The Social Impact of the Misconceptions Surrounding Tuberculosis

This paper addresses many of the misconceptions surrounding tuberculosis in three different time periods: ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the 19th-20th centuries, and explains the social ramifications caused by the lack of understanding

Honor and Shame in the Sagas of the Icelanders: Women\u27s Struggle for Influence

This thesis explores the agency of women in Medieval Iceland through the examination of the Icelandic sagas. The Icelandic sagas are one of the most impressive bodies of literature to emerge from Medieval Europe. The sagas offer a trove of social information and a look into the society of Medieval Iceland. These narratives tell the story of the people of Iceland during the first 160 years of settlement, beginning in AD 870. While their focus is on the struggles of men, the sagas do not ignore women. In Medieval Iceland, women had no judiciary standing and relied on men for safety, status, and property. However, the sagas do not paint a picture of powerless women. The sagas show that women influenced situations by using the strict honor code of Iceland to their advantage. Because of men’s concern with maintaining their honor, a woman could goad a man into action by shaming and threatening his honor and masculinity. Men would then perform acts that the women themselves were not allowed to perform. The purpose of this research is to explain the speech acts and the context of these situations, as well as argue that this behavior actually happened and was a way for Icelandic women to influence situations. This thesis looks at three instances when a woman employed this technique: when she felt humiliated or wronged, when she wanted to further her own interests, or when she wanted to avenge the death of a kinsmen

Are there differences between stemless and conventional stemmed shoulder prostheses in the treatment of glenohumeral osteoarthritis?

Background: Conventional stemmed anatomical shoulder prostheses are widely used in the treatment of glenohumeral osteoarthritis. The stemless shoulder prosthesis, in contrast, is a new concept, and fewer outcome studies are available. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to investigate the early functional outcome and postoperative proprioception of a stemless prosthesis in comparison with a standard stemmed anatomic shoulder prosthesis. Methods: Twelve patients (mean age 68.3 years [SD ± 5.4]; 5 female, 7 male) with primary glenohumeral osteoarthritis of the shoulder were enrolled, who underwent total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA) with a stemless total shoulder prosthesis, Total Evolution Shoulder System (TESS®; Biomed, France). The control group consisted of twelve (age and gender matched) patients (mean age 67.8 years; [SD ± 7.1]; 9 female, 3 male), getting a TSA with a standard anatomic stemmed prosthesis, Aequalis® Shoulder (Tournier, Lyon, France). Patients were examined the day before and six months after surgery. The pre- and postoperative Constant Score (CS) was evaluated and proprioception was measured in a 3D video motion analysis study using an active angle-reproduction (AAR) test. Results: Comparing the postoperative CS, there was no significant difference between the groups treated with the TESS® prosthesis (48.0 ± 13.8 points) and the Aequalis® prosthesis (49.3 ± 8.6 points; p = 0.792). There was no significant difference in postoperative proprioception between the TESS® group (7.2° [SD ± 2.8]) and the Aequalis® group(8.7° [SD ± 2.7]; p = 0.196), either. Comparison of in the results of CS and AAR test pre- and postoperatively showed no significant differences between the groups. Discussion: In patients with glenohumeral osteoarthritis, treated with TSA, the functional and the proprioceptive outcome is comparable between a stemless and a standard stemmed anatomic shoulder prosthesis at early followup. Conclusion: Further follow-up is necessary regarding the long-term performance of this prosthesis. Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials DRKS 00007528. Registered 17 November 201

EM-Cube: An Architecture for Low-Cost Real-Time Volume Rendering

EM-Cube is a VLSI architecture for low-cost, high quality volume rendering at full video frame rates. Derived from the Cube-4 architecture developed at SUNY at Stony Brook, EM-Cube computes sample points and gradients on-the-fly to project 3-dimensional volume data onto 2-dimensional images with realistic lighting and shading. A modest rendering system based on EM-Cube consists of a PCI card with four rendering chips (ASICs), four 64Mbit SDRAMs to hold the volume data, and four SRAMs to capture the rendered image. The performance target for this configuration is to render images from a 256^3 x 16 bit data set at 30 frames/sec. The EM-Cube architecture can be scaled to larger volume data-sets and/or higher frame rates by adding additional ASICs, SDRAMs, and SRAMs. This paper addresses three major challenges encountered developing EM-Cube into a practical product: exploiting the bandwidth inherent in the SDRAMs containing the volume data, keeping the pin-count between adjacent ASICs at a tractable level, and reducing the on-chip storage required to hold the intermediate results of rendering.Engineering and Applied Science

Digital ink and differentiated subjective ratings for cognitive load measurement in middle childhood

