Apoptosis chip for drug screening

This thesis described the process of the development towards a microfluidic platform to perform apoptosis studies on chip in real-time at a single-cell level

Negotiating the 'trading zone'. Creating a shared information infrastructure in the Dutch public safety sector

Our main concern in this article is whether nation-wide information technology (IT) infrastructures or systems in emergency response and disaster management are the solution to the communication problems the safety sector suffers from. It has been argued that implementing nation-wide IT systems will help to create shared cognition and situational awareness among relief workers. We put this claim to the test by presenting a case study on the introduction of ‘netcentric work’, an IT system-based platform aiming at the creation of situational awareness for professionals in the safety sector in the Netherlands. The outcome of our research is that the negotiation with relevant stakeholders by the Dutch government has lead to the emergence of several fragmented IT systems. It becomes clear that a top-down implementation strategy for a single nation-wide information system will fail because of the fragmentation of the Dutch safety sector it is supposed to be a solution to. As the US safety sector is at least as fragmented as its Dutch counterpart, this may serve as a caveat for the introduction of similar IT systems in the US

Maladaptive bias for extrahippocampal navigation strategies in aging humans.

Efficient spatial navigation requires not only accurate spatial knowledge but also the selection of appropriate strategies. Using a novel paradigm that allowed us to distinguish between beacon, associative cue, and place strategies, we investigated the effects of cognitive aging on the selection and adoption of navigation strategies in humans. Participants were required to rejoin a previously learned route encountered from an unfamiliar direction. Successful performance required the use of an allocentric place strategy, which was increasingly observed in young participants over six experimental sessions. In contrast, older participants, who were able to recall the route when approaching intersections from the same direction as during encoding, failed to use the correct place strategy when approaching intersections from novel directions. Instead, they continuously used a beacon strategy and showed no evidence of changing their behavior across the six sessions. Given that this bias was already apparent in the first experimental session, the inability to adopt the correct place strategy is not related to an inability to switch from a firmly established response strategy to an allocentric place strategy. Rather, and in line with previous research, age-related deficits in allocentric processing result in shifts in preferred navigation strategies and an overall bias for response strategies. The specific preference for a beacon strategy is discussed in the context of a possible dissociation between beacon-based and associative-cue-based response learning in the striatum, with the latter being more sensitive to age-related changes

Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI): Apprenticing deaf students in the construction of English text

This study investigates the effects of using Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) with deaf, middle school students who use American Sign Language as their L1 and written English as L2. Using a pretest-posttest control group design, the research explores whether students receiving SIWI made significantly greater gains compared to those not receiving SIWI on a number of variables. There are 33 total students, 16 in the treatment group and 17 in the comparison group. The intervention lasted a total of 8 weeks, during which time the treatment group collaboratively constructed two report papers using SIWI components, and the comparison group continued with their typical literacy instruction. The pre and posttest measures were scored, according to rubrics, for evidence of primary traits, contextual language, and conventions. The multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and follow-up univariate analyses were statistically significant. Furthermore, effect sizes (d) were large to very large, ranging from 1.27 to 2.65, indicating SIWI to be an effective approach with deaf L2 writers