Two cases of food aversion with semantic dementia

Accounts of altered eating behavior in semantic dementia generally emphasize gluttony and abnormal food preferences. Here we describe two female patients with no past history of eating disorders who developed early prominent aversion to food in the context of an otherwise typical semantic dementia syndrome. One patient (aged 57) presented features in line with anorexia nervosa while the second patient (aged 58) presented with a syndrome more suggestive of bulimia nervosa. These cases add to the growing spectrum of apparently dichotomous behavior patterns in the frontotemporal dementias and illustrate a potentially under-recognized cause of eating disorders presenting in later life

Are intuitions about moral relevance susceptible to framing effects?

Various studies have reported that moral intuitions about the permissibility of acts are subject to framing effects. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments which further examine the susceptibility of moral intuitions to framing effects. The main aim was to test recent speculation that intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of cases might be relatively resistent to framing effects. If correct, this would provide a certain type of moral intuitionist with the resources to resist challenges to the reliability of moral intuitions based on such framing effects. And, fortunately for such intuitionists, although the results can’t be used to mount a strident defence of intuitionism, the results do serve to shift the burden of proof onto those who would claim that intuitions about moral relevance are problematically sensitive to framing effects

Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements

Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy

Diabetic autonomic neuropathies (DAN) are clinical syndromes resulting from impairments of the autonomic nervous system in patients with diabetes mellitus. Since the autonomic nervous system innervates most body organs, any or all of those organs may be affected by DAN. A high index of suspicion is the best diagnostic tool. Proper management, with patient and family education in its center, improves the quality of life of persons with DAN. Undiagnosed and ignored, DAN could cause severe disability and even death.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68591/2/10.1177_014572178701300208.pd

Psychopathy: what apology making tells us about moral agency

Psychopathy is often used to settle disputes about the nature of moral judgment. The “trolley problem” is a familiar scenario in which psychopathy is used as a test case. Where a convergence in response to the trolley problem is registered between psychopathic subjects and non-psychopathic (normal) subjects, it is assumed that this convergence indicates that the capacity for making moral judgments is unimpaired in psychopathy. This, in turn, is taken to have implications for the dispute between motivation internalists and motivation externalists, for instance. In what follows, we want to do two things: firstly, we set out to question the assumption that convergence is informative of the capacity for moral judgment in psychopathy. Next, we consider a distinct feature of psychopathy which we think provides strong grounds for holding that the capacity for moral judgment is seriously impaired in psychopathic subjects. The feature in question is the psychopathic subject’s inability to make sincere apologies. Our central claim will be this: convergence in response to trolley problems does not tell us very much about the psychopathic subject’s capacity to make moral judgments, but his inability to make sincere apologies does provide us with strong grounds for holding that this capacity is seriously impaired in psychopathy

Can cognitive psychological research on reasoning enhance the discussion around moral judgments?

In this article we will demonstrate how cognitive psychological research on reasoning and decision making could enhance discussions and theories of moral judgments. In the first part, we will present recent dual-process models of moral judgments and describe selected studies which support these approaches. However, we will also present data that contradict the model predictions, suggesting that approaches to moral judgment might be more complex. In the second part, we will show how cognitive psychological research on reasoning might be helpful in understanding moral judgments. Specifically, we will highlight approaches addressing the interaction between intuition and reflection. Our data suggest that a sequential model of engaging in deliberation might have to be revised. Therefore, we will present an approach based on Signal Detection Theory and on intuitive conflict detection. We predict that individuals arrive at the moral decisions by comparing potential action outcomes (e.g., harm caused and utilitarian gain) simultaneously. The response criterion can be influenced by intuitive processes, such as heuristic moral value processing, or considerations of harm caused

Text-mining of PubMed abstracts by natural language processing to create a public knowledge base on molecular mechanisms of bacterial enteropathogens

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Enteropathogen Resource Integration Center (ERIC; <url>http://www.ericbrc.org</url>) has a goal of providing bioinformatics support for the scientific community researching enteropathogenic bacteria such as <it>Escherichia coli </it>and <it>Salmonella </it>spp. Rapid and accurate identification of experimental conclusions from the scientific literature is critical to support research in this field. Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in particular Information Extraction (IE) technology, can be a significant aid to this process.</p> <p>Description</p> <p>We have trained a powerful, state-of-the-art IE technology on a corpus of abstracts from the microbial literature in PubMed to automatically identify and categorize biologically relevant entities and predicative relations. These relations include: Genes/Gene Products and their Roles; Gene Mutations and the resulting Phenotypes; and Organisms and their associated Pathogenicity. Evaluations on blind datasets show an F-measure average of greater than 90% for entities (genes, operons, etc.) and over 70% for relations (gene/gene product to role, etc). This IE capability, combined with text indexing and relational database technologies, constitute the core of our recently deployed text mining application.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our Text Mining application is available online on the ERIC website <url>http://www.ericbrc.org/portal/eric/articles</url>. The information retrieval interface displays a list of recently published enteropathogen literature abstracts, and also provides a search interface to execute custom queries by keyword, date range, etc. Upon selection, processed abstracts and the entities and relations extracted from them are retrieved from a relational database and marked up to highlight the entities and relations. The abstract also provides links from extracted genes and gene products to the ERIC Annotations database, thus providing access to comprehensive genomic annotations and adding value to both the text-mining and annotations systems.</p

The Molecular Clockwork of the Fire Ant Solenopsis invicta

This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication

Addressing the sample size problem in behavioural operational research: simulating the newsvendor problem

Laboratory-based experimental studies with human participants are beneficial for testing hypotheses in behavioural operational research. However, such experiments are not without their problems. One specific problem is obtaining a sufficient sample size, not only in terms of the number of participants but also the time they are willing to devote to an experiment. In this paper, we explore how agent-based simulation (ABS) can be used to address the sample size problem and demonstrate the approach in the newsvendor setting. The decision-making strategies of a small sample of individual decision-makers are determined through laboratory experiments. The interactions of these suppliers and retailers are then simulated using an ABS to generate a large sample set of decisions. With only a small number of participants, we demonstrate that it is possible to produce similar results to previous experimental studies that involved much larger sample sizes. We conclude that ABS provides the potential to extend the scope of experimental research in behavioural operational research

The GATA1s isoform is normally down-regulated during terminal haematopoietic differentiation and over-expression leads to failure to repress MYB, CCND2 and SKI during erythroid differentiation of K562 cells

Background: Although GATA1 is one of the most extensively studied haematopoietic transcription factors little is currently known about the physiological functions of its naturally occurring isoforms GATA1s and GATA1FL in humans—particularly whether the isoforms have distinct roles in different lineages and whether they have non-redundant roles in haematopoietic differentiation. As well as being of general interest to understanding of haematopoiesis, GATA1 isoform biology is important for children with Down syndrome associated acute megakaryoblastic leukaemia (DS-AMKL) where GATA1FL mutations are an essential driver for disease pathogenesis. &lt;p/&gt;Methods: Human primary cells and cell lines were analyzed using GATA1 isoform specific PCR. K562 cells expressing GATA1s or GATA1FL transgenes were used to model the effects of the two isoforms on in vitro haematopoietic differentiation. &lt;p/&gt;Results: We found no evidence for lineage specific use of GATA1 isoforms; however GATA1s transcripts, but not GATA1FL transcripts, are down-regulated during in vitro induction of terminal megakaryocytic and erythroid differentiation in the cell line K562. In addition, transgenic K562-GATA1s and K562-GATA1FL cells have distinct gene expression profiles both in steady state and during terminal erythroid differentiation, with GATA1s expression characterised by lack of repression of MYB, CCND2 and SKI. &lt;p/&gt;Conclusions: These findings support the theory that the GATA1s isoform plays a role in the maintenance of proliferative multipotent megakaryocyte-erythroid precursor cells and must be down-regulated prior to terminal differentiation. In addition our data suggest that SKI may be a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of children with DS-AMKL