Pharmacological distribution diagrams: a tool for de novo drug design

BACKGROUND: There is no empirical data available on attitudes concerning AIDS and habits towards HIV infected patients of physicians in general or private practice. In this study results of a self-evaluation are presented. METHODS: 178 physicians working with out-patients in different medical fields were randomly selected for a cross sectional study and interviewed using a standardised questionnaire. RESULTS: 89% think that they are sufficiently informed about AIDS (in the USA 20%). They regarded the risk of infection to be lower than the Anglo-American physicians. They believed there is a lack of interchange of information between colleagues regarding the degree of infectiousness of referred patients. A third of the physicians fear that other patients will go elsewhere if they find out that their physician is treating AIDS patients. 54% would hold special clinic sessions for HIV-patients outside the normal schedule for practice times. 89% believed that HIV patients were partly to blame for their illness. CONCLUSIONS: Although the physicians recognise the problem of HIV-infection, they partly deny the real necessities and facts. A reason for this could be the emotions underlying the general attitude to everything pertaining to HIV-disease. Attitudes to HIV-disease and the dealing with it in daily practice must be considered on the basis of individual emotional motives.     

Multiple time-scale diffusion models of starfish and coral state changes over the whole great barrier reef

A model is developed to investigate starfish and coral dynamics at the macro-scale of the whole Great Barrier Reef. This stochastic near-equilibrium theory is consistent with all available data for the mean rates of change of reef-state relative to abundances of the starfishAcanthaster planci and the scleractinian corals upon which it preys. This result is in striking contrast to the stably cyclic behaviour which dominates the meso-scale of individual reefs as reported previously by the authors. For the first time, a number of important numerical estimates have been made and are reported here. Generally, the starfish dynamics is dominated by randomness, being indistinguishable from Brownian motion in the state-space. On the other hand, the coral process is embedded in a drift field which is always directed towards the low coral state. In fact, the high coral state is inaccessible on the Great Barrier Reef.     

Electronic `how things work' articles: two early prototypes

The electronic encyclopedia exploratorium (E³) is a vision of a future computer system-an electronic book describing how thing work. Typical articles in E³ will describe such mechanisms as compression refrigerators, engines, telescopes, and mechanical linkages. Each article will provide simulations, three-dimensional animated graphics that the user can manipulate, laboratory areas that allow a user to modify the device or experiment with related artifacts, and a facility for asking questions and receiving customized, computer-generated English-language explanations. Some of the foundational technology is discussed, focusing on topics in artificial intelligence, graphics, and user interfaces. The initial prototype system and the technical lessons learned from it, as well as the second prototype currently under construction, are described     

Testing of multi-output circuits by means of signature analyzer

Let a circuit havem outputs,m>1. There are two ways to test this circuit by means of a signature analyzer: use a single input analyzer for each output or use anm-input analyzer to test all outputs simultaneously. The main goal of this letter is to demonstrate that for fault output sequences with small multiplicity of errors and long length the second approach is more effective.     

Study of ways of reducing energy consumption in a ventilation system

Translated from Fiziko-Tekhnicheskie Problemy Razrabotki Poleznykh Iskopaemykh, No. 6, pp. 88–98, November–December, 1996.     

Electrical characterization of very-narrow-gap bulk HgCdTe single crystals by variable magnetic field hall measurements

Variable-magnetic-field Hall measurements (0 to 1.5 T) are performed on very-narrow-gap bulk-grown Hg_1−xCd_xTe single crystals (0.165 ≤ x ≤ 0.2) at various temperatures (10 to 300K). The electron densities and mobilities are obtained within the one-carrier (electrons) approximation of the reduced-con-ductivity-tensor scheme. The present data together with the selected data set reported by other workers exhibit a pronounced peak when the electron mobility is plotted against the alloy composition x-value which has been predicted to be due to the effective-mass minimum at the bandgap-crossing (E_g ≈ 0). The observed position (x ≈ 0.165), height (≈4 x 10² m²Vs), and width (≈0.01 in x) of the mobility-peak can be explained by a simple simulation involving only ionized-impurity scattering. A lower bound of the effective mass is introduced as a fitting parameter to be consistent with the finiteness of the observed electron mobility and is found to be of the order of 10⁻⁴ of the mass of a free electron.