Advances in the surgical management of prolapse

Prolapse is an extremely common condition, for which 11% of women will have a surgical procedure at some point in their lives. The recurrence rate after most of the traditional surgical procedures is high and upto 29% of women who have had surgery for prolapse will require a further operation. In order to improve the surgical outcome, there is currently much interest in the use of grafts to augment traditional repairs and new procedures have been developed using specifically developed grafts. These have been combined with minimally invasive surgical techniques in an attempt to reduce surgical morbidity. These procedures may improve the outcome of surgery for prolapse. However, there is currently a lack of long-term data from randomized trials to demonstrate their effectiveness and safety.     

Integrations,identity and conflicts: A cross-border perspective on residential relocation of Hong Kong citizens to Mainland China

This paper aims to test if traditional literature on both internal residential mobility and international migration hold up in explaining the driving forces behind the home-moving behaviours of Hong Kong residents to the Chinese Mainland, under a mixture of economic integrations, past connections along with present structural and identity differences. The multi-dimensionality of this behaviour, in comparison to other forms of residential movements in the literature, is shown as there is no single attribute, albeit all necessary conditions, sufficient enough to encourage such movement on its own. Instead, the cross-border residence is primarily a middle-class, middle-aged phenomenon, due to one’s past connections with Mainland China throughout his/her life course and the possession of financial resources insufficient to afford larger living space in Hong Kong yet enough to benefit from the remarkable living cost advantages on the other side of the border. It provides some directions for studying similar forms of residential mobility in the era of globalization when the functions of national borders have become more obscure than before. Implications from this residential behaviour are then discussed.     

英语中动句研究

中动句式是英语中的一种常见句型。主要表现为动词使用主动语态,外论元不出现,动词后必须有副词修饰。关于中动句的生成过程,主要有两派意见,即移位法和词汇法。前者认为中动句的形成主要是由于名词短语的移位;后者则认为中动句在词汇中形成。本文坚持移位解释法,但认为利用最简方案来解释英汉语中动句的成因比管约论框架下的分析更经济合理;并且还可以解释中动句中两个悬而未决的问题。其一是解释中动句中副词存在的必要性;其次则是解释中动句表层主语为(non_argment)非论元时的情形。     

The stochastic distribution of available coefficient of friction on quarry tiles for human locomotion

The available coefficient of friction (ACOF) for human locomotion is the maximum coefficient of friction that can be supported without a slip at the shoe and floor interface. A statistical model was introduced to estimate the probability of slip by comparing the ACOF with the required coefficient of friction, assuming that both coefficients have stochastic distributions. This paper presents an investigation of the stochastic distributions of the ACOF of quarry tiles under dry, water and glycerol conditions. One hundred friction measurements were performed on a walkway under the surface conditions of dry, water and 45% glycerol concentration. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit test was used to determine if the distribution of the ACOF was a good fit with the normal, log-normal and Weibull distributions. The results indicated that the ACOF appears to fit the normal and log-normal distributions better than the Weibull distribution for the water and glycerol conditions. However, no match was found between the distribution of ACOF under the dry condition and any of the three continuous distributions evaluated. Based on limited data, a normal distribution might be more appropriate due to its simplicity, practicality and familiarity among the three distributions evaluated.     

Improving wheelchair prescription: an analysis of user needs and existing tools

Wheelchair users experience many situations that affect the stability and associated performance of their wheelchair. Stability is affected by user characteristics and abilities, environmental features and conditions, and wheelchair modification and accessories. Wheelchair prescribers need effective tools and methods to provide quantitative evaluation and prediction of the behavior of the user-wheelchair system in a variety of static and dynamic situations. Such information is very important to guide efficient management of associated risks and adjust chairs accordingly. This project involves a user-centered approach for design and evaluation of a load cell based wheelchair stability assessment system (Wheel-SAS). Here, the current methods for assessing stability are described, and their shortcomings explained. The user-centered design approach being applied to the development of the associated Wheel-SAS hardware and software is described. Future work including semi-structured interviews and an online survey with wheelchair prescribers and associated healthcare professionals for deriving user requirements and a design specification for a load cell system for measuring dynamic wheelchair stability are detailed.     

Structural holes and managerial performance: Identifying the underlying mechanisms

Structural holes theory suggests a variety of possible explanations for the empirically observed relationship between structural holes and individual managerial performance. However, little has been done to disentangle one mechanism from another. This paper empirically tests a mediated moderation model that distinguishes between the five different theoretical mechanisms: autonomy, competition, information brokering, opportunity recognition and innovativeness. The findings suggest that of these five theoretical causal motors, innovativeness plays a key role in linking network structure and network content to performance.     

Communicative Openness Within Adoptive Families: Adoptive Parents' Narrative Accounts of the Challenges of Adoption Talk and the Approaches Used to Manage These Challenges

Policy and practice relating to openness in adoption have changed substantially in the last 30 years. There is a growing body of empirical research that supports both structural and communicative openness, and there is widespread consensus that communicative openness is desirable within adoptive families. Despite this, there is evidence that some adoptive parents and their adopted children struggle to achieve the level of communicative openness to which they aspire. This paper presents data from a small-scale exploratory study of adoptive family life. It draws on the narrative accounts of adoptive mothers and fathers to explore some of the sensitivities of adoption talk, the communication challenges experienced by adoptive parents, and the ways that adopters manage these challenges. Finally, some suggestions are made for practice.