Initial and Extended Use of Femoral Versus Nonfemoral Double-Lumen Vascular Catheters and Catheter-Related Infection During Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy.

BACKGROUND: The risk of catheter-related infection or bacteremia, with initial and extended use of femoral versus nonfemoral sites for double-lumen vascular catheters (DLVCs) during continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT), is unclear. STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective observational cohort study. SETTING & PARTICIPANTS: Critically ill patients on CRRT in a combined intensive care unit of a tertiary institution. FACTOR: Femoral versus nonfemoral venous DLVC placement. OUTCOMES: Catheter-related colonization (CRCOL) and bloodstream infection (CRBSI). MEASUREMENTS: CRCOL/CRBSI rates expressed per 1,000 catheter-days. RESULTS: We studied 458 patients (median age, 65 years; 60% males) and 647 DLVCs. Of 405 single-site only DLVC users, 82% versus 18% received exclusively 419 femoral versus 82 jugular or subclavian DLVCs, respectively. The corresponding DLVC indwelling duration was 6±4 versus 7±5 days (P=0.03). Corresponding CRCOL and CRBSI rates (per 1,000 catheter-days) were 9.7 versus 8.8 events (P=0.8) and 1.2 versus 3.5 events (P=0.3), respectively. Overall, 96 patients with extended CRRT received femoral-site insertion first with subsequent site change, including 53 femoral guidewire exchanges, 53 new femoral venipunctures, and 47 new jugular/subclavian sites. CRCOL and CRBSI rates were similar for all such approaches (P=0.7 and P=0.9, respectively). On multivariate analysis, CRCOL risk was higher in patients older than 65 years and weighing >90kg (ORs of 2.1 and 2.2, respectively; P<0.05). This association between higher weight and greater CRCOL risk was significant for femoral DLVCs, but not for nonfemoral sites. Other covariates, including initial or specific DLVC site, guidewire exchange versus new venipuncture, and primary versus secondary DLVC placement, did not significantly affect CRCOL rates. LIMITATIONS: Nonrandomized retrospective design and single-center evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: CRCOL and CRBSI rates in patients on CRRT are low and not influenced significantly by initial or serial femoral catheterizations with guidewire exchange or new venipuncture. CRCOL risk is higher in older and heavier patients, the latter especially so with femoral sites.

The Arts (Music, Arts&Crafts and Drama) as a procedure for learning pre-school content: Grupo Edebé Project

There is nothing as amazing and fascinating as children learning process. Between 0 and 6 years old, a child brain develops in a waythat will never be repeated. At this age, children are eager to discover and they have great potential of active and affective life.Because of this, their learning capacity in this period is incalculable. (Jordan-Decarbo y Nelson, 2002; Wild, 1999).Pre-school Education is a unique and special stage, with self identity, which aims are:attending children as a whole,motivate them to learn,give them an affective and stable environment in which they can grow up and get to be balanced and confident people and inwhich they can relate to others, learn, enjoy and be happy.Arts, Music, Visual Arts and Drama (Gardner, 1994) can provide a framework of special, even unique, personal expression.With the aim of introducing qualitative improvements in the education of children and to ensure their emotional wellbeing, and havingnoticed that teachers had important needs and concerns as regards to diversity in their student groups, we developed a programbased on the detection of needs and concerns explained by professionals in education.This program of Grupo edebé, object of our research, is a multicultural, interdisciplinary and globalizing project the aims of which are:developing children's talent and personality,keeping their imagination and creativity and using these as a learning resource,promoting reasoning, favouring expression and communication,providing children with the tools to manage their emotions,and especially, introducing Arts as a procedure to increase learning.We wanted to start the research by studying the impact (Brice, 2003) that this last point had on the learning of five-year-old childrenschooled in multicultural environments.Therefore, the main goal of the research was the assessment of the implementation of a child education programme attending todiversity in a population of five-year-old children, specifically in the practice of procedures based on the use of Arts (music, arts andcrafts and theatre) as a vehicle or procedure for learning contents in Pre-school stage.Because children emotional welfare was a subject of our concern, and bearing in mind that the affective aspects are of vitalimportance for learning and child development (Parke and Gauvain, 2009), Grupo Edebé has also evaluated the starting, evolving andfinal impact in five-year-old children given that they finish Pre-school education at that age.

