Rapid antigen tests, DFA, R-Mix culture and the xTAG RVP test all detected the novel H1N1 strain, but with highly varied sensitivity. The RVP test provided the best diagnostic option as RVP demonstrated superior sensitivity for the detection of all influenza strains, including the novel H1N1, provided accurate influenza A subtyping and identified a significant number of additional respiratory pathogens.

Because male CEOs dominate corporate leadership, the literature on top management decision-making suffers from an implicit masculine bias. Although research indicates that males and females are biologically and psychologically different, the leadership characteristics of female CEOs are largely unexplored. Two of these characteristics, risk aversion and ethical sensitivity, are tied to key accounting issues, such as conservatism in financial reporting and steadfast opposition to fraud. In this study, we examine the relationship between CEO gender and accounting conservatism, and find a positive association between the two. Consistent with conventional wisdom, this association appears to be stronger in firms with high rather than low litigation and takeover risks. This study contributes to the ethics literature by highlighting the benefits of gender diversity in upholding the integrity of financial reporting.

We propose and evaluate transformer-based acoustic models (AMs) for hybrid speech recognition. Several modeling choices are discussed in this work, including various positional embedding methods and an iterated loss to enable training deep transformers. We also present a preliminary study of using limited right context in transformer models, which makes it possible for streaming applications. We demonstrate that on the widely used Librispeech benchmark, our transformer-based AM outperforms the best published hybrid result by 19% to 26% relative when the standard n-gram language model (LM) is used. Combined with neural network LM for rescoring, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on Librispeech. Our findings are also confirmed on a much larger internal dataset.

Sulfide formation by oil field sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) can be diminished by the injection of nitrate, stimulating the growth of nitrate-reducing bacteria (NRB). We monitored the field-wide injection of nitrate into a low temperature (approximately 30 degrees C) oil reservoir in western Canada by determining aqueous concentrations of sulfide, sulfate, nitrate, and nitrite, as well as the activities of NRB in water samples from 3 water plants, 2 injection wells, and 15 production wells over 2 years. The injection water had a low sulfate concentration (approximately 1 mM). Nitrate (2.4 mM, 150 ppm) was added at the water plants. Its subsequent distribution to the injection wells gave losses of 5-15% in the pipeline system, indicating that most was injected. Continuous nitrate injection lowered the total aqueous sulfide output of the production wells by 70% in the first five weeks, followed by recovery. Batchwise treatment of a limited section of the reservoir with high nitrate eliminated sulfide from one production well with nitrate breakthrough. Subsequent, field-wide treatment with week-long pulses of 14 mM nitrate gave breakthrough at an additional production well. However, this trend was reversed when injection with a constant dose of 2.4 mM (150 ppm) was resumed. The results are explained by assuming growth of SRB near the injection wellbore due to sulfate limitation. Injection of a constant nitrate dose inhibits these SRB initially. However, because of the constant, low temperature of the reservoir, SRB eventually grow back in a zone further removed from the injection wellbore. The resulting zonation (NRB closest to and SRB further away from the injection wellbore) can be broken by batch-wise increases in the concentration of injected nitrate, allowing it to re-enter the SRB-dominated zone.

Abstract-Vascular cytochrome P450 (CYP) 4A enzymes catalyze the synthesis of 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (20-HETE), an eicosanoid which participates in the regulation of vascular tone by sensitizing the smooth muscle cells to constrictor and myogenic stimuli. This study was undertaken to investigate the consequences of CYP4A overexpression on blood pressure and endothelial function in rats treated with adenoviral vectors carrying the CYP4A2 construct. Intravenous injection of Adv-CYP4A2 increased blood pressure (from 114Ϯ1 to 133Ϯ1 mm Hg, PϽ0.001), and interlobar renal arteries from these rats displayed decreased relaxing responsiveness to acetylcholine, which was offset by treatment with an inhibitor of CYP4A. Relative to data in control rats, arteries from Adv-CYP4A2-transduced rats produced more 20-HETE (129Ϯ10 versus 97Ϯ7 pmol/mg protein, PϽ0.01) and less nitric oxide (NO; 4.2Ϯ1.6 versus 8.4Ϯ1 nmol nitriteϩnitrate/mg; PϽ0.05). They also displayed higher levels of oxidative stress as measured by increased generation of superoxide anion and increased expression of nitrotyrosine and gp91phox. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that augmentation in vascular 20-HETE promotes the development of hypertension and causes endothelial dysfunction, a condition characterized by decreased NO synthesis and/or bioavailability, imbalance in the relative contribution of endothelium-derived relaxing and contracting factors, and enhanced endothelial activation. T he endothelium plays a critical role in the short-and long-term regulation of the cardiovascular system. It serves as a protective barrier between tissues and circulating blood and functions to maintain vascular homeostasis by releasing bioactive factors in response to hemodynamic changes and blood borne signals. Such endothelial cell functions are impaired in many disease processes, including, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and hypertension.The expression of the cytochrome P450 (CYP) 4A and its catalytic activity as arachidonic acid -hydroxylase which produces 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (20-HETE) has been linked to the regulation of vascular reactivity and tone and to the development of hypertension. This notion is substantiated by observations that 20-HETE promotes vasoconstriction, 1,2 that CYP4A expression and/or 20-HETE production is increased in vascular tissues of hypertensive animals, 3 and that interventions that decrease CYP4A expression and/or activity cause blood pressure to fall in animal models of hypertension. 4 -11 The vasoconstrictor action of 20-HETE is primarily attributed to inhibition of the large conductance Ca 2ϩ -activated K Their study demonstrated that 20-HETE attenuates acetylcholine-induced dilation in cremasteric arterioles of normotensive rats on a low salt diet and that inhibition of 20-HETE synthesis enhances arteriolar dilation to acetylcholine in hypertensive rats on a high salt diet. More recently, 20-HETE has been shown to functionally antagonize EDHF-mediated relaxation in small porcine coronary arteries. 20 In the pre...