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Isobaric heat capacity data are needed to test and improve thermodynamic models of natural gas over wide ranges of temperature and pressure. Measurements are reported here at temperatures between (184 and 421) K and pressures between (5 and 32) MPa for supercritical mixtures of methane (1) + propane (2) at x1 = 0.950 (±0.005). Estimated relative uncertainties in the measured heat capacities range from (1.8 to 4.5) %. In addition, measurements at temperatures of (184, 190, 197, 203 and 209) K were performed at pressures (1.67 to 2.39) MPa higher than saturation conditions to estimate the heat capacity of the mixture at the bubble point. The binary mixture data were compared with the predictions of three models: the Groupe Européen de Recherches Gazières (GERG) 2008 multi-parameter equation of state (EOS), the Peng-Robinson (PR) EOS used widely by chemical engineers, and the Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (SAFT)-γ Mie EOS incorporating group contributions. Among the three models, the PR EOS was found to describe the heat capacity values best. A brief investigation indicated that the Joback and Reid method that the SAFT-γ Mie EOS is based on fails to accurately predict the ideal gas heat capacity of methane at cryogenic temperatures, while the inaccuracy of the GERG-2008 EOS stems from the residual part of the methane (1) + propane (2) mixing functions. more...

Contains fulltext : 229013.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access), OBJECTIVES: The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criteria for acute kidney injury lack specificity for identifying patients at risk of adverse renal outcomes. The objective was to develop a model that analyses hourly urine output values in real time to identify those at risk of developing severe oliguria. DESIGN: This was a retrospective cohort study utilizing prospectively collected data. SETTING: A cardiac ICU in the United Kingdom. PATIENTS: Patients undergoing cardiac surgery between January 2013 and November 2017. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS: Patients were randomly assigned to development (n = 981) and validation (n = 2,389) datasets. A patient-specific, dynamic Bayesian model was developed to predict future urine output on an hourly basis. Model discrimination and calibration for predicting severe oliguria (< 0.3 mL/kg/hr for 6 hr) occurring within the next 12 hours were tested in the validation dataset at multiple time points. Patients with a high risk of severe oliguria (p > 0.8) were identified and their outcomes were compared with those for low-risk patients and for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion for acute kidney injury. Model discrimination was excellent at all time points (area under the curve > 0.9 for all). Calibration of the model's predictions was also excellent. After adjustment using multivariable logistic regression, patients in the high-risk group were more likely to require renal replacement therapy (odds ratio, 10.4; 95% CI, 5.9-18.1), suffer prolonged hospital stay (odds ratio, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.0-6.4), and die in hospital (odds ratio, 6.4; 95% CI, 2.8-14.0) (p < 0.001 for all). Outcomes for those identified as high risk by the model were significantly worse than for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion. CONCLUSIONS: This novel, patient-specific model identifies patients at increased risk more...

Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) research involves the infection of otherwise healthy participants with disease often for the sake of vaccine development. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the urgency of enhancing CHIM research capability and the importance of having clear ethical guidance for their conduct. The payment of CHIM participants is a controversial issue involving stakeholders across ethics, medicine and policymaking with allegations circulating suggesting exploitation, coercion and other violations of ethical principles. There are multiple approaches to payment: reimbursement, wage payment and unlimited payment. We introduce a new Payment for Risk Model, which involves paying for time, pain and inconvenience and for risk associated with participation. We give philosophical arguments based on utility, fairness and avoidance of exploitation to support this. We also examine a cross-section of the UK public and CHIM experts. We found that CHIM participants are currently paid variable amounts. A representative sample of the UK public believes CHIM participants should be paid approximately triple the UK minimum wage and should be paid for the risk they endure throughout participation. CHIM experts believe CHIM participants should be paid more than double the UK minimum wage but are divided on the payment for risk. The Payment for Risk Model allows risk and pain to be accounted for in payment and could be used to determine ethically justifiable payment for CHIM participants.Although many research guidelines warn against paying large amounts or paying for risk, our empirical findings provide empirical support to the growing number of ethical arguments challenging this status quo. We close by suggesting two ways (value of statistical life or consistency with risk in other employment) by which payment for risk could be calculated. more...

