On Presence, Collective Performance and Assumptions of Causality

The ways we assume, observe and model “presence” and its effects are the focus in this paper. Entities with selectively shared presences are the basis of any collective, and of attributions (such as “humorous”, “efficient” or “intelligent”). The subtleties of any joint presence can markedly influence potentials, perceptions and performance of the collective as demonstrated when a humorous tale is counterpoised with disciplined thought. Disciplines build on presences assumed known or knowable while fluid and interpretable presences pervade humor. Explorations in this paper allow considerations of collectives, causality and the philosophy of computing. Economics has long considered issues of collective action in ways circumscribed by assumptions about the presence of economic entities. Such entities are deemed rational but they are clearly not intelligent. To reach its potential, collective intelligence research needs more adequate considerations of alternate presences and their impacts.

Vectors and methods for hairpin RNA and artificial microRNA-mediated gene silencing in plants

In plant cells, DICER-LIKE4 processes perfectly double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) into short interfering (si) RNAs, and DICER-LIKE1 generates micro (mi) RNAs from primary miRNA transcripts (pri-miRNA) that form fold-back structures of imperfectly dsRNA. Both si and miRNAs direct the endogenous endonuclease, ARGONAUTE1 to cleave complementary target single-stranded RNAs and either small RNA (sRNA)-directed pathway can be harnessed to silence genes in plants. A routine way of inducing and directing RNA silencing by siRNAs is to express self-complementary single-stranded hairpin RNA (hpRNA), in which the duplexed region has the same sequence as part of the target gene's mRNA. Artificial miRNA (amiRNA)-mediated silencing uses an endogenous pri-miRNA, in which the original miRNA/miRNA* sequence has been replaced with a sequence complementary to the new target gene. In this chapter, we describe the plasmid vector systems routinely used by our research group for the generation of either hpRNA-derived siRNAs or amiRNAs.

A retrospective cohort study of Acticoat™ versus Silvazine™ in a paediatric population

We wished to determine whether changing our centre's practice of using Acticoat instead of Silvazine as our first-line burns dressing provided a better standard of care in terms of efficacy, cost and ease of use. A retrospective cohort study was performed examining 328 Silvazine treated patients from January 2000 to June 2001 and 241 Acticoat treated patients from July 2002 to July 2003. During those periods the respective dressings were used exclusively. There was no significant difference in age, %BSA and mechanism of burn between the groups. In the Silvazine group, 25.6% of children required grafting compared to 15.4% in the Acticoat group (p=0.001). When patients requiring grafting were excluded, the time taken for re-epithelialisation in the Acticoat group (14.9 days) was significantly less than that for the Silvazine group (18.3 days), p=0.047. There were more wounds requiring long term scar management in the Silvazine group (32.6%) compared to the Acticoat group (29.5%), however this was not significant. There was only one positive blood culture in each group, indicating that both Silvazine and Acticoat are potent antimicrobial agents. The use of Acticoat as our primary burns dressing has dramatically changed our clinical practice. Inpatients are now only 18% of the total admissions, with the vast majority of patients treated on an outpatient basis. In terms of cost, Acticoat was demonstrated to be less expensive over the treatment period than Silvazine . We have concluded that Acticoat is a safe, cost-effective, efficacious dressing that reduces the time for re-epithelialisation and the requirement for grafting and long term scar management, compared to Silvazine.

Silver absorption on burns after the application of Acticoat : data from pediatric patients and a porcine burn model

