Aerosol delivery via a mechanical ventilator remains unregulated with no standards for drug delivery to intubated patients. Bench models predicting drug delivery have not been validated in vivo. For modern ventilator designs, we chose to identify, on the bench, the most important variables affecting aerosol delivery and to correlate in vitro predictions of aerosol delivery with in vivo end points independent of patient response. Test aerosols of albuterol and antibiotics were compared. Bench measurements of inhaled mass (percentage of nebulizer charge, mean +/- SEM) ranged from 5.7 +/- 0.5% to 37.4 +/- 1.6%, with breath-actuated nebulization and humidity identified as the most important factors determining aerosol delivery. In patients, sputum levels of deposited antibiotics varied from 1.10 to 19.6 microg/ml/mg. Variation in sputum levels correlated with predictions from the in vitro model. Aerosol delivery in ventilated patients can be efficient and reproducible only if defined ventilator parameters are tightly controlled. Key parameters can be determined via in vitro bench testing defining delivery standards for clinical trials of drugs with narrow therapeutic/toxicity ratios.

This paper examines how the external factorsi.e. customers, competitorsthat driven Malaysian SMEs to adopt E-Commerce may influence the benefits these SMEs gained by adopting such technologies. The findings show the SMEs that were driven to adopt E-Commerce by customers demand are less likely to experience the reduction of operational cost. The results also show that SMEs would be able to achieve most of the expected benefits of E-Commerce adoption, if it is aimed as a tool to improve the competitiveness of the business.

Efficient Förster energy transfer from steroid donors to a terbium ion acceptor occurs in aqueous solution when the two species are sequestered in sodium dodecyl sulfate micelles. The microorganized medium provides both proximity between donor and acceptor and protection from quenching of terbium fluorescence by water. Detection limits down to 100 pg have been achieved for steroids with an alpha,beta-unsaturated carbonyl group in the A-ring. This detection strategy has been used in HPLC separations, using either normal- or reversed-phase chromatography with postcolumn addition of detergent and/or terbium, or micellar chromatography with the detergent solution as the mobile phase. This last method proved to be superior, requiring no sample preparation and allowing direct injection of urine onto the HPLC column.

Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. We employ the novel methodology of word embeddings to quantify male gender bias: the tendency to associate a domain with the male gender. We measure male gender bias in four stereotypically gendered domains: career, family, science, and arts. We found that stereotypical gender associations in language have decreased over time but still remain, with career and science terms demonstrating positive male gender bias and family and arts terms demonstrating negative male gender bias. We also seek evidence of changing associations corresponding to the second shift and find partial support. Traditional gender ideology is latent within the text of published English-language books, yet the magnitude of traditionally gendered associations appears to be decreasing over time.

A short, mid-day nap can improve cognitive functioning and alertness among first-year IM residents.