Periodontal disease and some adverse perinatal outcomes in a cohort of low risk pregnant women

Objective: To evaluate the association of periodontal disease (PD) in pregnancy with some adverse perinatal outcomes. Method: This cohort study included 327 pregnant women divided in groups with or without PD. Indexes of plaque and gingival bleeding on probing, probing pocket depth, clinical attachment level and gingival recession were evaluated at one periodontal examination below 32 weeks of gestation. The rates of preterm birth (PTB), low birth weight (LBW), small for gestational age (SGA) neonates and prelabor rupture of membranes (PROM) were evaluated using Risk Ratios (95%CI) and Population Attributable Risk Fractions. Results: PD was associated with a higher risk of PTB (RRadj. 3.47 95% CI 1.62-7.43), LBW (RRadj. 2.93 95% CI 1.36-6.34) and PROM (RRadj. 2.48 95% CI 1.35-4.56), but not with SGA neonates (RR 2.38 95% CI 0.93 - 6.10). Conclusions: PD was a risk factor for PT, LBW and PROM among Brazilian low risk pregnant women

Efficient cooperative searching on the Web: system design and evaluation

The World Wide Web provides a convenient and inexpensive infrastructure for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Groupware systems allow distant users to work together in a shared virtual workspace. Awareness of group members’ actions is a basic feature and key functionality for groupware. Many times a group of people work together researching information on the Web about a topic. This type of collaboration can be decomposed into two tasks. First, team members have to access, process and filter by importance the Web pages gathered. Second, they have to synthesize and present them either as a whole in the form of a report, or in an organized way in the form of Web directories. A key issue that strongly affects this particular type of cooperative work is the revisiting of pages and, consequently, the time spent on accessing and processing the same information sources, which may be relevant or not to the topic. We propose group member URL traversal awareness (GMUTA) as significant functionality for Web-based collaboration tools in order to avoid conflicting or repetitive actions by group members. We then present a prototype system we developed, the Web Collaborative Searching Assistant (WCSA), which exploits GMUTA and helps distributed croup members to work more efficiently. Experimental evaluation of the WCSA indicated that the functionality provided overcomes the above-mentioned problem, improves searching efficiency and adds substantial value to the collaboration. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved

The multimedia multicasting problem

This paper explores the problems associated with the multicasting of continuous media to support multimedia group applications. The interaction between multicasting and the delivery of multiple time-correlated continuous-media streams with real-time delay requirements poses various new and interesting problems in research on communication protocols and architectures. We describe these problems, and identify where the opportunities are for effective solutions, all in the context of providing an overview of the current state of research in multimedia multicasting. The issues we discuss include quality of service, resource reservations, routing, error and traffic control, heterogeneity, and the use of hierarchical coding and open-loop control techniques

Multisource and multipath file transfers through publish-subscribe internetworking

We present mmFTP, an information-centric and receiver-driven file transfer protocol for the Publish Subscribe Internetworking (PSI) architecture. mmFTP supports both multisource and multipath transfers, while requiring minimal complexity in terms of network operation. We describe the basic design and operation of mmFTP and present preliminary experimental performance results from a prototype implementation deployed in the PlanetLab testbed. Copyright © 2013 ACM

Supporting Mobile streaming services in future publish/subscribe networks

The architecture of the current Internet was not originally designed to support either mobility or multicast. In particular, its coupling of host identification and location identification has hindered the provision of effective mobile services. At the same time, its lack of support for multicast distribution causes a multitude of redundant unicast transmissions, leading to an inefficient utilization of network resources. Both these limitations are especially apparent in the case of real-time continuous media distribution. The publish/subscribe paradigm has been proposed as a promising alternative to the current send/receive paradigm for a future Internet architecture. In future publish/subscribe networks, multicast will be the norm, and this change of the end-to-end communication semantics will lead to a networking environment more suitable for mobility. In the context of this paradigm, this paper considers a prototype architecture based on the Scribe overlay multicast scheme. Preliminary simulation results show that our publish/subscribe network implementation achieves better performance during mobility compared to Mobile IPv6 in all relevant metrics, such as hand-off delay (or resume time) and loss of real-time traffic during disconnections, at the cost of a slight increase of the end-to-end delay due to the routing stretch imposed by the overlay. © 2009 IEEE