Contains fulltext : 229013.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access), OBJECTIVES: The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criteria for acute kidney injury lack specificity for identifying patients at risk of adverse renal outcomes. The objective was to develop a model that analyses hourly urine output values in real time to identify those at risk of developing severe oliguria. DESIGN: This was a retrospective cohort study utilizing prospectively collected data. SETTING: A cardiac ICU in the United Kingdom. PATIENTS: Patients undergoing cardiac surgery between January 2013 and November 2017. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS: Patients were randomly assigned to development (n = 981) and validation (n = 2,389) datasets. A patient-specific, dynamic Bayesian model was developed to predict future urine output on an hourly basis. Model discrimination and calibration for predicting severe oliguria (< 0.3 mL/kg/hr for 6 hr) occurring within the next 12 hours were tested in the validation dataset at multiple time points. Patients with a high risk of severe oliguria (p > 0.8) were identified and their outcomes were compared with those for low-risk patients and for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion for acute kidney injury. Model discrimination was excellent at all time points (area under the curve > 0.9 for all). Calibration of the model's predictions was also excellent. After adjustment using multivariable logistic regression, patients in the high-risk group were more likely to require renal replacement therapy (odds ratio, 10.4; 95% CI, 5.9-18.1), suffer prolonged hospital stay (odds ratio, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.0-6.4), and die in hospital (odds ratio, 6.4; 95% CI, 2.8-14.0) (p < 0.001 for all). Outcomes for those identified as high risk by the model were significantly worse than for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion. CONCLUSIONS: This novel, patient-specific model identifies patients at increased risk of severe ol more...

Contains fulltext : 229013.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access), OBJECTIVES: The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criteria for acute kidney injury lack specificity for identifying patients at risk of adverse renal outcomes. The objective was to develop a model that analyses hourly urine output values in real time to identify those at risk of developing severe oliguria. DESIGN: This was a retrospective cohort study utilizing prospectively collected data. SETTING: A cardiac ICU in the United Kingdom. PATIENTS: Patients undergoing cardiac surgery between January 2013 and November 2017. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS: Patients were randomly assigned to development (n = 981) and validation (n = 2,389) datasets. A patient-specific, dynamic Bayesian model was developed to predict future urine output on an hourly basis. Model discrimination and calibration for predicting severe oliguria (< 0.3 mL/kg/hr for 6 hr) occurring within the next 12 hours were tested in the validation dataset at multiple time points. Patients with a high risk of severe oliguria (p > 0.8) were identified and their outcomes were compared with those for low-risk patients and for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion for acute kidney injury. Model discrimination was excellent at all time points (area under the curve > 0.9 for all). Calibration of the model's predictions was also excellent. After adjustment using multivariable logistic regression, patients in the high-risk group were more likely to require renal replacement therapy (odds ratio, 10.4; 95% CI, 5.9-18.1), suffer prolonged hospital stay (odds ratio, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.0-6.4), and die in hospital (odds ratio, 6.4; 95% CI, 2.8-14.0) (p < 0.001 for all). Outcomes for those identified as high risk by the model were significantly worse than for patients who met the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes urine output criterion. CONCLUSIONS: This novel, patient-specific model identifies patients at increased risk of severe ol more...

Issues with hydrocarbon fuel supply security, price volatility, alongside environmental, and health concerns of conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) transport technologies have raised interest in electric vehicle (EV) alternatives. However, the methods of EV testing for performance and range are inadequate adaptations from ICE testing standards designed to measure liquid fuel economy and emissions under largely unrealistic conditions. This research assesses the performance of a battery EV (BEV) by conducting a number of real-world driving tests under varying conditions including the impact of vehicle accessory usage (lights, air-conditioning, stereo, heater etc.) and additional passengers. The authors’ results demonstrate that large increases of energy consumption from accessory usage and additional passengers do occur in BEVs, which remain outside of most published EV/BEV and ICE vehicle standard test results, which themselves have recently come under scrutiny for other reasons. Owing to the relatively small battery in modern BEVs, this additional loss in efficiency and range under real-world on-road conditions may severely compromise the nascent BEV industry; particularly in areas with limited charging infrastructure. more...

