Cross-species evidence suggests that the ability to exert control over a stressor is a key dimension of stress exposure that may sensitize frontostriatal-amygdala circuitry to promote more adaptive responses to subsequent stressors. The present study examined neural correlates of stressor controllability in young adults. Participants (N = 56; M age = 23.74, range = 18–30 years) completed either the controllable or uncontrollable stress condition of the first of two novel stressor controllability tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) acquisition. Participants in the uncontrollable stress condition were yoked to age- and sex-matched participants in the controllable stress condition. All participants were subsequently exposed to uncontrollable stress in the second task, which is the focus of fMRI analyses reported here. A whole-brain searchlight classification analysis revealed that patterns of activity in the right dorsal anterior insula (dAI) during subsequent exposure to uncontrollable stress could be used to classify participants' initial exposure to either controllable or uncontrollable stress with a peak of 73% accuracy. Previous experience of exerting control over a stressor may change the computations performed within the right dAI during subsequent stress exposure, shedding further light on the neural underpinnings of stressor controllability.

Introduction: 9-1-1 telecommunicators receive minimal education on agonal breathing, often resulting in unrecognized out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). We successfully piloted an educational intervention that significantly improved telecommunicators’ OHCA recognition and bystander CPR rates in Ottawa. We sought to better understand the operations of Canadian 9-1-1 communications centers (CC) in preparation for a multi-centre study of this intervention. Methods: We conducted a National survey of all Canadian CCs. Survey domains included information on organizational structure, dispatch system used, education curriculum, and performance monitoring. It was peer-reviewed, translated in French, pilot-tested, and distributed electronically using a modified Dillman method. We designated respondents in each CC before distribution and used targeted follow-up and small incentives to increase response rate. Respondents also described functioning of neighboring CCs if known. Results: We received information from 51/51 provincial and 1/25 territorial CCs, representing 99.7% of the Canadian population. CCs largely utilize the Medical Dispatch Priority System (MPDS) platform (93%), many are Province/Ministry regulated (50%) and most require a High School diploma as minimum entry level education (78%). Telecommunicators receive initial in-class training (median 1.3 months, IQR 0.3-1.9; range 0.1-2.2), often followed by a preceptorship (84.4%) (median 1.0 months, IQR 0.7-1.7; range 0.4-6.0). Educational curriculum includes information on agonal breathing in 41% of CC, without audio examples in 34%. Among responding CCs, over 39,000 suspected OHCA 9-1-1 calls are received annually. Few CCs maintain local performance statistics on OHCA recognition (25%), bystander CPR rates (25%) or survival rates (50%). Most (97%) expressed interest in future research collaborations. Conclusion: Most Canadian telecommunicators receive no or minimal education in recognizing agonal breathing. Further training and improved OHCA monitoring may assist recognition and enhance outcomes.

This paper reviews some of the research that has been carried out at the University of Liverpool where the Flight Science and Technology Research Group has developed its Heliflight-R full-motion research simulator to create a simulation environment for the launch and recovery of maritime helicopters to ships. HELIFLIGHT-R has been used to conduct flight trials to produce simulated Ship-Helicopter Operating Limits (SHOLs). This virtual engineering approach has led to a much greater understanding of how the dynamic interface between the ship and the helicopter contributes to the pilot's workload and the aircraft's handling qualities and will inform the conduct of future real-world SHOL trials. The paper also describes how modelling and simulation has been applied to the design of a ship's superstructure to improve the aerodynamic flow field in which the helicopter has to operate. The superstructure aerodynamics also affects the placement of the ship's anemometers and the dispersion of the ship's hot exhaust gases, both of which affect the operational envelope of the helicopter, and both of which can be investigated through simulation.

Background. Sustained attention has been found to be impaired in individuals suffering from schizophrenia and their close relatives. This has led to the hypothesis that impaired sustained attention is an indicator of vulnerability to schizophrenia.

Methods. The Edinburgh High Risk Study used the Continuous Performance Test-Identical Pairs version (CPT-IP) to assess sustained attention in 127 high risk participants, 30 controls and 15 first-episode schizophrenic patients. A second assessment was completed by 59 high risk and 18 control participants 18 months to 2 years after the first.

Results. No differences in attentional capacity were found between the high risk and control groups and there was no association between genetic liability to schizophrenia and poor performance on the CPT-IP. Additionally, no association between occurrence of psychotic symptoms in the high risk group and impaired attentional capacity was found.

Conclusions. The results suggest that deficits in sustained attention are not indicative of a genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, and are not associated with the occurrence of psychotic symptoms.

The objective of the present study was to investigate live weight (LW) gain, urinary nitrogen (UN) excretion and urination behaviour of dairy heifers grazing pasture, chicory and plantain in autumn and spring. The study comprised a 35-day autumn trial (with a 7-day acclimation period) and a 28-days spring trial (with a 7-day acclimation period). For each trial, 56 Friesian × Jersey heifers were blocked into five dietary treatments balanced for their LW and breeding worth (i.e. genetic merit of a cow for production and reproduction): 1·00 perennial ryegrass–white clover pasture (PA); 1·00 chicory (CH); 1·00 plantain (PL); 0·50 pasture + 0·50 chicory (PA + CH); and 0·50 pasture + 0·50 plantain (PA + PL). A fresh allocation of the herbage was offered every 3 days with allowance calculated according to feed requirement for maintenance plus gain of 1·0 kg LW/day. In both trials, LW gain was lower on CH than other treatments. In the spring trial, UN concentration and UN excretion were lower in CH and PL than other treatments. In autumn, a higher urination frequency was observed over the first 6 h after forage allocation in CH and PA + CH than other treatments. Data from the present study indicate that feeding CH alone limited heifer LW gain. However, heifers grazing swards containing chicory (CH and PA + CH) and plantain (PL and PA + PL) had the potential to lower nitrous oxide emissions and nitrate leaching from soil compared with heifers grazing PA, by reducing N loading in urine patches.

This paper describes a study which has been concerned with numerical predictions of the airwakes resulting from two simplified ship geometries: the internationally agreed Simple Frigate Shape, SFS1, and its successor, SFS2. Extensive steady-state simulations have been carried out for a wide range of wind conditions using Fluent, a commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. The CFD predictions have been partially validated against wind tunnel data produced by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and have shown good agreement. The resulting airwake velocity components have been exported from Fluent, interpolated onto suitable grids and attached to the FLIGHTLAB flight-simulation environment as look-up tables; piloted flight trials were then carried out using the Liverpool full-motion simulator. The pilot workload and helicopter control margins resulting from a range of wind-over-deck conditions have been used to develop the Ship-Helicopter Operating Limits (SHOL) for a Lynx-like helicopter and the SFS2. The workload was compared to the pilot’s experiences on a similar aircraft and a Type 23 Frigate and the simulated SHOL compared with SHOLs derived from sea trials. The results are very encouraging and open up further the long awaited prospect of such simulations being used in the future to reduce at-sea trials, and to provide a safe environment for pilot training.

This paper presents highlights from research conducted at the University of Liverpool to determine suitable fidelity criteria and guidelines for the modelling and simulation of the helicopter-ship dynamic interface environment. The paper begins by describing the characteristics of the helicopter-ship dynamic interface, explaining the motivation behind the research and reviewing the state-of-the-art in dynamic interface simulation. The development of a dynamic interface research environment based on an existing research simulator operated by the University of Liverpool is then described, before key results from a number of piloted simulation experiments are presented. These experiments were specifically designed to address fidelity sensitivity issues, such as, are unsteady airwake models necessary, or can a steady airwake model induce appropriate levels of pilot workload? What influence does the modelled ship geometry, or choice of atmospheric wind conditions have on the airwake model and on pilot workload? Finally, the paper concludes by briefly describing the relevance of these research findings to current and future industry programmes.

The class of restless bandits as proposed by Whittle (1988) have long been known to be intractable. This paper presents an optimality result which extends that of Weber and Weiss (1990) for restless bandits to a more general setting in which individual bandits have multiple levels of activation but are subject to an overall resource constraint. The contribution is motivated by the recent works of Glazebrook et al. (2011a), (2011b) who discussed the performance of index heuristics for resource allocation in such systems. Hitherto, index heuristics have been shown, under a condition of full indexability, to be optimal for a natural Lagrangian relaxation of such problems in which a resource is purchased rather than constrained. We find that under key assumptions about the nature of solutions to a deterministic differential equation that the index heuristics above are asymptotically optimal in a sense described by Whittle. We then demonstrate that these assumptions always hold for three-state bandits.

