Pig intestinal epithelium undergoes a complete renewal every 2 to 3 days that is driven by intestinal stem cells (ISCs) located at the crypt base in their niche. Intestinal stem cells generate a pool of highly proliferative transit-amplifying cells, which either migrate up the villus and differentiate into enterocytes and secretory cells or migrate towards the base of the crypt where they differentiate into Paneth cells that secrete antimicrobial peptides. The balance between ISCs’ self-renewal and differentiation controls intestinal epithelial homeostasis; therefore, ISCs are essential for ensuring intestinal epithelial integrity. Detailed knowledge of these mechanisms in pig and other domestic species is very limited. Therefore, the aim of this work was to characterize ISC from birth to weaning. We analysed the duodenum, jejunum and colon of six piglets at birth, 6-day-old nursing piglets and 28-day-old weanlings, one week after weaning. We immunolocalized homeobox only protein+ (HOPX) and sex-determining region Y-box 9+ (SOX9) cells that identify quiescent and active ISC, respectively. The volume of ISCs was quantified with stereological methods and was compared to that of mitotic cells expressing proliferating cell nuclear antigen and apoptotic cells identified by the presence of cleaved caspase-3. Furthermore, we compared all these values with crypts and villi measurements and their ratio. Our results indicated that both quiescent and active ISCs are present in pig intestine from birth to weaning and are localized in the crypts of the small and large intestine. However, both markers were also observed along the villi and on the colon luminal epithelium, suggesting that at these stages, pig mucosa is still immature. Weaning induced a dramatic reduction of both HOPX+ and SOX9+ cells, but SOX9+ cells underwent a significantly greater reduction in the small intestine than in the colon. This suggests that the two ISC types are differentially regulated along the intestinal tracts. Overall, the pig ISC complex has many similarities with its murine counterpart, but also has some differences. These include active ISC not showing the typical columnar base morphology as well as the absence of bona fide Paneth cells. This is the first description of ISC dynamics during pig’s early life and provides useful reference data for future studies, aimed at targeting ISC for the development of efficient alternatives to in-feed antibiotics for preserving intestinal integrity.

Background: While exposure therapy effectively reduces anxiety associated with specific phobias, not all individuals respond to treatment and some will experience a return of fear after treatment ceases. Aims: This study aimed to test the potential benefit of increasing the intensity of exposure therapy by adding an extra step that challenged uncontrollability (Step 15: allowing a spider to walk freely over one's body) to the standard fear hierarchy. Method: Fifty-one participants who had a severe fear of spiders completed two 60-min exposure sessions 1 week apart in a context that was either the same or different from the baseline and follow-up assessment context. Participants were categorized into groups based on the last hierarchy step they completed during treatment (Step 14 or fewer, or Step 15). Results: Those who completed Step 15 had greater reductions in fear and beliefs about the probability of harm from baseline to post-treatment than those who completed fewer steps. Although completing Step 15 did not prevent fear from returning after a context change, it allowed people to maintain their ability to tolerate their fear, which earlier steps did not. Despite some fear returning after a context change, individuals who completed Step 15 tended to report greater reductions in fear from baseline to the follow-up assessment than participants who completed 14 or fewer steps. Conclusions: Overall, these results suggest that more intensive exposure that directly challenges harm beliefs may lead to greater changes in fear and fear beliefs than less intensive exposure.

This article examines the liberal Protestant encounter with the urban renewal programs that remade U.S. cities after World War II. Suburbanization had punishing consequences for cities and threatened the already tenuous presence of liberal Protestants there. The concept of renewal—in both its religious and secular dimensions—promised a solution to these problems. Many renewalists, those clergy and laypeople who viewed deteriorating urban neighborhoods as an opportunity to restore Church unity, initially embraced urban renewal as a secular corollary to their work. But the interaction among ecclesial organizations, government, and inner city parishioners over its implementation exacerbated tensions within liberal Protestantism. Many who initially supported urban renewal came to conclude that its results did not match their own objectives. By supporting challenges to redevelopment from African Americans, Latinos, and other urban residents, renewalists criticized the Church for what they believed to be complicity in the degradation of Christian culture and the urban environment.

This history demonstrates the mutual influence of culture and organizational structure within liberal Protestantism and the impact of those changes on secular society. Renewalists grappling with urban renewal programs interpreted both theological and secular concepts through their own experiences with city populations, Church bodies, government, and redevelopment agencies. Their subsequent actions prompted mainline denominational leaders to support, for a time, at least, ministries geared more towards to indigenous community development. Such ministries reflected a more pluralist conception of society and the Church's role in it. Eventually, renewalists' opponents turned this pluralist conception on its head, decentralizing the church bureaucracies that had funded their ministries. An analogous process took place in the urban renewal programs themselves, underscoring the ways in which religious and urban histories intersect.

