The role of a community pharmacist in diabetes education

A pharmacist is one of few medical professionals in the world to whom a patient or anyone else can go for a consultation or advice without an appointment. They are easily accessed and knowledgeable about a myriad of aspects concerning patients and their medication. It is thus of the utmost importance to take these skills into consideration when it comes to diabetic education. Pharmacists have long-term relationships with most of their chronic patients, which sets a good foundation for mutual trust and respect and better patient compliance

Chemically driven switches for online detection of pH changes in microfluidic devices

The internal walls of microfabricated fluidic channels were functionalized with a selfassembled monolayer of Rhodamine B lactam. This molecule has the capability to interconvert between its open fluorescent amide form and the closed non-fluorescent lactam form upon changes of the pH conditions. The interconversion (switch) between the two reversible forms is achieved by addition of an acid or a base and is consistent with a reaction mechanism of the first order. This paper describes the online observation of such fluorescent switch covalently anchored to the channel and proposes this method as a possible sensor for the monitoring of pH changes in microreactors

Stochastic Domination in Space-Time for the Contact Process

Liggett and Steif (2006) proved that, for the supercritical contact process \non certain graphs, the upper invariant measure stochastically dominates an \ni.i.d.\\ Bernoulli product measure. In particular, they proved this for \n$\\mathbb{Z}^d$ and (for infection rate sufficiently large) $d$-ary homogeneous \ntrees $T_d$. \n In this paper we prove some space-time versions of their results. We do this \nby combining their methods with specific properties of the contact process and \ngeneral correlation inequalities. \n One of our main results concerns the contact process on $T_d$ with $d\\geq2$. \nWe show that, for large infection rate, there exists a subset $\\Delta$ of the \nvertices of $T_d$, containing a "positive fraction" of all the vertices of \n$T_d$, such that the following holds: The contact process on $T_d$ observed on \n$\\Delta$ stochastically dominates an independent spin-flip process. (This is \nknown to be false for the contact process on graphs having subexponential \ngrowth.) \n We further prove that the supercritical contact process on $\\mathbb{Z}^d$ \nobserved on certain $d$-dimensional space-time slabs stochastically dominates \nan i.i.d.\\ Bernoulli product measure, from which we conclude strong mixing \nproperties important in the study of certain random walks in random \nenvironment

Intercorrelation study of dietary and biochemical data from schoolchildren in the Pretoria area

No Abstrac

Welfare spending and quality of growth in developing countries: A note on evidence from Hopefuls, Contenders and Best Performers

The transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shifted the policy debate from growth to ‘quality of growth’ (QG). We explore a new dataset on QG by the IMF and classify 93 developing countries for the period 1990–2011 in terms of Hopefuls, Contenders and Best Performers. The aims are as follows: (i) to depict the contradiction between high-growth and poor social welfare and (ii) to assess the influence of education and health spending on the QG. We use quantile regressions to articulate least and best QG performers. Two key findings emerge. First, 31 of the 33 countries in the Hopefuls category are in SSA. Second, the effect of health is decreasingly positive from Hopefuls to Best Performers, while the impact of education is increasingly positive. As a main policy implication, it would benefit countries in SSA to invest more in health relative to education now, but decrease such health expenditure and increase education spending as the economies in the sub-region make the transition from Hopeful to Contenders and finally to Best Performers in terms of ‘quality of growth

On the minimization of Dirichlet eigenvalues of the Laplace operator

We study the variational problem \inf \{\lambda_k(\Omega): \Omega\ \textup{open in}\ \R^m,\ |\Omega| < \infty, \ \h(\partial \Omega) \le 1 \}, where $\lambda_k(\Omega)$ is the $k$'th eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian acting in $L^2(\Omega)$, \h(\partial \Omega) is the $(m-1)$- dimensional Hausdorff measure of the boundary of $\Omega$, and $|\Omega|$ is the Lebesgue measure of $\Omega$. If $m=2$, and $k=2,3, \cdots$, then there exists a convex minimiser $\Omega_{2,k}$. If $m \ge 2$, and if $\Omega_{m,k}$ is a minimiser, then $\Omega_{m,k}^*:= \textup{int}(\overline{\Omega_{m,k}})$ is also a minimiser, and $\R^m\setminus \Omega_{m,k}^*$ is connected. Upper bounds are obtained for the number of components of $\Omega_{m,k}$. It is shown that if $m\ge 3$, and $k\le m+1$ then $\Omega_{m,k}$ has at most $4$ components. Furthermore $\Omega_{m,k}$ is connected in the following cases : (i) $m\ge 2, k=2,$ (ii) $m=3,4,5,$ and $k=3,4,$ (iii) $m=4,5,$ and $k=5,$ (iv) $m=5$ and $k=6$. Finally, upper bounds on the number of components are obtained for minimisers for other constraints such as the Lebesgue measure and the torsional rigidity.Comment: 16 page

Intersecting Brane Worlds at One Loop

We develop techniques for one-loop diagrams on intersecting branes. The one-loop propagator of chiral intersection states on D6 branes is calculated exactly and its finiteness is shown to be guaranteed by RR tadpole cancellation. The result is used to demonstrate the expected softening of power law running of Yukawa couplings at the string scale. We also develop methods to calculate arbitrary N-point functions at one-loop, including those without gauge bosons in the loop. These techniques are also applicable to heterotic orbifold models.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures; added reference, corrected typos, JHEP styl

An exploration of ebook selection behavior in academic library collections

Academic libraries have offered ebooks for some time, however little is known about how readers interact with them while making relevance decisions. In this paper we seek to address that gap by analyzing ebook transaction logs for books in a university library

Hydrodynamic flow of expanding Bose-Einstein condensates

We study expansion of quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) after switching off the confining harmonic potential. Exact solution of dynamical equations is obtained in framework of the hydrodynamic approximation and it is compared with the direct numerical simulation of the full problem showing excellent agreement at realistic values of physical parameters. We analyze the maximum of the current density and estimate the velocity of expansion. The results of the 1D analysis provides also qualitative understanding of some properties of BEC expansion observed in experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX4. To appear in Physical Review