Attention In Recent Months Research Articles

A call for action: Comparative effectiveness research in asthma

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has received considerable research attention in recent months, and efforts to promote CER are part of the newly enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In this article we define CER and how it complements traditional efficacy research in asthma and discuss how CER can help provide the basis for rational decision making about the care of individual patients with asthma and how best to deliver this care in real-world settings. We present information about the challenges and opportunities to conduct CER, including enhanced patient registries for observational CER and effectiveness trials (also called pragmatic trials). We discuss the urgent need to define the appropriate methodologies for CER and to develop and prioritize a research agenda for CER studies in asthmatic subjects with the help of a diverse group of stakeholders.

New spotlights shine on health-care-associated infections

Attempts to control health-care-associated infections have received renewed attention in recent months from government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and academic research groups. At the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this year launched a wide-ranging effort to

SOUTHERN AFRICA ASSESSMENT

The year 2005 is being touted as the one in which Africa stakes its claim on the international agenda, topping the list of priorities for the Group of Eight (G8) the European Union (EU) and, increasingly, US foreign policy. Indeed the continent has received better media attention in recent months, stimulated by reinvigorated peace processes and the G7’s agenda for poverty eradication in Africa that is led by the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, poverty and hunger still characterise life for most of the continent’s inhabitants who are denied agency over their livelihoods as a result of a complex mix of reinforcing structural, political and environmental factors. Commenting on recent initiatives for debt relief for African countries, World Bank’s James Wolfensohn said he hopes that ‘there is a recognition now on behalf of the rich world that they cannot continue to be rich if the world is destabilised by poverty’.1 The following pages identify HIV/AIDS and food insecurity (particularly in rural areas) as the two most severe and interrelated humanitarian issues currently facing southern Africa. It is argued that the current situation must be contextualised as an ‘entangling crisis’ of climatic factors, chronic poverty, the failure of economic and political governance, and the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ability of individuals to respond independently. The chains of poverty

Model driven architecture: Principles and practice

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is an approach to application modeling and generation that has received a lot of attention in recent months. Championed by the Object Management Group (OMG), many organizations are now looking at the ideas of MDA as a way to organize and manage their application solutions, tool vendors are explicitly referring to their capabilities in terms of “MDA compliance”, and the MDA lexicon of platform-specific and platform-independent models is now widely referenced in the industry.

Facial recognition — Part 1

Out of all the biometric technologies, the facial recognition sector has received the most attention in recent months. Although the technology is not as accurate as some others, such as fingerprint or iris recognition, it does have unique features that elude other biometric modalities, and that make it an attractive biometric to use in a multitude of scenarios. The first part of this two-part survey looks at the issues surrounding this technology, predicted market sizes and the types of technology on offer. Part two will look in depth at the companies and individual products in this exciting market, as well as listing full contact details for the main players.

Image is everything!

Steganography has gained some media attention in recent months not least due to some media reports linking its use to the 11 September disaster in New York.

US hydropower dams: Environmental solution or problem?

Environmental concerns about hydropower generation have garnered significant US media attention in recent months. The hydropower industry, however, describes hydropower as a clean, renewable energy source that is more environmentally friendly than most-power generation methods. Hydropower advocates further emphasize that in our digital society, high electricity demands necessitate using a variety of generation methods to ensure grid stability. The debate has escalated recently as a result of a few key events. Cathy Swirbul takes a closer look.

The time of troubles: The US national security agency in the twenty‐first century

This article seeks to ask whether the US National Security Agency (NSA) doing its job or stumbling through a midlife crisis. It reviews what has occurred at NSA during the last decade. It argues that some statements that have appeared in the American press that NSA was solely responsible for some of the US intelligence community's recent intelligence failures are factually incorrect. Furthermore, NSA's Sigint collection capabilities have actually improved considerably during the last decade, and evidence suggests that the technological obstacles that have been often cited in press reports as contributing to NSA's current problems have not yet begun to be widely used outside of the developed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. NSA's most pressing problem is, instead, an area which unfortunately has received little public attention in recent months, specifically the deterioration of the Agency's Sigint processing, analysis and reporting capabilities. It is clear that NSA must recruit substantial numbers of analysts and information technology specialists in the near future, and invest money in acquiring new processing technologies in order to begin to address this problem. The Agency must also take immediate steps to shore up its strained relations with its customers inside the US government and the armed forces. Given the transient and oftentimes fickle nature of politics, NSA must realize that it cannot depend solely on a few allies in the US Congress for its continued survival. Equally important, but more difficult, will be NSA's internal management problems, such as how to trim the Agency's large bureaucracy, eliminate duplication of effort and how to put NSA's financial accounts in order. Finally, it is time that NSA adopts a policy of greater openness about what it does and how it does it. One obvious way to do this is to declassify documents which detail the Agency's significant accomplishments since the end of World War II.

