What are we Singing on Sunday? The Trinity, Canadian Pentecostals, and Contemporary Worship Music

This article offers an analysis of the trinitarian impulses in contemporary worship music used by the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC). It considers whether the lyrics from the most commonly used PAOC songs are consistent with this Evangelical group's trinitarian statement of faith

The effect of a mindfulness-based decentering strategy on chocolate craving

According to the elaborated-intrusion theory of desire, strategies that load visual working memory will reduce cravings. According to the grounded cognition theory of desire, cravings will be reduced with mindfulness-based decentering strategies that encourage individuals to see their thoughts as thoughts. However, decentering strategies also tend to load visual working memory making it difficult to test the latter prediction. This study addressed this issue by matching visualization across decentering and guided imagery tasks. Male and female participants (n = 101) underwent a chocolate craving induction before listening to a 4-min audio recording that guided them to (a) decenter from their thoughts and feelings, (b) engage in visualization, or (c) let their mind wander. Participants reported on chocolate craving before and after the craving induction and following the 4-min recording. They also provided retrospective reports of craving during the recording, reported on the extent to which they had adhered to the audio instructions and briefly indicated what they had been thinking about during the recording. Results showed a significant reduction in cravings to baseline following the recording across all three conditions (p < .001), but no significant differences between conditions or in the retrospective reports of craving. There was some evidence to suggest that participants in the mind wandering condition had been thinking about alternate goals, which may have inhibited thoughts about chocolate and been just as effective at reducing craving as the imagery and decentering strategies. Exploratory analyses showed a trend toward decentering being more effective than imagery where participants reported higher task adherence throughout the 4 min (p = .067). This raises the possibility that decentering effects may be improved with better strategy adherence, which might be achieved through practice or increased motivation

Campylobacter jejuni Transmission from Pet Animals: A New Zoonosis?

In recent years, Campylobacter jejuni has been recognized as an important enteric pathogen of human beings causing acute and subacute gastrointestinal illness. Recent reports have suggested that infected household pets may be vectors for the human infection. It has been theorized that as more research will be conducted\u27 the zoonotic implications of C. jejuni will rival and probably exceed those of salmonellosis. Therefore, as veterinarians, it is important to be aware of the disease in animals, the zoonotic implications, and be able to advise our clientele

The Air-temperature Response to Green/blue-infrastructure Evaluation Tool (TARGET v1.0) : an efficient and user-friendly model of city cooling

The adverse impacts of urban heat and global climate change are leading policymakers to consider green and blue infrastructure (GBI) for heat mitigation benefits. Though many models exist to evaluate the cooling impacts of GBI, their complexity and computational demand leaves most of them largely inaccessible to those without specialist expertise and computing facilities. Here a new model called The Air-temperature Response to Green/blue-infrastructure Evaluation Tool (TARGET) is presented. TARGET is designed to be efficient and easy to use, with fewer user-defined parameters and less model input data required than other urban climate models. TARGET can be used to model average street-level air temperature at canyon-to-block scales (e.g. 100 m resolution), meaning it can be used to assess temperature impacts of suburb-to-city-scale GBI proposals. The model aims to balance realistic representation of physical processes and computation efficiency. An evaluation against two different datasets shows that TARGET can reproduce the magnitude and patterns of both air temperature and surface temperature within suburban environments. To demonstrate the utility of the model for planners and policymakers, the results from two precinct-scale heat mitigation scenarios are presented. TARGET is available to the public, and ongoing development, including a graphical user interface, is planned for future work

Dopamine D_2-receptor activation elicits akinesia, rigidity, catalepsy, and tremor in mice expressing hypersensitive 4 nicotinic receptors via a cholinergic-dependent mechanism

