Sophisticated Insight Research Articles

Critical Reflections: A Qualitative Study on the Development and Impact of Critical Thinking Skills Across Industries

Critical thinking is a vital skill in professional settings, contributing to increased efficiency and innovation. Recognizing its importance, this study aims to explore how critical thinking is developed and applied across various industries. It is based on qualitative interviews with professionals in Education, Health, Logistics, Tourism, and Media. The analysis utilizes thematic, comparative, and content analysis to provide a sophisticated insight into the conceptualization, learning, and practice of critical thinking skills in each industry. By examining industry-specific differences, the study emphasizes the necessity for specialized training programs tailored to the unique demands of each sector. The uniqueness of this study lies in its comprehensive cross-sectoral analysis, offering a detailed comparative perspective on the role and impact of critical thinking across diverse professional landscapes. The results highlight critical thinking as a cornerstone of professional competence, supporting the development of the "Critical Reflections" program, which aims to provide intensive training adapted to sector-specific needs. Ultimately, this research underscores the importance of critical thinking in fostering adaptability, strategic decision-making, and innovative problem-solving across diverse professional landscapes, ensuring that professionals are equipped to meet contemporary challenges effectively.

An Exploratory Study for Performance Improvement through Supplier Client Services Framework

This research is aimed to study on supplier relationship management particularly on service procurement of the oil and gas industry in Malaysia. Volatile oil price and COVID-19 pandemic required oil and gas companies to re-evaluate their supply chain strategies to minimise the impact. One of the strategies was to build better relationships with suppliers. Based on literature, services procurement is much more complex than goods procurement. The literature reviewed the topic of the oil and gas industry, outsourcing and subcontracting and supplier relationship management. In details, different elements of supplier relationship management are discussed such as its model, benefits, influencing factors and types of suppliers and relationships were discussed. From the literature review, a conceptual framework was developed. “Case study” is adopted as the research method as it provides sophisticated insight on the research topic. Four companies were interviewed to understand the supplier relationship management process. The research findings show that there are different supplier relationship management processes adopted by the four companies selected for case study. All companies agreed that they gained benefits with better supplier relationships. However, all the companies are facing difficulties in implementation of supplier relationship management. In addition, the interviewees expect their suppliers to be more competent in terms of cost, time and quality to contribute to a better buyer-supplier relationship. The conceptual framework is revised based on the research findings and presented as one of the findings.

Futuristic Ordering: Unearthing the Method of Ordering Food through QR Code in Restaurants with Sophisticated Insight

A Smart Ordering Menu powered by QR codes in restaurants revolutionizes the traditional dining experience. Patrons simply scan the QR code on their tables, gaining instant access to a digital menu on their smartphones. This interactive menu allows customers to browse dishes, view images, and get detailed descriptions. Ordering becomes efficient as diners can customize their selections and submit orders directly from their devices. Moreover, the smart ordering system can accommodate special requests or dietary preferences. It enhances communication between customers and kitchen staff, ensuring a personalized dining experience. Additionally, the QR-based system can display real-time updates on item availability and promotions. The convenience extends to payment, as customers can settle their bills digitally, reducing the need for physical cash or card transactions. This not only enhances speed but also minimizes contact points, promoting a safer dining environment. For restaurant owners, the smart ordering menu provides valuable insights into customer preferences and ordering patterns. This data can be used to optimize the menu, refine marketing strategies, and improve overall operational efficiency. In summary, a Smart Ordering Menu using QR codes transforms the dining landscape, offering convenience, safety, and valuable data insights for both customers and restaurant establishmen

ECOSYSTEM METABOLISM AND OXYGEN DEFICIT IN LAKE MANINJAU: INSIGHT FROM HIGH-FREQUENCY MEASUREMENT

High-frequency measurement provides a sophisticated insight in capturing environmental pattern. Compared to traditional discrete measurement, high-frequency sensors allow better understanding of any processes particularly those with temporal scale characteristics. Lake metabolism is one of the exemplars getting advantage of such better resolution measurement. The dynamics of dissolved oxygen concentration (DO) observed in hourly manner, even in minutes, may explain the balance of photosynthetic activity as expressed by gross primary production (GPP) and respiration (R), and atmospheric exchange. Using a coupled thermistor-chain and oxygen sensor, we computed lake metabolism of the eutrophic Lake Maninjau. Characterized by high phytoplankton productivity fueled by the abundance of nutrient availability, DO concentration in Lake Maninjau is likely to be supersaturated. On the other hand, floating cage aquaculture operated in the lake may have a consequence in increasing water column heterotrophy, oxygen demanding community. Through a simple mathematical model we revealed that water column respiration in Lake Maninjau is higher than gross primary production (R > GPP) with an average of 12.1 mg O 2 L -1 day -1 and 9.0 mg O 2 L -1 day -1 , respectively. Our findings highlight that as heterotrophy in eutrophic lakes may relatively be high, oxygen depletion in the water column may occur in any instance, especially in lakes where dense floating cage aquaculture is in place. Keywords: lake metabolism, dissolved oxygen, high-frequency monitoring, heterotrophy

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians

This monograph offers much more than the focus of its title on its little-known—and hence possibly suspect as marginal—subjects might be taken to imply. Out of fragments of the stories of 598 identifiable individuals, out of some 8,100 Asians (and more than a few globally traveled Africans) reaching central Mexico as slaves aboard the returning vessels of the famous Manila galleons from Manila in the Philippines between roughly the 1560s and the 1660s, Seijas has spun sophisticated insight into the laws and politics of Iberian (primarily Spanish, but indirectly also Portuguese) domains in both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds, the laws, politics, and cultures of Spain’s República de Indios, in the Philippines as well as in New Spain, and the beginnings of racialization of the Hispanic New World. The book’s subtitle alludes to the transcending conclusion: these Asians (except for the Africans arriving from Mozambique via Goa, the Indonesian archipelago, or Macau, who remained negros) were chinos integrated into the Spanish monarchs’ overseas realms as “natives,” protected under the Patronato Real as royal subjects and hence not legally subject to enslavement.The contradictions of the legal ambiguities created by “natives” enslaved in Asia (and beyond) and their theoretical, and often contested, liberty in America generated much of the documentation—petitions, investigations, judgments—that supports the book. Seijas handles these technical materials like a lawyer, and that’s a very good thing, since seventeenth-century Spain was a tangle of plural jurisdictions, royal decrees and fueros, canon law, Inquisitorial jurisdictions, and municipal regulations that she navigates with all the assurance of the pilots of those Manila galleons, framing the records in terms of the relevant jurisprudence, sensing the legal options not pursued, and considering possible circumstances behind the issues but not presentable in courts of law as evidence. She thus turns the very problematics of case records into rich and revealing sources for history. In this review, a single example will suffice to illustrate a necessarily simplified summary of a complex argument: the Tagalog and Visaya of Spain’s Philippines were “Indios” with precisely the same legal indemnities as Nahua in New Spain or Quechua in Peru, but in Mexico as chinos they were treated as enslaveable along with Muslims from the Mughal Empire captured in “just wars” and natives of China or Japan of no less unassailable status as property through their acquisition by purchase.The story climaxes with resolution of these dramas in the 1672 decree making the chinos unambiguously full-blooded “Indians,” leaving them to their further assimilation into the native communities of rural central Mexico and into the emerging castas of its cities. The decree thus left their former captive shipmates, of African origin, as the only legally enslaveable residents of the realm, and Seijas concludes suggestively by remarking on the contemporaneity of this decree with what she sees as parallel racialization of slavery in the English Americas. Among the numerous and revealing arguments that Seijas weaves from these and other legal threads are the ways in which chinos’ persistent filing of legal challenges to their enslavement might have opened the minds of the judges and other officials who made law in the Americas, the concentration of the chinos in urban domestic service and their (and other “Indios’”) harsh treatment in the textile-manufacturing obrajes rather than in rural labor, a leitmotif of contrasts with the status and conditions of the Africans enslaved in the region, and the gritty personal and social dynamics revealed in the proceedings of the Inquisition.Significant broader issues of method and conceptualization emerge in exemplary form as well. The ways Seijas has framed her arguments develop organically from the documentation at hand, resisting awkward alternative approaches—for example, to attempt to force a “social history” of aggregate categories from the small sample available to her. She historicizes the judges as well as the plaintiffs, so that we have the politics and contradictions and inevitable ironies of attempting to create order out of the inherent disorder of human life rather than a mystified implacable law. She writes about people enslaving and enforcing and engineering and evading captivity rather than trying to force humanity in all its variety into a single abstract institutionalized “slavery.” The book, finally, is a model of historicization rather than drifting into the faux sociology that too often still prevails in your reviewer’s own field of early African history, as well as in the American counterpart that proceeds under the unnecessarily qualified label of “ethnohistory.”The reader, and not only an outsider like your reviewer, comes away from this book with wide-ranging and engaging insight into the Iberian world of the seventeenth century, from Madrid to Mexico City to Manila and even Mozambique. Small packages of persona from the past sometimes open up to reveal welcome historical gifts, and this book is one of those happy occasions.

