The association of intra-abdominal infection and abdominal wound dehiscence

Concurrent infection is a risk factor for abdominal wound dehiscence. We reviewed our experience with fascial dehiscence to determine the incidence and to identify prognostic factors for associated intra-abdominal infection. Over a 7-year period, 107 patients with abdominal wound dehiscence were identified. Seventeen were managed nonoperatively, and 90 underwent exploratory laparotomy, 43 of whom had no intra-abdominal pathology and 47 of whom had intra-abdominal infections. Demographic factors, comorbid diseases, and potential indicators of systemic infection did not distinguish patients with intra-abdominal infection from those without. Patients with an intra-abdominal infection were more likely to have undergone an emergency operation (74% vs 48%; P < 0.02), an operation on the colon (55% vs 25%; P < 0.005), or an operation with a higher wound classification (P < 0.02). Mortality was higher in patients with intra-abdominal infection than in those without (44% vs 20%; P < 0.02). Wound dehiscence after emergent operations, and operations with a higher wound classification, especially those involving the colon, should raise concern for intra-abdominal infection. Thorough abdominal exploration should be performed at the time of dehiscence repair. Before nonoperative management is chosen, intra-abdominal infection should be excluded.     

Personalcasting: Tailored Broadcast News

Broadcast news sources and newspapers provide society with the vast majority of real-time information. Unfortunately, cost efficiencies and real-time pressures demand that producers, editors, and writers select and organize content for stereotypical audiences. In this article we illustrate how content understanding, user modeling, and tailored presentation generation promise personalcasts on demand. Specifically, we report on the design and implementation of a personalized version of a broadcast news understanding system, MITRE’s Broadcast News Navigator (BNN), that tracks and infers user content interests and media preferences. We report on the incorporation of Local Context Analysis to both expand the user’s original query to the most related terms in the corpus, as well as to allow the user to provide interactive feedback to enhance the relevance of selected newsstories. We describe an empirical study of the search for stories on ten topics from a video corpus. By personalizing both the selection of stories and the form in which they are delivered, we provide users with tailored broadcast news. This individual news personalization provides more fine-grained content tailoring than current personalized television program level recommenders and does not rely on externally provided program metadata.     

Geothermal energy in Australia

Although Australia is not usually associated with geothermal energy, it possesses significant amounts of both conventional (wet) geothermal and hot dry rock (HDR) geothermal resources. The country's conventional geothermal resources are extensive, but are low temperature and are located in areas of low population density with the result that they are not used extensively for either electricity generation or for direct heating. Australia's HDR resources, on the other hand, represent a world-class resource but have not been used to date because the technology for converting HDR resources into electricity is not yet fully commercial. The effort being directed towards exploring economically useful HDR resources and in the development of technology to convert this energy resource into electricity could make HDR resources an important part of Australia's energy mix in the near future, but there are major barriers.     

Farbication of Optically Transparent Lead Magnesium Niobate Polycrystalline Ceramics Using Hot Isostatic Pressing

The physical, dielectric, and optical properties of hot isostatically pressed lead magnesium niobate polycrystalline ceramics modified with 1/2 mol% La₂O₃, Pb_{1–3/2 x} La _x □ _{x /2}-(Mg_1/3Nb_2/3)O₃, have been investigated. Methods used to characterize the ceramics included determination of the dielectric permittivity, optical transmittance, and refractive index dispersion. The materials exhibited relaxor ferroelectric type behavior with a peak dielectric constant K > 14000 and average T _c ∼−35°C. Various sintering, hot isostatic pressing, and annealing conditions were examined to produce highly dense and optically transparent materials. Through the use of hot isostatic pressing, densities more than 99.5% theoretical and transmittance greater than 50% at 633-nm wavelength were obtained. Hot isostatic pressing technique appears to be a good alternative to hot uniaxial pressing without the associated problem of PbO volatility, reactivity with the pressure vessel, and geometrical constraints.     

Hydro,tidal and wave energy in Australia

The three renewable energy technologies discussed in this paper are based on water, but differ markedly in terms of the size of the available potential resource, the maturity of the associated conversion technologies, the extent to which they have been exploited to date, and the current research effort being devoted to their future development. Hydro-electricity and tidal power are both very mature technologies. The exploitation of Australia's relatively limited potential for hydro-electric development began over a century ago and the opportunities for further hydro-electric development are now very restricted. The country's significant tidal power resources, on the other hand, have not been exploited for electricity generation to date, but continual assessment of the feasibility of tidal power projects has been undertaken over the past half century. Although Australia has large ocean wave energy resources, ocean wave energy conversion technology is not yet fully commercial and no commercial wave generation plants are operating in Australia. A small number of wave energy conversion devices, however, are at the pilot testing stage.     

The chi psi subunits of DNA polymerase III holoenzyme bind to single-stranded DNA-binding protein (SSB) and facilitate replication of an SSB-coated template

A complex of the chi and psi proteins is required to confer resistance to high levels of glutamate on the DNA polymerase III holoenzyme-catalyzed reaction (Olson, M., Dallmann, H. G., and McHenry, C. (1995) J. Biol. Chem. 270, 29570-29577). We demonstrate that this salt resistance also requires templates to be coated with the Escherichia coli single-stranded DNA-binding protein (SSB). We show that this is the result of a direct chipsi-SSB interaction that is strengthened approximately 1000-fold when SSB is bound to DNA. On model oligonucleotide templates, DNA polymerase III core is inhibited by SSB. We show that the minimal polymerase assembly that will synthesize DNA on SSB-coated templates is polymerase III-tau-psi chi. gamma, the alternative product of the dnaX gene, will not replace tau in this reaction, indicating that tau's unique ability to bind to DNA polymerase III holding chipsi in the same complex is essential. All of our findings are consistent with chipsi strengthening DNA polymerase III holoenzyme interactions with the SSB-coated lagging strand at the replication fork, facilitating complex assembly and elongation.     

Measuring Programming Improvement at IBM-FSD

The introduction of structured programming into FSD operations and the apparent resulting improvements in the programming process stimulated efforts to measure actual improvement.     

Temperature-Dependent Giant Magnetoimpedance Effect in Amorphous Soft Magnets

Giant magnetoimpedance (GMI)-based devices offer potential as next-generation low-cost, flexible, ultrasensitive sensors. They can be used in applications that include current sensors, field sensors, stress sensors, and others. Challenging applications involve operation at high temperatures, and therefore studies of GMI temperature dependence and performance of soft magnetic materials are needed. We present a high-temperature GMI study on an amorphous soft magnetic microwire from room temperature to 560°C. The GMI ratio was observed to be nearly constant at ～86% at low temperatures and to decrease rapidly at ～290°C, finally reaching a near-zero value at 500°C. The rapid drop in GMI ratio at 290°C is associated with a reduction in the long-range ferromagnetic order as measured by the spontaneous magnetization (M) at the Curie temperature (T _c). We also correlated the impedance with the magnetic properties of the material. From room temperature to 290°C, the impedance was found to be proportional to the square root of the magnetization to magnetic anisotropy ratio. Lastly, M(T) has been fit using a Handrich–Kobe model, which describes the system with a modified Brillouin function and an asymmetrical distribution of exchange interactions. We infer that the structural fluctuations of the amorphous phase result in a relatively small asymmetry in the fluctuation parameters.