Recent studies suggest that high-affinity neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) containing α4 and β2 subunits (α4β2*) functionally interact with G-protein-coupled dopamine (DA) D_2 receptors in basal ganglia. We hypothesized that if a functional interaction between these receptors exists, then mice expressing an M2 point mutation (Leu9'Ala) rendering 4 nAChRs hypersensitive to ACh may exhibit altered sensitivity to a D_2-receptor agonist. When challenged with the D_(2)R agonist, quinpirole (0.5–10 mg/kg), Leu9'Ala mice, but not wild-type (WT) littermates, developed severe, reversible motor impairment characterized by rigidity, catalepsy, akinesia, and tremor. While striatal DA tissue content, baseline release, and quinpirole-induced DA depletion did not differ between Leu9'Ala and WT mice, quinpirole dramatically increased activity of cholinergic striatal interneurons only in mutant animals, as measured by increased c-Fos expression in choline acetyltransferase (ChAT)-positive interneurons. Highlighting the importance of the cholinergic system in this mouse model, inhibiting the effects of ACh by blocking muscarinic receptors, or by selectively activating hypersensitive nAChRs with nicotine, rescued motor symptoms. This novel mouse model mimics the imbalance between striatal DA/ACh function associated with severe motor impairment in disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and the data suggest that a D_(2)R–α4*-nAChR functional interaction regulates cholinergic interneuron activity.—Zhao-Shea, R., Cohen, B. N., Just, H., McClure-Begley, T., Whiteaker, P., Grady, S. R., Salminen, O., Gardner, P. D., Lester, H. A., Tapper, A. R. Dopamine D2-receptor activation elicits akinesia, rigidity, catalepsy, and tremor in mice expressing hypersensitive α4 nicotinic receptors via a cholinergic-dependent mechanism

Clinical perspectives of emerging pathogens in bleeding disorders.

As a result of immunological and nucleic-acid screening of plasma donations for transfusion-transmissible viruses, and the incorporation of viral reduction processes during plasma fractionation, coagulation-factor concentrates (CFC) are now judged safe in terms of many known infectious agents, including hepatitis B and C viruses, HIV, and human T-cell lymphotropic virus. However, emerging pathogens could pose future threats, particularly those with blood-borne stages that are resistant to viral-inactivation steps in the manufacturing process, such as non-lipid-coated viruses. As outlined in this Review, better understanding of infectious diseases allows challenges from newly described agents of potential concern in the future to be anticipated, but the processes of zoonotic transmission and genetic selection or modification ensure that plasma-derived products will continue to be subject to infectious concerns. Manufacturers of plasma-derived CFC have addressed the issue of emerging infectious agents by developing recombinant products that limit the need for human plasma during production. Such recombinant products have extended the safety profile of their predecessors by ensuring that all reagents used for cell culture, purification steps, and stabilisation and storage buffers are completely independent of human plasma

Review article: the diagnostic approach and current management of chylous ascites

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138889/1/apt14284.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138889/2/apt14284_am.pd

Demonstration of FPGA acceleration of Monte Carlo simulation

We present results from a stand-alone simulation of electron single Coulomb scattering as implemented completely on an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architecture and compared with an identical simulation on a standard CPU. FPGA architectures offer unprecedented speed-up capability for Monte Carlo simulations, however with the caveats of lengthy development cycles and resource limitation, particularly in terms of on-chip memory and DSP blocks. As a proof of principle of acceleration on an FPGA, we chose a single scattering process of electrons in water at an energy of 6 MeV. The initial code-base was implemented in C++ and optimised for CPU processing. To measure the potential performance gains of FPGAs compared to modern multi-core CPUs we computed 100M histories of a 6 MeV electron interacting in water. Without performing any hardware-specific optimisation, the results show that the FPGA implementation is over 110 times faster than an optimised parallel implementation running on 12 CPU-cores, and over 270 times faster than a sequential single-core CPU implementation. The results on both architectures were statistically equivalent. The successful implementation and acceleration results are very encouraging for the future exploitation of more sophisticated Monte Carlo simulation on FPGAs for High Energy Physics applications