Hand held bell SFX

A stereo recording of a hand held bell ringing.

School funding, public transport racism and the looming second-hand digital music battle

 SBS News radio interview with Amelia Johns about racism on public transport and the response of witnesses.

A possible anatomical and biomechanical explanation of the 10% rule used in the clinical assessment of prehensile hand movements and handed dominance

Abstract
A current doctrine in the dynamometric approach to determine lateralization of hand function states that in 10% of cases, the non-dominant hand will be stronger than the dominant hand. In this study, a novel MRI based modelling approach was applied to the first dorsal introsseus muscle (FDI), to determine whether the 10% rule may be applied to the FDI and may be partially explained by the arrangement of the anatomical components of the FDI.

Methods
Initially the force generated by the thumb segment during an isometric pushing task in the horizontal plane was measured from 25 strongly right-handed young males. Nine of these participants then had structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) of the thumb and index osseous compartment. A modelling technique was developed to extract the muscle data and quantify the muscle line of action onto to the first metacarpal bone segment in order to quantify the muscle force at the point of momentary rotation – equilibrium.

Results
Eight of 25 subjects exhibited stronger force from the left hand. Six out of nine subjects from the MRI possessed significantly greater angles of attachment of the index osseous compartment on the left (non-dominant) hand. These six subjects also generated greater maximal isometric forces from the FDI of the left side. There was a significantly greater muscle volume for the right FDI muscle as compared to the left as measured from the reconstructed MRI slice data.

Conclusions
The calculated force produced by the muscle is related to the angle of attachment of the muscle to bone in the index osseous compartment. The MRI findings indicate that the 10% rule may be anatomically and biomechanically explained.

Is body dysmorphic disorder associated with abnormal bodily self-awareness? A study using the rubber hand illusion.

Evidence from past research suggests that behaviours and characteristics related to body dissatisfaction may be associated with greater instability of perceptual body image, possibly due to problems in the integration of body-related multisensory information. We investigated whether people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a condition characterised by body image disturbances, demonstrated enhanced susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which arises as a result of multisensory integration processes when a rubber hand and the participant's hidden real hand are stimulated in synchrony. Overall, differences in RHI experience between the BDD group and healthy and schizophrenia control groups (n = 17 in each) were not significant. RHI strength, however, was positively associated with body dissatisfaction and related tendencies. For the healthy control group, proprioceptive drift towards the rubber hand was observed following synchronous but not asynchronous stimulation, a typical pattern when inducing the RHI. Similar drifts in proprioceptive awareness occurred for the BDD group irrespective of whether stimulation was synchronous or not. These results are discussed in terms of possible abnormalities in visual processing and multisensory integration among people with BDD.