Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Short Exposures to Spinosad-Treated Wheat or Maize on Four Stored-Grain Insects

ABSTRACT The effect of short exposures to spinosad-treated wheat, Triticum aestivum L. , or maize, Zea mays L. , was evaluated against adults of four stored-product insect species: lesser grain borer, Rhyzopertha dominica (F.) (Coleoptera: Bostrichidae); rice weevil, Sitophilus oryzae (L.) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae); red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst) (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae); and the psocid Lepinotus reticulatus (Enderlein) (Psocoptera: Trogiidae). Adult mortality of these species was recorded after 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 40 h on commodities treated with 1 ppm of spinosad (immediate mortality). Then, the surviving individuals were removed and placed on untreated wheat or maize, and mortality was recorded again 7 d later (delayed mortality). Progeny production then was determined 65 and 35 d later for the beetles and psocids, respectively. Among the four species tested, R. dominica was the most susceptible, and immediate mortality after 40 h reached 78 and 72% on wheat and maize, respectively. Moreover, 7 d later, all adults that had been exposed for >2 h were dead on both commodities. Progeny production was significantly reduced in comparison with the controls, and no progeny were found when parental adults had been exposed for >8 or >4 h on wheat and maize, respectively. For S. oryzae, 40-h exposures significantly increased delayed mortality on both wheat and maize, but progeny production still was high. Generally, no effect of short exposures was noted for T. castaneum. For L. reticulatus, despite the fact that the increase of exposure interval increased mortality on maize, progeny production was not avoided. With the exception of T. castaneum, more progeny were found on wheat than on maize. The results of the current study indicate that R. dominica is very susceptible after short exposures to spinosad-treated substrate, but the other species are able to survive and reproduce at the exposure range examined.
Disparities in the Conduct of the Medical Encounter

The U.S. health care system continues to struggle to meet the needs of all members of society. Health disparities are a major concern of the health care system. There are differences in health outcomes related to gender, race, ethnicity, age, and other social indicators. Previous research has focused on differences in access to health care and differences in the delivery of specific medical services. More recently, researchers have examined the way doctors and patients interact to understand health disparities. The current study examines differences in the way doctors and patients interact in terms of information gathering, communicating information, and relationship building, as well as general conduct of the interaction and patient’s satisfaction with the encounter. The study uses data coded from audiotapes of 221 doctor–patient encounters. The results suggest medical encounters differ in important ways depending on patient and physician characteristics. These differences can create and contribute to health disparities.
Impact of acne on quality of life of students at sultan qaboos university.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of acne on the quality of life. Its secondary objective was to assess the influence of gender of students and severity of symptoms on the quality of life. METHODS A cross sectional study was conducted on 100 students at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) (40 males and 60 females) diagnosed with acne who attended the Student Clinic during a period of three months from September to December 2009. The Acne Quality Of Life index (Acne-QoL) questionnaire was used to assess the patient's quality of life in four different domains: self-perception, social, emotional, and acne symptoms. RESULTS Acne affected all areas of the patients, quality of life with the emotional domain found to be the most affected. Overall, female patients reported more adverse QoL effects. The mean score for self-perception for female students was 2.5 and 2.8 for males (p=0.300). The role-social domain approached a significant difference between genders (p=0.078). There was a statistically significant correlation between severity of acne symptoms and the other three domains. The correlation was highest between acne symptoms score and self-perception score. CONCLUSION This study showed that acne affects the quality of life of affected SQU students treated by primary care physicians at the Student Clinic. Therefore, physicians should take into account the effect of acne on the persons' quality of life when individualizing treatment.
Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis for Tensor-based Composition

According to the distributional inclusion hypothesis, entailment between words can be measured via the feature inclusions of their distributional vectors. In recent work, we showed how this hypothesis can be extended from words to phrases and sentences in the setting of compositional distributional semantics. This paper focuses on inclusion properties of tensors; its main contribution is a theoretical and experimental analysis of how feature inclusion works in different concrete models of verb tensors. We present results for relational, Frobenius, projective, and holistic methods and compare them to the simple vector addition, multiplication, min, and max models. The degrees of entailment thus obtained are evaluated via a variety of existing word-based measures, such as Weed’s and Clarke’s, KL-divergence, APinc, balAPinc, and two of our previously proposed metrics at the phrase/sentence level. We perform experiments on three entailment datasets, investigating which version of tensor-based composition achieves the highest performance when combined with the sentence-level measures.
The Gendering of Drug Use and the Absence of Gender.

