Search

Purpose To systematically review and assess the use of the Ligament Advanced Reinforcement System (LARS; Surgical Implants and Devices, Arc-sur-Tille, France) for posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) reconstruction. Methods A search of multiple databases was conducted using the following terms: (LARS[All Fields] AND posterior[All Fields]) OR (LARS[All Fields] AND PCL[All Fields]). The methodologic quality of each article was assessed by use of abridged Downs and Black criteria. Results Fifty-four studies were found from the database search, of which 5 were included in the final review (4 case series and 1 case-control study). One hundred twenty-nine PCL reconstructions with LARS were performed. The mean patient age was 32.2 years, with 89 male and 40 female patients included. The mean follow-up time ranged from 10.5 to 44 months. Lysholm scores improved from a mean of 64.8 preoperatively to 89.8 postoperatively. No patients had International Knee Documentation Committee grade 1 or 2 preoperatively, with 93.0% achieving this postoperatively. Only 1 case of synovitis and 1 case of graft rupture were reported. Conclusions There is little evidence on the effectiveness of PCL reconstructions using LARS ligaments. What data there are show great promise, with short- and medium-term outcome data appearing favorable to autograft reconstruction. Complication rates are encouragingly low. Clinical Relevance LARS has great potential for PCL reconstruction. Further studies are needed regarding the use of LARS ligaments during PCL reconstruction, including longer follow-up periods and investigation into the optimal timing for reconstruction. This may be best achieved by way of a multicenter study.

Background:Knee osteoarthritis after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury has previously been reported. However, there has been no meta-analysis reporting the development and progression of osteoarthritis.Purpose:We present the first meta-analysis reporting on the development and progression of osteoarthritis after ACL injury at a minimum mean follow-up of 10 years, using a single and widely accepted radiologic classification, the Kellgren & Lawrence classification.Study Design:Meta-analysis.Method:Articles were included for systematic review if they reported radiologic findings of ACL-injured knees and controls using the Kellgren & Lawrence classification at a minimum mean follow-up period of 10 years. Appropriate studies were then included for meta-analysis.Results:Nine studies were included for systematic review, of which 6 studies were further included for meta-analysis. One hundred twenty-one of 596 (20.3%) ACL-injured knees had moderate or severe radiologic changes (Kellgren & Lawrence grade III or IV) compared with 23 of 465 (4.9%) uninjured ACL-intact contralateral knees. After ACL injury, irrespective of whether the patients were treated operatively or nonoperatively, the relative risk (RR) of developing even minimal osteoarthritis was 3.89 ( P < .00001), while the RR of developing moderate to severe osteoarthritis (grade III and IV) was 3.84 ( P < .0004). Nonoperatively treated ACL-injured knees had significantly higher RR (RR, 4.98; P < .00001) of developing any grade of osteoarthritis compared with those treated with reconstructive surgery (RR, 3.62; P < .00001). Investigation of progression to moderate or severe osteoarthritis (grade III or IV only) after 10 years showed that ACL-reconstructed knees had a significantly higher RR (RR, 4.71; P < .00001) compared with nonoperative management (RR, 2.41; P = .54). It was not possible to stratify for return to sports among the patients undergoing ACL reconstruction.Conclusion:Results support the proposition that ACL injury predisposes knees to osteoarthritis, while ACL reconstruction surgery has a role in reducing the risk of developing degenerative changes at 10 years. However, returning to sports activities after ligament reconstruction may exacerbate the development of arthritis.

The word “commodity” in the Bastard's speech in King John 2.1 is listed in the O.E.D. as an example of definition 2b, “expediency”. Most of the major scholarly editions of the play also ascribe that meaning to the word. There is historical near-consensus among editors that the Bastard means expediency or self-interest when he says “commodity”. Karl Marx quotes these lines in an 1857 newspaper article in such a way that suggests that he reads the word “commodity” as denoting an article with exchange-value. A close reading of the Bastard's speech, an exploration of Shakespeare's use of the word in other plays and a survey of other early modern texts that use the word “commodity” provide evidence that Shakespeare means to denote the more modern economic sense of the word. If this is accepted, then the O.E.D. and future textual practice should be revised to incorporate this change. This also opens a space for King John to be read as a critique of the alienating effects of the newly emerging economic system in...

[Extract] American sociology has not taken and does not take religion as seriously as it needs to in order to do the best sociology possible. Despite religion being an important and distinctive kind of practice in human social life, both historically and in the world today, American sociologists often neglect religion or treat it redtionistically. We explore several reasons for this negligence, focusing on key historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional factors. We then turn to offer a number of proposais to help remedy American sociology’s negligence of religion, advance the study of religion in particular, and enhance sociology’s broader disciplinary capacity to improve our understanding and explanation of human social life. Our purpose in this analysis is to stimulate critical and constructive discussion about the significance of religion in human life and scholarly research on it.

The trends in the publication of articles regarding knee arthroplasty and soft tissue surgery were analysed with regard to geographical authorship, institutional funding and number of authors. Over 7500 articles from relevant journals with the highest impact factors according to the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report (2010) were evaluated from 1995 to 2010. The rate of publication increased by 16.9 per year for arthroplasty articles and by 13.9 per year for soft tissue surgery articles. The relative supremacy of the USA has declined over the 16 years, its share dropping from 72.2% to 39.2% for arthroplasty articles and from 61.7% to 36.6% for soft tissue surgery articles. The UK, Japan, South Korea and smaller countries in Asia and South America have become increasingly prolific.

(2013). Why Things Matter to People. Journal of Critical Realism: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 255-259.

Modern tracking technologies enables new ways for data mining in the wild. It allows wildlife monitoring centers to permanently collect geospatial data in a non-intrusive manner in real-time and at low cost. Unfortunately, wildlife data is exposed to crime and there is already a first reported case of ‘cyber-poaching’. Based on stolen geospatial data, poachers can easily track and kill animals. As a result, cautious monitoring centers limited data access for research and public use. This means that the data cannot fully exploit its potential. We propose a novel solution to overcome the security problem. It allows monitoring centers to securely answer questions from the research community and to provide aggregated data to the public while the raw data is protected against unauthorized third parties. This data service can also be monetized. Several new applications are conceivable, such as a mobile app for preventing conflicts between human and wildlife or for engaging people in wildlife donation. Besides presenting the solution and potential use cases, the intention of present article is to start a discussion about the need for data protection and privacy in the animal world., GeoRich '17 Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Workshop on Managing and Mining Enriched Geo-Spatial Data, ISBN:978-1-4503-5047-1

Objectives. There have been advances in the identification and understanding of molecular subsets of lung cancer, defined by specific oncogenic aberrations. A number of actionable genetic alterations have been identified, such as the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation. We aimed to establish the reasons why patients were not undergoing EGFR mutation testing at the time of histological diagnosis. Methods. The records of 70 patients with advanced adenocarcinoma of the lung managed through a single multidisciplinary team at a single institution were reviewed. Data were collected on method of tumour sample collection, whether this was sent for EGFR testing, and the result. Results. Seventy patients were identified. In 21/25 (84%) cases, cytological sampling was sufficient for EGFR mutation analysis, compared with 40/45 (89%) cases with histological sampling. EGFR mutation testing was not carried out in 22/70 (31.4%) patients. There was insufficient tumour sample for EGFR testing in 9/22 (40.9%) patients. Other reasons for not testing included poor patient fitness and problems in the diagnostic pathway. Conclusions. In this series, cytological tumour sampling was not the predominant reason why cancers failed to have EGFR mutation status established.

In this paper, we present a novel kinematic framework using hybrid twists, that has the potential to improve the reliability of estimated human shoulderkinematics. This is important as the functional aspects ofthe human shoulder are evaluated using the information embedded in thoracohumeral kinematics. We successfully demonstrate in our results, that our approach is invariant of the body-fixed coordinate definition, is singularity free and has high repeatability; thus resulting in a flexible user-specific kinematic tracking not restricted to bony landmarks. Accepted paper. This preprint is for personal use only.(AAL Call 6) AXO-SUIT project

The objectives of our study were to assess the evidence for the diagnostic efficacy of 3-T MRI for meniscal and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in the knee using arthroscopy as the reference standard and to compare these results with the results of a previous meta-analysis assessing 1.5-T MRI.The online Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, and PubMed databases were searched using the following terms: MRI AND ((3 OR three) AND (Tesla OR T)) AND knee AND arthroscopy AND (menisc* OR ligament). Patient demographics, patient characteristics, MRI scanning details, and diagnostic results were investigated. The methodologic quality of the included studies was assessed using the revised Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS-2) tool. A meta-analysis of studies using 3-T MRI was performed, and the results were compared with a previous meta-analysis of studies using 1.5-T MRI.One hundred one studies were identified by the search strategy, and 13 studies were included in our review. Twelve studies were considered to have level 1b evidence, and one study was considered to have level 2b evidence. All 13 studies had high methodologic integrity and low risk of bias using the QUADAS-2 tool. The studies included 1197 patients with a mean age of 41.9 years. Ten of the 13 studies were eligible for meta-analysis. The mean sensitivity and mean specificity of 3-T MRI for knee injuries by location were as follows: medial meniscus, 0.94 (95% CI, 0.91-0.96) and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.75-0.83), respectively; lateral meniscus, 0.81 (95% CI, 0.75-0.85) and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.84-0.89); and ACL, 0.92 (95% CI, 0.83-0.96) and 0.99 (95% CI, 0.96-1.00). The specificity of 3-T MRI for injuries of the lateral meniscus was significantly lower than that of 1.5-T MRI (p = 0.0013).This study does not provide evidence that 3-T scanners have superior diagnostic efficacy for meniscal damage and ACL integrity when compared with previous studies of 1.5-T machines.

Efficient and accurate planning of fingertip grasps is essential for dexterous in-hand manipulation. In this work, we present a system for fingertip grasp planning that incrementally learns a heuristic for hand reachability and multi-fingered inverse kinematics. The system consists of an online execution module and an offline optimization module. During execution the system plans and executes fingertip grasps using Canny's grasp quality metric and a learned random forest based hand reachability heuristic. In the offline module, this heuristic is improved based on a grasping manifold that is incrementally learned from the experiences collected during execution. The system is evaluated both in simulation and on a Schunk-SDH dexterous hand mounted on a KUKA-KR5 arm. We show that, as the grasping manifold is adapted to the system's experiences, the heuristic becomes more accurate, which results in an improved performance of the execution module. The improvement is not only observed for experienced objects, but also for previously unknown objects of similar sizes.

How can small and medium sized companies relate to these three letters that have such an extensive meaning? Should they develop a policy and system for meeting the requirements in UN Global Compact and/or the GRI – Global Reporting Initiative? How does personal experience influence the interpretation of policies and actions? What can be done to create meaningful policies and actions in a small and medium sized company to enhance its work with CSR? In our Master of Management thesis, we have explored how a small business in the fjords of Norway worked with CSR. We interviewed several of its key personnel regarding how they understood CSR, what they did, how the employees in the company responded and how their customers responded to their efforts.

