In view of the increasing complexity of both cardiovascular implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) and patients in the current era, practice guidelines, by necessity, have become increasingly specific. This document is an expert consensus statement that has been developed to update and further delineate indications and management of CIEDs in pediatric patients, defined as ≤21 years of age, and is intended to focus primarily on the indications for CIEDs in the setting of specific disease categories. The document also highlights variations between previously published adult and pediatric CIED recommendations and provides rationale for underlying important differences. The document addresses some of the deterrents to CIED access in low- and middle-income countries and strategies to circumvent them. The document sections were divided up and drafted by the writing committee members according to their expertise. The recommendations represent the consensus opinion of the entire writing committee, graded by class of recommendation and level of evidence. Several questions addressed in this document either do not lend themselves to clinical trials or are rare disease entities, and in these instances recommendations are based on consensus expert opinion. Furthermore, specific recommendations, even when supported by substantial data, do not replace the need for clinical judgment and patient-specific decision-making. The recommendations were opened for public comment to Pediatric and Congenital Electrophysiology Society (PACES) members and underwent external review by the scientific and clinical document committee of the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS), the science advisory and coordinating committee of the American Heart Association (AHA), the American College of Cardiology (ACC), and the Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology (AEPC). The document received endorsement by all the collaborators and the Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society (APHRS), the Indian Heart Rhythm Society (IHRS), and the Latin American Heart Rhythm Society (LAHRS). This document is expected to provide support for clinicians and patients to allow for appropriate CIED use, appropriate CIED management, and appropriate CIED follow-up in pediatric patients.

We explain how to form a novel dataset of Calabi–Yau threefolds via the Gross–Siebert algorithm. We expect these to degenerate to Calabi–Yau toric hypersurfaces with certain Gorenstein (not necessarily isolated) singularities. In particular, we explain how to ‘smooth the boundary’ of a class of four-dimensional reflexive polytopes to obtain polarised tropical manifolds. We compute topological invariants of a compactified torus fibration over each such tropical manifold, expected to be homeomorphic to the general fibre of the Gross–Siebert smoothing. We consider a family of examples related to products of reflexive polygons. Among these we find $14$ topological types with $b_2=1$ that do not appear in existing lists of known rank-one Calabi–Yau threefolds.

We introduce a concept of minimality for Fano polygons. We show that, up to mutation, there are only finitely many Fano polygons with given singularity content, and give an algorithm to determine representatives for all mutation-equivalence classes of such polygons. This is a key step in a program to classify orbifold del Pezzo surfaces using mirror symmetry. As an application, we classify all Fano polygons such that the corresponding toric surface is qG-deformation-equivalent to either (i) a smooth surface; or (ii) a surface with only singularities of type $1/3(1,1)$.

An alternative version of the necessary and sufficient condition for almost sure fixation in the conditional branching process model is derived. This formulation provides an insight into why the examples considered in Buckley and Seneta (1983) all have the same condition for fixation.

Montage is a portable, scaleable toolkit that runs on end-users desktops, clusters, and computing grids. It generates astronomical image mosaics that preserve the calibration and photometry in the input FITS files. The code is available for download at the project website at <http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu>, and includes independent modules for image discovery (including support for VO image access protocols), image reprojection, rectification of the sky background to a common level and image co-addition.

Variable magnetic field Hall effect, photoluminescence (PL) and capacitance-voltage (CV) analysis have been used to study InN layers grown by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy. All three techniques reveal evidence of a buried p-type layer beneath a surface electron accumulation layer in heavily Mg-doped samples. The use of lattice-matched Yttria-stablized Zirconia substrates also provides evidence of a p-type layer.

Background. Population-based studies suggest substantial co-morbidity between physical illness and depression in late-life. However, a causal relationship has not been established. If a relationship exists, it is important to establish which aspects of poor health determine risk for depression, and which factors confer vulnerability or resilience in the face of poor health. We investigate the role of disablement, measured as impairment, disability and handicap.

Methods. A prospective population-based cohort study, comprising an index assessment and 1 year follow-up, of all residents aged 65 years or over, of an electoral ward in London, UK (N=889).