W omen's illicit drug use has been increasing rapidly in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world in recent years. The narrowing gender gap in lifetime prevalence rates across the 1990s suggests that gender is no longer a significant predictor of, or protector from, illicit drug use. Does this mean that gender is no longer of relevance to drug use? A consideration of the figures suggests that the relationship between gender and drug use remains the big neglected question in the field of substance use. This omission indicates both that drugs research is lagging behind and peripheral to the debates in mainstream criminology in terms of engaging with gender issues (covered elsewhere in this issue), and furthermore that we are not appreciating the full significance of the role of drug use to our understanding of wider society. So where are the women? Official statistics indicate that the disproportionate concentration of young, male and minority ethnic offenders in the UK criminal justice system in general is also reflected in drugs offences, with a gender ratio of about nine men to every woman appearing in the criminal statistics. Selfreport studies and household victimisation surveys show a quite different story, however, with a gender ratio of about one and a half men to every one woman experimenting with illicit drugs. Furthermore, research suggests that the biggest changes in terms of a liberalisation of both drug-related behaviour and drug-related attitudes can be seen in 'unexpected' sections of the population such as women and the over 40s. But whether women are considered irrelevant (because they are absent from official statistics) or gender is considered irrelevant (because women and men are increasingly equally represented in self-report studies), criminologists have barely begun to consider the myriad ways in which the supply and use of illicit drugs intersect with social structural factors such as gender.
Seasonal Variability of the Global Spectral Wind Wave Climate

Our understanding of the seasonal variability in the global wind wave field is revisited here using a novel analysis that resolves the directional wave spectra. Empirical orthogonal function analysis was applied to modeled wave spectral data from a WAVEWATCH III hindcast across a sparse global grid to identify the main patterns of the climatological wave spectral variability at each grid point. Prior methods have focused on the variability of two modes of the wave field—locally generated sea and the primary swell component. Our results also consider additional wave modes at each location, enabling us to track the passage of the less dominant swell modes. Consistent with existing climatological knowledge, the main modes of wave spectral variability at high latitudes are related to eastward propagating waves that disperse equatorward as swell following great circle paths. However, despite being the less energetic mode, the Northern Hemisphere generated swell is found to propagate into the Southern Hemisphere further than the more energetic Southern Hemisphere swell which propagates northward. In the equatorial zone, a complex multimodal wave climate is found, with the spectra variability modulated by remotely generated swell and higher‐frequency waves associated with the prevailing winds. The evolution of these patterns throughout the year is clearly depicted. Overall, our approach captures a more complete picture of the seasonal variability of the global wave field, by accounting for all the wave modes observed in the spectra at each location together with their temporal variability.
ALV-J strain SCAU-HN06 induces innate immune responses in chicken primary monocyte-derived macrophages

&NA; Avian leucosis virus subgroup J (ALV‐J) can cause lifelong infection and can escape from the host immune defenses in chickens. Since macrophages act as the important defense line against invading pathogens in host innate immunity, we investigated the function and innate immune responses of chicken primary monocyte‐derived macrophages (MDM) after ALV‐J infection in this study. Our results indicated that ALV‐J was stably maintained in MDM cells but that the viral growth rate was significantly lower than that in DF‐1 cells. We also found that ALV‐J infection significantly increased nitric oxide (NO) production, but had no effect on MDM phagocytic capacity. Interestingly, infection with ALV‐J rapidly promoted the expression levels of Myxovirus resistance 1 (Mx) (3 h, 6 h), ISG12 (6 h), and interleukin‐1&bgr; (IL‐1&bgr;) (3 h, 12 h) at an early infection stage, whereas it sharply decreased the expression of Mx (24 h, 36 h), ISG12 (36 h), and made little change on IL‐1&bgr; (24 h, 36 h) production at a late infection stage in MDM cells. Moreover, the protein levels of interferon‐&bgr; (IFN‐&bgr;) and interleukin‐6 (IL‐6) had sharply increased in infected MDM cells from 3 to 36 h post infection (hpi) of ALV‐J. And, the protein level of interleukin‐10 (IL‐10) was dramatically decreased at 36 hpi in MDM cells infected with ALV‐J. These results demonstrate that ALV‐J can induce host innate immune responses and we hypothesize that macrophages play an important role in host innate immune attack and ALV‐J immune escape.
Appraising netnography: towards insights about new markets in the digital tourist era

Netnography, a naturalistic and predominantly unobtrusive technique developed by Kozinets for exploring online contributions, was the centrepiece of this appraisal. The authors argue that netnography could play a valuable role in enhancing our understanding of (a) rapidly changing tourist markets, (b) the growth of new markets and (c) the perspectives of culturally distinctive groups. The analysis of the blogs of Chinese recreational vehicle tourists who had visited Australia was chosen as a case study. In studying an emerging market segment from a rapidly changing and culturally different community, the case represented a key test of the value of the approach in generating insights. Practical steps to employ the method – entrée, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation and member checks – were illustrated. Issues arising from the case study for the application of netnography in tourism research were highlighted. They included the value of the detail inherent in the postings, the attendant ability to consider the material using conceptual schemes, the practicality of getting additional information, the need to fully address ethical concerns and the value of supplementary perspectives. Suggestions for ways to adapt the technique for better information retrieval and interpretation were also provided.
Hysterosalpingographic (HSG) Pattern of Infertility in Women of Reproductive Age

Background: Infertility is a complex disorder with significant medical, psychological and economic problems. Aims: The aim of the study is to evaluate the structural abnormalities of the uterus and fallopian tubes in infertile women as elucidated by hysterosalpingography. Setting and Design: A retrospective study, conducted at the Radiology and Obstetric and Gynaecologic Departments of a tertiary health care institution. Materials and Methods: Evaluation of all consecutive patients in whom hysterosalpingographic (HSG) was performed for infertility between July 2013 and June 2015 in the Department of Radiology. For the biodata, indications for the investigation and the HSG findings were obtained. Statistical Analysis: The data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) for Windows, version 20 software. Results: A total of 299 patients were evaluated. Of these, 250 were for infertility with primary and secondary infertility constituting 18.4 and 81.6%, respectively. Seventy percent of the cases for infertility had abnormalities on the HSG. Normal uterine cavity was found in 123 (49.2%) cases. Uterine filling defects were the most common uterine abnormality. Fallopian tube occlusion, loculated contrast material spillage and hydrosalpinx were more common on the right, and bilateral tubal occlusion was seen only in 11.2%. All cases of intravasation were associated with either unilateral or bilateral fallopian tube blockage or irregularity of the uterus. Conclusion: There was a high incidence of tubal disease in the women presenting with infertility. This was commonly as a result of infection and inflammatory process. This study showed that HSG is very vital in detecting birth canal pathologies; hence, the facility for this important procedure, especially fluoroscopy, should be made available in the health centres for adequate assessment of the women with infertility.
Humour and scams in guided tours; synthesising issues from embodied international experiences

Electronic guiding tools challenge the future of tourist guides in some settings. In an attempt to generate new insights into the human qualities of interpersonal interaction in "live" guided tours, ten cases were systematically drawn from a larger listing of documented, personally familiar tours featuring humour and tourist scams. Using a repertory grid style sorting task and the researchers' judgements, it was suggested that humour and incidents involving tourist scams were perceived by well defined constructs. For humour, specific humour and generic overall amusing qualities of the tour were important; for scams the dominant construct was the scam's seriousness.
Regulation and specificity of antifungal metapleural gland secretion in leaf-cutting ants

Ants have paired metapleural glands (MGs) to produce secretions for prophylactic hygiene. These exocrine glands are particularly well developed in leaf-cutting ants, but whether the ants can actively regulate MG secretion is unknown. In a set of controlled experiments using conidia of five fungi, we show that the ants adjust the amount of MG secretion to the virulence of the fungus with which they are infected. We further applied fixed volumes of MG secretion of ants challenged with constant conidia doses to agar mats of the same fungal species. This showed that inhibition halos were significantly larger for ants challenged with virulent and mild pathogens/weeds than for controls and Escovopsis-challenged ants. We conclude that the MG defence system of leaf-cutting ants has characteristics reminiscent of an additional cuticular immune system, with specific and non-specific components, of which some are constitutive and others induced.
Falling short of expectations: the 2012 children amendment, from drafting to referendum

ABSTRACT In November 2012, the Irish electorate approved a new provision in the Constitution dedicated to children’s rights. The popular portrayal of the referendum campaign was that it was largely uncontroversial, albeit with a sting in the tail. However, this over-simplifies the reality of a political struggle that was vigorously contested for almost a decade before the actual referendum campaign. While the idea of a children’s rights amendment was never far from the political agenda during this period, the political appetite for ambitious reform ebbed and flowed. The campaign itself was successful in passing the amendment, but the outcome was nonetheless seen as a disappointing one. This paper will explore two questions regarding the genesis and evolution of the children amendment, from initial public consultations through to the referendum campaign. First, what were the political forces that sought to influence the wording of the amendment, and which side had more reason to be pleased with the final product? Second, what were the factors that caused the referendum campaign to play out in such an unsatisfactory way for the Government?
Penal Policy in Scandinavia

