Noninvasive assessment of the direct action of oral nifedipine and nicardipine on left ventricular contractile state in patients with systemic hypertension: importance of reflex sympathetic responses

BACKGROUND: Alveolar macrophages from patients with sarcoidosis were analyzed for their ability to secrete tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), interleukin-1-beta (IL-1-beta), and interleukin-6 (IL-6). RESULTS: Constitutive release of all three monokines in these patients was concomitantly increased in the active state of disease in comparison with inactive sarcoidosis or healthy control subjects. Alveolar macrophages from patients with inactive sarcoidosis compared with cells from healthy subjects showed increased spontaneous secretion of TNF-alpha and IL-6 only, whereas the constitutive release of IL-1-beta was similar as in healthy volunteers. In vitro stimulation of alveolar macrophages from healthy control subjects with lipopolysaccharide or pokeweed mitogen led to a time- and dose-dependent enhanced secretion of TNF-alpha, IL-1-beta, and IL-6. In a similar manner, with corresponding cells from patients with sarcoidosis the secretion of all three cytokines could be further increased by stimulation with lipopolysaccharide or pokeweed mitogen. CONCLUSIONS: The data presented indicate that an increased release of TNF-alpha, IL-1-beta, and IL-6 correlates to disease activity and may play a critical part in the pathogenesis of sarcoidosis.     

The natural history and fisheries ecology of Lake Chilwa,southern Malawi

Lake Chilwa produces between zero and 24,000 metric tons of fish per year, making it one of the most productive but variable lakes in Africa. The size of the lake varies seasonally and among years, sometimes drying completely. Its surrounding wetland and floodplain provide habitat for a diversity of birds and economically valuable grasses and reeds. When the lake has water, there is considerable activity on its shores and temporary fishing villages spring up. People move in and out of the lake basin in concert with these seasonal and longer term changes. This paper examines the environmental dynamics of Lake Chilwa and its surrounding wetlands, presents an overview of the socio-economic context of the area and discusses threats to this resilient system that might occur as a result of climate change. We conclude that management of Lake Chilwa must place the lake in the wider economic and ecological system in which it is situated. Ultimately, land-use practices within the basin present more of a threat to the resilience of the fishery and people's livelihoods than overfishing or a strict focus on the lake's resources. These perspectives present significant challenges to conventional fisheries governance.     

Supporting ordering and consistency in a distributed Event Heap for Ubiquitous Computing

The Stanford Event Heap has been shown to provide appropriate support for constructing interactive workspace applications. Given this success it is natural to consider the Event Heap as a platform to support other classes of Ubiquitous Computing applications. In this paper we argue that the distributed, spontaneous nature of these applications places additional demands on the Event Heap that require extensions to both the engineering and API. Suitable extensions are described and their use to support a typical Ubicomp application is discussed.

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Wind characteristics and energy potential assessment in Akure,South West Nigeria: econometrics and policy implications

This paper analysed 11 years of daily mean wind-speed data, measured at Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria, using Weibull and Rayleigh distribution functions. While both distributions showed good agreements in extreme-value estimation patterns, investigation of their wind-speed characteristics modelling criteria, using goodness-of-fit statistics, revealed that the wind data followed the Weibull more than Rayleigh. Monthly wind-speed of Akure city ranged from 1.41 to 4.24 m/s by the Weibull fittings and from 1.40 to 4.16 m/s by the Rayleigh fittings. Overall results, of 2.71 m/s (Weibull) or 2.70 m/s (Rayleigh) mean wind-speed and 18.51 W/m² (Weibull) or 22.26 W/m² (Rayleigh) mean power density, indicated Akure a low wind-speed site, requiring low wind-speed turbine for generating wind energy. Econometric analyses of power output simulations using such turbine system resulted in affordable wind energy cost. These bear policy implications for sustainable wind energy usage in this and similar regions of the world.     

