2,090 research outputs found
Relative importance of auditing to the accounting profession: Is auditing a profit center?
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/dl_proceedings/1030/thumbnail.jp
The association between pain diagram area, fear-avoidance beliefs, and pain catastrophising
BACKGROUND: The development of clinical practice guidelines for managing spinal pain have been informed by a biopsychosocial framework which acknowledges that pain arises from a combination of psychosocial and biomechanical factors. There is an extensive body of evidence that has associated various psychosocial factors with an increased risk of experiencing persistent pain. Clinicians require instruments that are brief, easy to administer and score, and capable of validly identifying psychosocial factors. The pain diagram is potentially such an instrument. The aim of our study was to examine the association between pain diagram area and psychosocial factors. METHODS: 183 adults, aged 20–85, with spinal pain were recruited. We administered a demographic checklist; pain diagram; 11-point Numerical Rating Scale assessing pain intensity; Pain Catastrophising Scale (PCS); MOS 36 Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36); and the Fear Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ). Open source software, GIMP, was used to calculate the total pixilation area on each pain diagram. Linear regression was used to examine the relationship between pain diagram area and the following variables: age; gender; pain intensity; PCS total score; FABQ-Work scale score; FABQ-Activity scale score; and SF-36 Mental Health scale score. RESULTS: There were no significant associations between pain diagram area and any of the clinical variables. CONCLUSION: Our findings showed that that pain diagram area was not a valid measure to identify psychosocial factors. Several limitations constrained our results and further studies are warranted to establish if pain diagram area can be used assess psychosocial factors
Protease-activated receptor 4 variant p.Tyr157Cys reduces platelet functional responses and alters receptor trafficking
OBJECTIVE—: Protease-activated receptor 4 (PAR4) is a key regulator of platelet reactivity and is encoded by F2RL3, which has abundant rare missense variants. We aimed to provide proof of principle that rare F2LR3 variants potentially affect on platelet reactivity and responsiveness to PAR1 antagonist drugs and to explore underlying molecular mechanisms. APPROACH AND RESULTS—: We identified 6 rare F2RL3 missense variants in 236 cardiac patients, of which the variant causing a tyrosine 157 to cysteine substitution (Y157C) was predicted computationally to affect most on PAR4 structure. Y157C platelets from 3 cases showed reduced responses to PAR4-activating peptide and to α-thrombin compared with controls, but no reduction in responses to PAR1-activating peptide. Pretreatment with the PAR1 antagonist vorapaxar caused lower residual α-thrombin responses in Y157C platelets than in controls, indicating greater platelet inhibition. HEK293 cells transfected with a PAR4 Y157C expression construct had reduced PAR4 functional responses, unchanged total PAR4 expression but reduced surface expression. PAR4 Y157C was partially retained in the endoplasmic reticulum and displayed an expression pattern consistent with defective N-glycosylation. Mutagenesis of Y322, which is the putative hydrogen bond partner of Y157, also reduced PAR4 surface expression in HEK293 cells. CONCLUSIONS—: Reduced PAR4 responses associated with Y157C result from aberrant anterograde surface receptor trafficking, in part, because of disrupted intramolecular hydrogen bonding. Characterization of PAR4 Y157C establishes that rare F2RL3 variants have the potential to markedly alter platelet PAR4 reactivity particularly after exposure to therapeutic PAR1 antagonists
Distributed situation awareness in dynamic systems: Theoretical development and application of an ergonomics methodology
The purpose of this paper is to propose foundations for a theory of situation awareness based on the analysis of interactions between agents (i.e., both human and non-human) in subsystems. This approach may help promote a better understanding of technology-mediated interaction in systems, as well as helping in the formulation of hypotheses and predictions concerning distributed situation awareness. It is proposed that agents within a system each hold their own situation awareness which may be very different from (although compatible with) other agents. It is argued that we should not always hope for, or indeed want, sharing of this awareness, as different system agents have different purposes. This view marks situation awareness as a
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dynamic and collaborative process that binds agents together on tasks on a moment-by-moment basis. Implications of this viewpoint for development of a new theory of, and accompanying methodology for, distributed situation awareness are offered
