Frontostriatal deficit in Motor Neuron Disease/Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (MND/ALS)

So far, cognitive derangements in MND/ALS have not been widely studied. Nevertheless, it seems that in subgroups of patients cognitive functions are impaired in different degree, so that often at least two sub-types of the syndrome are reported: Motor Neuron Disease/Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/Dementia Syndrome (MND/ALS/DS) and Motor Neuron Disease/Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/ Aphasia Syndrome (MND/ALS/AS. A third subtype showing both symptoms of cognitive impairment may be identified in subgroups of patients and denominated Motor Neuron Disease/Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/Dementia-Aphasia Syndrome (MND/ALS/DAS). Frontostriatal system is reported as a network heavily damaged in MND/ALS/DS, MND/ALS/AS, MND/ALS/DAS. The system is plausibly responsible of motor skills and verbs production, hence to become aware of a possible frontostriatal deficit in subgroup of MND/ALS patients might consent us to link at the brain level (motor) action and verbs and possibly ideomotor praxia and verbs. We have used Goal-Oriented Perception Task (GOPT) and Action Fluency Task (AFT) in order to detect with some accuracy impairments related to gestaltic analysis directed toward a goal, and verb retrieval deficits possibly underlying executive system dysfunction that destabilizes the ability to mentally coordinate the information associated with a verb. These tests should consent to detect possible frontostriatal derangements. We have tested 10 MND/ALS patients and 10 healthy subjects matched fore age, sex and laterality. AFT showed that 3 out of 6 patients are heavily impaired in this test (6.3 (mean) verbs generated vs 13.3 of the control group). GOPT detected a remarkable impairment in all patients: p=0.0021 (grammatical side), p=0.0002 (perceptual side). Reported frontostriatal deficit in MND/ALS seems confirmed by this study, and probably it is more easily detected by GOPT than by AFT

Soil fertility comparison among organic and conventional managed citrus orchards in Sicily.

In recents years, organic farming is expanding in Southern Italy and in the Mediterranean area, due to interest of consumers and EU agricultural policies. Evaluation of organic farming system introduction on soil quality and fertility status should be taken into account in order to define medium-long term environmental and agricultural strategies, on both locol and national scale. Soil physical, chemical and biological parameters represent effective tools to evaluate soil quality and changes in soil fertility status, as a consequence of different agronomic management (i.e. organic vs coventional). The aim of this work was to compare soil fertility of conventional and organic managed citrus Orchards, using specific soil system descriptors. The research was carried out in a Mediterranean environment (Sicil Region, Southern Italy), on Navelina and Tarocco orchards. Soil characteristics were analysed in 54 farms under both organic and conventional management. Farms were selected to obtain similar pairs (27) in the same environmental conditions. Moreover, orchards pairs were homogeneous for age, cultivar and rootsock to reduce effects not linked to soil management. For each soil, total organic carbon, total nitrogen, mineral NO3-N and NH4-N were determined. In addition, in order to evaluate biological fertility of the considered soils, carbon mineralisation and nitrogen mineralisation in anaerobic conditions were studied. Soils' humic fraction was at least characterised qualitatively by isoelectric focusing technique,to obtain information on soil organic matter stability. Potenzially mineralisable carbon and cumulative mineralised carbon determined on 21 days experimental trials differed significantly in organic and conventional soils. Since this significance was detected also for cumulative mineralised carbon after 7 days, probably C-mineralisation represents the more reliable and prompter indicator to discriminate soil biological fertility with respect to the other tested ones. Moreover, it should be remarked that some parameters (as total nitrogen content, mineralised carbon after 1 days and the more humified organic matter fraction), even if not yet significantly different, revealed a strong tendency to increase in organic managed soils, attesting that the organic citrus orchards can be considered systems able to conserve energy and store nutrients more than the conventional ones

Delayed Manifestation of Transurethral Syndrome as a Complication of Transurethral Prostatic Resection

Metabolic encephalopathy as a part of ‘transurethral syndrome’ is an immediate complication following transurethral resection of prostate. It occurs during or few hours after the surgery. However, delayed manifestation of this complication is rare. It is also possible that pretreatment with diuretics can exaggerate this problem by predisposing the patient to electrolyte abnormalities. Here we present a report of such a patient who manifested with neurological complications six days after the prostate surger

A Giant Lipoma In The Hand - Report Of A Rare Case

A 38 years old male patient presented with a large painless swelling in the right palm with ultrasound examination suggestive of fatty nature of the swelling MRI showing a well-circumscribed soft tissue swelling in the deep palmar space. The giant tumor of 6.5 X 4 cm was excised and the patient was symptom free two years following the surgery

Adapted Extended Baum-Welch transformations

The discrimination technique for estimating parameters of Gaussian mixtures that is based on the Extended Baum-Welch transformations (EBW) has had significant impact on the speech recognition community. \ud In this paper we introduce a general definition of a family of EBW transformations that can be associated with a weighted sum of updated and initial models. We compute a gradient steepness measurement for a family of EBW transformations that are applied to functions of Gaussian mixtures and demonstrate the growth property of these transformations. We consider EBW transformations of discriminative functions in which EBW controlled parameters are adapted to a gradient steepness measurement or to the likelihood of the data given the model. We present experimental results that show that adapted EBW transformations can significantly speed up estimating parameters of Gaussian mixtures and give better decoding results

Global challenges of graduate level Ayurvedic education: A survey

In the present day scenario, Ayurveda is globally being perceived in several contradictory ways. Poor quality of Ayurveda graduates produced as a result of poorly structured and poorly regulated education system is at least one of the important factors responsible for this scenario. The present study was carried out to evaluate the 'Global challenges of graduate level Ayurvedic education' and is based on the responses of Ayurvedic students and Ayurvedic teachers from various educational institutions of India to a methodically validated questionnaire. As the study indicates, the poor standard of Ayurvedic education in India is definitely a cause of concern. The curriculum of Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) course of studies is required to be reviewed and restructured. The syllabi are required to be updated with certain relevant topics like laws governing the intellectual property rights, basic procedures of standardization of medicinal products, fundamental methods of evaluating the toxicity of the medicinal products, essentials of healthcare management and the basics of cultivation and marketing of medicinal plants. Furthermore, the study suggests that the Ayurvedic academicians are required to be trained in standard methods of research and documentation skills, and the educational institutions are required to be encouraged to contribute their share in building up the evidence base for Ayurveda in the form of quality education and research

Prelimenary results on a comparative study evaluating landraces of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in organic agriculture in a protected area (Northern Greece)

Organic farming requires cultivars or landraces that are specifically adapted to this low input cropping system. Six landraces of Greek common dry bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and one from the neighbouring Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) were evaluated for different agronomic and physicochemical characteristics under organic conditions in the National Park of the lake Prespes, on the borders of Greece, FYROM and Albania. Significant differences among landraces were found in yield characteristics such as yield plant-1, pod plant-1 and seeds pod-1 with two of the landraces performing the best. The cooking time was estimated by measuring seed hardness using a penetrometer. There was a considerable variation between the landraces tested with cooking times between 25-45 minutes. Some of the landraces could be a useful resource for the development of organic farming systems in this protected area

Generalization of Extended Baum-Welch Parameter Estimation for Discriminative Training and Decoding

We demonstrate the generalizability of the Extended Baum-Welch (EBW) algorithm not only for HMM parameter estimation but for decoding as well.\ud We show that there can exist a general function associated with the objective function under EBW that reduces to the well-known auxiliary function used in the Baum-Welch algorithm for maximum likelihood estimates.\ud We generalize representation for the updates of model parameters by making use of a differentiable function (such as arithmetic or geometric\ud mean) on the updated and current model parameters and describe their effect on the learning rate during HMM parameter estimation. Improvements on speech recognition tasks are also presented here

Culture and Cancer

Genetic mechanisms, since they broadly involve information transmission, should be translatable into information dynamics formalism. From this perspective we reconsider the adaptive mutator, one possible means of 'second order selection' by which a highly structured 'language' of environment and development writes itself onto the variation upon which evolutionary selection and tumorigenesis operate. Our approach uses recent results in the spirit of the Large Deviations Program of applied probability that permit transfer of phase transition approaches from statistical mechanics to information theory, generating evolutionary and developmental punctuation in what we claim to be a highly natural manner

Editorial: Critical Reflections on Higher Education in Prison

Editorial: Critical Reflections on Higher Education in Priso