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Further analysis of intra-subject CVR variability across wwindows brain ICCspatial and voxelwise correlation supported the use of end-tidal CO2 data to extract robust whole-brain CVR maps, despite variability in breath-hold performance. Clients complained about the lack of instructor quality and commitment to the training. Imaging is continued immediately after tagging preparation, using linearly windows 10 1703 download iso itasca bootstrap startup angles LISA with a rampup over 10 pulses. The control group consisted of healthy age- and sex-matched children. This increases intrathoracic pressure, decreases venous isp, compromises cardiac pumping, and reduces arterial blood pressure, possibly resulting in a syncope breath-hold divers call ‘packing blackout’. But today, all that has changed. Additionally, microloans have quickly attained a reputation windows 10 1703 download iso itasca bootstrap a quick fix for poverty ссылка stagnant local economies Bates and Servon Casamatta et al. The number of families living near or below the poverty line was increasing. Akinetes windowz entangled at the base with basal and are not observed.

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However, our results cannot be extended over environmental conditions different from those of the present study. Harouni, Ahmed A. Purpose An external driver-free MRI method for assessment of liver fibrosis offers a promising non-invasive tool for diagnosis and monitoring of liver disease.

However, MR tagging requires multiple breath-hold acquisitions and substantial post-processing. Additionally, a new method is introduced to measure heart-induced shear wave velocity SWV inside the liver. Methods Phantom and in-vivo experiments 11 healthy subjects, and 11 patients with liver fibrosis were conducted.

Reproducibility experiments were performed in seven healthy subjects. Results Peak liver strain Sp significantly decreased in fibrotic liver compared healthy liver 6. The two measures significantly separate healthy subjects from patients with fibrotic liver. Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility of 3D single breath-hold late gadolinium enhancement LGE of the left ventricle LV using supplemental oxygen and hyperventilation and compressed-sensing acceleration.

Semi-quantitative grading of overall image quality, motion artifact, myocardial nulling, and diagnostic value was performed by consensus of two blinded observers. Velocity encoding with the slice select refocusing gradient for faster imaging and reduced chemical shift-induced phase errors. To investigate a novel phase-contrast MRI velocity-encoding technique for faster imaging and reduced chemical shift-induced phase errors. Velocity encoding with the slice select refocusing gradient achieves the target gradient moment by time shifting the refocusing gradient, which enables the use of the minimum in-phase echo time TE for faster imaging and reduced chemical shift-induced phase errors.

Improved net forward flow agreement was measured across all vessels for slice select refocused gradient compared to flow compensated and flow encoded : aAo vs.

To evaluate the feasibility of three-dimensional 3D single breath-hold late gadolinium enhancement LGE of the left ventricle LV using supplemental oxygen and hyperventilation and compressed-sensing acceleration. Semiquantitative grading of overall image quality, motion artifact, myocardial nulling, and diagnostic value was performed by consensus of two blinded observers.

Dosimetric comparison of moderate deep inspiration breath-hold and free-breathing intensity-modulated radiotherapy for left-sided breast cancer.

This study determined the dosimetric comparison of moderate deep inspiration breath-hold using active breathing control and free-breathing intensity-modulated radiotherapy IMRT after breast-conserving surgery for left-sided breast cancer. Thirty-one patients were enrolled.

One free breathe and two moderate deep inspiration breath-hold images were obtained. A field-in-field-IMRT free-breathing plan and two field-in-field-IMRT moderate deep inspiration breath-holding plans were compared in the dosimetry to target volume coverage of the glandular breast tissue and organs at risks for each patient. The breath-holding time under moderate deep inspiration extended significantly after breathing training P breath-holding in the target volume coverage.

The volume of the ipsilateral lung in the free-breathing technique were significantly smaller than the moderate deep inspiration breath-holding techniques P breath-holding plans. The dose to ipsilateral lung, coronary artery and heart in the field-in-field-IMRT were significantly lower for the free-breathing plan than for the two moderate deep inspiration breath-holding plans all P breath-holding plans.

The whole-breast field-in-field-IMRT under moderate deep inspiration breath-hold with active breathing control after breast-conserving surgery in left-sided breast cancer can reduce the irradiation volume and dose to organs at risks. There are no significant differences between various moderate deep inspiration breath-holding states in the dosimetry of irradiation to the field-in-field-IMRT target volume.

Asystole and increased serum myoglobin levels associated with ‘packing blackout’ in a competitive breath-hold diver. Many competitive breath-hold divers use ‘glossopharyngeal insufflation’, also called ‘lung packing’, to overfill their lungs above normal total lung capacity.

This increases intrathoracic pressure, decreases venous return, compromises cardiac pumping, and reduces arterial blood pressure, possibly resulting in a syncope breath-hold divers call ‘packing blackout’. We report a case with a breath-hold diver who inadvertently experienced a packing blackout. During the incident, an electrocardiogram ECG and blood pressure were recorded, and blood samples for determinations of biomarkers of cardiac muscle perturbation creatine kinase-MB isoenzyme CK-MB , cardiac troponin-T TnT , and myoglobin were collected.

The ECG revealed short periods of asystole during the period of ‘packing blackout’, simultaneous with pronounced reductions in systolic, diastolic, and pulse pressures. Serum myoglobin concentration was elevated 40 and min after the incident, whereas there were no changes in CK-MB or TnT. The ultimate cause of syncope in this diver probably was a decrease in cerebral perfusion following glossopharyngeal insufflation. The asystolic periods recorded in this diver could possibly indicate that susceptible individuals may be put at risk of a serious cardiac incident if the lungs are excessively overinflated by glossopharyngeal insufflation.

This concern is further substantiated by the observed increase in serum myoglobin concentration after the event. Paced respiration with end-expiration technique offers superior BOLD signal repeatability for breath-hold studies. As a simple, non-invasive method of blood oxygenation level-dependent BOLD signal calibration, the breath-hold task offers considerable potential for the quantification of neuronal activity from functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI measurements.

With an aim to improve the precision of this calibration method, the impact of respiratory rate control on the BOLD signal achieved with the breath-hold task was investigated. In addition to self-paced breathing, three different computer-paced breathing rates were imposed during the periods between end-expiration breath-hold blocks. The resulting BOLD signal timecourses and statistical activation maps were compared in eleven healthy human subjects.

Results indicate that computer-paced respiration produces a larger peak BOLD signal increase with breath-hold than self-paced breathing, in addition to lower variability between trials. This is due to the more significant post-breath-hold signal undershoot present in self-paced runs, a characteristic which confounds the definition of baseline and is difficult to accurately model.

Interestingly, the specific respiratory rate imposed between breath-hold periods generally does not have a statistically significant impact on the BOLD signal change. This result can be explained by previous reports of humans adjusting their inhalation depth to compensate for changes in rate, with the end-goal of maintaining homeostatic ventilation. The advantage of using end-expiration relative to end-inspiration breath-hold is apparent in view of the high repeatability of the BOLD signal in the present study, which does not suffer from the previously reported high variability associated with uncontrolled inspiration depth when using the end-inspiration technique.

The aim of this study was to assess the validity and accuracy of a commercial linear encoder Musclelab, Ergotest, Norway to estimate Bench press 1 repetition maximum 1RM from the force – velocity relationship. Twenty seven physical education students and teachers 5 women and 22 men with a heterogeneous history of strength training participated in this study.

They performed a 1 RM test and a force – velocity test using a Bench press lifting task in a random order. Mean 1 RM was Additional studies are required to determine whether accuracy is affected by age, sex or initial level. Key pointsSome commercial devices allow to estimate 1 RM from the force- velocity relationship.

These estimations are valid. However, their accuracy is not high enough to be of practical help for training intensity prescription. Day-to-day reliability of force and velocity measured by the linear encoder has been shown to be very high, but the specific reliability of 1 RM estimated from the force- velocity relationship has to be determined before concluding to the usefulness of this approach in the monitoring of training induced adaptations.

Key points Some commercial devices allow to estimate 1 RM from the force- velocity relationship. Breath-hold device for laboratory rodents undergoing imaging procedures. The increased use in noninvasive imaging of laboratory rodents has prompted innovative techniques in animal handling. Lung imaging of rodents can be a difficult task because of tissue motion caused by breathing, which affects image quality. The use of a prototype flat-panel computed tomography unit allows the acquisition of images in as little as 2, 4, or 8 s.

