Effects of Estrogen on Recovery of Spatial Function After Cerebellar Lesion

The traditional view of cerebellar processing has been that it plays a role in motor planning and function, now the cerebellum is also believed to be involved in spatial learning and cognition. Like the cerebellum’s involvement in cognition the role of estrogen in cerebellar functioning has only recently been investigated. The cerebellum normally has low levels of estrogen but aromatase activity is upregulated after brain injury, increasing estrogen levels. This upregulation after injury suggests that estrogen could be involved in neuroprotection. This study uses male zebra finches to investigate the role of the cerebellum in spatial function and the possible role of estrogen in recovery of function after cerebellar lesion. To test the hypotheses that estrogen aids in recovery of spatial abilities after cerebellar lesion, we developed a maze for small birds to test spatial abilities. To examine recovery of function, I made bilateral puncture lesions to the cerebellum or performed a sham lesion (controls). I compared sham birds, to birds with bilateral lesions to the cerebellum, either given a control vehicle or fed vehicle + letrozole to block estrogen synthesis. Our findings suggest that the cerebellum is involved in spatial function and that estrogen improves the outcome of behavioral recovery after cerebellar lesions

Dryden\u27s Adaptations of Shakespeare

It is the purpose of this study to discuss Dryden\u27s adaptations of Shakespeare\u27s The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida. As a background for this study, Restoration drama will be discussed from the standpoint of the following criteria: relationship to Elizabethan drama; Restoration audiences, theaters, and fashion; adaptations, primarily of Shakespeare; D’Avenant, Dryden, and heroic drama; and finally, English opera in the Restoration period. The first of the five chapters in this discussion will be concerned with the items listed above. Succeeding chapters in order will discuss Dryden\u27s adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and in a summary chapter some critical conclusions will be given. In chapters two, three, and four dealing with the plays of Shakespeare which Dryden adapted, the discussion will be concerned with the theme of the plays, the structure, the plot, major and important minor characters, and imagery, and it will close with a critical summary

Test results from a breadboard cryogenic propellant condition assembly

Cryogenic auxiliary propulsion systems consist of five major subsystems: propellant tanks, propellant conditioning assemblies, accumulators, propellant distribution systems, and thrustors. The propellant conditioning assembly (PCA) converts low pressure liquid to high pressure gas for use by the thrustors, and is one of the most complex subsystems of the cryogenic propulsion system. The ability to achieve rapid starts and at the same time maintain system control are two critical areas of PCA operation. To investigate these critical areas of operation, a PCA of the general type required was designed, fabricated, and tested using existing hardware. Realistic start times were achieved and system control was maintained at all operating conditions

Lorain Police Department: A Study to Improve Patrol Deployment

The Lorain (OH) Police Department requested research assistance from the Ohio Consortium of Crime Science (OCCS) for the purpose of evaluating and revising the current patrol districts and the allocation of resources within the districts. The OCCS is an association of researchers from universities and state agencies working together to provide evidence-based solutions to the real-world problems faced by local criminal justice agencies. The goal of the project was to evaluate and revise the current police districts and the allocation of resources within those districts. The first objective in support of the project goal was to assess calls for service, officers’ workload, hotspots, and violent crimes within the existing police districts. The second objective in support of the project goal was to develop new police districts based on the findings of the first objective and to predict future calls for service, officers’ workload, hotspots, and violent crimes within those proposed districts. Calls for service data (N = 56,423) from the Lorain Police Department’s computer-aideddispatch (CAD) system were analyzed for the year 2013. Findings indicate that there is disparity in allocation of patrol resources and calls for service workload across the five current police districts within the city of Lorain. The CHAID algorithm was employed to group 93 existing geographic section tracts within the city into twelve statistically similar groups. Geospatial patterns readily emerged and the five police districts were reconfigured into four new patrol beats. Four recommendations are presented: (1) the proposed new police beats should be implemented; (2) section tracts within the new beats should be used as crime analysis targets; (3) patrol resources should be specifically assigned to each of the new beats on all shifts; and, (4) patrol operations should be fully integrated within the new CAD system scheduled for implementation in early 2015

