Photo editing: Enhancing social media images to reflect appearance ideals

Many of the images used in traditional forms of mass media have been modified to portray unrealistic and idealised beauty characteristics. Further to this, members of the general public have now begun to digitally enhance their own pictures for social media posts, in order to fulfil these often unattainable standards. Ella Guest explores the impact exposure to idealised images of peers may have on health and wellbein

SARS and hospital priority setting: a qualitative case study and evaluation

BACKGROUND: Priority setting is one of the most difficult issues facing hospitals because of funding restrictions and changing patient need. A deadly communicable disease outbreak, such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto in 2003, amplifies the difficulties of hospital priority setting. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate priority setting in a hospital in response to SARS using the ethical framework 'accountability for reasonableness'. METHODS: This study was conducted at a large tertiary hospital in Toronto, Canada. There were two data sources: 1) over 200 key documents (e.g. emails, bulletins), and 2) 35 interviews with key informants. Analysis used a modified thematic technique in three phases: open coding, axial coding, and evaluation. RESULTS: Participants described the types of priority setting decisions, the decision making process and the reasoning used. Although the hospital leadership made an effort to meet the conditions of 'accountability for reasonableness', they acknowledged that the decision making was not ideal. We described good practices and opportunities for improvement. CONCLUSIONS: 'Accountability for reasonableness' is a framework that can be used to guide fair priority setting in health care organizations, such as hospitals. In the midst of a crisis such as SARS where guidance is incomplete, consequences uncertain, and information constantly changing, where hour-by-hour decisions involve life and death, fairness is more important rather than less

Redox linked flavin sites in extracellular decaheme proteins involved in microbe-mineral electron transfer

Extracellular microbe-mineral electron transfer is a major driving force for the oxidation of organic carbon in many subsurface environments. Extracellular multi-heme cytochromes of the Shewenella genus play a major role in this process but the mechanism of electron exchange at the interface between cytochrome and acceptor is widely debated. The 1.8 Å x-ray crystal structure of the decaheme MtrC revealed a highly conserved CX8C disulfide that, when substituted for AX8A, severely compromised the ability of S. oneidensis to grow under aerobic conditions. Reductive cleavage of the disulfide in the presence of flavin mononucleotide (FMN) resulted in the reversible formation of a stable flavocytochrome. Similar results were also observed with other decaheme cytochromes, OmcA, MtrF and UndA. The data suggest that these decaheme cytochromes can transition between highly reactive flavocytochromes or less reactive cytochromes, and that this transition is controlled by a redox active disulfide that responds to the presence of oxygen

The Inverse Born Approximation: Exact Determination of Shape of Convex Voids

The Inverse Born Approximation (IBA) to the elastic wave inverse scattering problem is known to give highly accurate results for the shape of complex voids. In this paper we present an argument demonstrating that the IBA is, in fact, exact for determining the size, shape and orientation of a wide class of these scatterers given infinite bandwidth and unlimited aperture information. Essentially, our argument demonstrates how the IBA algorithm picks out the singular contribution to the impulse response function and correctly relates it to the shape of the scatterer. Some specific examples will be used to illustrate the more intuitive aspects of the discussion

Decreased functional connectivity within a language subnetwork in benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes.

OBJECTIVE: Benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS, also known as Rolandic epilepsy) is a common epilepsy syndrome that is associated with literacy and language impairments. The neural mechanisms of the syndrome are not known. The primary objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that functional connectivity within the language network is decreased in children with BECTS. We also tested the hypothesis that siblings of children with BECTS have similar abnormalities. METHODS: Echo planar magnetic resonance (MR) imaging data were acquired from 25 children with BECTS, 12 siblings, and 20 healthy controls, at rest. After preprocessing with particular attention to intrascan motion, the mean signal was extracted from each of 90 regions of interest. Sparse, undirected graphs were constructed from adjacency matrices consisting of Spearman's rank correlation coefficients. Global and nodal graph metrics and subnetwork and pairwise connectivity were compared between groups. RESULTS: There were no significant differences in graph metrics between groups. Children with BECTS had decreased functional connectivity relative to controls within a four-node subnetwork, which consisted of the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left superior frontal gyrus, the left supramarginal gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe (p = 0.04). A similar but nonsignificant decrease was also observed for the siblings. The BECTS groups had significant increases in connectivity within a five-node, five-edge frontal subnetwork. SIGNIFICANCE: The results provide further evidence of decreased functional connectivity between key mediators of speech processing, language, and reading in children with BECTS. We hypothesize that these decreases reflect delayed lateralization of the language network and contribute to specific cognitive impairments

Ultrasonic Imaging and the Long Wavelength Phase

Elastodynamic and acoustic wave scattering play an essential role in various inspection methods such as sonar and ultrasonic tomography. Recently there has been considerable interest in the implications of long wavelength elastodynamic scattering for the characterization of flaws in elastic solids [1-6]. If the scattering amplitude is expanded as a power series in the frequency, the leading term is real and varies as the frequency squared. The next term varies as the frequency cubed and is purely imaginary. The evaluation of the phase variation in the long wavelength limit requires the ratio of these terms. Most effort to date has been invested in understanding the dependence of the coefficient of the frequency squared term on the size, shape, orientation and material properties of the scatterer. Richardson [3] and Kohn and Rice [4] have shown that, for an anisotropic elastic inclusion in an otherwise isotropic and homogeneous elastic space, the coefficient depends on at most 22 parameters. In addition, efficient numerical programs have been constructed to evaluate this coefficient for ellipsoidal inclusions. Other work has related it to the stress intensity factor for flaws which are crack-like [5]

Catalytic steam gasification of biomass for a sustainable hydrogen future: influence of catalyst composition

Hydrogen is regarded as a clean energy for fuelling the future. Hydrogen will be the energy carrier from other resources such as hydropower, wind, solar and biomass. Producing hydrogen from gasification of biomass wastes, particularly in the presence of steam, represents a promising route to produce this clean and CO2-neutral fuel. The steam pyrolysis-gasification ofbiomass (wood sawdust) was carried out with various nickel-based catalysts for hydrogen production in a two-stage fixed bed reaction system. The wood sawdust was pyrolysed in the first reactor and the derived products were gasified in the second reactor in the presence of the catalyst and steam. The synthesised Ni-Ca-Al and Ni-Zn-Al catalysts were preparedbyco-precipitation method with different Ni loadings of 20 mol% and various Zn/Al or Ca/Al ratios, which were characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and temperature-programmed oxidation (TPO). The results showed that the Ni/Zn-Al (1:9) catalyst resulted in higher hydrogenproduction(23.9 mmol H2 g-1biomass)compared with the Ni/Ca-Al (1:9) catalyst (12.7 23.9 mmol H2 g-1 biomass) and in addition, the increase of Ca or Zn content in the catalyst slightly increased the hydrogen production. The TPO results showed that the catalyst suffered negligible coke deposition from the catalytic steam pyrolysis/gasification of wood sawdust. Additionally, Na2CO3 basic solution was also found toproduce a catalyst with better performance and lower coke deposition, compared with NH4OH catalyst preparation agent, as observed by TPO, SEM and TEM analysis