Evidence for suppressed mid-Holocene northeastern Australian monsoon variability from coral luminescence

Summer monsoon rainfall in northeastern (NE) Australia exhibits substantial interannual variability resulting in highly variable river flows. The occurrence and magnitude of these seasonal river flows are reliably recorded in modern inshore corals as luminescent lines. Here we present reconstructed annual river flows for two ~120 year mid-Holocene windows based on luminescence measurements from five cores obtained from three separate coral colonies. We were able to cross-date the luminescence signatures in four cores from two of the colonies, providing confidence in the derived reconstruction. Present-day NE Australian rainfall and river flow are sensitive to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability, with La Niña (El Niño) events typically associated with wetter (drier) monsoon seasons. Thus, our replicated and annually resolved coral records provide valuable insights into the northern Australian summer monsoon and ENSO variability at a key period (6 ka) when greenhouse gas levels and ice sheet cover were comparable to the preindustrial period but orbital forcing was different. Average modern and mid-Holocene growth characteristics were very similar, suggesting that sea surface temperatures off NE Australia at 6 kyr were also close to present values. The reconstructed river flow record suggests, however, that the mid-Holocene Australian summer monsoon was weaker, less variable from year to year (possibly indicative of reduced ENSO variability), and characterized by more within-season flood pulses than present. In contrast to today, the delivery of moisture appears to have been dominated by eastward propagating convective coupled waves associated with the Madden-Julian Oscillation

Compact Modeling for a Double Gate MOSFET

MOSFETs (metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistors) are an integral part of modern electronics. Improved designs are currently under investigation, and one that is promising is the double gate MOSFET. Understanding device characteristics is critical for the design of MOSFETs as part of design tools for integrated circuits such as SPICE. Current methods involve the numerical solution of PDEs governing electron transport. Numerical solutions are accurate, but do not provide an appropriate way to optimize the design of the device, nor are they suitable for use in chip simulation software such as SPICE. As chips contain more and more transistors, this problem will get more and more acute. There is hence a need for analytic solutions of the equations governing the performance of MOSFETs, even if these are approximate. Almost all solutions in the literature treat the long-channel case (thin devices) for which the PDEs reduce to ODEs. The goal of this problem is to produce analytical solutions based on the underlying PDEs that are rapid to compute (e.g. require solving only a small number of algebraic equations rather than systems of PDEs). Guided by asymptotic analysis, a fast numerical procedure has been developed to obtain approximate solutions of the governing PDEs governing MOSFET properties, namely electron density, Fermi potential and electrostatic potential. The approach depends on the channel’s being long enough, and appears accurate in this limit

Parathyroid hormone, cognitive function and dementia: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: Metabolic factors are increasingly recognized to play an important role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Abnormal parathyroid hormone (PTH) levels play a role in neuronal calcium dysregulation, hypoperfusion and disrupted neuronal signaling. Some studies support a significant link between PTH levels and dementia whereas others do not. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review through January 2014 to evaluate the association between PTH and parathyroid conditions, cognitive function and dementia. Eleven electronic databases and citation indexes were searched including Medline, Embase and the Cochrane Library. Hand searches of selected journals, reference lists of primary studies and reviews were also conducted along with websites of key organizations. Two reviewers independently screened titles and abstracts of identified studies. Data extraction and study quality were performed by one and checked by a second reviewer using predefined criteria. A narrative synthesis was performed due to the heterogeneity of included studies. RESULTS: The twenty-seven studies identified were of low and moderate quality, and challenging to synthesize due to inadequate reporting. Findings from six observational studies were mixed but suggest a link between higher serum PTH levels and increased odds of poor cognition or dementia. Two case-control studies of hypoparathyroidism provide limited evidence for a link with poorer cognitive function. Thirteen pre-post surgery studies for primary hyperparathyroidism show mixed evidence for improvements in memory though limited agreement in other cognitive domains. There was some degree of cognitive impairment and improvement postoperatively in observational studies of secondary hyperparathyroidism but no evident pattern of associations with specific cognitive domains. CONCLUSIONS: Mixed evidence offers weak support for a link between PTH, cognition and dementia due to the paucity of high quality research in this area.NIHR PenCLAHRCAlzheimer’s AssociationRosetrees TrustMary Kinross Charitable TrustJames Tudor FoundationHalpin TrustNorman Family Charitable Trus

From concrete quarks to QCD: a personal perspective

The simple story line that ‘Gell-Mann and Zweig invented quarks in 1964 and the quark model was generally accepted after 1968 when deep inelastic electron scattering experiments at SLAC showed that they are real’ contains elements of the truth, but is not true. This paper describes the origins and development of the quark model until it became generally accepted in the mid-1970s, as witnessed by a spectator and some-time participant who joined the field as a graduate student in October 1964. It aims to ensure that the role of Petermann is not overlooked, and Zweig and Bjorken get the recognition they deserve, and to clarify the role of Serber

General practitioners’ perspectives on campaigns to promote rapid help-seeking behaviour at the onset of rheumatoid arthritis

Objective. To explore general practitioners’ (GPs’ ) perspectives on public health campaigns to encourage people with the early symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to seek medical help rapidly. Design. Nineteen GPs participated in four semistructured focus groups. Focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using thematic analysis. Results. GPs recognised the need for the early treatment of RA and identified that facilitating appropriate access to care was important. However, not all held the view that a delay in help seeking was a clinically significant issue. Furthermore, many were concerned that the early symptoms of RA were often non-specific, and that current knowledge about the nature of symptoms at disease onset was inadequate to inform the content of a help-seeking campaign. They argued that a campaign might not be able to specifically target those who need to present urgently. Poorly designed campaigns were suggested to have a negative impact on GPs’ workloads, and would “clog up” the referral pathway for genuine cases of RA. Conclusions. GPs were supportive of strategies to improve access to Rheumatological care and increase public awareness of RA symptoms. However, they have identified important issues that need to be considered in developing a public health campaign that forms part of an overall strategy to reduce time to treatment for patients with new onset RA. This study highlights the value of gaining GPs’ perspectives before launching health promotion campaigns

