Beyond Critical Period Learning: Striatal FoxP2 Affects the Active Maintenance of Learned Vocalizations in Adulthood.

In humans, mutations in the transcription factor forkhead box P2 (FOXP2) result in language disorders associated with altered striatal structure. Like speech, birdsong is learned through social interactions during maturational critical periods, and it relies on auditory feedback during initial learning and on-going maintenance. Hearing loss causes learned vocalizations to deteriorate in adult humans and songbirds. In the adult songbird brain, most FoxP2-enriched regions (e.g., cortex, thalamus) show a static expression level, but in the striatal song control nucleus, area X, FoxP2 is regulated by singing and social context: when juveniles and adults sing alone, its levels drop, and songs are more variable. When males sing to females, FoxP2 levels remain high, and songs are relatively stable: this "on-line" regulation implicates FoxP2 in ongoing vocal processes, but its role in the auditory-based maintenance of learned vocalization has not been examined. To test this, we overexpressed FoxP2 in both hearing and deafened adult zebra finches and assessed effects on song sung alone versus songs directed to females. In intact birds singing alone, no changes were detected between songs of males expressing FoxP2 or a GFP construct in area X, consistent with the marked stability of mature song in this species. In contrast, songs of males overexpressing FoxP2 became more variable and were less preferable to females, unlike responses to songs of GFP-expressing control males. In deafened birds, song deteriorated more rapidly following FoxP2 overexpression relative to GFP controls. Together, these experiments suggest that behavior-driven FoxP2 expression and auditory feedback interact to precisely maintain learned vocalizations

Association between urinary sodium, creatinine, albumin, and long term survival in chronic kidney disease

Dietary sodium intake is associated with hypertension and cardiovascular risk in the general population. In patients with chronic kidney disease, sodium intake has been associated with progressive renal disease, but not independently of proteinuria. We studied the relationship between urinary sodium excretion and urinary sodium:creatinine ratio and mortality or requirement for renal replacement therapy in chronic kidney disease. Adults attending a renal clinic who had at least one 24-hour urinary sodium measurement were identified. 24-hour urinary sodium measures were collected and urinary sodium:creatinine ratio calculated. Time to renal replacement therapy or death was recorded. 423 patients were identified with mean estimated glomerular filtration rate of 48ml/min/1.73m<sup>2</sup>. 90 patients required renal replacement therapy and 102 patients died. Mean slope decline in estimated glomerular filtration rate was -2.8ml/min/1.73m<sup>2</sup>/year. Median follow-up was 8.5 years. Patients who died or required renal replacement therapy had significantly higher urinary sodium excretion and urinary sodium:creatinine but the association with these parameters and poor outcome was not independent of renal function, age and albuminuria. When stratified by albuminuria, urinary sodium:creatinine was a significant cumulative additional risk for mortality, even in patients with low level albuminuria. There was no association between low urinary sodium and risk, as observed in some studies. This study demonstrates an association between urinary sodium excretion and mortality in chronic kidney disease, with a cumulative relationship between sodium excretion, albuminuria and reduced survival. These data support reducing dietary sodium intake in chronic kidney disease but further study is required to determine the target sodium intake

Designing industrial strategy for a low carbon transformation

The recent re-emergence of industrial policy as a legitimate pursuit of governments in Europe and the US has the potential to open up a new realm of policy action for climate change mitigation. This would aim to align efforts to secure national industrial opportunities with the development of low carbon industrial systems, so as to generate both socio-economic and environmental benefits. The paper discusses the role of low carbon industrial strategy in seeking to do this, thereby accelerating transitions to a low carbon economy. It sets out the elements of a more systemic low carbon industrial strategy, including providing a mission-oriented and learning-based approach, drawing on and combining insights from neo-Schumpeterian and ecological economics perspectives

Situational and Emotional Influences on the Acceptability of Wolf Management Actions

Abstract This article examined the effectiveness of situational and emotional variables in predicting the acceptability of wolf management actions in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Three hypotheses were advanced: (a) both situational and emotional variables will influence acceptability ratings, (b) emotions will explain the largest proportion of variance for the lethal management action, and (c) this pattern of findings will be the same for residents and visitors. Data were obtained from a survey of local residents and a survey of visitors to Grand Teton National Park. Two situational variables (location of encounter, wolf status) and three emotional variables (sympathy for ranchers, sympathy for wolves, anger about wolves) were included as independent variables. The dependent variables were acceptability of non-lethal and lethal management. Regression analyses supported the hypotheses. While debates regarding wolves are likely to continue, these findings highlight the role that emotion plays in evaluating the acceptability of management actions

Do physicians do as they say? The case of mammography

OBJECTIVE: To assess the utility of survey-based physician policy in predicting actual mammography ordering behavior, as measured by medical record abstraction. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey of practicing community physicians. Responses were correlated with data abstracted from the medical records of patients in the practices of the participating physicians. PARTICIPANTS: Family and general practitioners in Washington State. Medical records of female patients aged 40 to 80 years provided data on actual mammography performance. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The proportions of female patients aged 40 to 49 and 50 to 80 years who had received a screening mammogram within the previous 2 years. RESULTS: Of the more than 100 potential predictors available, only 4 were significantly associated with screening rates for women younger than 50 years and only 3 were associated with screening rates for older women. Regression models explained only 21% to 25% of the variance in screening rates. Physician estimates of screening rates were poorly correlated with actual screening rates. CONCLUSIONS: Practicing physicians do not know how well they screen their patients using mammography. Extensive survey data, including direct estimates of behavior, demographics, policy measures, and case scenario responses, were of limited use in predicting actual screening rates. Our results underscore the importance of using data rather than proxy measures to study physician performance

Adaptive foveated single-pixel imaging with dynamic super-sampling

As an alternative to conventional multi-pixel cameras, single-pixel cameras enable images to be recorded using a single detector that measures the correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, to fully sample a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation measurements as there are pixels in the reconstructed image. Therefore single-pixel imaging systems typically exhibit low frame-rates. To mitigate this, a range of compressive sensing techniques have been developed which rely on a priori knowledge of the scene to reconstruct images from an under-sampled set of measurements. In this work we take a different approach and adopt a strategy inspired by the foveated vision systems found in the animal kingdom - a framework that exploits the spatio-temporal redundancy present in many dynamic scenes. In our single-pixel imaging system a high-resolution foveal region follows motion within the scene, but unlike a simple zoom, every frame delivers new spatial information from across the entire field-of-view. Using this approach we demonstrate a four-fold reduction in the time taken to record the detail of rapidly evolving features, whilst simultaneously accumulating detail of more slowly evolving regions over several consecutive frames. This tiered super-sampling technique enables the reconstruction of video streams in which both the resolution and the effective exposure-time spatially vary and adapt dynamically in response to the evolution of the scene. The methods described here can complement existing compressive sensing approaches and may be applied to enhance a variety of computational imagers that rely on sequential correlation measurements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Multiple imputation of missing covariates for the Cox proportional hazards cure model

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134146/1/sim7048_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134146/2/sim7048.pd