Violence-related Police Crime Arrests in the United States, 2005-2011

This study is a quantitative content analysis of news reports and court records on 3,328 violence-related arrest cases of 2,586 individual sworn law enforcement officers during the years 2005-2011. The arrested officers were employed by 1,445 nonfederal state, local, special, constable, tribal, and regional law enforcement agencies located in 805 counties and independent cities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Binary logistic regression and classification and regression tree (CART) analyses were conducted to predict criminal conviction in violence-related police crime arrest cases. Finding indicate that conviction of police officers on one or more offenses charged are driven by specific legal and extralegal factors. Policy implications will be discussed

Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested

There are no comprehensive statistics available on problems with police integrity, and no government entity collects data on all criminal arrests of law enforcement officers in the United States. Police crimes are those crimes committed by sworn law enforcement officers with the general powers of arrest. These crimes can occur while the officer is either on- or off-duty and include offenses committed by officers employed by state and local law enforcement agencies. This study provides a wealth of data on a phenomena that relates directly to police integrity— data that previously did not exist in any usable format. The first goal of the study is to determine the nature and extent of police crime in the United States. The objective for this goal is to determine the incidence and prevalence of officers arrested. A second goal is to determine what factors influence how an agency responds to arrests of its officers. Objectives for this goal are to determine whether certain factors influence agency response and employment outcomes: (a) severity of crimes for which officers are arrested; (b) level of urbanization for each employing agency; (c) geographic location for each employing agency; (d) length of service and age of arrested officers; and, (e) criminal case outcomes. A final goal is to foster police integrity by exploring whether officer arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct. Objectives for this goal are to determine whether arrested officers were also named as a civil defendant in any 42 U.S.C. §1983 federal court actions during their careers, and to inform practitioners and policymakers of strategies that will better identify problem officers and those at risk for engaging in police crime and its correlates. The advent of nationwide, objective, and verifiable data on the law-breaking behavior of sworn officers and provides potential benefits to law enforcement agencies that connect the technical expertise of researchers to criminal justice policymakers and practitioners. These data 2 provide direct guidance in three areas. First, the study provides agencies information on the types of crime that are most frequently perpetrated by police officers. Second, the research provides information on the relationship between police crimes and other types of misbehavior that collectively comprise the problem officer. Third, nationwide data on police crimes and the manner in which arrested officers are organizationally sanctioned provides points of comparison for law enforcement agencies that confront these problems, as well as information on the degree to which law enforcement agencies tend to sanction or ignore certain crimes committed by officers. This is a quantitative content analysis study of archived records reporting several thousand arrests of police officers during the years 2005-2011. The primary information source is the Google News search engine and its Google Alerts email update service. Chi-Square was used to measure the statistical significance of the association between two variables measured at the nominal level. Cramer’s V was utilized to measure the strength of the Chi-Square association. Stepwise binary logistic regression was used to determine which of the predictor variables are statistically significant in multivariate models. Classification tree analysis was utilized to uncover the causal pathways between independent predictors and outcome variables. The Google News searches resulted in the identification of 6,724 cases in which sworn law enforcement officers were arrested during the years 2005 through 2011. The cases involved the arrests of 5,545 individual sworn officers employed by 2,529 nonfederal state and local law enforcement agencies located in 1,205 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The findings indicate that nonfederal law enforcement officers were arrested nationwide during 2005-2011 at a rate of 0.72 officers arrested per 1,000 officers, and at a rate of 1.7 officers arrested per 100,000 population nationwide

