Where to find facial artery perforators: a reference point

Reconstructive surgery of the midface using facial artery perforator (FAP) flaps is being used more frequently now as it has been reported to provide better aesthetic results and reduce a traditional two-stage procedure to a one-stage technique. Wide acceptance of this approach is limited by poor understanding of the anatomy associated with this technique however. This was investigated through a cadaveric study. The facial artery (FA) of 16 cadaveric half faces were each identified, cannulated with coloured latex, and then dissected to give an accurate and quantified description of FA perforating branches. A lateral view picture of each specimen was taken and analysed using ImageJ 1.42q. Cadaveric dissections showed that each hemiface could be regarded as a single entity. Means: FA length = 116±22 mm, FA diameter = 2.62±0.74mm, number of FAPs = 4±2, FAP length = 14.12±3.46 mm, FAP diameter = 0.94±0.29 mm. A reference point, A, where FAPs were consistently found to originate was also identified. Therefore, the FAP flap is a viable and valuable addition to plastic reconstructive techniques. The localisation of point A with precise measurements can facilitate the design and use of such FAP flaps for the reconstruction of nasal, as well as perinasal and perioral defects

Chinese Social Media as Laboratory: What We Can Learn about China from Research into Sina Weibo

Like all nations, China has been profoundly affected by the emergence of the Internet, particularly new forms of social media—that is, media that relies less on mainstream sources to broadcast news and instead relies directly on individuals themselves to share information. I use mixed methods to examine how three different but intertwined groups—companies, the government, and Chinese Internet users themselves (so-called “netizens”)—have confronted social media in China. In chapter one, I outline how and why China’s most important social media company, Sina Weibo, censors its website. In addition, I describe my research into blocked search terms on Sina Weibo, and explain why particular keywords are sensitive. In chapter two, I take a quantitative approach informed by political science methodology to examine how the names of Chinese politicians were handled by Sina Weibo during a major political event: the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. In response to research by Gary King which finds that online criticism of the government in China is allowed so long as it does not involve topics related to collective action, my study concludes that Sina Weibo actively filtered the search results of Communist Party delegates, particularly higher-ranked politicians and incumbents, during the observation period, often regardless of whether or not the individuals were controversial figures or linked to issues of collective action. In chapter three, I focus specifically on the end user, the microbloggers of Sina Weibo. Relying on communications and media studies research as well as content analysis, I report on the contentious comments netizens made in response to a post by the Japanese celebrity and porn star Sora Aoi—specifically ethnic slurs and nationalist rhetoric—during the Diaoyu Islands dispute between China and Japan in September 2012. These three components will allow readers to understand the power of social media in China—both contained within users and employed by authorities

Asymptotically efficient product-limit estimators with censoring indicators missing at random

In this paper, we develop methods for estimating a survival function with censoring indicators missing at random. The resulting methods lead to the use of imputation and inverse probability weighting. We give several asymptotically efficient PL estimators. All the estimators are proved to be strongly uniformly consistent and weakly convergent to a Gaussian process. Further, it is shown that these estimators are asymptotically efficient. A simulation study was carried out to evaluate the finite sample performances of the proposed estimators and compare the proposed estimators with van der Laan and McKeague's (1998) estimator under missing at random (MAR) and missing completely at random (MCAR) assumptions, respectively.published_or_final_versio

Electro-osmotic flow through a thin channel with gradually varying wall potential and hydrodynamic slippage

The lubrication approximation is applied to electro-osmotic flow through a thin parallel-plate channel under the combined effect of charge and hydrodynamic slippage modulation on the walls. The walls are periodically patterned for the charge and slip distributions, with a wavelength much longer than the channel height. It is shown that the phase of the wall patterns will play a significant role in determining the section-averaged velocity as well as the local convection pattern, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The effect of the phase on the flow will be dramatically different, depending on whether the electric field is applied along or perpendicular to the varying direction of the patterns. The possibility of generating a net flow in a direction perpendicular to the applied field is demonstrated. © 2012 The Japan Society of Fluid Mechanics and IOP Publishing Ltd.postprin