Motor imagery ability in patients with traumatic brain injury

Oostra KM, Vereecke A, Jones K, Vanderstraeten G, Vingerhoets G. Motor imagery ability in patients with traumatic brain injury. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2012;93:828-33. Objective: To assess motor imagery (MI) ability in patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Design: Prospective, cohort study. Setting: University hospital rehabilitation unit. Participants: Patients with traumatic brain injury (mean coma duration, 18d) undergoing rehabilitation (n=20) and healthy controls (n=17) matched for age and education level. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: The vividness of MI was assessed using a revised version of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Revised second version (MIQ-RS); the temporal features were assessed using the time-dependent motor imagery (TDMI) screening test, the temporal congruence test, and a walking trajectory imagery test; and the accuracy of MI was assessed using a mental rotation test. Results: The MIQ-RS revealed a decrease of MI vividness in the TBI group. An increasing number of stepping movements was observed with increasing time periods in both groups during the TDMI screening test. The TBI group performed a significantly smaller number of imagery movements in the same movement time. The temporal congruence test revealed a significant correlation between imagery and actual stepping time in both groups. The walking trajectory test revealed an increase of the imagery and actual walking time with increasing path length in both groups, but the ratio of imaginary walking over actual walking time was significantly greater than 1 in the TBI group. Results of the hand mental rotation test indicated significant effects of rotation angles on imagery movement times in both groups, but rotation time was significantly slower in the TBI group. Conclusions: Our patients with TBI demonstrated a relatively preserved MI ability indicating that MI could be used to aid rehabilitation and subsequent functional recovery

The G Dwarf Problem Exists in Other Galaxies

Stellar population models with abundance distributions determined from the analytic Simple model of chemical evolution fail to match observations of the nuclei of bulge-dominated galaxies in three respects. First, the spectral energy distribution in the mid-ultraviolet range 2000 < lam < 2400 exceeds observation by ~ 0.6 mag. Most of that excess is due to metal-poor main sequence stars. Second, the models do not reproduce metal-sensitive optical absorption features that arise mainly from red giant stars. Third, the strength of a Ca II index sensitive to hot stars does not jibe with the predicted number of A-type horizontal branch stars. The number of metal poor stars in galaxies is at least a factor of two less than predicted by the Simple model, exactly similar to the ``G Dwarf problem'' in the solar cylinder. Observations at larger radii in local group galaxies indicate that the paucity of metal poor stars applies globally, rather than only in the nuclei. Because of the dominance of metal rich stars, primordial galaxies will have a plentiful dust supply early in their star formation history, and thus will probably have weak Lyman-alpha emission, as is apparently observed. We confirm that early-type galaxies cannot have been formed exclusively from mergers of small all-stellar subsystems, a result already established by dynamical simulations. The constraint of peaked abundance distributions will limit future chemical evolution models. It will also make age estimates for the stellar populations in early type galaxies and bulges more secure.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX includes 3 postscript figures. Uses AAS LaTeX v 4.0 and times.sty. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Postscript available at http://shemesh.gsfc.nasa.gov/~dorman/Ben.htm

The Dog that Finally Barked:England as an Emerging Political Community

This report presents evidence which suggests the emergence of a new kind of Anglo-British identity in which the English component is increasingly the primary source of attachment for English people. It also suggests that English identity is becoming more politicised: that is, the more English a person feels, the more likely they are to believe that the current structure of the UK is unfair and to support a particularly English dimension to the governance of England

KLM-Style Defeasible Reasoning for Datalog

In many problem domains, particularly those related to mathematics and philosophy, classical logic has enjoyed great success as a model of valid reasoning and discourse. For real-world reasoning tasks, however, an agent typically only has partial knowledge of its domain, and at most a statistical understanding of relationships between properties. In this context, classical inference is considered overly restrictive, and many systems for non-monotonic reasoning have been proposed in the literature to deal with these tasks. A notable example is the Klm framework, which describes an agent's defeasible knowledge qualitatively in terms of conditionals of the form “if A, then typically B”. The goal of this research project is to investigate Klm-style semantics for defeasible reasoning over Datalog knowledge bases. Datalog is a declarative logic programming language, designed for querying large deductive databases. Syntactically, it can be viewed as a computationally feasible fragment of firstorder logic, so this continues a recent line of work in which the Klm framework is lifted to more expressive languages

A study of chrome and diaspore mixes

The high refractoriness of both chrome and diaspore make them very valuable to the refractory industry. Chrome ore has been experimented with since 1879 and used in brick form since 1886. Diaspore on the other hand, has just recently been recognized as a refractory After going through all the available literature on the subject I have been unable to find any mention of any work carried on in which mixtures of chrome and diaspore were used --page 1

Interrogating the prevention approach of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 for people with mental health needs who are homeless

Rates of homelessness and poor mental health present significant challenges across the globe. In this article, we explore how these intersecting issues have been addressed in Wales through Part 2 of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 through a paradigm shift towards a prevention model. This article reports findings from a study (conducted between 2016 and 2018) which evaluated the processes and impacts of the Act against the backdrop of welfare reform and systemic changes taking place in Wales and the UK. Using new evidence, we offer a critical examination of how homelessness prevention policy operates in practice and how social values and power affect policy implementation. We offer new evidence of the translation of policy into practice through the experiences of two stakeholder groups: people with mental health needs and service providers. In doing so, we offer a critique of how policy and practice could be modified to improve outcomes for homeless people with implications for prevention policy in Wales and in other contexts and different welfare regimes

Evaluation of sauerkraut prepared with potassium chloride as a complete or partial replacement for sodium chloride

The purpose of this study was to develop sauerkraut products using potassium chloride as a complete or partial sodium chloride replacement, to determine the microbiological and chemical safety of the products, and to determine the consumer acceptance of the sauerkraut. Sauerkraut was prepared with 3 different salts as treatments: sodium chloride, potassium chloride, and Morton Lite SaltR. The fermentations were allowed to proceed for 30 days while total microbial counts, lactic acid-producing bacterial counts, yeast and mold counts, and titratable acidities were being monitored. Total and lactic microbial counts for the potassium chloride and Lite Salt treatments were found to be higher than counts for the sodium chloride treatments. This was due to the lower ionic strength of the potassium chloride in the brine, allowing for greater microbial growth and therefore, greater lactic acid production as was evidenced by the higher titratable acidities of these treatments. Sauerkraut juice components were analyzed with an HPLC instrument and no differences were found in the types and quantities of components present in the 3 treatments. Total amounts of sodium and potassium in the finished sauerkraut products were determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometric analyses. Sodium reduction in the kraut prepared with potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride is about 98%. Kraut prepared with Lite Salt shows a reduction in sodium of 40-45% over that prepared with sodium chloride. Sensory evaluation using an untrained consumer-type panel showed kraut prepared with Lite Salt compared favorably to kraut prepared with sodium chloride. No bitter aftertaste of the Lite Salt was noted due to the masking of this flavor by the lactic acid. Sauerkraut prepared with potassium chloride was rated lower than the other two treatments due to its bitter, metallic aftertaste. This study shows that potassium chloride can be used as at least a partial replacement for sodium chloride in the fermentation of sauerkraut. Use of Lite Salt provides a microbiologically and chemically safe product that is not only palatable but compares favorably to kraut prepared with sodium chloride, yet provides a substantial amount of sodium reduction over common sauerkraut

Guidelines for Negotiating Scientific Collaboration

Whether it's sharing reagents with a laboratory on the other side of the world or working with the postdoc at the neighboring bench, some simple rules of collaboration might help