Manual skills

The process of manual material manipulation is disappearing from daily life. Why is it that we still have an educational and social environment that does not put the same priority on practical and theoretical knowledge as is does on virtual academics? This disconnect is particularly poignant in a field such as design that should demand the mastery of both. As a modern nation, we have repressed manual skill and incremental learning by fostering an educational climate geared solely towards the desire for white-collar status. We base the accreditation of our grade schools on the rate of their college placement and that mentality carries over to society at large. This trend has been going on long enough that the students currently in college have no longer had the opportunity to witness their fathers or even their grandfathers doing something as simple as changing the oil in the family car. Traits of competency and creativity that might actually have been hereditary at one point in time have been repressed to the point that successive generations are not even aware of them. Students have not been exposed to the possibilities and honor contained within these activities. We have a generation and a half of people who exhibit no mastery of their stuff and we have students getting to their senior year of college before realizing that there is a creative outlet that makes use of the material intelligence they seek. They learn to tap threads in a hole at the age of twenty-one and I end up teaching middle school shop to college seniors. In the field of design, this lack of understanding carries over to the products created. Designers who don\u27t make for themselves do not consider the values of object interaction that would be appreciated by an individual who makes. This results in crop after crop of products that help perpetuate a cycle of material unawareness, of waste and of limited development of the user/object relationship

Cellular specializations for sound localization

One of the key elements in auditory perception is the localization of sounds in space. The major cues used for localizing sounds in the azimuthal plane have long been recognized as interaural differences in time of arrival of a sound and amplitude differences between the two ears (Rayleigh 1907; Thompson 1878). High frequency sounds are reflected by the head and thereby produce interaural level differences (ILDs) that are used for localization. The head does not reflect low frequency sounds and so interaural timing differences (ITDs) are used. One of the cell groups of the auditory brainstem, the medial superior olive (MSO), functions in sound localization by comparing ITDs between the two ears. The MSO is defined as a binaural group of cells because it integrates input from the cochlear nucleus (CN) from each ear. Afferent nerve fibers from the ipsilateral CN are restricted to dendrites oriented laterally and inputs from the contralateral CN are segregated to medially oriented dendrites (Stotler 1953). At low to moderate sound levels, activation from each cochlear nucleus is below action potential threshold and MSO neurons only generate action potentials when inputs from both sides arrive within a short temporal window called the coincidence detection window.;Several cellular specializations exist along the auditory pathway that aid MSO cells in their ability to detect changes in ITD. These specializations include large nerve terminals and distinct organelle complexes located within terminals, which facilitate fast, well-timed inhibitory inputs to MSO cells. Very little is known about the role of inhibition in sound localization and proper understanding of its role depends on knowledge of the cells that impinge on the MSO and the pharmacology and kinetics of synaptic transmission in MSO cells. Also, the membranes of MSO cells contain specific voltage-gated potassium channels (Kv), these channels are known to affect membrane electrical properties, but how these channels influence ITD sensitivity is unknown. The main goal of my research was to understand these cellular specializations that contribute to neural processing of ITDs

Reducing Implicit Gender Bias Using a Virtual Workplace Environment

Implicit gender bias has costly and complex consequences for women in the workplace. We present an online desktop virtual environment that follows the story of a male or female self-avatar from the first-person perspective, who either experiences a positive or negative workplace scenario. Participants who experienced negative workplace experiences with a female self-avatar had significantly decreased levels of implicit gender bias compared to those who had a male self-avatar with evidence of perspective taking. Experiences of a positive workplace scenario showed no significant decreases in implicit gender bias regardless of self-avatar gender. We discuss the implications of these findings and make recommendations for virtual environment technologies and scenarios with respect to the reduction of implicit biases

Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV-2 Infection: Recommendations for Management in Low-Resource Settings

HIV-2 contributes approximately a third to the prevalence of HIV in West Africa and is present in significant amounts in several low-income countries outside of West Africa with historical ties to Portugal. It complicates HIV diagnosis, requiring more expensive and technically demanding testing algorithms. Natural polymorphisms and patterns in the development of resistance to antiretrovirals are reviewed, along with their implications for antiretroviral therapy. Nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, crucial in standard first-line regimens for HIV-1 in many low-income settings, have no effect on HIV-2. Nucleoside analogues alone are not sufficiently potent enough to achieve durable virologic control. Some protease inhibitors, in particular those without ritonavir boosting, are not sufficiently effective against HIV-2. Following review of the available evidence and taking the structure and challenges of antiretroviral care in West Africa into consideration, the authors make recommendations and highlight the needs of special populations

