Resection of the right middle lobe and lingula for mycobacterial infection

BACKGROUND: In a series of 229 patients infected with mycobacterial organisms, we noted a specific female phenotype that involves isolated infections of the middle lobe and lingula. METHODS: Thirteen patients were found to have infections of the middle lobe, lingula, or both. All of them were infected with Mycobacterium other then Mycobacterium tuberculosis, all were women, 12 of the 13 were slender, and most had variable combinations of skeletal abnormalities. All underwent resection of the middle lobe, lingula, or both. RESULTS: There were no operative deaths. Only 2 patients have had reactivation requiring additional antibiotic therapy. All patients have had a decreased number of pulmonary infections in the postoperative period. Anatomic findings at operation included a complete major fissure and at least a partially complete minor fissure with middle lobe resections or an elongated lingula. CONCLUSIONS: Mycobacterial infection of the middle lobe and lingula is primarily a disease of asthenic women and is often associated with skeletal abnormalities and complete fissures or an elongated lingula. We recommend that surgical intervention be performed early once the condition is identified.     

Mothers' Affect in the Homework Context: The Importance of Staying Positive.

This research investigated mothers' affect in the context of children's homework. Mothers (N=109) of children 8 to 12 years old were interviewed daily about their affect while interacting with children, their assistance with children's homework, and children's behavior while completing homework. At this time and 6 months later, children's motivational and emotional functioning was assessed. Although mothers' negative affect was lower than their positive affect, it was elevated on days their assistance with homework was high. This was accounted for by mothers' perceptions of children as helpless on days they provided heightened assistance. Mothers' positive affect in the homework context buffered children's motivational and emotional functioning against mothers' negative affect as well as children's helplessness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Where similarity beats redundancy: The importance of context, higher order similarity, and response assignment": Correction to Eidels, Townsend, and Pomerantz (2008).

Reports an error in "Where similarity beats redundancy: The importance of context, higher order similarity, and response assignment" by Ami Eidels, James T. Townsend and James R. Pomerantz (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008[Dec], Vol 34[6], 1441-1463). The DOIs for the article and the supplemental materials were incorrectly listed. The correct DOIs are provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-16831-008.) People are especially efficient in processing certain visual stimuli such as human faces or good configurations. It has been suggested that topology and geometry play important roles in configural perception. Visual search is one area in which configurality seems to matter. When either of 2 target features leads to a correct response and the sequence includes trials in which either or both targets are present, the result is a redundant-target paradigm. It is common for such experiments to find faster performance with the double target than with either alone, something that is difficult to explain with ordinary serial models. This redundant-targets study uses figures that can be dissimilar in their topology and geometry and manipulates the stimulus set and the stimulus-response assignments. The authors found that the combination of higher order similarity (e.g., topological) among the features in the stimulus set and response assignment can effectively overpower or facilitate the redundant-target effect, depending on the exact nature of the former characteristics. Several reasonable models of redundant-targets performance are falsified. Parallel models with the potential for channel interactions are supported by the data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of mothers' perceptions of children's competence: The moderating role of mothers' theories of competence.

There is much evidence that parents' perceptions of children's competence affect the development of children's academic functioning. In the current research, the possibility that this is moderated by parents' theories about the stability of competence was examined. In a 2-wave, 1-year study of 126 children (9 to 12 years old) and their mothers, children's academic functioning (i.e., grades, perceptions of competence, attributions for performance, and mastery orientation) and affective functioning (i.e., self-esteem and depressive symptoms) were examined. Among mothers with relatively high entity theories, their perceptions acted as self-fulfilling prophecies foreshadowing children's academic and affective functioning over time. However, among mothers with relatively low entity theories, mothers' perceptions did not predict children's academic and affective functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

European American and Chinese parents' responses to children's success and failure: Implications for children's responses.

The authors examined cultural differences in parents' responses to their children's performance. In Study 1 (N = 421), Chinese 5th graders reported that their parents de-emphasized their academic success and emphasized their academic failure, whereas their American counterparts reported that their parents did the opposite. This partially accounted for Chinese (vs. American) children responding less positively to success and more negatively to failure. In Study 2 (N = 128), Chinese and American mothers' responses to their 4th and 5th graders' performance were observed in the laboratory. The cultural differences in children's reports of parents' responses documented in Study 1 were replicated; mothers' responses were also associated with children's subsequent performance. In addition, Chinese mothers were more involved than were American mothers, but their affect was similar. Taken together, the results suggest that parents' responses to children's performance may be a channel for cultural transmission and perpetuation of responses to performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Isothermal solid‐state transformation kinetics applied to Pd/Cu alloy membrane fabrication

In this work, time‐resolved, in situ high‐temperature X‐ray diffraction was used to study the solid‐state transformation kinetics of the formation of the fcc Pd/Cu alloy from Pd/Cu bilayers for the purpose of fabricating sulfur‐tolerant Pd/Cu membranes for H₂ separation. Thin layers of Pd and Cu (total ～15 wt % Cu) were deposited on porous stainless steel with the electroless deposition method and annealed in H₂ at 500, 550, and 600°C. The kinetics of the annealing process was successfully described by the Avrami nucleation and growth model, showing that the annealing process was diffusion controlled and one dimensional. The activation energy for the solid‐state transformation was 175 kJ/mol, which was similar to the activation energy of Pd‐Cu bulk interdiffusion. Furthermore, the Avrami model was able to successfully describe the changes in permeance and activation energy observed in Pd/Cu alloy membranes during characterization as they were annealed at high temperatures. © 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2010     

