538 research outputs found

    Tettagalma Menon, new genus

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    <i>Tettagalma</i> Menon, new genus <p> <b>Diagnosis.</b> Medium­sized (25 mm forewing length) tettigarctid; prominent costal margin; Rs with three branches; origin of MA branches proximal to nodal line; CuA strongly deflected anteriorly at nodal line; wide marginal membrane; marginal membrane bearing numerous, equidistant striae.</p> <p> <b>Etymology.</b> Genus­group name formed from a combination of <i>tetti</i> in reference to the family and <i>agalma</i> from the Greek present, gift, as the specimen was donated to the author.</p> <p> <b>Type locality and horizon.</b> Vicinity of Nova Olinda, Nova Olinda Member, Crato Formation.</p> <p> <b>Type species.</b> <i>Tettagalma striata</i> Menon new genus and species, by monotypy.</p>Published as part of <i>Menon, Federica, 2005, New record of Tettigarctidae (Insecta, Hemiptera, Cicadoidea) from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil, pp. 53-58 in Zootaxa 1087</i> on page 54, DOI: <a href="http://zenodo.org/record/170508">10.5281/zenodo.170508</a&gt

    6-year outcomes of the United Kingdom Medisoft® audit study following treatment with the ILUVIEN® (fluocinolone acetonide) implant in patients with diabetic macular edema.

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    Purpose: The Medisoft study was designed as a retrospective audit of eyes treated with the fluocinolone acetonide (FAc) implant and aimed to assess the long-term effectiveness and safety of FAc implant in patients with diabetic macular edema (DME) that persists or recurs despite treatment. Outcomes from this study have previously been reported in patients monitored for ≥3 years. We now report outcomes obtained in the last 3-years since the initial outcomes were reported. Methods. The Medisoft audit tool was used to extract pseudo-anonymised electronic medical records (EMR), identifying only patients with DME that had been treated with the FAc implant across 14 UK clinical sites between 2014 and 2022. Clinical effectiveness and safety were measured.Results. Data were available from 302 eyes (256 patients) with ≥3 years of follow-up. The mean follow-up period was 64.2±18.4 months [mean±SD]). Best-recorded visual acuity (BRVA) was 56.8±15.6 letters, 59.2±17.1 letters and 60.54±15.6 letters at baseline, 3 and 6 years respectively. At years 3 and 6, stable/improved BRVA was observed in 75.6% and 74.6% respectively. The proportion of eyes with 6/12 (20/40) or better BRVA rose from 22.5% at baseline to 35.2% and 39.7%, respectively. In terms of safety, mean IOP was 16.3±4.1 mmHg at baseline and remained below a mean value of 21 mmHg at years 3 and 6. Around one third (36.1%) of eyes required topical IOP-lowering drops to control elevations in pressure (versus 21.5% of eyes pre-FAc implant) and IOP was &gt;30 mmHg at a single time point post-FAc implant in 25.5% of eyes (versus 10.6 pre-FAc implant).Conclusions. Over a 6-year follow-up period, UK EMR data obtained in real-world practice revealed that three-out-of-four patients with DME and treated with a FAc implant benefited from stable/improved BRVA and that one-in-three had visual acuity 6/12 or better. This data was obtained since the first eye was treated in the UK and is an ongoing study that will continue to monitor the outcomes and the management of DME patients in clinical practice.<br/

    Treatment satisfaction and well-being in patients with myopic choroidal neovascularization treated with ranibizumab in the REPAIR study

