Canyon Depth Effect on Surface Ground Motion

Topographic effects are rarely accounted for in seismic design codes, despite their potential to significantly modify surface ground motions. This paper investigates the influence of a canyon’s slope height on the surface ground motion through a parametric time-domain Finite Element (FE) study. A two-dimensional plane-strain model of an idealised canyon is considered for vertically propagating SV waves, using wavelets as input excitation. The model consists of two step-like slopes with slope height (H), in a homogeneous linear elastic soil layer overlying rigid bedrock. The analysis results show that the distribution of topographic aggravation at the ground surface varies significantly with normalized canyon depth over the input wavelength (H/λ) and it does not necessarily reach a maximum at a specific H/λ ratio, as has been suggested in previous studies. The validity of this conclusion is investigated for different depths to bedrock and soil layer properties

Garment Recommendations for Online and Offline Consumers

Recommender Systems have obvious influence in environments where data size exceeds the capabilities of any user to fully explore the available choices in the store (physical or on-line). Many algorithms and techniques have been used to help recommending useful and interesting items to users. If the user is unidentified, the process is even harder as there are no historical or other data to use as input. Association rules is a popular technique used for many purposes in Recommender Systems such as for building more robust systems, improving quality of recommendations; and even addressing fundamental limitations of recommender systems and, generally, large datasets, e.g. sparsity and cold start. At the same time, efforts have been made to fully understand if and how differently customers are behaving in an online and in a physical environment.This work tries to combine the two efforts. We use association rules to provide recommendations to customers, as well as understand who the customer is, what her needs are and what is her mentality when entering a physical store or the corresponding e-shop. To fulfill our goal, we used descriptive statistics along with Association Rules analysis of the POS transactional data on basket data level and historical data level

Investigating the Association between Physical Health Comorbidities and Disability in Individuals with Severe Mental Illness

BACKGROUND: Research suggests that an increased risk of physical comorbidities might have a key role in the association between severe mental illness (SMI) and disability. We examined the association between physical multimorbidity and disability in individuals with SMI. METHODS: Data were extracted from the clinical record interactive search system at South London and Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre. Our sample (n = 13,933) consisted of individuals who had received a primary or secondary SMI diagnosis between 2007 and 2018 and had available data for Health of Nations Outcome Scale (HoNOS) as disability measure. Physical comorbidities were defined using Chapters II–XIV of the International Classification of Diagnoses (ICD-10). RESULTS: More than 60 % of the sample had complex multimorbidity. The most common organ system affected were neurological (34.7%), dermatological (15.4%), and circulatory (14.8%). All specific comorbidities (ICD-10 Chapters) were associated with higher levels of disability, HoNOS total scores. Individuals with musculoskeletal, skin/dermatological, respiratory, endocrine, neurological, hematological, or circulatory disorders were found to be associated with significant difficulties associated with more than five HoNOS domains while others had a lower number of domains affected. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with SMI and musculoskeletal, skin/dermatological, respiratory, endocrine, neurological, hematological, or circulatory disorders are at higher risk of disability compared to those who do not have those comorbidities. Individuals with SMI and physical comorbidities are at greater risk of reporting difficulties associated with activities of daily living, hallucinations, and cognitive functioning. Therefore, these should be targeted for prevention and intervention programs

Mapping multimorbidity in individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders: evidence from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Biomedical Research Centre (SLAM BRC) case register

