Search

Parent-adolescent conflict seems to be common when adolescents negotiate power with their parents. Forum theatre (FT), an interactive and participatory theatre form, is recommended as a community-based intervention to assist Chinese parents in managing the challenges of parent-adolescent interaction. FT proposes that solutions to daily struggles can be reached through concerted efforts of the participants. This article documents the impact of FT on parents who took on the role of ‘spect-actor’. The spect-actor is an active spectator who acts on stage to test solutions to a problem. The results indicate that parents gained more awareness of their children’s needs, which helped them to relax their control over their children. FT is recommended as a means of parent education in schools.

The growing concerns over the environmental impacts of buildings have led to increasing demands for more environmental friendly buildings and building materials. Hitherto, there are not any comprehensive studies that show the overall environmental impact profiles of building materials and building services components for buildings. This paper intends to bridge this gap by reporting overall lifecycle environmental profiles of buildings as well as the ranking orders of environmental impacts of all the building materials and building services materials and components for commercial buildings. Twenty-five commercial buildings in Hong Kong, which include three Grade A office buildings, four Grade B office buildings, one Grade C office buildings, four retail centers and three hotels, have been selected for our study. Based upon these collected samples, no statistical differences were found in the average lifecycle environmental impacts for different building types despite some minor variations were detected. Subsequently, 10 types of building materials and 10 types of building services components have been identified for their significant lifecycle environmental impacts on commercial buildings. Among all, concrete, reinforcement bar, copper power cables, and copper busbars were ranked to be the four most significant materials or components to the total lifecycle environmental impacts. These should form the major targets for improvements in environmental performance of commercial buildings.

Aim: To evaluate the effect of nasogastric lansoprazole on acid suppression in critically ill patients. Methods: Patients were eligible for the study if they had a nasogastric tube in place and had not received acid-suppressive agents for 3 days prior to enrolment into the study. Patients with active gastrointestinal bleeding or a baseline gastric pH > 4.0 were excluded. Patients served as their own controls during a 24 h lead-in period. Lansoprazole 30 mg was administered once daily with water through a nasogastric tube for 2 days. Intragastric pH was measured by continuous 24 h pH-metry for 3 days. Results: Fifteen patients were enrolled into the study. The baseline median 24 h intragastric pH was 2.25 ± 1.01, and increased to 6.70 ± 0.82 (P= 0.001) after 2 days of lansoprazole. Mean percentage of time intragastric pH was ≥ 4.0 was 25 ± 13% at baseline, and increased to 84 ± 14% (P=0.001) after 2 days of lansoprazole. Conclusions: Nasogastric lansoprazole 30 mg daily is effective in suppressing gastric acid secretion in critically ill patients.

In order to understand the dependence of magnetic properties of Co100-xNbx(x = 16, 24, 32 at.%) thin films on the film thickness. the Nb concentration, and the annealing conditions, we investigated the FMR spectra. When the static magnetic field was parallel to the film plane, only one peak was observed in all films. However, when the static field is perpendicular to the film plane, subsidiary peaks were observed in almost all samples. When the annealing temperature increased up to 250°C the surface magnetic anisotropy constant Ks1 of the film-air interface decreased rapidly from -0.08 erg/cm2 to -0.89 erg/cm2 and the surface magnetic anisotropy constant Ks2 of the film-substrate interface decreased slightly from -0.08 erg/cm2 to -0.40 erg/cm2 for 2600 A thick Co76Nb24 film. It is shown that the surface magnetic anisotropy at the film-air interface is very sensitive to the Nb content and the annealing temperature.

To evaluate the effect of nasogastric lansoprazole on acid suppression in critically ill patients.Patients were eligible for the study if they had a nasogastric tube in place and had not received acid-suppressive agents for 3 days prior to enrolment into the study. Patients with active gastrointestinal bleeding or a baseline gastric pH4.0 were excluded. Patients served as their own controls during a 24 h lead-in period. Lansoprazole 30 mg was administered once daily with water through a nasogastric tube for 2 days. Intragastric pH was measured by continuous 24 h pH-metry for 3 days.Fifteen patients were enrolled into the study. The baseline median 24 h intragastric pH was 2.25 +/- 1.01, and increased to 6.70 +/- 0.82 (P= 0.001) after 2 days of lansoprazole. Mean percentage of time intragastric pH wasor = 4.0 was 25 +/- 13% at baseline, and increased to 84 +/- 14% (P=0. 001) after 2 days of lansoprazole.Nasogastric lansoprazole 30 mg daily is effective in suppressing gastric acid secretion in critically ill patients.

