4,290 research outputs found
Pattern of skin disease in Ethiopian HIVâinfected patients on combination antiretroviral therapy: A crossâsectional study in a dermatology referral hospital
Abstract Background More than 90% of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)âinfected patients will develop at least one type of skin disorder during the course of the disease. The prevalence and severity of skin disease commonly seen in HIVâinfected patients has decreased in the era of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). Few studies in Ethiopia have shown the magnitude of skin problems among adult patients on cART. The aim of this study is to describe the pattern of skin disease among adult patients who are on cART. Methods Crossâsectional observational study at ALERT Hospital from April 2018 to November 2018. Patterns of clinically diagnosed skin diseases were summarized descriptively. Result A total of 572 patients were evaluated. In total, 412 (72%) were female and the mean age of study participants was 40 (SDÂ =Â 10.4). The median CD4 count at the time of diagnosis and start of cART were 178 (R 5â2000) and 168 cells/ÎŒl (R 5â1327), respectively. The mean duration of cART was 8 (SDÂ =Â 3) years. 89.3% of patients were on first line and 7% on second line of cART regimen. Noninfectious inflammatory skin disorders (40.9%) were the most common concomitant diagnosis followed by infectious diseases (34.9%), infestation (7.7%), pigmentary disorders (6.3%) and cutaneous drug eruption (0.7%), respectively. Among the inflammatory skin disorders, 56.5% presented with eczema. One patient had Kaposi sarcoma. Conclusion Noninfectious inflammatory skin disorders are the most common concomitant skin disease in HIVâinfected patients, with eczema being most prevalent. Infectious skin diseases were also common presentations. In our study, AIDSâdefining skin conditions were rare
Developing a Holistic Fire Risk Assessment Framework for Building Construction Sites in Hong Kong
Amongst all types of construction accidents, industrial practitioners tend to pay less attention to the prevention of fires at construction sites. Although fires may not occur frequently on construction sites, statistics show that when they do, the consequences are very serious; involving fatalities, injuries, serious project delays and financial loss. There are many reasons why fires occur on sites, but a simple lack of awareness of the risks of fire is a major contributor. Fire risk assessment is not commonly performed on sites. Hence, it is believed that an appropriate assessment method for evaluating potential fire risk is required in order to improve the awareness of fire risk on construction sites. This paper reports on the key findings of a research project which aims to develop a comprehensive, objective, reliable, and practical fire risk assessment framework for building construction sites based in Hong Kong. A comprehensive list of those factors (or conditions) which may constitute a fire risk was compiled using desktop research and structured face-to-face interviews with experienced site personnel. This list of factors was then used to develop a questionnaire survey form and the Reliability Interval Method (RIM) was used to analyse the survey results and determine the relative importance and rankings of the various fire risk factors at a broad level and risk sub-factors at a detailed level. It was found that the fire risk factor of âFire Services Equipment and Installationsâ has the greatest impact on construction site fire safety, with âMeans of Escape in Case of Fireâ being the second, and âAttitude of Main Contractor towards Fire Safetyâ being the third. In fact, it is the main contractor who plays the pivotal role in maintaining construction site fire safety, which is in line with the high ranking given to the fire risk factor of âAttitude of Main Contractor towards Fire Safetyâ. The proposed fire risk assessment framework can be used to develop a useful checklist for assessing the overall level of fire risk for a construction site, and to identify any areas needing improvement. Although the fire risk assessment framework was developed locally in Hong Kong, the research methodology could be replicated in other countries to produce similar frameworks for international comparison. Such an extension would aid the understanding of the management of fire risk on construction sites and help discover differences between countries
Spinodal Decomposition and the Tomita Sum Rule
The scaling properties of a phase-ordering system with a conserved order
parameter are studied. The theory developed leads to scaling functions
satisfying certain general properties including the Tomita sum rule. The theory
also gives good agreement with numerical results for the order parameter
scaling function in three dimensions. The values of the associated
