Decreasing postpartum sexual abstinence time

Postpartum sexual abstinence time can be safely shortened for most patients when episiotomy repair is done meticulously with fine PGA suture on small needles. The time preferred by patients for resumption of intercourse seems to be between the second and third postpartum week. We have seen no ill effects from this, and we feel that sexual intercourse at these early dates does not influence the healing of the episiotomy in any way.     

EMC regulations within Europe

As part of the process of harmonisation of technical standards needed to achieve the single European market in 1992, the European Commission has proposed a directive on EMC. The author describes the requirements contained within the proposal and, since the proposal will refer to European standards for technical requirements, a brief outline of the standards-making procedure is included     

Interaction of Pavlovian conditioning with a zero operant contingency: Chronic exposure to signaled inescapable shock maintains learned helplessness effects.

Four studies, with 372 male Holtzman rats, examined the effect of Pavlovian contingencies and a zero operant contingency (i.e., uncontrollability) on subsequent shock-escape acquisition in the shuttle box using triads consisting of escapable-shock (ES), yoked inescapable-shock (IS), and no-shock (NS) rats. After exposure to 50 signals and shocks per session for 9 sessions, interference with shuttlebox escape acquisition for IS Ss was a monotonically increasing function of the percentage of signal–shock pairings during training (Exp I), with 50% pairings producing little or no impairment. Without regard to signaling, ES Ss performed as well as NS Ss. Exp II demonstrated that training and test conditions led to substantial and equal impairment in IS Ss preexposed for 1 session to 100 or 50% signal–shock pairings or to unsignaled shocks. In Exp III, chronic exposure to 100% signaled ISs resulted in impairment only if the signal (light) was present during the shuttlebox test. The continuous presence of the signal during the test contrasted with its discrete (5-sec) presentation during training and suggested that an antagonistic physiological reaction rather than a specific competing motor response had been conditioned. Exp IV provided evidence for possible conditioned opioid mediation. Findings suggest that chronic exposure to uncontrollable shocks maintains the impairment produced by acute exposure only if the shocks are adequately signaled. (63 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variable geometry wind turbine for performance enhancement,improved survivability and reduced cost of energy

The conceptual design and proof‐of‐concept testing of a furling vertical axis wind turbine, suited to large‐scale offshore deployment, is described. Through the implementation of variable geometry capabilities, extreme storm loads can be reduced, and unsteady flow‐related fatigue loads can be minimized thereby reducing capital (structural) and maintenance costs. Moreover, annual power generation can be optimized in real‐time to account for unsteady wind effects related to weather and siting thus improving efficiency and annual power generation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shrink technology

Cold-shrink and heat-shrink technologies have been around for many years, but how they work is quite different and not widely understood. This article offers an overview of the shrink technologies and their advantages and disadvantages. This article also discusses the different methods of electrical stress control and how they perform relative to terminations and splices. Specific considerations for both terminations and splices are also addressed. We discuss high-dielectric stress control and geometric stress control and present the advantages and disadvantages of each.     

Closed form solution to the position workspace of Stewart parallel manipulators

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