A new methodology for complex societal problems

Questions on the theme which developments will be in Europe the next ten, thirty to fifty years can be considered as complex societal problems. These problems need an integral approach based on analysis of the temporary situation, with a reflection of the past and focusing on new developments, trends, political values and ideas. Analysing the situation in Europe should be done in accordance to a micro analysis of the states of Europe and a macro analyses of the world. Several issues like finance, economy, infrastructure, internet, environment, employment, knowledge, education, health care, technical developments etc. should be integrated with each other and should be analysed in relation to the legal and political ideas. Many actors with different power and emotions are involved. Analysing as well as predicting future developments should be done with several groups of people. A new methodology is developed that handles these kind of questions. The method support the analysis of the past, the temporary situation and the future, integrating the many different aspects. This new methodology, the method Compram (DeTombe, 1994), is based on the idea that handling complex societal problems is based on knowledge, power and emotion. The method handles these problems with a six step approach starting with analysing the situation with neutral experts from different fields, then analysing the same situation with the different actors, then together based on several scenario's trying to make a picture of future developments. In the paper the method will be described in relation to the questions of future development of Europe.

Applications of Rapid Cardiac Micro-CT

Mouse models are an important tool in cardiovascular disease research and a non-invasive imaging method is an advantageous way of monitoring disease progression. Cardiac micro-CT is rapid imaging technique capable of quantifying changes in cardiac structure and function in mice. The goal of this thesis was to demonstrate the utility of this technique in monitoring disease progression in a longitudinal study, as well as its capability for evaluating other methods of measuring cardiac function in mice. In a longitudinal study, a mouse model of myocardial infarction was scanned weekly for four weeks; left ventricular volume and ejection fraction were measured from the images. Cardiac micro-CT was capable of tracking small changes in cardiac structure and function, with the MI mice demonstrating a significant increase in volume and a significant decrease in ejection fraction. Both inter- and intra-variability was low, indicating the results were highly reproducible. Contrast agents are essential to evaluating the heart in micro-CT images. A new blood-pool agent was evaluated to determine its suitability for use in cardiac micro-CT studies. The agent produced excellent enhancement for the first 30 minutes post-injection, and had a unique characteristic of enhancing the myocardium, which may prove useful in studies evaluating wall motion. The effect of x-ray dose delivered during a longitudinal micro-CT study was also evaluated. C57BL/6 mice were scanned weekly for six weeks; the total entrance dose delivered over the study was 5.04 Gy. No significant changes to the heart or lungs were detectable on the micro-CT images at six weeks, and the histology performed on myocardial and pulmonary tissue showed no indication of early inflammation at a cellular level. Micro-CT can therefore be used in longitudinal studies without concern of adverse effects. Cardiac micro-CT was used to evaluate conductance catheters, and found that the catheter volumes were drastically underestimated compared to the micro-CT volumes. It was also determined that catheterization has the potential for causing cardiac enlargement; 40% of the mice demonstrated enlarged hearts following the catheterization procedure. Overall, cardiac-gated micro-CT is a rapid and reproducible imaging technique, and is proving to be valuable tool in cardiovascular disease research

Digital textuality, autopoietic editing, and the Courten MS.

Jerome McGann has explained the functioning of text by appealing to systems theory, explaining that reading is an autopoietic process that operates as a feedback loop co-dependent with the reader. He uses this idea as a starting point in a critique of hierarchical methods of digital markup, such as TEI. By forcing the structure of the text to conform to a formula of ordered content objects, the autopoietic functionality is lost and, since the text can no longer be said to operate in the same way, the reader's engagement is irreparably altered. In his essay “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” McGann calls for the development of digital tools that would allow for markup that preserves the ambiguity of language and, therefore, the autopoietic nature of text. Though such tools do not yet exist, something of McGann's vision can be realized by modifying one's notion of the process of digitization. If the entire movement of text from printed object to on-screen rendering is understood as an autopoietic system, the engagement that McGann desires can still be achieved using the common and open tools available today. My work digitizing MS Sloane 3961, William Courten's seventeenth-century financial records, demonstrates this. The process I followed can be read as an autopoietic system, despite my use of TEI in the marking of the text. By conceiving of the system as the reader/editor's interaction with successive iterations of the text, rather than with textual elements and bibliographic cues, the reader/editor is made aware of the inherent ambiguities and is forced to actively read and engage the ambiguity in pursuit of a digital text. The autopoietic functionality is introduced in the iterative nature of the process, in that iterations of the text are read and understood in the light of previous and subsequent iterations of the text. The rendered text becomes the record of the decisions that led to that iteration and representative of the numerous iterations that preceded it and surround it. This is seen in the solutions developed to effectively digitize and represent Courten's cipher

Spinal cord compression is associated with brain plasticity in degenerative cervical myelopathy.

