Aetiology of cardiac arrest in a ‘trauma patient’: Exploiting trauma CT for concomitant cardiac assessment

AbstractThe widespread use of protocolised CT in trauma has the potential to expedite assessment and save lives. However, the exclusion of injury may risk overlooking other important pathology, where patients have been involved in potentially traumatic incidents because of an underlying medical problem.This case describes a middle-aged patient who suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest while driving his car. Some days after admission he was found to have an occluded left anterior descending coronary artery, which had been poorly visualised on his trauma CT.The difficulties in identifying coronary occlusion in the critically ill patient are considered, and the utility of ECG-gated CT for cardiac evaluation and its potential impact on rapid diagnosis in trauma is discussed

Cotton receipt, 19 November 1866

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aldrichcorr_d/1076/thumbnail.jp

Canvassers tend to seek out supporters who are like themselves, and that's not good for political participation.

Petition canvassers play an important role as political recruiters by introducing citizens to political issues and seeking their support. But not much is known about how these canvassers decide whom to recruit or about their methods. Research by Clayton Nall, Benjamin Schneer, and Daniel Carpenter sets forth a model of political recruiting that changes depending on canvassers' experiences, is constrained ..

Advanced regression methods for combustion modelling using principal components

pre-printModelling the physics of combustion remains a challenge due to a large range of temporal and physical scales which are important in these systems. Detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms are used to describe the chemistry involved in the combustion process yielding highly coupled partial differential equations for each of the chemical species used in the mechanism. Recently, Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has shown promise in its ability to identify a low-dimensional manifold describing the reacting system. Several PCA-based models have been developed which may be well-suited for combustion problems; however, several challenging aspects of the model must be addressed. In this paper, the parameterization of state-space variables and PC-transport equation source terms are investigated. The ability to achieve highly accurate mapping through various nonlinear regression methods is shown. In addition, the effect of PCA-scaling on the ability to regress the surface is investigated. Finally, the present work demonstrates the capabilities of the model by solving a reduced system represented by several PC-transport equations for a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) configuration

Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies

It is generally accepted that the widespread availability of specialist services has helped drive the growth of cybercrime in the past fifteen to twenty years. Individuals and groups involved in cybercrime no longer need to build their own botnet or send their own spam because they can pay others to do these things. What has seldom been remarked upon is the amount of tedious administrative and maintenance work put in by these specialist suppliers. There is much discussion of the technically sophisticated work of developing new strains of malware or identifying zero-day exploits but the mundane nature of the day to day tasks of operating infrastructure has been almost entirely overlooked. Running bulletproof hosting services, herding botnets, or scanning for reflectors to use in a denial of service attack is unglamorous and tedious work, and is little different in character from the activity of legitimate sysadmins. We provide three case studies of specialist services that underpin illicit economies and map out their characteristics using qualitative sociological research involving interviews with infrastructure providers and scraped data from webforums and chat channels. This enables us to identify some of the distinct cultural and economic factors which attend this infrastructural work and to note, in particular, how its boring nature leads to burnout and the withdrawal of services. This leads us to suggest ways in which this new understanding could open novel avenues for the disruption of cybercrime.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

The hidden side of animal cognition research: Scientists' attitudes toward bias, replicability and scientific practice.

Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field, but less so in their own work. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan's canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses. Researchers self-reported that most of their studies had been published, however they often reported that studies went unpublished because they had negative or inconclusive results, or results that questioned "preferred" theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves-however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, 73.0% of respondents suggested areas of animal cognition research could experience a 'replication crisis' if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants' free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, which are available as part of an open dataset. However, many researchers appeared concerned with how to interpret negative results, publication bias, theoretical bias and reliability in areas of animal cognition research. Collectively, these data provide a candid overview of barriers to progress in animal cognition and can inform debates on how individual researchers, as well as organizations and journals, can facilitate robust scientific research in animal cognition

Advanced Applications of Cardiac Computed Tomography for the Difficult-to-Image Patient

Throughout the development of computed tomographic (CT) imaging the challenges of capturing the heart, with its perpetual, vigorous motion, and in particular the tiny detail within the coronary arteries, has driven technological progress. Today, CT is a widely used and rapidly growing modality for the investigation of coronary artery disease, as well as other cardiac pathology. However, limitations remain and particular patient groups present a significant challenge to the CT operator. This thesis adds new knowledge to the assessment of these difficult-to-image patients. It considers patients with artefact from coronary artery calcification or stents, examining the remarkable diagnostic performance of high definition scanning, as well as material subtraction techniques using dual energy CT, alongside ways in which current technology might be revisited and refined with the use of alternative image reconstruction methods. Patients with challenging heart rate or rhythm abnormalities are considered in three studies; how to achieve diagnostic image quality in atrial fibrillation, the safety of an aggressive approach to intravenous beta-blocker use prior to coronary imaging, and the development of patient information to address anxiety as a source of tachycardia and motion artefact. Finally, the novel application of a single source, dual energy CT scanner to additional cardiac information is considered, with studies of myocardial perfusion CT and delayed iodine enhancement imaging, to identify ways in which non-coronary imaging might be exploited to more thoroughly evaluate a patient’s coronary artery status. These findings are presented in the context of developing technology and together offer a range of potential options for operators of cardiac CT when faced with a difficult-to-image patient

Little evidence that Eurasian jays protect their caches by responding to cues about a conspecific’s desire and visual perspective

Eurasian jays have been reported to protect their caches by responding to cues about either the visual perspective or current desire of an observing conspecific, similarly to other corvids. Here, we used established paradigms to test whether these birds can – like humans – integrate multiple cues about different mental states and perform an optimal response accordingly. Across five experiments, which also include replications of previous work, we found little evidence that our jays adjusted their caching behaviour in line with the visual perspective and current desire of another agent, neither by integrating these social cues nor by responding to only one type of cue independently. These results raise questions about the reliability of the previously reported effects and highlight several key issues affecting reliability in comparative cognition research