Overt Anger in Response to Victimization: Attributional Style and Organizational Norms as Moderators.

Prior theory and research suggests a positive relation between perceived victimization and overt anger. The authors proposed and tested a theoretical extension of this link by investigating possible moderating effects of individual and contextual variables. A sample of 158 employees of a municipality was used to test hypotheses that the relationship between perceived victimization and overt anger is moderated by hostile attributional style and perceptions of organizational norms. The results showed that the relation between perceptions of direct victimization and overt anger was stronger when the employee had a more rather than less hostile attributional style and when the employee perceived the organizational norms as more rather than less oppositional. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Design Strategies for Piled Rafts Subjected to Nonuniform Vertical Loading

The piled raft is a geotechnical composite construction, consisting of the three elements piles, raft, and soil, which is applied for the foundation of tall buildings in an increasing number. In a parametric study, 259 different piled raft configurations have been analyzed by means of three-dimensional elastoplastic finite element analyses. In the study, the pile positions, the pile number, the pile length, and the raft-soil stiffness ratio as well as the load distribution on the raft has been varied. In the scope of this paper, the results of the parametric study are presented and design strategies for an optimized design of piled rafts subjected to nonuniform vertical loading are discussed.     

Characterization of residual stresses from cold expansion using spatial statistics

Residual stress fields from cold expansion have been widely used to extend the fatigue life of aircraft structures. However, the spatial statistical character of these residual stress fields has not been established and has not been incorporated in current analysis methods. The objective of this study was to establish a spatial statistical method to quantify the residual stress field around a cold expanded hole. A framework called the Spatial Analysis of Residual Stress (SpARS) was developed utilizing spatial correlation, response surface modelling techniques and statistical resampling methods to characterize the residual stress field. Our results showed that tolerance bounds on residual stress can be quantified using this method. We also demonstrated the SpARS method using recently published round robin case studies. The newly developed model will be useful for aircraft structural fatigue crack growth analyses to incorporate residual stress fields for extending inspection intervals for fatigue and fracture critical structures.     

A Single Injection of NTG-101 Reduces the Expression of Pain-Related Neurotrophins in a Canine Model of Degenerative Disc Disease

Background: Tissue sources of pain emanating from degenerative discs remains incompletely understood. Canine intervertebral discs (IVDs) were needle puncture injured, 4-weeks later injected with either phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or NTG-101, harvested after an additional fourteen weeks and then histologically evaluated for the expression of NGFr, BDNF, TrkB and CALCRL proteins. Quantification was performed using the HALO automated cell-counting scoring platform. Immunohistochemical analysis was also performed on human IVD tissue samples obtained from spinal surgery. Immunohistochemical analysis and quantification of neurotrophins and neuropeptides was performed using an in vivo canine model of degenerative disc disease and human degenerative disc tissue sections. Discs injected with NTG-101 showed significantly lower levels of Nerve Growth Factor receptor (NGFr/TrkA, p = 0.0001), BDNF (p = 0.009), TrkB (p = 0.002) and CALCRL (p = 0.008) relative to PBS injections. Human IVD tissue obtained from spinal surgery due to painful DDD show robust expression of NGFr, BDNF, TrkB and CALCRL proteins. A single intradiscal injection of NTG-101 significantly inhibits the expression of NGFr, BDNF, TrkB and CALCRL proteins in degenerative canine IVDs. These results strongly suggest that NTG-101 inhibits the development of neurotrophins that are strongly associated with painful degenerative disc disease and may have profound effects upon the management of patients living with discogenic pain.     

