Extra-auditory effects of noise in laboratory animals: the relationship between noise and sleep

Noise has both auditory and extra-auditory effects. Some of the most deleterious extra-auditory effects of noise are those leading to sleep disturbances. These disturbances seem to be related to both endogenous (physical parameters) and exogenous (sex, age) factors of noise. Despite correlative relations between noise level and awakenings, the scientific community has not reached consensus regarding a specific action of these factors on the different sleep stages. In animal research, 2 complementary main fields of research exist. One is focused on the positive modulation of sleep by repeated tone stimulation. The other concerns noise-related sleep disturbances. The few studies that have investigated noise-related sleep disturbances suggest the following conclusions. First, sleep disturbances are greater upon exposure to environmental noise, whose frequency spectrum is characterized by high and ultrasonic sounds, than white noise. Second, unpredictability and pattern of noise events are responsible for extractions from both SWS and PS. Third, chronic exposure to noise permanently reduces and fragments sleep. Finally, in chronic noise exposure, an inter-individual variability in SWS deficits is observed and correlated to a psychobiological profile related to an incapability to face stressful situations. Based on results from other research, acute noise-related sleep perturbations could result from an imbalance in the sleep-wake cycle in favor of arousing ascending systems. Chronic noise-related sleep disturbances may arise due to imbalance of the sleep-wake cycle and malfunctioning of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis which may both contribute to the development of pathology

Ultrastable neuroendocrine robot controller

The work of a simulated neuroendocrine controller with ultrastable neurons and glands is sketched and tested in terms of stability and adaptability. The artificial neurons connect to each other and to motors, while hormones produced by behaviour-related glands regulate their output. The ultrastable nature of the cells allows them to maintain their homeostasis by random reconfiguration of their connections and parameters without reference to the global goal of the system. Interactions of these ultrastable components cause individual robot behaviours to emerge to certain extents. The pre- sented results show that the controller as a whole is capable of not only configuring itself to perform random walk, obstacle avoidance, mineral collection and recharging, but also to stay robust or adapt to a number of environmental and body perturbations without a need for a body model

Airway progenitor cell development and function : mimicking in vivo behavior in vitro

This thesis presents novel in vitro models to study the differentiation of airway progenitor cells. These models were subsequently used to study the function of SOX2 and SOX21 in the development and regeneration of the airways

Data driven neuroendocrine pid controller for mimo plants based adaptive safe experimentation dynamics algorithm

This study focused on data-driven tools and controller structure in the data-driven control scheme. Data-driven tools are an optimization method to find the optimal controller parameters using the system’s input and output data. Meanwhile, the controller structure refers to the controller design that is highly dependent on the input and output system. The existing data-driven neuroendocrine-PID (NEPID) utilizes the simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm as the data-driven tool. However, this SPSA-based method is unable to find the optimal value of the design parameter due to unstable convergence obtained that degrades the controller performance in MIMO systems. Thus, a safe experimentation dynamics (SED) algorithm is selected to solve this unstable convergence but still not enough to achieve high accuracy because the update designed parameter only depends on the fixed step size gain. For the controller structure, the hormone secretion rate parameter of the existing NEPID is constant during the experimental time. However, control accuracy is insufficient because the secretion rate and control variable error are not able to interact directly and limits the controller capability. Besides, in the existing NEPID controller structure of the SISO system, only a single node of hormone regulation is used due to a single control variable. Meanwhile, in the MIMO systems, many control variables available that interact with each other, and the single node hormone regulation of NEPID is still inadequate in producing better control accuracy of nonlinear MIMO systems. Therefore, this study proposed the adaptive safe experimentation dynamics (ASED) algorithm to improve the SED algorithm performance accuracy by minimizing its objective function in terms of mean, best, worst, and standard deviation analysis. In order to increase the control accuracy of the existing NEPID controller, this study also established the sigmoid-based secretion rate neuroendocrine- PID (SbSR-NEPID) controller structure by varying the hormone secretion rate according to the change of error. Finally, this study also focused on developing a multiple node hormone regulation neuroendocrine-PID (MnHR–NEPID) controller structure to improve the control accuracy of existing NEPID by prioritizing the control regulation of each node from their level of error. The performance of PID and NEPID controllers was compared with those of SbSR-NEPID and MnHR-NEPID performances based on error and input tracking. The results show that the ASED- and SED-based methods produced stable convergence. The ASED-based method provided better tracking performance than the SED method by obtaining the objective function’s lower values. Besides, from the simulation work, the SbSR-NEPID and MnHR-NEPID designs provided better control accuracy in terms of lower objective function, total norm of error, and total norm of input compared to those of the PID and NEPID controllers. Moreover, the SbSR-NEPID controller achieved control accuracy improvement of 4.95% and 5.89% for the container gantry crane and TRMS systems, respectively. Besides, the MnHR-NEPID controller achieved control accuracy improvement of 5.7% and 5.1% for the container gantry crane and TRMS systems, respectively. The ASED-based method significantly improved the SED method’s accuracy by using adaptive terms based on changing the objective function in the updated procedure. Besides, the SbSR-NEPID was effective in reducing the error in a transient state, and MnHR-NEPID provided effective interaction between nodes available in MIMO systems which contributed to accuracy improvement

Pemahaman pelajar tingkatan lima katering terhadap bab kaedah memasak dalam mata pelajaran teknologi katering

Bab Kaedah Memasak merupakan salah satu bab yang penting dalam mata pelajaran Teknologi Katering. Faktor terpenting adalah memastikan pelajar menguasai serta memahami konsepnya adalah melalui proses pengajaran dan pembelajaran yang betul. Tinjauan awal di Sekolah Menengah Teknik yang menawarkan Kursus Katering, menunjukkan bahawa kebanyakan pelajar sukar untuk menguasai dan memahami bab tersebut. Berdasarkan hasil tinjauan , pengkaji ingin mengenalpasti pemasalahan dalam memahami bab tersebut. Di samping itu juga, pengkaji ingin mengenalpasti adakah pencapaian pelajar dalam PMR, minat, motivasi dan gaya pembelajaran mempengaruhi pemahaman pelajar, Kajian rintis telah dilakukan terhadap 10 orang responden dengan nilai alpha 0.91. Ini menunjukkan kebolehpercayaan terhadap kajian di jalankan adalah tinggi. Responden adalah terdiri daripada 30 orang pelajar Tingkatan Lima (ERT) Sekolah Menengah Teknik Muar, Johor. Keputusan skor min keseluruhan menunjukkan pelajar berminat dan mempunyai motivasi ynag baik dalam bidang ini. Namun begitu, gaya pembelajaran yang diamalkan tidak sesuai dan antara pemyebab wujudnya pemasalahan dalam memahami bab Kaedah Memasak. Ujian kolerasi menunjukkan bahawa tidak terdapat sebarang hubungan signifikan antara pencapaian PMR pelajar dengan pemahaman bab tersebut. Sementara minat, motivasi dan gaya pembelajaran membuktikan ada hubungan signifikan dengan pemahaman pelajar dalam bab Kaedah Memasak

Limbic forebrain interleukin-1B mechanisms in the central regulation of feeding, taste perception and metabolism

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