17,165 research outputs found

    EVALUACIÓN ANALGÉSICA PERIOPERATORIA DEL ACETAMINOFÉN EN PERRAS SOMETIDAS A OVARIOHISTERECTOMÍA ELECTIVA

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    Tesis de doctorado que evalúa el efecto analgésico del acetaminofén en perras ovarihisterectomizadas.La administración de analgésicos antiinflamatorios no esteroidales (AINES) para el control del dolor post-quirúrgico en perros es una práctica común, debido a sus efectos analgésicos, antiinflamatorios y antipiréticos. En el presente trabajo se realizaron dos estudios. En el experimento 1, el objetivo fue evaluar la analgesia post-operatoria del acetaminofén (paracetamol) a través de la utilización de las escalas de reconocimiento clínico del dolor DIVAS (Escala Dinámica e Interactiva Analógica Visual) y UMPS (Escala de la Universidad de Melbourne), en perras sometidas a ovariohisterectomía electiva. Además de valorar la seguridad y eficacia clínica del uso del acetaminofén en perros mediante pruebas de funcionamiento hepático y renal en el post-operatorio inmediato. Para ello, se utilizaron 30 perras de diferentes razas que fueron asignadas aleatoriamente a uno de los tres grupos de tratamiento: acetaminofén [GACET; n=10, 15 mg kg-1 intravenoso (IV)], carprofeno (GCARP; n=10, 4 mg kg-1 IV) y meloxicam (GMELOX; n=10, 0.2 mg kg-1 IV). Todos los tratamientos se administraron 30 minutos antes de la cirugía y posterior a esta durante 48 horas. En este período el acetaminofén se administró por vía oral cada 8 horas (15 mg kg-1); el carprofeno (4 mg kg-1) y el meloxicam (0.1 mg kg-1) se administraron por vía IV cada 24 horas. Durante el postoperatorio, los sistemas de puntuación del dolor DIVAS y UMPS fueron medidos a las 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 36 y 48 horas post-cirugía. Para evaluar la seguridad clínica de los tratamientos, se recolectaron muestras de sangre de la vena yugular para realizar la medición de enzimas ALT, AST, ALP, y los metabolitos bilirrubina directa, bilirrubina indirecta, bilirrubina total, creatinina, urea, albúmina y glucosa. Esto fue realizado en T0 (pre-anestesia; TBASAL), 48 y 96 horas después de la cirugía (T48, T96). Los resultados indican que en la evaluación clínica del dolor de todos los grupos de estudio, hubo una reducción gradual en la percepción del mismo durante el postoperatorio en ambos sistemas de puntuación; no obstante, también fue observado que ninguna escala difirió significativamente entre los tres grupos de tratamiento (P>0.05) en cada momento de evaluación durante las 48 horas post-cirugía. En cuanto a los parámetros bioquímico séricos, sólo la ALT aumentó significativamente en T96 en el GACET y GCARP con respecto a los valores basales (P<0.01). El resto de los analitos séricos evaluados se mantuvo en rangos normales. En el experimento 2 bajo el mismo diseño experimental de tratamientos administrados, el objetivo fue evaluar el efecto analgésico perioperatorio del acetaminofén 2 administrado pre y post-quirúrgicamente en perras sometidas a ovariohisterectomía electiva a través de la medición del índice de la actividad del tono parasimpático (PTA). Este parámetro hemodinámico fue medido 60 minutos antes de la cirugía (TBASAL) y durante el transquirúrgico en la aplicación de estímulos nociceptivos: colocación de las pinzas de campo backhouse (TPINZ), incisión de piel y abordaje quirúrgico primario (TINC), ligadura y extracción de pedículo ovárico izquierdo (TOVI) y derecho (TOVD), ligadura y transfixión del cuello uterino (TLIGUT), sección quirúrgica del cuello uterino (TCUT), reconstrucción de peritoneo y planos anatómicos musculares (TMUSC) y sutura de piel (TSUT). Durante el postoperatorio, el índice PTA fue valorado a las 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 36 y 48 horas, en los mismos tiempos en que fueron evaluadas las escalas de reconocimiento de dolor DIVAS y UMPS. Los resultados obtenidos en la medición del índice PTA basal para GACET fue 65 ± 8, para GCARP 65 ± 7 y para GMELOX 62 ± 5. Durante los diferentes tiempos transquirúrgicos, los valores promedio de índice PTA indican que GACET (76 ± 14) y GMELOX (72 ± 18) muestran tendencia a manifestar mayores niveles en comparación con GCARP (62 ± 13) desde el inicio del procedimiento quirúrgico sin que esto pudiera comprobarse estadísticamente, ya que no hubo diferencias significativas entre grupos de tratamiento ni entre los tiempos quirúrgicos evaluados (P>0.05). En el postoperatorio, el índice PTA fue de 65 ± 9 en el GACET, 63 ± 8 en el GCARP y 65 ± 8 en el GMELOX. Los resultados tampoco mostraron diferencias estadísticamente significativas con los valores basales o entre los tratamientos (P>0.05). El índice PTA postoperatorio mostró una sensibilidad del 40%, especificidad del 98.46% y valor predictivo negativo del 99.07% con respecto a la escala validada de UMPS. En conclusión, el acetaminofén puede considerarse una herramienta para el tratamiento efectivo del dolor perioperatorio agudo en perros, ya que mostró la misma eficacia clínica que el meloxicam y el carprofeno para la analgesia postquirúrgica en perras sometidas a ovariohisterectomía electiva. Además, la evidencia del uso de este medicamento no condujo a reacciones adversas o cambios en los parámetros evaluados, lo que indica su seguridad clínica. Finalmente, destacar que el índice PTA representa una medición objetiva del comfort y analgesia postoperatoria, por lo que es una herramienta que podría ayudar a predecir las respuestas hemodinámicas asociadas con el dolor

