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Abstract- Facial recognition technology holds the promise of transforming criminal identification processes by offering a highly effective tool for law enforcement. Its capacity to quickly match individuals with mugshots or surveillance footage can significantly speed up investigations and potentially act as a deterrent to criminal activity. This technology can provide crucial support in solving cases and identifying suspects more efficiently. Facial recognition technology has the potential to revolutionize criminal identification by providing a powerful tool for law enforcement. Its ability to rapidly match suspects with mugshots or surveillance footage can expedite investigations and potentially deter crime. However, its implementation must be approached with caution to address challenges such as accuracy limitations, privacy concerns, and ethical considerations. By carefully considering the benefits and drawbacks, policymakers and law enforcement agencies can harness the power of facial recognition while safeguarding individual rights and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OBJECTIVE: To assess the safety aspects of carers' enteral feeding technique when home enteral tube feeding children with inherited metabolic disorders (IMD). METHODS: 40 patients (median age, 5.1 years; range, 0.3–13.6 years) with IMD requiring pump tube feeding were recruited. 12 patients had glycogen storage disease, 11 organic acidemias, 8 fatty acid oxidation disorders, 4 urea cycle disorders, and 5 had other conditions. 50% of the patients were fed by gastrostomy and 50% nasogastric tube. A questionnaire and practical assessment of feeding process was completed with carers by a dietician and nurse in the child's home. Areas investigated included carer hygiene, feed preparation, tube care, tube changing, use of feeding pumps and equipment, and storage of enteral feeding equipment. RESULTS: The main issues identified were poor hygiene practices (78% unclean work surfaces; 25% no hand washing); inaccurate ingredient measuring (40%); irregular checking of tube position (40%); inadequate tube flushing (50%); poor knowledge of how to clear tube blockages (80%); incorrect priming of pump sets (50%); incorrect position of child for night feeding (63%); untrained secondary carers (43%); and poor knowledge of pump alarms, battery life, and charging time. Children commonly slept in parent's room as a safety precaution (58%). CONCLUSIONS: Long term follow-up of children with IMD on home enteral tube feeding suggests that regular updates on knowledge and technique for carers may be necessary to reduce risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burn severity classifications derived from multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper images and the Normalised Burn Ratio (NBR) are commonly used to assess the post-fire ecological effects of wildfires. Ongoing efforts to retrospectively map historical burn severity require defensible, objective methods of classifying continuous differenced Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR) data where field data are often unavailable. For three fires, we compare three methods of classifying pre- and post-fire Landsat data: (1) dNBR classification using Composite Burn Index (CBI) field data to assign severity classes; (2) fuzzy C-means classification of a dNBR image; (3) local Getis–Ord statistic (Gi*) output applied to a dNBR image, classified using fuzzy C-means clustering. We then use a Kappa statistic to evaluate the agreement of severity classes assigned to a pixel with its corresponding CBI plot. For two of the three fires, the C-means clustering of the dNBR and the Gi* output performed as well or better than dNBR images classified using CBI data, with strong agreement for moderate- and high-severity classes. These results suggest that clustering of dNBR data may be a suitable approach for classifying burn severity data without field data. This method may also be useful as a tool for rapid post-fire assessments (e.g. Burned Area Emergency Response and Burned Area Reflectance Classification maps), where images must often be classified quickly and subjectively. Further analysis using additional field data and across different vegetation types will be necessary to better understand the importance of localised spatial variability in classifying burn severity data or other remote sensing change-detection analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unresolved question in sexual selection research is whether different secondary sexual traits are developmentally independent or instead whether their degree of expression is a manifestation of a general resource pool (i.e., condition) within the organism. If degree of expression of different sexual traits reflects ability to accumulate condition, then covariation should exist across genotypes in the expression of these traits, even if they are very different in kind. Here we present evidence for predicted covariation between morphological (sex comb size) and behavioral (courtship song) sexual traits among genetic lines of Drosophila bipectinata Duda extracted from a natural population. There is evidence that both these traits in Drosophila are condition dependent and subject to sexual selection. We detected significant body size–independent differences in comb size among 32 lines. Replicate lines exhibiting relatively high and low values of comb size were then subjected to analyses