The Role of Borderline Personality Features, Social Support, and Perceived Stress on Prescribed and Non-Prescribed Opioid Use during Pregnancy

The current project examined the role of prescribed and non-prescribed opioid use in a sample of pregnant mothers (N = 99) who were patients in a high-risk pregnancy clinic. Borderline personality disorder features were assessed as whether these personality features may be associated with opioid misuse during pregnancy. Hepatitis-C virus, lack of social support, and perceived stress was also assessed in relation to opioid use and borderline personality features. Participants were representative of the geographic area (78.7% White) and in their 2nd and 3rd trimester (Gestation M = 26.2). Opioid use was measured through self-report questionnaires as well as urine and blood analysis from medical records. Linear and hierarchical regressions were employed to test predictor and outcome variables. Individuals who had high borderline features were more likely to misuse opioids, particularly the features of negative relationships and selfharm. Individuals with HCV were more likely to misuse opioids but were not more likely to have a clinical cut-off score of borderline features. The borderline features of negative relationships was positively associated with HCV diagnosis. Lack of social support did not moderate the relation between total borderline features and both self-reported and urine analysis of opioid use. Perceived stress moderated the relation between total borderline features and opioid use severity as indicated in the urine samples, such that when levels of perceived stress were medium to high, borderline features did not affect opioid use severity. Limitations along with future directions and clinical interventions are discussed

Effect of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder on Adolescents’ Experience of Maltreatment and Adolescent Borderline Features

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a severe mental illness characterized by dysfunction and instability across a variety of domains including interpersonal relations, behavior, emotion, and cognitions. The current study assessed maltreatment in the adolescent offspring of mothers’ with BPD, who may be more at risk for experiencing maltreatment compared to adolescents who do not have a mother with the disorder. Participants were adolescents age 14-18 years (M = 15.78, SD = 1.21) who were a part of a larger study examining offspring of mothers with BPD. Groups were divided into adolescents whose mothers’ were diagnosed with BPD (n = 28) compared to adolescents whose mother did not have the disorder (n = 28). Adolescent offspring of mothers with BPD experienced more maltreatment overall, more physical abuse, more neglect, more emotional abuse, but not more sexual abuse compared to controls. Those who were sexually abused had higher borderline features of self-harm compared to emotionally abused, neglected, and non-maltreated adolescents. Adolescents who were physically abused reported higher affective instability compared to adolescents who were not maltreated. Additionally, dimensions of maltreatment including severity, multiple subtypes of abuse, and chronicity of abuse were related to borderline features of affective instability, self-harm, and total borderline features. The results conclude with a discussion of the empirical and clinical implications of a developmental understanding of the effect that maltreatment has on borderline personality features in adolescents whose mothers have the disorder

The role of napping on memory consolidation in preschool children

Nocturnal sleep has been shown to benefit memory in adults and children. During the preschool age range (~3-5 years), the distribution of sleep across the 24-hour period changes dramatically. Children transition from biphasic sleep patterns (a nap in addition to overnight sleep) to a monophasic sleep pattern (only overnight sleep). In addition, early childhood is a time of neuronal plasticity and pronounced acquisition of new information. This dissertation sought to examine the relationship between daytime napping and memory consolidation in preschool-aged children during this transitional time. Children were taught either a declarative or an emotional task in the morning, and memory was probed following a nap and following an equivalent period of wake. Memory was also examined 24-hours later in the morning after overnight sleep. Overall, memory for both declarative and emotional information was shown to benefit from the nap. In both experiments, napping protected encoded information, whereas wake-promotion during the day led to an approximate 10% reduction in memory accuracy the following morning. Performance on the declarative memory task was associated with sleep spindles in the nap, whereas performance on the emotional memory task was related to nap slow wave activity. The results of this dissertation indicate that napping is important for memory consolidation of newly learned information in preschool-aged children. As such, this work supports the continued practice of nap promotion in preschool classrooms

