain assessment, under dosing and inadequate provision of analgesia1,2. A femur fracture is considered a painful injury and as such, should be managed with effective analgesia. Pain is associated with multiple negative physiological effects which may potentially worsen a patient's clinical condition1, further highlighting the importance of providing effective analgesia. Vassiliadis et al., highlighted that patients with a femur fracture receive only moderate analgesia in the prehospital setting and this requires a focused strategy to improve the care received by these patients3. A retrospective audit of the Hamad Medical Corporation Ambulance Service (HMCAS) electronic patient care records (ePCR) highlighted the low frequency of prehospital analgesia for the management of femur fractures (October 2016 – December 2016). The provision of three pharmacological agents (Methoxyflurane, Fentanyl and Ketamine) which are the primary analgesics used by the HMCAS for the management of pain associated with femur fractures was reviewed. These drugs are often used together in a multimodal strategy to manage pain effectively. A multimodal approach to managing trauma pain has the benefit of improving efficacy with multiple mechanisms of action, limiting the number of doses required of a single drug, as well as reducing the risk of side effects4. The aim of this study was to improve prehospital analgesia for femur fractures, by means of introducing a purpose-designed trauma CPD training course. Focused training through the means of high fidelity simulations and simple skills training leads to improved performance and an increase in knowledge gained by the practitioner5, resulting in improved and safer care delivered to patients. Methods: An intervention consisting of a theoretical, individual skills and simulation-based mandatory trauma CPD training session for all operational prehospital care providers was implemented over a three-month period (January 2017 – March 2017). The eight-hour trauma CPD training session focused on managing major trauma with specific focus on femur fracture identification and optimization of analgesia (Figure 1). Following the intervention period, a repeat retrospective audit of the ePCR database was conducted to identify any improvement in the frequency of prehospital analgesia for patients with femur fractures (April 2017 – June 2017). Results: The mean provision of prehospital analgesia for a femur fracture in the pre-intervention stage was found to be suboptimal (Methoxyflurane 61%; Fentanyl 21%; Ketamine 12%). Whereas, following the intervention period, the mean provision of prehospital analgesia for femur fractures increased significantly (Methoxyflurane 100%; Fentanyl 30%; Ketamine 52%). See Figure 2. Conclusion: This study found that focused trauma training is an effective means to improve prehospital analgesia for femur fractures as well as overall patient care. Introduction of the trauma CPD training session resulted in an improvement in the management of pain associated with a femur fracture. Significant room for improvement still exists and prehospital analgesia should continue to be developed. Further research is still required.


The need to decrease excess antibiotic use in ambulatory practice has been fueled by the epidemic increase in antibiotic-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae. The majority of antibiotics prescribed to adults in ambulatory practice in the United States are for acute sinusitis, acute pharyngitis, acute bronchitis, and nonspecific upper respiratory tract infections (including the common cold). For each of these conditions--especially colds, nonspecific upper respiratory tract infections, and acute bronchitis (for which routine antibiotic treatment is not recommended)--a large proportion of the antibiotics prescribed are unlikely to provide clinical benefit to patients. Because decreasing community use of antibiotics is an important strategy for combating the increase in community-acquired antibiotic-resistant infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened a panel of physicians representing the disciplines of internal medicine, family medicine, emergency medicine, and infectious diseases to develop a series of "Principles of Appropriate Antibiotic Use for Treatment of Acute Respiratory Tract Infections in Adults." These principles provide evidence-based recommendations for evaluation and treatment of adults with acute respiratory illnesses.This paper describes the background and specific aims of and methods used to develop these principles. The goal of the principles is to provide clinicians with practical strategies for limiting antibiotic use to the patients who are most likely to benefit from it. These principles should be used in conjunction with effective patient educational campaigns and enhancements to the health care delivery system that facilitate nonantibiotic treatment of the conditions in question.


INTRODUCTION In discussing the emergence and development of evolutionary biology, historians of biology typically divide the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into four eras. The first, the pre-Darwinian period, came prior to publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, and it includes evolutionary theorizing by figures like Lamarck and Chambers. The second period focused on the reception and reaction to Darwin's work by the public, religious authorities, and natural scientists. This period lasted from 1859 to about 1880 and is best characterized by works that systematically examine the reception of Darwin's ideas across different countries (Glick, 1974). Beginning about 1880 and lasting through most of the 1930s is a period widely described as the "eclipse of Darwinism" or the "eclipse of Darwin."1 Biologists and historians of biology alike have described this period as one during which many theories competed for status. During these years, Darwinian evolutionary theory was supposedly obscured, and ultimately discarded, as speculative and old-fashioned natural history. Finally, beginning about 1940, a collection of geneticists, organismal biologists, and statisticians produced what Julian Huxley termed the modern "evolutionary synthesis," which brought together Darwinism and Mendelism, mutationism and modern genetics. This paper focuses on the period of so-called eclipse. Unfortunately, much of our understanding of this eclipse comes from scientists of the synthesis era and historians who have been unduly influenced by them. For example, in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, Huxley (1942) explained that during the 1910s evolutionary scientists were scattered, confused, and contradictory. Huxley explained how Mendelians contradicted the neo-Lamarckians, mutationists fought with Weismannians who were also fighting with the neo-Lamarckians, experimental embryologists opposed the classical recapitulatory theories of development, and the followers of newer disciplines, like genetics, considered the zoologists who clung to Darwinism to be antiquated naturalists rather than true scientists. Another architect of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Ernst Mayr, described the early twentieth century as rife with opposition to Darwinism. He pointed to the threat Darwinism posed to the argument from design, the lasting influence of essentialism, and the ambiguity of terms and phrases such as selection, species, and survival of the fittest. Historians of science, as we shall see, have perpetuated claims made by synthesis authors about the work done by the previous generation of biologists. Some who have written about the development of evolutionary theory after Darwin have gone as far as simply ignoring an entire generation of biologists. For example, Ruse's "really big book" (600+ pages), Monad to Man (1996), on the two-and-a-half-century history of evolutionary theory ignores nearly every American biologist of the early twentieth century and claims there were no American researchers "working on evolution for its own sake" during this period.2 For those historians who write about the time between T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, the era of the eclipse of Darwin was a time of great upheaval, and Darwinism was, at best, just one of a number of competing theories of evolution. At worst, it was considered litde more than speculation that had been discarded by most working biologists. The eclipse ended, the current literature claims, in the early 1940s with technical and disciplinary developments to evolutionary science that brought about the modern evolutionary synthesis. I argue here that the phrase "eclipse of Darwinism" is inappropriately and problematically employed by historians of biology. The eclipse is a deterministic metaphor of darkness that establishes a discontinuous history of evolutionary theory. The era of the eclipse of Darwin was, according to the current literature, a time when the bright light of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was obscured by competing mediodologies, by the speculative nature of the work done by its adherents and by an onslaught of competing tiieories of evolutionary change. …


This paper discusses ongoing research on the relation of money to economic activity in the post-World War I1 United States. As in previous work, the stress is on the distinction between anticipated and unanticipated movements of money. Part I deals with annual data. Aside from updating and refinements of earlier analysis, the principal new results concern joint, cross-equation estimation and testing of the money growth, unemployment, output and price level equations. The present findings raise some doubts about the specification of the price equation, although the other relations receive further statistical support. Part I1 applies the analysis to quarterly data. Despite the necessity to deal with pronounced serial correlation of residuals in the equations for unemployment, output and the price level, the main results are consistent with those obtained from annual data. Further, the quarterly estimates allow a detailed description of the lagged response of unemployment and output to money shocks. The estimates reveal some lack of robustness in the price equation, which again suggests some misspecification of this relation.


Deep learning systems typically suffer from catastrophic forgetting of past knowledge when acquiring new skills continually. In this paper, we emphasize two dilemmas, representation bias and classifier bias in class-incremental learning, and present a simple and novel approach that employs explicit class augmentation (classAug) and implicit semantic augmentation (semanAug) to address the two biases, respectively. On the one hand, we propose to address the representation bias by learning transferable and diverse representations. Specifically, we investigate the feature representations in incremental learning based on spectral analysis and present a simple technique called classAug, to let the model see more classes during training for learning representations transferable across classes. On the other hand, to overcome the classifier bias, semanAug implicitly involves the simultaneous generating of an infinite number of instances of old classes in the deep feature space, which poses tighter constraints to maintain the decision boundary of previously learned classes. Without storing any old samples, our method can perform comparably with representative data replay based approaches.


Abstrac Green sea turtles, Chelonia mydas, are known to inhabit populated and often urbanized areas. To understand turtle habitat use and behavior within these unique habitats, seven juvenile green turtles were fitted with acoustic transmitters (September 2012 – August 2014), of which two transmitters included an accelerometer (AP transmitter). One individual fitted with an AP transmitter was tracked using a passive acoustic array in an urbanized river, the San Gabriel River, Long Beach, CA (33°45' N, 118°05' W). Three additional turtles in this river and three turtles (one with AP transmitter) in a restored estuary (33°44' N, 118°03' W) in southern California were actively tracked for two non-consecutive 24-h periods. Those fitted with AP transmitters indicated that turtles were less active at night (0.58 ± 0.56 m/s2 and 0.50 ± 0.63 m/s2) than during the day (0.86 ± 0.63 m/s2 and 0.78 ± 0.60 m/s2) at both sites. Activity data and corresponding movements of the actively tracked turtle fitted with the AP transmitter were used to infer resting periods for other tracked individuals. Turtles rested near bridge pilings and runoff outflows in the river to potentially shelter from tidal flow. Turtles used significantly larger daily areas in the urbanized river (0.046 ± 0.023 km2) where resources may be patchier and less abundant, compared to turtles in the estuary (0.024 ± 0.012 km2) where large, dense eelgrass beds are present. Based on the habitat use and behaviors of green sea turtles, it appears that some green sea turtles are able to make use of both highly developed and restored habitats and likely benefit from certain aspects of development.


Abstract New strategies in the development of anthrax vaccines and therapeutics have been presented. Recently, considerable progress has been made in the finding of new drugs and suitable therapy for anthrax. Very promising research considers the use of antimicrobials against selected bacteria species, including antibiotic-resistant strains. However, alternative therapeutic options should also be considered, among them vaccines. Bacillus anthracis spores are still the most dangerous weapon amongst pathogens which can be used in a bioterror attack. In this case, research for new anti-anthrax preparations is of primary importance for the protection of humans and animals. The overview of the most recent data shows the many new and promising possibilities for effective strategies in the development of vaccines and anti-anthrax preparations. The most effective of them should be available in the National Stockpile in the event of a biological crisis.


The coupling of high-power optical pulses into integrated-optics waveguides exhibiting nonlinearities is treated theoretically. A general result is that the coupling efficiency varies with pulse energy. Furthermore, the output pulses are distorted relative to the input pulses. For input pulses symmetric in time about their peak amplitude, the output pulses are asymmetric and symmetric for nonlinearities with turn-off times slower and faster, respectively, than the pulse width. Coupling efficiency and pulse distortion are also evaluated for interference between slow and fast nonlinearities of opposite sign. Finally, the dependence of the temporal pulse profile on the ratio of the pulse width to nonlinearity relaxation time is examined.


This paper strives to overturn the general consensus that has formed over the past three decades on the identification of the Akkadian lexeme udru as exclusively designating the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus). This general opinion does not appreciate the semantic evolution of the lexeme udru during the Iron Age. By examining references to udru in Mesopotamian texts from a diachronic perspective, we can outline the semantic evolution of the lexeme. It will be demonstrated that the lexeme udru without any qualifications designated the camel in general and the dromedary in particular during the 11th to 9th centuries bce. Only after the Assyrians defeated the Arabians in the 8th century bce and became better acquainted with the dromedary (Camelus dromedarius), did the lexeme udru start to designate the Bactrian camel in particular.


Activation-induced cell death of T lymphocytes requires the inducible expression of CD95 (APO-1/Fas) ligand, which triggers apoptosis in CD95-bearing target cells by an autocrine or paracrine mechanism. Although execution of the CD95 death pathway is largely independent of reactive oxygen intermediates, activation-induced cell death is blocked by a variety of antioxidants. In the present study, we investigated the involvement of redox processes in the regulation of CD95 ligand (CD95L) expression in Jurkat T cells. We show that various antioxidants potently inhibited the transcriptional activation of CD95L following T cell receptor ligation or stimulation of cells with phorbol ester and ionomycin. Conversely, a prooxidant such as hydrogen peroxide alone was able to increase CD95L expression. As detected by Western blot and cytotoxicity assays, functional expression of CD95L protein was likewise diminished by antioxidants. Inhibition of CD95L expression was associated with a decreased DNA binding activity of nuclear factor (NF)-κB, an important redox-controlled transcription factor. Moreover, inhibition of NF-κB activity by a transdominant IκB mutant attenuated CD95L expression. Our data suggest that, although reactive oxygen intermediates do not act as mediators in the execution phase of CD95-mediated apoptosis, they are involved in the transcriptional regulation of CD95L expression.


Introduction:

Breastfeeding is the natural way of feeding a baby, so it should be easy and trouble free for most mothers. It is recommended that mothers to breastfeed their babies exclusively, without giving any other food or drink, for the first six months and continue breastfeeding with appropriate complementary foods up to two years old and beyond [1]. An exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life was also being emphasized in the Malaysian National Breastfeeding Policy which was formulated in 1993 and revised in 2005 in accordance with the World Health Assembly Resolution 54.2.

Breastfeeding is beneficial to both, baby and mother. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) [2], if every baby were exclusively breastfed from birth, an estimated 1.5 million lives would be saved each year. And not just saved, but enhanced, because breast milk is the perfect food for a baby's first six months of life. Beral et al. [3] reported that the longer women breastfeed the more they are protected against breast cancer. In addition, according to Danforth et al. [4], mothers who breastfeed their babies of 18 or more months are associated with a significant decrease in ovarian cancer risk compared to those never breastfeed. Other than health benefits of breastfeeding, it offers a natural opportunity to communicate love at the very beginning of a child's life by providing hours of closeness and nurturing every day, laying the foundation for a caring and trusting relationship between mother and child [2].

Despite the vast benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and babies, breastfeeding rates are declining worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) [5], the decline in duration of breastfeeding in the twentieth century as a result of rapid social and economic change, including urbanization and marketing of breast milk substitutes. Malaysia faces a similar phenomenon where not all mothers choose to breastfeed according to the suggested duration. Findings of the Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Surveys showed that the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding had declined from 29.0% in year 1996 to 14.5% in year 2006 [6].

Objective:

The aim of this study was to estimate the duration of breastfeeding and also to explore the determinants of the duration of breastfeeding in Peninsular Malaysia.


Liver cancer is the 3rd deadliest cancer worldwide, with 5‐year survival rates of only 15%. In the United States, liver cancer incidence and death rates are increasing at a faster rate than any other cancer and are projected to continue to rise through at least 2030. A significant proportion of these liver cancer cases are due to hepatitis B virus (HBV). Community‐based screening is a public health practice working to identify individuals who are living with HBV in underserved communities, particularly Asian American, Pacific Islander and African immigrant populations. This data set includes a total of 3019 individuals considered high risk for HBV tested at community‐based testing events between 2008 and 2019. Descriptive results revealed HBV infection rate was 7.9% (N = 229), and 59% (N = 1704) had protective antibodies against HBV. To account for missingness in the data, multiple imputation was preformed and followed by logistic regression to create a predictive model. The results support an association between insurance status and HBV infection in the predictive model. Participant region of origin was also significantly related to HBV infection, and participants who immigrated from the Western Pacific and African World Organization designated regions had higher odds of infection compared to participants from the Americas. Results emphasize the need to continue to expand testing in high‐risk populations for HBV.


ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview of this Special Issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ethnic and Racial Studies. We discuss some of the themes that are covered in this issue in the context of the wider history of the journal. We argue that the journal has worked over the years both to publish the highest quality original research and to feature scholarship in emerging subfields that have helped to broaden both our scope and reach across the globe. In addition we highlight some of the contribution that the journal has made to the development of both established and new areas of scholarship in its field throughout the world.


