Study protocol for a double blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial of continuous subpectoral local anaesthetic infusion for pain and shoulder function following mastectomy: SUB-pectoral Local anaesthetic Infusion following MastEctomy (SUBLIME) study.

INTRODUCTION: Over 16 000 mastectomies are performed in England and Wales annually. Acute postoperative pain and nausea are common. The most frequently occurring long-term complications are chronic pain (up to 50%) and reduced shoulder function (reported at 35%). Regional techniques that improve acute postoperative pain relief may reduce the incidence of these complications. This study assesses the effectiveness of a 24-hour continuous local anaesthetic in the subpectoral plane in improving postoperative pain and quality of life in patients undergoing mastectomy. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This is a randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled, two-centre, parallel group trial in women undergoing mastectomy with or without axillary involvement. One hundred and sixty participants will be randomised in a 1:1 ratio to receive either 0.25% levobupivacaine or 0.9% saline by subpectoral infusion postoperatively for 24 h. All participants will be provided with an intravenous morphine patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) system. Participants will be followed-up for 24 h in hospital and at approximately 14 days and 6 months postoperatively. Joint primary outcome measures are total morphine consumption and total pain score (captured via patient-recorded visual analogue scale (VAS) 4 hourly) during the first 24 h postoperatively. Primary statistical analysis of total pain is based on the area under the curve of pain versus time graph. Secondary outcomes include PCA attempts in first 24 h; VAS pain scores and shoulder function by goniometry at 24 h, 14 days (approximately) and 6 months; Verbal Rating Scale pain scores in first 24 h; Brief Pain Inventory and Oxford Shoulder Score at 6 months; duration of hospital stay; incidence of postoperative nausea and vomiting; cost-effectiveness. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study is approved by the South West England Research Ethics Committee (12/SW/0149). RESULTS: will be published in a peer-reviewed journal and presented at local, national and international scientific meetings. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN46621916. EudraCT 2011-005775-16

Measurement of web tension distribution by point source pulse excitation

A web is a material that is produced as a continuous sheet and stored in wound roll form. Mechanics of web material handling in production, coating or conditioning, and winding operations affect web uniformity and the material stress/strain state, thus affecting roll quality. In an effort to improve all aspects of web handling procedures, much attention has been focused on acquisition and utilization of on-line web handling process information such as web tension. Tension is a quantity basic to web production and processing yet historically has been difficult to measure except in an average sense. Improvements in on-line tension measurement accuracy have foreseeable application to automated tension control systems and winder maintenance used in modern day web production/processing facilities. This paper describes a new means of noncontacting, local web tension measurement through use of a point source pneumatic excitation coupled to signal acquisition and processing schemes. Advantages of this new system include variable web excitation rate, variable system tuning for different applications, high lateral tension distribution resolution, and compact, easily serviceable transducer head assembly. This work was sponsored through the Web Handling Research Center (WHRC), an NSF funded research facility located at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma.Mechanical and Aerospace Engineerin

Composite Polarons in Ferromagnetic Narrow-band Metallic Manganese Oxides

A new mechanism is proposed to explain the colossal magnetoresistance and related phenomena. Moving electrons accompanied by Jahn-Teller phonon and spin-wave clouds may form composite polarons in ferromagnetic narrow-band manganites. The ground-state and finite-temperature properties of such composite polarons are studied in the present paper. By using a variational method, it is shown that the energy of the system at zero temperature decreases with the formation of composite polaron; the energy spectrum and effective mass of the composite polaron at finite temperature is found to be strongly renormalized by the temperature and the magnetic field. It is suggested that the composite polaron contribute significantly to the transport and the thermodynamic properties in ferromagnetic narrow-band metallic manganese oxides.Comment: Latex, no figur

