2,509 research outputs found
Rehabilitation needs of persons discharged from an African trauma center
Background: The study prospectively assessed the functional impairments and rehabilitation needs of Africans admitted to a regional trauma center. It also acts as a pilot study to demonstrate the practical use of the Language Independent Functional Evaluation (L.I.F.E.) software in an acute hospital setting. Methods: A 5 page questionnaire was used to gather demographic data (age, sex, medical diagnosis, education, housing type, place of residency, occupation), cause of disability/injury, severity of disability or functional impairment, and rehabilitation treatment received (types of rehab, frequency of treatment, duration of therapy, follow up therapy, equipment). Functional status on discharge was evaluated with the L.I.F.E. scale. Results: 84 consecutive consenting subjects were recorded. The predominant disability/injury of respondents involved the lower extremities (70%), followed by upper extremities (23%). The mechanisms of injury were largely related to auto accidents (69%). Falls made up 17% of these injuries and 14% were related to violence. Eleven subjects had disability measured using L.I.F.E and all were classified as having major disabilities. Only 14 patients (17%) received any rehabilitation therapy which consisted of only physical therapy provided at a frequency of once a day for less than one week duration. Conclusion: This study found that most persons admitted to a sophisticated trauma unit in Ghana are discharged without adequate rehabilitation services, and that the level of disability experienced by these people can be measured,  even while they are still sick and in the hospital, using L.I.F.E. The implications are clear: African trauma systems must measure the long term outcomes from their treatments and provide the inpatient medical rehabilitation services that are a standard of care for trauma victims elsewhere in the world
Hsp21potentiates antifungal drug tolerance in Candida albicans
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Direct Formation of Supermassive Black Holes via Multi-Scale Gas Inflows in Galaxy Mergers
Observations of distant bright quasars suggest that billion solar mass
supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place less than a billion
years after the Big Bang. Models in which light black hole seeds form by the
collapse of primordial metal-free stars cannot explain their rapid appearance
due to inefficient gas accretion. Alternatively, these black holes may form by
direct collapse of gas at the center of protogalaxies. However, this requires
metal-free gas that does not cool efficiently and thus is not turned into
stars, in contrast with the rapid metal enrichment of protogalaxies. Here we
use a numerical simulation to show that mergers between massive protogalaxies
naturally produce the required central gas accumulation with no need to
suppress star formation. Merger-driven gas inflows produce an unstable, massive
nuclear gas disk. Within the disk a second gas inflow accumulates more than 100
million solar masses of gas in a sub-parsec scale cloud in one hundred thousand
years. The cloud undergoes gravitational collapse, which eventually leads to
the formation of a massive black hole. The black hole can grow to a billion
solar masses in less than a billion years by accreting gas from the surrounding
disk.Comment: 26 pages, 4 Figures, submitted to Nature (includes Supplementary
Information
Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online
We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a
minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the
network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of
the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital
preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively
commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration.
We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders
A Relational Event Approach to Modeling Behavioral Dynamics
This chapter provides an introduction to the analysis of relational event
data (i.e., actions, interactions, or other events involving multiple actors
that occur over time) within the R/statnet platform. We begin by reviewing the
basics of relational event modeling, with an emphasis on models with piecewise
constant hazards. We then discuss estimation for dyadic and more general
relational event models using the relevent package, with an emphasis on
hands-on applications of the methods and interpretation of results. Statnet is
a collection of packages for the R statistical computing system that supports
the representation, manipulation, visualization, modeling, simulation, and
analysis of relational data. Statnet packages are contributed by a team of
volunteer developers, and are made freely available under the GNU Public
License. These packages are written for the R statistical computing
environment, and can be used with any computing platform that supports R
(including Windows, Linux, and Mac).
A global method for coupling transport with chemistry in heterogeneous porous media
Modeling reactive transport in porous media, using a local chemical
equilibrium assumption, leads to a system of advection-diffusion PDE's coupled
with algebraic equations. When solving this coupled system, the algebraic
equations have to be solved at each grid point for each chemical species and at
each time step. This leads to a coupled non-linear system. In this paper a
global solution approach that enables to keep the software codes for transport
and chemistry distinct is proposed. The method applies the Newton-Krylov
framework to the formulation for reactive transport used in operator splitting.
