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STUDY QUESTIONCan risks associated with novelties in assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) be assessed in a systematic and structured way?SUMMARY ANSWERAn ART-specific risk assessment tool has been developed to assess the risks associated with the development of novelties in ART (EuroGTP II-ART).WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADYHow to implement new technologies in ART is well-described in the literature. The successive steps should include testing in animal models, executing pre-clinical studies using supernumerary gametes or embryos, prospective clinical trials and finally, short- and long-term follow-up studies on the health of the offspring. A framework categorizing treatments from experimental through innovative to established according to the extent of the studies conducted has been devised. However, a systematic and standardized methodology to facilitate risk evaluation before innovations are performed in a clinical setting is lacking.STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATIONThe EuroGTP II-ART risk assessment tool was developed on the basis of a generic risk assessment algorithm developed for tissue and cell therapies and products (TCTPs) in the context of the project ‘Good Practices for demonstrating safety and quality through recipient follow-up European Good Tissue and cells Practices II (EuroGTP II)’. For this purpose, a series of four meetings was held in which eight ART experts participated. In addition, several tests and simulations were undertaken to fine-tune the final tool.PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODSThe three steps comprising the EuroGTP II methodology were evaluated against its usefulness and applicability in ART. Ways to improve and adapt the methodology into ART risk assessment were agreed and implemented.MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCEAssessment of the novelty (Step 1), consisting of seven questions, is the same as for other TCTPs. Practical examples were included for better understanding. Identification of potential risks and consequences (Step 2), consisting of a series of risks and risk consequences to consider during risk assessment, was adapted from the generic methodology, adding more potential risks for processes involving gonadic tissues. The algorithm to score risks was also adapted, giving a specific range of highest possible risk scores. A list of strategies for risk reduction and definition of extended studies required to ensure effectiveness and safety (Step 3) was also produced by the ART experts, based on generic EuroGTP II methodology. Several explanations and examples were provided for each of the steps for better understanding within this field.LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTIONA multidisciplinary team is needed to perform risk assessment, to interpret results and to determine risk mitigation strategies and/or next steps required to ensure the safety in the clinical use of novelties.WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGSThis is a dynamic tool whose value goes beyond assessment of risk before implementing a novel ART in clinical practice, to re-evaluate risks based on information collected during the process.STUDY FUNDING / COMPETING INTEREST(S)This study was called EUROGTP II and was funded by the European Commission (Grant agreement number 709567). The authors declare no competing interests concerning the results of this study.

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before.

After reading the article,'Heart to heart' (Features May 15) I congratulate Andrew Mooraby and his colleagues for demonstrating how the nurse's role can be developed to enhance patient care.

This article describes the evaluation of the ACE club, a service for younger people with dementia in North Wales. The evaluation was conducted by the ACE club members and conducted through a relationship‐centred approach expressed through the Senses Framework (achievement, belonging, continuity, purpose, security, significance) (Nolan et al, 2006). Members of the ACE club found the sense of significance to be the most important and meaningful ‘sense’ in helping to structure their evaluation and use of the ACE club. The clinical interventions outline is shared within the text to help provide a grounded and inductively generated practice structure. The funding of ‘normalising’ activities for younger people with dementia is an area of dementia care that needs urgent attention.

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long-term memory (LTM) has been proposed. In this paper, we present a computational model of children's vocabulary acquisition (EPAM-VOC) that specifies how phonological working memory and LTM interact. The model learns phoneme sequences, which are stored in LTM and mediate how much information can be held in working memory. The model's behaviour is compared with that of children in a new study of NWR, conducted in order to ensure the same nonword stimuli and methodology across ages. EPAM-VOC shows a pattern of results similar to that of children: performance is better for shorter nonwords and for wordlike nonwords, and performance improves with age. EPAM-VOC also simulates the superior performance for single consonant nonwords over clustered consonant nonwords found in previous NWR studies. EPAM-VOC provides a simple and elegant computational account of some of the key processes involved in the learning of new words: it specifies how phonological working memory and LTM interact; makes testable predictions; and suggests that developmental changes in NWR performance may reflect differences in the amount of information that has been encoded in LTM rather than developmental changes in working memory capacity.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the major literature concerning human rights, health and wellbeing and, especially, sexual and reproductive health among young people in a rapidly urbanising world. Key aspects relating to the structural determinants of health in urban slum settings and the major theories which have sought to explain it are described.

