The promise and challenge of collaboration for CSR: Corporate- NGO engagement

Against the backdrop of a new Indian legislation that makes CSR mandatory, this short piece unpacks the pragmatic and ideological tensions and challenges in achieving the promise of corporate-NGO engagement

'CARE’ in social media: Perceptions of reputation in the healthcare sector

Guided by the growing importance of social-mediated organisational communication, this study examines how communication professionals within healthcare organisations perceive and respond to the impacts of social media on the organisation’s reputation. Although the healthcare sector finds itself in the midst of a (continually) transforming landscape characterized by large amounts of digital health (mis)information and an empowered ‘patient-as-consumer,’ little is known about how professionals in this sector understand the changes and respond to them. Moreover, much extant schol

An ontological approach to creating an Andean Weaving Knowledge Base

Andean textiles are products of one of the richest, oldest and continuous weaving traditions in the world. Understanding the knowledge and practice of textile production as a form of cultural heritage is particularly relevant in the Andean context due to erosion of clothing traditions, reuse of traditional textiles on commodities targeted at the tourism market, and loss of knowledge embedded in textile production. ``Weaving Communities of Practice'' was a pilot project that aimed to create a knowledge base of Andean weaving designed to contribute to curatorial practice and heritage policy. The research team gathered data on the chain of activities, instruments, resources, peoples, places and knowledge involved in the production of textiles, relating to over 700 textile samples. A major part of the project has been the modelling and representation of the knowledge of domain experts and information about the textile objects themselves in the form of an OWL ontology, and the development of a suite of search facilities to be supported by the ontology. This paper describes the research challenges faced in developing the ontology and search facilities, the methodology adopted, the design and implementation of the system, and the design and outcomes of a user evaluation of the system undertaken with a group of domain experts

Ethanol seeking triggered by environmental context is attenuated by blocking dopamine D1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens core and shell in rats

Conditioned behavioral responses to discrete drug-associated cues can be modulated by the environmental context in which those cues are experienced, a process that may facilitate relapse in humans. Rodent models of drug self-administration have been adapted to reveal the capacity of contexts to trigger drug seeking, thereby enabling neurobiological investigations of this effect. We tested the hypothesis that dopamine transmission in the nucleus accumbens, a neural structure that mediates reinforcement, is necessary for context-induced reinstatement of responding for ethanol-associated cues. Rats pressed one lever (active) for oral ethanol (0.1 ml; 10% v/v) in operant conditioning chambers distinguished by specific visual, olfactory, and tactile contextual stimuli. Ethanol delivery was paired with a discrete (4 s) light-noise stimulus. Responses on a second lever (inactive) were not reinforced. Behavior was then extinguished by withholding ethanol but not the discrete stimulus in a different context. Reinstatement, expressed as elevated responding for the discrete stimulus without ethanol delivery, was tested by placing rats into the prior self-administration context after administration of saline or the dopamine D1 receptor antagonist, SCH 23390 (0.006, 0.06, and 0.6 μg/side), into the nucleus accumbens core or shell. Compared with extinction responding, active lever pressing in saline-pretreated rats was enhanced by placement into the prior ethanol self-administration context. SCH 23390 dose-dependently reduced reinstatement after infusion into the core or shell. These findings suggest a critical role for dopamine acting via D1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens in the reinstatement of responding for ethanol cues triggered by placement into an ethanol-associated context

Estimation of the elastic modulus and the work of adhesion of soft materials using the extended Borodich–Galanov (BG) method and depth sensing indentation

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd The depth-sensing indentation (DSI) is currently one of the main experimental techniques for studying elastic properties of materials of small volumes. Usually DSI tests are performed using sharp pyramidal indenters and the load-displacement curves obtained are used for estimations of elastic moduli of materials, while the curve analysis for these estimations is based on the assumptions of the Hertz contact theory of non-adhesive contact. The Borodich–Galanov (BG) method provides an alternative methodology for estimations of the elastic moduli along with estimations of the work of adhesion of the contacting pair in a single experiment using the experimental DSI data for spherical indenters. The method assumes fitting the experimental points of the load-displacement curves using a dimensionless expression of an appropriate theory of adhesive contact. Earlier numerical simulations showed that the BG method was robust. Here first the original BG method is modified and then its accuracy in the estimation of the reduced elastic modulus is directly tested by comparison with the results of conventional tensile tests. The method modification is twofold: (i) a two-stage fitting of the theoretical DSI dependency to the experimental data is used and (ii) a new objective functional is introduced which minimizes the squared norm of difference between the theoretical curve and the one used in preliminary data fitting. The direct experimental validation of accuracy and robustness of the BG method has two independent steps. First the material properties of polyvinyl siloxane (PVS) are determined from a DSI data by means of the modified BG method; and then the obtained results for the reduced elastic modulus are compared with the results of tensile tests on dumbbell specimens made of the same charge of PVS. Comparison of the results of the two experiments showed that the absolute minimum in relative difference between individual identified values of the reduced elastic modulus in the two experiments was 3.80%; the absolute maximum of the same quantity was 27.38%; the relative difference in averaged values of the reduced elastic modulus varied in the range 16.20.. 17.09% depending on particular settings used during preliminary fitting. Hence, the comparison of the results shows that the experimental values of the elastic modulus obtained by the tensile tests are in good agreement with the results of the extended BG method. Our analysis shows that unaccounted factors and phenomena tend to decrease the difference in the results of the two experiments. Thus, the robustness and accuracy of the proposed extension of the BG method has been directly validated

A Method for the Generation of Ectromelia Virus (ECTV) Recombinants: In Vivo Analysis of ECTV vCD30 Deletion Mutants

Ectromelia virus (ECTV) is the causative agent of mousepox, a lethal disease of mice with similarities to human smallpox. Mousepox progression involves replication at the initial site of infection, usually the skin, followed by a rapid spread to the secondary replicative organs, spleen and liver, and finally a dissemination to the skin, where the typical rash associated with this and other orthopoxviral induced diseases appears. Case fatality rate is genetically determined and reaches up to 100% in susceptible mice strains. Like other poxviruses, ECTV encodes a number of proteins with immunomodulatory potential, whose role in mousepox progression remains largely undescribed. Amongst these is a secreted homologue of the cellular tumour necrosis factor receptor superfamily member CD30 which has been proposed to modulate a Th1 immune response in vivo

Metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 as a potential target for smoking cessation

Rationale Most habitual smokers find it difficult to quit smoking because they are dependent upon the nicotine present in tobacco smoke. Tobacco dependence is commonly treated pharmacologically using nicotine replacement therapy or drugs, such as varenicline, that target the nicotinic receptor. Relapse rates, however, remain high and there remains a need to develop novel non-nicotinic pharmacotherapies for the dependence that are more effective than existing treatments. Objective The purpose of this paper is to review the evidence from preclinical and clinical studies that drugs that antagonise the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) in the brain are likely to be efficacious as treatments for tobacco dependence. Results Imaging studies reveal that chronic exposure to tobacco smoke reduces the density of mGluR5s in human brain. Preclinical results demonstrate that negative allosteric modulators (NAMs) at mGluR5 attenuate both nicotine self-administration and the reinstatement of responding evoked by exposure to conditioned cues paired with nicotine delivery. They also attenuate the effects of nicotine on brain dopamine pathways implicated in addiction. Conclusions Although mGluR5 NAMs attenuate most of the key facets of nicotine dependence they potentiate the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. This may limit their value as smoking cessation aids. The NAMs that have been employed most widely in preclinical studies of nicotine dependence have too many \u201coff target\u201d effects to be used clinically. However newer mGluR5 NAMs have been developed for clinical use in other indications. Future studies will determine if these agents can also be used effectively and safely to treat tobacco dependence

Surviving Mousepox Infection Requires the Complement System

Poxviruses subvert the host immune response by producing immunomodulatory proteins, including a complement regulatory protein. Ectromelia virus provides a mouse model for smallpox where the virus and the host's immune response have co-evolved. Using this model, our study investigated the role of the complement system during a poxvirus infection. By multiple inoculation routes, ectromelia virus caused increased mortality by 7 to 10 days post-infection in C57BL/6 mice that lack C3, the central component of the complement cascade. In C3−/− mice, ectromelia virus disseminated earlier to target organs and generated higher peak titers compared to the congenic controls. Also, increased hepatic inflammation and necrosis correlated with these higher tissue titers and likely contributed to the morbidity in the C3−/− mice. In vitro, the complement system in naïve C57BL/6 mouse sera neutralized ectromelia virus, primarily through the recognition of the virion by natural antibody and activation of the classical and alternative pathways. Sera deficient in classical or alternative pathway components or antibody had reduced ability to neutralize viral particles, which likely contributed to increased viral dissemination and disease severity in vivo. The increased mortality of C4−/− or Factor B−/− mice also indicates that these two pathways of complement activation are required for survival. In summary, the complement system acts in the first few minutes, hours, and days to control this poxviral infection until the adaptive immune response can react, and loss of this system results in lethal infection