Französisch-Frühbeginn in England

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Change in the body temperature of healthy term infant over the first 72 hours of life

Objective: To determine the range of body temperature in a group of healthy Chinese term neonates over the first 72 hours of life and to assess the influence of body weight, gestational age and route of delivery. Method: All 200 consecutive cases of neonates delivered at our hospital from March to August 2001 were included in this retrospective study. Temperatures were measured immediately after delivery, after 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 8 hours and 15 hours and on the 2nd and 3rd day. Axillary temperatures ranging from 36.5 oC to 37 oC were regarded as normal. No cases of maternal fever or systemic infection of the newborns were discovered. All infants were discharged in good general condition. Results: The mean rectal temperature at birth was 37.19 ℃. The lowest average temperature was reached at 1 hour after delivery (36.54 ℃) with a significant difference between natural delivery (36.48 ℃) and section (36.59 ℃) (P<0.05). Temperature subsequently rose to 36.70 ℃ at 8 hours and 36.78 ℃ at 15 hours (P<0.05). Hypothermia was seen in 51.8% and hypothermia in 42.5% of the patients. On the 3rd day after delivery, 96% of all temperatures were in the normal range. A significant relation was found between hypothermia and both low birth weight (P<0.001) and low gestational age (P<0.05). Conclusion: The reference range presently used did not include all physiological temperatures in the first 72 hours of life. Considering other factors, such as birth weight, route of delivery, gestational age and body temperature on the 2nd and 3rd day of life, may help to correctly assess the significance of temperatures beyond the reference range.     

Adolescent Weak Decoders Writing in a Shallow Orthography: Process and Product

It has been hypothesized that students with dyslexia struggle with writing because of a word-level focus that reduces attention to higher level textual features (structure, theme development). This may result from difficulties with spelling and/or difficulties with reading. Twenty-six Norwegian upper secondary students (M = 16.9 years) with weak decoding skills and 26 age-matched controls composed expository texts by keyboard under two conditions: normally and with letters masked to prevent them reading what they were writing. Weak decoders made more spelling errors and produced poorer quality text. Their inter-key-press latencies were substantially longer preword, at word end, and within word. These findings provide some support for the word-level focus hypothesis, although we found that weak decoders were slightly less likely to engage in word-level editing. Preventing reading did not affect differences between weak decoders and controls, indicating that their reduced fluency was associated with production rather than reading difficulties.     

Hypoplasticmodeling of soil-structure interfaces in offshore applications

Cyclic and monotonic loaded offshore structures (e.g. piles, pipelines, cables, and suction-buckets) must be designed and calculated considering the effects of the soil-structure interaction. An advanced constitutive soil model must be used, but a simplified Mohr-Coulomb friction law is applied for the soil-structure interface. The Mohr- Coulomb model is a simple bilinear friction model that cannot take into account monotonic and cyclic interface phenomena. These include hardening, softening, and stiffness degradation under loading. However, we propose two advanced hypoplastic interface models for fine- and coarse-grained soils with intergranular strain concept. The intergranular strain concept has been proven to be an efficient way to model the small-strain deformation and un/reloading behavior of soils. The intergranular strain concept is therefore used to enhance the prediction capabilities of the hypoplastic interface models. Differences of the recent model formulation compared with previous versions are presented and discussed based on simulation. This is followed by an application of different models in finite-element simulations. The new models are used to simulate cyclic direct shear interface tests. Furthermore, the advanced interface model is used for simulation of a torodial penetrometer penetration problem. Several aspects, which are particularly important for offshore structures, are compared with the simple Mohr-Coulomb friction model.     

Examining the Performance of the Modified ADF Goodness-of-fit Test Statistic in Structural Equation Models

The asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) test statistic depends on very mild distributional assumptions and is theoretically superior to many other so-called robust tests available in structural equation modeling. The ADF test, however, often leads to model overrejection even at modest sample sizes. To overcome its poor small-sample performance, a family of robust test statistics obtained by modifying the ADF statistics was recently proposed. This study investigates by simulation the performance of the new modified test statistics. The results revealed that although a few of the test statistics adequately controlled Type I error rates in each of the examined conditions, most performed quite poorly. This result underscores the importance of choosing a modified test statistic that performs well for specific examined conditions. A parametric bootstrap method is proposed for identifying such a best-performing modified test statistic. Through further simulation it is shown that the proposed bootstrap approach performs well.