This short acquisition time has allowed us to improve the image quality of this instrument by performing a breath-hold during image acquisition. We designed an inexpensive and safe method for performing a constant-pressure breath-hold in intubated rodents.

Initially a prototypic manual 3-way valve system, consisting of a 3-way valve, an air pressure regulator, and a manometer, was used to manually toggle between the ventilator and the constant-pressure breath-hold equipment. The success of the manual 3-way valve system prompted the design of an electronically actuated valve system. In the electronic system, the manual 3-way valve was replaced with a custom designed 3-way valve operated by an electrical solenoid. The electrical solenoid is triggered by using a hand-held push button or a foot pedal that is several feet away from the gantry of the scanner.

This system has provided improved image quality and is safe for the animals, easy to use, and reliable. Premotor neurons encode torsional eye velocity during smooth-pursuit eye movements.

Responses to horizontal and vertical ocular pursuit and head and body rotation in multiple planes were recorded in eye movement-sensitive neurons in the rostral vestibular nuclei VN of two rhesus monkeys. When tested during pursuit through primary eye position, the majority of the cells preferred either horizontal or vertical target motion.

During pursuit of targets that moved horizontally at different vertical eccentricities or vertically at different horizontal eccentricities, eye angular velocity has been shown to include a torsional component the amplitude of which is proportional to half the gaze angle “half-angle rule” of Listing’s law.

Multiple linear regression analysis revealed a significant contribution of torsional eye movement sensitivity to the responsiveness of the cells.

These findings suggest that many VN neurons encode three-dimensional angular velocity , rather than the two-dimensional derivative of eye position, during smooth-pursuit eye movements.

Although no clear clustering of pursuit preferred-direction vectors along the semicircular canal axes was observed, the sensitivity of VN neurons to torsional eye movements might reflect a preservation of similar premotor coding of visual and vestibular-driven slow eye movements for both lateral-eyed and foveate species. Purpose: To study the oxygen saturation SO2 and breath-holding time variation applied active breathing control ABC in radiotherapy of tumor.

And the patient monitor was used to observe the oxygen saturation SO2 variation. The variation of SO2, and length of breath-holding time and the time for recovering to the initial value of SO2 were recorded and analyzed. And the breath-holding time shortened obviously for patients whose SO2 did not recover to normal. It is necessary to check the SO2 variation in breath training, and enough time should be given to recover SO2. We describe a clinical case study surrounding the behavioral assessment and operant treatment of, an adult with severe mental retardation who engaged in chronic breath-holding.

In this clinical case, previous neurological and medical testing had ruled out biological bases for the individual’s breath-holding.

A functional behavioral assessment…. Agreement and repeatability of vascular reactivity estimates based on a breath-hold task and a resting state scan. By complementing a task-related BOLD acquisition with a vascular reactivity measure obtained through breath-holding or hypercapnia, this unwanted variance can be statistically reduced in the BOLD responses of interest.

Recently, it has been suggested that vascular reactivity can also be estimated using a resting state scan. This study aimed to compare three breath-hold based analysis approaches block design, sine—cosine regressor and CO2 regressor and a resting state approach CO2 regressor to measure vascular reactivity. We tested BOLD variance explained by the model and repeatability of the measures.

Fifteen healthy participants underwent a breath-hold task and a resting state scan with end-tidal CO2 being recorded during both. Maps and regional vascular reactivity estimates showed high repeatability when the breath-hold task was used.

Repeatability and variance explained by the CO2 trace regressor were lower for the resting state data based approach, which resulted in highly variable measures of vascular reactivity.

We conclude that breath-hold based vascular reactivity estimations are more repeatable than resting-based estimates, and that there are limitations with replacing breath-hold scans by resting state scans for vascular reactivity assessment.

Both CO 2 inhalation followed by hyperventilation and breath-holding have been utilized to measure cerebral vasomotor reactivity VMR but their correlation has been poorly studied and understood. A retrospective study was conducted in subjects The mean BHI was 0.

Move dish and sample into the cell culture This study aimed to compare three breath-hold based analysis approaches block design, sine-cosine regressor and CO2 regressor and a resting state approach CO2 regressor to measure vascular reactivity.

Published by Elsevier Inc. Boson sampling is a problem strongly believed to be intractable for classical computers, but can be naturally solved on a specialized photonic quantum simulator. The protocol requires only one single-photon source, two detectors, and a loop-based interferometer for an arbitrary number of photons. The single-photon pulse train is time-bin encoded and deterministically injected into an electrically programmable multimode network.

The observed three- and four-photon boson sampling rates are Volumetric velocity measurements in restricted geometries using spiral sampling : a phantom study. The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of maximum velocity measurements using volumetric phase-contrast imaging with spiral readouts in a stenotic flow phantom.

In a phantom model, maximum velocity , flow, pressure gradient, and streamline visualizations were evaluated using volumetric phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging MRI with velocity encoding in one extending on current clinical practice and three directions for characterization of the flow field using spiral readouts.

Results of maximum velocity and pressure drop were compared to computational fluid dynamics CFD simulations, as well as corresponding low-echo-time TE Cartesian data.

Flow was compared to 2D through-plane phase contrast PC upstream from the restriction. Results obtained with 3D through-plane PC as well as 4D PC at shortest TE using a spiral readout showed excellent agreements with the maximum velocity values obtained with CFD velocity location, as well as the accurate velocity quantification can be obtained in stenotic regions using short-TE spiral volumetric PC imaging.

Marijuana smoking: effects of varying puff volume and breathhold duration. Two studies were conducted to quantify biological and behavioral effects resulting from exposure to controlled doses of marijuana smoke. Each study also varied levels of delta 9-tetrahydro-cannabinol marijuana cigarette content 1.

Subjects smoked 10 puffs in each of six sessions; a seventh, nonsmoking session all measures recorded at the same times as in active smoking sessions served as a control. Variations in puff volume produced significant dose-related changes in postsmoking plasma delta 9-tetrahydro-cannabinol levels, carbon monoxide boost and subjective effects e. In contrast, breathholding for 10 or 20 sec versus 0 sec increased plasma delta 9-tetrahydro-cannabinol levels but not CO boost or subjective effects.

Task performance measures were not reliably influenced by marijuana smoke exposure within the dosing ranges examined. These findings confirm the utility of the controlled smoking technology, support the notion that cumulative puff volume systematically influences biological exposure and subjective effects, but cast doubt on the common belief that prolonged breathholding of marijuana smoke enhances classical subjective effects associated with its reinforcing value in humans.

Zhang, Ziheng; Dione, Donald P. A novel MR imaging technique, spatial modulation of magnetization with polarity alternating velocity encoding SPAMM-PAV , is presented to simultaneously examine the left ventricular early diastolic temporal relationships between myocardial deformation and intra-cavity hemodynamics with a high temporal resolution of 14 ms. This approach is initially evaluated in a dynamic flow and tissue mimicking phantom.

A comparison of regional longitudinal strains and intra-cavity pressure differences integration of computed in-plane pressure gradients within a selected region in relation to mitral valve inflow velocities is performed in eight normal volunteers.

Our results demonstrate that apical regions have higher strain rates 0. This pattern is reversed during the deceleration period, when the strain-rates in the basal regions are the highest 0. A positive base-to-apex gradient in peak pressure difference is observed during acceleration, followed by a negative base-to apex gradient during deceleration. These studies shed insight into the regional volumetric and pressure difference changes in the left ventricle during early diastolic filling.

Breast tumor hemodynamic response during a breath-hold as a biomarker to predict chemotherapeutic efficacy: preclinical study. Therefore, it requires a perturbation of physiological signals, such as blood flow and oxygenation. In that sense, a few groups reported that monitoring a relative hemodynamic change during a breast tissue compression or a breath-hold to a patient can provide good contrast between tumor and nontumor.

