2,980 research outputs found
Hōmai te Waiora ki Ahau: te ara whakamua - towards the establishment of construct validity
Hōmai te Waiora ki Ahau: te ara
whakamua, is about the development of a
tool to measure psychological wellbeing
among Māori. Why is it relevant? Because
a quick look at the June 2002 edition of
New Zealand’s Journal of Psychology will
show you that the wellbeing measures
being used in this country are not responsive to the needs of
Māori, are not based on Māori concepts or
Constructs, do not facilitate Māori participation in
te ao Māori and do not provide pathways through
which Māori can develop a positive Māori
identity.
It is highly unlikely that the tools
which psychologists use to measure
wellbeing among Māori will help Māori to
experience whānau ora and that, as we all
know, is the paramount health objective for
Māori (Ministry of Health, 2002). In this
regard, it would seem that the powers that
be in psychology are failing to meet their
Treaty obligations to Māori. Therefore,
Hōmai te Waiora ki Ahau simply aims to assist change. This presentation will briefly
describe the context of the development of
this measure, the methodologies used to
develop this tool, the outcomes of a small
pilot-study, and current challenges and
future directions for Hōmai te Waiora ki
Ahau
Identification of synthetic chemical compound inhibitors of Pseudomonas aeruginosa protein synthesis and the development of lead series
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a ubiquitous Gram-negative bacteria and a primary cause of nosocomial infections. An aminoacylation/translation (A/T) assay was developed using P. aeruginosa components to perform poly(U) mRNA directed protein synthesis. Using scintillation proximity assay (SPA) technology a high-throughput screening (HTS) platform was developed. A synthetic chemical compound library (\u3e900) was screened, 36 hit compounds were identified and molecular targets were determined. Compounds were analyzed for enzymatic inhibition (IC50) and inhibition of bacterial cultures (MIC). Time-kill studies determined bacterial growth to be bacteriostatic or bactericidal in the presence of inhibitor. Mechanism of action, effects on eukaryotic cytosolic and mitochondrial protein synthesis were determined. Cytotoxicity using a mammalian cell line and global mode of inhibition was determined. One compound was evaluated for the ability to generate spontaneous resistant mutants or develop resistance after serial passage
Star formation and accretion in the circumnuclear disks of active galaxies
We explore the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBH) centered in a
circumnuclear disk (CND) as a function of the mass supply from the host galaxy
and considering different star formation laws, which may give rise to a
self-regulation via the injection of supernova-driven turbulence. A system of
equations describing star formation, black hole accretion and angular momentum
transport was solved for an axisymmetric disk in which the gravitational
potential includes contributions from the black hole, the disk and the hosting
galaxy. Our model extends the framework provided by Kawakatu et al. (2008) by
separately considering the inner and outer part of the disk, and by introducing
a potentially non-linear dependence of the star formation rate on the gas
surface density and the turbulent velocity. The star formation recipes are
calibrated using observational data for NGC 1097, while the accretion model is
based on turbulent viscosity as a source of angular momentum transport in a
thin viscous accretion disk. We find that current data provide no strong
constraint on the star formation recipe, and can in particular not distinguish
between models entirely regulated by the surface density, and models including
a dependence on the turbulent velocity. The evolution of the black hole mass,
on the other hand, strongly depends on the applied star formation law, as well
as the mass supply from the host galaxy. We suggest to explore the star
formation process in local AGN with high-resolution ALMA observations to break
the degeneracy between different star formation models.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, 6 tables, accepted at A&
Murine Warriors or Worriers: The Saga of Comt1, B2 SINE Elements, and the Future of Translational Genetics
Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) is an extremely well characterized enzyme that degrades catecholamines. A common coding polymorphism (rs4680; Val158Met) in the human COMT gene has been associated with a diverse array of phenotypes including personality, cognition, pain sensitivity, and risk for psychiatric disorders (Tunbridg
State Dependence of Stimulus-Induced Variability Tuning in Macaque MT
Behavioral states marked by varying levels of arousal and attention modulate
some properties of cortical responses (e.g. average firing rates or pairwise
correlations), yet it is not fully understood what drives these response
changes and how they might affect downstream stimulus decoding. Here we show
that changes in state modulate the tuning of response variance-to-mean ratios
(Fano factors) in a fashion that is neither predicted by a Poisson spiking
model nor changes in the mean firing rate, with a substantial effect on
stimulus discriminability. We recorded motion-sensitive neurons in middle
temporal cortex (MT) in two states: alert fixation and light, opioid
anesthesia. Anesthesia tended to lower average spike counts, without decreasing
trial-to-trial variability compared to the alert state. Under anesthesia,
within-trial fluctuations in excitability were correlated over longer time
scales compared to the alert state, creating supra-Poisson Fano factors. In
contrast, alert-state MT neurons have higher mean firing rates and largely
sub-Poisson variability that is stimulus-dependent and cannot be explained by
firing rate differences alone. The absence of such stimulus-induced variability
tuning in the anesthetized state suggests different sources of variability
between states. A simple model explains state-dependent shifts in the
distribution of observed Fano factors via a suppression in the variance of gain
fluctuations in the alert state. A population model with stimulus-induced
variability tuning and behaviorally constrained information-limiting
correlations explores the potential enhancement in stimulus discriminability by
the cortical population in the alert state.Comment: 36 pages, 18 figure
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