Long-term safety of unopposed estrogen used by women surviving myocardial infarction : 14 year follow-up of the ESPRIT randomised controlled trial

Peer reviewedPostprin

Drought: Understanding and reducing vulnerability through monitoring and early warning systems. Report of the DrIVER workshop, 17 March 2015.

As part of the Belmont Forum funded international DRIVER research project on linking indicators to impacts to improve drought monitoring and early warning systems (MEWs), a stakeholder workshop was held on 17th March 2015 in Wallingford, UK. The workshop was attended by representatives of various UK organisations with an interest in drought and MEWs and DRIVER researchers from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UK), Open University (UK), University of Freiburg (Germany), National Drought Mitigation Center (USA) and CSIRO (Australia). The aims of the workshop were to introduce participants to the DRIVER project and recent RCUK drought projects; engage with stakeholders’ experiences, understandings and needs in relation to droughts; and identify needs for future MEWs. The design of the workshop was based on a commitment to social learning. It comprised a mix of presentations and interactive sessions using innovative techniques to develop collective insights, enabling participants to learn from others and contribute their experiences and ideas and concerns in relation to drought and MEWs. Themes emerging findings from the workshop were wide-ranging, but point to a range of issues, concerns and suggestions for improving drought management and MEWs centred on: recognition of different types of drought; uncertainties and risks relating to indicators; forecasting; impacts; politics of drought; public communication; role of stakeholders; and resilience strategies. The workshop suggests different ways of thinking and acting are required about drought and MEWs in particular. The discussions and presentations also suggest the complexity of droughts requires a more systemic understanding of drought policy, processes and practices in order to determine the role of MEWs and how these can be improved by linking indicators to impacts. The output of the workshop constitute a key source for informing and shaping ongoing DRIVER research activities and other events convened by RCUK drought research projects

Systems-theoretic Safety Assessment of Robotic Telesurgical Systems

Robotic telesurgical systems are one of the most complex medical cyber-physical systems on the market, and have been used in over 1.75 million procedures during the last decade. Despite significant improvements in design of robotic surgical systems through the years, there have been ongoing occurrences of safety incidents during procedures that negatively impact patients. This paper presents an approach for systems-theoretic safety assessment of robotic telesurgical systems using software-implemented fault-injection. We used a systemstheoretic hazard analysis technique (STPA) to identify the potential safety hazard scenarios and their contributing causes in RAVEN II robot, an open-source robotic surgical platform. We integrated the robot control software with a softwareimplemented fault-injection engine which measures the resilience of the system to the identified safety hazard scenarios by automatically inserting faults into different parts of the robot control software. Representative hazard scenarios from real robotic surgery incidents reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) MAUDE database were used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach for safety-based design of robotic telesurgical systems.Comment: Revise based on reviewers feedback. To appear in the the International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (SAFECOMP) 201

An updated national-scale assessment of trends in UK peak river flow data: how robust are observed increases in flooding?

A cluster of recent floods in the UK has prompted significant interest in the question of whether floods are becoming more frequent or severe over time. Many trend assessments have addressed this in recent decades, typically concluding that there is evidence for positive trends in flood magnitude at the national scale. However, trend testing is a contentious area, and the resilience of such conclusions must be tested rigorously. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of flood magnitude trends using the UK national flood dataset (NRFA Peak Flows). Importantly, we assess trends using this full dataset as well as a subset of near-natural catchments with high-quality flood data to determine how climate-driven trends compare with those from the wider dataset that are subject to a wide range of human disturbances and data limitations. We also examine the sensitivity of reported trends to changes in study time window using a ‘multitemporal’ analysis. We find that the headline claim of increased flooding generally holds up regionally to nationally, although we show a much more complicated picture of spatio-temporal variability. While some reported trends, such as increasing flooding in northern and western Britain, appear to be robust, trends in other regions are more mixed spatially and temporally – for example, trends in recent decades are not necessarily representative of longer-term change, and within regions (e.g. in southeast England) increasing and decreasing trends can be found in close proximity. While headline conclusions are useful for advancing national flood-risk policy, for flood-risk estimation, it is important to unpack these local changes, and the results and methodological toolkit provided here could provide such supporting information to practitioners