This paper develops an endogenous growth model which links pollution to ineffective input-use, which can be reduced through conservation capital investment. It derives the conditions under which individual preferences for environmental quality and private investment in conservation capital can lead to non-decreasing environmental quality and balanced growth in an unregulated and in a regulated regime. In the absence of regulation, balanced growth can lead to improvement in environmental quality as long as the rate of growth is low. The extent to which the growth rate is low depends upon preference for environmental quality, interest and discount rates, productivity of conservation capital, and price of the polluting input. Under an emissions tax regime, sustainable balanced growth requires the interest rate to lie between the amenity value derived by consumers from environmental improvement and the marginal return to the firm due to the regenerative capacity of the environment. This implies that interest rate must be high enough to encourage consumers to forego consumption but low enough to constrain the productivity of conservation capital and restrain usage of the polluting input. The emissions tax is also shown to be equivalent to a pollution permit system or to a two-instrument scheme composed of a tax on polluting input and a subsidy on conservation capital investment.


Ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) has become a reality as a technique to evaluate and recondition lungs from marginal donors. We report the first case on the use of EVLP followed by separate transplantation in two different centres. The local organ procurement organization proposed the lungs of a 53-year-old non-smoker donor who died for cerebral haemorrhage. P/F ratio was 294 after lung recruitment manoeuvres. Oto score was 10. Two centres accepted the grafts for two single transplantations under the condition of EVLP evaluation. After usual retrieval, the bi-pulmonary block was transferred to Centre 1 and EVLP was run as previously described. At the end of the procedure the two lungs were evaluated separately and both judged suitable for transplantation. After cooling and storage on ice, the block was separated on the back table. The left lung was transplanted in a patient with pulmonary fibrosis at Centre 1; surgery was complicated by cardiac arrhythmias that required several defibrillations. The right lung was transferred on ice to Centre 2, 250 km away from Centre 1, and transplanted in a patient with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Thirty months after transplantations Patient 1 and Patient 2 are both alive, in good clinical conditions. This is the first report of the separate use of lungs after EVLP for non-urgent recipients in two different centres. This experience opens the door to a new allocation model with great potentials on organ shortage. Actually, we demonstrated that the perspective of a 'lung repair centre' is feasible and effective.


Information Systems for Health & Wellbeing
Morning Parallel Session 2
Chair - Professor Kevin Balanda, Director of Research at the Institute of Public Health in Ireland
The Knowledge 4 Health Conference 2016 took place on 25th May at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, in Dublin.
This all-Island Conference explored innovative and practical ways of providing knowledge support for the implementation of  two public health frameworks. These are 'Healthy Ireland: A Framework for Improved Health & Wellbeing 2013-2025' in the Republic of Ireland and 'Making Life Better – A Whole System Strategic Framework for Public Health 2013–2023' in Northern Ireland.
'Innovation' was the cross-cutting theme of the Conference which included a broad range of speakers. It was a very interactive programme that ended with a key note speaker and an expert panel discussion answering questions from the audience. The Conference included two plenary and four parallel sessions focusing on the following themes:

Monitoring Health and Wellbeing Across the Population
Crossing Boundaries for Better Knowledge
Knowledge Exchange: Formulating Policy and Practice
Information Systems for Health and Wellbeing

There was an opportunity for interested organisations to display any projects (including online tools and systems) that support knowledge for health on the Island during an interactive showcase over lunch.
There was also a photographic exhibition titled "Health and Wellbeing" exploring the many meanings of health and wellbeing as reflected in the two public health frameworks on the Island.
To View the presentation, Click here
To listen to the presentation, Click here
To view photos from the event, Click here
To view the programme, Click here.
To view speaker profiles, Click here.


Many African and African America artists have chosen to represent Nsibidi and other African and Afro-Caribbean syllabaries in their works of art. However, some artists also produces art and script given to them "by God" with the intent of carrying out God's will and helping others? J.B. Murray believed this to be his situation. Through a thorough investigation of the history of the scripts and forms of Africa and the writing systems that developed in the Americas from those African scripts, the diasporic path that African traditions took in the Americas, will be explored. One of the challenges of this research has been the different perceptions expressed by Western and non-Western viewpoints. Through an analysis of several critical viewpoints, including sociological, anthropological, and art historical, these Western and non-Western viewpoints are critiqued in connection with the continuation of African traditions throughout the diaspora. Another area examined is the difference between knowing and choosing to use the scripts and forms of Africa to express a connection with that culture, such as the artists Betye Saar and Victor Ekpuk, and simply producing art, folkart, or script, and not knowing there is any connection between their work and the work of others, whether in other countries or their own. J.B. Murray is a wonderful artist to examine, due to the fact that he had no preconceived notions of African art, traditions, or customs. He was illiterate and therefore had no opportunity to read and gain knowledge of other cultures. Until he had produced his script and forms for a iv few years and gained notoriety with exposure to art institutions in the United States, he had no idea the messages going to his recipients through him, from God, had any connection to any


Although combinatorial auctions are important mechanisms for many specialized applications, their adoption in general-purpose marketplaces is still fairly limited, partly due to the inherent difficulty in evaluating the efficacy of bids without the availability of comprehensive bidder support. In this paper, we present both theo-retical results and computational designs to support real-time feedback to bidders in continuous combinatorial auctions, where bidders are free to join and leave the auction at any time. In particular, we focus on the broad class of single-item multi-unit (SIMU) combinatorial auctions, where multiple identical units of one homogenous item are being auctioned. We also consider two common ways to express bidding preferences: OR bids and XOR bids. For SIMU auctions with each of the two bid types, we present comprehensive analyses of auction dynamics, which can determine winning bids that satisfy allocative fairness, and compute critical evaluative metrics needed to provide bidder support, including bid winning and deadness levels. We also design the data structures and algorithms needed to provide bidder support in real time for SIMU auctions of practically relevant sizes. The computational tools proposed in this paper can facilitate the efficient and more transparent implementation of SIMU combinatorial auctions in business- and consumer-oriented markets.


We conducted elastic-wavefield modeling of shot gathers using soil-column models with vertical and lateral velocity variations to study the dispersive behavior of Rayleigh waves and the effect of lateral heterogeneity on the accuracy of Rayleigh-wave inversion for shear-wave velocity estimation. We also conducted a field experiment over an alluvial valley with soil column that thins out in the direction orthogonal to the valley axis. From the model and field experiments, we found that the dispersion characteristics of Rayleigh waves are greatly influenced by the geometry of and lateral heterogeneities within the soil column. Nevertheless, estimation of shear-wave velocities within a soil column with lateral heterogeneity by Rayleigh-wave inversion is sufficiently robust and accurate for geotechnical applications.


GPR35, a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), was discovered and specified as an orphan receptor in 1998. GPR35 has been described as a prospective therapeutic target as a result of its association with many diseases including type-2 diabetes, nociceptive pain, inflammation, mild mental retardation syndrome, metabolic disorders, and gastric cancer. A GPR35 antagonist benzothiazole was identified via high-throughput screening of approximately 300,000 compounds. Based on the docking of the benzothiazole into a homology model of GPR35, analogs were designed, synthesized, and evaluated as antagonists at GPR35. The study examines various regions of the GPR35 binding site for the benzothiazole ligand. The results provided information that was used as a guide to design and synthesized potent GPR35 ligands. A heterocyclic ring, pyrazole, has gained special consideration as a result of its significant biological properties including anti-cancer, anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-inflammatory. Structurally novel pyrazole derivatives were designed, synthesized and evaluated for antagonist activity at the GPR35 receptor. Due to the scarcity in the anti-microbial drugs and limited scaffold with potentially unique mode of action and different resistance mechanism, these pyrazoles were also evaluated for their anti-microbial activity. SAR study on the pyrazole core presented potential antimicrobial agents that will serve as basis for designing and developing novel antimicrobial drugs.


