Particles and the Perversely Philosophical Schoolchild: Rigid Designation, Haecceitism and Statistics

In this paper, I want to draw attention to a connection between rigid designation with its consequence that we are able to stipulate worlds and haecceitism, the doctrine that we have possible worlds alike in all qualitative features which nonetheless are metaphysically different, in that two individuals can have all their qualitative features swapped while remaining the same individuals. I shall argue that stipulation leads to haecceitism, which in turn depends upon commitment to haecceity ("primitive thisness"). Haecceitism is, I claim, an unattractive doctrine, but there is one powerful argument for it, drawn from the desire to make sense of observed frequencies of probabilistic events in terms of possible configurations of phase spaces which may be taken to be a form of possible world. However, by paying close attention to classical and quantum statistics, we see that this argument fails

Cultura ciudadana y comunicación en el Colegio Rochester de Bogotá

Comunicación y cultura ciudadana en el Colegio Rochester de Bogotá es un trabajo orientado al estudio y análisis del papel de la comunicación en una institución educativa como gestora de las bases para consolidar la cultura ciudadana.Se parte del principio que la educación debe ser integral y por tal razón debe proveer espacios de reflexión, participación y diálogo en los estudiantes, motivando el intercambio y la retroalimentación. Dichas experiencias sobre el marco de los valores, van a permitir que la comunidad educativa se relacione mejor entre si, a través de una sana convivencia que guíe a las personas a actuar correctamente dentro y fuera de la institución.Comunicador (a) SocialPregrad

Characteristics of Four Agricultural Crops Established as Northern Bobwhite Brood Habitat

Small plots of agricultural crops are often planted in the Southeast for northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) management. Often these are viewed as primarily winter habitat, and assumed to provide summer habitat. We evaluated the macroinvertebrate and vegetative structure of millet, sorghum, wheat, and soybean plots on a cotton farm to assess their value as bobwhite brood habitat. During June and July 1999 and June, July, and August 2000, we studied 5 blocks, each planted with all 4 agricultural crops. We measured invertebrate abundance along a 15-meter transect in each plot using vacuum sampling and height/density of vegetation. Visual obstruction readings (VOR) were highest in millet and sorghum, followed by wheat and then soybean (P \u3c 0.001). Macroinvertebrate numbers differed among cover types (P \u3c 0.001), but macroinvertebrate weights did not (P = 0.14). Among important Orders, Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Diptera, and Homoptera were found in greater numbers in millet. Numbers of Hymenoptera did not differ among crops. In most cases, millet yielded the highest biomass and numbers of macroinvertebrates, followed by sorghum. Soybeans and wheat had fewer macroinvertebrates among the crops studied. On our study area it appears that millet provides the best brood habitat, although sorghum appears to provide a second useful crop. Thus, among these crops we recommend use of millet plots as brood habitat for northern bobwhite chicks

Elevated levels of circulating microRNA-200 family members correlate with serous epithelial ovarian cancer

Background: There is a critical need for improved diagnostic markers for high grade serous epithelial ovarian cancer (SEOC). MicroRNAs are stable in the circulation and may have utility as biomarkers of malignancy. We investigated whether levels of serum microRNA could discriminate women with high-grade SEOC from age matched healthy volunteers.Methods: To identify microRNA of interest, microRNA expression profiling was performed on 4 SEOC cell lines and normal human ovarian surface epithelial cells. Total RNA was extracted from 500 μL aliquots of serum collected from patients with SEOC (n = 28) and age-matched healthy donors (n = 28). Serum microRNA levels were assessed by quantitative RT-PCR following preamplification. Results: microRNA (miR)-182, miR-200a, miR-200b and miR-200c were highly overexpressed in the SEOC cell lines relative to normal human ovarian surface epithelial cells and were assessed in RNA extracted from serum as candidate biomarkers. miR-103, miR-92a and miR -638 had relatively invariant expression across all ovarian cell lines, and with small-nucleolar C/D box 48 (RNU48) were assessed in RNA extracted from serum as candidate endogenous normalizers. No correlation between serum levels and age were observed (age range 30-79 years) for any of these microRNA or RNU48. Individually, miR-200a, miR-200b and miR-200c normalized to serum volume and miR-103 were significantly higher in serum of the SEOC cohort (P < 0.05; 0.05; 0.0005 respectively) and in combination, miR-200b + miR-200c normalized to serum volume and miR-103 was the best predictive classifier of SEOC (ROC-AUC = 0.784). This predictive model (miR-200b + miR-200c) was further confirmed by leave one out cross validation (AUC = 0.784). Conclusions: We identified serum microRNAs able to discriminate patients with high grade SEOC from age-matched healthy controls. The addition of these microRNAs to current testing regimes may improve diagnosis for women with SEOC. © 2012 Kan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Simulation-based reachability analysis for nonlinear systems using componentwise contraction properties

A shortcoming of existing reachability approaches for nonlinear systems is the poor scalability with the number of continuous state variables. To mitigate this problem we present a simulation-based approach where we first sample a number of trajectories of the system and next establish bounds on the convergence or divergence between the samples and neighboring trajectories. We compute these bounds using contraction theory and reduce the conservatism by partitioning the state vector into several components and analyzing contraction properties separately in each direction. Among other benefits this allows us to analyze the effect of constant but uncertain parameters by treating them as state variables and partitioning them into a separate direction. We next present a numerical procedure to search for weighted norms that yield a prescribed contraction rate, which can be incorporated in the reachability algorithm to adjust the weights to minimize the growth of the reachable set

Age-related Changes in the Natural Killer Cell Response to Seasonal Influenza Vaccination are not Influenced by a Synbiotic; a Randomised Controlled Trial

Natural killer (NK) cells are an important component of the immune response to influenza infection, but are subject to alteration during ageing, which may play a role in impaired response to infection and vaccination in older people. Enhancement of NK cell activity could, therefore, present a means to improve the immune response to vaccination in older subjects, and pre- and probiotics offer an opportunity to modulate anti-viral defences via alteration of the gut microbiota. This study investigated the effect of a novel probiotic, Bifidobacterium longum bv. infantis CCUG 52486, combined with a prebiotic, gluco-oligosaccharide (B. longum + Gl-OS), on the NK cell response to seasonal influenza vaccination in young and older subjects in a double-blind, randomized controlled trial. There were significant effects of ageing on NK cell phenotype, the most notable of which were an increase in CD56dim cells, mainly reflected in the CD16+ subset, a decrease in CD56bright cells, mainly reflected in the CD16- subset, and greater expression of the immunosenescence marker, CD57, on NK cell subsets. However, these changes only partially translated to differences in NK cell activity, observed as trends towards reduced NK cell activity in older subjects when analysed on a per cell basis. Influenza vaccination increased the proportion of CD56bright cells and decreased the proportion of CD56dim cells, in young, but not older subjects. Although NK cell activity in response to vaccination was not significantly different between the young and older subjects, low post-vaccination NK cell activity was associated with poor seroconversion in only the older subjects. There was no influence of the synbiotic on NK cell phenotype or activity, either before or after influenza vaccination. In conclusion, ageing is associated with marked alteration of the phenotype of the NK cell population and there was evidence of an impaired NK cell response to influenza vaccination in older subjects. The effects of ageing on NK cell phenotype and activity could not be offset by B. longum + Gl-OS. Clinical trial identifier: clinicaltrials.gov NCT01066377

Lagrangian Reachabililty

We introduce LRT, a new Lagrangian-based ReachTube computation algorithm that conservatively approximates the set of reachable states of a nonlinear dynamical system. LRT makes use of the Cauchy-Green stretching factor (SF), which is derived from an over-approximation of the gradient of the solution flows. The SF measures the discrepancy between two states propagated by the system solution from two initial states lying in a well-defined region, thereby allowing LRT to compute a reachtube with a ball-overestimate in a metric where the computed enclosure is as tight as possible. To evaluate its performance, we implemented a prototype of LRT in C++/Matlab, and ran it on a set of well-established benchmarks. Our results show that LRT compares very favorably with respect to the CAPD and Flow* tools.Comment: Accepted to CAV 201