1,692 research outputs found
The Role of Immune and Inflammatory Mechanisms in ALS
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a severe progressive neurodegenerative disease. The cause is unknown, but genetic abnormalities have been identified in subjects with familial ALS and also in subjects with sporadic ALS. Environmental factors such as occupational exposure have been shown to be risk factors for the development of ALS. Patients differ in their clinical features and differ in the clinical course of disease. Immune abnormalities have been found in the central nervous system by pathological studies and also in the blood and CSF of subjects with ALS. Inflammation and immune abnormalities are also found in animals with a model of ALS due to mutations in the SOD1 gene. Previously it has been considered that immune abnormalities might contribute to the pathogenesis of disease. However more recently it has become apparent that an immune response can occur as a response to damage to the nervous system and this can be protective
Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual Level Approach
The universality of design perception and response is tested using data collected from ten countries: Argentina, Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. A Bayesian, finite-mixture, structural-equation model is developed that identifies latent logo clusters while accounting for heterogeneity in evaluations. The concomitant variable approach allows cluster probabilities to be country specific. Rather than a priori defined clusters, our procedure provides a posteriori cross-national logo clusters based on consumer response similarity. To compare the a posteriori cross-national logo clusters, our approach is integrated with Steenkamp and Baumgartner’s (1998) measurement invariance methodology. Our model reduces the ten countries to three cross-national clusters that respond differently to logo design dimensions: the West, Asia, and Russia. The dimensions underlying design are found to be similar across countries, suggesting that elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony are universal design dimensions. Responses (affect, shared meaning, subjective familiarity, and true and false recognition) to logo design dimensions (elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony) and elements (repetition, proportion, and parallelism) are also relatively consistent, although we find minor differences across clusters. Our results suggest that managers can implement a global logo strategy, but they also can optimize logos for specific countries if desired.adaptation;standardization;Bayesian;international marketing;design;Gibbs sampling;concomitant variable;logos;mixture models;structural equation models
COVID-19: 20 countries’ higher education intra-period digital pedagogy responses
The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created significant challenges for the global higher education community. Through a desktop analysis leveraging university and government sources where possible, we provide a timely map of the intra-period higher education responses to COVID-19 across 20 countries. We found that the responses by higher education providers have been diverse from having no response through to social isolation strategies on campus and rapid curriculum redevelopment for fully online offerings. We provide in our discussion a typology of the types of responses currently undertaken and assess the agility of higher education in preparing for the pandemic. We believe there are significant opportunities to learn from the pedagogical developments of other universities, in order to strengthen our collective response to COVID-19 now and into the future
The field theoretic derivation of the contact value theorem in planar geometries and its modification by the Casimir effect
The contact value theorem for Coulomb gases in planar or film-like geometries
is derived using a Hamiltonian field theoretic representation of the system.
The case where the film is enclosed by a material of different dielectric
constant to that of the film is shown to contain an additional Casimir-like
term which is generated by fluctuations of the electric potential about its
mean-field value.Comment: Link between Sine-Gordon and Coulomb gas pressures via subtraction of
self interaction terms included. Discussion of results within Debye-Huckel
approximation included. Added reference
Active Amplification of the Terrestrial Albedo to Mitigate Climate Change: An Exploratory Study
This study explores the potential to enhance the reflectance of solar
insolation by the human settlement and grassland components of the Earth's
terrestrial surface as a climate change mitigation measure. Preliminary
estimates derived using a static radiative transfer model indicate that such
efforts could amplify the planetary albedo enough to offset the current global
annual average level of radiative forcing caused by anthropogenic greenhouse
gases by as much as 30 percent or 0.76 W/m2. Terrestrial albedo amplification
may thus extend, by about 25 years, the time available to advance the
development and use of low-emission energy conversion technologies which
ultimately remain essential to mitigate long-term climate change. However,
additional study is needed to confirm the estimates reported here and to assess
the economic and environmental impacts of active land-surface albedo
amplification as a climate change mitigation measure.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures. In press with Mitigation and Adaptation
Strategies for Global Change, Springer, N
Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual Level Approach
The universality of design perception and response is tested using data collected from ten countries: Argentina, Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. A Bayesian, finite-mixture, structural-equation model is developed that identifies latent logo clusters while accounting for heterogeneity in evaluations. The concomitant v
Erratum to: Search for diboson resonances in hadronic final states in 139 fb−1 of pp collisions at s√ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
A mistake was identified for the paper [1] in the treatment of the radion [2] cross-sections, which resulted in multiple changes.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Structural and dynamical properties of superfluid helium: a density functional approach
We present a novel density functional for liquid 4He, properly accounting for
the static response function and the phonon-roton dispersion in the uniform
liquid. The functional is used to study both structural and dynamical
properties of superfluid helium in various geometries. The equilibrium
properties of the free surface, droplets and films at zero temperature are
calculated. Our predictions agree closely to the results of ab initio Monte
Carlo calculations, when available. The introduction of a phenomenological
velocity dependent interaction, which accounts for backflow effects, is
discussed. The spectrum of the elementary excitations of the free surface and
films is studied.Comment: 37 pages, REVTeX 3.0, figures on request at [email protected]
The significance of the fragmentation region in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions
We present measurements of the pseudorapidity distribution of primary charged
particles produced in Au+Au collisions at three energies, sqrt(s_{NN}) = 19.6,
130, and 200 GeV, for a range of collision centralities. The centrality
dependence is shown to be non-trivial: the distribution narrows for more
central collisions and excess particles are produced at high pseudorapidity in
peripheral collisions. For a given centrality, however, the distributions are
found to scale with energy according to the "limiting fragmentation"
hypothesis. The universal fragmentation region described by this scaling grows
in pseudorapidity with increasing collision energy, extending well away from
the beam rapidity and covering more than half of the pseudorapidity range over
which particles are produced. This approach to a universal limiting curve
appears to be a dominant feature of the pseudorapidity distribution and
therefore of the total particle production in these collisions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
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