The aim of this study was to characterise the elution profiles of antibiotics in combination with pharmaceutical grade calcium sulphate beads in phosphate buffered saline and other physiological ...solutions which more closely mimic the in vivo environment. Synthetic recrystallised calcium sulphate was combined with vancomycin hydrochloride powder and tobramycin sulphate solution and the paste was formed into 3 mm diameter hemispherical beads. Then 2 g of beads were immersed in 2 ml of either phosphate buffered saline, Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium or Hartmann’s solution and incubated at 37℃ for up to 21 days. At a range of time points, eluent was removed for analysis by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Tobramycin sulphate and vancomycin hydrochloride release was successfully quantified against standard curves from solutions eluted in all three physiological media (phosphate buffered saline, Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium and Hartmann’s solution) during incubation with calcium sulphate beads. One hour eluate concentrations were high, up to 2602 µg/ml for tobramycin in phosphate buffered saline and 7417 µg/ml for vancomycin, whereas in DMEM, the levels of tobramycin were 2458 µg/ml and 4401 µg/ml for vancomycin. The levels in HRT were 2354 µg/ml for tobramycin and 5948 µg/ml for vancomycin. The results show highest levels of antibiotic elution over the first 24 h, which gradually diminish over the following 21 days.
Conditions data infrastructure for both ATLAS and CMS have to deal with the management of several terabytes of data 1, 2. Distributed computing access to this data requires particular care and ...attention to manage request-rates of up to several tens of kHz. Thanks to the large overlap in use cases and requirements, ATLAS and CMS have worked towards a common solution for conditions data management with the aim of using this design for data-taking in Run 3. In the meantime other experiments, including NA62, have expressed an interest in this cross-experiment initiative. For experiments with a smaller payload volume and complexity, there is particular interest in having simple payload storage. The conditions data management model is implemented in a small set of relational database tables. A prototype access toolkit consisting of an intermediate web server has been implemented, using standard technologies available in the Java community. Access is provided through a set of REST services for which the API has been described in a generic way using standard Open API specifications, implemented in Swagger. Such a solution allows the automatic generation of client code and server stubs and further allows changes in the backend technology transparently. An important advantage of using a REST API for conditions access is the possibility of caching identical URLs, addressing one of the biggest challenges that large distributed computing solutions impose on conditions data access, avoiding direct DB access by means of standard web proxy solutions.
ATLAS data preparation in run 2 Laycock, PJ; Chelstowska, MA; Donszelmann, TC ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
10/2017, Letnik:
898, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this contribution, the data preparation workflows for Run 2 are presented. The challenges posed by the excellent performance and high live time fraction of the LHC are discussed, and the solutions ...implemented by ATLAS are described. The prompt calibration loop procedures are described and examples are given. Several levels of data quality assessment are used to quickly spot problems in the control room and prevent data loss, and to provide the final selection used for physics analysis. Finally the data quality efficiency for physics analysis is shown.
This article considers the rhetorical paradoxes surrounding The Satanic Temple (TST) and its interpretation of 'black mass' rituals. TST's conservative critics have framed the movement as part of an ...ancient tradition of Satanism while also claiming that its members are not Satanists at all but merely 'trolls' seeking to upset Christians. Catholic critics vehemently opposed TST's attempt to give a public performance of the black mass, but also accused TST of performing the black mass 'incorrectly' when TST explained it would not abuse a consecrated host. This article seeks to interpret these paradoxical responses by framing the black mass as a Christian discourse that TST has knowingly attempted to appropriate and repurpose. Drawing on David Frankfurter's theory of 'rituals of inversion', it argues that stories of black masses function to support certain Christian worldviews and that these worldviews are potentially weakened when their imagined inverted counterparts are appropriated. Thus, what is really at stake in debates surrounding TST's status as a Satanist movement is who can define an important site of discursive power within the Christian imaginaire.
Otherkin are individuals who identify as “not entirely human.” Scholarship has framed this identity claim as religious because it is frequently supported by a framework of metaphysical beliefs. This ...article draws on survey data and interviews with Otherkin in order to provide a more thorough treatment of the phenomenon and to assess and qualify the movement's religious dimensions. It is argued that, in addition to having a substantively religious quality, the Otherkin community serves existential and social functions commonly associated with religion. In the final analysis, the Otherkin community is regarded as an alternativenomos—a socially constructed worldview—that sustains alternate ontologies.
Dangerous games Laycock, Joseph P
2015., 20150212, 2015, 2015-02-12
eBook
The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such asDungeons and Dragons.A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the ...field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game.Dangerous Gamesexplores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion-as a socially constructed world of shared meaning-can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds.Laycock's clear and accessible writing ensures thatDangerous Gameswill be required reading for those with an interest in religion, popular culture, and social behavior, both in the classroom and beyond.
While a significant fraction of ATLAS physicists directly analyse the AOD (Analysis Object Data) produced at the CERN Tier 0, a much larger fraction have opted to analyse data in a flat ROOT format. ...The large scale production of this Derived Physics Data (DPD) format must cater for both detailed performance studies of the ATLAS detector and object reconstruction, as well as higher level and generally lighter-content physics analysis. The delay between data-taking and DPD production allows for software improvements, while the ease of arbitrarily defined skimming/slimming of this format results in an optimally performant format for end-user analysis. Given the diversity of requirements, there are many flavours of DPDs, which can result in large peak computing resource demands. While the current model has proven to be very flexible for the individual groups and has successfully met the needs of the collaboration, the resource requirements at the end of Run 1 were much larger than planned. In the near future, ATLAS plans to consolidate DPD production, optimising resource usage vs flexibility such that the final analysis format will be more homogeneous across ATLAS while still keeping most of the advantages enjoyed during Run 1. The ATLAS Run 1 DPD Production Model is presented along with an overview of the resource usage at the end of Run 1, followed by an outlook for future plans.
In high energy physics (HEP), analysis metadata comes in many forms—from theoretical cross-sections, to calibration corrections, to details about file processing. Correctly applying metadata is a ...crucial and often time-consuming step in an analysis, but designing analysis metadata systems has historically received little direct attention. Among other considerations, an ideal metadata tool should be easy to use by new analysers, should scale to large data volumes and diverse processing paradigms, and should enable future analysis reinterpretation. This document, which is the product of community discussions organised by the HEP Software Foundation, categorises types of metadata by scope and format and gives examples of current metadata solutions. Important design considerations for metadata systems, including sociological factors, analysis preservation efforts, and technical factors, are discussed. A list of best practices and technical requirements for future analysis metadata systems is presented. These best practices could guide the development of a future cross-experimental effort for analysis metadata tools.
A new method is described which can be used to determine the setting times of small amounts of high value bone cements. The test was developed to measure how the setting times of a commercially ...available synthetic calcium sulfate cement (Stimulan, Biocomposites, UK) in two forms (standard and Rapid Cure) varies with the addition of clinically relevant antibiotics. The importance of being able to accurately quantify these setting times is discussed. The results demonstrate that this new method, which is shown to correlate to the Vicat needle, gives reliable and repeatable data with additional benefits expressed in the article. The majority of antibiotics mixed were found to retard the setting reaction of the calcium sulfate cement.
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