Learning at work - a combination of experience based learning and theoretical education

Training and learning at work is important as employees competence has to meet organisational requirements for flexibility. This study examines conditions and obstacles in integrating a web-based course at work in order to enhance employees level of competence. Employees view of working condition, competence and how they learn at work is also of importance. A selection of 35 people was made at a company which is part of a large business. The design was quantitative with complementary qualitative data. The employees had a positive attitude towards work despite increasing difficulties in work tasks and an increasing workload, which was the greatest barrier of integrating the web-based course at work. Competence development involved a certain degree of stress, but was outweighed by the fact that it was stimulating and led to the work feeling easier. To manage work, knowledge was obtained primarily by colleagues and company courses.     

Studies of arginine-arene interactions through synthesis and evaluation of a series of galectin-binding aromatic lactose esters

Aromatic lactose 2-O-esters were synthesized and used to probe arene-arginine interactions with the galectin family of proteins. They were found to be low microM inhibitors of galectin-1, -3, and -9N-terminal domain and moderate inhibitors of galectin-7, but not inhibitors of galectin-8N-terminal, which lacks an arginine residue close to the critical, esterified lactose 2-O-position. Molecular modeling of galectins in complex with aromatic lactose 2-O-esters, as well as binding studies with a galectin-3 R186S mutant, confirmed that the inhibitory efficiency of the lactose 2-O-esters was due to the formation of strong interactions between the aromatic ester moieties and the arginine guanidinium groups of galectin-1 and -3. An important common feature shared by galectin-1 and -3 was that the arginines formed in-plane ion pairs with two side-chain carboxylates, which resulted in extended planar pi-electron surfaces that did not require solvation by water; these surfaces were ideal for stacking with aromatic moieties of the ligands. The results provide a basis for the design of lectin inhibitors and drugs that exploit interactions with arginine side-chains via aromatic moieties, which are involved in intramolecular protein salt bridges.     

Posttraining lesions of the amygdala interfere with fear-potentiated startle to both visual and auditory conditioned stimuli in C57BL/6J mice.

The fear-potentiated startle paradigm has been used with great success to examine conditioned fear in both rats and humans. The purpose of the present experiment was to extend the authors' previous findings and further validate the fear-potentiated startle paradigm in mice. In Experiments 1 and 2, C57BL/6J mice were given Pavlovian fear conditioning with either an auditory or a visual conditioned stimulus. Similar to data collected with rats, fear-potentiated startle was observed for both stimulus modalities. In Experiment 3, posttraining lesions of the amygdala disrupted fear-potentiated startle in both conditioned stimulus modalities. These data are consistent with amygdala lesion studies in rats and suggest that fear-potentiated startle in mice requires an intact amygdala. Together, these results extend the authors' previous results and provide the basis for using this well-understood behavioral paradigm for examining the molecular mechanisms of conditioned fear in transgenic and knockout mice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prevalence, genetics and clinical presentation of chronic granulomatous disease in Sweden

To estimate the prevalence of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) in Sweden, an inquiry asking for known and possible CGD cases was mailed to paediatric, internal medicine and infectious disease departments all over Sweden. The detected patients were characterized as to genetics and the clinical presentation. Twenty-one patients (belonging to 16 different families) were found, corresponding to a prevalence of approximately 1/450,000 individuals. The patients with X-linked disease, lacking a functional gp91phox protein (n = 12), comprised 57% and 43% of the patients had an autosomal recessive (AR) disease lacking p47phox (n = 7) or p67phox (n = 1), respectively. All unrelated patients with X-linked disease displayed different gene abnormalities such as point mutations predicting nonsense (n = 3), missense (n = 1) or splice site mutations (n = 2), but also a total deletion and a unique 40 base pair duplicature insertion. The patients with p47phox-deficiency showed a GT deletion at a GTGT tandem repeat, and the p67phox-deficient patient displayed a heterozygous in-frame deletion of AAG combined with a large deletion in the other allele. Three patients died during the study period, two from pseudomonas cepacia infections. Patients with X-linked disease had more frequent infections (mean of 1.7 per year), than the patients with AR inheritance (0.5 infections per year). The most common infections were dermal abscesses (n = 111), followed by lymphadenitis (n = 82) and pneumonias (n = 73). Inflammatory bowel disease-like symptoms, mimicking Crohn's disease of the colon, was seen in three CGD patients.     

