Towards a population of HMXB/NS microquasars as counterparts of low-latitude unidentified EGRET sources

The discovery of the microquasar LS 5039 well within the 95% conficence contour of the Unidentified EGRET Source (UES) 3EG J1824-1514 was a major step towards the possible association between microquasars (MQs) and UESs. The recent discovery of precessing relativistic radio jets in LS I +61 303, a source associated for long time with 2CG 135+01 and with the UES 3EG J0241+6103, has given further support to this idea. Finally, the very recently proposed association between the microquasar candidate AX J1639.0-4642 and the UES 3EG J1639-4702 points towards a population of High Mass X-ray Binary (HMXB)/Neutron Star (NS) microquasars as counterparts of low-latitude unidentified EGRET sources.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Proceedings of the Conference "The Multiwavelength Approach to Unidentified Gamma-ray Sources", to appear in the journal Astrophysics and Space Scienc

Technology and Discourse: A Comparison of Face-to-face and Telephone Employment Interviews

Very little research has investigated the comparability of telephone and face-to-face employment interviews. This exploratory study investigated interviewers' questioning strategies and applicants' causal attributions produced during semi structured telephone and face-to-face graduate recruitment interviews (N=62). A total of 2044 causal attributions were extracted from verbatim transcripts of these 62 interviews. It was predicted that an absence of visual cues would lead applicants to produce, and interviewers to focus on, information that might reduce the comparative anonymity of telephone interviews. Results indicate that applicants produce more personal causal attributions in telephone interviews. Personal attributions are also associated with higher ratings in telephone, but not face-to-face interviews. In face-to-face interviews, applicants who attributed outcomes to more global causes received lower ratings. There was also a non-significant tendency for interviewers to ask more closed questions in telephone interviews. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed

Overcoming Barriers to Skills Training in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Qualitative Interview Study

Despite evidence suggesting that skills training is an important mechanism of change in dialectical behaviour therapy, little research exploring facilitators and barriers to this process has been conducted. The study aimed to explore clients’ experiences of barriers to dialectical behaviour therapy skills training and how they felt they overcame these barriers, and to compare experiences between treatment completers and dropouts. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 40 clients with borderline personality disorder who had attended a dialectical behaviour therapy programme. A thematic analysis of participants’ reported experiences found that key barriers to learning the skills were anxiety during the skills groups and difficulty understanding the material. Key barriers to using the skills were overwhelming emotions which left participants feeling unable or unwilling to use them. Key ways in which participants reported overcoming barriers to skills training were by sustaining their commitment to attending therapy and practising the skills, personalising the way they used them, and practising them so often that they became an integral part of their behavioural repertoire. Participants also highlighted a number of key ways in which they were supported with their skills training by other skills group members, the group therapists, their individual therapist, friends and family. Treatment dropouts were more likely than completers to describe anxiety during the skills groups as a barrier to learning, and were less likely to report overcoming barriers to skills training via the key processes outlined above. The findings of this qualitative study require replication, but could be used to generate hypotheses for testing in further research on barriers to skills training, how these relate to dropout, and how they can be overcome. The paper outlines several such suggestions for further research

Vitamin D supplementation improves pathophysiology in a rat model of preeclampsia

Deficiency of Vitamin D (VD) is associated with preeclampsia (PE), a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy characterized by proinflammatory immune activation. We sought to determine if VD supplementation would reduce the pathophysiology and hypertension associated with the Reduced Uterine Perfusion Pressure (RUPP) rat model of PE. Normal pregnant (NP) and RUPP rats were supplemented with VD2 or VD3 (270 IU and 15 IU/day, respectively) on gestation days 14-18 and mean arterial pressures (MAPs) measured on day 19. MAP increased in RUPP to 123+/-2 mmHg compared to 102+/-3 mmHg in NP and decreased to 113+/-3 mmHg with VD2 and 115+/-3 mmHg with VD3 in RUPP rats. Circulating CD4+ T cells increased in RUPP to 7.90+/-1.36% lymphocytes compared to 2.04+/-0.67% in NP but was lowered to 0.90+/-0.19% with VD2 and 4.26+/-1.55% with VD3 in RUPP rats. AT1-AA, measured by chronotropic assay, decreased from 19.5+/-0.4 bpm in RUPPs to 8.3+/-0.5 bpm with VD2 and 15.4±0.7 bpm with VD3. Renal cortex endothelin-1 (ET-1) expression was increased in RUPP rats (11.6+/-2.1-fold change from NP) and decreased with both VD2 (3.3+/-1.1-fold) and VD3 (3.1+/-0.6-fold) supplementation in RUPP rats. Plasma soluble FMS-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt-1) was also reduced to 74.2+/-6.6 pg/ml in VD2-treated and 91.0+/-16.1 pg/ml in VD3-treated RUPP rats compared to 132.7+/-19.9 pg/ml in RUPP rats. VD treatment reduced CD4+ T cells, AT1-AA, ET-1, sFlt-1, and blood pressure in the RUPP rat model of PE and could be an avenue to improve treatment of hypertension in response to placental ischemia