An Electrocorticographic Brain Interface in an Individual with Tetraplegia

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology aims to help individuals with disability to control assistive devices and reanimate paralyzed limbs. Our study investigated the feasibility of an electrocorticography (ECoG)-based BCI system in an individual with tetraplegia caused by C4 level spinal cord injury. ECoG signals were recorded with a high-density 32-electrode grid over the hand and arm area of the left sensorimotor cortex. The participant was able to voluntarily activate his sensorimotor cortex using attempted movements, with distinct cortical activity patterns for different segments of the upper limb. Using only brain activity, the participant achieved robust control of 3D cursor movement. The ECoG grid was explanted 28 days post-implantation with no adverse effect. This study demonstrates that ECoG signals recorded from the sensorimotor cortex can be used for real-time device control in paralyzed individuals

The Reach-Avoid Problem for Constant-Rate Multi-Mode Systems

A constant-rate multi-mode system is a hybrid system that can switch freely among a finite set of modes, and whose dynamics is specified by a finite number of real-valued variables with mode-dependent constant rates. Alur, Wojtczak, and Trivedi have shown that reachability problems for constant-rate multi-mode systems for open and convex safety sets can be solved in polynomial time. In this paper, we study the reachability problem for non-convex state spaces and show that this problem is in general undecidable. We recover decidability by making certain assumptions about the safety set. We present a new algorithm to solve this problem and compare its performance with the popular sampling based algorithm rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) as implemented in the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL).Comment: 26 page

Women are warmer but no less assertive than men: gender and language on Facebook

Using a large social media dataset and open-vocabulary methods from computational linguistics, we explored differences in language use across gender, affiliation, and assertiveness. In Study 1, we analyzed topics (groups of semantically similar words) across 10 million messages from over 52,000 Facebook users. Most language differed little across gender. However, topics most associated with self-identified female participants included friends, family, and social life, whereas topics most associated with self-identified male participants included swearing, anger, discussion of objects instead of people, and the use of argumentative language. In Study 2, we plotted male- and female-linked language topics along two interpersonal dimensions prevalent in gender research: affiliation and assertiveness. In a sample of over 15,000 Facebook users, we found substantial gender differences in the use of affiliative language and slight differences in assertive language. Language used more by self-identified females was interpersonally warmer, more compassionate, polite, and—contrary to previous findings—slightly more assertive in their language use, whereas language used more by self-identified males was colder, more hostile, and impersonal. Computational linguistic analysis combined with methods to automatically label topics offer means for testing psychological theories unobtrusively at large scale.This work was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust

Biodiversity Loss and the Taxonomic Bottleneck: Emerging Biodiversity Science

Human domination of the Earth has resulted in dramatic changes to global and local patterns of biodiversity. Biodiversity is critical to human sustainability because it drives the ecosystem services that provide the core of our life-support system. As we, the human species, are the primary factor leading to the decline in biodiversity, we need detailed information about the biodiversity and species composition of specific locations in order to understand how different species contribute to ecosystem services and how humans can sustainably conserve and manage biodiversity. Taxonomy and ecology, two fundamental sciences that generate the knowledge about biodiversity, are associated with a number of limitations that prevent them from providing the information needed to fully understand the relevance of biodiversity in its entirety for human sustainability: (1) biodiversity conservation strategies that tend to be overly focused on research and policy on a global scale with little impact on local biodiversity; (2) the small knowledge base of extant global biodiversity; (3) a lack of much-needed site-specific data on the species composition of communities in human-dominated landscapes, which hinders ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation; (4) biodiversity studies with a lack of taxonomic precision; (5) a lack of taxonomic expertise and trained taxonomists; (6) a taxonomic bottleneck in biodiversity inventory and assessment; and (7) neglect of taxonomic resources and a lack of taxonomic service infrastructure for biodiversity science. These limitations are directly related to contemporary trends in research, conservation strategies, environmental stewardship, environmental education, sustainable development, and local site-specific conservation. Today’s biological knowledge is built on the known global biodiversity, which represents barely 20% of what is currently extant (commonly accepted estimate of 10 million species) on planet Earth. Much remains unexplored and unknown, particularly in hotspots regions of Africa, South Eastern Asia, and South and Central America, including many developing or underdeveloped countries, where localized biodiversity is scarcely studied or described. ‘‘Backyard biodiversity’’, defined as local biodiversity near human habitation, refers to the natural resources and capital for ecosystem services at the grassroots level, which urgently needs to be explored, documented, and conserved as it is the backbone of sustainable economic development in these countries. Beginning with early identification and documentation of local flora and fauna, taxonomy has documented global biodiversity and natural history based on the collection of ‘‘backyard biodiversity’’ specimens worldwide. However, this branch of science suffered a continuous decline in the latter half of the twentieth century, and has now reached a point of potential demise. At present there are very few professional taxonomists and trained local parataxonomists worldwide, while the need for, and demands on, taxonomic services by conservation and resource management communities are rapidly increasing. Systematic collections, the material basis of biodiversity information, have been neglected and abandoned, particularly at institutions of higher learning. Considering the rapid increase in the human population and urbanization, human sustainability requires new conceptual and practical approaches to refocusing and energizing the study of the biodiversity that is the core of natural resources for sustainable development and biotic capital for sustaining our life-support system. In this paper we aim to document and extrapolate the essence of biodiversity, discuss the state and nature of taxonomic demise, the trends of recent biodiversity studies, and suggest reasonable approaches to a biodiversity science to facilitate the expansion of global biodiversity knowledge and to create useful data on backyard biodiversity worldwide towards human sustainability