This chapter examines the universe of risk and resilience and focuses on sexual and reproductive health among the growing number of young migrants taking up residence in the urban slum.

The Jones Dependency Tool can be used in emergency departments to improve patient care and identify the required staffing and skill mix. Using the tool, the nurse can accurately identify a patient's specific nursing needs. The dependency tool is used to evaluate patients' needs in six areas: communication; airway, breathing and circulation; mobility; eating, drinking, elimination and personal care; environmental safety, health and social needs; and triage. Appropriate nursing care can be tailored to the dependency level, depending on whether the dependency level is low, moderate, high or total dependency.

Insight problems are problems where the problem solver struggles to find a solution until * aha! * the solution suddenly appears. Two contemporary theories suggest that insight problems are difficult either because problem solvers begin with an incorrect representation of the problem, or that problem solvers apply inappropriate heuristics to the problem. The relative contributions of representational change and inappropriate heuristics on the process of insight problem solving was studied with a task that required the problem solver to move two matchsticks in order to transform an incorrect arithmetic statement into a correct one. Problem solvers (N = 120) worked on two different types of two-move matchstick arithmetic problems that both varied with respect to the effectiveness of heuristics and to the degree of a necessary representational change of the problem representation. A strong influence of representational change on solution rates was found whereas the influence of heuristics hadminimal effects on solution rates. That is, the difficulty of insight problems within the two-move matchstick arithmetic domain is governed by the degree of representational change required. A model is presented that details representational change as the necessary condition for ensuring that appropriate heuristics can be applied on the proper problem representation.

Microprocessor architectures are diversifying to support niche market requirements, with growing emphasis for performance delivery on the architectural design rather than the silicon implementation. This paper outlines the architectural design, programmer's model and instruction set of a microprocessor, which adopts a novel approach to network data. In particular, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cells are delivered to a special FIFO cache memory, located at the heart of the processor. Cell input and output is conducted at wire speed using dedicated streaming input and output hardware. Special read and write instructions then allow the cell payloads to be accessed directly, and transferred from/to the register file. Multimedia applications have previously been identified as an important market for such a network centric architecture. Therefore the paper ends with a demonstration of the power of some key instructions. A motion estimation kernel from the MPEG standard is used to exercise the architecture and instruction set. Execution speed is shown to be comparable to today's processors, using only a 400 MHz clock for a full search. The minimally resourced design is therefore suited to embedded network applications from both economic and performance standpoints.

The causes of anaphylactic shock and presenting features are not clearly understood. In addition, the treatment of people suffering from anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reactions has not always been effectively provided. This article aims to rectify some of the current areas of concern, especially highlighting the recent work carried out by the Resuscitation Council (UK) on this subject (Resuscitation Council UK 1999/2001). After reading this article you should be able to: Explain the circulation of the blood and changes that occur during an anaphylactic reaction. Summarise the antigen/antibody mechanism especially in relation to allergic reactions. Describe the difference between anaphylactic and anaphylactoid reactions. Recognise the presenting signs and symptoms of anaphylaxis and shock. Describe the assessment and appropriate intervention for a patient suffering from an anaphylactic reaction. Explain what prevention/support services are available to suffers.

In the past two decades, the problem of bed shortages and emergency departments under pressure has increased in intensity. More than 25 years ago, when the seeds of today's problems were sown, we were told that it would be okay to reduce bed numbers because community and social services would be improved.

The chunking hypothesis suggests that during the repeated exposure of stimulus material, information is organized into increasingly larger chunks. Many researchers have not considered the full power of the chunking hypothesis as both a learning mechanism and as an explanation of human behavior. Indeed, in developmental psychology there is relatively little mention of chunking and yet it can be the underlying cause of some of the mechanisms of development that have been proposed. This paper illustrates the chunking hypothesis in the domain of non-word repetition, a task that is a strong predictor of a child's language learning. A computer simulation of non-word repetition that instantiates the chunking mechanism shows that: (1) chunking causes task behavior to improve over time, consistent with children's performance; and (2) chunking causes perceived changes in areas such as short-term memory capacity and processing speed that are often cited as mechanisms of child development. Researchers should be cautious when considering explanations of developmental data, since chunking may be able to explain differences in performance without the need for additional mechanisms of development.

