The effect of spinal cord injury on vagal afferents.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a significant public health concern that leaves patients with a multitude of life-long disabilities. Major complications of SCI apart from paralysis, include deficits in bladder and bowel function. Lower urinary tract dysfunction continues to remain a top priority issue affecting quality of life for this population. The majority of visceral organs receive a dual sensory innervation from both spinal nerves as well as the vagus nerve. Following SCI, the vagus nerve is a potential pathway through which information from regions below the level of a spinal injury can travel directly to the brainstem, bypassing the spinal cord. The effect of SCI on the vagus nerve and the tissue it supplies has not been thoroughly examined. In order to advance bladder management after SCI, a thorough understanding of its neural control following chronic injury is needed to ultimately improve existing therapeutic options, as well as develop novel interventions that take advantage of this extraspinal route. The objective of this project was to describe the anatomical, neurochemical, and electrophysiological profiles of vagal innervation of the rat urinary bladder. Initially, the first study identified both single and double-labeled vagal afferents supplying the rat bladder and distal colon in the nodose ganglion (NG). The degree of neural innervation to the colon also was assessed, as a single axon that dichotomizes and innervates both organs can serve an important role for mediating both normal physiological and pathological reflexes. Following chronic SCI, we evaluated potential plasticity in subsets of NG neurons which contain projections that bypass the spinal cord from visceral organs, including those projections that specifically supply the bladder. Vagal sensory cell bodies displayed an increase in P2X3 expression and a decrease in IB4 binding, which also held true for many neurons innervating the bladder. Bladder-innervating neurons also displayed altered membrane electrophysiological properties, suggesting they are responsive to a chronic spinal injury. Even though SCI does not directly sever the vagus nerve, our results indicate vagal afferents, including those innervating the bladder, exhibit neurochemical plasticity post-injury that may have implications for visceral homeostatic mechanisms and nociceptive signaling

The Use of Technology in a FLIPPED Classroom

The purpose of this study was to explore and evaluate the benefits of a FLIPPED classroom delivery mode and methods that may aid in student growth and achievement

A follow-up study exploring the transformative effects of wilderness therapy on adolescents with histories of trauma : a project based upon an investigation at Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Programs, Albany, Oregon

This quantitative, quasi-experimental study examined 57 adolescents, ages 13 to 18, who attended the Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Program 21-day trek. The program is based in Albany, Oregon. The purpose of this study was to conduct a follow-up to Ganapol\u27s (2008) study in order to further assess the treatment modality, wilderness therapy, through the lens of trauma. More specifically, this study focused on wilderness therapy\u27s potential to act as a transformative experience for adolescents with histories of trauma. For use in this research, the phenomenological term, transformative experience, corresponds to a decrease in trauma symptomatology, an increase in psychological resilience, and an increase in psychosocial functioning. These psychological constructs were measures pre- / post-treatment using Likert-type scales, and the global assessment of functioning scale (GAF) (DSM IV-TR, 2000). Three hypotheses were investigated in this study: 1) Wilderness therapy programs would provide transformative experiences for adolescents with trauma histories. 2) There would be differences in the transformative experiences between adolescents with trauma histories and adolescents without. 3) There would be demographical trends between the groups of individuals with histories of trauma and those without. This study did not find evidence to support the first hypothesis. Evidence, based on significant differences in all three measures, suggests that individuals without trauma histories experienced statistically significant transformative experiences while those with trauma histories did not. It should be noted, however, that participants with histories of trauma were seen to have a significant increase in their psychosocial functioning. Regarding the third hypothesis, 70% of female participants had histories of trauma whereas only 46% of males fit this category. Of additional note, female participants reported greater frequency of sexual abuse (6:1) than male participants. Based on this study\u27s assessment, it can be reasonably concluded that wilderness therapy acts as a transformative experience for those without trauma histories, however, this study suggests that wilderness therapy functions less so as a transformative experience for those with histories of traum

Sparse Approximation Via Iterative Thresholding

The well-known shrinkage technique is still relevant for contemporary signal processing problems over redundant dictionaries. We present theoretical and empirical analyses for two iterative algorithms for sparse approximation that use shrinkage. The GENERAL IT algorithm amounts to a Landweber iteration with nonlinear shrinkage at each iteration step. The BLOCK IT algorithm arises in morphological components analysis. A sufficient condition for which General IT exactly recovers a sparse signal is presented, in which the cumulative coherence function naturally arises. This analysis extends previous results concerning the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and Basis Pursuit (BP) algorithms to IT algorithms

Message Passing Algorithms for Compressed Sensing

Compressed sensing aims to undersample certain high-dimensional signals, yet accurately reconstruct them by exploiting signal characteristics. Accurate reconstruction is possible when the object to be recovered is sufficiently sparse in a known basis. Currently, the best known sparsity-undersampling tradeoff is achieved when reconstructing by convex optimization -- which is expensive in important large-scale applications. Fast iterative thresholding algorithms have been intensively studied as alternatives to convex optimization for large-scale problems. Unfortunately known fast algorithms offer substantially worse sparsity-undersampling tradeoffs than convex optimization. We introduce a simple costless modification to iterative thresholding making the sparsity-undersampling tradeoff of the new algorithms equivalent to that of the corresponding convex optimization procedures. The new iterative-thresholding algorithms are inspired by belief propagation in graphical models. Our empirical measurements of the sparsity-undersampling tradeoff for the new algorithms agree with theoretical calculations. We show that a state evolution formalism correctly derives the true sparsity-undersampling tradeoff. There is a surprising agreement between earlier calculations based on random convex polytopes and this new, apparently very different theoretical formalism.Comment: 6 pages paper + 9 pages supplementary information, 13 eps figure. Submitted to Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US

A Theory for Preparing Students to Maintain Integration of Christian Faith and Business While Starting Careers

This paper proposes a theory for addressing the challenge of preparing students to maintain integration of faith with business while starting careers. In so doing, it synthesizes ideas from qualitative literature regarding what to teach and how to teach it in order to address this challenge and then attaches these syntheses to propositions imported from other fields. Ultimately, the paper suggests a simple way into the concept of worldview and a demonstration-based approach in academic classrooms. Finally, the paper combines propositions, develops hypotheses and describes a simple empirical test with promising results

What If We Are Graduating Utilitarians?

Senior undergraduate business students at a Christian university surprise the author during presentations of personally-held values by failing to describe their top value of truthfulness in terms of Christian virtue. This leads to a 30-month grounded theory study. Observations of students’ top value of truthfulness may indicate utilitarian precognitive tacit knowledge, suggesting bias engaged without deliberate thought. Implications are discussed at the end of the paper. Informed by literature on the social psychology of moral decision-making, the author suggests a transformational integration approach may be required for preparing students for the problems associated with Utilitarianism in the marketplace

Study of the GPA Perspective Among Students at a Two-Year Institution

Higher Education Administratio

First observations with a GNSS antenna to radio telescope interferometer

We describe the design of a radio interferometer composed of a Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) antenna and a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) radio telescope. Our eventual goal is to use this interferometer for geodetic applications including local tie measurements. The GNSS element of the interferometer uses a unique software-defined receiving system and modified commercial geodetic-quality GNSS antenna. We ran three observing sessions in 2022 between a 25 m radio telescope in Fort Davis, Texas (FD-VLBA), a transportable GNSS antenna placed within 100 meters, and a GNSS antenna placed at a distance of about 9 km. We have detected a strong interferometric response with a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of over 1000 from Global Positioning System (GPS) and Galileo satellites. We also observed natural radio sources including Galactic supernova remnants and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) located as far as one gigaparsec, thus extending the range of sources that can be referenced to a GNSS antenna by 18 orders of magnitude. These detections represent the first observations made with a GNSS antenna to radio telescope interferometer. We have developed a novel technique based on a Precise Point Positioning (PPP) solution of the recorded GNSS signal that allows us to extend integration time at 1.5 GHz to at least 20 minutes without any noticeable SNR degradation when a rubidium frequency standard is used.Comment: 33 pages, 19 figure