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    The Ranibizumab for the Treatment of Choroidal Neovascularisation (CNV) Secondary to Pathological Myopia (PM): an Individualized Regimen (REPAIR) trial was a prospective study exploring the efficacy and safety of intravitreal ranibizumab 0.5 mg using an individualized treatment regimen over 12 months. The current study investigated the impact of treatment with ranibizumab as needed (pro re nata [PRN]) on individuals with myopic choroidal neovascularization (mCNV) in the REPAIR study, using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for treatment satisfaction and well-being. This study included 65 adults with mCNV and a best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) letter score of 24-78 in the study eye. Patients completed the Macular Disease Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire (MacTSQ) at months 1, 6 and 12, and the 12-item Well-Being Questionnaire (W-BQ12) at baseline and months 1, 6 and 12. Subgroup analyses investigated the relationship between PROM scores and treatment in the better- or worse-seeing eye (BSE/WSE), number of injections received, baseline BCVA, BCVA improvement and age. Pearson correlations between change in BCVA, MacTSQ scores and W-BQ12 scores were calculated. The main outcome measures were treatment satisfaction measured with the MacTSQ (score 0-72) and well-being measured with the W-BQ12 (score 0-36). Treatment satisfaction significantly increased over the study period (p = 0.0001). Mean MacTSQ scores increased by 9.7 and 10.0 in patients treated in their WSE and BSE, respectively. Treatment satisfaction was highest in individuals receiving only one injection at month 1; however, by month 12, scores were similar across injection subgroups. Patients aged 68 years or older had the highest MacTSQ scores. Well-being scores also significantly increased over the study period (p = 0.03). Mean W-BQ12 scores increased by 1.7 in patients treated in their WSE and by 2.1 in patients treated in their BSE. Individuals aged 40 years or younger had the greatest increases in general well-being. Patients who experienced stable or improved BCVA at month 12 had greater increases in W-BQ12 scores than those who experienced a decrease. Correlations between BCVA, MacTSQ scores and W-BQ12 scores were largely non-significant. In conclusion, treatment satisfaction and well-being increased during treatment with ranibizumab PRN. Although directly comparable data are limited for the MacTSQ and W-BQ12 in mCNV, these results complement PROM outcomes reported in related studies

    Novel Dialogue 2.3: Because I Couldn't Be a Dancer: Sigrid Nunez and Tara Menon (JP)

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    The brilliant New York writer Sigrid Nunez's most recent novel is What Are You Going Through; her previous one, The Friend, (2018) won the National Book Award. She speaks with Tara Menon, of the Harvard English department, and author of a terrific article about Sigrid Nunez in the Sewanee Review. The conversation ranges widely and then plunges into depths. Because life is defined by grief and mourning, so too are my novels, says Nunez. She thinks her upbringing with immigrant parents who felt adrift from their homeland and her own "failure" as a dancer (recounted in her 1995 debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God ) are the ferment from which her vocation as a writer arose. The question of genre is tossed around: "fictional memoir" perhaps, which gets confused (insultingly, Tara thinks!) with auto-fiction. But Sigrid is fascinated by establishing a reality that is entirely made-up ("not a single friend angry!"), yet also documentary in nature. Perhaps the best tag for her work is "essay novel": that allows one to do what Javier Marias calls "literary thinking." And there's a wonderfully non-Pavlovian answer to the treat question: sometimes you can just have the whiskey

    A priori and a posteriori analysis of the hybrid two-level large-eddy simulation method for high Reynolds number complex flows

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    We present a priori and a posteriori analysis of the assumptions and predictions of the hybrid two-level large-eddy simulation (TLS-LES) method for high Reynolds number complex flows. The TLS-LES methodology is a multi-scale framework for simulation of turbulent flows in complex configurations at practically relevant Reynolds number. It additively combines the two-level simulation (TLS) model with a conventional large-eddy simulation (LES) approach by employing a static or dynamic blending function. In the present study, first we analyze the model assumptions employed by the TLS model to obtain the small-scale solution necessary for closure of the large-scale equations. Afterward, we analyze the large-scale and small-scale solutions to assess the predictive ability of the multi-scale framework for specific turbulence physics such as role of forward and backscatter of energy and presence of co- and counter-gradient diffusion. To perform these investigations, we consider cases with increasing degree of geometrical complexity, namely, flow in a periodic channel, flow past a bump placed on the lower surface of the channel and flow past a finite-span NACA0015 airfoil

    Judgments of behavioral frequencies: An information processing perspective

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    U of I OnlyIn marketing and consumer research, respondents are often asked questions about the frequency with which they engage in various behaviors (e.g., bank loans taken, purchases of durable goods, consumption of snack foods). The information processing demands that such questions placed on the respondent can be tremendous. For some behaviors, it may be easy to recall all specific instances of the target behavior and provide an exact count. For relatively frequent behaviors, however, this recall-and-count method may be difficult or impossible; instead consumers are likely to use heuristics to arrive at a behavioral frequency estimate.This research examines the process by which frequency judgments are generated for frequent behavior with the goals of (a) contributing to our knowledge of the cognitive processing of autobiographical information (organization and structure in memory, retrieval strategies), and (b) understanding how different questioning strategies may improve the accuracy of such behavioral frequency judgments.It is hypothesized that the regularity and the similarity of the target behavior determine the way the requisite information is stored in memory and therefore the process by which the judgment is generated. This, in turn, determines the effectiveness of alternative cuing strategies. These hypotheses are tested by obtaining judgments of the frequency of behaviors varying on regularity and similarity. The dependent measures are: (a) verbal protocols, concurrent and retrospective, (b) response time to generate a frequency judgment, and (c) the discrepancy between reported frequency and objective frequency (diary data).Data indicate that there is support for the model of autobiographical memory for frequent events tested in this research. However, the cuing strategies tested seem to interfere with the natural process of frequency judgment formulation in a way that they do not contribute to improving the accuracy of these reports.Theoretical implications of the results for autobiographical information processing and questionnaire and survey design are discussed, together with practical implications and proposed extensions for future research.Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T12:14:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4922 bytes, checksum: 910b249b4beec47e7ab768910c8f966f (MD5) 9210916.pdf: 7765994 bytes, checksum: ecb039fb9f0ce6f2ed8d6ac5778ca9b5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1991Item marked as restricted to the 'UIUC Users [automated]' Group (id=2) by Howard Ding ([email protected]) on 2011-05-07T14:38:36Z Item is restricted indefinitely.Restriction data tranferred 2014-07-01T11:16:06-05:00 Original Data Group with Access UIUC Users [automated] Release Date: none Reason: ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissionETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

    Il bene del filosofo e il limite della città. Sulla politica filosofica di Leo Strauss

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    The intention of this paper is to show how Leo Straussʼ mature writings respond to the twofold necessity of political philosophy: contributing, at the same time, to the good of the city and to the good of the philosophers. In the first place, it will try to prove this point by analyzing in detail the Introduction to On Tyranny (1948), which represents an essential step in order to understand the intention of the author. In the second place, it will tackle the problem of justice, that is, of natural right, by concentrating on the so called " tyrannical teaching ". This teaching is a way to present a truth which the city cannot find acceptable, that is, an unpleasant truth concerning the irresoluble problem of justice and legitimacy. In conclusion, it will point to the tension between philosophy, i.e., search for knowledge, and the city, i.e., the realm of opinion. For the philosopher, as such, has to " corrupt " the young in order to pursue his search for knowledge of the whole, or the nature of all things. Therefore, he weakens the city, since philosophizing implies unbelief in the gods of the city

    Equivariant elliptic cohomology and twisted equivariant k-theory

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    Equivariant elliptic cohomology and twisted equivariant K-theory are both related to the representations of loop groups. After making these relationships precise, we propose a map from twisted equivariant elliptic cohomology to twisted K-theory of the inertia stack using equivariant de Rham models. This proposal agrees with the Freed-Hopkins-Teleman q = 1 map from characters of representations of loop groups to distributions associated to twisted equivariant K-theory classes.Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2021-08-01The student, Dileep Menon, accepted the attached license on 2019-05-24 at 15:54.The student, Dileep Menon, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2019-05-24 at 16:06.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2019-05-28 at 10:50.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #13991 on 2019-11-26 at 13:00:58Made available in DSpace on 2019-11-26T20:49:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 4 MENON-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf: 528838 bytes, checksum: fbe8f9b0e3bd2fbc0c4e207d94ba6cdd (MD5) thesis-ex.tex: 116427 bytes, checksum: 1eb2193b9661caa6b07eb1f864882e78 (MD5) thesisbib.bib: 7057 bytes, checksum: 2f604815e6b22de4a7bd0bec92caf53a (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4209 bytes, checksum: ef4b73600b176b70c7c9713536cda315 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2019-05-28Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 112889 Lift date: 2021-11-26T20:49:41Z Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD systemU of I Only Restriction Lifted for Item 112889 on 2021-11-27T10:15:09Z