OBJECTIVES: The first aim of this study was to design and develop a valid and replicable strategy to extract physical health conditions from clinical notes which are common in mental health services. Then, we examined the prevalence of these conditions in individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) and compared their individual and combined prevalence in individuals with bipolar (BD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). DESIGN: Observational study. SETTING: Secondary mental healthcare services from South London PARTICIPANTS: Our maximal sample comprised 17 500 individuals aged 15 years or older who had received a primary or secondary SMI diagnosis (International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition, F20-31) between 2007 and 2018. MEASURES: We designed and implemented a data extraction strategy for 21 common physical comorbidities using a natural language processing pipeline, MedCAT. Associations were investigated with sex, age at SMI diagnosis, ethnicity and social deprivation for the whole cohort and the BD and SSD subgroups. Linear regression models were used to examine associations with disability measured by the Health of Nations Outcome Scale. RESULTS: Physical health data were extracted, achieving precision rates (F1) above 0.90 for all conditions. The 10 most prevalent conditions were diabetes, hypertension, asthma, arthritis, epilepsy, cerebrovascular accident, eczema, migraine, ischaemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The most prevalent combination in this population included diabetes, hypertension and asthma, regardless of their SMI diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS: Our data extraction strategy was found to be adequate to extract physical health data from clinical notes, which is essential for future multimorbidity research using text records. We found that around 40% of our cohort had multimorbidity from which 20% had complex multimorbidity (two or more physical conditions besides SMI). Sex, age, ethnicity and social deprivation were found to be key to understand their heterogeneity and their differential contribution to disability levels in this population. These outputs have direct implications for researchers and clinicians

In vitro propagation of Vitis vinifera L. cv. 'Monastrell'

[EN] Background: A protocol for the micropropagation of the grape (Vitis vinifera L.) cultivar 'Monastrell' was developed. Initial plant material was obtained from the sanitary selection of grapevine plants performed by real-time RT-PCR to confirm the absence of Grapevine fanleaf virus, Arabis mosaic virus, Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 1, Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3, and Grapevine fleck virus. Results: The effects of the salt composition (comparing Lloyd and McCown woody plant medium and Murashige and Skoog medium 1/2 macronutrients) and the growth regulator benzylaminopurine (BAP), at 0 and 8.9 mu M, on plant propagation were evaluated using nodes as explants. The most efficient procedure consisted of bud induction in the medium with Lloyd and McCown woody plant salts and 8.9 mu M BAP for 30 d along with elongation in cytokinin-free medium for 60 d, which gave 22 nodes/explant (174 plants/initial plant). A second cycle of propagation in a medium without BAP for another 60 d could give approximately 10,000 nodes, which can be obtained after an additional 2 months of culture. All plants acclimatized after the second cycle of multiplication were successfully transferred to soil. Conclusion: We developed an optimal protocol for V. vinifera cv. 'Monastrell' micropropagation, the first described for this cultivar. (C) 2017 Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso. Production and hosting by Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.The study was supported by the projects RTA2011-00067-C04, RTA2014-00061-C03, and PRP-CGL2015-70843-R, all co-funded with FEDER Funds. Tania San Pedro has a grant (01/14-FSE-22) supported by the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias.San Pedro-Galan, T.; Peiró Barber, RM.; Villanova, J.; Olmos Castelló, A.; Gisbert Domenech, MC. (2017). In vitro propagation of Vitis vinifera L. cv. 'Monastrell'. Electronic Journal of Biotechnology. 27:80-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejbt.2017.03.006S80832

ECIL-6 guidelines for the treatment of invasive candidiasis, aspergillosis and mucormycosis in leukemia and hematopoietic stem cell transplant patients

The European Conference on Infections in Leukemia (ECIL) provides recommendations for diagnostic strategies and prophylactic, pre-emptive or targeted therapy strategies for various types of infection in patients with hematologic malignancies or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation recipients. Meetings are held every two years since 2005 and evidence-based recommendations are elaborated after evaluation of the literature and discussion among specialists of nearly all European countries. In this manuscript, the ECIL group presents the 2015-update of the recommendations for the targeted treatment of invasive candidiasis, aspergillosis and mucormycosis. Current data now allow a very strong recommendation in favor of echinocandins for first-line therapy of candidemia irrespective of the underlying predisposing factors. Anidulafungin has been given the same grading as the other echinocandins for hemato-oncological patients. The beneficial role of catheter removal in candidemia is strengthened. Aspergillus guidelines now recommend the use of either voriconazole or isavuconazole for first-line treatment of invasive aspergillosis, while first-line combination antifungal therapy is not routinely recommended. As only few new data were published since the last ECIL guidelines, no major changes were made to mucormycosis recommendations