High Numbers of Staphylococcus aureus at Three Bathing Beaches in South Florida

While the value of Staphylococcus aureus as an indicator for non-enteric diseases is unclear, understanding its prevalence in recreational beaches would prove useful, given its pathogenic potential. Staphylococcus aureus levels were evaluated in sand and seawater at three beaches during one year. To elucidate possible S. aureussources or colonization trends, distribution in sand was analyzed at Hollywood Beach. Staphylococcus aureus levels fluctuated throughout the study with highest average densities detected in dry sand (3.46 × 105 CFU/g, Hobie Beach), particularly at beaches with high human density. Patchy distribution marked hotspots of human use and/or possible bacterial re-growth. Data from a brief epidemiological survey indicated a very slight association between beach usage and skin conditions; suggesting high S. aureus levels in sand may not necessarily constitute major health risks. Because the possibility of disease transmission exists, particularly to children and immuno-compromised beach-goers, periodic surveying of highly frequented beaches seems warranted

Electronic and paper versions of a faces pain intensity scale: concordance and preference in hospitalized children

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Assessment of pain in children is an important aspect of pain management and can be performed by observational methods or by self-assessment. The Faces Pain Scale-Revised (FPS-R) is a self-report tool which has strong positive correlations with other well established self-report pain intensity measures. It has been recommended for measuring pain intensity in school-aged children (4 years and older). The objective of this study is to compare the concordance and the preference for two versions, electronic and paper, of the FPS-R, and to determine whether an electronic version of the FPS-R can be used by children aged 4 and older.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The study is an observational, multicenter, randomized, cross-over, controlled, open trial. Medical and surgical patients in two pediatric hospitals (N = 202, age 4-12 years, mean age 8.3 years, 58% male) provided self-reports of their present pain using the FPS-R on a personal digital assistant (PDA) and on a paper version. Paper and electronic versions of the FPS-R were administered by a nurse in a randomized order: half the patients were given the PDA version first and the other half the paper version first. The time between the administrations was planned to be less than 30 minutes but not simultaneous. Two hundred and thirty-seven patients were enrolled; 35 were excluded from analysis because of misunderstanding of instructions or abnormal time between the two assessments.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Final population for analysis comprised 202 children. The overall weighted Kappa was 0.846 (95%CI: 0.795; 0.896) and the Spearman correlation between scores on the two versions was r_s= 0.911 (p < 0.0001). The mean difference of pain scores was less than 0.1 out of 10, which was neither statistically nor clinically significant; 83.2% of children chose the same face on both versions of the FPS-R. Preference was not modified by order, sex, age, hospitalization unit (medical or surgical units), or previous analgesics. The PDA was preferred by 87.4% of the children who expressed a preference.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The electronic version of the FPS-R can be recommended for use with children aged 4 to 12, either in clinical trials or in hospitals to monitor pain intensity.</p

Steiner t-designs for large t

One of the most central and long-standing open questions in combinatorial design theory concerns the existence of Steiner t-designs for large values of t. Although in his classical 1987 paper, L. Teirlinck has shown that non-trivial t-designs exist for all values of t, no non-trivial Steiner t-design with t > 5 has been constructed until now. Understandingly, the case t = 6 has received considerable attention. There has been recent progress concerning the existence of highly symmetric Steiner 6-designs: It is shown in [M. Huber, J. Algebr. Comb. 26 (2007), pp. 453-476] that no non-trivial flag-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist. In this paper, we announce that essentially also no block-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist.Comment: 9 pages; to appear in: Mathematical Methods in Computer Science 2008, ed. by J.Calmet, W.Geiselmann, J.Mueller-Quade, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

Block-Transitive Designs in Affine Spaces

This paper deals with block-transitive $t$-$(v,k,\lambda)$ designs in affine spaces for large $t$, with a focus on the important index $\lambda=1$ case. We prove that there are no non-trivial 5-$(v,k,1)$ designs admitting a block-transitive group of automorphisms that is of affine type. Moreover, we show that the corresponding non-existence result holds for 4-$(v,k,1)$ designs, except possibly when the group is one-dimensional affine. Our approach involves a consideration of the finite 2-homogeneous affine permutation groups.Comment: 10 pages; to appear in: "Designs, Codes and Cryptography