Ontogeny of meal patterning in rats and its recapitulation during recovery from lateral hypothalamic lesions.

Investigated the development of feeding patterns in weanling rats and in rats with lateral hypothalamic lesions. 2 experiments were conducted with a total of 39 male albino Sprague-Dawley rats. From 16 to 25 days of age, the weanlings demonstrated a preprandial intake pattern (i.e., a positive correlation between meal size and time since the preceding meal). This subsequently declined while the postprandial relationship (correlation with time until subsequent meal) such that by 30-35 days of age a full adult pattern was observed. Ss recovering from lateral hypothalamic lesions, for a brief period, also demonstrated a preprandial intake pattern. The postprandial relationship was abolished by the lesion. Results suggest that the development of adult meal patterning results from maturation of lateral hypothalamic mechanisms governing meal initiation. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in intraperson variability in mood.

The experience sampling method and palm-top computers were used to obtain 75–200 randomly timed in situ assessments of 11 mood-related items from 54 Ss over 12–24 days. The variability in the distribution of an S's responses to each item was used as an estimate of intrasubject mood variability. Mood variability was stable across time and across situations. The intercorrelations among the individual item variabilities were also substantial; when the items were combined into a mood variability scale, the coefficient alpha was .84. The stability and internal consistency of mood variability could not be reasonably attributed to similarity in item valences, differences among the Ss in the situations they encountered, response biases, or response errors. It was concluded that mood variability is a stable personal characteristic, but additional analyses suggested that it may be independent from other kinds of intraperson variability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cost of caring for end-stage kidney disease patients: an analysis based on hospital financial transaction records

The costs of care for end-stage renal disease patients continue to rise because of increased numbers of patients. Efforts to contain these costs have focused on the development of capitated payment schemes, in which all costs for the care of these patients are covered in a single payment. To determine the effect of a capitated reimbursement scheme on care of dialysis patients (both hemodialysis [HD] and peritoneal dialysis [PD]), complete financial records (all reimbursements for inpatient and outpatient care, as well as physician collections) of dialysis patients at a single medical center over 1 year were analyzed. For the period from July 1994 to July 1995, annualized cost per dialysis patient-year averaged $63,340, or 9.8% higher than the corrected estimate from the U.S. Renal Data Service (USRDS; $57,660). The "most expensive" 25% of patients engendered 44 to 48% of the total costs, and inpatient costs accounted for 37 to 40% of total costs. Nearly half of the inpatient costs resulted from only two categories (room charges and inpatient dialysis), whereas other categories each made up a small fraction of the inpatient costs. PD patients were far less expensive to care for than HD patients, due to reduced hospital days and lower cost of outpatient dialysis. Care for a university-based dialysis population was only slightly more expensive than estimates predicted from the USRDS. These results validate the USRDS spending data and suggest that they can be used effectively for setting capitated rates. Efforts to control costs without sacrificing quality of care must center on reducing inpatient costs, particularly room charges and the cost of inpatient dialysis.     

Signal and noise transfer in spatiotemporal quantum-based imaging systems

Fourier-based transfer theory is extended into the temporal domain to describe both spatial and temporal noise processes in quantum-based medical imaging systems. Lag is represented as a temporal scatter in which the release of image quanta is delayed according to a probability density function. Expressions describing transfer of the spatiotemporal Wiener noise power spectrum through quantum gain and scatter processes are derived. Lag introduces noise correlations in the temporal domain in proportion to the correlated noise component only. The effect of lag is therefore dependent on both spatial and temporal physical processes. A simple model of a fluoroscopic system shows that image noise is reduced by a factor that is similar to Wagner's information bandwidth integral, which depends on the temporal modulation transfer function.     

Novel Simple Conjugation Chemistries for Decoration of GMMA with Heterologous Antigens

Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMV) constitute a promising platform for the development of efficient vaccines. OMV can be decorated with heterologous antigens (proteins or polysaccharides), becoming attractive novel carriers for the development of multicomponent vaccines. Chemical conjugation represents a tool for linking antigens, also from phylogenetically distant pathogens, to OMV. Here we develop two simple and widely applicable conjugation chemistries targeting proteins or lipopolysaccharides on the surface of Generalized Modules for Membrane Antigens (GMMA), OMV spontaneously released from Gram-negative bacteria mutated to increase vesicle yield and reduce potential reactogenicity. A Design of Experiment approach was used to identify optimal conditions for GMMA activation before conjugation, resulting in consistent processes and ensuring conjugation efficiency. Conjugates produced by both chemistries induced strong humoral response against the heterologous antigen and GMMA. Additionally, the use of the two orthogonal chemistries allowed to control the linkage of two different antigens on the same GMMA particle. This work supports the further advancement of this novel platform with great potential for the design of effective vaccines.     

Using digital but physical surrogates to mediate awareness, communication and privacy in media spaces

Digital but physical surrogates are tangible representations of remote people (typically members of small intimate teams), positioned within an office and under digital control. Surrogates selectively collect and present awareness information about the people they represent. They also react to people's explicit and implicit physical actions: a person's explicit acts include grasping and moving them, while their implicit acts include how they move towards or away from the surrogate. By responding appropriately to these physical actions of people, surrogates can control the communication capabilities of a media space in a natural way. Surrogates also balance awareness and privacy by limiting and abstracting how activities are portrayed, and by offering different levels of salience to its users. The combination of all these attributes means that surrogates can make it easy for intimate collaborators to move smoothly from awareness of each other to casual interaction while mitigating privacy and distraction concerns.Exploring different surrogate designs and how they work together can be straightforward if a good infrastructure is in place. We use anawareness server based on a distributed model-view-controller architecture, which automatically captures, stores and distributes events. We also package surrogates as physical widgets orphidgets with a well-defined interface; this makes it easy for a programmer to plug a surrogate into the awareness server as a controller (to generate awareness events), or view (to display events that others have produced), or both. Because surrogate design, implementation and use is still a new discipline, we also present several issues and next steps.