Association between Work-Related Hyperthermia Emergency Department Visits and Ambient Heat in Five Southeastern States, 2010-2012--A Case-Crossover Study

The objective of this study is to assess ambient temperatures\u27 and extreme heat events\u27 contribution to work-related emergency department (ED) visits for hyperthermia in the southeastern United States to inform prevention. Through a collaborative network and established data framework, work-related ED hyperthermia visits in five participating southeastern U.S. states were analyzed using a time stratified case-crossover design. For exposure metrics, day- and location-specific measures of ambient temperatures and county-specific identification of extreme heat events were used. From 2010 to 2012, 5,017 work-related hyperthermia ED visits were seen; 2,298 (~46%) of these visits occurred on days when the daily maximum heat index was at temperatures the Occupational Safety and Health Administration designates as having lower or moderate heat risk. A 14% increase in risk of ED visit was seen for a 1°F increase in average daily mean temperature, modeled as linear predictor across all temperatures. A 54% increase in risk was seen for work-related hyperthermia ED visits during extreme heat events (two or more consecutive days of unusually high temperatures) when controlling for average daily mean temperature. Despite ambient heat being a well-known risk to workers\u27 health, this study\u27s findings indicate ambient heat contributed to work-related ED hyperthermia visits in these five states. Used alone, existing OSHA heat-risk levels for ambient temperatures did not appear to successfully communicate workers\u27 risk for hyperthermia in this study. Findings should inform future heat-alert communications and policies, heat prevention efforts, and heat-illness prevention research for workers in the southeastern United States

Intergenerational transmission of literacy skills among Filipino families

We examined the joint role of parental word reading skills and conventional home literacy environment measures among 320 Filipino low- to- middle-income families in Cebu City, Philippines with children aged 5 to 8 years old. A ranking of parent-reported ratings of their frequency of engaging in home literacy activities and adult literacy practices revealed that book-related behaviors were less frequently practiced in this sample, and mean ratings on the home literacy resources scale suggested a relatively print-poor environment. Nevertheless, scale items about book reading and direct literacy instruction at home correlated with child’s literacy skills. Structural equation modeling showed that parent’s education and frequency of engaging in home literacy activities uniquely accounted for variance in child’s oral and print skills. In a second model, parent’s word reading skills were significantly related to child’s skills, but did not eliminate or attenuate influences from parent’s education and home literacy activities. Results are important in relation to theories on the intergenerational transmission of literacy skills and the generalizability of findings from developed countries to developing country contexts

Sporendocladia bactrospora

A survey to identify ophiostomatoid fungi that infect wounds on native Norwegian and Swedish broadleaved trees was undertaken during summer 2004. A fungus resembling a species of Sporendocladia was commonly isolated from the exposed cambium and inner bark of wounds. Morphological examination and comparisons of DNA sequence data for the ITS and 5.8S regions of the rRNA gene region led to its identification as Sporendocladia bactrospora. Pathogenicity trials on young Populus tremula and Betula pubescens trees showed that S. bactrospora is capable of causing lesions on these trees. There have been few previous reports of S. bactrospora, and in most cases, these have been as saprophytes on wood. In contrast, results of this study show that it is a common inhabitant of freshly made wounds on native broadleaved trees in Scandinavia, and it appears to contribute to staining of wood.Norwegian Research Council (152266/V10)http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1439-0329hb201

Visualization of Chemical Databases Using the Singular Value Decomposition and Truncated-Newton Minimization

We describe a rapid algorithm for visualizing large chemical databases in a low-dimensional space (2D or 3D) as a rst step in chemical database analyses and drug design applications. The compounds in the database are described as vectors in the high-dimensional space of chemical descriptors. The algorithm is based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) combined with a minimization procedure implemented with the e cient truncated-Newton program package (TNPACK). Numerical experiments show that the algorithm achieves an accuracy in 2D for scaled datasets of around 30 to 46%, re ecting the percentage of pairwise distance segments that lie within 10 % of the original distance values. The low percentages can be made close to 100 % with projections onto a ten-dimensional space. The 2D and 3D projections, in particular, can be e ciently generated and easily visualized and analyzed with respect to clustering patterns of the compounds