Acute pulmonary pathology and sudden death in rats following the intravenous administration of the plasticizer, DI (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, solubilized with Tween surfactants

Intravenous administration of 200-300 mg/kg of di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) solubilized in aqueous solutions of several Tween surfactants caused respiratory distress in rats. There was a dose-dependent lethality with death generally occurring within 90 minutes after injection. The lungs from DEHP:Tween treated animals were enlarged, generally darkened, and in some cases showed hemorrhagic congestion. Neither the overt symptoms nor the morphologic alterations resulting from DEHP:Tween administration could be reproduced by intravenous administration of aqueous Tween solutions alone. The absence of pulmonary abnormalities following the intravenous administration of DEHP as an aqueous emulsion given either alone or even as soon as 2 minutes after pretreatment with Tween 80, suggests that the specific in vivo interaction between DEHP and Tween surfactants depends on the prior formation of water-soluble micelles of DEHP

Functional preservation of vascular smooth muscle tissue

The ionic and cellular feedback relationships operating to effect the vascular decompensatory modifications were examined to reveal procedures for implementing protective measures guarding against vascular collapse when returning from a weightless environment to that of the earth's gravity. The surgical procedures for preparing the rat cremaster, and the fixation methods are described. Abstracts of publications resulting from this research are included

Brief of Scholars of the History and Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402 (U.S. Aug. 14, 2017)

Obtaining and examining cell site location records to find a person is a “search” in any normal sense of the word — a search of documents and a search for a person and her personal effects. It is therefore a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment in that it constitutes “examining,” “exploring,” “looking through,” “inquiring,” “seeking,” or “trying to find.” Nothing about the text of the Fourth Amendment, or the historical backdrop against which it was adopted, suggests that “search” should be construed more narrowly as, for example, intrusions upon subjectively manifested expectations of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.Entrusting government agents with unfettered discretion to conduct searches using cell site location information undermines Fourth Amendment rights. The Amendment guarantees “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches.” The Framers chose that language deliberately. It reflected the insecurity they suffered at the hands of “writs of assistance,” a form of general warrant that granted state agents broad discretion to search wherever they pleased. Such arbitrary power was “unreasonable” to the Framers, being “against the reason of the common law,” and it was intolerable because of its oppressive impact on “the people” as a whole. As emphasized in one of the seminal English cases that inspired the Amendment, this kind of general power to search was “totally subversive of the liberty of the subject.” James Otis’s famous speech denouncing a colonial writ of assistance similarly condemned those writs as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power,” placing “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Thus, although those who drafted and ratified the Fourth Amendment could not have anticipated cellphone technology, they would have recognized the dangers inherent in any state claim of unlimited authority to conduct searches for evidence of criminal activity. Cell site location information provides insight into where we go and what we do. Because this information is constantly generated and can be retrieved by the government long after the activities it memorializes have taken place, unfettered government access to cell site location information raises the specter of general searches and undermines the security of “the people.

Gesture analysis for physics education researchers

Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction in real time. This paper provides a review of the research in gesture analysis that is most relevant to physics education researchers and illustrates gesture analysis for the purpose of better understanding student thinking about physics.Comment: 14 page

Oil film interferometry in high Reynolds number turbulent boundary layers

There is continuing debate regarding the validity of skin friction measurements that are dependent on the functional form of the mean velocity profile, for example, the Clauser chart method. This has brought about the need for independent and direct measures of wall shear stress, tw. Of the independent methods to measure tw, oil film interferometry is the most promising, and it has been extensively used recently at low and moderately high Reynolds number. The technique uses interferometry to measure the thinning rate of an oil film, which is linearly related to the level of shear stress acting on the oil film. In this paper we report on the use of this technique in a high Reynolds number boundary layer up to Rq = 50,000. Being an independent measure of tw, the oil film measurement can be used as a means to validate more conventional techniques, such as the Preston tube and Clauser chart at these high Reynolds numbers. The oil-film measurement is validated by making comparative measurements of tw in a large-scale fully-developed channel flow facility where the skin friction is known from the pressure gradient along the channe

The precautions of clinical waste: disposable medical sharps in the United Kingdom

This article deals with recent changes in UK guidance on clinical waste, in particular a shift to disposable, single-use instruments and sharps. I use interviews conducted with nurses from a GP practice and two clinical waste managers at alternative treatment and incineration sites as a springboard for reflection on the relationship between the legislation on clinical waste management and its implementation. Scrutinizing the UK guidance, European legislation and World Health Organization principles, I draw out interviewees’ concerns that the changed practices lead to an expansion of the hazardous waste category, with an increased volume going to incineration. This raises questions regarding the regulations’ environmental and health effects, and regarding the precautionary approach embedded in the regulations. Tracing the diverse reverberations of the term ‘waste’ in different points along the journeys made by sharps in particular, and locating these questions in relation to existing literature on waste, I emphasize that public health rationales for the new practices are not made clear in the guidance. I suggest that this relative silence on the subject conceals both the uncertainties regarding the necessity for these means of managing the risks of infectious waste, and the tensions between policies of precautionary public health and environmental sustainability

How Many Topics? Stability Analysis for Topic Models

Topic modeling refers to the task of discovering the underlying thematic structure in a text corpus, where the output is commonly presented as a report of the top terms appearing in each topic. Despite the diversity of topic modeling algorithms that have been proposed, a common challenge in successfully applying these techniques is the selection of an appropriate number of topics for a given corpus. Choosing too few topics will produce results that are overly broad, while choosing too many will result in the "over-clustering" of a corpus into many small, highly-similar topics. In this paper, we propose a term-centric stability analysis strategy to address this issue, the idea being that a model with an appropriate number of topics will be more robust to perturbations in the data. Using a topic modeling approach based on matrix factorization, evaluations performed on a range of corpora show that this strategy can successfully guide the model selection process.Comment: Improve readability of plots. Add minor clarification

Note and Comment

The Proposed Code of Legal Ethics for the American Bar Association; The Power of a court of Equity to Order the Exhumation of a Dead Body for Examination in Aid of the Defense of a Civil Action at Law; The Consolidation of Municipal Corporations and the Federal Constitution; The Scalper in Law and in Equity; The Basis of Equitable Jurisdiction in Cases of Fraud

The structure ofAl(111)-K−(√3 × √3)R30° determined by LEED: stable and metastable adsorption sites

It is found that the adsorption of potassium on Al(111) at 90 K and at 300 K both result in a (√3 × √3)R0° structure. Through a detailed LEED analysis it is revealed that at 300 K the adatoms occupy substitutional sites and at 90 K the adatoms occupy on-top sites; both geometries have hitherto been considered as very unusual. The relationship between bond length and coordination is discussed with respect to the present results, and with respect to other quantitative studies of alkali-metal/metal adsorption systems

Iron biogeochemistry across marine systems progress from the past decade

Based on an international workshop (Gothenburg, 14–16 May 2008), this review article aims to combine interdisciplinary knowledge from coastal and open ocean research on iron biogeochemistry. The major scientific findings of the past decade are structured into sections on natural and artificial iron fertilization, iron inputs into coastal and estuarine systems, colloidal iron and organic matter, and biological processes. Potential effects of global climate change, particularly ocean acidification, on iron biogeochemistry are discussed. The findings are synthesized into recommendations for future research areas