of courtship song. High sex comb lines exhibited shorter mean burst period and shorter mean burst duration than low sex comb lines. These song differences occurred only during the distant pursuit phase of male courtship and existed despite factoring out individual variations in sex comb size, the trait on the basis of which test lines were originally chosen. The results verify the prediction of an association between condition-dependent secondary sexual traits across genotypes and, therefore, support the existence of an overall genetic quality related to condition acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To compare the complication rates of parotidectomy operations on benign histology performed by ENT and non-ENT surgeons.Study design and setting: A seven-year (1994–2000) retrospective case notes review of patients undergoing parotidectomy in a United Kingdom district general hospital was performed. Patients with malignant histology were excluded.Participants: Patients were identified from the hospital computer database. One hundred and fifty-nine patients underwent parotidectomy for both benign and malignant conditions over the seven-year period. One hundred and thirty-seven (86 per cent) patients had parotidectomy for benign conditions and were included in this study.Main outcome measures: The presence or absence of facial palsy and other associated complications following parotidectomy surgery in both groups.Results: The temporary facial palsy rates for ENT and non-ENT surgeons were 56 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively. The permanent facial palsy rates for ENT and non-ENT surgeons were 2 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. Differences in facial palsy were not statistically significant. The difference in other complication rates such as Frey's syndrome, haematoma, salivary fistula, and neuroma were also not statistically significant.Conclusion: Our complication rates were comparable with published results. There was no significant difference in the observed rate of post-operative facial nerve palsy and other known complications following parotid surgery performed by ENT and non-ENT surgeons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Three lignocellulolytic fungi, Trametes versicolor, Pleurotus ostreatus , and Coprinus cinereus, and two cellulolytic fungi Trichoderma reesei and Chaetomium elatum were tested for their ability to degrade nitrocellulose. They were provided with different carbon and nitrogen sources in liquid cultures. Nitrocellulose (N content above 12%) was added as nitrogen source (in solution in acetone) alongside amino acids or as sole N source. Either starch or carboxy-methyl cellulose were provided as carbon sources. After 28 days of growth the highest decrease of nitrocellulose was observed with Chaetomium elatum when up to 43% was degraded in a medium containing nitrocellulose as the only nitrogen source. Coprinus cinereus caused a 37% decrease of nitrocellulose when provided with amino acids and starch as co-substrate. In cultures of Trametes versicolor, Pleurotus ostreatus and Trichoderma reesei, only 10%–22% decrease of nitrocellulose was measured in all media. In the presence of nitrocellulose with N content below 12% supplied as 3 mm pellets as the only carbon source, or with nitrocellulose with carboxy-methyl cellulose, the release of nitrite and nitrate from liquid cultures of Chaetomium elatum was measured. Between 6 and 9 days of growth in these media, an increase in both nitrite and nitrate was observed with a loss in weight of nitrocellulose up to 6% achieved after 34 days. The physical nature of the NC pellets may have reduced the rate of degradation in comparison with supplying NC in solution in the cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was to compare the image quality of film-screen (FS) and computed radiography (CR) for adult chest examinations across a range of beam energies. A series of images of the CDRAD threshold contrast detail detection phantom were acquired for a range of tube potential and exposure levels with both CR and FS. The phantom was placed within 9 cm of Perspex to provide attenuation and realistic levels of scatter in the image. Hardcopy images of the phantom were scored from a masked light-box by two scorers. Threshold contrast indices were used to calculate a visibility index (VI). The relationships between dose and image quality for CR and for FS are fundamentally different. The improvements in VIs obtained using CR at 75 kVp and 90 kVp were found to be statistically significant compared with 125 kVp at matched effective dose levels. The relative performance of FS and CR varies as a function of energy owing to the different k-edges of each system. When changing from FS to CR, the use of lower tube potentials may allow image quality to be maintained whilst reducing effective dose. A tube voltage of 90 kVp is indicated by this work, but may require clinical verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the use of practical tests for assessing whether particular business practices should be found anticompetitive. The courts have implemented such tests in many areas of competition policy including the recoupment test used in the United States for assessing aggressive pricing and the exceptional circumstances test used in the European Union for considering refusals to supply intellectual property. Economists can help the courts devise, refine, and reform such tests which, to be useful, must be capable