The Multiple Dimensions of Child Abuse and Neglect: New Insights Into an Old Problem

Outlines the long-term health and cognitive effects and developmental delays that can result from child maltreatment. Makes a case for incorporating child well-being indicators into agencies' databases to monitor and address the needs of at-risk children

The Open Spectral Database: an open platform for sharing and searching spectral data

BACKGROUND: A number of websites make available spectral data for download (typically as JCAMP-DX text files) and one (ChemSpider) that also allows users to contribute spectral files. As a result, searching and retrieving such spectral data can be time consuming, and difficult to reuse if the data is compressed in the JCAMP-DX file. What is needed is a single resource that allows submission of JCAMP-DX files, export of the raw data in multiple formats, searching based on multiple chemical identifiers, and is open in terms of license and access. To address these issues a new online resource called the Open Spectral Database (OSDB) http://osdb.info/ has been developed and is now available. Built using open source tools, using open code (hosted on GitHub), providing open data, and open to community input about design and functionality, the OSDB is available for anyone to submit spectral data, making it searchable and available to the scientific community. This paper details the concept and coding, internal architecture, export formats, Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface and options for submission of data. RESULTS: The OSDB website went live in November 2015. Concurrently, the GitHub repository was made available at https://github.com/stuchalk/OSDB/, and is open for collaborators to join the project, submit issues, and contribute code. CONCLUSION: The combination of a scripting environment (PHPStorm), a PHP Framework (CakePHP), a relational database (MySQL) and a code repository (GitHub) provides all the capabilities to easily develop REST based websites for ingestion, curation and exposure of open chemical data to the community at all levels. It is hoped this software stack (or equivalent ones in other scripting languages) will be leveraged to make more chemical data available for both humans and computers

The IUPAC Gold Book website

In the past 100 years IUPAC has become well known for the development of nomenclature standards for chemicals and terminology for communication of chemically related concepts. Initially published in IUPAC\u27s Pure and Applied Chemistry (PAC), terminology recommendations have been incorporated into the IUPAC Color Books published by the divisions. Subsequently, many terms from the color books have been incorporated into the Gold Book - the Compendium of Chemical Terminology. While the work to date as been focused on the standardization of concept (term) definitions for human use, the aggregated set of all PAC recommendations on terminology constitutes a corpus of high quality definitions for entries into an ontology for use in computer representation of chemical concepts. This is sorely needed at a time when there is a significant move toward machine learning approaches to understand science both within and outside chemistry. With it chemical data scientists can envision and apply this \u27common language\u27 into their cheminformatics work, promoting interoperability in chemical data. This paper will review the history of the PAC recommendations, the color books, and highlight how the existing guidelines for the development of terms supports the renovation of the terms for computer use. The current update to the Gold Book website will be discussed (including machine processability) as well as future ontological representation of the terms. Finally, this development will be highlighted as one of the most important in the next 100 years of IUPAC

Flow Injection Reagent Introduction by Supported Liquid and Nafion Membranes: Determination of Phosphate

The use of membrane tubing for the introduction of reagents for the determination of phosphate in waters by flow injection analysis was studied. The use of membranes eliminates the need for confluence points in the design of flow injection manifolds. This increases the sensitivity of the manifold by providing a sufficient reagent excess for the reaction without diluting the sample. Methods for the introduction of acid, molybdate and hydrazine were devised for the determination of phosphate by the Molybdenum Blue method. Several membranes were examined and Nafion and Accurel (microporous polypropylene) were found to be most useful. Molybdate introduction was achieved using a supported liquid membrane (SLM). Calibration was linear and a detection limit of 12 ppb phosphate (4 ppb phosphorus) was obtained

Neural oscillations as a signature of efficient coding in the presence of synaptic delays

