Increased risk for malaria in chronically malnourished children under 5 years of age in rural Gambia.

Malaria and malnutrition cause high morbidity and mortality in rural sub-Saharan Africa. To explore the relationship between nutritional status and malaria, a cohort of Gambian children under 5 years of age was followed weekly during one malaria season. Anthropometric measurements were made at the beginning and at the end of the season. A total of 55/107 (51.4 per cent) children with baseline stunting, defined as having a height-for-age z-score below -2 standard deviations, subsequently experienced malaria episodes, compared to 145/380 (38.2 per cent) children who were not stunted (RR = 1.35; 95 per cent CI, 1.08-1.69; p value = 0.01). Neither wasting (weight-for-height z-score below -2 standard deviations) nor undernutrition (weight-for-age z-score below -2 standard deviations) influenced susceptibility to malaria. Adjustment for characteristics of age, sex, and ethnicity did not significantly change the risk ratios. Malaria had no effect on the nutritional status from the beginning to the end of the malaria season. Our findings suggest that chronically malnourished children may be at higher risk for developing malaria episodes

Long duration thermal hard X-ray sources observed in two eruptive flares

We present observations of two eruptive flares on 17 of December 2006 (C1.9) and 19 of May 2007 (B9.7) which had good coverage with both Hinode and RHESSI. In these flares we see a long lived, gradual thermal hard X-ray source of low emission measure and, relative to the loops observed with GOES and XRT, high temperature. The lack of a non-thermal hard X-ray component and impulsive behaviour is inconsistent with electron beam driven chromospheric evaporation

A critical analysis of COA research.

Five experts respected for their significant contributions to the scientific literature on children of alcoholics (COA's) offer their perspectives in a panel discussion format. The panel members reflect on the historical roots of COA research and comment on its current status and future direction. Enriched by the panelists' variety of backgrounds, research interests, and approaches, the discussion emphasizes the need to consider multiple variables that influence the risk for alcoholism among COA's

To lead or not to lead : analysis of the sprint in track cycling

This paper uses a statistical analysis of match sprint outcomes to guide tactical decisions in this highly tactical contest and to provide competitors and coaches with a potential, marginal gain. Logistic regression models are developed to predict the probability of the leading rider winning at different points of the race, based on how the race proceeds up to each point. Key tactics are successfully identified from the models, including how the leading rider might hold the lead and how the following rider might optimise overtaking

A Neural Attention Model for Categorizing Patient Safety Events

Medical errors are leading causes of death in the US and as such, prevention of these errors is paramount to promoting health care. Patient Safety Event reports are narratives describing potential adverse events to the patients and are important in identifying and preventing medical errors. We present a neural network architecture for identifying the type of safety events which is the first step in understanding these narratives. Our proposed model is based on a soft neural attention model to improve the effectiveness of encoding long sequences. Empirical results on two large-scale real-world datasets of patient safety reports demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with significant improvements over existing methods.Comment: ECIR 201

Controllability and observabiliy of an artificial advection-diffusion problem

In this paper we study the controllability of an artificial advection-diffusion system through the boundary. Suitable Carleman estimates give us the observability on the adjoint system in the one dimensional case. We also study some basic properties of our problem such as backward uniqueness and we get an intuitive result on the control cost for vanishing viscosity.Comment: 20 pages, accepted for publication in MCSS. DOI: 10.1007/s00498-012-0076-

Evolving solitons in bubbly flows

At the end of the sixties, it was shown that pressure waves in a bubbly liquid obey the KdV equation, the nonlinear term coming from convective acceleration and the dispersive term from volume oscillations of the bubbles.\ud For a variableu, proportional to –p, wherep denotes pressure, the appropriate KdV equation can be casted in the formu t –6uu x +u xxx =0. The theory of this equation predicts that, under certain conditions, solitons evolve from an initial profileu(x,0). In particular, it can be shown that the numberN of those solitons can be found from solving the eigenvalue problem xx–u(x,0)=0, with(0)=1 and(0)=0.N is found from counting the zeros of the solution of this equation betweenx=0 andx=Q, say,Q being determined by the shape ofu(x,0). We took as an initial pressure profile a Shockwave, followed by an expansion wave. This can be realised in the laboratory and the problem, formulated above, can be solved exactly.\ud In this contribution the solution is outlined and it is shown from the experimental results that from the said initial disturbance, indeed solitons evolve in the predicated quantity.\u