    The Effect of Systemic Levels of TNF-alpha and Complement Pathway Activity on Outcomes of VEGF Inhibition in Neovascular AMD

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    Background/Objectives: Systemic levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and activated complement components affect the risk and/or progression of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This study investigated the effect of serum pro-inflammatory cytokine levels and complement pathway activity on the clinical response to vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibition in neovascular AMD. Methods: Sixty-five patients with a new diagnosis of neovascular AMD were observed over a six-month period in a single-centre, longitudinal cohort study. At each visit, the visual acuity score (VAS), central macular thickness (CMT), serum levels of CRP, pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-2, IL-6 and IL-8), and complement pathway activity were measured. Participant DNA samples were sequenced for six complement pathway single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with AMD. Results: A statistically significant difference in VAS was observed for serum levels of TNF-α only: there was a gain in VAS (from baseline) of 1.37 for participants below the 1st quartile of mean concentration compared to a reduction of 2.71 for those above the 3rd quartile. Statistical significance was maintained after Bonferroni correction (P value set at &lt;0.006). No significant differences in CMT were observed. In addition, statistically significant differences, maintained after Bonferroni correction, were observed in serum complement activity for participants with the following SNPs: CFH region (rs1061170), SERPING1 (rs2511989) and CFB (rs641153). Serum complement pathway components did not significantly affect VAS. Conclusions: Lower serum TNF-α levels were associated with an increase in visual acuity after anti-VEGF therapy. This suggests that targeting pro-inflammatory cytokines may augment treatment for neovascular AMD.</p

    Genome-wide association study of primary open angle glaucoma risk and quantitative traits

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    PURPOSE: Primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) is a characteristic optic neuropathy which progresses to irreversible vision loss. Few genes have been detected that influence POAG susceptibility and other genes are therefore likely to be involved. We analyzed carefully characterized POAG cases in a genome-wide association study (GWAS). METHODS: We performed a GWAS in 387 POAG cases using public control data (WTCCC2). We also investigated the quantitative phenotypes, cup:disc ratio (CDR), central corneal thickness (CCT), and intra-ocular pressure (IOP). Promising single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), based on various prioritisation criteria, were genotyped in a cohort of 294 further POAG cases and controls. RESULTS: We found 2 GWAS significant results in the discovery stage for association, one of which which had multiple evidence in the gene 'neural precursor cell expressed, developmentally down-regulated 9' (NEDD9; rs11961171, p=8.55E-13) and the second on chromosome 16 with no supporting evidence. Taking into account all the evidence from risk and quantitative trait ocular phenotypes we chose 86 SNPs for replication in an independent sample. Our most significant SNP was not replicated (p=0.59). We found 4 nominally significant results in the replication cohort, but none passed correction for multiple testing. Two of these, for phenotypes CDR (rs4385494, discovery p=4.51x10-5, replication p=0.029) and CCT (rs17128941, discovery p=5.52x10-6, replication=0.027), show the consistent direction of effects between the discovery and replication data. We also assess evidence for previously associated known genes and find evidence for the genes 'transmembrane and coiled-coil domains 1' (TMCO1) and 'cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2B' (CDKN2B). CONCLUSIONS: Although we were unable to replicate any novel results for POAG risk, we did replicate two SNPs with consistent effects for CDR and CCT, though they do not withstand correction for multiple testing. There has been a range of publications in the last couple of years identifying POAG risk genes and genes involved in POAG related ocular traits. We found evidence for 3 known genes (TMCO1, CDKN2B, and S1 RNA binding domain 1 [SRBD1]) in this study. Novel rare variants, not detectable by GWAS, but by new methods such as exome sequencing may hold the key to unravelling the remaining contribution of genetics to complex diseases such as POAG
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