The Altman corporation failure prediction model : applied among South African medical schemes

Includes bibliographical references.This study has a number of interrelated objectives that seek to understand and contextualize the Altman bankruptcy prediction model in the setting of the South African medical schemes over a ten year period (2002 to 2011). The main objective of this study is to validate the Altman Z₂ model amongst the medical schemes in South Africa; in terms of accurately classifying Z₂-scores of ≤ 1.23 and ≥ 2.9 into the a priori groups of failed and non-failed schemes. The average classification rates in the period 2002 to 2011 are as follows: 82% accuracy rate and 17.9% error rate. A linear trend line inserted in the graph shows the accuracy improving from 72% to 91% between the period 2003/2004 to 2011/2012. This outcome is consistent with the conclusion in previous studies (Aziz and Humayon, 2006: 27) that showed the accuracy rates in most failure prediction studies to be as follows: 84%, 88%, and 85% for statistical models, AEIS models and theoretical models respectively. Although this study validated the Altman model, further studies are required to test the rest of the study objectives under conditions where some of the assumptions are revised

Treating AIDS-associated cerebral toxoplasmosis - pyrimethamine plus sulfadiazine compared with cotrimoxazole, and outcome with adjunctive glucocorticoids

We conducted a retrospective study of AIDS-associated cerebral toxoplasmosis. Eighteen patients received pyrimethamine plus sulfadiazine and 25 co-trimoxazole, with comparable baseline characteristics. There were no differences in clinical outcomes, but co-trimoxazole was better tolerated (p = 0.066). There was also a trend towards more deaths among patients who received glucocorticoids

Electrostatic Separator for Beneficiation of Lunar Soil

A charge separator has been constructed for use in a lunar environment that will allow for separation of minerals from lunar soil. In the present experiments, whole lunar dust as received was used. The approach taken here was that beneficiation of ores into an industrial feedstock grade may be more efficient. Refinement or enrichment of specific minerals in the soil before it is chemically processed may be more desirable as it would reduce the size and energy requirements necessary to produce the virgin material, and it may significantly reduce the process complexity. The principle is that minerals of different composition and work function will charge differently when tribocharged against different materials, and hence be separated in an electric field

Electrostatic Beneficiation of Lunar Simulant

Electrostatic beneficiation of lunar regolith is a method allowing refinement of specific minerals in the material for processing on the moon. The use of tribocharging the regolith prior to separation was investigated on the lunar simulant MLS-I by passing the dust through static mixers constructed from different materials; aluminum, copper, stainless steel, and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). The amount of charge acquired by the simulant was dependent upon the difference in the work function of the dust and the charging material. XPS and SEM were used to characterize the simulant after it was sieved into five size fractions (> 100 pm, 75-100 pm, 50- 75 pm, 50-25 pm, and 100 pm) size fractions were beneficiated through a charge separator using the aluminum (charged the simulant negatively) and PTFE (charged positively) mixers. The mass fractions of the separated simulant revealed that for the larger particle size, significant unipolar charging was observed for both mixers, whereas for the smaller particle sizes, more bipolar charging was observed, probably due to the finer simulant adhering to the inside of the mixers shielding the dust from the charging material. Subsequent XPS analysis of the beneficiated fractions showed the larger particle size fraction having some species differentiation, but very little difference for the smaller.size. Although MLS-1 was made to have similar chemistry to actual lunar dust, its mineralogy is quite different. On-going experiments are using NASA JSC-1 lunar simulant. A vacuum chamber has been constructed, and future experiments are planned in a simulated lunar environment

Synergistic epistasis enhances cooperativity of mutualistic interspecies interactions