A monocular color vision system for road intersection detection

Urban driving has become the focus of autonomous robotics in recent years. Many groups seek to benefit from the research in this field including the military, who hopes to deploy autonomous rescue forces to battle-torn cities, and consumers, who will benefit from the safety and convenience resulting from new technologies finding purpose in consumer automobiles. One key aspect of autonomous urban driving is localization, or the ability of the robot to determine its position on a road network. Any information that can be obtained for the surrounding area including stop signs, road lines, and intersecting roads can aid this localization. The work here attempts to combine some previously established computer vision methods to identify roads and develop a new method that can identify both the road and any possible intersecting roads present in front of a vehicle using a single color camera. Computer vision systems rely on a few basic methods to understand and identify what they are looking at. Two valuable methods are the detection of edges that are present in the image and analysis of the colors that compose the image. The method described here attempts to utilize edge information to find road lines and color information to find the road area and any similarly colored intersecting roads. This work demonstrates that combining edge detection and color analysis methods utilizes their strengths and accommodates for their weaknesses and allows for a method that can successfully detect road lanes and intersecting roads at speeds fast enough for use with autonomous urban driving

Determination of norflurazon concentration in wheat leaves using a modified QuEChERS method

The aim of this analytical study was to develop and validate an easy-to-use method for measuring the actual level of norflurazon that accumulates in leaves. We amended the QuEChERS method, i.e. Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe, which is widely used for pesticide and herbicide analysis in food, and usually combined with HPLC-MS detection. We adapted this method for the detection of norflurazon in leaves or leaf fragments and proposed a useful modification using of HPLC-UV detection. Reproducible retention times of 3.11±0.04 min, precision (RSD<8.0%), LOQ=315 ng∙mL-1 and linearity (R=0.99874) were achieved

The pattern of photosynthetic response and adaptation to changing light conditions in lichens is linked to their ecological range

Epiphytic lichens constitute an important component of biodiversity in both deforested and forest ecosystems. Widespread occurrence is the domain of generalist lichens or those that prefer open areas. While, many stenoecious lichens find shelter only in a shaded interior of forests. Light is one of the factors known to be responsible for lichen distribution. Nevertheless, the effect of light intensity on photosynthesis of lichen photobionts remain largely unknown. We investigated photosynthesis in lichens with different ecological properties in relation to light as the only parameter modified during the experiments. The aim was to find links between this parameter and habitat requirements of a given lichen. We applied the methods based on a saturating light pulse and modulated light to perform comprehensive analyses of fast and slow chlorophyll fluorescence transient (OJIP and PSMT) combined with quenching analysis. We also examined the rate of $CO_{2}$ assimilation. Common or generalist lichens, i.e. Hypogymnia physodes, Flavoparmelia caperata and Parmelia sulcata, are able to adapt to a wide range of light intensity. Moreover, the latter species, which prefers open areas, dissipates the excess energy most efficiently. Conversely, Cetrelia cetrarioides considered an old-growth forest indicator, demonstrates definitely lower range of energy dissipation than other species, although it assimilates $CO_{2}$ efficiently both at low and high light. We conclude that functional plasticity of the thylakoid membranes of photobionts largely determines the dispersal abilities of lichens and light intensity is one of the most important factors determining the specificity of a species to a given habitat

Rogers Corporation -- An Optimal Paste Extrusion Process

In this report, Team 16: The Extruders break down the design process of meeting their sponsor’s goals as a part of a capstone project. Team 16 was tasked with finding a solution to the problem put forth by Rogers, which was to reduce thickness variation of PTFE foam sheets produced by Rogers to within a 0.0003” tolerance. This will talk about how the team originally came up with potential solution for the problem, before transitioning into working on small scale testing equipment. While the ultimate goal of the project is to reduce the thickness variation of the sheets, no testing equipment was readily available to the team or Rogers short of shutting down production in order to run tests. In order to test potential solutions and gather relevant data on the problem testing equipment needed to be designed for Rogers’ Narragansett facility, the location the project was based out of. Solving this problem would expand Rogers’ market for its PTFE sheets to industries with high standards for quality such as the aerospace industry. This project proposes solutions and allows Rogers to test solutions that would allow them to eventually raise the quality of the PTFE sheets to these standards. The following report documents the team’s initial design process, including research and concept generation, the process of choosing the most viable solutions, and the lengthy redesign process of the small scale testing equipment. The project resulted in a finished small scale version of the extruder used in the production process, as well as a testing plan that outlines the team’s proposed solutions. After significant redesigns and careful consideration of potential solutions the team developed an easily executable plan for testing the potential solutions and finished testing equipment that will allow Rogers to test the team’s design and to model their extrusion process easily for future testing. This plan and equipment can be used to find a solution which would make Rogers the only company in the world capable of producing PTFE at that quality

Procrustes Analysis of Truncated Least Squares Multidimensional Scaling

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) is an important class of techniques for embedding sets of patterns in Euclidean space. Most often it is used to visualize in mathbbR3 multidimensional data sets or data sets given by dissimilarity measures that are not distance metrics. Unfortunately, embedding n patterns with MDS involves processing O(n2) pairwise pattern dissimilarities, making MDS computationally demanding for large data sets. Especially in Least Squares MDS (LS-MDS) methods, that proceed by finding a minimum of a multimodal stress function, computational cost is a limiting factor. Several works therefore explored approximate MDS techniques that are less computationally expensive. These approximate methods were evaluated in terms of correlation between Euclidean distances in the embedding and the pattern dissimilarities or value of the stress function. We employ Procrustes Analysis to directly quantify differences between embeddings constructed with an approximate LS-MDS method and embeddings constructed with exact LS-MDS. We then compare our findings to the results of classical analysis, i.e. that based on stress value and correlation between Euclidean distances and pattern dissimilarities. Our results demonstrate that small changes in stress value or correlation coefficient can translate to large differences between embeddings. The differences can be attributed not only to the inevitable variability resulting from the multimodality of the stress function but also to the approximation errors. These results show that approximation may have larger impact on MDS than what was thus far revealed by analyses of stress value and correlation between Euclidean distances and pattern dissimilarities

Effects of Sparse Initialization in Deep Belief Networks

Deep neural networks are often trained in two phases: first hidden layers are pretrained in an unsupervised manner and then network is fine-tuned with error backpropagation. Pretraining is often carried out using Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), with initial weights set to small random values. However, recent results established that well-designed initialization schemes, e.g. Sparse Initialization (SI), can greatly improve performance of networks that do not use pretraining. An interesting question arising from these results is whether such initialization techniques wouldn't also improve pretrained networks? To shed light on this question, in this work we evaluate SI in DBNs that are used to pretrain discriminative networks. The motivation behind this research is our observation that SI has an impact on the features learned by a DBN during pretraining. Our results demonstrate that this improves network performance: when pretraining starts from sparsely initialized weight matrices networks achieve lower classification error after fine-tuning

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy in studies of the protective effects of 24-epibrasinoide and selenium against zearalenone-stimulation of the oxidative stress in germinating grains of wheat

These studies concentrate on the possibility of using selenium ions and/or 24-epibrassinolide at non-toxic levels as protectors of wheat plants against zearalenone, which is a common and widespread mycotoxin. Analysis using the UHPLC-MS technique allowed for identification of grains having the stress-tolerant and stress-sensitive wheat genotype. When germinating in the presence of 30 µM of zearalenone, this mycotoxin can accumulate in both grains and hypocotyls germinating from these grains. Selenium ions (10 µM) and 24-epibrassinolide (0.1 µM) introduced together with zearalenone decreased the uptake of zearalenone from about 295 to 200 ng/g and from about 350 to 300 ng/g in the grains of tolerant and sensitive genotypes, respectively. As a consequence, this also resulted in a reduction in the uptake of zearalenone from about 100 to 80 ng/g and from about 155 to 128 ng/g in the hypocotyls from the germinated grains of tolerant and sensitive wheat, respectively. In the mechanism of protection against the zearalenone-induced oxidative stress, the antioxidative enzymes—mainly superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT)—were engaged, especially in the sensitive genotype. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) studies allowed for a description of the chemical character of the long-lived organic radicals formed in biomolecular structures which are able to stabilize electrons released from reactive oxygen species as well as the changes in the status of transition paramagnetic metal ions. The presence of zearalenone drastically decreased the amount of paramagnetic metal ions—mainly Mn(II) and Fe(III)—bonded in the organic matrix. This effect was particularly found in the sensitive genotype, in which these species were found at a smaller level. The protective effect of selenium ions and 24-epibrassinolide originated from their ability to inhibit the destruction of biomolecules by reactive oxygen species. An increased ability to defend biomolecules against zearalenone action was observed for 24-epibrassinolide