Challenges to sustainable management of the lakes of Malawi

This paper reviews the management challenges facing Malawi lakes and analyzes the management responses that have been developed to deal with these challenges. Malawi lakes are under considerable stress due to high population growth and increasing levels of poverty which have led to overexploitation of fishery resources. High rates of soil erosion in the lake catchments are increasing siltation of shallow lakes, deltas and embayments, affecting water quality and fish breeding habitats, thereby degrading fish production potential. This review further shows that past and current management approaches have focused on maximizing sustainable yield and have failed to adequately incorporate socio-ecological factors and broader lake catchment processes into fisheries management plans. This, in turn, led to the top-down development of fisheries laws and technical regulations which were difficult to enforce, increased conflict between resource users and fisheries managers, and failed to control fisheries over-exploitation and the collapse of the chambo (tilapia) and cyprinid fisheries. The paper recommends that the fisheries policy should be reviewed to focus on resilience of fisheries, environment and livelihoods. Policy makers should adopt integrated management planning to address the diverse interest of stakeholders in lake basins, as well as the ecological, socio-economic and external factors threatening sustainability of lake ecosystems and livelihoods of dependent communities.     

Optimizing printable FEDs towards the standard for mass‐market displays

Abstract— This paper reviews the recent progress made at Printable Field Emitters (PFE), Ltd., in creating a 5.7‐in. quarter‐VGA field‐emission display (FED), describing some of the technical hurdles that were overcome and quantifying the performance of the display. First, however, some detailed market analysis is presented that shows that mass‐market displays in the 30–60‐in.‐diagonal range need to be significantly lower in cost than the present PDP technology if market penetration is to be successful. In addition, the results of cost‐modeling the manufacturing of a low‐cost FED with at least a printed cold‐cathode layer are presented. This paper shows that by scaling‐up the processes used in the demonstrator presented, sufficient cost savings are made, making a very marketable product. We present the architecture of our frit‐sealed display and describe some of the testing that was performed to characterize the devices. Finally, we discuss work in progress to optimize the manufacturing route and introduce even more cost savings and performance improvements.     

Public Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Lessons from the e-Campus Display Deployments

In this paper, the authors reflect on their experiences of deploying ubiquitous computing systems in public spaces and present a series of lessons that they feel will be of benefit to researchers planning similar public deployments. They focus on experiences gained from building and deploying three experimental public display systems as part of the e-Campus project. However, they believe the lessons are likely to be generally applicable to many different types of public ubicomp deployment. This article is part of a special issue on Real-World Deployments.     

L2imbo: A distributed systems platform for mobile computing

Mobile computing environments increasingly consist of a range of supporting technologies offering a diverse set of capabilities to applications and end-systems. Such environments are characterised by sudden and dramatic changes in the quality-of-service (QoS) available to applications and users. Recent work has shown that distributed systems platforms can assist applications to take advantage of these changes in QoS and, more specifically, facilitate applications to adapt to their environment. However, the current state-of-the-art in these platforms reflects their fixed network origins through their choice of synchronous connection-oriented communications paradigms. In this paper we argue that these paradigms are not well suited to operation in the emerging mobile environments. Furthermore, we offer an alternative programming paradigm based on tuple spaces which, we believe, offers a number of benefits within a mobile context. The paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a new platform based on this paradigm. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Simulation of coke calciners

A mathematical rotary calciner simulator is developed based on theoretical considerations and experimental data. It simulates the available petroleum coke calciner test run data satisfactorily. The most important datum, calcined coke yield, is simulated with maximum ± 0·7% error. The simulator is the package of acceptable process mechanisms which apply to rotary calciners. It is useful for calciner design and optimization of operations.     

Effect of compliance for chronic asthmatic children.

Compliance to a theophylline regimen by 11 male and 11 female chronically asthmatic 7–12 yr olds was assessed by a riboflavin tracer method. Ss who took 80% or more of their prescribed medication were considered compliant; Ss who took less were considered noncompliant. Results indicate that noncompliant Ss experienced significantly more wheezing, greater variability in peak flow rates, and lower overall scores than compliant Ss. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)