However, no longitudinal study reports the utilization of a breath-hold to predict tumor response during chemotherapy. A continuous wave near-infrared spectroscopy was employed to monitor hemodynamics in rat breast tumor during a hyperoxic to normoxic inhalational gas intervention to mimic a breath-hold during tumor growth and chemotherapy. The reduced oxyhemoglobin concentration during inhalational gas intervention correlated well with tumor growth, and it responded one day earlier than the change of tumor volume after chemotherapy.

In conclusion, monitoring tumor hemodynamics during a breath-hold may serve as a biomarker to predict chemotherapeutic efficacy of tumor. Left ventricle changes early after breath-holding in deep water in elite apnea divers. To study by ultrasounds cardiac morphology and function early after breath-hold diving in deep water in elite athletes. Each subject performed a series of three consecutive breath-hold dives and 40 m depth.

End-diastolic left ventricular LV diameter EDD and end-diastolic LV volume EDV increased significantly p breath-hold diving due to favorable changes in loading conditions relative to pre-diving, namely the recruitment of left ventricular preload reserve and the reduction in afterload.

Dark chocolate reduces endothelial dysfunction after successive breath-hold dives in cool water. The aim of this study is to observe the effects of dark chocolate on endothelial function after a series of successive apnea dives in non-thermoneutral water. Twenty breath-hold divers were divided into two groups: a control group 8 males and 2 females and a chocolate group 9 males and 1 female.

The chocolate group performed the dives 1 h after ingestion of 30 g of dark chocolate. A significant decrease in FMD was observed in the control group after the dives No differences in digital photoplethysmography and peroxynitrites were observed between before and after the dives.

Antioxidants contained in dark chocolate scavenge free radicals produced during breath-hold diving. Ingestion of 30 g of dark chocolate 1 h before the dive can thus prevent endothelial dysfunction which can be observed after a series of breath-hold dives.

Validation of high temporal resolution spiral phase velocity mapping of temporal patterns of left and right coronary artery blood flow against Doppler guidewire. Temporal patterns of coronary blood flow velocity can provide important information on disease state and are currently assessed invasively using a Doppler guidewire. A non-invasive alternative would be beneficial as it would allow study of a wider patient population and serial scanning.

A retrospectively-gated breath-hold spiral phase velocity mapping sequence TR 19 ms was developed at 3 Tesla. Velocity maps were acquired in 8 proximal right and 15 proximal left coronary arteries of 18 subjects who had previously had a Doppler guidewire study at the time of coronary angiography. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance CMR velocity -time curves were processed semi-automatically and compared with corresponding invasive Doppler data. High temporal resolution breath-hold spiral phase velocity mapping underestimates absolute values of coronary flow velocity but allows accurate assessment of the temporal patterns of blood flow.

MR imaging of the human heart without explicit cardiac synchronization promises to extend the applicability of cardiac MR to a larger patient population and potentially expand its diagnostic capabilities. However, conventional non-gated imaging techniques typically suffer from low image quality or inadequate spatio-temporal resolution and fidelity. Patient-Adaptive Reconstruction and Acquisition in Dynamic Imaging with Sensitivity Encoding PARADISE is a highly-accelerated non-gated dynamic imaging method that enables artifact-free imaging with high spatio-temporal resolutions by utilizing novel computational techniques to optimize the imaging process.

In addition to using parallel imaging, the method gains acceleration from a physiologically-driven spatio-temporal support model; hence, it is doubly accelerated. The support model is patient-adaptive, i. The proposed method is also doubly adaptive as it adapts both the acquisition and reconstruction schemes.

Based on the theory of time-sequential sampling , the proposed framework explicitly accounts for speed limitations of gradient encoding and provides performance guarantees on achievable image quality.

Determination of ethane, pentane and isoprene in exhaled air–effects of breath-holding , flow rate and purified air. Exhaled ethane, pentane and isoprene have been proposed as biomarkers of oxidative stress. The objectives were to explore whether ethane, pentane and isoprene are produced within the airways and to explore the effect of different sampling parameters on analyte concentrations.

The flow dependency of the analyte concentrations, the concentrations in dead-space and alveolar air after breath-holding and the influence of inhaling purified air on analyte concentrations were investigated. The analytical method involved thermal desorption from sorbent tubes and gas chromatography. The studied group comprised 13 subjects with clinically stable asthma and 14 healthy controls. After breath-holding , no significant changes in ethane levels were observed.

Pentane and isoprene levels increased significantly after 20 s of breath-holding. Inhalation of purified air before exhalation resulted in a substantial decrease in ethane levels, a moderate decrease in pentane levels and an increase in isoprene levels. The major fractions of exhaled ethane, pentane and isoprene seem to be of systemic origin.

There was, however, a tendency for ethane to be flow rate dependent in asthmatic subjects, although to a very limited extent, suggesting that small amounts of ethane may be formed in the airways. Double-blind, placebo-controlled trial on the effect of piracetam on breath-holding spells. Breath-holding spells BHS are apparently frightening events occurring in otherwise healthy children.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of piracetam in the treatment of breath-holding spells. Forty patients with BHS who were classified into two groups were involved in a double-blinded placebo-controlled prospective study. Piracetam was given to group A while group B received placebo. Patients were followed monthly for a total period of 4 months. There was a significant decline of number of attacks after piracetam treatment compared to placebo p value breath-holding spells in children.

Evaluation of correlation between physical properties and ultrasonic pulse velocity of fired clay samples. The aim of this study is to establish a correlation between physical properties and ultrasonic pulse velocity of clay samples fired at elevated temperatures.

Brick-making clay and pottery clay were studied for this purpose. A commercial ultrasonic testing instrument Proceq Pundit Lab was used to evaluate the ultrasonic pulse velocity measurements for each fired clay sample as a function of temperature. It was observed that there became a relationship between physical properties and ultrasonic pulse velocities of the samples. The results showed that in consequence of increasing densification of the samples , the differences between the ultrasonic pulse velocities were higher with increasing temperature.

These findings may facilitate the use of ultrasonic pulse velocity for the estimation of physical properties of fired clay samples. In a series of breath-hold acquisitions, three-dimensional data were acquired initially for prospective image registration of subsequent BOLD measurements. Prospective image registration and BOLD imaging of each kidney was achieved within a total measurement time of about 17 s, enabling its execution within a single breath-hold.

Magn Reson Med , Sensory neurons integrate information about the world, adapting their sampling to its changes. However, little is understood mechanistically how this primary encoding process, which ultimately limits perception, depends upon stimulus statistics.

Here, we analyze this open question systematically by using intracellular recordings from fly Drosophila melanogaster and Coenosia attenuata photoreceptors and corresponding stochastic simulations from biophysically realistic photoreceptor models.

Simulations reveal how a photoreceptor’s information capture depends critically upon the stochastic refractoriness of its 30, sampling units microvilli. In daylight, refractoriness sacrifices sensitivity to enhance intensity changes in neural image representations, with more and faster microvilli improving encoding. But for GWN and other stimuli, which lack longer dark contrasts of real-world intensity changes that reduce microvilli refractoriness, these performance gains are submaximal and energetically costly.

Decompression sickness in breath-hold divers: a review. Although it has been generally assumed that the risk of decompression sickness is virtually zero during a single breath-hold dive in humans, repeated dives may result in a cumulative increase in the tissue and blood nitrogen tension. Many species of marine mammals perform extensive foraging bouts with deep and long dives interspersed by a short surface interval, and some human divers regularly perform repeated dives to m or a single dive to more than m, all of which may result in nitrogen concentrations that elicit symptoms of decompression sickness.

Neurological problems have been reported in humans after single or repeated dives and recent necropsy reports in stranded marine mammals were suggestive of decompression sickness-like symptoms.

Modelling attempts have suggested that marine mammals may live permanently with elevated nitrogen concentrations and may be at risk when altering their dive behaviour.

In humans, non-pathogenic bubbles have been recorded and symptoms of decompression sickness have been reported after repeated dives to modest depths. The mechanisms implicated in these accidents indicate that repeated breath-hold dives with short surface intervals are factors that predispose to decompression sickness. Optimising diffusion-weighted MR imaging for demonstrating pancreatic cancer: a comparison of respiratory-triggered, free-breathing and breath-hold techniques.

Two radiologists, independently and blindly, assigned total image quality scores [sum of rating diffusion images lesion detection, anatomy, presence of artefacts and ADC maps lesion characterisation, overall image quality ] per technique and ranked them. Total image quality scores for respiratory-triggered, free-breathing and breath-hold techniques were The respiratory-triggered technique had a significantly higher ranking. Lesion SI on all b-values and signal-to-noise ratio on b and b were significantly higher for the respiratory-triggered technique.

For respiratory-triggered, free-breathing and breath-hold techniques the mean ADCs were 1. Anonymized images were randomized for blinded review by two independent readers for image quality, artifact severity in 8 defined vessel segments and aortic dimensions in 6 standard sites. Comparison and reproducibility of ADC measurements in breathhold , respiratory triggered, and free-breathing diffusion-weighted MR imaging of the liver.

To compare and determine the reproducibility of apparent diffusion coefficient ADC measurements of the normal liver parenchyma in breathhold , respiratory triggered, and free-breathing diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging DWI.

Eleven healthy volunteers underwent three series of DWI. ADCs of the liver parenchyma were compared by using nonparametric tests. Reproducibility was assessed by the Bland-Altman method. ADC measurements of the normal liver parenchyma in respiratory triggered DWI are significantly higher and less reproducible than in breathhold and free-breathing DWI. Copyright c Wiley-Liss, Inc. Qualitative assessment of contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography using breath-hold and non-breath-hold techniques in the portal venous system.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the image quality in delineation of the portal venous systems with two different methods, breath-hold and non-breath-hold by using the 3D FLASH sequence. We used a 1. Our study showed contrast-enhanced 3D FLASH MR angiography, together with the breath-hold technique, may provide reliable and accurate information on the portal venous system.

Time-instant sampling based encoding of time-varying acoustic spectrum. The inner ear has been shown to characterize an acoustic stimuli by transducing fluid motion in the inner ear to mechanical bending of stereocilia on the inner hair cells IHCs. Subsequently, the afferent auditory nerve fiber ANF bundle samples the encoded waveform in the IHCs by synapsing with them. In this work we focus on sampling of information by afferent ANFs from the IHCs, and show computationally that sampling at specific time instants is sufficient for decoding of time-varying acoustic spectrum embedded in the acoustic stimuli.

The approach is based on sampling the signal at its zero-crossings and higher-order derivative zero-crossings. We show results of the approach on time-varying acoustic spectrum estimation from cricket call signal recording.

The framework gives a time-domain and non-spatial processing perspective to auditory signal processing. The approach works on the full band signal, and is devoid of modeling any bandpass filtering mimicking the BM action.

Instead, we motivate the approach from the perspective of event-triggered sampling by afferent ANFs on the stimuli encoded in the IHCs. Though the approach gives acoustic spectrum estimation but it is shallow on its complete understanding for plausible bio-mechanical replication with current mammalian auditory mechanics insights.

Reflex anoxic seizures ‘white breath-holding ‘ : nonepileptic vagal attacks. From clinical history 58 children were diagnosed as having reflex anoxic seizures secondary to provoked cardioinhibition also known as white breath-holding attacks.

Before referral, these seizures were commonly misdiagnosed as epileptic either because the provocation was ignored, not recognised, or was a febrile illness, or because there was no crying, no obvious breath-holding , little cyanosis, and often no pallor to suggest syncope and cerebral ischaemia.

The duration of cardiac asystole after ocular compression was measured in these children and in 60 additional children with other paroxysmal disorders.

Review of the literature supports the concept that these seizures result from vagal-mediated reflex cardiac arrest which can if necessary be prevented by atropine. The simple name ‘vagal attack’ is proposed. Images Figs. This work was aimed at estimating the concentrations of proteins encoded by human chromosome 18 Chr 18 in plasma samples of 54 healthy male volunteers aged These young persons have been certified by the medical evaluation board as healthy subjects ready for space flight training.

Over stable isotope-labeled peptide standards SIS were synthesized to perform the measurements of proteins encoded by Chr These proteins were quantified in whole and depleted plasma samples. A minor part of the proteins mostly representing intracellular proteins was characterized by extremely high inter individual variations. The results provide a background for studies of a potential biomarker in plasma among proteins encoded by Chr Breath-holding spells may be associated with maturational delay in myelination of brain stem.

To evaluate possible contribution of maturational delay of brain stem in the etiology of breath-holding spells in children using brain stem auditory evoked potentials. The study group included children who experienced breath-holding spells. The control group consisted of healthy age- and sex-matched children.

Age, gender, type and frequency of spell, hemoglobin, and ferritin levels in study group and brain stem auditory evoked potentials results in both groups were recorded. Study group was statistically compared with control group for brain stem auditory evoked potentials.

The mean age of study and control groups was The III-V and I-V interpeak latencies were significantly prolonged in the study group compared with the control group 2. At the same time, III-V and I-V interpeak latencies of patients without anemia in the study group compared with those of control group were significantly prolonged 2.

CEc-M59 When 3. For a more extensive Table of percent dissimilarity, see Table S2. Cells are granulated, shorter than wide Fig. Necridia is uncommon, light blue- material prepared from isolate CK Secondary structures for the D1—D10 helices of Nunduva and Kyrtuthrix taxa treated in this study, with Rivularia and Phyllonema serving as related outgroups in the Rivulariaceae for comparison.

Nucleotides in circles represent variation seen either within species or within different operons in the same strain. In no instance did these substitutions result in a change in structure.

Etymology: komarkovae L. Filaments are iso- and heteropolar, Ecology and distribution: Epilithic on intertidal slightly curved, with double and single false fringes C58 K82, CK Trichomes are not slightly constricted, 8— Observations: In environmental material, frequently 16 lm wide.

When mature, isopolar filaments this species presents a small apical bead-like protu- sometimes erect at both attenuated ends and fre- berance only reported for N.

This species quently forming hair Fig. Cells are shorter does not form apical hair. In culture, it develops than wide, 4—9 lm long. Apical cells are slightly abundant one-celled to few-celled hormogonia in attenuated, sometimes forming a short, non- chains. See Table S3 in the Supporting Informa- hyaline hair. Heterocytes are scarce, generally tion for further details. In environmental material, thallus is mainly by biconcave lens-shaped necridia or tri- caespitose up to 1—2 mm high, formed by blue- chome fragmentation, generally developing into green to dark green apically attenuated filaments, heteropolar young filaments Fig.

Akinetes densely entangled at the base with basal and are not observed. Secondary structures for the Box-B helices of Nunduva and Kyrtuthrix taxa treated in this study, with Rivularia and Phyllonema serving as related outgroups in the Rivulariaceae for comparison. Nucleotides in circles represent variation seen within Nunduva komarko- vae. This substitution results in a mismatch that opens the terminal loop by two nucleotides. In culture, filaments are heteropolar with lamel- a widened sheath Fig.

Basal hormogonia lated, hyaline, apically open sheaths Fig. Trichomes constricted at cross-walls, thickened every cell has the ability to develop into small iso- or at the base, gradually attenuated, and ending in a heteropolar hormogonia that are released Fig.

Cells are granulated, shorter E, H—J. Heterocytes are October L. Sequences were obtained cal to oval-cylindrical, complanate, solitary, and for cultured isolate CK Secondary structures for the V3 helices of Nunduva and Kyrtuthrix taxa treated in this study, with Rivularia and Phyllonema serv- ing as related outgroups in Rivulariaceae for comparison.

Nucleotides in circles represent variation seen within ribosomal operons in Nun- duva biania. These substitutions did not result in a change in structure. Table S3 for further details. Ecology and distribution: Epilithic on supratidal fringes Kyrtuthrix munecosensis J. TABLE 2. Comparison of nucleotide lengths of conserved domains in the 16SS ITS region for Nunduva and Kyrtuthrix strains treated in this study. Filaments are platform C, up to 0—1 m ASL ; epilithic in par- apically attenuated, isopolar, folded at the base, com- tially sunny and exposed granitic rock.

Single, individual filaments 9—17 20 lm tuthrix huatulcensis and K. Trichomes are slightly to very con- sheath as compared with hormogonia from those stricted at cross-walls, 4. Cells are variably species See Table S4 in the Supporting Informa- shaped, from subquadrate to trapezoidal or barrel- tion for further details.

In environmental material, thalli are long 4. Repro- crustaceous flat, up to 1 cm in diameter, formed by duction is by terminal iso- or heteropolar, generally colonies of blue-green to dark green parallelly dis- thin hormogonia, 4—7 lm wide Sequences were the upper apices. Filaments are isopolar folded at the obtained from environmental sample CE.

April base, forming generally simple loops and occasionally 23, Morphological traits of Nunduva komarkovae. A—K Culture material. A Thallus showing parallel and entangled arrangement of filaments.

B—D Heteropolar filaments. J—I Lamellate hyaline sheaths. F—J Hormogonia formation, iso- and heteropolar. B, K Fila- ments showing apical cells without hair. L—O Nunduva komarkovae environmental samples. K Basal heterocyte. L Caespitose thallus with yellowish to ochre sheath. M Apical cell slightly attenuated with no hair. N Trichome fragmentation. O Intercalary heterocyte. Single, indi- commonly very constricted but with long series of simi- vidual filaments 8—10 lm wide and double folded lar width cells 5—8 lm wide Fig.

Cells are 13—24 lm wide. Morphological traits of Nunduva sanagustinensis. A—D Environmental sample. A—B Thallus caespitose showing attenuated fila- ments and non-hyaline hair.

B—C Basal part with densely entangled filaments. D Heteropolar hormogonia. E—K Nunduva sanagusti- nensis morphological traits of culture material. E Simple false branched filaments. F, K Granulated cytoplasm constricted cells. G—J Development of basal hormogonia into thick-sheathed flexuous or fragmented hormogonia. Heterocytes are solitary, Fragmentation is by terminal iso- or heteropolar, gen- intercalar or terminal in some hormogonia, variable erally thin, hormogonia, 3—5 lm wide, 25—51 lm long from subspherical, short cylinders to quadrate 4 5—6 Fig.

Morphological traits of Kyrtuthrix munecosensis. A—K Environmental samples. A—C Thallus showing filaments with parallel arrangement with diffluent sheath. D—F, J Stages of loop development. I, K Heteropolar and isopolar arrow hormogonia develop- ment. H Intercalary heterocyte asterisk. Etymology: totonaca L.

Cells are blue-green, variably shaped, platform C, up to 0—1 m ASL ; epilithic in par- 4—7. Heterocytes are intercalary, uncom- tially sunny and exposed granitic rock. Hormogonia Observations: Thalli in environmental material without sheath, with 2—3 semicircular cells, 10— have firm, common sheaths as compared with Kyr- 12 lm long.

Trichomes are wider 5—8 lm Type locality: Mexico. Sequences Key to currently described Kyrtuthrix and Nunduva were obtained for environmental sample CEc. Thallus in nature is a firm mat of isopolar, tapered, erect filaments closely folded at the substrate U-shaped with individual and common sheaths, arranged in a strictly parallel fashion, with no false branches.

Thallus is endolithic in limestone. Thallus is epilithic. Sheaths are hyaline, not lamellated. Sheaths are hyaline to yellow-brown, lamellated. Trichomes are loosely arranged in crust, straight or flexuous, with soft diffluent sheath.

Trichomes are arranged in parallel and tightly appressed with firm sheaths. Cells are 1. Cells are 5—8 lm wide, with hairs 2. Trichomes are in culture untapered or widened at the apices. Trichomes are never widened at the apices, tapering to a hair in culture. Sheaths are widened at the apices, resembling a flame. Sheaths are open or closed, but not resembling a flame at the apices.

Apical cells are abruptly tapering, often with a small bead-like protuberance. Apical cells are not bead-like, often forming a hair. Thallus is a caespitose mat 2—3 cm high, formed by entangled filaments in fascicles. Thallus is a caespitose mat maximally 0. Sheath is colorless, and trichomes are constricted at cross walls. Sheath is hyaline to yellow, and trichomes are unconstricted at cross walls. Nunduva is solely epilithic, presence and kind of false branching, and the mor- whereas Kyrtuthrix has both endolithic and epi- phology of basal regions of the trichomes.

The key lithic species. However, both form visible mats on we provide will likely help future researchers recog- rocks in the intertidal and supratidal zones of nize these interesting species, but confusion with coastal marine waters, and both form tapering tri- other tapering marine taxa, such as Calothrix, Brachy- chomes in culture.

Nunduva has three species that trichia, and Scytonematopsis, will likely occur if the do not taper or only slightly taper at the apices material is scarce or if those who identify the species N.

The primary morphological difference is available will be very difficult due to the conver- between the two genera is the formation of com- gence of morphology in culture and the absence of pact thalli in Kyrtuthrix with parallelly arranged U- knowledge about thallus characteristics in nature.

An additional separating characteristic is high among all taxa. Secondary structures of con- is that Nunduva possesses single and geminate served domains of the ITS regions are also distinct false branching, whereas Kyrtuthrix does not. This and provide a good means to distinguish species. Most Umezaki , Our species are primarily from coastal Morphological traits of Kyrtuthrix totonaca.

A—J Environmental samples. A—B Thallus showing parallel arrangement of fila- ments in epifluorescence and BF microscopy. C Filament with lateral folding. D—E Heteropolar hormogonia. F Intercalary hetero- cyte. F—H Lamellated sheath.

H—J Filaments showing the formation of loops, and different shaped cells. Brito et al. Some ture Collection have updated the strain on their species-level diversity remains to be resolved taxo- Web site to Nunduva sp.

Unfortunately, rect designation proposed by Walter et al. The We made new threshold trasiak et al. It is very clear that 16S used it to recognize cryptic speciation in uncultur- rRNA genetic identities are often uninformative at able populations of Synechococcus spongiarum.

When multiple strains of the same spe- make taxonomic hypotheses? Some researchers have cies are compared, the average PD among strains is postulated that taxonomists will have a more sure typically around 1.

When PD is between 3. Certainly, additional been used to recognize different species Mai et al. Phylogenies based on large numbers of pro- Table 1, Table S2.

CEc-M59, and the difference in those two et al. We raised the question in our among genera in the Nostocales will become much Introduction: Will there come a saturation point clearer as more genomes become available, particu- where the discontinuities separating species disap- larly of many of the genera described in the last pear as many more strains are sequenced?

At pre- 20 years. However, we question the use of similarity sent, based on the present study and others, the thresholds based on protein coding genes. An alterna- genetic identities based on 16S rRNA genes among tive proposal was to use a combination of alignment these species. As an example heterotrophic bacteria Yarza et al. What was of application of thresholds to cyanobacterial taxon- even more remarkable was the high genetic identi- omy, recommendations have been made to collapse ties among the genera of Rivulariaceae.

Average all Microcystis species into one species, M. Only Phyllonema was prokaryotic species with a criterion that is genomic below this threshold Table S5 in the Supporting but much easier to determine and that does not Information. The high genetic similarities among require continual retesting when new species are genera in the Nostocales have been noted previously found, we fundamentally disagree with the concept Flechtner et al. It is still possible to recognize the higher level taxa that have been recently recognized species in these genera based upon their thallus based on the polyphasic approach also satisfy the and filament morphology.

To reduce them all down microbiological criteria for taxonomic recognition to just a few taxa in one or two genera would make at the species, genus, family, and order levels. The them more taxonomically confusing, not less, and morphologically and ecologically complex Nosto- would cause us to lose the ecological information cales show little genetic divergence, and conse- these species will likely communicate when records quently, if genetic thresholds were followed strictly, of their distribution become more available.

We wel- it would require collapsing many heterocytous taxa. If these microbiological, approach that includes morphology, ecology, physi- genome-based thresholds are followed, we answer ology, and single-gene phylogeny.

We welcome the our third question raised in the Introduction, we increased ease with which cyanobacterial cultures will eventually reach a point where authors begin to that are microbial consortia i. We reject discarding the polyphasic or total evi- We consider the best species concept for cyanobac- dence approach in favor of a single threshold teria to be a phylogenetic species concept Mishler approach that discards years of taxonomic pro- and Theriot , Johansen and Casamatta , gress in the study of this morphologically and eco- which is less pragmatic than the prokaryotic species logically interesting phylum.