Scandinavian imprisonment rates are among the lowest in Western democracies, despite 20–30 percent increases in recent years, and penal policies generally are among the mildest. Reasons for this include the continuing strength and credibility of the welfare state, high levels of social trust and political legitimacy, consensual and corporatist political cultures, and the central roles of career judges and other non–political practictioners. Political and penal cultures differ somewhat between countries. Crime control is more openly a contentious political issue in some than in others. Policies have become harsher concerning drugs, sex, and violence. Punitive changes, however, tend to be narrowly focused, while other changes in sanctions policies tend to be liberalizing and broad‐based. Overall, commitments to liberal values, human rights, and rational policy making remain strong.
Release of Interleukin-1α or Interleukin-1β Depends on Mechanism of Cell Death*

Background: Cell death is a regulator of inflammation via the master cytokine IL-1. Results: Apoptotic stimuli induced a caspase-8-dependent release of IL-1β from macrophages. Necroptotic stimuli induced a calpain-dependent release of IL-1α. Conclusion: Mechanisms of cell death dictate the nature and form of IL-1 release. Significance: Sterile inflammatory responses may be determined by the mechanisms of cell death potentially allowing for selective interventions. The cytokine interleukin-1 (IL-1) has two main pro-inflammatory forms, IL-1α and IL-1β, which are central to host responses to infection and to damaging sterile inflammation. Processing of IL-1 precursor proteins to active cytokines commonly occurs through activation of proteases, notably caspases and calpains. These proteases are instrumental in cell death, and inflammation and cell death are closely associated, hence we sought to determine the impact of cell death pathways on IL-1 processing and release. We discovered that apoptotic regulation of caspase-8 specifically induced the processing and release of IL-1β. Conversely, necroptosis caused the processing and release of IL-1α, and this was independent of IL-1β processing and release. These data suggest that the mechanism through which an IL-1-expressing cell dies dictates the nature of the inflammatory mechanism that follows. These insights may allow modification of inflammation through the selective targeting of cell death mechanisms during disease.
Bilingual language assessment: a meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy.

PURPOSE To describe quality indicators for appraising studies of diagnostic accuracy and to report a meta-analysis of measures for diagnosing language impairment (LI) in bilingual Spanish-English U.S. children. METHOD The authors searched electronically and by hand to locate peer-reviewed English-language publications meeting inclusion criteria; the authors rated quality features, calculated accuracy metrics and confidence intervals, and generated forest plots. RESULTS Of 771 citations (86 unique) located initially, accuracy metrics could be calculated for 17 index measures studied in a total of 100 children with LI and 109 with typical language. Most studies lacked clear descriptions of reference standards, procedures, and controls for subjective bias, making it difficult to rate specific quality features with confidence. Positive likelihood ratios (LR+) for most measures were at least diagnostically suggestive (pooled LR+ = 4.12; 95% CI [2.94, 5.78]). Negative likelihood ratios (LR-) were also generally suggestive, but heterogeneity precluded averaging. For every measure, confidence intervals for LR+ and LR- included diagnostically uninformative values. CONCLUSIONS The available evidence does not support strong claims concerning the diagnostic accuracy of these measures, but a number appear promising. Several steps are suggested for strengthening future investigations of diagnostic accuracy.
2 Natural and artificial life Natural life

In this first chapter we give a brief overview over the historical origin of the relatively young field in science called Artificial Life. Besides which, we try to give the reader an idea of the controversial understandings of Natural Life and the comparatively straight-forward definition of Artificial Life. In the third part of this first chapter we introduce the main methodology used in Artificial Life “the synthetic approach” which can briefly be explained by the phrase “understanding by building”.
Grazing rates on bacteria by marine heterotrophic microflagellates compared to uptake rates of bacterial-sized monodisperse fluorescent latex beads.

Uptake rates of monodlsperse fluorescent latex beads by heterotrophic microflagellates were investigated under controlled laboratory conditions and in Masfjorden, S Norway. In 2-stage continuous cultures it was shown that for a Bodo sp. , ingestion of latex beads was considerably less efficient than ingestion of bacteria. The selection coefficient (clearance rate of beaddclearance rate of bacteria) decreased with increasing dilution rate, implying that slow-growing or starving microflagellates discriminated less efficiently against latex beads. Only between 17 and 50% of the flagellates grown at dfferent dllution rates contained latex beads after incubation for 20 min, whereas 80 % were found to ingest FITC-stained bacteria. In a comparison among 8 species of bacterivorous microflagellates, one species did not take up beads at all, while the other species ingested beads to a variable extent. In seawater samples from Masfjorden, the number of organisms found to take up beads was, as a mean, only 60 % (n = 6) of the number found to take up FITC-stained bacteria. Results imply that if latex beads are used to measure grazing rates on bacteria, corrections for selectivity are required to avoid serious underestimates. With selectivity being growth-rate-dependent such corrections may be complicated. The use of stained bacteria as markers seems more promising.