112,459 research outputs found
Comparison of valsartan 160 mg with lisinopril 20 mg, given as monotherapy or in combination with a diuretic, for the treatment of hypertension: the Blood Pressure Reduction and Tolerability of Valsartan in Comparison with Lisinopril (PREVAIL) study.
No full textBackground: The goal of antihypertensive therapy is to provide good blood pressure (BP) control without eliciting adverse effects. Objective: This study compared the risk-benefit profile of the angiotensin II receptor blocker valsartan with that of the angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor lisinopril in patients with mild to severe hypertension. The primary objective was to show that the equipotent BP-lowering effect of the valsartan-based treatment is accompanied by a better tolerability profile. Methods: This 16-week, randomized, double-blind, parallel-group study was conducted at 88 outpatient centers across Italy. After a 2-week placebo run-in period, patients aged ≥ 18 years with mild to severe hypertension (systolic BP [SBP], 160-220 mm Hg; diastolic BP [DBP], 95-110 mm Hg) were eligible. Patients were randomized to receive once-daily, oral, self-administered treatment with valsartan 160-mg capsules or lisinopril 20-mg capsules under double-blind conditions for 4 weeks. Responders continued monotherapy, whereas nonresponders had hydrochlorothiazide 12.5 mg added for the final 12 weeks of the study. The 2 primary variables used to assess the equivalence of therapeutic efficacy of the 2 regimens were sitting SBP and sitting DBP, which were measured at weeks 0 (baseline), 4, 8, and 16. The rate of drug-related adverse events (AEs) was used to assess whether 1 treatment had a better tolerability profile than the other. Tolerability was assessed by collecting information about AEs by means of questioning the patient or physical examination at each visit. Results: A total of 1213 patients were enrolled (635 men, 578 women; mean [SD] age, 54.5 [10.1] years [range, 28-78 years]). The study was completed by 1100 patients (553 receiving valsartan and 547 receiving lisinopril). Fifty-one patients (8.4%) treated with valsartan and 62 (1.2%) treated with lisinopril withdrew, mainly because of AEs (9 [1.5%] and 23 patients [3.8%], respectively). The valsartan- and lisinopril-based treatments were similarly effective in reducing sitting BP, with mean SBP/DBP reductions of 31.2/15.9 mm Hg and 31.4/15.9 mm Hg, respectively. At the end of the study, BP was controlled in 82.7% of the patients receiving valsartan and 81.6% of those receiving lisinopril. AEs were experienced by 5.1% of the patients treated with valsartan and 10.7% of those treated with lisinopril (P = 0.001), with dry cough observed in 1.0% and 7.2% of patients, respectively (P < 0.001). Conclusions: Valsartan and lisinopril were both highly effective in controlling BP in these patients with mild to severe hypertension, but valsartan was associated with a significantly reduced risk for AEs, especially cough. Copyright © 2004 Excerpta Medica, Inc
The evolution of European legislation on doping. New challenges in the age of NPS
No full textThe fight against doping in sport, formally started in 1960 with the constitution of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and culminated in 1999 with the birth of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), commissioned to chair various activities, including the publication of the annual list of prohibited substances and methods for doping. In Europe, as early as 1967, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution to stigmatise the intake of substances foreign to the body for the sole purpose of artificially and unfairly influencing sports performance. In 2002, the Council of Europe adopted an Additional Protocol to the 1989 Strasbourg Convention against Doping to ensure mutual recognition of doping controls and to strengthen the enforcement of the Convention. In Italy, the Law of 14 December 2000 n. 376 “Discipline of the health protection of sports activities and the fight against doping”, defines doping as “the administration or intake of drugs or biologically or pharmacologically active substances and the adoption or submission to medical practices not justified by pathological conditions and suitable to modify the psychophysical or biological conditions of the organism in order to alter the athletic performance of athletes”. The same law regulates the use of drugs or biologically or pharmacologically active substances and update an annual list in agreement with WADA. The article aims to analyse the legislation from a national perspective, offering as complete a view as possible of the current situation
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
The vanishing author in computer-generated works: a critical analysis of recent Australian case law
No full textAbstract
The use of software is ubiquitous in the creation of many copyright works, yet the requirement in copyright law that every work have a human author who engages in independent intellectual effort means that its use may prevent copyright subsistence. Several recent Australian cases have refocused attention on authorship as an essential criterion of copyright subsistence, and these cases suggest that much computer-produced output may be authorless and thus lack copyright protection. This article, the first in a two-part series, analyses how each case deals with the question of authorship of computer-produced works and why the use of software diminishes copyright protection for a significant number of computer-generated works. The article critiques the application of conventional notions of human authorship developed in the pre-computer age to modern productions and suggests alternative approaches to authorship that satisfy both the major objectives of copyright policy and the need to adapt to the computer age. The article argues that, without a broader judicial approach to authorship of computer-generated works, Parliament must remedy the lacuna in protection for these ‘authorless’ works. Possible solutions for reform are suggested. In a forthcoming article, the author comprehensively examines those reform proposals