    The temporality of rhetoric: the spatialization of time in modern criticism

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    Every conception of criticism conceals a notion of time which informs the manner in which the critic conceives of history, representation and criticism itself. This thesis reveals the philosophies of time inherent in certain key modern critical concepts: allegory, irony and the sublime. Each concept opens a breach in time, a disruption of chronology. In each case this gap or aporia is emphatically closed, elided or denied. Taking the philosophy of time elaborated by Giorgio Agamben as an introductory proposition, my argument turns in Chapter One to the allegorical temporality which Walter Benjamin sees as the time of photography. The second chapter examines the aesthetics of the sublime as melancholic or mournful untimeliness. In Chapter Three, Paul de Man's conception of irony provides an exemplary instance of the denial of this troubling temporal predicament. In opposition to the foreclosure of the disturbing temporalities of criticism, history and representation, the thesis proposes a fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of time as it relates to these categories of reflection. In a reading of an inaugural meditation on the nature of time, and in examining certain key contemporary philosophical and critical texts, I argue for a critical attendance to that which eludes those modes of thought that attempt to map time as a recognizable and essentially spatial field. The Confessions of Augustine provide, in the fourth chapter, a model for thinking through the problems set up earlier: Augustine affords us, precisely, a means of conceiving of the gap or the interim. In the final chapter, this concept is developed with reference to the criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of cinema derived from Deleuze and Lyotard. In conclusion, the philosophical implications of the thesis are placed in relation to a conception of the untimeliness of death

    Image classification over unknown and anomalous domains

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    A longstanding goal in computer vision research is to develop methods that are simultaneously applicable to a broad range of prediction problems. In contrast to this, models often perform best when they are specialized to some task or data type. This thesis investigates the challenges of learning models that generalize well over multiple unknown or anomalous modes and domains in data, and presents new solutions for learning robustly in this setting. Initial investigations focus on normalization for distributions that contain multiple sources (e.g. images in different styles like cartoons or photos). Experiments demonstrate the extent to which existing modules, batch normalization in particular, struggle with such heterogeneous data, and a new solution is proposed that can better handle data from multiple visual modes, using differing sample statistics for each. While ideas to counter the overspecialization of models have been formulated in sub-disciplines of transfer learning, e.g. multi-domain and multi-task learning, these usually rely on the existence of meta information, such as task or domain labels. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to a new transfer learning setting, called latent domain learning in this thesis, in which training and inference are carried out over data from multiple visual domains, without domain-level annotations. Customized solutions are required for this, as the performance of standard models degrades: a new data augmentation technique that interpolates between latent domains in an unsupervised way is presented, alongside a dedicated module that sparsely accounts for hidden domains in data, without requiring domain labels to do so. In addition, the thesis studies the problem of classifying previously unseen or anomalous modes in data, a fundamental problem in one-class learning, and anomaly detection in particular. While recent ideas have been focused on developing self-supervised solutions for the one-class setting, in this thesis new methods based on transfer learning are formulated. Extensive experimental evidence demonstrates that a transfer-based perspective benefits new problems that have recently been proposed in anomaly detection literature, in particular challenging semantic detection tasks

    Queer spies in British Cold War culture: literature, film, theatre and television

