Scanning Electron Microscopy of the Human Myocardium

Owing to the impossibility of fixation, in the human being, by means of perfusion in vivo and the rare availability of fresh comparatively intact hearts resected at transplantation, the possibility was explored of using post-mortem material in instances where the autopsies were performed within 2 hours of demise of the patients. Four cases were examined: 2 normal adult hearts and 2 hearts of hypertensive patients in the stage of decompensation. The hearts were fixed by means of perfusion with 2.5% glutaraldehyde in phosphate buffer, pH 7.4. Contiguous blocks were taken for light microscopy (LM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) from the left ventricular free wall of all 4 cases and of the impulse conducting system of the heart in the 2 normal hearts. The SEM material was processed by the osmium-thiocarbohydrazide-osmium method (O-T-O). There was good correlation between the LM and SEM findings. The left ventricular blocks were sectioned in the transverse axis and SEM showed a step-wise transection of the myofibrils. Z and M bands, mitochondria and myofilaments were identified at ultrastructural magnifications. The difference in vascularity between normal and hypertensive myocardium and the presence of para-arterial fibrosis in the latter were demonstrated by SEM. The SEM study of the impulse conducting system of the heart included the sinoatrial (SA) and atrioventricular (AV) nodes and the penetrating portion of the atrioventricular (AV) bundle of His. Characteristic pacemaker or P cells were identified in the nodes

A plug-and-play ripple mitigation approach for DC-links in hybrid systems

© 2016 IEEE.In this paper, a plug-and-play ripple mitigation technique is proposed. It requires only the sensing of the DC-link voltage and can operate fully independently to remove the low-frequency voltage ripple. The proposed technique is nonintrusive to the existing hardware and enables hot-swap operation without disrupting the normal functionality of the existing power system. It is user-friendly, modular and suitable for plug-and-play operation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ripple-mitigation capability of the proposed device. The DC-link voltage ripple in a 110 W miniature hybrid system comprising an AC/DC converter and two resistive loads is shown to be significantly reduced from 61 V to only 3.3 V. Moreover, it is shown that with the proposed device, the system reliability has been improved by alleviating the components' thermal stresses

Disclosure to a Credulous Audience: The Role of Limited Attention

In our model, informed players decide whether or not to disclose, and observers allocate attention among disclosed signals, and toward reasoning through the implications of a failure to disclose. In equilibrium disclosure is incomplete, and observers are unrealistically optimistic. Nevertheless, regulation requiring greater disclosure can reduce observers' belief accuracies and welfare. A stronger tendency to neglect disclosed signals increases disclosure, whereas a stronger tendency to neglect failures to disclose reduces disclosure. Observer beliefs are influenced by the salience of disclosed signals, and disclosure in one arena can crowd out disclosure in other fundamentally unrelated arenas.disclosure; disclosure regulation; limited attention; credulity

Spoken word recognition and serial recall of words from the giant component and words from lexical islands in the phonological network

Network science is a field that applies mathematical techniques to study complex systems, and the tools of network science have been used to analyze the phonological network of language (Vitevitch, 2008). The phonological network consists of a giant component, lexical islands, and several hermits. The giant component represents the largest connected component of the network, whereas lexical islands constitute smaller groups of words that are connected to each other but not to the giant component. To determine if the size of the network component that a word resided in influenced lexical processing, three psycholinguistic tasks (word shadowing, lexical decision, and serial recall) were used to compare the processing of words from the giant component and word from lexical islands. Results showed that words from lexical islands were more quickly recognized and more accurately recalled than words from the giant component. These findings can be accounted for via a spreading activation framework. Implications for models of spoken word recognition and network science are also discussed

Community structure in the phonological network

A grant from the One-University Open Access Fund at the University of Kansas was used to defray the author’s publication fees in this Open Access journal. The Open Access Fund, administered by librarians from the KU, KU Law, and KUMC libraries, is made possible by contributions from the offices of KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research. For more information about the Open Access Fund, please see http://library.kumc.edu/authors-fund.xml.Community structure, which refers to the presence of densely connected groups within a larger network, is a common feature of several real-world networks from a variety of domains such as the human brain, social networks of hunter-gatherers and business organizations, and the World Wide Web (Porter et al., 2009). Using a community detection technique known as the Louvain optimization method, 17 communities were extracted from the giant component of the phonological network described in Vitevitch (2008). Additional analyses comparing the lexical and phonological characteristics of words in these communities against words in randomly generated communities revealed several novel discoveries. Larger communities tend to consist of short, frequent words of high degree and low age of acquisition ratings, and smaller communities tend to consist of longer, less frequent words of low degree and high age of acquisition ratings. Real communities also contained fewer different phonological segments compared to random communities, although the number of occurrences of phonological segments found in real communities was much higher than that of the same phonological segments in random communities. Interestingly, the observation that relatively few biphones occur very frequently and a large number of biphones occur rarely within communities mirrors the pattern of the overall frequency of words in a language (Zipf, 1935). The present findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of activation spread among words in the phonological network that are relevant to lexical processing, as well as understanding the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition and the evolution of language

