The management of feeding difficulties in children with cerebral palsy in Bangladesh

The majority of children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) have feeding difficulties, which result in chronic malnutrition and respiratory disease, reducing quality of life for caregiver and child, and causing early child mortality. In well-resourced countries, high and low-tech medical interventions, ranging from gastrostomy tube-feeding to parent training, are available. In Bangladesh the former is not viable and the latter is both scarce and its effectiveness not evaluated. The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a training programme to improve the feeding practices of carers of children with CP, observing the impact on level of nutritional intake, risk of aspiration and distress caused to both during feeding. Thirty-seven caregivers and their children aged 1-11 with moderate-severe CP and feeding difficulties were invited to a six-session training programme. Pre and post measures (quantitative and qualitative) were taken during home visits in addition to giving brief advice. A control phase was evaluated for 12 of the participant pairs whilst awaiting training. A minimum of four training sessions was successful in significantly improving children’s nutritional intake and chest health, maximising independence in feeding, improving the experience of mealtimes for both child and caregiver, decreasing caregiver stress regarding their child’s feeding difficulties and improving child levels of cooperation. Catch-up growth was observed in 26% of the children. A significant difference in the outcomes between advice only and groups was observed. In conclusion, carers in Bangladesh, who have minimal formal education and live in abject poverty are able to change care-giving practices significantly after four training sessions, with positive consequences for both child and caregiver. Methods of providing affordable food supplementation need to be investigated and further steps must to be taken to lobby policy-makers in order to ensure that services have the motivation and capacity to address this area of need

Willingness to establish private forest plantation among dwellers in some selected Local Government Area of Osun State, Nigeria

This study was carried out to investigate the willingness to establish private forest plantations among dwellers in Ife North, Ede South and Osogbo Local Government Areas of Osun State. One hundred and seventeen (117) questionnaires were administered randomly to selected respondents from nine (9) selected communities in the study areas, while ninety-three (93) copies of questionnaire were retrieved. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select respondents from the study area. The willingness of the respondents to private forest plantation establishment showed that 64.5% of the respondents agreed on establishment of private forest plantation. Chi-square analysis indicated that a significant relationship exist between respondents’ sex, level of education, source of labour and secondary occupation on willingness to establish private forest plantation. Many of the dwellers faced some problems which influenced their willingness in establishing private forest plantations such as poor extension service, land tenure system, small land holding, non-availability of seed/seedlings, lack of technical know-how, Government policies, trees casting shadow on crops, etc. More dwellers can be encouraged in willingness to participate in private forest plantation through extension service to farmers, government institutions’ involvement at various levels of activities that will encourage individuals and organizations to establish private forest plantations. Government policies on land tenure system should be reviewed to encourage individual or private organisations to invest and actively participate more in forest plantation establishment.Keywords: Willingness, Private Forests, Plantation Establishmen

tt* Geometry and Closed String Tachyon Potential

We propose a closed string tachyon action including kinetic and potential terms for non-supersymmetric orbifolds. The action is given in terms of solutions to $tt^*$ equations which captures the geometry of vacua of the corresponding N=2 worldsheet theory. In certain cases the solutions are well studied. In case of tachyons of ${\bf C}/Z_n$, solutions to affine toda equations determine the action. We study the particular case of ${\bf C}/Z_3\to {\bf C}$ in detail and find that the Tachyon action is determined in terms of a solution to Painleve III equation.Comment: 10 page

Tachyons in Compact Spaces

We discuss condensations of closed string tachyons localized in compact spaces. Time evolution of an on-shell condensation is naturally related to the worldsheet RG flow. Some explicit tachyonic compactifications of Type II string theory is considered, and some of them are shown to decay into supersymmetric theories known as the little string theories.Comment: 14 page

Fuzzy Rings in D6-Branes and Magnetic Field Background

We use the Myers T-dual nonabelin Born-Infeld action to find some new nontrivial solutions for the branes in the background of D6-branes and Melvin magnetic tube field. In the D6-Branes background we can find both of the fuzzy sphere and fuzzy ring solutions, which are formed by the gravitational dielectric effect. We see that the fuzzy ring solution has less energy then that of the fuzzy sphere. Therefore the fuzzy sphere will decay to the fuzzy ring configuration. In the Melvin magnetic tube field background there does not exist fuzzy sphere while the fuzzy ring configuration may be formed by the magnetic dielectric effect. The new solution shows that $D_0$ propagating in the D6-branes and magnetic tube field background may expand into a rotating fuzzy ring. We also use the Dirac-Born-Infeld action to construct the ring configuration from the D-branes.Comment: Latex, 15 pages, detailed comments in section 2, typos correcte

