Resting state functional connectivity in the default mode network and aerobic exercise in young adults

Around the world Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is on the rise. Previous studies have shown the default mode network (DMN) sees changes with AD progression as the disease erodes away cortical areas. Aerobic exercise with significant increases to cardiorespiratory fitness could show neuro-protective changes to delay AD. This study will explore if functional connectivity changes in the DMN can be seen in a young adult sample by using group independent component analysis through FSL MELODIC. The young adult sample of 19 were selected from a larger study at the Brain Plasticity and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boston University. The participants engaged in a twelve-week exercise intervention in either a strength training or aerobic training group. They also completed pre-intervention and post-intervention resting-state fMRI scans to evaluate change in functional connectivity in the default mode network. Cardiorespiratory fitness was assessed using a modified Balke protocol with pre-intervention and post-intervention VO2 max percentiles being used. Through two repeated-measure ANOVA analyses, this study found no significant increase in mean functional connectivity or cardiorespiratory fitness in the young adult sample. While improvements in mean VO2 max percentile and functional connectivity would have been seen with a larger sample size, this study adds to the literature by suggesting if fitness does not improve significantly, neither will functional connectivity in the default mode network

The Research Teaching nexus and its potential to enhance the opportunities of those teaching Higher Education in Further Education Colleges

The paper reports on the enhancement of HE in FECs specifically Higher Education Institution (HEI) collaborative partnership colleges and their staff and mirroring the academic practice of offering enhancement opportunities within the HEI to promote research informed teaching. The main body of the paper reports on the background and developments of one HEI, which allowed me to build up a series of cumulative case studies that developed capability in and around the research teaching nexus as strategy to address the challenge of building a HE research culture in an HE environment in FECs. The findings demonstrate a shift in thinking through lecturers active participation in a series of enhancement events, which revealed scholarly capability and independence of knowledge, judgements practice and ownership of research base in a culture that was previously known to be “research deficit” (Davy, 2009, p.11)

Can a Drinfeld module be modular?

Let $k$ be a global function field with field of constants \Fr and let $\infty$ be a fixed place of $k$. In his habilitation thesis \cite{boc2}, Gebhard B\"ockle attaches abelian Galois representations to characteristic $p$ valued cusp eigenforms and double cusp eigenforms \cite{go1} such that Hecke eigenvalues correspond to the image of Frobenius elements. In the case where k=\Fr(T) and $\infty$ corresponds to the pole of $T$, it then becomes reasonable to ask whether rank 1 Drinfeld modules over $k$ are themselves ``modular'' in that their Galois representations arise from a cusp or double cusp form. This paper gives an introduction to \cite{boc2} with an emphasis on modularity and closes with some specific questions raised by B\"ockle's work.Comment: Final corrected versio

An investigation of the possible effects of pollution on some members of the periphyton in the littoral zone of the north-east coast of England

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A Riemann Hypothesis for characteristic p L-functions

We propose analogs of the classical Generalized Riemann Hypothesis and the Generalized Simplicity Conjecture for the characteristic p L-series associated to function fields over a finite field. These analogs are based on the use of absolute values. Further we use absolute values to give similar reformulations of the classical conjectures (with, perhaps, finitely many exceptional zeroes). We show how both sets of conjectures behave in remarkably similar ways.Comment: This is the final version (with new title) as it will appear in the Journal of Number Theor