StAR protein is expressed in both medulla and cortex of the bovine and rat adrenal gland

We have employed polyclonal antibodies to a peptide sequence of bovine steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein and human placental 3beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (3beta-HSD) to determine the localisation and distribution of these proteins in rat and bovine adrenal glands. Immunohistochemical staining demonstrated the presence of StAR protein in the zona glomerulosa (ZG), zona fasciculata (ZF), zona reticularis (ZR) and in the medulla of both species. For 3beta-HSD, immunostaining was observed in the ZG, ZF and ZR of the rat adrenal and was absent in the medulla. Immunoblotting experiments showed intense bands for StAR protein (30 kDa, 37 kDa) in the mitochondria of bovine ZG, ZF and medulla and a less intense band (30 kDa) in the microsomes. In rat ZG and ZF/R mitochondria only the 30 kDa protein was present. For 3beta-HSD, an intense band (42 kDa) was found in microsomes and mitochondria of rat and bovine ZG and ZFR. A very faint signal for 3beta-HSD was seen in adrenal medulla. In conclusion, StAR (or a closely related) protein is present throughout the adrenal gland in rat and bovine species in contrast to 3beta-HSD which is confined to the steroidogenic zones. The possible function of StAR protein in the adrenal medulla merits investigation.     

Review of The mind’s we: Contextualism in cognitive psychology.

Reviews the book, The mind's we: Contextualism in cognitive psychology by Diane Gillespie (1992). In this text the author has both expanded on several of the key insights previously outlined in the critical literature and provided a congenial introductory text for the newcomer; a text to serve as a conceptual bridge between traditional cognitive psychological approaches and their newly emergent contextualist alternatives. As stated in her preface, Gillespie's purpose in preparing this book was to "bring together the work of psychologists who are interested in telling the contextualist story of cognition" and to "reveal and strengthen their insights and perspectives" (p. xiv). Given the philosophical range and theoretical diversity of those interested in telling such a story, the task is certainly a formidable one, but it is nonetheless one that she accomplishes with a commendable degree of elegance. Gillespie clearly articulates the diverse work of a large number of psychological theorists into a coherent and meaningful account that will do much toward imposing order on a field that is, by its very nature, somewhat scattered and contentious. Each of the book's six chapters proceeds carefully through a detailed and representative historical and conceptual analysis of traditional mechanistic approaches to human cognition prior to advancing their contextualist critiques and alternatives. Through a systematic analysis of the manner in which this "contextualist story" has arisen within the mechanistic milieu of traditional scientific psychology, she is able to clarify both the implications and relative merits and liabilities of two, quite often antithetical, conceptualizations of human cognitive phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Saccadic system functioning among schizophrenia patients and their first-degree biological relatives.

In Study 1, 30 schizophrenia Ss and 27 nonpsychiatric comparison Ss were presented with a fixation task, a visually guided reflexive saccade (prosaccade) task, a predictive tracking task (0.4-Hz square wave), and an antisaccade task. The 2 groups did not differ on either the fixation or prosaccade tasks. Schizophrenia Ss had an increased number of errors on the antisaccade task and had decreased rightward visually guided saccade amplitudes during the predictive tracking task. In Study 2, 13 psychiatric comparison Ss and 32 1st-degree biological relatives of the schizophrenia Ss were compared with the schizophrenia Ss and a larger and older sample of nonpsychiatric Ss (n?=?33) on the predictive tracking and antisaccade tasks. The groups did not differ on predictive saccadic tracking. The schizophrenia Ss and their 1st-degree biological relatives made more errors on the antisaccade task than both the nonpsychiatric and psychiatric comparison groups (who did not significantly differ). Results are consistent with the notion that dysfunction of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, or both is related to liability for schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the role of theory in the postmodern integration of science and practice.

Comments on L. T. Hoshmand and D. E. Polkinghorne's (see record 1992-21300-001) article on redefining the science–practice relationship. Missing from their work is an account of the restrictions placed on theory by positivism. The challenge of postmodernism is not to look beyond theory for an assumption-free discovery of practitioner understanding but to expand the mechanistic and stage-based theoretical repertoires to include context-sensitive models of embodied psychological processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Usher Syndrome in the Inner Ear: Etiologies and Advances in Gene Therapy

Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder with ~466 million people worldwide affected, representing about 5% of the population. A substantial portion of hearing loss is genetic. Hearing loss can either be non-syndromic, if hearing loss is the only clinical manifestation, or syndromic, if the hearing loss is accompanied by a collage of other clinical manifestations. Usher syndrome is a syndromic form of genetic hearing loss that is accompanied by impaired vision associated with retinitis pigmentosa and, in many cases, vestibular dysfunction. It is the most common cause of deaf-blindness. Currently cochlear implantation or hearing aids are the only treatments for Usher-related hearing loss. However, gene therapy has shown promise in treating Usher-related retinitis pigmentosa. Here we review how the etiologies of Usher-related hearing loss make it a good candidate for gene therapy and discuss how various forms of gene therapy could be applied to Usher-related hearing loss.     

