Space-centred information management approach to improve CAD-based healthcare building design

This study focuses on developing a space-centred CAD tool to enable designers to effectively manage and implement the information of design guidance information and user requirements during design processes, especially for the stages of design briefing and conceptual design. It aims to structure and store design guidance and user requirements for healthcare building design into a relational database, and link them to relevant space entities in design plans. The tool is developed on the platform of Autodesk Architecture Desktop (ADT). It also enables users to store and retrieve pictures associated with textual information, because pictures have been always used by designers as an effective medium to represent and deliver design information and knowledge. This can give users directly visual and more understandable perceptions of the design guidance. The tool is fully embedded with Autodesk AutoCAD systems to ensure the application of this tool being fully merged with CAD-based design process. A set of design guidance about Alzheimer clinic built environments are adopted as a sample to demonstrate and validate the tool. Moreover, the scenario of expanding this application to more broad areas has also been foreseen

Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective

This Report has a number of inter-related general purposes. One is to explore the extent to which food, nutrition, physical activity, and body composition modify the risk of cancer, and to specify which factors are most important. To the extent that environmental factors such as food, nutrition, and physical activity influence the risk of cancer, it is a preventable disease. The Report specifies recommendations based on solid evidence which, when followed, will be expected to reduce the incidence of cancer

Exploring industry level capabilities in the UK Creative Industries

The competitive dynamics of the UK’s Creative Industries has changed considerably over the past decade and perhaps none more so than in the Publishing Industry. There is no doubt that this industry continues to undergo structural changes that compel firms to adapt and transform their business in response to the dynamic nature of competitive environment. Industries have long been examined by researchers from a strategic perspective with various themes of inquiry relating to; industry structure and positioning, industry evolution and development, industry lifecycle, industry change and industry consolidation. This paper argues that ‘industry analysis’ could usefully draw on Dynamic Capabilities Theory which argues for the strategic adaptation and reconfiguration of firm resources and capabilities in order to address a rapidly changing competitive environment. This paper will present empirical findings from a comparative time-series analysis (1997-2014) of the UK Publishing Industry and compare it to other industries categorised within the UK’s Creative Industries. In doing so, this analysis will add to the limited knowledge base on industry level dynamic capabilities and extend our knowledge on inter-industry comparisons in performance following the reconfiguration of industry resources

Understanding the Role of Nutrition in the Brain & Behavioral Development of Toddlers and Preschool Children: Identifying and Overcoming Methodological Barriers

The pre-school years (i.e., 1–5 years of age) is a time of rapid and dramatic postnatal brain development, i.e., neural plasticity, and of fundamental acquisition of cognitive development i.e., working memory, attention and inhibitory control. Also, it is a time of transition from a direct maternal mediation/selection of diet-based nutrition to food selection that is more based on self-selection and self-gratification. However, there have been fewer published studies in pre-school children than in infants or school-aged children that examined the role of nutrition in brain/mental development (i.e., 125 studies vs. 232 and 303 studies, respectively during the last 28 years, Figure 1). This may arise because of age-related variability, in terms of individual differences in temperament, linguistic ability, and patterns of neural activity that may affect assessment of neural and cognitive development in pre-school children. In this review, we suggest several approaches for assessing brain function in children that can be refined. It would be desirable if the discipline developed some common elements to be included in future studies of diet and brain function, with the idea that they would complement more targeted measures based on time of exposure and understanding of data from animal models. Underlining this approach is the concepts of “window of sensitivity” during which nutrients may affect postnatal neural development: investigators and expert panels need to specifically look for region-specific changes and do so with understanding of the likely time window during which the nutrient was, or was not available. (244 words

Understanding the role of nutrition in the brain and behavioral development of toddlers and preschool children: Identifying and addressing methodological barriers

The preschool years (i.e. 1-5 years of age) is a time of rapid and dramatic postnatal brain development (i.e. neural plasticity), and of fundamental acquisition of cognitive development (i.e. working memory, attention and inhibitory control). Also, it is a time of transition from a direct maternal mediation/selection of diet-based nutrition to food selection that is more based on selfselection and self-gratification. However, there have been fewer published studies in preschool children than in infants or school-aged children that examined the role of nutrition in brain/mental development (125 studies versus 232 and 303 studies, respectively during the last 28 years). This may arise because of age-related variability, in terms of individual differences in temperament, linguistic ability, and patterns of neural activity that may affect assessment of neural and cognitive development in pre-school children. In this review, we suggest several approaches for assessing brain function in children that can be refined. It would be desirable if the discipline developed some common elements to be included in future studies of diet and brain function, with the idea that they would complement more targeted measures based on time of exposure and understanding of data from animal models. Underlining this approach is the concept of 'window of sensitivity' during which nutrients may affect postnatal neural development: investigators and expert panels need to look specifically for region-specific changes and do so with understanding of the likely time window during which the nutrient was, or was not available

Hepatitis C virus cell-cell transmission and resistance to direct-acting antiviral agents

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is transmitted between hepatocytes via classical cell entry but also uses direct cell-cell transfer to infect neighboring hepatocytes. Viral cell-cell transmission has been shown to play an important role in viral persistence allowing evasion from neutralizing antibodies. In contrast, the role of HCV cell-cell transmission for antiviral resistance is unknown. Aiming to address this question we investigated the phenotype of HCV strains exhibiting resistance to direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) in state-of-the-art model systems for cell-cell transmission and spread. Using HCV genotype 2 as a model virus, we show that cell-cell transmission is the main route of viral spread of DAA-resistant HCV. Cell-cell transmission of DAA-resistant viruses results in viral persistence and thus hampers viral eradication. We also show that blocking cell-cell transmission using host-targeting entry inhibitors (HTEIs) was highly effective in inhibiting viral dissemination of resistant genotype 2 viruses. Combining HTEIs with DAAs prevented antiviral resistance and led to rapid elimination of the virus in cell culture model. In conclusion, our work provides evidence that cell-cell transmission plays an important role in dissemination and maintenance of resistant variants in cell culture models. Blocking virus cell-cell transmission prevents emergence of drug resistance in persistent viral infection including resistance to HCV DAAs

High-resolution microbial community reconstruction by integrating short reads from multiple 16S rRNA regions

The emergence of massively parallel sequencing technology has revolutionized microbial profiling, allowing the unprecedented comparison of microbial diversity across time and space in a wide range of host-associated and environmental ecosystems. Although the high-throughput nature of such methods enables the detection of low-frequency bacteria, these advances come at the cost of sequencing read length, limiting the phylogenetic resolution possible by current methods. Here, we present a generic approach for integrating short reads from large genomic regions, thus enabling phylogenetic resolution far exceeding current methods. The approach is based on a mapping to a statistical model that is later solved as a constrained optimization problem. We demonstrate the utility of this method by analyzing human saliva and Drosophila samples, using Illumina single-end sequencing of a 750 bp amplicon of the 16S rRNA gene. Phylogenetic resolution is significantly extended while reducing the number of falsely detected bacteria, as compared with standard single-region Roche 454 Pyrosequencing. Our approach can be seamlessly applied to simultaneous sequencing of multiple genes providing a higher resolution view of the composition and activity of complex microbial communities