Aspiring workers or striving consumers? Rethinking social exclusion in the era of consumer capitalism

https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.138583

Ultrasound-Guided Femoral and Sciatic Nerve Blocks for Repair of Tibia and Fibula Fractures in a Bennett's Wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus)

Locoregional anesthetic techniques may be a very useful tool for the anesthetic management of wallabies with injuries of the pelvic limbs and may help to prevent capture myopathies resulting from stress and systemic opioids’ administration. This report describes the use of ultrasound-guided femoral and sciatic nerve blocks in Bennett’s wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus) referred for orthopaedic surgery. Ultrasound-guided femoral and sciatic nerve blocks were attempted at the femoral triangle and proximal thigh level, respectively. Whilst the sciatic nerve could be easily visualised, the femoral nerve could not be readily identified. Only the sciatic nerve was therefore blocked with ropivacaine, and methadone was administered as rescue analgesic. The ultrasound images were stored and sent for external review. Anesthesia and recovery were uneventful and the wallaby was discharged two days postoperatively. At the time of writing, it is challenging to provide safe and effective analgesia to Macropods. Detailed knowledge of the anatomy of these species is at the basis of successful locoregional anesthesia. The development of novel analgesic techniques suitable for wallabies would represent an important step forward in this field and help the clinicians dealing with these species to improve their perianesthetic management

Nonexistence of stable solutions to quasilinear elliptic equations on Riemannian manifolds

We prove nonexistence of nontrivial, possibly sign changing, stable solutions to a class of quasilinear elliptic equations with a potential on Riemannian manifolds, under suitable weighted volume growth conditions on geodesic balls

Reaction-diffusion problems on time-dependent Riemannian manifolds: stability of periodic solutions

We investigate the stability of time-periodic solutions of semilinear parabolic problems with Neumann boundary conditions. Such problems are posed on compact submanifolds evolving periodically in time. The discussion is based on the principal eigenvalue of periodic parabolic operators. The study is motivated by biological models on the effect of growth and curvature on patterns formation. The Ricci curvature plays an important role

Harnack's inequality and H\"older continuity for weak solutions of degenerate quasilinear equations with rough coefficients

We continue to study regularity results for weak solutions of the large class of second order degenerate quasilinear equations of the form \begin{eqnarray} \text{div}\big(A(x,u,\nabla u)\big) = B(x,u,\nabla u)\text{ for }x\in\Omega\nonumber \end{eqnarray} as considered in our previous paper giving local boundedness of weak solutions. Here we derive a version of Harnack's inequality as well as local H\"older continuity for weak solutions. The possible degeneracy of an equation in the class is expressed in terms of a nonnegative definite quadratic form associated with its principal part. No smoothness is required of either the quadratic form or the coefficients of the equation. Our results extend ones obtained by J. Serrin and N. Trudinger for quasilinear equations, as well as ones for subelliptic linear equations obtained by Sawyer and Wheeden in their 2006 AMS memoir article.Comment: 39 page

Continuous and Discontinuous Phase Transitions in the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selective pressure

The presence of phenomena analogous to phase transition in Statistical Mechanics, has been suggested in the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation and genetic drift. By using numerical simulations of a model system, we analyze the evolution of a population of $N$ diploid hermaphrodites in random mating regime. The population evolves under the effect of drift, selective pressure in form of viability on an additive polygenic trait, and mutation. The analysis allows to determine a phase diagram in the plane of mutation rate and strength of selection. The involved pattern of phase transitions is characterized by a line of critical points for weak selective pressure (smaller than a threshold), whereas discontinuous phase transitions, characterized by metastable hysteresis, are observed for strong selective pressure. A finite size scaling analysis suggests the analogy between our system and the mean field Ising model for selective pressure approaching the threshold from weaker values. In this framework, the mutation rate, which allows the system to explore the accessible microscopic states, is the parameter controlling the transition from large heterozygosity (disordered phase) to small heterozygosity (ordered one).Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl