Loops and the Lagrange property

Let \cF be a family of finite loops closed under subloops and factor loops. Then every loop in \cF has the strong Lagrange property if and only if every simple loop in \cF has the weak Lagrange property. We exhibit several such families, and indicate how the Lagrange property enters into the problem of existence of finite simple loops.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX2e, uses natbib.sty, submitted to Results in Mathematic

EDI in Singapore: emerging issues with sexual and gender minorities and people living with HIV

Diversity management had always been at the forefront of Singapore's social and economic policies. Over the last half a century, a slew of legislation, social and economic policies aimed at maintaining harmony and ensuring economic progress have successfully put Singapore on the world map as a global trading hub. Owing to Singapore's heritage as a migrant nation, much of the diversity management efforts in the past had focused on bases of diversity such as age, race, gender, religion. However, in recent years, there was much public discourse on the inclusion of gender and sexual minorities and people living with HIV, pushing for a greater need to address issues that have long been considered sensitive. This chapter spotlights the two issues against a backdrop of how diversity is managed in the Singapore context, and discusses two frameworks that may help shed more light on Singapore's approach to diversity management.acceptedVersio

A difficult diagnosis - constrictive pericarditis and its treatment: a case report

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract The diagnosis of constrictive pericarditis requires a high degree of clinical suspicion, for the signs and symptoms of this disease can be falsely attributed to other causes. Herein, we present a case of a 70-year old retired farmer whose symptoms of right heart failure were initially attributed to co-existing pneumonia and pulmonary embolism. He was discharged. Three weeks later he presented with worsening breathlessness and ascites. Echocardiography, computed tomography and cardiac catheterization revealed the diagnosis of constrictive pericarditis. He underwent complete pericardectomy and to date has made a good recovery. This case exemplifies the difficulty in diagnosing this condition, the investigation required, and provides a discussion of the benefit and outcomes of prompt treatment.Peer Reviewe

An optimized resilient advance bandwidth scheduling for media delivery services

Part 3: Evaluation and Experimental Study of Rich Network ServicesInternational audienceIn IP-based media delivery services, we often deal with predictable network load and traffic, making it beneficial to use advance reservations even when network failure occurs. In such a network, to offer reliable reservations, fault-tolerance related features should be incorporated in the advance reservation system. In this paper, we propose an optimized protection mechanism in which backup paths are selected in advance to protect the transfers when any failure happens in the network. Using a shared backup path protection, the proposed approach minimizes the backup capacity of the requests while guaranteeing 100% single link failure recovery. We have evaluated the quality and complexity of our proposed solution and the impact of different percentages of backup demands and timeslot sizes have been investigated in depth. The presented approach has been compared to our previously-designed algorithm as a baseline. Our simulation results reveal a noticeable improvement in request acceptance rate, up to 9.2%. Moreover, with fine-grained timeslot sizes and under limited network capacity, the time complexity of the proposed solution is up to 14% lower

Milk clotting activity of protease, extracted from rhizome of Taffin giwa ginger (Zingiber officinale) cultivar, from northwestern Nigeria

The increasing prices of calf rennets, their accessibility and ethical concerns associated with the production of such enzymes for general cheese making have led to systematic investigations on the possibility and suitability of their substitution by other enzymes of plant origin. In this study, ammonium sulphate ((NH4)2SO4) fractionation, characterization and milk clotting activity (MCA) of protease extracted from Taffin Giwa ginger rhizome cultivar of the family Zingiberaceae from northwestern Nigeria were carried out. The protease extracted showed optimum activity at temperatures near 60 °C and pH value of 6.5 with a relative activity in a broad pH range of 5.0 to 8.0 accordingly. The enzyme was completely denatured at higher temperature of 100 °C and higher pH range of 12.0. The milk clotting property of the protease indicated 3.1 and 2.2 folds of MCA and MSCA respectively in relation to the commercial calf rennet with MCA/PA ratio of 2.52. The properties of Taffin Giwa protease shown in this study, especially its milk clotting activity, make it a potential candidate for substituting calf rennet in the food industries, particularly in cheese making processes.Keywords: Ginger Protease, Milk Clotting Activity, Calf rennet, Characterization, Extractio

Raman spectral signatures of mouse mammary tissue and associated lymph nodes: normal, tumor and mastitis

Raman spectroscopy involves the interaction of light with the molecular vibrations and therefore can provide information about molecular structure, tissue composition and changes in its environment. We explored whether Raman spectroscopy can reliably distinguish mammary tumors from normal mammary tissues and other pathological states in mice. We analyzed a large number of Raman spectra from the tumor and normal mammary glands of mice injected with 4T1 tumor cells, which were collected using a high-resolution (less than 4 cm −1 ) Raman spectrometer at a fixed (785 nm) laser excitation wavelength and with 60 mW of laser power. The spectra of normal and tumor mammary glands showed consistent differences in the intensity of certain Raman bands and loss of some bands in the tumor spectra. Multivariate statistical methods—principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant functional analysis (DFA)—were used to separate the data into different groups of mammary tumors, mastitis, lymph nodes contralateral and tumor-cell-injected sides, and normal contralateral and tumor-cell-injected sides. We demonstrate that this spectroscopic technique has the feasibility of discriminating tumor and mastitis from normal tissues and other pathological states in a short period of time and may detect tumor transformation earlier than the standard histological examination stage. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55947/1/1565_ftp.pd

Integrability of Lie systems through Riccati equations

Integrability conditions for Lie systems are related to reduction or transformation processes. We here analyse a geometric method to construct integrability conditions for Riccati equations following these approaches. This approach provides us with a unified geometrical viewpoint that allows us to analyse some previous works on the topic and explain new properties. Moreover, this new approach can be straightforwardly generalised to describe integrability conditions for any Lie system. Finally, we show the usefulness of our treatment in order to study the problem of the linearisability of Riccati equations.Comment: Corrected typo

Disturbed sleep is associated with reduced verbal episodic memory and entorhinal cortex volume in younger middle-aged women with risk-reducing early ovarian removal

INTRODUCTION: Women with early ovarian removal (&lt;48 years) have an elevated risk for both late-life Alzheimer's disease (AD) and insomnia, a modifiable risk factor. In early midlife, they also show reduced verbal episodic memory and hippocampal volume. Whether these reductions correlate with a sleep phenotype consistent with insomnia risk remains unexplored.METHODS: We recruited thirty-one younger middleaged women with risk-reducing early bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO), fifteen of whom were taking estradiol-based hormone replacement therapy (BSO+ERT) and sixteen who were not (BSO). Fourteen age-matched premenopausal (AMC) and seventeen spontaneously peri-postmenopausal (SM) women who were ~10y older and not taking ERT were also enrolled. Overnight polysomnography recordings were collected at participants' home across multiple nights (M=2.38 SEM=0.19), along with subjective sleep quality and hot flash ratings. In addition to group comparisons on sleep measures, associations with verbal episodic memory and medial temporal lobe volume were assessed.RESULTS: Increased sleep latency and decreased sleep efficiency were observed on polysomnography recordings of those not taking ERT, consistent with insomnia symptoms. This phenotype was also observed in the older women in SM, implicating ovarian hormone loss. Further, sleep latency was associated with more forgetting on the paragraph recall task, previously shown to be altered in women with early BSO. Both increased sleep latency and reduced sleep efficiency were associated with smaller anterolateral entorhinal cortex volume.DISCUSSION: Together, these findings confirm an association between ovarian hormone loss and insomnia symptoms, and importantly, identify an younger onset age in women with early ovarian removal, which may contribute to poorer cognitive and brain outcomes in these women.</p