12,849 research outputs found
Age as a determinant of nutritional status: A cross sectional study
Background
Undenutrition is known to be prevalent and largely unrecognised in older patients; however, aberrations in indicators of nutritional status may simply reflect effects of age and/or functional disability.
Objective
The aim of this study was to measure the effect, if any of age on nutritional status in older patients.
Design
445 randomly selected hospitalised patients consented to nutritional status assessment derived from anthropometric, haematological, and biochemical data within 72 hours of admission. Nutritional status was compared between those age < 75 years and those aged 75 years or more. Using multiple regression models, we measured the association between age and nutritional assessment variables after adjusting for disability, chronic illness, medications, smoking and tissue inflammation.
Results
Body weight, body mass index, mid-upper arm circumference, haemoglobin, serum albumin and plasma ascorbic acid were all significantly lower in people aged ≥ 75 years compared with those < 75 years of age. Although riboflavin (vitamin B2), 25OH VitD3, red-cell folate and vitamin B12 concentrations were lower in those aged ≥ 75 years, differences were not statistically significant. After adjusting for disability and co-morbidity in a multivariate analysis, age alone had a significant and independent effect on important anthropometric and biochemical nutritional assessment variables.
Conclusion
Increasing age is independently associated with poor nutritional status. This may partly explain the poor clinical outcome in older patients
Unbounded-error One-way Classical and Quantum Communication Complexity
This paper studies the gap between quantum one-way communication complexity
and its classical counterpart , under the {\em unbounded-error}
setting, i.e., it is enough that the success probability is strictly greater
than 1/2. It is proved that for {\em any} (total or partial) Boolean function
, , i.e., the former is always exactly one half
as large as the latter. The result has an application to obtaining (again an
exact) bound for the existence of -QRAC which is the -qubit random
access coding that can recover any one of original bits with success
probability . We can prove that -QRAC exists if and only if
. Previously, only the construction of QRAC using one qubit,
the existence of -RAC, and the non-existence of
-QRAC were known.Comment: 9 pages. To appear in Proc. ICALP 200
Attentional capture by entirely irrelevant distractors
Studies of attentional capture often question whether an irrelevant distractor will capture attention or be successfully ignored (e.g., Folk & Remington, 1998). Here we establish a new measure of attentional capture by distractors that are entirely irrelevant to the task in terms of visual appearance, meaning, and location (colourful cartoon figures presented in the periphery while subjects perform a central letter-search task). The presence of such a distractor significantly increased search RTs, suggesting it captured attention despite its task-irrelevance. Such attentional capture was found regardless of whether the search target was a singleton or not, and for both frequent and infrequent distractors, as well as for meaningful and meaningless distractor stimuli, although the cost was greater for infrequent and meaningful distractors. These results establish stimulus-driven capture by entirely irrelevant distractors and thus provide a demonstration of attentional capture that is more akin to distraction by irrelevant stimuli in daily life
Structural heterogeneity and permeability in faulted eolian sandstone: Implications for subsurface modeling of faults
We determined the structure and permeability variations of a 4 km-long normal fault by integrating surface mapping with data from five boreholes drilled through the fault (borehole to tens of meters scale). The Big Hole fault outcrops in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, central Utah. A total of 363.2 m of oriented drill core was recovered at two sites where fault displacement is 8 and 3-5 m. The main fault core is a narrow zone of intensely comminuted grains that is a maximum of 30 cm thick and is composed of low-porosity amalgamated deformation bands that have slip surfaces on one or both sides. Probe permeameter measurements showed a permeability decline from greater than 2000 to less than 0.1 md as the fault is approached. Whole-core analyses showed that fault core permeability is less than I md and individual deformation band permeability is about 1 md. Using these data, we calculated the bulk permeability of the fault zone. Calculated transverse permeability over length scales of 5-10 m is 30-40 md, approximately 1-4% the value of the host rock. An inverse power mean calculation (representing a fault array with complex geometry) yielded total fault-zone permeabilities of 7-57 md. The bulk fault-zone permeability is most sensitive to variations in fault core thickness, which exhibits the greatest variability of the fault components
Fractional Operators, Dirichlet Averages, and Splines
Fractional differential and integral operators, Dirichlet averages, and
splines of complex order are three seemingly distinct mathematical subject
areas addressing different questions and employing different methodologies. It
is the purpose of this paper to show that there are deep and interesting
relationships between these three areas. First a brief introduction to
fractional differential and integral operators defined on Lizorkin spaces is
presented and some of their main properties exhibited. This particular approach
has the advantage that several definitions of fractional derivatives and
integrals coincide. We then introduce Dirichlet averages and extend their
definition to an infinite-dimensional setting that is needed to exhibit the
relationships to splines of complex order. Finally, we focus on splines of
complex order and, in particular, on cardinal B-splines of complex order. The
fundamental connections to fractional derivatives and integrals as well as
Dirichlet averages are presented
Origins of Bulk Viscosity at RHIC
A variety of physical phenomena can lead to viscous effects. Several sources
of shear and bulk viscosity are reviewed with an emphasis on the bulk viscosity
associated with chiral restoration and with chemical non-equilibrium. We show
that in a mean-field treatment of the limiting case of a second order phase
transition, the bulk viscosity peaks in a singularity at the critical point.Comment: submitted to PR
Distilling Non-Locality
Two parts of an entangled quantum state can have a correlation in their joint
behavior under measurements that is unexplainable by shared classical
information. Such correlations are called non-local and have proven to be an
interesting resource for information processing. Since non-local correlations
are more useful if they are stronger, it is natural to ask whether weak
non-locality can be amplified. We give an affirmative answer by presenting the
first protocol for distilling non-locality in the framework of generalized
non-signaling theories. Our protocol works for both quantum and non-quantum
correlations. This shows that in many contexts, the extent to which a single
instance of a correlation can violate a CHSH inequality is not a good measure
for the usefulness of non-locality. A more meaningful measure follows from our
results.Comment: Revised abstract, introduction and conclusion. Accepted by PR
Evaluation of ERTS imagery for spectral geological mapping in diverse terranes of New York State
Linear anomalies dominate the new geological information derived from ERTS-1 imagery, total lengths now exceeding 6000 km. Experimentation with a variety of viewing techniques suggests that conventional photogeologic analyses of band 7 results in the location of more than 97 percent of all linears found. The maxima on rose diagrams for ERTS-1 anomalies correspond well with those for mapped faults and topographic lineaments, despite a difference in relative magnitudes of maxima thought due to solar illumination direction. A multiscale analysis of linears showed that single topographic linears at 1:2,500,000 became segmented at 1:1,000,000, aligned zones of shorter parallel, en echelon, or conjugate linears at 1:500,000, and still shorter linears lacking obvious alignment at 1:250,000. Visible glacial features include individual drumlins, best seen in winter imagery, drumlinoids, eskers, ice-marginal drainage channels, glacial lake shorelines and sand plains, and end moraines
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