Hormonal contraception and HIV acquisition among women : an updated systematic review

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. Disclaimer The findings and conclusions of this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, or other institutions with which the authors are affiliated. Competing interests MIR reports personal fees from Merck (contraceptive implant trainer) and Bayer (IUD trainer), outside the submitted work. TC, JK and PS were members of the ECHO trial consortium, and JK and PS were part of the writing group for the ECHO trial results. All of the authors participated in the 2019 WHO Guideline Development Group (GDG) process which assessed recommendations on contraception for women at high risk of HIV. Patient consent for publication Not required. Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. Contributors KC, PH, TC, PS and JK were coauthors on the previous systematic review and contributed to the planning of this updated review. KC, PH and TC conducted the literature search, screening, and risk of bias assessment. MIR conducted the meta-analysis. KC wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to subsequent drafts and approved of the final manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

CAMELS-GB : a large sample, open-source, hydro-meteorological dataset for Great Britain

Data underpins our knowledge and understanding of the hydrological system; they are used to drive, test and evaluate hydrological models and advance our understanding of hydrological processes and dynamics. With the increasing availability of observational datasets, the integration of information from many catchments for data and modelling analyses is becoming increasingly common. The production of new, open source, datasets for large samples of catchments is vital to advance knowledge on hydrological processes and to ensure hydrological research is reusable and reproducible through the use of common datasets and code. However, the availability of open source, large-sample catchment datasets is notably sparse. In this study, we present CAMELS-GB, the first large sample, open-source, hydro-meteorological catchment dataset for Great Britain (GB). CAMELS-GB integrates a wealth of different datasets derived from national, continental and global products based on observational, satellite and modelled data. The dataset consists of hydro-meteorological timeseries, catchment attributes and catchment boundaries for >800 catchments that cover a wide range of climatic, hydrological, landscape and human management characteristics across GB. Long daily timeseries is provided for a range of hydro-meteorological data (including rainfall, potential-evapotranspiration, temperature, radiation, humidity and flow) from 1970-2015 covering several major hydrological events. A comprehensive set of catchment attributes are provided describing a range of catchment characteristics including topography, climate, hydrology, land cover, soils and (hydro)-geology. Importantly, we also derive human impact attributes (including abstraction returns, percentage urban and gauge distance from reservoir), as well as attributes describing the quality of the flow data (including discharge uncertainty estimates and out of bank flow). The dataset and code used to derive the data will be made open source and provided with comprehensive metadata to allow its use in a wide range of hydro-meteorological data and environmental modelling analyses

An updated systematic review of epidemiological evidence on hormonal contraceptive methods and HIV acquisition in women

We are grateful to Sharon Achilles for her thoughtful input related to describing potential biological mechanisms, and to all study investigators who provided additional information about their analyses. WHO provided support for the writing of this systmatic review and for the writing group to attend a working meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2015. D.J.W. was partially funded by NIH DP2-HD-08-4070. The review was conducted independently of the WHO guidance development process; and conclusions represent the independent opinions of the authors. The findings and conclusions in this article do not necessarily reflect the positions and policies of the donor. Role of authors: The World Health Organization (J.N.K. and P.S.S.) initiated the idea to conduct this systematic review update. C.B.P. led the conduct of the systematic review, including conducting the systematic literature search and drafting the manuscript. C.B.P., K.M.C., and P.C.H. screened titles, abstracts, and full-text manuscripts to determine study inclusion. S.J.P. conducted the statistical meta-analysis. All coauthors (C.B.P., K.M.C., P.C.H., S.J.P., T.C., J.N.K., D.J.W., and P.S.S.) participated in framing the study question, developing the quality criteria, abstracting study information and assessing study quality, interpreting the data, and contributing to the writing and editing of the manuscript. Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official positions of the Guttmacher Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, or other institutions with which the authors are affiliated.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Optogalvanic Spectroscopy of Metastable States in Yb^{+}

