Human infection with Gongylonema pulchrum

A 43 year old woman developed a painful tumor at the left buccal mucosa. Following local anti-inflammatory treatment a 35 mm long, living female adult worm of Gongylonema pulchrum was extracted from the affected side. No further treatment was needed and recovery was complete 5 days after extraction. Infection had occurred possibly 6 weeks before in Hungary with ingestion of contaminated water from an open draw well. Although commonly occurring as parasitic infection of domestic cattle and other vertebrates, gongylonemiasis is very rare in humans. Only 48 cases have been described in the literature since 1864. Life cycle and pathology of G. pulchrum are discussed

Probabilistic methods in the analysis of protein interaction networks

Imperial Users onl

Design, poverty and sustainable development

Design in a poor context, or for the alleviation of poverty, has received little or no attention. An informal discourse analysis shows that design and poverty have not been linked, the two being seen as mutually exclusive. This paper aims to examine the relationships between design and designers, poverty and the poor, and sustainable development, which aims to alleviate poverty. On the face of it, there would appear to be little that links them; however, this paper aims to identify specific design initiatives that relate to poor people in the southern hemisphere as producers and consumers of designed goods.1 It briefly outlines definitions of poverty and sustainable development, then describes selected design interventions. It analyzes the contribution that these initiatives make to the reduction of poverty, and to the different aspects of sustainable development

Perfect colourings of isonemal fabrics by thin striping

Perfect colouring of isonemal fabrics by thin striping of warp and weft and the closely related topic of isonemal prefabrics that fall apart are reconsidered and their relation further explored. The catalogue of isonemal prefabrics that fall apart is extended to order 20 for those of even genus.Comment: 25 pages, 20 figure

Coded Cooperative Data Exchange for a Secret Key

We consider a coded cooperative data exchange problem with the goal of generating a secret key. Specifically, we investigate the number of public transmissions required for a set of clients to agree on a secret key with probability one, subject to the constraint that it remains private from an eavesdropper. Although the problems are closely related, we prove that secret key generation with fewest number of linear transmissions is NP-hard, while it is known that the analogous problem in traditional cooperative data exchange can be solved in polynomial time. In doing this, we completely characterize the best possible performance of linear coding schemes, and also prove that linear codes can be strictly suboptimal. Finally, we extend the single-key results to characterize the minimum number of public transmissions required to generate a desired integer number of statistically independent secret keys.Comment: Full version of a paper that appeared at ISIT 2014. 19 pages, 2 figure