The variability of axon and dendrite orientations — termed neurite orientation dispersion — is reduced in the spinal cords of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to new research. This finding could provide a new biomarker for MS prognosis and therapeutic efficacy.

In a globalised world the need for leadership in the construction industry has been greater due to the fact that health and safety has become an important business tool to reduce accidents to save lives and minimise injuries. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the importance and role of leadership for manging risks associated with health and safety aspects in small construction companies. Therefore, a case study of an Italian family run small construction company is investigated and reported. The chapter dwells in depth with regards to health and safety (H&S) risk management issues such as: commitment, workers engagement, prioritisation of H&S, compliance, measurement and organisational learning from a leadership perspective. As a diagnostic tool Leadership and Worker Involvement toolkit was administrated in the company. The toolkit had assessment levels (walking, running and sprinting). Analysis of the case study company showed they were at walking and running stages in various aspects. But the leadership aspiration of the company was to reach the ‘sprinting’ stage as a long-term target and sustain it to minimise health and safety risk. A holistic approach was developed to achieve the leadership aspirations of the company. An Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Framework (strategy, process and performance) with a health and safety strand was developed and evaluated. This strand had health and safety at the heart of the organisational vision and objectives which had processes to identify the health and safety risk factors which then lead to health and safety performance measurement. This measurement is based on the Balance Score Card concept which includes H&S risk from aspects such as: financial, clients, business process and learning and growth. Evaluation of framework revealed that violation of H&S laws and regulations have an impact on all the four aspects of Balance Score Card (financial, clients, business process and learning and growth). This then has an overall effect on the ERM which has an impact on leadership decisions on H&S aspects. Therefore, in conclusion, the role of leadership in small companies is to In-doc controls understand the importance of H&S aspects and develop strategies which are then embedded in the processes of the companies to minimise H&S risks for their sustainability and competitiveness. This chapter is beneficial for professional at site (operatives/site trainees), project and programme level (site/project/programme managers) and for leadership team (Directors/board members).

Dolichoectasia, a condition of unknown cause characterized by elongation, twisting and dilation of the basilar artery in old age, is common among young patients admitted for acute stroke, a new study shows. This finding highlights the need to consider vascular abnormalities as a risk factor for stroke in young adults.

Recent research on Big Data proposed and evaluated a number of advanced techniques to gain meaningful information from the complex and large volume of data available on the World Wide Web. To achieve accurate text analysis, a process is usually initiated with a Text Classification (TC) method. Reviewing the very recent literature in this area shows that most studies are focused on English (and other scripts) while attempts on classifying Arabic texts remain relatively very limited. Hence, we intend to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review (SLR) utilizing a search protocol strictly to summarize key characteristics of the different TC techniques and methods used to classify Arabic text, this work also aims to identify and share a scientific evidence of the gap in current literature to help suggesting areas for further research. Our SLR explicitly investigates empirical evidence as a decision factor to include studies, then conclude which classifier produced more accurate results. Further, our findings identify the lack of standardized corpuses for Arabic text; authors compile their own, and most of the work is focused on Modern Arabic with very little done on Colloquial Arabic despite its wide use in Social Media Networks such as Twitter. In total, 1464 papers were surveyed from which 48 primary studies were included and analyzed.

Objective: To identify in an observational study the neurophysiologic mechanisms that mediate adaptation to oscillopsia in patients with bilateral vestibular failure (BVF). Methods: We directly probe the hypothesis that adaptive changes that mediate oscillopsia suppression implicate the early visual-cortex (V1/V2). Accordingly, we investigated V1/V2 excitability using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in 12 avestibular patients and 12 healthy controls. Specifically, we assessed TMS-induced phosphene thresholds at baseline and cortical excitability changes while performing a visual motion adaptation paradigm during the following conditions: baseline measures (i.e., static), during visual motion (i.e., motion before adaptation), and during visual motion after 5 minutes of unidirectional visual motion adaptation (i.e., motion adapted). Results: Patients had significantly higher baseline phosphene thresholds, reflecting an underlying adaptive mechanism. Individual thresholds were correlated with oscillopsia symptom load. During the visual motion adaptation condition, no differences in excitability at baseline were observed, but during both the motion before adaptation and motion adapted conditions, we observed significantly attenuated cortical excitability in patients. Again, this attenuation in excitability was stronger in less symptomatic patients. Conclusions: Our findings provide neurophysiologic evidence that cortically mediated adaptive mechanisms in V1/V2 play a critical role in suppressing oscillopsia in patients with BVF.

