The Brighton Fuse 2. Freelancers in the creative digital IT economy

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Central nervous system infections in the intensive care unit

Neurological infections constitute an uncommon, but important aetiological cause requiring admission to an intensive care unit (ICU). In addition, health-care associated neurological infections may develop in critically ill patients admitted to an ICU for other indications. Central nervous system infections can develop as complications in ICU patients including post-operative neurosurgical patients. While bacterial infections are the most common cause, mycobacterial and fungal infections are also frequently encountered. Delay in institution of specific treatment is considered to be the single most important poor prognostic factor. Empirical antibiotic therapy must be initiated while awaiting specific culture and sensitivity results. Choice of empirical antimicrobial therapy should take into consideration the most likely pathogens involved, locally prevalent drug-resistance patterns, underlying predisposing, co-morbid conditions, and other factors, such as age, immune status. Further, the antibiotic should adequately penetrate the blood-brain and blood- cerebrospinal fluid barriers. The presence of a focal collection of pus warrants immediate surgical drainage. Following strict aseptic precautions during surgery, hand-hygiene and care of catheters, devices constitute important preventive measures. A high index of clinical suspicion and aggressive efforts at identification of aetiological cause and early institution of specific treatment in patients with neurological infections can be life saving

Community resource centres to improve the health of women and children in Mumbai slums: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial

Background: The trial addresses the general question of whether community resource centers run by a non-government organization improve the health of women and children in slums. The resource centers will be run by the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action, and the trial will evaluate their effects on a series of public health indicators. Each resource center will be located in a vulnerable Mumbai slum area and will serve as a base for salaried community workers, supervised by officers and coordinators, to organize the collection and dissemination of health information, provision of services, home visits to identify and counsel families at risk, referral of individuals and families to appropriate services and support for their access, meetings of community members and providers, and events and campaigns on health issues. Methods/design: A cluster randomized controlled trial in which 20 urban slum areas with resource centers are compared with 20 control areas. Each cluster will contain approximately 600 households and randomized allocation will be in three blocked phases, of 12, 12 and 16 clusters. Any resident of an intervention cluster will be able to participate in the intervention, but the resource centers will target women and children, particularly women of reproductive age and children under 5. The outcomes will be assessed through a household census after 2 years of resource center operations. The primary outcomes are unmet need for family planning in women aged 15 to 49 years, proportion of children under 5 years of age not fully immunized for their ages, and proportion of children under 5 years of age with weight for height less than 2 standard deviations below the median for age and sex. Secondary outcomes describe adolescent pregnancies, home deliveries, receipt of conditional cash transfers for institutional delivery, other childhood anthropometric indices, use of public sector health and nutrition services, indices of infant and young child feeding, and consultation for violence against women and children

High Performance Distributed File System Based on Blockchain

Distributed filesystem architectures use commodity hardware to store data on a large scale with maximum consistency and availability. Blockchain makes it possible to store information that can never be tampered with and incentivizes a traditional decentralized storage system. This project aimed to implement a decentralized filesystem that leverages the blockchain to keep a record of all the transactions on it. A conventional filesystem viz. GFS [1] or HDFS [2] uses designated servers owned by their organization to store the data and are governed by a master service. This project aimed at removing a single point of failure and makes use of participating users’ machines to store data. The implemented file system uses a distributed hash table to evenly store data on multiple machines and efficiently look up, track, maintain, and persist the data. The data stored on the file system is made easily and readily accessible to a user ensuring its soundness. Finally using smart contracts enabled incentives and increased the integrity and reliability of storing data by recording all the transactions. The project functions autonomously by coordinating multiple participant machines in the network to store data and monetize unused storage space on the machines. It supports the basic functionalities of a filesystem which include storing, deletion, and reading a file as desired. The filesystem’s performance was tested with files of different sizes and a variable number of nodes. The current file system is able to store files as big as 100 MB within 12 seconds and 300 MB in less than 25 seconds. This is significantly faster than Storj [3] which nearly takes more than a minute for a similar operation. The tests also provided observations on the average gas consumed during transactions