Living in the past, present, and future: measuring temporal orientation with language

OBJECTIVE: Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. METHOD: Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurately predict the temporal orientation of new messages in a separate validation set (accuracy/mean sensitivity = .72; mean specificity = .77). We used the classifier to automatically classify 1.3 million messages written by 5,372 participants (50% female, aged 13-48). Finally, we tested whether individual differences in past, present, and future orientation differentially related to gender, age, Big Five personality, satisfaction with life, and depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Temporal orientations exhibit several expected correlations with age, gender, and Big Five personality. More future-oriented people were older, more likely to be female, more conscientious, less impulsive, less depressed, and more satisfied with life; present orientation showed the opposite pattern. CONCLUSION: Language-based assessments can complement and extend existing measures of temporal orientation, providing an alternative approach and additional insights into language and personality relationships. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.Support for this article was provided by grant #63597 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (M. E. P. Seligman, PI) and by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust (M.E.P. Seligman, H. A. Schwartz, L. H. Ungar, co-PIs)

The effects of socioeconomic status and indices of physical environment on reduced birth weight and preterm births in Eastern Massachusetts

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background: Air pollution and social characteristics have been shown to affect indicators of health. While use of spatial methods to estimate exposure to air pollution has increased the power to detect effects, questions have been raised about potential for confounding by social factors.Methods: A study of singleton births in Eastern Massachusetts was conducted between 1996 and 2002 to examine the association between indicators of traffic, land use, individual and area-based socioeconomic measures (SEM), and birth outcomes ( birth weight, small for gestational age and preterm births), in a two-level hierarchical model.Results: We found effects of both individual ( education, race, prenatal care index) and area-based ( median household income) SEM with all birth outcomes. The associations for traffic and land use variables were mainly seen with birth weight, with an exception for an effect of cumulative traffic density on small for gestational age. Race/ethnicity of mother was an important predictor of birth outcomes and a strong confounder for both area-based SEM and indices of physical environment. The effects of traffic and land use differed by level of education and median household income.Conclusion: Overall, the findings of the study suggested greater likelihood of reduced birth weight and preterm births among the more socially disadvantaged, and a greater risk of reduced birth weight associated with traffic exposures. Results revealed the importance of controlling simultaneously for SEM and environmental exposures as the way to better understand determinants of health.This work is supported by the Harvard Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Center, Grants R827353 and R-832416, and National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) ES-0002

Robust optical delay lines via topological protection

Phenomena associated with topological properties of physical systems are naturally robust against perturbations. This robustness is exemplified by quantized conductance and edge state transport in the quantum Hall and quantum spin Hall effects. Here we show how exploiting topological properties of optical systems can be used to implement robust photonic devices. We demonstrate how quantum spin Hall Hamiltonians can be created with linear optical elements using a network of coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROW) in two dimensions. We find that key features of quantum Hall systems, including the characteristic Hofstadter butterfly and robust edge state transport, can be obtained in such systems. As a specific application, we show that the topological protection can be used to dramatically improve the performance of optical delay lines and to overcome limitations related to disorder in photonic technologies.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures + 12 pages of supplementary informatio

