Change in viral bronchiolitis management in hospitals in the UK after the publication of NICE guideline.

BACKGROUND: Viral bronchiolitis is one of the most common causes of hospitalisation in young infants. It has previously been shown that many United Kingdom (UK) hospital Trusts were not compliant with many aspects of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) bronchiolitis guideline prior to its publication. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to investigate changes in the management of bronchiolitis by hospital Trusts between 2015 (before NICE guideline publication) and 2017, after publication. STUDY DESIGN: We prospectively surveyed paediatricians at UK hospital Trusts on the management of bronchiolitis before (March to May 2015) and after (January to May 2017) the NICE bronchiolitis guideline publication in June 2015, using an electronic, structured questionnaire. RESULTS: In 2015 111 Trusts were represented and in 2017 100 Trusts. Significant improvements were seen in the use of nebulised bronchodilators and hypertonic saline and provision of parental written guidance. However, full compliance with the guideline did not change with 18% of Trusts compliant before publication of the guideline in 2015 and 19% fully compliant with the guideline in 2017. CONCLUSIONS: Overall there were modest but important improvements in the reported management of bronchiolitis after the publication of the NICE guideline

Meeting review: the Drosophila genome: so that's what it looks like!

Peer Reviewe

Assay of proteolytic enzyme(s) from Neurospora crassa

Assay of proteolytic enzyme(s) from Neurospora crass

Taking Harriet Martineau Seriously in the Classroom and Beyond

The contributors to this book, sociologists all, take Harriet Martineau seriously as a major and consequential intellect within their chosen discipline and their classrooms. It has not always been so, at least in recent times, but Martineau has now been rediscovered by sociologists who are writing about Martineau in a growing series of books, essays, and scholarly editions. We do not all see Martineau through the same author spectacles, as the following contributions make evident, but we do see her-she is no longer invisible to those of our students and colleagues who possess a modicum of bibliographic savvy. At several points in this book, readers are presented with contextual background and biographical details about Martineau, information that is useful and necessary for readers who are still new to Martineau\u27s work, but it warrants notice that the time for penning generic introductory synopses of Martineau and her accomplishments is drawing to a close-several sociological introductions are readily available and are cited among the references at the end of this book. Along this line, although uncited in the present bibliography, a growing number of introductory sociology textbooks now make at ieast passing reference to Martineau (Hill 1998). Harriet Martineau has arrived on the doorstep of the twenty-first century sociological scene, and it is high time that the discipline\u27s scholars, thinkers, and theoreticians take her seriously

Taking Harriet Martineau Seriously in the Classroom and Beyond

The contributors to this book, sociologists all, take Harriet Martineau seriously as a major and consequential intellect within their chosen discipline and their classrooms. It has not always been so, at least in recent times, but Martineau has now been rediscovered by sociologists who are writing about Martineau in a growing series of books, essays, and scholarly editions. We do not all see Martineau through the same author spectacles, as the following contributions make evident, but we do see her-she is no longer invisible to those of our students and colleagues who possess a modicum of bibliographic savvy. At several points in this book, readers are presented with contextual background and biographical details about Martineau, information that is useful and necessary for readers who are still new to Martineau\u27s work, but it warrants notice that the time for penning generic introductory synopses of Martineau and her accomplishments is drawing to a close-several sociological introductions are readily available and are cited among the references at the end of this book. Along this line, although uncited in the present bibliography, a growing number of introductory sociology textbooks now make at ieast passing reference to Martineau (Hill 1998). Harriet Martineau has arrived on the doorstep of the twenty-first century sociological scene, and it is high time that the discipline\u27s scholars, thinkers, and theoreticians take her seriously

Histidinol dehydrogenase from Neurospora crassa

Histidinol dehydrogenase from Neurospora crass

A CubeSat for Calibrating Ground-Based and Sub-Orbital Millimeter-Wave Polarimeters (CalSat)

We describe a low-cost, open-access, CubeSat-based calibration instrument that is designed to support ground-based and sub-orbital experiments searching for various polarization signals in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). All modern CMB polarization experiments require a robust calibration program that will allow the effects of instrument-induced signals to be mitigated during data analysis. A bright, compact, and linearly polarized astrophysical source with polarization properties known to adequate precision does not exist. Therefore, we designed a space-based millimeter-wave calibration instrument, called CalSat, to serve as an open-access calibrator, and this paper describes the results of our design study. The calibration source on board CalSat is composed of five "tones" with one each at 47.1, 80.0, 140, 249 and 309 GHz. The five tones we chose are well matched to (i) the observation windows in the atmospheric transmittance spectra, (ii) the spectral bands commonly used in polarimeters by the CMB community, and (iii) The Amateur Satellite Service bands in the Table of Frequency Allocations used by the Federal Communications Commission. CalSat would be placed in a polar orbit allowing visibility from observatories in the Northern Hemisphere, such as Mauna Kea in Hawaii and Summit Station in Greenland, and the Southern Hemisphere, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile and the South Pole. CalSat also would be observable by balloon-borne instruments launched from a range of locations around the world. This global visibility makes CalSat the only source that can be observed by all terrestrial and sub-orbital observatories, thereby providing a universal standard that permits comparison between experiments using appreciably different measurement approaches

Computing the Largest Empty Rectangle

We consider the following problem: Given a rectangle containing N points, find the largest area subrectangle with sides parallel to those of the original rectangle which contains none of the given points. If the rectangle is a piece of fabric or sheet metal and the points are flaws, this problem is finding the largest-area rectangular piece which can be salvaged. A previously known result [13] takes $O(N^2 )$ worst-case and $O(N\log ^2 N)$ expected time. This paper presents an $O(N\log ^3 N)$ time, $O(N\log N)$ space algorithm to solve this problem. It uses a divide-and-conquer approach similar to the ones used by Bentley [1] and introduces a new notion of Voronoi diagram along with a method for efficient computation of certain functions over paths of a tree

Minimum-weight triangulation is NP-hard

A triangulation of a planar point set S is a maximal plane straight-line graph with vertex set S. In the minimum-weight triangulation (MWT) problem, we are looking for a triangulation of a given point set that minimizes the sum of the edge lengths. We prove that the decision version of this problem is NP-hard. We use a reduction from PLANAR-1-IN-3-SAT. The correct working of the gadgets is established with computer assistance, using dynamic programming on polygonal faces, as well as the beta-skeleton heuristic to certify that certain edges belong to the minimum-weight triangulation.Comment: 45 pages (including a technical appendix of 13 pages), 28 figures. This revision contains a few improvements in the expositio