The Importance of Screening for, and managing, Gestational Diabetes Mellitus in Malta

The detection and management of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has been a source of controversy for many years. Evidence has now accumulated that dietary and insulin therapy are effective and reduce the risk of macrosomia and Caesarean section. Studies are underway to assess the impact of screening and of the different diagnostic criteria for GDM. However, studies to date have reported only an impact on obstetric, neonatal and fetal outcomes. It is now possible to prevent or at least delay the onset of maternal Type 2 diabetes, and interventions targeting women with a history of GDM are likely to have a substantive impact on the current diabetes epidemic. An even greater impact may result from preventing excessive intra-uterine exposure to hyperglycaemia, increasingly implicated as a cause of obesity and diabetes in the offspring of women with past GDM. Developing and implementing approaches to preventing long term risks to mother and baby across populations will take many years and possibly decades. In the meantime, all women should be screened for GDM so that the need for long term follow up, and, where possible, intervention for mother and baby can be identified. Such action requires knowledge of the diagnosis not only by the health care team but also the woman herself.peer-reviewe

Cramming: The Effects of School Accountability on College-Bound Students

This paper is the first to explore the effects of school accountability systems on high-achieving students' long-term performance. Using exceptional data from a large highly-selective state university, we relate school accountability pressure in high school to a student's university-level grades and study habits. We exploit a change in the state's accountability system in 1999 that led to some schools becoming newlythreatened by accountability pressure and others becoming newly-unthreatened to identify the effects of accountability pressure. We find that an accountability system based on a low-level test of basic skills apparently led to generally reduced performance by high-achieving students, while an accountability system based on a more challenging criterion-referenced exam apparently led to improved performance in college on mathematics and other technical subjects. Both types of systems are associated with increased "cramming" by students in college. The results indicate that the nature of an accountability system can influence its effectiveness.

Character-Aware Neural Language Models

We describe a simple neural language model that relies only on character-level inputs. Predictions are still made at the word-level. Our model employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a highway network over characters, whose output is given to a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM). On the English Penn Treebank the model is on par with the existing state-of-the-art despite having 60% fewer parameters. On languages with rich morphology (Arabic, Czech, French, German, Spanish, Russian), the model outperforms word-level/morpheme-level LSTM baselines, again with fewer parameters. The results suggest that on many languages, character inputs are sufficient for language modeling. Analysis of word representations obtained from the character composition part of the model reveals that the model is able to encode, from characters only, both semantic and orthographic information.Comment: AAAI 201

Characterization of hyporheic zone processes of a northern prairie stream

A hyporheic zone occurs beneath and adjacent to streams where surface water and groundwater mix. This zone is known to be a reservoir for solutes and a habitat for interstitial organisms. Hyporheic zone boundaries in the Tongue River, North Dakota, were investigated through examination of the physicochemical and biological gradients present in the stream channel and bank sediments. The effects of cattle grazing at the streamside interface of the riparian zone were also examined at two locations to determine land use impacts on the hyporheic zone. Electrical conductivity (EC) and ammonium gradients were observed beneath the stream channel via nests of mini-piezometers (1.27-cm clear polyethylene tube) and wells (2.54-cm PVC). EC and ammonium increased immediately below the stream, then decreased laterally and with depth. Discontinuities in the EC gradient may indicate where metabolic or redox reactions occur under the streambed due to mixing of surface water and groundwater, or conditions in the sediments. Discontinuities in the ammonium gradient may represent a boundary between dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium and a nitrification-denitrification couple, as well as subtle changes in hydraulic gradient. Discontinuities in gradients and zones beneath the stream channel likely fluctuate as subsurface processes shift temporally. Changes in biotic activity could have caused ammonium concentrations in sub-channel water to decrease from spring to summer and then increase from summer to fall at both sites. Chemical and biological gradients in the Tongue River differ from other studies presumably because of regional differences in geology, climate, and hydrology. The density and diversity of interstitial meiofauna populations may provide information about the general physical and chemical conditions of streambed sediments. Meiofauna diversity and population size decreased with ·depth at both study sites. High levels of ammonium and/or ambient reduced conditions in zones beneath the channel could exclude most meiofauna species. Meiofauna population dynamics also may indicate stream reach health. Cattle grazing in the riparian zone appeared to affect chemical and biological gradients. Ammonium concentrations and EC were elevated at the grazed site (\u3e10 mg/Land 1300 µSiem, respectively). The lack of riparian vegetation and direct input of cattle waste may have caused higher EC and ammonium at the stream margin of the grazed site. Less dense and diverse populations of meiofauna at the grazed site were likely caused by greater disturbance of the sediments, lack of woody debris and preferred substrate, and more reduced conditions in the channel sediments. Differences in ammonium concentrations in subchannel water between the sites were greater than differences in nitrate concentrations in surface water. This implies that sampling designed to evaluate stream health must consider all sources and reservoirs of pollutants, and cannot solely depend on surface water analysis