A re-appraisal of Harknessia (Diaporthales), and the introduction of Harknessiaceae fam. nov

Harknessiaceae is introduced as a new family in the ascomycete order Diaporthales to accommodate species of Harknessia with their Wuestneia-like teleomorphs. The family is distinguished by having pycnidial conidiomata with brown, furfuraceous margins, brown conidia with hyaline, tube-like basal appendages, longitudinal striations, and rhexolytic secession. Six species occurring on Eucalyptus are newly introduced, namely H. australiensis, H. ellipsoidea, H. pseudohawaiiensis, and H. ravenstreetina from Australia, H. kleinzeeina from South Africa, and H. viterboensis from Italy. Epitypes are designated for H. spermatoidea and H. weresubiae, both also occurring on Eucalyptus. Members of Harknessia are commonly associated with leaf spots, but also occur as saprobes and endophytes in leaves and twigs of various angiosperm hosts.

Complete cytogenetic response and major molecular response as surrogate outcomes for overall survival in first-line treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia: A case study for technology appraisal on the basis of surrogate outcomes evidence

Objectives In 2012, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence assessed dasatinib, nilotinib, and standard-dose imatinib as first-line treatment of chronic phase chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Licensing of these alternative treatments was based on randomized controlled trials assessing complete cytogenetic response (CCyR) and major molecular response (MMR) at 12 months as primary end points. We use this case study to illustrate the validation of CCyR and MMR as surrogate outcomes for overall survival in CML and how this evidence was used to inform National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s recommendation on the public funding of these first-line treatments for CML. Methods We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to quantify the association between CCyR and MMR at 12 months and overall survival in patients with chronic phase CML. We estimated life expectancy by extrapolating long-term survival from the weighted overall survival stratified according to the achievement of CCyR and MMR. Results Five studies provided data on the observational association between CCyR or MMR and overall survival. Based on the pooled association between CCyR and MMR and overall survival, our modeling showed comparable predicted mean duration of survival (21–23 years) following first-line treatment with imatinib, dasatinib, or nilotinib. Conclusions This case study illustrates the consideration of surrogate outcome evidence in health technology assessment. Although it is often recommended that the acceptance of surrogate outcomes be based on randomized controlled trial data demonstrating an association between the treatment effect on both the surrogate outcome and the final outcome, this case study shows that policymakers may be willing to accept a lower level of evidence (i.e., observational association).

Religion Explained? : A Philosophical Appraisal of the Cognitive Science of Religion

This study examines philosophically the main theories and methodological assumptions of the field known as the cognitive science of religion (CSR). The study makes a philosophically informed reconstruction of the methodological principles of the CSR, indicates problems with them, and examines possible solutions to these problems. The study focuses on several different CSR writers, namely, Scott Atran, Justin Barrett, Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber. CSR theorising is done in the intersection between cognitive sciences, anthropology and evolutionary psychology. This multidisciplinary nature makes CSR a fertile ground for philosophical considerations coming from philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. The study begins by spelling out the methodological assumptions and auxiliary theories of CSR writers by situating these theories and assumptions in the nexus of existing approaches to religion. The distinctive feature of CSR is its emphasis on information processing: CSR writers claim that contemporary cognitive sciences can inform anthropological theorising about the human mind and offer tools for producing causal explanations. Further, they claim to explain the prevalence and persistence of religion by cognitive systems that undergird religious thinking. I also examine the core theoretical contributions of the field focusing mainly on the (1) “minimally counter-intuitiveness hypothesis” and (2) the different ways in which supernatural agent representations activate our cognitive systems. Generally speaking, CSR writers argue for the naturalness of religion: religious ideas and practices are widespread and pervasive because human cognition operates in such a way that religious ideas are easy to acquire and transmit. The study raises two philosophical problems, namely, the “problem of scope” and the “problem of religious relevance”. The problem of scope is created by the insistence of several critics of the CSR that CSR explanations are mostly irrelevant for explaining religion. Most CSR writers themselves hold that cognitive explanations can answer most of our questions about religion. I argue that the problem of scope is created by differences in explanation-begging questions: the former group is interested in explaining different things than the latter group. I propose that we should not stick too rigidly to one set of methodological assumptions, but rather acknowledge that different assumptions might help us to answer different questions about religion. Instead of adhering to some robust metaphysics as some strongly naturalistic writers argue, we should adopt a pragmatic and explanatory pluralist approach which would allow different kinds of methodological presuppositions in the study of religion provided that they attempt to answer different kinds of why-questions, since religion appears to be a multi-faceted phenomenon that spans over a variety of fields of special sciences. The problem of religious relevance is created by the insistence of some writers that CSR theories show religious beliefs to be false or irrational, whereas others invoke CSR theories to defend certain religious ideas. The problem is interesting because it reveals the more general philosophical assumptions of those who make such interpretations. CSR theories can (and have been) interpreted in terms of three different philosophical frameworks: strict naturalism, broad naturalism and theism. I argue that CSR theories can be interpreted inside all three frameworks without doing violence to the theories and that these frameworks give different kinds of results regarding the religious relevance of CSR theories.

Tactile processing in human somatosensory and auditory cortices

Tactile sensation plays an important role in everyday life. While the somatosensory system has been studied extensively, the majority of information has come from studies using animal models. Recent development of high-resolution anatomical and functional imaging techniques has enabled the non-invasive study of human somatosensory cortex and thalamus. This thesis provides new insights into the functional organization of the human brain areas involved in tactile processing using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The thesis also demonstrates certain optimizations of MEG and fMRI methods. Tactile digit stimulation elicited stimulus-specific responses in a number of brain areas. Contralateral activation was observed in somatosensory thalamus (Study II), primary somatosensory cortex (SI; I, III, IV), and post-auditory belt area (III). Bilateral activation was observed in secondary somatosensory cortex (SII; II, III, IV). Ipsilateral activation was found in the post-central gyrus (area 2 of SI cortex; IV). In addition, phasic deactivation was observed within ipsilateral SI cortex and bilateral primary motor cortex (IV). Detailed investigation of the tactile responses demonstrated that the arrangement of distal-proximal finger representations in area 3b of SI in humans is similar to that found in monkeys (I). An optimized MEG approach was sufficient to resolve such fine detail in functional organization. The SII region appeared to contain double representations for fingers and toes (II). The detection of activations in the SII region and thalamus improved at the individual and group levels when cardiac-gated fMRI was used (II). Better detection of body part representations at the individual level is an important improvement, because identification of individual representations is crucial for studying brain plasticity in somatosensory areas. The posterior auditory belt area demonstrated responses to both auditory and tactile stimuli (III), implicating this area as a physiological substrate for the auditory-tactile interaction observed in earlier psychophysical studies. Comparison of different smoothing parameters (III) demonstrated that proper evaluation of co-activation should be based on individual subject analysis with minimal or no smoothing. Tactile input consistently influenced area 3b of the human ipsilateral SI cortex (IV). The observed phasic negative fMRI response is proposed to result from interhemispheric inhibition via trans-callosal connections. This thesis contributes to a growing body of human data suggesting that processing of tactile stimuli involves multiple brain areas, with different spatial patterns of cortical activation for different stimuli.

Predicting the Timing of Spikes Evoked by Tactile Stimulation of the Hand

Kim SS, Sripati AP, Bensmaia SJ. Predicting the timing of spikes evoked by tactile stimulation of the hand. J Neurophysiol 104: 1484-1496, 2010. First published July 7, 2010; doi: 10.1152/jn.00187.2010. What does the hand tell the brain? Tactile stimulation of the hand evokes remarkably precise patterns of neural activity, suggesting that the timing of individual spikes may convey information. However, many aspects of the transformation of mechanical deformations of the skin into spike trains remain unknown. Here we describe an integrate-and-fire model that accurately predicts the timing of individual spikes evoked by arbitrary mechanical vibrations in three types of mechanoreceptive afferent fibers that innervate the hand. The model accounts for most known properties of the three fiber types, including rectification, frequency-sensitivity, and patterns of spike entrainment as a function of stimulus frequency. These results not only shed light on the mechanisms of mechanotransduction but can be used to provide realistic tactile feedback in upper-limb neuroprostheses.

