32 research outputs found

    Cartilla agraria para la enseñanza de la agricultura en las Escuelas de Instruccion Elemental de la Provincia de León

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    Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Cultura. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 200

    Biogeographic distributions of neotropical trees reflect their directly measured drought tolerances

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    High levels of species diversity hamper current understanding of how tropical forests may respond to environmental change. In the tropics, water availability is a leading driver of the diversity and distribution of tree species, suggesting that many tropical taxa may be physiologically incapable of tolerating dry conditions, and that their distributions along moisture gradients can be used to predict their drought tolerance. While this hypothesis has been explored at local and regional scales, large continental-scale tests are lacking. We investigate whether the relationship between drought-induced mortality and distributions holds continentally by relating experimental and observational data of drought-induced mortality across the Neotropics to the large-scale bioclimatic distributions of 115 tree genera. Across the different experiments, genera affiliated to wetter climatic regimes show higher drought-induced mortality than dry-affiliated ones, even after controlling for phylogenetic relationships. This pattern is stronger for adult trees than for saplings or seedlings, suggesting that the environmental filters exerted by drought impact adult tree survival most strongly. Overall, our analysis of experimental, observational, and bioclimatic data across neotropical forests suggests that increasing moisture-stress is indeed likely to drive significant changes in floristic composition

    Worthy to Lose Some Money for Better Air Quality: Applications of Bayesian Networks on the Causal Effect of Income and Air Pollution on Life Satisfaction in Switzerland

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    One important determinant of well-being is the environmental quality. Many countries apply environmental regulations, reforms and policies for its improvement. However, the question is how the people value the environment, including the air quality. This study examines the association between air pollution and life satisfaction using the Swiss Household Panel survey over the years 2000–2013. We follow a Bayesian network (BN) strategy to estimate the causal effect of the income and air pollution on life satisfaction. We look at five main air pollutants: the ground-level ozone (O3), sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter of 10 micrometres (PM10). Then, we calculate the individuals’ marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) of reducing air pollution that aims to improve their life satisfaction. Beside the BN model, we take advantage of the panel structure of our data and we follow two approaches as robustness check. This includes the adapted probit fixed effects and the generalised methods of moments system. Our findings show that O3 and PM10 present the highest MWTP values ranging between 8000and8000 and 12,000, followed by the remained air pollutants with MWTP extending between 2000and2000 and 6500. Applying the BNs, we find that the causal effect of income on life satisfaction is substantially increased. We also show the causal effects of air pollutants remain almost the same, leading to lower values of willingness to pay

    Fuzzy uncertainty in random variable generation: a cumulative membership function approach

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    Los conjuntos difusos son representaciones de percepciones humanas alrededor de palabras / conceptos. Se ha aplicado ampliamente a funciones difusas, optimización, ecuaciones diferenciales, etc., por lo que su uso en sistemas / modelos de simulación es un campo abierto que debe cubrirse. Muchos problemas de simulación carecen de datos estadísticos para utilizar métodos clásicos, y en ocasiones la información proviene de expertos. De esta forma, los conjuntos difusos pueden ayudar a usar sus opiniones / percepciones como fuentes primarias de información en modelos de simulación.Fuzzy sets are representations of human-like perceptions around words/concepts. It has been widely applied to fuzzy functions, optimization, differential equations etc., so its use in simulation systems/models is an open field to be covered. Many simulation problems lack of statistical data to use classical methods, and sometimes information comes from experts. This way, fuzzy sets can help to use their opinions/perceptions as primary information sources in simulation models

    Influence of endogenous pro-inflammatory cytokines on neutrophil-mediated damage of Candida albicans pseudohyphae, quantified in a modified tetrazolium dye assay.

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    Contains fulltext : 48033.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)For quantitative assessment of polymorphonuclear granulocyte (PMN)-mediated pseudohyphal damage, an improved tetrazolium (2,3-bis-(2-methoxy-4-nitro-5-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium-5-carboxanilide; XTT) dye assay was developed. The modified assay proved to be a reliable indicator of viable pseudohyphal inoculum sizes. In addition, the influence of various endogenous pro-inflammatory cytokines on the capacity of PMN to damage Candida albicans pseudohyphae was investigated. PMN obtained from mice in which the genes encoding for tumor necrosis factor-alpha/lymphotoxin-alpha (TNF/LT), interferon-gamma (IFNgamma), interleukin (IL)-1alpha, or IL-1beta were disrupted, showed a significantly reduced pseudohyphal damage capacity in comparison with control PMN. The reduction amounted 25% for TNF-/- LT-/-, 11% for IFNgamma-/-, 21% for IL-1alpha-/-, and 34% for IL-1alpha-/-beta-/- PMN. In contrast, deficiency of IL-12 or IL-18 did not result in a diminished capacity to damage pseudohyphae and the capacity of PMN to damage Candida pseudohyphae was even slightly increased by 10% in IL-18-/- mice. These data suggest that endogenous pro-inflammatory cytokines are able to modulate antihyphal activity of PMN, the main effector cells against disseminated candidiasis by virtue of their capacity to kill both Candida blastoconidia and pseudohyphae
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