79 research outputs found
Investigation of the role of selenium in the nutrition and physiology of neural tissues of chickens and turkeys
Endogenous selenium concentrations in selected tissue of chickens, turkeys, and coturni
Human performance in adverse environments
Human performance testing of astronaut capabilities during prolonged space fligh
Research on a one-inch-square linear d-c plasma accelerator
One-inch-square linear d-c plasma accelerator using cesium seeded nitroge
Pregnancy complications as markers for subsequent maternal cardiovascular disease: Validation of a maternal recall questionnaire
Background: We designed and tested the validity of a questionnaire to characterize maternal recall of pregnancy complications associated with increased future cardiovascular disease risk, based on the 2011 American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines. Methods: A maternal recall questionnaire of pregnancy history was administered to 971 patients who had participated in a previous cohort study of 1,608 pregnant women. Medical records from the study pregnancy served as the gold standard. Prevalence, sensitivity (sens), specificity (spec), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and/or Spearman's correlation coefficients (r) were calculated for each question. Results: A total of 526 (54%) individuals recontacted responded. Respondents were more likely to be older, white, educated, and nulliparous and were less likely to deliver low-birthweight infants in the study pregnancy than were individuals who did not respond. Mean length of recall was 4.35 years (standard deviation [SD] 0.46) postpartum. Maternal recall was most accurate for gestational diabetes (sens: 92%, spec: 98%, PPV: 79%, NPV: 99%), infant birthweight (r=0.95), and gestation length (r=0.85). Maternal recall was modest for preeclampsia (sens: 79%, spec: 97%, PPV: 68%, NPV: 98%) and pregnancy-associated hypertension, including preeclampsia or gestational hypertension (sens: 60%, spec: 95%, PPV: 64%, NPV: 94%). Conclusions: This validation study demonstrated that the majority of women could accurately recall a history of gestational diabetes, infant birthweight, and gestational age at delivery, 4 years postpartum on average. Recall of preeclampsia and pregnancy-associated hypertension overall was modest. Maternal report of these pregnancy conditions may help clinicians identify women at increased risk for cardiovascular disease
Astro-WISE: Chaining to the Universe
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives
threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or
when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware
developments allow to acquire, process and store 100s of terabytes of data at
the cost of a modern sports car, the software systems to handle these data are
lagging behind. This general problem is recognized and addressed by various
scientific communities, e.g., DATAGRID/EGEE federates compute and storage power
over the high-energy physical community, while the astronomical community is
building an Internet geared Virtual Observatory, connecting archival data.
These large projects either focus on a specific distribution aspect or aim to
connect many sub-communities and have a relatively long trajectory for setting
standards and a common layer. Here, we report "first light" of a very different
solution to the problem initiated by a smaller astronomical IT community. It
provides the abstract "scientific information layer" which integrates
distributed scientific analysis with distributed processing and federated
archiving and publishing. By designing new abstractions and mixing in old ones,
a Science Information System with fully scalable cornerstones has been
achieved, transforming data systems into knowledge systems. This break-through
is facilitated by the full end-to-end linking of all dependent data items,
which allows full backward chaining from the observer/researcher to the
experiment. Key is the notion that information is intrinsic in nature and thus
is the data acquired by a scientific experiment. The new abstraction is that
software systems guide the user to that intrinsic information by forcing full
backward and forward chaining in the data modelling.Comment: To be published in ADASS XVI ASP Conference Series, 2006, R. Shaw, F.
Hill and D. Bell, ed
- …