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Objective:Using the African Neuropsychology Battery (ANB), we seek to develop normative data by examining the demographic effects for two learning process scores: initial learning (Trial One) and learning ratio (LR, the percentage of items learned relative of to-be-learned material following Trial 1).Methods:Healthy participants from the Democratic Republic of Congo completed the four memory tests of the ANB: the African Story Memory Test (ASMT), African List Memory Test (ALMT), African Visuospatial Memory Test (AVMT), and African Contextual Visuospatial Memory Test (ACVMT). We developed indices of learning for each subtest, as well as aggregate learning indices for Trial 1 and LR, and composite indices examining verbal, visual, contextual, and noncontextual learning, and grand indices comprising all four subtests.Results:Trial 1 and LR scores each demonstrated acceptable intercorrelations across memory tests. We present normative data for Trial 1 and LR by age and education.Conclusion:These data provide normative standards for evaluating learning in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Purpose This paper aims to provide a comparative analysis of sustainable tourism development across the Anglophone Caribbean region from the post-independence period of 1962 to the 2020s. The perspective explores the implications of insularity, tourism investment and the pace of technology adoption on the potential realisation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and the Eastern Caribbean States. Design/methodology/approach The viewpoint uses secondary data from grey literature such as government policy documents, academic literature, newspapers and consultancy reports to explore the central themes and provide a conceptual framework for the paper. Findings The findings reveal that Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are nearer to the light-green single-sector approach to sustainable tourism development. The overarching findings reveal that the region’s heavy focus on economic priorities results in less attention to competitiveness challenges such as environmental management, social equity and technological innovations. Research limitations/implications The research presents a comprehensive overview of the tourism development trajectory of other tourism-dependent island-states. The research offers lessons and cross-learning opportunities that may be useful to decision-makers within SIDS. The main limitation is that the findings may only be transferable and generalised to the extent that other jurisdictions bear similar macroeconomic governance structures and cultural characteristics to Caribbean SIDS. Practical implications This paper provides a meaningful discussion and contributes to the body of knowledge on the history of Caribbean tourism development, the challenges and future potential of sustainability and lends itself to opportunities for future research in the Caribbean and other SIDS. Social implications The study outlines the social implications for inclusive, responsible and sustainable tourism that can potentially take Caribbean SIDS from slow growth to efficiency in developing the tourism product, including the technological environment. This can reduce inequalities, contribute to socio-economic development and improve the region’s human capital. Originality/value This paper provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of Caribbean tourism development specific to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States. No previous work has been done to compare tourism development within this grouping. Hence, this paper is essential in informing decision-makers and providing the foundation for continuing research in this area.

We show that infrared telescopes can be constructed at low cost using consumer-grade thermal infrared imagers and commercially available germanium lenses. Using these telescopes in the laboratory, introductory astronomy students can image nearby celestial objects to observe properties that are not seen in the visible region, in particular, variations in temperature across the surface.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a boom in the use of V-V ECMO for ARDS secondary to COVID. Comparisons of outcomes of ECMO for COVID to ECMO for influenza have emerged. Very few comparisons of ECMO for COVID to ECMO for ARDS of all etiologies are available.To compare clinically important outcome measures in recipients of ECMO for COVID to those observed in recipients of ECMO for ARDS of other etiologies.V-V ECMO recipients between March 2020 and March 2022 consisted exclusively of COVID patients and formed the COVID ECMO group. All patients who underwent V-V ECMO for ARDS between January 2014 and March 2020 were eligible for analysis as the non-COVID ECMO comparator group. The primary outcome was survival to hospital discharge. Secondary outcomes included ECMO decannulation, ECMO duration30 days, and serious complications.Thirty-six patients comprised the COVID ECMO group and were compared to 18 non-COVID ECMO patients. Survival to hospital discharge was not significantly different between the two groups (33% in COVID vs. 50% in non-COVID; p = 0.255) nor was there a significant difference in the rate of non-palliative ECMO decannulation. The proportion of patients connected to ECMO for30 days was significantly higher in the COVID ECMO group: 69% vs. 17%; p = 0.001. There was no significant difference in serious complications.This study could not identify a statistically significant difference in hospital survival and rate of successful ECMO decannulation between COVID ECMO and non-COVID ECMO patients. Prolonged ECMO may be more common in COVID. Complications were not significantly different.

Microglia have long been thought to be responsible for the initiation of the central nervous system (CNS) immune response to pathogen exposure. However, we recently reported that depleting CNS microglia and circulating monocytes does not abrogate the sickness response in male rats or mice to bacterial endotoxin, lipopolysaccharide (LPS). How the central immune response to an endotoxin challenge is initiated and resolved in the absence of microglia and monocytes remains unclear. Here we investigated the role of microglia and monocytes in driving the behavioral, febrile and neuroimmune response to LPS using the Cx3cr1-Dtr rat model of conditional microglia/monocyte depletion, assessed if this role is similar in females and males, and examined how the response to an immune challenge might be initiated in the absence of these cells. We show that depletion of microglia and monocytes exacerbates the response to LPS at each phase of the immune cascade. Our data indicate that the changes in the central response to immune challenge may be an indirect effect of excess neutrophil expansion into the bloodstream and infiltration into peripheral organs stimulating a rapid and exacerbated cytokine and prostaglandin response to the LPS that is not curtailed by the usual negative feedback mechanisms. Thus, we show that a demonstrable immune response can be generated (and resolved) in the near complete absence of microglia and monocytes and that these cells play a regulatory role in the initiation and resolution of the response to an immune challenge, rather than being critical for it to occur.