My book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), co-authored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, follows over hundreds of pages a variety of topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued diversions and digressions. But what does the bigger picture of the religious and spiritual lives of US teenagers look like when we stand back and try to put it all together? Here we re-summarize our observations in venturing a general thesis about teenage religion and spirituality in the USA, tentatively advancing this thesis as something between conclusive fact and mere conjecture. We suggest that the de facto dominant religion among contemporary teenagers in the USA is what we call ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ (MTD). This ‘religion’, which emerged from hundreds of interviews with US teenagers, consists of a God who created and orders the world, watching over human life on earth. This God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, but does not need to be particularly involved in their lives, except when he is needed to resolve a problem. Being happy and feeling good about oneself is the central goal in life. When they die, good people will go to heaven. These tenets form a de facto creed that is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth, but is also more than a little visible among black and conservative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers and even many ‘non-religious’ teenagers in the USA. Note that no teenager would actually use the terminology ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deist’ to describe himself or herself and very few would lay out the main points of its creed so clearly and concisely. Rather, it is our summarizing term for the religious viewpoint that emerged from hundreds of interviews on matters of religion, faith, and spiritual practices. While quotes illustrating MTD are aplenty, suffice it here to examine merely a few that are representative of this religion’s core components.

Christian Smith Crystal Bartolovich, Jean E. Howard and David Hillman, Marx and Freud: Great Shakespeareans, Vol. X (London: Continuum, 2012), 221 pp., £75.00 (hbk) A spectre is haunting theory – t...

The problem of door opening is fundamental for robots operating in domestic environments. Since these environments are generally unstructured, a robot must deal with several types of uncertainties associated with the dynamics and kinematics of a door to achieve successful opening. The present paper proposes a dynamic force/velocity controller which uses adaptive estimation of the radial direction based on adaptive estimates of the door hinge's position. The control action is decomposed into estimated radial and tangential directions, which are proved to converge to the corresponding actual values. The force controller uses reactive compensation of the tangential forces and regulates the radial force to a desired small value, while the velocity controller ensures that the robot's end-effector moves with a desired tangential velocity. The performance of the control scheme is demonstrated in simulation with a 2 DoF planar manipulator opening a door.

A wide-held assumption is that increased religiousness is associated with stronger perceptions of a conflict between religion and science. This article examines this assumption using four distinct questions asked on the third wave of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Results indicate a variety of viewpoints for constructing the relationship between science and religion, rather than a simple conflict-compatibility continuum. Further, findings suggest that increased religiousness among emerging adults is associated with a stronger agreement in science and religion’s compatibility, rather than conflict. Incorporating New Age or non-Western spiritual tradition and a strict adherence to fundamentalist Christian doctrine are associated with complex configurations of beliefs on the relationship between religion and science. Collectively, the findings among emerging adults contradict traditional assumptions about how religious experiences influence beliefs, suggesting that such social factors may influence beliefs and attitudes uniquely at different points in the lifecourse or across generations. More broadly, the findings speak to the ongoing debate about the extent to which differing social experiences may produce consistent or discordant sets of beliefs and values, and in turn how particular configurations may impact strategies of action across a range of life domains.

This paper provides an analysis of three fundamental flaws in traditional water-efficiency discussions, as exemplified by a recent paper in Water International (Frederiksen and Allen 2011). In particular, we identify major components of inefficient water use typically ignored in theoretical discussions, address the concept of water productivity beyond simple efficiency, and identify important non-water “co-benefits” that are either ignored or discounted in most basin assessments, including improved water quality, increased production, greater reliability, decreased energy demands, and reduced or delayed infrastructure investments. While there are no silver bullets, water conservation and efficiency can play an important role in solving water management challenges.

Previous research on charitable giving has identified a significant relationship between political conservatism and greater financial giving to charitable causes. Yet that research has not adequately explored the important role of religion in that relationship, nor differences in financial giving targets (i.e., religious congregations, noncongregational religious organizations, and nonreligious organizations). Support for competing theories concerning political ideology, religious practice, and charitable financial giving is assessed using data from the Panel Study on American Ethnicity and Religion (PS-ARE). For both religious and nonreligious giving, the effect of political ideology is completely mediated by participation in religious and civic practices. These findings support recent arguments on “practice theory” in cultural sociology and suggest that it is less the effect of ideology than of active participation in religious, political, and community organizations that explains Americans’ financial giving to religious and nonreligious organizations.

This study analyzes the potential for water savings from irrigation efficiency improvements in California, USA. We model water savings associated with three efficiency scenarios in wet, average and dry water years. The ‘efficient irrigation technology’ scenario shifts a fraction of the crops from flood irrigation to sprinkler and drip systems; the ‘improved irrigation scheduling’ scenario uses local climate and soil information to more precisely meet crop water needs; and the ‘regulated deficit irrigation’ applies less water to crops during drought-tolerant growth stages to save water and improve crop quality or yield. The three scenarios evaluated here each conservatively show the potential for significant water savings. Their combined potential applied water savings are between 5.6 × 109 m3 (4.5 million acre-feet (MAF)) in a wet year and 7.4 × 109 m3 (6.0 MAF) in a dry year. In total, these scenarios could reduce water applied to California agriculture by 17% or reduce water consumed by California agriculture by 13%. The results also indicate that water conservation and efficiency improvements are particularly effective in dry years, when agricultural water demand is greater and conflicts over scarce water resources are more severe. These approaches can reduce vulnerability to increasingly uncertain water supplies.

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) has two distinct phases of its viral life cycle: lytic and latent. One viral immediate-early protein that is responsible for determining the balance between productive lytic replication and reactivation from latency is infected cell protein 0 (ICP0). ICP0 is a 775-amino acid really interesting new gene (RING)-finger-containing protein that possesses E3 ubiquitin ligase activity, which is required for ICP0 to activate HSV-1 gene expression, disrupt nuclear domain (ND) 10 structures, mediate the degradation of cellular proteins, and evade the host cell’s intrinsic and innate antiviral defenses. This article examines our current understanding of ICP0’s transactivating, E3 ubiquitin ligase, and antihost defense activities and their inter-relationships to one another. Lastly, we will discuss how these properties of ICP0 may be utilized as possible targets for HSV-1 antiviral therapies.

How might the social scientific study of religion (SSSR) benefit from adjusting some of its journal article publishing standards and practices ? This article builds onfive presuppositions about the purpose and nature of good sociology in order to advance five specific proposals for changes in how we write, review, and make use of journal articles in the field. Those proposals concern the publishing of descriptive empirical research notes, meta-analysis review essays, detailed methodological information, arguments about causation, and analytical emphases on the substantive power of variables rather than mere statistical significance. The purpose and expected result of these proposed publishing adjustments is to increase the quality, value, and cumulative nature of the scholarship produced in the SSSR.

In this paper we describe a method for bridging internet time delays in a free motion type teleoperation scenario in an unmodeled remote environment with video feedback. The method proposed uses minimum jerk motion models to predict the input from the user a time into the future that is equivalent to the round-trip communication delay. The predictions are then used to control a remote robot. Thus, the operator can in effect observe the resulting motion of the remote robot with virtually no time-delay, even in the presence of a delay on the physical communications channel. We present results from a visually guided teleoperated line tracing experiment with 100 ms round-trip delays, where we show that the proposed method makes a significant performance improvement for teleoperation with delays corresponding to intercontinental distances.

This article discusses the findings of a multi-hospital satisfaction survey of men with newly diagnosed prostate cancer. The survey was designed to enable direct comparison with a previously published satisfaction survey conducted by the Prostate Cancer Charity. Results showed that the nurse specialist is a valuable resource for patients and has an important role in maintaining standards of care.

Over the past two decades, watershed restoration has dramatically increased internationally. California has been at the forefront, allocating billions of dollars to restoration activities through legislation and voter-approved bonds. Yet, the implications of restoration remain ambiguous because there has been little examination of restoration accomplishments and almost no analysis of the political context of restoration. This article addresses these gaps, utilizing a case study of the Russian River basin in Northern California. We identify trends that shed light on both the ecological and the political implications of restoration at a basin scale by examining a database of 787 restoration projects implemented in the Russian River basin since the early 1980s. Although a total of over $47 million has been spent on restoration in the basin, dominant forms of restoration are limited in scope to small-scale projects that focus on technical solutions to site-specific problems. The majority of restoration efforts are devoted to road repair, riparian stabilization, and in-stream structures, accounting for 62% of all projects. These types of projects do not address the broader social drivers of watershed change such as land and water uses. We suggest that restoration can become more effective by addressing the entire watershed as a combination of social and ecological forces that interact to produce watershed conditions.

