Availability Of Comprehensive Information Research Articles

Ecosystem Service Concept as a Rationale for Urban Green Space Conservation- A Systematic Review Report

Urban Green Space (UGS) is recognized as vital to modern infrastructure development worldwide. While the conventional method of urban planning has long prioritized built structures over UGS, an increasing number of scientific studies have demonstrated that UGS not only supports biodiversity but also provides numerous essential benefits for humans, such as clean air, water, weather regulation, food, and a place for respite for urban residents. This points to a need for an interdisciplinary synthesis of recently published research to document the ecological and social benefits and present comprehensive recommendations. We conducted an in-depth review of existing scientific literature to explore supporting, regulating, cultural, and provisioning ecosystem services benefits, major factors enhancing them, and management recommendations to optimize those benefits. The results indicate that optimizing heterogeneous UGS coverage as an essential part of urban design benefits natural as well as human communities in the form of enhanced wildlife habitat, clean air and water, weather regulation, and livability. Findings highlight the multifaceted contributions of UGS in maintaining natural ecosystems to provide essential benefits for human wellbeing and environmental health, which are integral components of sustainable development. We discuss evidence-based recommendations for policy and planning for optimum UGS suitable for different environmental, geographic, ecoclimatic, and socioeconomic statuses worldwide. The availability of comprehensive information on the enhanced benefits of UGS renders new directions and impetus for UGS conservation in the era of expanding urbanization and climate change.

Nanoreactors Technology in Green Organic Synthesis

Background: Nanoreactors technology represents a promising tool for efficient and selective organic synthesis typically under “green” and sustainable reaction conditions. These structures with generating a confined reaction environment to accommodate that both reactants and catalysts can change the reaction pathways and induce new activities and selectivities. Objective: The paper reviews literature examples in which nanoreactors were employed in various types of organic and metal catalyzed reactions including multicomponent reactions, palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions, olefin metathesis, aza-Cope rearrangement, allylic alcohol isomerization, cyclization reactions, ring opening reactions, halogenation reactions, hydrolysis reactions, hydroformylation reactions, cascade reactions, addition reactions, oxidation reactions and reduction reactions. The reactions' survey is accompanied with the explanation of structure and performance of nanoreactors that are applied there. Conclusion: The availability of comprehensive information about the role of nanoreactors technology in green organic synthesis and investigation of different aspects of them such as their structures, mechanisms and synthetic utility can assist researchers in designing the greener approaches in organic synthesis.

Assessing vegetation response to precipitation in northwest Morocco during the last decade: an application of MODIS NDVI and high resolution reanalysis data

Understanding vegetation dynamics provides information on changes in land cover that can directly be related to regional changes in the climate system. In data-sparse regions, i.e. northwest Morocco studies are limited by the availability of comprehensive information on precipitation. We extracted precipitation data of high spatiotemporal resolution (2 km, 1 day) from the Northwest Africa Reanalysis (NwAR) and gridded Normalized Difference Negetation Index (NDVI) of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that cover northwest Morocco over ten hydrological years (September 2000 to August 2010). The results are based on a sequence of linear regression analyses. The mean precipitation of different input timeframes is systematically applied as the predicting variables to the mean NDVI of the growing seasons. Results show that 73 % of the variance in mean NDVI is explained by the variance in mean precipitation at the beginning of the growing season (November to the end of December). The results also show that 75 % of the variance in the mean NDVI of agriculturally used areas is explained by the variance in mean precipitation of beginning September to the end of December. Potentially irrigated land cover of low to medium explained variance but of a high seasonal range in NDVI cover about 14 % of the study region. We conclude that a considerable part of agricultural used areas are still potentially rain-fed. The applied methods and especially the re-analysed precipitation data of high spatiotemporal resolution open a new quality of analysis valuable for, e.g. monitoring aspects, policy decisions or regulatory actions.

Education and parental involvement in decision-making about newborn screening: understanding goals to clarify content.

