Are the demographics for squamous cell cancer in the head and neck changing in the United Kingdom?

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is well known to be more common in men than women. Smoking and alcohol are the key risk factors causing such malignancies and there are several publications which have suggested that the prevalence of these diseases is increasing more in women than in men in western countries due to increased smoking and alcohol use.We collected our data at the Institute of Laryngology and Otology from the last 45 years and analysed the disease ratios in male to female patients in different sites within the head and neck. Our results revealed a decreasing male to female ratio, though this was not statistically significant. However, it draws attention to the increasing number of women with head and neck cancer, which may reflect their increasing use of cigarettes and alcohol

Two-level recognition of isolated word using neural nets

Describes a neural-net based isolated word recogniser that has a better performance on a standard multi-speaker database than the reference hidden Markov model recogniser. The complete neural net recogniser is formed from two parts: a front-end which transforms the complex acoustic specification of the speech into a simplified phonetic feature specification, and a whole-word discriminator net. Each level was trained separately, thus considerably reducing the time necessary to train the overall system

Relations between light emission and electron density and temperature fluctuations in a helium plasma

The relations between three atomic lines, He I 667.8 nm (3¹ D → 2¹ P), 706.5 nm (3³ S → 2³ P), and 728.1 nm (3¹ S → 2¹ P), and the underlying fluctuations in a helium plasma are investigated for the quantitative interpretation of optical observations in plasma fluctuationmeasurements. Frequency dependent fluctuation amplitude ratios and phase delays between the line emission fluctuation and the electron density and temperaturefluctuations are calculated based on a quasi-static collisional-radiative model and a linear approximation technique. For frequencies up to the upper limit of practical interest (<1 MHz), the fluctuation amplitude ratios and phase delays are similar to those directly evaluated by the quasi-static model. It is found that the difference between the results from the linear approximation technique and from the quasi-static model is due to the absence of metastable fluctuations. Contributions of the 2¹ S and 2³ S metastable fluctuations to the three helium line emission fluctuations are analyzed. The linearity between fluctuations in the line emission and in the electron density and temperature is valid for fluctuation levels higher than 10%

Technology, organization and materiality: Reflections on the Problem of Agency

In management and information systems research, there has been a long-standing debate over the relationship between technology and the organization in which it is embedded. This debate flares up periodically and this is one such time. At one extreme is technological determinism, which makes the claim that technology is the cause and organizational change is the effect. At the other extreme is social determinism, which claims that social action and interaction is the cause and technological change is the effect. Is there a way out of this debate? How can we make sense of the interactions between people and machines? In this paper, we will examine the debate, discuss what is at stake in its resolution and explore an alternative

Beyond Patient Reported Pain: Perfusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging Demonstrates Reproducible Cerebral Representation of Ongoing Post-Surgical Pain

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Supramolecular structure in the membrane of Staphylococcus aureus

The fundamental processes of life are organized and based on common basic principles. Molecular organizers, often interacting with the membrane, capitalize on cellular polarity to precisely orientate essential processes. The study of organisms lacking apparent polarity or known cellular organizers (e.g., the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus) may enable the elucidation of the primal organizational drive in biology. How does a cell choose from infinite locations in its membrane? We have discovered a structure in the S. aureus membrane that organizes processes indispensable for life and can arise spontaneously from the geometric constraints of protein complexes on membranes. Building on this finding, the most basic cellular positioning system to optimize biological processes, known molecular coordinators could introduce further levels of complexity. All life demands the temporal and spatial control of essential biological functions. In bacteria, the recent discovery of coordinating elements provides a framework to begin to explain cell growth and division. Here we present the discovery of a supramolecular structure in the membrane of the coccal bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which leads to the formation of a large-scale pattern across the entire cell body; this has been unveiled by studying the distribution of essential proteins involved in lipid metabolism (PlsY and CdsA). The organization is found to require MreD, which determines morphology in rod-shaped cells. The distribution of protein complexes can be explained as a spontaneous pattern formation arising from the competition between the energy cost of bending that they impose on the membrane, their entropy of mixing, and the geometric constraints in the system. Our results provide evidence for the existence of a self-organized and nonpercolating molecular scaffold involving MreD as an organizer for optimal cell function and growth based on the intrinsic self-assembling properties of biological molecules

Immunological selection for Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis antigens.

Comparative ELISA and selective immunoblotting procedures were used in attempts to identify differential serological indicators of infection with the Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis complex, infection with the L. braziliensis species, and therapeutic cure of localized or mucocutaneous leishmaniasis (LCL or MCL). Although mean ELISA absorbance values were significantly higher for MCL sera than for LCL sera, absorbance could not be used as a reliable indicator of the clinical form of disease. Immunoblotting profiles were similar with sera from MCL and LCL. Pre-adsorption with heterologous trypanosomatid antigens indicated that recognition of antigens of about 56, 60, 66, 72, 88 and 110 kDa might be specific to the subgenus Viannia. In two-colour, sequential, dual ELISA-based immunoblotting, no antigens recognized only by sera from MCL patients were detected. After glucantime therapy, immunoblotting profiles with LCL sera were reduced both in intensity and in the range of antigens detected; a 104-kDa antigen was newly detected with post-treatment LCL sera. Overall, the results show the value of differential immunological detection strategies and support the close relationship between species of the subgenus Viannia but fail to indicate a prognostic antigen for MCL