Effects of surgery on the pharmacokinetic parameters of drugs

As with other forms of stress, surgery is a time of fluctuating haemodynamics, physiological shifts, intense metabolic changes, and protein catabolism and anabolism. At times, these changes can occur within hours. There is a reasonable body of literature concerning the adverse effects of surgery on gastric emptying, but not on the effects of surgery on the distribution, metabolism and excretion of drugs. Gastric emptying is diminished or absent following major procedures, which prevent the delivery of orally administered drugs to their major site of absorption, the small bowel. Changes in the paracellular absorption of drugs may occur postoperatively, although transcellular absorption appears to be unimpaired. Distribution is affected by changes in blood volume, alterations in circulation, increases in the extracellular fluid and changes in the circulating plasma protein levels, such as albumin and alpha 1-acid glycoprotein. Little is known about alterations in drug metabolism following surgery. However, it has been shown that systemic hypoxia alters the function of some of the cytochrome P450 (CYP) system and increased levels of cytokines have an effect on the metabolism of at least 1 drug. In addition, the renal elimination of drugs is affected in patients postoperatively, although the effects of biliary clearance in this period are difficult to determine. Despite the lack of research into pharmacokinetics during the postoperative period, and given the immense and often sudden changes observed in patients post-surgery, it is reasonable to recommend vigilance with respect to drug therapy during this period.     

Anesthesia and analgesia for minor injuries to children

Today's children are rambunctious, playful, and aggressive and are provided through the miracles of modern technology with ample opportunities to injure themselves. As such, they are a source of both joy and terror to their parents. It is a "given" that many of them will injure themselves in the course of growing up. When they come to us in the ED waiting room, they are typically very frightened and usually in pain. We are fortunate that we have techniques and drugs to alleviate this pain and to attenuate their fear. It is our responsibility as anesthesiologists to ensure that these drugs and techniques are used appropriately and cause no further harm. We hope the information contained in this chapter may be of benefit in achieving this goal.     

Physiological compensation in antisense transformants: specific induction of an "ersatz" glucan endo-1,3-beta-glucosidase in plants infected with necrotizing viruses

Plant class I glucan endo-1,3-beta-glucosidases (beta-1,3-glucanase; 1,3-beta-D-glucan glucanohydrolase, EC 3.2.1.39) have been implicated in development and defense against pathogen attack. Nevertheless, beta-1,3-glucanase deficiencies generated by antisense transformation of Nicotiana sylvestris and tobacco have little biological effect. We report here that another beta-1,3-glucanase activity is induced in these deficient mutants after infection with necrotizing viruses. Induction of class I beta-1,3-glucanase was markedly inhibited in leaves of N. sylvestris and tobacco antisense transformants infected with tobacco necrosis virus and tobacco mosaic virus, respectively. A serologically distinct beta-1,3-glucanase activity was present in the infected antisense transformants but was absent in both healthy and infected control plants and in antisense transformants treated with the stress hormone ethylene. Immunoblot analyses, localization studies, and measurements of antibody specificity indicate that this compensatory beta-1,3-glucanase activity is an intracellular enzyme different from known tobacco beta-1,3-glucanases. Therefore, plants can compensate for a deficiency in enzyme activity by producing a functionally equivalent replacement--i.e., "ersatz"--protein or proteins. The fact that compensation for beta-1,3-glucanase activity occurs in response to infection argues strongly for an important role of these enzymes in pathogenesis.     

The psychological development of orphanage-reared infants: interventions with outcomes (Tehran)

This paper describes five successive interventions in the rearing of infants at an orphanage in Tehran, with their outcomes. The outcomes were assessed longitudinally. The first of the successive groups, here called "waves", numbered 15. These Ss constitute the controls. The only intervention consisted of examining the infants every other week during the first year and every fourth week thereafter with the ordinal, sensorimotor scales of Uzgiris and Hunt. The audio-visual intervention intended for the second wave of 10 infants was tape-recorded mother talk and music under the control of the infants and mobiles that the infants could activate. This plan was never adequately implemented because of inadequate supervision. The third wave of 10 infants got extra untutored human care. The fourth wave of 20 infants got the kind of audio-visual intervention originally intended for the second wave plus access to responsive inanimate materials. For the fifth wave, numbering 11, the infant-caretaker ratio was reduced to two or three to one and the caretakers were taught the Badger program supplemented with procedures to foster vocal imitation and semantic mastery of body parts, clothing, toys, and other objects and events regularly encountered. The results show that each successive wave, excepting the second, achieved the top steps of nearly all seven of the ordinal scales at mean ages younger than the preceding wave, and the fifth wave surpassed even home-reared American children from predominantly professional families in achieving the top steps on five of the seven scales. The findings show that infants need not advance along all branches simultaneously and that the kinds of experience encountered determine the branch along which advancement occurs. A number of theoretical implications are examined. Especially important is the idea that a dependable educational psychology for infancy and early childhood calls for much more knowledge than we now have of the kinds of experience that advance development along each of the various branches.     