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    This PhD thesis investigates how male homosexuality has been represented in British spy fiction from the 1950s to the 2010s in multiple media: literature, film, television and theatre. Due mainly to the betrayal of the Cambridge Spy ring around the middle of the century, British culture has associated spies with homosexuality, while the wider Anglophone world was in the grip of a homophobic atmosphere created by McCarthy's Red Scare. My thesis explores how this history is reflected in the spy genre from the Cold War to the present, in which male homosexuality and secret agency intersect as “queer”, in so far as they were both considered to be discreet and criminal, existing outside of the heteronormative order. By following multiple texts across media and time, I discuss how some writers, television and film directors and actors update queer identity in spy fiction, creating a shifting image of queer spies through decades. I refer to the findings of adaptation studies and queer studies, along with numerous studies on spy fiction. I conclude that the interrelation of different media has contributed to the re-drawing of queer identity in spy fiction. These developments have enabled the spies' queer identity to transcend its pejorative history in British culture, towards its more flexible and pliant sense which is designated by the term's modern usage. I also discuss that spies’ homosexuality has been represented as a fleeting ghost in most of the texts examined, hovering on the margins of pages and screen. Although homosexuality is not “the love that dare not speak its name” anymore, clandestine queer spies have been preserved as spectral others in the genre for many years. Spy fiction is a cultural repository retaining the memory of violence inflicted against those who have been called “queer” in twentieth century Britain, and the spectral nature of queer spies narrates this history reaching back to the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, from which point British queer identity as we know now developed. This thesis benefits the study of spy fiction by filling a gap in the investigation of homosexual representation. It also contributes to the field of gender studies of literature, film, television, and theatre by illustrating queer history in a genre which has not received a great deal of focus on its representation of homosexuality. Spy fiction occupies a central position in British popular culture, and by exploring this genre in terms of homosexuality, this research will identify the role which same-sex desire has historically played in the British cultural imagination

    Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s

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    This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectuals’ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life. Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the characters’ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. “Crossing” relates to characters’ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction. There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives. Type 1 is the crossing into “haunted” houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned ‘haunting’, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiers’ silenced, suffocated state. Type 2 is men crossing into female ghosts’ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals. Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the characters’ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the characters’ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality. Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authors’ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society. The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanity’s vices and destructive potential. The primary sources demonstrate their writers’ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and people’s lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity. The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality. This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time

    Pharmacological, Biopesticide, and Post-Harvest Loss Management Application of Jimsonweed (<em>Datura stramonium</em>)

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    Datura stramonium is one of the most intriguing, in part because of its well-known therapeutic and psychoactive properties in the treatment of many diseases. Datura species have been found to exhibit a variety of biological activity. Insecticide, fungicide, antioxidant, antibacterial, hypoglycemic, and immune response boosting properties have been linked to the genus’ species. These effects are linked to the existence of secondary metabolites such as terpenoids, flavonoids, with anolides, tannins, phenolic compounds, and tropane alkaloids, which are the most prevalent atropine and scopolamine in the genus Datura. Ingestion of Jimson weed produces the toxidrome of anticholinergic intoxication. Understanding and recognizing the classic signs and symptoms of anticholinergic intoxication can help clinicians evaluate persons presenting with Jimson weed poisoning. Moreover, this review is to identify the most important phytochemical substances extracted from the Jimsonweed and to characterize their biological activity for health effect and biopesticide application. Biopesticides are less harmful than chemical pesticides because they do not leave harmful residues, generally target one specific pest or a small number of related pests rather than broad spectrum chemical pesticides that affect other beneficial insects, birds, mammals, or non-target species, are effective in smaller quantities, decompose quickly and do not cause environmental problems, and are often cheaper. In conclusion, Datura stramonium, beside its medicinal value, can applicable for biopesticide application and for postharvest loss control of insects such as weevil

    Identification of Hindbrain Neural Substrates for Motor Initiation in the hatchling Xenopus laevis Tadpole

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    Animal survival profoundly depends on the ability to detect stimuli in the environment, process them and respond accordingly. In this respect, motor responses to a sensory stimulation evolved into a variety of coordinated movements, which involve the control of brain centres over spinal locomotor circuits. The hatchling Xenopus tadpole, even in its embryonic stage, is able to detect external sensory information and to swim away if the stimulus is considered noxious. To do so, the tadpole relies on well-known ascending sensory pathway, which carries the sensory information to the brain. When the stimulus is strong enough, descending interneurons are activated, leading to the excitation of spinal CPG neurons, which causes the undulatory movement of swimming. However, the activation of descending interneurons that marks the initiation of motor response appears after a long delay from the sensory stimulation. Furthermore, the long-latency response is variable in time, as observed in the slow-summating excitation measured in descending interneurons. These two features, i.e. long-latency and variability, cannot be explained by the firing time and pattern of the ascending sensory pathway of the Xenopus tadpole. Therefore, a novel neuronal population has been proposed to lie in the hindbrain of the tadpole, and being able to 'hold' the sensory information, thus accounting for the long and variable delay of swim initiation. In this work, the role of the hindbrain in the maintenance of the long and variable response to trunk skin stimulation is investigated in the Xenopustadpole at developmental stage 37/38. A multifaceted approach has been used to unravel the neuronal mechanisms underlying the delayed motor response, including behavioural experiments, electrophysiology analysis of fictive swimming, hindbrain extracellular recordings and imaging experiments. Two novel neuronal populations have been identified in the tadpole's hindbrain, which exhibit activation patterns compatible with the role of delaying the excitation of the spinal locomotor circuit. Future work on cellular properties and synaptic connections of these newly discovered populations might shed light on the mechanism of descending control active at embryonic stage. Identifying supraspinal neuronal populations in an embryonic organism could aid in understanding mechanisms of descending motor control in more complex vertebrates

