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Many approaches for reducing unwanted behavior use punishment, extinction, or noncontingent reinforcement. Other methods focus on teaching and reinforcing alternative behaviors that can replace the unwanted behavior. Another strategy can be to change the stimulus control of the unwanted behavior. The present study investigated if conditional discrimination training using positive reinforcement could reduce undesirable behaviors in a pet dog. After conditional discrimination training, two unwanted behaviors (jumping and mouthing) occurred reliably in the presence of new discriminative stimuli, while other behaviors occurred in the presence of the discriminative stimuli that had previously produced these unwanted behaviors. This experiment demonstrates that conditional discrimination training can be an effective way to control the frequency of an unwanted behavior by controlling the frequency of the presentation of a discriminative stimulus.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS A variety of auto-antibody assays are available as part of the clinical care of patients with liver disease. We sought to better understand the clinical utility of immune serological testing in patients with primary biliary cholangitis (PBC). METHODS We retrospectively analysed data from 2846 patients investigated for liver disease at a UK liver centre between 2001 and 2017. A total of 499 patients with PBC were identified. Immune serology results were examined for their diagnostic utility and prognostic significance to predict transplant-free survival. RESULTS Antimitochondrial antibodies (AMAs) were specific (94.5%) and sensitive (85.6%) for PBC; antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) against glycoprotein 210 (gp210) and sp100 were specific (>98%) but not sensitive (

College sports are a multi-billion dollar industry that influence the financial decisions of colleges and universities throughout the United States. One such decision is the implementation of manda...

Objective Behçet’s disease (BD) is a multisystem autoinflammatory disease characterised by mucosal ulceration, ocular, neural, joint and skin inflammation. The cause of BD is not known but there is a strong genetic association with HLA-B*51, IL10 and IL23R. Neutrophils are a first line of defence against invading pathogens and have been described as activated in patients with BD. Neutrophils can now be separated into different subsets, such as low density (LDN) and normal density (NDN) that have diverse functional roles. We wished to address neutrophil heterogeneity in patients with BD. MethodsPeripheral blood neutrophils were obtained from 32 BD patients and 37 healthy aged-matched controls. Percoll isolation was used to isolate all neutrophils, while Ficol-Hypaque was used to obtain LDN and NDN. Phagocytic capacity and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and neutrophil extracellular traps (NET) stimulated with phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) and Escherichia coli (E.coli) were assessed in both groups. Results We have demonstrated reduced phagocytic capacity and ROS production but greater NET production by total neutrophils stimulated with PMA or E.coli from BD patients in comparison with healthy controls. Patients with BD had elevated numbers of LDN and lower number of NDN compared with healthy controls. However, both neutrophil subsets showed the same reduced ROS production and phagocytic function as total neutrophils in both 41 groups. Conclusion Our novel findings indicate that the neutrophil population in BD is heterogeneous and the increased number of LDN in combination with greater NET production may contribute to the inflammatory response and pathogenesis.

Background An article published by Sidpra J et al, in ADC in July 2020 reported an increase of approximately 1500% in the incidence of abusive head trauma (AHT) in children, understandably shocking paediatricians nationally. Objectives We wanted to see the impact of lockdown on referrals made to our hospital (University Hospital of North Tees, Stockton, UK) for children suspected to have non-accidental injuries (NAI) or AHT. Methods We audited the records of children referred with suspected NAI during the first lockdown period (23rd of March to 4th of July 2020) and compared it with the preceding year (23rd of March to 4th of July 2019) As children under two are more likely to suffer AHT, these cases were identified by two auditors and then a single auditor reviewed these case records in detail. Results Total of thirty-one children in 2019 & twenty-five in 2020 were referred for Child Protection Medical Assessments. Eleven children - six in 2019 and five in 2020 - were less than two years old. Of these, four were girls and seven boys. Five children were less than three months old Nine children were referred with suspicious bruising, one was the sibling of an index child with NAI and for one, an allegation was made of rough handling. Two children with skull fractures and one with a rib fracture (on follow up scan) were identified on radiological investigations. Hematological investigations and ophthalmic findings were unremarkable for all the children. All children were seen within 24 hours of a referral being made. In all cases, an interim report was provided on the same day and a final report within seven working days. All children were investigated as per RCPCH guidelines. Seven out of eleven children referred for NAI assessment were concluded to have probable non-accidental injuries – three in 2019, and four in 2020. Our neighbouring hospital received five and four referrals for suspected NAI in children under 2 years old in the same period of time in 2019 and 2020 respectively. One of these children in 2020 had retinal haemorrhages associated with AHT and a skull fracture. Conclusions Our audit of children referred for NAI medical assessment does not suggest any significant difference between numbers in 2019 and 2020. This is in contrast with what colleagues from UCL, London have reported, and surprising given the high levels of socioeconomic deprivation in our area, which is usually associated with a higher incidence of child abuse. In order to understand national trends, we recommend other areas of the United Kingdom to review their data to establish whether this pandemic and associated lockdowns are impacting children in Teesside differently.

System logs provide invaluable resources for understanding system behavior and detecting anomalies on high performance computing (HPC) systems. As HPC systems continue to grow in both scale and complexity, the sheer volume of system logs and the complex interaction among system components make the traditional manual problem diagnosis and even automated line-by-line log analysis infeasible or ineffective. In this paper, we present a System Log Event Block Detection (SLEBD) framework that identifies groups of log messages that follow certain sequence but with variations, and explore these event blocks for event-based system behavior analysis and anomaly detection. Compared with the existing approaches that analyze system logs line by line, SLEBD is capable of characterizing system behavior and identifying intricate anomalies at a higher (i.e., event) level. We evaluate the performance of SLEBD by using syslogs collected from production supercomputers. Experimental results show that our framework and mechanisms can process streaming log messages, efficiently extract event blocks and effectively detect anomalies, which enables system administrators and monitoring tools to understand and process system events in real time. Additionally, we use the identified event blocks and explore deep learning algorithms to model and classify event sequences.

Prosthetic devices are not meeting the needs of people with upper limb amputations. Due to controlsidelimitations, prosthetic wrists cannot yet be fully articulated. This study sought to determine which wrist motions users felt were most important for completing activities of daily living. We specifically invstigated whether adding a combinationof flexion and deviation known as the Dart Thrower's Motion to a prosthetic wrist would help improve functionality.Fifteen participants with a trans-radial amputation, aged 25-64 years, who use a prosthesis completed an online survey and answered interview questions to determine which types of tasks pose particular challenges. Participants were asked what kinds of improvements they would like to see in a new prosthesis. A subset of five participants were interviewed in-depth to provide further information about difficulties they face using their device.The survey showed that participants had difficulty performing activities of daily living that involve a combination of wrist flexion and deviation known as the "Dart Throwers Motion". Interview responses confirmed that users have difficulty performing these tasks, especially those that require tools. Additionally, users said that they were more interested in having flexion and deviation than rotation in a prosthetic wrist.This research indicates that including the Dart Thrower's Motion in future designs of prosthetic wrists would improve these devices and people with upper limb amputations would be excited to see this improvement in their devices. Implications for Rehabilitation • Over one third of people with upper limb amputations do not use a prosthesis because prosthetic devices do not meet their needs.• The number of motions possible in state of the art prosthetic devices is limited by the small number of control sites available.• The Dart Thrower?s Motion is a wrist motion used for many activities of daily living but unavailable in commercial prosthetics leading many prosthetics users to have difficulty with these tasks.• Prosthetic use, and therefore quality of life, could be improved by including the Dart Thrower's Motion in a prosthesis.

This paper presents a two-stage optimization approach to mitigate the rapid voltage fluctuations and minimize the power losses of distribution systems due to the high penetration of photovoltaic (PV) generation. The first stage is a day-ahead optimal strategy which aims to minimize the total voltage deviations and power losses within the constraints of the daily maximum allowable number of operations of the on-load tap changers (OLTCs) and shunt capacitors (SCs). The second stage is a real-time inverter reactive power control to compensate for the uncertainties of PV output and load demand. As a part of the real-time control, an artificial neural network (ANN) approach is used to estimate the system states. In both stages, the optimization problems are formulated as nonlinear optimization problems and solved with direct search algorithms. The real-time optimization method is tested using a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation platform. A modified IEEE 34-node test feeder is applied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we present the Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) usage of a new simulation approach recently introduced by the authors and discuss the programmable logic interface required for the HIL simulation of high switching frequency power electronics converters. As a test case, we simulate a notional ship power system where one converter is externally controlled using the developed HIL simulation platform. The ship system is composed of eight converters all operating at 100kHz, the real-time simulation is performed using a FPGA-based platform and a 50 nanosecond simulation time step.

Peters et al. use intracranial recordings and machine-learning techniques to show that human subjects under-use decision-incongruent evidence in the brain when computing perceptual confidence.

In this paper, the use of Power Hardware-in-the-Loop (PHIL) is presented for analyzing, testing, and characterizing a commercial single-phase grid-tied PV micro-inverter in a laboratory environment. The PHIL set-up used is composed of a real-time system (RTS), device (micro-inverter) under test (DUT), four-quadrant amplifiers for grid simulation, solar array simulator (SAS), and data acquisition hardware and software. Using this set-up, the micro-inverter operation was tested against manufacturer claims of performance, IEEE 1547, and additional operating conditions so to fully characterize the device.

Motion Induced Blindness (MIB) is a well-established visual phenomenon whereby highly salient targets disappear when viewed against a moving background mask. No research has yet explored whether contracting and expanding optic flow can also trigger target disappearance. We explored MIB using mask speeds corresponding to driving at 35, 50, 65 and 80 km/h in simulated forward (expansion) and backward (contraction) motion as well as 2-D radial movement, random, and static mask motion types. Participants (n = 18) viewed MIB targets against masks with different movement types, speed, and target locations. To understand the relationship between saccades, pupil response and perceptual disappearance, we ran two additional eye-tracking experiments (n = 19). Target disappearance increased significantly with faster mask speeds and upper visual field target presentation. Simulated optic flow and 2-D radial movement caused comparable disappearance, and all moving masks caused significantly more disappearance than a static mask. Saccades could not entirely account for differences between conditions, suggesting that self-motion optic flow does cause MIB in an artificial setting. Pupil analyses implied that MIB disappearance induced by optic flow is not subjectively salient, potentially explaining why MIB is not noticed during driving. Potential implications of MIB for driving safety and Head-Up-Display (HUD) technologies are discussed.

The bronchial airway epithelial cell (BAEC) is the site for initial encounters between inhaled environmental factors and the lower respiratory system. Our hypothesis was that release of pro inflammatory interleukins (IL)-6 and IL-8 from primary BAEC cultured from children will be increased after in vitro exposure to common environmental factors. Primary BAEC were obtained from children undergoing clinically indicated routine general anaesthetic procedures. Cells were exposed to three different concentrations of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or house dust mite allergen (HDM) or particulates extracted from side stream cigarette smoke (SSCS). BAEC were obtained from 24 children (mean age 7.0 years) and exposed to stimuli. Compared with the negative control, there was an increase in IL-6 and IL-8 release after exposure to HDM (p ≤ 0.001 for both comparisons). There was reduced IL-6 after higher compared to lower SSCS exposure (p = 0.023). There was no change in BAEC release of IL-6 or IL-8 after LPS exposure. BAEC from children are able to recognise and respond in vitro with enhanced pro inflammatory mediator secretion to some inhaled exposures.