Trends in Hydrological Parameters of a Southern Brazilian Watershed and its Relation to Human Induced Changes

The Piracicaba river basin is a subtropical watershed located in the southeastern region of Brazil. With an area of 12 400 km², the basin is a typical example of new landscape resulting from development in tropical and sub-tropical regions: establishment of intensive industrial and agricultural processes were followed by significant population growth and water management. This scenario has led to significant increase in water demand and decrease in water quality. The main objective of this study is the detection of changes in the patterns of flow and precipitation in the basin, and its possible relation to man-induced changes. Statistical analyses were performed on records of precipitation, evapotranspiration and streamflow, from 1947 to 1991. Precipitation and evapotranspiration totals showed significant increasing trends for the entire basin. From eight streamflow gauge stations, half showed significant decreasing trend. The most probable cause of such trends is the export of water from the basin to the metropolitan region of São Paulo city.     

Cushing’s Syndrome Effects on the Thyroid

The most known effects of endogenous Cushing’s syndrome are the phenotypic changes and metabolic consequences. However, hypercortisolism can exert important effects on other endocrine axes. The hypothalamus–pituitary–thyroid axis activity can be impaired by the inappropriate cortisol secretion, which determinates the clinical and biochemical features of the “central hypothyroidism”. These findings have been confirmed by several clinical studies, which also showed that the cure of hypercortisolism can determine the recovery of normal hypothalamus–pituitary–thyroid axis activity. During active Cushing’s syndrome, the “immunological tolerance” guaranteed by the hypercortisolism can mask, in predisposed patients, the development of autoimmune thyroid diseases, which increases in prevalence after the resolution of hypercortisolism. However, the immunological mechanism is not the only factor that contributes to this phenomenon, which probably includes also deiodinase-impaired activity. Cushing’s syndrome can also have an indirect impact on thyroid function, considering that some drugs used for the medical control of hypercortisolism are associated with alterations in the thyroid function test. These considerations suggest the utility to check the thyroid function in Cushing’s syndrome patients, both during the active disease and after its remission.     

The principle of guarantee availability for security protocol analysis

Conformity to prudent design principles is an established approach to protocol correctness although it is not free of limitations. We term goal availability a design principle that is often implicitly followed, prescribing protocols to aim at principal-centric goals. Adherence to a design principle is normally established through protocol analysis that is an evaluation of whether a protocol achieves its goals. However, the literature shows that there exists no clear guidance on how to conduct and interpret such an analysis, a process that is only left to the analyzer’s skill and experience. Goal availability has the desirable feature that its supporting protocol analysis can be precisely guided by what becomes a principle of realistic analysis, which we call guarantee availability. It prescribes that the outcome of the analysis, which is the set of guarantees confirming the protocol goals, be practically applicable by the protocol participants. In consequence, the guarantees must be based on assumptions that the principals have the capacity to verify. Our focus then turns entirely to protocol analysis, because an analysis conforming to guarantee availability signifies that the analyzed protocol conforms to goal availability. Existing analysis of (both classical and deployed) protocols has been reconsidered with the aim of studying their conformity to guarantee availability. Some experiments clarify the relationships between goal availability and the existing design principles, with particular reference to explicitness. Other experiments demonstrate that boosting an analysis with guarantee availability generally makes it deeper, unveiling additional protocol niceties that depending on the analyzer’s skills may remain overseen otherwise. In particular, an established claim about a protocol (made using a well-known formal method) can be subverted.     

Finite element shakedown analysis of two‐dimensional structures

In the present paper, the formulation proposed by Casciaro and Garcea (Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Eng., 2002; 191 :5761–5792) and applied to the shakedown analysis of plane frames, is extended to the analysis of two‐dimensional flat structures in both the cases of plane‐stress and plane‐strain. The discrete formulation is obtained using a mixed finite element in which both stress and displacement fields are interpolated. The material is assumed to be elasto‐plastic and a linearization of the elastic domain is performed. The result is a versatile iterative scheme well suited to implementation in general purpose FEM codes. An extensive series of numerical tests is presented showing the reliability of the proposed formulation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Leachability of degradation products from hard chairside reline resins in artificial saliva: Effect of water‐bath post‐polymerization treatment