An Example of Human-Centric Sensor Network: Be Responsible Platform

The paper addresses the Be Responsible platform, a representative example of human-centric sensing network which, relying on the Info-Communication and Internet of Things concepts, aims to improve the communication between citizens, on one side, and government authorities, on the other side, with the purpose of resolving various problems encountered in a modern society. A widespread network of human-centric smartphone devices and PCs has been used as a valuable source of data collected and processed in order to trigger adequate actions upon problem resolving. In this way, humans acting as sensor operators and data sources become a powerful factor in improving their society. The Be Responsible platform enables the people to report the irregularities in various aspects of their social life (grey economy, misuse of government vehicles, ecology, traffic), and hence to take active part in resolving them. It also promotes positive and responsible social and institutional behavior, which has to be nurtured in any society seeking progress. The number of submitted reports as well as the money collected from the fine revenues and subsequently invested in projects of social good, undoubtedly prove that what could not be achieved through years of traditional government-led policy approach, was achieved in months of citizen engagement.     

Trapping and recombination processes via deep level T3 in semi-insulating gallium arsenide

Trapping and recombination of free carriers by deep level T₃ has been studied. Occupancy of the level by electrons and dynamics of its filling and emptying as a function of illumination with monoenergetic photons in 0.69–1.55 eV range has been monitored by the thermally stimulated currents method. We have found that level T₃ behaves more like a recombination center than like an ordinary electron trap. Besides trapping free electrons from conduction band, this trap can also communicate with valence band, trapping holes. The capture cross section for trapping a hole is estimated to be comparable or even larger than the capture cross section for trapping an electron. However, in many experimental conditions free electrons are generated more abundantly than free holes, and free carrier mobility and thermal velocity are both much higher for electrons than for holes. Therefore, electron trapping often prevails, so that this frequently detected defect, has been up to now most often perceived as a deep electron trap.     

增加折叠电流保护的电路

对许多需要数安培供电电流的应用而言，三端输出可调线性稳压器有易用．低成本和完全片上过载保护等特点，如美国国家半导体公司的LM317。增加数个元器件可以使三端稳压器具备一种高速度的短路限流能力，从而提高可靠性。限流器可将最大输出电流限制在一个安全的恒定水平IMAX上，避免稳压器的损坏。当出现一个故障状况时，传输晶体管上的功耗近似于VIN×IMAX。要让设计的稳压器能承受过载，就需要谨慎地选择元器件的额定值（经常是留了过大的余地），除非可以在故障发生时降低或折叠（foldback）输出电流。     

A Parallel Hill Climbing Algorithm for Pushing Dependent Data in Clients–Providers–Servers Systems

The up-link bandwidth in satellite networks and in advanced traffic wireless information system is very limited. A server broadcasts data files provided by different independent providers and accessed by many clients in a round-robin manner. The clients who access these files may have different patterns of access. Some clients may wish to access several files in any order (AND), some wish to access one out of several files (OR), and some clients may access a second file only after accessing another file (IMPLY). The goal of the server is to order the files in a way that minimizes the access time of the clients given some a priori knowledge of their access patterns. An appropriate clients–servers model was recently proposed by Bay-Noy, Naor and Schieber. They formulated three separate problems and proposed an algorithm that evaluates certain number of random permutations and chooses the one whose access time is minimized. In this paper, we formulate a combined AOI (AND-OR-IMPLY) problem, and propose to apply a parallel hill climbing algorithm (to each of the four problems), which begins from certain number of random permutations, and then applies hill climbing technique on each of them until there is no more improvement. The evaluation time of neighboring permutations generated in hill climbing process is optimized, so that it requires O(n) time per permutation instead of O(n ²) time required for evaluating access time of a random permutation, where n is the number of files the server broadcasts. Experiments indicate that the parallel hill climbing algorithm is O(n) times faster that random permutations method, both in terms of time needed to evaluate the same number of permutations, and time needed to provide a high quality solution. Thus the improvement is significant for broadcasting large number of files.     

A generalized correlation attack on a class of stream ciphers based on the Levenshtein distance

A statistical approach to cryptanalysis of a memoryless function of clock-controlled shift registers is introduced. In the case of zero-order correlation immunity, an algorithm for a shift register initial state reconstruction based on the sequence comparison concept is proposed. A constrained Levenshtein distance relevant for the cryptanalysis is defined and a novel recursive procedure for its efficient computation is derived. Preliminary experimental results are given and open theoretic problems are discussed.Following [11], a Boolean function f(x ₁,..., x _n) is said to be mth-order correlation immune if m is the maximum integer such that the random variable f(X ₁,..., X _n) is statistically independent of every set of m random variables chosen from the balanced and independent binary random variables X ₁,..., X _n.