Clinical factors impacting quality of life and outcomes through the transition from pre-dialysis chronic kidney disease to early dialysis treatment

This thesis, “Clinical factors impacting quality of life and outcomes through the transition from pre-dialysis CKD to early dialysis treatment”, examines clinical factors that improve dialysis start and patient survival. The gathered data suggests that patient differences, which affect the way patients start dialysis, may be present in late stage CKD. Clinical interventions related to blood pressure, dialysis preparation, and home therapy use may benefit patients. The way patients start dialysis and dialysis changes in the first treatment year may impact quality of life perceptions. CKD clinical data analysis may help to personalize CKD care and improve the transition to dialysis start

Reparameterization Invariance to all Orders in Heavy Quark Effective Theory

Heavy Quark Effective Theory splits a heavy quark momentum into a large fixed momentum and a variable residual momentum, p = m_Q v + k. It thereby suffers a redundancy of description corresponding to small changes in the choice of the fixed velocity, v. The fact that full QCD is manifestly v-independent should lead to a non-trivial constraint on the form of the effective theory, known as Reparameterization Invariance. For spin-1/2 quarks, the precise form of the constraint and its solution at the level of the effective lagrangian have proven to be rather subtle, and the original proposal by Luke and Manohar has been questioned. In this paper I employ a version of Heavy Quark Effective Theory containing the ``anti-particle'' field as a non-propagating auxiliary field, which greatly simplifies keeping track of v-dependence. This permits a very simple derivation of Reparameterization Invariance from first principles. The auxiliary field can also be integrated out to return to the standard formulation of the effective theory, but with the effective lagrangian now satisfying the full reparameterization constraint. I compare this result with earlier proposals.Comment: 12 pages, LaTex. Important and confusing typographical error in eq. (15) corrected. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Future long-range transports: Prospects for improved fuel efficiency

A status report is provided on current thinking concerning potential improvements in fuel efficiency and possible alternate fuels. Topics reviewed are: (1) historical trends in airplane efficiency; (2) technological opportunities including supercritical aerodynamics, (3) vortex diffusers, (4) composite materials, (5) propulsion systems, (6) active controls, and terminal-area operations; (7) unconventional design concepts, and (8) hydrogen-fueled airplane

Rotational and vibrational effects in ion- dipole collisions

Rotational and vibration effects in ion dipole collisions demonstrated in color motion pictur