Oral malodor in Special Care Patients: current knowledge

Epidemiological studies report that about 50% of the population may have oral malodor with a strong social and psychological impact in their daily life. When intra-oral causes are excluded, referral to an appropriate medical specialist is paramount for management and treatment of extra-oral causes. The intra-oral causes of halitosis are highly common, and the dentist is the central clinician to diagnose and treat them. Pseudohalitosis or halitophobia may occur and an early identification of these conditions by the dentist is important in order to avoid unnecessary dental treatments for patients who need psychological or psychiatric therapy. The organoleptic technique is still considered the most reliable examination method to diagnose genuine halitosis. Special needs patients are more prone than others to have oral malodor because of concurrent systemic or metabolic diseases, and medications. The present report reviews halitosis, its implications, and the management in special care dentistry

Training-induced inversion of spontaneous exchange bias field on La1.5Ca0.5CoMnO6

In this work we report the synthesis and structural, electronic and magnetic properties of La1.5Ca0.5CoMnO6 double-perovskite. This is a re-entrant spin cluster material which exhibits a non-negligible negative exchange bias effect when it is cooled in zero magnetic field from an unmagnetized state down to low temperature. X-ray powder diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and magnetometry results indicate mixed valence state at Co site, leading to competing magnetic phases and uncompensated spins at the magnetic interfaces. We compare the results for this Ca-doped material with those reported for the resemblant compound La1.5Sr0.5CoMnO6, and discuss the much smaller spontaneous exchange bias effect observed for the former in terms of its structural and magnetic particularities. For La1.5Ca0.5CoMnO6, when successive magnetization loops are carried, the spontaneous exchange bias field inverts its sign from negative to positive from the first to the second measurement. We discuss this behavior based on the disorder at the magnetic interfaces, related to the presence of a glassy phase. This compound also exhibits a large conventional exchange bias, for which there is no sign inversion of the exchange bias field for consecutive cycles

From Theory to Practice: Plug and Play with Succinct Data Structures

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

One Hundred Years Later: Stern-Gerlach Experiment and Dimension Witnesses

Inspired by the one-hundredth anniversary of the seminal works of Stern and Gerlach, our contribution is a proposal of how to use their famous experiment in a more contemporary perspective. Our main idea is to re-cast the experiment in the modern language of prepare-and-measure scenarios. By doing so, it is possible to connect geometric and algebraic aspects of the space of states with the physical space. We also discuss possible simulations of the SG experiment as well as some experimental properties of the experiment revealed at the statistical level. Merging a more modern perspective with a paradigmatic experiment, we hope this paper can serve as an entry door for quantum information theory and the foundations of quantum mechanics.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures. Minor adjustments, according to referee suggestion

Succinct Indexable Dictionaries with Applications to Encoding kk-ary Trees, Prefix Sums and Multisets

We consider the {\it indexable dictionary} problem, which consists of storing a set $S \subseteq \{0,...,m-1\}$ for some integer $m$, while supporting the operations of \Rank(x), which returns the number of elements in $S$ that are less than $x$ if $x \in S$, and -1 otherwise; and \Select(i) which returns the $i$-th smallest element in $S$. We give a data structure that supports both operations in O(1) time on the RAM model and requires ${\cal B}(n,m) + o(n) + O(\lg \lg m)$ bits to store a set of size $n$, where {\cal B}(n,m) = \ceil{\lg {m \choose n}} is the minimum number of bits required to store any $n$-element subset from a universe of size $m$. Previous dictionaries taking this space only supported (yes/no) membership queries in O(1) time. In the cell probe model we can remove the $O(\lg \lg m)$ additive term in the space bound, answering a question raised by Fich and Miltersen, and Pagh. We present extensions and applications of our indexable dictionary data structure, including: An information-theoretically optimal representation of a $k$-ary cardinal tree that supports standard operations in constant time, A representation of a multiset of size $n$ from $\{0,...,m-1\}$ in ${\cal B}(n,m+n) + o(n)$ bits that supports (appropriate generalizations of) \Rank and \Select operations in constant time, and A representation of a sequence of $n$ non-negative integers summing up to $m$ in ${\cal B}(n,m+n) + o(n)$ bits that supports prefix sum queries in constant time.Comment: Final version of SODA 2002 paper; supersedes Leicester Tech report 2002/1

Sensitivity of the sorghum yield to individual changes in climate parameters: modelling based approach.

Based on sensitivity analyses the effect of changing in climate on sorghum has been investigated. This has been achieved by conducting crop modeling experiments carried out with weather observations and output of global climate models. As can be anticipated results demonstrated that the sorghum yield is more sensitive to rainfall, solar radiation and CO2 concentration. However, the increase in CO2 concentration has a positive effect on yield in years that the crop is submitted to water stress. This effect is extremely reduced under well watered conditions and therefore is subject to the climate inter-annual variability. Accumulated solar radiation along the sorghum cycle below 1900 MJ m?2 has also been shown to reduce the yield. Compared to other weather variables the sorghum yield is less sensitive to changes in relative humidity. In this sense, changes in stomatal closure and therefore photosyntesis is not highly dependent on water vapor pressure. These finds can be applied for both climate observations and global models output

Effect of Cereals and Legumes Processing on In Situ Rumen Protein Degradability: A Review

The determination of the ruminal degradability rate of feeds, mainly starch and crude protein, is one of the most common methods to evaluate the nutritional value of ruminant feed. The protein requirements for ruminants are met from microbial protein and undegraded dietary protein digested in the small intestine. In order to reach maximum productivity, high-quality proteins are needed, and the requirement for undegraded dietary protein increases with the performance of the animal. This protein can be supplied by reducing the ruminal degradation to increase the amount of protein digested post-rumen, but the form in which a feed is administered influences degradability, and grain processing, especially, is a common practice to improve feed efficiency. Despite these aspects, studies on the effects of feed processing methods on protein degradability are limited, even though more and more ruminants are fed with processed feeds. For these reasons, this review investigated the protein degradability of different processed cereals and legumes in ruminants based on the analysis of available literature in order to take stock of the state of the art on this topic. Results showed that: First, the majority of the papers are focused on the energy aspects mainly due to carbohydrate-rich feeds; second, the majority of the studies in the literature are quite old, probably because the changes occurred in the animal testing legislation that made in vivo studies more and more difficult in the last 20 years; third, as a consequence, the few data available in recent years concern in vitro experiments; fourth, we found a high variability of the experimental conditions thus affecting protein degradability and making it quite difficult to compare the different results