Visual Stability and the Motion Aftereffect: A Psychophysical Study Revealing Spatial Updating

Eye movements create an ever-changing image of the world on the retina. In particular, frequent saccades call for a compensatory mechanism to transform the changing visual information into a stable percept. To this end, the brain presumably uses internal copies of motor commands. Electrophysiological recordings of visual neurons in the primate lateral intraparietal cortex, the frontal eye fields, and the superior colliculus suggest that the receptive fields (RFs) of special neurons shift towards their post-saccadic positions before the onset of a saccade. However, the perceptual consequences of these shifts remain controversial. We wanted to test in humans whether a remapping of motion adaptation occurs in visual perception

Prognostic model to predict postoperative acute kidney injury in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery based on a national prospective observational cohort study.

Background: Acute illness, existing co-morbidities and surgical stress response can all contribute to postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI) in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery. The aim of this study was prospectively to develop a pragmatic prognostic model to stratify patients according to risk of developing AKI after major gastrointestinal surgery. Methods: This prospective multicentre cohort study included consecutive adults undergoing elective or emergency gastrointestinal resection, liver resection or stoma reversal in 2-week blocks over a continuous 3-month period. The primary outcome was the rate of AKI within 7 days of surgery. Bootstrap stability was used to select clinically plausible risk factors into the model. Internal model validation was carried out by bootstrap validation. Results: A total of 4544 patients were included across 173 centres in the UK and Ireland. The overall rate of AKI was 14·2 per cent (646 of 4544) and the 30-day mortality rate was 1·8 per cent (84 of 4544). Stage 1 AKI was significantly associated with 30-day mortality (unadjusted odds ratio 7·61, 95 per cent c.i. 4·49 to 12·90; P < 0·001), with increasing odds of death with each AKI stage. Six variables were selected for inclusion in the prognostic model: age, sex, ASA grade, preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, planned open surgery and preoperative use of either an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker. Internal validation demonstrated good model discrimination (c-statistic 0·65). Discussion: Following major gastrointestinal surgery, AKI occurred in one in seven patients. This preoperative prognostic model identified patients at high risk of postoperative AKI. Validation in an independent data set is required to ensure generalizability

The Impossibility of Teaching Cultural Studies

"When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind." -- Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies" Those of us in the academy who call cultural studies "home" often claim that one of the main things we do is to teach cultural studies to other people. And, the vast majority of the time, that claim is simply wrong. As its title suggests, this essay is a polemic on the impossibility of teaching cultural studies. While recognizing that critical pedagogy is one of cultural studies' most important tasks, I argue that cultural studies itself is not something that people can be taught to do. Among other things, this essay examines: * the structural and institutional barriers that prevent us from teaching undergraduates what cultural studies is in any meaningful way, * the logistical and definitional problems that undercut our ability to teach graduate students how to do cultural studies themselves, and * the pedagogical and political issues that stand in the way of teaching anyone to become cultural studies practitioners. As a project that changes its shape dramatically across both space and time, cultural studies resists our efforts to squeeze it into traditional syllabi or lesson plans. As both an intellectual and a political project, cultural studies defies even the sharpest teacher's ability to train other people in its practice