Food Quality Standards in Equilibrium Models: A Discussion of Current Modeling Approaches

Throughout recent year food quality standards have become a ubiquitous phenomenon that nationally and globally influences agri-food markets. With equilibrium models commonly used in the quantitative analysis of market and trade effects, we review possible approaches to modeling standards existent in the literature, elaborate the reasoning behind them and discuss their suitability to reflect "real world" situations. While the modeling approaches identified may respectively depict a specific situation, they may not be appropriate in others. That is they capture certain effects of standards only. With increasing ability to account for the various effects of standards, the modeling approaches become more complex and the data requirements increase.food quality, standards, modeling approaches, equilibrium models, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, F1, C6, Q18,

THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG MASTER’S LEVEL COUNSELING TRAINEES’ TRAINING LEVEL, EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, AND PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF EMOTION REGULATION DURING A SIMULATED COUNSELING INTERACTION

This study explored the relationships among master’s level counseling trainees’ level of training, ability emotional intelligence (EI), and psychophysiological correlates of emotion regulation recorded during a video-simulated client interaction. Agreement exists among counselor educators, researchers, and theorists that counselors’ emotion regulation is foundational to the competent delivery of counseling treatment. The literature further suggests that counselors and trainees experience frequent emotional challenges that overwhelm emotion regulation skills, interfere with competent delivery of service, and affect client outcomes. However, little research in counseling training and supervision has investigated trainees’ emotion regulation or factors that support adaptive emotion regulation while trainees interact with clients who are experiencing emotional distress. Participants were 66 master’s level counseling trainees from counseling programs accredited by the Counsel for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. Participants’ EI was operationalized as scores on the Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, 2003). Emotion regulation was operationalized as electrodermal activity (EDA), high-frequency heart rate variability, and the standard deviation of normal heartbeat intervals (HRV-SDNN). Correlation and regression analyses indicated that psychophysiological correlates of trainees’ emotion regulation were not significantly correlated with training. However, HRV-SDNN significantly correlated with total EI, and the EI subscale Perceiving Emotions, while EDA significantly correlated with the Managing Emotions subscale

DOC 2014-10 Proposal for MS in Education - Leadership for Educational Systems

Legislative authorit

FN-EDA domain knock-in and knock-out mice, as a model for the study of the hepatic fibronectin (FN) functions

Fibronectin (FN) is a multidomain glycoprotein found in plasma and tissue extracellular matrices (ECM). Plasma FN (pFN) is produced and secreted into the bloodstream by the liver. Liver ECM-FN and pFN are characte,rized by the absence of the EDA domain, one of the three FN exons undergoing alternative splicing. However, in pathological situations such as wound healing, the liver produces and accumulates huge amounts of EDA+FN in sinusoidal ECM. In order to study the functions of the FN isoforms produced by the liver, we used two mouse strains devoid of EDA-exon alternative splicing, which constitutively include (EDA+/+ strain) or exclude (EDA-/- strain) the EDA domain. The EDA+/+ strain is characterized by an important decrease of FN levels both in plasma and tissues. Here, we show that the atypycal presence of the EDA domain in hepatocytes affects pFN secretion into the bloodstream and we demonstrate that a high proportion of tissue ECM-FN is supplied by plasma. In fact, removal of the EDA exon only from the liver, by hepatocyt'-specific deletion of the EDA exon, restores normal levels of FN in both plasma and tissues of the EDA+/+ animals. This finding not only suggests that plasma behaves as a sort of FN reservoir for tissue maintenance but also shows for the first time that the pFN contribution to the ECM of tissues is roughly equal to that produced locally. The EDA-/- strain was used to study the role of the EDA domain in the onset of liver fibrosis. In two different liver fibrosis models, we observed that EDA-/- animals develop attenuated fibrosis in comparison to control mice. The important role of the EDA domain in the activation and proliferation of the hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), these are the key cells responsible for the ECM protein overproduction in the fibrotic processes, is demonstrated for the first time in vivo. EDA-/- livers treated to induce fibrosis, present a striking reduction in the number of myofibroblasts or activated HSCs, suggesting that the EDA domain could be a potential target for the treatment of liver fibrosis

Defense Industry Transition in California

The Senate Committee on Rules contracted in 1993 with policy analyst Joseph E. Nation to develop a California action plan on defense conversion, under the direction of the Senate Office of Research. This report explores the transition of California defense industries from contracting with the federal government to manufacturing products for commercial use. It is based on research through 1993, and is the first of two reports by Mr. Nation. The second will review issues associated with the closing of military bases in California

Defense Industry Transition in California

The Senate Committee on Rules contracted in 1993 with policy analyst Joseph E. Nation to develop a California action plan on defense conversion, under the direction of the Senate Office of Research. This report explores the transition of California defense industries from contracting with the federal government to manufacturing products for commercial use. It is based on research through 1993, and is the first of two reports by Mr. Nation. The second will review issues associated with the closing of military bases in California

Flipping Biological Switches: Solving for Optimal Control: A Dissertation

Switches play an important regulatory role at all levels of biology, from molecular switches triggering signaling cascades to cellular switches regulating cell maturation and apoptosis. Medical therapies are often designed to toggle a system from one state to another, achieving a specified health outcome. For instance, small doses of subpathologic viruses activate the immune system’s production of antibodies. Electrical stimulation revert cardiac arrhythmias back to normal sinus rhythm. In all of these examples, a major challenge is finding the optimal stimulus waveform necessary to cause the switch to flip. This thesis develops, validates, and applies a novel model-independent stochastic algorithm, the Extrema Distortion Algorithm (EDA), towards finding the optimal stimulus. We validate the EDA’s performance for the Hodgkin-Huxley model (an empirically validated ionic model of neuronal excitability), the FitzHugh-Nagumo model (an abstract model applied to a wide range of biological systems that that exhibit an oscillatory state and a quiescent state), and the genetic toggle switch (a model of bistable gene expression). We show that the EDA is able to not only find the optimal solution, but also in some cases excel beyond the traditional analytic approaches. Finally, we have computed novel optimal stimulus waveforms for aborting epileptic seizures using the EDA in cellular and network models of epilepsy. This work represents a first step in developing a new class of adaptive algorithms and devices that flip biological switches, revealing basic mechanistic insights and therapeutic applications for a broad range of disorders

Federal Register

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii

Temporal bisection is influenced by ensemble statistics of the stimulus set

Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevertheless susceptible to temporal context. Previous research on temporal bisection has shown that duration comparisons are influenced by both stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics. However, theories proposed to account for bisection performance lack a plausible justification of how the effects of stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics are actually combined in temporal judgments. To explain the various contextual effects in temporal bisection, we develop a unified ensemble-distribution account (EDA), which assumes that the mean and variance of the duration set serve as a reference, rather than the short and long standards, in duration comparison. To validate this account, we conducted three experiments that varied the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1), the frequency of the probed durations (Experiment 2), and the variability of the probed durations (Experiment 3). The results revealed significant shifts of the bisection point in Experiments 1 and 2, and a change of the sensitivity of temporal judgments in Experiment 3-which were all well predicted by EDA. In fact, comparison of EDA to the extant prior accounts showed that using ensemble statistics can parsimoniously explain various stimulus set-related factors (e.g., spacing, frequency, variance) that influence temporal judgments