A randomised controlled trial of caseload midwifery care: M@NGO (Midwives @ New Group practice Options)

Background: Australia has an enviable record of safety for women in childbirth. There is nevertheless growing concern at the increasing level of intervention and consequent morbidity amongst childbearing women. Not only do interventions impact on the cost of services, they carry with them the potential for serious morbidities for mother and infant.Models of midwifery have proliferated in an attempt to offer women less fragmented hospital care. One of these models that is gaining widespread consumer, disciplinary and political support is caseload midwifery care. Caseload midwives manage the care of approximately 35-40 a year within a small Midwifery Group Practice (usually 4-6 midwives who plan their on call and leave within the Group Practice.) We propose to compare the outcomes and costs of caseload midwifery care compared to standard or routine hospital care through a randomised controlled trial.Methods/design: A two-arm RCT design will be used. Women will be recruited from tertiary women's hospitals in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia. Women allocated to the caseload intervention will receive care from a named caseload midwife within a Midwifery Group Practice. Control women will be allocated to standard or routine hospital care. Women allocated to standard care will receive their care from hospital rostered midwives, public hospital obstetric care and community based general medical practitioner care. All midwives will collaborate with obstetricians and other health professionals as necessary according to the woman's needs.Discussion: Data will be collected at recruitment, 36 weeks antenatally, six weeks and six months postpartum by web based or postal survey. With 750 women or more in each of the intervention and control arms the study is powered (based on 80% power; alpha 0.05) to detect a difference in caesarean section rates of 29.4 to 22.9%; instrumental birth rates from 11.0% to 6.8%; and rates of admission to neonatal intensive care of all neonates from 9.9% to 5.8% (requires 721 in each arm). The study is not powered to detect infant or maternal mortality, however all deaths will be reported. Other significant findings will be reported, including a comprehensive process and economic evaluation.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12609000349246. © 2011 Tracy et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Sea anemones may thrive in a high CO2 world

Increased seawater pCO 2, and in turn 'ocean acidification' (OA), is predicted to profoundly impact marine ecosystem diversity and function this century. Much research has already focussed on calcifying reef-forming corals (Class: Anthozoa) that appear particularly susceptible to OA via reduced net calcification. However, here we show that OA-like conditions can simultaneously enhance the ecological success of non-calcifying anthozoans, which not only play key ecological and biogeochemical roles in present day benthic ecosystems but also represent a model organism should calcifying anthozoans exist as less calcified (soft-bodied) forms in future oceans. Increased growth (abundance and size) of the sea anemone (Anemonia viridis) population was observed along a natural CO 2 gradient at Vulcano, Italy. Both gross photosynthesis (P G) and respiration (R) increased with pCO 2 indicating that the increased growth was, at least in part, fuelled by bottom up (CO 2 stimulation) of metabolism. The increase of P G outweighed that of R and the genetic identity of the symbiotic microalgae (Symbiodinium spp.) remained unchanged (type A19) suggesting proximity to the vent site relieved CO 2 limitation of the anemones' symbiotic microalgal population. Our observations of enhanced productivity with pCO 2, which are consistent with previous reports for some calcifying corals, convey an increase in fitness that may enable non-calcifying anthozoans to thrive in future environments, i.e. higher seawater pCO 2. Understanding how CO 2-enhanced productivity of non- (and less-) calcifying anthozoans applies more widely to tropical ecosystems is a priority where such organisms can dominate benthic ecosystems, in particular following localized anthropogenic stress. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Software defect prediction: do different classifiers find the same defects?

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.During the last 10 years, hundreds of different defect prediction models have been published. The performance of the classifiers used in these models is reported to be similar with models rarely performing above the predictive performance ceiling of about 80% recall. We investigate the individual defects that four classifiers predict and analyse the level of prediction uncertainty produced by these classifiers. We perform a sensitivity analysis to compare the performance of Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, RPart and SVM classifiers when predicting defects in NASA, open source and commercial datasets. The defect predictions that each classifier makes is captured in a confusion matrix and the prediction uncertainty of each classifier is compared. Despite similar predictive performance values for these four classifiers, each detects different sets of defects. Some classifiers are more consistent in predicting defects than others. Our results confirm that a unique subset of defects can be detected by specific classifiers. However, while some classifiers are consistent in the predictions they make, other classifiers vary in their predictions. Given our results, we conclude that classifier ensembles with decision-making strategies not based on majority voting are likely to perform best in defect prediction.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Is Emotion Recognition Impaired in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders?

Researchers have argued that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) use an effortful “systematizing” process to recognize emotion expressions, whereas typically developing (TD) individuals use a more holistic process. If this is the case, individuals with ASDs should show slower and less efficient emotion recognition, particularly for socially complex emotions. We tested this account by assessing the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition while limiting exposure time and response window. Children and adolescents with ASDs showed quick and accurate recognition for most emotions, including pride, a socially complex emotion, and no differences emerged between ASD and TD groups. Furthermore, both groups trended toward higher accuracy when responding quickly, even though systematizing should promote a speed-accuracy trade-off for individuals with ASDs

Statistical distribution of quantum entanglement for a random bipartite state

We compute analytically the statistics of the Renyi and von Neumann entropies (standard measures of entanglement), for a random pure state in a large bipartite quantum system. The full probability distribution is computed by first mapping the problem to a random matrix model and then using a Coulomb gas method. We identify three different regimes in the entropy distribution, which correspond to two phase transitions in the associated Coulomb gas. The two critical points correspond to sudden changes in the shape of the Coulomb charge density: the appearance of an integrable singularity at the origin for the first critical point, and the detachement of the rightmost charge (largest eigenvalue) from the sea of the other charges at the second critical point. Analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo numerical simulations. A short account of some of these results appeared recently in Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 104}, 110501 (2010).Comment: 7 figure

Locality for quantum systems on graphs depends on the number field

Adapting a definition of Aaronson and Ambainis [Theory Comput. 1 (2005), 47--79], we call a quantum dynamics on a digraph "saturated Z-local" if the nonzero transition amplitudes specifying the unitary evolution are in exact correspondence with the directed edges (including loops) of the digraph. This idea appears recurrently in a variety of contexts including angular momentum, quantum chaos, and combinatorial matrix theory. Complete characterization of the digraph properties that allow such a process to exist is a long-standing open question that can also be formulated in terms of minimum rank problems. We prove that saturated Z-local dynamics involving complex amplitudes occur on a proper superset of the digraphs that allow restriction to the real numbers or, even further, the rationals. Consequently, among these fields, complex numbers guarantee the largest possible choice of topologies supporting a discrete quantum evolution. A similar construction separates complex numbers from the skew field of quaternions. The result proposes a concrete ground for distinguishing between complex and quaternionic quantum mechanics.Comment: 9 page