Issues with hydrocarbon fuel supply security, price volatility, alongside environmental, and health concerns of conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) transport technologies have raised interest in electric vehicle (EV) alternatives. However, the methods of EV testing for performance and range are inadequate adaptations from ICE testing standards designed to measure liquid fuel economy and emissions under largely unrealistic conditions. This research assesses the performance of a battery EV (BEV) by conducting a number of real-world driving tests under varying conditions including the impact of vehicle accessory usage (lights, air-conditioning, stereo, heater etc.) and additional passengers. The authors’ results demonstrate that large increases of energy consumption from accessory usage and additional passengers do occur in BEVs, which remain outside of most published EV/BEV and ICE vehicle standard test results, which themselves have recently come under scrutiny for other reasons. Owing to the relatively small battery in modern BEVs, this additional loss in efficiency and range under real-world on-road conditions may severely compromise the nascent BEV industry; particularly in areas with limited charging infrastructure. more...

Time lapse microscopy has emerged as an important modality for studying early human embryo development. Detection of certain events can provide insight into embryo health and fate. Embryo tracking is challenged by a high dimensional search space, weak features, outliers, occlusions, missing data, multiple interacting deformable targets, changing topology, and a weak motion model. We address these with a data driven approach that uses a rich set of discriminative image and geometric features and their spatiotemporal context. We pose the mitosis detection problem as augmented simultaneous segmentation and classification in a conditional random field framework that combines tracking based and tracking free elements. For 275 clinical image sequences we measured division events during the first 48 hours of embryo development to within 30 minutes resulting in an improvement of 24.2% over a tracking-based approach and a 35.7% improvement over a tracking-free approach, and more than an order of magnitude improvement over a traditional particle filter, demonstrating the success of our framework. more...

Causal knowledge in complex process systems is a powerful representational model that permits a range of important applications related to process risk management. These include the development of operator training systems, diagnosis tools, emergency response planning as well as implications on process and control system retrofit and design. Using a blended hazard identification approach we show how causal knowledge can be generated from design documentation and represented in a structured language, which is then amenable to display cause-implication graphs that explicitly show the links between failures, causes and implications. A case study illustrates the application of the methodology to a safety system in an industrial coke making plant. more...

Early endosome-to-trans-Golgi network (TGN) transport is organized by the retromer complex. Consisting of cargo-selective and membrane-bound subcomplexes, retromer coordinates sorting with membrane deformation and carrier formation. Here, we describe four mammalian retromers whose membrane-bound subcomplexes contain specific combinations of the sorting nexins (SNX), SNX1, SNX2, SNX5, and SNX6. We establish that retromer requires a dynamic spatial organization of the endosomal network, which is regulated through association of SNX5/SNX6 with the p150(glued) component of dynactin, an activator of the minus-end directed microtubule motor dynein; an association further defined through genetic studies in C. elegans. Finally, we also establish that the spatial organization of the retromer pathway is mediated through the association of SNX1 with the proposed TGN-localized tether Rab6-interacting protein-1. These interactions describe fundamental steps in retromer-mediated transport and establish that the spatial organization of the retromer network is a critical element required for efficient retromer-mediated sorting., Early endosome-to-trans-Golgi network (TGN) transport is organized by the retromer complex. Consisting of cargo-selective and membrane-bound subcomplexes, retromer coordinates sorting with membrane deformation and carrier formation. Here, we describe four mammalian retromers whose membrane-bound subcomplexes contain specific combinations of the sorting nexins (SNX), SNX1, SNX2, SNX5, and SNX6. We establish that retromer requires a dynamic spatial organization of the endosomal network, which is regulated through association of SNX5/SNX6 with the p150(glued) component of dynactin, an activator of the minus-end directed microtubule motor dynein; an association further defined through genetic studies in C. elegans. Finally, we also establish that the spatial organization of the retromer pathway is mediated through the association of SNX1 with the proposed TGN-localized tether Rab6-interacting protein-1. These interactions describe fundamental steps in retromer-mediated transport and establish that the spatial organization of the retromer network is a critical element required for efficient retromer-mediated sorting. more...