of being implemented with available evidence and must minimise the cost of making mistaken inferences concerning competitive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the way in which a population of tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii), which have been isolated from mammalian predators since the last ice age, responded to the sight and sound of historical and ontogenetically and evolutionarily novel predators. Tammars were shown a range of visual stimuli, including taxidermic mounts of two evolutionarily novel predators, a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and a cat (Felis catus), and a model of an extinct predator, the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus). Controls were a conspecific, the cart on which all mounts were presented, and blank trials in which spontaneous change in behavior was measured. We played back recorded sounds to characterize responses to acoustic cues from predators and to a putative conspecific antipredator signal. Treatments included the howls of dingoes (Canis lupus dingo), an evolutionarily novel predator; calls of a wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax), a historical and current predator; and wallaby foot thumps. Controls were the song of an Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) and a blank trial. After seeing a fox, wallabies thumped their hind feet in alarm, suppressed foraging, and increased looking. The sight of a cat similarly suppressed foraging and increased looking. The sounds of predators did not influence responsiveness, but wallabies foraged less and looked more after thump playbacks. Our results suggest that tammars respond to the sight, but not the sounds, of predators. In contrast, the response to foot thumps demonstrates that this particular sound functions as an antipredator signal. We suggest that responsiveness to visual cues has been preserved under relaxed selection because predator morphology is convergent, but vocalizations are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: ATP gated potassium (KATP) channels and adenosine are of crucial importance in coronary blood flow regulation and activation of KATP channels and adenosine receptor stimulation protect against infarction and development of stunning. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that opening of KATP channels and adenosine receptor stimulation are involved in perfusion-contraction matching, in acute hibernation, and in recovery after reperfusion. Methods: 30 isolated piglet hearts (2-10 d old) and 20 isolated rabbit hearts were studied. The isolated piglet hearts were perfused with modified Krebs Henseleit (KH) solution enriched by washed human red blood cells; the isolated rabbit hearts were perfused with modified KH buffer. The effects of the KATP channel opener aprikalim (1 μM), the KATP channel antagonist glibenclamide (30 μM), and the adenosine receptor antagonist 8-(p-sulphophenyl)theophylline (SPT, 300 μM) on 2 h of low flow (10%) ischaemia and 1 h reperfusion were compared with saline in the piglet hearts. The effects of aprikalim (1 jxM), glibenclamide (30 μM), and saline during 90 min of low flow (10%) ischaemia followed by 1 h reperfusion were also examined in the isolated rabbit hearts. Results: At constant coronary flow aprikalim reduced perfusion pressure from 53(SEM 5) to 25(1) mm Hg (p<0.001) in piglet hearts and from 55(5) to 39(5) mm Hg (p<0.05) in rabbit hearts. Glibenclamide increased perfusion pressure from 47(5) to 61(6) mm Hg (p<0.01) in piglet hearts and from 45(4) to 81(5) mm Hg (p<0.001) in rabbit hearts. SPT increased perfusion pressure from 55(6) to 67(6) mm Hg (p<0.05) in piglet hearts. Left ventricular systolic pressure remained unchanged in both models. During stepwise reductions in coronary flow a parallel stepwise reduction in left ventricular systolic pressure was observed in all groups. At 2 h of low flow ischaemia systolic pressure was 39(4)%, 37(5)%, 41(4)%, and 37(3)% of control for hearts treated with saline aprikalim, glibenclamide, and SPT, respectively. During the low flow period systolic pressure and MVo2 stabilised. An almost identical pattern occurred in rabbit hearts. After 30 min of recovery of piglet hearts left ventricular systolic pressure increased to 78(5)% (saline), 74(5)% (aprikalim), 84(5)% (glibenclamide), and 77(4)% (SPT) of control. The recovery as percentage of control in rabbit hearts was 63(11) (saline), 69(8) (aprikalim) and 56(13) (glibenclamide). Conclusion: Coronary vascular tone is highly responsive to KATP channel modulation and adenosine receptor blockade. KATP channels do not modulate either perfusion-contraction matching or acute hibernation and functional recovery during reperfusion in the red blood cell perfused piglet heart or the crystalloid perfused rabbit hearts. Moreover, adenosine receptor antagonism does not affect these phenomena in piglet hearts.Cardiovascular Research 1994:28:872-880 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on actual cases, this paper asserts the factors necessary for successful development and implementation of educational programmes in intercultural teams. The findings, based on the authors' several years of experience in the field, suggest th at international course development is a resource-intense activity that must take into consideration the cultural differences and core competencies of the institutions involved if the course development is to be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]