Patterns, shapes, and distribution in skin disease

This chapter examines how pattern recognition can be helpful as part of the approach to the assessment of a child presenting with a rash or lesion(s). It begins with a glossary of common patterns, shapes, and distributions of skin disease with examples and links to relevant detail in later chapters. Some of the more common patterns of skin diseases such as annular, linear, segmental, and serpiginous rashes are expanded upon further, with a differential diagnosis offered including common, less common, and rarer causes. Through the use of illustrations and examples, the chapter also examines important distributions, such as acral rashes, and the differential diagnoses for such cases. Clinical images and diagrams are included throughout the chapter and link to the relevant text for further explanation.

Meaning, reasoning, and common knowledge

Abstract“Pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of ‘ampliative‘ inference—induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some special application of general principles special to communication, as conceived by Grice … —but in any case a sort of reasoning” (Korta, Kepa & John Perry. 2015. Pragmatics. In The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Metaphysics research lab, Stanford, CA: Stanford University:1). Pragmatics assumes that one’s competence as speaker is sufficient to allow one to construct, in range of significant cases, plausible accounts of how speakers and audiences reason. The question is that are those who attribute reasoning to speakers and audiences suffering a “curious mental derangement” that prevents them from seeing that reasoning is rare? I consider four responses. (1) Speakers and audiences do reason to the extent pragmatic explanations require; they just typically do not do so consciously. (2) The second reply concedes that speakers and audiences often do not reason even unconsciously in any relevant detail, but it insists that attributions of reasoning can nonetheless be, and often are, explanatory. (3) The third reply is a response to objections to the second. It identifies reasoning with information processing steps. (4) The fourth view is that a speaker’s utterance provides an audience evidence for what the speaker means, but the audience typically does not reason to a conclusion about what the speaker means. I reject the first three replies and embrace the fourth, but I argue that attributions of reasoning in pragmatics can still play a significant explanatory role.

On the identity of Aporcelinus granuliferus (Cobb, 1893) Andrássy, 2009 and its taxonomic consequences

The intricate taxonomical history of Aporcelinus granuliferus, the most often recorded species of its genus, is reviewed and discussed. A new concept, based on its original description, is proposed for it as type material is apparently lost although available data provide enough information to complete and update its diagnosis: 1.20-1.70 mm long body, lip region 15-16 μm broad, odontostyle 17-21 μm long, neck 309-403 μm long, pharyngeal expansion 155-214 μm long, dorsal cell mass present at pharyngo-intestinal junction, uterus simple and up to one body diam. long, V = 47-55, female tail conical with acute tip and occasionally somewhat recurved dorsad (46-55 μm; c = 24-37; c′ = 1.4-1.9), and male absent. The population studied by Thorne & Swanger (1936) is certainly not conspecific with Cobb’s original one due to significant differences in lip region breadth and odontostyle length, and belongs to a non-described species, herein characterised and named as A. brasiliensis sp. n.: 1.5-1.6 mm long body, lip region offset by constriction and 24-27 μm wide, odontostyle 25-28 μm long, neck 345-370 μm long, V = 48, tail conical (46-55 μm; c = 29-32; c′ = 1.3-1.4) with very finely rounded or acute tip and barely recurved dorsad, spicules 54-72 μm long and nine irregularly spaced ventromedian supplements with no hiatus. The three females deposited with USDANC are not identical either to those studied by Cobb or by Thorne & Swanger, and also belong to a non-described species, herein characterised as named as A. neogranuliferus sp. n.: 1.25-1.31 mm long body, lip region offset by constriction and 17.5-18.0 μm broad, odontostyle 18 μm at its ventral side, neck 312-337 μm long, pharyngeal expansion 136-168 μm long, dorsal cell mass present at level of pharyngo-intestinal junction, uterus simple and 41-48 μm long or 0.6 times corresponding body diam., V = 49-53, female tail conical (28-35 μm; c = 36-46; c′ = 0.8-1.0) with finely rounded terminus and no hyaline region. Both Dorylaimus reynecki and D. yucatanensis, hitherto considered to be identical to A. granuliferus, are valid species, being transferred to Aporcelinus as A. reynecki comb. n. and A. yucatanensis comb. n. The available information on D. micrurus and D. menzeli lacks sufficient relevant detail to characterise these species, which are therefore regarded as species inquirendae within Aporcelinus and are transferred as A. micrurus comb. n. and A. menzeli comb. n. The true identity of other records of A. granuliferus is analysed and discussed in the light of the new concept of the taxon.