The article explores the development of the concept of slavery in the European legal sphere. By means of an evolutionary approach, the author provides introduction to the first implementations of the prohibition of slavery in instruments of international law. Starting out as an economic measure protecting the colonial interests of the great European powers in the 19th century, the prohibition of slavery then developed, over the course of the 20th century, into a matter of human rights, with the prohibition aimed at protecting people subject to slavery. However, the practical scope of the slavery prohibition has always been subject to disagreements, not just to do with the first legal definition of slavery as incorporated into the Slavery Convention of 1926 but also extending to the contemporary approach. The author introduces the scholarly debate regarding the substantial meaning of the prohibition of slavery and the discrepancies among the approaches taken by international institutions.


Despite the advances made in the last decade in automated planning, no planner outperforms all the others in every known benchmark domain. This observation motivates the idea of selecting different planning algorithms for different domains. Moreover, the planners' performances are affected by the structure of the search space, which depends on the encoding of the considered domain. In many domains, the performance of a planner can be improved by exploiting additional knowledge, extracted in the form of macro-operators or entanglements. In this paper we propose ASAP, an automatic Algorithm Selection Approach for Planning that: (i) for a given domain initially learns additional knowledge, in the form of macro-operators and entanglements, which is used for creating different encodings of the given planning domain and problems, and (ii) explores the 2 dimensional space of available algorithms, defined as encodings -- planners couples, and then (iii) selects the most promising algorithm for optimising either the runtimes or the quality of the solution plans.


As the first phase of their Kidsmart programme in the UK, IBM donated a total of 27 of their Young Explorer Early Learning Centres, complete with Edmark educational software to 14 nurseries in 1999. These Early Learning Centres were initially developed by Little Tykes to serve the needs of 3 to 7 year olds and the Kidsmart aim has been to support early childhood educators in their efforts to apply this new technology to stimulate the development of children's social and cognitive skills. The UK initiative has also involved the British Association for Early Childhood Education (Early Education), who have worked in partnership with IBM to initially identify appropriate settings and in providing suitable training for them, to promote the initiative, and to commission this evaluation. The evaluation has therefore been carried out in association with the British Association for Early Childhood Education (Early Education), and is funded jointly by IBM and indirectly by the European Union as a part of the Developmentally Appropriate Technology in Early Childhood (DATEC) research project. The study has been conducted in the 14 pre-school settings (4 in Scotland and 10 in England) initially identify as appropriate Kidsmart recipient in the UK. They each offer a diversity of early childhood services in mainly disadvantaged areas. The settings included playgroups, nurseries, early excellence centres, family centres, and nursery classrooms. The study seeks to investigate whether the IBM initiative has improved the information and communications technology (ICT) provision offered to the three and four-year old children in the centres, and how the provision may be improved in the next phase of the project. The approach adopted in the study has been informed strongly by the work carried out by the principal investigators in contributing to the European Union funded project: Developmentally Appropriate Technology in Early Childhood (DATEC), and by the position statement by NAEYC (the USA National Association for the Education of Young Children) for developmentally appropriate practices for children from birth through age eight. Both of these initiatives accept as a basic principle that all high quality early childhood programmes should; "provide a safe and nurturing environment that promotes the physical, social, emotional and cognitive development of young children while responding to the needs of families" (Bredekamp and Copple (1997). The study has also been informed by the previous evaluations of the Kidsmart programme that were carried out in the USA by Nancy Nager (1999 and 2000).


Sal'nikov's reaction: P→A→B involves a precursor, P, in two consecutive, first-order chemical reactions, yielding a final product B via an intermediate A. Partly as an academic exercise, but partly because of its relationship with cool flames, the situation is considered where the second step is faster than the first one, which is taken to be thermoneutral without an activation energy. The second step is assumed to have a significant activation energy, although it is exothermic. The reaction proceeds batchwise inside a spherical reactor, whose walls are held at a constant temperature, but do not participate chemically. Natural convection becomes important, once the temperature is high enough for the Rayleigh number (Ra) to reach ~ 103. The subsequent behaviour of the system depends on the interaction between convection, diffusion of heat and mass, and chemical kinetics. By examining the governing equations, we develop and evaluate scales for the characteristic velocity, the concentration of the intermediate A and the temperature rise during the progress of the reaction, for the two extreme cases when transport is dominated, in turn, by diffusion and then by natural convection. These scales depend on the characteristic timescales for the interacting phenomena of chemical reaction, diffusion and natural convection. Typically, the characteristic velocity in a relatively small reactor of radius 0.27 m is as large as 0.3 m s-1, when the temperature rise is 100 K near the centre of the vessel. These theoretical predictions from scaling are verified by full numerical simulations. Oscillations of both the temperature and the concentration of the intermediate, A, can occur and the conditions for their appearance are identified. Any accompanying flow field proves to be toroidal, with the fluid ascending close to the reactor's axis, but descending adjacent to its walls. In addition, the effects of variables, such as the initial temperature of the batch reactor and its contents, the pressure and also the size of the reactor are all assessed, together with a consideration of what happens when the reaction proceeds in the liquid phase. In this case, because of the different physical properties of a liquid and a gas, natural convection is more intense than in the gas-phase and is quite likely to lead to turbulence and good mixing.


Ukraine belongs among those young countries where the beginnings of democratisation and nation-building approximately coincided. While the development of nation states in Central Europe was usually preceded by the development of nations, the biggest dilemma in the Ukraine is whether a nation-state programme — parallel to the aim of state-building — is able to bring unfinished nation-building to completion. Ukraine sways between the EU and Russia with enormous amplitude. The alternating orientation between the West and the East can be ascribed to superpower ambitions reaching beyond Ukraine. Eventually, internal and external determinants are intertwined and mutually interact with one another. The aim of the paper is to explain the dilemmas arising from identity problems behind the Ukraine's internal and external orientation.


A loyal servant of the Ottoman Empire in his early career, Sati' al-Husri (1880-1968) became one of Arab nationalism's most articulate and influential spokesmen. His shift from Ottomanism, based on religion and the multi-national empire, to Arabism, defined by secular loyalties and the concept of an Arab nation, is the theme of William Cleveland's account of "the making of an Arab nationalist." Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Background and purpose: Aging is associated with brain changes and reduction in motor skill acquisition that can limit its functional capacity. One of the effective interventions is using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The aim of this systematic review was to assess the effect of tDCS on learning and motor skill in healthy older adults.
Materials and methods: A literature search for the period of 1995-2016 was performed using PubMed, Google scholar, Science Direct, OVID, PEDro, Cochrane library, and CINAHL databases. Studies investigating the effect of tDCS in different regions of cortex on learning and motor skill parameters in healthy older adults were included. The PEDro quality scale was used to investigate the studies included.
Results: According to the inclusion criteria of the study, seven articles were selected from 97 relevant articles. There were considerable differences among the studies in terms of methodology, outcome measures, sample size, procedure, etc. The results indicated that using tDCS on primary motor cortex and cerebellum regions could significantly improve motor learning and motor skill in older adults. In addition, tDCS in prefrontal, parietal and temporoparietal regions had significant, strong and long-term effects on cognition and working memory in older adults.
Conclusion: It seems that administration of tDCS in different regions of brain as a boosting technique can enhance motor learning, motor skill, and working memory capacity in healthy older adults. This method can control aging learning deficits.
Keywords: trans-cranial direct current stimulation, motor learning, motor skill, older adult


Copybooks and the Palmer method, handwriting analysis and autograph collecting-these words conjure up a lost world, in which people looked to handwriting as both a lesson in conformity and a talisman of individuality. In this engaging history, ranging from colonial times to the present, Tamara Plakins Thornton explores the shifting functions and meanings of handwriting in America. Script emerged in the eighteenth century as a medium intimately associated with the self, says Thornton, in contrast to the impersonality of print. But thereafter, just what kind of self would be defined or revealed in script was debated in the context of changing economic and social realities, definitions of manhood and womanhood, and concepts of mind and body. Thornton details the parties to these disputes: writing masters who used penmanship training to form and discipline character; scientific experts who chalked up variations in script to mere physiological idiosyncrasy; and autograph collectors and handwriting analysts who celebrated signatures that broke copybook rules as marks of personality, revealing the uniqueness of the self. In our time, concludes Thornton, when handwriting skills seem altogether obsolete, calligraphy revivals and calls for old-fashioned penmanship training reflect nostalgia and the rejection of modernity.


The World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) serves as a forum to negotiate, review, and revise the Radio Regulations (RR), an international treaty and one of the most difficult regulations for radiocommunication services. RR is complex since it includes intergovernmental issues in relation to regulation covering technical, legal and societal aspects. A large number of parties are interested and involved in revising RR and creating supranational instruments for optimal management of the spectrum. As a consequence, it can be difficult for one involved stakeholder to see its own position and other relevant issues directly influencing them in relation to the whole work of WRC and its subprocesses. A systematic analysis of the main decision-making process would contribute to better understanding of the role of WRC and positions of the involved parties. The aim of the paper is to contribute to better understanding of the role of the WRC with a focus on the current agenda items. Agenda items are specified issues from RR that need to be handled at an actual conference. The point of departure is using the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework [see Ostrom (2011)] to gain a suitable institutional overview of the main decision-making process and its sub-processes. The IAD framework has the capacity to explain jointly produced outcomes, such as negotiating an international treaty depending on multiple inputs and different priority levels. Also, it can be used to enhance the understanding of WRC matters in order to improve the decision-making process by focusing on the main interactions and involved parties in relation to the possible outcomes of the WRC. The paper is based on data obtained from historical documents, content analysis, literature review, observations, and interviews. The results of this paper illustrate the benefits of the IAD framework in the context of the WRC, especially for the process of agenda setting and study cycles. The practical implications are important for policy makers, for example, since it highlights critical actors, events, and interactions aligned with the main activities of WRC. A stakeholder will better understand its own position and its possibility for control, both in relation to the overall process and the sub-processes important for agenda items in which it has an interest. It will gain understanding not only of the overall role of WRC, but also of its own possibilities to intervene during the process of revision of RR so that it could protect its interests - e.g., with more proper contribution in the suitable forums with the expected outcome.


Different kinds of user-generated content are becoming available in mobile digital and web media settings as well spurred by the rapid advances in the cellular telephony market. We use a unique dataset of individual-level mobile records to study the nature of interdependencies between users' content generation and content usage behavior. While theories of resource constraints from economics posit the existence of a negative interdependency between content generation and usage, theories of social exchange from sociology posit the existence of a positive interdependency between these two activities. Hence, the final directional nature of this interdependency is an empirical question. We find that there exist negative inter-temporal interdependencies between the content generation and usage behavior. The effect is also asymmetric such that the negative impact of previous period's content generation on current period's content usage is higher than vice-versa. Managerial implications for discounting in data transmission prices are discussed.


Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) takes his readers on a pilgrimage through what he calls the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso (ostensibly Hell, Purgatory and Heaven) in his epic poem The Divine Comedy, originally titled Commedia. This paper concentrates exclusively on Dante's contemporaries, those people who lived during his lifetime, and examines his possible motivation for targeting enemy Ghibellines, Black Guelphs, treacherous White Guelphs, corrupt popes, and others who either crossed him or caused him trouble. He vindictively used his masterpiece to lash out at his contemporary enemies, exacting retribution against many who angered him in his lifetime or otherwise offended his religious, political, civic or personal sensibilities, thus revealing a hidden sin, Wrath. Dante deviously groups contemporary characters in such a way as to arrive at a larger and more sinister point, that people from Bologna, Pistoia, Siena, Pisa, Genoa and even his beloved Florence, should be reviled or exterminated. He vindictively roots for ethnic cleansing. The lower construction of Dante's Hell appears to have little to do with Christian theology but, rather, is a contrivance to house his detested enemies and give him personal revenge. Dante's wrath for his contemporaries may have inspired much of the Inferno, making the poem far less Divine.


In a stylized model of international trade, firms in the North indirectly export second-hand products to a representative firm in the South to be reused as intermediate goods, with potential trade gains. The level of reusability of waste products is a crucial choice variable in the North. This is because, in the presence of imperfect international monitoring, non-reusable waste can be illegally mixed with reusable waste. I explore the driving forces for illegal waste movement, with a particular focus on local waste regulations such as the EU's Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. Under mild conditions, it is shown that increasingly stringent regulations in the North induce Northern firms to reduce product reusability. Consequently, the flow of non-reusable waste to the South increases, magnifying the pollution haven effect.


This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no 'Great Man' in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden's book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden's ideas, the varying versions of 'logical atomism' of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby's (1837–1912) 'significs', and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.


This article analyzes how the groups of the Swedish Pirate movement (specifically the Piratbyran, The Pirate Bay, the Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet, and the Piratpartiet) use dialogical comedy to counter the rhetoric of the copyright lobby. By appropriating the discourse, slogans, and even names of pro-copyright groups, the Swedish groups position themselves as the natural respondents to antipiracy campaigns. This positioning helps them to publicize onerous copyright legislation and prompt discussion on infringement, free speech, and digital rights. The reclamation of the term piracy and the subversive doubling of antipiracy rhetoric in parody, irony, and satire allows for the resignification of piracy and the recontextualization of incorrect and alarmist statements by industry representatives. As a rhetorical strategy, dialogic comedy counters hegemonic discourse, facilitates social learning, and inaugurates debate and dialogue.


The separability problem for word languages of a class $\mathcal{C}$ by languages of a class $\mathcal{S}$ asks, for two given languages $I$ and $E$ from $\mathcal{C}$, whether there exists a language $S$ from $\mathcal{S}$ that includes $I$ and excludes $E$, that is, $I \subseteq S$ and $S\cap E = \emptyset$. In this work, we assume some mild closure properties for $\mathcal{C}$ and study for which such classes separability by a piecewise testable language (PTL) is decidable. We characterize these classes in terms of decidability of (two variants of) an unboundedness problem. From this, we deduce that separability by PTL is decidable for a number of language classes, such as the context-free languages and languages of labeled vector addition systems. Furthermore, it follows that separability by PTL is decidable if and only if one can compute for any language of the class its downward closure wrt. the scattered substring ordering (i.e., if the set of scattered substrings of any language of the class is effectively regular).
The obtained decidability results contrast some undecidability results. In fact, for all (non-regular) language classes that we present as examples with decidable separability, it is undecidable whether a given language is a PTL itself.
Our characterization involves a result of independent interest, which states that for any kind of languages $I$ and $E$, non-separability by PTL is equivalent to the existence of common patterns in $I$ and $E$.


In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. This book situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology, yet emerge from traditional cultural models. Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, the book connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. It shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate. Theorizing the rise of "the leaking subject" who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, the book investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal. The book maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.


We describe an intelligent context-aware conversational system that incorporates screen context information to service multimodal user requests. Screen content is used for disambiguation of utterances that refer to screen objects and for enabling the user to act upon screen objects using voice commands. We propose a deep learning architecture that jointly models the user utterance and the screen and incorporates detailed screen content features. Our model is trained to optimize end to end semantic accuracy across contextual and non-contextual functionality, therefore learns the desired behavior directly from the data. We show that this approach outperforms a rule-based alternative, and can be extended in a straightforward manner to new contextual use cases. We perform detailed evaluation of contextual and non-contextual use cases and show that our system displays accurate contextual behavior without degrading the performance of non-contextual user requests.


Coronary Heart Disease (CHD), which results from buildup of plaque in the heart's coronary arteries, accounts for 12.2% of all deaths worldwide. There are two major ways to treat CHD: if the plaque level is high (above ~70% blockage), then open-heart surgery is usually performed. However, if the plaque level is moderate (~40% to 70%), then a drug-eluting stent can be placed in the artery to hold the plaque back from interfering with the blood flow and reduce restenosis. Laparoscopic heart surgery, or heart surgery conducted through small holes made between the ribs and on the sides of the chest, has increasingly been used over traditional coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, however, laparoscopic robotic-assisted CABG surgery has shown many advantages in research over both. Despite improvements, these traditional operations still take vast amounts of time and can result in infection or other complications. In this study, we developed auto-sutures that are automated through the use of a helical suture needle. Due to the significant decrease of time to suture, we increased the amount of sutures per segment of the auto-sutured CABG anastomosis. The quality of the auto-sutures was tested in a tensile test as well as a burst test apparatuses designed for this research. A burst test was simulated by pumping a blood-mimicking solution into silicon tubing. In all 80 experiments conducted (40 tensile test & 40 burst test), five sutures per segment was the optimal suturing method, as it had the highest maximum pressure as well as second-highest tensile strength.


