Lipogenesis by Isolated Human Apocrine Sweat Glands: Testosterone Has no Effect During Long-Term Organ Maintenance

Lipid synthesis by freshly isolated human apocrine glands has been measured by the incorporation of [U-14C] acetate. Incorporation is linear over 6h at 1010 ± 282 pmol/mg wet weight/h (n = 11; mean ± sem). The lipid classes, as percentages of the total lipid synthesized, were found by TLC to be cholesterol 12.3 ± 2.0, mono-glycerides 7.5 ± 1.5, 1,2 di-glycerides 3.0 ± 0.9, 1,3 di-glycerides 3.5 ± 0.5, tri-glycerides 28.4 ± 1.8, free fatty acids 2.0 ± 0.4, lysolecithin 15.4 ± 3.9, sphingomyelin 9.9 ± 4.3, phosphatidyl-choline 8.4 ± 0.4, phosphatidyl-ethanolamine -inositol and -serine 1.8 ± 0.1, phosphatidic acid and cardiolipin 3.3 ± 0.5, and unidentified 3.3 ± 0.5 (mean ± sem, n = 5); Glands were maintained on permeable supports. After 10 d maintenance, electron microscopy showed that the cellular architecture had been preserved, that the ATP contents were the same as in freshly isolated glands, and that [U-14]C] acetate incorporation was not significantly altered at 851 ± 237 pmol/mg/h (n = 18). The addition of 3μM testosterone had no effect on acetate incorporation at 844 ± 231 pmol/mg/h (n = 18). The lipid classes and their proportions were similar to the values for fresh glands after 10 d maintenance both with and without testosterone

The use of technology in group-work: a Situational Analysis of students’ reflective writing

Group work is a powerful constructivist pedagogy for facilitating students’ personal and professional development, but it can be difficult for students to work together in an academic context. The assessed reflective writings of undergraduate students studying Information Management are used as data in this exploration of the group work situation and what matters to students in terms of ensuring success. Situational Analysis provides the methodological framework and a number of mapping techniques are used to interrogate the data. Students reflect on the importance of communication for group work and identify the convivial tools they use when arranging meetings, working collaboratively and producing outputs. Students valued the instant communication facilitated by smart phones, but despite the immediacy of electronic communication, face-to-face meetings are still highly valued. Silences in the data reveal the lack of engagement with the Virtual Learning Environment as a tool for group collaboration. Implications for educators in supporting group work are identified

Preterm infants have significantly longer telomeres than their term born counterparts

There are well-established morbidities associated with preterm birth including respiratory, neurocognitive and developmental disorders. However several others have recently emerged that characterise an `aged' phenotype in the preterm infant by term-equivalent age. These include hypertension, insulin resistance and altered body fat distribution. Evidence shows that these morbidities persist into adult life, posing a significant public health concern. In this study, we measured relative telomere length in leukocytes as an indicator of biological ageing in 25 preterm infants at term equivalent age. Comparing our measurements with those from 22 preterm infants sampled at birth and from 31 term-born infants, we tested the hypothesis that by term equivalent age, preterm infants have significantly shorter telomeres (thus suggesting that they are prematurely aged). Our results demonstrate that relative telomere length is highly variable in newborn infants and is significantly negatively correlated with gestational age and birth weight in preterm infants. Further, longitudinal assessment in preterm infants who had telomere length measurements available at both birth and term age (n = 5) suggests that telomere attrition rate is negatively correlated with increasing gestational age. Contrary to our initial hypothesis however, relative telomere length was significantly shortest in the term born control group compared to both preterm groups and longest in the preterm at birth group. In addition, telomere lengths were not significantly different between preterm infants sampled at birth and those sampled at term equivalent age. These results indicate that other, as yet undetermined, factors may influence telomere length in the preterm born infant and raise the intriguing hypothesis that as preterm gestation declines, telomere attrition rate increases

The ATLAS SCT Optoelectronics and the Associated Electrical Services

The requirements for the optical links of the ATLAS SCT are described. From the individual detector modules to the first patch panel, the electrical services are integrated with the optical links to aid in mechanical design, construction and integration. The system architecture and critical elements of the system are described. The optical links for the ATLAS SCT have been assembled and mounted onto the carbon fibre support structures. The performance of the system as measured during QA is summarised and compared to the final performance obtained after mounting modules onto the support structures

