bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Synthesis of Montmorillonite Nanoclay Reinforced Chitin-cellulose Nanocomposite Film
Authors: Louise Lao Tiffany , Tristan Pengson Lance , Placido Jordan , Joy Diaz Leslie 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
Montmorillonite (MMT) nanoclay reinforced chitin-cellulose nanocomposite is a biodegradable polymer that has potential as a food packaging material. In this study, it was synthesized using 1 and 5 wt% MMT (1NC and 5NC) via solution casting. Good miscibility of chitin and cellulose was interpreted by the presence of cylindrical particles revealed in the SEM image, and the XRD peak at ∼19° and shoulder at ∼23°. Peaks were also observed at 2.62 and 2.27° for 1NC and 5NC, respectively, that corresponded to 16.87 and 19.47 Å interlayer spacings, both of which were higher than that of pristine MMT which is 12.57 Å. This suggested that chitin-cellulose penetrated MMT and that 5NC had a lower degree of intercalates, which was confirmed by EDX mapping. This better MMT dispersion was speculated to be due to the nematic state of 5NC gel. With molecules sliding off easily in the gel, polymer penetration in the interlayer spacing was easier. This was verified by its lower apparent viscosity. Finally, this better MMT dispersion resulted to a good stress transfer and, maybe, introduced a more torturous crack path for 5NC. These improved its toughness (2.22 J/mm3) and Young’s modulus (6. 25 GPa).
The Aesthetic Significance of the Lying-Misleading Distinction
Authors: Pepp Jessica 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
There is a clear intuitive difference between lying and attempting to mislead. Recent efforts to analyse this difference, and to define lying in ways that respect it, are motivated by the conviction that the difference is important or significant in some way. Traditionally, the importance of the lying-misleading distinction has been cashed out in moral terms, but this approach faces a number of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to suggest and develop a different way in which the lying-misleading distinction might be important: it might matter aesthetically. I propose that the aesthetic significance of the distinction inheres in a more prominent experienced disharmony in lying as compared with attempting to mislead.
Understanding the Spatial Distribution of Welfare Impacts of Global Warming on Agriculture and its Drivers
Authors: Baldos Uris L. C. , Hertel Thomas W. , Moore Frances C. 
Published: June 2019

AbstractThis paper explores the interplay between the biophysical and economic geographies of climate change impacts on agriculture. It does so by bridging the extensive literature on climate impacts on yields and physical productivity in global crop production, with the literature on the role of adaptation through international trade in determining the consequences of climate change impacts. Unlike previous work in this area, instead of using a specific crop model or a set of models, we employ a statistical meta‐analysis that encompasses all studies available to the IPCC‐AR5 report. This permits us to isolate specific elements of the spatially heterogeneous biophysical geography of climate impacts, including the role of initial temperature, differential patterns of warming, and varying crop responses to warming across the globe. We combine these climate impact estimates with the Global Trade Analysis Project model of global trade in order to estimate the national welfare changes that are decomposed into three components: the direct (biophysical impact) contribution to welfare, the terms of trade effect, and the allocative efficiency effect. We find that when we remove the spatial variation in climate impacts, the terms of trade impacts are cut in half. Given the inherent heterogeneity of climate impacts in agriculture, this points to the important role of trade in distributing the associated welfare impacts. When we allow the biophysical impacts to vary across the empirically estimated uncertainty range taken from the meta‐analysis, we find that the welfare consequences are highly asymmetric, with much larger losses at the low end of the yield distribution. This interaction between the magnitude and heterogeneity of biophysical climate shocks and their welfare effects highlight the need for detailed representation of both in projecting climate change impacts.
Invited Commentary: Beyond Overdiagnosis—Diagnosis Without Benefit
Authors: Harris Russell P 
Published: June 2019

AbstractIn an accompanying article, Hofmann (Am J Epidemiol. 2019;188(10):1812–1817) seeks to clarify the concept of overdiagnosis by screening. He makes a helpful suggestion to reconnect diagnosis with patient suffering, pointing out the underlying issue in overdiagnosis of prognostic uncertainty. He then divides prognostic uncertainty into developmental and progression uncertainty, using a categorical model of disease progression through indicators to manifest disease. This model could be improved by considering the heterogeneity of patient-condition combinations. This leads to an understanding of the probabilistic nature of the connection between any indicator in a specific individual and patient suffering. The model also needs to consider the time span over which the patient-condition combination leads to patient suffering. I propose a simpler approach that goes further to focus not only on overdiagnosis but also on the broader problem of diagnosis without benefit and diagnosis without net benefit. This makes measurement easier and focuses attention where it belongs: on the harm caused by overly aggressive screening programs.
Male relatedness, lekking behavior patterns, and the potential for kin selection in a Neotropical hummingbird
Authors: González Clementina , Ornelas Juan Francisco 
Published: June 2019

