Background: Surgical mortality data are collected routinely in high-income countries, yet virtually no low-or middle-income countries have outcome surveillance in place. The aim was prospectively to collect worldwide mortality data following emergency abdominal surgery, comparing findings across countries with a low, middle or high Human Development Index (HDI).Methods: This was a prospective, multicentre, cohort study. Self-selected hospitals performing emergency surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive patients from at least one 2-week interval during July to December 2014. Postoperative mortality was analysed by hierarchical multivariable logistic regression.

Abstract-Modern digital IC designs have a critical operating point, or "wall of slack", that limits voltage scaling. Even with an errortolerance mechanism, scaling voltage below a critical voltage -so-called overscaling -results in more timing errors than can be effectively detected or corrected. This limits the effectiveness of voltage scaling in trading off system reliability and power. We propose a designlevel approach to trading off reliability and voltage (power) in, e.g., microprocessor designs. We increase the range of voltage values at which the (timing) error rate is acceptable; we achieve this through techniques for power-aware slack redistribution that shift the timing slack of frequently-exercised, near-critical timing paths in a power-and area-efficient manner. The resulting designs heuristically minimize the voltage at which the maximum allowable error rate is encountered, thus minimizing power consumption for a prescribed maximum error rate and allowing the design to fail more gracefully. Compared with baseline designs, we achieve a maximum of 32.8% and an average of 12.5% power reduction at an error rate of 2%. The area overhead of our techniques, as evaluated through physical implementation (synthesis, placement and routing), is no more than 2.7%.

Critical feminists have argued that research on women and gender is not sufficiently ‘global’ in its representation of scholars and perspectives. We draw on these works to argue that the scholarship on women, gender and politics does not sufficiently consider the effects of the global order in the Global South. We propose the adoption of a ‘global lens’ to address this gap. We further examine the representation of South-based scholars by analysing leading women, gender and politics journals, and find that they are severely under-represented as authors. We propose steps to address this underrepresentation and to decolonise the scholarship.

Background : The prevalence of reflux‐type symptoms among community individuals in Singapore is low. Aim : To describe the healthcare‐seeking behaviour of those subjects with heartburn. Methods : A cross‐sectional survey, using a reliable and valid questionnaire, was carried out on a race‐stratified random sample of residents, aged 21–95 years, in a Singaporean town; 93% responded (n=696). Results : The ethnic‐adjusted prevalence of heartburn for the past 1‐year was 4.6%. Sixteen (30%) of the 53 heartburn sufferers had sought consultation for their symptoms. They were more likely to have severe heartburn (P < 0.001), and to have complained of nocturnal awakening due to heartburn (P < 0.05) than those who did not present to medical attention. Ethnic origin did not influence the consultation pattern. Only 18 (34%) of the 53 heartburn sufferers received pharmacological therapy for their symptoms. The most commonly used medication was antacid. Medication use was associated with symptom severity (P < 0.05), but not ethnicity. Conclusions : Heartburn is uncommon in the general population of Singapore. Few heartburn sufferers seek medical attention, and most do not receive medications for symptomatic control. The decision to seek medical advice and/or to medicate was generally linked to symptom severity, but not to ethnicity.

We study a special class of diamond channels which was introduced by Schein in 2001. In this special class, each diamond channel consists of a transmitter, a noisy relay, a noiseless relay and a receiver. We prove the capacity of this class of diamond channels by providing an achievable scheme and a converse. The capacity we show is strictly smaller than the cut-set bound. Our result also shows the optimality of a combination of decode-and-forward (DAF) and compress-andforward (CAF) at the noisy relay node. This is the first example where a combination of DAF and CAF is shown to be capacity achieving. Finally, we note that there exists a duality between this diamond channel coding problem and the Kaspi-Berger source coding problem. I. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND THE RESULTThe diamond channel was first introduced by Schein in 2001 [1]. The diamond channel consists of one transmitter, two relays and a receiver, where the transmitter and the two relays form a broadcast channel as the first stage and the two relays and the receiver form a multiple access channel as the second stage. The capacity of the diamond channel in its most general form is open. Schein explored several special cases of the diamond channel, one of which [1, Section 3.5] is specified as follows (see Figure 1). The multiple access channel consists of two orthogonal links with rate constraints R 1 and R 2 , respectively. The broadcast channel contains a noisy branch and a noiseless branch, i.e., with input X and two outputs X and Y . We refer to the relay node receiving Y as the noisy relay and the relay node receiving X as the noiseless relay. Schein provided two achievable schemes for this class of diamond channels. In this paper, we will prove the capacity of this special class of diamond channels.