Allergy to rats and guinea pigs : an immunochemical study of the sources and nature of allergens

Imperial Users onl

Financing, fire sales, and the stockholder wealth effects of asset divestiture announcements

We thank Dimitris Andriosopoulos, Leonidas Barbopoulos, Robert Faff, Russell Gregory-Allan, Krishna Paudyal, Amandeep Sahota, Jianren Xu, participants at the 2015 European Accounting Association Annual Congress (Glasgow), 2015 Financial Management Association European Conference (Venice), 2015 Financial Management Association Annual Meeting (Orlando), and seminar participants at the University of Strathclyde for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. We also thank Martin Kemmitt for helpful research assistance. All errors remain our own.Peer reviewedPostprin

Two Minimal Clinically Important Difference (2MCID) : A New Twist on an Old Concept

This work is open access licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Peer reviewe

Guest Editorial: How to Succeed in Medicine

In this guest editorial, Professor Andrew Y Finlay discusses how to succeed in medicine. As a Professor of Dermatology, pioneer of the Dermatology Life Quality Index and co-founder of the Journal of Dermatological Treatment, alongside many other achievements, his career demonstrates the breadth and variety a career in medicine can offer. His editorial provides valuable insights and practical advice for career development, as well as methods for contributing to the improvement of clinical care

Primary producer perspectives on rural land management in central and western NSW

In light of the on-going environmental challenges being faced by managers of Australia’s rural and remote landscapes it has become apparent that change will occur only when policy makers have a better understanding of farmer attitudes towards land management. As a means of understanding land managers’ knowledge of, and attitudes toward, a range of issues facing primary production, 327 land managers from Central Western New South Wales responded to two surveys which contained questions regarding problems and impediments on the land, external and environmental influences, sustainability and responsibility, the challenges facing primary production, the personality dispositions of producers and how such dispositions influence attitudes towards land management issues. Survey responses reveal a strong commitment on the part of primary producers to sustainable management and acknowledge a duty of care and responsibility towards the land they manage in order to benefit future generations, while displaying a dislike at the ‘outside invention’ of others into their farm management decisions and practices. Respondents strongly support restoration of degraded landscapes, but there is an equally strong belief that they should not be solely responsible for funding what is essentially a public benefit. Seminal personality factors which define respondents’ characters both personally and at work were also identified, with agreeableness and openness being the most frequent

The impact of patients' chronic disease on family quality of life : an experience from 26 specialties

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have assessed family quality of life in individual disease areas and specialties. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of disease on family members of patients over a wide range of specialties and identify key impact areas. This information is essential in order to reveal the extent of this impact and to allow strategies to be developed to support the family members of patients with chronic disease. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 133 family members of mostly chronically ill patients from 26 medical specialties. Family members were invited to discuss all areas of their lives that had been affected by having an unwell relative. Thematic analysis was carried out using NVivo9® software. RESULTS: Most family members were female (61%), the partner or spouse of the patient (56%), or the parent (22%). Their mean age was 56.1 years (range: 21-85 years) and the mean duration of the patient's disease was 8.9 years (range: 1 month to 60 years). Ten key themes of family quality of life were identified from interviews. The median number of themes reported by family members was six (range: 1-10). The key themes included: emotional impact (mentioned by 92% of subjects), daily activities (91%), family relationships (69%), sleep and health (67%), holidays (62%), involvement in medical care and support given to family members (61%), work and study (52%), financial impact (51%), social life (37%), and time planning (14%). Relationships between the themes were identified. CONCLUSION: This large scale multi-specialty study has demonstrated the significant, yet similar, impact that illness can have on the quality of life of patients' family members. Family quality of life is a previously neglected area of health care which needs to be addressed in order to provide appropriate support for the patient and the family unit.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Imaging Earth's crustal magnetic field with satellite data: a regularized spherical triangle tessellation approach

We present a method for imaging the global crustal magnetic field at Earth's surface using a local basis representation and a minimum norm model regularization approach. The local basis consists of a spherical triangle tessellation (STT) parametrization of the radial component of the crustal field at Earth's reference spherical surface. The Green's function for Laplace's equation in spherical geometry with Neumann boundary conditions provides the necessary forward modelling scheme. We solve the inverse problem of estimating the crustal field from satellite magnetic observations by minimizing an objective function comprising a mean absolute deviation (L1-norm) measure of misfit plus a norm measuring model complexity. Both quadratic and entropy measures of field complexity are investigated. We report results from synthetic tests performed on a geophysically motivated scenario; these include a successful benchmark of the method and a comparison between quadratic and entropy regularization strategies. Applying our technique to real observations collected by the CHAMP, Ørsted and SAC-C satellites, we obtain stable images of the crustal magnetic field at Earth's surface that include sharp features with high amplitudes. We present details of two prototype crustal field models STT-CRUST-Q and STT-CRUST-E regularized using quadratic and entropy norms respectively; these provide a perspective complementary to that given by conventional spherical harmonic crustal field model