bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Healthcare‐associated infections in gynecology and obstetrics at a university hospital in the Czech Republic
Authors: Gregor Miroslav , Paterová Pavla , Buchta Vladimír , Ketřánek Jan , Špaček Jiří 
Published: May 2014

AbstractObjectiveTo determine the spectrum of etiology and the incidence of healthcare‐associated infections (HAIs) among gynecologic and obstetric patients.MethodsIn a descriptive survey, data were analyzed from in‐patients at the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, between January 2007 and December 2011.ResultsAmong 21 937 patients treated during the study period, there were 189 (0.86%) cases of HAI. Gynecologic patients had a higher incidence of HAIs (1.31%) compared with pregnant women (0.60%). The incidence of HAI was 0.13% after laparoscopic surgery, 0.63% after a minor gynecologic intervention, and 3.73% after major surgery. Vaginal delivery (0.36%) represented a low risk of HAI. Compared with vaginal delivery, the incidence of HAI increased twofold for planned cesarean delivery (0.64%), and tenfold for emergency cesarean delivery (3.63%). The majority of causative microorganisms (72.7%) were susceptible to penicillin antibiotics. None of the patients died as a result of HAI.ConclusionThe incidence of HAIs at a university hospital in the Czech Republic was very low. Antibiotic resistance was only a minor problem, and the incidence of multiresistant strains was rare.
Differentiation of atrial tachycardia from other long RP tachycardias by electrocardiographic characteristics
Authors: Yagishita Atsuhiko , Hachiya Hitoshi , Higuchi Koji , Nakamura Tomofumi , Sugiyama Koji , Tanaka Yasuaki , Sasano Tetsuo , Kawabata Mihoko , Isobe Mitsuaki , Hirao Kenzo 
Published: May 2014

AbstractBackgroundThe incidence and electrocardiographic characteristics of atrial tachycardia (AT) among long RP tachycardias have not been fully elucidated.Methods and resultsThirty‐six patients with 37 long RP tachycardias were classified as having AT (n=23) or non‐AT (n=14). We analyzed the electrocardiographic features, including the ratio between the RP and PR intervals (RP/PR ratio), P‐wave morphology, and P‐wave duration. The RP/PR ratio was higher in AT than in non‐AT (2.01±0.54 vs. 1.57±0.24, P<0.001). A negative P wave in the inferior leads was less common in AT (4/23 vs. 13/14, P<0.01). The P‐wave duration was longer in AT than in non‐AT (105±13 ms vs. 84±10 ms, P<0.001). The fulfillment of any 2 of the following had a specificity and a positive predictive value of 100% for AT: RP/PR ratio of ≥1.65, absence of negative P wave in the inferior leads, or a P‐wave duration of >96 ms.ConclusionAT accounted for nearly two thirds of long RP tachycardias in this cohort. Electrocardiographic features, including the RP/PR ratio, polarity of the P wave, and P‐wave duration were useful in the differentiation of AT.
Effectiveness of Varenicline in Psychiatric Patients with Co-Morbid Polysubstance Dependence
Authors: Kim Jungjin , Kaul Prashant , Schwartz Thomas L. , Megna James 
Published: May 2014

Introduction: Individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs) and mental health disorders (MHDs) have greater prevalence of smoking and suffer greater tobacco-related morbidity and mortality. Varenicline is the latest FDA-approved smoking-cessation agent and few studies have investigated the use of varenicline in this difficult-to-treat population.Aims: This study examines the smoking cessation outcomes and tolerability of varenicline when used to help quit smoking in 16 patients enroled in both psychiatric and substance abuse programme.Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted on 16 patient charts. Patient demographics, psychiatric disorder diagnoses, substance use history, dosing, side effects, number of cigarettes used pre/post varenicline use and the number of complete smoking cessation outcomes were tabulated.Results: After varenicline intervention, 25% of those who completed treatment completely quit smoking. Thirty-one per cent were able to substantially cut back the amount that they smoked to one cigarette per day. The average reduction in cigarettes was 16 per day (64%), and all but one patient tolerated varenicline.Conclusions: The authors observed reasonable clinical benefit when varenicline was used to help quit smoking in patients with comorbid SUDs and MHDs. Better-controlled future studies with larger sample sizes will help further determine clinical utility of varenicline in this difficult-to-treat nicotine-dependent population.
Authority Migration and Accountability in Canadian Public Governance
Authors: Waterman Robert 
Published: May 2014

