3,917 research outputs found
The Wreck of the Hesperus : A Cantata
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-me/1744/thumbnail.jp
Penicillin Use in Meningococcal Disease Management: Active Bacterial Core Surveillance Sites, 2009.
In 2009, in the Active Bacterial Core surveillance sites, penicillin was not commonly used to treat meningococcal disease. This is likely because of inconsistent availability of antimicrobial susceptibility testing and ease of use of third-generation cephalosporins. Consideration of current practices may inform future meningococcal disease management guidelines
The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury Program: Metallicity Estimates for the Stellar Population and Exoplanet Hosts
We present new UV-to-IR stellar photometry of four low-extinction windows in
the Galactic bulge, obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space
Telescope (HST). Using our five bandpasses, we have defined reddening-free
photometric indices sensitive to stellar effective temperature and metallicity.
We find that the bulge populations resemble those formed via classical
dissipative collapse: each field is dominated by an old (~10 Gyr) population
exhibiting a wide metallicity range (-1.5 < [Fe/H] < 0.5). We detect a
metallicity gradient in the bulge population, with the fraction of stars at
super-solar metallicities dropping from 41% to 35% over distances from the
Galactic center ranging from 0.3 to 1.2 kpc. One field includes candidate
exoplanet hosts discovered in the SWEEPS HST transit survey. Our measurements
for 11 of these hosts demonstrate that exoplanets in the distinct bulge
environment are preferentially found around high-metallicity stars, as in the
solar neighborhood, supporting the view that planets form more readily in
metal-rich environments.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Latex,
5 pages, ApJ forma
Assise: Performance and Availability via NVM Colocation in a Distributed File System
The adoption of very low latency persistent memory modules (PMMs) upends the
long-established model of disaggregated file system access. Instead, by
colocating computation and PMM storage, we can provide applications much higher
I/O performance, sub-second application failover, and strong consistency. To
demonstrate this, we built the Assise distributed file system, based on a
persistent, replicated coherence protocol for managing a set of
server-colocated PMMs as a fast, crash-recoverable cache between applications
and slower disaggregated storage, such as SSDs. Unlike disaggregated file
systems, Assise maximizes locality for all file IO by carrying out IO on
colocated PMM whenever possible and minimizes coherence overhead by maintaining
consistency at IO operation granularity, rather than at fixed block sizes.
We compare Assise to Ceph/Bluestore, NFS, and Octopus on a cluster with Intel
Optane DC PMMs and SSDs for common cloud applications and benchmarks, such as
LevelDB, Postfix, and FileBench. We find that Assise improves write latency up
to 22x, throughput up to 56x, fail-over time up to 103x, and scales up to 6x
better than its counterparts, while providing stronger consistency semantics.
Assise promises to beat the MinuteSort world record by 1.5x
Burden of treatment for chronic illness: a concept analysis and review of the literature
Context Treatment burden, the burden associated with the treatment and management of chronic illness, has not yet been well articulated. Objective Using Rodgers' (1989, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 14, 330–335) method of concept analysis, this review describes the ways in which treatment burden has been conceptualized to define the concept and to develop a framework for understanding its attributes, antecedents and consequences. Methods Leading databases were searched electronically between the years 2002 and 2011. To ensure the review focused on actual observations of the concept of interest, articles that did not measure treatment burden (either qualitatively or quantitatively) were excluded. An inductive approach was used to identify themes related to the concept of treatment burden. Main results Thirty articles, identified from 1557 abstracts, were included in the review. The attributes of treatment burden include burden as a dynamic process, as a multidimensional concept, and comprising of both subjective and objective elements. Prominent predisposing factors (antecedents) include the person's age and gender, their family circumstances, possible comorbidity, high use of medications, characteristics of treatment and their relationship with their health-care provider. The most dominant consequences are poor health and well-being, non-adherence to treatment, ineffective resource use and burden on significant others. Furthermore, many of these consequences can also become antecedents, reflecting the cyclic and dynamic nature of treatment burden. Conclusion The findings underscore the need for researchers and health-care professionals to engage in collaborative discussions and make cooperative efforts to help alleviate treatment burden and tailor treatment regimens to the realities of people's daily lives
The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury Program: A First Look at Resolved Stellar Population Tools
[Abridged] When WFC3 is installed on HST, the community will have powerful
new tools for investigating resolved stellar populations. The WFC3 Galactic
Bulge Treasury program will obtain deep imaging on 4 low-extinction fields.
