Impact of prosthodontic rehabilitation on the chewing efficiency of partially dentate older patients

Objectives: This study compared two tooth replacement strategies for partially dentate older patients namely; removable partial dentures (RPDs) and functionally orientated treatment based on the shortened dental arch (SDA) concept. Patients were compared in terms of chewing efficiency after prosthodontic rehabilitation. Methods: Chewing efficiency was assessed electronically by a two-colour gum-mixing test. Specimens were assembled from two different colours of chewing gums with a size of 30 x 18 x 3 mm. After participants chewed for 20 cycles, the gum was retrieved, flattened to a 1-mm-thick wafer, and digitized with a flatbed image scanner. The pixels of unmixed colour in the specimen were counted by means of Adobe Photoshop 2.0R software (Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA, USA), and the ratio to the pixels of the entire frame was computed. This ratio is called the Unmixed Fraction (UF). The more efficiently the specimen is chewed, the less unmixed colour remains, and the smaller the gum becomes. Consequently, a low unmixed fraction corresponds to good chewing efficiency. Results: 32 patients completed the chewing efficiency test (17 RPDs and 15 SDA). The mean UF recorded for the SDA group was not significantly different to that recorded for the RPD group (p>0.05, unpaired t-test). Conclusion: These results indicate that prosthodontic rehabilitation according to the principles of the SDA is equivalent to RPDs in terms of restoration of chewing ability for partially dentate older patients.

Evolving national park models: The emergence of an economic imperative and its effect on the contested nature of the 'national' park concept in Northern Ireland.

National park models have evolved in tandem with the emergence of a multifunctional countryside. Sustainable development has been added to the traditional twin aims of conservation and recreation. This is typified by recent national park designations, such as the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. A proposed Mournes national park in Northern Ireland has evolved a stage further with a model of national park to deliver national economic goals envisaged by government. This seeks to commodify the natural landscape. This paper compares Cairngorm and Mourne stakeholders’ views on the principal features of both models: park aims, management structures and planning functions. While Cairngorm stakeholders were largely positive from the outset, the model of national park introduced is not without criticism. Conversely, Mourne stakeholders have adopted an anti-national park stance. Nevertheless, the model of national park proposed possessing a strong economic imperative, an absence of the Sandford Principle as a means to manage likely conflicts, and lacking any planning powers in its own right, may still be insufficient to bring about widespread support for a Mourne national park. Such a model is also likely to accelerate the degradation of the Mourne landscape. Competing national identities (British and Irish) provide an additional dimension to the national park debate in Northern Ireland. Deep ideological cleavages are capable of derailing the introduction of a national park irrespective of the model proposed. In Northern Ireland the national park debate is not only about reconciling environmental and economic interests but also political and ethno-national differences.

Ubiquitous Translation

In this book, Piotr Blumczynski explores the central role of translation as a key epistemological concept as well as a hermeneutic, ethical, linguistic and interpersonal practice. His argument is three-fold: (1) that translation provides a basis for genuine, exciting, serious, innovative and meaningful exchange between various areas of the humanities through both a concept (the WHAT) and a method (the HOW); (2) that, in doing so, it questions and challenges many of the traditional boundaries and offers a transdisciplinary epistemological paradigm, leading to a new understanding of quality, and thus also meaning, truth, and knowledge; and (3) that translational phenomena are studied by a broad range of disciplines in the humanities (including philosophy, theology, linguistics, and anthropology) using various, often seemingly unrelated concepts which nevertheless display a considerable degree of qualitative proximity. The common thread running through all these convictions and binding them together is the insistence that translational phenomena are ubiquitous. Because of its unconventional and innovative approach, this book will be of interest to translation studies scholars looking to situate their research within a broader transdisciplinary model, as well as to students of translation programs and practicing translators who seek a fuller understanding of why and how translation matters.

Ethics, power and space: International hospitality beyond Derrida

This article argues for the importance of hospitality in discussions of international ethics, suggesting that, while Jacques Derrida’s thought on the concept ought to be central, we also need to go beyond it. In particular, Derrida’s focus on the threshold moment of sovereign decision has the effect of reinforcing International Relations’ focus on the state as the only ethical actor and space. In contrast, this article suggests that we think of hospitality as a spatial relation with affective dimensions and a practice that continues once the guest crosses the threshold of the home. Conceived as such, hospitality reveals a constitutive relation between ethics, power and space, which directs us to the way hospitality produces international spaces and manages them through various tactics seeking to contain the resistant guest. This argument is illustrated through an examination of perhaps the most urgent of contemporary international ethical spaces: the refugee camp.

Using Graph Components Derived from an Associative Concept Dictionary to Predict fMRI Neural Activation Patterns that Represent the Meaning of Nouns

In this study, we introduce an original distance definition for graphs, called the Markov-inverse-F measure (MiF). This measure enables the integration of classical graph theory indices with new knowledge pertaining to structural feature extraction from semantic networks. MiF improves the conventional Jaccard and/or Simpson indices, and reconciles both the geodesic information (random walk) and co-occurrence adjustment (degree balance and distribution). We measure the effectiveness of graph-based coefficients through the application of linguistic graph information for a neural activity recorded during conceptual processing in the human brain. Specifically, the MiF distance is computed between each of the nouns used in a previous neural experiment and each of the in-between words in a subgraph derived from the Edinburgh Word Association Thesaurus of English. From the MiF-based information matrix, a machine learning model can accurately obtain a scalar parameter that specifies the degree to which each voxel in (the MRI image of) the brain is activated by each word or each principal component of the intermediate semantic features. Furthermore, correlating the voxel information with the MiF-based principal components, a new computational neurolinguistics model with a network connectivity paradigm is created. This allows two dimensions of context space to be incorporated with both semantic and neural distributional representations.