Cerebrospinal fluid protein and glucose examinations and tuberculosis: Will laboratory safety regulations force a change of practice?

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protein and glucose examinations are usually performed in chemical pathology departments on autoanalysers. Tuberculosis (TB) is a group 3 biological agent under Directive 2000/54/EC of the European Parliament but in the biochemistry laboratory, no extra precautions are taken in its analysis in possible TB cases. The issue of laboratory practice and safety in the biochemical analyses of CSF specimens, when tuberculosis infection is in question is addressed in the context of ambiguity in the implementation of current national and international health and safety regulations. Additional protective measures for laboratory staff during the analysis of CSF TB samples should force a change in current laboratory practice and become a regulatory issue under ISO 15189. Annual Mantoux skin test or an interferon-? release assay for TB should be mandatory for relevant staff. This manuscript addresses the issue of biochemistry laboratory practice and safety in the biochemical analyses of CSF specimens when tuberculosis infection is in question in the context of the ambiguity of statutory health and safety regulations

Effect of Short Term Exercise and High Fat Diet on Skeletal Muscle miR133a

Micro RNAs (miR) are small non-coding RNA that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. miR133a is abundant in cardiac and skeletal muscle. In skeletal muscle, miR133a is best known for its regulatory role in myogenesis and differentiation. Nie (2016) found that muscle miR133a expression increased after acute exercise and with 12w of treadmill exercise training in mice. Knockdown of miR133a in transgenic mice resulted in blunted skeletal muscle mitochondrial biogenesis and function in response to exercise training (Nie, 2016) suggesting a role for miR133a in regulating the normal skeletal muscle metabolic adaptive response to exercise. Among other miR, skeletal muscle miR133a is reported as downregulated in insulin-resistant muscle. Insulin resistance in mice fed a high-fat diet is detectable after 3 days on diet (Lee, 2011). In this study, voluntary, rather than forced, exercise was employed to test whether miR133a expression is regulated early in the adoption of increased daily physical activity

Reference priors for high energy physics

Bayesian inferences in high energy physics often use uniform prior distributions for parameters about which little or no information is available before data are collected. The resulting posterior distributions are therefore sensitive to the choice of parametrization for the problem and may even be improper if this choice is not carefully considered. Here we describe an extensively tested methodology, known as reference analysis, which allows one to construct parametrization-invariant priors that embody the notion of minimal informativeness in a mathematically well-defined sense. We apply this methodology to general cross section measurements and show that it yields sensible results. A recent measurement of the single top quark cross section illustrates the relevant techniques in a realistic situation

Towards an understanding of game software development processes: a case study

This paper aims to fill the gap that exists about software development processes in game development in the research literature, and address the gap in the research literature by investigating and reporting information about the software development processes used in game development. To investigate the role of the software development process in relation to the game development process, and to better understand the processes and practices used in game software development, a single industrial based case study was undertaken and reported to investigate in a real world context the software development processes and practices used in game development. This research contributes to our knowledge of the field of game development and potentially forms the foundation for further research in the area

High-Precision Measurement of the 19Ne Half-Life and Implications for Right-Handed Weak Currents

We report a precise determination of the 19Ne half-life to be $T_{1/2} = 17.262 \pm 0.007$ s. This result disagrees with the most recent precision measurements and is important for placing bounds on predicted right-handed interactions that are absent in the current Standard Model. We are able to identify and disentangle two competing systematic effects that influence the accuracy of such measurements. Our findings prompt a reassessment of results from previous high-precision lifetime measurements that used similar equipment and methods.Comment: 5 pages and 5 figures. Paper accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Iterative graph cuts for image segmentation with a nonlinear statistical shape prior

Shape-based regularization has proven to be a useful method for delineating objects within noisy images where one has prior knowledge of the shape of the targeted object. When a collection of possible shapes is available, the specification of a shape prior using kernel density estimation is a natural technique. Unfortunately, energy functionals arising from kernel density estimation are of a form that makes them impossible to directly minimize using efficient optimization algorithms such as graph cuts. Our main contribution is to show how one may recast the energy functional into a form that is minimizable iteratively and efficiently using graph cuts.Comment: Revision submitted to JMIV (02/24/13