Phylogenetic species concepts from now? This is impossible to answer at this point. It is developed for eukaryotic species and have been necessary for the evaluation of biodiversity.

It is nec- adopted in most recent taxonomic treatments of essary for understanding environmental impacts on cyanobacteria. They are also more in line with histori- our ecosystems. It is an endeavor that helps us cal taxonomic treatments of cyanobacteria, which gave understand evolutionary processes in diverse lin- weight to the use of morphology in defining genus eages.

Despite our uncertainty concerning of long- and species boundaries. We consider phylogenetic spe- term viability of current taxonomic standards, the cies concepts to also be ideal for many algal groups, criteria for recognition of taxa in cyanobacteria have which are frequently asexual or rarely sexual in their been expanded and tested in the last 20 years, and reproductive strategies.

The biological species concept we feel confident they will continue to serve us, at does not fit these taxa well. Furthermore, the existence least in the near future. The authors wish to thank Karnkowska-Ishikawa et al. Even preparation of this manuscript Guiry and Guiry The taxa of the reproductively complex seaweeds have authors would like to thank anonymous referees for their been found to harbor cryptic species Lindstrom comments leading to improvement the manuscript.

Johansen: Formal analysis lead ; supervi- concepts are theoretically sound in addition to being sion supporting ; writing-original draft lead ; pragmatic in practice.

Segal-Kischinevzky: Investigation equal. Desertifilum salka- lead ; writing-original draft supporting ; writing- linema sp. Phytotaxa — Cai, F. Fottea Com- Aguiar, R. Nostocales, A. A novel epiphytic Cyanobacteria from a wet rocky wall in China. Phycologia cyanobacterial species from the genus Brasilonema causing — Phylogenetically Ahn, A.

Genomic diversity unostoc gen. Fottea within the haloalkaliphilic genus Thioalkalivibrio. Violetonostoc minutum gen et sp. Alvarenga, D. A metage- nov. Indeed, over the past decade or so, the principal analyses of adult literacy have come not from academics at all, or even from community advocates as in past, but rather from employer groups, business councils, and other labor-market and economic think tanks.

Under pressure from the business community, national governments of many political stripes have begun to pay more attention to literacy. The objective of this survey process is to measure and profile literacy levels among the working-age population in more than thirty countries across the world. Results from these surveys have caught the attention of governments across the industrialized world, particularly the claim that large portions of the working-age populations do not have adequate literacy levels to support everyday life and work.

Depending on the country and which iteration of the surveys is cited, between one-third and more than two-thirds of adult populations in countries surveyed1 are said to lack the minimum skill level Level 3 considered by experts to be suitable for coping with the increasing demands of the emerging knowledge society and the information economy OECD and Statistics Canada There have been many controversies among experts about the methodology, reliability, and meanings of the findings of these surveys Sticht a, b.

Perhaps the point that gained the most attention was the large disparity reported between measured performance on a set of taskbased test items and the views about performance ability expressed in the self-assessment portion of the survey.

Respondents were asked how well their reading, writing, and numeracy skills met the demands of their daily lives and work. Quite consistently, adults believed their own skills to be much higher than their measured performance.

Other contrasting reports have long been reported elsewhere in the academic literature Prinsloo and Breier ; Darville and are familiar to literacy practitioners. These anomalies in survey results have produced quite different reactions among some government officials.

This is very dangerous! But, for our purposes in this essay, this talk of danger and blame offers not an explanation but more puzzling data. In the following pages, we aim to shed light on this puzzle by looking first at what the literature can tell us about changing uses of text at work and then by exploring a concrete example of an electronics manufacturing workplace.

High-Performance Work Volumes have been written in the past two decades about workplace restructuring, revealing a sea change in the philosophy of management for workplaces of all kinds, both private- and public-sector. Achieving this standard depends heavily on prescribed use of text, either paper or electronic, by front-line workers. A second and closely related aspect of high-performance production is continuous improvement CI.

Like quality assurance, CI is a highly technical practice involving the systematic use of an ongoing cycle of planning, executing, checking, and refining operations to improve efficiencies and to eliminate waste in all aspects of the production process.

Data come from many sources, including the most routine use of charts, checklists, and logbooks, sometimes computerized, as part of the daily work tasks of employees in all kinds of workplaces. Until the s, production environments often involved very little paperwork.

Production control was exercised through an oral culture of supervision. But today, all that has changed. Shop-floor workers commonly see the paperwork as an add-on and a second priority, while for senior managers and quality assurance experts, the data—in the form of paper or electronic text—are increasingly the form of work that counts.

The texts increasingly stand in for the product and mediate business relationships through real-time and just-in-time communications between suppliers and customers. Thus, the use of text, electronic or paper, in this setting is inseparable from the exercise of managerial power. She shows us how the demands of reading and writing in this setting are embedded in a textual organization of work that is complex and highly contested.

However, as we continued our dialogue about my work in the plant, we discovered that texts were profoundly important, both to understanding the nature of the work and to identifying my frustrations with my job. Here I will try to make those tensions visible. For seven years, I worked in a large, global, ISOregistered electronics contract manufacturing company.

I was one of approximately fifty surface mount technology SMT team leaders in the plant whose job was to lead a small team of workers through the first manufacturing step in the production of electronic circuit boards, such as memory cards and motherboards. The physical work of making circuit boards was relatively straightforward, since the processes for each machine and each product were documented in manufacturing instructions MIs ; although there were wide variations in the types of products that we built, the process itself was highly prescribed.

All approved procedures for each stage of the production needed to be explicitly documented. The MIs, for example, contained product-specific process steps, including details on which parts should be on the board, how much solder paste should be applied, and how to handle the boards.

At the beginning of each shift, my first responsibility was to check the production board to find out which product we were building. My second task was to print all the relevant MIs to ensure that the team had the most current set of instructions. An owner of a document was the person, usually a process engineer, who was responsible for the correct maintenance of the document in compliance with ISO. As team leader, it was my responsibility to ensure that the team was using the correct revision number of the document; this requirement meant that most team leaders printed a new set of documents each shift just to be safe.

In theory, we were allowed to do only what was detailed in the MI; in practice, there were often more effective ways to get the work done. Yet, if we were audited by a quality specialist or internal ISO auditor and asked why we were doing something in particular, we would need to be able to show the relevant section of the appropriate document to justify our actions.

These documentary requirements were essential in order for the plant to maintain the ISO certification. Thus, documents governed our work both by defining the acceptable range of our actions and by curbing our discretion. The SMT line process involved the mechanical application of solder paste on a circuit board, the mechanical placement of electronic components on top of the solder paste, and the thermal cycling of the board in a fifty-foot oven to melt and solidify the solder paste.

As the components were tiny some measured 0. A long conveyer belt transported the circuit board from operation to operation. Part of that work was to record machine data from each step of the process in logbooks; as I reflect on my experience, this activity turned out to be central to my experience of frustration in the job. On the assembly line, there were four paper logbooks for solder paste measurements, to document when new parts were added to the placement machines and to record the results of the weekly oven profile test.

These data were used to track manufacturing problems back to the specific employee. Production demands conflicted with these requirements for recording the process, but, as team leader, I was held accountable for both tasks. I was usually able to keep on top of the required paperwork for the team leader; however, checking that the logbooks had been properly filled in by the contract workers at the end of each shift was something that I never had time for.

My attitude toward what counted as real work was shaped by middle-management actions that clearly sent the message that meeting production targets was our main priority.

If the team failed to meet the production targets on a shift, I, as team leader, would be questioned by my manager about what had gone wrong. I would also have to complete a form detailing the problems we had encountered on the shift more paperwork! It was only at the time of the ISO audits that the gaps in logbooks would be noticed. When an audit was approaching, there would be a big panic about whether the documents were thorough enough to pass the audit.

Each department had a quality specialist who had to ensure that the logbooks, employee training records, and all instructional documents were up to date and complete. At audit time, these specialists had a big job on their hands. Not surprisingly, we would often have to fabricate data after the fact in order to appear to be in compliance with audit specifications. Team leaders like me learned to play the game to keep our jobs. The failure to complete logbooks was often seen by team leaders as evidence of deficiencies in the literacy abilities of individual contract workers.

Thus, to keep up with the other demands, contract workers would neglect the logbooks. Eventually, I realized there were several more layers to this story, revealing profound contradictions in the hiring practices in the plant. For example, each SMT line was operated by four workers, three of whom had expertise on only one part of the process; only I, as team leader, was trained on all of the machines.

Yet I was also the only permanent employee on my team. The other team members were employed on six-month contracts renewable three times to a maximum of eighteen months. This practice meant that skilled and experienced workers left the company on a weekly basis, resulting in constant disruption to the team.

As a team leader, I wholeheartedly agreed with this goal. However, I was frustrated by the barriers to achieving it when company hiring policies and practices favored short-term contract workers. The minimum requirement for contract positions was a postsecondary degree from any country, an acceptable score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language TOEFL , and the successful completion of a thirty-to-forty-five-minute scenario-based interview.

These hiring practices ensured that the contract workers on the manufacturing floor were highly educated people with a high degree of fluency in English. Most workers were recent male immigrants to Canada, usually with more than one university degree; these hiring criteria ensured a highly literate workforce, yet the way these highly educated workers were utilized by the company suggested otherwise. Permanent employees were equipped with individual email accounts so that they could communicate with other workers in other departments or on other shifts.

We were also given training on how to create and work with documents so that we would be able to own documents and take the lead in technical problem solving at regular quality meetings. Permanent employees were expected to be involved in cross-shift and cross-department communication and were given the tools to accomplish this. In sharp contrast, contract workers did not have personal email accounts; they had access only to a general department email account.

As a result, they lost both their individual identities as employees and any sense of privacy in communication. They were not permitted to create new documents, lead process-improvement projects, or meet with employees on other shifts or in other departments.

At the Learning Centre, they were restricted to functional training on how to fill in logbooks. In other words, the contract workers were actively excluded from the main electronic textual practices that tied together much work of the plant. In a very real sense, the value of workers to the company could be gauged by their access to such literacy practices as the ability to communicate through email, access texts, and create new work processes via text.

Exclusion from this textual realm also meant exclusion from real power in the workplace. Finally, I also came to understand the significance of the fact that the majority of these workers were people of color.

In my two years as a team leader, I worked with people from all areas of the world. It was an uncomfortable experience for me, as a Canadian-born white woman with a B. Because the majority of permanent employees in manufacturing were also white and the majority of the contract workers were people of color, there was a strange neocolonial feel to the workplace that made me uneasy.

This was not incidental, accidental, or an oversight; it was an organizational course of action central to the labor-market strategy of this large corporation. She was keenly aware that it was a form of racialized discrimination. But what did it have to do with literacy? Together we unraveled these connections.

In this setting, as in many others, the concept of literacy was at the center of a complex textual relation between the changing demands of powerful institutions and the increasingly precarious lives of individuals. Here was a group of highly literate workers who were accused of having poor literacy on the basis of how they functioned in the plant.

How they functioned, however, turned out to have little to do with individual skills or skill deficits. Instead, it was part of an organizational course of action in which some workers and not others were hired into temporary and subordinate positions and then excluded from key literacy practices in the plant. These arrangements were designed to monitor and control the work process and were justified in terms of the imperative to turn a profit on every shift.

This particular story focuses on a relation between permanent, North American—born employees and highly skilled immigrant workers of color. Indeed, as the number of highly skilled immigrants grows in many industrialized countries, creating a workforce of newcomers who are technically skilled but socially and culturally vulnerable to exclusion, the type of situation explored in this chapter may well occur more frequently.

But the dynamics described here can apply not only to the situation of immigrant workers. Such individuals may indeed encounter challenges at work and sometimes in other areas of their lives. This could be seen as a threat to the economic status of any nation in the global marketplace. Relatedly, there may be political dangers for public officials if they are seen to be failing in their responsibility for labor force development.

So the Canadian official who spoke with such alarm may have been accurately reflecting and projecting her own fears. But her way—and the dominant way—of framing the issues collapses these economic relations into a property—and a responsibility—of individuals. Constructing illiteracy as a problem of crisis proportions is key to making it into a site of administrative action Smith a; Darville , Yet, it is revealing to note that the kind of action that is being taken most frequently in response to this issue is not to provide more literacy instruction to increase the functional levels of adults.

On the contrary, funds available for adult literacy programming are reported to be shrinking internationally, though there is widespread new investment in literacy for children Jackson a; Khan ; Sivasubramaniam ; World Bank Testing is now commonplace not only for new job applicants but also as part of compulsory certification for people who want to keep jobs they already have.

In theory, a failed test in most of these settings is said to trigger compulsory literacy instruction; in practice, since resources for instruction are scarce, the immediate impact is often exclusion from services and opportunities. Thus, while literacy may not be experienced by individuals as a problem in the routine conduct of their lives, it is being made to matter by powerful interests that have harnessed it to their own purposes. In the process, corporate interests have overtaken human interests as the centerpiece of the literacy movement.

Notes The authors wish to acknowledge funding for this research from the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence: The Automobile in the 21st Century. Statement recorded in field notes by Nancy Jackson, who attended the conference. These texts have been important in tracing how my awareness developed over the year that we worked together. The documents were more of a shield than a source of information; I found out about production changes verbally, at shift crossover, from the other team leader.

I needed that piece of paper which was often fifteen pages long to validate my actions should I be audited. My experiences in this workplace have been the impetus for my graduate research. For more detailed analysis of the deprofessionalization of immigrant women engineers in Canada, see Slade a. This chapter examines the push for accountability in primary education and extends the idea of interinstitutional discourses that carry ruling ideas across institutional realms and national borders.

They show us mothers attempting to fill in with extra tutoring where underfunded schools and overworked teachers may not be able to meet accountability demands—in much the same way that family caregivers may fill in with unpaid child-care work as lowincome mothers are pressed into the labor force Scott and London chapter 8 and Ridzi chapter 11 this volume , or with informal nursing as hospital stays are shortened Rankin and Campbell She is doing an assignment from the Open Court Reading textbook, part of the series adopted by her urban elementary school.

Also on the table is a test-preparation workbook for the secondgrade level of the CAT-6, the standardized test required by California.

Each night, while she cooks dinner and after her daughter finishes her regular homework, the mother helps her daughter go through the workbook so that the young girl will be better prepared to do well on the standardized tests she will soon take. In Toronto, another child is doing a reading assignment, which is aligned to provincial curriculum standards for which a new version of a Canadian standardized test, the CAT-3,1 has been developed.

He, too, is using the Open Court Reading text and a test-preparation workbook bought from a local bookshop on the recommendation of the community center tutor.

His English is coming along well, and his parents, who speak only Farsi, wish they could better help their son prepare for the upcoming tests. These two stories are drawn from research done in Canada and the United States that explores the educational work of mothers with children in elementary school. The similarities in these stories are striking, yet they are occurring in different countries with different educational systems, different educational policies, and different school demographics.

Across national boundaries, students undertake educational work in local classrooms that has been developed by international educational publishing corporations and prepare for standardized tests required by educational policies that, across provincial and state boundaries, have strong similarities in terms of content and process. Over the past ten years, school systems in the United States and Canada have undergone extensive restructuring, particularly in the areas of finance, accountability, standardization and testing.

Regardless of, or perhaps in concert with, the standardizing practices of current educational reforms, parents and educators struggle to meet new educational goals that have been established locally in boards of education and school districts and translocally through a global educational discourse. In our research and writing, we have been exploring how local changes in schooling are being shaped by a global discourse on educational restructuring. In particular, we are interested in the ways that educational policies frame up the issues embedded within them in such a way that the issues can be made administratively actionable.

The educational actions that flow from a policy, then, bring with them an administrative process that manages our interaction with the identified issues. Recursively, the language of the policy can be tracked back to the globalized discourse that shaped the issue in the first place.

What we see in classrooms as a result of these policy mandates is a new standardized curriculum, accompanied by standardized testing and standardized reporting—the new institutional technologies of standardization and accountability.

In the different national educational contexts of Canada and the United States, internationally developed reading series, like Open Court Reading mentioned earlier, are shaping local school and family practices in similar ways Jenkins These curricula are linked to the accountability reforms in public education, particularly to standardized testing processes. The introductory stories tell of one way that a global educational discourse embedded in the institutional technologies of standardization and accountability can appear at the kitchen tables of families with children in public school.

Exploring the Terrain The institutional technologies that we are seeing in our research are not specific to educational contexts. New institutional technologies can be linked to the social and economic transformation taking place across public service institutions.

The Canadian and U. Typically, the emphasis in discussions of the changing economy has been on the transformation of the private sector. We can see this trend particularly in the human-service domains of education, health care, and social work. We suggest that current and ongoing changes to the traditionally defined public sector are important to explore in that they affect all segments of Canadian, U.

Of particular interest to us are the new institutional technologies that are central to the process of transforming human-service organizations within a globalizing economy. As the public sector is changing, these ordinary work routines are becoming ever more digitized and more similar across institutional and national boundaries.

The new institutional technologies include standardized, often computer-mediated, always textually mediated work processes that link professionals and nonprofessionals in social institutions. They provide the administrative ground on which various levels of management in a social institution can assess and coordinate action.

Although institutions differ widely in their organization, contemporary social change is interinstitutional. The new institutional technologies are changing the relationship between professionals and nonprofessionals and directly affecting the lives of those people who fall within their institutional mandate. Institutional technologies are reshaping the work and relationships of people who participate in the public sector—those who provide services and those who receive services.

Public-service institutions are actively addressing themselves to businesslike management strategies to help accommodate reductions in social spending. Indeed, it might be said that the early-twenty-first-century revolution in information and communication makes such a transformation in human services possible. Knowledge, in processable forms, has become a resource of the greatest importance for determining the most efficient course of action in health care, social services, and educational services.

Institutional technologies that harness knowledge for the purposes of planning, resource utilization, program management, and evaluation are transforming the public sector—ranging from the processes of service-delivery systems to the required expertise of practitioners. They also create distinctive new problems. Working from informational data bases instead of from the more traditional hands-on interaction, decision making, and professional judgment means that the manifold functions of the service sector must be reconceptualized in specific ways.

Whether organizational texts are for processing people for eligibility, assessing results of programs, determining the most cost-efficient interventions, or determining whose need is greatest for placement on waiting lists, they are constructed for the purpose of decision making about the efficient deployment of human services. Thus, knowing, in other than objective ways, has been called into question.

Yet, systems that are automated and objective must continue to rely on knowledgeable people and on the experiential input of individuals themselves to keep them operating successfully. Our research is focused at this juncture—the intersection of the new institutional technologies and the actual activities of people who work in or use human-service organizations in the transforming public sector.

The professionals employed in social work, nursing, community health, and education, as well as the support workers e. So, too, their institutional work is oriented to that part of society in which women have primary care-taking responsibility—the disabled, the family, the child. The new institutional technologies are one instance of the textually mediated conversations that permeate social institutions.

As Smith , notes, texts are ubiquitous in our social world. Texts coordinate the apparently individual but socially organized points of connection between people working in different parts of institutional complexes of activity.

In the research on education and on globalization, we are struck by the unexamined, textually mediated communications that coordinate the work and understandings of people in different social sites, nations, and, indeed, globally oriented agencies. So, too, the phenomenon often called globalization is thoroughly textualized.

For example, converging educational policies are informed by theories of the market that are being taught through textbooks in M.

In the international education market, universities are changing regulations and policies to admit students from other countries on the basis of educational equivalencies portrayed in school transcripts sent within educational packages. Bilateral and multilateral trade agreements—written agreements—shape the work of government ministries that credential public and private universities. And so on. Digitally oriented institutional texts are an empirically interesting feature of institutional restructuring.

Our interaction with texts is a moment of activity, taking time and energy—in other words, work—and thus can be described and analyzed. As the human-service professional teacher, social worker, nurse activates the textual relations through her ongoing work practices—doing report cards, estimating risk assessments, doing welfare intake, entering patient classification forms—she enters into the extended textual relations of the institution.

Of interest to us are the processes through which institutional technologies, with their embedded globalized policy discourses, orient the everyday activities of those who work within the social institution and those whose lives intersect with it.

As we engage with texts, we coordinate the local and the translocal, managing and smoothing over the disjunctures between our experience and the relations of power and knowledge that shape and are shaped by education policies. In order to understand the intersections between globalization and the kitchen table work of families, our research must attend to the social relations of ruling as they are coordinated textually.

Texts and Accountability Since internationally developed curricula such as Open Court are coordinated with the accountability reforms in public education, particularly standardized testing, what is taught in the classroom must have some connection to the tests. Open Court Reading is used widely in low-performing urban schools like the ones the children in our stories attend. Finding the same reading series in classrooms in Toronto as well as Los Angeles suggests an active role for corporate publishers in the planning, production, and distribution of a standardized curriculum.

For example, capitalizing on the compliance provisions in the NCLB law, companies are marketing such services as tutoring supplemental education services and voice-messaging systems that can assist school districts in the United States as they try to raise test scores of low-performing students by notifying parents of absences and meet testtaker percentages by announcing standardized testing dates Borja ; Walsh The standardized-testing requirements of accountability reform provide lucrative opportunities for educational publishers, as well.

The McGraw-Hill Web site states that, as part of its worldwide mission, McGraw-Hill plans to expand its global publishing operations and increase its penetration of the global education market. It is not alone. Major educational publishers are all pushing to claim a share of the global education industry. So we have a pretty big school business. So supplemental is one area for us to grow. Testing is certainly another.

You need a lot of information to figure out how to help him, how does he learn best, what are his deficiencies, what are his particular problems, health problems or whatever, and then fashion a program for him. We can do this because we have enterprise solutions for schools, we have testing and data collection, and we have school materials.

The Houghton Mifflin Company, which once held 12 percent of the market, hopes to purchase Harcourt Education from the London-based Reed Elsevier Group, which would vault Houghton Mifflin to the lead in education publishing, with a 33 percent share of the K market. Such a consolidation would mean that three corporations, producing more than 80 percent of K textbooks, would control the global education industry.

Standardized testing and measures for ensuring educational accountability have been the primary vehicles for top-down control of local school activities. The push toward greater accountability is couched in the rhetoric of preparing children to be productive members in a global society. How these changes appear in the everyday lives of parents with children in school needs to be examined more closely.

Parents will require new and different knowledges Filer and Pollard and new forms of cultural and social capital. Parents are confronted with the new technologies of accountability as achievement data are produced by government-mandated accountability systems and school curricula are modified to raise standardized test scores.

Parents will increasingly be asked to manage new forms of participation that accompany and support these changes—to take up the discourse of shared responsibility. For example, the mothers understood the standardizing effects of the Open Court curriculum. Cynthia, a white and working-class mother, said: It actually gets a little crazy with the whole Open Court thing—is that, you know, a kid in California can go to X school, Y school, Z school and transfer three times in a year and be on chapter 5 at his first school.

Georgia, an African American mother, made the same observation. Regardless of what these mothers may individually think about standardized curriculum and standardized testing, they are participating in the home-based educational work, discussed in the next section, that is coordinated with the classroom-mandated and increasingly standardized educational work of schools. A Home-Learning Economy While much of the work parents take up at home involves traditional home-based educational practices such as helping with homework, reading to children, and seeing to proper bedtimes, a new form of involvement is taking shape—helping children prepare for successful performance on standardized tests.

For example, McGraw-Hill publishes its Spectrum series for standardized test preparation for grades 1 through 8 Foreman, Cohen, et al. These books are easily found on Internet searches and in the large bookstore chains.

The mothers Lois interviewed in Los Angeles shared how they use these books to help their children prepare for testing. Or what else can I teach them to keep them learning this?

And they had a lot of like—you remember a long time ago we had the SRA [previous pedagogical strategy adopted by the County]? Well, the Open Court has a new concept. It was almost like SRAs. And it taught them to read. Every day of the week they read. And my daughter took one yesterday. Let me show you [pointing to page in test-prep workbook]. She took a similarity test yesterday.

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High-Performance Work Volumes have been written in the past two decades about workplace restructuring, revealing a sea change in the philosophy of management for workplaces of all kinds, both private- and public-sector.

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