The metastable ^{2}F_{7/2} and ^{2}D_{3/2} states of Yb^{+} are of interest for applications in metrology and quantum information and also act as dark states in laser cooling. These metastable states are commonly repumped to the ground state via the 638.6 nm ^{2}F_{7/2} -- ^{1}D[5/2]_{5/2} and 935.2 nm ^{2}D_{3/2} -- ^{3}D[3/2]_{1/2} transitions. We have performed optogalvanic spectroscopy of these transitions in Yb^{+} ions generated in a discharge. We measure the pressure broadening coefficient for the 638.6 nm transition to be 70 \pm 10 MHz mbar^{-1}. We place an upper bound of 375 MHz/nucleon on the 638.6 nm isotope splitting and show that our observations are consistent with theory for the hyperfine splitting. Our measurements of the 935.2 nm transition extend those made by Sugiyama et al, showing well-resolved isotope and hyperfine splitting. We obtain high signal to noise, sufficient for laser stabilisation applications.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Optimization of Starburst99 for Intermediate-Age and Old Stellar Populations

We have incorporated the latest release of the Padova models into the evolutionary synthesis code Starburst99. The Padova tracks were extended to include the full asymptotic giant branch (AGB) evolution until the final thermal pulse over the mass range 0.9 to 5 solar mass. With this addition, Starburst99 accounts for all stellar phases that contribute to the integrated light of a stellar population with arbitrary age from the extreme ultraviolet to the near-infrared. AGB stars are important for ages between 0.1 and 2 Gyr, with their contribution increasing at longer wavelengths. We investigate similarities and differences between the model predictions by the Geneva and the Padova tracks. The differences are particularly pronounced at ages > 1 Gyr, when incompleteness sets in for the Geneva models. We also perform detailed comparisons with the predictions of other major synthesis codes and found excellent agreement. Our synthesized optical colors are compared to observations of old, intermediate-age, and young populations. Excellent agreement is found for the old globular cluster system of NGC 5128 and for old and intermediate-age clusters in NGC 4038/39. In contrast, the models fail for red supergiant dominated populations with sub-solar abundances. This failure can be traced back to incorrect red supergiant parameters in the stellar evolutionary tracks. Our models and the synthesis code are publicly available as version 5.0 of Starburst99 at http://www.stsci.edu/science/starburst99/.Comment: The revised Starburst99 code discussed in this paper will replace the current version 4.0 on our Starburst99 website by December 31, 2004. Accepted for publication in ApJ; 39 pages, 23 figures, 5 table

High Resolution Optical Spectroscopy of the F Supergiant Proto-Planetary Nebula V887 Her=IRAS 18095+2704

An abundance analysis is presented for IRAS 18095+2704 (V887 Her), a post-AGB star and proto-planetary nebula. The analysis is based on high-resolution optical spectra from the McDonald Observatory and the Special Astrophysical Observatory. Standard analysis using a classical Kurucz model atmosphere and the line analysis program MOOG provides the atmospheric parameters: Teff = 6500 K, log g = +0.5, and a microturbulent velocity Vt = 4.7 km/s and [Fe/H] = -0.9. Extraction of these parameters is based on excitation of FeI lines, ionization equilibrium between neutral and ions of Mg, Ca, Ti, Cr, and Fe, and the wings of hydrogen Paschen lines. Elemental abundances are obtained for 22 elements and upper limits for an additional four elements. These results show that the star's atmosphere has not experienced a significant number of C- and s-process enriching thermal pulses. Abundance anomalies as judged relative to the compositions of unevolved and less-evolved normal stars of a similar metallicity include Al, Y, and Zr deficiencies with respect to Fe of about 0.5 dex. Judged by composition, the star resembles a RV Tauri variable that has been mildly affected by dust-gas separation reducing the abundances of the elements of highest condensation temperature. This separation may occur in the stellar wind. There are indications that the standard 1D LTE analysis is not entirely appropriate for IRAS 18095+2704. These include a supersonic macroturbulent velocity of 23 km/s, emission in H-alpha and the failure of predicted profiles to fit observed profiles of H-beta and H-gamma.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA