Anorectal malformation are common congenital problems occurring in 1 in 5,000 births and have a spectrum of anatomical presentations, requiring individualized treatments for the newborn, sophisticated approaches to the definitive reconstruction, and management of long-term treatments and outcomes. Associated anomalies related to the cardiac, renal, gynecologic, orthopedic, spinal, and sacral systems impact care and prognosis. Long-term results are good provided there is an accurate anatomical reconstruction and a focus on maximizing of functional results.

Neurons in macaque primary visual cortex are spatially arranged by their global topographic position and in at least three overlapping local modular systems: ocular dominance columns, orientation pinwheels, and cytochrome oxidase (CO) blobs. Individual neurons in the blobs are not tuned to orientation, and populations of neurons in the pinwheel center regions show weak orientation tuning, suggesting a close relation between pinwheel centers and CO blobs. However, this hypothesis has been challenged by a series of optical recording experiments. In this report, we show that the statistical error associated with photon scatter and absorption in brain tissue combined with the blurring introduced by the optics of the imaging system has typically been in the range of 250 m. These physical limitations cause a systematic error in the location of pinwheel centers because of the vectorial nature of these patterns, such that the apparent location of a pinwheel center measured by optical recording is never (on average) in the correct in vivo location. The systematic positional offset is Ϸ116 m, which is large enough to account for the claimed misalignment of CO blobs and pinwheel centers. Thus, optical recording, as it has been used to date, has insufficient spatial resolution to accurately locate pinwheel centers. The earlier hypothesis that CO blobs and pinwheel centers are coterminous remains the only hypothesis currently supported by reliable observation.hypercolumn model ͉ orientation maps ͉ visual cortex ͉ cytochrome oxidase blobs T he columnar organization of the neocortex is one of the seminal discoveries in neurobiology (1, 2). Neurons in vertical register within the cortex tend to have similar response properties, such as selectivity for oriented visual stimuli and ocular dominance (2). Perhaps even more important, however, was the discovery that columns were themselves organized into larger structures, termed hypercolumns, comprised of the full 180°range of orientation tuning for both eyes on the scale of Ϸ1 mm (3, 4). This idea has proven vital because it suggested a basic uniformity of cortical structure and a principle around which it might be organized. Because hypercolumn structure is critical to theories of both cortical function and its development, clarifying its details has been a central goal of neuroscience.Horton and Hubel (5, 6) showed that an additional periodic anatomical feature of primate visual cortex, the cytochrome oxidase (CO) blob system, consists of patches of cortical tissue most prominently appearing in layers II͞III but also appearing in layers I, IVb, V, and VI, with a size of Ϸ150 ϫ 250 m in primary visual cortex (V1) of macaque, and exhibiting higherthan-average metabolic activity, hence, staining darkly for CO activity. They observed the CO blob density to be approximately five per mm 2 , although Horton and Hocking (7) showed variation of a factor of two across subjects. The receptive field properties of neurons in the blobs is still an area of active research, but Livingstone and H...

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The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of switching from a habitual diet to a carbohydrate-restricted diet (CRD) on strength and power performance in trained men (n = 16) and women (n = 15). Subjects performed handgrip dynamometry, vertical jump, 1RM bench press and back squat, maximum-repetition bench press, and a 30-second Wingate anaerobic cycling test after consuming a habitual diet (40.7% carbohydrate, 22.2% protein, and 34.4% fat) for 7 days and again after following a CRD (5.4% carbohydrate, 35.1% protein, and 53.6% fat) for 7 days. Before both testing sessions, body weight and composition were examined using bioelectrical impedance analysis. Three 2 × 2 multiple analyses of variance were used to compare performance variables between the habitual diet and CRD. Subjects consumed significantly fewer (p < 0.05) total kilocalories during the CRD (2,156.55 ± 126.7) compared with the habitual diet (2,537.43 ± 99.5). Body mass decreased significantly (p < 0.05). Despite a reduction in body mass, strength and power outputs were maintained for men and women during the CRD. These findings may have implications for sports that use weight classes, and in which strength and power are determinants of success. A CRD may be an alternative method for short-term weight loss without compromising strength and power outputs. The use of a 7-day CRD could replace weight loss methods employing severe dehydration before competition.

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The indication for most surgical procedures is 'failed' medical management, yet no standardized definition for this exists. Many surgical procedures are proposed with little evidence to show outcomes. We recommend that the surgical evaluation and treatment of children with constipation needs to be protocolized and studied in a prospective manner using validated outcomes measures. Our center's current protocol is described.

This paper extends the ‘lens’ concept for view updating in Computer Science beyond the categories of sets and ordered sets. It is first shown that a constant complement view updating strategy also corresponds to a lens for a categorical database model. A variation on the lens concept called a c-lens is introduced, and shown to correspond to the categorical notion of Grothendieck opfibration. This variant guarantees a universal solution to the view update problem for functorial update processes.

The relationships, in many cases equivalences, between lattice distributivity, adjunction and continuity have been studied by many authors, for example [1, 3–8, 12, 13, 15, 17–20, 22, 23]. Very roughly, we refer to the following circle of ideas. Let L be an ordered set, and L a class of subsets of L, and suppose that L has a supremum for each element in L. We might say that L has -sups. The ‘distributivity’ we refer to is that of infs over -sups. The ‘adjunction’ is that given by a left adjoint to the map V: L→L. Now the latter has a left adjoint if and only if it preserves infs, and this means roughly that the -sup of an intersection is an inf of -sups. When one does succeed in identifying the -sup of an intersection as a -sup of infs, one has an instance of distributivity.