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When the temperature was increased from 77 K, the resonance lines became gradually weak without changing AV q and immeasurable above 215 K. ESR spectra taken at various temperatures revealed the presence of paramagnetic sites of ca. 5x 10 2<) mol -1 arising from Au(II). The small but finite concentration of Au(II) or some other reason should be responsible for the fade out phenomenon and the large Avq observed.

BackgroundTo examine the effects of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) on quality of life (QOL) in patients with dementia.MethodsWe retrospectively included 53 Japanese community and tertiary hospitals to investigate the relationship between the newly developed PEG and consecutive dementia patients with swallowing difficulty between Jan 1st 2006 and Dec 31st 2008. We set improvements in 1) the level of independent living, 2) pneumonia, 3) peroral intake as outcome measures of QOL and explored the factors associated with these improvements.ResultsTill October 31st 2010, 1,353 patients with Alzheimer’s dementia (33.1%), vascular dementia (61.7%), dementia with Lewy body disease (2.0%), Pick disease (0.6%) and others were followed-up for a median of 847 days (mean 805 ± 542 days). A total of 509 deaths were observed (mortality 59%) in full-followed patients. After multivariate adjustments, improvement in the level of independent living was observed in milder dementia, or those who can live independently with someone, compared with advanced dementia, characterized by those who need care by someone: Odds Ratio (OR), 3.90, 95% confidence interval (95%CI), 1.59 - 9.39, P = 0.003. Similarly, improvement of peroral intake was noticed in milder dementia: OR, 2.69, 95%CI, 1.17 - 6.17, P = 0.02. Such significant associations were not observed in improvement of pneumonia.ConclusionsThese results suggest that improvement of QOL after PEG insertion may be expected more in milder dementia than in advanced dementia.

English is the only language available for global communication and is used by approximately 1.5 billions of speakers. It is also known to have a large diversity of pronunciation due to the influence of speakers' mother tongue, called accents. Our project aims at creating a global and individual-basis map of English pronunciations to be used in teaching and learning World Englishes (WE) as well as research studies of WE [1,2]. Creating the map mathematically requires a distance matrix in terms of pronunciation differences among all the speakers considered, and technically requires a method of predicting the pronunciation distance between any pair of the speakers only by using their speech samples. In our previous study [3], we combined invariant pronunciation structure analysis [4,5,6,7] and Support Vector Regression (SVR) to predict the inter-speaker pronunciation distances. In this paper, several techniques are introduced and examined whether they can increase accuracy and robustness of prediction. Experiments show that the correlation between IPA-based reference distances and the predicted distances is increased from 0.805 to 0.903, which is over the correlation of 0.829 that is obtained by using the phoneme-based ground truth distances.

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