VALUE AT RISK PORTOFOLIO SAHAM LIKUID: KAPITALISASI BESAR DAN KAPITALISASI KECIL (STUDI KASUS SAHAM LQ – 45 DI BEI JANUARI 2011 – DESEMBER 2012)

Penulisan ini adalah pengaruh likuiditas dalam saham dan pengukuran resiko portofolio dengan Value at Risk (VaR). Menggunakan pengembalian saham  harian dan kapitalisasi pasar. Perhitungan empiris bahwa VaR belum sukses membuktikan pola dari hubungan diantara resiko dan likuiditas keduanya dalam saham level individual dan portofolio. Penelitian ini juga memperjelas bahwa diversifikasi portofolio saham mencapai pengurangan resiko

Distributional Bellman Operators over Mean Embeddings

We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and temporal-difference learning based on this framework, provide asymptotic convergence theory, and examine the empirical performance of the algorithms on a suite of tabular tasks. Further, we show that this approach can be straightforwardly combined with deep reinforcement learning, and obtain a new deep RL agent that improves over baseline distributional approaches on the Arcade Learning Environment

Restoration of pharyngeal dilator muscle force in dystrophin-deficient (mdx) mice following co-treatment with neutralizing interleukin-6 receptor antibodies and urocortin-2

New Findings: What is the central question of this study? We previously reported impaired upper airway dilator muscle function in the mdx mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Our aim was to assess the effect of blocking interleukin-6 receptor signalling and stimulating corticotrophin-releasing factor receptor 2 signalling on mdx sternohyoid muscle structure and function. What is the main finding and its importance? The interventional treatment had a positive inotropic effect on sternohyoid muscle force, restoring mechanical work and power to wild-type values, reduced myofibre central nucleation and preserved the myosin heavy chain type IIb fibre complement of mdx sternohyoid muscle. These data might have implications for development of pharmacotherapies for DMD with relevance to respiratory muscle performance. The mdx mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy shows evidence of impaired pharyngeal dilator muscle function. We hypothesized that inflammatory and stress-related factors are implicated in airway dilator muscle dysfunction. Six-week-old mdx (n = 26) and wild-type (WT; n = 26) mice received either saline (0.9% w/v) or a co-administration of neutralizing interleukin-6 receptor antibodies (0.2 mg kg−1) and corticotrophin-releasing factor receptor 2 agonist (urocortin 2; 30 μg kg−1) over 2 weeks. Sternohyoid muscle isometric and isotonic contractile function was examined ex vivo. Muscle fibre centronucleation and muscle cellular infiltration, collagen content, fibre-type distribution and fibre cross-sectional area were determined by histology and immunofluorescence. Muscle chemokine content was examined by use of a multiplex assay. Sternohyoid peak specific force at 100 Hz was significantly reduced in mdx compared with WT. Drug treatment completely restored force in mdx sternohyoid to WT levels. The percentage of centrally nucleated muscle fibres was significantly increased in mdx, and this was partly ameliorated after drug treatment. The areal density of infiltrates and collagen content were significantly increased in mdx sternohyoid; both indices were unaffected by drug treatment. The abundance of myosin heavy chain type IIb fibres was significantly decreased in mdx sternohyoid; drug treatment preserved myosin heavy chain type IIb complement in mdx muscle. The chemokines macrophage inflammatory protein 2, interferon-γ-induced protein 10 and macrophage inflammatory protein 3α were significantly increased in mdx sternohyoid compared with WT. Drug treatment significantly increased chemokine expression in mdx but not WT sternohyoid. Recovery of contractile function was impressive in our study, with implications for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The precise molecular mechanisms by which the drug treatment exerts an inotropic effect on mdx sternohyoid muscle remain to be elucidated

One-way diffraction grating

Matthew J. Lockyear, Alastair P. Hibbins, Kevin R. White, and J. Roy Sambles, Physical Review E, Vol. 74, article 056611 (2006). "Copyright © 2006 by the American Physical Society."Diffraction gratings are elementary tools for much of optics and spectroscopy. Here, at microwave frequencies, we provide a new perspective on these fundamental structures. A transmission diffraction grating is presented that has diffracted beams emanating from one surface only. It can thus function either as a transmission grating with no reflected orders (other than zero) or, in the reverse configuration, as a partially transmitting structure with diffracted orders in reflection only