AbstractSeveral models have been proposed to explain the evolution of leks, both in terms of direct or indirect fitness benefits, and in survival. According to kin selection theory, male skewed reproductive success leads unsuccessful males to join successful relatives to increase their inclusive fitness, because their genes would be transmitted indirectly to the next generation. Wedge-tailed Sabrewing (Campylopterus curvipennis) is a hummingbird species whose males congregate at leks, in which spatially clustered males sing a particular song with marked differences among neighboring males (song neighborhoods). The maintenance of song neighborhoods presumably depends on juvenile newcomers copying the song type of their neighbors when they establish within a lek, and their acceptance could be more likely if a relative has already settled down in a territory, which in turn could offer fitness benefits explained by kin selection theory. To investigate the potential for kin selection in this species, we genotyped 126 hummingbirds at 10 microsatellite loci and estimated pairwise relatedness among males at 6 leks and in 4 song neighborhoods within 1 focal lek. Within leks, most males were unrelated and only a few were relatives. Moreover, even though relatedness within leks was higher than between leks, it was not higher than 0, which is likely due to isolation by distance. Our results do not support the idea of kin selection as an important force acting on the formation of leks in this species. Additionally, we found no evidence for kin clustering within song neighborhoods, suggesting that juveniles attempting to settle in a lek have to learn the song of the neighborhood (regardless of their kinship) to gain access to territories.
An extensive molecular phylogeny of weaverbirds (Aves: Ploceidae) unveils broad nonmonophyly of traditional genera and new relationships
Authors: De Silva Thilina N , Peterson A Townsend , Perktas Utku 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
The diverse Old World avian family Ploceidae (weaverbirds) presently comprises 117 species in 17 genera. Despite being a well-known bird group, the family has received incomplete attention in terms of molecular systematics; systematists have often focused on subclades, with the most extensive study to date covering <66% of recognized species. As a consequence, weaverbird taxonomy remains outdated, and phylogenetic relationships, particularly of the African Malimbus (previously Ploceus and Malimbus) clade, remains largely unresolved. Here, we sampled 109 weaver species (and numerous nominal subspecies), including 99 of the 103 recognized “typical weaverbird” taxa for an 8-gene dataset. Antique DNA techniques were used to extract DNA from study skins of 27 rare taxa not available in global tissue collections. The study included 32 species and 4 genera of ploceids previously unstudied phylogenetically. Our analyses supported monophyly of the family and identified 8 distinct clades. Our results conflict extensively with current taxonomy. We suggest that plumage traits and morphology exhibit high plasticity, such that phenotype does not always reflect phylogenetic relationships in weaverbirds. We recommend (1) uniting African-Ploceus, Malimbus, Anaplectes, and Notiospiza in Malimbus; (2) retaining the monotypic genus Pachyphantes; and (3) placing Brachycope with Euplectes. This study, the first near-species-level phylogeny for the family, lays a firm foundation for downstream studies of biogeography and character evolution.
A sequential algorithm to detect diffusion switching along intracellular particle trajectories
Authors: Briane Vincent , Vimond Myriam , Valades-Cruz Cesar Augusto , Salomon Antoine , Wunder Christian , Kervrann Charles 
Published: June 2019

AbstractMotivationRecent advances in molecular biology and fluorescence microscopy imaging have made possible the inference of the dynamics of single molecules in living cells. Changes of dynamics can occur along a trajectory. Then, an issue is to estimate the temporal change-points that is the times at which a change of dynamics occurs. The number of points in the trajectory required to detect such changes will depend on both the magnitude and type of the motion changes. Here, the number of points per trajectory is of the order of 102, even if in practice dramatic motion changes can be detected with less points.ResultsWe propose a non-parametric procedure based on test statistics computed on local windows along the trajectory to detect the change-points. This algorithm controls the number of false change-point detections in the case where the trajectory is fully Brownian. We also develop a strategy for aggregating the detections obtained with different window sizes so that the window size is no longer a parameter to optimize. A Monte Carlo study is proposed to demonstrate the performances of the method and also to compare the procedure to two competitive algorithms. At the end, we illustrate the efficacy of the method on real data in 2D and 3D, depicting the motion of mRNA complexes—called mRNA-binding proteins—in neuronal dendrites, Galectin-3 endocytosis and trafficking within the cell.Availability and implementationA user-friendly Matlab package containing examples and the code of the simulations used in the paper is available at http://serpico.rennes.inria.fr/doku.php? id=software:cpanalysis:index.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Conjugate Bayes for probit regression via unified skew-normal distributions
Authors: Durante Daniele 
Published: June 2019

