NOISE EXPOSURE AMONG TRAFFIC POLICE OFFICERS IN KHARTOUM LOCALITY, SUDAN

Background: This study reports noise exposure among traffic police officers in Khartoum locality, Sudan. In this study, noise exposure was measured among Traffic Police Officer in Khartoum Locality, Sudan, in May 2010. Objectives: This paper addresses the noise levels, and their negative effects on traffic police officers resulting from its exposure to road traffic noise. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in twenty two streets points along the Khartoum locality roads. The Khartoum locality roads have heavy traffic during the day, and the noise exposure level among traffic policemen was measured during the time period from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm on working day using a noise dosimeter which reads the noise exposure of a person. Also, 46 traffic police officers working in these points were selected as the study population. Results: The level of noise was ranged from 74.5 to 86.7 dBA. 52.2% have mood characteristic as annoyance, while 26.1% have tinnitus. Conclusion: It was observed that at all points, the level of noise was higher. Major effects of noise among traffic police officer include annoyance and tinnitus. All Traffic Police officers did not used hearing protection devices

NOISE EXPOSURE AMONG TRAFFIC POLICE OFFICERS IN KHARTOUM LOCALITY, SUDAN

Background: This study reports noise exposure among traffic police officers in Khartoum locality, Sudan. In this study, noise exposure was measured among Traffic Police Officer in Khartoum Locality, Sudan, in May 2010. Objectives: This paper addresses the noise levels, and their negative effects on traffic police officers resulting from its exposure to road traffic noise. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in twenty two streets points along the Khartoum locality roads. The Khartoum locality roads have heavy traffic during the day, and the noise exposure level among traffic policemen was measured during the time period from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm on working day using a noise dosimeter which reads the noise exposure of a person. Also, 46 traffic police officers working in these points were selected as the study population. Results: The level of noise was ranged from 74.5 to 86.7 dBA. 52.2% have mood characteristic as annoyance, while 26.1% have tinnitus. Conclusion: It was observed that at all points, the level of noise was higher. Major effects of noise among traffic police officer include annoyance and tinnitus. All Traffic Police officers did not used hearing protection devices

Separate Mechanisms for Audio-Tactile Pitch and Loudness Interactions

A major goal in perceptual neuroscience is to understand how signals from different sensory modalities are combined to produce stable and coherent representations. We previously investigated interactions between audition and touch, motivated by the fact that both modalities are sensitive to environmental oscillations. In our earlier study, we characterized the effect of auditory distractors on tactile frequency and intensity perception. Here, we describe the converse experiments examining the effect of tactile distractors on auditory processing. Because the two studies employ the same psychophysical paradigm, we combined their results for a comprehensive view of how auditory and tactile signals interact and how these interactions depend on the perceptual task. Together, our results show that temporal frequency representations are perceptually linked regardless of the attended modality. In contrast, audio-tactile loudness interactions depend on the attended modality: Tactile distractors influence judgments of auditory intensity, but judgments of tactile intensity are impervious to auditory distraction. Lastly, we show that audio-tactile loudness interactions depend critically on stimulus timing, while pitch interactions do not. These results reveal that auditory and tactile inputs are combined differently depending on the perceptual task. That distinct rules govern the integration of auditory and tactile signals in pitch and loudness perception implies that the two are mediated by separate neural mechanisms. These findings underscore the complexity and specificity of multisensory interactions

Poverty Effects of House Holds in the Southern Region of Jordan

This study investigated the poverty effects of households in the southern region of Jordan, Madaba, Aqaba, Tafila governorates.The poverty ratio in this region exceeds 28.7%,  . Data was collected by the use of questionnaire which addressed questions related to the study. A total of 900 questionnaires were given out to all the population. Of these, 180 questionnaires were re-called from each local government. The variables of research – per capita expenditure, per capital income, age of respondent, sex (male or female head count), the age structure of the population shows a significant difference in the household saving rate. Idiosyncratic and covariate factors affect the expected per capita consumption of the overall expected poverty for this area. Not less than 80% expected poverty is synonymous with southern region according to these variables. The highest variance occurred in education head count levels which can be divided into five categories. Male-headed households have lower mean consumption than female-headed households. As the determinants of households of the southern region and structures of variables to link the results and actions, therefore the paper, extends the usual of set of explanatory variables which explained the household behavior and to capture their influential impact on household and life cycle dependency ratio admitted as explanatory due to a young, under-educated populace, which is compounded by a heavy responsibility on male-headed count per female. The paper found that the growth of the agricultural sector is slow which means that most of the southern region depends on returns of this sector beyond the dependence on civilian employement to support their household. These results provides a big support for life cycle hypothesis as well as the permanent income hypothesis.We noticed that poverty is a predominant as phenomenon as it is pervasive, with over 30% of the population falling below the poverty line in Jordan. This paper assesses the impact of poverty in the level of determinants of households. Jel elassification: 053, D21, J20, E1

Chronic Use of a Sensitized Bionic Hand Does Not Remap the Sense of Touch

Electrical stimulation of tactile nerve fibers can be used to restore touch through a bionic hand. Ortiz-Catalan et al. show that a mismatch between the location of the sensor on the bionic hand and the tactile experience is not resolved after long-term prosthesis use

Sensory computations in the cuneate nucleus of macaques

Tactile nerve fibers fall into a few classes that can be readily distinguished based on their spatiotemporal response properties. Because nerve fibers reflect local skin deformations, they individually carry ambiguous signals about object features. In contrast, cortical neurons exhibit heterogeneous response properties that reflect computations applied to convergent input from multiple classes of afferents, which confer to them a selectivity for behaviorally relevant features of objects. The conventional view is that these complex response properties arise within the cortex itself, implying that sensory signals are not processed to any significant extent in the two intervening structures-the cuneate nucleus (CN) and the thalamus. To test this hypothesis, we recorded the responses evoked in the CN to a battery of stimuli that have been extensively used to characterize tactile coding in both the periphery and cortex, including skin indentations, vibrations, random dot patterns, and scanned edges. We found that CN responses are more similar to their cortical counterparts than they are to their inputs: CN neurons receive input from multiple classes of nerve fibers, they have spatially complex receptive fields, and they exhibit selectivity for object features. Contrary to consensus, then, the CN plays a key role in processing tactile information

A context-dependent switch from sensing to feeling in the primate amygdala

The skin transmits affective signals that integrate into our social vocabulary. As the socio-affective aspects of touch are likely processed in the amygdala, we compare neural responses to social grooming and gentle airflow recorded from the amygdala and the primary somatosensory cortex of non-human primates. Neurons in the somatosensory cortex respond to both types of tactile stimuli. In the amygdala, however, neurons do not respond to individual grooming sweeps even though grooming elicits autonomic states indicative of positive affect. Instead, many show changes in baseline firing rates that persist throughout the grooming bout. Such baseline fluctuations are attributed to social context because the presence of the groomer alone can account for the observed changes in baseline activity. It appears, therefore, that during grooming, the amygdala stops responding to external inputs on a short timescale but remains responsive to social context (or the associated affective states) on longer time scales