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Stably stratified shear-produced turbulence and large-scalewaves in a lid driven cavity
No full textWe study experimentally stably stratified sheared turbulence and large-scale flows and waves in a lid driven cavity with a non-zero vertical mean temperature gradient. Geometrical properties of the large-scale vortex (e.g., its size and form) and the level of small-scale turbulence inside the vortex are controlled by the buoyancy (i.e., by the temperature stratification). The observed velocity fluctuations are produced by the shear of the large-scale vortex. At larger stratification obtained in our experiments, the strong turbulence region is located at the upper part of the cavity where the large scale vortex exists. In this region the Brunt-Väisälä frequency is small and increases in the direction outside the large-scale vortex. This is the reason of that the large-scale internal gravity waves are observed in the regions outside the large-scale vortex. We found these waves by analyzing the non instantaneous correlation functions of the temperature and velocity fields. The observed large-scale waves are nonlinear because the frequency of the waves determined from the temperature field measurements is two times smaller than that obtained from the velocity field measurements. The measured intensity of the waves is of the order of the level of the temperature turbulent fluctuations
Ratio of n-6/n-3 in the diets of beef cattle
No full textEffects of feeding heat-treated canola (C), soybean (S) and flax (F) or mixtures on growth and slaughter characteristics, taste and fatty acid (FA) composition of beef tissue were investigated using 128 crossbred steers to determine the potential of improving the nutritional quality of beef for humans. For Trial 1 (48 steers), dietary treatments were: roasted C, extruded C, roasted S, extruded S, roasted F and extruded F. For Trial 2 (80 steers), the dietary treatments were: S:F (1:1), S:C (1:1), C:F (1:1) and S:F:C (1:1:1), and the oilseeds were processed either by roasting or extruding before mixing. Soybean meal and soybean oil were used to give equivalent lipid and protein contents to each experimental diet. The basal diet consisted of grass silage, barley grain, vitamins and minerals. Steers were fed for a minimum of 100d then slaughtered at a uniform degree of finish. Growth and slaughter characteristics of the steers were only slightly affected by dietary treatment in that the soybean-fed steers consumed more feed and had a higher average daily gain than the canola or flax-fed animals in Trial 1. There was no difference in taste panel parameters for any of the treatments. Inclusion of flax in the diet increased the total n-3 content of meat. Similar results were found for canola and C18:1n-9 although this was not the case for soybean and the n-6 FA. For the n-6 FA in the PL and neutral lipid fractions of the meat samples, levels were correlated with high dietary levels of n-6 or n-9 with low levels of n-3 while for the n-3 FA, levels were correlated with high dietary n-3 levels and low n-6 levels. Oilseed processing method did not have an effect on any fatty acid levels. It is possible to modify the FA composition of beef meat toward a healthier profile by including heat-treated oilseeds in the diet to influence the degree of lipid metabolism in the rumen.ID: S0377840111004007; M3: Article; Accession Number: S0377840111004007; Author: M.A. McNiven (a, ⁎); Author: J.L. Duynisveld (b); Author: T. Turner (a); Author: A.W. Mitchell (a); Affiliation: Department of Health Management, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of PEI, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada C1A 4P3; Affiliation: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Nappan, NS, Canada B0L 1C0; Keyword: Oilseeds; Keyword: Roasted; Keyword: Extruded; Keyword: Fatty acids; Keyword: Healthy fat; Number of Pages: 11; Language: English
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Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach
No full textForensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material
Investigation of a flow field generated by a fractal grid based on experimental data and CFD simulations
No full textFractal grids generate turbulence by directly exciting many length-scales of different sizes simultaneously, rather than using the nonlinear cascade mechanism to obtain multiscale excitation, as it is the case for classical grids. These scales influence each other and show very different properties compared to all previously documented turbulent flows. In this work we present experimental wind tunnel and computer fluid dynamics (CFD) studies of the turbulent flow generated by a fractal grid under the same conditions. We did an extensive statistical study and a direct comparison between the experimentally and numerically acquired time series in order to investigate and compare one-point- and two-point-statistics. In addition we present an application of a stochastic method, so-called Langevin approach, to the experimentally and numerically acquired velocity increment time series to examine three-point-statistics in terms of Kramers-Moyal coefficients
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