G-protein-mediated signaling in cholesterol-enriched arterial smooth muscle cells. 2. Role of protein kinase C-delta in the regulation of eicosanoid production

PGI2 generation by the vessel wall is an agonist for cyclic-AMP-dependent cholesteryl ester hydrolysis. The process of enhanced PGI2 synthesis is stimulated, in part, by G-protein-coupled receptor ligands. Cellular cholesterol enrichment has been hypothesized to alter G-protein-mediated PGI2 synthesis. In the studies reported herein, cells generated PGI2 in response to AlF4-, GTPgammaS, and ATP in a dose-dependent manner. G-protein agonists stimulated eicosanoid production principally by activating phospholipase A2, but not phospholipase C. This is in contrast to PDGF, which stimulated phospholipase A2 and PLCgamma activities. Galphai subunits mediate G-protein agonist-induced PGI2 synthesis, since ATP- and PDGF-induced PGI2 synthesis was inhibited by pertussis toxin. Although cholesterol enrichment reduced arachidonic acid- and PDGF-induced PGI2 synthesis, cholesterol enrichment enhanced PGI2 release in response to AlF4-, GTPgammaS, and ATP. The enhancement of PGI2 release in cholesterol-enriched cells was augmented by mevalonate, which inhibits the ability of cholesterol enrichment to reduce membrane-associated G-protein subunits. Since cholesterol enrichment inhibited PDGF and AlF4--induced MAP kinase activity [Pomerantz, K., Lander, H. M., Summers, B., Robishaw, J. D., Balcueva, E. A., & Hajjar, D. P. (1997) Biochemistry 36, 9523-9531] (the major mechanism by which phospholipase A2 is activated), these results suggest that cholesterol enrichment induces other alternative signaling pathways leading to phospholipase A2 activation. A PKC-dependent pathway is described herein that is involved in enhanced eicosanoid production in cholesterol-enriched cells. This conclusion is supported by two observations: (1) G-protein-linked PGI2 production is inhibited by calphostin, and (2) cholesterol enrichment augments the specific translocation of the delta-isoform of PKC from the cytosol to the plasma membrane following treatment of cells with phorbol ester. These data support the concept that, in cells possessing normal levels of cholesterol, MAP-kinase-dependent pathways mediate eicosanoid synthesis in response to G-protein activation; however, under conditions of high cellular cholesterol levels, augmented G-protein-linked eicosanoid production results from enhanced PKCdelta activity.     

Distortion of Palmaz-Schatz stent geometry following side-branch balloon dilation through the stent in a rabbit model

In this prospective study, we have compared women undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy, laparoscopic gynaecological surgery and laparoscopic minor gynaecological procedures (diagnostic, tubal, ligation) (n = 10 in each group) to determine if lower abdominal laparoscopy results in less postoperative pulmonary dysfunction than upper abdominal laparoscopy. Pulmonary testing was performed before operation, and 3 and 6 h after operation, on the first and second days after surgery. After operation, a significant reduction in forced vital capacity, forced expiratory volume in 1 s and peak expiratory flow rate occurred after laparoscopic cholecystectomy at each time. There were no significant changes after minor gynaecologic laparoscopy, whereas laparoscopic gynaecological surgery resulted in minor pulmonary dysfunction on the day of surgery only. We conclude that postoperative pulmonary function was less impaired after gynaecological laparoscopy than after laparoscopic cholecystectomy. This study suggests that the site of surgery is an important determinant of lung dysfunction after laparoscopy.     

Better Security for Deterministic Public-Key Encryption: The Auxiliary-Input Setting

Deterministic public-key encryption, introduced by Bellare, Boldyreva, and O’Neill (CRYPTO ’07), provides an alternative to randomized public-key encryption in various scenarios where the latter exhibits inherent drawbacks. A deterministic encryption algorithm, however, cannot satisfy any meaningful notion of security when the plaintext is distributed over a small set. Bellare et al. addressed this difficulty by requiring semantic security to hold only when the plaintext has high min-entropy from the adversary’s point of view. In many applications, however, an adversary may obtain auxiliary information that is related to the plaintext. Specifically, when deterministic encryption is used as a building block of a larger system, it is rather likely that plaintexts do not have high min-entropy from the adversary’s point of view. In such cases, the framework of Bellare et al. might fall short from providing robust security guarantees. We formalize a framework for studying the security of deterministic public-key encryption schemes with respect to auxiliary inputs. Given the trivial requirement that the plaintext should not be efficiently recoverable from the auxiliary input, we focus on hard-to-invert auxiliary inputs. Within this framework, we propose two schemes: the first is based on the d-linear assumption for any d≥1 (including, in particular, the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption), and the second is based on a rather general class of subgroup indistinguishability assumptions (including, in particular, the quadratic residuosity assumption and Paillier’s composite residuosity assumption). Our schemes are secure with respect to any auxiliary input that is subexponentially hard to invert (assuming the standard hardness of the underlying computational assumptions). In addition, our first scheme is secure even in the multi-user setting where related plaintexts may be encrypted under multiple public keys. Constructing a scheme that is secure in the multi-user setting (even without considering auxiliary inputs) was identified by Bellare et al. as an important open problem.