Personal constructs of mind-body identity in people who experience medically unexplained symptoms (MUS)

"Medically unexplained symptoms" (MUS) refers to chronic physical symptoms without a clear medical cause, which produce significant levels of distress and functional impairment. This project modified the repertory grid technique to explore how twenty participants experiencing MUS construed self and others in bodily and psychological ways. Findings suggested that symptoms are well integrated within participants' wider mind–body construct systems. Increased distance between how self in general is construed compared to self when symptoms are worst was associated with reduced anxiety. Measuring intrapersonal and interpersonal implicative dilemmas suggested that moral and relational construing of identity is affected by MUS.Peer reviewe

S.H.I.E.L.D Relays (Shadow-masked Hack-proof Ion Etched Latch Deterrence Relays)

We are presenting micro-scale logic devices using single cantilever relays fabricated in-plane from single crystal Silicon. These logic devices are designed to protect electrical systems that require a high level of security by being completely hack proof by not having the ability or need to be connected to any outside internet connection. Because these devices are fabricated from silicon, they are extremely reliable, durable and adaptable. Silicon’s high Young’s Modulus allows the cantilevers to function for an extremely long time, compared to other materials such as metal that will start to fatigue over time, producing a longer life span of the devices. The logic devices are also Rad-Hard and chemically resilient. This allows the devices to remain durable in many types of environments from satellites orbiting the Earth to Nuclear power plants and submarines to industrial manufacturing plants with harsh chemicals. These devices can also be fabricated to have device actuation voltages from a fraction of a volt to tens of thousands of volts allowing the devices the ability to function in almost any electrical system. We have also innovated a new processing procedure using hi-resolution shadowing masking techniques that improves the fabrication of these devices. By using the hi-resolution shadow mask, we are able to reduce the number of steps required to fabricate the logic devices, shorten the processing time and reduce the chemical waste from fabrication. This allows the devices to be fabricated at a lower cost while also reducing the environmental impact from chemical waste.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1194/thumbnail.jp

Toward a balanced grammatical description

The writer of a grammatical description attempts to accomplish many goals in one complex document. Some of these goals seem to conflict with one another, thus causing tension, discouragement and paralysis for many descriptive linguists. For example, all grammar writers want their work to speak clearly to general linguists and to specialists in their language area tradition. Yet a grammar that addresses universal issues, may not be detailed enough for specialists; while a highly detailed description written in a specialized areal framework may be incomprehensible to those outside of a particular tradition. In the present chapter, I describe four tensions that grammar writers often face, and provide concrete suggestions on how to balance these tensions effectively and creatively. These tensions are: • Comprehensiveness vs. usefulness. • Technical accuracy vs. understandability. • Universality vs. specificity. • A ‘form-driven’ vs. a ‘function-driven’ approach. By drawing attention to these potential conflicts, I hope to help free junior linguists from the unrealistic expectation that their work must fully accomplish all of the ideals that motivate the complex task of describing the grammar of a language. The goal of a description grammar is to produce an esthetically pleasing, intellectually stimulating, and genuinely informative piece of work.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Leadership After COVID-19 [Spoiler: There is Something Beyond Recovery and Resilience for Individuals and Organizations]

Throughout history, humans have found ways to recycle energy in ways that benefit them and would otherwise be wasted. Examples of this processing include learning to use fire for warmth, light, and cooking or identifying how to redirect the wind to navigate a ship in a preferred direction as opposed to a undetermined random route. Today, leaders can learn how to harvest uncertainty and randomness into tasks that utilize their strengths, as well as those on the team, to fuel optimal business outcomes and well-being for their employees. The author provides two workshop outlines. The first will help leaders correct cognitive distortions and view an uncertain world more objectively. The second workshop will use a validated framework to reframe uncertainty inherent in work tasks as opportunities to utilize strengths that to energize individuals and maximize resources within any organization

Novel biomarkers of renal transplant failure/dysfunction via spectroscopic phenotyping

Successful renal transplantation not only improves patients’ quality and duration of life, but also confers a substantial economic healthcare cost saving. With the growing burden of end-stage renal disease and the requirement for renal replacement therapy, strategies to augment transplant success and subsequent graft survival become more vital than ever. Herein, an objective means of characterising renal function across the transplant journey, and appropriately stratifying in accordance to individual contingencies/factors (including the early detection of renal dysfunction), based on metabolism is explored. Patient pairs, recipients and donors, were metabolically phenotyped prior to (24 h) and post (days 1–5) transplantation using a multi-platform analytical approach (i.e., Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) and Mass Spectrometry (MS)) of urine and plasma (n = 50). Using advanced statistics, the resulting metabolic profiles were subsequently modelled, and related to multiple clinical phenotypes (and outcomes), to increase the understanding of molecular changes/signatures across transplantation, capturing valuable information pertinent to transplant type, cause, co-morbidity, modality, immunology and complication (p-value < 0.05) – over donors as well as recipients. An attempt to then develop predictive algorithms for the early detection of renal dysfunction was preliminary defined within the confines of the study design, where integrated NMR and MS metabolic data improved patient stratification for complications over clinical measures (receiver operator characteristic area under curve over 0.900) and potentially replace current measures. While prospective/multicentre studies are imperative for subsequent real-world adoption (qualification/validation), the work conducted herein encompassed much of the first stage of marker development – discovery – where metabolic phenotyping renal transplantation has provided a deeper characterisation of patient journeys with new insights into multiple contingencies/factors (including complication). Such findings infer the value of metabolic phenotyping to augment and potentially replace current measures and methods to better inform decision making in the clinic on the individual/precision level.Open Acces