Cortical networks exhibit ‘global oscillations’, in which neural spike times are entrained to an underlying oscillatory rhythm, but where individual neurons fire irregularly, on only a fraction of cycles. While the network dynamics underlying global oscillations have been well characterised, their function is debated. Here, we show that such global oscillations are a direct consequence of optimal efficient coding in spiking networks with synaptic delays and noise. To avoid firing unnecessary spikes, neurons need to share information about the network state. Ideally, membrane potentials should be strongly correlated and reflect a ‘prediction error’ while the spikes themselves are uncorrelated and occur rarely. We show that the most efficient representation is when: (i) spike times are entrained to a global Gamma rhythm (implying a consistent representation of the error); but (ii) few neurons fire on each cycle (implying high efficiency), while (iii) excitation and inhibition are tightly balanced. This suggests that cortical networks exhibiting such dynamics are tuned to achieve a maximally efficient population code

A study of pulsed thermography for life assessment of thin EB-PVD TBCs undergoing oxidation ageing

This paper presents an assessment of ageing for thin Thermal Barrier Coatings (TBC) using active thermography. As TBCs undergo ageing during their service life, sintering changes the porosity, elements migrate from the substrate, and micro-cracks build up in the structure of the material, exhibiting a change in thermal conductivity and diffusion properties. As the material ages and these properties change over time, it is possible to exploit trends in this change for characterisation of coating ageing, which would provide a diagnostics tool to estimate remaining useful life. In this study, through-depth diffusivity measurement has been applied to thin EB-PVD coatings which are artificially aged via oxidation furnace cycles. In order to address the difficulties of capturing a fast thermal event in a thin coating, a novel parametric study approach has been carried out to optimise data capture and analysis, maximising available frames for the model fitting step. Through-depth diffusivities have been measured during ageing for six samples, yielding a repeatable trend in thermal diffusivity measurements, with three features, which can be exploited for ageing characterisation of thin EB-PVD TBCs, and used as an alarm of imminent failure

An improved version of white matter method for correction of non-uniform intensity in MR images: application to the quantification of rates of brain atrophy in Alzheimer's disease and normal aging

A fully automated 3D version of the so-called white matter method for correcting intensity non-uniformity in MR T1-weighted neuro images is presented. The algorithm is an extension of the original work published previously. The major part of the extension was the development of a fully automated method for the generation of the reference points. In the design of this method, a number of measures were introduced to minimize the effects of possible inclusion of non-white matter voxels in the selection process. The correction process has been made iterative. PI drawback of this approach is an increased cost in computational time. The algorithm has been tested on T1-weighted MR images acquired from a longitudinal study involving elderly subjects and people with probable Alzheimer's disease. More quantitative measures were used for the evaluation of the algorithm's performance. Highly satisfactory correction results have been obtained for images with extensive intensity non-uniformity either present in raw data or added artificially. With intensity correction, improved accuracy in the measurement of the rate of brain atrophy in Alzheimer's patients as well as in elderly people due to normal aging has been achieved

Laboratory Animal Allergy: Industrial Hygiene Groundwork For A Prospective Epidemiologic Study

This paper discusses some basic principles of allergy and asthma, and provides an overview of laboratory animal allergy and aeroallergen quantitation methods. Laboratory animal worker exposures to total and respirable particulate concentrations were determined from personal samples (both time-weighted average and task specific) and area samples. All results were below threshold limit values for nuisance dust (10 mg/M^3-total, 5 mg/M-^3-respirable) and hardwood dust (1 mg/M^3). The highest particulate exposures existed in the area on the clean side of the automatic cage washers (0.97 mg/M^3-total, 0.05 mg/M^3-respirable, TWAs) where hardwood bedding chips were dispensed into clean cages. The respirable percent of the samples varied widely (5 to 100%). The air samples collected will be analyzed by RAST inhibition for rat urinary protein and rat dander, and will be used for dose determination in a prospective study on the development of laboratory animal allergy and asthma. A system of dose calculation and data presentation is suggested for the follow-up epidemiology.Master of Science in Public Healt