402 research outputs found
A Tradition of Service
My work consists of a collection of narrative portraits of men in my family and my wife’s. I am inspired by photographs and documents from the lives of our predecessors. I admire their willingness to serve their countries and support their families. The symbolism included in these portraits is my attempt to create an homage to their lives. The artworks are composed of layered imagery of documents and photos. I create the compositions by digitizing and filtering the images collected from each man’s life. Then, I reassemble them and add color and layer brush work to add emphasis. My principle tool throughout the process has been my computer. The computer and various programs allow me to paint in the virtual environment. This has given me more control of the resulting print, and allowed me to include a higher level of detail and historical material in the image. Through these compositions I have sought to create a deeper personal connection to the men in our families
Brazilian Ethanol and U.S. Industrial Organization: An Analysis of Bilateral Trade Barrier Removal
With rising petroleum costs and a plethora of other influences causing international ethanol demand to grow at an unprecedented rate, discussion of trade liberalization has become an important point of debate for the ethanol production industry. Although there have been many studies on the results of the removal of trade barriers there has been little emphasis on the potential impact it would have on domestic industrial organization. This paper looks to analyze the possible effects of ethanol trade barrier removal between Brazil and the United States on U.S. industrial organization through evaluation of the removal\u27s ,influence on incentives for consolidation in both fanner and non-fanner owned sectors of the U.S. ethanol production industry. Both the existing dead weight loss due to the accumulation of trade barrier costs and the potential for costs associated with increased market concentration are compared in the evaluation process as well as evaluation and incorporation of theory on trade flows and market structure resulting from trade tariff removal
SINCERE: Supervised Information Noise-Contrastive Estimation REvisited
The information noise-contrastive estimation (InfoNCE) loss function provides
the basis of many self-supervised deep learning methods due to its strong
empirical results and theoretic motivation. Previous work suggests a supervised
contrastive (SupCon) loss to extend InfoNCE to learn from available class
labels. This SupCon loss has been widely-used due to reports of good empirical
performance. However, in this work we suggest that the specific SupCon loss
formulated by prior work has questionable theoretic justification, because it
can encourage images from the same class to repel one another in the learned
embedding space. This problematic behavior gets worse as the number of inputs
sharing one class label increases. We propose the Supervised InfoNCE REvisited
(SINCERE) loss as a remedy. SINCERE is a theoretically justified solution for a
supervised extension of InfoNCE that never causes images from the same class to
repel one another. We further show that minimizing our new loss is equivalent
to maximizing a bound on the KL divergence between class conditional embedding
distributions. We compare SINCERE and SupCon losses in terms of learning
trajectories during pretraining and in ultimate linear classifier performance
after finetuning. Our proposed SINCERE loss better separates embeddings from
different classes during pretraining while delivering competitive accuracy
Waring's Problem in Finite Rings
In this paper we obtain sharp results for Waring's problem over general
finite rings, by using a combination of Artin-Wedderburn theory and Hensel's
lemma and building on new proofs of analogous results over finite fields that
are achieved using spectral graph theory. We also prove an analogue of
S\'ark\"ozy's theorem for finite fields.Comment: 34 page
Playing With Biofeedback: A Practical, Playful Approach to Using Biofeedback in Pediatric Health
Epigenetics and transgenerational inheritance in domesticated farm animals
Epigenetics provides a molecular mechanism of inheritance that is not solely dependent on DNA sequence and that can account for non-Mendelian inheritance patterns. Epigenetic changes underlie many normal developmental processes, and can lead to disease development as well. While epigenetic effects have been studied in well-characterized rodent models, less research has been done using agriculturally important domestic animal species. This review will present the results of current epigenetic research using farm animal models (cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens). Much of the work has focused on the epigenetic effects that environmental exposures to toxicants, nutrients and infectious agents has on either the exposed animals themselves or on their direct offspring. Only one porcine study examined epigenetic transgenerational effects; namely the effect diet micronutrients fed to male pigs has on liver DNA methylation and muscle mass in grand-offspring (F2 generation). Healthy viable offspring are very important in the farm and husbandry industry and epigenetic differences can be associated with production traits. Therefore further epigenetic research into domestic animal health and how exposure to toxicants or nutritional changes affects future generations is imperative
Noradrenergic Pharmacotherapy, Intracerebral Infusion and Adrenal Transplantation Promote Functional Recovery After Cortical Damage
The research described in this review briefly
summarizes evidence that short term
pharmacological enhancement of noradrenergic
(NA) synaptic activity, combined with symptom
relevant experience (SRE), promotes functional
recovery of some symptoms of cortical damage
in rat, cat and human beings even when
treatment is initiated from days to weeks after
injury. A summary is provided of the numerous
drugs tested in rodent cortical injury models
which have been proven useful for predicting
beneficial or harmful effects on behavioral
outcome in human stroke. The pattern of drug
effects indicates a central role for NA in
functional recovery. Additionally, studies of the
effects of direct intraventricular infusion of
monoamine neurotransmitters are reviewed and
further support the hypothesized role of NA in
recovery from some symptoms of cortical injury.
The site of NA/SRE interaction to promote
recovery from hemiplegia apparently involves
the cerebellar hemisphere contralateral to the
cortical injury. Microinfusions of NA into the
contra- but not ipsilaterai cerebellar hemisphere
dramatically enhance recovery. Furthermore,
like its systemic action, microinfusion of the α1-
NA receptor antagonist, phenoxybenzamine,
reinstates hemiplegia. A “permanent” symptom
of motor cortex injury in the cat is the complete
loss of tactile placing contralateral to the injury
which does not spontaneously recover for as
long as seven years after ablation. This posturai
reflex is temporarily restored for 8-12 hours
following amphetamine administration.
However, this permanently lost reflex can be
enduringly restored by transplanting catecholamine secreting adrenal tissue into the
wound cavity. The experiment is reviewed in
detail and involves chromaffin cell autografts
into the frontal cortex ablation wound cavity
producing a restoration of tactile placing for the
7-10 month duration of the study. This enduring
restoration of tactile placing is considered a
result of the release of catecholamines into the
CNS from the grafted chromaffin cells found, by
histochemical methods, surviving 7-10 months
after transplant. Lastly, we attribute these
delayed treatment effects to an attenuation of a
diaschisis, or remote functional depression, in
morphologically intact areas anatomically
connected to the area of injury. The widespread
reduction of glycolytic and oxidative
metabolism, produced by focal cortical injury, is
normalized by the same treatment which
alleviates symptoms and is worsened by drugs
which exacerbate deficits. These data support
the hypothesis that providing SRE during a
period of enhanced NA synaptic activity
produces an enduring functional recovery after
cortical injury by attenuating remote functional
depression. This treatment for enhancing
recovery is especially attractive since it is
effective even when begun weeks after cortical
damage
Alleviation of Brain Injury-Induced Cerebral Metabolic Depression by Amphetamine: A Cytochrome Oxidase Histochemistry Study
Measurements of oxidative metabolic
capacity following the ablation of rat sensorimotor
cortex and ,he administration of amphetamine
were examined to determine their
effects on the metabolic dysfunction that
follows brain injury. Twenty-four hours after
surgery, rats sustaining either sham operations
or unilateral cortical ablation were administered
a single injection of D-amphetamine (2 mg/kg;
i.p.) or saline and then sacrificed 24 h later.
Brain tissue was processed for cytochrome
oxidase histochemistry, and 12 bilateral cerebral
areas were measured, using optical density as
an index of the relative amounts of the
enzyme. Compared with that of the control
groups, cytochrome oxidase in the injured
animals was significantly reduced throughout
the cerebral cortex and in 5 of II subcortical
structures. This injury-induced depression of
oxidative capacity was most pronounced in
regions of the hemisphere ipsilateral to the
ablation. Animals given D-amphetamine had less depression of oxidative capacity, which
was most pronounced bilaterally in the cerebral
cortex, red nucleus, and superior colliculus;
and in the nucleus accumbens, caudateputamen,
and globus pallidus ipsilaterai to the
ablation. The ability of D-amphetamine to
alleviate depressed cerebral oxidative metabolism
following cortical injury may be one mechanism
by which drugs increasing noradrenaline
release accelerate functional recovery in both
animals and humans
Altered drainage patterns in patients with melanoma and previous axillary dissection.
The incidence of melanoma is increasing rapidly in the United States. Sentinel lymph node biopsy is an important diagnostic tool in the treatment and staging of melanoma. However, many patients with melanoma will have had lymph node surgery for previous melanoma or breast cancer. We set out to examine alterations in drainage patterns in patients with previous axillary dissection for breast cancer. We reviewed four patients with truncal and/or extremity melanomas and examined their lymphoscintigraphy and drainage patterns. Three patients with truncal melanoma mapped to cervical lymph nodes and a fourth patient with an arm melanoma mapped to her previously dissected axilla. Sentinel lymph node mapping is still an important adjunct in patients with melanoma despite previous axillary dissection
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