Frequent fluctuations in sulfate availability rendered syntrophic interactions between the sulfate reducing bacterium Desulfovibrio vulgaris (Dv) and the methanogenic archaeon Methanococcus maripaludis (Mm) unsustainable. By contrast, prolonged laboratory evolution in obligate syntrophy conditions improved the productivity of this community but at the expense of erosion of sulfate respiration (SR). Hence, we sought to understand the evolutionary trajectories that could both increase the productivity of syntrophic interactions and sustain SR. We combined a temporal and combinatorial survey of mutations accumulated over 1000 generations of 9 independently-evolved communities with analysis of the genotypic structure for one community down to the single-cell level. We discovered a high level of parallelism across communities despite considerable variance in their evolutionary trajectories and the perseverance of a rare SR+ Dv lineage within many evolution lines. An in-depth investigation revealed that synergistic epistasis across Dv and Mm genotypes had enhanced cooperativity within SR- and SR+ assemblages, allowing their co-existence as r- and K-strategists, respectively

Extendibility of bilinear forms on banach sequence spaces

[EN] We study Hahn-Banach extensions of multilinear forms defined on Banach sequence spaces. We characterize c(0) in terms of extension of bilinear forms, and describe the Banach sequence spaces in which every bilinear form admits extensions to any superspace.The second author was supported by MICINN Project MTM2011-22417.DANIEL CARANDO; Sevilla Peris, P. (2014). Extendibility of bilinear forms on banach sequence spaces. Israel Journal of Mathematics. 199(2):941-954. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11856-014-0003-9S9419541992F. Albiac and N. J. Kalton, Topics in Banach Space Theory, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, Vol. 233, Springer, New York, 2006.R. Arens, The adjoint of a bilinear operation, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 2 (1951), 839–848.R. Arens, Operations induced in function classes, Monatshefte für Mathematik 55 (1951), 1–19.R. M. Aron and P. D. Berner, A Hahn-Banach extension theorem for analytic mappings, Bulletin de la Société Mathématique de France 106 (1978), 3–24.S. Banach, Sur les fonctionelles linéaires, Studia Mathematica 1 (1929), 211–216.S. Banach, Théorie des opérations linéaires, (Monogr. Mat. 1) Warszawa: Subwncji Funduszu Narodowej. VII, 254 S., Warsaw, 1932.D. Carando, Extendible polynomials on Banach spaces, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 233 (1999), 359–372.D. Carando, Extendibility of polynomials and analytic functions on l p, Studia Mathematica 145 (2001), 63–73.D. Carando, V. Dimant and P. Sevilla-Peris, Limit orders and multilinear forms on lp spaces, Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences 42 (2006), 507–522.J. M. F. Castillo, R. García, A. Defant, D. Pérez-García and J. Suárez, Local complementation and the extension of bilinear mappings, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 152 (2012), 153–166.J. M. F. Castillo, R. García and J. A. Jaramillo, Extension of bilinear forms on Banach spaces, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 129 (2001), 3647–3656.P. Cembranos and J. Mendoza, The Banach spaces ℓ ∞(c 0) and c 0(ℓ ∞) are not isomorphic, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 367 (2010), 461–463.A. Defant and K. Floret, Tensor Norms and Operator Ideals, North-Holland Mathematics Studies, Vol. 176, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1993.A. Defant and C. Michels, Norms of tensor product identities, Note di Matematica 25 (2005/06), 129–166.J. Diestel, H. Jarchow and A. Tonge, Absolutely Summing Operators, Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics, Vol. 43, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.D. J. H. Garling, On symmetric sequence spaces, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (3) 16 (1966), 85–106.A. Grothendieck, Résumé de la théorie métrique des produits tensoriels topologiques, Bol. Soc. Mat. São Paulo 8 (1953), 1–79.H. Hahn, Über lineare Gleichungssysteme in linearen Räumen, Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik 157 (1927), 214–229.R. C. James, Bases and reflexivity of Banach spaces, Annals of Mathematics (2) 52 (1950), 518–527.H. Jarchow, C. Palazuelos, D. Pérez-García and I. Villanueva, Hahn-Banach extension of multilinear forms and summability, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 336 (2007), 1161–1177.W. B. Johnson and L. Tzafriri, On the local structure of subspaces of Banach lattices, Israel Journal of Mathematics 20 (1975), 292–299.P. Kirwan and R. A. Ryan, Extendibility of homogeneous polynomials on Banach spaces, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 126 (1998), 1023–1029.J. Lindenstrauss and A. Pełczyński, Absolutely summing operators in Lp-spaces and their applications, Studia Mathematica 29 (1968), 275–326.J. Lindenstrauss and L. Tzafriri, Classical Banach Spaces. II, Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete [Results in Mathematics and Related Areas], Vol. 97, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1979. Function spaces.G. Pisier, Factorization of Linear Operators and Geometry of Banach Spaces, CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, Vol. 60, Published for the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, Washington, DC, 1986.M. Fernndez-Unzueta and A. Prieto, Extension of polynomials defined on subspaces, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 148 (2010), 505–518.W. L. C. Sargent, Some sequence spaces related to the lp spaces, Journal of the London Mathematical Society 35 (1960), 161–171.N. Tomczak-Jaegermann, Banach-Mazur Distances and Finite-Dimensional Operator Ideals, Pitman Monographs and Surveys in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 38, Longman Scientific & Technical, Harlow, 1989

Synergistic epistasis enhances the co-operativity of mutualistic interspecies interactions

Early evolution of mutualism is characterized by big and predictable adaptive changes, including the specialization of interacting partners, such as through deleterious mutations in genes not required for metabolic cross-feeding. We sought to investigate whether these early mutations improve cooperativity by manifesting in synergistic epistasis between genomes of the mutually interacting species. Specifically, we have characterized evolutionary trajectories of syntrophic interactions of Desulfovibrio vulgaris (Dv) with Methanococcus maripaludis (Mm) by longitudinally monitoring mutations accumulated over 1000 generations of nine independently evolved communities with analysis of the genotypic structure of one community down to the single-cell level. We discovered extensive parallelism across communities despite considerable variance in their evolutionary trajectories and the perseverance within many evolution lines of a rare lineage of Dv that retained sulfate-respiration (SR+) capability, which is not required for metabolic cross-feeding. An in-depth investigation revealed that synergistic epistasis across pairings of Dv and Mm genotypes had enhanced cooperativity within SR− and SR+ assemblages, enabling their coexistence within the same community. Thus, our findings demonstrate that cooperativity of a mutualism can improve through synergistic epistasis between genomes of the interacting species, enabling the coexistence of mutualistic assemblages of generalists and their specialized variants

Head-To-Head Comparison of PET and Perfusion Weighted MRI Techniques to Distinguish Treatment Related Abnormalities from Tumor Progression in Glioma

The post-treatment imaging surveillance of gliomas is challenged by distinguishing tumor progression (TP) from treatment-related abnormalities (TRA). Sophisticated imaging techniques, such as perfusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI PWI) and positron-emission tomography (PET) with a variety of radiotracers, have been suggested as being more reliable than standard imaging for distinguishing TP from TRA. However, it remains unclear if any technique holds diagnostic superiority. This meta-analysis provides a head-to-head comparison of the diagnostic accuracy of the aforementioned imaging techniques. Systematic literature searches on the use of PWI and PET imaging techniques were carried out in PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, ClinicalTrials.gov and the reference lists of relevant papers. After the extraction of data on imaging technique specifications and diagnostic accuracy, a meta-analysis was carried out. The quality of the included papers was assessed using the QUADAS-2 checklist. Nineteen articles, totaling 697 treated patients with glioma (431 males; mean age ± standard deviation 50.5 ± 5.1 years) were included. The investigated PWI techniques included dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC), dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE) and arterial spin labeling (ASL). The PET-tracers studied concerned [S-methyl- 11C]methionine, 2-deoxy-2-[ 18F]fluoro-D-glucose ([ 18F]FDG), O-(2-[ 18F]fluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine ([ 18F]FET) and 6-[ 18F]-fluoro-3,4-dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine ([ 18F]FDOPA). The meta-analysis of all data showed no diagnostic superior imaging technique. The included literature showed a low risk of bias. As no technique was found to be diagnostically superior, the local level of expertise is hypothesized to be the most important factor for diagnostically accurate results in post-treatment glioma patients regarding the distinction of TRA from TP