Een Program Theory benadering voor het theoretisch onderbouwen van sociale interventies: een casestudie van vijf Nederlandse maatjesprojecten

Een Program Theory benadering voor het theoretisch onderbouwen van sociale interventies: een casestudie van vijf Nederlandse maatjesprojecten

Measuring Corporate Sustainability and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance Value Added

The aim of the paper is to propose a model for measuring sustainable value which would complexly assess environmental, social, and corporate governance contribution to value creation. In the paper the concept of the Sustainable Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance Value Added is presented. The Sustainable Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance Value Added is based on the Sustainable Value Added model and combines weighted environmental, social, and corporate governance indicators with their benchmarks determined by Data Envelopment Analysis. Benchmark values of indicators were set for each company separately and determine the optimal combination of environmental, social, and corporate governance inputs to economic outcomes. The Sustainable Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance Value Added methodology is applied on real-life corporate data and presented through a case study. The value added of most of the selected companies was negative, even though economic indicators of all of them are positive. The Sustainable Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance Value Added is intended to help owners, investors, and other stakeholders in their decision-making and sustainability assessment. The use of environmental, social, and corporate governance factors helps identify the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and provides a more sophisticated insight into it than the one-dimensional methods based on economic performance alone.

Mechanism of Action of Antipsychotic Medications

Article AbstractA variety of antipsychotic medications exist for treating patients with schizophrenia. Knowledge of pharmacokinetics (the body's effect on the drug) and pharmacodynamics (the drug's effect on the body) can help clinicians select antipsychotics and make timely dose adjustments to improve patient outcomes. Currently, the only known effective mechanism to reduce positive psychotic symptoms is dopamine D2 blockade. However, several relevant dopamine pathways exist, and increasingly sophisticated insight into the role of subsections of the striatum has helped link dopamine D2 blockade in specific pathways to the beneficial and adverse effects of antipsychotics, including extrapyramidal side effects (EPS) and secondary negative or cognitive effects. Antipsychotics with low D2 affinity (partial D2 agonism) that modulate dopamine transmission via blockade of histamine or cholinergic receptors or that bind more tightly to serotonin 5-HT2A receptors than D2 receptors generally have less risk for EPS. However, some of the mechanisms that balance dopamine tone can be associated with sedation, central and peripheral anticholinergic effects, weight gain and metabolic abnormalities. Thus, treatment selection needs to be individualized based on the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles of available antipsychotics as well as their effects in a given patient with past treatment response patterns, comorbidities, and preferences. Importantly, new medications with either additional or exclusive nondopaminergic pharmacologic mechanisms need to be developed that can address not only positive symptoms of schizophrenia but also negative and cognitive symptoms, which do not appear to be primarily related to dopamine dysfunction.See the entire activity.

Rereading Dam Street in the Chinese Cultural Context

As an emerging film director, Yu Li has yet to be recognized by the international academic critics. By examining Hongyan/Dam Street in the Chinese cultural context with the assistance of analyzing scenes in detail and the film’s visual style, this article argues that the film illustrates the protagonist Xiaoyun is stuck between traditions and modernity, providing a sophisticated insight to an important feminist issue. The reading of the traditions involves chastity code, the image of a rouge face which is the translation of the film’s Chinese title, the Chinese four-character idioms, the time-honoured terms, the development of feminism, and the characteristics of the modernity in China. The perversity of the modernity originates from the social commercialization. Prejudices from the traditions and the modernity leave little space for women to settle in.

