552 research outputs found
Managing Access to Biobanks:How Can We Reconcile Privacy and Public Interests in Genetic Research?
This article is concerned with the ultimate objectives of genetic biobanks set up to promote the public interest—being the sharing of samples and data for medical research—and the consequences for personal privacy of realising them. Our aim is to chart the values, interests and principles in play, to consider the challenges of realizing biobanking objectives on a global scale, and to propose viable ways forward that ensure, as far as possible, that access provisions remain fit for purpose throughout the entire life of a biobank, while adequately protecting the privacy interests at stake. It is argued that key features in any robust access model must include mechanisms to (a) maintain participant trust in management of the resource and to measure and respond to participants’ expectations, (b) facilitate and promote the sharing of benefits, and (c) respond timeously and effectively to new challenges
Ceftriaxone or HIV associated angio-oedema? Case report
Angio-oedema may be hereditary or acquired and is characterised by episodes of potentially life threatening localised tissue oedema and swelling resulting from deficiency of compliment pathway C1 esterase inhibitor. Acquired angio-oedema is about ten times less frequent than the hereditary type and has been associated with immune-deficiency disorders, malignancies and exposure to specific medications and food substances. We present a case of seven year old, human immune-deficiency virus positive girl, who developed gross swelling of the tongue and neck while on treatment for pneumococcal meningitis with ceftriaxone. Difficulties in arriving at a definitive diagnosis of angio-oedema in a resource poor country are discussed and alternative diagnostic options proposed
Combining gravity with the forces of the standard model on a cosmological scale
We prove the existence of a spectral resolution of the Wheeler-DeWitt
equation when the underlying spacetime is a Friedman universe with flat spatial
slices and where the matter fields are comprised of the strong interaction,
with \SU(3) replaced by a general \SU(n), , and the electro-weak
interaction. The wave functions are maps from to a subspace of the
antisymmetric Fock space, and one noteworthy result is that, whenever the
electro-weak interaction is involved, the image of an eigenfunction is in
general not one dimensional, i.e., in general it makes no sense specifying a
fermion and looking for an eigenfunction the range of which is contained in the
one dimensional vector space spanned by the fermion.Comment: 53 pages, v6: some typos correcte
On the Cosmology of Massive Vector Fields with SO(3) Global Symmetry
A relevant reference ([14]) has been added.Comment: 19 pages, plain tex, DF/IST-3/92 and DFFCUL 03-5/199
Grain Yield of Rice, Corn, and Sorghum to Low External Input Agriculture Practices in Maliana, Bobonaro, Timor Leste
A farmers’ field yield trial during the 2018 dry season was conducted in Maliana, Bobonaro District, Timor Leste to evaluate the compatibility of selected hybrid and inbred varieties of rice, maize, and sorghum to low external input crop management practices common to subsistence farmers in the region. In rice, grain yield performance as influenced by genotype (hybrid or inbred) and planting density (single or double row spacing) was assessed by measuring grain yield and selected agronomic traits. In rice, grain yield was not significantly different, between hybrid and inbred varieties, but higher planting densities gave 17-27% advantage for hybrids and 36-45% for inbred varieties. The observed yield from farmers’ field was, however, 60-70% lower than yield obtained from experimental fields. Agronomic traits (plant height, tiller, panicle, and spikelet counts) were found to have very strong genotype x planting density interaction effects, and although post-hoc analyses revealed marginal differences on selected yield-related components between the two planting densities, these differences were not statistically significant, and did not contribute to improvement in rice grain yield. Hybrid and inbred varieties of maize and sorghum showed comparable yield levels in two independent yield trials, and although agronomic traits showed significant differences between varieties, these did not account for any yield advantage.
Correlation Effects in Nuclear Transparency
The Glauber approximation is used to calculate the contribution of nucleon
correlations in high-energy reactions. When the excitation energy of
the residual nucleus is small, the increase of the nuclear transparency due to
correlations between the struck nucleon and the other nucleons is mostly
compensated by a decrease of the transparency due to the correlations between
non detected nucleons. We derive Glauber model predictions for nuclear
transparency for the differential cross section when nuclear shell level
excitations are measured. The role of correlations in color transparency is
briefly discussed.Comment: 24 pages revtex, 4 uuencoded PostScript Figures as separate fil
String Theory and Cosmology
We discuss the main cosmological implications of considering string-loop
effects and a potential for the dilaton in the lowest order string effective
action. Our framework is based on the effective model arising from regarding
homogeneous and isotropic dilaton, metric and Yang-Mills field configurations.
The issues of inflation, entropy crisis and the Polonyi problem as well as the
problem of the cosmological constant are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, plain Tex, no figure
Practitioners’ understanding of barriers to accessing specialist support by family carers of people with dementia in distress
Distressing symptoms in dementia are hard to manage for many family carers. This article explores practitioners' perceptions of the barriers to accessing skilled behaviour management support encountered by carers. A survey of cases referred to the English National Health Service (n = 5,360) was followed by in-depth group discussions and practitioner interviews. Data revealed that practitioners focused on care home residents or older people with mental health problems other than dementia, rather than community-dwelling people with dementia and families. Barriers to access included misperceptions about the nature of distressing behaviour affecting carers and structural limitations in the capacity of specialist services to respond to carers
Dust-filled axially symmetric universes with a cosmological constant
Following the recent recognition of a positive value for the vacuum energy
density and the realization that a simple Kantowski-Sachs model might fit the
classical tests of cosmology, we study the qualitative behavior of three
anisotropic and homogeneous models: Kantowski-Sachs, Bianchi type-I and Bianchi
type-III universes, with dust and a cosmological constant, in order to find out
which are physically permitted. We find that these models undergo
isotropization up to the point that the observations will not be able to
distinguish between them and the standard model, except for the Kantowski-Sachs
model
with smaller than some critical value
. Even if one imposes that the Universe should be nearly
isotropic since the last scattering epoch (), meaning that the
Universe should have approximately the same Hubble parameter in all directions
(considering the COBE 4-Year data), there is still a large range for the matter
density parameter compatible with Kantowsky-Sachs and Bianchi type-III if
, for a very small . The
Bianchi type-I model becomes exactly isotropic owing to our restrictions and we
have in this case. Of course, all these models
approach locally an exponential expanding state provided the cosmological
constant .Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Published in Physical Review D 1
Photoproduction of Pseudoscalar Mesons off Nuclei at Forward Angles
With the advent of new photon tagging facilities and novel experimental
technologies it has become possible to perform photoproduction cross section
measurements of pseudoscalar mesons on nuclei with a percent level accuracy.
The extraction of the radiative decay widths from these measurements at forward
angles is done by the Primakoff method, which requires theoretical treatment of
all processes participating in these reactions at the same percent level. In
this work we review the theoretical approach to meson photoproduction
amplitudes in the electromagnetic and strong fields of nuclei at forward
direction. The most updated description of these processes are presented based
on the Glauber theory of multiple scattering. In particular, the effects of
final state interactions, corrections for light nuclei, and photon shadowing in
nuclei are discussed.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure
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