Evolution of female choice and age-dependent male traits with paternal germ-line mutation

Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to females choosing mates. Germ-line mutations could oppose preferences for "good genes." Choosy females run the risk that offspring of older males will be no more attractive or healthy than offspring of younger males. Germ-line mutations could pose a particular problem when females can only judge male trait size, rather than assessing age directly. I ask whether or not females will prefer extreme traits, despite reduced offspring survival due to age-dependent mutation. I use a quantitative genetic model to examine the evolution of female preferences, an age-dependent male trait, and overall health ("condition"). My dynamical equation includes mutation bias that depends on the generation time of the population. I focus on the case where females form preferences for older males because male trait size depends on male age. My findings agree with good genes theory. Females at equilibrium always select above-average males. The trait size preferred by females directly correlates with the direct costs of the preference. Direct costs can accentuate the equilibrium preference at a higher rate than mutational parameters. Females can always offset direct costs by mating with older, more ornamented males. Age-dependent mutation in condition maintains genetic variation in condition and thereby maintains the selective value of female preferences. Rather than eliminating female preferences, germ-line mutations provide an essential ingredient in sexual selection.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Towards better outcomes for autistic individuals with Eating Disorders

Evidence suggests that autistic individuals with an Eating Disorder (ED) respond to current interventions differently compared to neurotypical individuals. Furthermore, many are undiagnosed until they reach mental health services with mainly women being missed with current bias in the assessment process. Once they reach mental health services clinicians struggle to identify who might benefit from a full assessment and potential treatment adaptations. This thesis aims to firstly evaluate how autistic individuals respond to standard ED interventions utilising a systematic search to evaluate all available literature on the topic. By evaluating the current literature clinicians can make more informed clinical pathway decisions. Secondly, to evaluate an improved screening measure for use in ED services to help guide clinicians to make accurate referrals and appropriate adaptations for those that might benefit from an autism assessment. Participants were recruited as part of a larger study examining eating difficulties in autistic individuals, but the data was utilised in a novel way to develop a predictive model for screening autistic individuals with an ED. Finally, my reflections on the process of completing a thesis in this area for the benefit of fellow researchers and clinicians working in this field

A Handbook to Aid in the Control and Coordination of the Athletic Program for the Moses Lake Schools, Moses Lake, Washington

As athletic director of the Moses Lake school system, it has been this writer\u27s responsibility to organize, coordinate and conduct the athletic program. Moses Lake has been undergoing a period of tremendous growth, which has resulted in an increase of student enrollment and the necessity of increasing the athletic program. To effectively operate a good program under this condition, it has become necessary to establish some method which will serve the following purposes: (1) the dissemination of information concerning the athletic program for coaches, administrators, teachers, students and parents; (2) the clarification of athletic philosophy, duties, standards and regulations; (3) the method of keeping the athletic program in balance with the rest of the educational program; (4) the ease of coordination of the over-all athletic program

The use of carbides in refractories

With the new demands being made on the ceramic industry in mind, it was thought that an investigation of the ceramic possibilities of certain high melting refractory materials might prove of interest and value. The high melting materials are the oxides, carbides, nitrides, borides, and hydrides. Since a great deal of work has been done on the oxides, and relatively little on the others, the oxides were dismissed. Of the other groups, the carbides seemed interesting. Of the carbides, the following materials were chosen for investigation: Boron Carbide (B₄C), Zirconium carbide (ZrC), and Titanium carbide (TiC). These materials were chosen because of their high melting points, apparently stability at high temperatures, and the fact that authorities on refractories suggested that they might have good possibilities --Introduction, page 2

Evaluation of strategies for reducing the burden of COPD in the UK using Bayesian methods

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is responsible for 5.3% of all deaths and 1.7% of all hospital admissions in the UK. This thesis focuses on strategies to reduce COPD burden by targeting three aspects across the public healthcare system: prevention, emergency treatment, and long-term management. Analyses were performed in a Bayesian framework to exploit its flexibility in modelling uncertainty and the incorporation of prior knowledge. First, I assessed whether communication of personalised disease risk in primary care is an effective smoking cessation intervention, using cost-effectiveness and value of information analyses based on various data sources across the literature. The odds ratio for the effectiveness of communication of personalised disease risk was 1.48 (95%CrI:0.91-2.26). While I found a probability of cost-effectiveness of about 90%, further research up to a maximum of £27 million is justified to reduce the uncertainty around this estimate. Secondly, I assessed whether case ascertainment affects the detection of poorly performing hospital trusts in the treatment of acute exacerbation of COPD (AECOPD) in secondary care, using data from the National Asthma and COPD Audit Programme. Case ascertainment was associated with 30-day mortality (OR:1.74; 1.25-2.41) and adjusting for it impacted the findings, with 5 trusts becoming outliers and 2 trusts no longer classified as outliers. Finally, using general practice data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink, I assessed whether new guidelines suggesting triple therapy (long-acting beta-2 agonists, LABA + long-acting muscarinic antagonists, LAMA + inhaled corticosteroids, ICS) for the treatment of those with poorly-controlled COPD on LABA+LAMA dual therapy improves disease outcomes. Triple therapy was not associated with severe AECOPD (IRR:1.00; 0.93-1.07) or mortality (IRR:0.95; 0.86-1.06), but was associated with increased risk of pneumonia (IRR:1.19; 1.05-1.35). This thesis applied sophisticated Bayesian methods to increase understanding of how COPD burden could be reduced in different areas of the public healthcare system.Open Acces

A Survery of Growth Factors in Selected Churches of the Greater Metropolitan Portland Area

The effectiveness of the total church program has been increasingly questioned in recent years . Some of the questioning comes from those who feel the church program generally is irrelevant to the needs of contemporary man, with the Sunday School being the most 1-vasted hour of the week. 11 others, though not so thorough in discarding the church\u27s present structure and efforts, nevertheless question whether some changes in the life of the church are not in order if new people are to be reached with the Gospel and involved in programs that promote genuine spiritual growth and development

