Biomedical subjects

Aniruddha Das

Publications and source records attributed to Aniruddha Das.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Sexual harassment of women in urban China.

Using data from the Chinese Health and Family Life survey, this study analyzed the prevalence of and risk factors for sexual harassment in China in the year 2000. It was the first study to use a general population sample to examine all types of harassment in an Asian country. The dataset was a stratified probability sample with 3,821 participants, and was nationally representative (apart from Hong Kong and Tibet) of China's adult population aged 20-64. In total, 12.5% of all women and 15.1% of urban women reported some form of harassment in the past year. Among urban women age 20-45, most cross-sex harassment was not from supervisors or superiors (1.4%) but from coworkers and other peers (7.0%), strangers (4.6%), dates and boyfriends (3.6%), and others (2.6%). Multivariate analysis of risk factors for cross-sex harassment suggested that, despite its predominance in the Western literature on sexual harassment, the power differentials approach, focusing on male-female power differentials in patriarchal societies, was of modest utility. The results were more consistent with a more comprehensive routine activities approach borrowed from criminology, which emphasizes situational opportunity, perceived benefit to the harasser, and reduced costs for the harasser. The most striking result from the data represents the area receiving the least attention in the West, namely, the perpetrator's perception of "benefit," deriving from the victim's inadvertent "signaling."

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Neuroscience: rewiring the adult brain.

Any analysis of plastic reorganization at a neuronal locus needs a veridical measure of changes in the functional output--that is, spiking responses of the neurons in question. In a study of the effect of retinal lesions on adult primary visual cortex (V1), Smirnakis et al. propose that there is no cortical reorganization. Their results are based, however, on BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which provides an unreliable gauge of spiking activity. We therefore question their criterion for lack of plasticity, particularly in the light of the large body of earlier work that demonstrates cortical plasticity.

Action Potentials↗

PubMed2005

Cortical maps: where theory meets experiments.

Primary visual cortex (V1) has remarkably systematic functional maps. One commonly used class of computational models proposes that such maps are generated by a mechanism that projects the multiple dimensions of neuronal responses smoothly onto the two dimensions of cortex. In this issue of Neuron, Mriganka Sur and colleagues find a close match between such model predictions and measurements from ferret V1.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

Lateral connectivity and contextual interactions in macaque primary visual cortex.

Two components of cortical circuits could mediate contour integration in primary visual cortex (V1): intrinsic horizontal connections and feedback from higher cortical areas. To distinguish between these, we combined functional mapping with a new technique for labeling axons, a recombinant adenovirus bearing the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP), to determine the extent, density, and orientation specificity of V1 intrinsic connections and V2 to V1 feedback. Both connections cover portions of V1 representing regions of visual space up to eight times larger than receptive fields as classically defined, though the intrinsic connections are an order of magnitude denser than the feedback. Whereas the intrinsic connections link similarly oriented domains in V1, V2 to V1 feedback displays no such specificity. These findings suggest that V1 intrinsic horizontal connections provide a more likely substrate for contour integration.

Adenoviridae↗