Affective and physiological responses to environmental noises and music

Research suggests that respiratory patterns may reflect general dimensions of emotional response. In this study, we investigated the relationships between judgments of affective valence (pleasantness) and arousal and respiratory responses to acoustic stimuli. Sixteen environmental noises and 16 musical fragments of 30 s duration were presented to 31 participants, while respiration, skin conductance level and heart rate were recorded. Judgments of valence and arousal were registered using the 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin. For noises, breathing accelerated and minute ventilation augmented with decreases in pleasantness for low-arousal stimuli and with increases in arousal for positive stimuli. For music, breathing accelerated and minute ventilation augmented with increases both in rated valence and arousal. Skin conductance level increased with arousal ratings for music but not for noises, whereas mean heart rate increased with rated arousal for noises but not for music. Although both noises and music are sound-vibrations, differences in the relationships between affective judgments and physiological responses were found suggesting differences in the processing of the two types of acoustic stimuli. [Authors]

Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) : cardiorespiratory activity in high- and low-anxious professional music students before a performance situation

Descriptors: music performance anxiety, respiration, hyperventilation Surveys indicate that high-anxious musicians may suffer from hyperventilation (HV) before or during performance. Reported symptoms include shortness of breath, fast/ deep breathing and thumping heart. However, no study has yet tested if these selfreported symptoms reflect actual cardiorespiratory activity. Themain goal of this study was to determine if MPA is manifested physiologically in specific correlates of cardiorespiratory activity associated with HV.We studied 74 professional music students from Swiss Music Academies. In this study, we compared the most anxious students (highanxious; n 5 20) with the least anxious students (low-anxious; n 5 23) based on their self-reported performance anxiety. We measured cardiorespiratory patterns with the Lifeshirt system, end-tidal CO2 with a capnograph (EtCO2, a good non-invasive estimator of HV), self-perceived physiological activation and affective experience in three situations on different days: baseline, performance without audience, and performance with audience. Comparing measures for the private vs. the public concert, high- compared to low-anxious students showed a significant drop in EtCO2 before the public concert and reported larger increases in anxiety, tension, palpitations and breathing difficulties. In contrast, heart rate, respiratory rate and volume did not differ significantly between groups. The results of this study support the hypothesis thatMPA may be associated with a tendency to hyperventilate and, thus, point to a potential hyperventilation problem in high-anxious music students.

Anàlisi comparativa d'accessibilitat i UX d'iTunes, Google Music i Amazon Cloud Player

Aquest treball final de carrera consisteix en la realització d'un estudi de la usabilitat i accessibilitat de tres gestors de medis multimèdia: iTunes, Google Music i Amazon Cloud Player. A través d'observacions contextuals, avaluacions heurístiques i tests d'usuaris he realitzat una anàlisi comparativa. Per tal d'esquematitzar tota aquesta informació he confeccionat una taula amb els punts forts i punts febles de cada aplicació per concloure amb la proposta de millores per a cada un dels gestors de medis.

Motivic analysis and its relevance to raga identification in carnatic music

A raga is a collective melodic expression consisting of motifs. A raga can be identified using motifs which areunique to it. Motifs can be thought of as signature prosodic phrases. Different ragas may be composed of the same setof notes, or even phrases, but the prosody may be completely different. In this paper, an attempt is made to determinethe characteristic motifs that enable identification of a raga and distinguish between them. To determine this, motifs are first manually marked for a set of five popular raga by a professional musician. The motifs are then normalisedwith respect to the tonic. HMMs are trained for each motif using 80% of the data and about 20% are used for testing. The results do indicate that about 80% of the motifs are identified as belonging to a specific raga accurately.