A Prospective Study of the Association of Metacognitive Beliefs and Processes with Persistent Emotional Distress After Diagnosis of Cancer

Two hundred and six patients, diagnosed with primary breast or prostate cancer completed self-report questionnaires on two occasions: before treatment (T1) and 12 months later (T2). The questionnaires included: the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale; Impact of Events Scale; the Metacognitions Questionnaire-30 (MCQ-30) and the Illness Perceptions Questionnaire-revised. A series of regression analyses indicated that metacognitive beliefs at T1 predicted between 14 and 19 % of the variance in symptoms of anxiety, depression and trauma at T2 after controlling for age and gender. For all three outcomes, the MCQ-30 subscale ‘negative beliefs about worry’ made the largest individual contribution with ‘cognitive confidence’ also contributing in each case. For anxiety, a third metacognitive variable, ‘positive beliefs about worry’ also predicted variance in T2 symptoms. In addition, hierarchical analyses indicated that metacognitive beliefs explained a small but significant amount of variance in T2 anxiety (2 %) and T2 depression (4 %) over and above that explained by demographic variables, T1 symptoms and T1 illness perceptions. The findings suggest that modifying metacognitive beliefs and processes has the potential to alleviate distress associated with cancer

Public value and pricing in English hospitals:Value creation or value extraction?

Hospitals create public Vvalue creation happens when hospitals provide new services are provided or clinicians deliver existing services in better or more cost efficient ways. On the other hand, according to Mazzucato, those who deliver healthcare can extract financial value from the system. Cost-based prices are now potent measures of financial value for profit centres in English hospitals. Here, we focus on the ramifications of these cost-based prices for creating or extracting value at three different levels in the health care system. Our empirical data is drawn from: first, semi-structured interviews with Clinical Directors who head up profit centres in English hospitals; and, second, documentary sources which reveal how accounting drives costing for health treatments. From thesies data sources we identify three valuing activities which mobilise cost-based prices: “bubble” charts; “up-coding” and business cases in the context of a joint venture. We conclude that cost-based pricing can creates public value because it incentivizes clinical activity and can be used to enhance health care quality. But the traditional accounting mode for cost-based pricing advantages standardised care while disadvantaging complex care, this generates opportunities for value extraction for those, including some private sector providers, who deliver standardised care. Our analysis focus encompasses three different levels: the profit centre based on a specialty, the hospital and the entire health care system. This broad appraisal reveals that value creation at the level of the individual profit centre can become value extraction for the hospital and the health care system as a whole. <br/

Systematic techniques for assisting recruitment to trials (START): study protocol for embedded, randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND: Randomized controlled trials play a central role in evidence-based practice, but recruitment of participants, and retention of them once in the trial, is challenging. Moreover, there is a dearth of evidence that research teams can use to inform the development of their recruitment and retention strategies. As with other healthcare initiatives, the fairest test of the effectiveness of a recruitment strategy is a trial comparing alternatives, which for recruitment would mean embedding a recruitment trial within an ongoing host trial. Systematic reviews indicate that such studies are rare. Embedded trials are largely delivered in an ad hoc way, with interventions almost always developed in isolation and tested in the context of a single host trial, limiting their ability to contribute to a body of evidence with regard to a single recruitment intervention and to researchers working in different contexts. METHODS/DESIGN: The Systematic Techniques for Assisting Recruitment to Trials (START) program is funded by the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (MRC) Methodology Research Programme to support the routine adoption of embedded trials to test standardized recruitment interventions across ongoing host trials. To achieve this aim, the program involves three interrelated work packages: (1) methodology - to develop guidelines for the design, analysis and reporting of embedded recruitment studies; (2) interventions - to develop effective and useful recruitment interventions; and (3) implementation - to recruit host trials and test interventions through embedded studies. DISCUSSION: Successful completion of the START program will provide a model for a platform for the wider trials community to use to evaluate recruitment interventions or, potentially, other types of intervention linked to trial conduct. It will also increase the evidence base for two types of recruitment intervention. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The START protocol covers the methodology for embedded trials. Each embedded trial is registered separately or as a substudy of the host trial

An ontology-aided, natural language-based approach for multi-constraint BIM model querying

Being able to efficiently retrieve the required building information is critical for construction project stakeholders to carry out their engineering and management activities. Natural language interface (NLI) systems are emerging as a time and cost-effective way to query Building Information Models (BIMs). However, the existing methods cannot logically combine different constraints to perform fine-grained queries, dampening the usability of natural language (NL)-based BIM queries. This paper presents a novel ontology-aided semantic parser to automatically map natural language queries (NLQs) that contain different attribute and relational constraints into computer-readable codes for querying complex BIM models. First, a modular ontology was developed to represent NL expressions of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) concepts and relationships, and was then populated with entities from target BIM models to assimilate project-specific information. Hereafter, the ontology-aided semantic parser progressively extracts concepts, relationships, and value restrictions from NLQs to fully identify constraint conditions, resulting in standard SPARQL queries with reasoning rules to successfully retrieve IFC-based BIM models. The approach was evaluated based on 225 NLQs collected from BIM users, with a 91% accuracy rate. Finally, a case study about the design-checking of a real-world residential building demonstrates the practical value of the proposed approach in the construction industry