Investigative Tools and Techniques for Indoor Air Quality Studies

Indoor air quality problems are diverse and often complex. Adverse indoor air quality problems can exist which create symptomatic conditions for building occupants. Often, the exact cause, or causes, of the substandard indoor air quality are unknown. Therefore, an investigative approach must usually be taken to identify the source(s) of the air quality problem, and if present, air contaminant concentrations. As the general public becomes more aware of the problems associated with poor indoor air quality conditions, an associated increase in air quality evaluation requests can be expected. This paper discusses some of the various investigative tools and techniques that can be utilized to identify air quality contaminants when performing an indoor air quality evaluation. These investigative tools and techniques can be used to develop a site specific list of possible contaminants and their sources, and can then be used to determine which contaminants are, in fact, present in adverse concentrations. Some of the investigative tools and techniques to be discussed in this paper include the following: visual inspections and site observations, information searches, review of building construction, review of ventilation systems, interviews, low and high volume sampling pumps, flow and oxygen meters, portable photoionization and flame ionization detectors (PID & FID), various types of vapor detector tubes, and gas chromatograph/mass spectrophotometer (GC/MS) analysis. This paper will be an introductory overview of the above listed investigative tools and techniques. The paper's attempt is to acquaint the reader with these investigative tools and techniques, and how they can assist the reader in an air quality evaluation

Investigative Tools and Techniques for Indoor Air Quality Studies

Indoor air quality problems are diverse and often complex. Adverse indoor air quality problems can exist which create symptomatic conditions for building occupants. Often, the exact cause, or causes, of the substandard indoor air quality are unknown. Therefore, an investigative approach must usually be taken to identify the source(s) of the air quality problem, and if present, air contaminant concentrations. As the general public becomes more aware of the problems associated with poor indoor air quality conditions, an associated increase in air quality evaluation requests can be expected. This paper discusses some of the various investigative tools and techniques that can be utilized to identify air quality contaminants when performing an indoor air quality evaluation. These investigative tools and techniques can be used to develop a site specific list of possible contaminants and their sources, and can then be used to determine which contaminants are, in fact, present in adverse concentrations. Some of the investigative tools and techniques to be discussed in this paper include the following: visual inspections and site observations, information searches, review of building construction, review of ventilation systems, interviews, low and high volume sampling pumps, flow and oxygen meters, portable photoionization and flame ionization detectors (PID & FID), various types of vapor detector tubes, and gas chromatograph/mass spectrophotometer (GC/MS) analysis. This paper will be an introductory overview of the above listed investigative tools and techniques. The paper's attempt is to acquaint the reader with these investigative tools and techniques, and how they can assist the reader in an air quality evaluation

Conservation of grassland birds in North America: understanding ecological processes in different regions

Many species of birds that depend on grassland or savanna habitats have shown substantial overall population declines in North America. To understand the causes of these declines, we examined the habitat requirements of birds in six types of grassland in different regions of the continent. Open habitats were originally maintained by ecological drivers (continual and pervasive ecological processes) such as drought, grazing, and fire in tallgrass prairie, mixed-grass prairie, shortgrass prairie, desert grassland, and longleaf pine savanna. By contrast, grasslands were created by occasional disturbances (e.g., fires or beaver [Castor canadensis] activity) in much of northeastern North America. The relative importance of particular drivers or disturbances differed among regions. Keystone mammal species grazers such as prairie-dogs (Cynomys spp.) and bison (Bison bison) in western prairies, and dam-building beavers in eastern regions of the continent. Deciduous forests played a crucial, and frequently unappreciated, role in maintaining many grassland systems. Although fire was important in preventing invasion of woody plants in the tallgrass and moist mixed prairies, grazing played a more important role in maintaining the typical grassland vegetation of shortgrass prairies and desert grasslands. Heavy grazing by prairiedogs or bison created a low \u27grazing lawn\u27 that is the preferred habitat for many grassland bird species that are restricted to the shortgrass prairie and desert grasslands. Ultimately, many species of grassland birds are vulnerable because people destroyed their breeding, migratory, and wintering habitat, either directly by converting it to farmland and building lots, or indirectly by modifying grazing patterns, suppressing fires, or interfering with other ecological processes that originally sustained open grassland. Understanding the ecological processes that originally maintained grassland systems is critically important for efforts to improve, restore, or create habitat for grassland birds and other grassland organisms. Consequently, preservation of large areas of natural or seminatural grassland, where these processes can be studied and core populations of grassland birds can flourish, should be a high priority. However, some grassland birds now primarily depend on artificial habitats that are managed to maximize production of livestock, timber, or other products. With a sound understanding of the habitat requirements of grassland birds and the processes that originally shaped their habitats, it should be possible to manage populations sustainably on \u27working land\u27 such as cattle ranches, farms, and pine plantations. Proper management of private land will be critical for preserving adequate breeding, migratory, and winter habitat for grassland and savanna species

