Electrochemical preparation of peroxodisulfuric acid using boron doped diamond thin film electrodes

We have investigated the electrochemical oxidation of sulfuric acid on boron-doped synthetic diamond electrodes (BDD) obtained by HF CVD on p-Si. The results have shown that high current efficiency for sulfuric acid oxidation to peroxodisulfuric acid can be achieved in concentrated H2SO4 (>2 M) at moderate temperatures (8–10 °C). The main side reaction is oxygen evolution. Small amounts of peroxomonosulfuric acid (Caro's acid) have also been detected. A reaction mechanism involving hydroxyl radicals, HSO4− and undissociated H2SO4 has been proposed. According to this mechanism electrogenerated hydroxyl radicals at the BDD anode react with HSO4− and H2SO4 giving peroxodisulfate

Final report to the Anchorage Police Department

This brief report updates the previous report Descriptive Analysis of Sexual Assaults in Anchorage to document some of the changes in the nature of sexual assault in Anchorage, Alaska from 2000 to 2003. From 2000 to 2003, the rates of reported sexual assaults in Anchorage continue to be significantly higher than national rates; most victims continued to be female, and almost all suspects male; over half of sexual assaults continued to occur in private residences; and the Spenard and Fairview community council areas continued to experience the highest numbers of sexual assaults in the municipality. However, from 2000 to 2003, some key changes in the nature of sexual assaults were observed. The number of forcible rapes and sexual assaults reported showed a steady increase; sexual assault victimizations increased particularly among Natives and Blacks, among persons younger than 15 years old and those aged 45 to 54 years of age; stranger assaults declined while non-stranger assaults increased; and sexual assaults occurring in the Downtown community council area increased by 144 percent. While this update provides a brief overview of some key changes in the nature of sexual assaults in Anchorage, it does provide enough information to assist in changing policy, and the information presented is now two years old. Ideally, a monitoring program would be developed in Anchorage to provide real-time empirical information about sexual assault and forcible rape to assist in efforts to fight these crimes.Acknowledgments / Executive Summary / I. Gravity Of The Problem: How Does Anchorage Compare Now? / II. The Current Study / III. Victim Information / IV. Suspect Information / V. Assault Information / Conclusion / Appendix A: Data Collection Instrument for 2002/2003 Updat

Assessment of surgical risk in colo-rectal cancer patients : POSSUM vs. ACPGBI?

Diversos modelos têm sido desenvolvidos para prever o risco cirúrgico dos doentes submetidos a cirurgia por cancro colo- -rectal (CCR), contudo actualmente ainda não existe nenhum que responda satisfatoriamente a essa necessidade. Material e métodos: Foram analisados os processos de 345 doentes submetidos a tratamento cirúrgico por CCR no Serviço de Cirurgia Geral do Hospital de Braga e calculado o risco cirúrgico previsto pelas escalas Physiological and Operative Severity Score for the enumeration of Mortality and Morbidity (POSSUM), Portsmouth POSSUM (P-POSSUM), ColoRectal POSSUM (CR-POSSUM), Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland (ACPGBI) e ACPGBI modificado. Para todas as escalas de risco foi comparada a mortalidade prevista com a observada e realizada a análise de curva Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). Resultados e conclusão: O estudo incluiu 345 doentes operados por CRC, 219 homens e 126 mulheres com média de idade de 68 anos. Na maioria dos doentes (69,0%) o cancro localizou-se no cólon tendo sido a maioria (86,4%) submetidos a cirurgia de forma electiva. A mortalidade pós-operatória global observada aos 30 dias foi de 3,768%. No nosso estudo, apesar de nenhum dos modelos mostrar ser estatisticamente superior a outro, o modelo ACPGBI foi o que apresentou melhor capacidade discriminativa, o que aliado à maior facilidade de aplicação o torna no modelo escolhido para avaliar o risco cirúrgico, na nossa população.Introduction: Several models have been developed with the purpose of predicting surgical risk of patients submitted to colorectal cancer surgery. However, to date, there isn’t any model that fulfills this purpose in a satisfactory manner. Methods: We consulted the clinical processes of 345 patients, who were submitted to surgical colorectal cancer treatment at the General Surgery department in Hospital de Braga, and calculated surgical risk based on the following risk assessment scales: Physiological and Operative Severity Score for the enumeration of Mortality and Morbidity (POSSUM), Portsmouth POSSUM (P-POSSUM), ColoRectal POSSUM (CR-POSSUM), Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland (ACPGBI) and modified ACPGBI. For all scales, we compared observed and previewed mortality and calculated Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. Results and conclusion: The study included 345 patients submitted to colorectal cancer surgery of which 219 were male and 126 were female, with an average age of 68 years old. Most patients (69,0%) presented with colon cancer and 86,4% were submitted to elective surgery. Post-operatory mortality at 30 days was 3,768%. In the present study, despite no model being statistically better than the other, the ACPGBI model was the one that showed more discriminative properties which, along with easier applicability, makes it the best model for evaluating surgical risk in our population

Inguinal hernia: Anatomy, physiopathology, diagnosis and treatment

A hérnia inguinal é uma das patologias mais frequentes que se coloca ao Cirurgião Geral. Muitas vezes considerada de menor importância, esta acarreta um impacto importante quer pela interferência na qualidade de vida diária do doente quer em termos sociais pelo absentismo laboral. A evolução do conhecimento anatómico e da técnica cirúrgica permitiu ao cirurgião dispor de diversas técnicas, colocando hoje em dia o problema na seleção da melhor técnica cirúrgica para cada doente. Neste artigo, os autores descrevem a anatomia da região inguinal do ponto de vista da abordagem cirúrgica, os fatores predisponentes e desencadeantes do aparecimento da hérnia inguinal, o diagnóstico desta patologia e a evolução da cirurgia; abordando alguns temas de controvérsia atual no tratamento desta patologia.Inguinal hernias are one of the most common pathologies general surgeons have to manage. Despite being frequently considered a minor issue, it has an important impact on the patients‘ quality of life and, socially, by leading to work cessation. The evolution of anatomical knowledge and surgical techniques has allowed for the development of different surgical approaches, raising a problem of selecting the most appropriate technique for each specific patient. In this article, the authors describe the anatomy of the inguinal region from the surgeon's point of view, the causes and predisposing factors for inguinal hernia development, the diagnostic approach and evolution of the surgical technique, bringing to question some controversial aspects concerning the treatment of this pathology

Order Picking in Narrow-Aisle Warehouses: A Fast Approach to Minimize Waiting Times

Mail order companies like Zalando or Amazon reported a significant increase regarding the number of incoming customer orders in recent years. Customers are served from a central distribution center (warehouse) where requested items of the orders have to be retrieved (picked) from their storage locations. The picking process is performed by human operators (order pickers) who are employed on a large scale in order to enable a fast processing of the orders. However, due to limited space, aisles are often very narrow in warehouses, and order pickers cannot pass or overtake each other. Thus, an order picker may have to wait until another picker has performed his/her operations. The arising waiting times may significantly increase the processing times of the orders, implying that a large number of pickers does not guarantee for small processing times. Therefore, in this paper, the impact of several problem parameters on the amount of waiting time is investigated first and situations are identified where the consideration of waiting times is inevitable for an efficient organization of the picking process. In the second part of the paper, a solution approach, namely a truncated branch-and-bound algorithm, is proposed which aims for the minimization of the waiting times. By means of extensive numerical experiments, it is demonstrated that this approach provides high-quality solutions within a very small amount of computing time

Quantum oscillations and upper critical magnetic field of the iron-based superconductor FeSe

Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations and upper critical magnetic field ($H\_{c2}$) of the iron-based superconductor FeSe ($T\_c$ = 8.6 K) have been studied by tunnel diode oscillator-based measurements in magnetic fields of up to 55 T and temperatures down to 1.6 K. Several Fourier components enter the SdH oscillations spectrum with frequencies definitely smaller than predicted by band structure calculations indicating band renormalization and reconstruction of the Fermi surface at low temperature, in line with previous ARPES data. The Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg model accounts for the temperature dependence of $H\_{c2}$ for magnetic field applied both parallel (\textbf{H} $\|$ $ab$) and perpendicular (\textbf{H} $\|$ $c$) to the iron conducting plane, suggesting that one band mainly controls the superconducting properties in magnetic fields despite the multiband nature of the Fermi surface. Whereas Pauli pair breaking is negligible for \textbf{H} $\|$ $c$, a Pauli paramagnetic contribution is evidenced for \textbf{H} $\|$ $ab$ with Maki parameter $\alpha$ = 2.1, corresponding to Pauli field $H\_{P}$ = 36.5

Ethylenediamine- and propylenediaminediacetic acid derivatives as ligands for the "fac-[M(CO)3]+" core (M = Re, 99mTc)

The reaction of Re(CO)5Cl with o- or p-N-(nitrophenyl)ethylenediaminediacetic acid (H2L1, H2L2) and o- or p-N-(nitrophenyl)propylenediaminediacetic acid (H2L3, H2L4) in methanol leads to the formation of stable anionic [Et3NH][Re(CO)3(L)]·H2O complexes 1-4. These compounds have been characterized by means of IR, mass spectrometry, elemental analysis, NMR and conductimetry, as well as X-ray crystallography for 2 and 3. The [Re(CO)3]+ moiety is coordinated via the nitrogen of the iminodiacetic acid unit and two oxygens of monodentate carboxylate groups. In each case, the nitro group of the aromatic ring remains uncoordinated. The analogous technetium-99m complexes 1' and 3' were also prepared quantitatively by the reaction of H2L1 and H2L3, respectively, with the fac-[99mTc(CO)3(H2O)3]+ precursor in ethanol. The corresponding Re and 99mTc compounds were shown to possess the same structure by means of HPLC studies. The high affinity of these ligands for the Tc(I) or Re(I) core, coupled with the easiness of their derivatization (by reduction of the nitro group in amino group), implies that the utilization of this ligand system to develop target-specific radiopharmaceuticals for diagnosis and therapy is promising

A model of partial differential equations for HIV propagation in lymph nodes

Texto completo versión postprint de autor.-- PACS numbers: 02.30.Ks,02.30.Hq,87.18.Hf,87.19.XxA system of partial differential equations is used to model the dissemination of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in CD4+T cells within lymph nodes. Besides diffusion terms, the model also includes a time-delay dependence to describe the time lag required by the immunologic system to provide defenses to new virus strains. The resulting dynamics strongly depends on the properties of the invariant sets of the model, consisting of three fixed points related to the time independent and spatial homogeneous tissue configurations in healthy and infected states. A region in the parameter space is considered, for which the time dependence of the space averaged model variables follows the clinical pattern reported for infected patients: a short scale primary infection, followed by a long latency period of almost complete recovery and third phase characterized by damped oscillations around a value with large HIV counting. Depending on the value of the diffusion coefficient, the latency time increases with respect to that one obtained for the space homogeneous version of the model. It is found that same initial conditions lead to quite different spatial patterns, which depend strongly on the latency interval.This work was partially supported by the following Brazilian funding agencies: CAPES, FAPESB/PRONEX, CNPq and National Institute for Science and Technology/Complex Systems.Peer reviewe

In the game of adjustments: questions about memory construction in interviews

Reflexão teórico-metodológica em torno do uso da entrevista na recolha de relatos orais em dois estudos que cruzam perspetivas no campo da comunicação no espaço ibero-americano (Portugal e Brasil).N/

Physicochemical composition and sensory quality evaluation of capon and rooster meat

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of caponization on the physicochemical and sensory characteristics of rooster and capon meat (2 Portuguese autochthonous chicken breeds of roosters: Amarela and Pedrês), raised under the same production. The birds were castrated at 9 wk of age and bred until 140 d of age. Forty Amarela (20 roosters and 20 capons - castrated male) and 40 Pedrês Portuguesa (20 roosters and 20 capons) breed chickens, 5 free-range chickens, and 5 broilers were used. From the breast, leg, and wing muscles, physicochemical parameters such as pH, water activity (a w ), physical color, moisture content, ash, CP, pigments, collagen, and total fat and fatty acids profile, were analyzed according to standard procedures. Caponization did not affect pH, a w , lightness (L*), yellowness (b*), ash, protein, collagen, saturated fatty acids (SFA), polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), and the ratio of unsaturated fatty acids (UFA)/SFA. Results show that caponization decreased (P = 0.05) moisture content and increased (P = 0.05) pigments and intramuscular fat content. Capons showed higher (P = 0.001) redness (a*) and chroma (C*), and lower (P = 0.001) hue (H*) compared to roosters. Caponization increased (P = 0.05) monounsaturated fatty acids content and PUFA/SFA. The main fatty acids found were oleic (C18:1), palmitic (C16:0), and linoleic (C18:2). Capons had greater (P = 0.05) C18:1 content but lower (P = 0.01) butyric acid (C4:0), caprylic acid (C8:0), stearic acid (C18:0), and (P = 0.05) arachidonic acid (C20.4) content than roosters. The objective of sensory analysis was making the comparison of the Amarela and Pedrês meat with a free-range chicken and a broiler. Panelists classified the capon meat (Amarela and Pedrês) as juicier and less tough and fibrous than rooster meat. Broilers were in general juicier, tenderer, and less fibrous than the other chickens in this study. The results of sensory evaluation complement those obtained in physicochemical analysis, suggesting that caponization promotes an overall improvement in meat quality.The authors are grateful to Laboratory of Carcass and Meat Quality of Agriculture School of Polytechnic Institute of Bragança ‘Cantinho do Alfredo’.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio