Soft gluon k(t)-resummation and the Froissart bound

We study soft gluon k(t)-resurnmation and the relevance of InfraRed (IR) gluons for the energy dependence of total hadronic cross-sections. In our model, consistency with the Froissart bound is directly related to the ansatz that the IR behaviour of the QCD coupling constant follows an inverse power law.

Postoperative soft tissue defects in the ankle area : The etiology and methods of reconstruction

The risk is obvious for soft tissue complications after operative treatment of the Achilles tendon, calcaneal bone or after ankle arthroplasty. Such complications after malleolar fractures are, however, seldom seen. The reason behind these complications is that the soft tissue in this region is tight and does not allow much tension to the wound area after surgery. Furthermore the area of operation may be damaged by swelling after the injury, or can be affected by peripheral vascular disease. While complications in this area are unavoidable, they can be diminished. This study attempts to highlight the possible predisposing factors leading to complications in these operations and on the other hand, to determine the solutions to solve soft tissue problems in this region. The study consists of five papers. The first article is a reprint on the soft tissue reconstruction of 25 patients after their complicated Achilles tendon surgeries were analysed. The second study reviews a series of 126 patients after having undergone an operative treatment of calcaneal bone fractures and analyses the complications and possible reasons behind them. The third part analyses a series of corrections of 35 soft tissue complications after calcaneal fracture operations. The fourth part reviews a series of 7 patients who had undergone complicated ankle arthroplasties. The last article presents a series of post operative lateral defects of the ankle treated with a less frequently used distally based peroneus brevis muscle flap and analyses the results. What can be conducted from these studies is that in general, the results after the correction of even severe soft tissue complications in the ankle region are good. For the small defects around the Achilles tendon, the local flaps are useful, but the larger defects are best treated with a free flap. We found that a long delay from trauma to surgery and a long operating time were predisposing factors that lead to soft tissue complications after operatively treated calcaneal bone fractures. The more severe the injury, the greater the risk for wound complication. Surprisingly, the long-term results after infected calcaneal osteosyntheses were acceptable and the calcaneal bone seems to tolerate chronic infections very well if the soft tissue is reconstructed successfully. Behind the complicated ankle arthroplasties, unexpectedly high number of cases experiencing arteriosclerosis of the lower extremity was found. These complications lead to ankle fusion but can be solved with a free flap if the vascularity is intact or can be reconstructed. For this reason a vascular examination of the lower extremity arteries of the patients going to ankle arthroplasty is strongly recommended. Moreover postoperative lateral malleolar wound infections which typically create lateral ankle defects can successfully be treated with a peroneus brevis muscle flap covered with a free skin graft.

Evaluating China’s aspirations for cultural soft power in a post-globalisation era

‘Soft power’ has been a concept that has generated great political and scholarly interest in China, as it raises the question of how to achieve cultural standing commensurate with the nation’s growing economic significance. But from the perspectives of communication and cultural studies, we can identify limits with both ‘soft power’ as a concept and how it understands culture and communication, and the assumptions made about the capacities of state cultural promotion through media to appeal to global audiences. Drawing upon case studies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Japan and South Korea, this article identified challenges and opportunities for China in growing its international cultural soft power in a ‘post-globalisation’ era.

Open access and soft power: Chinese voices in international scholarship

Networked digital technologies and Open Access (OA) are transforming the processes and institutions of research, knowledge creation and dissemination globally: enabling new forms of collaboration, allowing researchers to be seen and heard in new ways and reshaping relationships between stakeholders across the global academic publishing system. This article draws on Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘Soft Power’ to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape academic publishing in China. It focusses on two important areas of OA development: OA journals and national-level repositories. OA is being supported at the highest levels, and there is potential for it to play an important role in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship. Investments in OA also have the potential to help China to re-position itself within international copyright discourses: moving beyond criticism for failure to enforce the rights of foreign copyright owners and progressing an agenda that places greater emphasis on equality of access to the resources needed to foster innovation. However, the potential for OA to help China to build and project its soft power is being limited by the legacies of the print era, as well as the challenges of efficiently governing the national research and innovation systems.

Microvascular reconstruction in extremity soft tissue sarcoma surgery

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are rare tumors of soft tissue occurring most frequently in the extremities. Modern treatment of extremity STS is based on limb-sparing surgery combined with radiotherapy. To prevent local recurrence, a healthy tissue margin of 2.5 cm around the resected tumor is required. This results in large defects of soft tissue and bone, necessitating the use of reconstructive surgery to achieve wound closure. When local or pedicled soft tissue flaps are unavailable, reconstruction with free flaps is used. Free flaps are elevated at a distant site, and have their blood flow restored at the recipient site through microvascular anastomosis. When limb-sparing surgery is made impossible, amputation is the only option. Proximal amputation such as forequarter amputation (FQA) causes considerable morbidity, but is nevertheless warranted for carefully selected patients for cure or palliation. 116 patients treated in 1985 - 2006 were included in the study. Of these, 93 patients treated with limb-sparing surgery and microvascular reconstructive surgery after resection of extremity STS. 25 patients who underwent FQA were also included. Patients were identified and their medical records retrospectively reviewed. In all, 105 free flap procedures were performed for 103 patients. A total of 95 curatively treated STS patients were included in survival analysis. The latissimus dorsi, used in 56% of cases, was the most frequently used free flap. Free flap success rate was 96%. There were 9% microvascular anastomosis complications and 15% wound complications. For curatively treated STS patients, local recurrence-free survival at 5 years was 73.1%, metastasis-free survival 58.3%, and overall disease-specific survival 68.9%. Functional results were good, with 75% of patients regaining normal or near-normal function after lower extremity, and 55% after upper extremity STS resection. Among curatively treated forequarter amputees, 5-year disease-free survival was 44%. In the palliatively treated group median time until disease death was 14 months. Microvascular reconstruction after extremity soft tissue sarcoma resection is safe and reliable, and produces well-healing wounds allowing early oncological treatment. Oncological outcome after these procedures is comparable to that of other extremity sarcoma patients. Functional results are generally good. Forequarter amputation is a useful treatment option for soft tissue tumors of the shoulder girdle and proximal upper extremity. When free flap coverage of extended forequarter amputation is required, the preferable flap is a fillet flap from the amputated extremity. Acceptable oncological outcome is achieved for curatively treated FQA patients. In the palliatively treated patient considerable periods of increased quality of life can be achieved.

A study of errors that can occur when weighing infants

When infants are weighed at well baby or infant welfare clinics, the weight change from one visit to the next is used as a guide to the welfare of the child. Infant welfare clinic nurses are expert clinicians who use weight measurements as a rough indicator of well-being only, as it is well known by them that these measurements are fraught with error. This paper calculates the amount of error which was found in repeated tests of weights of infants, and in the weight changes brought about by biological variation. As a result, it is recommended that babies under nine months of age be weighed at clinic visits no less than a fortnight apart, and older infants, at least one month apart. If they are weighed more often, then the weight changes detected will be less than the amount of error which affects the measurements.

Clinical reasoning: The relative contribution of identification, interpretation and hypothesis errors to misdiagnosis

The aim of this study was to identify and describe the types of errors in clinical reasoning that contribute to poor diagnostic performance at different levels of medical training and experience. Three cohorts of subjects, second- and fourth- (final) year medical students and a group of general practitioners, completed a set of clinical reasoning problems. The responses of those whose scores fell below the 25th centile were analysed to establish the stage of the clinical reasoning process - identification of relevant information, interpretation or hypothesis generation - at which most errors occurred and whether this was dependent on problem difficulty and level of medical experience. Results indicate that hypothesis errors decrease as expertise increases but that identification and interpretation errors increase. This may be due to inappropriate use of pattern recognition or to failure of the knowledge base. Furthermore, although hypothesis errors increased in line with problem difficulty, identification and interpretation errors decreased. A possible explanation is that as problem difficulty increases, subjects at all levels of expertise are less able to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant clinical features and so give equal consideration to all information contained within a case. It is concluded that the development of clinical reasoning in medical students throughout the course of their pre-clinical and clinical education may be enhanced by both an analysis of the clinical reasoning process and a specific focus on each of the stages at which errors commonly occur.

Total cross-section at LHC from minijets and soft gluon resummation in the infrared region

A model for total cross-sections incorporating QCD jet cross-sections and soft gluon resummation is described and compared with present data on pp and pp cross-sections. Predictions for LHC are presented for different parameter sets. It is shown that they differ according to the small x-behaviour of available parton density functions.

