Automated identification of Fos expression

The concentration of Fos, a protein encoded by the immediate-early gene c-fos, provides a measure of synaptic activity that may not parallel the electrical activity of neurons. Such a measure is important for the difficult problem of identifying dynamic properties of neuronal circuitries activated by a variety of stimuli and behaviours. We employ two-stage statistical pattern recognition to identify cellular nuclei that express Fos in two-dimensional sections of rat forebrain after administration of antipsychotic drugs. In stage one, we distinguish dark-stained candidate nuclei from image background by a thresholding algorithm and record size and shape measurements of these objects. In stage two, we compare performance of linear and quadratic discriminants, nearest-neighbour and artificial neural network classifiers that employ functions of these measurements to label candidate objects as either Fos nuclei, two touching Fos nuclei or irrelevant background material. New images of neighbouring brain tissue serve as test sets to assess generalizability of the best derived classification rule, as determined by lowest cross-validation misclassification rate. Three experts, two internal and one external, compare manual and automated results for accuracy assessment. Analyses of a subset of images on two separate occasions provide quantitative measures of inter- and intra-expert consistency. We conclude that our automated procedure yields results that compare favourably with those of the experts and thus has potential to remove much of the tedium, subjectivity and irreproducibility of current Fos identification methods in digital microscopy

THE INOUE HERO : EVOLUTION OR VARIATIONS ON A THEME?

井上靖の殆ど全ての小説に出てくる主人公には二つのタイプがあること,また,この二つのタイプのモデルは,井上が最初に出した二つの短編小説の主人公であることも,殆どめ評論家や学者が同意している。その一つのタイプは,「猟銃」に出てくる孤独で内向的な三杉穣介に代表され,もう一つのタイプは「闘牛」に出てくる積極的で活発的な津上に代表される。しかし,もう少し詳しく読むと,この二つのタイプは正反対のように思われるが実は一人の人間の中に潜む二面性を表していると考えられる。つまり,一人のタイプは,自分の心の中の寂しさや孤独によって消極的,内向的になっているが,もう一人のタイプは自分の弱気に鞭打って,仕事や何かに没頭することにより,積極的な自分を表すことができる。井上靖の小説に出てくる殆ど全ての主人公達は,この二つのタイプで表されている。この論文では,井上文学における主人公達のさまざまな性格描写,人物描写に注目し,作家が年をとるにつれて,その主人公達の性格がどのように変化してくるかを見ている。また,この主人公達の二つのタイプは,実は井上自身の中に存在し,彼の作品の根底となったと同時に,彼の作家生活を含む全人生の基となっていることに注目します。In the October 1949 edition of the literary journal Bungakkai 文学界, there appeared a short novel entitled Ryoju 猟銃 (The Hunting Gun, 1961), the work of a forty-two-year-old newspaper reporter by the name of Inoue Yasushi 井上靖. Another story, of similar length, by the same aspiring novelist, this one entitled Togyu 闘牛 (The Bullfights), appeared in the magazine\u27s December issue. Both works were well received, and indeed attracted such notice that early the following year both were nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize; ultimately the prize was awarded to the author for the second of his two tales, Togyu. Thus was launched the career of a writer who became one of postwar Japan\u27s most popular and prolific storytellers

Dynamic Scaling in Diluted Systems Phase Transitions: Deactivation trough Thermal Dilution

Activated scaling is confirmed to hold in transverse field induced phase transitions of randomly diluted Ising systems. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations have been made not just at the percolation threshold but well bellow and above it including the Griffiths-McCoy phase. A novel deactivation phenomena in the Griffiths-McCoy phase is observed using a thermal (in contrast to random) dilution of the system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, RevTe

Griffiths-McCoy Singularities in the Random Transverse-Field Ising Spin Chain

We consider the paramagnetic phase of the random transverse-field Ising spin chain and study the dynamical properties by numerical methods and scaling considerations. We extend our previous work [Phys. Rev. B 57, 11404 (1998)] to new quantities, such as the non-linear susceptibility, higher excitations and the energy-density autocorrelation function. We show that in the Griffiths phase all the above quantities exhibit power-law singularities and the corresponding critical exponents, which vary with the distance from the critical point, can be related to the dynamical exponent z, the latter being the positive root of [(J/h)^{1/z}]_av=1. Particularly, whereas the average spin autocorrelation function in imaginary time decays as [G]_av(t)~t^{-1/z}, the average energy-density autocorrelations decay with another exponent as [G^e]_av(t)~t^{-2-1/z}.Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 8 eps-figures include

