Histochemical light microscopic study of catecholamine containing paraganglia in the human pelvis

Histological and histochemical techniques have been employed to determine the structure and autonomic innervation of paraganglia located in the human pelvis. In foetal and early postnatal tissues, paraganglia formed rounded cellular masses which were frequently in company with the autonomic nerves and ganglia of the urinary bladder and other pelvic viscera. The constituent cells contained only small amounts of cholinesterase and were unrelated to enzyme positive autonomic nerves; acetylcholinesterase containing nerves were occasionally observed in the capsule and the fibrous septa of the pelvic paraganglia. In early postnatal specimens, pelvic paraganglia frequently contained single or multiple "pacinian-like" corpuscles, each possessing a central region which was rich in both acetyl and pseudocholinesterase. These structures were rarely observed within autonomic ganglia and were absent 4 1/2 years post partum. By means of a histochemical technique, pelvic paraganglia were found to contain catecholamine which was attributed to the presence of relatively large quantities of noradrenaline. These observations have been discussed with particular reference to the results of other studies on the autonomic innervation of paraganglia.     

Community intervention with the elderly: a social network approach

A technique is described for using the advantages of a social systems approach when working with elderly persons in psychiatric distress. The technique is based on the assumption that the solution to a variety of human predicaments lies within the collective instrumental and affective resources of the client's social network. The vehicle for accomplishing this objective is the "Network Session" during which a mental health professional meets with the elderly person and members of his/her social network to help resolve the difficulty. A case report demonstrating use of the technique is included.     

Scenario-oriented design for single-chip heterogeneous multiprocessors

Single-chip heterogeneous multiprocessors (SCHMs) are arising to meet the computational demands of portable and handheld devices. These computing systems are not fully custom designs traditionally targeted by the design automation community, general-purpose designs traditionally targeted by the computer architecture community, nor pure embedded designs traditionally targeted by the real-time community. An entirely new design philosophy will be needed for this hybrid class of computing. The programming of the device will be drawn from a narrower set of applications with execution that persists in the system over a longer period of time than for general-purpose programming. However, the devices will still be programmable, not only at the level of the individual processing element, but across multiple processing elements and even the entire chip. The design of other programmable single chip computers has enjoyed an era where the design tradeoffs could be captured in simulators such as SimpleScalar and performance could be evaluated to the SPEC benchmarks. Motivated by this, we describe new benchmark-based design strategies for SCHMs which we refer to as scenario-oriented design. We include an example and results.     

Performance of Alcohol and Safer Sex Change Rulers Compared With Readiness to Change Questionnaires.

As part of a larger intervention study, the authors hypothesized that change rulers created for alcohol and safer sex would be equivalent to longer questionnaires. Ninety-six male college students completed rulers and questionnaires for assessing behavior change readiness. Participants' scores on the rulers significantly correlated with their scores on the questionnaires (r = .77 for alcohol; r = .77 for safer sex). In both domains, the rulers outperformed the questionnaires in predicting behavioral intentions, suggesting that the rulers had at least comparable concurrent criterion validity. This finding is the first of its kind in the safe sex literature and suggests that quick assessments of readiness to change are possible. Because the rulers are a continuous measure, the results are consistent with the idea that the change process is continuous rather than a series of discrete stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Citius altius fortius: Lessons learned from the Theorem Prover Waldmeister

In the last years, the development of automated theorem provers has been advancing in a so to speak Olympic spirit, following the motto “faster, higher, stronger”; and the Waldmeister system has been a part of that endeavour. We will survey the concepts underlying this prover, which implements Knuth-Bendix completion in its unfailing variant. The system architecture is based on a strict separation of active and passive facts, and is realized via specifically tailored representations for each of the central data structures: indexing for the active facts, set-based compression for the passive facts, successor sets for the conjectures. In order to cope with large search spaces, specialized redundancy criteria are employed, and the empirically gained control knowledge is integrated to ease the use of the system. We conclude with a discussion of strengths and weaknesses, and a view of future prospects.     

Automated surgical screwdriver: automated screw placement

The use of power screwdrivers and drills for tapping and screw insertion in surgery is becoming more common. It has been established from clinical observations that the use of a small air drill for inserting self-tapping screws provides improved coaxial alignment and precision, and that the drill should be stopped before the screw head is completely seated on the plate, presumably to reduce the risk of over-tightening. The risk of overrun and over-tightening during tapping and screw insertion is increased with the use of power tools. Prevention of over-tightening is dependent upon when the surgeon detects the onset of tightening, both visually and from the feel of the rapid increase in torque. If detection is too late, then over-tightening or stripping can occur. This study is concerned with using a mechatronic screwdriver to control the tapping depth and to prevent the over-tightening of screws. The effects of various parameters upon the torque profile during tapping and screw insertion have been investigated in synthetic bone and sheep tibia. An automated system is proposed for preventing over-tightening of pre-tapped and self-tapping screws when attaching a surgical plate to a sheep tibia in vitro. The system was used to attach a plate to a sheep tibia using self-tapping screws. The mean torque of the screws inserted using the automated system was 35 per cent of the stripping torque.     

Uranium Superconductivity Redux

Since the discovery of heavy-fermion superconductivity in uranium compounds in the early 1980s, other uranium compounds have been discovered that are fully as interesting to study. However, as we look forward in the year 2000, we now have higher-purity, single crystals of the element itself. Preliminary resistivity and ac susceptibility measurements show the improved quality of the samples and thus hold the promise of understanding many aspects of its superconductivity, which have remained untouched for almost 25 years.