Towards an Urban Ecological Consciousness: Experiencing Wild Places in the City

The "Green City"2 has in recent years emerged as an integrated conceptual framework with which to respond locally to the global environmental crisis. In theory, a Green City is "in harmony with ecosystems that support it, and ... contains a populace that considers itself a part of the biosphere and acts accordingly."3 The concept, in short, addresses the need for our society to respectfully build with, rather than impose upon, the land and the natural world

Synthesis of carboxylate Cp*Zr(IV) species : towards the formation of novel metallocavitands

With the intent of generating metallocavitands isostructural to species [(CpZr)3(μ(3)-O)(μ(2)-OH)3(κO,O,μ(2)-O2C(R))3](+), the reaction of Cp*2ZrCl2 and Cp*ZrCl3 with phenylcarboxylic acids was carried out. Depending on the reaction conditions, five new complexes were obtained, which consisted of Cp*2ZrCl(κ(2)-OOCPh) (1), (Cp*ZrCl(κ(2)-OOCPh))2(μ-κ(2)-OOCPh)2 (2), [(Cp*Zr(κ(2)-OOCPh))2(μ-κ(2)-OOCPh)2(μ(2)-OH)2]·Et2O (3·Et2O), [[Cp*ZrCl2](μ-Cl)(μ-OH)(μ-O2CC6H5)[Cp*Zr]]2(μ-O2CC6H5)2 (4), and [Cp*ZrCl4][(Cp*Zr)3(κ2-OOC(C6H4Br)3(μ3-O)(μ2-Cl)2(μ2-OH)] [5](+)[Cp*ZrCl4](-). The structural characterization of the five complexes was carried out. Species 3·Et2O exhibits host-guest properties where the diethyl ether molecule is included in a cavity formed by two carboxylate moieties. The secondary interactions between the cavity and the diethyl ether molecule affect the structural parameters of the complex, as demonstrated be the comparison of the density functional theory models for 3 and 3·Et2O. Species 5 was shown to be isostructural to the [(CpZr)3(μ(3)-O)(μ(2)-OH)3(κO,O,μ(2)-O2C(R))3](+) metallocavitands

Metabolic syndrome increases operative mortality in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting surgery

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine the impact of the metabolic syndrome (MS) on operative mortality after a coronary artery bypass grafting surgery (CABG). BACKGROUND: Diabetes and obesity are highly prevalent among patients undergoing CABG. However, it remains unclear whether these factors have a significant impact on operative mortality after this procedure. We hypothesized that the metabolic abnormalities associated with MS could negatively influence the operative outcome of CABG surgery. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed the data of 5,304 consecutive patients who underwent an isolated CABG procedure between 2000 and 2004. Of these 5,304 patients, 2,411 (46%) patients met the National Cholesterol Education Program-Adult Treatment Panel III criteria for MS. The primary end point was operative mortality. RESULTS: The operative mortality after CABG surgery was 2.4% in patients with MS and 0.9% in patients without MS (p < 0.0001). The MS was a strong independent predictor of operative mortality (relative risk 3.04 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.73 to 5.32], p = 0.0001). After adjusting for other risk factors, the risk of mortality was increased 2.69-fold (95% CI 1.43 to 5.06; p = 0.002) in patients with MS and diabetes and 2.36-fold (95% CI 1.26 to 4.41; p = 0.007) in patients with MS and no diabetes, whereas it was not significantly increased in the patients with diabetes and no MS. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study to report that MS is a highly prevalent and powerful risk factor for operative mortality in patients undergoing a CABG surgery. Thus, interventions that could contribute to reduce the prevalence of MS in patients with coronary artery disease or that could acutely modify the metabolic perturbations of MS at the time of CABG might substantially improve survival in these patient

Validity of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease diagnoses in a large administrative database,”

H ealth authorities (often the payers of health care) create and maintain administrative databases by compiling claims data sets. Claims data include the patient diagnosis that motivated the provision of services and the charges paid for the services provided. Typically, the database includes patient demographics and patient-level data about their use of health care resources. Administrators and health care researchers can access the information in these databases to ascertain resource use, even if it involved several providers and health care centres (1-3). When one payer reimburses all health care provisions, these databases afford the opportunity to conduct large populationbased observational studies with minimal referral bias, nonresponse and drop-outs. Similar to other investigators, we were interested in exploiting such a database for a series of studies that could answer health services questions (eg, utilization or quality of care) and clinical questions related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Before doing so, we considered the underlying validity of the diagnoses included in the database. The objective of the present study was, therefore, to determine the extent to which the principal diagnoses of COPD made in hospitalized patients and recorded in a large administrative database were valid, ie, corroborated by clinical history (including smoking status) and pulmonary function tests

Kilometer range filamentation

International audienceWe demonstrate for the first time the possibility to generate long plasma channels up to a distance of 1 km, using the terawatt femtosecond T&T laser facility. The plasma density was optimized by adjusting the chirp, the focusing and beam diameter. The interaction of filaments with transparent and opaque targets was studied

F.A.R.O.G. FORUM, Vol. 4 No. 1

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/francoamericain_forum/1054/thumbnail.jp

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe