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"Sako, M."
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Sensitivity of Water Clarity to Drawdown in Reservoirs Across the Climatic 100th Meridian
Reservoirs provide key water storage in regions facing projected water scarcity and population growth. Many reservoirs experience water level fluctuations including periods of drawdown tied to drought. To examine sensitivity of water clarity to drawdown, we compiled 30 years of water level and Secchi depth measurements in southern Great Plains reservoirs (n = 84) positioned across a climate gradient from the arid west to the wetter east. Mixed‐effect models incorporated reservoir‐specific coefficients relating Secchi depth to water storage volume. Predictions from the best model indicated that many reservoirs lost more than half of their Secchi depth as water levels approached their recorded lows. Reservoirs in west and central Texas tended to experience more severe drawdown and more pronounced loss of water clarity during drawdown. These results show that droughts can cause a dual setback in which the loss of water quantity coincides with loss of water quality in reservoirs.
Journal Article
The Dark Energy Survey Image Processing Pipeline
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a five-year optical imaging campaign with the goal of understanding the origin of cosmic acceleration. DES performs a ∼5000 deg2 survey of the southern sky in five optical bands (g, r, i, z, Y) to a depth of ∼24th magnitude. Contemporaneously, DES performs a deep, time-domain survey in four optical bands (g, r, i, z) over ∼27 deg2. DES exposures are processed nightly with an evolving data reduction pipeline and evaluated for image quality to determine if they need to be retaken. Difference imaging and transient source detection are also performed in the time domain component nightly. On a bi-annual basis, DES exposures are reprocessed with a refined pipeline and coadded to maximize imaging depth. Here we describe the DES image processing pipeline in support of DES science, as a reference for users of archival DES data, and as a guide for future astronomical surveys.
Journal Article
Outsourcing and Offshoring: Implications for Productivity of Business Services
This paper reviews the implications of outsourcing and offshoring for the productivity of business services in the UK. Official statistics indicate that business-service productivity has grown by over 20 per cent in the last 7 years at the same time as employment grew by 20 per cent. The paper considers possible factors that account for the simultaneous growth of employment and productivity. First, we discuss outsourcing and offshoring, and their role in enhancing productivity through greater specialization, standardization, and consolidation of business processes, and a shift to higher value-added services. Outsourcing of business services is interpreted as part of corporate restructuring, namely as the unbundling of corporate functions as well as vertical disintegration. Second, as some services become more like products, both low-skilled and high-skilled jobs are subjected to productivity growth through standardization and digitization. It is argued, however, that the future of business-service productivity is on a knife-edge, depending on the mix of two sources of productivity enhancement—namely greater standardization and capturing value from customized solutions.
Journal Article
Rituximab for childhood-onset, complicated, frequently relapsing nephrotic syndrome or steroid-dependent nephrotic syndrome: a multicentre, double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial
Rituximab could be an effective treatment for childhood-onset, complicated, frequently relapsing nephrotic syndrome (FRNS) and steroid-dependent nephrotic syndrome (SDNS). We investigated the efficacy and safety of rituximab in patients with high disease activity.
We did a multicentre, double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial at nine centres in Japan. We screened patients aged 2 years or older experiencing a relapse of FRNS or SDNS, which had originally been diagnosed as nephrotic syndrome when aged 1–18 years. Patients with complicated FRNS or SDNS who met all other criteria were eligible for inclusion after remission of the relapse at screening. We used a computer-generated sequence to randomly assign patients (1:1) to receive rituximab (375 mg/m2) or placebo once weekly for 4 weeks, with age, institution, treatment history, and the intervals between the previous three relapses as adjustment factors. Patients, guardians, caregivers, physicians, and individuals assessing outcomes were masked to assignments. All patients received standard steroid treatment for the relapse at screening and stopped taking immunosuppressive agents by 169 days after randomisation. Patients were followed up for 1 year. The primary endpoint was the relapse-free period. Safety endpoints were frequency and severity of adverse events. Patients who received their assigned intervention were included in analyses. This trial is registered with the University Hospital Medical Information Network clinical trials registry, number UMIN000001405.
Patients were centrally registered between Nov 13, 2008, and May 19, 2010. Of 52 patients who underwent randomisation, 48 received the assigned intervention (24 were given rituximab and 24 placebo). The median relapse-free period was significantly longer in the rituximab group (267 days, 95% CI 223–374) than in the placebo group (101 days, 70–155; hazard ratio: 0·27, 0·14–0·53; p<0·0001). Ten patients (42%) in the rituximab group and six (25%) in the placebo group had at least one serious adverse event (p=0·36).
Rituximab is an effective and safe treatment for childhood-onset, complicated FRNS and SDNS.
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
Journal Article
Changes in CO2 Emissions in Online Student Learning Activities Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia and Japan
The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting entire countries. One of them is having an impact on CO2 emissions in Indonesia and Japan. The research project is focused on the use of transportation and electricity by Japanese Literature students of BINUS and Wakayama University Japan students before and during the pandemic. Concepts and methodologies, looking at the situation before and during a pandemic, using quantitative methods and approaches based on carbon footprint analysis. This study provides results showing that the use of electronics and transportation which has CO2 emissions is drastically reduced both in Indonesia and in Japan. However, Japan has higher CO2 emissions when compared to Indonesia which is influenced by certain factors, such as transportation mileage.
Journal Article
The sub-energetic γ-ray burst GRB 031203 as a cosmic analogue to the nearby GRB 980425
Over the six years since the discovery
1
of the γ-ray burst GRB 980425, which was associated
2
with the nearby (distance ∼40 Mpc) supernova 1998bw, astronomers have debated fiercely the nature of this event. Relative to bursts located at cosmological distance (redshift
z
≈ 1), GRB 980425 was under-luminous in γ-rays by three orders of magnitude. Radio calorimetry
3
,
4
showed that the explosion was sub-energetic by a factor of 10. Here we report observations of the radio and X-ray afterglow of the recent GRB 031203 (refs
5–7
), which has a redshift of
z
= 0.105. We demonstrate that it too is sub-energetic which, when taken together with the low γ-ray luminosity
7
, suggests that GRB 031203 is the first cosmic analogue to GRB 980425. We find no evidence that this event was a highly collimated explosion viewed off-axis. Like GRB 980425, GRB 031203 appears to be an intrinsically sub-energetic γ-ray burst. Such sub-energetic events have faint afterglows. We expect intensive follow-up of faint bursts with smooth γ-ray light curves
8
,
9
(common to both GRB 031203 and 980425) to reveal a large population of such events.
Journal Article
Spectroscopy of 16B from quasi-free (p,pn) reaction with 17B
Spectroscopy of 16B plays an essential role in understanding the halo structure in 17B, but very limited knowledge has so far been obtained. We have carried out a kinematically complete measurement on the spectroscopy of 16B by using quasi-free (p,pn) reaction on 17B. The level scheme of 16B up to 5 MeV was made clear for the first time.
Journal Article
Neurodevelopmental abnormalities associated with severe congenital neutropenia due to the R86X mutation in the HAX1 gene
Objective:Severe congenital neutropenia (SCN), also known as Kostmann syndrome (SCN3, OMIM 610738), includes a variety of haematological disorders caused by different genetic abnormalities. Mutations in ELA2 are most often the cause in autosomal dominant or sporadic forms. Recently, mutations in HAX1 have been identified as the cause of some autosomal recessive forms of SCN, including those present in the original pedigree first reported by Kostmann. We sought to determine the relationship between HAX1 gene mutations and the clinical characteristics of Japanese cases of SCN.Methods:The genes implicated in SCN (ELA2, HAX1, Gfi-1, WAS, and P14) were analysed in 18 Japanese patients with SCN. The clinical features of these patients were obtained from medical records. Immunoblotting of HAX1 was performed on cell extracts from peripheral blood leucocytes from patients and/or their parents.Results:We found five patients with HAX1 deficiency and 11 patients with mutations in the ELA2 gene. In HAX1 deficiency, a homozygous single base pair substitution (256C>T), which causes the nonsense change R86X, was identified in three affected individuals. Two sibling patients showed a compound heterozygous mutation consisting of a single base pair substitution (256C>T) and a 59 bp deletion at nucleotides 376–434. There was no detectable phenotype in any heterozygous carrier. All patients with HAX1 deficiency had experienced developmental delay. Three patients carrying R86X also suffered from epileptic seizures. In contrast, no SCN patient with heterozygous mutations in the ELA2 gene suffered from any neurodevelopmental abnormality.Conclusions:These findings suggest that the R86X mutation in the HAX1 gene is an abnormality in Japanese SCN patients with HAX1 deficiency and may lead to neurodevelopmental abnormalities and severe myelopoietic defects.
Journal Article