An evaluation of Bradfordizing effects

The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to reorder result sets from distributed searches. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science (SOLIS, SoLit, USB Köln Opac, CSA Sociological Abstracts, World Affairs Online, Psyndex and Medline) and 164 standardized topics. An evaluation of the method and its effects is carried out in two laboratory-based information retrieval experiments (CLEF and KoMoHe) using a controlled document corpus and human relevance assessments. The results show that Bradfordizing is a very robust method for re-ranking the main document types (journal articles and monographs) in today’s digital libraries (DL). The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones. The items in the core are significantly more often assessed as relevant, than items in zone 2 (z2) or zone 3 (z3). The improvements between the zones are statistically significant based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the paired T-Test

Aerostructural Optimization of Long Span Bridges: Current Advances and Challenges

Structures Congress 2020. 5-8 abril, 2020. St. Louis, Missouri[Abstract] This paper describes the evolution of deck shape of long span bridges since the Tacoma Narrows collapse trying to avoid undesirable aerodynamic behavior under wind flow and the trend in the last decades to increase the length of the main span of suspension and cable stayed bridges. The necessity to use advanced technologies to help the engineer to obtain the best possible design is highlighted and the advantages of applying optimization methodologies is encouraged. It is explained that this approach requires to use only numerical tools and hence to eliminate experimental studies, as wind tunnel tests using reduced models of full bridge of a segment of the deck, and their substitution by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. After doing so, the current capabilities of this approach are presented and, finally, the problems that need to be solved to have a fully operational methodology able to be implemented in real structures are outlined.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in the frame of the research project BIA2016-76656-R and the Galician regional government (including FEDER Funding) reference ED431C 2017/72. M. Cid Montoya has been funded by the Galician regional government (Xunta de Galicia) with reference ED481B 2018/053 and the Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship programXunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/72Xunta de Galicia; ED481B 2018/05

Garden varieties: how attractive are recommended garden plants to butterflies?

One way the public can engage in insect conservation is through wildlife gardening, including the growing of insect-friendly flowers as sources of nectar. However, plant varieties differ in the types of insects they attract. To determine which garden plants attracted which butterflies, we counted butterflies nectaring on 11 varieties of summer-flowering garden plants in a rural garden in East Sussex, UK. These plants were all from a list of 100 varieties considered attractive to British butterflies, and included the five varieties specifically listed by the UK charity Butterfly Conservation as best for summer nectar. A total of 2659 flower visits from 14 butterfly and one moth species were observed. We performed a principal components analysis which showed contrasting patterns between the species attracted to Origanum vulgare and Buddleia davidii. The “butterfly bush” Buddleia attracted many nymphalines, such as the peacock, Inachis io, but very few satyrines such as the gatekeeper, Pyronia tithonus, which mostly visited Origanum. Eupatorium cannibinum had the highest Simpson’s Diversity score of 0.75, while Buddleia and Origanum were lower, scoring 0.66 and 0.50 respectively. No one plant was good at attracting all observed butterfly species, as each attracted only a subset of the butterfly community. We conclude that to create a butterfly-friendly garden, a variety of plant species are required as nectar sources for butterflies. Furthermore, garden plant recommendations can probably benefit from being more precise as to the species of butterfly they attract