Systems, interactions and macrotheory
A significant proportion of early HCI research was guided by one very clear vision: that the existing theory base in psychology and cognitive science could be developed to yield engineering tools for use in the interdisciplinary context of HCI design. While interface technologies and heuristic methods for behavioral evaluation have rapidly advanced in both capability and breadth of application, progress toward deeper theory has been modest, and some now believe it to be unnecessary. A case is presented for developing new forms of theory, based around generic “systems of interactors.” An overlapping, layered structure of macro- and microtheories could then serve an explanatory role, and could also bind together contributions from the different disciplines. Novel routes to formalizing and applying such theories provide a host of interesting and tractable problems for future basic research in HCI
Affordances, constraints and information flows as ‘leverage points’ in design for sustainable behaviour
Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingTwo of Donella Meadows' 'leverage points' for intervening in systems (1999) seem particularly pertinent to design for sustainable behaviour, in the sense that designers may have the scope to implement them in (re-)designing everyday products and services. The 'rules of the system' -- interpreted here to refer to affordances and constraints -- and the structure of information flows both offer a range of opportunities for design interventions to in fluence behaviour change, and in this paper, some of the implications and possibilities are discussed with reference to parallel concepts from within design, HCI and relevant areas of psychology
Non-magnetic impurity scattering in a superconductor near a van Hove point: Zn versus Ni in the cuprates
We consider the effect of non-magnetic impurities in a
superconductor with \ef close to a van Hove singularity. It is shown that the
non-trivial density of states (DOS) allows for resonant scattering already at
intermediate potential strengths eV. The residual DOS at
\ef, and the \tc suppression rate are found to strongly depend on the carrier
concentration. Quantitative agreement with experiments on Zn and Ni doped
cuprates is obtained by adjusting a single parameter, .Comment: 4 pages uuencoded compressed Postscript (Minor changes
The clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of computed tomography screening for lung cancer : systematic reviews
Screening for lung cancer has been the subject of
debate for the past three decades. This has largely
stemmed from the results of chest X-ray screening
studies where improvements in survival were
obtained but without reductions in disease-specific,
or total, mortality. The debate raises two issues:
the design of studies to evaluate screening for
lung cancer, in particular the choice of
comparator; and the potential role of overdiagnosis of well-differentiated, slow-growing
tumours that would not have led to symptoms or
death in the lifetime of the affected patient.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from
cancer in the UK, killing approximately 34,000
people per year. By the time symptoms develop,
the tumour is often at an advanced stage and the
prognosis is bleak. Treatment at a less advanced
stage of disease with surgical resection has been
shown to substantially reduce mortality.
Screening would be attractive if it could detect
presymptomatic lung cancer at a stage when
surgical intervention is feasible
Constraining Validity of the Minkowski Energy-Momentum Tensor
There exist two popular energy-momentum tensors for an electromagnetic wave
in a dielectric medium. The Abraham expression is robust to experimental
verification but more mathematically demanding, while the Minkowski expression
is the foundation of a number of simplifications commonly found within the
literature, including the relative refractive index transformation often used
in modelling optical tweezers. These simplifications are based on neglecting
the Minkowski tensor's material counterpart, a process known to be incompatible
with conservation of angular momentum, and in conflict with experimental
results, yet they are very successful in a wide range of circumstances. This
paper combines existing constraints on their usage with recent theoretical
analysis to obtain a list of conditions which much be satisfied to safely use
the simplified Minkowski approach. Applying these conditions to an experiment
proposed by Padgett et al., we find their prediction in agreement with that
obtained using the total energy-momentum tensor.Comment: 8 pages, RevTeX 4. Removed an erroneous factor of mu/mu_0 from Eq.(1
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