Incidence of community-acquired pneumonia and Chlamydia pneumoniae infection: a prospective multicentre study

Squamous carcinoma of the esophagus is a disease with a poor prognosis which fortunately occurs seldom in the United States. Because patients present with more advanced disease here, surgical therapy has not equaled results reported from Asia. Although, claims of equality have appeared in the literature, radiation therapy alone has not been very effective for this disease. There are a myriad of small reports which extol a variety of combined approaches. Based upon a review of these series it is obvious that a Phase III trial is required to establish the best multimodality therapy for management of squamous carcinoma of the esophagus. Components of such a trial are reviewed and suggestions are made for design and reporting of such a trial.     

Role of dietary lipids and butylated hydroxy anisol (BHA) administration on albino rats. Part I. Serum unsaturated fatty acids

Adult male albino rats were supplemented with edible plant oils, corn maize and cotton seed oils and their semihydrogenated forms (Heliopolis and Sultan cooking fats) for a period of 3 months. In general, the supplementation of tested oils produced increasing effect on the serum levels of total C18: 1, C18:2 and C20:4 unsaturated fatty acids (UFA). The increases were significant in case of feeding corn maize oil and Sultan cooking fat for total and C18: 1 and C18:2 UFA. However, the degree of significance was intensified by the feeding of cotton seed oil and Heliopolis cooking fat. Supplementation of Sultan cooking fat showed a significant increase in serum level of C20:4, while the other tested oils and Heliopolis cooking fat produced very highly significant increase. Butylated hydroxy anisol (BHA) produced no effect on the level of UFA when administered with dietary tested edible lipid but its role revealed by maintaining the higher level of UFA due to administration of oils and its semihydrogenated analogous.     

Determination of I(Kβ)I(Kα) in elements with 21 ⪕ Z ⪕ 35 by deuteron impact

Measurements of the K_β and K_α relative transition probabilities for Sc, Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Se and Br are reported. A 4.2 MeV deuteron beam provided by the 56 cm isochronous cyclotron of the University of Chile was used. Results show good agreement with Scofield's calculations.     

Noise figure monitoring of optical amplifiers via backwardamplified spontaneous emission

A new configuration of an optical amplifier is proposed that provide in-service noise figure (NF) monitoring. It is difficult to determine the NF of traditional optical amplifiers in operation because the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) power cannot be measured separately from the output signal power. The proposed technique measures the NF from the backward ASE power. The discrepancy between the NF measured from forward ASE (using the traditional technique) and backward ASE (proposed technique) is found to be less than 1.0 dB at input powers below -6.2 dBm. A prototype optical amplifier is successfully used as a linear repeater, in a 10 Gbit/s 200 km transmission experiment     

Primary ovarian lymphoma. A case report

A 44-year-old woman with stage IV non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) of the left ovary is described. She had an extended hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-ophorectomy and thereafter received six courses of combination chemotherapy (cyclophosphamide, adriamycin, vincristine and predonisolone; CHOP). The patient is well with no evidence of recurrence at 12 months after surgery. The literature on primary ovarian lymphoma is reviewed.     

Design and FPGA-Implementation of a High Performance Timing Recovery Loop for Broadband Communications

Timing recovery in communication systems with linear modulations is usually performed with a non-data-aided feedback loop based on a fractional interpolator timing corrector and the Gardner’s timing error detector. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, some design rules are given to predict the behaviour of the loop if pipeline is used. Second, it is shown that pipelining can be used to reduce power consumption in a timing feedback loop. A timing recovery loop has been implemented in an FPGA device and power consumption measures indicates that by including 16 extra registers in the loop the power consumption decreases a 63% and the synchronizer can process up to 66.5 MSPS.

Rapid separation of shikimic acid from Chinese star anise (Illicium verum Hook. f.) with hot water extraction

Shikimic acid can be rapidly separated (ca. 5 min) from Chinese star anise with hot water extraction at temperatures of 120 °C or higher to obtain recoveries of 100%. Extraction recoveries of shikimic acid close to 97% can be obtained with water at 70 °C using slightly longer extraction times (ca. 10 min) than those at 120 °C. A semi-batch flow apparatus was used to study the effect of temperature, average particle size, water flow rate, and extraction time on the experimental recoveries. For 0.5 g Chinese star anise raw material that contained ca. 8% shikimic acid, 100% recoveries of shikimic acid could be obtained with 60 g water at 150 °C at 15 MPa in 4 min for star anise material having a particle size range from 355 to 600 μm. A one-site kinetic model was found to provide good correlation of the data and the kinetic parameters of the model could be written in terms of linearized contributions in temperature, average particle diameter and flow rate.     

Efficient Mapping of CORDIC Algorithm for OFDM-Based WLAN

In an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based wireless local area network receiver there are three operations that can be performed by a unique coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) processor since they are needed in different time instants. These are the rotation of a vector, the computation of the angle of a vector and the computation of the reciprocal. This paper proposes a common architecture of CORDIC algorithm suitable to implement the three operations with a reduced increase of the hardware cost with respect to a single operation CORDIC. The proposed architecture has been validated on field programmable gate-arrays devices and the results of the implementation show that area saving around 28% and throughput increment of 64% are obtained.