These non-proprietary data will enable a variety of science investigations not
possible with previous data sets. To aid in planning for the use of these data
and for future proposals, we provide an introduction to the program, its
photometric system, and the associated calibration effort.
The observing strategy is based upon a new 5-band photometric system spanning
the UV, optical, and near-infrared. With these broad bands, one can construct
reddening-free indices of Teff and [Fe/H]. Besides the 4 bulge fields, the
program will target 6 fields in well-studied star clusters, spanning a wide
range of [Fe/H]. The cluster data serve to calibrate the indices, provide
population templates, and correct the transformation of isochrones into the
WFC3 photometric system. The bulge data will shed light on the bulge formation
history, and will also serve as population templates for other studies. One of
the fields includes 12 candidate hosts of extrasolar planets.
CMDs are the most popular tool for analyzing resolved stellar populations.
However, due to degeneracies among Teff, [Fe/H], and reddening in traditional
CMDs, it can be difficult to draw robust conclusions from the data. The 5-band
system used for the bulge Treasury observations will provide indices that are
roughly orthogonal in Teff and [Fe/H], and we argue that model fitting in an
index-index diagram will make better use of the information than fitting
separate CMDs. We provide simulations to show the expected data quality and the
potential for differentiating between different star-formation histories.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. 9 pages, 8
figures, latex, AJ forma
Wisconsin’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network: Information Systems Design for Childhood Cancer Surveillance
In this article we describe the development of an information system for environmental childhood cancer surveillance. The Wisconsin Cancer Registry annually receives more than 25,000 incident case reports. Approximately 269 cases per year involve children. Over time, there has been considerable community interest in understanding the role the environment plays as a cause of these cancer cases. Wisconsin’s Public Health Information Network (WI-PHIN) is a robust web portal integrating both Health Alert Network and National Electronic Disease Surveillance System components. WI-PHIN is the information technology platform for all public health surveillance programs. Functions include the secure, automated exchange of cancer case data between public health–based and hospital-based cancer registrars; web-based supplemental data entry for environmental exposure confirmation and hypothesis testing; automated data analysis, visualization, and exposure–outcome record linkage; directories of public health and clinical personnel for role-based access control of sensitive surveillance information; public health information dissemination and alerting; and information technology security and critical infrastructure protection. For hypothesis generation, cancer case data are sent electronically to WI-PHIN and populate the integrated data repository. Environmental data are linked and the exposure–disease relationships are explored using statistical tools for ecologic exposure risk assessment. For hypothesis testing, case–control interviews collect exposure histories, including parental employment and residential histories. This information technology approach can thus serve as the basis for building a comprehensive system to assess environmental cancer etiology
Big in the benthos: future change of seafloor community biomass in a global, body size-resolved model
Deep-water benthic communities in the ocean are almost wholly dependent on near-surface pelagic ecosystems for their supply of energy and material resources. Primary production in sunlit surface waters is channelled through complex food webs that extensively recycle organic material, but lose a fraction as particulate organic carbon (POC) that sinks into the ocean interior. This exported production is further rarefied by microbial breakdown in the abyssal ocean, but a residual ultimately drives diverse assemblages of seafloor heterotrophs. Advances have led to an understanding of the importance of size (body mass) in structuring these communities. Here we force a size-resolved benthic biomass model, BORIS, using seafloor POC flux from a coupled ocean-biogeochemistry model, NEMO-MEDUSA, to investigate global patterns in benthic biomass. BORIS resolves 16 size-classes of metazoans, successively doubling in mass from approximately 1ÎĽg to 28mg. Simulations find a wide range of seasonal responses to differing patterns of POC forcing, with both a decline in seasonal variability, and an increase in peak lag times with increasing body size. However, the dominant factor for modelled benthic communities is the integrated magnitude of POC reaching the seafloor rather than its seasonal pattern. Scenarios of POC forcing under climate change and ocean acidification are then applied to investigate how benthic communities may change under different future conditions. Against a backdrop of falling surface primary production (-6.1%), and driven by changes in pelagic remineralisation with depth, results show that while benthic communities in shallow seas generally show higher biomass in a warmed world (+3.2%), deep-sea communities experience a substantial decline (-32%) under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Our results underscore the importance for benthic ecology of reducing uncertainty in the magnitude and seasonality of seafloor POC fluxes, as well as the importance of studying a broader range of seafloor environments for future model development
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