1,647 research outputs found
Conclusion : gender and politics and the changing status of women today
This book concerns a new body of knowledge and an emerging set of questions that has accompanied national, cross national and international global political movements aimed at trying to understand and to improve the situation of women by eliminating gender inequities and injustices
Feeding, managing, and exhibiting lambs
Cover title
Community-based trial of screening for Chlamydia trachomatis to prevent pelvic inflammatory disease: the POPI (prevention of pelvic infection) trial.
BACKGROUND: Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) is common and can lead to tubal factor infertility, ectopic pregnancy or chronic pelvic pain. Despite major UK government investment in the National Chlamydia Screening Programme, evidence of benefit remains controversial. The main aim of this trial was to investigate whether screening and treatment of chlamydial infection reduced the incidence of PID over 12 months. Secondary aims were to conduct exploratory studies of the role of bacterial vaginosis (BV) in the development of PID and of the natural history of chlamydial infection.
DESIGN: Randomised controlled trial with follow up after 12 months.
SETTING NON-HEALTHCARE: Common rooms and lecture theatres at 20 universities and further education colleges in Greater London.
PARTICIPANTS: 2500 sexually active female students were asked to complete a questionnaire on sexual health and provide self-administered vaginal swabs and smears.
INTERVENTION: Vaginal swabs from intervention women were tested for chlamydia by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and those infected referred for treatment. Vaginal swabs from control women were stored and analysed after a year. Vaginal smears were Gram stained and analysed for BV.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Incidence of clinical PID over 12 months in intervention and control groups. Possible cases of PID will be identified from questionnaires and record searches. Confirmation of the diagnosis will be done by detailed review of medical records by three independent researchers blind to whether the woman is in intervention or control group. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical Trials NCT 00115388
Threshold Error Penalty for Fault Tolerant Computation with Nearest Neighbour Communication
The error threshold for fault tolerant quantum computation with concatenated
encoding of qubits is penalized by internal communication overhead. Many
quantum computation proposals rely on nearest-neighbour communication, which
requires excess gate operations. For a qubit stripe with a width of L+1
physical qubits implementing L levels of concatenation, we find that the error
threshold of 2.1x10^-5 without any communication burden is reduced to 1.2x10^-7
when gate errors are the dominant source of error. This ~175X penalty in error
threshold translates to an ~13X penalty in the amplitude and timing of gate
operation control pulses.Comment: minor correctio
Retrofitting Practice of a 100kWth Coal/Biomass Air-firing Combustor to the Oxy-firing Mode: Experiences and the Experimental Results
Air-firing of the fossil fuels results to relatively low concentration of CO2 in flue gases which make the capture of
CO2 difficult and expensive. Oxy-firing combustion is a novel method of using enriched oxygen for coal/biomass
combustion with Recycled Flue Gases (RFG) to control the adiabatic flame temperature and to increase the CO2
concentration of the off-gases up to a 60-70% oxy-firing mode (compared to air-fired mode, around 12-14%).
This new technology is being applied at Cranfield University to retrofit an existing 100kWth air-firing combustor
to the oxy-firing mode. This paper presents the procedure of the modifications applied on the combustor and the
excellent results obtained for co-firing of pulverised coal and biomass in this rig
The incidence of congenital syphilis in the United Kingdom: February 2010 to January 2015
OBJECTIVE: To estimate the incidence of congenital syphilis in the UK. DESIGN: Prospective study. SETTING AND POPULATION: United Kingdom. METHODS: Children born between February 2010 and January 2015 with a suspected diagnosis of congenital syphilis were reported through an active surveillance system. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Number of congenital syphilis cases and incidence. RESULTS: For all years, reported incidence was below the WHO threshold for elimination (<0.5/1000 live births). Seventeen cases (12 male, five female) were identified. About 50% of infants (8/17) were born preterm (<37 weeks' gestation): median birthweight 2000 g (865-3170 g). Clinical presentation varied from asymptomatic to acute disease, including severe anaemia, hepatosplenomegaly, rhinitis, thrombocytopaenia, skeletal damage, and neurosyphilis. One infant was deaf and blind. Median maternal age was 20 years (17-31) at delivery. Where maternal stage of infection was recorded, 6/10 had primary, 3/10 secondary and 1/10 early latent syphilis. Most mothers were white (13/16). Country of birth was recorded for 12 mothers: UK (n = 6), Eastern Europe (n = 3), Middle East (n = 1), and South East Asia (n = 2). The social circumstances of mothers varied and included drug use and sex work. Some experienced difficulty accessing health care. CONCLUSION: The incidence of congenital syphilis is controlled and monitored by healthcare services and related surveillance systems, and is now below the WHO elimination threshold. However, reducing the public health impact of this preventable disease in the UK is highly dependent on the successful implementation of WHO elimination standards across Europe. TWEETABLE ABSTRACT: Congenital syphilis incidence in the UK is at a very low level and well below the WHO elimination threshold
Scheme and gauge dependence of QCD fixed points at five loops
We analyse the fixed points of QCD at high loop order in a variety of
renormalization schemes and gauges across the conformal window. We observe that
in the minimal momentum subtraction scheme solutions for the Banks-Zaks fixed
point persist for values of Nf below that of the MSbar scheme in the canonical
linear covariant gauge. By treating the parameter of the linear covariant gauge
as a second coupling constant we confirm the existence of a second Banks-Zaks
twin critical point, which is infrared stable, to five loops. Moreover a
similar and parallel infrared stable fixed point is present in the
Curci-Ferrari and maximal abelian gauges which persists in different schemes
including kinematic ones. We verify that with the increased available loop
order critical exponent estimates show an improvement in convergence and
agreement in the various schemes.Comment: 56 latex pages, 11 figures, 34 tables, anc directory contains pdf of
additional tables, minor text addition
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