21,602 research outputs found
Evaluation of In-Hospital Management for Febrile Illness\ud in Northern Tanzania before and after 2010 World Health\ud Organization Guidelines for the Treatment of Malaria
In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) published updated guidelines emphasizing and expanding recommendations for a parasitological confirmation of malaria before treating with antimalarials. This study aimed to assess differences in historic (2007–2008) (cohort 1) and recent (2011–2012) (cohort 2) hospital cohorts in the diagnosis and treatment of febrile illness in a low malaria prevalence area of northern Tanzania. We analyzed data from two prospective cohort studies that enrolled febrile adolescents and adults aged $13 years. All patients received quality-controlled aerobic blood cultures and malaria smears. We compared patients’ discharge diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to assess changes in the treatment of malaria and bacterial infections. In total, 595 febrile inpatients were enrolled from two referral hospitals in Moshi, Tanzania. Laboratory-confirmed malaria was detected in 13 (3.2%) of 402 patients in cohort 1 and 1 (0.5%) of 193 patients in cohort 2 (p = 0.041). Antimalarials were prescribed to 201 (51.7%) of 389 smear-negative patients in cohort 1 and 97 (50.5%) of 192 smearnegative patients in cohort 2 (p = 0.794). Bacteremia was diagnosed from standard blood culture in 58 (14.5%) of 401 patients in cohort 1 compared to 18 (9.5%) of 190 patients in cohort 2 (p = 0.091). In cohort 1, 40 (69.0%) of 58 patients with a positive blood culture received antibacterials compared to 16 (88.9%) of 18 patients in cohort 2 (p = 0.094). In cohort 1, 43 (10.8%) of the 399 patients with known outcomes died during hospitalization compared with 12 (6.2%) deaths among 193 patients in cohort 2 (p = 0.073). In a setting of low malaria transmission, a high proportion of smear-negative patients were diagnosed with malaria and treated with antimalarials despite updated WHO guidelines on malaria treatment. Improved laboratory diagnostics for non-malaria febrile illness might help to curb this practice.\u
Bag Formation in Quantum Hall Ferromagnets
Charged skyrmions or spin-textures in the quantum Hall ferromagnet at filling
factor nu=1 are reinvestigated using the Hartree-Fock method in the lowest
Landau level approximation. It is shown that the single Slater determinant with
the minimum energy in the unit charge sector is always of the hedgehog form. It
is observed that the magnetization vector's length deviates locally from unity,
i.e. a bag is formed which accommodates the excess charge. In terms of a
gradient expansion for extended spin-textures a novel O(3) type of effective
action is presented, which takes bag formation into account.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure
Assessing International Sport Federations' Sustainability Practices: Toward Integrating Sustainability in Their Main Sports Events.
Research Question: Sustainability has become a pressing issue for a wide range of organizations, including sports' world governing bodies. This paper examines (1) how sustainability can be defined in the context of international sport federations and (2) how international federations implement social and environmental sustainability practices. We used an eight-dimensional analytical framework to analyze multiple case studies and drew on neo-institutional theory to interpret the recent changes international federations have made with regard to sustainability. Research Methods: Our methodology combined a multiple case study with analyses of official documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews. Results and Findings: Our six case studies revealed five approaches to sustainability: (a) implementing sustainability pilot events; (b) partnering with NGOs; (c) partnering with sustainability consultancies; (d) creating a sustainability committee; and (e) launching a comprehensive sustainability strategy with at least a full-time sustainability manager. Implications: In terms of theory, examining our data through the lens of neo-institutional theory provides insights into international federations' recent sustainability behaviors. Our findings enabled us to draw up a "sustainability ladder" of sport federations' responsibilities, which can be used to assess the degree to which they have embraced sustainability. In practical terms, our findings should encourage more sport federations to take concrete steps to improve their sustainability by implementing the five approaches
Bell's inequality with Dirac particles
We study Bell's inequality using the Bell states constructed from four
component Dirac spinors. Spin operator is related to the Pauli-Lubanski pseudo
vector which is relativistic invariant operator. By using Lorentz
transformation, in both Bell states and spin operator, we obtain an observer
independent Bell's inequality, so that it is maximally violated as long as it
is violated maximally in the rest frame.Comment: 7 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:quant-ph/0308156
by other author
The Radio Afterglow and Host Galaxy of the Dark GRB 020819
Of the fourteen gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) localized to better than 2' radius
with the SXC on HETE-2, only two lack optical afterglow detections, and the
high recovery rate among this sample has been used to argue that the fraction
of truly dark bursts is ~10%. While a large fraction of earlier dark bursts can
be explained by the failure of ground-based searches to reach appropriate
limiting magnitudes, suppression of the optical light of these SXC dark bursts
seems likely. Here we report the discovery and observation of the radio
afterglow of GRB 020819, an SXC dark burst, which enables us to identify the
likely host galaxy (probability of 99.2%) and hence the redshift (z=0.41) of
the GRB. The radio light curve is qualitatively similar to that of several
other radio afterglows, and may include an early-time contribution from the
emission of the reverse shock. The proposed host is a bright R = 19.5 mag
barred spiral galaxy, with a faint R ~ 24.0 mag "blob'' of emission, 3" from
the galaxy core (16 kpc in projection), that is coincident with the radio
afterglow. Optical photometry of the galaxy and blob, beginning 3 hours after
the burst and extending over more than 100 days, establishes strong upper
limits to the optical brightness of any afterglow or associated supernova.
Combining the afterglow radio fluxes and our earliest R-band limit, we find
that the most likely afterglow model invokes a spherical expansion into a
constant-density (rather than stellar wind-like) external environment; within
the context of this model, a modest local extinction of A_V ~ 1 mag is
sufficient to suppress the optical flux below our limits.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. ApJ, in press. For more info on dark bursts, see
http://www.astro.ku.dk/~pallja/dark.htm
Three very young HgMn stars in the Orion OB1 Association
We report the detection of three mercury-manganese stars in the Orion OB1
association. HD 37886 and BD-0 984 are in the approximately 1.7 million year
old Orion OB1b. HD 37492 is in the approximately 4.6 million year old Orion
OB1c. Orion OB1b is now the youngest cluster with known HgMn star members. This
places an observational upper limit on the time scale needed to produce the
chemical peculiarities seen in mercury-manganese stars, which should help in
the search for the cause or causes of the peculiar abundances in HgMn and other
chemically peculiar upper main sequence stars.Comment: 8 pages including 1 figure. To appear in Astrophysical Journal
Letter
Strong Correlation to Weak Correlation Phase Transition in Bilayer Quantum Hall Systems
At small layer separations, the ground state of a nu=1 bilayer quantum Hall
system exhibits spontaneous interlayer phase coherence and has a
charged-excitation gap E_g. The evolution of this state with increasing layer
separation d has been a matter of controversy. In this letter we report on
small system exact diagonalization calculations which suggest that a single
phase transition, likely of first order, separates coherent incompressible (E_g
>0) states with strong interlayer correlations from incoherent compressible
states with weak interlayer correlations. We find a dependence of the phase
boundary on d and interlayer tunneling amplitude that is in very good agreement
with recent experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures included, version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Universal conductance fluctuations in three dimensional metallic single crystals of Si
In this paper we report the measurement of conductance fluctuations in single
crystals of Si made metallic by heavy doping (n \approx 2-2.5n_c, n_c being
critical composition at Metal-Insulator transition). Since all dimensions (L)
of the samples are much larger than the electron phase coherent length L_\phi
(L/L_\phi \sim 10^3), our system is truly three dimensional. Temperature and
magnetic field dependence of noise strongly indicate the universal conductance
fluctuations (UCF) as predominant source of the observed magnitude of noise.
Conductance fluctuations within a single phase coherent region of L_\phi^3 was
found to be saturated at \approx (e^2/h)^2. An accurate
knowledge of the level of disorder, enables us to calculate the change in
conductance \delta G_1 due to movement of a single scatterer as \delta G_1 \sim
e^2/h, which is \sim 2 orders of magnitude higher than its theoretically
expected value in 3D systems.Comment: Text revised version. 4 eps figs unchange
Magnifying perfect lens and superlens design by coordinate transformation
The coordinate transformation technique is applied to the design of perfect
lenses and superlenses. In particular, anisotropic metamaterials that magnify
two-dimensional planar images beyond the diffraction limit are designed by the
use of oblate spheroidal coordinates. The oblate spheroidal perfect lens or
superlens can naturally be used in reverse for lithography of planar
subwavelength patterns.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, v2: submitted, v3: accepted by Physical Review
Sub-monolayer nucleation and growth of complex oxide heterostructures at high supersaturation and rapid flux modulation
We report on the non-trivial nanoscale kinetics of the deposition of novel
complex oxide heterostructures composed of a unit-cell thick correlated metal
LaNiO3 and dielectric LaAlO3. The multilayers demonstrate exceptionally good
crystallinity and surface morphology maintained over the large number of
layers, as confirmed by AFM, RHEED, and synchrotron X-ray diffraction. To
elucidate the physics behind the growth, the temperature of the substrate and
the deposition rate were varied over a wide range and the results were treated
in the framework of a two-layer model. These results are of fundamental
importance for synthesis of new phases of complex oxide heterostructures.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
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