Focal Ischemic Injury to the Early Neonatal Rat Brain Models Cognitive and Motor Deficits with Associated Histopathological Outcomes Relevant to Human Neonatal Brain Injury

Neonatal arterial ischemic stroke is one of the more severe birth complications. The injury can result in extensive neurological damage and is robustly associated with later diagnoses of cerebral palsy (CP). An important part of efforts to develop new therapies include the on-going refinement and understanding of animal models that capture relevant clinical features of neonatal brain injury leading to CP. The potent vasoconstrictor peptide, Endothelin-1 (ET-1), has previously been utilised in animal models to reduce local blood flow to levels that mimic ischemic stroke. Our previous work in this area has shown that it is an effective and technically simple approach for modelling ischemic injury at very early neonatal ages, resulting in stable deficits in motor function. Here, we aimed to extend this model to also examine the impact on cognitive function. We show that focal delivery of ET-1 to the cortex of Sprague Dawley rats on postnatal day 0 (P0) resulted in impaired learning in a touchscreen-based test of visual discrimination and correlated with important clinical features of CP including damage to large white matter structures.     

Social reader: towards browsing the social web

We describe Social Reader, a feed-reader-plus-social-network aggregator that mines comments from social media in order to display a user’s relational neighborhood as a navigable social network. Social Reader’s network visualization enhances mutual awareness of blogger communities, facilitates their exploration and growth with a fully dragn- drop interface, and provides novel ways to filter and summarize people, groups, blogs and comments. We discuss the architecture behind the reader, highlight tasks it adds to the workflow of a typical reader, and assess their cost. We also explore the potential of mood-based features in social media applications. Mood is particularly relevant to social media, reflecting the personal nature of the medium. We explore two prototype mood-based features: colour coding the mood of recent posts according to a valence/arousal map, and a mood-based abstract of recent activity using image media. A six week study of the software involving 20 users confirmed the usefulness of the novel visual display, via a quantitative analysis of use logs, and an exit survey.     

The Coolest Way to Generate Binary Strings

Pick a binary string of length n and remove its first bit b. Now insert b after the first remaining 10, or insert $\overline{b}$ at the end if there is no remaining 10. Do it again. And again. Keep going! Eventually, you will cycle through all 2 ⁿ of the binary strings of length n. For example, are the binary strings of length n=4, where and . And if you only want strings with weight (number of 1s) between ? and u? Just insert b instead of $\overline{b}$ when the result would have too many 1s or too few 1s. For example, are the strings with n=4, ?=0 and u=2. This generalizes ‘cool-lex’ order by Ruskey and Williams (The coolest way to generate combinations, Discrete Mathematics) and we present two applications of our ‘cooler’ order. First, we give a loopless algorithm for generating binary strings with any weight range in which successive strings have Levenshtein distance two. Second, we construct de Bruijn sequences for (i) ?=0 and any u (maximum specified weight), (ii) any ? and u=n (minimum specified weight), and (iii) odd u?? (even size weight range). For example, all binary strings with n=6, ?=1, and u=4 appear once (cyclically) in . We also investigate the recursive structure of our order and show that it shares certain sublist properties with lexicographic order.     

A customised approach to determining the geomorphic effectiveness of small flood events in a regulated river

The construction of dams significantly alters flow and sediment regimes with subsequent deleterious effects on the morphological and ecological character of rivers. Effective experimental floods can ameliorate the downstream geomorphic impacts of dams. The traditional view is that large floods are required to perform effective geomorphic work, and the geomorphic outcomes of small floods are often overlooked. Many river restoration frameworks do not consider small floods. Yet, there is evidence that the hydrological characteristics that ameliorate specific geomorphic impacts in a river are unique to each river, and a customised approach to setting the right mix of floods (including small experimental floods) is needed. In this study, we modify an existing flood effectiveness model developed for large floods, for determining the geomorphic effectiveness of small floods in a highly regulated Australian river. Two flood classes were added to the model (medium peak stream power and moderate total energy expenditure), and the flood power characteristics were rescaled to reflect the relative difference in the magnitude of the small floods and the magnitude of the geomorphic work performed. Using a step‐wise approach, this customised model determined the geomorphic effectiveness of small floods. The best flood for ameliorating the geomorphic impacts of flow regulation had medium to long duration (10 to 51 days), high peak unit stream power (77 to 123 Wm^?2) and moderate to large total energy expenditure (78,600 to 342,320 × 10³ J). This approach to determining flood effectiveness for small floods is applicable to other geomorphically impacted river channels downstream of dams and can be used to inform experimental flood releases for geomorphic outcomes.     

Unsupervised context detection using wireless signals

The sensing context plays an important role in many pervasive and mobile computing applications. Continuing from previous work [D. Phung, B. Adams, S. Venkatesh, Computable social patterns from sparse sensor data, in: Proceedings of First International Workshop on Location Web, World Wide Web Conference (WWW), New York, NY, USA, 2008, ACM 69–72.], we present an unsupervised framework for extracting user context in indoor environments with existing wireless infrastructures. Our novel approach casts context detection into an incremental, unsupervised clustering setting. Using WiFi observations consisting of access point identification and signal strengths freely available in office or public spaces, we adapt a density-based clustering technique to recover basic forms of user contexts that include user motion state and significant places the user visits from time to time. High-level user context, termed rhythms, comprising sequences of significant places are derived from the above low-level context by employing probabilistic clustering techniques, latent Dirichlet allocation and its n-gram temporal extension. These user contexts can enable a wide range of context-ware application services. Experimental results with real data in comparison with existing methods are presented to validate the proposed approach. Our motion classification algorithm operates in real-time, and achieves a 10% improvement over an existing method; significant locations are detected with over 90% accuracy and near perfect cluster purity. Richer indoor context and meaningful rhythms, such as typical daily routines or meeting patterns, are also inferred automatically from collected raw WiFi signals.