Structural Abnormalities of the Optic Nerve and Retina in Huntington’s Disease Pre-Clinical and Clinical Settings

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder caused by a polyglutamine expansion in the huntingtin protein. HD-related pathological remodelling has been reported in HD mouse models and HD carriers. In this study, we studied structural abnormalities in the optic nerve by employing Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT) in pre-symptomatic HD carriers of Caucasian origin. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) was used to investigate ultrastructural changes in the optic nerve of the well-established R6/2 mouse model at the symptomatic stage of the disease. We found that pre-symptomatic HD carriers displayed a significant reduction in the retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) thickness, including specific quadrants: superior, inferior and temporal, but not nasal. There were no other significant irregularities in the GCC layer, at the macula level and in the optic disc morphology. The ultrastructural analysis of the optic nerve in R6/2 mice revealed a significant thinning of the myelin sheaths, with a lamellar separation of the myelin, and a presence of myelonoid bodies. We also found a significant reduction in the thickness of myelin sheaths in peripheral nerves within the choroids area. Those ultrastructural abnormalities were also observed in HD photoreceptor cells that contained severely damaged membrane disks, with evident vacuolisation and swelling. Moreover, the outer segment of retinal layers showed a progressive disintegration. Our study explored structural changes of the optic nerve in pre- and clinical settings and opens new avenues for the potential development of biomarkers that would be of great interest in HD gene therapies.     

Fast electrical lysis of cells for capillary electrophoresis

In the past decade, capillary electrophoresis has demonstrated increasing utility for the quantitative analysis of single cells. New applications for the analysis of dynamic cellular properties demand sampling methods with sufficient temporal resolution to accurately measure these processes. In particular, intracellular signaling pathways involving many enzymes can be modulated on subsecond time scales. We have developed a technique to rapidly lyse an adherent mammalian cell using a single electrical pulse followed by efficient loading of the cellular contents into a capillary. Microfabricated electrodes were designed to create a maximum voltage drop across the flattened cell's plasma membrane at a minimum interelectrode voltage. The influence of the interelectrode distance, pulse duration, and pulse strength on the rate of cell lysis was determined. The ability to rapidly lyse a cell and collect and separate the cellular contents was demonstrated by loading cells with Oregon Green and two isomers of carboxyfluorescein. All three fluorophores were detected with a separation efficiency comparable to that of standards. Parallel comparison of electrical lysis to that produced by a laser-based lysis system revealed that the sampling efficiencies of the two techniques were comparable. Rapid cell lysis by an electrical pulse may increase the application of capillary electrophoresis to the study of cellular dynamics requiring fast sampling times.     

Relations between compliances of inhomogeneities having the same shape but different elastic constants

The contributions of inhomogeneities having the same shape but different elastic constants, to the overall elastic properties are interrelated. The utility of these relations lies, in particular, in the possibility to extend available results for pores or rigid inclusions to inhomogeneities of arbitrary elastic properties. The relations are exact for ellipsoids and approximate for non-ellipsoidal shapes. The constructed approximation also constitutes approximate connection between the first Eshelby’s problem (the eigenstrain problem) and the second one (the inhomogeneity problem), for non-ellipsoidal shapes. It also yields approximate formulas for the contribution of a non-ellipsoidal inhomogeneity to effective elastic properties.     

Evaluation of markov program models in virtual memory systems

A first order Markov model of program behaviour is developed from FORTRAN program instruction data. The program model is evaluated by using it to generate page references for input into a simple virtual memory operating system (VMOS) simulation model. The actual trace data are also used to drive the VMOS model. In both cases the fault probability is obtained for different replacement rules, memory sizes and page sizes. A comparison of fault probabilities is used to determine the effectiveness of the Markov program model.     

Iterative restoration of MR images corrupted with translational motion

Patient motion during the acquisition of magnetic resonance imaging data causes loss of resolution and ghost repetitions of the moving structures in the reconstructed image. In this paper the motion is modeled as being translational, and it is shown that this causes either the magnitude or the phase of the data to be corrupted, depending upon whether the motion is within or perpendicular to the imaging plane. The problem of restoring the image using only the corrupted data and no knowledge about the motion is addressed. The restoration problem is nonlinear in general, but is linear in two special cases. An iterative algorithm is developed that uses projections onto convex sets for magnitude retrieval and generalized projections for phase retrieval. In both cases constraint sets containing all a priori knowledge are used, and this is shown to be necessary for rapid convergence. The two algorithms may be combined to restore images corrupted by three-dimensional motion. The algorithms were verified using simulated data.