Cosmological parameter estimation using Very Small Array data out to ℓ= 1500

We estimate cosmological parameters using data obtained by the Very Small Array (VSA) in its extended configuration, in conjunction with a variety of other cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and external priors. Within the flat Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, we find that the inclusion of high-resolution data from the VSA modifies the limits on the cosmological parameters as compared to those suggested by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) alone, while still remaining compatible with their estimates. We find that Ωbh2= 0.0234+0.0012−0.0014, Ωdmh2= 0.111+0.014−0.016, h= 0.73+0.09−0.05, nS= 0.97+0.06−0.03, 1010AS= 23+7−3 and τ= 0.14+0.14−0.07 for WMAP and VSA when no external prior is included. On extending the model to include a running spectral index of density fluctuations, we find that the inclusion of VSA data leads to a negative running at a level of more than 95 per cent confidence ( nrun=−0.069 ± 0.032 ), something that is not significantly changed by the inclusion of a stringent prior on the Hubble constant. Inclusion of prior information from the 2dF galaxy redshift survey reduces the significance of the result by constraining the value of Ωm. We discuss the veracity of this result in the context of various systematic effects and also a broken spectral index model. We also constrain the fraction of neutrinos and find that fν < 0.087 at 95 per cent confidence, which corresponds to mν < 0.32 eV when all neutrino masses are equal. Finally, we consider the global best fit within a general cosmological model with 12 parameters and find consistency with other analyses available in the literature. The evidence for nrun < 0 is only marginal within this model

First season QUaD CMB temperature and polarization power spectra

QUaD is a bolometric CMB polarimeter sited at the South Pole, operating at frequencies of 100 and 150 GHz. In this paper we report preliminary results from the first season of operation (austral winter 2005). All six CMB power spectra are presented derived as cross spectra between the 100 and 150 GHz maps using 67 days of observation in a low foreground region of approximately 60 deg^2. These data are a small fraction of the data acquired to date. The measured spectra are consistent with the ΛCDM cosmological model. We perform jackknife tests that indicate that the observed signal has negligible contamination from instrumental systematics. In addition, by using a frequency jackknife we find no evidence for foreground contamination

Characterization of the Millimeter-Wave Polarization of Centaurus A with QUaD

Centaurus (Cen) A represents one of the best candidates for an isolated, compact, highly polarized source that is bright at typical cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment frequencies. We present measurements of the 4 degree by 2 degree region centered on Cen A with QUaD, a CMB polarimeter whose absolute polarization angle is known to 0.5 degrees. Simulations are performed to assess the effect of misestimation of the instrumental parameters on the final measurement and systematic errors due to the field's background structure and temporal variability from Cen A's nuclear region are determined. The total (Q, U) of the inner lobe region is (1.00 +/- 0.07 (stat.) +/- 0.04 (sys.), -1.72 +/- 0.06 +/- 0.05) Jy at 100 GHz and (0.80 +/- 0.06 +/- 0.06, -1.40 +/- 0.07 +/- 0.08) Jy at 150 GHz, leading to polarization angles and total errors of -30.0 +/- 1.1 degrees and -29.1 +/- 1.7 degrees. These measurements will allow the use of Cen A as a polarized calibration source for future millimeter experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, v2 matches version published in Ap

Production of 3-hydroxypropionate from biomass

Biorenewable technology is a developing field of science that researches alternative sources for petroleum products like fuels, plastics, paints, etc. The DoE biomass program has identified the 12 top chemicals that can be produced from biomass and further processed to replace many petroleum products; 3-hydroxypropionate (3HP) is a top 12 chemical that can be used to produce plastics, paints, tires, and other consumer products. This thesis describes the attempts to produce 3HP from glucose in E. coli and from syngas in R. rubrum. Malonyl CoA reductase from C. aurantiacus and R. castenholzii was cloned and expressed in E. coli and R. rubrum respectively. This enzyme converts malonyl-CoA (a central metabolic intermediate) to 3-HP. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry showed recombinant E. coli and R. rubrum produced 3HP in low levels. The quantity of 3-HP produced is not economical for commercial production so further studies were conducted to increase 3HP production