Artificial Intelligence–Based Decision Support Technologies in Pavement Management

The field of road pavement engineering has seen an explosion of artificial intelligence–based applications since the late 1980s. Such applications are found at key stages of the decision process involved in pavement management. In the analysis phase, they perform pavement diagnosis and deterioration modeling tasks. In the design phase, they enable rehabilitation needs to be assessed and contribute to the identification and selection of maintenance actions. Finally, in the choice phase, they are applied for priority programming of rehabilitation and maintenance. They either represent alternative approaches to existing systems or collaborate to make the overall system more efficient. The purpose of this article is to summarize the findings of up-to-date research articles concerning the application of artificial intelligence to pavement management and to illustrate the potential such tools can offer to pavement engineers. Artificial intelligence techniques include expert systems, artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and hybrid systems.     

Long-Term Effects of Lifestyle Behavior Change in Coronary Artery Disease: Effects on Recurrent Coronary Events After Percutaneous Coronary Intervention.

This study evaluated the effects of a behaviorally oriented cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention program on lifestyle changes and on coronary recurrence rates. Patients recently treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) were randomized to an intervention with an aggressive focus on lifestyle changes (smoking, diet, exercise, and stress; n = 46) or to a standard-care control group (n = 42). Results showed that the intervention group had significantly larger overall lifestyle changes than the control group after 12, 24, 36, and 60 months. The intervention group had significantly lower rates of all coronary events (acute myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass graft, PCI, cardiac death; 30.4% vs. 53.7%), and of cardiovascular mortality (2.2% vs. 14.6%). The need for future large-scale and long-term evaluations of lifestyle-oriented secondary prevention interventions of this kind is emphasized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A 1.3-THz Balanced Waveguide HEB Mixer for the APEX Telescope

In this paper, we report about the development, fabrication, and characterization of a balanced waveguide hot electron bolometer (HEB) receiver for the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope covering the frequency band of 1.25-1.39 THz. The receiver uses a quadrature balanced scheme and two HEB mixers, fabricated from 4- to 5-nm-thick NbN film deposited on crystalline quartz substrate with an MgO buffer layer in between. We employed a novel micromachining method to produce all-metal waveguide parts at submicrometer accuracy (the main-mode waveguide dimensions are 90 times 180 mum ). We present details on the mixer design and measurement results, including receiver noise performance, stability and ldquofirst-lightrdquo at the telescope site. The receiver yields a double-sideband noise temperature averaged over the RF band below 1200 K, and outstanding stability with a spectroscopic Allan time more than 200 s.     

Material characterisation using high-temperature Split Hopkinson pressure bar

In order to characterise the mechanical response of materials in manufacturing processes, such as wire and bar rolling involving very high strain rates, temperatures and level of straining, an experimental device is presented. The device is suitable for testing at strain rates up to approximately 4000 s^?1, temperatures up to 1200 °C (≈1500 K) and strains around 0.5. It is based on the classical Split Hopkinson pressure bar and is complemented with an inductive heating source for achieving requested temperatures. By keeping the specimen separated from the Hopkinson bars just until an instant before impact (50 ms) considerable cooling and temperature gradients in the specimen are avoided. Three steel grades, two stainless steels and a high-speed steel, were tested. Four different material models whose parameters were fitted to the obtained experimental data were used for mechanical characterisation: two empirically based and two physically based. Overall, one of the physically based models showed the best agreement between experimental results and the predicted flow stresses.     

Mental health and psychic structure: an empirical study

Psychodynamic clinicians cite psychic structure and structural changes observed in treatment as sources of important information about unconscious psychological processes and configurations. Empirical studies have had difficulty demonstrating that psychic structure measures something different from psychiatric symptoms and everyday functioning. This study examined the relationship between psychic structure and mental health using the Health-Sickness Rating Scale (HSRS) to measure mental health and two different measures to assess psychic structure: Kernberg's personality organization (PO) and Wallerstein's Scales of Psychological Capacities (PSYCAP). Bivariate correlations and multiple regression analyses were computed based on ratings for 124 psychiatric inpatients and psychotherapy clients. Correlations showed that mental health and psychic structure are substantially interrelated, and multiple regression analyses indicated that 44% of the variance of HSRS is explained by psychic structure measured with the two methods taken together. The findings provide some support for a general factor of mental health and psychic structure and a "pure" component of psychic structure that is independent from mental health. Different factor-analytic models for understanding the relationship between mental health and psychic structure are discussed.