    Balancing the urban stomach: public health, food selling and consumption in London, c. 1558-1640

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    Until recently, public health histories have been predominantly shaped by medical and scientific perspectives, to the neglect of their wider social, economic and political contexts. These medically-minded studies have tended to present broad, sweeping narratives of health policy's explicit successes or failures, often focusing on extraordinary periods of epidemic disease viewed from a national context. This approach is problematic, particularly in studies of public health practice prior to 1800. Before the rise of modern scientific medicine, public health policies were more often influenced by shared social, cultural, economic and religious values which favoured maintaining hierarchy, stability and concern for 'the common good'. These values have frequently been overlooked by modern researchers. This has yielded pessimistic assessments of contemporary sanitation, implying that local authorities did not care about or prioritise the health of populations. Overly medicalised perspectives have further restricted historians' investigation and use of source material, their interpretation of multifaceted and sometimes contested cultural practices such as fasting, and their examination of habitual - and not just extraordinary - health actions. These perspectives have encouraged a focus on reactive - rather than preventative - measures. This thesis contributes to a growing body of research that expands our restrictive understandings of pre-modern public health. It focuses on how public health practices were regulated, monitored and expanded in later Tudor and early Stuart London, with a particular focus on consumption and food-selling. Acknowledging the fundamental public health value of maintaining urban foodways, it investigates how contemporaries sought to manage consumption, food production waste, and vending practices in the early modern City's wards and parishes. It delineates the practical and political distinctions between food and medicine, broadly investigates the activities, reputations of and correlations between London's guild and itinerant food vendors and licensed and irregular medical practitioners, traces the directions in which different kinds of public health policy filtered up or down, and explores how policies were enacted at a national and local level. Finally, it compares and contrasts habitual and extraordinary public health regulations, with a particular focus on how perceptions of and actual food shortages, paired with the omnipresent threat of disease, impacted broader aspects of civic life

    The applied psychology of addictive orientations : studies in a 12-step treatment context.

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    The clinical data for the studies was collected at The PROMIS Recovery Centre, a Minnesota Model treatmentc entre for addictions,w hich encouragesth e membership and use of the 12 step Anonymous Fellowships, and is abstinence based. The area of addiction is contextualised in a review chapter which focuses on research relating to the phenomenon of cross addiction. A study examining the concept of "addictive orientations" in male and female addicts is described, which develops a study conductedb y StephensonM, aggi, Lefever, & Morojele (1995). This presents study found a four factor solution which appeared to be subdivisions of the previously found Hedonism and Nurturance factors. Self orientated nurturance (both food dimensions, shopping and caffeine), Other orientated nurturance (both compulsive helping dimensions and work), Sensation seeking hedonism (Drugs, prescription drugs, nicotine and marginally alcohol), and Power related hedonism (Both relationship dimensions, sex and gambling. This concept of "addictive orientations" is further explored in a non-clinical population, where again a four factor solution was found, very similar to that in the clinical population. This was thought to indicate that in terms of addictive orientation a pattern already exists in this non-clinical population and that consideration should be given to why this is the case. These orientations are examined in terms of gender differences. It is suggested that the differences between genders reflect power-related role relationships between the sexes. In order to further elaborate the significance and meaning behind these orientations, the next two chapters look at the contribution of personality variables and how addictive orientations relate to psychiatric symptomatology. Personality variables were differentially, and to a considerable extent predictably involved with the four factors for both males and females.Conscientiousness as positively associated with "Other orientated Nurturance" and negatively associated with "Sensation seeking hedonism" (particularly for men). Neuroticism had a particularly strong association with the "Self orientated Nurturance" factor in the female population. More than twice the symptomatology variance was explained by the factor scores for females than it was for males. The most important factorial predictors for psychiatric symptomatology were the "Power related hedonism" factor for males, and "Self oriented nurturance" for females. The results are discussed from theoretical and treatment perspectives
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