Community-based trial of screening for Chlamydia trachomatis to prevent pelvic inflammatory disease: the POPI (prevention of pelvic infection) trial.

BACKGROUND: Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) is common and can lead to tubal factor infertility, ectopic pregnancy or chronic pelvic pain. Despite major UK government investment in the National Chlamydia Screening Programme, evidence of benefit remains controversial. The main aim of this trial was to investigate whether screening and treatment of chlamydial infection reduced the incidence of PID over 12 months. Secondary aims were to conduct exploratory studies of the role of bacterial vaginosis (BV) in the development of PID and of the natural history of chlamydial infection. DESIGN: Randomised controlled trial with follow up after 12 months. SETTING NON-HEALTHCARE: Common rooms and lecture theatres at 20 universities and further education colleges in Greater London. PARTICIPANTS: 2500 sexually active female students were asked to complete a questionnaire on sexual health and provide self-administered vaginal swabs and smears. INTERVENTION: Vaginal swabs from intervention women were tested for chlamydia by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and those infected referred for treatment. Vaginal swabs from control women were stored and analysed after a year. Vaginal smears were Gram stained and analysed for BV. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Incidence of clinical PID over 12 months in intervention and control groups. Possible cases of PID will be identified from questionnaires and record searches. Confirmation of the diagnosis will be done by detailed review of medical records by three independent researchers blind to whether the woman is in intervention or control group. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical Trials NCT 00115388

Gas Detection for Experiments

Flammable gases are often used in detectors for physics experiments. The storage, distribution and manipulation of such flammable gases present several safety hazards. As most flammable gases cannot be detected by human senses, specific well-placed gas detection systems must be installed. Following a request from the user group and in collaboration with CERN safety officers, risk analyses are performed. An external contractor, who needs to receive detailed user requirements from CERN, performs the installations. The contract is passed on a guaranteed results basis. Co-ordination between all the CERN groups and verification of the technical installation is done by ST/AA/AS. This paper describes and focuses on the structured methodology applied to implement such installations based on goal directed project management techniques (GDPM). This useful supervision tool suited to small to medium sized projects facilitates the task of co-ordinating numerous activities to achieve a completely functional system

Batch Nonlinear Continuous-Time Trajectory Estimation as Exactly Sparse Gaussian Process Regression

In this paper, we revisit batch state estimation through the lens of Gaussian process (GP) regression. We consider continuous-discrete estimation problems wherein a trajectory is viewed as a one-dimensional GP, with time as the independent variable. Our continuous-time prior can be defined by any nonlinear, time-varying stochastic differential equation driven by white noise; this allows the possibility of smoothing our trajectory estimates using a variety of vehicle dynamics models (e.g., `constant-velocity'). We show that this class of prior results in an inverse kernel matrix (i.e., covariance matrix between all pairs of measurement times) that is exactly sparse (block-tridiagonal) and that this can be exploited to carry out GP regression (and interpolation) very efficiently. When the prior is based on a linear, time-varying stochastic differential equation and the measurement model is also linear, this GP approach is equivalent to classical, discrete-time smoothing (at the measurement times); when a nonlinearity is present, we iterate over the whole trajectory to maximize accuracy. We test the approach experimentally on a simultaneous trajectory estimation and mapping problem using a mobile robot dataset.Comment: Submitted to Autonomous Robots on 20 November 2014, manuscript # AURO-D-14-00185, 16 pages, 7 figure

Lax forms of the qq-Painlev\'e equations

All $q$-Painlev\'e equations which are obtained from the $q$-analog of the sixth Painlev\'e equation are expressed in a Lax formalism. They are characterized by the data of the associated linear $q$-difference equations. The degeneration pattern from the $q$-Painlev\'e equation of type $A_2$ is also presented.Comment: 24 page

Quantitative evaluation of multiband photographic techniques Final report

Quantitative evaluation of multiband photographic techniques using combination of black and white and color photo

I Wonder Where He Is To Night

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3901/thumbnail.jp