Panhypopituitarism : a rare cause of neonatal cholestatic jaundice

Although not uncommon, neonatal cholestatic jaundice is usually caused by congenital anatomical defects of the biliary tree or intrinsic liver pathology. We describe a case of persistent cholestatic jaundice in a six week old female infant caused by panhypopituitarism. To our knowledge this is the first report of hypopituitarism presenting with cholestatic jaundice in Malta. Prolonged obstructive jaundice in the neonatal period should be urgently investigated until a cause is found.peer-reviewe

Planning Serendipitous Liaison Outreach

College and university students, staff, and faculty are busier in 2010 than ever before. Many students work full-time in addition to school. With budget cuts, staff members are doing multiple jobs. Faculty members are being hired as fixed-term, temporary, or adjunct instructors more than ever. People do not come to the library as much as they used to, and they are often in a rush when they do. At the same time, evolving models of reference service mean that liaison librarians are often sequestered in their offices, working elsewhere on campus, or otherwise not available when their patrons happen to come to the library. Paradoxically the people whom we are supposed to help often are not able to get access to us when they stop by the library—and they may not have time to make appointments to return. As liaison librarians at VCU Libraries, we have found it very useful to look for opportunities to promote discipline-specific resources or listen to patron concerns. They emerge at unexpected times and in settings that do not necessarily seem to lend themselves to outreach. A little effort on our part, however, and willingness to move a small distance out of our comfort zones has proven remarkably successful in reaching elusive patrons. Serendipitous outreach may be difficult to document and thus less inherently appealing when it comes to annual evaluations, and yet in certain ways it helps us meet our outreach goals at least as effectively as formal outreach methods

Face(book)ing the Facts: A Librarian’s Guide to Surviving Facebook

Social networks are increasingly popular tools for personal communication. Large numbers of patrons use Facebook or similar websites daily, but can libraries use Facebook effectively? Our presentation will provide an overview of Facebook and its use in an academic library setting

Is discontinuous innovation on your corporate radar?

© Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM)In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI). Most organisations understand that innovation is an organisational imperative. They learn to listen to customers and constantly evolve their existing products and services, continuously improve their processes, so that they are not left behind by competitors. The ability to deal with this steady state type of innovation – the constant storms of change within an industry – is essential. Every so often, however, a whirlwind blows through an industry – whether caused by regulatory or political change, a technology, or a product, so radically different that it changes the shape of an industry completely and in doing so puts many existing, successful companies out of business. In the early 1900s the buggy whip manufacturers in the US, an entire city dedicated to making a supposedly indispensable item, were put out of business almost over night by a new fangled machine called a quadracyle, built by a young inventor called Henry Ford. More recently Polaroid, one of America’s great and longest standing companies, almost went the same way as the buggy whip manufacturers. The instant photography company was wrongfooted by the advent of digital photography, making a number of strategic mistakes in responding to this threat to its business. For an organisation to be truly successful and sustain that success over many years it needs to be good at both steady state, conventional innovation, and to be able to sense a radical new discontinuous innovation on the horizon, and, preferably, come up with one itself. Being ready for discontinuous innovation requires a specific set of organisational skills, not least the ability to search for signs of the potential whirlwind that may sweep through an industry, or, as with the internet, across entire business sectors right around the world. This briefing document focuses on that search skill. By looking at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Bovine serum albumin as the dominant form of dietary protein reduces subcutaneous fat mass, plasma leptin and plasma corticosterone in high fat-fed C57/BL6J mice

Acknowledgements The authors thank Harriett Schellekens from the University College Cork and Paula O’Connor from Teagasc Moorepark Food Research Centre for their assistance in procuring laboratory space and equipment. The present study was funded by Teagasc. B. L. M. was funded by the Walsh Fellowship Program. J. R. S. was supported by a 1000-talents professorship from the Chinese government. The funding bodies had no input on the design of the study or in the interpretation of the data.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Automatic computation of moment magnitudes for small earthquakes and the scaling of local to moment magnitude

Moment magnitudes (MW) are computed for small and moderate earthquakes using a spectral fitting method. 40 of the resulting values are compared with those from broadband moment tensor solutions and found to match with negligible offset and scatter for available MW values of between 2.8 and 5.0. Using the presented method, MW are computed for 679 earthquakes in Switzerland with a minimum ML= 1.3. A combined bootstrap and orthogonal L1 minimization is then used to produce a scaling relation between ML and MW. The scaling relation has a polynomial form and is shown to reduce the dependence of the predicted MW residual on magnitude relative to an existing linear scaling relation. The computation of MW using the presented spectral technique is fully automated at the Swiss Seismological Service, providing real-time solutions within 10 minutes of an event through a web-based XML database. The scaling between ML and MW is explored using synthetic data computed with a stochastic simulation method. It is shown that the scaling relation can be explained by the interaction of attenuation, the stress-drop and the Wood-Anderson filter. For instance, it is shown that the stress-drop controls the saturation of the ML scale, with low-stress drops (e.g. 0.1-1.0 MPa) leading to saturation at magnitudes as low as ML=

The value of designers' creative practice within complex collaborations

This paper reports a case study investigating the productive value of designers' creative practice within complex academic-industrial collaborations in which a designer's practice had a formative role. Adopting a pragmatic approach, collaborators' experiences of this project were reconstructed through interviews and ‘annotated timelines.’ Collaborators were found to value the designer's work in responding to their particular concerns whilst also opening up new possibilities. This paper discusses how such benefit is attributable to the ‘designerly thinking’ of skilled designers, shifting the focus of work from problem-solving to problematisation and enabling participants to collectively formulate concerns, roles, and potentialities. The paper concludes that designers' creative practice can enable collaborative projects to build upon and transcend participants' expertise and expectations through ‘creative exchange.