Improved human soft tissue thigh surrogates for superior assessment of sports personal protective equipment

Human surrogates are representations of living humans, commonly adopted to better understand human response to impacts. Though surrogates have been widely used in automotive, defence and medical industries with varying levels of biofidelity, their primary application in the sporting goods industry has been through primitive rigid anvils used in assessing personal protective equipment (PPE) effectiveness. In sports, absence from competition is an important severity measure and soft tissue injuries such as contusions and lacerations are serious concerns. Consequently, impact surrogates for the sporting goods industry need a more subtle description of the relevant soft tissues to assess impact severity and mitigation accurately to indicate the likelihood of injury. The fundamental aim for this research study was to establish a method to enable the development of superior, complementary, increasingly complex synthetic and computational impact surrogates for improved assessment of sports personal protective equipment. With a particular focus on the thigh segment, research was conducted to evaluate incremental increases in surrogate complexity. Throughout this study, empirical assessment of synthetic surrogates and computational evaluation using finite element (FE) models were employed to further knowledge on design features influencing soft tissue surrogates in a cost and time efficient manner. To develop a more representative human impact surrogate, the tissue structures considered, geometries and materials were identified as key components influencing the mechanical response of surrogates. As a design tool, FE models were used to evaluate the changes in impact response elicited with different soft tissue layer configurations. The study showed the importance of skin, adipose, muscle and bone tissue structures and indicated up to 15.4% difference in maximum soft tissue displacement caused by failure to represent the skin layer. FE models were further used in this capacity in a shape evaluation study from which it was determined that a full-scale anatomically contoured thigh was necessary to show the full diversity of impact response phenomena exhibited. This was particularly pertinent in PPE evaluations where simple surrogate shapes significantly underestimated the magnitudes of displacements exhibited (up to 155% difference) when rigid shell PPE was simulated under impact conditions. Synthetic PDMS silicone simulants were then fabricated for each of the organic soft tissues to match their dynamic responses. The developed simulants exhibited a superior representation of the tissues when compared to previous single material soft tissue simulant, Silastic 3483, which showed 324%, 11,140% and -15.8% greater differences than the PDMS when compared to previously reported target organic tissue datasets for relaxed muscle, skin and adipose tissues respectively. The impact response of these PDMS surrogates were compared in FE models with previously used single material simulants in representative knee and cricket ball sports impact events. The models were each validated through experimental tests and the PDMS simulants were shown to exhibit significantly closer responses to organic tissue predictions across all impact conditions and evaluation metrics considered. An anatomically contoured synthetic thigh surrogate was fabricated using the PDMS soft tissue simulants through a novel multi-stage moulding process. The surrogate was experimentally tested under representative sports impact conditions and showed a good comparison with FE model predictions with a maximum difference in impactor displacements and peak accelerations of +6.86% and +12.5% respectively at velocities between 2 - 4 m.s-1. The value of increased biofidelity in the anatomical synthetic and virtual surrogate thighs has been proven through the incremental adoption of important surrogate elements (tissue structures, material and geometries). The predictive capabilities of each surrogate have been demonstrated through their parallel developments and staged comparisons with idealised organic tissue responses. This increase in biofidelity is introduced at modestly higher cost compared to Silastic 3483, but, given the benefits of a more representative human impact response for PPE evaluations, this is shown to be worthwhile

Datable "Notre Dame" Conductus: New Historical Observations on Style and Technique

One of the greatest obstacles to histories of earlier medieval music lies in the relative absence of concrete historical testimony for extant compositions. Information pertaining to the names, life spans, and working records of composers is rare, dates for the creation or performance of pieces are exceptional, and critical judgments of specific works from contemporaries almost nonexistent

Locational relations in Yagua narrative

From the introduction: In this paper I will attempt to show that locational relations are specified by rhetorical predicates in the same way as the other relations mentioned above are. I suggest that the paucity of locational and directional relations in lists of rhetorical predicates in previous work is due to the absence of specific morphosyntactic devises for indicating such relations in the languages that most linguists speak