Nomina dubia and faunistic issues with New Zealand spiders(Araneae)

Attempts to clarify the identity of obscure New Zealand spider taxa have lead to the conclusion that six species are best treated as nomina dubia [Philodromus rubrofrontus Urquhart 1891 (Philodromidae); Dictyna urquhartii Roewer 1951, (Dictynidae); Linyphia albiapiata Urquhart 1891, Linyphia cruenta Urquhart 1891, Linyphia multicolor Urquhart 1891, Linyphia pellos Urquhart 1891 (Linyphiidae)]. Four species currently listed in Araneus Clerck 1757 (Araneidae) are re-affirmed as synonyms [Araneus lineaacutus (Urquhart 1887) = Zealaranea crassa (Walckenaer 1842), Araneus powelli (Urquhart 1894) = Novaranea laevigata (Urquhart 1891), Araneus sublutius (Urquhart 1892b) = Zealaranea trinotata (Urquhart 1890), Araneus ventricosellus (Roewer 1942) = Eriophora heroine (L. Koch 1871)]. An old record of Araneus brisbanae (L. Koch 1867b) (Araneidae) from New Zealand is a misidentification of Eriophora decorosa Urquhart 1894. The family Philodromidae, the genera Dictyna Sundevall 1833 (Dictynidae) and Linyphia Latreille 1804 (Linyphiidae), as well as Tharpyna munda L. Koch 1875 (Thomisidae) and Araneus brisbanae (Araneidae) are absent from New Zealand

Two Information Aggregation Mechanisms for Predicting the Opening Weekend Box Office Revenues of Films: Boxoffice Prophecy and Guess of Guesses

Successful field tests were conducted on two new Information Aggregation Mechanisms (IAMs). The mechanisms collected information held as intuitions about opening weekend box office revenues for movies in Australia. Participants were film school students. One mechanism is similar to parimutuel betting that produces a probability distribution over box office amounts. Except for “art house films”, the predicted distribution is indistinguishable from the actual revenues. The second mechanism is based on guesses of the guesses of others and applied when incentives for accuracy could not be used. It tested well against data and contains information not encompassed by the first mechanism

Description in occam and simulation on a transputer network of a systolic processor for image processing

The most significant drawback in using neighbourhood processing (linear filtering, morphology) is the cost of ils implementation, particularly in the area of image processing where the cost grows in proportion to the kernel size squared . However, in PIR [1] it was shown that a large amount of classical algorithms could be described as a cascade of peculiar elementary tells. Being highly integrable, these tells brought about the design of a neighbourhood systolic processor. Converting a functional description (e .g . flow graph, mathematical model) into a hardware structure raises several technical problems . In addition, the cost of designing an integrated circuit requires special cure, making it necessary to perform many simulations . The first part of this paper gives a short description of the décomposition method. It then goes on ta describe the power of occam as a design formalism, applying it to the cascaded tells modelisation . Furthermore, the obtained model can be compiled into a code directly loadable into a Transputer network, resulting in a performant simulation . The hierarchy of occam allows a description at différent levels of abstraction, in order to fit the precision of the model to the desired type of simulation .L'inconvénient majeur des algorithmes de voisinage (filtrage linéaire, morphologique) réside dans le coût associé à leur mise en oeuvre, principalement dans le domaine du traitement d'images où il croît avec le carré de la taille du voisinage . Il a toutefois été montré dans PIR [1] que de nombreux algorithmes couramment utilisés pouvaient être décrits sous la forme d'une cascade de cellules élémentaires particulières . Le caractère hautement intégrable de ces cellules nous a amené à concevoir un processeur systolique de voisinage basé sur le principe de la synthèse par cascades de cellules . Le passage d'une représentation fonctionnelle (graphe de fluence, modèle mathématique) à une structure matérielle soulève un certain nombre de problèmes . En outre, le coût lié à la réalisation d'un circuit intégré exige une extrême prudence, imposant généralement le recours à de nombreuses simulations . Le présent papier fournit un bref aperçu de la méthode de synthèse par cascades de cellules . Il montre ensuite la puissance du langage occam comme outil de formalisation appliquant celui-ci à la modélisation des cascades de cellules . La compilation du modèle au moyen d'outils adéquats fournit un code directement exécutable par un réseau de Transputers, ce qui conduit à une simulation performante . La hiérarchie incluse dans le langage permet une décomposition en niveaux d'abstraction de plus en plus fins, en vue d'ajuster la précision du modèle au type de simulation désiré

