28 research outputs found
Financing small and medium sized enterprises for sustainable development : a view from the Asia-Pacific region
No full textMacroeconomic Policy and Development Division, working paper series.This discussion paper was prepared for ESCAP by Nick Freeman, Independent Economic Development Consultant.
The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions made by Masato Abe, Sailendra Narain, Michael Troilo and J. S. Juneja
Dietary assessment in Whitehall II: comparison of 7d diet diary and food-frequency questionnaire and validity against biomarkers
No full textThe aim of the present cross-sectional study was to examine the agreement and disagreement between a 7 d diet diary (7DD) and a self-administered machine-readable food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) asking about diet in the previous year, and to validate both methods with biomarkers of nutrient intake. The subjects were an age- and employment-grade-stratified random subsample of London-based civil servants (457 men and 403 women), aged 39–61 years, who completed both a 7DD and a FFQ at phase 3 follow-up (1991–1993) of the Whitehall II study. Mean daily intakes of dietary energy, total fat, saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, linoleic acid, total carbohydrate excluding fibre, sugars, starch, dietary fibre, protein, vitamin C, vitamin E (as α-tocopherol equivalents), folate, carotenes (as total β-carotene activity), Fe, Ca, Mg, K and alcohol were measured. Serum cholesteryl ester fatty acids (CEFA), plasma α-tocopherol and β-carotene were also measured as biomarkers. Estimates of mean energy intake from the two methods were similar in men, and some 10 % higher according to the FFQ in women. Compared with the 7DD, the FFQ tended to overestimate plant-derived micronutrient intakes (carotenes from FFQ v. 7DD men 2713 (SD 1455) V. 2180 (sd 1188) μg/d, women 3100 (sd 1656) v. 2221 (sd 1180) μg/d, both differences P<0·0001) and to underestimate fat intake. Against plasma β-carotene/cholesterol, carotene intake was as well estimated by the FFQ as the 7DD (Spearman rank correlations, men 0·32 v. 0·30, women 0·27 v. 0·22, all P≤0·0001, energy-adjusted data). Ranking of participants by other nutrient intakes tended to be of the same order according to the two dietary methods, e.g. rank correlations for CEFA linoleic acid against FFQ and 7DD estimates respectively, men 0·38 v. 0·41, women 0·53 v. 0·62, all P≤0·0001, energy-adjusted % fat). For α-tocopherol there were no correlations between plasma level and estimated intakes by either dietary method. Quartile agreement for energy-adjusted nutrient intakes between the two self-report methods was in the range 37–50 % for men and 32–44 % for women, and for alcohol, 57 % in both sexes. Disagreement (misclassification into extreme quartiles of intake) was in the range 0–6 % for both sexes. The dietary methods yielded similar prevalences (about 34 %) of low energy reporters. The two methods show satisfactory agreement, together with an expected level of systematic differences, in their estimates of nutrient intake. Against the available biomarkers, the machine-readable FFQ performed well in comparison with the manually coded 7DD in this study population. For both methods, regression-based adjustment of nutrient intake to mean dietary energy intake by gender appears on balance to be the optimal approach to data presentation and analysis, in view of the complex problem of low energy reporting
Beyond the World as Picture:Worlding and Becoming the Whole World
No full textIn his well-known essay, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, Heidegger describes modernity as the age in which the world has been reduced to a picture. The conceptualization of the world as picture is the fundamental basis of globalization and the geopolitical relations of power, inequality and exploitation that characterize the world-system created by late capitalism. The world as picture is also the basis of various conceptual approaches for understanding worldliness informing various disciplines in the humanities and the narrative social sciences: world history, globality (global exchange and intercourse) and environmental kinship. But what is implied by the world as picture is the excess that is excluded or obscured by the picture frame because the idea of a frame intimates at something that lies beyond the picture that is its ontological condition of possibility. This talk examines two philosophical accounts of what is beyond the world as picture: Heidegger’s idea of worlding and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming the whole world as it is connected to their account of minor literature. It highlights the fundamental differences between these philosophies of world and the above approaches. Time permitting, I will then explore how postcolonial world literature, when read as part of the temporal process of worlding and world-creation, disrupts and shatters the world picture by participating in struggles within specific fields of forces in contemporary globalization. Such literature unsettles their readers’ sense of territorial boundaries and makes them aware of how they are constitutively implicated in the hierarchies of the contemporary world even as it resists being arrested in a geographically bounded and determinable subject-object such as a nation, a continent or a region. Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests include late 18th-20th century continental philosophy and contemporary critical theory, postcolonial theory and anglophone postcolonial literatures, theories of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, philosophy and literature, legal philosophy, social and political thought, and feminist theory. He is the author of What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003). Followed by a discussion with Pheng Cheah (UC Berkeley), Carmen Moersch (Kunsthochschule Mainz) and Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University) Moderated by Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University
Long-term-survival phase cells of Salmonella enteritidis ATCC 13076 exhibit significantly greater tolerance to atmospheric cold plasma treatment of shell eggs
No full textThe main objective of this study was to evaluate the tolerance of stationary phase (STAT) and long-term survival phase (LTS) Salmonella Enteritidis ATCC 13076 to atmospheric cold plasma (ACP) in phosphate buffered saline (PBS, pH 7.0) and on shell eggs. Salmonella Enteritidis was cultured in tryptic soy broth supplemented with 0.6% (w/v) yeast extract (35°C) for 20 h (STAT) and 21 days (LTS). Cell morphology was determined by light microscopy. The PBS and shell eggs were inoculated with STAT or LTS cells to obtain ∼7.0 log10 CFU/mL or egg. The ACP was applied at 45 kV (PBS) and 60 kV (shell eggs) for 1–4 min and 1–5 min, respectively. Pathogen survivors were enumerated on thin agar layer (TAL) medium and on xylose lysine tergitol-4 (XLT-4) agar after 48 h of incubation (35°C). For survivors on shell eggs, R2 and mean square error values were obtained using Log-linear with Tail and Weibull models. The STAT cells were predominantly rod-shaped whereas LTS cells were coccoid. In PBS, reductions (log10 CFU/mL) of STAT cells were 1.0, 0.95, 1.45, and 1.44 after exposure to ACP for 1, 2, 3, and 4 min, respectively. In contrast, reductions in LTS cells were significantly lower (p 0.05). Additionally, there were no observed differences in shell strength and yolk color between ACP-treated and control eggs. Based on these results, LTS cells of S. Enteritidis are more tolerant to ACP than STAT cells and should be considered when developing process validation protocols involving application of ACP to inactivate Salmonella on shell eggs.This article is published as Barry K, Mendonça A, Phillips GJ, Boylston T, Fortes-Da-Silva P, Brehm-Stecher B, Juneja V and Wan Z (2024) Long-term-survival phase cells of Salmonella enteritidis ATCC 13076 exhibit significantly greater tolerance to atmospheric cold plasma treatment of shell eggs. Front. Food. Sci. Technol. 4:1442761. doi: 10.3389/frfst.2024.1442761. © 2024 Barry, Mendonça, Phillips, Boylston, Fortes-Da-Silva, Brehm-Stecher, Juneja and Wan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms
Importance Sampling for a Markov Modulated Queuing Network with Customer Impatience until the End of Service
No full textFor more than two decades, there has been a growing of interest in fast simulation techniques for estimating probabilities of rare events in queuing networks. Importance sampling is a variance reduction method for simulating rare events. The present paper carries out strict deadlines to the paper by Dupuis et al for a two node tandem network with feedback whose arrival and service rates are modulated by an exogenous finite state Markov process. We derive a closed form solution for the probability of missing deadlines. Then we have employed the results to an importance sampling technique to estimate the probability of total population overflow which is a rare event. We have also shown that the probability of this rare event may be affected by various deadline values.Importance Sampling, Queuing Network, Rare Event, Markov Process, Deadline
Comparative All-Cause Mortality Among a Large Population of Patients with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Versus Matched Controls
No full textIntroduction
There is little information about survival of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) patients into adulthood, in particular from population-based samples. We estimated and compared age-specific, all-cause mortality rates in patients with SMA and matched controls in a large, retrospective cohort study using electronic health records (EHRs) from the pre-treatment era.