A retrospective observational study to determine baseline characteristics and early prescribing patterns for patients receiving Alirocumab in UK clinical practice

Background Alirocumab is a fully human monoclonal antibody to proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) and has been previously shown, in the phase III ODYSSEY clinical trial program, to provide significant lowering of lowdensity lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and reduction in risk of major adverse cardiovascular events. However, real-world evidence to date is limited. Objective The primary objective was to describe baseline characteristics, clinical history, and prior lipid-lowering therapy (LLT) use of patients initiated on alirocumab in UK clinical practice following publication of health technology appraisal (HTA) body recommendations. Secondary objectives included description of alirocumab use and lipid parameter outcomes over a 4-month follow-up period. Methods In this retrospective, single-arm, observational, multicenter study, data were collected for 150 patients initiated on alirocumab. Results Mean (standard deviation; SD) age of patients was 61.4 (10.5) years and baseline median (interquartile range; IQR) LDL-C level was 4.8 (4.2–5.8) mmol/l. Alirocumab use occurred predominantly in patients with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH) (n = 100/150, 66%) and those with statin intolerance (n = 123/150, 82%). Most patients started on alirocumab 75 mg (n = 108/150 [72%]) and 35 (23.3%) were up-titrated to 150 mg. Clinically significant reductions in atherogenic lipid parameters were observed with alirocumab, including LDL-C (median [IQR] change from baseline, − 53.6% [− 62.9 to − 34.9], P < 0.001). Conclusion This study highlights the unmet need for additional LLT in patients with uncontrolled hyperlipidemia and demonstrates the clinical utility of alirocumab in early real-world practice, where dosing flexibility is an important attribute of this therapeutic option

Definitions, Criteria and Global Classification of Mast Cell Disorders with Special Reference to Mast Cell Activation Syndromes: A Consensus Proposal

Activation of tissue mast cells (MCs) and their abnormal growth and accumulation in various organs are typically found in primary MC disorders also referred to as mastocytosis. However, increasing numbers of patients are now being informed that their clinical findings are due to MC activation (MCA) that is neither associated with mastocytosis nor with a defined allergic or inflammatory reaction. In other patients with MCA, MCs appear to be clonal cells, but criteria for diagnosing mastocytosis are not met. A working conference was organized in 2010 with the aim to define criteria for diagnosing MCA and related disorders, and to propose a global unifying classification of all MC disorders and pathologic MC reactions. This classification includes three types of `MCA syndromes' (MCASs), namely primary MCAS, secondary MCAS and idiopathic MCAS. MCA is now defined by robust and generally applicable criteria, including (1) typical clinical symptoms, (2) a substantial transient increase in serum total tryptase level or an increase in other MC-derived mediators, such as histamine or prostaglandin D 2, or their urinary metabolites, and (3) a response of clinical symptoms to agents that attenuate the production or activities of MC mediators. These criteria should assist in the identification and diagnosis of patients with MCAS, and in avoiding misdiagnoses or overinterpretation of clinical symptoms in daily practice. Moreover, the MCAS concept should stimulate research in order to identify and exploit new molecular mechanisms and therapeutic targets. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Base

Cooperative coupling of ultracold atoms and surface plasmons

Cooperative coupling between optical emitters and light fields is one of the outstanding goals in quantum technology. It is both fundamentally interesting for the extraordinary radiation properties of the participating emitters and has many potential applications in photonics. While this goal has been achieved using high-finesse optical cavities, cavity-free approaches that are broadband and easy to build have attracted much attention recently. Here we demonstrate cooperative coupling of ultracold atoms with surface plasmons propagating on a plane gold surface. While the atoms are moving towards the surface they are excited by an external laser pulse. Excited surface plasmons are detected via leakage radiation into the substrate of the gold layer. A maximum Purcell factor of $\eta_\mathrm{P}=4.9$ is reached at an optimum distance of $z=250~\mathrm{nm}$ from the surface. The coupling leads to the observation of a Fano-like resonance in the spectrum.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure