Public Health Versus Court-Sponsored Secrecy

Public health practice relies on access to information. Givelber and Robbins discuss the debate about court-sponsored secrecy: Whether or not courts should tolerate, edorse, or protect secrecy when the sequestered information might help protect the public health

Use of Self Organizing Maps in Technique Analysis

This study looked at the coordination patterns of four participants performing three different basketball shots from different distances. The shots selected were the three-point shot, the free throw shot and the hook shot; the latter was included to encourage a phase transition between shots. We hypothesised lower variability between the three-point and free throw shots compared to the hook shot. The study uses Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) to expose the non-linearity of the movement and to try to explain more specifically what it is about the coordination patterns that make them different or similar. The SOM proved to draw the researcher\u27s attention to aspects of the movement that were not obvious from a visual analysis of the original movement either viewed from video or as computer animation. A speculative link between the observational learning literature on the importance of the kinematics of distal segments in skill acquisition and the visual information a coach or analyst may rely on for qualitative technique analysis was made. Although making the distinction between the three shooting conditions was meant to be a trivial exercise, in many cases for this dataset the SOM output and the natural inclination of the movement analyst did not agree: the SOM may provide a more objective method for explaining movement patterning

Safety signals as instrumental reinforcers during free-operant avoidance.

Safety signals provide "relief" through predicting the absence of an aversive event. At issue is whether these signals also act as instrumental reinforcers. Four experiments were conducted using a free-operant lever-press avoidance paradigm in which each press avoided shock and was followed by the presentation of a 5-sec auditory safety signal. When given a choice between two levers in Experiment 1, both avoiding shock, rats preferentially responded on the lever that produced the safety signal as feedback, even when footshock was omitted. Following avoidance training with a single lever in Experiment 2, removal of the signal led to a decrease in avoidance responses and an increase in responses during the safety period normally denoted by the signal. These behavioral changes demonstrate the dual conditioned reinforcing and fear inhibiting properties of the safety signal. The associative processes that support the reinforcing properties of a safety signal were tested using a novel revaluation procedure. Prior experience of systemic morphine during safety signal presentations resulted in an increased rate of avoidance responses to produce the safety signal during a drug-free extinction test, a finding not seen with d-amphetamine in Experiment 3. Morphine revaluation of the safety signal was repeated in Experiment 4 followed by a drug-free extinction test in which responses did not produce the signal for the first 10 min of the session. Instrumental avoidance in the absence of the signal was shown to be insensitive to prior signal revaluation, suggesting that the signal reinforces free-operant avoidance behavior through a habit-like mechanism.This study was supported by a Wellcome Trust Programme grant to TWR, JW Dalley, BJ Everitt, AC Roberts and BJ Sahakian (089589/z/09/z). AF was supported by an MRC Case studentship and GU was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship. The authors would also like to thank Dr Rudolf Cardinal for his helpful comments and critiques of the manuscript. The study was completed within the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, supported by a joint award from the MRC and the Wellcome Trust (G00001354).This is the final published version. It's also available from the publishers at http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/21/9/488.long

Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) investigation of hypersonic flowfields in a Mach 10 wind tunnel

Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) of nitric oxide (NO) was used to visualize four different hypersonic flowfields in the NASA Langley Research Center 31-Inch Mach 10 Air wind tunnel. The four configurations were: (1) the wake flowfield of a fuselage-only X-33 lifting body, (2) flow over a flat plate containing a rectangular cavity, (3) flow over a 70deg blunted cone with a cylindrical afterbody, formerly studied by an AGARD working group, and (4) an Apollo-geometry entry capsule - relevant to the Crew Exploration Vehicle currently being developed by NASA. In all cases, NO was seeded into the flowfield through tubes inside or attached to the model sting and strut. PLIF was used to visualize the NO in the flowfield. In some cases pure NO was seeded into the flow while in other cases a 5% NO, 95% N2 mix was injected. Several parameters were varied including seeding method and location, seeding mass flow rate, model angle of attack and tunnel stagnation pressure, which varies the unit Reynolds number. The location of the laser sheet was as also varied to provide three dimensional flow information. Virtual Diagnostics Interface (ViDI) technology developed at NASA Langley was used to visualize the data sets in post processing. The measurements demonstrate some of the capabilities of the PLIF method for studying hypersonic flows

Effect of postactivation potentiation on fifty-meter freestyle in national swimmers

Effect of postactivation potentiation (PAP) on fifty meters freestyle in national swimmers. 2013.- The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of PAP on 50m freestyle in national-level swimmers. Four warm-ups were compared: A traditional race-specific warm-up (RSWU), upper body PAP (UBPAP), lower body PAP (LBPAP) and combined PAP warm-up (CPAP). Eighteen (10 men, 8 women) national-level swimmers participated in this study, which included seven separate testing sessions. Participants' 3 repetition maximum (3RM) of the pull-up (PU) was established in session 1. In session 2, rest periods for muscle enhancement of the upper body were determined using a medicine-ballthrow test 4, 8 and 12 minutes post UBPAP stimulus (1 x 3RM of the PU). In session 3, swimmers performed a counter movement jump 4, 8 and 12 minutes post LBPAP stimulus (1x5 jumps to a box whilst carrying 10% of the participants' body weight). The 50m freestyle tests were performed on sessions 4 to 7, preceded by each warm-up protocol and corresponding rest periods. A repeated measures ANOVA (p<0.05) and Bonferroni post hoc test revealed that RSWU elicited faster swimming times than UBPAP (29.00 ± 2.05 vs. 29.36 ± 1.88s p=0.046). Additionally, when data were split into gender, in the male group the UBPAP elicited significantly slower times than RSWU (27.51 ± 1.06 vs. 28.01 ± 1.17s p=0.047) and CPAP (27.49 ± 1.12 vs. 28.01 ± 1.17s p=0.02). These findings suggest individualized PAP warm-up may be a valuable tool to enhance performance in sprint events, particularly in male swimmers. However, the PU may not be an appropriate PAP stimulus on its own

Environmental Public Health Awaits Rediscovery

Preventing environmental exposures that threaten human health remains among the best but least attended to opportunities to improve everyone’s health. For more than a decade, medical care concerns, exacerbated by voracious competition among medical empires and the implacably growing number of uninsured, have often been misconstrued as constituting a complete agenda for health system reform. The authors explain the predicament from an historical perspective — how defining events moved U.S. health policy away from protecting the public against dangerous exposures toward unrealistic expectations that doctors will fix whatever goes wrong, at least for individuals with ample medical insurance. They explain how environmentally oriented public health is uniquely suited to help organized medical care with its biggest headache: how to restrain expenditures while producing health. The authors provide specific examples of what has been lost and a prescription for how the U.S. could become the first among nations to strategically link public health and increasingly organized medical care to improve population health

A waken the giant within = bangunkan kuasa raksasa di dalam diri

Anthony Robbins, tokoh terkemukan dalam ilmu pengetahuan tentang performa puncak, menunjukan startegi-strategi dan teknik-tekniknya yang paling efektif, untuk menguasai emosi anda , tubuh anda, hubungan-hubungan anda. Sebagai pakar yang diakui dalam psikologi perubahan ini, Anthony Robbins memberikan program selangkah-demi selangkah yang mengajarkan pelajaran-pelajaran mendasar berupa penguasaan diri yang akan memungkin anda menemukan amaksud anda yang sesungguhnya, mengendalikan kehidupan anda, dan mengerahkan daya-daya yang membentuk takdir and

Paper Session I-B - Report on the International Space Station\u27s Planning for Critical Assembly Phase Failures

During the early assembly missions the International Space Station could experience failures that will leave it single fault tolerant or could seriously reduce it’s power generating capability. These failures or reduction in power generating ability could endanger the crew, the station or completely bring ISS assembly to a halt until corrected. Recent analysis and planning have been completed that looked at critical hardware failures and recommended work around strategies, manifesting of spares or on-orbit stowage of spares. The implementation of this analysis will allow ISS assembly to continue with minimum impact. This report describes how the analysis was brought about, the analysis process and finally the implementation strategy recommended and being put into place