Increasingly chaotic business environments of today demand organizations to be more resilient. While the concept of resilience is widely discussed in disaster (e.g., Wildavsky, 1991) and crisis management literatures (e.g., Manyena, 2006), the literature on organizational resilience is developing disjointedly in organizational studies. The literature review suggests that some factors that are suggested in the literature as components of organizational resilience are sources contributing to the emergence of resilience in organizations. This study proposes an integrative framework for organizational resilience and introduces a new outcome concept of organizational evolvability, emphasizing the heightened sensitivity and increased wisdom of the post-event organization. In this model, sources of organizational resilience are categorized as perceptual stance, contextual integrity, strategic capacity and strategic acting, and organizational resilience leads to organizational evolvability as its outcome. The proposed organizational resilience framework attempts to provide a synthesis of the divergent literature on resilience and aims to strengthen organizational resilience research for richer theoretical and empirical progress.

One experiment used a free operant procedure with rats to compare ABA, AAB and ABC renewal by using a within-subject testing procedure. All rats were first trained to press a lever for food in context A. Lever pressing was then extinguished in either context A or context B. For rats in the groups ABA and ABC extinction took place in context B, while the rats in group AAB received extinction in the same context in which acquisition took place (context A). Finally, all rats were tested for renewal in two sessions. One extinction session was carried out in the same extinction context and another session in a different context. Rats in the group ABA were tested in context B and in context A; rats in the group AAB were tested in contexts A and B, whereas the group ABC was tested in contexts B and C. The results of the ANOVA showed context renewal since all groups had higher rates of responding when they were tested outside the extinction context, F(2, 21) = 15.32, p = .001, ηp 2 = .59; however, AAB and ABC renewal was lesser than ABA renewal, F(1, 21) = 16.70, p = .0001, ηp 2 = .61.

Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 regulates the renewal of business tenancies. Within highly technical confines, it promotes the continuation of the tenant's business and addresses the risk of tenant exploitation. Nevertheless, it is argued that section 30(1)(g) unnecessarily prioritises the occupation needs of the landlord over the tenant's renewal rights and without imposing effective procedural safeguards. Although compensation for loss of renewal rights may be available, the award disregards any loss of established goodwill. This inadequacy of compensation undermines the anti-profiteering ethos of the Act and contravenes Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

A variety of cues have been proven to elicit reactivity in nicotine-dependent individuals. Since such reactivity has been shown to form a source of relapse, treatments aim at extinguishing this reactivity. Yet, typically, in cue-exposure treatments a very limited range of relevant stimuli is used, usually focusing only on proximal stimuli (e.g., a cigarette) rather than on contextual cues that trigger craving (e.g., a bar). The restriction to proximal cues may be one of the reasons for the low efficacy of cue-exposure treatments. In the current pilot study (N = 88), we aimed to evaluate the effect on relapse rates of exposure to contextual cues prior to quitting smoking, by varying the degree of exposure/extinction to habitual smoking contexts prior to quitting between groups. Results suggest that context exposure prior to smoking cessation indeed reduces relapse. However, since dropout rates were high, this finding needs replication with a larger sample.

A simple model for a randomly oscillating variable is suggested, which is a variant of the two-state random velocity model. As in the latter model, the variable keeps rising or falling with constant velocity for some time before randomly reversing its direction. In contrast however, its propensity to reverse depends on its current value and it is for this desirable feature that the model is proposed here. This feature has two implications: (a) neither the changing variable nor its velocity is Markovian, although the joint process is, and (b) the linear differential equations arising in the case of our model do not have constant coefficients. The results given in this paper are meant to illustrate the straightforward nature of some of the calculations involved and to highlight the relationship with one-dimensional diffusions.

We analyze the notion of ‘reliability prediction’ by studying in detail a key property that is tacitly assumed to make reliability prediction possible. The analysis leads in turn to a special type of point process for which the connection of future to past can be explicitly displayed. In this type of process, the semi-renewal process, all finite-dimensional distributions are completely determined by the distribution of the time to the first event in the process. The theory provides a heretofore unappreciated unification of the two most commonly used reliability prediction models for maintained systems, namely, the renewal and revival processes. We show that familiar results from renewal theory extend and generalize to semi-renewal processes.

Busy period problems in infinite server queues are studied systematically, starting from the batch service time. General relations are given for the lengths of the busy cycle, busy period and idle period, and for the number of customers served in a busy period. These relations show that the idle period is the most difficult while the busy cycle is the simplest of the four random variables. Renewal arguments are used to derive explicit results for both general and special cases.

Let {Xn} be an infinite sequence of independent non-negative random variables. Let the distribution function of Xi, i = 1, 2, …, be either F1 or F2 where F1 and F2 are distinct. Set Sn = X1 + X2 + … + Xn and for t > 0 define and Zt = SN(t)+1 – t. The limit distributions of N(t), Yt and Zt as t → ∞ are obtained when F1 and F2 are in the domains of attraction of stable laws with exponents α1 and α2, respectively and Sn properly normalised has the composition of these two stable laws as its limit distribution.