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Sexual well-being and diurnal cortisol after prostate cancer treatment.
Sexual dysfunction and psychological distress are common after prostate cancer. Research has not examined the role of neuroendocrine markers of stress (e.g. cortisol). This study examines whether sexual functioning or sexual bother is associated with diurnal cortisol. Men treated for prostate cancer completed the University of California-Los Angeles Prostate Cancer Index and provided saliva samples four times daily for cortisol assessment. Higher sexual bother, but not sexual functioning, was associated with steeper cortisol slope. Better sexual functioning, and not sexual bother, was significantly associated with the cortisol awakening response. Assessment of stress and stress-reducing interventions might be warranted in sexual rehabilitation after prostate cancer
3D-XY critical fluctuations of the thermal expansivity in detwinned YBa2Cu3O7-d single crystals near optimal doping
The strong coupling of superconductivity to the orthorhombic distortion in
YBa2Cu3O7-d makes possible an analysis of the superconducting fluctuations
without the necessity of subtracting any background. The present
high-resolution capacitance dilatometry data unambiguously demonstrate the
existence of critical, instead of Gaussian, fluctuations over a wide
temperature region (+/- 10 K) around Tc. The values of the amplitude ratio
A+/A-=0.9-1.1 and the leading scaling exponent |alpha|<0.018, determined via a
least-squares fit of the data, are consistent with the 3D-XY universality
class. Small deviations from pure 3D-XY behavior are discussed.Comment: 11 pages including three figure
Endomyocardial Biopsy of Right Atrial Angiosarcoma Guided by Intracardiac Echocardiography
We report a case of a 22-year-old female who presented with pericardial effusion and cardiac tamponade. She was diagnosed with a right atrial mass by computed tomography and was referred to our institution for biopsy of this mass. Transcatheter biopsy was performed with intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) guidance, avoiding the need for transesophageal echocardiography or surgery to obtain the biopsy. ICE for transcatheter biopsy of an intracardiac mass is an attractive modality which provides precise localization of the cardiac structures
Financial Information Mediation: A Case Study of Standards Integration for Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment Using the COIN Mediation Technology
Each player in the financial industry, each bank, stock exchange, government agency, or insurance company operates its own financial information system or systems.
By its very nature, financial information, like the money that it represents, changes hands. Therefore the interoperation of financial information systems is the cornerstone of the financial services they support. E-services frameworks such as web services are an unprecedented opportunity for the flexible interoperation of financial systems. Naturally the critical economic role and the complexity of financial information led to the development of various standards. Yet standards alone are not the panacea: different groups of players use different standards or different interpretations of the same standard.
We believe that the solution lies in the convergence of flexible E-services such as web-services and semantically rich meta-data as promised by the semantic Web; then a mediation architecture can be used for the documentation, identification, and resolution of semantic conflicts arising from the interoperation of heterogeneous financial services.
In this paper we illustrate the nature of the problem in the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) industry and the viability of the solution we propose. We describe and analyze the integration of services using four different formats: the IFX, OFX and SWIFT standards, and an example proprietary format. To accomplish this integration we use the COntext INterchange (COIN) framework. The COIN architecture leverages a model of sources and receiversâ contexts in reference to a rich domain model or ontology for the description and resolution of semantic heterogeneity.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA
Radiative acceleration and transient, radiation-induced electric fields
The radiative acceleration of particles and the electrostatic potential
fields that arise in low density plasmas hit by radiation produced by a
transient, compact source are investigated. We calculate the dynamical
evolution and asymptotic energy of the charged particles accelerated by the
photons and the radiation-induced electric double layer in the full
relativistic, Klein-Nishina regime. For fluxes in excess of , the radiative force on a diluted plasma
(n\la 10^{11} cm) is so strong that electrons are accelerated rapidly
to relativistic speeds while ions lag behind owing to their larger inertia. The
ions are later effectively accelerated by the strong radiation-induced double
layer electric field up to Lorentz factors , attainable in the
case of negligible Compton drag. The asymptotic energies achieved by both ions
and electrons are larger by a factor 2--4 with respect to what one could
naively expect assuming that the electron-ion assembly is a rigidly coupled
system. The regime we investigate may be relevant within the framework of giant
flares from soft gamma-repeaters.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, ApJ, in press (tentatively scheduled for the v.
592, 2003 issue
An ellipsoidal mirror for focusing neutral atomic and molecular beams
Manipulation of atomic and molecular beams is essential to atom optics applications including atom lasers, atom lithography, atom interferometry and neutral atom microscopy. The manipulation of charge-neutral beams of limited polarizability, spin or excitation states remains problematic, but may be overcome by the development of novel diffractive or reflective optical elements. In this paper, we present the first experimental demonstration of atom focusing using an ellipsoidal mirror. The ellipsoidal mirror enables stigmatic off-axis focusing for the first time and we demonstrate focusing of a beam of neutral, ground-state helium atoms down to an approximately circular spot, (26.8±0.5) ÎŒmĂ(31.4±0.8) ÎŒm in size. The spot area is two orders of magnitude smaller than previous reflective focusing of atomic beams and is a critical milestone towards the construction of a high-intensity scanning helium microscope
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