The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery (WCPCCS) will be held in Washington DC, USA, from Saturday, 26 August, 2023 to Friday, 1 September, 2023, inclusive. The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery will be the largest and most comprehensive scientific meeting dedicated to paediatric and congenital cardiac care ever held. At the time of the writing of this manuscript, The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery has 5,037 registered attendees (and rising) from 117 countries, a truly diverse and international faculty of over 925 individuals from 89 countries, over 2,000 individual abstracts and poster presenters from 101 countries, and a Best Abstract Competition featuring 153 oral abstracts from 34 countries. For information about the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, please visit the following website: [www.WCPCCS2023.org]. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the activities related to global health and advocacy that will occur at the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.

Acknowledging the need for urgent change, we wanted to take the opportunity to bring a common voice to the global community and issue the Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action on Addressing the Global Burden of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases. A copy of this Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is provided in the Appendix of this manuscript. This Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is an initiative aimed at increasing awareness of the global burden, promoting the development of sustainable care systems, and improving access to high quality and equitable healthcare for children with heart disease as well as adults with congenital heart disease worldwide.

Chinese morphological awareness is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct but there is a lack of understanding of how its dimensions are related. Latent change score modeling was used to examine the bivariate relationships of two facets of oral morphological awareness, namely morpheme and structure awareness in Chinese children in grades one through three. Two hundred and three children in China completed morpheme (homonym awareness) and structure awareness (lexical compounding) tasks across the three grades (M = 6.66, SD = .30 at the first time point). Results indicated that growth in structure awareness was predicted in part by previous levels of morpheme awareness, suggesting that morpheme awareness leads the growth of structure awareness. Educational implications are discussed.

The Kawasaki and Dobuyama bentonite deposits in northeastern Japan show contrasting properties even though they are only 5 km apart in a sequence of Neogene sedimentary and pyroclastic rocks. The Kawasaki deposit consists of stratiform bentonite layers up to >50 m thick, and its wall rocks are unaltered shallow marine sedimentary rocks. In contrast, the Dobuyama deposit consists of a funnel-shaped ore body 200 m across, and its wall rocks are hydrothermally altered terrestrial rhyolitic pyroclastic rocks. The Kawasaki and Dobuyama bentonites mainly consist of Na-Ca smectite and Ca smectite, respectively, with subordinate opal-CT, quartz and zeolite. The geological occurrences of the deposits and wall-rock properties suggest that the Kawasaki and Dobuyama deposits were probably formed by diagenesis and low-temperature hydrothermal alteration, respectively. The difference in exchangeable cation ratios of the smectite between the two deposits is attributable to the difference in their sedimentary environments and/or burial depth.

Considered as a less hazardous piezoelectric material, potassium sodium niobate (KNN) has been in the fore of the search for replacement of lead (Pb) zirconate titanate for piezoelectrics applications. Here, we challenge the environmental credentials of KNN due to the presence of ~60 wt% Nb2O5, a substance much less toxic to humans than Pb oxide, but whose mining and extraction cause significant environmental damage.

The federally funded Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI) requires seamless federal, state, and local public health coordination to provide antibiotics to an entire city population within 48 hours of an aerosolized release of anthrax. We document practical lessons learned from the development and implementation of the Boston CRI plan. Key themes center on heightened emphasis on security, a new mass protection model of dispensing, neighborhood-centric clinic site selection, online training of Medical Reserve Corps volunteers, and the testing of operations through drills and exercises. Sharing such lessons can build national preparedness. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2008;2:40–49)

A total of 245 patients with confirmed 2009 H1N1 influenza were admitted to the intensive-care units of 28 hospitals (South Korea). Their mean age was 55·3 years with 68·6% aged >50 years, and 54·7% male. Nine were obese and three were pregnant. One or more comorbidities were present in 83·7%, and nosocomial acquisition occurred in 14·3%. In total, 107 (43·7%) patients received corticosteroids and 66·1% required mechanical ventilation. Eighty (32·7%) patients died within 30 days after onset of symptoms and 99 (40·4%) within 90 days. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that the clinician's decision to prescribe corticosteroids, older age, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score and nosocomial bacterial pneumonia were independent risk factors for 90-day mortality. In contrast with Western countries, critical illness in Korea in relation to 2009 H1N1 was most common in older patients with chronic comorbidities; nosocomial acquisition occurred occasionally but disease in obese or pregnant patients was uncommon.

Sokal in 2001 proved that the complex zeros of the chromatic polynomial PG(q) of any graph G lie in the disc |q| < 7.963907Δ, where Δ is the maximum degree of G. This result answered a question posed by Brenti, Royle and Wagner in 1994 and hence proved a conjecture proposed by Biggs, Damerell and Sands in 1972. Borgs gave a short proof of Sokal's result. Fernández and Procacci recently improved Sokal's result to |q| < 6.91Δ. In this paper, we shall show that all real zeros of PG(q) are in the interval [0,5.664Δ). For the special case that Δ = 3, all real zeros of PG(q) are in the interval [0,4.765Δ).

This note presents two results on real zeros of chromatic polynomials. The first result states that if $G$ is a graph containing a $q$-tree as a spanning subgraph, then the chromatic polynomial $P(G,\lambda)$ of $G$ has no non-integer zeros in the interval $(0,q)$. Sokal conjectured that for any graph $G$ and any real $\lambda>\Delta(G)$, $P(G,\lambda)>0$. Our second result confirms that it is true if $\Delta(G)\ge \lfloor n/3\rfloor -1$, where $n$ is the order of $G$.

We investigated the effects of V/III flux ratios on the Curie temperature, T C , in Ga1−x Mnx As layers with various Mn mole fractions of x = 0.03 and 0.05. A 75 nm thick GaMnAs layer was grown at the temperature of 250 °C with various V/III flux ratios of 25∼34. The low temperature molecular beam epitaxy (LT-MBE) method for growth of GaMnAs layer caused the defects related by excess As and Mn interstitial, and these leaded the formation of deep level. We investigated that formation of deep level was established with various Mn mole fraction for V/III flux ratio 34. The changes of T C are observed by varying V/III flux ratio with a fixed Mn mole fraction. The T C in the sample grown with a lower V/III flux ratio of 25 is found to be higher comparing to that with higher V/III flux ratio of 34 at a fixed high Mn concentration (x = 0.05). Although the Mn concentration increases, the T C is not much changed when the V/III flux ratio is high of 34. The changes of T C with various V/III flux ratios are explained by the existence of low temperature grown defects, which are clarified by the deep level transient spectroscopy measurement. The prime species of defects are found to be AsGa and MnI etc.

With respect to the operation of a Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM or PcRAM), we studied the effect of the contact between the electrode metal and the chalcogenide glass, N2 doped Ge2Sb2Te5 in this report. We investigated a change of the resistance-programming current pulse (R-I) curve varying the contact size and the electrode material. Also we tested the surface oxidation of the electrode. We found that the programming current, the resistance of the programmed state (“RESET”) and the erased state (“SET”) were highly dependent on the above parameters. These results are presented and a more effective way to the high density PRAM will be proposed.

This study was conducted to determine the molecular epidemiology of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Malaysian hospitals. A total of 264 MRSA isolates from eight hospitals were subjected to typing by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) of SmaI restricted DNA. Antibiotic disk susceptibility testing was also carried out to determine their resistance patterns. Thirty-one PFGE pattern types were identified. Three major pattern types A, ZC and K were found with type A the predominant profile in c. 80% of strains and present in all hospitals. Unlike type A, other DNA pattern types were unique to the hospitals in which they were isolated. PFGE type A also consisted of strains that were multiply antibiotic resistant. The presence of a single predominant PFGE type in Malaysian hospitals is an important finding which suggests that inter-hospital spread of MRSA had occurred frequently and regularly.

Room-temperature photovoltaic spectroscopy was applied to study undoped GaN, n-type GaN, and InGaN quantum well structures. Clear exciton absorption was observed in the photovoltaic spectra of the undoped GaN, and polarization measurements were made to identify the exciton absorption. For the n-type GaN sample, instead of the exciton absorption we observed only bulk absorption edge, which may be due to the free carrier screening effect. For the InGaN quantum well structures, the photovoltaic spectra showed relatively complicated line shape due to the overlap of the signals from different layers. By changing the reference phase of the lock-in amplifier, we were able to suppress some of the signals and thus identify the origin of the corresponding signal.

The objective of this research was to establish a new baseline process for obtaining ultra-thin silicon-oxide gate material in a prototype vertical furnace. Of particular concern was the optimization of a process sequence whereby unpatterned 150 mm diameter wafers ‘see’ the same processing steps prior to gate oxidation as patterned device wafers ‘see’. The figures-of-merit for evaluating process optimization include: i) full-wafer current-voltage (I-V) maps using Hg-gate capacitors; ii) the variation in the current or current density at a given bias voltage, extracted from an I-V map; iii) the variation in electrical oxide thickness that is extracted from full-wafer capacitance-voltage measurements using Hg-gate capacitors; and iv) the variation in optical oxide thickness that is extracted from full-wafer spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements. The results from this research demonstrate that: i) the addition of 1% O2 to the usual N2 gas during the ramp-up cycle in the vertical furnace is necessary to achieve acceptable across-the-wafer oxide-thickness uniformity as determined from both electrical and optical figures-of-merit; and ii) a full-wafer response surface of the current at a given bias voltage is a powerful finger print for process development when the question of variation in as-grown silicon-oxide thickness is at issue.

A graph G is called an H-type graph for some graph H if there is a mapping from V(G) to V(H) preserving edges. In this paper, we shall prove that: (1) every triangle-free graph G of order n with χ(G)[les ]3 and δ(G)>n/3 is of Fd-type for some d[ges ]1, where Fd is a certain d-regular triangle-free Hamiltonian Cayley graph of order 3d−1, (2) every triangle-free graph G of order n with χ(G)[ges ]4 and δ(G)>n/3 contains the Mycielski graph (see Figure 2) as a subgraph.

The CxN samples(C14N-C62N) prepared with a nickel catalyst had the higher crystallinity and less pyridine-type nitrogens existing at the edge of graphene layers than CxN prepared in the absence of a catalyst. With increase in the deposition temperature of CxN, the cy-cleability for electrochemical intercalation-deintercalation of lithium ions was improved and the profile of the charge-discharge curve approached that of graphite due to increase in the crystallinity and decrease in the incorporated nitrogens. CxN-coated graphites demonstrated gradual increase in the potential at the last stage of lithium ion deintercalation process.

The effect of fluoroester-mixing in 1 M LiClO4-EC/DEC was also investigated at a low temperature. It was found that CHF2COOCH3 with a low molecular weight and a small number of fluorine atoms was effective as a mixing agent.