Motivated by a wide range of applications, we consider a development of Whittle's restless bandit model in which project activation requires a state-dependent amount of a key resource, which is assumed to be available at a constant rate. As many projects may be activated at each decision epoch as resource availability allows. We seek a policy for project activation within resource constraints which minimises an aggregate cost rate for the system. Project indices derived from a Lagrangian relaxation of the original problem exist provided the structural requirement of indexability is met. Verification of this property and derivation of the related indices is greatly simplified when the solution of the Lagrangian relaxation has a state monotone structure for each constituent project. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case for a wide range of bidirectional projects in which the project state tends to move in a different direction when it is activated from that in which it moves when passive. This is natural in many application domains in which activation of a project ameliorates its condition, which otherwise tends to deteriorate or deplete. In some cases the state monotonicity required is related to the structure of state transitions, while in others it is also related to the nature of costs. Two numerical studies demonstrate the value of the ideas for the construction of policies for dynamic resource allocation, most especially in contexts which involve a large number of projects.

Loblolly pine trees struck by lightning offer a favorable attack and brood environment for the southern pine and Ips beetles. In central Louisiana lightning strikes reduced oleoresin exudation pressure, oleoresin flow, and relative water content of inner-bark tissue and resulted in a decrease in sucrose and an increase in reducing-sugar content of inner bark. Interspecific competition was much greater in struck trees than nonstruck trees. Among struck trees, those with highest carbohydrate levels produced the most numerous broods of the southern pine beetle.

Glucose, fructose, and sucrose were the only sugars detected in inner bark treated with a southern pine beetle–microorganism complex and two beetle-associated fungi. Treatments drastically lowered the reducing-sugar level. Storage of untreated bolts had no effect on reducing-sugar level; sucrose was lowered but not as much as in treated tissue. Starch content remained unchanged in all treatments.

At the 2003 Sydney IAU meeting, Marion Schmitz (Caltech, USA) took over the chair of the Commission 5 Working Group Designations, succeeding Helene Dickel. The Working Group Designations of IAU Commission 5 clarifies existing astronomical nomenclature and helps astronomers avoid potential problems when designating their sources. The most important function of WG Designations during the period 2003-2005 was overseeing the IAU REGISTRY FOR ACRONYMS (for newly discovered astronomical sources of radiation: see the website <http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/DicForm>) which is sponsored by the WG and operated by the Centre de Données de Strasbourg (CDS). The Clearing House, a subgroup of the WG, screens the submissions for accuracy and conformity to the IAU Recommendations for Nomenclature (<http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/iau-spec.html>). From its beginning in 1997 through August 2006, there have been 132 submissions and 111 acceptances. Attempts to register asterisms, common star names, and suspected variable stars were rejected. The past three years saw 61 acronyms submitted with 50 of them being accepted. (GIRL - yes; WOMEN - no).

The development of intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) has allowed the delivery of concave dose distributions. Planning studies have demonstrated the potential clinical benefit of IMRT in the treatment of the prostate and pelvic nodes in patients with advanced prostate cancer. As a consequence, IMRT was clinically implemented in the Royal Marsden NHS Trust in September 2000, using Elekta Sli series linear accelerators and NOMOS Corvus v3.0 planning system. As a relatively new treatment procedure in the United Kingdom, the clinical implementation involved developing appropriate quality assurance and verification procedures as well as training staff. This paper describes the practicalities of implementing IMRT into the routine workload of the radiotherapy department.

Voltage-gated potassium channel antibody encephalopathy, a rare cause of limbic encephalopathy, typically presents with memory impairment and seizures. Psychiatric symptoms have not been emphasised in the literature. Here we describe a 58-year-old man who presented with panic attacks and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures and, later on, developed delusions and hallucinations and then confusion. He was found to have antibodies to voltage-gated potassium channels. Treatment with immuno-modulatory therapy resulted in almost complete recovery.

A significant number of X-ray binaries are now known to exhibit long-term periodicities on timescales of ~10 - 100 days. Several physical mechanisms have been proposed that give rise to such periodicities, one of which is radiation-driven warping and precession of the accretion disk. Recent theoretical work predicts the stability to disk warping as a, function of the mass ratio, binary radius, viscosity and accretion efficiency. We investigate the stability of the superorbital periodicities in the neutron star X-ray binaries Cyg X-2, LMC X-4, SMC X-l and Her X-l, and thereby confront stability predictions with observation. We find that the period and nature of the superorbital variations in these sources is consistent with the predictions of warping theory.