Specific strains of Escherichia coli are pathogenic for the endometrium of cattle and cause pelvic inflammatory disease in cattle and mice.

BACKGROUND: Escherichia coli are widespread in the environment and pathogenic strains cause diseases of mucosal surfaces including the female genital tract. Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID; metritis) or endometritis affects ∼40% of cattle after parturition. We tested the expectation that multiple genetically diverse E. coli from the environment opportunistically contaminate the uterine lumen after parturition to establish PID. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Distinct clonal groups of E. coli were identified by Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) from animals with uterine disease and these differed from known diarrhoeic or extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli. The endometrial pathogenic E. coli (EnPEC) were more adherent and invasive for endometrial epithelial and stromal cells, compared with E. coli isolated from the uterus of clinically unaffected animals. The endometrial epithelial and stromal cells produced more prostaglandin E(2) and interleukin-8 in response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) purified from EnPEC compared with non-pathogenic E. coli. The EnPEC or their LPS also caused PID when infused into the uterus of mice with accumulation of neutrophils and macrophages in the endometrium. Infusion of EnPEC was only associated with bacterial invasion of the endometrium and myometrium. Despite their ability to invade cultured cells, elicit host cell responses and establish PID, EnPEC lacked sixteen genes commonly associated with adhesion and invasion by enteric or extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli, though the ferric yersiniabactin uptake gene (fyuA) was present in PID-associated EnPEC. Endometrial epithelial or stromal cells from wild type but not Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) null mice secreted prostaglandin E(2) and chemokine (C-X-C motif) ligand 1 (CXCL1) in response to LPS from EnPEC, highlighting the key role of LPS in PID. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The implication arising from the discovery of EnPEC is that development of treatments or vaccines for PID should focus specifically on EnPEC and not other strains of E. coli

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

United States Geological Survey Reports

From abstract: At the request of the Council of the San Carlos Apache Tribe the U. S. Geological Survey entered into a cooperative agreement calling for a brief reconnaissance study to determine, as far as practical, the mineral potential of the San Carlos Indian Reservation. Five months of field work was done during the winter and spring of 1952-53. About 30 percent of the reservation is covered by alluvial deposits of late Tertiary, Pleistocene, and Recent age, and another 60 percent is covered by volcanic rocks of Tertiary and perhaps Pleistocene age. These rocks are younger than the major epochs of metallization in southeastern Arizona. The remainder of the area is underlain by pre-Cambrian and Paleozoic sedimentary rocks, pre-Cambrian granite, and pre-Devonian diabase

It’s Good to Talk. How Speaking to Automation Will Improve Your Situation Awareness

Concerns about operators of complex and highly automated systems losing essential Situation Awareness and becoming “Out-Of-The-Loop” remains a current and ever more pressing concern with the promise of autonomous vehicles controlled by autonomous traffic control systems. Human Autonomy Teaming research proposes that to address this issue, human operators and managers of must have improved the communication with the autonomous agents of these systems. In this study we evaluated the impact of implementing a bi-directional audio-voice communication channel between a human and synthetic agent on the Situation Awareness and Performance of the human. We conducted an experimental study in which twenty-six participants teamed with a synthetic agent to complete a simulated dynamic traffic control task. The results of the study demonstrate that articulating commands including specific SA information assists with the transfer of implicit SA knowledge into explicit SA and show that both speaking and listening to the synthetic agent significantly improved participant SA. The results show that this change in SA was accompanied by a change is performance and decision-making behaviour, even when the audio-voice communication only provided “old” information readily available to the participant on the graphical display. Our conclusion drawn from the study is that “It’s good (for SA) to talk”

It’s Good to Talk:How Speaking to Automation Will Improve Your Situation Awareness

Concerns about operators of complex and highly automated systems losing essential Situation Awareness and becoming “Out-Of-The-Loop” remains a current and ever more pressing concern with the promise of autonomous vehicles controlled by autonomous traffic control systems. Human Autonomy Teaming research proposes that to address this issue, human operators and managers of must have improved the communication with the autonomous agents of these systems. In this study we evaluated the impact of implementing a bi-directional audio-voice communication channel between a human and synthetic agent on the Situation Awareness and Performance of the human. We conducted an experimental study in which twenty-six participants teamed with a synthetic agent to complete a simulated dynamic traffic control task. The results of the study demonstrate that articulating commands including specific SA information assists with the transfer of implicit SA knowledge into explicit SA and show that both speaking and listening to the synthetic agent significantly improved participant SA. The results show that this change in SA was accompanied by a change is performance and decision-making behaviour, even when the audio-voice communication only provided “old” information readily available to the participant on the graphical display. Our conclusion drawn from the study is that “It’s good (for SA) to talk”

Assessing the Impact of Sediment in Wairarapa Moana

The changing of the health of Wairarapa Moana due to environmental factors has affected its relationship with surrounding communities. This project aimed to understand how the health of the Moana impacts the connection between its surrounding communities and the environment. This project consisted of interviewing 19 individuals who have a deep connection with the Moana. We identified common themes from these interviews and created a video that recognized and amplified voices and stories from the Moana’s community

Changing the way we do child protection

Abstract Objective This paper describes a six-year large scale implementation of the Signs of Safety practise framework in a complex statutory child protection context in Western Australia. The case study documents both the practitioner-led and organisational-led implementation journey as part of the State\u27s child protection system reform drawing on Roger\u27s diffusion of innovation theory and Fixsen\u27s five stage implementation model as conceptual frameworks, and highlighting the key facilitators and barriers. Methods The study is a collaboration between researchers investigating the impact and use of Signs of Safety in Western Australia who contributed the theoretical perspectives and analysis; and key personnel from the Department responsible for implementation who contributed documents, manuals, records and personal accounts to form the narrative of the implementation. A naturalist, intrinsic and multiple case study design utilising semi-structured interviews was used to consult with 27 Departmental staff and practitioners. Thematic analysis was utilised to identify key themes and patterns of experiences with the Signs of Safety framework implementation. Findings Much can be learned from the journey of the Department and their long term commitment and systematic implementation strategy of Signs of Safety including the significance of leadership, learning and developing initiatives, effective communication, instituting continuous improvement processes and the provision of feedback for individual practitioners. Signs of Safety appealed to natural champions of systemic social work practise within the Department whose organisational culture adapted to align with the principles of the framework in building partnerships and understanding with families, being solution-focused, maintaining an open stance of inquiry and balancing strengths and safety around children whilst concurrently working to solve dangers and harm. As a learning organisation, the Department also utilised case practise implementation teams to be able to move through more successfully the different stages of implementation. In utilising Fixsen\u27s implementation framework, the challenges and gaps to implementation strategies were also highlighted, including a problematic data system and an internal focus compromising the success of interagency collaboration. Conclusion This discussion paper has provided an overview of the key concepts of the diffusion and implementation literature, and highlighted the importance of utilising theoretical frameworks in guiding implementation of practise models especially in complex statutory child protection contexts. Findings will be of particular interest to child welfare leaders and supporters of organisational change, providing concrete examples of implementation strategies and demonstrates the systemic benefits of a theoretical framework for guiding implementation efforts. &nbsp