SummaryRegression models for dichotomous data are ubiquitous in statistics. Besides being useful for inference on binary responses, these methods serve as building blocks in more complex formulations, such as density regression, nonparametric classification and graphical models. Within the Bayesian framework, inference proceeds by updating the priors for the coefficients, typically taken to be Gaussians, with the likelihood induced by probit or logit regressions for the responses. In this updating, the apparent absence of a tractable posterior has motivated a variety of computational methods, including Markov chain Monte Carlo routines and algorithms that approximate the posterior. Despite being implemented routinely, Markov chain Monte Carlo strategies have mixing or time-inefficiency issues in large-$p$ and small-$n$ studies, whereas approximate routines fail to capture the skewness typically observed in the posterior. In this article it is proved that the posterior distribution for the probit coefficients has a unified skew-normal kernel under Gaussian priors. This result allows efficient Bayesian inference for a wide class of applications, especially in large-$p$ and small-to-moderate-$n$ settings where state-of-the-art computational methods face notable challenges. These advances are illustrated in a genetic study, and further motivate the development of a wider class of conjugate priors for probit models, along with methods for obtaining independent and identically distributed samples from the unified skew-normal posterior.
Working through Barriers: Shaping Social Workers’ Engagement in Policy Practice
Authors: Nouman Hani , Levin Lia , Lavee Einat 
Published: June 2019

AbstractAlthough social workers’ engagement in policy-shaping processes to advance social justice reflects this obligation of the social work profession, many social workers avoid implementing policy practice (PP). Previous studies have identified several barriers limiting social workers’ use of this practice. However, how such barriers can be overcome remains under-studied. In this study, we address this lacuna by examining the role of social workers vis-à-vis their engagement in PP, through the theoretical framework of social psychology of organizations, and therein, through ideas concerning open systems and the formation of roles and praxes in organizations. Drawing on twenty-eight in-depth interviews and three focus groups, we demonstrate how social workers underwent a coping and transformation process that increased their engagement in PP. In certain situations, it was the expectations of colleagues and the challenges posed by them that impelled social workers to re-examine their approach to such engagement and enhance it. We show how social workers can overcome barriers and facilitate their involvement in the policy arena, as well as highlight policy-makers’ role in shaping social workers’ modes of operation.
An effective biomedical data migration tool from resource description framework to JSON
Authors: Liu Jian , Yang Mo , Zhang Lei , Zhou Weijun 
Published: June 2019

AbstractResource Description Framework (RDF) is widely used for representing biomedical data in practical applications. With the increases of RDF-based applications, there is an emerging requirement of novel architectures to provide effective supports for the future RDF data explosion. Inspired by the success of the new designs in National Center for Biotechnology Information dbSNP (The Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Database) for managing the increasing data volumes using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), in this paper we present an effective mapping tool that allows data migrations from RDF to JSON for supporting future massive data explosions and releases. We firstly introduce a set of mapping rules, which transform an RDF format into the JSON format, and then present the corresponding transformation algorithm. On this basis, we develop an effective and user-friendly tool called RDF2JSON, which enables automating the process of RDF data extractions and the corresponding JSON data generations.
Diversity and antimicrobial potential of Actinobacteria isolated from diverse marine sponges along the Beibu Gulf of the South China Sea
Authors: Liu Tan , Wu Shufei , Zhang Ruizhen , Wang Dexiang , Chen Jun , Zhao Jing 
Published: June 2019

