Urban Density and Pupil Attainment We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urba...

The clinical relevance of the small airways in persistent asthma has been gaining greater recognition in recent years [1]. Studies have shown that a significant proportion of asthmatics on standard treatment fail to achieve satisfactory asthma control. For example, in one study of 3421 asthmatic subjects who underwent guideline-driven dose titration with standard inhaled corticosteroids (ICS)/l...

OBJECTIVE To identify changes in the forced and quiet breathing parameters of lung function in healthy children and adolescents exposed to passive smoking (PS). METHOD Comparative cross-sectional study. Healthy schoolchildren aged 6 to 14 years. We collected anthropometric data, lung function parameters using spirometry (forced breathing), and quiet breathing parameters using impulse oscillom...

The purpose of r2 is to protect Alice’s secret bit b. To find b before Alice opens the commitment, Bob would have to find r′ 2 and b ′ such that H(r1r 2b ′) = c. This is akin to the problem of inverting H and is likely to be hard, although the one-way property for H is not strong enough to imply this. On the one hand, if Bob succeeds in finding such r′ 2 and b ′, he has indeed inverted H , but ...

BACKGROUND To investigate if age, gender and smoking are associated with airway wall thickness (AWT) measured by high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) and if higher AWT is associated with lower levels of pulmonary function in healthy current- and never-smokers with a wide age range. METHODS HRCT scans were performed in 99 subjects (48 never- and 51 current-smokers, median age 39 years [I...

The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) is a battery of tests that assesses six music processing components: scale, contour, interval, rhythm, metric, and music memory. The present study sought to verify the psychometric characteristics of the MBEA in a sample of 150 adolescents aged 14-18 years in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and to develop specific norms for t...

Each phycobilisome complex of the cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC 6803 binds approximately 2.4 copies of ferredoxin:NADP(+) reductase (FNR). A mutant of this strain that carries an N-terminally truncated version of the petH gene, lacking the 9 kDa domain of FNR that is homologous to the phycocyanin-associated linker polypeptide CpcD, assembles phycobilisome complexes that do not contain FNR. P...

The forced oscillation technique provides information concerning respiratory impedance, which comprises resistance and reactance of the respiratory system. However, its relationship with morphological changes of the lungs in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remains unclear. Respiratory impedance and spirometric data were evaluated in 98 patients with COPD and 49 reference subjects. ...

BACKGROUND Inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) are the mainstay of asthma treatment, but conventional ICS may have limited effectiveness in inflammation and patency of small airways. Ciclesonide is delivered and deposited in the peripheral region of the lung as a small particle corticosteroid. The aim of the study is to compare the effects of ciclesonide with fluticasone propionate on small airway fu...

This paper uses 2973 loan profile records of 2810 poor households who have taken these loans from different quasi-formal sources of which about 50 percent of the loan taken is supplied by the Ultra-poor oriented program designed by PKSF. The objective of this program was to create some income source for these Ultra-poor through credit support. But diversion of loan use from the proposed IGA to ...