Silver dressings have been widely used to successfully prevent burn wound infection and sepsis. However, a few case studies have reported the functional abnormality and failure of vital organs, possibly caused by silver deposits. The aim of this study was to investigate the serum silver level in the pediatric burn population and also in several internal organs in a porcine burn model after the application of Acticoat. A total of 125 blood samples were collected from 46 pediatric burn patients. Thirty-six patients with a mean of 13.4% TBSA burns had a mean peak serum silver level of 114 microg/L, whereas 10 patients with a mean of 1.85% TBSA burns had an undetectable level of silver (<5.4 microg/L). Overall, serum silver levels were closely related to burn sizes. However, the highest serum silver was 735 microg/L in a 15-month-old toddler with 10% TBSA burns and the second highest was 367 microg/L in a 3-year old with 28% TBSA burns. In a porcine model with 2% TBSA burns, the mean peak silver level was 38 microg/L at 2 to 3 weeks after application of Acticoat and was then significantly reduced to an almost undetectable level at 6 weeks. Of a total of four pigs, silver was detected in all four livers (1.413 microg/g) and all four hearts (0.342 microg/g), three of four kidneys (1.113 microg/g), and two of four brains (0.402 microg/g). This result demonstrated that although variable, the level of serum silver was positively associated with the size of burns, and significant amounts of silver were deposited in internal organs in pigs with only 2% TBSA burns, after application of Acticoat.

Selective regulation of p38β protein and signaling by integrin-linked kinase mediates bladder cancer cell migration

Integrin-linked kinase (ILK) and p38MAPK are protein kinases that transduce extracellular signals regulating cell migration and actin cytoskeletal organization. ILK-dependent regulation of p38MAPK is critical for mammalian kidney development and in smooth muscle cell migration, however, specific p38 isoforms has not been previously examined in ILK-regulated responses. Signaling by ILK and p38MAPK is often dysregulated in bladder cancer, and here we report a strong positive correlation between protein levels of ILK and p38β, which is the predominant isoform found in bladder cancer cells, as well as in patient-matched normal bladder and tumor samples. Knockdown by RNA interference of either p38β or ILK disrupts serum-induced, Rac1-dependent migration and actin cytoskeletal organization in bladder cancer cells. Surprisingly, ILK knockdown causes the selective reduction in p38β cellular protein level, without inhibiting p38β messenger RNA (mRNA) expression. The loss of p38β protein in ILK-depleted cells is partially rescued by the 26S proteasomal inhibitor MG132. Using co-precipitation and bimolecular fluorescent complementation assays, we find that ILK selectively forms cytoplasmic complexes with p38β. In situ proximity ligation assays further demonstrate that serum-stimulated assembly of endogenous ILK–p38β complexes is sensitive to QLT-0267, a small molecule ILK kinase inhibitor. Finally, inhibition of ILK reduces the amplitude and period of serum-induced activation of heat shock protein 27 (Hsp27), a target of p38β implicated in actin cytoskeletal reorganization. Our work identifies Hsp27 as a novel target of ILK–p38β signaling complexes, playing a key role in bladder cancer cell migration.

Health big data analytics : current perspectives, challenges and potential solutions

Modern health information systems can generate several exabytes of patient data, the so called "Health Big Data", per year. Many health managers and experts believe that with the data, it is possible to easily discover useful knowledge to improve health policies, increase patient safety and eliminate redundancies and unnecessary costs. The objective of this paper is to discuss the characteristics of Health Big Data as well as the challenges and solutions for health Big Data Analytics (BDA) – the process of extracting knowledge from sets of Health Big Data – and to design and evaluate a pipelined framework for use as a guideline/reference in health BDA.

Celebrating a partnership for the benefit of patients

In today’s NHS culture, commissioners are increasingly looking to the third sector for innovation and excellence in healthcare delivery. Opportunities for organisations within this sector to form fruitful and lasting partnerships have also grown.

Martha and her sisters : women in films about journalism

HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn (Philip Kaufman, 2012), broadcast in May on US television and starring Nicole Kidman as the pioneering female foreign correspondent, hasn't been well reviewed by the majority of critics. Variety described the biopic (with Clive Owen as Hemingway) as “swollen and heavy-handed”, while the Huffington Post declared it an “expensive misfire … a gigantic missed opportunity, a jaw-droppingly trying waste of time”. Regardless of whether such criticisms are fair—as this essay went to press I had been unable to see the film, so I cannot judge one way or the other—Hemingway and Gellhorn should be viewed as a significant addition to the filmography of journalism, retrieving from history as it does the achievements of one of the most significant of the early female practitioners. Gellhorn was a pioneer in a patriarchal press universe, a foreign and war correspondent at a time when this branch of the profession was seen very much as man's work. She covered the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and with just as much viscerality as any man.

