Neuroenhancement: Is Society Ready?

Humans were always able to discover and invent solutions to our species limitations, from the discovery of vaccines and irradiation of diseases to the invention of personal computers that could fit in our pockets. Concerning the idea of scientific and technological advancements, it is never the question of whether or not scientists could discover these achievements, but it is always the question of whether or not science should create or discover something. In regards to the topic of neuroenhancement, experts have been unable to unanimously determine if, as a society, we are morally responsible enough to handle such an advancement. Neuroenhancement is the use of pharmaceuticals and/or technologies to improve the cognitive abilities of a healthy individual. There is already an expressed interested from society to using neuroenhancements, as many individuals use pharmaceuticals such as Modafinil, methylphenidate, and Adderall off-label, with many of these pharmaceuticals purchased illegally, to potentially boost their cognitive capabilities. Even with the growing interest in society, experts are concerned with the potential concerns of introducing neuroenhancement into society. Three of the biggest concerns surrounding cognitive enhancements are safety, risk of coercion, and distribution justice. In regards to safety, many individuals are uncomfortable with disturbing healthy brains for the potential of enhancing it because of the possible adverse side effects from electing to partake in an “unnecessary improvement.” Regarding the risk of coercion, if neuroenhancements were to be available to the public, individuals may feel compelled to artificially enhance themselves to be competitive in their careers or society. This takes out the desire to improve oneself for self-actualization, but rather to improve oneself to be part of a community. Regarding distribution justice, society already has an issue distributing currently existing items fairly. To introduce a product that may cause more inequality will only hinder society. Neuroenhancement may not just refer to cognitive enhancement, but potentially someday, may lead to manipulation of moral behavior. Currently, society is not ready for the responsibility of neuroenhancement, and society might never be ready

In patients presenting to the emergency department with atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response, are calcium channel blockers more effective than beta-blockers for acute management of rate control?

The evidence on the efficacy of nondihydropyridine calcium channel blockers (CCBs) compared to beta-blockers (BBs) for acute atrial fibrillation (AF) rate control in the emergency department setting was examined. Twelve studies were relevant and revealed that CCBs, specifically diltiazem, were superior to BBs because of their rapid onset of action and the lower number of doses they required to sustain ventricular rate control compared to BBs. However, given the small sample sizes in these studies and the limited number of randomized, double-blinded trials, more research is needed to increase the generalizability and to confirm the significance of these findings

In patients presenting to the emergency department with atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response, are calcium channel blockers more effective than beta-blockers for acute management of rate control?

The evidence on the efficacy of nondihydropyridine calcium channel blockers (CCBs) compared to beta-blockers (BBs) for acute atrial fibrillation (AF) rate control in the emergency department setting was examined. Twelve studies were relevant and revealed that CCBs, specifically diltiazem, were superior to BBs because of their rapid onset of action and the lower number of doses they required to sustain ventricular rate control compared to BBs. However, given the small sample sizes in these studies and the limited number of randomized, double-blinded trials, more research is needed to increase the generalizability and to confirm the significance of these findings

Regional Capital Mobility in China: 1978-2006

We examine cross-region capital mobility in China and track how the degree of mobility has changed over time. The effects of fiscal and redistributive activities of different levels of government in China on private capital mobility are taken into account. Our results indicate that there was a significant improvement in capital mobility over time in China, particularly for private capital in the more developed regions. The central and provincial governments, via their taxation, spending, and transfers, loosen the relationship between private saving and investment and appear to promote capital mobility, particularly for less developed regions. There are considerable differences between more and less developed regions in terms of the degree of capital market integration and the improvement in capital mobility over time. The results have important policy implications on global re-balancing as well as regional development gap and risk-sharing within China.Feldstein-Horioka; Chinese cross-region capital mobility; saving-investment relationship; Chinese capital market integration

Methods for Removing Concrete Decks from Bridge Girders, TR-647

With ever tightening budgets and limitations of demolition equipment, states are looking for cost-effective, reliable, and sustainable methods for removing concrete decks from bridges. The goal of this research was to explore such methods. The research team conducted qualitative studies through a literature review, interviews, surveys, and workshops and performed small-scale trials and push-out tests (shear strength evaluations). Interviews with bridge owners and contractors indicated that concrete deck replacement was more economical than replacing an entire superstructure under the assumption that the salvaged superstructure has adequate remaining service life and capacity. Surveys and workshops provided insight into advantages and disadvantages of deck removal methods, information that was used to guide testing. Small-scale trials explored three promising deck removal methods: hydrodemolition, chemical splitting, and peeling

JC Virus Encephalopathy Is Associated with a Novel Agnoprotein-Deletion JCV Variant

JC virus encephalopathy (JCVE) is a newly described gray matter disease of the brain caused by productive infection of cortical pyramidal neurons. We characterized the full length sequence of JCV isolated from the brain of a JCVE patient, analyzed its distribution in various compartments by PCR, and determined viral gene expression in the brain by immunohistochemistry(IHC). We identified a novel JCV variant, JCVCPN1, with a unique 143 bp deletion in the Agno gene encoding a truncated 10 amino acid peptide, and harboring an archetype-like regulatory region. This variant lacked one of three nuclear protein binding regions in the Agno gene. It was predominant in the brain, where it coexisted with an Agno-intact wild-type strain. Double immunostaining with anti-Agno and anti- VP1 antibodies demonstrated that the truncated JCVCPN1 Agno peptide was present in the majority of cortical cells productively infected with JCV. We then screened 68 DNA samples from 8 brain, 30 CSF and 30 PBMC samples of PML patients, HIV+ and HIV- control subjects. Another JCVCPN strain with a different pattern of Agno-deletion was found in the CSF of an HIV+/PML patient, where it also coexisted with wild-type, Agno-intact JCV. These findings suggest that the novel tropism for cortical pyramidal neurons of JCVCPN1, may be associated with the Agno deletion. Productive and lytic infection of these cells, resulting in fulminant JCV encephalopathy and death may have been facilitated by the co-infection with a wild- type strain of JCV

Privacy Preserving Attribute-Focused Anonymization Scheme for Healthcare Data Publishing

Advancements in Industry 4.0 brought tremendous improvements in the healthcare sector, such as better quality of treatment, enhanced communication, remote monitoring, and reduced cost. Sharing healthcare data with healthcare providers is crucial for harnessing the benefits of such improvements. In general, healthcare data holds sensitive information about individuals. Hence, sharing such data is challenging because of various security and privacy issues. According to privacy regulations and ethical requirements, it is essential to preserve the privacy of patients before sharing data for medical research. State-of-the-art literature on privacy preserving studies either uses cryptographic approaches to protect the privacy or uses anonymizing techniques regardless of the type of attributes, this results in poor protection and data utility. In this paper, we propose an attribute-focused privacy preserving data publishing scheme. The proposed scheme is two-fold, comprising a fixed-interval approach to protect numerical attributes and an improved l -diverse slicing approach to protect the categorical and sensitive attributes. In the fixed-interval approach, the original values of the healthcare data are replaced with an equivalent computed value. The improved l -diverse slicing approach partitions the data both horizontally and vertically to avoid privacy leaks. Extensive experiments with real-world datasets are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The classification models built on anonymized dataset yields approximately 13% better accuracy than benchmarked algorithms. Experimental analyses show that the average information loss which is measured by normalized certainty penalty (NCP) is reduced by 12% compared to similar approaches. The attribute focused scheme not only provides data utility but also prevents the data from membership disclosures, attribute disclosures, and identity disclosures

Individual Differences in Dopamine Are Associated with Reward Discounting in Clinical Groups But Not in Healthy Adults.

Some people are more willing to make immediate, risky, or costly reward-focused choices than others, which has been hypothesized to be associated with individual differences in dopamine (DA) function. In two studies using PET imaging, one empirical (Study 1: N = 144 males and females across 3 samples) and one meta-analytic (Study 2: N = 307 across 12 samples), we sought to characterize associations between individual differences in DA and time, probability, and physical effort discounting in human adults. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in DA D2-like receptors were not associated with time or probability discounting of monetary rewards in healthy humans, and associations with physical effort discounting were inconsistent across adults of different ages. Meta-analytic results for temporal discounting corroborated our empirical finding for minimal effect of DA measures on discounting in healthy individuals but suggested that associations between individual differences in DA and reward discounting depend on clinical features. Addictions were characterized by negative correlations between DA and discounting, but other clinical conditions, such as Parkinson's disease, obesity, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, were characterized by positive correlations between DA and discounting. Together, the results suggest that trait differences in discounting in healthy adults do not appear to be strongly associated with individual differences in D2-like receptors. The difference in meta-analytic correlation effects between healthy controls and individuals with psychopathology suggests that individual difference findings related to DA and reward discounting in clinical samples may not be reliably generalized to healthy controls, and vice versa.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Decisions to forgo large rewards for smaller ones due to increasing time delays, uncertainty, or physical effort have been linked to differences in dopamine (DA) function, which is disrupted in some forms of psychopathology. It remains unclear whether alterations in DA function associated with psychopathology also extend to explaining associations between DA function and decision making in healthy individuals. We show that individual differences in DA D2 receptor availability are not consistently related to monetary discounting of time, probability, or physical effort in healthy individuals across a broad age range. By contrast, we suggest that psychopathology accounts for observed inconsistencies in the relationship between measures of DA function and reward discounting behavior

Super-resolution reconstruction of brain magnetic resonance images via lightweight autoencoder

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is useful to provide detailed anatomical information such as images of tissues and organs within the body that are vital for quantitative image analysis. However, typically the MR images acquired lacks adequate resolution because of the constraints such as patients’ comfort and long sampling duration. Processing the low resolution MRI may lead to an incorrect diagnosis. Therefore, there is a need for super resolution techniques to obtain high resolution MRI images. Single image super resolution (SR) is one of the popular techniques to enhance image quality. Reconstruction based SR technique is a category of single image SR that can reconstruct the low resolution MRI images to high resolution images. Inspired by the advanced deep learning based SR techniques, in this paper we propose an autoencoder based MRI image super resolution technique that performs reconstruction of the high resolution MRI images from low resolution MRI images. Experimental results on synthetic and real brain MRI images show that our autoencoder based SR technique surpasses other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), Information Fidelity Criterion (IFC), and computational time