ABSTRACT
Marine sponge-associated microorganisms have proven to be a very promising source of biologically active and pharmaceutically important natural products. In this study, we investigated the diversity and antibacterial potential of bacteria from 49 sponge species isolated from the Beibu Gulf, South China Sea, belonging to 16 genera and several unidentified taxa. Using a variety of selective media, 363 strains with different morphologies were identified to six bacterial taxa, including Proteobacteria (α-subgroup 85 and γ-subgroup 59), Actinobacteria (123), Firmicutes (90), Bacteroidetes (5) and Brevundimonas (1). Media ISP2 and R2A were the most effective for isolating Actinobacteria. One hundred and twenty-three actinobacterial strains clustered into 21 genera identified by 16S rDNA gene sequencing, most of which were from the genus Microbacterium, followed by Pseudonocardia, Streptomyces, Kocuria, Aeromicrobium, Brachybacterium and Nocardiopsis, constituted 82% of total actinobacterial isolates. By using the minimal medium, 92 actinobacterial isolates showed antimicrobial activities, and 51 strains displayed moderate to strong antimicrobial activity that inhibited the growth of more than half of the bacteria tested in this study. Functional genes related to secondary metabolites were screened, revealing that 10% (12/123) of actinobacterial isolates contained PKS-KS genes, 18% (22/123) harbored NRPS-A genes and 6% (7/123) had hybrid PKS-NRPS gene clusters. The sponges Haliclona sp., Callyspongia sp. and Desmacella sp., belonging to class Demonspongiae, and Leucaltis sp. from the class Calcarea, were dominant hosts, harboring the most diverse actinobacterial genera with stronger antimicrobial activities and more diverse PKS/NRPS genes.
U.S. Providers’ Perceptions of the Psychosocial Needs of Seriously Ill Patients of South Asian Origin: Implications for Health Social Work
Authors: Washington Karla T , Khosla Nidhi , Lero Christi 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
The number of individuals of South Asian origin receiving health care in the United States is rapidly growing, yet little is known about their psychosocial needs. To better inform the provision of culturally competent social work services for this patient population, researchers sought to describe U.S. health care providers’ perceptions of the psychosocial needs of seriously ill patients of South Asian origin. To do so, they conducted a multimethod qualitative descriptive study, collecting data during focus groups and individual interviews of health care providers (N = 57) and analyzing them via directed content analysis. Identified patient needs included addressing financial and legal problems, challenges completing activities of daily living, spiritual or existential concerns, psychosocial experiences of unresolved physical symptoms, and psychological distress. Providers also emphasized the importance of supporting patients’ family members to aid in their caregiving abilities and to enhance their quality of life. As social workers in U.S. health care settings encounter a growing number of patients of South Asian origin, a more comprehensive understanding of their psychosocial needs is imperative. Study findings suggest that health social workers should provide psychosocial care that encompasses culture-specific needs and psychosocial care that can be provided in a culturally responsive manner.
Traveling wave solutions for the Richards equation with hysteresis
Authors: Behi-Gornostaeva E El , Mitra K , Schweizer B 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
We investigate the one-dimensional non-equilibrium Richards equation with play-type hysteresis. It is known that regularized versions of this equation permit traveling wave solutions that show oscillations and, in particular, the physically relevant effect of a saturation overshoot. We investigate here the non-regularized hysteresis operator and combine it with a positive $\tau $-term. Our result is that the model has monotone traveling wave solutions. These traveling waves describe the behavior of fronts in a bounded domain. In a two-dimensional interpretation, the result characterizes the speed of fingers in non-homogeneous solutions.
High Genetic Diversity of Plasmodium falciparum in the Low-Transmission Setting of the Kingdom of Eswatini
Authors: Roh Michelle E , Tessema Sofonias K , Murphy Maxwell , Nhlabathi Nomcebo , Mkhonta Nomcebo , Vilakati Sibonakaliso , Ntshalintshali Nyasatu , Saini Manik , Maphalala Gugu , Chen Anna , Wilheim Jordan , Prach Lisa , Gosling Roly , Kunene Simon , S. Hsiang Michelle , Greenhouse Bryan 
Published: June 2019

Abstract

Background
To better understand transmission dynamics, we characterized Plasmodium falciparum genetic diversity in Eswatini, where transmission is low and sustained by importation.

Methods
Twenty-six P. falciparum microsatellites were genotyped in 66% of confirmed cases (2014–2016; N = 582). Population and within-host diversity were used to characterize differences between imported and locally acquired infections. Logistic regression was used to assess the added value of diversity metrics to classify imported and local infections beyond epidemiology data alone.

Results
Parasite population in Eswatini was highly diverse (expected heterozygosity [HE] = 0.75) and complex: 67% polyclonal infections, mean multiplicity of infection (MOI) 2.2, and mean within-host infection fixation index (FWS) 0.84. Imported cases had comparable diversity to local cases but exhibited higher MOI (2.4 vs 2.0; P = .004) and lower mean FWS (0.82 vs 0.85; P = .03). Addition of MOI and FWS to multivariate analyses did not increase discrimination between imported and local infections.

Conclusions
In contrast to the common perception that P. falciparum diversity declines with decreasing transmission intensity, Eswatini isolates exhibited high parasite diversity consistent with high rates of malaria importation and limited local transmission. Estimates of malaria transmission intensity from genetic data need to consider the effect of importation, especially as countries near elimination.
Controlling the Long-Term Problem of Short-Term Funding
Authors: Johnson Brian A , Scott Hal S 
Published: June 2019

Abstract
While financial crises can be triggered by several causes, runs on short-term liabilities are at the heart of all financial crises, with the recent 2007–09 financial crisis being no exception. Given the unpredictability of crisis triggers and the overwhelming predictability of short-term funding’s role in financial crises, legislative and regulatory responses to the recent financial crisis should focus on the consequences of relying on short-term funding in the financial system. However, in addressing the problem of such funding, it is important to recognize the social benefits afforded by short-term liabilities and not simply the costs. To this end, this paper provides a brief overview of short-term funding in the U.S. financial system, while also highlighting the trade-off between the costs and benefits of short-term liabilities. The paper proceeds with an analysis of various proposals aimed at addressing the short-term funding issue.