Article Surveys (article + survey)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Ultrasound Contrast Agents for Brain Perfusion Imaging and Ischemic Stroke Therapy

JOURNAL OF NEUROIMAGING, Issue 3 2005
Alberto Della Martina PhD
ABSTRACT Stroke is one of the major causes of death and disabilities in industrialized countries. Ultrasound imaging is a largely wide spread bedside technique that is easily accessible and valuable in case of emergency but suffers from the fact that the ultrasound wave has to cross the skull for brain imaging. However, ultrasound contrast agents and new contrast-specific imaging modalities have helped to improve the diagnostic quality of transcranial ultrasonography. This review article surveys and discusses the current state of microbubbles technology and the use of contrast-enhanced transcranial ultrasound for the assessment of brain perfusion. Future aspects and expecta tions in contrast agent functionality, such as targeting and drug or gene delivery, acceleration of thrombolysis, and imaging technology, are also discussed. [source]


Writing Revolution: British Literature and the French Revolution Crisis, a Review of Recent Scholarship1

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2006
M. O. Grenby
The French Revolution had a profound effect on almost all aspects of British culture. French events and ideas were avidly discussed and disputed in Britain. Long-standing British political and cultural debates were given new life; new socio-political ideologies rapidly emerged. The sense of political, religious and cultural crisis that developed in the 1790s was only slowly to dissipate. Generations afterwards, many British thinkers and writers were still considering and renegotiating their responses. The effect of the Revolution Crisis on British literature was particularly marked, something that was widely recognised at the time and has been the focus of much scholarship since. It has become something of a cliché that British literary Romanticism was born out of the Revolution. The last few decades have produced new waves of powerful criticism which has re-examined the relationship between the Revolution Crisis and the works it shaped. Different strands of radical writing have now received detailed investigation, as have equally complex conservative responses. Writing by and for women is now receiving as much attention as writing by men, and previously neglected forms, such as the popular novel, pamphlets and children's literature, are now the subject of an increasing number of studies. The writing of the 1790s and early 1800s has in fact provided many scholars with their test-case for exploring the very nature of the relationship between text and context. It is this profusion of recent, sophisticated and rapidly evolving scholarship which this article surveys. [source]


Some Questions in Hume's Aesthetics

PHILOSOPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2007
Christopher Williams
The central problem posed in Hume's essay ,Of the Standard of Taste' concerns the mutual adjustment of two things: a skepticism about the correctness of tastes, and a belief that artistic productions genuinely differ in their merits. In response, Hume modifies the skepticism by proposing that the ,joint verdict of true judges' is the standard of taste. This article surveys three sets of issues in connection with this solution: the role of rules in grounding verdicts; the possibility of circularity in the judge-verdict relation; and the relevance of the judges' verdicts to those that non-judges would or should make. [source]


Fallback foods, eclectic omnivores, and the packaging problem

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2009
Stuart A. Altmann
Abstract For omnivorous primates, as for other selective omnivores, the array of potential foods in their home ranges present a twofold problem: not all nutrients are present in any food in the requisite amounts or proportions and not all toxins and other costs are absent. Costs and benefits are inextricably linked. This so-called packaging problem is particularly acute during periods, often seasonal, when the benefit-to-cost ratios of available foods are especially low and animals must subsist on fallback foods. Thus, fallback foods represent the packaging problem in extreme form. The use of fallback foods by omnivorous primates is part of a suite of interconnected adaptations to the packaging problem, the commingling of costs and benefits in accessing food and other vital resources. These adaptations occur at every level of biological organization. This article surveys 16 types of potential adaptations of omnivorous primates to fallback foods and the packaging problem. Behavioral adaptations, in addition to finding and feeding on fallback foods, include minimizing costs and requirements, exploiting food outbreaks, living in social groups and learning from others, and shifting the home range. Adaptive anatomical and physiological traits include unspecialized guts and dentition, binocular color vision, agile bodies and limbs, Meissner's corpuscles in finger tips, enlargement of the neocortex, internal storage of foods and nutrients, and ability internally to synthesize compounds not readily available in the habitat. Finally, during periods requiring prolonged use of fallback foods, life history components may undergo changes, including reduction of parental investment, extended interbirth intervals, seasonal breeding or, in the extreme, aborted fetuses. Am J Phys Anthropol 140:615,629, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Risk Management in Agricultural Markets: A Review

THE JOURNAL OF FUTURES MARKETS, Issue 10 2001
William G. Tomek
This article surveys and evaluates the current state of knowledge about producers' marketing strategies to manage price and revenue risk for farm commodities. The review highlights gaps between concepts and their implementation. Many well-developed models of price behavior exist, but appropriate characterization and estimation of the probability distributions of commodity prices remain elusive. Hence, the preferred measure of price risk is ambiguous. Numerous models of optimal marketing portfolios for farmers have been specified, but their behavior appears to be inconsistent with most, if not all, of these models. In addition, some research suggests that farmers can earn speculative profits, which is inconsistent with notions of efficient markets. The conclusions discuss what academic research can and cannot accomplish in relation to assisting producers with risk-management decisions. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:953,985, 2001 [source]