Levels of State and Trait Anxiety in Patients Referred to Ophthalmology by Primary Care Clinicians: A Cross Sectional Study

Purpose There is a high level of over-referral from primary eye care leading to significant numbers of people without ocular pathology (false positives) being referred to secondary eye care. The present study used a psychometric instrument to determine whether there is a psychological burden on patients due to referral to secondary eye care, and used Rasch analysis to convert the data from an ordinal to an interval scale. Design Cross sectional study. Participants and Controls 322 participants and 80 control participants. Methods State (i.e. current) and trait (i.e. propensity to) anxiety were measured in a group of patients referred to a hospital eye department in the UK and in a control group who have had a sight test but were not referred. Response category analysis plus infit and outfit Rasch statistics and person separation indices were used to determine the usefulness of individual items and the response categories. Principal components analysis was used to determine dimensionality. Main Outcome Measure Levels of state and trait anxiety measured using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Results State anxiety scores were significantly higher in the patients referred to secondary eye care than the controls (p0.1). Rasch analysis highlighted that the questionnaire results needed to be split into “anxiety-absent” and “anxiety-present” items for both state and trait anxiety, but both subscales showed the same profile of results between patients and controls. Conclusions State anxiety was shown to be higher in patients referred to secondary eye care than the controls, and at similar levels to people with moderate to high perceived susceptibility to breast cancer. This suggests that referral from primary to secondary eye care can result in a significant psychological burden on some patients

A Discrete Event Simulation model to evaluate the treatment pathways of patients with Cataract in the United Kingdom

Background The number of people affected by cataract in the United Kingdom (UK) is growing rapidly due to ageing population. As the only way to treat cataract is through surgery, there is a high demand for this type of surgery and figures indicate that it is the most performed type of surgery in the UK. The National Health Service (NHS), which provides free of charge care in the UK, is under huge financial pressure due to budget austerity in the last decade. As the number of people affected by the disease is expected to grow significantly in coming years, the aim of this study is to evaluate whether the introduction of new processes and medical technologies will enable cataract services to cope with the demand within the NHS funding constraints. Methods We developed a Discrete Event Simulation model representing the cataract services pathways at Leicester Royal Infirmary Hospital. The model was inputted with data from national and local sources as well as from a surgery demand forecasting model developed in the study. The model was verified and validated with the participation of the cataract services clinical and management teams. Results Four scenarios involving increased number of surgeries per half-day surgery theatre slot were simulated. Results indicate that the total number of surgeries per year could be increased by 40% at no extra cost. However, the rate of improvement decreases for increased number of surgeries per half-day surgery theatre slot due to a higher number of cancelled surgeries. Productivity is expected to improve as the total number of doctors and nurses hours will increase by 5 and 12% respectively. However, non-human resources such as pre-surgery rooms and post-surgery recovery chairs are under-utilized across all scenarios. Conclusions Using new processes and medical technologies for cataract surgery is a promising way to deal with the expected higher demand especially as this could be achieved with limited impact on costs. Non-human resources capacity need to be evenly levelled across the surgery pathway to improve their utilisation. The performance of cataract services could be improved by better communication with and proactive management of patients.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

The SNAPSHOT study protocol : SNAcking, Physical activity, Self-regulation, and Heart rate Over Time

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The role of Cu and film thickness on the photocatalytic activity of mesoporous spin coated TiO2 films