Background: New methods are constantly being developed to adapt cognitive load measurement to different contexts. However, research on middle childhood students' cognitive load measurement is rare. Research indicates that the three cognitive load dimensions (intrinsic, extraneous, and germane) can be measured well in adults and teenagers using differentiated subjective rating instruments. Moreover, digital ink recorded by smartpens could serve as an indicator for cognitive load in adults. Aims: With the present research, we aimed at investigating the relation between subjective cognitive load ratings, velocity and pressure measures recorded with a smartpen, and performance in standardized sketching tasks in middle childhood students. Sample: Thirty-six children (age 7–12) participated at the university's laboratory. Methods: The children performed two standardized sketching tasks, each in two versions. The induced intrinsic cognitive load or the extraneous cognitive load was varied between the versions. Digital ink was recorded while the children drew with a smartpen on real paper and after each task, they were asked to report their perceived intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load using a newly developed 5-item scale. Results: Results indicated that cognitive load ratings as well as velocity and pressure measures were substantially related to the induced cognitive load and to performance in both sketching tasks. However, cognitive load ratings and smartpen measures were not substantially related. Conclusions: Both subjective rating and digital ink hold potential for cognitive load and performance measurement. However, it is questionable whether they measure the exact same constructs

Investigating the Usability of a Head-Mounted Display Augmented Reality Device in Elementary School Children

Augmenting reality via head-mounted displays (HMD-AR) is an emerging technology in education. The interactivity provided by HMD-AR devices is particularly promising for learning, but presents a challenge to human activity recognition, especially with children. Recent technological advances regarding speech and gesture recognition concerning Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 may address this prevailing issue. In a within-subjects study with 47 elementary school children (2nd to 6th grade), we examined the usability of the HoloLens 2 using a standardized tutorial on multimodal interaction in AR. The overall system usability was rated “good”. However, several behavioral metrics indicated that specific interaction modes differed in their efficiency. The results are of major importance for the development of learning applications in HMD-AR as they partially deviate from previous findings. In particular, the well-functioning recognition of children’s voice commands that we observed represents a novelty. Furthermore, we found different interaction preferences in HMD-AR among the children. We also found the use of HMD-AR to have a positive effect on children’s activity-related achievement emotions. Overall, our findings can serve as a basis for determining general requirements, possibilities, and limitations of the implementation of educational HMD-AR environments in elementary school classrooms

The murine catecholamine methyltransferase mTOMT is essential for mechanotransduction by cochlear hair cells

Hair cells of the cochlea are mechanosensors for the perception of sound. Mutations in the LRTOMT gene, which encodes a protein with homology to the catecholamine methyltransferase COMT that is linked to schizophrenia, cause deafness. Here, we show that Tomt/Comt2, the murine ortholog of LRTOMT, has an unexpected function in the regulation of mechanotransduction by hair cells. The role of mTOMT in hair cells is independent of mTOMT methyltransferase function and mCOMT cannot substitute for mTOMT function. Instead, mTOMT binds to putative components of the mechanotransduction channel in hair cells and is essential for the transport of some of these components into the mechanically sensitive stereocilia of hair cells. Our studies thus suggest functional diversification between mCOMT and mTOMT, where mTOMT is critical for the assembly of the mechanotransduction machinery of hair cells. Defects in this process are likely mechanistically linked to deafness caused by mutations in LRTOMT/Tomt

A Radio Relic And A Search For The Central Black Hole In The Abell 2261 Brightest Cluster Galaxy

We present VLA images and HST/STIS spectra of sources within the center of the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) in Abell 2261. These observations were obtained to test the hypothesis that its extremely large, flat core reflects the ejection of its supermassive black hole. Spectra of three of the four most luminous knots embedded in the core were taken to test whether one may represent stars bound to a displaced massive black hole. The three knots have radial velocity offsets dV \u3c ~150 km/s from the BCG. Knots 2 and 3 show kinematics, colors, and stellar masses consistent with infalling low-mass galaxies or larger stripped cluster members. Large errors in the stellar velocity dispersion of Knot 1, however, mean that we cannot rule out the hypothesis that it hosts a high-mass black hole. A2261-BCG has a compact, relic radio-source offset by 6.5 kpc (projected) from the optical core\u27s center, but no active radio core that would pinpoint the galaxy\u27s central black hole to a tight 10 GHz flux limit 48 Myr ago, with an equipartition condition magnetic field of 15 uG. These observations are still consistent with the hypothesis that the nuclear black hole has been ejected from its core, but the critical task of locating the supermassive black hole or demonstrating that A2261-BCG lacks one remains to be done