Newer drugs for focal epilepsy in adults

A 28 year old woman sees her general practitioner after experiencing what sounds like a convulsion without any apparent provoking factor. Over the past month she has also had “blank spells” during which her husband noticed her to be unresponsive. Her general practitioner suspects she may have developed focal epilepsy and refers her to an epilepsy specialist. The specialist elicits from the patient and her husband additional features in the history that are highly compatible with seizures arising from the temporal lobe (lip smacking, ipsilateral motor automatism, and contralateral dystonia) and confirms the diagnosis by finding focal epileptiform discharges on electroencephalography and cortical dysplasia in the left temporal lobe on brain imaging. To prevent further seizures the specialist advises treatment with antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). The patient is reluctant to start treatment because she has read that AEDs have many adverse effects, could interact with her oral contraception, and are harmful for babies. She wonders if there are newer AEDs that for her might be better than the traditional ones

When in Rome Think Like a Roman: Empirical Evidence and Implications of Temporarily Adopting Dialectical Thinking

As a result of increasing globalization, people are exposed to an even greater extent to other cultures, making it possible for individuals to assimilate mindsets that are typical of another culture. Recent work on extracultural cognition has shown that immediate cultural contexts exert powerful influences on cognition and behavioral patterns. This chapter reviews empirical support for extracultural cognition. Specifically, the chapter focuses on dialectical thinking and the well-established finding in the cultural literature that Westerners tend to anticipate linear continuity in the environment and East Asians anticipate change in existing patterns. Research shows, though, that cultural cues may shift these tendencies and—at least temporarily—alter cognitive mindsets to reflect the cognitions of another culture. After a review of the literature, the chapter addresses the implications of extracultural cognition for understanding the influence of dialectical thinking on judgment and decision-making

Effects of memory on the shapes of simple outbreak trees

Genomic tools, including phylogenetic trees derived from sequence data, are increasingly used to understand outbreaks of infectious diseases. One challenge is to link phylogenetic trees to patterns of transmission. Particularly in bacteria that cause chronic infections, this inference is affected by variable infectious periods and infectivity over time. It is known that non-exponential infectious periods can have substantial effects on pathogens’ transmission dynamics. Here we ask how this non-Markovian nature of an outbreak process affects the branching trees describing that process, with particular focus on tree shapes. We simulate Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes and compare different patterns of infectivity over time. We find that memory (non-Markovian-ness) in the process can have a pronounced effect on the shapes of the outbreak’s branching pattern. However, memory also has a pronounced effect on the sizes of the trees, even when the duration of the simulation is fixed. When the sizes of the trees are constrained to a constant value, memory in our processes has little direct effect on tree shapes, but can bias inference of the birth rate from trees. We compare simulated branching trees to phylogenetic trees from an outbreak of tuberculosis in Canada, and discuss the relevance of memory to this dataset

Audit of Antenatal Testing of Sexually Transmissible Infections and Blood Borne Viruses at Western Australian Hospitals

In August 2007, the Western Australian Department of Health (DOH) released updated recommendations for testing of sexually transmissible infections (STI) and blood-borne viruses (BBV) in antenates. Prior to this, the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) antenatal testing recommendations had been accepted practice in most antenatal settings. The RANZCOG recommends that testing for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis B and C be offered at the first antenatal visit. The DOH recommends that in addition, chlamydia testing be offered. We conducted a baseline audit of antenatal STI/BBV testing in women who delivered at selected public hospitals before the DOH recommendations. We examined the medical records of 200 women who had delivered before 1st July 2007 from each of the sevenWAhospitals included in the audit. STI and BBV testing information and demographic data were collected. Of the 1,409 women included, 1,205 (86%) were non-Aboriginal and 200 (14%) were Aboriginal. High proportions of women had been tested for HIV (76%), syphilis (86%), hepatitis C (87%) and hepatitis B (88%). Overall, 72% of women had undergone STI/BBV testing in accordance with RANZCOG recommendations. However, chlamydia testing was evident in only 18% of records. STI/BBV prevalence ranged from 3.9% (CI 1.5– 6.3%) for chlamydia, to 1.7% (CI 1–2.4%) for hepatitis C, 0.7% (CI 0.3–1.2) for hepatitis B and 0.6% (CI 0.2–1) for syphilis. Prior to the DOH recommendations, nearly three-quarters of antenates had undergone STI/BBV testing in accordance with RANZCOG recommendations, but less than one fifth had been tested for chlamydia. The DOH recommendations will be further promoted with the assistance of hospitals and other stakeholders. A future audit will be conducted to determine the proportion of women tested according to the DOH recommendations. The hand book from this conference is available for download Published in 2008 by the Australasian Society for HIV Medicine Inc © Australasian Society for HIV Medicine Inc 2008 ISBN: 978-1-920773-59-

Market evidence on the opaqueness of banking firms' assets.

We assess the market microstructure properties of U.S. banking firms' equity, to determine whether they exhibit more or less evidence of asset opaqueness than similar-sized nonbanking firms. The evidence strongly indicates that large banks (traded on NASDAQ) trade much less frequently despite microstructure characteristics. Problem (noncurrent) loans tend to raise the frequency with which the bank's equity trades, as well as the equity's return volatility. The implications for regulatory policy and future market microstructure research are discussed.Bank stocks ; Bank assets

Insecurity of position-based quantum cryptography protocols against entanglement attacks

Recently, position-based quantum cryptography has been claimed to be unconditionally secure. In contrary, here we show that the existing proposals for position-based quantum cryptography are, in fact, insecure if entanglement is shared among two adversaries. Specifically, we demonstrate how the adversaries can incorporate ideas of quantum teleportation and quantum secret sharing to compromise the security with certainty. The common flaw to all current protocols is that the Pauli operators always map a codeword to a codeword (up to an irrelevant overall phase). We propose a modified scheme lacking this property in which the same cheating strategy used to undermine the previous protocols can succeed with a rate at most 85%. We conjecture that the modified protocol is unconditionally secure and prove this to be true when the shared quantum resource between the adversaries is a two- or three- level system

Environmental learning using a problem-based approach in the field: A case study of a Hong Kong school

This study investigated the environmental learning of a group of senior geography students through a problem-based learning (PBL) field programme to see if the goals of education for the environment could be accomplished. In the PBL field programme, the students were given a problem statement concerning a real-life scenario of an old lady living in a remote village of Hong Kong. During the PBL field programme which also has adopted an action research framework, the students were observed to have identified the problem statement, set hypotheses, constructed the research methods and collected empirical data in an authentic environment all by themselves. This paper reports on the first cycle of this piece of action research. Data were collected both quantitatively and qualitatively via questionnaires, students' reflective journals, field observation notes and group interviews. The initial finding of this PBL field programme reveals that students had acquired more in-depth knowledge and extended their comfort zones in learning. They were able to develop and practice their critical thinking and problem-solving skills while they were working on the problem in the field. Although there was no evidence of sustained self-directed learning among the students, the PBL field programme offered them a framework for developing self-directed learning. An initial conclusion is that PBL in the field can provide a useful framework and direction for EE to accomplish the goals of education for the environment. ©. 2008 T. Kwan & M. So.published_or_final_versio