Bringing positional processes back in: occupational gender segregation in ‘non-academic’ work

This article highlights that organisations mask a 'gendered substructure' and a 'positional substructure', and reinforces the importance of (re)incorporating the effects of positional processes as an analytical concern in current analysis of occupational segregation. Drawing on the concept of 'inequality regimes', we use the case of 'non-academic' workers in Scottish higher education institutions as the context in which to explore how gendered and positional processes may be perpetuating occupational gender segregation ─ focusing on finance, registry, security and cleaning staff. Our findings show how embedded gendered and positional processes are reinforcing occupational gender segregation in many areas of non-academic work. We reveal that some gendered processes are position-sensitive and that stereotyped language use and related biases impact the progression and treatment of workers at the 'bottom' ─ and the compounding effects on women. We show that positions within organisational opportunity structures cannot merely be read off grading hierarchies and argue that any analysis of positional substructures necessitates uncovering the potential existence of multiple organisational hierarchies and other forms of positional advantage/disadvantage, whilst recognising that positional substructures are not static

Uses of strength-based interventions for people with serious mental illness: a critical review

Background: For the past 3 decades, mental health practitioners have increasingly adopted aspects and tools of strength-based approaches. Providing strength-based intervention and amplifying strengths relies heavily on effective interpersonal processes. Aim: This article is a critical review of research regarding the use of strength-based approaches in mental health service settings. The aim is to discuss strength-based interventions within broader research on recovery, focussing on effectiveness and advances in practice where applicable. Method: A systematic search for peer-reviewed intervention studies published between 2001 and December 2014 yielded 55 articles of potential relevance to the review. Results: Seven studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. The Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies was used to appraise the quality of the studies. Our review found emerging evidence that the utilisation of a strength-based approach improves outcomes including hospitalisation rates, employment/educational attainment, and intrapersonal outcomes such as self-efficacy and sense of hope. Conclusion: Recent studies confirm the feasibility of implementing a high-fidelity strength-based approach in clinical settings and its relevance for practitioners in health care. More high-quality studies are needed to further examine the effectiveness of strength-based approaches

Statistical methods in cosmology

The advent of large data-set in cosmology has meant that in the past 10 or 20 years our knowledge and understanding of the Universe has changed not only quantitatively but also, and most importantly, qualitatively. Cosmologists rely on data where a host of useful information is enclosed, but is encoded in a non-trivial way. The challenges in extracting this information must be overcome to make the most of a large experimental effort. Even after having converged to a standard cosmological model (the LCDM model) we should keep in mind that this model is described by 10 or more physical parameters and if we want to study deviations from it, the number of parameters is even larger. Dealing with such a high dimensional parameter space and finding parameters constraints is a challenge on itself. Cosmologists want to be able to compare and combine different data sets both for testing for possible disagreements (which could indicate new physics) and for improving parameter determinations. Finally, cosmologists in many cases want to find out, before actually doing the experiment, how much one would be able to learn from it. For all these reasons, sophisiticated statistical techniques are being employed in cosmology, and it has become crucial to know some statistical background to understand recent literature in the field. I will introduce some statistical tools that any cosmologist should know about in order to be able to understand recently published results from the analysis of cosmological data sets. I will not present a complete and rigorous introduction to statistics as there are several good books which are reported in the references. The reader should refer to those.Comment: 31, pages, 6 figures, notes from 2nd Trans-Regio Winter school in Passo del Tonale. To appear in Lectures Notes in Physics, "Lectures on cosmology: Accelerated expansion of the universe" Feb 201

Participatory budgeting, community engagement and impact on public services in Scotland

The institutional engagement and analysis needed to effectively integrate the requirements of equality legislation into participatory budgeting (PB) processes requires a transformational approach. Equality processes appear to exist in parallel with PB activity, rather than being operationalized as integral to the objectives and character of PB activity at local level. This paper proposes that PB and the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in the Equality Act 2010 share a transformative intent and potential, but that this is undermined by siloed thinking on equalities and enduring discriminatory behaviour and practices. The paper concludes with propositions for aligning the conceptual links between equality and community empowerment and, thereby, participation in local financial decision-making in practice