American Eel: A Symposium. Session One

Session One\u27s panel covers an overview of American eel scientific research and understandings

American Eel: A Symposium. Session One

Session One\u27s panel covers an overview of American eel scientific research and understandings

Patient safety: just ask. Patients as reporters of real-time safety data; a pilot project to improve patient safety in secondary care

The Berwick review into patient safety recommended ‘involving patients in the healthcare organisation and seeking out the patient voice as an essential asset to monitor safety.’ (1) However routine data collection from patients in our institution is retrospective and doesn\u27t focus on safety. Our objective was to create a patient-centred mechanism to monitor patient-perceived safety concerns and provide immediate resolution of highlighted issues. A pragmatic 6-question questionnaire was developed containing 4 scored and 2 free text questions. This questionnaire was piloted and adjusted before being administered to all inpatients meeting the inclusion criteria in our institution on one day. Safety issues raised were triaged and acted upon according to an agreed protocol providing a mechanism for immediate resolution. 225 patients were inpatients in the clinical areas surveyed of which 149 were eligible and 148 participated (99% participation). The majority (\u3e95%) felt nothing about their stay was unsafe and felt they had no concerns about their treatment plan. However multiple themes regarding patient safety were identified including environmental issues, staffing levels, supervision of vulnerable patients and handover of clinical information. None of the issues reported by patients had been reported through existing hospital incident reporting systems. Safety issues triaged as requiring immediate attention were fed back to appropriate teams on the day to allow immediate learning. These results suggest that patients find safety reporting of their care acceptable via a simple questionnaire. Integration of this new process may increase overall safety reporting and allow targeted improvements in safety, quality and patient experience

Improving the Usability of the Hierarchical File System

Whether you are interested in improving the usability of Linux, Macintosh or Windows, there is one restriction you cannot escape – the hierarchical file storage system. The notion of files and folders has been with us for so long that it almost seems axiomatic. In this paper we look at the effects on users of forcing a hierarchical classification of files. We also consider how some of the resultant problems can be tackled with a new piece of file browsing software based on the ideas of relational database systems

Affective Scene Generation

A new technique for generating virtual environments is proposed, whereby the user describes the environment that they wish to create using adjectives. An entire scene is then procedurally generated, based on the mapping of these adjectives to the parameter space of the procedural models used. This mapping is determined through a pre-process, during which the user is presented with a number of scenes and asked to describe them using adjectives. With such a technique, the ability to create complex virtual environments is extended to users with little or no technical knowledge, and additionally provides a means for experienced users to quickly generate a large, complex environment which can then be modified by hand

Thrackles: An improved upper bound

A thrackle is a graph drawn in the plane so that every pair of its edges meet exactly once: either at a common end vertex or in a proper crossing. We prove that any thrackle of n vertices has at most 1.3984n edges. Quasi-thrackles are defined similarly, except that every pair of edges that do not share a vertex are allowed to cross an odd number of times. It is also shown that the maximum number of edges of a quasi-thrackle on n vertices is 3/2(n-1), and that this bound is best possible for infinitely many values of n. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018

From Offshore to Onshore: Multiple Origins of Shallow-Water Corals from Deep-Sea Ancestors

Shallow-water tropical reefs and the deep sea represent the two most diverse marine environments. Understanding the origin and diversification of this biodiversity is a major quest in ecology and evolution. The most prominent and well-supported explanation, articulated since the first explorations of the deep sea, holds that benthic marine fauna originated in shallow, onshore environments, and diversified into deeper waters. In contrast, evidence that groups of marine organisms originated in the deep sea is limited, and the possibility that deep-water taxa have contributed to the formation of shallow-water communities remains untested with phylogenetic methods. Here we show that stylasterid corals (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa: Stylasteridae)—the second most diverse group of hard corals—originated and diversified extensively in the deep sea, and subsequently invaded shallow waters. Our phylogenetic results show that deep-water stylasterid corals have invaded the shallow-water tropics three times, with one additional invasion of the shallow-water temperate zone. Our results also show that anti-predatory innovations arose in the deep sea, but were not involved in the shallow-water invasions. These findings are the first robust evidence that an important group of tropical shallow-water marine animals evolved from deep-water ancestors