Consciousness, solidarity and hope as prevention and rehabilitation

This paper grapples with the question of how progressive criminologists might approach working with people who have committed violent or predatory crimes, or are ‘at risk’ of doing so. Progressives have often been uneasy about ‘intervention’ with people who offend: but in the face of the destructiveness of violence, especially in some parts of the world, a posture of simple non-intervention won’t suffice. I suggest three central principles – which I call consciousness, solidarity and hope – that may guide us in developing ways of working with offenders that are both progressive and effective.

Learning detectors quickly with stationary statistics

Computer vision is increasingly becoming interested in the rapid estimation of object detectors. The canonical strategy of using Hard Negative Mining to train a Support Vector Machine is slow, since the large negative set must be traversed at least once per detector. Recent work has demonstrated that, with an assumption of signal stationarity, Linear Discriminant Analysis is able to learn comparable detectors without ever revisiting the negative set. Even with this insight, the time to learn a detector can still be on the order of minutes. Correlation filters, on the other hand, can produce a detector in under a second. However, this involves the unnatural assumption that the statistics are periodic, and requires the negative set to be re-sampled per detector size. These two methods differ chie y in the structure which they impose on the co- variance matrix of all examples. This paper is a comparative study which develops techniques (i) to assume periodic statistics without needing to revisit the negative set and (ii) to accelerate the estimation of detectors with aperiodic statistics. It is experimentally verified that periodicity is detrimental.

Experiential role of artefacts in cooperative design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an 'experiential' role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the materiality, use and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people's performance and help them make better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain such as industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by design-related artefacts such as sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes -- used and developed in designers' everyday work. Our main intention in carrying out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers' everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on the personal, social and creative side of people's everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a much broader view in the design of new interactive technologies.

The role of parents and non-parents in the supervision of learner drivers in Australia

The purpose of this study was to contrast the role of parental and non-parental (sibling, other family and non-family) supervisors in the supervision of learner drivers in graduated driver licensing systems. The sample consisted of 522 supervisors from the Australian states of Queensland (n = 204, 39%) and New South Wales (n = 318, 61%). The learner licence requirements in these two states are similar, although learners in Queensland are required to accrue 100 h of supervision in a log book while those in New South Wales are required to accrue 120 h. Approximately 50 per cent of the sample (n = 255) were parents of the learner driver while the remainder of the sample were either siblings (n = 72, 13.8%), other family members (n = 153, 29.3%) or non-family (n = 114, 21.8%). Parents were more likely than siblings, other family or non-family members to be the primary supervisor of the learner driver. Siblings provided fewer hours of practice when compared with other supervisor types while the median and mode suggest that parents provided the most hours of practice to learner drivers. This study demonstrates that non-parental supervisors, such as siblings, other family members and non-family, at least in jurisdictions that require 100 or 120 h of practice, are important in facilitating learner drivers to accumulate sufficient supervised driving practice.

The power of naming : the multifaceted value of learning students’ names

The modern day Australian law school is expected to educate and engage law students. Ideally law school will instil a sense of passion (or at least appreciation) for the law, promote a positive professional identity, foster a sense of community, and provide general support to law students. Collectively, the Australian legal academy is struggling with these goals. Significant numbers of students feel isolated, disconnected and unengaged throughout their tertiary legal education. Teaching students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, who spend less time on campus and less face-to-face time in class, many law academics feel ill-equipped to respond to the challenge of engaging law students in time and cost efficient ways. Intentionally learning and using student names has potential to humanise the law school experience, build community, and positively impact upon the wellbeing of students and staff.

High pressure in situ diffraction studies of metal–hydrogen systems

“Hybrid” hydrogen storage, where hydrogen is stored in both the solid material and as a high pressure gas in the void volume of the tank can improve overall system efficiency by up to 50% compared to either compressed hydrogen or solid materials alone. Thermodynamically, high equilibrium hydrogen pressures in metal–hydrogen systems correspond to low enthalpies of hydrogen absorption–desorption. This decreases the calorimetric effects of the hydride formation–decomposition processes which can assist in achieving high rates of heat exchange during hydrogen loading—removing the bottleneck in achieving low charging times and improving overall hydrogen storage efficiency of large hydrogen stores. Two systems with hydrogenation enthalpies close to −20 kJ/mol H2 were studied to investigate the hydrogenation mechanism and kinetics: CeNi5–D2 and ZrFe2−xAlx (x = 0.02; 0.04; 0.20)–D2. The structure of the intermetallics and their hydrides were studied by in situ neutron powder diffraction at pressures up to 1000 bar and complementary X-ray diffraction. The deuteration of the hexagonal CeNi5 intermetallic resulted in CeNi5D6.3 with a volume expansion of 30.1%. Deuterium absorption filled three different types of interstices, Ce2Ni2 and Ni4 tetrahedra, and Ce2Ni3 half-octahedra and was accompanied by a valence change for Ce. Significant hysteresis was observed between deuterium absorption and desorption which profoundly decreased on a second absorption cycle. For the Al-modified Laves-type C15 ZrFe2−xAlx intermetallics, deuteration showed very fast kinetics of H/D exchange and resulted in a volume increase of the FCC unit cells of 23.5% for ZrFe1.98Al0.02D2.9(1). Deuterium content, hysteresis of H/D uptake and release, unit cell expansion and stability of the hydrides systematically change with the amount of Al content. In the deuteride D atoms exclusively occupy the Zr2(Fe,Al)2 tetrahedra. Observed interatomic distances are Zr–D = 1.98–2.11; (Fe, Al)–D = 1.70–1.75A˚ . Hydrogenation slightly increases the magnetic moment of the Fe atoms in ZrFe1.98Al0.02 and ZrFe1.96Al0.04 from 1.9 �B at room temperature for the alloy to 2.2 �B for its deuteride.

Ability of recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein 2 to enhance bone healing in the presence of tobramycin : evaluation in a rat segmental defect model

Objective To determine whether locally applied tobramycin influences the ability of recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein 2 (rhBMP-2) to heal a segmental defect in the rat femur. Methods The influence of tobramycin on the osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells was first evaluated in vitro. For the subsequent, in vivo experiments, a 5-mm segmental defect was created in the right femur of each of 25 Sprague-Dawley rats and stabilized with an external fixator and four Kirschner wires. Rats were divided in four groups: empty control, tobramycin (11 mg)/absorbable collagen sponge, rhBMP-2 (11 μg)/absorbable collagen sponge, and rhBMP-2/absorbable collagen sponge with tobramycin. Bone healing was monitored by radiography at 3 and 8 weeks. Animals were euthanized at 8 weeks and the properties of the defect were compared with the intact contralateral femur. Bone formation in the defect region was assessed by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, microcomputed tomography, histology, and mechanical testing. Results Tobramycin exerted a dose-dependent inhibition of alkaline phosphatase induction and calcium deposition by mesenchymal stem cells cultured under osteogenic conditions. The inhibition was reversed in the presence of 500 ng/mL of rhBMP-2. Segmental defects in the rat femora failed to heal in the absence of rhBMP-2. Tobramycin exerted no inhibitory effects on the ability of rhBMP-2 to heal these defects and increased the bone area of the defects treated with rhBMP-2. Data obtained from all other parameters of healing, including dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, microcomputed tomography, histology, and mechanical testing, were unaffected by tobramycin. Conclusions Although our in vitro results suggested that tobramycin inhibits the osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells, this could be overcome by rhBMP-2. Tobramycin did not impair the ability of rhBMP-2 to heal critical-sized femoral defects in rats. Indeed, bone area was increased by nearly 20% in the rhBMP-2 group treated with tobramycin. This study shows that locally applied tobramycin can be used in conjunction with rhBMP-2 to enhance bone formation at fracture sites.