The Tevatron Higgs exclusion limits and theoretical uncertainties: A critical appraisal

We examine the exclusion limits set by the CDF and D0 experiments on the Standard Model Higgs boson mass from their searches at the Tevatron in the light of large theoretical uncertainties on the signal and background cross sections. We show that when these uncertainties are consistently taken into account, the sensitivity of the experiments becomes significantly lower and the currently excluded mass range M-H = 158-175 GeV could be entirely reopened. The necessary luminosity required to recover the current sensitivity is found to be a factor of two higher than the present one. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

An appraisal of electric automobile power sources

Road transportation, as an important requirement of modern society, is presently hindered by restrictions in emission legislations as well as the availability of petroleum fuels, and as a consequence, the fuel cost. For nearly 270 years, we burned our fossil cache and have come to within a generation of exhausting the liquid part of it. Besides, to reduce the greenhouse gases, and to obey the environmental laws of most countries, it would be necessary to replace a significant number of the petroleum-fueled internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEVs) with electric cars in the near future. In this article, we briefly describe the merits and demerits of various proposed electrochemical systems for electric cars, namely the storage batteries, fuel cells and electrochemical supercapacitors, and determine the power and energy requirements of a modern car. We conclude that a viable electric car could be operated with a 50 kW polymer-electrolyte fuel cell stack to provide power for cruising and climbing, coupled in parallel with a 30 kW supercapacitor and/or battery bank to deliver additional short-term burst-power during acceleration.

Appraisal of Bishop's method of slope stability analysis

The stability of slopes is a major problem in geotechnical engineering. Of the methods available for the analysis of soil slopes such as limit equilibrium methods, limit analysis and numerical methods such as FEM and FDM, limit equilibrium methods are popular and generally used, owing to their simplicity in formulation and in evaluating the overall factor of safety of slope. However limit equilibrium methods possess certain disadvantages. They do not consider whether the slope is an embankment or natural slope or an excavation and ignore the effect of incremental construction, initial stress, stress strain behavior etc. In the work reported in this paper, a comparative study of actual state of stress and actual factor of safety and Bishop's factor of safety is performed. The actual factor of safety is obtained by consideration of contours of mobilised shear strains. Using Bishop's method of slices, the critical slip surfaces of a number of soil slopes with different geometries are determined and both the factors of safety are obtained. The actual normal stresses and shear stresses are determined from finite difference formulation using FLAG (Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continuaa) with Mohr-Coulomb model. The comparative study is performed in terms of parameter lambda(c phi) (= gamma H tan phi/c). I is shown that actual factor of safety is higher than Bishop's factor of safety depending on slope angle and lambda(c phi).

Appraisal of observational method for consolidation analysis

Two of the aims of laboratory one-dimensional consolidation tests are prediction of the end of primary settlement, and determination of the coefficient of consolidation of soils required for the time rate of consolidation analysis from time-compression data. Of the many methods documented in the literature to achieve these aims, Asaoka's method is a simple and useful tool, and yet the most neglected one since its inception in the geotechnical engineering literature more than three decades ago. This paper appraises Asaoka's method, originally proposed for the field prediction of ultimate settlement, from the perspective of laboratory consolidation analysis along with recent developments. It is shown through experimental illustrations that Asaoka's method is simpler than the conventional and popular methods, and makes a satisfactory prediction of both the end of primary compression and the coefficient of consolidation from laboratory one-dimensional consolidation test data.

Appraisal of groundwater resource in Holocene soil deposits by resistivity, hydrochemical and granulomerial studies in the Gulf of Mannar Coast from Southern India

This article is aimed to delineate groundwater sources in Holocene deposits area in the Gulf of Mannar Coast from Southern India. For this purpose 2-D electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), hydrochemical and granulomerical studies were carried out and integrated to identify hydrogeological structures and portable groundwater resource in shallow depths which in general appears in the coastal tracts. The 2-D ERT was used to determine the two-dimensional subsurface geological formations by multicore cable with Wenner array. Low resistivity of 1-5 Omega m for saline water appeared due to calcite at the depth of about 5 m below the ground level (bgl). Sea water intrusion was observed around the maximum resistivity as 5 Omega m at the 8 m depth, bgl in the calcite environs, but the calcareous sandstone layer shows around 15-64 Omega m at the 6 m depth, bgl. The hydrochemical variation of TDS, HCO3-, Cl-, Na+, K+, Ca2+, and Mg2+ concentrations was observed for the saline and sea water intrusion in the groundwater system. The granulometic analysis shows that the study area was under the sea between 5400 and 3000 year ago. The events of ice melting an unnatural ice-stone rain/hail among 5000-4000 years ago resulted in the inundation of sea over the area and deposits of late Holocene marine transgression formation up to Puthukottai quartzite region for a stretch of around 17 km.