Will Psychological Disorders Afflict Uploaded Personalities?

Uploading human minds into computer systems is an intriguing concept. Will this process become part of our evolutionary future? This paper begins by arguing that successfully replicating human minds in virtual environments will require more than computing power and the ability to transfer the information content of neural connections into computer memory. Virtual minds must also be equipped with certain properties of the human biological mind that may prove to be not easily transferable. These include psychological motivations and even our collective unconsciousness. Lacking these, virtual minds could suffer from a wide range of serious psychological disorders. Efforts to treat such disorders with “program” fixes would invalidate any plausible claim that a virtual mind had the same ‘identity’ as its biological ancestor, and also raise perplexing ethical issues. The paper next provides a theoretical psychological framework for these assertions, and goes on to explore nine specific psychological disorders that could afflict virtual personalities. The paper then concludes by identifying several ethical issues that might arise from attempts to “fix” the psychological problems of virtual personalities. Uploading would involve first freezing a brain, then slicing it, then scanning the slices with some high- resolution scanning technique, then using automated image processing software to reconstruct and tag a very detailed 3-D map of the original brain. The map would show all the neurons, the matrix of their synaptic interconnections, the strengths of these connections, and other relevant detail. Using computational models of how these basic elements operate, the whole brain could then be emulated on a sufficiently capacious computer.—Nick Bostrom (2004)

Recombinant p-Hydroxyphenylpyruvate Dioxygenase of High Activity

Inhibitors of p-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD) are bleaching compounds impairing the formation of colored carotenoids. This activity makes them promising candidates for herbicides. Detailed studies on enzyme-inhibitor complexes or on the binding niche of the enzyme have still to be performed. Enzyme preparation from plants is time-consuming and the yield is poor. This paper describes in relevant detail the preparation of recombinant enzyme from Arabidopsis thaliana with good yield and high specific activity.

Asthma Terminology and Classification in Hospital Records

Asthma is a national health priority area in Australia, and there is significant interest in capturing relevant detail about hospitalisations as a result of asthma. A public submission received by the National Centre for Classification in Health from a large teaching hospital in Victoria suggested that current classification terminology in ICD-10-AM did not adequately reflect the terms recorded in clinical inpatient records, and that patterns and severity of asthma better reflected current clinical terminology in Australian hospitals. The purpose of this study was to determine the validity of the public submission and inform future changes to ICD-10-AM. A representative sample of over 3000 asthma records across Australia and New Zealand were extracted, and the asthma terminology documented and codes assigned were recorded and analysed. The study concluded that there was little support for either pattern terminology or the current classification terminology; however, severity of asthma was commonly used in asthma documentation.

The Attraction of Color for Active Attention-Problem Children

The optimal stimulation theory proposes that attention disordered hyperactive children are less tolerant than their normal peers of rote, minimally stimulating tasks and thus should more readily attend to color added to such tasks. Due to this attentional selectivity, color added to relevant features should produce improved performance, especially for this group. To test this hypothesis, 17 children, rated high in attention and activity problems, were matched on the basis of age and performance to 17 controls. Matched pairs were randomly assigned to stimulation order (colored stimuli first and black stimuli second session or the reverse order) and to level of emphasis-placement (emphasis added to relevant letter parts or added to randomly selected letter stimuli) counterbalanced for stimulation order. Findings in support of the theory were that attention-problem children performed better with color emphasis placed on relevant detail than when it was assigned to randomly selected letters. Differential responding was significant for experimental but not control children.

The Congressional Game: A Prospectus

The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romantic past?” The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their “imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as ‘evidence,’ as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience.”