Results. The prevalence of SHORT-CARE pervasive depression was 17·7% at index assessment. The 1 year onset rate for pervasive depression was 12·0%, and the 1 year maintenance rate 63·2%. There was a high mortality rate among the depressed. Disablement, particularly handicap was the most important predictor of the onset of depression (population attributable fraction, 0·69). Lack of contact with friends was a direct risk factor but also modified the association between handicap and depression. Marriage was protective for men, but a risk factor for women. Maintenance of depression was predicted by low levels of social support and social participation, rather than by disablement.

Conclusions. It seems likely that disablement, specifically handicap, is the chief cause of onsets of depression in late-life. Genetic predisposition, early adversity and serious life events may play a less prominent role than in earlier life. Effective prevention of late-life depression requires attention at the structural level to the sources of handicap within communities.

Background. A companion paper reported a very strong cross-sectional association between handicap and late-life depression. Adjusting for handicap weakened associations between sociodemographic variables and depression. It was unclear whether handicap was a confounder, or a useful summary variable, mediating the effect of a range of sociodemographic disadvantages. This paper focusses on the cross-sectional relationship between depression and demographic variables, social support, and life events.

Method. A community survey of all residents over the age of 65 years of an electoral district in London, UK.

Results. There was a moderate association between SHORT-CARE pervasive depression and the number of life events experienced over the previous year. Personal illness, bereavement and theft were the most salient events. There was a stronger, graded, relationship between the number of social support deficits (SSDs) and depression. Number of SSDs also related to age, handicap, loneliness and use of homecare services. Loneliness was itself strongly associated with depression; odds ratio 12·4 (7·6–20·0).

Conclusions. Problems of collinearity, and the cross-sectional design of the study limited interpretation of the exact nature of the relationship between social support, loneliness, handicap and depression. However, the clustering of these four factors can be used to define a large part of the elderly population with a poor quality of life. An important avenue for future research will be the development and implementation of population intervention strategies designed to address some or all of these problems among older people in general.

Background. An association between disablement and late-life depression is often reported in cross-sectional studies. However, many lack effect sizes, and do not control for confounding. Therefore, it is difficult both to quantify the overall impact of poor health on depression and to understand which aspects are most salient.

Methods. A catchment area survey of all over 65-year-old residents of an electoral district in London, UK, using a population register derived from a door-to-door census was undertaken. Depression was measured using SHORT-CARE, and the consequences of disease classified according to the WHO International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps.

Results. Six hundred and fifty-four subjects were interviewed out of an older population of 889. The prevalence of SHORT-CARE pervasive depression was 17%. Impairment, disability and, particularly, handicap were strongly associated with depression. The adjusted odds ratio for depression in the most handicapped quartile compared with the least was 24·2 (8·8–66·6). The population attributable fraction (PAF) for depression attributable to handicap was 0·78. The PAFs for recent life events and female gender were much lower. Handicap explained most of the depression associated with individual impairments and disabilities. Adjusting for handicap abolished or weakened the associations between depression and social support, income, older age, female gender and living alone.

Conclusions. Even given some uncertainty in distinguishing handicap and depression as constructs, and the impossibility of deciding direction of causality, it seems likely that handicap is of central significance to late-life depression. Handicap may be more amenable to intervention than either impairment or disability.

X-ray pulsars are the only accreting magnetic stars where rotation torques induced by accretion are large enough to be measured on short timescales ~ days. They are thus unique laboratories for studying the interaction between an accretion disk and a stellar magnetosphere. We describe 5 years of continuous pulsar timing observations by the BATSE instrument on GRO which paint a strikingly different picture of pulsar spin behavior than understood from the previous 20 years of sparse observations. In particular, we find that more than half of the persistent pulsars we observe undergo dramatic torque reversals, switching suddenly between extended periods of steady spin-up and steady spin-down. Moreover, variations in pulsed flux are anticorrelated with torque in at least one system undergoing secular spin-down, GX1+4. This behavior contradicts standard accretion torque theory (Ghosh and Lamb 1979). A simple – albeit unconventional – hypothesis which naturally explains these observations is that the disks in these systems somehow alternate between epochs of prograde and retrograde rotation.