The organised abuse of children in rural England: The response of Social Services, Part One

There are a number of controversies raging in the world of child protection. Three in particular have attracted attention in recent months. There is the issue of the ‘repressed’ or ‘false’ memories of adults recalling sexual abuse in childhood. This topic has received extensive coverage in professional journals (see, for example, Neale, 1994 for a summary) and in the broader media (Wyndham, 1994).Once again, the very label given to the problem defines the debate, as indeed has been the case since modern interest in child abuse was prompted by Kempe's (1962) work. It is interesting to note that ‘false memory syndrome’ is now the term used by some to counter claims of abuse in childhood. As Neale points out (1994:17) the term has ‘no medical validity, but the use of the word ‘syndrome’ perhaps suggests such a feature.

Sulfadimethoxine Withdrawal Time in Lactating Cows

Drug residues in milk have received much attention in recent months. Not surprisingly, the residue data collected by different groups, as well as the interpretation of its significance to public health, have been widely divergent The publicity generated has caused public concerns about the safety and wholesomeness of dairy products.
 Because of these concerns and the recognized need of the dairy industry to strictly comply with the FDA requirements regarding allowable tolerance of approved drugs in milk, Hoffmann-La Roche and Rutgers University recently conducted a study to confirm the established milk discard (withdrawal) time following administration of sulfadimethoxine as Albon once-a-day Boluses to lactating dairy cows.
 The original sulfadimethoxine tolerance of 10 ppb in milk, established after evaluation of extensive human food safety data by the Agency, remains in effect today. The recent study was conducted to determine if changes in dairy management and assay methods implemented since the original milk discard time was established, had changed the drug withdrawal time required to comply with the established tolerance.

Reflections on (New) Philology

As the following remarks are to reflect my own scholarly commitment and experience, I should begin by saying that they come from a medievalist who in his work is always conscious of dealing with the works of a past state of civilization. They also come from a historian of literature, who in contrast to political or economic historians makes written documents the subject of his study, and who in contrast to linguists looks at them as works of verbal art. And finally, they come from a professor of English literature who works closely with colleagues whose ultimate aim is the aesthetic analysis and appraisal of verbal objects, and of whom many today feel driven to ask deeper theoretical questions about, not only the nature of aesthetic values, but the nature of language itself and its function to communicate about the relation between object and perceiver, about the psychological or political function of literature and of language, and so on. Working in such an environment naturally brings with it a certain amount of confrontation, which in turn has its occasional political side in discussions about such practical matters as departmental curricula and new appointments. Though I would not rank myself among philologists who have little use for literary criticism and theory, I can of course not help being conscious of pressures and of attitudes on the other side however unvoiced they may remain that would reject philology. Hence, my remarks will reflect a practitioner's concern with what is and with what continuing value for the study of medieval literature it has. They will describe a position and are in no way intended as a Forschungsbericht; the few illustrations cited are no more than examples that have crossed my attention in recent months. By tradition, philology can be taken in either a narrow or a broad sense. In the former it designates the academic discipline of studying or scientifically elucidating the basic, literal meaning of verbal documents. Originally, and primarily, this meant the study of older stages of particular languages, whose records, in contrast to contemporary utterances, required careful investigation and the application of a wide-ranging knowledge in order to make sense. Thus, dealt first with the classical languages, Greek and Latin, and with surviving documents of other dead languages, such as ancient Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages, and eventually the various branches of the Indo-European family. In a short time, philologists extended their studies to the older stages of modern European languages, of their national tongues, as well. To uncover their meaning, it was necessary to understand a variety of ancient writing systems and the phonetic value of individual symbols, whether these have continued in use or not. Once the hypothetical sounds hidden behind written signs had been identified, one could set out to deal with words and sentences and their meanings and