Gas blows have been quite commonly used in the power industry for cleaning fuel gas lines during the plant commissioning process, but this practice is being seriously evaluated and reconsidered by regulatory agencies and public safety organizations due to the fire and explosion hazards, and recent accidents and loss of life. This article merely captures the recent practices at Pacific Gas and Electric Company in the construction of power plants. It is not intended to reflect industry practices.Copyright © 2011 by ASME

ObjectivePrevious research on nutrition labelling has mainly used subjective measures. This study examines the effectiveness of two types of nutrition label using two objective measures: eye movements and healthiness ratings.DesignEye movements were recorded while participants made healthiness ratings for two types of nutrition label: standard and standard plus the Food Standards Agency's ‘traffic light’ concept.SettingUniversity of Derby, UK.SubjectsA total of 92 participants (mean age 31.5 years) were paid for their participation. None of the participants worked in the areas of food or nutrition.ResultsFor the standard nutrition label, participant eye movements lacked focus and their healthiness ratings lacked accuracy. The traffic light system helped to guide the attention of the consumer to the important nutrients and improved the accuracy of the healthiness ratings of nutrition labels.ConclusionsConsumers have a lack of knowledge regarding how to interpret nutrition information for standard labels. The traffic light concept helps to ameliorate this problem by indicating important nutrients to which to pay attention.

Objective: We investigated the physical attributes of an object that influence the difficulty of its assembly. Identifying attributes that contribute to assembly difficulty willprovide a method for predicting assembly complexity. Background: Despite object assembly being a widespread task, there has been insufficient research into information processing and cognition during assembly. The lack of research means that the variables that affect the performance of procedural assembly tasks with illustration only instructions are unknown. Method: In Experiment 1, seven physical characteristics (task variables) of assembly objects were systematically varied in a balanced fractional factorial and orthogonal design to create 16 abstract assemblies, which were assembled by 12 participants (6 men and 6 women aged 18-56). A second experiment (20 participants, 8 men and 12 women aged 18 to 52) involved scaled-down models of 8 real-world assemblies. Results:A clear relationship between the task variables and assembly difficulty was found in both studies, and the regression model from the first experiment was able to predict the assembly difficulty timings in Experiment 2. Conclusion: The proposed task variables are associated with assembly difficulty, and the regression analysis has shown four of the task variables to be significant predictors of difficulty. Application: Applications of this research include the use of the regression model as a tool to evaluate the difficulty of assemblies or assembly steps defined by instructions. The task variables can also be used to produce guidelines to ensure that assemblies or assembly steps are manageable.

Production systems are computer programs that reason using production rules. They have been used to create expert systems and models of human behavior. Keywords: interference engine; working memory; production rule; expert systems

The program thrust was material/device development, to improve the thermal characteristics of OLED materials so that they can withstand more heating without deterioration, and to improve the efficiency of the devices so that less heat is generated. Additionally, the program was to engineer a better thermal management strategy, to remove generated heat quickly and effectively, thus limiting the temperature rise in the OLED device.

Sir Stephen Moss recently commented that problems at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust had been '20-plus years in the making' (features March 14).

Different theories of development propose alternative mechanisms by which development occurs. Cognitive architectures can be used to examine the influence of each proposed mechanism of development while keeping all other mechanisms constant. An ACT-R computational model that matched adult behavior in solving a 21-block pyramid puzzle was created. The model was modified in three ways that corresponded to mechanisms of development proposed by developmental theories. The results showed that all the modifications (two of capacity and one of strategy choice) could approximate the behavior of 7-year-old children on the task. The strategy-choice modification provided the closest match on the two central measures of task behavior (time taken per layer, r = .99, and construction attempts per layer, r = .73). Modifying cognitive architectures is a fruitful way to compare and test potential developmental mechanisms, and can therefore help in specifying “what develops.”

I was saddened, but not surprised, to read that an Institute for Employment Studies survey found healthcare workers are being forbidden to share ideas outside their organisation (news and editorial, August 25).

The Neuropsychological Effects of Infratentorial, Supratentorial and Diencephalic Childhood Brain Tumors