Investigating the Influence of Inverse Preferential Attachment on Network Development

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Recent work investigating the development of the phonological lexicon, where edges between words represent phonological similarity, have suggested that phonological network growth may be partly driven by a process that favors the acquisition of new words that are phonologically similar to several existing words in the lexicon. To explore this growth mechanism, we conducted a simulation study to examine the properties of networks grown by inverse preferential attachment, where new nodes added to the network tend to connect to existing nodes with fewer edges. Specifically, we analyzed the network structure and degree distributions of artificial networks generated via either preferential attachment, an inverse variant of preferential attachment, or combinations of both network growth mechanisms. The simulations showed that network growth initially driven by preferential attachment followed by inverse preferential attachment led to densely-connected network structures (i.e., smaller diameters and average shortest path lengths), as well as degree distributions that could be characterized by non-power law distributions, analogous to the features of real-world phonological networks. These results provide converging evidence that inverse preferential attachment may play a role in the development of the phonological lexicon and reflect processing costs associated with a mature lexicon structure.University of Kansa

Dark Matter in Gauge Mediation from Emergent Supersymmetry

We investigated the viability of neutralino dark matter in the gauge mediation from emergent supersymmetry proposal. In this proposal, supersymmetry is broken at Planck scale and consequently, the gravitino is superheavy and completely decouples from the low energy theory. Squarks and sleptons obtain their soft masses dominantly through gauge mediation with other mechanisms highly suppressed. The lightest supersymmetric partner, in contrast to traditional gauge mediation, is a neutralino which is also a dark matter candidate. By explicit calculation of the low energy spectra, the parameter space was constrained using the WMAP observed relic density of dark matter, LEP2 Higgs mass bounds, collider bounds on supersymmetric partners and exotic B-meson decays. We found that the model has intriguing hybrid features such as a nearly gauge-mediated spectrum (the exception being the superheavy gravitino) but with a dominant mSUGRA-like bino-stau coannihilation channel and at large $\tan \beta$, A-resonance-like annihilation.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

External lightning protection system for wind turbine blades - aerodynamics.

Many wind turbine blade manufacturers have installed lightning protection systems (particularly the down conductor) internally. Having the down conductor internally within the blades would indeed preserve their aerodynamic performance. However, the blades are, as a consequence, vulnerable to damage and burn resulting from lightning strikes. Owing to this, the authors believe that by having the down conductor on the external surface of the blade, the incidence of blade damage would be reduced. The authors have not found any literature in the public domain that quantifies the effect of having an external down conductor on the aerodynamic performance. Hence, in this paper, a study of the effects of an externally mounted lightning conductor has been undertaken. Simulation studies were carried out using the computational fluid dynamics numerical method available in the COMSOL Multiphysics software package. The results of studies on single conductor arrangement have shown that the degradation on aerodynamic performance is least at the trailing edges of the blade. However, it may not be adequate for lightning protection. Therefore, using a similar numerical modelling methodology, simulations were extended and investigated on multiple conductor arrangements where conductors? locations were varied on an aerofoil surfaces. The results of the aerodynamic modelling suggested that a four conductor arrangement may be the best option as it gives more coverage for lightning protection of the wind turbine blades while still having the least reduction (of around 25%) on lift to drag ratio

External lightning protection system for wind turbine blades - power performance

Previous studies conducted by the authors on the aerodynamic performance of turbine blades have shown unfavourable effects of externally mounted lightning down conductors. Owing to this, one could ask whether or not externally mounted lightning down conductors could linearly affect the power performance of the whole wind turbine as well. Therefore, this paper presents a study of the power performance of one wind turbine with an externally mounted lightning down conductor. An untwisted blade profile of NACA 4418 with and without external conductor was used on the full wind turbine model. Numerical simulations were carried out on turbine power output derived from Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory. The results are compared and discussed. The preliminary results indicate that degradation in power performance may not be significant