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In recent years, significant developments have continued to be made in the field of pediatric liver transplantation. As experience increases, so there is now a wealth of outcome data. With improved patient and graft survival, issues such as quality of life and adherence to immunosuppressive medication regimes increase in importance, and affect outcomes. Demand for donor organs continues to increase, so surgical techniques and organ allocation policies are evolving to help meet this demand. Researchers have also looked at ways in which we might predict outcomes for liver transplant recipients, and how we may achieve increased graft tolerance in the future. By way of an introduction to recent articles in these exciting areas we have summarized several significant contributions from the hundreds of scientific articles related to pediatric liver transplantation published between 2006 and 2007. Comments linking themes across manuscripts have been included. This review is not exhaustive and we would encourage the reader to refer to the actual manuscripts and explore more deeply.

Ten case study businesses were assessed in relation to sixteen criteria in order to test the application of an hypothesised life cycle. Analysis of stakeholder aspirations for each of these ten businesses was also undertaken. On the basis of the empirical evidence, it was demonstrated that stakeholder groups favour diverse goals, that the level of goal coherence between major stakeholder groups declines as a co-op progresses through the co-operative life cycle and that in the later stages of the life cycle, the aspirations of the managers, rather than those of the farmers, are realised. Furthermore, the managers' preferred goals are reflected in the organisational and financial structures and trading practices of individual late stage businesses, which are more akin to investor oriented firms than traditional co-operatives.

This paper describes the evolution of the JikesTM Research Virtual Machine project from an IBM internal research project, called Jalapeno, into an open-source project. After summarizing the original goals of the project, we discuss the motivation for releasing it as an open-source project and the activities performed to ensure the success of the project. Throughout, we highlight the unique challenges of developing and maintaining an open-source project designed specifically to support a research community.

This paper examines the range of objectives open to cooperative businesses and assesses the change in organizational focus over time through the semantic analysis of historical annual reports of seven agricultural cooperative businesses. The findings indicated that, although there was a positive relationship between business age and increasing corporate, as opposed to member, orientation, this phenomenon is not inevitable for all organizations. The results also offered evidence that some of the change in business focus is generated by the internal dynamics of the business rather than from external factors such as competition and economic trends. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

This paper sets out to determine whether agricultural cooperative companies in the UK are more likely to underperform when compared with non-cooperative companies in the same sector. The research indicates, that on the basis of profitability, capital gearing and liquidity, there were no significant differences between the two groups. For the business operational efficiency indicators of sales/working capital ratios, and creditor ratios, there were also no significant differences although, for the indicators of stock turnover and debtor ratios, cooperatives were seen to have significantly higher rates when compared with the non-cooperative companies. The findings of this research reveal that cooperatives do not perform differently to non-cooperatives, despite being required to balance member needs with the attainment of corporate goals.

Recent data suggests that exogenous retinoic acid (RA) can induce alveolar regeneration in a mouse and a rat model of experimental emphysema and disrupted alveolar development. This may be because RA is required during normal alveolar development and the subsequent provision of RA reawakens the gene cascades used during development. Here, additional evidence that RA is required during alveologenesis in the mouse is provided by showing that disulphiram disrupts this process. A further model of disrupted alveolar development using dexamethasone administered postnatally is then described, and it is further shown that RA administered to these adult mice restores the lung architecture to normal. Alveolar regeneration with retinoic acid may therefore be an important novel therapeutic approach to the treatment of respiratory diseases characterised by a reduced gas-exchanging surface area, such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia and emphysema.

Copper access transmission systems, which provide high-speed communications (e.g. 2 Mbit/s) in one or both directions over local loops, are a recent innovation. The operation and maintenance of such systems poses some problems and offers some opportunities, which were not present in the passive copper loop environment, or with low-speed digital systems. These are discussed and set in the context of the revolution in access networks that is happening as optical fibre and other technologies are introduced. The evolution of the management of high-speed copper systems towards a vision of a centrally managed access network is described. >

The paper describes experiences with the design and implementation of the NPIC program analysis system. We describe how the object oriented design of the intermediate representation (Dakota) provides front end and analysis independence using the abstract factory pattern, and illustrate how using multiple inheritance allows it to be extended to support program analysis. We also describe how the intermediate representation can be serialized to and from a file. The techniques described in the article provide useful insight into the construction of an object oriented program analysis system.

Introduction Fibrosis is a constituent of various respiratory diseases including asthma, COPD, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and pulmonary hypertension. Research shows that Wnt genes, critical for lung development, are reactivated post cellular injury and that the canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway is mis-expressed in these diseases. The non-canonical Wnt/PCP pathway can inhibit canonical signalling and also cause co-ordinated, directional cell migration. Moreover components of this pathway are suppressed in many respiratory fibro-proliferative disorders. We investigated the role of non-canonical Wnts in a tractable model of lung repair, by comparing the rate of wound healing using either canonical Wnt4 or non-canonical Wnt5a ligands. We hypothesised that Wnt5a would exhibit a higher rate of wound healing than Wnt4, coupled with increased cytoskeleton dynamics, favouring co-ordinated and directional cell migration. Methods Confluent A549 cells were scratched with a 10µl pipette tip to induce a ‘wound’ and treated with either recombinant canonical Wnt4 or non-canonical Wnt5a, or cultured in control serum free medium. Wound area was measured at t=0, t-6 and t=24h post scratch to determine the rate of wound healing using time-lapse imaging. Phalloidin labelling and imaging was used to determine levels and distribution of F-actin at those times. Results The addition of Wnt5a healed 4 times the area either Wnt4 or Control did using concentrations that induce maximal activity at t=6 (5.49, 1.23 and 1.01×105µm2 respectively) and t=24 (8.62, 2.42 and 2.39×105µm2 respectively) hours post scratch (p Conclusion Wnt5a is more efficient at wound healing in A549 cells than Wnt4. Wnt5a associated increase in focal F-actin enrichment amplified wound healing is associated with increased cytoskeletal dynamics and directional movement. In the future, novel therapies based around Wnt5a have the potential to be used to enhance repair in fibrotic respiratory diseases.

L-arginine is the physiological precursor of nitric oxide, which is the major endothelium-derived relaxing factor, a potent vasodilator. This study examined the cardiovascular responses to application of incremental levels (-10, -20 and -40 mmHg) of lower body negative pressure (LBNP) in ten normal male subjects, after 1 and 7 days administration of placebo or L-arginine. It was hypothesized that L-arginine may attenuate the vasoconstrictor response elicited by application of LBNP. Placebo administration had no effect on any responses to LBNP. L-arginine administration had no significant effect on mean arterial blood pressure either after 1 day, or after 7 days. After both 1 and 7 days L-arginine ingestion, forearm blood flow (FBF) and forearm vascular conductance (FVC) were significantly lower than before L-arginine ingestion (p < 0.01), but were not significantly different from after placebo ingestion. The magnitude of the changes in FBF and FVC, induced by application of LBNP, were not different under any conditions. These findings suggest that L-arginine supplementation in healthy subjects, either acutely or chronically, has no significant effect on peripheral haemodynamics, or on reflex responses to LBNP.

Summary In a double-blind study, the effects of positive intra-operative suggestions on the incidence and severity of postoperative nausea and vomiting were studied in 60 patients randomly selected to undergo routine major gynaecological surgery. Patients who received positive suggestions suffered significantly less nausea and vomiting in the 24 h after surgery.

From the authors: H. Fehrenbach is perfectly correct to point out that the assessment of our data is based only on the measurement of mean chord length (Lm) and lung volume estimations, whereas “a whole range of stereological tools is available for more detailed anaysis”. However, the results were so dramatic that we felt that there was no need for these further, rather esoteric analyses, which would …

Ten patients received ocular gentamicin therapy topically or subconjunctivally. Systemic absorption was not detected after topical use but was detected after subconjuctival administration. The relative safety of ocular gentamicin therapy is discussed and the literature is reviewed.

Five children under the age of 9 years had topical chloramphenicol drops administered 2-hourly to each eye for 5 to 7 days. Systemic absorption was not detected by 2 sensitive assays for the drug. The hazards of topical chloramphenicol and reports in the current literature are discussed.