AbstractIn the tradition of democratic theory, elections are recognized as important mechanisms of accountability. However, the migration of public decision-making responsibility away from elected representatives and the emergence of new governance actors necessitate a fuller conceptualization of accountability relationships. As governments pursue partnerships with societal actors and disperse authority across multiple levels, questions of public input and accountability within the democratic governance process arise. In this paper, cases of authority migration in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia between the years of 1946 and 2005 are used to examine the accountability relationships between new governance actors and both government and society. The existence and relative strength of accountability relationships are evaluated using the rules stipulated in the provincial legislation. Political ideology of governing parties, geographic scale of new jurisdictions and period in time are evaluated as predictors of the strength of the accountability relationship overall.
Description of Metchnikovella spiralis sp. n. (Microsporidia: Metchnikovellidae), with notes on the ultrastructure of metchnikovellids
Authors: SOKOLOVA Y. Y. , PASKEROVA G. G. , ROTARI Y. M. , NASSONOVA E. S. , SMIRNOV A. V. 
Published: May 2014

SUMMARYThe present paper reports results of a transmission electron microscopy study of a new metchikovellid microsporidium. It was isolated from gregarines Polyrhabdina sp. inhabiting guts of polychaetes Pygospio elegans sampled at the White Sea silt littoral zone. Free sporogony (FS) occurred in the life cycle of the microsporidium alongside sac-bound sporogony (BS). Free spores resided in a parasitophorous vacuole and were of typical metchnikovellidean structure, uninucleate and oblong. They measured on sections 2·0–3·2×1·3–1·9 μm. The life cycle included pre-sporogonial stages represented by dikaryotic cells and 4-nucleate cells with coupled nuclei. A multinucleate sporogonial plasmodium of FS split in numerous (>10) sporoblasts. In BS segregation of sporoblasts occurred within thick-walled cysts by internal budding. Spore sacs of this microsporidium, measuring on average 11·6×4·7 μm, were limited by a thick electron-dense wall, externally ornamented with spirally wound cords of dense material. These oval spore sacs contained eight barrel-shaped spores, comparable in size and ultrastructure to FS spores. Ultrastructure of both types of spores and intracellular development of the new microsporidium and Metchnikovella spp. were similar, suggesting they belong to the same genus. In this paper we describe a new species Metchnikovella spiralis and discuss morphology of metchnikovellids in the context of putative evolutionary history of Microsporidia.
Human - robot collision detection and identification based on fuzzy and time series modelling
Authors: Dimeas Fotios , Avendaño-Valencia L. D. , Aspragathos Nikos 
Published: May 2014

SUMMARYIn this paper, two methods are proposed and implemented for collision detection between the robot and a human based on fuzzy identification and time series modelling. Both methods include a collision detection system for each joint of the robot that is trained to approximate the external torque. In addition, the proposed methods are able to detect the occurrence of a collision, the link that collided and to some extent the magnitude of the collision without using the explicit model of the robot. Since the speed of the detection is of critical importance for mitigating the danger, attention is paid to recognise a collision as soon as possible. Experimental results conducted with a KUKALWR manipulator using two joints in planar motion, verify the validity on both methods.
Authoritarian Environmentalism Undermined? Local Leaders’ Time Horizons and Environmental Policy Implementation in China
Authors: Eaton Sarah , Kostka Genia 
Published: May 2014

AbstractChina's national leaders see restructuring and diversification away from resource-based, energy intensive industries as central goals in the coming years. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in China between 2010 and 2012, we suggest that the high turnover of leading cadres at the local level may hinder state-led greening growth initiatives. Frequent cadre turnover is intended primarily to keep local Party secretaries and mayors on the move in order to promote the implementation of central directives. While rotation does seem to aid implementation by reducing coordination problems, there are also significant downsides to local leaders changing office every three to four years. Officials with short time horizons are likely to choose the path of least resistance in selecting quick, low-quality approaches to the implementation of environmental policies. We conclude that the perverse effects of local officials’ short time horizons give reason to doubt the more optimistic claims about the advantages of China's model of environmental authoritarianism.
African Merchants, Notables and the Slave Trade at Old Calabar, 1720: Evidence from the National Archives of Scotland
Authors: Behrendt Stephen D. , Graham Eric J. 
Published: May 2014

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.
Explorers' and Travelers' Narratives: A Peregrination Through Different Editions
Authors: MacLaren I.S. 
Published: May 2014

Researchers keen to examine the representation of native people in European accounts of exploration and travel need bring under review the mechanism by which field notes became books, and, once they were books, the multiplicity and diffusion of editions, often themselves quite different from one another. An example that illustrates well this need is British Royal Naval Captain James Cook's posthumously published account of his third voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1776-80. The standard scholarly source is J.C. Beaglehole's monumental edition,The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery(1955-74), a twenty-year editing project for the Hakluyt Society, which made available for the first time Cook's own writings until his death at Kealakekua Bay, Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), on 14 February 1779, during the third voyage. However, the need for Beaglehole's project arose, according to the president of the Hakluyt Society, because the original publications differed very widely from Cook's own writings. They were “official” accounts, published by order of George III, and they performed that always interesting exercise—they “improved” on Cook's own writings. It is well known that Cook did not prepare his journals for the press: in the case of the first two voyages to the Pacific, this was his choice. In the case of the third, the choice was not his to make, he being five years deceased. How wide are those differences?In the case of Cook's description of a month-long mooring in Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, do substantive differences occur between Cook's logs and journal and Bishop John Douglas' edition? Answering that question necessarily involves consulting first editions of the various published accounts.
Using Archives in South Africa: Planning a Research Trip in the ‘Information Age’
Authors: Duffy Joanne L. 
Published: May 2014

Much has changed since I first undertook research in South Africa six years ago. It is only having recently begun a a new research project that I have realized just how different things are now. Even more has changed since the ending of minority rule, as there has been a restructuring of both the State Archives Service and of the libraries of national deposit, as discussed later in this paper. The paper emerges from my reflections at this time and discusses both my experience of using archives in South Africa in the past and some of the resources which I have been able to make use of in planning my next research trip. My original research was on Afrikaner nationalist politics and identities in the 1930s and 1940s, and I now plan to work on Afrikaner moderates and English-speakers in the United Party during the same period, examining issues of identity and ideology, imperialism and nationalism. My work has taken me to several different archives in South Africa, which fall into two distinct types. The first of these are government archives, and the second are university archives. This paper will draw on my experiences of the archives I visited in 1997 and 1998, and on a brief trip I made to South Africa in 2002.Government archives in South Africa are held by the National Archives of South Africa (NASA), established in 1996 by the National Archives of South Africa Act (No. 43 of 1996). The National Archives replaced the old State Archives Service, and was structured to take into account changes in the provincial structure and to “reflect the post apartheid political order.”
Papers of an African King Collected by Jacques Hymans
Authors: Vansina Jan 
Published: May 2014

During a visit in the summer 1970, Jacques Hymans, professor of History at San Francisco State Univeisity, found discarded papers strewn over the floor of an abandoned European-style house at Mushenge (Nsheng), the capital of the Kuba kingdom, zone Mweka, West Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo. He salvaged them and then kept them at home. After his death Ms Kelley Hymans gave the papers to the collections of Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To this a notebook, which Wisconsin obtained through the good offices of Professor Mary Douglas, has been added. This contains a census of the capital for 1939-40 carried out by Jules Lene (Lyeen) as tribute collector for the Kuba king.Since early colonial times the Kuba people were well-known in Europe for their sculpture and their artistic textiles, and because they formed a single kingdom headed by a “divine” king. This was also the only territory in the Belgian Congo where “indirect administration” was officially practiced after 1920. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that the Kuba capital Nsheng, known as Mushenge, eventually became a minor tourist attraction for amateurs of their arts. After independence, travel in Congo became difficult and the prestige of Mushenge declined, but some of its fascination remained, and Hymans was one of the persons still attracted to it. His last visit to Mushenge occurred in 1970, not long after the death of king Bop Mabinc maKyeen. It is on that occasion that he salvaged the papers now in Madison.
Haunting Griaule: Experiences from the Restudy of the Dogon
Authors: van Beek Walter E.A. 
Published: May 2014