Multicomponent phase transition kinetics in cereal foam—part II: impact of microstructural properties

In the bakery industry, a considerably high amount of energy is used for the baking process. A possibility to decrease the baking time by means of optimized heat transfer through the bread microstructure would lead to less required baking time and cost reduction. Thermal treatment of cereal foam implicates thermo-physical processes such as simultaneous heat and mass transfer associated with evaporation–condensation-based heat transfer through the bubbles. Numerical investigations are carried out to deliver sophisticated insight into the heat transfer processes at microscale, supporting process understanding and visualization of phenomena inside the foam bubbles. In a further step, the elaborated knowledge is employed to determine the main influencing parameter on the heat transfer through the foam microstructure by means of lattice Boltzmann modeling techniques. For optimization purposes, the microstructure as well as individual foam lamella configurations are considered in the parameter variation studies.

What Do Christian Hebraists Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism?

What Do Christian Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism? David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 326.INTRODUCTIONJohannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564-1629) was a brilliant and subtle philologist, a master of European and Oriental languages both ancient and modem.1 The son of a Westphalian minister, Buxtorf studied at Herbom, Heidelberg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, where he rubbed elbows with the luminaries of mid-seventeenth-centuiy Reformed Protestantism-including Heinrich Bullinger and Theodore de Beze-while mastering the languages of biblical exegesis, especially Hebrew. Settling in Basel, where he became university professor of Hebrew, Buxtorf quickly sifted, collated, translated, and published his way to the pinnacle of the European Republic of Letters, revolutionizing the discipline of Christian Hebraism with a stunning array of learned bibles, dictionaries, concordances, and commentaries in Near Eastern languages. While his Biblia Hebraica cum paraph rosi Chaldaica et commentariis rabbinorum (1618) introduced a wide readership of Orientalists and exegetes the Hebrew text of the Bible, the Aramaic of the Targums, and an impressive array of medieval Jewish commentaries, his Tiberias, sive commentarius Masoreticus (1620) offered fellow specialists an uncommonly sophisticated insight into the historical context in which the masoretic text of the Bible was produced. Even without his greatest academic work, the posthumous Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum, et Rabbinicum (1632), which pioneered a new form of biblical concordance, Buxtorf would likely have remained a standard resource for down to the nineteenth centuiy. Yet for all this, Buxtorf was perhaps most famous among contemporaries as the source of a veiy different kind of access to Jewish knowledge - namely, his Juden-Scbul (1603), which promised its Christian readers nearly unprecedented entree into the homes and observances of Buxtorf's Jewish colleagues and neighbors, describing eveiything from the Passover seder to the rituals surrounding circumcision and menstruation. Unfortunately, in this arena, at least, Buxtorf was rather less distinguished than in his philological studies: as contemporaries quickly observed, JiidenScbiil is essentially a pastiche in which the morsels of trustworthy ethnographic knowledge Buxtorf had acquired from Jewish collaborators are far outweighed by textual tradition and Christian fantasy, not entirely unlike the libelous accounts of Jews and Judaism penned by sixteenthcentuiy polemicists like Anthony Margaritha.2Buxtorf, and other Christian like him-including not only well-known figures like Johannes Reuchlin but also the obscure Dutch Orientalist Wilhelm Surenhusius-play a significant role in David Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. They figure prominently, for example, in two different chapters, the first on the impact of print on Jewish learning (Christian and Their Judaic Publications in chapter 3, Knowledge Explosion) and the second on Jewish converts to Christianity (The Conflicting Loyalties of Christian Hebraists in chapter 5, Mingled Identities). While page counts are always a crude measure of significance, it is hard to overlook the considerable space dedicated to Christian Judaica: on a per capita basis, Christian and kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola drown out all but a handful of Jewish celebrities from the period, like the Abarbanels, Shabbetai Zevi and his antagonists Jacob Emden, Jacob Sasportas, and Moses Hagiz, the Luzzattos, or Spinoza. And the profile of Hebraizing Christians rises still further if one includes a second group of major importance to Ruderman: the conversos, who (as mentioned above) are the subject of their own chapter in large part because of their role as intermediaries between Jewish and Christian communities and cultures. …

