A New bush viper

Volume: XXVI

Oversight and Accountability in Corrections

There are seven underlying principles of our vision of excellence in corrections at Hampden County: the first is balance; second is that we are in the business of not just incarceration but corrections; third is that inmates should be held accountable for being positive and productive; fourth is that whether the prison is a state prison or county facility (urban, rural or in-between) it should be part of the community; fifth is that those in custody should be kept at the lowest level of security that is consistent with public safety; sixth is that corrections should not allow itself to be a scapegoat for the failures of the larger society; and the seventh is respect

Altered functional connectivity within the central reward network in overweight and obese women.

Background/objectivesNeuroimaging studies in obese subjects have identified abnormal activation of key regions of central reward circuits, including the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), in response to food-related stimuli. We aimed to examine whether women with elevated body mass index (BMI) show structural and resting state (RS) functional connectivity alterations within regions of the reward network.Subjects/methodsFifty healthy, premenopausal women, 19 overweight and obese (high BMI=26-38 kg m(-2)) and 31 lean (BMI=19-25 kg m(-2)) were selected from the University of California Los Angeles' Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress database. Structural and RS functional scans were collected. Group differences in grey matter volume (GMV) of the NAcc, oscillation dynamics of intrinsic brain activity and functional connectivity of the NAcc to regions within the reward network were examined.ResultsGMV of the left NAcc was significantly greater in the high BMI group than in the lean group (P=0.031). Altered frequency distributions were observed in women with high BMI compared with lean group in the left NAcc (P=0.009) in a medium-frequency (MF) band, and in bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (P=0.014, <0.001) and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (P=0.034, <0.001) in a high-frequency band. Subjects with high BMI had greater connectivity of the left NAcc with bilateral ACC (P=0.024) and right vmPFC (P=0.032) in a MF band and with the left ACC (P=0.03) in a high frequency band.ConclusionsOverweight and obese women in the absence of food-related stimuli show significant structural and functional alterations within regions of reward-related brain networks, which may have a role in altered ingestive behaviors

Pituitary function tests in black patients with pseudocyesis

Pituitary function was evaluated in a group of 10 patients with pseudocyesis. One patient was postmenopausal; the remainder demonstrated normal basal prolactin, luteinising hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels and also normal pituitary-adrenal, pituitary-thyroid axes. Oestradiol deficiency was present in 6 patients, while 2 patients demonstrated elevated serum progesterone values, suggestive of a luteal phase. Gonadotrophin-releasing hormone administration resulted in exaggerated stimulation of LH and FSH in 4 and 2 patients, respectively. Impaired growth hormone (GH) secretion was present in 6 patients after insulin-induced hypoglycaemia and L-dopa administration. GH impairment is probably a consequence of the oestrogen deficiency that commonly occurs in this condition. It thus appears that there are aberrations in specific pituitary hormone responses after provocation in pseudocyesis

Bismabenzene and its dimer

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/21837/1/0000240.pd

Polarimetric imaging for air accident investigation

We report a trial wherein a simple 4 CCD visible-band Polarimetric Imaging (PI) camera was fielded against aircraft debris distributed across an arid terrain, a littoral region and a small number of maritime debris targets A debris field realistically simulating an aircrash and a debris grid of aircraft remains were observed from an air platform flying in dry and sunny conditions. We report PI utility in support of air accident investigation by an enhanced ability to successfully locate small targets within the scene via the use of colour enhanced and decorrelated intensity PI products. Our results indicate that handheld PI capability may represent an effective low cost, upgrade and augmentation option for existing and future imaging systems that would support air accident investigators and assist in the cueing of more sophisticated assets and/or analyst attention

1,5-Trimethylsilyl migrations in 1-trimethylsilylindene

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/32854/1/0000230.pd

Noisy Coherent Population Trapping: Applications to Noise Estimation and Qubit State Preparation

Coherent population trapping is a well-known quantum phenomenon in a driven $\Lambda$ system, with many applications across quantum optics. However, when a stochastic bath is present in addition to vacuum noise, the observed trapping is no longer perfect. Here we derive a time-convolutionless master equation describing the equilibration of the $\Lambda$ system in the presence of additional temporally correlated classical noise, with an unknown decay parameter. Our simulations show a one-to-one correspondence between the decay parameter and the depth of the characteristic dip in the photoluminescence spectrum, thereby enabling the unknown parameter to be estimated from the observed spectra. We apply our analysis to the problem of qubit state initialization in a $\Lambda$ system via dark states and show how the stochastic bath affects the fidelity of such initialization as a function of the desired dark-state amplitudes. We show that an optimum choice of Rabi frequencies is possible

Creep Forming of Carbon-Reinforced Ceramic-Matrix Composites

A set of lecture slides describes an investigation of creep forming as a means of imparting desired curvatures to initially flat stock plates of carbon-reinforced ceramic-matrix composite (C-CMC) materials. The investigation is apparently part of a continuing effort to develop improved means of applying small CCMC repair patches to reinforced carbon-carbon leading edges of aerospace vehicles (e.g., space shuttles) prior to re-entry into the atmosphere of the Earth. According to one of the slides, creep forming would be an intermediate step in a process that would yield a fully densified, finished C-CMC part having a desired size and shape (the other steps would include preliminary machining, finish machining, densification by chemical vapor infiltration, and final coating). The investigation included experiments in which C-CMC disks were creep-formed by heating them to unspecified high temperatures for time intervals of the order of 1 hour while they were clamped into single- and double-curvature graphite molds. The creep-formed disks were coated with an oxidation- protection material, then subjected to arc-jet tests, in which the disks exhibited no deterioration after exposure to high-temperature test conditions lasting 490 seconds