The impact of spinal cord compression severity on brain plasticity and prognostic determinates is not yet fully understood. We investigated the association between the severity of spinal cord compression in patients with degenerative cervical myelopathy, a progressive disease of the spine, and functional plasticity in the motor cortex and subcortical areas using functional magnetic resonance imaging. A 3.0 T MRI scanner was used to acquire functional images of the brain in 23 degenerative cervical myelopathy patients. Patients were instructed to perform a structured finger-tapping task to activate the motor cortex to assess the extent of cortical activation.

Prospectus, February 15, 1995

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1995/1004/thumbnail.jp

A respiratory-gated micro-CT comparison of respiratory patterns in free-breathing and mechanically ventilated rats

© 2017 The Authors. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society. In this study, we aim to quantify the differences in lung metrics measured in free-breathing and mechanically ventilated rodents using respiratory-gated micro-computed tomography. Healthy male Sprague-Dawley rats were anesthetized with ketamine/xylazine and scanned with a retrospective respiratory gating protocol on a GE Locus Ultra micro-CT scanner. Each animal was scanned while free-breathing, then intubated and mechanically ventilated (MV) and rescanned with a standard ventilation protocol (56 bpm, 8 mL/kg and PEEP of 5 cm H2O) and again with a ventilation protocol that approximates the free-breathing parameters (88 bpm, 2.14 mL/kg and PEEP of 2.5 cm H2O). Images were reconstructed representing inspiration and end expiration with 0.15 mm voxel spacing. Image-based measurements of the lung lengths, airway diameters, lung volume, and air content were compared and used to calculate the functional residual capacity (FRC) and tidal volume. Images acquired during MV appeared darker in the airspaces and the airways appeared larger. Image-based measurements showed an increase in lung volume and air content during standard MV, for both respiratory phases, compared with matched MV and free-breathing. Comparisons of the functional metrics showed an increase in FRC for mechanically ventilated rats, but only the standard MV exhibited a significantly higher tidal volume than free-breathing or matched MV. Although standard mechanical ventilation protocols may be useful in promoting consistent respiratory patterns, the amount of air in the lungs is higher than in free-breathing animals. Matching the respiratory patterns with the free-breathing case allowed similar lung morphology and physiology measurements while reducing the variability in the measurements

Helping Business Schools Engage with Real Problems: The Contribution of Critical Realism and Systems Thinking

The world faces major problems, not least climate change and the financial crisis, and business schools have been criticised for their failure to help address these issues and, in the case of the financial meltdown, for being causally implicated in it. In this paper we begin by describing the extent of what has been called the rigour/relevance debate. We then diagnose the nature of the problem in terms of historical, structural and contextual mechanisms that initiated and now sustain an inability of business schools to engage with real-world issues. We then propose a combination of measures, which mutually reinforce each other, that are necessary to break into this vicious circle – critical realism as an underpinning philosophy that supports and embodies the next points; holism and transdisciplinarity; multimethodology (mixed-methods research); and a critical and ethical-committed stance. OR and management science have much to contribute in terms of both powerful analytical methods and problem structuring methods

Small-animal SPECT and SPECT/CT: application in cardiovascular research

Preclinical cardiovascular research using noninvasive radionuclide and hybrid imaging systems has been extensively developed in recent years. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is based on the molecular tracer principle and is an established tool in noninvasive imaging. SPECT uses gamma cameras and collimators to form projection data that are used to estimate (dynamic) 3-D tracer distributions in vivo. Recent developments in multipinhole collimation and advanced image reconstruction have led to sub-millimetre and sub-half-millimetre resolution SPECT in rats and mice, respectively. In this article we review applications of microSPECT in cardiovascular research in which information about the function and pathology of the myocardium, vessels and neurons is obtained. We give examples on how diagnostic tracers, new therapeutic interventions, pre- and postcardiovascular event prognosis, and functional and pathophysiological heart conditions can be explored by microSPECT, using small-animal models of cardiovascular disease