I thank my respondents for their feedback on my essay and David Yamane for providing the opportunity of this exchange to clarify issues and hopefully move forward our understanding of significant matters in our field. It is important, after considering the details of my respondents' reactions, first to step back to gain some larger perspective on the original nature and purpose of the essay in question. As to genre, my essay is a theoretical thought piece, intended to float ideas that may offer useful approaches and perspectives for future research in the field. I agree with the editor that such thought pieces deserve a hearing in our joumals, alongside more standard articles, because they hold the potential to contribute in their own way to our self-reflexivity as schol ars and creative reflection on alternative perspectives in our field. As to argu ment, to reiterate, I believe that the sociology of religion needs to develop a stronger empirical research program examining how religious beliefs and prac tices generate for adherents subjective experiences involving emotional respons es which help to reinforce people's commitment to those religions. Exactly how and why that happens (assuming the suggestion itself has any merit) is an open empirical question, but one that is currently neglected and I think well worth investigating more seriously in the future. The specific case that I took up in my essay as an example of how this might work was Christianity, a multifaceted case the argument about which could of course be developed and complexified well beyond what my short essay offered. I suspect that this proposed research agenda would also prove fruitful if applied to most other religions, although the specifics of the analytical stories to be told will no doubt vary by the religious tradition and sub-tradition being studied. As to style and tone, my essay was intentionally written with a strong feeling of sub jective experience and affect, in order to create something of an aesthetic corre spondence between the theoretical argument and the tenor of the prose. My pur pose was to give some sense of the phenomenological perspective embedded in my argument, which necessarily introduces subjectivity and affect into our under standing and explanation. This purposeful discursive move I made explicit in the seventh sentence of my essay's abstract, which stated, "I also reflect the subjec

Human beings subconsciously adapt their behaviors to a communication partner in order to make interactions run smoothly. In human-robot interactions, not only the human but also the robot is expected to adapt to its partner. Thus, to facilitate human-robot interactions, a robot should be able to read subconscious comfort and discomfort signals from humans and adjust its behavior accordingly, just like a human would. However, most previous, research works expected the human to consciously give feedback, which might interfere with the aim of interaction. We propose an adaptation mechanism based on reinforcement learning that reads subconscious body signals from a human partner, and uses this information to adjust interaction distances, gaze meeting, and motion speed and timing in human-robot interactions. The mechanism uses gazing at the robot's face and human movement distance as subconscious body signals that indicate a human's comfort and discomfort. A pilot study with a humanoid robot that has ten interaction behaviors has been conducted. The study result of 12 subjects suggests that the proposed mechanism enables autonomous adaptation to individual preferences. Also, detailed discussion and conclusions are presented. © 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 20110711

In this work we present an adaptive control approach for pivoting, which is an in-hand manipulation maneuver that consists of rotating a grasped object to a desired orientation relative to the robot’s hand. We perform pivoting by means of gravity, allowing the object to rotate between the fingers of a one degree of freedom gripper and controlling the gripping force to ensure that the object follows a reference trajectory and arrives at the desired angular position. We use a visual pose estimation system to track the pose of the object and force measurements from tactile sensors to control the gripping force. The adaptive controller employs an update law that accommodates for errors in the friction coefficient,which is one of the most common sources of uncertainty in manipulation. Our experiments confirm that the proposed adaptive controller successfully pivots a grasped object in the presence of uncertainty in the object’s friction parameters. QC 20160524

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 (SGMA) set a goal to achieve sustainable management of California's groundwater resources by 2040, yet it left many of the details of its implementation to be worked out through subsequent regulations. Arguably, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) developed the most important of these regulations this year regarding how the state should evaluate local Groundwater Sustainability Plans. Despite their importance, these regulations have received little media attention or independent review. Here, we offer our independent analysis of a key aspect of the regulations, focusing on the role of science, data, and models that will be critical for SGMA's material and institutional success. In particular, we draw on our previously published research regarding sustainability metrics (Christian-Smith and Abhold 2015), the role of stakeholders (Dobbin et al. 2015), and the importance of good governance (Kiparsky et al. 2016). We conclude with a series of general principles for ensuring scientific transparency.

Why has Christianity as a religious tradition survived for two millennia? What makes Christianity "work"? Many social scientific answers to related questions focus on structural forces shaping religion and on factors that explain variance across belief and practice. This article takes a dif ferent approach, seeking to explain the ongoing existence of the phenomenon itself before analyzing variance within it. The idea is to address basic causes of what exists as distinct from more superficial causes of variation within it. To do so, I take a phenomenological approach that focuses particularly on emotions, seeking to explicate the recurrent, characteristic, and subjective experiences of many Christians that help to explain their ongoing commitment to and involvement in the faith. I also reflect the subjective focus on emotions in the tone of the article, which introduces a strong sense of subjec tive experience and affect. By complementing typical sociological analyses of religious variance with this kind of causal analysis of its existence, this article seeks to expand our range of explanation and understanding in the sociology of religion.

A study was performed to establish whether transrectal ultrasound (TRUS)-based postimplant dosimetry (PID) is both practically feasible and comparable to computed tomography (CT)-based PID, recommended in current published guidelines. In total, 22 patients treated consecutively at a single cancer center with low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy for early-stage prostate cancer had a transrectal ultrasound performed immediately after implant (d0-TRUS) and computed tomography scan 30 days after implant (d30-CT). Postimplant dosimetry planning was performed on both image sets and the results were compared. The interobserver reproducibility of the transrectal ultrasound postimplant dosimetry planning technique was also assessed. It was noticed that there was no significant difference in mean prostate D 90 (136.5 Gy and 144.4 Gy, p = 0.2197), V 100 (86.4% and 89.1%, p = 0.1480) and V 150 (52.0% and 47.8%, p = 0.1657) for d30-CT and d0-TRUS, respectively. Rectal doses were significantly higher for d0-TRUS than d30-CT. Urethral doses were available with d0-TRUS only. We have shown that d0-TRUS PID is a useful tool for assessing the quality of an implant after low-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy and is comparable to d30-CT PID. There are clear advantages to its use in terms of resource and time efficiency both for the clinical team and the patient.

Several treatments have been shown to prolong survival in metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC); the optimum sequencing of these is not established. We investigated methods of identifying patients with mCRPC unlikely to respond to abiraterone.A retrospective analysis was carried-out in 47 consecutive patients with mCRPC treated sequentially with androgen deprivation (LHRHa), bicalutamide, docetaxel then abiraterone.The median progression-free survival in patients treated with abiraterone was shorter in those with ≤18 months' response to LHRHa (118 vs. 279 days; p=0.018), bicalutamide non-responders (91 vs. 196 days; p=0.003) and patients with ≤6 months' response to docetaxel (102 vs. 294 days; p0.001). The median overall survival was also shorter (348 vs. 815 days, p=0.016; 413 vs. 752 days, p=0.009; and 325 vs. 727 days, p0.04, respectively).A response of ≤18 months' to LHRHa, non-response to bicalutamide and ≤6 months' response to docetaxel predicted poor response to abiraterone.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the perceptions of and approaches to mathematical proof of undergraduates enrolled in lecture-based and problem-based “transition to proof” courses. While the students in the lecture-based course demonstrated conceptions of proof that reflect those reported in the research literature as insufficient and typical of undergraduates, the students in the problem-based course were found to hold conceptions of and approach the construction of proofs in ways that demonstrated efforts to make sense of mathematical ideas. This sense-making manifested itself in the ways in which students employed initial strategies, notation, prior knowledge and experiences, and concrete examples in the proof construction process. These differences were also seen when students were asked to determine the validity of completed proofs. These results suggest that such a problem-based course may provide opportunities for students to develop conceptions of proof that are more meaningful and robust than does a traditional lecture-based course.

