Synergistic interactions of etoposide and interleukin-1 alpha are not due to DNA damage in human melanoma cells

Family nursing, always a component of nursing, has been recently receiving increased attention through publications, educational programs, clinical practice settings and family nursing research. Nurses are in the best position to assist families experiencing the illness of a loved one, but often lack the skills and confidence necessary to assist with the psychosocial needs. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of a family nursing program within a large, tertiary care facility. The program's evaluation is ongoing but early outcomes indicate that day-to-day nursing practice has been positively influenced and improved job satisfaction may result.     

Modified modulation formats using time-varying phase functions

New modulation formats are presented that increase the transmission rate over that of conventional systems, without degrading the bit error rate (BER) and with minimal bandwidth variation. A time-varying function called an "extra phase variation function" (EPVF) is added to the discrete phase of conventional modulation formats such as M-PSK and QAM to transmit additional data bits. A receiver configuration is presented that allows the decoding of information represented by the discrete and extra phases. It is shown that in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, the BER performance of the bits carried by the discrete phase and the extra phase in the modified format improves over the BER of conventional modulation formats.     

Effect of sliding speed on friction and wear of uni-directional aramid fibre-phenolic resin composite

A previous study on the tribological performance of a compression-moulded aramid fibre-phenolic resin composite, containing 30% continuous fibre, showed that this composite provides a reasonable combination of the friction coefficient and wear rate to be used as a friction component, such as a brake shoe. In the present work, the effect of sliding speed on the friction and wear behaviour of this composite has been investigated. The sliding experiments were conducted in a speed range of 0.1–6 m s^–1 at two normal pressure levels of 1.0 and 4.9 MPa. The coefficient of friction was found to be stable over a wide range of sliding speeds and normal pressures. The wear of the composite was found to be insensitive to changes in the speed in the higher speed range. The results have been supplemented with scanning electron micrographs to help understand possible friction and wear mechanisms.