PIPELINE AND HAZARDOUS MATERIALS TRANSPORTATION SAFETY AND OIL SPILL REDUCTION

ABSTRACT Although statistics indicate that about five percent of the nation's oil spill incidents are caused by pipeline breaks, these spills are of such a nature that they cause about 15 percent of the annual total accidental release. Because such spills contribute considerably to the total problem of oil spills, they are the subject of particular attention for the Materials Transportation Bureau (MTB), U.S. Department of Transportation. This agency discharges the department's safety responsibility over all types of liquid pipelines. Some 225,000 miles of these pipelines transport crude oil, petroleum products, liquefied petroleum gases, anhydrous ammonia, and comparable fluids. The MTB responsibility stems from several legislative acts, including pipeline safety requirements contained in the Transportation of Explosives Act and the Deepwater Port Act of 1974. The MTB also regulates important aspects of the safe transportation of hazardous materials, including many petroleum products, by highway and rail. These regulations and those applicable to liquid pipelines constitute a tangible, albeit indirect, program providing sanctions against a number of types of discharges. A comprehensive system of rules applicable to surface carriers and container manufacturers is under continuous review and enforced through both criminal and civil penalties. The problems of hazardous materials transportation by surface means have received renewed attention in recent months. As a result, the prospects are for improved containment of petroleum products in transit, resulting from a more vigorous and consistent compliance program and more extensive research and development of carrying equipment and handling techniques. How this improved compliance program will be achieved is addressed within the context of the recent reorganization of the Materials Transportation Bureau and the bureau's inclusion within the Research and Special Programs Administration of the Department of Transportation and of current legislative initiatives.

U.S.-Japanese Trade: Perceptions and Reality

THIS PAPER ANALYZES two main topics-first, recent trends in U.S.-Japanese economic relations and, second, the interface of American and Japanese interests in the Pacific Asia region. The former area, the direct trading relationship between the United States and Japan, is of obvious importance to both countries and has received a good deal of attention in recent months, both in bilateral talks and within the multilateral framework of the Tokyo Round of GATT. The U.S. is the most significant market for Japanese exports, usually accounting for nearly 20% of the total, whereas Japan is in second place, right after Canada, as a very important market for U.S. goods. The indirect trading relationship, involving the rest of Pacific Asia, is also of great and growing significance for both countries. The developing countries of Asia, particularly the capitalist-roaders' (to coin a phrase), have become a strategic source of raw materials for both Japan and the U.S. These countries also have attracted significant flows of

Film monitoring of normal subjects during diagnostic radiology

The use of diagnostic X-rays in research on normal humans is a sensitive subject because of the moral and legal questions involved. NCRP Report No. 39, 'Radiation Protection Criteria', re-emphasizes the need to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure and the absolute necessity of truly informed consent on the part of normal subjects undergoing any potentially hazardous procedure. Concern for this problem is leading physicians and medical physicists to a greater interest in diagnostic radiation monitoring methods. The possibility of obtaining misleading low dose information from some of the available monitoring systems was dramatically brought to our attention in recent months. In an attempt to monitor normal subjects undergoing fluoroscopic examination in conjunction with a research oriented procedure, several monitors, alone or together (R-meters, Diamentors, dental size film and TLD), failed to supply the required information. The major difficulties encountered were in defining areas of exposure and assuring that the monitors were in the X-ray beam and totally exposed. Large sheet film was most helpful and convenient in obtaining an acceptable indication of surface exposure, beam size and radiation dose to critical organs. These latter data were obtained by relating the surface exposure on the film to TLD measurements within a Rando phantom. The study revealed that several films commercially available in large sheets are suitable for the exposure range of interest and in most cases can be automatically processed.

Dieldrin Residues and Cooking Losses in Pork Loins1

Much concern has focused on the wholesomeness of foods, as ecology and pollution of various types have gained increasing attention in recent months. Because pesticide residues in meat have been reported as concentrated in the fat, the question of whether cooking reduces them has been raised — and if so, what method would be most effective. Both dieldrin residues and cooking losses in pork chops cooked by three methods and in roasted pork loins are reported here.

Machinery of Government

SEVERAL distinct trends in public affairs have directed fresh attention in recent months to the adequacy or otherwise of the existing instruments of government in meeting the post-war needs of Britain. The reorganisation of the defence ministries under a co-ordinating Minister of Defence and the tendency to enlarge the responsibilities of the Lord President of the Council for the oversight and co-ordination of scientific effort, making him in effect the Minister for Research and Intelligence suggested by the Haldane Committee of many years ago, have raised the question of the efficiency at the highest level of administrative organisation. The formation of the Defence Research Policy Committee and the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, with their various sub-committees, is only one special aspect of the problem of relating knowledge to power at the very seat of authority. Sir Stafford Cripps' appointment as Minister for Economic Affairs was another indication of re-organisation in accordance with the recommendations of the Haldane Committee. The Government's programme of nationalization and the creation of the National Coal Board and similar national boards have also brought into question both the capacity of the Civil Service itself and the existing structure of government to deal competently and efficiently with the issues involved, while proposals for the re-organisation of local government and regionalism have likewise stimulated thought on these matters.