Recasting the heroic resistance ideal: Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé

This article argues that a re-reading of Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), directed by Robert Bresson, is timely because of its sophisticated insight into the nature of resistance, how it came about, and how it was sustained in daily life. Much Bresson criticism focuses almost exclusively on the visual quality of his films and the timelessness of his themes. Many have suggested this film’s wartime setting is a mere backdrop for the playing out of a drama that transcends its historical location. Others simplistically describe it as the near perfect articulation of the ‘Gaullist myth of resistance’. Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is relevant to the ongoing debates about resistance in France because it redefines the heroic resistance ideal and because of its emphasis on process rather than outcomes. It speaks to a new generation of historians aiming to supplant the unsustainable and misplaced epic representation of resistance with one that is more in keeping with the lived experience of resisters and the everyday decisions that rooted them in their local communities. More than solidarity, the film depicts the complementarity of the roles of the protagonists and calls into question the false dichotomy between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ resistance.

A Tale of Two Maladies? Pathogenesis of Depression with and without the Huntington’s Disease Gene Mutation

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant disorder caused by a tandem repeat expansion encoding an expanded tract of glutamines in the huntingtin protein. HD is progressive and manifests as psychiatric symptoms (including depression), cognitive deficits (culminating in dementia), and motor abnormalities (including chorea). Having reached the twentieth anniversary of the discovery of the “genetic stutter” which causes HD, we still lack sophisticated insight into why so many HD patients exhibit affective disorders such as depression at very early stages, prior to overt appearance of motor deficits. In this review, we will focus on depression as the major psychiatric manifestation of HD, discuss potential mechanisms of pathogenesis identified from animal models, and compare depression in HD patients with that of the wider gene-negative population. The discovery of depressive-like behaviors as well as cellular and molecular correlates of depression in transgenic HD mice has added strong support to the hypothesis that the HD mutation adds significantly to the genetic load for depression. A key question is whether HD-associated depression differs from that in the general population. Whilst preclinical studies, clinical data, and treatment responses suggest striking similarities, there are also some apparent differences. We discuss various molecular and cellular mechanisms which may contribute to depression in HD, and whether they may generalize to other depressive disorders. The autosomal dominant nature of HD and the existence of models with excellent construct validity provide a unique opportunity to understand the pathogenesis of depression and associated gene-environment interactions. Thus, understanding the pathogenesis of depression in HD may not only facilitate tailored therapeutic approaches for HD sufferers, but may also translate to the clinical depression which devastates the lives of so many people.

Bayesian model selection techniques as decision support for shaping a statistical analysis plan of a clinical trial: An example from a vertigo phase III study with longitudinal count data as primary endpoint

BackgroundA statistical analysis plan (SAP) is a critical link between how a clinical trial is conducted and the clinical study report. To secure objective study results, regulatory bodies expect that the SAP will meet requirements in pre-specifying inferential analyses and other important statistical techniques. To write a good SAP for model-based sensitivity and ancillary analyses involves non-trivial decisions on and justification of many aspects of the chosen setting. In particular, trials with longitudinal count data as primary endpoints pose challenges for model choice and model validation. In the random effects setting, frequentist strategies for model assessment and model diagnosis are complex and not easily implemented and have several limitations. Therefore, it is of interest to explore Bayesian alternatives which provide the needed decision support to finalize a SAP.MethodsWe focus on generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) for the analysis of longitudinal count data. A series of distributions with over- and under-dispersion is considered. Additionally, the structure of the variance components is modified. We perform a simulation study to investigate the discriminatory power of Bayesian tools for model criticism in different scenarios derived from the model setting. We apply the findings to the data from an open clinical trial on vertigo attacks. These data are seen as pilot data for an ongoing phase III trial. To fit GLMMs we use a novel Bayesian computational approach based on integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLAs). The INLA methodology enables the direct computation of leave-one-out predictive distributions. These distributions are crucial for Bayesian model assessment. We evaluate competing GLMMs for longitudinal count data according to the deviance information criterion (DIC) or probability integral transform (PIT), and by using proper scoring rules (e.g. the logarithmic score).ResultsThe instruments under study provide excellent tools for preparing decisions within the SAP in a transparent way when structuring the primary analysis, sensitivity or ancillary analyses, and specific analyses for secondary endpoints. The mean logarithmic score and DIC discriminate well between different model scenarios. It becomes obvious that the naive choice of a conventional random effects Poisson model is often inappropriate for real-life count data. The findings are used to specify an appropriate mixed model employed in the sensitivity analyses of an ongoing phase III trial.ConclusionsThe proposed Bayesian methods are not only appealing for inference but notably provide a sophisticated insight into different aspects of model performance, such as forecast verification or calibration checks, and can be applied within the model selection process. The mean of the logarithmic score is a robust tool for model ranking and is not sensitive to sample size. Therefore, these Bayesian model selection techniques offer helpful decision support for shaping sensitivity and ancillary analyses in a statistical analysis plan of a clinical trial with longitudinal count data as the primary endpoint.

Discovering Randomness, Recovering Expertise: The Different Approaches to the Quality in Measurement of Coulomb and Gauss and of Today’s Students

The aim of this paper is to discuss different approaches to the quality (or uncertainty) of measurement data considering both historical examples and today’s students’ views. Today’s teaching of data analysis is very much focussed on the application of statistical routines (often called the „Gaussian approach” to error analysis). Studies on students’ understanding of measurement however show, that though the majority can be enabled to apply those routines most of the students fail to construct a coherent understanding of the matter. Analysing two historical examples of measurement practice of the time around 1,800 when the statistical approach was established, we point out what often neglected key idea gave rise to the statistical approach to data analysis (the appreciation of randomness in data distribution) and how the emergence of this idea was embedded in a very sophisticated insight on measurement and the nature of measurement data (experimental expertise). These two aspects can vividly be illustrated using the different approaches to data handling of Coulomb and Gauss around the time of 1,800. Gauss’s appreciation of the randomness in data distribution consequently led him to other analytical routines as those employed by Coulomb. This is an important aspect concerning the teaching of the statistical routines of data analysis. However, the deep experimental expertise of both Gauss and Coulomb in both cases prevented an application by rote of some routines and shaped their approaches to very successful instruments of data handling. We therefore argue that both the key idea of randomness as well as an elaborated experimental expertise has to be taken into consideration much more than before by instructors and teachers in order to support the students to construct a coherent understanding on the nature and the handling of measurement data and especially the assessment of their quality.

The missing p in psychiatric training: why it is important to teach pain to psychiatrists.

Pain problems are exceedingly prevalent among psychiatric patients. Moreover, clinical impressions and neurobiological research suggest that physical and psychological aspects of pain are closely related entities. Nonetheless, remarkably few pain-related themes are currently included in psychiatric residency training. To provide clinical and scientific rationale for psychiatric-training enrichment with basic tenets of pain medicine and to raise the awareness and sensitivity of physicians, scientists, and educators to this important yet unmet clinical and public health need. We present 3 lines of translational research evidence, extracted from a comprehensive literature review, in support of our objectives. First, the neuroanatomical and functional overlap between pain and emotion/reward/motivation brain circuitry suggests integration and mutual modulation of these systems. Second, psychiatric disorders are commonly associated with alterations in pain processing, whereas chronic pain may impair emotional and neurocognitive functioning. Third, given its stressful nature, pain may serve as a functional probe for unraveling pathophysiological mechanisms inherent in psychiatric morbidity. Pain training in psychiatry will contribute to deeper and more sophisticated insight into both pain syndromes and general psychiatric morbidity regardless of patients' pain status. Furthermore, it will ease the artificial boundaries separating psychiatric and medical formulations of brain disorders, thus fostering cross-fertilizing interactions among specialists in various disciplines entrusted with the care of patients experiencing pain.