nonequilibrium decay exponents are given by the known lower bounds.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure
Temporal Effects of Agent Aggregation in the Dynamics of Multiagent Systems
We propose a model of multiagent systems whose agents have a tendency to
balance their decisions in time. We find phase transitions to oscillatory
behavior, explainable by the aggregation of agents into two groups. On a longer
time scale, we find that the aggregation of smart agents is able to explain the
lifetime distribution of epochs to 8 decades of probability.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Bilayer Membrane in Confined Geometry: Interlayer Slide and Steric Repulsion
We derived free energy functional of a bilayer lipid membrane from the first
principles of elasticity theory. The model explicitly includes
position-dependent mutual slide of monolayers and bending deformation. Our free
energy functional of liquid-crystalline membrane allows for incompressibility
of the membrane and vanishing of the in-plane shear modulus and obeys
reflectional and rotational symmetries of the flat bilayer. Interlayer slide at
the mid-plane of the membrane results in local difference of surface densities
of the monolayers. The slide amplitude directly enters free energy via the
strain tensor. For small bending deformations the ratio between bending modulus
and area compression coefficient, Kb/KA, is proportional to the square of
monolayer thickness, h. Using the functional we performed self-consistent
calculation of steric potential acting on bilayer between parallel confining
walls separated by distance 2d. We found that temperature-dependent curvature
at the minimum of confining potential is enhanced four times for a bilayer with
slide as compared with a unit bilayer. We also calculate viscous modes of
bilayer membrane between confining walls. Pure bending of the membrane is
investigated, which is decoupled from area dilation at small amplitudes. Three
sources of viscous dissipation are considered: water and membrane viscosities
and interlayer drag. Dispersion has two branches. Confinement between the walls
modifies the bending mode with respect to membrane in bulk solution.
Simultaneously, inter-layer slipping mode, damped by viscous drag, remains
unchanged by confinement.Comment: 23 pages,3 figures, pd
A monte-carlo floating-point unit for self-validating arithmetic
Monte-Carlo arithmetic is a form of self-validating arith-metic that accounts for the effect of rounding errors. We have implemented a floating point unit that can perform ei-ther IEEE 754 or Monte-Carlo floating point computation, allowing hardware accelerated validation of results during execution. Experiments show that our approach has a mod-est hardware overhead and allows the propagation of round-ing error to be accurately estimated
Children's Time With Fathers in Intact Families
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73550/1/j.1741-3737.2001.00136.x.pd
Overall time evolution in phase-ordering kinetics
The phenomenology from the time of the quench to the asymptotic behavior in
the phase-ordering kinetics of a system with conserved order parameter is
investigated in the Bray-Humayun model and in the Cahn-Hilliard-Cook model.
From the comparison of the structure factor in the two models the generic
pattern of the overall time evolution, based on the sequence ``early linear -
intermediate mean field - late asymptotic regime'' is extracted. It is found
that the time duration of each of these regimes is strongly dependent on the
wave vector and on the parameters of the quench, such as the amplitude of the
initial fluctuations and the final equilibrium temperature. The rich and
complex crossover phenomenology arising as these parameters are varied can be
accounted for in a simple way through the structure of the solution of the
Bray-Humayun model.Comment: RevTeX, 14 pages, 18 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Condensation vs. phase-ordering in the dynamics of first order transitions
The origin of the non commutativity of the limits and in the dynamics of first order transitions is investigated. In the
large-N model, i.e. taken first, the low temperature phase is
characterized by condensation of the large wave length fluctuations rather than
by genuine phase-ordering as when is taken first. A detailed
study of the scaling properties of the structure factor in the large-N model is
carried out for quenches above, at and below T_c. Preasymptotic scaling is
found and crossover phenomena are related to the existence of components in the
order parameter with different scaling properties. Implications for
phase-ordering in realistic systems are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures. To be published in Phys. Rev.
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