Saturated duration of rectangular pressure pulse applied to rectangular plates with finite-deflections

The inequities in health care and housing access experienced by low-income women in the United States are a continuing concern. This article addresses the interrelationships between housing and health as experienced by low-income clients so that health care practitioners can begin to build active and effective health-promoting partnerships with clients, their families, and their communities. A case study is presented that describes the actual experience of a woman living in a low-income housing development and its effect on her health and access to health care. The importance of the role of midwives in addressing the health care and advocacy needs of women in substandard housing is highlighted.</span

Myanmar: The Key Link between South Asia and Southeast Asia

This paper examines the road and railway links in Myanmar connecting northeast India on the one side with the rest of Southeast Asia on the other. It also discusses the importance of new deep-sea ports in creating alternative shipping routes, essential for Myanmar's international links. It also reviews the country's external trade patterns, and analyzes issues related to trade facilitation, exchange rate policy, financial sector reform, and private sector development. The extent to which these gaps can be addressed will depend on the costs and benefits. South Asia-Southeast Asia connectivity can only be accomplished if Myanmar improves the hard and soft infrastructure aspects of connectivity

Trans-ethnic Meta-analysis and Functional Annotation Illuminates the Genetic Architecture of Fasting Glucose and Insulin

Knowledge of the genetic basis of the type 2 diabetes (T2D)-related quantitative traits fasting glucose (FG) and insulin (FI) in African ancestry (AA) individuals has been limited. In non-diabetic subjects of AA (n = 20,209) and European ancestry (EA; n = 57,292), we performed trans-ethnic (AA+EA) fine-mapping of 54 established EA FG or FI loci with detailed functional annotation, assessed their relevance in AA individuals, and sought previously undescribed loci through trans-ethnic (AA+EA) meta-analysis. We narrowed credible sets of variants driving association signals for 22/54 EA-associated loci; 18/22 credible sets overlapped with active islet-specific enhancers or transcription factor (TF) binding sites, and 21/22 contained at least one TF motif. Of the 54 EA-associated loci, 23 were shared between EA and AA. Replication with an additional 10,096 AA individuals identified two previously undescribed FI loci, chrX FAM133A (rs213676) and chr5 PELO (rs6450057). Trans-ethnic analyses with regulatory annotation illuminate the genetic architecture of glycemic traits and suggest gene regulation as a target to advance precision medicine for T2D. Our approach to utilize state-of-the-art functional annotation and implement trans-ethnic association analysis for discovery and fine-mapping offers a framework for further follow-up and characterization of GWAS signals of complex trait loc

Foundation under Grants ECS-0323685 and DMI-0423607.

Abstract When applied to large-scale separable optimization problems, the recently developed surrogate subgradient method for Lagrangian relaxation (Zhao et al.: J. Optim. Theory Appl. 100, 699–712, 1999) does not need to solve optimally all the subproblems to update the multipliers, as the traditional subgradient method requires. Based on it, the penalty surrogate subgradient algorithm was further developed to address the homogenous solution issue (Guan et al.: J. Optim. Theory Appl. 113, 65–82, 2002; Zhai et al.: IEEE Trans. Power Syst. 17, 1250–1257, 2002). There were flaws in the proofs of Zhao et al., Guan et al., and Zhai et al.: for problems with inequality constraints, projection is necessary to keep the multipliers nonnegative; however, the effects of projection were not properly considered. This note corrects the flaw, completes the proofs, and asserts the correctness of the methods

On the similarity methods in fracture mechanics

This paper presents a brief review about the application of similarity methods to fracture mechanics. This includes some dimensionless numbers and some scaling laws in fracture mechanics, discrete scale invariance (DSI) and log-periodic corrections to scaling, the analogy between multiple fracture of solids and fully developed turbulence, and the property of self-organized criticality of some fracture process. An example is given to show the application of similarity method for the solution of a stationary semi-infinite mode III crack subjected to step dynamic loading. As a self-similar problem, the governing equation can be reduced to Riemann's equation by a simple similarity transformation, and Riemann's equation can be reduced to Gauss' hypergeometric equation by a certain transformation, thus this problem is solved by using the hypergeometric series