Randomized Trial of Antibiotics in Addition to Tocolytic Therapy to Treat Preterm Labor

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess whether antibiotic therapy plus tocolysis given to women in preterm labor would prolong pregnancy compared with tocolysis alone

Who should we hire?: Examining coaching succession in NCAA Division I women’s basketball

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of newly hired coaches in relation to their predecessors, and utilize the analysis to provide guidance to decision makers in college athletic departments. This study examined 185 coaching changes in Division I women’s basketball in 16 conferences between 2000 and 2009. Data were collected from online sources including institutional websites, media guides, and media articles. Latent class analysis was employed to reduce the data to one item per factor. Factors included demographics, coaching ability, coaching experience, past team performance, hiring factors (coaching level change, inside/outside hire, interim, conference affiliation), and institutional factors (public/private, demographic market area, enrollment, budget, and National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics standings). Mixed models analysis was performed to identify which categories have a relationship with changes in the number of wins following a coaching change. Results suggest that past team performance was the strongest indicator of future performance after a coaching change

I-fibrinogen as an oncophilic radiodiagnostic agent: distribution kinetics in tumour-bearing mice.

Fibrinogen radioiodinated by the iodine monochloride method was tested as a tumour radiodiagnostic agent in mice. The I-fibrinogen cleared from the blood of tumour-bearing mice more rapidly than from that of normal mice, but it cleared from the whole body more slowly, suggesting it accumulated in a substantial tumour-related compartment in the abnormal mice. The tumour concentration steadily increased for 4 h after injection, at which time it reached a peak concentration of 11-4% of the injected dose/g. This concentration was higher than the peak concentration for Ga-citrate (not reached until 24 h) or any other oncophilic radiopharmaceutical tested in this tumour model. The early accumulation is consistent with the use of 123I as a tracer label for fibrinogen. A combination of the large tumour concentration of I-fibrinogen, an increased catabolic rate induced by chemical modification, and the exceptional nuclear properties of 123I for scintigraphic imaging, could lead to a very useful radiodiagnostic procedure for cancer

Pure Samples of Quark and Gluon Jets at the LHC

Having pure samples of quark and gluon jets would greatly facilitate the study of jet properties and substructure, with many potential standard model and new physics applications. To this end, we consider multijet and jets+X samples, to determine the purity that can be achieved by simple kinematic cuts leaving reasonable production cross sections. We find, for example, that at the 7 TeV LHC, the pp {\to} {\gamma}+2jets sample can provide 98% pure quark jets with 200 GeV of transverse momentum and a cross section of 5 pb. To get 10 pb of 200 GeV jets with 90% gluon purity, the pp {\to} 3jets sample can be used. b+2jets is also useful for gluons, but only if the b-tagging is very efficient.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figures; v2 section on formally defining quark and gluon jets has been adde

Rhythm in the speech of a person with right hemisphere damage: Applying the pairwise variability index

Although several aspects of prosody have been studied in speakers with right hemisphere damage (RHD), rhythm remains largely uninvestigated. This study compares the rhythm of an Australian English speaker with right hemisphere damage (due to a stroke, but with no concomitant dysarthria) to that of a neurologically unimpaired individual. The speakers' rhythm is compared using the pairwise variability index (PVI) which allows for an acoustic characterization of rhythm by comparing the duration of successive vocalic and intervocalic intervals. A sample of speech from a structured interview between a speech and language therapist and each participant was analysed. Previous research has shown that speakers with RHD may have difficulties with intonation production, and therefore it was hypothesized that there may also be rhythmic disturbance. Results show that the neurologically normal control uses a similar rhythm to that reported for British English (there are no previous studies available for Australian English), whilst the speaker with RHD produces speech with a less strongly stress-timed rhythm. This finding was statistically significant for the intervocalic intervals measured (t(8) = 4.7, p < .01), and suggests that some aspects of prosody may be right lateralized for this speaker. The findings are discussed in relation to previous findings of dysprosody in RHD populations, and in relation to syllable-timed speech of people with other neurological conditions

Cooling of Molecular Ion Beams

An overview of the use of stored ion beams and phase space cooling (electron cooling) is given for the field of molecular physics. Emphasis is given to interactions between molecular ions and electrons studied in the electron cooler: dissociative recombination and, for internally excited molecular ions, electron-induced ro-vibrational cooling. Diagnostic methods for the transverse ion beam properties and for the internal exciation of the molecular ions are discussed, and results for phase space cooling and internal (vibrational) cooling are presented for hydrogen molecular ions

Phenomenology of the Little Higgs model with X-Parity

In the popular littlest Higgs model, T-parity can be broken by Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) terms induced by a strongly coupled UV completion. On the other hand, certain models with multiple scalar multiplets (called moose models) permit the implementation of an exchange symmetry (X-parity) such that it is not broken by the WZW terms. Here we present a concrete and realistic construction of such a model. The little Higgs model with X-Parity is a concrete and realistic implementation of this idea. In this contribution, the properties of the model are reviewed and the collider phenomenology is discussed in some detail. We also present new results on the decay properties and LHC signatures of the light triplet scalars that are predicted by this model.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in in the proceedings of the International Workshop on Beyond the Standard Model Physics and LHC Signatures (BSM-LHC) and of the 17th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY09), Boston, USA, 2-4 and 5-10 Jun 200

Optimal jet radius in kinematic dijet reconstruction

Obtaining a good momentum reconstruction of a jet is a compromise between taking it large enough to catch the perturbative final-state radiation and small enough to avoid too much contamination from the underlying event and initial-state radiation. In this paper, we compute analytically the optimal jet radius for dijet reconstructions and study its scale dependence. We also compare our results with previous Monte-Carlo studies.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures; minor corrections; published in JHE