Burden of fetal alcohol syndrome in a rural West Coast area of South Africa

Background. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is common in parts of South Africa; rural residence is a frequently cited risk factor. We conducted a FAS school prevalence survey of an isolated rural community in a West Coast village of Western Cape Province, so obtaining the first directly measured rate, focusing specifically on a South African rural area, of FAS and partial FAS (PFAS). Methods. The study area (Aurora village), a community of about 2 500 people in a grain-producing region, has one primary school. All learners were eligible for study inclusion. Initial anthropometry screening was followed by a diagnostic stage entailing examination by a dysmorphologist for features of FAS, neurodevelopmental assessment, and an interview assessing maternal alcohol consumption. Results. Of 160 learners screened, 78 (49%) were screen-positive, of whom 63 (81%) were clinically assessed for FAS. The overall FAS/PFAS rate among the screened learners was 17.5% (95% confidence interval 12.0 - 24.2%), with 16 (10.0%) children having FAS and 12 (7.5%) PFAS. High rates of stunting, underweight and microcephaly were noted in all learners, especially those with FAS or PFAS. Five (18%) mothers of affected children were deceased by the time of assessment. Conclusion. We describe very high rates of FAS/PFAS in an isolated rural part of the Western Cape that is not located in a viticultural region. Our study suggests that the prevalence of FA S may be very high in isolated communities, or in particular hot-spots. It adds to the growing evidence that FAS/PFAS is a significant, and underestimated, health problem in South Africa. Expanded screening and surveillance programmes, and preventive interventions, are urgently needed

Lobster Eye X-ray optics for astrophysics: Recent status

X-ray optics in Lobster Eye arrangement represent promising complementary device to narrow field X-ray optics in common use. We present briefly recent status of design, developments, and tests of X-ray optics including Lobster Eye modules developed and tested within recent space project

Anderson impurity model in nonequilibrium: analytical results versus quantum Monte Carlo data

We analyze the spectral function of the single-impurity two-terminal Anderson model at finite voltage using the recently developed diagrammatic quantum Monte Carlo technique as well as perturbation theory. In the (particle-hole-)symmetric case we find an excellent agreement of the numerical data with the perturbative results of second order up to interaction strengths $U/\Gamma \approx 2$, where $\Gamma$ is the transparency of the impurity-electrode interface. The analytical results are obtained in form of the nonequilibrium self-energy for which we present explicit formulas in the closed form at arbitrary bias voltage. We observe an increase of the spectral density around zero energy brought about by the Kondo effect. Our analysis suggests that a finite applied voltage $V$ acts as an effective temperature of the system. We conclude that at voltages significantly larger than the equilibrium Kondo temperature there is a complete suppression of the Kondo effect and no resonance splitting can be observed. We confirm this scenario by comparison of the numerical data with the perturbative results.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Sustaining Collection Value: Managing Collection/Item Metadata Relationships

Many aspects of managing collection/item metadata relationships are critical to sustaining collection value over time. Metadata at the collection-level not only provides context for finding, understanding, and using the items in the collection, but is often essential to the particular research and scholarly activities the collection is designed to support. Contemporary retrieval systems, which search across collections, usually ignore collection level metadata. Alternative approaches, informed by collection-level information, will require an understanding of the various kinds of relationships that can obtain between collection-level and item-level metadata. This paper outlines the problem and describes a project that is developing a logic-based framework for classifying collection-level/item-level metadata relationships. This framework will support (i) metadata specification developers defining metadata elements, (ii) metadata librarians describing objects, and (iii) system designers implementing systems that help users take advantage of collection-level metadata.Institute for Museum and Libary Services (Grant #LG06070020)published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Reimagining quality in early childhood [Editorial]

This special issue brings together a collection of rich, complex and challenging contributions that attempt to offer generative approaches to reconfigure what might constitute ‘quality’ within early years education. The issue came about from a shared concern about what Moss (this issue) refers to as the ‘gravitational pull’ of quality in early childhood education; debates about quality have existed for a considerable time and, despite rigorous critique, remain resolute. This issue aims to revisit and extend the groundbreaking work undertaken by Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss and Alan Pence (1999, 2007) in Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives and in the subsequent revised edition. In both texts, the authors made the astute observation that the concept and language of quality cannot accommodate issues such as diversity and multiple perspectives, contextual specificity and subjectivity. They argue that we must ‘go beyond the concept of quality’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 6) and, in so doing, suggest working with a new concept: ‘meaning making’

Development of an Advanced Force Field for Water using Variational Energy Decomposition Analysis

Given the piecewise approach to modeling intermolecular interactions for force fields, they can be difficult to parameterize since they are fit to data like total energies that only indirectly connect to their separable functional forms. Furthermore, by neglecting certain types of molecular interactions such as charge penetration and charge transfer, most classical force fields must rely on, but do not always demonstrate, how cancellation of errors occurs among the remaining molecular interactions accounted for such as exchange repulsion, electrostatics, and polarization. In this work we present the first generation of the (many-body) MB-UCB force field that explicitly accounts for the decomposed molecular interactions commensurate with a variational energy decomposition analysis, including charge transfer, with force field design choices that reduce the computational expense of the MB-UCB potential while remaining accurate. We optimize parameters using only single water molecule and water cluster data up through pentamers, with no fitting to condensed phase data, and we demonstrate that high accuracy is maintained when the force field is subsequently validated against conformational energies of larger water cluster data sets, radial distribution functions of the liquid phase, and the temperature dependence of thermodynamic and transport water properties. We conclude that MB-UCB is comparable in performance to MB-Pol, but is less expensive and more transferable by eliminating the need to represent short-ranged interactions through large parameter fits to high order polynomials

Automated Reasoning and Presentation Support for Formalizing Mathematics in Mizar

This paper presents a combination of several automated reasoning and proof presentation tools with the Mizar system for formalization of mathematics. The combination forms an online service called MizAR, similar to the SystemOnTPTP service for first-order automated reasoning. The main differences to SystemOnTPTP are the use of the Mizar language that is oriented towards human mathematicians (rather than the pure first-order logic used in SystemOnTPTP), and setting the service in the context of the large Mizar Mathematical Library of previous theorems,definitions, and proofs (rather than the isolated problems that are solved in SystemOnTPTP). These differences poses new challenges and new opportunities for automated reasoning and for proof presentation tools. This paper describes the overall structure of MizAR, and presents the automated reasoning systems and proof presentation tools that are combined to make MizAR a useful mathematical service.Comment: To appear in 10th International Conference on. Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation AISC 201

Perturbation of magnetostatic modes observed by ferromagnetic resonance force microscopy

Magnetostatic modes of yttrium iron garnet (YIG) films are investigated by ferromagnetic resonance force microscopy. A thin-film "probe" magnet at the tip of a compliant cantilever introduces a local inhomogeneity in the internal field of the YIG sample. This influences the shape of the sample's magnetostatic modes, thereby measurably perturbing the strength of the force coupled to the cantilever. We present a theoretical model that explains these observations; it shows that the tip-induced variation of the internal field creates either a local "potential barrier" or "potential well" for the magnetostatic waves. The data and model together indicate that local magnetic imaging of ferromagnets is possible, even in the presence of long-range spin coupling, through the introduction of localized magnetostatic modes predicted to arise from sufficiently strong tip fields