Aims: To estimate the annual incidence of hospitalisations due to severe complications of varicella, describe the complications and estimate annual mortality. Methods: Active surveillance throughout the UK and Ireland for 13 months by paediatricians notifying cases to the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit and completing a questionnaire. The case definition was any child aged ,16 years hospitalised with complicated varicella, as defined by a list of conditions, or admitted to ICU/HDU with varicella. Results: 188 cases were notified for the surveillance period, of which 112 (0.82/100 000 children/year) met the case definition and were not duplicates. Confirmed cases had a median age of 3 years (range 0-14). The complications were: bacteraemia/septic shock (n = 30), pneumonia (n = 30), encephalitis (n = 26), ataxia (n = 25), toxic shock syndrome/toxin-mediated disease (n = 14), necrotising fasciitis (n = 7), purpura fulminans/disseminated coagulopathy (n = 5), fulminant varicella (n = 5) and neonatal varicella (n = 3). 52 children (46%) had additional bacterial infections. Six deaths were due, or possibly due, to varicella, including one intrauterine death. Four of the other five children who died (ages 2-14 years) had a preexisting medical condition. Sequelae on discharge were reported for 41 cases (40%), most frequently ataxia or skin scarring. The median length of hospital stay was 7 days (range 1-68).Conclusions: This study provides a minimum estimate of severe complications and death resulting from varicella in children in the UK and Ireland. Most complications, excluding deaths, occur in otherwise healthy children and thus would be preventable only through a universal childhood immunisation programme. V aricella-zoster virus causes varicella (chickenpox) on primary infection and herpes zoster upon reactivation. Varicella is generally mild, but there is an increased risk of complications in immunocompromised individuals and neonates if maternal varicella is temporally close to birth. Nevertheless, severe complications can occur even in previously healthy children, including secondary bacterial infections, central nervous system manifestations and death.

This paper investigates the effect of mobile phone screen size (1.65 inches - 2.75 inches) on video based learning. It first examines the educational benefits of video as a teaching medium and surveys the usage and issues related with video based learning. After which, it investigates the value of video for mobile learning. It reports on an empirical investigation that studied the effect that screen-size has on video-based m-learning. Findings indicate that regardless of the screen size of a mobile phone, students tended to have a positive overall opinion of m-learning and watching the video significantly increased their knowledge of the subject area. However, if an m-learning environment that relies heavily on video based material is displayed on a mobile device with a small screen, such as an average mobile phone, then the effectiveness of the learning experience may be inhibited. Paper identifies the underlying reasons why mobile phone screen size may be a problem for video based m-learning. The implications of this finding are discussed.

The tension between software architecture and agility is not well understood by agile practitioners or researchers. If an agile software team spends too little time designing architecture up-front then the team faces increased risk and higher chance of failure; if the team spends too much time the delivery of value to the customer is delayed, and responding to change can become extremely difficult. This paper presents a grounded theory of agile architecture that describes how agile software teams answer the question of how much upfront architecture design effort is enough. This theory, based on grounded theory research involving 44 participants, presents six forces that affect the team's context and five strategies that teams use to help them determine how much effort they should put into up-front design.

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