A challenge in designing effective education for parents about newborn screening (NBS) has been uncertainty about appropriate content. Arguing that the goals of education may be usefully tied to parental decision-making, we sought to: (1) explore how different ways of implementing NBS differ in their approaches to parental engagement in decision-making; (2) map the potential goals of education onto these "implementation models"; and (3) consider the content that may be needed to support these goals. The resulting conceptual framework supports the availability of comprehensive information about NBS for parents, irrespective of the model of implementation. This is largely because we argue that meeting parental expectations and preferences for communication is an important goal regardless of whether or notparents are actively involved in making a decision. Our analysis supports a flexible approach, in which some educational messages are emphasized as important for all parents to understand while others are made available depending on parents' preferences. We have begun to define the content of NBS education for parents needed to support specific goals. Further research and discussion is important to determine the most appropriate strategies for delivering the tailored approach to education that emerged from our analysis.

The EBI enzyme portal

The availability of comprehensive information about enzymes plays an important role in answering questions relevant to interdisciplinary fields such as biochemistry, enzymology, biofuels, bioengineering and drug discovery. At the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, we have developed an enzyme portal (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/enzymeportal) to provide this wealth of information on enzymes from multiple in-house resources addressing particular data classes: protein sequence and structure, reactions, pathways and small molecules. The fact that these data reside in separate databases makes information discovery cumbersome. The main goal of the portal is to simplify this process for end users.

Opinions and Expectations of Women in the Treatment of Cervical and Uterine Cancer in Spain

To know the experiences, needs and expectations of women in the treatment of cervical and uterine cancer in the Andalusian Health Service. Focus groups and in-depth interviews with women being treated for cervical-uterine cancer within the Andalusian Health Service. Analysis with Nudist Vivo 1.0 (QSR International Pty Ltd, Doncaster, Victoria, Australia). The needs and expectations detected were: coherence in the promotion strategies and the presence of a proactive approach by health professionals, availability of comprehensive information and understanding, possibility of expressing to health professionals one's doubts and fears, and of participation in decision-making, technical quality, humane treatment and continuity of care and attention to psychosocial aspects. The knowledge of women in the treatment of cancer of the cervix and uterus plays a crucial part in improving the delivery of these services.

ARTICLE: Does information about patients who are intellectually disabled translate into better cooperation during dental visits?

The objective of this study was to investigate whether having background information about a patient with an intellectual disability (ID) would have a positive effect on the level of cooperation during a first dental visit. Study participants were 57 consecutive dental patients (mean age = 24.3 years, range: 4 to 69) with ID, who received a first oral examination at a center for special dental care. They were randomly assigned to a condition in which the dentist either received information about the patient prior to a dental visit (n = 29) or not (n = 28). Patients were assessed on the level of displayed cooperation, using a behavior-rating scale. Patients with less-severe levels of ID displayed better cooperation. No significant difference was found between the cooperation scores of both groups. The results suggest that the availability of comprehensive information concerning patients who are intellectually disabled prior to a dental appointment does not enhance cooperative behavior.

Identification of Monomorphic and Divergent Haplotypes in the 2006-2007 Norovirus GII/4 Epidemic Population by Genomewide Tracing of Evolutionary History

Our norovirus (NoV) surveillance group reported a >4-fold increase in NoV infection in Japan during the winter of 2006-2007 compared to the previous winter. Because the increase was not linked to changes in the surveillance system, we suspected the emergence of new NoV GII/4 epidemic variants. To obtain information on viral changes, we conducted full-length genomic analysis. Stool specimens from 55 acute gastroenteritis patients of various ages were collected at 11 sites in Japan between May 2006 and January 2007. Direct sequencing of long PCR products revealed 37 GII/4 genome sequences. Phylogenetic study of viral genome and partial sequences showed that the two new GII/4 variants in Europe, termed 2006a and 2006b, initially coexisted as minorities in early 2006 in Japan and that 2006b alone had dominated over the resident GII/4 variants during 2006. A combination of phylogenetic and entropy analyses revealed for the first time the unique amino acid substitutions in all eight proteins of the new epidemic strains. These data and computer-assisted structural study of the NoV capsid protein are compatible with a model of antigenic drift with tuning of the structure and functions of multiple proteins for the global outgrowth of new GII/4 variants. The availability of comprehensive information on genome sequences and unique protein changes of the recent global epidemic variants will allow studies of diagnostic assays, molecular epidemiology, molecular biology, and adaptive changes of NoV in nature.

Pharmacogenetics of the major polymorphic metabolizing enzymes.