Derivational Trapping And The Morphosyntax Of Inflectionlessness

The broad objective of this dissertation is to advance our understanding of how grammatical operations are formulated in the postsyntactic module of the grammar. To that end, the dissertation examines the distribution of agreement morphemes, and especially the distribution of exceptionally inflectionless elements, whose lack of agreement morphology can affect other operations such as postsyntactic movement, in some cases interfering with these operations, yielding ungrammaticality. The dissertation pursues a serial rule-based approach within the Distributed Morphology (DM) framework (Halle and Marantz 1993; Embick and Noyer 2001, 2007; Arregi and Nevins 2012; Harley 2014; a.o.), focusing chiefly on postsyntactic operations that produce and refer to agreement morphology (‘node-sprouting’) and postsyntactic operations that displace heads onto neighboring elements. The key innovation of the current model is that postsyntactic operations distinguish between their triggering environments and the actual execution of a change. A theoretical consequence of making this distinction is that a derivation can crash when the conditions for application of an operation are satisfied but the change itself cannot be executed, yielding ungrammaticality. This state of affairs is referred to as derivational trapping. The evidence that bears on the theory of how postsyntactic rules are formulated comes from exceptionally inflectionless (EI) elements in various languages, including Bulgarian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), German, Greek, Latin, Icelandic, Italian, and Russian. These EI elements belong to some syntactic category – such as adjective – whose members are specified to bear agreement morphology, while EI elements lack this morphology. The distributional properties of these elements is important for our understanding not only of the representation of inflectionlessness, but also of postsyntactic movement, the separation between the narrow syntax and the postsyntactic module, and the ways in which crashes in the postsyntactic module arise. Beyond the evidence from inflectionlessness for derivational trapping, the dissertation also examines other phenomena that motivate this approach, including lexical gaps, coordination, and other forms of postsyntactic movement. Chapter 1 defines derivational trapping and articulates a model of the postsyntax, with special attention paid to two types of postsyntactic operations: i) node-sprouting, the operation which produces dissociated morphology such as agreement morphemes, and ii) postsyntactic movement. This chapter motivates an account of node-sprouting in which the operation may target a terminal node, a morphological word (MWd) (in the sense of Embick and Noyer 2001), or a phrase, and argues that node-sprouting at the MWd occurs prior to linearly defined movement operations. It also synthesizes various case studies from the literature to motivate an account of postsyntactic movement, whose locality is argued to be restricted by adjacency, in a way defined by the stage of linearization at which the operation is specified. In Chapter 2, I claim that exceptional inflectionlessness is (often) a morphological fact that is encoded postsyntactically. Consequently, given the modularity of narrow syntax and the postsyntactic module, it is predicted that inflectionlessness can affect postsyntactic processes but not the narrow syntax. I evaluate this hypothesis by examining how the absence of agreement morphology affects postsyntactic movement and other operations in Latin, Icelandic, Bulgarian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), Italian, and Russian. For Bulgarian and BCS, I offer a derivational trapping account to capture patterns of ungrammaticality. Chapter 3 investigates German adjectival inflection, and demonstrates that its distribution is best stated in linear terms, thereby supporting its postsyntactic status, and it also demonstrates that the distribution of inflection supports the hypothesis that node-sprouting can happen at the phrasal level. I also demonstrate how exceptional inflectionlessness among adjectives is sensitive to linear order, and offer a derivational trapping account of the inability for such adjectives to be stranded by noun phrase ellipsis. Chapter 4, extends the account of derivational trapping to three other phenomena beyond agreement morphology: lexical gaps, postsyntactic movement into coordinate structures, and the (postsyntactic) formation of English possessive pronouns. I connect the stride gap (Yang 2016) to the feature structure and morphophonology of participles and preterites, showing how lexical gaps can give rise to derivational trapping due to the structure of morphophonological rules. I also argue on the basis of coordination data from various Romance languages for a derivational trapping account of postsyntactic ATB violations, with a refinement of the ATB constraint that permits certain types of attested putative violations. Lastly, I argue that derivational trapping can occur in the production of English possessive pronouns; the account captures surprising patterns of ungrammaticality that arise when an internally complex possessor contains a pronoun. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of the dissertation, pointing to limitations of the current study as well as to directions for future work

The Effect of Educational and Residential Characteristics on the Private Return to Education

This paper attempts to investigate the individual wage rate of return to college education. Over the last twenty years, the return to college education has increased dramatically. We propose to investigate how the return to college differs across educational and residential characteristics. We first consider differential returns to an associate, bachelor, advanced, and professional degrees and what characteristics of an individual\u27s college education influence the rate of return to different degrees. Secondly, we focus on the variation in the return to college education in different areas of residence by comparing the return to education across regions and metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. These issues will be explored using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set. In our preliminary analysis, we explored the differential impact of educational characteristics on wages across regions of residence, on the location where the college was attended, and on wages metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan workers. Our initial findings suggest that returns to education do vary with college location and area worked, and are greater for metro workers

Direct Broadcast Satellite: A Proposal for a Global/Regional System

The purpose of this article is to discuss the possibility of establishing a global/regional direct broadcast satellite (DBS) system. Albeit, in the past, there have been a number of initiatives aimed at forging a unified global DBS system, such initiatives have not been successful. The most significant barriers (political, rather than technical in nature) existing in the international negotiating arenas were spillover, equal access, privacy, national sovereignty, the free flow of information, prior consent, and cultural invasion. Although not all of these issues have been fully resolved, the time has come again for seriously considering the implementation of an international DBS system. It may seem strange at this time to propose the establishment of a global DBS system, while the sole existing International Satellite Organization-- INTELSAT--is facing the problems of competition, if not dismantling, due to the proliferation of national and regional satellite systems. However, our assertion is primarily derived from four recent developments