Diary of a backpacker rockstar: A UNI student\u27s guide to traveling Western Europe

During the summer of 1996 I dedicated two months of my life to backpacking Western Europe. It was the most incredible experience of my life. It is my belief that many students at UNI would love to have the opportunity to travel as I did. In fact, a journey across Europe is completely within the reaches of the typical UNI student. Planning such a trip is systematic and reasonably simple. From obtaining passports to buying airline tickets and train passes, all aspects of planning a European backpacking excursion can be accomplished easily

The Quality of Managed Care: Evidence from the Medical Literature

Gottfried and Sloan examine the empirical evidence, drawn from the medical literature, pertaining to the safety of managed care practices. They seek to ground the ongoing debate on the medical merits of managed care organizations in the science of clinical research

The Quality of Managed Care: Evidence from the Medical Literature

Gottfried and Sloan examine the empirical evidence, drawn from the medical literature, pertaining to the safety of managed care practices. They seek to ground the ongoing debate on the medical merits of managed care organizations in the science of clinical research

The role of delamanid in the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant cause of death worldwide, and emergence of drug-resistant TB requires lengthy treatments with toxic drugs that are less effective than their first-line equivalents. New treatments are urgently needed. Delamanid, previously OPC-67863, is a novel drug of the dihydro-nitroimidazole class with potent anti-TB activity and great promise to be effective in the treatment of drug-resistant TB. This review examines the preclinical and clinical development of delamanid, reviews current guidance on its use and evaluates the opportunities and challenges for its future role in TB management.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Management of multidrug-resistant TB : novel treatments and their expansion to low resource settings

This article received no specific funding. JL is supported by the Wellcome Trust as a clinical PhD fellow [grant number 109105/Z/15/Z].Despite overall progress in global TB control, the rising burden ofmultidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) threatens to undermine efforts to end theworldwide epidemic. Of the 27 countries classified as high burden for MDR-TB, 17 are in 'low' or 'low-middle' income countries. Shorter, all oral and less toxic multidrug combinations are required to improve treatment outcomes in these settings. Suitability for safe co-administration with HIV drugs is also desirable. A range of strategies and several new drugs (including bedaquiline, delamanid and linezolid) are currently undergoing advanced clinical evaluations to define their roles in achieving these aims. However, several clinical questions and logistical challenges need to be overcome before these new MDR-TB treatments fulfil their potential.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Follicle-Stimulating Hormone Promotes RANK Expression on Human Monocytes

Elevated serum concentrations of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) are associated with diminished bone density in women, beginning years before menopause and the decline in estradiol. We hypothesized that FSH promotes development of myeloid cells toward the bone-resorbing osteoclast phenotype. This was tested by isolating peripheral blood mononuclear cells from nine healthy adults, incubating them in the presence of FSH at three different concentrations spanning the physiological range, and then measuring the expression of receptor activator for NF-κB (RANK, a surface marker for osteoclasts) on CD14+ cells by flow cytometry. In the absence of FSH, 3.3±0.5% of the cells expressed high levels of the receptor (RANKhigh). Increasing concentrations of FSH caused a biphasic dose-response, with a maximal (1.5-fold) increase in RANKhigh cells achieved with 50mIU/ml FSH (P=0.02). Cytokines that influence development of osteoclasts were also measured in culture supernatants: macrophage colony stimulating factor (M-CSF), osteoprotegerin (OPG) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα) concentrations were not significantly influenced by FSH, whereas RANK-ligand was undetectable. This study supports the concept that the elevated circulating concentrations of FSH during perimenopause may contribute to the increased rate of bone loss by promoting the development of osteoclast precursor cells

Factors influencing healthy meal choice in Germany

The aim of this study is to discover what German restaurant customers consider to be healthy. Owing to the paucity of literature on healthy meals, this research attempts to initiate an exploratory investigation testing a new psychological construct of health meals by using college students as the study population. The proposed scale consists of three dimensions (nutrition value, organic content, and gastronomy), which are defined by 16 attributes. This study finds that low in fat is the major consideration for selecting healthy meals, whereas the aroma of meals is not a concern for healthy meal choice. In the final analysis 15 indicators are retained in the measurement scale after the reliability test. Since the dimension of organic content has the highest reliability score, it could be best utilized as the surrogate indicator assessing the perception of a healthy meal. The derived scale is rather embryonic since it is tested only on German students. It is suggested that the scale should be further tested by drawing large samples from heterogeneous populations to boost the scale\u27s construct validity so as to collect samples from restaurant goers with different cultural background

Algorithmic approaches to enhancing and exploiting application-level error tolerance

As late-CMOS process scaling leads to increasingly variable circuits/logic and as most post-CMOS technologies in sight appear to have largely stochastic characteristics, hardware reliability has become a first-order design concern. To make matters worse, emerging computing systems are becoming increasingly power constrained. Traditional hardware/software approaches are likely to be impractical for these power constrained systems due to their heavy reliance on redundant, worstcase, and conservative designs. The primary goal of this research has been to investigate how we can leverage inherent application and algorithm characteristics (e.g. natural error resilience, spatial and temporal reuse, and fault containment) to build more efficient robust systems. This dissertation research describes algorithmic approaches that leverage application and algorithm-awareness for building such systems. These approaches include (a) application-specific techniques for low-overhead fault detection, (b) an algorithmic approach for error correction using localization, (c) selection of scientific computing solver schemes to leverage application-level error resilience, and (d) a numerical optimization-based methodology for converting applications into a more error tolerant form. This dissertation shows that application and algorithm-awareness can significantly increase the robustness of computing systems, while also reducing the cost of meeting reliability targets