It really was a chance occasion, just before Christmas 2003. On my way to the Dogon area I had greeted my friends in Sangha, and was speaking with a Dutch friend, when a French tourist lady suddenly barged into the hall of the hotel and asked me: “There should be a cavern with a mural depicting Sirius and the position of all the planets. I saw it in a book. Where is it?”. My friend smiled wrily, amused by the irony of situation: by chance the lady had fallen upon the one who had spent decennia to disprove this kind of “information”. “In what book?” I asked, and named a few. It was none of these, and she could not tell me. Cautiously (maybe she had planned her whole trip around this Sirius “experience”) I explained to her that though there was a lot to see, this particular mural did not exist. She left immediately, probably convinced she stumbled on a real ignoramus.In retrospect I never meant to criticize Marcel Griaule, it just happened as a consequence of other choices, which eventually led me to Dogon country. After completing my PhD thesis on the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroun and northeastern Nigeria, I started scouting for a second area of field research. For two reasons, I wanted a comparable setting: to allow myself to feel at home easily because I seemed to have less time, and to use in general the approach of controlled comparison. In my first field research I had made a more or less classic ethnography of a group of comparable size (150,000) in a similar environment, living in the Mandara Mountains south of Lake Chad and straddling the border between northern Cameroun and North Eastern Nigeria.
“If We are Still Here Next Year”: Zambian Historical Research in the Context of Decline, 2002–2003
Authors: Larmer Miles 
Published: May 2014

This paper addresses the challenges facing researchers seeking to explore the post-colonial history of Zambia, a country whose social infrastructure in general, and academic and research facilities in particular, are in a state of apparently perpetual decline. It describes some of the major archival resources available and their (significant) limitations. It surveys recent and ongoing attempts to document the history of nationalist movements and leaders. Finally, it explores the potential for developing a history of post-colonial Zambia which escapes the assumptions of a still dominant nationalist historiography, and which thereby contributes to a deeper understanding of the lives actually lived by Zambians since Independence.The tendency for colonial and post-colonial governments and their advisors to seek to depoliticize issues of power, inequality and control, by turning them into “technical” or developmental issues, has been noted by historians and anthropologists. The historiography of post-colonial Zambia is a prime example of the conflation of history with development, creating a discourse that assesses historical change by the achievement of supposedly neutral development goals, and conflates the ideologies and policies of nationalist politicians with those of the nation as a whole. The relatively benign judgments passed by prominent historians of the colonial era in their postscript surveys of the government of Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia's First Republic (1964-72) have retained an unwarranted influence. This is partly because of the dearth of post-colonial historical studies of equal importance conducted during the last 20 years. UNIP's leading historian, Henry Meebelo, while providing valuable insights into the African perspective on decolonization, played a leading role in establishing nationalism as the unquestioned norm of progressive understanding, axiomatically placing all social forces which came into conflict with it as reactionary and illegitimate.
Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities on Senegal's Petite Cote
Authors: Mark Peter , Horta José da Silva 
Published: May 2014

Portuguese archives contain a wealth of documents that are insufficiently utilized by, and often unknown to, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century west Africa. Lusophone sources are crucial for the period of earliest contact between Europeans and West Africans. While the publications of Avelino Teixeira da Mota are widely known, the work of contemporary Portuguese scholars such as Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Maria Manuel Torrão, and Maria João Soares does not have the same visibility except among lusophone scholars. Relatively few Africanists have recognized the potential significance of the Portuguese archives for Senegambia, a region generally considered within the orbit of francophone or anglophone west Africa. The Portuguese archives remain a rich source of hitherto unknown documents, some of which will lead to fundamental transformations in our historical knowledge of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Upper Guinea coast.The two of us have worked extensively on the history of the Luso-Africans in Senegambia and the Guinea of Cape Verde. Mark has investigated the construction and evolution of their identity. Horta, in particular, has for many years focused on their representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources. Both writers have argued elsewhere—following Boulègue and Moraes—that among these Luso-Africans—or “Portuguese” as they were known in contemporary sources—there were New Christians, some of whom were probably practicing Jews. Evidence of the Jewish presence in west Africa remained scanty, however, and we argued that if some “Christian” Portuguese were in fact practicing Jews, they were Jews primarily in the privacy of their own communities.