The method is formulated in terms of total mobile and total fixed
concentrations and uses the chemical solver as a black box, as it only requires
that on be able to solve chemical equilibrium problems (and compute
derivatives), without having to know the solution method. An additional
advantage of the Newton-Krylov method is that the Jacobian is only needed as an
operator in a Jacobian matrix times vector product. The proposed method is
tested on the MoMaS reactive transport benchmark.Comment: Computational Geosciences (2009)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/933p55085742m203/?p=db14bb8c399b49979ba8389a3cae1b0f&pi=1
Treatment effect of idebenone on inspiratory function in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Assessment of dynamic inspiratory function may provide valuable information about the degree and progression of pulmonary involvement in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The aims of this study were to characterize inspiratory function and to assess the efficacy of idebenone on this pulmonary function outcome in a large and well‐characterized cohort of 10–18 year‐old DMD patients not taking glucocorticoid steroids (GCs) enrolled in the phase 3 randomized controlled DELOS trial. We evaluated the effect of idebenone on the highest flow generated during an inspiratory FVC maneuver (maximum inspiratory flow; V'I,max(FVC)) and the ratio between the largest inspiratory flow during tidal breathing (tidal inspiratory flow; V'I,max(t)) and the V'I,max(FVC). The fraction of the maximum flow that is not used during tidal breathing has been termed inspiratory flow reserve (IFR). DMD patients in both treatment groups of DELOS (idebenone, n = 31; placebo: n = 33) had comparable and abnormally low V'I,max(FVC) at baseline. During the study period, V'I,max(FVC) further declined by −0.29 L/sec in patients on placebo (95%CI: −0.51, −0.08; P = 0.008 at week 52), whereas it remained stable in patients on idebenone (change from baseline to week 52: 0.01 L/sec; 95%CI: −0.22, 0.24; P = 0.950). The between‐group difference favoring idebenone was 0.27 L/sec (P = 0.043) at week 26 and 0.30 L/sec (P = 0.061) at week 52. In addition, during the study period, IFR improved by 2.8% in patients receiving idebenone and worsened by −3.0% among patients on placebo (between‐group difference 5.8% at week 52; P = 0.040). Although the clinical interpretation of these data is currently limited due to the scarcity of routine clinical practice experience with dynamic inspiratory function outcomes in DMD, these findings from a randomized controlled study nevertheless suggest that idebenone preserved inspiratory muscle function as assessed by V'I,max(FVC) and IFR in patients with DMD
Selected reactive oxygen species and antioxidant enzymes in common bean after Pseudomonas syringae pv. phaseolicola and Botrytis cinerea infection
Phaseolus vulgaris cv. Korona plants were
inoculated with the bacteria Pseudomonas syringae pv.
phaseolicola (Psp), necrotrophic fungus Botrytis cinerea
(Bc) or with both pathogens sequentially. The aim of the
experiment was to determine how plants cope with multiple
infection with pathogens having different attack strategy.
Possible suppression of the non-specific infection with
the necrotrophic fungus Bc by earlier Psp inoculation was
examined. Concentration of reactive oxygen species
(ROS), such as superoxide anion (O2
-) and H2O2 and
activities of antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase
(SOD), catalase (CAT) and peroxidase (POD) were
determined 6, 12, 24 and 48 h after inoculation. The
measurements were done for ROS cytosolic fraction and
enzymatic cytosolic or apoplastic fraction. Infection with
Psp caused significant increase in ROS levels since the
beginning of experiment. Activity of the apoplastic
enzymes also increased remarkably at the beginning of
experiment in contrast to the cytosolic ones. Cytosolic
SOD and guaiacol peroxidase (GPOD) activities achieved
the maximum values 48 h after treatment. Additional forms
of the examined enzymes after specific Psp infection were
identified; however, they were not present after single Bc
inoculation. Subsequent Bc infection resulted only in
changes of H2O2 and SOD that occurred to be especially
important during plant–pathogen interaction. Cultivar Korona
of common bean is considered to be resistant to Psp and mobilises its system upon infection with these bacteria.
We put forward a hypothesis that the extent of defence
reaction was so great that subsequent infection did not
trigger significant additional response
A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems: Computational Creativity Evaluation Based on What it is to be Creative
Computational creativity is a flourishing research area, with a variety of creative systems being produced and developed. Creativity evaluation has not kept pace with system development with an evident lack of systematic evaluation of the creativity of these systems in the literature. This is partially due to difficulties in defining what it means for a computer to be creative; indeed, there is no consensus on this for human creativity, let alone its computational equivalent. This paper proposes a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS). SPECS is a three-step process: stating what it means for a particular computational system to be creative, deriving and performing tests based on these statements. To assist this process, the paper offers a collection of key components of creativity, identified empirically from discussions of human and computational creativity. Using this approach, the SPECS methodology is demonstrated through a comparative case study evaluating computational creativity systems that improvise music
Konstruktivistische Ansätze in der Erwachsenenbildung und Weiterbildung
Theoretical approaches in the field of further education and advanced vocational training have to face multifaceted demands: the analysis of knowledge aquisition and knowledge transfer and its instructional support as well as the revealment of the mechanisms which influence further education on an organisational level in companies. This article describes, that herefore especially moderate constructivistic approaches are useful. After an introduction to the philosophical tradition of these approaches and important characteristics of adult learning, two examples of constructivistic models are being described particularly: The theory of situated learning environments and career counseling. Concluding it is shown, that a moderate constructive perspective fulfils important criteria for the theoretic modelling of further education processes.Theoretische Ansätze in der Erwachsenen- und insbesondere in der beruflichen Weiterbildung müssen sich vielfältigen Ansprüchen stellen: der Analyse des Wissenserwerbs und Wissenstransfers und seiner instruktionalen Unterstützung ebenso wie der Aufdeckung der Mechanismen, die in den Betrieben auf organisatorischer Ebene die Weiterbildung beeinflussen. In diesem Beitrag wird die Auffassung vertreten, daß dafür insbesondere liberalisierte konstruktivistische Ansätze gut geeignet sind. Nach einer Einführung in die philosophische Tradition dieser Ansätze und wichtiger Merkmale des Lernens im Erwachsenenalter werden zwei Beispiele konstruktivistischer Modelle genauer beschrieben: die Theorie situierter Lernumgebungen und das career counseling. Abschließend wird gezeigt, daß eine liberalisierte konstruktivistische Perspektive wichtige Kriterien für die theoretische Modellierung von Weiterbildungsprozessen erfüllt
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