A self-tuning proportional-integral control law prescribingmotor torques was tested in experiment on a threedegree-of-freedom wave energy converter. The control objectivewas to maximize electrical power. The control law relied uponan identified model of device intrinsic impedance to generate afrequency-domain estimate of the wave-induced excitation forceand measurements of device velocities. The control law was testedin irregular sea-states that evolved over hours (a rapid, butrealistic time-scale) and that changed instantly (an unrealisticscenario to evaluate controller response). For both cases, thecontroller converges to gains that closely approximate the postcalculatedoptimal gains for all degrees of freedom in a sufficientlyshort-time for realistic sea states. In addition, electricalpower was found to be relatively insensitive to gain tuning overa broad range of gains, implying that an imperfectly tunedcontroller does not result in a large penalty to electrical powercapture. Because the controller relies on an identified model ofdevice intrinsic impedance, the sensitivity of power capture wasevaluated with respect to uncertainty in the constituent termsof intrinsic impedance. Power capture is found to be relativelyinsensitive to uncertainty of 20% in constituent terms of theidentified intrinsic impedance model. An extension of this controllaw that allows for adaptation to a changing device impedancemodel over time is proposed for long-term deployments, aswell as an approach to explicitly handle constraints within thisarchitecture.

Although continuous-flow left ventricular assist devices (CF-LVADs) provide an augmentation in systemic perfusion, there is a scarcity of in vivo data regarding systemic pulsatility on support. Patients supported on CF-LVAD therapy (n = 71) who underwent combined left/right catheterization ramp study were included. Aortic pulsatility was defined by the pulsatile power index (PPI), which was also calculated in a cohort of high-output heart failure (HOHF, n = 66) and standard HF cohort (n = 44). PPI was drastically lower in CF-LVAD-supported patients with median PPI of 0.006 (interquartile range [IQR], 0.002-0.012) compared with PPI in the HF population at 0.09 (IQR, 0.06-0.17) or HOHF population at 0.25 (IQR, 0.13-0.37; p0.0001 among groups). With speed augmentation during ramp, PPI values fell quickly in patients with higher PPI at baseline. PPI correlated poorly with left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) in all groups. In CF-LVAD patients, there was a stronger correlation with LV dP/dt (r = 0.41; p = 0.001) than LVEF (r = 0.21; p = 0.08; pint0.001). CF-LVAD support is associated with a dramatic reduction in arterial pulsatility as measured by PPI relative to HOHF and HF cohorts and decreases with speed. Further work is needed to determine the applicability to the next generation of device therapy.

The Response Bias Scale (RBS) is a measure of protocol validity that is composed of items from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - 2. The RBS has been successfully cross-validated as a whole, but the composition of the scale has not been reexamined until recently when three types of items were identified. In this study we sought to examine the reliability of the scale as a whole, as well as the items that are (a) empirically supported and conceptually similar (ES/CS), (b) empirically supported but not conceptually similar (ES/NS), and (c) not empirically supported (NES). Participants included 56 veterans undergoing neuropsychological evaluation for suspected traumatic brain injury. Results generally replicated Ratcliffe et al. finding that removing key NES items improved the internal consistency of the RBS from 0.706 to 0.747. Examined separately, ES/CS and ES/NS had internal consistencies of 0.629 and 0.605, respectively. One of the nine NES items had strong internal consistency, but none of the remaining eight had corrected item-total correlations above 0.194. NES items had an internal consistency of 0.177. Although the RBS is well-validated in detecting non-credible cognitive presentations, it may prove even more valuable after further item refinement whereby items detracting from its reliability and validity are excised.

Gastrointestinal motility is crucial to gut health and has been associated with different disorders such as inflammatory bowel diseases and postoperative ileus. Despite rat and mouse being the two animal models most widely used in gastrointestinal research, minimal studies in rats have investigated gastrointestinal motility. Therefore, our study provides a comparison of colonic motility in the mouse and rat to clarify species differences and assess the relative effectiveness of each animal model for colonic motility research. We describe the protocol modifications and optimization undertaken to enable video imaging of colonic motility in the rat. Apart from the broad difference in terms of gastrointestinal diameter and length, we identified differences in the fundamental histology of the proximal colon such that the rat had larger villus height-to-width and villus height-to-crypt depth ratios compared with mouse. Since gut motility is tightly regulated by the enteric nervous system (ENS), we investigated how colonic contractile activity within each rodent species responds to modulation of the ENS inhibitory neuronal network. Here we used