Personal values and visual thresholds in a complex recognition task.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of the present experiment was to study the relationship between motivation and perception, specifically between visual recognition thresholds of words related to specific areas of personal value. The context of this experiment is provided by those studies in perception which found the evidence for a relationship between positive motivational states of the perceiver such as reward states, needs, etc., and the speed with which the perceiver recognizes motivationally congruent stimuli. Of these studies, those utilizing personal value as the motivational factor have engendered much theoretical and methodological criticism. One such critique proposed to explain the obtained relationship between high personal value and low tachistoscopic visual recognition thresholds for relevant high value words on the basis of the perceiver's familiarity with the stimulus words used. In that experiment it was demonstrated that the value factor was insignificant when common words, as measured by word counts of samples of popular literature, were used. [TRUNCATED

Alloparental behaviour and long-term costs of mothers tolerating other members of the group in a plurally breeding mammal

Cooperative-breeding studies tend to focus on a few alloparental behaviours in highly cooperative species exhibiting high reproductive skew and the associated short-term, but less frequently long-term, fitness costs. We analysed a suite of alloparental behaviours (assessed via filming) in a kin-structured, high-density population of plurally breeding European badgers, Meles meles, which are not highly cooperative. Group members, other than mothers, performed alloparental behaviour; however, this was not correlated with their relatedness to within-group young. Furthermore, mothers babysat, allogroomed cubs without reciprocation, and allomarked cubs more than other members of the group (controlling for observation time). For welfare reasons, we could not individually mark cubs; however, the number observed pre-independence never exceeded that trapped. All 24 trapped cubs, in three filmed groups, were assigned both parents using 22 microsatellites. Mothers may breed cooperatively, as the time they babysat their assigned, or a larger, litter size did not differ. Furthermore, two mothers probably allonursed, as they suckled more cubs than their assigned litter size. An 18-year genetic pedigree, however, detected no short-term (litter size; maternal survival to the following year) or long-term (offspring breeding probability; offspring lifetime breeding success) fitness benefits with more within-group mothers or other members of the group. Rather, the number of other members of the group (excluding mothers) correlated negatively with long-term fitness. Mothers may tolerate other members of the group, as nonbreeders undertook more digging. Our study highlights that alloparental care varies on a continuum from that seen in this high-density badger population, where alloparenting behaviour is minimal, through to species where alloparental care is common and provides fitness benefits. (C) 2010 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Pro/con debate: Do the benefits of regionalized critical care delivery outweigh the risks of interfacility patient transport?

You are providing input in planning for critical care services to a large regional health authority. You are considering concentrating some critical care services into high-volume regional centres of excellence, as has been done in other fields of medicine. In your region, this would require several centres with differing levels of expertise that are geographically separated. Given there are inherent risks and time delays associated with interfacility patient transport, you debate whether these potential risks outweigh the benefits of regional centres of excellence

Dragons in the Drawing Room: Chinese Embroideries in British Homes

Chinese embroideries have featured in British domestic interiors since at least the seventeenth century. However, Western imperial interests in China during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century created a particular set of meanings around Chinese material culture, especially a colonial form of nostalgia for pre-nineteenth century China, with its emperors and 'exotic' court etiquette. This article examines the use of Chinese satin-stitch embroideries in British homes between 1860 and 1949, and explores how a range of British identities was constructed through the ownership, manipulation and display of these luxury Chinese textiles

SenseBelt:a belt-worn sensor to support cross-device interaction

Mobile interaction is shifting from a single device to simultaneous interaction with ensembles of devices such as phones, tablets, or watches. Spatially-aware cross-device interaction between mobile devices typically requires a fixed tracking infrastructure, which lim- its mobility. In this paper, we present SenseBelt – a sensing belt that enhances existing mobile interactions and enables low-cost, ad hoc sensing of cross-device gestures and interactions. SenseBelt enables proxemic interactions between people and their personal devices. SenseBelt also supports cross-device interaction be- tween personal devices and stationary devices, such as public displays. We discuss the design and implementation of SenseBelt together with possible applications. With an initial evaluation, we provide insights into the benefits and drawbacks of a belt-worn mediating sensor to support cross-device interactions

Pathfinder cells provide a novel therapeutic intervention for acute kidney injury

Pathfinder cells (PCs) are a novel class of adult-derived cells that facilitate functional repair of host tissue. We used rat PCs to demonstrate that they enable the functional mitigation of ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury in a mouse model of renal damage. Female C57BL/6 mice were subjected to 30 min of renal ischemia and treated with intravenous (i.v.) injection of saline (control) or male rat pancreas-derived PCs in blinded experimentation. Kidney function was assessed 14 days after treatment by measuring serum creatinine (SC) levels. Kidney tissue was assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) for markers of cellular damage, proliferation, and senescence (TUNEL, Ki67, p16ink4a, p21). Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was performed to determine the presence of any rat (i.e., pathfinder) cells in the mouse tissue. PC-treated animals demonstrated superior renal function at day 14 post-I/R, in comparison to saline-treated controls, as measured by SC levels (0.13 mg/dL vs. 0.23 mg/dL, p<0.001). PC-treated kidney tissue expressed significantly lower levels of p16ink4a in comparison to the control group (p=0.009). FISH analysis demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of repaired kidney tissue was mouse in origin. Rat PCs were only detected at a frequency of 0.02%. These data confirm that PCs have the ability to mitigate functional damage to kidney tissue following I/R injury. Kidneys of PC-treated animals showed evidence of improved function and reduced expression of damage markers. The PCs appear to act in a paracrine fashion, stimulating the host tissue to recover functionally, rather than by differentiating into renal cells. This study demonstrates that pancreatic-derived PCs from the adult rat can enable functional repair of renal damage in mice. It validates the use of PCs to regenerate damaged tissues and also offers a novel therapeutic intervention for repair of solid organ damage in situ

Effects of bovine parathyroid hormone and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 on the production of prostaglandins by cells derived from human bone

AbstractLocal production of prostaglandins by osteoblasts may be important in controlling the bone resorbing activity of some hormones which have receptors on osteoblasts. We have demonstrated that osteoblast-like cells derived from human bone can incorporate [14C]arachidonic acid into phospholipids and synthesise immunoreactive PGE. Parathyroid hormone increases both the release of incorporated arachidonic acid and the synthesis of PGE. This is the first demonstration of modulation of bone cell prostaglandin synthesis by a bone resorbing hormone

An Extension to the Frenet-Serret and Bishop Invariant Extended Kalman Filters for Tracking Accelerating Targets

This paper presents an extension to the original Frenet-Serret and Bishop frame target models used in the invariant extended Kalman filter (IEKF) to account for tangential accelerations for highly-manoeuvrable targets. State error propagation matrices are derived for both IEKFs and used to build the accelerating Frenet-Serret (FSa-LIEKF) and Bishop (Ba-LIEKF) algorithms. The filters are compared to the original Frenet-Serret and Bishop algorithms in a tracking scenario featuring a target performing a series of complex manoeuvres. The accelerating forms of the LIEKF are shown to improve velocity estimation during non-constant velocity trajectory segments at the expense of increased noise during simpler manoeuvres

Retail Sales of Alcohol and the Risk of Being a Victim of Assault

Russell Bennetts and Rachel Seabrook discuss the implications of a new case-crossover study that links retail alcohol sales and violent assaults