The effect of a post‐polymerization treatment on the leaching of methacrylic acid (MA) and benzoic acid (BA) from the reline resins [Kooliner (K), New Truliner (N), Ufi Gel hard (U), and Tokuso Rebase Fast (T)] was evaluated. Specimens of each material were divided into two groups: Group C (control) – left untreated; Group WB (water‐bath) – immersion in water at 55 ± 1°C for 10 min. Specimens were placed in artificial saliva at 37 ± 1°C and, after 1‐, 3‐, 5‐, 24‐h and 3‐, 7‐, 14‐, and 30‐day intervals, aliquots were removed and analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography. Data were analyzed by using Wilcoxon, Mann–Whitney or Kruskal–Wallis tests (α = 0.05). At 1 h, the concentration of MA released from U control specimens was higher than those of the other ones, and decreased after 3 h. WB specimens released lower amounts of MA than control specimens only for material U, at the 1‐ and 3‐h periods. For all control specimens, concentrations of leached BA progressively decreased within 5 h and from 24 h to the end. WB specimens released significantly lower amounts of BA than did the control groups. The highest concentration of MA was leached from control specimens of Ufi Gel hard. Water‐bath post‐polymerization treatment caused a significant reduction in elution of BA. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2011     

Cranberry and Recurrent Cystitis: More than Marketing?

Epidemiologic studies indicate that millions of people suffer from recurrent cystitis, a pathology requiring antibiotic prophylaxis and entailing high social costs. Cranberry is a traditional folk remedy for cystitis and, which, in the form of a variety of products and formulations has over several decades undergone extensive evaluation for the management of urinary tract infections (UTI). The aim of this retrospective study is to summarize and review the most relevant and recent preclinical and clinical studies on cranberries for the treatment of UTIs. The scientific literature selected for this review was identified by searches of Medline via PubMed. A variety of recent experimental evidence has shed light on the mechanism underlying the anti-adhesive properties of proanthrocyanidins, their structure–activity relationships, and pharmacokinetics. Analysis of clinical studies and evaluation of the cranberry efficacy/safety ratio in the prevention of UTIs strongly support the use of cranberry in the prophylaxis of recurrent UTIs in young and middle-aged women. However, evidence of its clinical use among other patients remains controversial.     

Inductive study of confidentiality: for everyone

The Inductive Method is among the most established tools to analyse security protocols formally. It has successfully coped with large, deployed protocols, and its findings are widely published. However, perhaps due to its embedding in a theorem prover or to the lack of tutorial publications, it is at times criticised to require super-specialised skills and hence to be rather impractical. This paper aims at showing that criticism to be stereotypical. It pursues its aim by presenting the first tutorial-style paper to using the Inductive Method. This paper cannot cover every aspect of the method. It focuses on a key one, that is how the Inductive Method treats one of the main goals of security protocols: confidentiality against a threat model. The treatment of that goal, which may seem elegant in the Inductive Method, in fact forms a key aspect of all protocol analysis tools, hence the paper motivation rises still. With only standard skills as a requirement, the reader is guided step by step towards design and proof of significant confidentiality theorems. These are developed against two threat models, the standard Dolev–Yao and a more up-to-date one, the General Attacker, the latter turning out particularly useful also for didactic purposes.     

A comparison of higher order auditory processes in younger and older adults.

The authors conducted 3 experiments investigating the effects of aging on higher order auditory processes. They compared younger and older adults with respect to (a) their auditory channel capacity, (b) the extent of their top-down control over auditory gain, and (c) their ability to focus attention on a narrow band of frequencies. To ensure that subclinical cochlear processing deficits in older adults (e.g., higher thresholds, poorer discrimination of frequency and intensity differences) did not limit performance, the authors used only stimuli that were perfectly discriminable by all participants. No age differences were found in any of these experiments, suggesting that some higher order auditory processes (e.g., top-down control over auditory gain, auditory attention) are preserved in normal aging, despite numerous age-related declines in peripheral auditory functionality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of stimulus range on perceived contrast: Evidence for contrast gain control.

Investigated whether the stimulus range affected the perceived contrast of vertical gratings whose spatial frequencies were either 1 or 4 cycles/deg to determine if adjustive processes apply to the contrast sensitivity of spatial frequency channels in a vision task. Nine Ss judged the perceived contrasts of 1 and 4 cycle/deg gratings intermixed within a session. Four different conditions were created by combining either a set of low-contrast or high-contrast gratings at 1 frequency with a broad range of contrasts at the other frequency. When the broad-range set was at 1 cycle/deg, contrast-matches across spatial frequencies were unaffected by changing the range of the 4-cycle/deg gratings. When the broad-range set was 4 cycles/deg, contrast matches were changed by changing the range of the 1 cycle/deg gratings. This asymmetry in the range effect was shown to be consistent with the characteristics of the 2 channels' receptive-field profiles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)