Abstract. Estimates of the radiative forcing due to anthropogenically-produced tropospheric O3 are derived primarily from models. Here, we use tropospheric ozone and cloud data from several instruments in the A-train constellation of satellites as well as information from the GEOS-5 Data Assimilation System to accurately estimate the radiative effect of tropospheric O3 for January and July 2005. Since we cannot distinguish between natural and anthropogenic sources with the satellite data, our derived radiative effect reflects the unadjusted (instantaneous) effect of the total tropospheric O3 rather than the anthropogenic component. We improve upon previous estimates of tropospheric ozone mixing ratios from a residual approach using the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) by incorporating cloud pressure information from OMI. We focus specifically on the magnitude and spatial structure of the cloud effect on both the short- and long-wave radiative budget. The estimates presented here can be used to evaluate the various aspects of model-generated radiative forcing. For example, our derived cloud impact is to reduce the radiative effect of tropospheric ozone by ~16%. This is centered within the published range of model-produced cloud effect on unadjusted ozone radiative forcing.


Reliability and survivability are the two important attributes of cellular networks. In the existing literature, these measures were studied through the simulation. In this paper, we construct an analytical model to determine reliability and survivability attributes of third generation and beyond Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) networks. Hierarchical architecture of UMTS networks is modeled using stochastic models such as Markov chains, semi-Markov process, reliability block diagrams and Markov reward models to obtain these attributes. The model can be tailored to evaluate the reliability and survivability attributes of other beyond third generation cellular networks such as All-IP UMTS networks and CDMA2000. Numerical results illustrate the applicability of the proposed analytical model. It is observed that incorporating fault tolerance increases the network reliability and survivability. The results are useful for reliable topological design of UMTS networks. In addition, it can help the guarantee of network connectivity after any failure, without over dimensioning the networks. Moreover, it might have some impact from the point of view of the design and evaluation of UMTS infrastructures.


In order to study the importance of gastro-oesophageal reflux (GOR) as a trigger of asthma the effect of inhibition of gastric acid secretion on asthma was assessed in a double-blind, cross-over, placebo-controlled trial over four weeks in 37 children and adolescents (mean age 14 yrs) with bronchial asthma. Ranitidine 300 mg, (150 mg if B.W. was less than 40 kg) was given as a single evening dose during four weeks. In previous investigations 18 of the 37 patients had been shown to have pathological GOR by 24 h pH monitoring in the oesophagus. The remaining 19 patients with normal GOR served as controls for possible effects of ranitidine on asthma, not related to reduction of GOR. A modest (30%) but statistically significant reduction of nocturnal asthma symptoms was produced by ranitidine in the patients with pathological GOR when compared to those with normal GOR. There was a significant correlation between the improvement in asthma symptoms and the degree of acid reflux. Side-effects of ranitidine were negligible. Acid reflux appears to be only a weak stimulus for bronchoconstriction in children and adolescents with bronchial asthma and pathological GOR. Further confirmative trials with more potent inhibitors of gastric acid secretion are, however, warranted.


In assessing the health risks posed from heavy metals in a contaminated site, it is important to determine when the contamination occurred and when the metals become available to the surrounding biota. Trees and plants growing in the vicinity of a contaminated site may provide such a historic record. There have been few studies on their role as biomarkers to identify metal mobility or bioavailability for continuous monitoring purposes.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the role of plants as biomonitors for site characterisation and risk assessment purposes and to see if there was any selectivity between metal uptake in leaves and roots. Tree cores were also collected as metals in soil or ground water and may be drawn up via tree roots and deposited in the growth rings. This was examined using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LAICPMS) and Proton Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE).

From the plant analysis, the elements present in highest amount were lead, zinc and cooper. The mobility of lead could be monitored by bramble and nettle leaves; that of copper by nettle roots and bramble leaves and that of zinc by nettle roots, bramble and sycamore leaves.

Analysis of tree cores by LAICPMS and PIXE showed a contrasting contaminant signature between the sampled trees, as there was inconsistency of metal concentrations within the same segment of growth ring. This variability may offer an insight into labile metal function within the tree physiology. The utility of using the dendrochemical record may best serve as an indicator of macro-environmental perturbations, rather than an indicator of labile metal chronologies, for which only lead showed a reasonably consistent decline through time, across the tree core record.


Although homeownership rates currently stand at historically high levels for all segments of the U.S. population, large gaps in homeownership rates remain when comparing various groups of the population. As of the third quarter of 2006, the non-Hispanic White (hereafter, White) homeownership rate was 76 percent while African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates were below 50 percent and the Asian homeownership rate was 60 percent. The homeownership gap between African-American and White households was larger in 2006 than it was in 1990, while the homeownership gap between Hispanics and Whites was only slightly smaller in 2006 than it was in 1990. Households with very low incomes had a homeownership rate that was 37 percentage points below the rate for high-income households. These gaps have changed little over the past 50 years. The primary goal of this study is to synthesize what is known about the determinants of gaps in homeownership rates by income status and racial and ethnic status. We first present a conceptual framework for analyzing the determinants of homeownership. We then review the literature that identifies the relative importance of various contributing factors to observed homeownership gaps, separating the factors into those that are observed and those that are part of an unexplained residual that represents unmeasured factors such as discrimination, lack of information about the homebuying and mortgage financing processes, and omitted socioeconomic variables.


We have previously reported that the leaf extract of Albizia anthelmintica exhibited substantial antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, and antipyretic properties in vivo. We also comprehensively characterized the active phytoconstituents and found several flavonoids and galloyl glucosides derivatives. In the current work, we explored the gastroprotective effects of the leaf extract in an indomethacin-induced ulcer model and the mechanisms involved. The rats being pretreated with the tested extract (100 and 200 mg kg−1) significantly prevented gastric lesions by 87.4% and 92.3%, respectively, and they had no structural derangements in the gastric mucosa. The extract significantly reduced the elevated levels of IKκB, NF-κB, TNF-α, IL-6, iNOS, and lipid peroxidation; increased the reduced level of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity; and reduced glutathione (GSH) in the indomethacin-induced ulcer model. The protective activities of the extract were similar in most aspects to those exerted by the known anti-ulcer drug famotidine. These activities might be attributed to the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities, and the reduction of iNOS levels. In conclusion, Albizia anthelmintica is a potential candidate for management of gastric ulcers with antioxidant properties.


We use the lowest possible approximation order, piecewise linear, continuous velocities and piecewise constant pressures to compute solutions to Stokes equation and Darcy's equation, applying an edge stabilization term to avoid locking. We prove that the formulation satisfies the discrete inf–sup condition, we prove optimal a priori and a posteriori error estimates for both problems, the formulation is then extended to the coupled case using a Nitsche–type weak formulation allowing for different meshes in the two subdomains. Finally we present some numerical examples verifying the theoretical predictions and showing the flexibility of the coupled approach.


: Food allergies (FA) are a growing problem in the pediatric population and clinical features differ according to the underlying immunological mechanisms. While the primary management strategy is to eliminate the culprit food from the diet, assessment of the potential nutritional risks of elimination is also an integral part of management. In cases that do not improve over time; if you have basic food allergies and multiple food allergies, this can also lead to negative nutritional consequences. The contribution of basic nutrients, economical and easily accessible foods to the diet, is critical and has an important place in meeting the daily adequate intake of many nutrients. In the presence of food allergy, it is necessary to meet the vitamins and minerals that cannot be obtained from allergic foods, with alternative sources or supplements. For example, insufficient calcium intake in cow's milk allergy (CMA), the most common FA in early childhood, is very likely if an alternative supplement has not been introduced. In the management of CMA, choosing the appropriate formula and/or supplement for the clinical characteristics of children, when necessary, has an important place. In conclusion, nutritional risk assessment of children with FA requires a comprehensive, detailed, and multidisciplinary approach.


A monopolist bookmaker may set betting odds on a fairly even contest to induce match-fixing by an influential corrupt punter. His loss to the corrupt punter is more than made up for by enticing enough ordinary punters to bet on the losing team. This result is in sharp contrast to competitive bookmaking, where even contests have been shown to be immune to fixing. The analysis also reveals a surprising result that the incidence of match-fixing can dramatically fall when match-fixing opportunities rise. This is shown by comparing two scenarios—when only one team is corruptible and when both are corruptible. For both teams corruptible, the bookmaker is uncertain about to which team the influential punter will have access, so carefully maneuvering the odds to induce match-fixing is too costly.


Abstract Objective To investigate the predictors of wasting, stunting and low mid-upper arm circumference among children aged 6–59 months in Somalia using data from household cross-sectional surveys from 2007 to 2010 in order to help inform better targeting of nutritional interventions. Design Cross-sectional nutritional assessment surveys using structured interviews were conducted among communities in Somalia each year from 2007 to 2010. A two-stage cluster sampling methodology was used to select children aged 6–59 months from households across three livelihood zones (pastoral, agro-pastoral and riverine). Predictors of three anthropometric measures, weight-for-height (wasting), height-for-age (stunting) and mid-upper arm circumference, were analysed using Bayesian binomial regression, controlling for both spatial and temporal dependence in the data. Setting The study was conducted in randomly sampled villages, representative of three livelihood zones in Somalia. Subjects Children between the ages of 6 and 59 months in Somalia. Results The estimated national prevalence of wasting, stunting and low mid-upper arm circumference in children aged 6–59 months was 21 %, 31 % and 36 %, respectively. Although fever, diarrhoea, sex and age of the child, household size and access to foods were significant predictors of malnutrition, the strongest association was observed between all three indicators of malnutrition and the enhanced vegetation index. A 1-unit increase in enhanced vegetation index was associated with a 38 %, 49 % and 59 % reduction in wasting, stunting and low mid-upper arm circumference, respectively. Conclusions Infection and climatic variations are likely to be key drivers of malnutrition in Somalia. Better health data and close monitoring and forecasting of droughts may provide valuable information for nutritional intervention planning in Somalia.


Background: Although gastric noncardia adenocarcinoma (GNCA) incidence rates in the United States have decreased, the rates of gastric cardia adenocarcinoma (GCA) and esophageal adenocarcinoma (EADC) have increased. Obesity increases the risks of GCA and EADC, and the associations may be partially mediated by insulin resistance. A few case-control studies have shown an association between diabetes and an increased risk of EADC. Methods: We prospectively examined the association between diabetes and upper gastrointestinal (UGI) cancers in a cohort of 469,448 people in the United States, ages 50 to 71 at baseline. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to estimate the HR and 95% CI for diabetes and UGI cancers, controlling for multiple potential confounders, including body mass index (BMI). Results: We observed no association of self-reported diabetes with risk of EADC, HR (95% CI) = 0.98 (0.73–1.31), esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), HR (95% CI) = 1.02 (0.60–1.74), or GNCA, HR (95% CI) = 0.98 (0.70–1.37). However, diabetes was significantly associated with an increased risk of GCA, HR (95% CI) = 1.89 (1.43–2.50). The significant association between diabetes and risk of GCA remained after adjustment for BMI, HR (95% CI) = 1.70 (1.28–2.26) and did not differ by BMI strata (Pinteraction = 0.83). The significant association was unchanged when restricting to only overweight subjects (BMI 25 to ≤30), HR (95% CI) = 1.83 (1.18–2.85). Conclusions: We found a significant association between self-reported diabetes and increased risk of GCA. Impact: Our results suggest that the metabolic and hormonal changes related to diabetes may play a role in the etiology of GCA independently from BMI. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 20(5); 954–61. ©2011 AACR.


Herpes simplex esophagitis commonly occurs in immune-compromised individuals. We report the condition in two immunocompetent individuals (one presenting with retrosternal pain and diarrhea and the other with dysphagia and fever) and in two patients with obstructive airway disease who had received corticosteroid therapy. The first two did not receive treatment, one was lost to follow up and the other is asymptomatic two years later. The latter two patients received acyclovir therapy.


Abstract Forestiera acuminata (swamp privet) is a common wetland shrub/small tree native to the southeastern United States. We examined several possible dispersal avenues for the plant. We tested germination of seeds exposed to various treatments, including passage through Ictalurus punctatus (Channel Catfish) guts, and conducted other tests and observations to infer seed-dispersal pathways. Channel Catfish consumed swamp privet drupes and defecated viable seeds, confirming that they are seed dispersers. Bombycilla cedrorum (Cedar Waxwings) ate the carbohydrate-rich drupes, and we predict that they disperse the seeds. We also inferred passive seed dispersal by water. Diverse dispersal pathways may allow for effective seed dispersal under a wide range of environmental conditions. Growing in wetlands and riparian areas, the plant experiences extreme annual variation in hydrologic conditions, which should influence the importance of the various dispersal pathways among years.


Open access to peer reviewed journal articles is one of the key messages of the current global movement that is changing the paradigm of scholarly communication. Creating open access journals is one such route and creating institutional repositories containing author generated electronic text is another complementary alternative. In the UK, the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) programme of research is based on the vision of open access. Experiments in setting up an institutional repository for academic research output at the University of Southampton have emphasized that the institutional repository agenda is broader and that academic needs may dictate a more expanded database model than the pioneering discipline based e-Prints archive known as 'arXiv'. The institution is represented by a broad range of publication types including, but not exclusively, peer reviewed journal articles and the different disciplines have evolved different recording practices. Full text deposits may provide the opportunity for added value elements – e.g. enhanced diagrams, additional data or presentations – if the database provides the capability. The repository may provide the building blocks for effective management of collaborative e-research. Academic institutions that impose research reporting in an institutional repository require full recording of publications including those where obtaining full text is difficult or inappropriate. A practical route is, therefore, to develop an institutional repository which is 'hybrid' – containing both records and full text where achievable. In this scenario, the technical and management issues eg authentication and quality assurance of the metadata generation may become more complex. However, the full text element can grow as the practice becomes more natural within the recording process and as copyright restrictions ease. In the UK, several factors including the Research Assessment Exercise and citation impact measures based on increasing open access could also help encourage this change. The goal of providing open access to peer reviewed research items may, therefore, come about by a more circuitous but, in the end, more effective route. The 'hybrid' library will have evolved to the digital library of the ideal.


Asia as a whole is experiencing a rapid demographic transition toward older population structures. Within this broader region-wide trend, there is considerable heterogeneity, with different countries at different stages of the demographic transition. In this paper, we document Asia's population aging, describe the region's old-age support systems, and draw out the regional socioeconomic implications of population aging and old-age support systems. Population aging gives rise to two fundamental challenges for the region – (1) developing socioeconomic systems that can provide economic security to the growing number of elderly and (2) sustaining strong growth in the face of aging over the next few decades. Successfully addressing those two challenges will be vital for ensuring Asia's continued economic success in the medium and long term.


In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), mobility between vehicles can cause rapid topology changes with frequent disconnections, which result in collisions and packet losses that make communications unstable. Alternatively, cooperative transmission can increase the reliability of communication by eliminating these problems in VANETS. In heavy traffic conditions, carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) suffers from collision, and it is not effective when high data rate is required. Therefore, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is proposed. With the use of OFDMA, throughput is increased and delay is decreased by reducing the probability of collision in high traffic scenario. In this study, a novel OFDMA based efficient cooperative MAC protocol (OEC-MAC) is proposed for VANETs. Subcarrier channels assignment and access mechanisms are provided. The mechanism is presented not only for choosing the appropriate transmission mode but also for selecting the optimum relay. New control messages are defined to support cooperative communication. The performance of OEC-MAC protocol is examined by providing analytical analysis based on Markov chain model. Numerical results are demonstrated, which reveal that OEC-MAC protocol ensures a remarkable increase in throughput and also satisfies the strict delay requirement of 100 ms in VANETs for safety messages (sm). In addition, communication reliability is increased by reducing the packet dropping rate (PDR). Numerical results are compared with existing protocols, and a quantitative comparison is provided. It has been seen form results that proposed OEC-MAC protocol is better than existing schemes, especially under heavy traffic scenarios.


This paper empirically analyzes the productivity, profitability, innovation and network effects of a public policy promoting micro and small scale industrial clusters in Ethiopia. To this end, firm-level survey data was collected from randomly selected clustered leather shoe manufacturers that have directly benefited from the policy and those that do not, both before and after the cluster policy intervention. The results from econometric analysis suggests that the industrial cluster policy adversely impacts the productivity, profitability, growth, and innovation performance of the small and micro leather shoe manufacturing enterprises that moved to the government created clusters . The analysis of the transmission mechanism further reveals that the relocated cluster policy hampers the treated firms' collaborative business and knowledge network and aggravates their growth impediments which includes lack of trust, high customer and supplier search and reach cost, lack of market information, imperfect contract enforcement, delays in the supply of raw materials and the lack of skilled labor. The time lag between policy implementation and its impacts may conceal the long-term impact of the cluster policy. The overwhelming majority of the representatives of treatment group firms also continue to believe that their buisness performance will improve over time as a result of their participation in the MSE cluster development program. This study is a pioneer to quantitatively evaluate the productivity, profitability, innovation and network effect of industrial cluster policy in Ethiopia.


Computational science depends on complex, data intensive applications operating on datasets from a variety of scientific instruments. A major challenge is the integration of data into the scientist's workflow. Recent advances in dynamic, networked cloud resources provide the building blocks to construct reconfiguration, end-to-end infrastructure that can increase scientific productivity, but applications are not taking advantage of them. In our previous work, we introduced Dy-N amo, that enabled CASA scientists to improve the efficiency of their operations and effortlessly leverage capabilities of the cloud resources available to them that previously remained underutilized. However, the provided workflow automation did not satisfy all the operational requirements of CASA. Custom scripts were still in production to manage workflow triggering, while multiple layer2 connections would have to be allocated to maintain network QoS requirements. In this work, we enhance the DyNamo system with ensemble workflow management capabilities, end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, as well as more advanced network manipulation mechanisms. To accommodate CASA's operational needs we also extended the newly integrated Pegasus Ensemble Manager with file and time based triggering functionality, that improves managing workflow ensembles. Additionally, Virtual Software Defined Exchange (vSDX) capabilities have been extended, enabling link adaptation, flow prioritization and traffic control between endpoints. We evaluate the effects of the DyNamo's vSDX policies by using two CASA workflow ensembles competing for network resources, and we show that traffic shaping of the ensembles can lead to a fairer use of the network links.


Abstract. We present global distributions of carbon monoxide (CO) from the upper troposphere to the mesosphere observed by the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) on Envisat. Vertically resolved volume mixing ratio profiles have been retrieved from 4.7 μm limb emission spectra under consideration of non-local thermodynamic equilibrium. The precision of individual CO profiles is typically 5–30 ppbv (15–40% for altitudes greater than 40 km and lower than 15 km and 30–90% within 15–40 km). Estimated systematic errors are in the order of 8–15%. Below 60 km, the vertical resolution is 4–7 km. The data set which covers 54 days from September 2003 to March 2004 has been derived with an improved retrieval version including (i) the retrieval of log(vmr), (ii) the consideration of illumination-dependent vibrational population gradients along the instrument's line of sight, and (iii) joint-fitted vmr horizontal gradients in latitudinal and longitudinal directions. A detailed analysis of spatially resolved CO distributions during the 2003/2004 Northern Hemisphere major warming event demonstrate the potential of MIPAS CO observations to obtain new information on transport processes during dynamical active episodes, particularly on those acting in the vertical. From the temporal evolution of zonally averaged CO abundances, we derived extraordinary polar winter descent velocities of 1200 m per day inside the recovered polar vortex in January 2004. Middle stratospheric CO abundances show a well established correlation with the chemical source CH4, particularly in the tropics. In the upper troposphere, a moderate CO decrease from September 2003 to March 2004 was observed. Upper tropospheric CO observations provide a detailed picture of long-range transport of polluted air masses and uplift events. MIPAS observations taken on 9–11 September 2003 confirm the trapping of convective outflow of polluted CO-rich air from Southeast Asia into the Asian monsoon anticyclone, which has been described in previous studies. Upper tropospheric CO plumes, observed by MIPAS on this day, were predominantly located in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of these plumes could be related to Southeast Asian pollution by means of backward trajectory calculations. During 20–22 October, southern hemispheric biomass burning was the most likely source of the major CO plumes observed over the Southern Atlantic and Indian Ocean.


AIMS
Lipoprotein (a) deposition in coronary vascular plaques and cerebral vessels is a recognized risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and research supports its role as a "repair factor" in vascular walls weakened by vitamin C deficiency.

BACKGROUND
Humans depend on dietary vitamin C as an important antioxidant, and as a cofactor in collagen synthesis, yet are prone to vitamin C deficiency. The brain is the one with the highest vitamin C content, due to its high oxygen consumption and oxidative stress. It has been shown that brain aging is accompanied by accumulated oxidative damage, which can lead to memory decline and neurological diseases.

OBJECTIVE
Our transgenic mouse, Gulo (-/-); Lp(a)+, presents a unique model for the study of key aspects of human metabolism with respect to a lack of internal vitamin C synthesis and the production of human Lipoprotein(a).

METHOD
This mouse model was used in our study to investigate the effects of prolonged intake of low and high levels of vitamin C, at different ages, on oxidative damage, cholesterol levels and Lipoprotein(a) deposition in the brain.

RESULT
The results show that a long-term high vitamin C intake is important in maintaining brain cholesterol homeostasis and preventing oxidative damage in Gulo(-/-);Lp(a)+ mice as they age. Moreover, we observed that the formation of brain Lipoprotein(a) deposits was negatively correlated with brain level of vitamin C, thereby confirming its role as a stability factor for an impaired extracellular matrix.

CONCLUSION
Our study emphasizes the critical role of vitamin C in protecting brain health as we age. Other: Our findings show that optimal vitamin C intake from early life to old age is important in brain health to prevent oxidative stress damage and to maintain cholesterol homeostasis in the brain. More importantly, negative correlation between brain ascorbic levels and the formation of Lp(a) deposit on the choroid plexus further emphasizes the critical role of vitamin C in protecting brain health throughout the normal aging process.


Resilience is most often understood as the ability to achieve well-being in the face of significant adversity. It is both a dynamic process and an outcome that can be pursued by individuals and communities alike. Despite becoming an increasingly popular topic in policy fields such as education, development, and refugee studies, there is limited research into the promotion of resilience within refugee education. This qualitative study, which examines the experiences of Syrian refugee children who are attending a non-formal education center in Lebanon, seeks to understand the role education plays in fostering pathways to resilience in the children's lives. Half of the students in the study had chosen to drop out of the Lebanese formal schools they attended. This study argues that the students who chose to drop out felt that the risks they faced while attending Lebanese schools were not worth the rewards, thus they sought different pathways to resilience. Many chose to attend non-formal schools like the one involved in this study, which supported the students in finding pathways to resilience. The insights gained from studying these schools could help to improve education for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, including how to provide safe, affordable, productive, and culturally relevant education choices for more children and their families, and to support more refugee children and youth in choosing education as a pathway to resilience. Received July 24, 2014; revised January 3, 2015, October 9, 2016, February 19, 2018, and June 11, 2018; accepted June 12, 2018; electronically published August 2018. Journal on Education in Emergencies, Vol. 4, No. 1 Copyright © 2018 by the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE). ISSN 2518-6833


Negative pressure has become a very valuable adjunct to wound care therapy over the last few years. This can be largely attributed to work that was carried out by Morykwas and Argenta in 1997. In a series of three articles, they describe a new method for wound control and treatment for open wounds by using open-cell foam as a wound interface (wound filler). An occlusive dressing was used to create an airtight seal so that subatmospheric pressure could be applied to the wound.