There is increasing information available on the existence of polymorphisms in genes encoding xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes and the functional significance of many of these. In addition to genes long recognized as being polymorphic, such as CYP2D6, CYP2C19 and CYP2C9, there is now information available on the existence of polymorphisms in other cytochrome P450 genes such as CYP2A6, CYP2B6 and CYP2C8. With respect to phase II metabolism, polymorphisms in GSTM1, GSTT1, NAT2 and TPMT are well understood but information is also emerging on other GST polymorphisms and on polymorphisms in the UDP-glucuronosyltransferases and sulfotransferases. The availability of comprehensive information on the occurrence and functional significance of polymorphisms affecting drug metabolism should facilitate their application to pharmacogenomic profiling.

Dose discrepancies between the Physicians' Desk Reference and the medical literature, and their possible role in the high incidence of dose-related adverse drug events.

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are a major cause of morbidity and mortality, and even minor ADEs may adversely affect patients' compliance with treatment. Because most ADEs are dose-related phenomena, adjusting drug dosages to account for individual patients' needs and tolerances is fundamental to good therapeutics. To determine whether the Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR), the leading source of drug information for physicians, provides the full range of effective drug doses, especially the lowest, least ADE-prone doses of medications, for physicians to consider in treating patients. Review of dosage guidelines and dose-response information in the PDR. Comparison with dose-response data obtained from articles listed in MEDLINE from 1966 to 2000. For many types of medications, physicians are frequently advised to use the lowest effective doses of drugs, especially initially. Yet, effective low doses determined in prerelease studies or in postrelease work are often omitted from the PDR, even when they have been recommended by expert panels. Optimal therapeutics depends on the availability of comprehensive information. However, the PDR contains only the limited dose information from package inserts. Because the PDR was originally developed as a promotional device, there is no mechanism by which all clinically relevant dose-response data or important postrelease discoveries are regularly and rapidly incorporated into it. Thus, a gap exists in the availability of current and comprehensive dose information for physicians. This article provides information on lower, effective doses for 48 major medications, with an extensive reference list-a compilation of low-dose information not previously published, to our knowledge, in the medical literature. Physicians must have a readily accessible source of current and complete dose-response information to individualize drug therapy and minimize the risks of ADEs.

A Conceptual Model of Biomedical Network in DRDO

Easy and timely availability of comprehensive information catered to the specific needs of the user is the blood of R&D activities in biomedical field. For the successful accomplishment of the highly specialised, multidisciplinary programme, the necessity of having an advanced IT-oriented infrastructure is indisputable. The need to access current and relevant information transcends the boundaries of the libraries/technical information resource centres (TIRCs). Though many computer-assisted communication technologies are available, their provisioning requires a substantial commitment of resources in terms of staff expertise, computer hardware (H/W) and software (S/W) and training, which may not be adequately available at all TIRCs. Recognising the criticality of the need to access current biomedical information, the authors have conceptualised the establishment of an advanced informatics centre for biotechnology under 'Microbiology 2000' programme of the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO). The proposed facility is planned to be established with the technical and professional help from librarians, information technologists and subject specialists from life sciences laboratories of DRDO. The facility is visualised as a technology group that will perform the dual role of being the facility centre as well as the design centre. In the second phase of the proposal, the facility may be thrown open for commercial exploitation. Institute of Nuclear Medicine & Allied Sciences (INMAS) can play a pivotal role in this cooperative effort for creation of this facility, which is expected to tremendously improve capabilities in information handling and customised services specially in the field of telemedicine. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.20.3.3516

Identifying the Need for Respite Care for People with Learning Disabilities in Northern Ireland

The present paper describes the methods employed to investigate the range and models of respite care services provided for people with learning disabilities and their carers in Northern Ireland. A total of 1786 carers (representing 1917 persons with learning disabilities) were surveyed to determine their perceptions and levels of satisfaction regarding the range of services provided for them. In addition 101 local respite care services were examined and interviews conducted with commissioners, providers and professional support staff to assess the perceptions of individuals involved in the planning, commissioning and provision of respite care services. The study confirmed that regional variations existed throughout the Province and that the current range of services often failed to meet the significant (and often complex) needs of users. Epidemiological data was obtained regarding the presenting needs of users. Specific recommendations were made requesting that the availability of comprehensive information about respite care should be readily accessible to users and carers. The need to extend the range of services and to provide more inclusive services for groups such as children and adults with autistic spectrum disorder, people with behavioural and complex medical conditions was also identified. Whilst the study was conducted in Northern Ireland it is considered that many of the findings will be equally applicable to elsewhere in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.