Atrial natriuretic factor (ANF) and renin-aldosterone in volume regulation of patients with cirrhosis

The role of the atrial natriuretic factor and of the main counteracting sodium-retaining principle, the renin-aldosterone system, in acute volume regulation of cirrhosis of the liver has been investigated. Central volume stimulation was achieved in 21 patients with cirrhosis, 11 without and 10 with ascites, and 25 healthy controls by 1-hr head-out water immersion. Immersion prompted a highly significant (p<0.001) increase of atrial natriuretic factor plasma concentrations in cirrhotic patients without ascites from 8.5 ± 1.3 fmoles per ml to 16.5 ± 2.6 fmoles per ml, comparable to the stimulation in control subjects (6.0 ± 0.6 fmoles per ml to 13.6 ± 2.6 fmoles per ml). In cirrhotic patients with ascites, atrial natriuretic factor increase (from 7.7 ± 1.3 fmoles per ml to 11.4 ± 2.3 fmoles per ml) was blunted (p<0.05). Plasma renin activity and plasma aldosterone concentration were elevated in cirrhotic patients, especially in the presence of ascites. Following immersion, plasma renin activity and plasma aldosterone concentration were reduced similarly in all groups. Water immersion induced a more pronounced natriuresis and diuresis in control subjects than in cirrhotic patients. Neither atrial natriuretic factor nor plasma renin activity nor plasma aldosterone concentration alone correlated to sodium excretion. However, atrial natriuretic factor to plasma aldosterone concentration ratios were closely correlated to basal and stimulated natriuresis in cirrhotic patients, particularly in those with ascites. These data suggest that atrial natriuretic factor and the renin-aldosterone system influence volume regulation in patients with cirrhosis

Fighting Domestic Violence in the Nation’s Capital

Every year, in the District of Columbia alone, the Metropolitan Police Department receives more than 18,000 calls for help from victims of domestic violence, and more than 2,500 battered women bring legal actions requesting protection from their abusers. Thousands of other cases go unreported, either because the victims are too afraid of their batterers to report the violence, or because they do not know how to obtain relief to which they are entitled

Lower Bounds for On-line Interval Coloring with Vector and Cardinality Constraints

We propose two strategies for Presenter in the on-line interval graph coloring games. Specifically, we consider a setting in which each interval is associated with a $d$-dimensional vector of weights and the coloring needs to satisfy the $d$-dimensional bandwidth constraint, and the $k$-cardinality constraint. Such a variant was first introduced by Epstein and Levy and it is a natural model for resource-aware task scheduling with $d$ different shared resources where at most $k$ tasks can be scheduled simultaneously on a single machine. The first strategy forces any on-line interval coloring algorithm to use at least $(5m-3)\frac{d}{\log d + 3}$ different colors on an $m(\frac{d}{k} + \log{d} + 3)$-colorable set of intervals. The second strategy forces any on-line interval coloring algorithm to use at least $\lfloor\frac{5m}{2}\rfloor\frac{d}{\log d + 3}$ different colors on an $m(\frac{d}{k} + \log{d} + 3)$-colorable set of unit intervals

Redefining the State\u27s Response to Domestic Violence: Past Victories and future Challenges

What role should the state play in the fight against domestic violence? Although most activists in the early domestic abuse movement viewed government institutions with a robust dose of suspicion, over time they began to look to the state for substantial assistance. During this period-the late sixties and seventies-increased hope for a positive governmental role appeared to be well-founded. The civil rights, feminist, and labor movements had pushed the federal government into expanding civil liberty guarantees and economic protections. Laws were enacted prohibiting sex- and race-based discrimination, health care got a strong boost through the creation of Medicaid and Medicare, and workplace safety guarantees were expanded. And in the seventies and eighties, on the domestic violence front, state legislatures enacted civil protection order statutes that were the first laws specifically designed to protect victims of intimate abuse