The aim of this study is to determine the diagnostic value of 24-hour ambulatory esophageal manometry and pH-metry for patients with noncardiac chest pain (NCCP), but no reflux symptoms. Twenty-four hour ambulatory esophageal manometry and pH-metry was performed on 34 patients with NCCP, but no reflux symptoms. The pressure transducers were located 3, 8, and 13 cm above the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) and the pH probes were located 5 and 20 cm above the LES. An event marker was triggered by the patient for chest pain. Only 17 patients (50%) had at least one pain episode (total 81 episodes, range 1-19 episodes per person) during a 24-hour recording. Twenty-one chest pain episodes (26%) occurred during abnormal motility, whereas 4 episodes (5%) were associated with pH4, and 10 episodes (12%) had both abnormalities. The majority of chest pain episodes, 46 out of 81 events (57%), did not have any association with motility or pH abnormalities. Five of 7 patients (71%) with reflux-related chest pain and 8 of 11 patients (73%) with dysmotility-related chest pain had symptom association probability95%, indicating a significant association between chest pain and esophageal dysfunction. Our conclusion is that ambulatory esophageal manometry and pH-metry is a useful tool in the evaluation of NCCP, but only a few additional patients with reflux-related chest pain could be found in patients without reflux symptoms.

ACTH infusions into fetal sheep have been extensively used as a method of inducing premature parturition and the investigation of the associated endocrine and maturational changes in the fetus and ewe. Synthetic ACTH [ACTH-(1–24)] has been generally used in doses of 4–10 μg/h to induce parturition. These dose rates greatly exceed calculated endogenous fetal blood production rates for ACTH. The present study was designed to investigate the endocrine changes occurring in fetal and maternal ovine plasma during the induction of premature delivery with continuous infusion of a more physiological dose [1 μg ACTH-(1–24)/h]. The effect of ACTH-(1–24) infusions to the fetus at 120 or 130 days gestation were compared with appropriate gestational age controls. During ACTH-(1–24) infusion, the fetal plasma cortisol concentration in both age groups rose at similar rates. Furthermore, levels at delivery were equal to those observed in normal term fetuses. Where possible, three-parameter exponential curves were fitted t...

Fetal and maternal plasma concentrations of androstenedione, testosterone, and estradiol were measured in chronically catheterized pregnant sheep during late gestation, spontaneous term delivery, and premature delivery induced by the infusion of low doses of synthetic ACTH-(1-24) (ACTH) to the fetus at 120-130 days gestation. RIAs employing two different antisera directed at different sites of each molecule were used in combination with Celite column chromatography to ensure the specificity of the hormone measurements. Fetal plasma concentrations of all three hormones were greater than the respective maternal concentration at all periods investigated, except immediately before ACTH-induced delivery when fetal testosterone and estradiol concentrations were lower. These observations further support the hypothesis that delivery in the sheep is associated with the induction of placental 17 alpha-hydroxylase and 17,20-lyase by the increased conversion of progesterone to estrogens. The higher values of androstenedione than of testosterone also support the view that estrone is produced in larger quantities than estradiol and that estrone and estrone sulfate are good endocrine markers of the progress of the endocrine changes occurring immediately before parturition in the sheep.

The present experiment is similar to Bower's (1970) study on imagery as a relational organizer in paired-associate (PA) learning with normals. Three groups of 20 schizophrenic patients learned three different lists of 30 word-word paired-associates, which used either interactive imagery, separation imagery, or rote repetition encoding. Ss were tested on stimulus recognition and paired-associate recall, given recognition. Differences in stimulus recognition and paired-associate recall were not significant across the three encoding methods. Results suggest that schizophrenics are unable to benefit from imaginal cues to facilitate learning in a manner similar to normals. These results are interpreted as providing additional support for the notion that the schizophrenics' cognitive deficit is associated with the relational organizing process of learning.

The serum inhibitory activities on RBC-C3b receptor rosette of healthy individuals were studied in myasthenia gravis (MG) patients. The serum inhibitory activities appeared in 65% of MG patients. The serum inhibitory activities of generalized type MG were higher than those of ocular type MG. It was also found that the serum inhibitory activities were correlated with the RBC-C3b receptor rosette rate and immune complex (CIC). Furthermore, it was identified that the CIC of MG serums possessed the inhibitory activity on RBC-C3b receptor rosette.

The levels of circulating immune complex from 43 patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) and 50 normal controls were detected by using ELISA based on bovine conglutinin. The levels of circulating immune complex in MG patients were higher than those in normal controls (P less than 0.01). Although the levels of circulating immune complex in generalized type MG were higher than those in ocular type MG, the difference showed no statistically significant. It was found that the levels of circulating immune complex, both generalized type MG and ocular type MG, were higher than those in normal controls respectively (P less than 0.01).

The classical assignment problem seeks to determine a mapping between a set of assignees and a set of assignments. The linear cost assignment problem (LCGAP), as a generalized model, incorporates the relative workloads between assignees and assignments. Although LCGAP is computationally intractable, it has been extensively studied because of its practical implications in many real world situations. Variable-depth-search heuristic (VDSH) method is one of the solution methods that have been developed to produce quality near-optimal solutions to LCGAP. The main structure of VDSH consists of two basic operations: reassign and swap. In this paper, we make further observations on this effective heuristic method through a series of computational experiments. The numerical results statistically evince that different combina-tions of these two operations will result in solutions of different quality levels. These findings are expected to have similar implications to search heuristics for other optimization problems.