Early endosome-to-trans-Golgi network (TGN) transport is organized by the retromer complex. Consisting of cargo-selective and membrane-bound subcomplexes, retromer coordinates sorting with membrane deformation and carrier formation. Here, we describe four mammalian retromers whose membrane-bound subcomplexes contain specific combinations of the sorting nexins (SNX), SNX1, SNX2, SNX5, and SNX6. We establish that retromer requires a dynamic spatial organization of the endosomal network, which is regulated through association of SNX5/SNX6 with the p150(glued) component of dynactin, an activator of the minus-end directed microtubule motor dynein; an association further defined through genetic studies in C. elegans. Finally, we also establish that the spatial organization of the retromer pathway is mediated through the association of SNX1 with the proposed TGN-localized tether Rab6-interacting protein-1. These interactions describe fundamental steps in retromer-mediated transport and establish that the spatial organization of the retromer network is a critical element required for efficient retromer-mediated sorting., Early endosome-to-trans-Golgi network (TGN) transport is organized by the retromer complex. Consisting of cargo-selective and membrane-bound subcomplexes, retromer coordinates sorting with membrane deformation and carrier formation. Here, we describe four mammalian retromers whose membrane-bound subcomplexes contain specific combinations of the sorting nexins (SNX), SNX1, SNX2, SNX5, and SNX6. We establish that retromer requires a dynamic spatial organization of the endosomal network, which is regulated through association of SNX5/SNX6 with the p150(glued) component of dynactin, an activator of the minus-end directed microtubule motor dynein; an association further defined through genetic studies in C. elegans. Finally, we also establish that the spatial organization of the retromer pathway is mediated through the association of SNX1 with the proposed TGN-localized tether Rab6-interacting protein-1. These interactions describe fundamental steps in retromer-mediated transport and establish that the spatial organization of the retromer network is a critical element required for efficient retromer-mediated sorting. more...

Medical school curricula and postgraduate education programmes expend considerable resources teaching medical ethics. Simultaneously, whistleblowers' agitation continues, at great personal cost, to prompt major intrainstitutional and public inquiries that reveal problems with the application of medical ethics at particular clinical "coalfaces". Virtue ethics, emphasising techniques promoting an agent's character and instructing their conscience, has become a significant mode of discourse in modern medical ethics. Healthcare whistleblowers, whose complaints are reasonable, made in good faith, in the public interest, and not vexatious, we argue, are practising those obligations of professional conscience foundational to virtue based medical ethics. Yet, little extant virtue ethics scholarship seriously considers the theoretical foundations of healthcare whistleblowing. The authors examine whether healthcare whistleblowing should be considered central to any medical ethics emphasising professional virtues and conscience. They consider possible causes for the paucity of professional or academic interest in this area and examine the counterinfluence of a continuing historical tradition of guild mentality professionalism that routinely places relationships with colleagues ahead of patient safety.Finally, it is proposed that a virtue based ethos of medical professionalism, exhibiting transparency and sincerity with regard to achieving uniform quality and safety of health care, may be facilitated by introducing a technological imperative using portable computing devices. Their use by trainees, focused on ethical competence, provides the practical face of virtue ethics in medical education and practice. Indeed, it assists in transforming the professional conscience of whistleblowing into a practical, virtue based culture of self reporting and personal development. more...

Overland monthly and Out West magazine. / Volume 1, Issue 4, Page(s) 388-396, (dlps) volume: ahj1472.2-01.004, (dlps) article: ahj1472.2-01.004:13, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/text/accesspolicy.html more...

Understanding the physical processes of high power electrical energy is of major importance for the advancement of state-of-art directed energy, simulation and confined fusion programs. Generation of high voltage, short duration pulses may result in high energy density plasma which produces quantities of VUV and soft X-ray photons in the range of 0.15-10 ev. Power transport down vacuum lines presents two problems which must be dealt with in every application-insulator flashover and electrode gap closure. The pulsed flashover and ablative closure mechanisms under soft VUV photon fluence are described. Two tests were conducted. First, an insulator surface was subjected to VUV photons (0.5 ev) using apertures of 0.0156 to 0.5 inches in diameter with and without a quartz window. The apertures had no effect in inhibiting a flashover; however, the quartz window prevented the occurrance of insulator flashover. Second the gap closure rate of copper electrodes under the photon fluence of 6 x 10'9 watts per square meter was measured. A gap closure rate of 0.35 cm/microsecond was determined for the copper electrodes. more...