The Zulu traditional birth attendant An evaluation of her attitudes and techniques and their implications for health education

Some of the important practices of Zulu traditional birth attendants in their care of pregnant women are summarized. This. information is valuable in constructing the format/content of appropriate antenatal health education for women from rural areas. The target group for antenatal health education should include the opinion-formers of the community

Electromagnetic String Fluid in Rolling Tachyon

We study Born-Infeld type effective action for unstable D3-brane system including a tachyon and an Abelian gauge field, and find the rolling tachyon with constant electric and magnetic fields as the most general homogeneous solution. Tachyonic vacua are characterized by magnitudes of the electric and magnetic fields and the angle between them. Analysis of small fluctuations in this background shows that the obtained configuration may be interpreted as a fluid consisting of string-like objects carrying electric and magnetic fields. They are stretched along one direction and the rolling tachyon move in a perpendicular direction to the strings. Direction of the propagating waves coincides with that of strings with velocity equal to electric field.Comment: LaTeX, 18 pages, 1 figure, minor correction

Metrics for Differential Privacy in Concurrent Systems

Part 3: Security AnalysisInternational audienceOriginally proposed for privacy protection in the context of statistical databases, differential privacy is now widely adopted in various models of computation. In this paper we investigate techniques for proving differential privacy in the context of concurrent systems. Our motivation stems from the work of Tschantz et al., who proposed a verification method based on proving the existence of a stratified family between states, that can track the privacy leakage, ensuring that it does not exceed a given leakage budget. We improve this technique by investigating a state property which is more permissive and still implies differential privacy. We consider two pseudometrics on probabilistic automata: The first one is essentially a reformulation of the notion proposed by Tschantz et al. The second one is a more liberal variant, relaxing the relation between them by integrating the notion of amortisation, which results into a more parsimonious use of the privacy budget. We show that the metrical closeness of automata guarantees the preservation of differential privacy, which makes the two metrics suitable for verification. Moreover we show that process combinators are non-expansive in this pseudometric framework. We apply the pseudometric framework to reason about the degree of differential privacy of protocols by the example of the Dining Cryptographers Protocol with biased coins

D-brane anti-D-brane effective action and brane interaction in open string channel

We construct the effective action of a $D_p$-brane-anti-$D_p$-brane system by making use of the non-abelian extension of tachyonic DBI action. We succeed the construction by restricting the Chan-Paton factors of two non-BPS $D_p$-branes in the action to the Chan-Paton factors of a $D_p\bar{D}_p$ system. For the special case that both branes are coincident, the action reduces to the one proposed by A. Sen. \\The effective $D_p\bar{D}_p$ potential indicates that when branes separation is larger than the string length scale, there are two minima in the tachyon direction. As branes move toward each other under the gravitational force, the tachyon tunneling from false to true vacuum may make a bubble formation followed by a classical evolution of the bubble. On the other hand, when branes separation is smaller than the string length scale, the potential shows one maximum and one minimum. In this case, a homogeneous tachyon rolling in real time makes an attractive potential for the branes distance. This classical force is speculated to be the effective force between the two branes.Comment: Latex, 14 pages, 1 figure, the version appears in JHE

SD-brane gravity fields and rolling tachyons

S(pacelike)D-branes are objects arising naturally in string theory when Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed on the time direction. SD-brane physics is inherently time-dependent. Previous investigations of gravity fields of SD-branes have yielded undesirable naked spacelike singularities. We set up the problem of coupling the most relevant open-string tachyonic mode to massless closed-string modes in the bulk, with backreaction and Ramond-Ramond fields included. We find solutions numerically in a self-consistent approximation; our solutions are naturally asymptotically flat and time-reversal asymmetric. We find completely nonsingular evolution; in particular, the dilaton and curvature are well-behaved for all time. The essential mechanism for spacetime singularity resolution is the inclusion of full backreaction between the bulk fields and the rolling tachyon. Our analysis is not the final word on the story, because we have to make some significant approximations, most notably homogeneity of the tachyon on the unstable branes. Nonetheless, we provide significant progress in plugging a gaping hole in prior understanding of the gravity fields of SD-branes.Comment: References added. Analysis for much broader range of solutions presented. Conclusions unchanged. Time-reversal symmetric examples ruled out, new examples are provide

2^2H (3^3He,t) 2p reaction at 2 GeV

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Abelian and nonabelian vector field effective actions from string field theory

The leading terms in the tree-level effective action for the massless fields of the bosonic open string are calculated by integrating out all massive fields in Witten's cubic string field theory. In both the abelian and nonabelian theories, field redefinitions make it possible to express the effective action in terms of the conventional field strength. The resulting actions reproduce the leading terms in the abelian and nonabelian Born-Infeld theories, and include (covariant) derivative corrections.Comment: 49 pages, 1 eps figur

S-matrix elements and off-shell tachyon action with non-abelian gauge symmetry

We propose that there is a unique expansion for the string theory S-matrix elements of tachyons that corresponds to non-abelian tachyon action. For those S-matrix elements which, in their expansion, there are the Feynman amplitudes resulting from the non-abelian kinetic term, we give a prescription on how to find the expansion. The gauge invariant action is an $\alpha'$ expanded action, and the tachyon mass $m$ which appears as coefficient of many different couplings, is arbitrary. We then analyze in details the S-matrix element of four tachyons and the S-matrix element of two tachyons and two gauge fields, in both bosonic and superstring theories, in favor of this proposal. In the superstring theory, the leading terms of the non-abelian gauge invariant couplings are in agreement with the symmetrised trace of the direct non-abelian generalization of the tachyonic Born-Infeld action in which the tachyon potential is consistent with $V(T)=e^{\pi\alpha' m^2T^2}$. In the bosonic theory, on the other hand, the leading terms are those appear in superstring case as well as some other gauge invariant couplings which spoils the symmetrised trace prescription. These latter terms are zero in the abelian case.Comment: Latex, 27 pages, no figures,v4:change the introduction section, add some notes to clarify the idea, add reference

Impaired LXRa phosphorylation attenuates progression of fatty liver disease

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a very common indication for liver transplantation. How fat-rich diets promote progression from fatty liver to more damaging inflammatory and fibrotic stages is poorly understood. Here, we show that disrupting phosphorylation at Ser196 (S196A) in the liver X receptor alpha (LXRα, NR1H3) retards NAFLD progression in mice on a high-fat-high-cholesterol diet. Mechanistically, this is explained by key histone acetylation (H3K27) and transcriptional changes in pro-fibrotic and pro-inflammatory genes. Furthermore, S196A-LXRα expression reveals the regulation of novel diet-specific LXRα-responsive genes, including the induction of Ces1f, implicated in the breakdown of hepatic lipids. This involves induced H3K27 acetylation and altered LXR and TBLR1 cofactor occupancy at the Ces1f gene in S196A fatty livers. Overall, impaired Ser196-LXRα phosphorylation acts as a novel nutritional molecular sensor that profoundly alters the hepatic H3K27 acetylome and transcriptome during NAFLD progression placing LXRα phosphorylation as an alternative anti-inflammatory or anti-fibrotic therapeutic target