An examination of the sources of Plutarch's lives of Nicias % Lysander

Source-criticism of the lives of Nicia and Lysander makes it clear that Plutarch did not adopt any uniform method in the compilation of his lives, nor was he wholly dependant upon late and wothless sources. Each lie constituted a seperate problem, requiring seperate examinantion. For the nicias, in his description of the Sicilian Expedition, he made us of Timaeus' History of Sicily, thereby incorporating Thucydides and the eye-witness record of Philistus, which formed the basis of Timaeus' account; in his description of the character of Nicias to book X of the Philippica of the Theopompus. Thus, two historians supplied the biographer with the information in aneadotal form which his required for his appreciation of the Nicias, little differernt from extant writers have recorded about him. Plutarch's approach to the Lysander was different. He was aware of two traditions - one complimentary, the other wholly derogatory. The greater part of the narrative of the Lysander is encomistic and based upon the Hellenica of Theopompus, which covered the short period of Greek History monopolised by the achievements of Lysander, and was indebted to the Hellenica of Xenophon. But small section of the Lysander was based upon a 'Hostile source', which was also used to Nepos. This source, apparently a Hellenistic biography, adapted and distorted the historical facts of Ephorus, making use of the politial pamphlets of Pausanias the younger, king of Sparta, exiled in 395 B. C. The result is a curiously contradictory life, which preserves the conflicting estimate of Lysander current in the century after his demie. In addition, both lives contain Plutarch's reflexions upon his material and his sources, or digressions of a topographical and archaelogical nature, supplemented by apophthegms noted own by the biographer in the earlier reading

Classifying Cognitive Profiles Using Machine Learning with Privileged Information in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Early diagnosis of dementia is critical for assessing disease progression and potential treatment. State-or-the-art machine learning techniques have been increasingly employed to take on this diagnostic task. In this study, we employed Generalised Matrix Learning Vector Quantization (GMLVQ) classifiers to discriminate patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) from healthy controls based on their cognitive skills. Further, we adopted a ``Learning with privileged information'' approach to combine cognitive and fMRI data for the classification task. The resulting classifier operates solely on the cognitive data while it incorporates the fMRI data as privileged information (PI) during training. This novel classifier is of practical use as the collection of brain imaging data is not always possible with patients and older participants.MCI patients and healthy age-matched controls were trained to extract structure from temporal sequences. We ask whether machine learning classifiers can be used to discriminate patients from controls based on the learning performance and whether differences between these groups relate to individual cognitive profiles. To this end, we tested participants in four cognitive tasks: working memory, cognitive inhibition, divided attention, and selective attention. We also collected fMRI data before and after training on the learning task and extracted fMRI responses and connectivity as features for machine learning classifiers. Our results show that the PI guided GMLVQ classifiers outperform the baseline classifier that only used the cognitive data. In addition, we found that for the baseline classifier, divided attention is the only relevant cognitive feature. When PI was incorporated, divided attention remained the most relevant feature while cognitive inhibition became also relevant for the task. Interestingly, this analysis for the fMRI GMLVQ classifier suggests that (1) when overall fMRI signal for structured stimuli is used as inputs to the classifier, the post-training session is most relevant; and (2) when the graph feature reflecting underlying spatiotemporal fMRI pattern is used, the pre-training session is most relevant. Taken together these results suggest that brain connectivity before training and overall fMRI signal after training are both diagnostic of cognitive skills in MCI

Targeting kidney mesangium by nanoparticles of defined size

Nanoparticles are being investigated for numerous medical applications and are showing potential as an emerging class of carriers for drug delivery. Investigations on how the physicochemical properties (e.g., size, surface charge, shape, and density of targeting ligands) of nanoparticles enable their ability to overcome biological barriers and reach designated cellular destinations in sufficient amounts to elicit biological efficacy are of interest. Despite proven success in nanoparticle accumulation at cellular locations and occurrence of downstream therapeutic effects (e.g., target gene inhibition) in a selected few organs such as tumor and liver, reports on effective delivery of engineered nanoparticles to other organs still remain scarce. Here, we show that nanoparticles of ~75 ± 25-nm diameters target the mesangium of the kidney. These data show the effects of particle diameter on targeting the mesangium of the kidney. Because many diseases originate from this area of the kidney, our findings establish design criteria for constructing nanoparticle-based therapeutics for targeting diseases that involve the mesangium of the kidney

Dihedral symmetry of periodic chain: quantization and coherent states

Our previous work on quantum kinematics and coherent states over finite configuration spaces is extended: the configuration space is, as before, the cyclic group Z_n of arbitrary order n=2,3,..., but a larger group - the non-Abelian dihedral group D_n - is taken as its symmetry group. The corresponding group related coherent states are constructed and their overcompleteness proved. Our approach based on geometric symmetry can be used as a kinematic framework for matrix methods in quantum chemistry of ring molecules.Comment: 13 pages; minor changes of the tex