Review of integrated approaches to river basin, planning, development and management

Piecemeal approaches to river basin development and management may not fully recognize the interactions and interdependence among components of a river basin system. River basin management that focuses on a single water use, on a single sector, or on the supply to particular segment of the basin population may inadvertently disrupt other sectors of the economy (in time or space). Hence, advocating for a systems approach to river basin development - for models that could help account for a river basin's key components and help address various objectives. The authors review the literature on such economic models, including models that deal with issues of water quality and quantity or with environmental considerations, recreational demand, countrywide planning, and multiple objective planning. Their review may serve as a source of references for those who need to consider whether they can use a model. Readers can evaluate the suitability, advantages, and disadvantages of particular modeling approaches for specific objectives.Water Conservation,River Basin Management,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Water and Industry,Town Water Supply and Sanitation

Cultivation, Erudition, Edification

Cultivation, Erudition, Edification is an exercise of self-portraiture. Few careers are as all encompassing, and all consuming as that as a physician. Becoming a physician is a metamorphosis, it changes who you are and becomes an intrinsic part of who you become. As a medical student, I am measured first by my intellect, and then by my communication skills, social competence and responsibility. In a way, I am somewhat disembodied by my profession. Everyday life comes with a mask on your face, bulky scrubs obscuring your gender and the epochal white coat spilling over with notes, books and instruments. Gender becomes entirely inconsequential. That’s why, in this piece, in place of the classic female form, there is a medical cross. It expresses the duality of constantly sacrificing my body to medicine while at the same time giving me the freedom to be judged by who I am intellectually in this field, without the critique placed on the body so often seen in mainstream society. In medicine, the importance of my body has been eclipsed by the importance of my mind. However, just because I’m in a profession that doesn’t rely as heavily on my gender doesn’t mean that the weight of the feminine ceases to exist. There are other ways, both subtle and blatant in which I feel the burden and joy of being a woman as well as a medical student. For one, in this piece, the hair is flowing out and interconnecting with the knowledge that is saturating the background. Shortly before I began the medical school interview process I cut my hair short because I knew I wouldn’t have the time to style it in a way that would be deemed professionally acceptable. Since that day at that first interview, I have not cut it again. It has now been over three years worth of growth. When I look at myself in the mirror, I measure the person I was then and the person I have become by my hair, which now flows over my shoulders and almost down to my waist. Not only is it a physical chronology of hard work and time passed, it’s a keepsake of femininity that I can enjoy in the rare moments that I get to myself. Finally, perhaps one of the greatest achievements and most potentially treacherous permutations of the female form is the ability to bring forth life. Despite so many obstacles that have been overcome, pregnancy as a student physician is riddled with roadblocks often in the form of deeply rooted sexist and antiquated rules and beliefs. I know any number of my male classmates who are married and whose wives are either pregnant or have children. When my classmates go on rotations, or go to interview, they are not forced to disclose whether or not they have a child on the way. They will not risk having their names struck from a list because they may have to take an absence to attend to their family. They will not face being passed over for their qualifications because of the possibility that they may incur other responsibilities in the near future. But I do, and I am, and I will-- because one of the most beautiful and miraculous things my body can do has also become the biggest liability to my career and future success. I am asked to sacrifice my ability to secure a residency and secure a job, or to delay and forego motherhood. This is something that many female medical students face alone. I strongly believe that something needs to be done in order to change these practices, and here in the portrait can be seen a series of cracks where the uterus lies. It is a broken system, in great need of repair, it is a part of my life and I am a part of it. I wanted to create this piece in order to present the female form in a different light, one beyond the superficial we often see in advertising, beyond the classic male gaze of female portraiture, which relies so heavily on the aesthetics of the physical body. In my clogs, with my hair pulled up and my surgical cap on I am just as much a woman as the patient I’m taking care of who’s breastfeeding her child, or the sister who stands at bedside in her full makeup, skirt and high heels. The female form is more than a set of lines and curves to be dressed up, bathed in flattering lighting and flaunted. It is beyond the physical, it is a metaphorical and cerebral, sometimes intangible representation of who we are as both women and human beings

Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMs

We present $\textbf{Platypus}$, a family of fine-tuned and merged Large Language Models (LLMs) that achieves the strongest performance and currently stands at first place in HuggingFace's Open LLM Leaderboard as of the release date of this work. In this work we describe (1) our curated dataset $\textbf{Open-Platypus}$, that is a subset of other open datasets and which $\textit{we release to the public}$ (2) our process of fine-tuning and merging LoRA modules in order to conserve the strong prior of pretrained LLMs, while bringing specific domain knowledge to the surface (3) our efforts in checking for test data leaks and contamination in the training data, which can inform future research. Specifically, the Platypus family achieves strong performance in quantitative LLM metrics across model sizes, topping the global Open LLM leaderboard while using just a fraction of the fine-tuning data and overall compute that are required for other state-of-the-art fine-tuned LLMs. In particular, a 13B Platypus model can be trained on $\textit{a single}$ A100 GPU using 25k questions in 5 hours. This is a testament of the quality of our Open-Platypus dataset, and opens opportunities for more improvements in the field. Project page: https://platypus-llm.github.i

A Rapid and Efficient Method for Purifying High Quality Total RNA from Peaches (Prunus persica) for Functional Genomics Analyses

http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-97602005000100010&lng=es&nrm=isoPrunus persica has been proposed as a genomic model for deciduous trees and the Rosaceae family. Optimized protocols for RNA isolation are necessary to further advance studies in this model species such that functional genomics analyses may be performed. Here we present an optimized protocol to rapidly and efficiently purify high quality total RNA from peach fruits (Prunus persica). Isolating high-quality RNA from fruit tissue is often difficult due to large quantities of polysaccharides and polyphenolic compounds that accumulate in this tissue and co-purify with the RNA. Here we demonstrate that a modified version of the method used to isolate RNA from pine trees and the woody plant Cinnamomun tenuipilum is ideal for isolating high quality RNA from the fruits of Prunus persica. This RNA may be used for many functional genomic based experiments such as RT-PCR and the construction of large-insert cDNA libraries

Nidoviruses in Reptiles: A Review

Since their discovery in 2014, reptile nidoviruses (also known as serpentoviruses) have emerged as significant pathogens worldwide. They are known for causing severe and often fatal respiratory disease in various captive snake species, especially pythons. Related viruses have been detected in other reptiles with and without respiratory disease, including captive and wild populations of lizards, and wild populations of freshwater turtles. There are many opportunities to better understand the viral diversity, species susceptibility, and clinical presentation in different species in this relatively new field of research. In captive snake collections, reptile nidoviruses can spread quickly and be associated with high morbidity and mortality, yet the potential disease risk to wild reptile populations remains largely unknown, despite reptile species declining on a global scale. Experimental studies or investigations of disease outbreaks in wild reptile populations are scarce, leaving the available literature limited mostly to exploring findings of naturally infected animals in captivity. Further studies into the pathogenesis of different reptile nidoviruses in a variety of reptile species is required to explore the complexity of disease and routes of transmission. This review focuses on the biology of these viruses, hosts and geographic distribution, clinical signs and pathology, laboratory diagnosis and management of reptile nidovirus infections to better understand nidovirus infections in reptiles