Mixed pixel analysis and assessment for flood mapping

The most difficult operation in flood inundation mapping using optical flood images is to map the ‘wet’ areas where trees and houses are partly covered by water. This can be referred to as a typical problem of the presence of mixed pixels in the images. A number of automatic information extracting image classification algorithms have been developed over the years for flood mapping using optical remote sensing images, with most labelling a pixel as a particular class. However, they often fail to generate reliable flood inundation mapping because of the presence of mixed pixels in the images. To solve this problem, spectral unmixing methods have been developed. In this thesis, methods for selecting endmembers and the method to model the primary classes for unmixing, the two most important issues in spectral unmixing, are investigated. We conduct comparative studies of three typical spectral unmixing algorithms, Partial Constrained Linear Spectral unmixing, Multiple Endmember Selection Mixture Analysis and spectral unmixing using the Extended Support Vector Machine method. They are analysed and assessed by error analysis in flood mapping using MODIS, Landsat and World View-2 images. The Conventional Root Mean Square Error Assessment is applied to obtain errors for estimated fractions of each primary class. Moreover, a newly developed Fuzzy Error Matrix is used to obtain a clear picture of error distributions at the pixel level. This thesis shows that the Extended Support Vector Machine method is able to provide a more reliable estimation of fractional abundances and allows the use of a complete set of training samples to model a defined pure class. Furthermore, it can be applied to analysis of both pure and mixed pixels to provide integrated hard-soft classification results. Our research also identifies and explores a serious drawback in relation to endmember selections in current spectral unmixing methods which apply fixed sets of endmember classes or pure classes for mixture analysis of every pixel in an entire image. However, as it is not accurate to assume that every pixel in an image must contain all endmember classes, these methods usually cause an over-estimation of the fractional abundances in a particular pixel. In this thesis, a subset of adaptive endmembers in every pixel is derived using the proposed methods to form an endmember index matrix. The experimental results show that using the pixel-dependent endmembers in unmixing significantly improves performance.

Influence lines for bending under a ring load of a free shell, a shell embedded in a soft medium and a shell containing a soft core

Theoretical expressions for stresses and displacements have been derived for bending under a ring load of a free shell, a shell embedded in a soft medium, and a shell containing a soft core. Numerical work has been done for typical cases with an Elliot 803 Digital Computer and influence lines are drawn therefrom.

Ion Transport in a Polymer-Plastic Solid Soft Matter Electrolyte in the Light of Solvent Dynamics and Ion Association

Ion transport in a recently demonstrated promising soft matter solid plastic-polymer electrolyte is discussed here in the context of solvent dynamics and ion association. The plastic-polymer composite electrolytes display liquid-like ionic conductivity in the solid state,compliable mechanical strength (similar to 1 MPa), and wide electrochemical voltage stability (>= 5 V). Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) dispersed in lithium perchlorate (LiClO4)-succinonitrile (SN) was chosen as the model system for the study (abbreviated LiClO4-SN:PAN). Systematic observation of various mid-infrared isomer and ion association bands as a function of temperature and polyme concentration shows an effective increase in trans conformer concentration along with free Li+ ion concentration. This strongly supports the view that enhancement in LiClO4-SN:PAN ionic conductivity over the neat plastic electrolyte (LiClO4-SN) is due to both increase in charge mobility and concentration. The ionic conductivity and infrared spectroscopy studies are supported by Brillouin light scattering. For the LiClO4-SN:PAN composites, a peak at 17 GHz was observed in addition to the normal trans-gauche isomerism (as in neat SN) at 12 GHz. The fast process is attributed to increased dynamics of those SN molecules whose energy barrier of transition from gauche to trans has reduced under influences induced by the changes in temperature and polymer concentration. The observations from ionic conductivity, spectroscopy, and light scattering studies were further supplemented by temperature dependent nuclear magnetic resonance H-1 and Li-7 line width measurements.

Ring loading of a long, thin, circular cylindrical shell enclosing a soft, solid core: A recalculation by the love function method of elasticity.

The problem is solved using the Love function and Flügge shell theory. Numerical work has been done with a computer for various values of shell geometry parameters and elastic constants.

Exclusion of an Exotic Top Quark with -4/3 Electric Charge Using Soft Lepton Tagging

We present a measurement of the electric charge of the top quark using $\ppbar$ collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.7~fb$^{-1}$ at the CDF II detector. We reconstruct $\ttbar$ events in the lepton+jets final state and use kinematic information to determine which $b$-jet is associated with the leptonically- or hadronically-decaying $t$-quark. Soft lepton taggers are used to determine the $b$-jet flavor. Along with the charge of the $W$ boson decay lepton, this information permits the reconstruction of the top quark's electric charge. Out of 45 reconstructed events with $2.4\pm0.8$ expected background events, 29 are reconstructed as $\ttbar$ with the standard model $+$2/3 charge, whereas 16 are reconstructed as $\ttbar$ with an exotic $-4/3$ charge. This is consistent with the standard model and excludes the exotic scenario at 95\% confidence level. This is the strongest exclusion of the exotic charge scenario and the first to use soft leptons for this purpose.