Tachyon Condensation and Black Strings

We show that under certain conditions, closed string tachyon condensation produces a topology changing transition from black strings to Kaluza-Klein "bubbles of nothing." This can occur when the curvature at the horizon is much smaller than the string scale, so the black string is far from the correspondence point when it would make a transition to an excited fundamental string. This provides a dramatic new endpoint to Hawking evaporation. A similar transition occurs for black p-branes, and can be viewed as a nonextremal version of a geometric transition. Applications to AdS black holes and the AdS soliton are also discussed.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, v2: references adde

Protogalactic Extension of the Parker Bound

We extend the Parker bound on the galactic flux $\cal F$ of magnetic monopoles. By requiring that a small initial seed field must survive the collapse of the protogalaxy, before any regenerative dynamo effects become significant, we develop a stronger bound. The survival and continued growth of an initial galactic seed field $\leq 10^{-9}$G demand that ${\cal F} \leq 5 \times 10^{-21} (m/10^{17} {GeV}) {cm}^{-2} {sec}^{-1} {sr}^{-1}$. For a given monopole mass, this bound is four and a half orders of magnitude more stringent than the previous `extended Parker bound', but is more speculative as it depends on assumptions about the behavior of magnetic fields during protogalactic collapse. For monopoles which do not overclose the Universe ($\Omega_m <1$), the maximum flux allowed is now $8 \times 10^{-19}$ cm^{-2} s^{-1} sr^{-1}, a factor of 150 lower than the maximum flux allowed by the extended Parker bound.Comment: 9 pages, 1 eps figur

Reconciling inflation with openness

It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe can be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In this frame of ideas, we show here that the probability of living in a bubble with the right $\Omega_0$ (now the observations require $\Omega_0 \approx .2$) can be comparable with unity, rather than infinitesimally small. For this purpose we modify both quantitatively and qualitatively an intuitive toy model based upon fourth order gravity. As this scheme can be implemented in canonical General Relativity as well (although then the inflation driving potential must be designed entirely ad hoc), inferring from the observations that $\Omega_0 < 1$ not only does not conflict with the inflationary paradigm, but rather supports therein the occurrence of a primordial phase transition.Comment: 4 pages, one postscript figure, to be published on Physical Review D PACS: 98.80. C

Unique Identification of Lee-Wick Gauge Bosons at Linear Colliders

Grinstein, O'Connell and Wise have recently presented an extension of the Standard Model (SM), based on the ideas of Lee and Wick (LW), which demonstrates an interesting way to remove the quadratically divergent contributions to the Higgs mass induced by radiative corrections. This model predicts the existence of negative-norm copies of the usual SM fields at the TeV scale with ghost-like propagators and negative decay widths, but with otherwise SM-like couplings. In earlier work, it was demonstrated that the LW states in the gauge boson sector of these models, though easy to observe, cannot be uniquely identified as such at the LHC. In this paper, we address the issue of whether or not this problem can be resolved at an $e^+e^-$ collider with a suitable center of mass energy range. We find that measurements of the cross section and the left-right polarization asymmetry associated with Bhabha scattering can lead to a unique identification of the neutral electroweak gauge bosons of the Lee-Wick type.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures; discussion and references adde

Relic Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Turbulence

Turbulence may have been produced in the early universe during several kind of non-equilibrium processes. Periods of cosmic turbulence may have left a detectable relic in the form of stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves. In this paper we derive general expressions for the power spectrum of the expected signal. Extending previous works on the subject, we take into account the effects of a continuous energy injection power and of magnetic fields. Both effects lead to considerable deviations from the Kolmogorov turbulence spectrum. We applied our results to determine the spectrum of gravity waves which may have been produced by neutrino inhomogeneous diffusion and by a first order phase transition. We show that in both cases the expected signal may be in the sensitivity range of LISA.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur