Is there a difference between narrowing of the spinal canal and neurological deficits comparing Denis and Magerl classifications?

We have read with great interest the retrospective study by Caffaro and Avanzi1 evaluating the relation between narrowing of the spinal canal and neurological deficits in patients with burst-type fractures of the spine. The authors are to be commended for obtaining detailed neurological and radiological data in a large cohort of 227 patients. The authors conclude: “The percentage of narrowing of the spinal canal proved to be a pre-disposing factor for the severity of the neurological status in thoracolumbar and lumbar burst-type fractures according to the classifications of Denis and Magerl.” Although this conclusion is mainly in accordance with previous findings, we would like to comment on the methodological approach applied in the current study.

Perceptions of aging across 26 cultures and their culture-level associates

College students (N = 3,435) in 26 cultures reported their perceptions of age-related changes in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional areas of functioning and rated societal views of aging within their culture. There was widespread cross-cultural consensus regarding the expected direction of aging trajectories with (1) perceived declines in societal views of aging, physical attractiveness, the ability to perform everyday tasks, and new learning, (2) perceived increases in wisdom, knowledge, and received respect, and (3) perceived stability in family authority and life satisfaction. Cross-cultural variations in aging perceptions were associated with culture-level indicators of population aging, education levels, values, and national character stereotypes. These associations were stronger for societal views on aging and perceptions of socioemotional changes than for perceptions of physical and cognitive changes. A consideration of culture-level variables also suggested that previously reported differences in aging perceptions between Asian and Western countries may be related to differences in population structure.

Bushfire sustainability : Strategies for reconciling bushfire and biodiversity with daily life

This exhibition and catalogue provides a visual record of student work exhibited at the Australian Institute of Architects offices in Brisbane from November 15 to 29, 2010. The exhibition features the final design outcomes of the inaugural Bushfire Sustainability unit conducted at QUT in semester two, 2010. The core objective of this unit was to develop our students’ skills in collaborative practice in design, research and presentation. The theme of ‘bushfire sustainability’ was chosen because living sustainably in bushfire prone landscapes presents a number of problems, the nature of which might only be resolved via multidisciplinary collaboration among the design disciplines. The students involved represent the disciplines of Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, Architecture and Sustainability – all from within the School of Design at QUT. 55 students, mostly in their third year of study, worked in teams of five (one from each discipline) to design one of a number of homes in highly bushfire prone sites in either Western Australia or SE Queensland. This year level and the interdisciplinary mix are perhaps the best placed to resolve these problems: being unrestrained from the burdens of professional practice and technical overload they retain the potential for innovative, lateral thinking across the range of spatial scales and philosophical perspectives associated with inhabitation of bushfire prone landscapes. It is envisaged that, through the ‘vehicle’ of this design research, that the students’ work will contribute to understandings of how creative design disciplines might respond to this significant national problem, which hitherto has been attended to primarily by engineering and the sciences.

High-pressure Raman spectroscopic and other structural studies of hydrotalcites containing intercalated dicarboxylic acid anions

The results of pressure-tuning Raman spectroscopic, X-ray powder diffraction and solid-state 13C-NMR studies of selected dicarboxylate anions intercalated in a Mg-Al layered double hydroxide (talcite) lattice are reported. The pressure dependences of the vibrational modes are linear for pressures up to 4.6 GPa indicating that no phase transitions occur. The interlayer spacings show that the oxalate, malonate and succinate dianions are oriented perpendicular to the layers, but the glutarate and adipate are tilted. The solid-state 13C-NMR spectra of these materials show full chemical shift anisotropy and, therefore, the anions are not mobile at room temperature.

Inter-sector leader transitions and organisation transformation : a research agenda

Faced with the need for strategic change, structural and cultural realignment, innovation and value-adding, many public sector organisations are tapping into a wider senior leadership talent pool and attracting successful leaders from other sectors (Flynn and Thompson, 2009). Leadership renewal has resulted, in some cases, in the external recruitment of whole senior leadership teams (Hockridge, 2008), raising issues about the influence of context on leader success (Pawar and Eastman, 1997) and potential leader transition failure, a costly outcome for leaders and organisations (Howard, 2001). There is little research on inter-sector leader transitions, which is surprising given the significant costs associated with leader acquisition and failure(Conger, 2010; Day and Halpin, 2004). For example, it is not clear what organizations do (or do not do) to ensure the outcomes of their significant investment in inter sector transitions are realised. In addition, it is not clear how the individual leader manages the challenging transition into a new leadership context and how their approach to leadership facilitates or inhibits successful transition (Avolio, 2010). Leader assimilation programs have been developed to assimilate new leaders (Manderscheid, 2008); however, assimilation is not necessarily a desired organisational outcome (Denis and Pineault, 2000). In this paper we critically review the limited literature on inter-sector leader transitions and transformational change outcomes and argue for a mutual accommodation approach. We draw on our own initial empirical work to propose the elements of a program for achieving this outcome from the perspective of the public organisation and the inter-sector appointee.

The validity and structure of culture-level personality scores: Data from ratings of young adolescents

We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N=5,109) ages 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, 8 of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted.

Esprit Futur : Le Corbusier and José Oubrerie at Saint-Pierre De Firminy, Firminy-Vert, France, 1968–2006

What is the secret mesmerism that death possesses and under the operation of which a modern architect – strident, confident, resolute – becomes rueful, pessimistic, or melancholic?1 Five years before Le Corbusier’s death at sea in 1965, the architect reluctantly agreed to adopt the project for L’Église Saint-Pierre de Firminy in Firminy-Vert (1960–2006), following the death of its original architect, André Sive, from leukemia in 1958.2 Le Corbusier had already developed, in 1956, the plan for an enclave in the new “green” Firminy town, which included his youth and culture center and a stadium and swimming pool; the church and a “boîte à miracles” near the youth center were inserted into the plan in the ’60s. (Le Corbusier was also invited, in 1962, to produce another plan for three Unités d’Habitation outside Firminy-Vert.) The Saint-Pierre church should have been the zenith of the quartet (the largest urban concentration of works by Le Corbusier in Europe, and what the architect Henri Ciriani termed Le Corbusier’s “acropolis”3) but in the early course of the project, Le Corbusier would suffer the diocese’s serial objections to his vision for the church – not unlike the difficulties he experienced with Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950–1954) and the resistance to his proposed monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette (1957–1960). In 1964, the bishop of Saint-Étienne requested that Le Corbusier relocate the church to a new site, but Le Corbusier refused and the diocese subsequently withdrew from the project. (With neither the approval, funds, nor the participation of the bishop, by then the cardinal archbishop of Lyon, the first stone of the church was finally laid on the site in 1970.) Le Corbusier’s ambivalence toward the project, even prior to his quarrels with the bishop, reveals...

Visual front-end wars : Viola-Jones face detector vs Fourier Lucas-Kanade

The performance of visual speech recognition (VSR) systems are significantly influenced by the accuracy of the visual front-end. The current state-of-the-art VSR systems use off-the-shelf face detectors such as Viola- Jones (VJ) which has limited reliability for changes in illumination and head poses. For a VSR system to perform well under these conditions, an accurate visual front end is required. This is an important problem to be solved in many practical implementations of audio visual speech recognition systems, for example in automotive environments for an efficient human-vehicle computer interface. In this paper, we re-examine the current state-of-the-art VSR by comparing off-the-shelf face detectors with the recently developed Fourier Lucas-Kanade (FLK) image alignment technique. A variety of image alignment and visual speech recognition experiments are performed on a clean dataset as well as with a challenging automotive audio-visual speech dataset. Our results indicate that the FLK image alignment technique can significantly outperform off-the shelf face detectors, but requires frequent fine-tuning.

Prediction and proactivity in real-time interactive music systems

We advocate for the use of predictive techniques in interactive computer music systems. We suggest that the inclusion of prediction can assist in the design of proactive rather than reactive computational performance partners. We summarize the significant role prediction plays in human musical decisions, and the only modest use of prediction in interactive music systems to date. After describing how we are working toward employing predictive processes in our own metacreation software we reflect on future extensions to these approaches.

Evaluation of the alkaline comet assay and urinary 3-methyladenine excretion for monitoring DNA damage in melanoma patients treated with dacarbazine and tamoxifen

Purpose: To develop, using dacarbazine as a model, reliable techniques for measuring DNA damage and repair as pharmacodynamic endpoints for patients receiving chemotherapy. Methods: A group of 39 patients with malignant melanoma were treated with dacarbazine 1 g/m2 i.v. every 21 days. Tamoxifen 20 mg daily was commenced 24 h after the first infusion and continued until 3 weeks after the last cycle of chemotherapy. DNA strand breaks formed during dacarbazine-induced DNA damage and repair were measured in individual cells by the alkaline comet assay. DNA methyl adducts were quantified by measuring urinary 3-methyladenine (3-MeA) excretion using immunoaffinity ELISA. Venous blood was taken on cycles 1 and 2 for separation of peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) for measurement of DNA strand breaks. Results: Wide interpatient variation in PBL DNA strand breaks occurred following chemotherapy, with a peak at 4 h (median 26.6 h, interquartile range 14.75- 40.5 h) and incomplete repair by 24 h. Similarly, there was a range of 3-MeA excretion with peak levels 4-10 h after chemotherapy (median 33 nmol/h, interquartile range 20.448.65 nmol/h). Peak 3-MeA excretion was positively correlated with DNA strand breaks at 4 h (Spearman's correlation coefficient, r = 0.39, P = 0.036) and 24 h (r = 0.46, P = 0.01). Drug-induced emesis correlated with PBL DNA strand breaks (Mann Whitney U-test, P = 0.03) but not with peak 3-MeA excretion. Conclusions: DNA damage and repair following cytotoxic chemotherapy can be measured in vivo by the alkaline comet assay and by urinary 3-MeA excretion in patients receiving chemotherapy.

The inaccuracy of national character stereotypes

Consensual stereotypes of some groups are relatively accurate, whereas others are not. Previous work suggesting that national character stereotypes are inaccurate has been criticized on several grounds. In this article we (a) provide arguments for the validity of assessed national mean trait levels as criteria for evaluating stereotype accuracy and (b) report new data on national character in 26 cultures from descriptions (N= 3323) of the typical male or female adolescent, adult, or old person in each. The average ratings were internally consistent and converged with independent stereotypes of the typical culture member, but were weakly related to objective assessments of personality. We argue that this conclusion is consistent with the broader literature on the inaccuracy of national character stereotypes

Shrinkage empirical likelihood estimator in longitudinal analysis with time-dependent covariates-application to modeling the health of Filipino children

The method of generalized estimating equations (GEE) is a popular tool for analysing longitudinal (panel) data. Often, the covariates collected are time-dependent in nature, for example, age, relapse status, monthly income. When using GEE to analyse longitudinal data with time-dependent covariates, crucial assumptions about the covariates are necessary for valid inferences to be drawn. When those assumptions do not hold or cannot be verified, Pepe and Anderson (1994, Communications in Statistics, Simulations and Computation 23, 939–951) advocated using an independence working correlation assumption in the GEE model as a robust approach. However, using GEE with the independence correlation assumption may lead to significant efficiency loss (Fitzmaurice, 1995, Biometrics 51, 309–317). In this article, we propose a method that extracts additional information from the estimating equations that are excluded by the independence assumption. The method always includes the estimating equations under the independence assumption and the contribution from the remaining estimating equations is weighted according to the likelihood of each equation being a consistent estimating equation and the information it carries. We apply the method to a longitudinal study of the health of a group of Filipino children.