30 inch Roll-Based Production of High-Quality Graphene Films for Flexible Transparent Electrodes

We report that 30-inch scale multiple roll-to-roll transfer and wet chemical doping considerably enhance the electrical properties of the graphene films grown on roll-type Cu substrates by chemical vapor deposition. The resulting graphene films shows a sheet resistance as low as ~30 Ohm/sq at ~90 % transparency which is superior to commercial transparent electrodes such as indium tin oxides (ITO). The monolayer of graphene shows sheet resistances as low as ~125 Ohm/sq with 97.4% optical transmittance and half-integer quantum Hall effect, indicating the high-quality of these graphene films. As a practical application, we also fabricated a touch screen panel device based on the graphene transparent electrodes, showing extraordinary mechanical and electrical performances

A conceptual classification of parents’ attributions of the role of food advertising in children’s diets

Background: High levels of child obesity are triggering growing concerns about the prevalence and effects of food advertising targeted at children. Efforts to address this advertising are confounded by the expanding repertoire of media and promotional techniques used to reach and attract children. The present study explored parents’ views on food marketing and the strategies parents employ when attempting to ameliorate its effects. As part of an online survey of Australian parents’ attitudes towards a range of food advertisements, respondents were invited to provide additional comment in an open-ended question. The question was optional and asked “Are there any other comments you would like to make?”. One in five of the survey respondents (18%; n = 235) elected to answer this question by discussing their views on food advertising and children’s diets. The responses were imported into NVivo10 for coding and analysis. A grounded approach was used to draw meaning from the data and develop a proposed conceptual classification of parents’ attributions relating to food advertising and its consequences.Results: The majority of responses related to the negative perceived effects of unhealthy food advertising on children’s diets, with few respondents considering such advertisements to be innocuous. The responses were classified into four conceptual categories reflecting differing attitudes to advertising (negative to neutral) and varying levels of locus of control (low to high). The typical characteristics of parents allocated to the four categories exhibited variation according to weight status, television viewing habits, education level, and family size. The largest number of responses was coded to the category characterized by a negative attitude toward food advertising and a low locus of control. Parents in this category were more likely than others to be overweight/obese and heavy television viewers. Parents in the negative attitude to advertising and high locus of control category nominated a variety of parenting practices that could form the basis of parent education interventions. Conclusions: The results suggest that many Australian parents may feel disempowered in the face of high levels of advertising for unhealthy foods. The current voluntary regulatory code appears to be inadequate in scope and coverage to address this situation

Spatial patterns of the tau pathology in progressive supranuclear palsy

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is characterized neuropathologically by neuronal loss, gliosis, and the presence of tau-immunoreactive neuronal and glial cell inclusions affecting subcortical and some cortical regions. The objectives of this study were to determine (1) the spatial patterns of the tau-immunoreactive pathology, viz., neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), oligodendroglial inclusions (GI), tufted astrocytes (TA), and Alzheimer's disease-type neuritic plaques (NP) in PSP and (2) to investigate the spatial correlations between the histological features. Post-mortem material of cortical and subcortical regions of eight PSP cases was studied. Spatial pattern analysis was applied to the NFT, GI, TA, NP, abnormally enlarged neurons (EN), surviving neurons, and glial cells. NFT, GI, and TA were distributed either at random or in regularly distributed clusters. The EN and NP were mainly randomly distributed. Clustering of NFT and EN was more frequent in the cortex and subcortical regions, respectively. Variations in NFT density were not spatially correlated with the densities of either GI or TA, but were positively correlated with the densities of EN and surviving neurons in some regions. (1) NFT were the most widespread tau-immunoreactive pathology in PSP being distributed randomly in subcortical regions and in regular clusters in cortical regions, (2) GI and TA were more localized and exhibited a regular pattern of clustering in subcortical regions, and (3) neuronal and glial cell pathologies were not spatially correlated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag