The Structure and Mode of Innervation of Capillary Blood-Vessels: The Development of the Cardiac Innervation in Man

Current descriptions of the innervation of blood capillaries -or rather, descriptions of the nerves which accompany such vessels- omit to describe the mode of termination of the nerves. On the other hand, if Krogh's view may be regarded as the accepted view of the mechanism subserving capillary function, the description of the effective apparatus of constriction pays little if any regard to the nervous system. The existence of this hiatus would be sufficient justification for reopening the question of capillary structure even in the absence of Babyliss's reminder that a capillary blood vessel as a distinct anatomical structure in still awaiting definition. The present investigation was undertaken to clear up these matters, if that might be done, for the ogan of definitive circulation is not of secondary importance even to those larger and better known structures which furnish it with its reserves of blood

The Fallout of Too Big for Trial: Advocating Control Person Liability

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2008 (Subprime Crisis or Crisis) caused an unprecedented worldwide recession. Between 2007 and 2010, the global financial services sector lost 325,000 jobs. In the United States, consumer household net worth decreased by $11 trillion. Meanwhile, C-level executives (hereafter, executives or corporate officers) from sixteen of the firms most closely associated with the Subprime Crisis were eligible to receive golden parachute payments approaching$1 billion if their firms’ failures had resulted in their terminations. Because of the government bailout program, that money would have been indirectly funded by United States taxpayers. The Subprime Crisis presented the U.S. government with an opportunity to establish new responses to financial crises through reassessments of control person liability. To avoid repeating the types of failure that precipitated the Subprime Crisis and caused the worst national recession since the Great Depression, legislators attempting to stabilize a financial system that has become characterized by products of unfathomable complexity should take novel steps, in addition to implementing regulations, to achieve their goals. While this Comment later outlines at least one viable model for legislators to follow, this introduction first sets the stage by discussing inadequate past responses to crises, the general nature of the failures of corporate leadership, and the inefficacy of the current corporate liability model in deterring the kinds of failures that brought down the economy in 2008. Two cases will be introduced to provide context and, from there, the discussion will proceed

The Fallout of Too Big for Trial: Advocating Control Person Liability

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2008 (Subprime Crisis or Crisis) caused an unprecedented worldwide recession. Between 2007 and 2010, the global financial services sector lost 325,000 jobs. In the United States, consumer household net worth decreased by $11 trillion. Meanwhile, C-level executives (hereafter, executives or corporate officers) from sixteen of the firms most closely associated with the Subprime Crisis were eligible to receive golden parachute payments approaching$1 billion if their firms’ failures had resulted in their terminations. Because of the government bailout program, that money would have been indirectly funded by United States taxpayers. The Subprime Crisis presented the U.S. government with an opportunity to establish new responses to financial crises through reassessments of control person liability. To avoid repeating the types of failure that precipitated the Subprime Crisis and caused the worst national recession since the Great Depression, legislators attempting to stabilize a financial system that has become characterized by products of unfathomable complexity should take novel steps, in addition to implementing regulations, to achieve their goals. While this Comment later outlines at least one viable model for legislators to follow, this introduction first sets the stage by discussing inadequate past responses to crises, the general nature of the failures of corporate leadership, and the inefficacy of the current corporate liability model in deterring the kinds of failures that brought down the economy in 2008. Two cases will be introduced to provide context and, from there, the discussion will proceed

Structural approaches to protein sequence analysis

Various protein sequence analysis techniques are described, aimed at improving the prediction of protein structure by means of pattern matching. To investigate the possibility that improvements in amino acid comparison matrices could result in improvements in the sensitivity and accuracy of protein sequence alignments, a method for rapidly calculating amino acid mutation data matrices from large sequence data sets is presented. The method is then applied to the membrane-spanning segments of integral membrane proteins in order to investigate the nature of amino acid mutability in a lipid environment. Whilst purely sequence analytic techniques work well for cases where some residual sequence similarity remains between a newly characterized protein and a protein of known 3-D structure, in the harder cases, there is little or no sequence similarity with which to recognize proteins with similar folding patterns. In the light of these limitations, a new approach to protein fold recognition is described, which uses a statistically derived pairwise potential to evaluate the compatibility between a test sequence and a library of structural templates, derived from solved crystal structures. The method, which is called optimal sequence threading, proves to be highly successful, and is able to detect the common TIM barrel fold between a number of enzyme sequences, which has not been achieved by any previous sequence analysis technique. Finally, a new method for the prediction of the secondary structure and topology of membrane proteins is described. The method employs a set of statistical tables compiled from well-characterized membrane protein data, and a novel dynamic programming algorithm to recognize membrane topology models by expectation maximization. The statistical tables show definite biases towards certain amino acid species on the inside, middle and outside of a cellular membrane

Concealment algorithms for networked video transmission systems

This thesis addresses the problem of cell loss when transmitting video data over an ATM network. Cell loss causes sections of an image to be lost or discarded in the interconnecting nodes between the transmitting and receiving locations. The method used to combat this problem is to use a technique called Error Concealment, where the lost sections of an image are replaced with approximations derived from the information in the surrounding areas to the error. This technique does not require any additional encoding, as used by Error Correction. Conventional techniques conceal from within the pixel domain, but require a large amount of processing (2N2 up to 20N2) where N is the dimension of an N×N square block. Also, previous work at Loughborough used Linear Interpolation in the transform domain, which required much less processing, to conceal the error. [Continues.

Metallic Triple Beam Resonator with Thick-film Printed Drive and Pickup

A triple beam resonator fabricated in 430S17 stainless steel with thick-film piezoelectric elements to drive and detect the vibrations is presented. The resonator substrate was fabricated by a simultaneous, double-sided photochemical etching technique and the thick-film piezoelectric elements were deposited by a standard screen-printing process. The combination of these two batch-fabrication processes provides the opportunity for mass production of the device at low cost. The resonator, a dynamically balanced triple beam tuning fork (TBTF) structure 23.5 mm long and 6.5 mm wide, has a favoured mode at 4.96 kHz with a Q-factor of 3630 operating in air

Evaluation of a polymerase chain reaction assay for the diagnosis of bovine trypanosomiasis and epidemiological surveillance in Bolivia

BACKGROUND: Sporadic outbreaks of bovine trypanosomiasis have been reported in Bolivia since 1996 when T. vivax and T. evansi were identified for the first time by parasitological means. However, comprehensive epidemiological information concerning T. vivax and T. evansi in the country is lacking. Current parasitological and serological diagnostic methods for trypanosomiasis have important limitations either in their sensitivity or specificity, which can result in unreliable data when applied in epidemiological studies. PCR assays are a recently developed procedure that might help to overcome the constraints of parasitological and serological assays. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate PCR assays as a diagnostic tool for epidemiological studies in Bolivia. RESULTS: PCR assays for diagnosis of trypanosome infection in cattle were evaluated for their ability to detect trypanosome DNA in blood spots samples collected from cattle in four different provinces from the Bolivian lowlands and the results compared with those obtained with standard parasitological Micro Haematocrit Centrifugation Technique (MHCT) and stained smears and serological methods (Card Agglutination Test for T. evansi (CATT), and Antibody ELISAs for T. vivax and T. congolense). Kappa agreement analysis showed a significant agreement between PCR assays and results from parasitological methods but there was no agreement when PCR was compared with serological assays. Some samples from T. vivax smear positive animals were negative by PCR, therefore modifications to the PCR assay conditions were undertaken to try to improve agreement between PCR and parasitological assays. Changes in the template DNA concentration or the use of an alternative primer set resulted in improvements in the PCR detection rate, but not all the parasitologically positive samples were detected by PCR. Results from PCR assays for T. vivax and T. evansi were combined with results from parasitological and serological assays to provide information on prevalence rates for the four provinces from where the samples were obtained. CONCLUSION: The present study established evidence of the usefulness of PCR as diagnostic tool for epidemiological studies and confirmed that cattle trypanosomiasis appears to be endemic in several regions of the Bolivian lowlands