American sociology has long documented and theorized persistent inequalities between religious communities in the United States; in addition, socioeconomic inequalities between religious groups have played an important role in many sociological theories about religion and society. Since the publication of numerous important works published in the mid-20th century, however, the social stratification of American religion has been a curiously understudied topic. This research note is an attempt to update our descriptive knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities between American religious groups. Using General Social Survey data to track educational, income, and job status inequality over a 16-year period, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, we find that socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system has been quite persistent and stable, suggesting that significant mobility within this system in the mid-20th century may be declining, thus producing a more stable system of stratification.

Students of religious development in youth tend to focus on characteristics of the child or adolescent and perhaps those of their parents. Although often reflecting standard disciplinary practices, this approach is also often the result of data limitations. This study used longitudinal data from adolescents, parents, friends, schools, and communities to examine the role of social and religious context on the development of public and subjective religiosity in adolescents. Employing data from 2 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we found that parents and friends strongly influenced the religious service attendance habits of adolescents and that these, as well as school context, shaped how important religion is in adolescents' lives. County-level influences appeared minimal. The results affirmed an ecological approach to the study of religious development in youth, one that considers the multiple social contexts in which youth live.

A large body of empirical studies shows that religion often serves as a factor promoting positive, healthy outcomes in the lives of American adolescents. This research note reports findings of one test of a “network closure” explanation of these religious effects. It uses the national Survey of Parents and Youth (1998–1999) data to examine the relationship between religious participation and five measures of network closure. The findings support the hypothesis that participation in American religious congregations increases network closure between the parents of youth and their children's friends, their children's friends' parents, and their children's teachers.

A large body of empirical studies shows that religion often serves as a factor promoting positive, healthy outcomes in the lives of American adolescents. Yet existing theoretical explanations for these religious effects remain largely disjointed and fragmented. This article attempts to formulate a more systematic, integrated, and coherent account of religion’s constructive influence in the lives of American youth, suggesting nine key factors (moral directives, spiritual experiences, role models, community and leadership skills, coping skills, cultural capital, social capital, network closure, and extra-community links) that cluster around three key dimensions of influence (moral order, learned competencies, and social and organizational ties). Several decades of social scientific studies have shown that religion is often a factor in the lives of American adolescents, influencing their attitudes and behaviors in ways that are commonly viewed as positive and constructive. Across a number of areas of concern, various measures of religiosity are typically associated with a variety of healthy, desirable outcomes. This article is an attempt to theorize systematically why religion might have such an influence in the lives of American adolescents. Within the relevant bodies of literature, individual publications normally suggest causal mechanisms explaining their particular findings. Altogether, these many studies are very helpful, but as a whole they present the contemporary researcher with a disjointed and fragmented account for religious influences in the lives of American teenagers. In the following pages, I attempt to synthesize some of what we know from these and other informative studies into a more coherent, systematic account of how and why religion exerts significant positive effects on American youth.

In this work we propose a sliding mode controllerfor in-hand manipulation that repositions a tool in the robot’shand by using gravity and controlling the slippage of the tool. In our approach, the robot holds the tool with a pinch graspand we model the system as a link attached to the grippervia a passive revolute joint with friction, i.e., the grasp onlyaffords rotational motions of the tool around a given axis ofrotation. The robot controls the slippage by varying the openingbetween the fingers in order to allow the tool to move tothe desired angular position following a reference trajectory.We show experimentally how the proposed controller achievesconvergence to the desired tool orientation under variations ofthe tool’s inertial parameters. QC 20160112