Hypothermic organ perfusion in the 2020s: mixing the benefits of low temperatures and dynamic flow outside the body

The cold chain supply of donor organs for transplantation has been an integral part of the delivery of transplant clinical services over the past five decades. Within the technologies used for this, hypothermic machine perfusion (HMP) was a concept, which was attractive to maintain organs under optimal conditions outside the body, and many early research studies on HMP were reported. However, it took the arrival of important new concepts to ensure that HMP was logistically feasible and valuable from an organ physiology perspective within the clinical pathways. This review provides details of the current status of HMP across the range of organs transplanted in the clinic, and discusses what new areas might benefit from applying HMP in coming years. In conclusion, HMP is now being used more frequently for clinical organ preservation in a variety of settings. As new therapies such as cell or gene therapy become more common, HMP will continue to play an important facilitator role for optimising organs in the donor pathway

Measuring Consumer Preferences Using Conjoint Poker

We develop and test an incentive-compatible Conjoint Poker (CP) game. The preference data collected in the context of this game are comparable to incentive-compatible choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis data. We develop a statistical efficiency measure and an algorithm to construct efficient CP designs. We compare incentive-compatible CP to incentive-compatible CBC in a series of three experiments (one online study and two eye-tracking studies). Our results suggest that CP induces respondents to consider more of the profile-related information presented to them compared with CBC

Thinkers in Residence: An EBook for Thinking

Thinkers in Residence, a joint project with The Photographers' Gallery and Surviving Work. Actual Thoughts

The Consortium for Advancing Renewable Energy Technology (CARET)

The Consortium for Advancing Renewable Energy (CARET) is a research and education program which uses the theme of renewable energy to build a minority scientist pipeline. CARET is also a consortium of four universities and NASA Lewis Research Center working together to promote science education and research to minority students using the theme of renewable energy. The consortium membership includes the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Fisk, Wilberforce and Central State Universities as well as Kent State University and NASA Lewis Research Center. The various stages of this pipeline provide participating students experiences with a different emphasis. Some emphasize building enthusiasm for the classroom study of science and technology while others emphasize the nature of research in these disciplines. Still others focus on relating a practical application to science and technology. And, of great importance to the success of the program are the interfaces between the various stages. Successfully managing these transitions is a requirement for producing trained scientists, engineers and technologists. Presentations describing the CARET program have been given at this year's HBCU Research Conference at the Ohio Aerospace Institute and as a seminar in the Solar Circle Seminar series of the Photovoltaic and Space Environments Branch at NASA Lewis Research Center. In this report, we will describe the many positive achievements toward the fulfillment of the goals and outcomes of our program. We will begin with a description of the interactions among the consortium members and end with a description of the activities of each of the member institutions

Geographic profiling as a novel spatial tool for targeting infectious disease control

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Geographic profiling is a statistical tool originally developed in criminology to prioritise large lists of suspects in cases of serial crime. Here, we use two data sets - one historical and one modern - to show how it can be used to locate the sources of infectious disease.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>First, we re-analyse data from a classic epidemiological study, the 1854 London cholera outbreak. Using 321 disease sites as input, we evaluate the locations of 13 neighbourhood water pumps. The Broad Street pump - the outbreak's source- ranks first, situated in the top 0.2% of the geoprofile. We extend our study with an analysis of reported malaria cases in Cairo, Egypt, using 139 disease case locations to rank 59 mosquitogenic local water sources, seven of which tested positive for the vector <it>Anopheles sergentii</it>. Geographic profiling ranks six of these seven sites in positions 1-6, all in the top 2% of the geoprofile. In both analyses the method outperformed other measures of spatial central tendency.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We suggest that geographic profiling could form a useful component of integrated control strategies relating to a wide variety of infectious diseases, since evidence-based targeting of interventions is more efficient, environmentally friendly and cost-effective than untargeted intervention.</p

The Increase in the Primordial He-4 Yield in the Two-Doublet Four-Neutrino Mixing Scheme

