Paradoxical enhancement of fear extinction memory and synaptic plasticity by inhibition of the histone acetyltransferase p300

It is well established that the coordinated regulation of activity-dependent gene expression by the histone acetyltransferase (HAT) family of transcriptional coactivators is crucial for the formation of contextual fear and spatial memory, and for hippocampal synaptic plasticity. However, no studies have examined the role of this epigenetic mechanism within the infralimbic prefrontal cortex (ILPFC), an area of the brain that is essential for the formation and consolidation of fear extinction memory. Here we report that a postextinction training infusion of a combined p300/CBP inhibitor (Lys-CoA-Tat), directly into the ILPFC, enhances fear extinction memory in mice. Our results also demonstrate that the HAT p300 is highly expressed within pyramidal neurons of the ILPFC and that the small-molecule p300-specific inhibitor (C646) infused into the ILPFC immediately after weak extinction training enhances the consolidation of fear extinction memory. C646 infused 6 h after extinction had no effect on fear extinction memory, nor did an immediate postextinction training infusion into the prelimbic prefrontal cortex. Consistent with the behavioral findings, inhibition of p300 activity within the ILPFC facilitated long-term potentiation (LTP) under stimulation conditions that do not evoke long-lasting LTP. These data suggest that one function of p300 activity within the ILPFC is to constrain synaptic plasticity, and that a reduction in the function of this HAT is required for the formation of fear extinction memory.

Toward an object-based semantic memory for long-term operation of mobile service robots

Throughout a lifetime of operation, a mobile service robot needs to acquire, store and update its knowledge of a working environment. This includes the ability to identify and track objects in different places, as well as using this information for interaction with humans. This paper introduces a long-term updating mechanism, inspired by the modal model of human memory, to enable a mobile robot to maintain its knowledge of a changing environment. The memory model is integrated with a hybrid map that represents the global topology and local geometry of the environment, as well as the respective 3D location of objects. We aim to enable the robot to use this knowledge to help humans by suggesting the most likely locations of specific objects in its map. An experiment using omni-directional vision demonstrates the ability to track the movements of several objects in a dynamic environment over an extended period of time.

Nonvolatile multilevel data storage memory device from controlled ambipolar charge trapping mechanism

The capability of storing multi-bit information is one of the most important challenges in memory technologies. An ambipolar polymer which intrinsically has the ability to transport electrons and holes as a semiconducting layer provides an opportunity for the charge trapping layer to trap both electrons and holes efficiently. Here, we achieved large memory window and distinct multilevel data storage by utilizing the phenomena of ambipolar charge trapping mechanism. As fabricated flexible memory devices display five well-defined data levels with good endurance and retention properties showing potential application in printed electronics.

Small firms and health and safety harmonisation : potential regulatory effects of a dominant narrative

Small firms are popularly viewed as resistant to complying with regulation. Harmonisation of Australia’s state-based work health and safety regimes is a significant regulatory change. In this article, we consider the likely responses of small firms to work health and safety harmonisation and argue that a range of choices are open to small firm owner-managers. These choices are shaped by individuals’ world views and are influenced by elements in the firms’ context. A significant element is the public narrative of work health and safety harmonisation, which can be understood by using discourse and sense-making concepts. Our analysis of small firm owner-manager choices takes into account small firms’ embeddedness in their regulatory context and the influence on organisational decision-making of the narrative of work health and safety harmonisation. The dominant narrative is arguably silent on the benefits of the work health and safety regulatory change and therefore the response of small firms is likely to be avoidance or minimalism. Non-compliance could be the result due to poor awareness of opportunities arising from this regulatory change.

Horas Perditam : A collaboration of Coney and Writerguy

An experiment in narrative play. Ten Threaders explored an urban physical space and creatively related what they encountered via mobile to their Weavers. Weavers creatively shaped this material to fashion a collaborative story on the fly, framed by a theme of loss and connection. The Weavers On Threader’s Day, during the hours of the lost, Threaders and Weavers collaborate to recover moments of connection and loss, of missed (or not) meetings and inevitable (or not) parting. Threaders: Your path begins near Brick Lane. Use your gift to discover threads. The threads may be thin at start, as fine as an inkling or as fleet as a passing memory. Yet they pull forth deep personal moments which in turn lead to the most powerful stories in human experience, ones that partake of the mythic inevitable. On a street in London, as the sun declines, Gilgamesh pursues, Orpheus sings, Perdita boards a ship, Eurydice walks forever toward the light… as the Lady of Shalott works her loom. Weavers: The fabric a Threader stitches through is the ancient story rediscovered every time one person follows or leads another. As your Threader describes the moments and aspects of this journey to you, in spoken words and written words and in images sent from their phone, you weave these impressions into a multithreaded story, in concert with the other Weavers. And you help guide your Threader across the storyscape, with your narrative intuition and by pulling the threads that connect to times in your own life.

Enhancing sense of recovery and self-reflectivity in people with schizophrenia : a pilot study of Metacognitive Narrative Psychotherapy

Objective This study investigated the effectiveness of an innovative, manualized psychotherapy aimed at enhancing recovery and self-experience in people with schizophrenia, Metacognitive Narrative Psychotherapy. Design Treatment effects were assessed using a mixed methodology. Data were quantitatively assessed using a single sample, pre- and post-therapy design and qualitatively assessed using a case-study methodology. Methods Eleven patients diagnosed with schizophrenia received Metacognitive Narrative Psychotherapy over the course of 11 to 26 months. Therapists were seven supervised postgraduate psychology students. On average patients attended 49 sessions over the course of therapy. Patients completed interview-based and self-report measures for general and treatment-specific outcomes at pre-, mid-, and post-treatment. Results Quantitative analyses showed that patients significantly improved on the general outcome of subjective recovery, as well as the treatment-specific outcome of self-reflectivity, with medium to large effect sizes. Case-study evidence also showed improvements for some patients in symptom severity, and narrative coherence and complexity. Conclusions These results are consistent with previous case-study evidence and suggest that this manualized version of Metacognitive Narrative Psychotherapy produces general and approach-specific improvements for people with schizophrenia. Replication is needed to ascertain its effectiveness with a larger sample size and within a controlled design.

Predicting transactive memory systems in multidisciplinary teams : The interplay between team and professional identities

In explaining how communication quality predicts TMS in multidisciplinary teams, we drew on the social identity approach to investigate the mediating role of team identification and the moderating role of professional identification. Recognizing that professional identification could trigger intergroup biases among professional subgroups, or alternatively, could bring resources to the team, we explored the potential moderating role of professional identification in the relationship between team identification and TMS. Using data collected from 882 healthcare personnel working in 126 multidisciplinary hospital teams, results supported our hypothesis that perceived communication quality predicted TMS through team identification. Furthermore, findings provided support for a resource view of professional subgroup identities with results indicating that high levels of professional identification compensated for low levels of team identification in predicting TMS. We provide recommendations on how social identities may be used to promote TMS in multidisciplinary teams.

Triumphs and tribulations in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia : reflections on a pilot study of metacognitive narrative psychotherapy

Schizophrenia results in a profound disruption of one’s capacity to make sense of mental states, coherently narrate self-experiences, and meaningfully relate to others. While current treatment options for people with schizophrenia tend to be symptom-focused, experience in designing and implementing a study focusing on enhancing sense of self demonstrates the feasibility of developing and implementing models of treatment that prioritize the subjective distress and self-experience of people with schizophrenia. There is emerging research evidence, based upon dialogical theory of self, that posits the potential of people with deficits of self to engage in meaningful therapeutic relationships and work toward greater integrity of self and degrees of recovery. The challenge is to translate these ideas into a research methodology that can be successfully applied within therapeutic contexts with people who meet the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. Based upon dialogical theory, we developed a principle-based manual for metacognitive narrative psychotherapy: a psychological approach to the treatment of people with schizophrenia, which aims to enhance metacognitive capacity and ability to narrate self-experiences. Five phases of treatment were identified: (1) developing a therapeutic relationship, (2) eliciting narratives, (3) enhancing metacognitive capacity, (4) enriching narratives, and (5) living enriched stories. Proscribed practices were also identified. We then implemented the manual within a university clinic context. Six therapists were trained to implement the model and, in turn, provided therapy to 11 patients who completed 12 to 24 months of treatment. Participants were assessed on metacognitive capacity, narrative coherence, narrative richness, self-reported recovery, and symptomatology at three points in time over the course of therapy. Contrary to expectations, participants were highly engaged in the therapeutic process, with minimal dropout. Overall, over 75% of participants evidenced improvement in their level of recovery over the course of therapy. The manualization and outcome findings demonstrate the feasibility of applying such interventions to a broader clinical population.

The monadic environment : evoking emotion and memory in participatory performance

This practice-led research project examined the audience experience of immersive environments in participatory performance. Drawing upon the work of artist Ilya Kabakov, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1964) and Leibniz's theory of the monad, the study investigated how an immersive space can be constructed to evoke emotion and memory recall in participants. The research consisted of two cycles of creative experimentation resulting in the presentation of a final piece entitled Dulcet. The research contributes new terminology to the discourse surrounding the participant experience in immersive environments, specifically space-as-memory, the role of ambiguity in spatial design and the construct of the monadic environment.

Injury narrative text classification : a preliminary study

Description of a patient's injuries is recorded in narrative text form by hospital emergency departments. For statistical reporting, this text data needs to be mapped to pre-defined codes. Existing research in this field uses the Naïve Bayes probabilistic method to build classifiers for mapping. In this paper, we focus on providing guidance on the selection of a classification method. We build a number of classifiers belonging to different classification families such as decision tree, probabilistic, neural networks, and instance-based, ensemble-based and kernel-based linear classifiers. An extensive pre-processing is carried out to ensure the quality of data and, in hence, the quality classification outcome. The records with a null entry in injury description are removed. The misspelling correction process is carried out by finding and replacing the misspelt word with a soundlike word. Meaningful phrases have been identified and kept, instead of removing the part of phrase as a stop word. The abbreviations appearing in many forms of entry are manually identified and only one form of abbreviations is used. Clustering is utilised to discriminate between non-frequent and frequent terms. This process reduced the number of text features dramatically from about 28,000 to 5000. The medical narrative text injury dataset, under consideration, is composed of many short documents. The data can be characterized as high-dimensional and sparse, i.e., few features are irrelevant but features are correlated with one another. Therefore, Matrix factorization techniques such as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Non Negative Matrix Factorization (NNMF) have been used to map the processed feature space to a lower-dimensional feature space. Classifiers with these reduced feature space have been built. In experiments, a set of tests are conducted to reflect which classification method is best for the medical text classification. The Non Negative Matrix Factorization with Support Vector Machine method can achieve 93% precision which is higher than all the tested traditional classifiers. We also found that TF/IDF weighting which works well for long text classification is inferior to binary weighting in short document classification. Another finding is that the Top-n terms should be removed in consultation with medical experts, as it affects the classification performance.

Double-strand breaks and the concept of short- and long-term epigenetic memory

Double-strand breaks represent an extremely cytolethal form of DNA damage and thus pose a serious threat to the preservation of genetic and epigenetic information. Though it is well-known that double-strand breaks such as those generated by ionising radiation are among the principal causative factors behind mutations, chromosomal aberrations, genetic instability and carcino-genesis, significantly less is known about the epigenetic consequences of double-strand break formation and repair for carcinogenesis. Double-strand break repair is a highly coordinated process that requires the unravelling of the compacted chromatin structure to facilitate repair machinery access and then restoration of the original undamaged chromatin state. Recent experimental findings have pointed to a potential mechanism for double-strand break-induced epigenetic silencing. This review will discuss some of the key epigenetic regulatory processes involved in double-strand break (DSB) repair and how incomplete or incorrect restoration of chromatin structure can leave a DSB-induced epigenetic memory of damage with potentially pathological repercussions

Memory management and parallelization of data intensive all-to-all comparison in shared-memory systems

This thesis presents a novel program parallelization technique incorporating with dynamic and static scheduling. It utilizes a problem specific pattern developed from the prior knowledge of the targeted problem abstraction. Suitable for solving complex parallelization problems such as data intensive all-to-all comparison constrained by memory, the technique delivers more robust and faster task scheduling compared to the state-of-the art techniques. Good performance is achieved from the technique in data intensive bioinformatics applications.

In-memory business process management

In-memory databases have become a mainstay of enterprise computing offering significant performance and scalability boosts for online analytical and (to a lesser extent) transactional processing as well as improved prospects for integration across different applications through an efficient shared database layer. Significant research and development has been undertaken over several years concerning data management considerations of in-memory databases. However, limited insights are available on the impacts of applications and their supportive middleware platforms and how they need to evolve to fully function through, and leverage, in-memory database capabilities. This paper provides a first, comprehensive exposition into how in-memory databases impact Business Pro- cess Management, as a mission-critical and exemplary model-driven integration and orchestration middleware. Through it, we argue that in-memory databases will render some prevalent uses of legacy BPM middleware obsolete, but also open up exciting possibilities for tighter application integration, better process automation performance and some entirely new BPM capabilities such as process-based application customization. To validate the feasibility of an in-memory BPM, we develop a surprisingly simple BPM runtime embedded into SAP HANA and providing for BPMN-based process automation capabilities.

Narrative and multimodality in English language arts curricula : a tale of two nations

In this policy column within this special edition on "The Arts in Language Arts", we critique the current place of multimodality and narratives in research and curriculum policy. This is a vital issue of significance for literacy educators, researchers, and policy makers because the narrative texts that circulate in our everyday lives are multimodal, tied to the ever-broadening range of narratives forms in digital sites of display. Here, we critically evaluate the place of multimodality and narratives in the language arts or English curriculum policies of two nations, the USA and Australia. In particular, we highlight the silence on multimodality within the Common Core State Standards, USA, and the contrasting centrality of multimodality in the National Curriculum: English, Australia.

The Scent of Ancestral Memory

Poetry expresses the physical and spiritual worlds that other kinds of writing cannot. Travelling open our minds and frees our spirit. Creative writings and meditations on life, spirit, grace and relationships, art and nature weave their way through these lyrical poems. Some poems are suitable for study in the Australian Curriculum.