Resonant Tunnelling Optoelectronic Circuits

Nowadays, most communication networks such as local area networks (LANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs), and wide area networks (WANs) have replaced or are about to replace coaxial cable or twisted copper wire with fiber optical cables. Light-wave communication systems comprise a transmitter based on a visible or near-infrared light source, whose carrier is modulated by the information signal to be transmitted, a transmission media such as an optical fiber, eventually utilizing in-line optical amplification, and a receiver based on a photo-detector that recovers the information signal (Liu, 1996)(Einarsson, 1996). The transmitter consists of a driver circuit along a semiconductor laser or a light emitting diode (LED). The receiver is a signal processing circuit coupled to a photo-detector such as a photodiode, an avalanche photodiode (APD), a phototransistor or a high speed photoconductor that processes the photo-detected signal and recovers the primitive information signa

Smeared phase transition in a three-dimensional Ising model with planar defects: Monte-Carlo simulations

We present results of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for a three-dimensional Ising model with short range interactions and planar defects, i.e., disorder perfectly correlated in two dimensions. We show that the phase transition in this system is smeared, i.e., there is no single critical temperature, but different parts of the system order at different temperatures. This is caused by effects similar to but stronger than Griffiths phenomena. In an infinite-size sample there is an exponentially small but finite probability to find an arbitrary large region devoid of impurities. Such a rare region can develop true long-range order while the bulk system is still in the disordered phase. We compute the thermodynamic magnetization and its finite-size effects, the local magnetization, and the probability distribution of the ordering temperatures for different samples. Our Monte-Carlo results are in good agreement with a recent theory based on extremal statistics.Comment: 9 pages, 6 eps figures, final version as publishe

Polymeric Films for the Encapsulation, Storage, and Tunable Release of Therapeutic Microbes

Microbe-based therapeutics (MBTs) are an emerging therapeutic modality for treating gastrointestinal infections and inflammatory bowel diseases. Current formulations for oral delivery of MBTs use capsules to achieve safe gastric transit, but oral formulations that control the spatiotemporal concentration of MBTs are yet to be developed, despite well-established connections between all therapeutics and their location, concentration, and distribution at sites of action. The development of a multi-functional polymer-based encapsulation system to formulate MBTs for enhanced storage and delivery through formulation of a model MBT, Lactobacillus casei ATCC393, is reported here. This approach enables the additive inclusion of excipients and polymers to grant specific functions, toward the development of a modular MBT platform. Through addition of established excipients, the formulation provides long-term storage of the encapsulated MBT. By adding higher molecular weight polymers, the release kinetics of the encapsulated MBTs can be modified. The inclusion of a mucoadhesive polymer significantly increases the adhesion force between the formulation and the intestinal tissue. Together, mucoadhesive and sustained release properties can be used to modulate the spatiotemporal concentration of MBTs. The formulation is compatible with standard oral capsules, thus maintaining existing clinical advantages of oral capsules while providing new functions from film encapsulation

Natural equilibrium states for multimodal maps

This paper is devoted to the study of the thermodynamic formalism for a class of real multimodal maps. This class contains, but it is larger than, Collet-Eckmann. For a map in this class, we prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium states for the geometric potentials $-t \log|Df|$, for the largest possible interval of parameters $t$. We also study the regularity and convexity properties of the pressure function, completely characterising the first order phase transitions. Results concerning the existence of absolutely continuous invariant measures with respect to the Lebesgue measure are also obtained

Percolation in random environment

We consider bond percolation on the square lattice with perfectly correlated random probabilities. According to scaling considerations, mapping to a random walk problem and the results of Monte Carlo simulations the critical behavior of the system with varying degree of disorder is governed by new, random fixed points with anisotropic scaling properties. For weaker disorder both the magnetization and the anisotropy exponents are non-universal, whereas for strong enough disorder the system scales into an {\it infinite randomness fixed point} in which the critical exponents are exactly known.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Smectic ordering in liquid crystal - aerosil dispersions I. X-ray scattering

Comprehensive x-ray scattering studies have characterized the smectic ordering of octylcyanobiphenyl (8CB) confined in the hydrogen-bonded silica gels formed by aerosil dispersions. For all densities of aerosil and all measurement temperatures, the correlations remain short range, demonstrating that the disorder imposed by the gels destroys the nematic (N) to smectic-A (SmA) transition. The smectic correlation function contains two distinct contributions. The first has a form identical to that describing the critical thermal fluctuations in pure 8CB near the N-SmA transition, and this term displays a temperature dependence at high temperatures similar to that of the pure liquid crystal. The second term, which is negligible at high temperatures but dominates at low temperatures, has a shape given by the thermal term squared and describes the static fluctuations due to random fields induced by confinement in the gel. The correlation lengths appearing in the thermal and disorder terms are the same and show strong variation with gel density at low temperatures. The temperature dependence of the amplitude of the static fluctuations further suggests that nematic susceptibility become suppressed with increasing quenched disorder. The results overall are well described by a mapping of the liquid crystal-aerosil system into a three dimensional XY model in a random field with disorder strength varying linearly with the aerosil density.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure