Extending flood damage assessment methodology to include sociological and environmental dimensions

Optimal and sustainable flood plain management, including flood control, can only be achieved when the impacts of flood control measures are considered for both the man-made and natural environments, and the sociological aspects are fully considered. Until now, methods/models developed to determine the influences of floods and flood control measures in South Africa, and elsewhere in the world, focus on the man-made environment and neglect the natural environment and social dimensions. Two models, recently completed in South Africa, namely FLODSIM (flood damage simulation model for irrigation areas) and TEWA (flood damage simulation model for urban areas) are cases in point. This paper gives an overview of the development of flood damage assessment and mitigation methodology in South Africa. Emphasis is placed on the evolution from the traditional ex-post approach to the latest ex-ante approach in which the sociological and natural environmental dimensions are included. Deliverables from the presentation should be of value to researchers and managers in the fields of flood management and environmental impact assessment worldwide. WaterSA Vol.27(4) 2001: 517-52

The role of prenatal alcohol exposure in abruptio placentae

Objective. To investigate the association between preconception and prenatal alcohol use and abruptio placentae. Methods. A case-control study of women with the clinical diagnosis of abruptio placentae, 65 cases and 66 controls, at Tygerberg Academic Hospital, Western Cape, South Africa. Women in whom a retroplacental blood clot, covering at least 15% of the placental surface, was found at delivery at 24 weeks’ gestation or later were asked to complete a timeline follow-back questionnaire to determine their alcohol intake 12 and 3 months before and during pregnancy. The same questionnaire was administered to a control group of high-risk women who had no antepartum haemorrhage. Outcome. Women who drank alcohol 12 months before conception were more than 4 times more likely to develop abruptio placentae than the control group (odds ratio (OR) 4.49, p=0.00009). Women who drank alcohol 3 months prior to conception were 3 times more likely to develop abruptio placentae than the control group (OR 3.06, p=0.003). Drinking alcoholic beverages during pregnancy carried a more than 3 times greater risk of developing abruptio placentae (OR 3.52, p=0.0006). In the study group, women consumed a mean of 13.6, 12.0 and 11.2 standard drinks in a typical week at 12 and 3 months before and during pregnancy, respectively. The study group demonstrated a binge-drinking pattern, with two to four sessions per month. Conclusion. An association was found between preconception and prenatal consumption of alcohol and abruptio placentae

Exploiting temporal information for 3D pose estimation

In this work, we address the problem of 3D human pose estimation from a sequence of 2D human poses. Although the recent success of deep networks has led many state-of-the-art methods for 3D pose estimation to train deep networks end-to-end to predict from images directly, the top-performing approaches have shown the effectiveness of dividing the task of 3D pose estimation into two steps: using a state-of-the-art 2D pose estimator to estimate the 2D pose from images and then mapping them into 3D space. They also showed that a low-dimensional representation like 2D locations of a set of joints can be discriminative enough to estimate 3D pose with high accuracy. However, estimation of 3D pose for individual frames leads to temporally incoherent estimates due to independent error in each frame causing jitter. Therefore, in this work we utilize the temporal information across a sequence of 2D joint locations to estimate a sequence of 3D poses. We designed a sequence-to-sequence network composed of layer-normalized LSTM units with shortcut connections connecting the input to the output on the decoder side and imposed temporal smoothness constraint during training. We found that the knowledge of temporal consistency improves the best reported result on Human3.6M dataset by approximately $12.2\%$ and helps our network to recover temporally consistent 3D poses over a sequence of images even when the 2D pose detector fails

Structure and efflux mechanism of the yeast pleiotropic drug resistance transporter Pdr5.

Pdr5, a member of the extensive ABC transporter superfamily, is representative of a clinically relevant subgroup involved in pleiotropic drug resistance. Pdr5 and its homologues drive drug efflux through uncoupled hydrolysis of nucleotides, enabling organisms such as baker's yeast and pathogenic fungi to survive in the presence of chemically diverse antifungal agents. Here, we present the molecular structure of Pdr5 solved with single particle cryo-EM, revealing details of an ATP-driven conformational cycle, which mechanically drives drug translocation through an amphipathic channel, and a clamping switch within a conserved linker loop that acts as a nucleotide sensor. One half of the transporter remains nearly invariant throughout the cycle, while its partner undergoes changes that are transmitted across inter-domain interfaces to support a peristaltic motion of the pumped molecule. The efflux model proposed here rationalises the pleiotropic impact of Pdr5 and opens new avenues for the development of effective antifungal compounds.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL

Narrowband Biphotons: Generation, Manipulation, and Applications

In this chapter, we review recent advances in generating narrowband biphotons with long coherence time using spontaneous parametric interaction in monolithic cavity with cluster effect as well as in cold atoms with electromagnetically induced transparency. Engineering and manipulating the temporal waveforms of these long biphotons provide efficient means for controlling light-matter quantum interaction at the single-photon level. We also review recent experiments using temporally long biphotons and single photons.Comment: to appear as a book chapter in a compilation "Engineering the Atom-Photon Interaction" published by Springer in 2015, edited by A. Predojevic and M. W. Mitchel

Longitudinal grey and white matter changes in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia are characterised by progressive brain atrophy. Longitudinal MRI volumetry may help to characterise ongoing structural degeneration and support the differential diagnosis of dementia subtypes. Automated, observer-independent atlas-based MRI volumetry was applied to analyse 102 MRI data sets from 15 bvFTD, 14 AD, and 10 healthy elderly control participants with consecutive scans over at least 12 months. Anatomically defined targets were chosen a priori as brain structures of interest. Groups were compared regarding volumes at clinic presentation and annual change rates. Baseline volumes, especially of grey matter compartments, were significantly reduced in bvFTD and AD patients. Grey matter volumes of the caudate and the gyrus rectus were significantly smaller in bvFTD than AD. The bvFTD group could be separated from AD on the basis of caudate volume with high accuracy (79% cases correct). Annual volume decline was markedly larger in bvFTD and AD than controls, predominantly in white matter of temporal structures. Decline in grey matter volume of the lateral orbitofrontal gyrus separated bvFTD from AD and controls. Automated longitudinal MRI volumetry discriminates bvFTD from AD. In particular, greater reduction of orbitofrontal grey matter and temporal white matter structures after 12 months is indicative of bvFTD

Steiner trees for hereditary graph classes.

We consider the classical problems (Edge) Steiner Tree and Vertex Steiner Tree after restricting the input to some class of graphs characterized by a small set of forbidden induced subgraphs. We show a dichotomy for the former problem restricted to (H1,H2) -free graphs and a dichotomy for the latter problem restricted to H-free graphs. We find that there exists an infinite family of graphs H such that Vertex Steiner Tree is polynomial-time solvable for H-free graphs, whereas there exist only two graphs H for which this holds for Edge Steiner Tree. We also find that Edge Steiner Tree is polynomial-time solvable for (H1,H2) -free graphs if and only if the treewidth of the class of (H1,H2) -free graphs is bounded (subject to P≠NP ). To obtain the latter result, we determine all pairs (H1,H2) for which the class of (H1,H2) -free graphs has bounded treewidth

Preoperative systemic inflammation predicts postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing curative resection for colorectal cancer

The presence of systemic inflammation before surgery, as evidenced by the glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), predicts poor long-term survival in colorectal cancer. The aim was to examine the relationship between the preoperative mGPS and the development of postoperative complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer. Patients (n=455) who underwent potentially curative resections between 2003 and 2007 were assessed consecutively, and details were recorded in a database. The majority of patients presented for elective surgery (85%) were over the age of 65 years (70%), were male (58%), were deprived (53%), and had TNM stage I/II disease (61%), had preoperative haemoglobin (56%), white cell count (87%) and mGPS 0 (58%) in the normal range. After surgery, 86 (19%) patients developed a postoperative complication; 70 (81%) of which were infectious complications. On multivariate analysis, peritoneal soiling (P<0.01), elevated preoperative white cell count (P<0.05) and mGPS (P<0.01) were independently associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. In elective patients, only the mGPS (OR=1.75, 95% CI=1.17-2.63, P=0.007) was significantly associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. Preoperative elevated mGPS predicts increased postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer

Giant Anharmonic Phonon Scattering in PbTe

Understanding the microscopic processes affecting the bulk thermal conductivity is crucial to develop more efficient thermoelectric materials. PbTe is currently one of the leading thermoelectric materials, largely thanks to its low thermal conductivity. However, the origin of this low thermal conductivity in a simple rocksalt structure has so far been elusive. Using a combination of inelastic neutron scattering measurements and first-principles computations of the phonons, we identify a strong anharmonic coupling between the ferroelectric transverse optic (TO) mode and the longitudinal acoustic (LA) modes in PbTe. This interaction extends over a large portion of reciprocal space, and directly affects the heat-carrying LA phonons. The LA-TO anharmonic coupling is likely to play a central role in explaining the low thermal conductivity of PbTe. The present results provide a microscopic picture of why many good thermoelectric materials are found near a lattice instability of the ferroelectric type

Photothermal conversion characteristics of gold nanoparticles under different filter conditions

In this article, plasmonic nanopaerticles (PNP) were used to improve the solar thermal conversion efficiency and the abortion prosperity under eight different wavelength spectrum was compared. Gold nanoparticles (GNP) is synthesized through an improved citrate-reduction method, which was used to illustrate the photo-thermal conversion of PNPs under a solar simulator with eight filters. Experimental results showed that the best light intensities at wavelength of 710 nm could reach 0.004 W/cm2 when applied to two suns. With the increase of the irradiation time, the GNP temperature increased linearly and the temperature could be increased by 3.5 K within 300 s. In addition, there were no infrared, no visible light, and no UV filters utilized to compare GNP photothermal conversion efficiencies in three main spectrum regions. As eight filters were applied in the current experiment, more specified wavelength spectrum and longer time need to be tested for the purpose of optimisation