BACKGROUND:Public access defibrillation (PAD) programs are a major goal of the American Heart Association (AHA) to ensure that automated external defibrillators and trained lay rescuers are available in public areas where sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is likely to occur. The Johnson County Early Defibrillation Task Force (JCEDTF) is a volunteer organization which distributed AEDs throughout Johnson County, Iowa. JCEDTF was responsible for initial training but ongoing support was the responsibility of each site.OBJECTIVE:The purpose of this study was to evaluate compliance of community PAD sites to recommendations for site maintenance as proposed by the American Heart Association (AHA).METHODS:Thirty-two surveys were distributed to community PAD sites that received assistance from JCEDTF. PAD sites were categorized into business, educational, or community sites. A twenty-five point scoring system to assess PDA programs was developed based on AHA recommendations. On-site evaluations were conducted to verify survey results and assess barriers to an effective PAD site. Differences among the three categories were measured with ANOVA.RESULTS:No site was able to comply with all the AHA guidelines for a PAD site. The mean score among all sites was 57% of possible points with no significant differences among the three categories. Business sites were more compliant with ongoing training compared to educational and community sites (p<0.022).CONCLUSIONS:Community PAD sites in Johnson County currently do not comply with the recommendations for effective PAD sites. After initial training and establishment of community PAD sites, better methods for assuring ongoing training and maintenance are needed for sites to be effective.

This review explores the recent chemotherapeutic work on drug delivery using nanoparticles as carriers for the targeted treatment of cancer. Compared to direct drug delivery, delivery through a carrier can increase the efficacy of a drug, but decrease the side-effects by utilizing the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect and tumor-specific targeting. The search for efficient and safe transport vehicles (carriers) to achieve better drug availability at the target site has been a challenging yet exciting area of research. Current interest focuses on the colloidal nanoparticles (diameter <500 nm), including the biodegradable polymer- and liposome-systems, bioconjugating with antitumor drugs. These biocompatible nanoparticles, with an enlarged surface area-volume ratio can overcome non-cellular and cellular-based mechanisms of resistance and increase the selectivity of drugs towards cancer cells, while reducing their toxicity towards normal tissues. This review focuses on the evolution of nanoparticles as carriers for anticancer drug delivery, with emphasis on the biocompatible magnetic nanohybrids.

The manager/agent model has been the de facto paradigm used for designing network management systems. However, as the network size grows and new network and computing technology emerges, consistency, flexibility, reliability, and scalability issues of distributed network management systems might not be fully addressed within the model. This paper proposes an extension to the manager/agent model, called the manager/agency paradigm, to address these issues. In the manager/agency paradigm, a manager performs management functions through an agency of cooperating management entities, (lower-level) managers and/of agents, which are collaboratively working together to achieve consistent management goals. Agencies may recursively constitute other agencies, based on the layering and partitioning principles, to scale with ever growing network size. They may be organized flexibly according to different management functionalities, goals and policies, and may present a single management view to their (upper-level) managers by hiding management complexity. Inside an agency, various fault tolerant schemes, such as active replication or primary-backup approach, may be used to implement reliable management functionality transparently to its manager. The paper begins by describing the anatomy and semantics of an agency and comparing the manager/agency model against the manager/agent model. It then demonstrates its applications to address the consistency and reliability issues of network management problems. Finally, applications of the manager/agency model to the broader, distributed enterprise management is discussed

We consider the problem of fault detection and isolation in systems that consist of real-time distributed cooperating processes. A framework for adding fault detection and isolation capabilities to SNMP-based distributed management systems is presented. The framework revolves around the use of a formal specification model of the cooperating processes which we refer to as “local directed graphs”. We describe the local directed graph model, and a fault monitoring and isolation architecture that implements the framework. In doing so, we address the problem of the size of our formal description and also show that this architecture is suited to the management of internetworks. Lastly, we present an example illustrating the operation of the architecture.

The use o f existing software technology for the construction of automated monitoring and management tools for processes providing network-wide services such as email in a WAN and MAN heterogeneous computing environment is complicated by nonstandard nature of available software technology. SNMP is a protocol standard for managing the network elements providing tcp/ip services in an internet environment. It is designed to access and manipulate a Management Information Base (MIB) which describes the various tcp/ip elements; in terms o f objects and attributes. The standard defining the MIB allows for extensions t o it. In this paper we outline an example extension of the MIB for the manipulation and management of processes providing essential services in a MAN/WAN environment. The implementation aspects of integrating SN MP with technology appropriate for the construction of an appropriate automated monitoring and management tool are also reviewed. NOMS '92 16.3.1 CH3134-4/92/0000-0479 $3.00