A surgical treatment for anxiety-triggered palmar hyperhidrosis is not unlike treating tearfulness in major depression by severing the nerves to the lacrimal glands

not applicabl

Reading Character In Ho Minfong’s The Clay Marble

Sarun and Dara share a bittersweet relationship. At the beginning of the novel, the relationship is supportive as Sarun guides and leads the family towards Nong Chan, where there is supposed to be an abundance of food and supplies. He has dreams of gathering supplies at Nong Chan such as food, rice seed, and other supplies so that they can go home, repair the house, replant the fields, and start their life all over again. As a responsible elder brother, he chides her for being impatient in demanding food immediately and complaining that the rice was insufficient and cold. Eventually, their relationship becomes an antagonistic one as their character growth levels head in different directions, with Dara maturing towards becoming a responsible adult and Sarun regressing into becoming a spoilt, temperamental and petty child-like adult

Narrative Leadership: Exploring the Concept of Time in Leader Storytelling

This dissertation explores leader storytelling and the use of temporality in leader enactment. Although narrative leadership is broadly described in previous theory as leading with storytelling, a formal theory of narrative leadership has not yet been developed. Recently, researchers have identified the narrator’s ability to locate a story within a meaningful time continuum of past, present, and future as potentially important. Using a grounded theory approach, the question that guided the research was: How does the use of time in narrative impact the enactment of leadership during a strategic change? With the goal of developing a theory that emerges from the ground up, a three-pronged approach was utilized. A review of the literature on narrative, leader sensegiving and sensemaking, and current conceptualizations of temporality (including cosmic versus phenomenological time; chronos, kairos, and chaos; monochronic, polychronic, and cyclical orientation; and near-distant-deep time) was conducted. Then, seven leaders identified as exemplars in the use of storytelling for organizational change were interviewed. These interviews were coded and analyzed for emergent concepts to build a theoretical model of story and time. The model was assessed with the reflections of employees of a sub-set of the original leaders and researchers’ reflexive journals. The process model of time-based narrative leadership that culminated from these steps includes three critical components: action, identity, and meaning. Action refers to the new or changed cognition or behavior that the leader’s story prompts; identity is the centrality of the leader’s past experience for facilitating listener engagement and visualizing a landscape for future action; and meaning is the leader’s sensemaking for understanding and learning at personal or collective levels. Furthermore, it is proposed that the theory of sensegiving provides the best framing for the observed stories, and that the study’s culminating model contributes important directions for future research. In the leaders’ stories, giving sense to others in the organization pivots on the leaders’ own personal experience as landscape for the unknown future. Implications of the culminating model and directions for future research are discussed

The Locus Ceruleus in PTSD

NO ABSTRACT: This is 750 word encyclopedia entr

The MOUSE approach: Mapping Ontologies using UML for System Engineers

To address the problem of semantic heterogeneity, there has been a large body of research directed toward the study of semantic mapping technologies. Although various semantic mapping technologies have been investigated,  facilitating the process for domain experts to perform a semantic data integration task is still not easy. This is because one is required not only to possess domain expertise but also to have a good understanding of knowledge engineering. This paper proposes an approach that automatically transforms an abstract semantic mapping syntax into a concrete executable mapping syntax, we call this approach MOUSE (Mapping Ontologies using UML for System Engineers). In order to evaluate MOUSE, an implementation of this approach for a semantic data integration use case has been developed (called SDI, Semantic Data Integration). The aim is to enable domain experts, particularly system engineers, to undertake mappings using a technology that they are familiar with (UML), while ensuring the created mappings are accurate and the approach is easy to use. The proposed UML-based abstract mapping syntax is evaluated through usability experiments conducted in a lab environment by participants who have skills equivalent to real life system engineers using the SDI tool. Results from the evaluations show that the participants could correctly undertake the semantic data integration task using the MOUSE approach while maintaining accuracy and usability (in terms of ease of use)

Robust H.263+ video for real-time Internet applications

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3D time series analysis of cell shape using Laplacian approaches

Background: Fundamental cellular processes such as cell movement, division or food uptake critically depend on cells being able to change shape. Fast acquisition of three-dimensional image time series has now become possible, but we lack efficient tools for analysing shape deformations in order to understand the real three-dimensional nature of shape changes. Results: We present a framework for 3D+time cell shape analysis. The main contribution is three-fold: First, we develop a fast, automatic random walker method for cell segmentation. Second, a novel topology fixing method is proposed to fix segmented binary volumes without spherical topology. Third, we show that algorithms used for each individual step of the analysis pipeline (cell segmentation, topology fixing, spherical parameterization, and shape representation) are closely related to the Laplacian operator. The framework is applied to the shape analysis of neutrophil cells. Conclusions: The method we propose for cell segmentation is faster than the traditional random walker method or the level set method, and performs better on 3D time-series of neutrophil cells, which are comparatively noisy as stacks have to be acquired fast enough to account for cell motion. Our method for topology fixing outperforms the tools provided by SPHARM-MAT and SPHARM-PDM in terms of their successful fixing rates. The different tasks in the presented pipeline for 3D+time shape analysis of cells can be solved using Laplacian approaches, opening the possibility of eventually combining individual steps in order to speed up computations