Twitter has eased real-time information flow for decision makers, it is also one of the key enablers for Open-source Intelligence (OSINT). Tweets mining has recently been used in the context of incident response to estimate the location and damage caused by hurricanes and earthquakes. We aim to research the detection of a specific type of high-risk natural disasters frequently occurring and causing casualties in the Arabian Peninsula, namely `floods'. Researching how we could achieve accurate classification suitable for short informal (colloquial) Arabic text (usually used on Twitter), which is highly inconsistent and received very little attention in this field. First, we provide a thorough technical demonstration consisting of the following stages: data collection (Twitter REST API), labelling, text pre-processing, data division and representation, and training models. This has been deployed using `R' in our experiment. We then evaluate classifiers' performance via four experiments conducted to measure the impact of different stemming techniques on the following classifiers SVM, J48, C5.0, NNET, NB and k-NN. The dataset used consisted of 1434 tweets in total. Our findings show that Support Vector Machine (SVM) was prominent in terms of accuracy (F1=0.933). Furthermore, applying McNemar's test shows that using SVM without stemming on Colloquial Arabic is significantly better than using stemming techniques.

Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) are gregarious primates that form despotic societies characterized by frequent and intense aggression. Within long-term social groups, demographic changes may influence hierarchical stability, potentially resulting in conflict and violently abrupt hierarchical changes. This conflict can result in serious implications for animal welfare, and thus, predictive tools would be invaluable to captive managers in determining social instabilities. Using the method Elo-rating to track rank changes and dominance stability, we predicted that demographic changes to a population of semi-free ranging rhesus macaques would result in changes in hierarchical stability. Over a 3 y period, dominance data were recorded on all troop members to track the hierarchy. Throughout the 3 y, significant changes occurred to the population (mainly due to health and colony management reasons; no changes specifically occurred for this study) including permanent removal of a large group of natal males, temporary and permanent removal of top-ranking females, and depositions of top-ranking families. Our retrospective study suggests that removing natal males was beneficial in promoting overall troop stability (that is, stability of dominance relationships), although remaining males opportunistically attempted to increase in rank, perhaps due to limited competition. Our results also suggest that removing top-ranking females, even temporarily, destabilized dominance relationships; consequently adjacently ranked females opportunistically increased in Elo-rating, both before and after the depositions of the α families. Thus, these challenges to the established hierarchy can be predicted by increases in Elo-rating within the β families after demographic changes to the α families. Our results suggest that the presence of natal males and the removal of top-ranking females should be minimized to maintain stable dominance relationships. In addition, longitudinal data reflecting dominance ranks, collected by using Elo-rating, may help managers of captive colonies in predicting dominance instabilities before they occur.

The transformation of kaolinite was examined at 175°C for 24 h in the CaO-Al2O3- SiO2-H2O (CASH) system, which is important in cement science and especially in, cement chemistry and is closely related to the pozzolanic reaction, the CaO-aggregate reaction and the glass fibre reinforcement of hardened cement. The hydration products were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy, Magic Angle Spinning Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and thermogravimetric analysis in order to elucidate their mineral chemistry and microstructure. Results reveal that several poorly crystalline phases were formed, with un-reacted Ca(OH)2 appearing at shorter reaction times. Hydrogarnet tends to form more rapidly than tobermorite. It was transformed into aluminium-substituted tobermorite with curing time. A batch experimental study confirmed that kaolinitebased calcium silicate hydrates are effective for the treatment of acid mine drainage, particularly in removing metal ions and ammonium

The discovery of cortical neurons responsive to both the observation of another individual’s movement and one’s own physical movement has spurred scientists into utilising this interplay for rehabilitation. The idea that humans can quickly transfer motor programmes or refine existing motor strategies through observation has only recently gained interest in the context of gait rehabilitation but may offer significant promise as an adjunctive therapy to routine balance training. This review is the first dedicated to action observation in postural control or gait in healthy individuals and patients. The traditional use of action observation in rehabilitation is that the observer has to carefully watch pre-recorded or physically performed actions and thereafter imitate them. Using this approach, previous studies have shown improved gait after action observation in stroke, Parkinson’s disease and knee or hip replacement patients. In healthy subjects, action observation reduced postural sway from externally induced balance perturbations. Despite this initial evidence, future studies should establish whether patients are instructed to observe the same movement to be trained (i.e., replicate the observed action(s)) or observe a motor error in order to produce postural countermeasures. The best mode of motor transfer from action observation is yet to be fully explored, and may involve observing live motor acts rather than viewing video clips. Given the ease with which action observation training can be applied in the home, it offers a promising, safe and economical approach as an adjunctive therapy to routine balance training.