Can a \u27Dumb Ass Woman\u27 Achieve Equality in the Workplace? Running the Gauntlet of Hostile Environment Harassing Speech

Sandra Bundy may have guessed that her new job with the District of Columbia Department of Corrections would be a challenge. What she may not have expected was that she would have to meet the challenge under very different conditions than those faced by her male coworkers. Ms. Bundy\u27s work was continually interrupted by one of her supervisors, who kept calling her into his office and forcing her to listen to his theories about how women ride horses to obtain sexual gratification. He repeatedly asked Ms. Bundy to come home with him in order to view his collection of pictures and books on this topic. Another supervisor repeatedly propositioned her, asking her to come with him to a motel or on a trip to the Bahamas. None of Ms. Bundy\u27s male counterparts, in contrast, had to listen to their boss\u27s sexual fantasies and proposals. When Ms. Bundy tried to remove this gender-based obstacle to her job performance by reporting it to a third supervisor and pleading for help, he only exacerbated the problem, telling her that any man in his right mind would want to rape you, and asking her to have sex with him. Ms. Bundy successfully sued the Department of Corrections for sexual harassment in violation of Title VII, the federal statute outlawing workplace discrimination. The implicit holding of the Bundy case-that speech alone can create a discriminatory hostile work environment-went unquestioned for many years. Recently, however, defense attorneys have challenged the constitutionality of this principle, arguing that a prohibition on discriminatory workplace expression violates harassers\u27 First Amendment rights

An Extended Coding Theorem with Application to Quantum Complexities

This paper introduces a new inequality in algorithmic information theory that can be seen as an extended coding theorem. This inequality has applications in new bounds between quantum complexity measures.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Biko on non-white and black: improving social reality

This paper examines Steve Biko’s distinction between black and non-white as a project in the “amelioration” of social concepts and categories. Biko himself—it has been persuasively argued by Mabogo More and Lewis Gordon—writes in the tradition of existential phenomenology. More and Gordon explore Biko’s continuity with Frantz Fanon, and in this paper I draw on their interpretations, attempting to complement and elaborate on these continuities. I also, however, attempt to show how Biko moves beyond Fanon in crucial ways, solving problems that Fanon confronted. By examining Fanon’s and Biko’s categories in light of recent work in social metaphysics, I explore the ways Biko attempts to transform an existing set of oppressive social categories in the world into new social categories

Discounting Credibility: Doubting the Stories of Women Survivors of Sexual Harassment

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only limited attention to a factor that goes straight to the heart of the problem: our reflexive inclination to discount the credibility of women, especially when those women are recounting experiences of abuse perpetrated by more powerful men. We will not succeed in ending gender-based workplace discrimination until we can understand and resist this tendency and begin to appropriately credit survivors’ stories. How does gender-based credibility discounting operate? First, those charged with responding to workplace harassment--managers, supervisors, union representatives, human resource officers, and judges—improperly discount as implausible women’s stories of harassment, due to a failure to understand either the psychological trauma caused by abusive treatment or the practical realities that constrain women’s options in its aftermath. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women’s personal trustworthiness, based on their demeanor (as affected by the trauma they often have suffered); on negative cultural stereotypes about women’s motives for seeking redress for harms; and on our deep-rooted cultural belief that women as a group are inherently less than fully trustworthy. The impact of such unjust and discriminatory treatment of women survivors of workplace harassment is exacerbated by the larger “credibility economy”—the credibility discounts imposed on many women-victims can only be fully understood in the context of the credibility inflations afforded to many male harassers. Moreover, discounting women’s credibility results in a particular and virulent set of harms, which can be measured as both an additional psychic injury to survivors, and as an institutional betrayal that echoes the harm initially inflicted by harassers themselves. It is time—long past time--to adopt practical, concrete reforms to combat the widespread, automatic tendency to discount women and the stories they tell. We must embark on a path toward allowing women who share their experiences of male abuses of workplace power to trust the responsiveness of their employers, judges, and our larger society