Most practical applications of photocatalysts will involve coatings on an inert support; here we have examined how copper doping of spin coated porous TiO2 films affects their physical characteristics and photocatalytic activity. The photocatalytic degradation of stearic acid was used as a measure of photocatalytic activity for catalysts spin coated from a sol-gel onto glass with 0, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2.5 and 5 wt% copper introduced into the catalyst lattice before gelation. The effects of spin coating speed on film thickness, structure and band gap were studied and the nature of the copper incorporated into the films examined with XPS and XANES measurements. Increased spin coating speeds reduces the thickness of the deposited films from ∼ 50 μm to ∼ 20 μm until a spin speed of ∼ 3000 rpm at which point non-Newtonian behaviour of the gels prevents further reductions in film thickness. A larger effect on film thickness is the presence of the added copper nitrate which results in thinner films. After calcining, XANES shows the bulk of the copper to be in a Cu(II) state but at the surface of the thinnest, most active films XPS shows only Cu(I). Photocatalytic activity is much more strongly affected by the presence of the copper than the thickness of the films with 0.1 wt% Cu catalysts as much as 10 times more active than the undoped catalysts. Increasing the copper content, however, reduces activity until at ∼ 5 wt% activity is lower than for the pure TiO2 films

Measurement of Angular Distributions and R= sigma_L/sigma_T in Diffractive Electroproduction of rho^0 Mesons

Production and decay angular distributions were extracted from measurements of exclusive electroproduction of the rho^0(770) meson over a range in the virtual photon negative four-momentum squared 0.5< Q^2 <4 GeV^2 and the photon-nucleon invariant mass range 3.8< W <6.5 GeV. The experiment was performed with the HERMES spectrometer, using a longitudinally polarized positron beam and a ^3He gas target internal to the HERA e^{+-} storage ring. The event sample combines rho^0 mesons produced incoherently off individual nucleons and coherently off the nucleus as a whole. The distributions in one production angle and two angles describing the rho^0 -> pi+ pi- decay yielded measurements of eight elements of the spin-density matrix, including one that had not been measured before. The results are consistent with the dominance of helicity-conserving amplitudes and natural parity exchange. The improved precision achieved at 47 GeV, reveals evidence for an energy dependence in the ratio R of the longitudinal to transverse cross sections at constant Q^2.Comment: 15 pages, 15 embedded figures, LaTeX for SVJour(epj) document class Revision: Fig. 15 corrected, recent data added to Figs. 10,12,14,15; minor changes to tex

Comparison between cytochrome P450 (CYP) content and relative activity approaches to scaling from cDNA-expressed CYPs to human liver microsomes: ratios of accessory proteins as sources of discrepancies between approaches. Drug Metab

This paper is available online at http://www.dmd.org ABSTRACT: Relative activity factors (RAFs) and immunoquantified levels of cytochrome P450 (CYP) isoforms both have been proposed as scaling factors for the prediction of hepatic drug metabolism from studies using cDNA-expressed CYPs. However, a systematic comparison of the two approaches, including possible mechanisms underlying differences, is not available. In this study, RAFs determined for CYPs 1A2, 2B6, 2C19, 2D6, and 3A4 in 12 human livers using lymphoblast-expressed enzymes were compared to immunoquantified protein levels. 2C19, 2D6, and 3A4 RAFs were similar to immunoquantified enzyme levels. In contrast, 1A2 RAFs were 5-to 20-fold higher than CYP1A2 content, and the RAF:content ratio was positively correlated with the molar ratio of NADPH:CYP oxidoreductase (OR) to CYP1A2. The OR:CYP1A2 ratio in lymphoblast microsomes was 92-fold lower than in human liver microsomes. Reconstitution experiments demonstrated a 10-to 20-fold lower activity at OR:CYP1A2 ratios similar to those in lymphoblasts, compared with those in human livers. CYP2B6-containing lymphoblast microsomes had 29-and 13-fold lower OR:CYP and cytochrome b 5 :CYP ratios, respectively, than did liver microsomes and yielded RAFs that were 6-fold higher than CYP2B6 content. Use of metabolic rates from cDNA-expressed CYPs containing nonphysiologic concentrations of electron-transfer proteins (relative to human liver microsomes) in conjunction with hepatic CYP contents may lead to incorrect predictions of liver microsomal rates and relative contributions of individual isoforms. Scaling factors used in bridging the gap between expression systems and liver microsomes should not only incorporate relative hepatic abundance of individual CYPs but also account for differences in activity per unit enzyme in the two systems. The cloning and heterologous expression of the drug-metabolizing human CYPs 1 has resulted in the commercial availability of cDNAexpressed CYPs for use as reagents for in vitro quantitative phenotyping, and bridging the gap between cDNA-expressed cytochromes and human liver microsomes has been the subject of several recent reviews The turnover number of CYPs in human liver microsomes is affected by several factors that are biochemically distinct from the CYP enzyme itself. Examples include the accessory electron-transfer proteins NADPH cytochrome P450-oxidoreductase (OR) and cytochrome b 5 , membrane lipid composition, and ionic strength of the in vitro incubation matrix The relative contribution of each isoform can then be determined as follows: Enzyme kinetic studies using cDNA-expressed human CYPs are being increasingly used to define the functions v i (s) for whatever individual CYPs biotransform a drug. Such analyses indicate the relative affinities and capacities of the CYPs contributing to a biotransformation. However, the relative contribution of each enzyme cannot be estimated unless the results incorporate the scaling factors (A i ). Although immunoquantified levels of CYP isoforms in human liver microsomes RAFs are determined for specific CYPs by comparing the rate of an isoform-specific index reaction at saturating substrate concentrations in human liver microsomes (V max for liver microsomes) to the rate of the same reaction catalyzed by the specific cDNA-expressed CYP under identical conditions (V max for cDNA-expressed enzyme): Mean V max for isoform-specific reaction in human liver microsomes V max for isoform-specific reaction by cDNA expressed isoform When the numerator is expressed in picomoles metabolite per milligram of protein per minute and the denominator as picomoles of metabolite per picomole of CYP per minute, the units of RAF are picomoles of CYP per milligram of protein, which can be compared with the immunoquantified CYP contents. RAFs have been used as estimates of A i in reaction phenotyping Materials and Methods Human Liver Microsomes and Heterologously Expressed CYP Isoforms. Liver samples, obtained from the International Institute for the Advancement of Medicine (Exton, PA) or the Liver Tissue Procurement and Distribution Service (University of Minnesota), were from 12 different transplant donors (L1-L12) with no known liver disease. The donor population (median age 27 years, range 3-50 years; 5 females and 7 males) was balanced with respect to age, sex, race, smoking habits, and alcohol consumption. The tissue was partitioned and kept at Ϫ80°C until the time of microsome preparation as described previously Microsomes from cDNA-transfected human lymphoblastoid cells expressing CYP 1A2, 2B6, 2C19, 2D6, or 3A4 (Crespi, 1995) were purchased from Gentest Corporation (Woburn, MA), aliquoted and stored at Ϫ80°C, and thawed on ice before use. Lymphoblast-expressed CYPs 3A4 and 2D6 used in the study were coexpressed with OR, whereas the activities of lymphoblast- expressed CYPs 1A2, 2B6, and 2C19 were supported by endogenous levels of reductase native to the host cell line. Microsomal protein concentrations and CYP content were provided by the manufacturer. Antibodies and Quantitative Western Blotting. Concentrations of CYP1A2, 2B6, 2C19, 2D6, and 3A4/5 in human liver microsomal preparations from livers L1 to L12 were determined by quantitative Western blotting In Vitro Metabolic Incubations and Metabolite Analysis. Incubations of index substrates with human liver microsomes and lymphoblas

Nuclear Polarization of Molecular Hydrogen Recombined on a Non-metallic Surface

The nuclear polarization of $\mathrm{H}_2$ molecules formed by recombination of nuclear polarized H atoms on the surface of a storage cell initially coated with a silicon-based polymer has been measured by using the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry in deep-inelastic positron-proton scattering. The molecules are found to have a substantial nuclear polarization, which is evidence that initially polarized atoms retain their nuclear polarization when absorbed on this type of surfac