Coronal sources of the intrastream structure of the solar wind

Short time scale changes in the bulk speed were found not to coincide with X-ray transients near the sub-earth point nor with the number of X-ray bright points within a coronal hole and near the equator. The changes in bulk speed, it is shown, are associated with changes in light areas in a hole which may be associated with the opening or closing of magnetic field lines within the coronal hole. That there is a causal connection between these sudden changes (apperance or disappearance) in light area and sudden changes in the bulk speed of the solar wind is further evidenced by the spatial proximity on the Sun of these changing light regions to the source position of stream lines from Levine's model that connect into the same solar wind streams

An Integrated Approach for Evaluating Students' Achievement of Clinical Objectives

During the clinical phase of undergraduate medical education (UME) students are often geographically dispersed and assigned to preceptors throughout the community. Monitoring, documenting, and evaluating their clinical experiences and achievement of clinical objectives in this venue becomes a challenge, especially for large UME programs. The purpose of this manuscript is to discuss a method for developing and implementing a school-wide evaluation system for the clinical phase of UME. This type of evaluation system links students' clinical experiential data with the objectives of a clerkship, using technological advances, such as the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), Internet, and intranet. Clerkship directors are provided real-time reports on student's progress toward achieving clerkship objectives and are able to monitor the clinical activities of the clerkship. Students on the other hand, will be empowered to take more control of their educational experiences by monitoring their own progress

Flexible Ultrathin PolyDVB/EVB Composite Membranes for the Optimization of a Whole Blood Glucose Sensor.

An ultrathin composite membrane has been developed as the outer covering barrier in a model amperometric glucose oxidase enzyme electrode. The membrane was formed by cathodic electropolymerization of divinylbenzene/ethylvinylbenzene at the surface of a gold coated polyester support membrane. Permeability coefficients were determined for O2 and glucose across membranes with a range of polymer thicknesses. Anionic interferents (such as ascorbate), were screened from the working electrode via a charge exclusion mechanism. The enzyme electrode showed an initial 10% signal drift when first exposed to whole human blood over a period of 2 hours, after which responses remained essentially stable. Whole blood patient glucose determinations yielded a correlation coefficient of r2=0.99 compared to standard hospital analyses

Survey of the plasma electron environment of Jupiter: A view from Voyager

The plasma environment within Jupiter's bow shock is considered in terms of the in situ, calibrated electron plasma measurements made between 10 eV and 5.95 keV by the Voyager plasma science experiment (PLS). Measurements were analyzed and corrected for spacecraft potential variations; the data were reduced to nearly model independent macroscopic parameters of the local electron density and temperature. It is tentatively concluded that the radial temperature profile within the plasma sheet is caused by the intermixing of two different electron populations that probably have different temporal histories and spatial paths to their local observation. The cool plasma source of the plasma sheet and spikes is probably the Io plasma torus and arrives in the plasma sheet as a result of flux tube interchange motions or other generalized transport which can be accomplished without diverting the plasma from the centrifugal equator. The hot suprathermal populations in the plasma sheet have most recently come from the sparse, hot mid-latitude "bath" of electrons which were directly observed juxtaposed to the plasma sheet

The far-infrared/submillimeter properties of galaxies located behind the Bullet cluster

The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) takes advantage of gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters to sample a population of high-redshift galaxies which are too faint to be detected above the confusion limit of current far-infrared/submillimeter telescopes. Measurements from 100–500 μm bracket the peaks of the far-infrared spectral energy distributions of these galaxies, characterizing their infrared luminosities and star formation rates. We introduce initial results from our science demonstration phase observations, directed toward the Bullet cluster (1E0657-56). By combining our observations with LABOCA 870 μm and AzTEC 1.1 mm data we fully constrain the spectral energy distributions of 19 MIPS 24 μm-selected galaxies which are located behind the cluster. We find that their colors are best fit using templates based on local galaxies with systematically lower infrared luminosities. This suggests that our sources are not like local ultra-luminous infrared galaxies in which vigorous star formation is contained in a compact highly dust-obscured region. Instead, they appear to be scaled up versions of lower luminosity local galaxies with star formation occurring on larger physical scales

The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS): Overview

The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) will conduct deep PACS and SPIRE imaging of ∼40 massive clusters of galaxies. The strong gravitational lensing power of these clusters will enable us to penetrate through the confusion noise, which sets the ultimate limit on our ability to probe the Universe with Herschel. Here we present an overview of our survey and a summary of the major results from our science demonstration phase (SDP) observations of the Bullet cluster (z = 0.297). The SDP data are rich and allow us to study not only the background high-redshift galaxies (e.g., strongly lensed and distorted galaxies at z = 2.8 and 3.2) but also the properties of cluster-member galaxies. Our preliminary analysis shows a great diversity of far-infrared/submillimeter spectral energy distributions (SEDs), indicating that we have much to learn with Herschel about the properties of galaxy SEDs. We have also detected the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect increment with the SPIRE data. The success of this SDP program demonstrates the great potential of the Herschel Lensing Survey to produce exciting results in a variety of science areas

Following basal stem rot in young oil palm plantings

The PCR primer GanET has previously been shown to be suitable for the specific amplification of DNA from Ganoderma boninense. A DNA extraction and PCR method has been developed that allows for the amplification of the G. boninense DNA from environmental samples of oil palm tissue. The GanET primer reaction was used in conjunction with a palm-sampling programme to investigate the possible infection of young palms through cut frond base surfaces. Ganoderma DNA was detected in frond base material at a greater frequency than would be expected by comparison with current infection levels. Comparisons are made between the height of the frond base infected, the number of frond bases infected, and subsequent development of basal stem rot. The preliminary results suggest that the development of basal stem rot may be more likely to occur when young lower frond bases are infected

Use of sedation to relieve refractory symptoms in dying patients

Objectives. To document the use of sedation for refractory symptoms in patients admitted to an independent palliative care unit.Method. A prospective descriptive study.Setting. The 7-bed inpatient unit at Sungardens Hospice, Pretoria.Subjects. Patients who required sedation for refractory symptoms in addition to normal palliative care treatment between January and June 2002.Findings. Twenty of 100 consecutive patients admitted required sedation. All had advanced cancer. Their mean age was 68 years. Thirty-six per cent were men and 64% women.Indications. Agitated delirium was the most common reason (45%) for using sedation, followed by intractable vomiting due to inoperable malignant intestinal obstruction in 25% of patients. Three patients with persistent convulsions or myoclonic jerking and 2 patients with severe refractory dyspnoea required some sedation. Intractable pain was the main reason for sedation in only 1 patient.Survival. Mean survival following the start of sedation was 92 hours/3.8 days (range 6 - 369 hours/0.25 - 19.4 days). The combined mean survival recorded in 9 other studies was 57 hours/2.4 days (range 36 - 93.6 hours/1.5 - 3.9 days).Medication. The main drugs used for sedation were midazolam and haloperidol. The mean dosage for midazolam was 18.5 mg/24 hours (range 7.5 - 40 mg) and for haloperidol 8 mg/24 hours (range 5 - 10 mg). For pain relief the mean daily dose of parenteral morphine was 76 mg (range 15 - 260 mg).Conclusion. Use of sedation for the relief of refractory symptoms at Sungardens Hospice is in line with several studies reported in the international literature

A conversational collaborative filtering approach to recommendation

Recent work has shown the value of treating recommendation as a conversation between user and system, which conversational recommenders have done by allowing feedback like “not as expensive as this” on recommendations. This allows a more natural alternative to content-based information access. Our research focuses on creating a viable conversational methodology for collaborative-filtering recommendation which can apply to any kind of information, especially visual. Since collaborative filtering does not have an intrinsic understanding of the items it suggests, i.e. it doesn’t understand the content, it has no obvious mechanism for conversation. Here we develop a means by which a recommender driven purely by collaborative filtering can sustain a conversation with a user and in our evaluation we show that it enables finding multimedia items that the user wants without requiring domain knowledge

Deep Herschel view of obscured star formation in the Bullet cluster

We use deep, five band (100–500 μm) data from the Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) to fully constrain the obscured star formation rate, SFR_(FIR), of galaxies in the Bullet cluster (z = 0.296), and a smaller background system (z = 0.35) in the same field. Herschel detects 23 Bullet cluster members with a total SFRFIR = 144±14 M_☉ yr^(-1). On average, the background system contains brighter far-infrared (FIR) galaxies, with ~50% higher SFRFIR (21 galaxies; 207 ± 9 M_☉ yr^(-1)). SFRs extrapolated from 24 μm flux via recent templates (SFR_(24 µm)) agree well with SFRFIR for ~60% of the cluster galaxies. In the remaining ~40%, SFR24 µm underestimates SFR_(FIR) due to a significant excess in observed S_(100)/S_(24) (rest frame S_(75)/S_(18)) compared to templates of the same FIR luminosity