Mechanisms mediating brain and cognitive reserve: Experience-dependent neuroprotection and functional compensation in animal models of neurodegenerative diseases

'Brain and cognitive reserve' (BCR) refers here to the accumulated neuroprotective reserve and capacity for functional compensation induced by the chronic enhancement of mental and physical activity. BCR is thought to protect against, and compensate for, a range of different neurodegenerative diseases, as well as other neurological and psychiatric disorders. In this review we will discuss BCR, and its potential mechanisms, in neurodegenerative disorders, with a focus on Huntington's disease (HD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Epidemiological studies of AD, and other forms of dementia, provided early evidence for BCR. The first evidence for the beneficial effects of enhanced mental and physical activity, and associated mechanistic insights, in an animal model of neurodegenerative disease was provided by experiments using HD transgenic mice. More recently, experiments on animal models of HD, AD and various other brain disorders have suggested potential molecular and cellular mechanisms underpinning BCR. We propose that sophisticated insight into the processes underlying BCR, and identification of key molecules mediating these beneficial effects, will pave the way for therapeutic advances targeting these currently incurable neurodegenerative diseases.

Venture Capitalists’ Confidence, Asymmetric Information, and Liquidity Events

Venture capitalists, in assessing and advising their portfolio firms and seeking viable exit strategies for them through discussions with investment bankers and corporate acquisitors, develop early and sophisticated insight in high potential new ventures and alternative liquidity events for them. Given this early and unique perspective that VCs have of their portfolio firms and potential liquidity events, in this paper, relying on an information asymmetries perspective, we examine whether changes in venture capitalists’ confidence, as informed by VCs’ unique informational advantage, may precede changes in the volume of liquidity events (IPOs and M&As) of venture-backed firms. To explore this notion, we conducted quarterly surveys of VCs for 3.5 years with regard to their confidence in the future high-growth entrepreneurial environment and compared our results with archival data of the volume of IPOs and M&As of venture-backed firms over the same period. We find, in fact, that changes in VC confidence do precede changes in the dollar volume of exits of venture-backed firms in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Specifically, we find that an increase in VC confidence precedes an increase in IPO activity one quarter later and a decrease in M&A activity two quarters later. These relationships hold while controlling for changes in NASDAQ level. Our findings contribute to the venture capital literature by highlighting the significance of asymmetric information in venture capital markets. Our findings also suggest that entrepreneurs may benefit from monitoring VC confidence as changes in VC confidence appear to have temporal precedence to changes in liquidity opportunities for venture-backed firms.

Seven Bowls of Wrath: The Ecological Relevance of Revelation

Catastrophic effects of climate change invite comparisons with the “plagues” or wounds of the earth described in chapters 15 and 16 of the Book of Revelation. The seven Bowls of Wrath can be interpreted as an ecological parable for the decades ahead, as the impact of several centuries of human exploitation of natural resources and the effects of pollution threaten to result in a number of global calamities in the areas of human and animal health, environmental decline, habitat destruction, population displacement, and physical suffering caused by increasingly violent and frequent storms. Although symbolic admonitions, the “bowls of wrath” demonstrate an unusually sophisticated insight into the organic connection that exists among biological and geological systems and also the consequences of wantonly disrupting this balance through human greed, oppression, and malice. Finally, the compensating divine response to ecocatastrophe ends not in ultimate punishment, but the renewal of the cosmos and the healing of the nations. Revelation is a message of hope as well as warning and a summons to repent.

Numerical solution of stochastic differential problems in the biosciences

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) models play a prominent role in many application areas including biology, epidemiology and population dynamics, mostly because they can offer a more sophisticated insight through physical phenomena than their deterministic counterparts do. So, suitable numerical methods must be introduced to simulate the solutions of the resulting stochastic differential systems. In this work we take into account both Euler–Taylor expansion and Runge–Kutta-type methods for stochastic ordinary differential equations (SODEs) and the Euler–Maruyama method for stochastic delay differential equations (SDDEs), focusing on the most relevant implementation issues. The corresponding Matlab codes for both SODEs and SDDEs problems are tested on mathematical models arising in the biosciences.