Variability of growth in children starting antiretroviral treatment in southern Africa

Poor growth is an indication for antiretroviral therapy (ART) and a criterion for treatment failure. We examined variability in growth response to ART in 12 programs in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa.

"She Was Not Even Normal": Unreliable Narratives of Female Insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea

In my thesis, I interrogate narrative reliability related to depictions of female insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea. By subjecting the trustworthiness of her storytelling to criticism, especially as regards the concealed madwoman, Bertha Mason, Jane's narration is revealed as unstable, offering problematic insight into a character long considered unflinchingly honest. In du Maurier's later literary adaptation of Jane Eyre, Bertha's parallel character, the eponymous Rebecca, comes to the fore, while the novel's unnamed narrator remains in the shadows, and bases much of her storytelling upon hearsay, rather than the "autobiography" of Jane Eyre. The most transparent narrative voice, however, is Antoinette, the main character of Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre. Despite her madness, Antoinette's narration makes no attempt at dissemblance, speaking forthrightly about her marriage and experience, proving a truthful narrator and openly rejecting the marginal status the earlier narrators try desperately to hide.

Engaged Learning: Enabling Self-Authorship and Effective Practice

There is now broad consensus that higher education must extend beyond content-based knowledge to encompass intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning. The college learning outcomes needed for success in 21st century life include critical thinking, a coherent sense of self, intercultural maturity, civic engagement, and the capacity for mutual relationships. Yet, research suggests that college students are struggling to achieve these outcomes in part because skills needed to succeed in college are not those needed to succeed upon graduation. One reason for this gap is that these college learning outcomes require complex developmental capacities or “self-authorship” that higher education is not currently designed to promote.

Effects of somatosensory stimulation on use-dependent plasticity in chronic stroke

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: There is a need to develop strategies to enhance the beneficial effects of motor training, including use-dependent plasticity (UDP), in neurorehabilitation. Peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) modulates motor cortical excitability in healthy humans and could influence training effects in stroke patients. METHODS: We compared the ability of PNS applied to the (1) arm, (2) leg, and (3) idle time to influence training effects in the paretic hand in 7 chronic stroke patients. The end point measure was the magnitude of UDP. RESULTS: UDP was more prominent with arm stimulation (increased by 22.8%) than with idle time (by 2.9%) or leg stimulation (by 6.4%). CONCLUSIONS: PNS applied to the paretic limb paired with motor training enhances training effects on cortical plasticity in stroke patients.

In utero haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Experiences in mice, sheep and humans

Early prenatal diagnosis and in utero therapy of certain fetal diseases have the potential to reduce fetal morbidity and mortality. The intrauterine transplantation of stem cells provides in some instances a therapeutic option before definitive organ failure occurs. Clinical experiences show that certain diseases, such as immune deficiencies or inborn errors of metabolism, can be successfully treated using stem cells derived from bone marrow. However, a remaining problem is the low level of engraftment that can be achieved. Efforts are made in animal models to optimise the graft and study the recipient's microenvironment to increase long-term engraftment levels. Our experiments in mice show similar early homing of allogeneic and xenogeneic stem cells and reasonable early engraftment of allogeneic murine fetal liver cells (17.1% donor cells in peripheral blood 4 weeks after transplantation), whereas xenogeneic HSC are rapidly diminished due to missing self-renewal and low differentiation capacities in the host's microenvironment. Allogeneic murine fetal liver cells have very good long-term engraftment (49.9% donor cells in peripheral blood 16 weeks after transplantation). Compared to the rodents, the sheep model has the advantage of body size and gestation comparable to the human fetus. Here, ultrasound-guided injection techniques significantly decreased fetal loss rates. In contrast to the murine in utero model, the repopulation capacities of allogeneic ovine fetal liver cells are lower (0.112% donor cells in peripheral blood 3 weeks after transplantation). The effect of MHC on engraftment levels seems to be marginal, since no differences could be observed between autologous and allogeneic transplantation (0.117% donor cells vs 0.112% donor cells in peripheral blood 1 to 2 weeks after transplantation). Further research is needed to study optimal timing and graft composition as well as immunological aspects of in utero transplantation.

A NOVEL AND SIMPLE RULE OF THUMB FOR MULTIPLICITY CONTROL IN EQUIVALENCE TESTING USING TWO ONE-SIDED TESTS

Equivalence testing is growing in use in scientific research outside of its traditional role in the drug approval process. Largely due to its ease of use and recommendation from the United States Food and Drug Administration guidance, the most common statistical method for testing (bio)equivalence is the two one-sided tests procedure (TOST). Like classical point-null hypothesis testing, TOST is subject to multiplicity concerns as more comparisons are made. In this manuscript, a condition that bounds the family-wise error rate (FWER) using TOST is given. This condition then leads to a simple solution for controlling the FWER. Specifically, we demonstrate that if all pairwise comparisons of k independent groups are being evaluated for equivalence, then simply scaling the nominal Type I error rate down by (k - 1) is sufficient to maintain the family-wise error rate at the desired value or less. The resulting rule is much less conservative than the equally simple Bonferroni correction. An example of equivalence testing in a non drug-development setting is given.

Connectionism as metaphor: Towards an integrated, unified conception of self-system and individual difference

Comments on an article by Kashima et al. (see record 2007-10111-001). In their target article Kashima and colleagues try to show how a connectionist model conceptualization of the self is best suited to capture the self's temporal and socio-culturally contextualized nature. They propose a new model and to support this model, the authors conduct computer simulations of psychological phenomena whose importance for the self has long been clear, even if not formally modeled, such as imitation, and learning of sequence and narrative. As explicated when we advocated connectionist models as a metaphor for self in Mischel and Morf (2003), we fully endorse the utility of such a metaphor, as these models have some of the processing characteristics necessary for capturing key aspects and functions of a dynamic cognitive-affective self-system. As elaborated in that chapter, we see as their principal strength that connectionist models can take account of multiple simultaneous processes without invoking a single central control. All outputs reflect a distributed pattern of activation across a large number of simple processing units, the nature of which depends on (and changes with) the connection weights between the links and the satisfaction of mutual constraints across these links (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986). This allows a simple account for why certain input features will at times predominate, while others take over on other occasions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)