76 research outputs found
Transmission of visceral lymphomatosis from field cases
Call number: LD2668 .T4 1958 R6
Modeling Inter-trial Variability of Saccade Trajectories: Effects of Lesions of the Oculomotor Part of the Fastigial Nucleus
This study investigates the inter-trial variability of saccade trajectories observed in five rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). For each time point during a saccade, the inter-trial variance of eye position and its covariance with eye end position were evaluated. Data were modeled by a superposition of three noise components due to 1) planning noise, 2) signal-dependent motor noise, and 3) signal-dependent premotor noise entering within an internal feedback loop. Both planning noise and signal-dependent motor noise (together called accumulating noise) predict a simple S-shaped variance increase during saccades, which was not sufficient to explain the data. Adding noise within an internal feedback loop enabled the model to mimic variance/covariance structure in each monkey, and to estimate the noise amplitudes and the feedback gain. Feedback noise had little effect on end point noise, which was dominated by accumulating noise. This analysis was further extended to saccades executed during inactivation of the caudal fastigial nucleus (cFN) on one side of the cerebellum. Saccades ipsiversive to an inactivated cFN showed more end point variance than did normal saccades. During cFN inactivation, eye position during saccades was statistically more strongly coupled to eye position at saccade end. The proposed model could fit the variance/covariance structure of ipsiversive and contraversive saccades. Inactivation effects on saccade noise are explained by a decrease of the feedback gain and an increase of planning and/or signal-dependent motor noise. The decrease of the fitted feedback gain is consistent with previous studies suggesting a role for the cerebellum in an internal feedback mechanism. Increased end point variance did not result from impaired feedback but from the increase of accumulating noise. The effects of cFN inactivation on saccade noise indicate that the effects of cFN inactivation cannot be explained entirely with the cFN's direct connections to the saccade-related premotor centers in the brainstem
Customer Satisfaction, Product Quality and Performance of Companies
This paper presents an analysis of quality, customer satisfaction and business performance in food industry. The main objective of the research is to determine the influence of quality on customer satisfaction and on business performance and competitiveness. In particular, this paper answers the following research question: Does the quality of a product result in a satisfied customer and thereby in a well-performing business? Customer satisfaction is defined as the satisfaction of the customer with a product and the business performance as a capability to generate profit. Therefore, satisfaction was examined by the means of a survey using questionnaires, and the performance was measured by financial data. We managed to find a correlation between the main factors, although partial results were due more factors mostly statistically insignificant
Climate dynamics and fluid mechanics: Natural variability and related uncertainties
The purpose of this review-and-research paper is twofold: (i) to review the
role played in climate dynamics by fluid-dynamical models; and (ii) to
contribute to the understanding and reduction of the uncertainties in future
climate-change projections. To illustrate the first point, we focus on the
large-scale, wind-driven flow of the mid-latitude oceans which contribute in a
crucial way to Earth's climate, and to changes therein. We study the
low-frequency variability (LFV) of the wind-driven, double-gyre circulation in
mid-latitude ocean basins, via the bifurcation sequence that leads from steady
states through periodic solutions and on to the chaotic, irregular flows
documented in the observations. This sequence involves local, pitchfork and
Hopf bifurcations, as well as global, homoclinic ones. The natural climate
variability induced by the LFV of the ocean circulation is but one of the
causes of uncertainties in climate projections. Another major cause of such
uncertainties could reside in the structural instability in the topological
sense, of the equations governing climate dynamics, including but not
restricted to those of atmospheric and ocean dynamics. We propose a novel
approach to understand, and possibly reduce, these uncertainties, based on the
concepts and methods of random dynamical systems theory. As a very first step,
we study the effect of noise on the topological classes of the Arnol'd family
of circle maps, a paradigmatic model of frequency locking as occurring in the
nonlinear interactions between the El Nino-Southern Oscillations (ENSO) and the
seasonal cycle. It is shown that the maps' fine-grained resonant landscape is
smoothed by the noise, thus permitting their coarse-grained classification.
This result is consistent with stabilizing effects of stochastic
parametrization obtained in modeling of ENSO phenomenon via some general
circulation models.Comment: Invited survey paper for Special Issue on The Euler Equations: 250
Years On, in Physica D: Nonlinear phenomen
Lacticacidaemia due to pyruvate dehydrogenase deficiency, with evidence of protein polymorphism in the α-subunit of the enzyme
In three infants with neonatal lacticacidaemia, a deficiency in the E 1 (pyruvate dehydrogenase) component of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex was demonstrated in skin fibroblast cultures. Residual activites of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex in the activated state were 1.6%, 3.9% and 18.8% of control values, respectively. Immunoprecipitation of extracts of cultures skin fibroblasts grown on 35 S-methionine with anti-pyruvate dehydrogenase complex antibody revealed an abnormality in the E 1 α-component of these three patients when visualised after sodium dodecyl sulphate/polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. This component appeared to have a slightly lower molecular weight than did this protein from control cell strains. Cell strains from other patients with a deficiency of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex did not exhibit this defect. Three patients also showed dysmorphism and developmental abnormalities of the central nervous system.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47532/1/431_2004_Article_BF00441736.pd
Singlet oxygen luminescence as an in vivo photodynamic therapy dose metric: validation in normal mouse skin with topical amino-levulinic acid
Although singlet oxygen (1O2) has long been proposed as the primary reactive oxygen species in photodynamic therapy (PDT), it has only recently been possible to detect it in biological systems by its luminescence at 1270ânm. Having previously demonstrated this in vitro and in vivo, we showed that cell survival was strongly correlated to the 1O2 luminescence in cell suspensions over a wide range of treatment parameters. Here, we extend this to test the hypothesis that the photobiological response in vivo is also correlated with 1O2 generation, independent of individual treatment parameters. The normal skin of SKH1-HR hairless mice was sensitised with 20% amino-levulinic acid-induced protoporophyrin IX and exposed to 5, 11, 22 or 50âJâcmâ2 of pulsed 523ânm light at 50âmWâcmâ2, or to 50âJâcmâ2 at 15 or 150âmWâcmâ2. 1O2 luminescence was measured during treatment and the photodynamic response of the skin was scored daily for 2 weeks after treatment. As observed by other authors, a strong irradiance dependence of the PDT effect was observed. However, in all cases the responses increased with the 1O2 luminescence, independent of the irradiance, demonstrating for the first time in vivo an unequivocal mechanistic link between 1O2 generation and photobiological response
Origins of direction selectivity in the primate retina
From mouse to primate, there is a striking discontinuity in our current understanding of the neural coding of motion direction. In non-primate mammals, directionally selective cell types and circuits are a signature feature of the retina, situated at the earliest stage of the visual process. In primates, by contrast, direction selectivity is a hallmark of motion processing areas in visual cortex, but has not been found in the retina, despite significant effort. Here we combined functional recordings of light-evoked responses and connectomic reconstruction to identify diverse direction-selective cell types in the macaque monkey retina with distinctive physiological properties and synaptic motifs. This circuitry includes an ON-OFF ganglion cell type, a spiking, ON-OFF polyaxonal amacrine cell and the starburst amacrine cell, all of which show direction selectivity. Moreover, we discovered that macaque starburst cells possess a strong, non-GABAergic, antagonistic surround mediated by input from excitatory bipolar cells that is critical for the generation of radial motion sensitivity in these cells. Our findings open a door to investigation of a precortical circuitry that computes motion direction in the primate visual system.This work was largely supported by grants from the National Eye Institute (NIH NEI) to D.M.D. (EY032045), R.G.S. (EY022070), P.D.G. (EY018369) and by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant RR-00166 to the Tissue Distribution Program of the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), grant P51 OD010425 from the NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Program to the WaNPRC. and EY01730 to the Vision Research Core at the University of Washington. Additional support from MICINN Programa de Movilidad Salvador de Madariaga (PRX16/00188) to F.V. and NIH (NIBIB) R21EB028069 to J.B.T, and a Christina Enroth-Cugell and David Cugell Fellowship to J.W.Peer reviewe
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