Evaluating the Use of Medicare Part D in the Veteran Population With Spinal Cord Injury/Disorder.

Objective: To examine the different sources of medications, the most common drug classes filled, and the characteristics associated with Medicare Part D pharmacy use in veterans with spinal cord injury/disorder (SCI/D).

Design: Retrospective, cross-sectional, observational study.

Setting: Outpatient clinics and pharmacies.

Management learning from air purifier tests in hotels: Experiment and action research.

Recently, indoor air quality (IAQ) has become an important issue as it affects people's comfort and health. To mitigate the problem, application of some innovative air filtering devices has been generally recognized as one of the effective ways. This study adopted an action research-dominated approach to test whether the indoor air quality in the tested hotel rooms meets the recognized standard, and measure the pollutant removal efficiency of three types of air purifiers.

Not physically present contours can yield illusory motion.

We demonstrate a perceptual effect whereby contours not physically present in a visual scene can yield striking illusory motion. The not physically present contours are paths of invariant contrast polarity (CP). For example, when a square checkerboard composed of dark and light square checks with small black and white discs covering the vertices is put in lateral motion, there is the striking perception of vertical expansion/contraction.

Changing trends in the management of end-stage neuromuscular respiratory muscle failure: recommendations of an international consensus.

Objective: Respiratory management of patients with end-stage respiratory muscle failure of neuromuscular disease has evolved from no treatment and inevitable respiratory failure to the use of up to continuous noninvasive intermittent positive pressure ventilatory support (CNVS) to avert respiratory failure and to permit the extubation of "unweanable" patients without tracheostomy. An international panel experienced in CNVS was charged by the 69th Congress of the Mexican Society of Pulmonologists and Thoracic Surgeons to analyze changing respiratory management trends and to make recommendations.

Design: Neuromuscular disease respiratory consensuses and reviews were identified from PubMed.

Contrast polarity preservation's role in perception: explained and unexplained stimuli.

Roncato and Casco (2003, Perception & psychophysics 65 1252-1272) had shown that in situations where the Gestalt principle of good continuity is put into conflict with preservation of contrast polarity (CP) the perception that preserves CP prevails. Parlangeli and Roncato (2010, Perception 39 255-259) have studied this question of preservation of CP more closely and have added an addendum to the rule. They have used stimuli consisting of a checkerboard of perpendicularly arranged rectangular bricks (white, gray, or black) and draughtsmen white, gray, or black disks placed at the corners of the bricks.

Koffka's effect is mediated by figure thickness at the joining region.

Three-quarters of a century ago Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka described a remarkable effect: when a contiguous gray ring is placed on a background half one shade of gray, half another, the ring appears homogeneous. However, if the ring is divided, the two halves of the ring appear different shades of gray, the half of the ring on the darker background appearing lighter than the half of the ring on the lighter background. The Gestalt principle of continuity is used to explain this effect.

Noninvasive respiratory management for patients with spinal cord injury and neuromuscular disease.

The purpose of this article is to describe noninvasive respiratory management for patients with neuromuscular respiratory muscle dysfunction (NMD) and spinal cord injury (SCI) and the role of electrophrenic pacing (EPP) and diaphragm pacing (DP) in this respect. Long term outcomes will be reviewed and the use of noninvasive intermittent positive pressure ventilation (NIV), MAC, and EPP/DP to prevent pneumonia and acute respiratory failure, to facilitate extubation, and to avoid tracheotomy will be evaluated. Although ventilator dependent patients with most NMDs and high level SCI can be indefinitely managed noninvasively, most ALS patients can be managed for a limited time by continuous NIV before tracheostomy is necessary for survival.

Metameric intransitivity.

There are two kinds of afterimages. In negative afterimages, looking at a blank field after staring at a colored figure gives a figure whose color is complementary to that of the original figure. Less well understood and studied is the phenomenon of induced positive afterimages, in which staring at a colored area surrounding a small white test patch produces an afterimage in which the hue of the surround is transferred into the previously white area.

The Wertheimer-Benary effect does not invert, and a nulled Wertheimer-Benary effect.

More than three-quarters of a century ago Wertheimer and Benary demonstrated an ingenious and clear, though, interestingly, small effect: a grey triangle just inside an arm of a black cross on a white background appears slightly lighter than an identical triangle immediately adjacent to the cross, despite both triangles having the same perimeter exposure to black and white. Over a generation ago White discovered an apparently related, but far stronger effect: when short grey (test) bars are placed onto either black or white alternating long bars, the short test bars placed on the long black bars appear much lighter than those placed on the long white bars. A decade ago Spehar, Gilchrist, and Arend found that, enigmatically, if the short test bars in White's effect are the lightest stimulus in a figure, then the relative lightness of the test bars inverts compared with the standard version of White's effect.

Thickness and the Koffka ring effect.

Over seven decades ago Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka described a remarkable effect: when a contiguous gray ring is placed on a background half of one shade of gray, half of another, the ring appears homogeneous. However, if the ring is slightly divided, the two halves of the ring appear different shades of gray, the half of the ring on the darker background appearing lighter than the half of the ring on the lighter background. The Gestalt principle of continuity is used to explain this effect.