The application of low crude protein wheat-soyabean diets to growing and finishing pigs: 2. The effects on nutrient digestibility, nitrogen excretion, faecal volatile fatty acid concentration and ammonia emission from boars

peer-reviewedThis study received financial support from Telltech Ltd. (Wicklow, Ireland) and Enterprise Ireland (Dublin, Ireland).Diets containing 132, 152, 183 and 206 g/kg crude protein (CP) were fed to growing and finishing boars to evaluate the effect on nutrient digestibility, N balance, faecal volatile fatty acids (VFA) and ammonia-N (NH3–N) emission. Dietary CP concentration was adjusted by altering the ratio of wheat:soyabean meal. Lysine, threonine, tryptophan and total sulphur-containing amino acids were included in all diets at concentrations equivalent to that in the highest CP diet. All diets were formulated to provide 9.7 MJ/kg of net energy. Urine and faeces were collected from 16 boars (4 boars per treatment) housed in metabolism crates. Collections were performed at 72, 80 and 87 kg live weight. NH3–N emission was measured over 10 days using a laboratory scale procedure. Reducing the concentration of dietary CP decreased N intake (linear, P < 0.01), the excretion of urinary N, ammoniacal N and total N (linear, P < 0.001; cubic, P < 0.001) and the emission of NH3–N (linear, P < 0.001; cubic, P < 0.01). Total N excretion and NH3–N emission decreased 8.7% and 10.1% per 10 g/kg reduction in dietary CP concentration between 205.6 and 131.9 g/kg, respectively. There was no interaction between dietary CP concentration and collection period. N balance differed between the collection periods and less NH3–N was emitted at 87 kg than at 72 kg. Decreasing dietary CP reduced faecal VFA concentration (linear, P < 0.05) and the molar proportions of acetic and butyric acids (quadratic, P < 0.01).Enterprise Irelan

Positron Emission Tomography Score Has Greater Prognostic Significance Than Pretreatment Risk Stratification in Early-Stage Hodgkin Lymphoma in the UK RAPID Study.

PURPOSE: Accurate stratification of patients is an important goal in Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), but the role of pretreatment clinical risk stratification in the context of positron emission tomography (PET) -adapted treatment is unclear. We performed a subsidiary analysis of the RAPID trial to assess the prognostic value of pretreatment risk factors and PET score in determining outcomes. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients with stage IA to IIA HL and no mediastinal bulk underwent PET assessment after three cycles of doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine; 143 PET-positive patients (PET score, 3 to 5) received a fourth doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine cycle and involved-field radiotherapy, and 419 patients in complete metabolic remission were randomly assigned to receive involved-field radiotherapy (n = 208) or no additional treatment (n = 211). Cox regression was used to investigate the association between PET score and pretreatment risk factors with HL-specific event-free survival (EFS). RESULTS: High PET score was associated with inferior EFS, before (P .4). CONCLUSION: In RAPID, a positive PET scan did not carry uniform prognostic weight; only a PET score of 5 was associated with inferior outcomes. This suggests that in future trials involving patients without B symptoms or mediastinal bulk, a score of 5 rather than a positive PET result should be used to guide treatment escalation in early-stage HL

O projeto museográfico da exposição Cartografia de uma história - São Paulo colonial: mapas e relatos

Este artigo apresenta o projeto museográfico da exposição Cartografia de uma história, inaugurada no Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo em março de 2005. O projeto museográfico foi concebido e elaborado a partir do diálogo entre as propostas da equipe de pesquisa e os dados do perfil dos visitantes do Museu, constituindo-se assim um trabalho integrado, que buscava tratar de forma lúdica o ato de descobrir.This article presents the museum set design project for Cartography of a history, an exhibition opened at Museu Paulista/São Paulo University in March 2005. The said project was conceived and developed based on a combination of the research team's ideas and the profile of visitors to the Museum. It is therefore an integrated pursuit whose purpose was to approach the process of discovery in a playful manner

Anything You Can Do, You Can Do Better: Neural Substrates of Incentive-Based Performance Enhancement

Performance-based pay schemes in many organizations share the fundamental assumption that the performance level for a given task will increase as a function of the amount of incentive provided. Consistent with this notion, psychological studies have demonstrated that expectations of reward can improve performance on a plethora of different cognitive and physical tasks, ranging from problem solving to the voluntary regulation of heart rate. However, much less is understood about the neural mechanisms of incentivized performance enhancement. In particular, it is still an open question how brain areas that encode expectations about reward are able to translate incentives into improved performance across fundamentally different cognitive and physical task requirements

Recent and future trends in synthetic greenhouse gas radiative forcing

Atmospheric measurements show that emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons are now the primary drivers of the positive growth in synthetic greenhouse gas (SGHG) radiative forcing. We infer recent SGHG emissions and examine the impact of future emissions scenarios, with a particular focus on proposals to reduce HFC use under the Montreal Protocol. If these proposals are implemented, overall SGHG radiative forcing could peak at around 355 mW m[superscript −2] in 2020, before declining by approximately 26% by 2050, despite continued growth of fully fluorinated greenhouse gas emissions. Compared to “no HFC policy” projections, this amounts to a reduction in radiative forcing of between 50 and 240 mW m[superscript −2] by 2050 or a cumulative emissions saving equivalent to 0.5 to 2.8 years of CO2 emissions at current levels. However, more complete reporting of global HFC emissions is required, as less than half of global emissions are currently accounted for.Natural Environment Research Council (Great Britain) (Advanced Research Fellowship NE/I021365/1)United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Upper Atmospheric Research Program Grant NNX11AF17G)United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratio

Parametric uncertainty in complex environmental models: a cheap emulation approach for models with high-dimensional output

In order to understand underlying processes governing environmental and physical processes, and predict future outcomes, a complex computer model is frequently required to simulate these dynamics. However there is inevitably uncertainty related to the exact parametric form or the values of such parameters to be used when developing these simulators, with \emph{ranges} of plausible values prevalent in the literature. Systematic errors introduced by failing to account for these uncertainties have the potential to have a large effect on resulting estimates in unknown quantities of interest. Due to the complexity of these types of models, it is often unfeasible to run large numbers of training runs that are usually required for full statistical emulators of the environmental processes. We therefore present a method for accounting for uncertainties in complex environmental simulators without the need for very large numbers of training runs and illustrate the method through an application to the Met Office's atmospheric transport model NAME. We conclude that there are two principle parameters that are linked with variability in NAME outputs, namely the free tropospheric turbulence parameter and particle release height. Our results suggest the former should be significantly larger than is currently implemented as a default in NAME, whilst changes in the latter most likely stem from inconsistencies between the model specified ground height at the observation locations and the true height at this location. Estimated discrepancies from independent data are consistent with the discrepancy between modelled and true ground height

Motor Preparatory Activity in Posterior Parietal Cortex is Modulated by Subjective Absolute Value

For optimal response selection, the consequences associated with behavioral success or failure must be appraised. To determine how monetary consequences influence the neural representations of motor preparation, human brain activity was scanned with fMRI while subjects performed a complex spatial visuomotor task. At the beginning of each trial, reward context cues indicated the potential gain and loss imposed for correct or incorrect trial completion. FMRI-activity in canonical reward structures reflected the expected value related to the context. In contrast, motor preparatory activity in posterior parietal and premotor cortex peaked in high “absolute value” (high gain or loss) conditions: being highest for large gains in subjects who believed they performed well while being highest for large losses in those who believed they performed poorly. These results suggest that the neural activity preceding goal-directed actions incorporates the absolute value of that action, predicated upon subjective, rather than objective, estimates of one's performance

Value-related neuronal responses in the human amygdala during observational learning

The amygdala plays an important role in many aspects of social cognition and reward learning. Here, we aimed to determine whether human amygdala neurons are involved in the computations necessary to implement learning through observation. We performed single-neuron recordings from the amygdalae of human neurosurgical patients (male and female) while they learned about the value of stimuli through observing the outcomes experienced by another agent interacting with those stimuli. We used a detailed computational modeling approach to describe patients' behavior in the task. We found a significant proportion of amygdala neurons whose activity correlated with both expected rewards for oneself and others, and in tracking outcome values received by oneself or other agents. Additionally, a population decoding analysis suggests the presence of information for both observed and experiential outcomes in the amygdala. Encoding and decoding analyses suggested observational value coding in amygdala neurons occurred in a different subset of neurons than experiential value coding. Collectively, these findings support a key role for the human amygdala in the computations underlying the capacity for learning through observation

Methodology for Validating Building Energy Analysis Simulations

The objective of this report was to develop a validation methodology for building energy analysis simulations, collect high-quality, unambiguous empirical data for validation, and apply the validation methodology to the DOE-2.1, BLAST-2MRT, BLAST-3.0, DEROB-3, DEROB-4, and SUNCAT 2.4 computer programs. This report covers background information, literature survey, validation methodology, comparative studies, analytical verification, empirical validation, comparative evaluation of codes, and conclusions

Characterization of uncertainties in atmospheric trace gas inversions using hierarchical Bayesian methods

We present a hierarchical Bayesian method for atmospheric trace gas inversions. This method is used to estimate emissions of trace gases as well as "hyper-parameters" that characterize the probability density functions (PDFs) of the a priori emissions and model-measurement covariances. By exploring the space of "uncertainties in uncertainties", we show that the hierarchical method results in a more complete estimation of emissions and their uncertainties than traditional Bayesian inversions, which rely heavily on expert judgment. We present an analysis that shows the effect of including hyper-parameters, which are themselves informed by the data, and show that this method can serve to reduce the effect of errors in assumptions made about the a priori emissions and model-measurement uncertainties. We then apply this method to the estimation of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) emissions over 2012 for the regions surrounding four Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) stations. We find that improper accounting of model representation uncertainties, in particular, can lead to the derivation of emissions and associated uncertainties that are unrealistic and show that those derived using the hierarchical method are likely to be more representative of the true uncertainties in the system. We demonstrate through this SF6 case study that this method is less sensitive to outliers in the data and to subjective assumptions about a priori emissions and model-measurement uncertainties than traditional methods