Methods
The US Optum® de-identified EHR database contains EHRs for ~ 104 million persons (study period: January 1, 2007–December 22, 2016). SMA cases were identified by one or more International Classification of Diseases, Ninth/Tenth Edition codes for SMA. Controls with no SMA diagnosis code were matched 10:1 to SMA cases based on birth year, gender, and first diagnostic code date. For both groups, ≥ 1 month of observation and (if deceased) a valid date of death were required for inclusion. Age-specific mortality rates per person-year (PY) and hazard ratios were calculated.
Results
Five thousand one hundred seventy-nine SMA cases and 51,152 controls were analyzed. The overall hazard ratio comparing cases with controls was 1.76 (95% CI 1.63–1.90). In patients with SMA type III diagnostic codes only, the all-age mortality rate was 1059/100,000 PYs in cases and 603/100,000 PYs in controls. In older age groups (13–20, 21–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–60, and > 60 years), age-specific mortality rates for cases consistently exceeded those of controls. Limitations of this study included the inability to confirm the SMA diagnosis or SMA type by genetic or clinical confirmation.
Conclusion
Patients with SMA of all ages, including adults and type III patients, had a higher all-cause mortality rate as compared to age-matched controls during the pre-treatment era.Full Tex
Solid-state behaviors of materials - Thermal expansion, molecular pedal motion, phase transitions, and conformational flexibility
No full textDesign of materials utilizing the principles of supramolecular chemistry and the study of structure-property relationship has gained an immense amount of importance in the past few decades. Understanding the robustness, strength and directionality of an intermolecular interaction is a vital criteria that needs to be addressed in order to generate an effective material with desired physicochemical behavior. Cocrystallization, a process of synthesizing multi-component solids using non-covalent interactions, has been proven to be a very useful technique to alter the solid-state behaviors as compared to the single components. One solid-state property that solely relies on internal composition and that we have focused primarily on is thermal expansion (TE), which is the tendency of the solids to undergo change in shape, area, and volume with respect to change in temperature as an external stimuli. Many molecules in the solid state tend to undergo molecular motions depending on the type of symmetry they exhibit. We focused on molecules similar to that of azobenzenes and stilbenes as they have tendency to undergo molecular pedal motion. Incorporating components with motion-capable groups in a multi-component solid can afford large TE behaviors if the pedal motion can be activated. Another aspect that can contribute and enhance TE behaviors is torsional flexibility. Molecules consisting of imine groups have the tendency to undergo flexibility and motion capability, hence can influence TE behavior of the overall solids. We synthesized and explored bis pyridyl imine solid that undergoes large volumetric expansion as compared to it hydrogen bonded cocrystals. Moreover, molecular pedal motion was turned on in the solid by crystallizing it with another torsional flexible molecule that contained a motion-capable group and hence higher expansion was achieved along that direction. The category of mixed cocrystals has been underdeveloped, and, we reported the first example of one-dimensional halogen bonded mixed cocrystals where direct tunability in TE behavior was achieved with respect to the percentages of motion-capable and motion-incapable groups.Embargo status: Restricted until 09/2024. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link
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Trypanosomatids are common and diverse parasites of Drosophila
No full textDrosophila melanogaster is an important model system of immunity and parasite resistance, yet most studies use parasites that do not naturally infect this organism. We have studied trypanosomatids in natural populations to assess the prevalence and diversity of these gut parasites. We collected several species of Drosophila from Europe and surveyed them for trypanosomatids using conserved primers for two genes. We have used the conserved GAPDH sequence to construct a phylogenetic tree and the highly variable spliced leader RNA to assay genetic diversity. All 5 of the species that we examined were infected, and the average prevalence ranged from 1 to 6%. There are several different groups of trypanosomatids, related to other monoxenous Trypanosomatidae. These may represent new trypanosomatid species and were found in different species of European Drosophila from different geographical locations. The detection of a little studied natural pathogen in D. melanogaster and related species provides new opportunities for research into both the Drosophila immune response and the evolution of hosts and parasites.</p
P1‐339: COGNITIVE AND OTHER NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS DOCUMENTED IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS PRIOR TO OR AT ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE DIAGNOSIS
No full text[P2–275]: SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS OF ALZHEIMER's DISEASE NOTED IN HEALTH RECORDS UP TO 5 YEARS PRIOR TO DIAGNOSIS
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