The rectifying property of polarized barium titanate

February 8, 1955.Two titles published in one volume. "Ternary system ethyl alcohol--n--heptane-water at 30 [degrees] C" by Joseph L. Schweppe and James R. Lorah and "The rectifying property of polarized barium titanate" by Donald L. Waidelich.Ternary system ethyl alcohol--n--heptane-water at 30 [degrees] C ; "Reprinted from Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Vol. 26, November 1954"The rectifying property of polarized barium titanate ; "Reprinted from Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 25 July 1953.

MatricS—A novel tool for monitoring professional role development in surgical disciplines

Introduction: Mentoring is an effective method for human resource development. Monitoring the process is important for individual mentee/mentor pairs as well as for program directors. Due to individual personality differences of both mentees and mentors and their respective interactions, it is challenging to monitor the individual development process of mentees in a structured manner. This study investigates to what extent a novel instrument, the mentee-based assessment tool for role development of interpersonal competencies in surgical professions (MatricS) can adequately monitor the professional role development process of residents during an established mentoring program. Material and methods: In a prospective longitudinal study, the competence development of 31 mentees in two subsequent cohorts was assessed by a modified role matrix based on Canadian Medical Education Directives for Specialists. The evaluation focused on three defined roles (D, developer; N, networker; M, multiplicator) at three levels (private, employer-related, national/international) with four stages of development. For validation of mentee self-assessments, the assessments of the respective mentors were recorded alongside. For correlation analyses, Pearson coefficients were calculated, pre-post-comparisons were done by paired t-tests; significance was assumed at p < 0.05, respectively. Results: Mentee self-assessments overall correlated well with the objective mentor assessments (Pearson's r 0.8, p 75% of all roles and levels. Conclusion: The role development process during mentoring can be reliably monitored by using MatricS. MatricS scores highly correlate between mentees and mentors, indicating that mentee self-assessments are suitable and sufficient for monitoring. These findings help to lessen the work burden on senior surgeons and thus can help to increase the acceptance of mentoring programs in surgical disciplines

Sending Granny to Chiang Mai: debating global outsourcing of care for the elderly

This article ties in with existing discussions on global care chains, family separation and the devaluation of social-reproductive work. We explore the new trend of outsourcing care for the elderly to countries with lower wages. We base our analysis on the debate in the German press and supplement it with insights from ethnographic field observations in two care homes in Thailand. We identify a discourse of abandonment, which shows how outsourcing the care of the elderly unsettles the privilege of sedentarism that is often taken for granted in the Global North. Furthermore, the newspaper articles tend to villainize people who seek care for their loved ones abroad. We argue that both discourses foster a neoliberal rationale of individualized responsibility and obfuscate the deep systemic roots of the care crisis in the Global North. However, by extending the discussion on outsourcing care for the elderly beyond the dominant media discourses, we envisage a rich potential for provoking political debate on the revaluation of care

Methotrexate used in combination with aminolaevulinic acid for photodynamic killing of prostate cancer cells

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) using 5-aminolaevulinic acid (ALA) to drive production of an intracellular photosensitiser, protoporphyrin IX (PpIX), is a promising cancer treatment. However, ALA-PDT is still suboptimal for thick or refractory tumours. Searching for new approaches, we tested a known inducer of cellular differentiation, methotrexate (MTX), in combination with ALA-PDT in LNCaP cells. Methotrexate alone promoted growth arrest, differentiation, and apoptosis. Methotrexate pretreatment (1 mg l−1, 72 h) followed by ALA (0.3 mM, 4 h) resulted in a three-fold increase in intracellular PpIX, by biochemical and confocal analyses. After exposure to 512 nm light, killing was significantly enhanced in MTX-preconditioned cells. The reverse order of treatments, ALA-PDT followed by MTX, yielded no enhancement. Methotrexate caused a similar relative increase in PpIX, whether cells were incubated with ALA, methyl-ALA, or hexyl-ALA, arguing against a major effect upon ALA transport. Searching for an effect among porphyrin synthetic enzymes, we found that coproporphyrinogen oxidase (CPO) was increased three-fold by MTX at the mRNA and protein levels. Transfection of LNCaP cells with a CPO-expressing vector stimulated the accumulation of PpIX. Our data suggest that MTX, when used to modulate intracellular production of endogenous PpIX, may provide a new combination PDT approach for certain cancers

Detection of abnormal cells by optical image processing.

Optimized image formation is an essential step preceding automatic image analysis. We report about an optical device for automatic prescreening of cervical cytologic samples. The system should detect abnormal cells. Using band-pass filtering in the Fourier plane a detection of abnormal cells is possible. The main advantage of this method is its ability of parallel processing in real time. That means we can handle a large object field at once in a microscope. We use a very simple parameter -the size of the cell nucleus- for a discrimination between normal and abnormal cells. As a typical result the detection of abnormal cells in a Papanicolaou smear by band-pass filtering is showed