The ABC130 barrel module prototyping programme for the ATLAS strip tracker

For the Phase-II Upgrade of the ATLAS Detector, its Inner Detector, consisting of silicon pixel, silicon strip and transition radiation sub-detectors, will be replaced with an all new 100 % silicon tracker, composed of a pixel tracker at inner radii and a strip tracker at outer radii. The future ATLAS strip tracker will include 11,000 silicon sensor modules in the central region (barrel) and 7,000 modules in the forward region (end-caps), which are foreseen to be constructed over a period of 3.5 years. The construction of each module consists of a series of assembly and quality control steps, which were engineered to be identical for all production sites. In order to develop the tooling and procedures for assembly and testing of these modules, two series of major prototyping programs were conducted: an early program using readout chips designed using a 250 nm fabrication process (ABCN-25) and a subsequent program using a follow-up chip set made using 130 nm processing (ABC130 and HCC130 chips). This second generation of readout chips was used for an extensive prototyping program that produced around 100 barrel-type modules and contributed significantly to the development of the final module layout. This paper gives an overview of the components used in ABC130 barrel modules, their assembly procedure and findings resulting from their tests.Comment: 82 pages, 66 figure

High-level activity learning and recognition in structured environments

Automatic recognition of events in video is an immensly challenging problem. If solved, the number of potential domains in which such a system could be deployed is vast and growing; including traffic monitoring, surveillance, security, elderly care and semantic video search to name but a few. Much prior research in the area has focused on producing a solution that is tailored towards one of these applications, applying methods which are most appropriate given the constraints of the target domain. For the moment, this remains to some extent the only practical way to approach the problem. The aim in this thesis is to build a high-level framework for event recognition which is in the main generic and widely transferrable, yet allows domain-appropriate elements to be incorporated. A detector is constructed for low-level events which is based on dense extraction of Histograms of Optical Flow. This descriptor has only recently been adopted by the event detection community, and as such there are aspects of the features which have not been optimized. This thesis performs extensive experimentation on normalization scheme and finds that the strategy most widely in use is suboptimal compared to one of the alternatives proposed. The detector is then trained on a challenging real world domain to run in a sliding window fashion on continuous video input. A high level model which exploits temporal relations between different event types is constructed. The model is designed with transferrability and computational tractability in mind. Several methods are benchmarked for learning the distributions over time differences between pairs of events. Three different connection strategies are proposed and evaluated for creating a tree structured prior that permits fast, exact inference. An efficient iterative optimization scheme is presented for handling scenarios which contain unknown numbers of event instances. Finally, the model is extended in a Conditional Random Field framework that allows weights to be learned to balance the response from independent detectors with the pairwise temporal relationships

Assessment of Risk in Medication-Use Systems: Learning from the Medication Safety Self-Assessment

INTRODUCTIONInterest in tools for enhancing patient safety has grown with the patient safety movement. The Medication Safety Self-Assessment (MSSA), a comprehensive assessment program originally developed by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) in the United States, is one such tool. The MSSA was adapted for use in Canada in 2001 and has been used by individual hospitals, regional health authorities, and provincial governments to identify and prioritize areas for improvement in medication-use systems.1 The Canadian MSSA program is administered by ISMP Canada, independent of ISMP (US), and includes additional features not available with the US version. The MSSA assists interdisciplinary hospital teams to evaluate the safety of medication practices in their institutions and to heighten awareness of the characteristics of a safe medication system. The MSSA consists of a series of safe medication practice characteristics, which are grouped into 10 key elements of medication-use systems (Table 1). Each key element is defined by one or more core distinguishing characteristics. Several self-assessment items describing safe medication practices are then used to determine the level of success for each of the key elements. Some of the items purposely represent innovative practices and system enhancements that are not widely implemented in Canadian hospitals but that are grounded in scientific research and expert analysis of medication errors and their causes. When completing the self-assessment, respondents must select 1 of 5 responses, ranging from no activity or discussion about a particular item to full implementation throughout the organization. Although ISMP Canada is not itself a standardssetting organization, several items are under consideration for inclusion in the new standards of the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation. The principal values of the MSSA are the ability of individual hospitals to identify opportunities for improvement and to track their improvement efforts over time. These values are enabled through a unique feature of the Canadian MSSA, whereby a Web-based program allows participants to immediately compare their current results to the aggregate national, provincial, and regional results, as well as to their own previous results in real time, as soon as responses have been electronically submitted. This functionality is not available for the US version. At the time of writing, in late 2006, a total of 273 Canadian hospitals had completed at least one self-assessment. This article describes one hospital’s experience with the MSSA program