A knowledge based signal processing approach to tonic identification in indian classical music

In this paper, we describe several techniques for detecting tonic pitch value in Indian classical music. In Indian music, the raga is the basic melodic framework and it is built on the tonic. Tonic detection is therefore fundamental for any melodic analysis in Indian classical music. This workexplores detection of tonic by processing the pitch histograms of Indian classic music. Processing of pitch histograms using group delay functions and its ability to amplify certain traits of Indian music in the pitch histogram, is discussed. Three different strategies to detect tonic, namely, the concert method, the template matching and segmented histogram method are proposed. The concert method exploits the fact that the tonic is constant over a piece/concert.templatematchingmethod and segmented histogrammethodsuse the properties: (i) the tonic is always present in the background, (ii) some notes are less inflected and dominant, to detect the tonic of individual pieces. All the three methods yield good results for Carnatic music (90−100% accuracy), while for Hindustanimusic, the templatemethod works best, provided the v¯adi samv¯adi notes for a given piece are known (85%).

Metrical strength and contradiction in turkish Makam music

In this paper we investigate how note onsets in Turkish Makam music compositions are distributed, and in how far this distribution supports or contradicts the metrical structure of the pieces, the usul. We use MIDI data to derive the distributions in the form of onset histograms, and comparethem with metrical weights that are applied to describe the usul in theory. We compute correlation and syncopation values to estimate the degrees of support and contradiction, respectively. While the concept of syncopation is rarelymentioned in the context of this music, we can gain interesting insight into the structure of a piece using such a measure.We show that metrical contradiction is systematically applied in some metrical structures. We will compare thedifferences between Western music and Turkish Makam music regarding metrical support and contradiction. Such a study can help avoiding pitfalls in later attempts to perform audio processing tasks such as beat tracking or rhythmic similarity measurements.

Features for analysis of Makam music

For computational studies of makam music, it is essential to gather a list of characteristics that constitute a makam and explore corresponding quantitative features for automaticanalysis. This study is such an attempt where we address the characteristics for makams as defined in theory books and deduce a list of quantitative features. The target here is to evoke discussions on some measurable features other than providing complete analysis on thediscriminative potentials of each proposed feature which could be the subject of a few larger studies.

Double-blind comparison of indapamide with a placebo in hypertensive patients treated by practicing physicians.

The antihypertensive effect of indapamide (2.5 mg/day) was compared to that obtained with a placebo in a controlled trial carried out by 11 physicians in their private practice. Thirty-one patients with uncomplicated essential hypertension were included. After a run-in period of 3 weeks without any treatment, either indapamide (n = 16) or a placebo (n = 15) were administered for 8 weeks in double-blind fashion. Blood pressure decreased in both groups. In patients treated with indapamide, systolic pressure was significantly lower than in those given the placebo at 3 out of the 4 follow-up visits; diastolic pressure, however, was significantly lower only at the end of the trial. Both the active drug and the placebo were well tolerated. No significant change in body weight, plasma potassium and uric acid occurred during the study in either group of patients. It appears therefore that indapamide, at a dose which apparently has no major diuretic effect, may be useful for practitioners in managing patients with mild to moderate hypertension.

Double-Antiprism Central Configurations of the 3n-Body Problem

Abstract In this paper we study numerically a new type of central configurations of the 3n-body problem with equal masses which consist of three n-gons contained in three planes z = 0 and z = ±β = 0. The n-gon on z = 0 is scaled by a factor α and it is rotated by an angle of π/n with respect to the ones on z = ±β. In this kind of configurations, the masses on the planes z = 0 and z = β are at the vertices of an antiprism with bases of different size. The same occurs with the masses on z = 0 and z = −β. We call this kind of central configurations double-antiprism central configurations. We will show the existence of central configurations of this type.