We assess the effects on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) of lepton number generation in the early universe resulting from the two-doublet four-neutrino mass/mixing scheme. It has been argued that this neutrino mass/mixing arrangement gives the most viable fit to the existing data. We study full 4 x 4 mixing matrices and show how possible symmetries in these can affect the BBN He-4 abundance yields. Though there is as yet no consensus on the reliability of BBN calculations with neutrino flavor mixing, we show that, in the case where the sign of the lepton number asymmetry is unpredictable, BBN considerations may pick out specific relationships between mixing angles. In particular, reconciling the observed light element abundances with a \bar\nu_\mu \bar\nu_e oscillation interpretation of LSND would allow unique new constraints on the neutrino mixing angles in this model.Comment: 12 pages, including 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Sterile neutrinos and supernova nucleosynthesis

A light sterile neutrino species has been introduced to explain simultaneously the solar and atmospheric neutrino puzzles and the results of the LSND experiment, while providing for a hot component of dark matter. Employing this scheme of neutrino masses and mixings, we show how matter-enhanced active-sterile neutrino transformation followed by active-active neutrino transformation can solve robustly the neutron deficit problem encountered by models of r-process nucleosynthesis associated with neutrino-heated supernova ejecta.Comment: 29 pages, 3 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

River & Estuary Observation Network: Refinement of Stage Height Sensor Subsystem for Low Cost and High Reliability

A system comprised of software and on-site measurements is presented for accurately obtaining water stage data from vented or non-vented submersible pressure sensors installed at autonomous stream gauging stations. The system accounts for pressure sensor offset errors, water density, and local gravitational acceleration to produce a stage height reading which is accurate to either ±0.01 ft (±3 mm) or to the accuracy limit of the sensor, whichever is greater. A 2nd order polynomial expression for determination of water density from temperature and salinity is developed and found to be sufficiently accurate for this purpose. Simulated stage measurements performed in the laboratory with a commercially produced sensor showed errors of up to ±0.04 ft in reported stage when the sensor’s default conversion from pressure to depth was used; the maximum error limit was reduced to ±0.02 ft when the sensor output was instead processed using the new system. A custom-designed, low-cost, versatile submersible pressure sensor is introduced and tested under the same conditions and found to exhibit a maximum error of ±0.04 ft without any sensor calibration. These new developments, integrated into previously developed inexpensive base stations, enable accurate monitoring of stage height at remote locations with low installation and operating costs

Rolling friction of a viscous sphere on a hard plane

A first-principle continuum-mechanics expression for the rolling friction coefficient is obtained for the rolling motion of a viscoelastic sphere on a hard plane. It relates the friction coefficient to the viscous and elastic constants of the sphere material. The relation obtained refers to the case when the deformation of the sphere $\xi$ is small, the velocity of the sphere $V$ is much less than the speed of sound in the material and when the characteristic time $\xi/V$ is much larger than the dissipative relaxation times of the viscoelastic material. To our knowledge this is the first ``first-principle'' expression of the rolling friction coefficient which does not contain empirical parameters.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Autoregression as a means of assessing the strength of seasonality in a time series

BACKGROUND: The study of the seasonal variation of disease is receiving increasing attention from health researchers. Available statistical tests for seasonality typically indicate the presence or absence of statistically significant seasonality but do not provide a meaningful measure of its strength. METHODS: We propose the coefficient of determination of the autoregressive regression model fitted to the data ([Image: see text]) as a measure for quantifying the strength of the seasonality. The performance of the proposed statistic is assessed through a simulation study and using two data sets known to demonstrate statistically significant seasonality: atrial fibrillation and asthma hospitalizations in Ontario, Canada. RESULTS: The simulation results showed the power of the [Image: see text] in adequately quantifying the strength of the seasonality of the simulated observations for all models. In the atrial fibrillation and asthma datasets, while the statistical tests such as Bartlett's Kolmogorov-Smirnov (BKS) and Fisher's Kappa support statistical evidence of seasonality for both, the [Image: see text] quantifies the strength of that seasonality. Corroborating the visual evidence that asthma is more conspicuously seasonal than atrial fibrillation, the calculated [Image: see text] for atrial fibrillation indicates a weak to moderate seasonality ([Image: see text] = 0.44, 0.28 and 0.45 for both genders, males and females respectively), whereas for asthma, it indicates a strong seasonality ([Image: see text] = 0.82, 0.78 and 0.82 for both genders, male and female respectively). CONCLUSIONS: For the purposes of health services research, evidence of the statistical presence of seasonality is insufficient to determine the etiologic, clinical and policy relevance of findings. Measurement of the strength of the seasonal effect, as can be determined using the [Image: see text] technique, is also important in order to provide a robust sense of seasonality