Parables

A collection of drawings by James C. Christensen, with paraphrased narratives written by Robert L. Millet.https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/pda/1009/thumbnail.jp

Testing metallicity indicators at z~1.4 with the gravitationally lensed galaxy CASSOWARY 20

We present X-shooter observations of CASSOWARY 20 (CSWA 20), a star-forming (SFR ~6 Msol/yr) galaxy at z=1.433, magnified by a factor of 11.5 by the gravitational lensing produced by a massive foreground galaxy at z=0.741. We analysed the integrated physical properties of the HII regions of CSWA 20 using temperature- and density-sensitive emission lines. We find the abundance of oxygen to be ~1/7 of solar, while carbon is ~50 times less abundant than in the Sun. The unusually low C/O ratio may be an indication of a particularly rapid timescale of chemical enrichment. The wide wavelength coverage of X-shooter gives us access to five different methods for determining the metallicity of CSWA 20, three based on emission lines from HII regions and two on absorption features formed in the atmospheres of massive stars. All five estimates are in agreement, within the factor of ~2 uncertainty of each method. The interstellar medium of CSWA 20 only partially covers the star-forming region as viewed from our direction; in particular, absorption lines from neutrals and first ions are exceptionally weak. We find evidence for large-scale outflows of the interstellar medium (ISM) with speeds of up 750 km/s, similar to the values measured in other high-z galaxies sustaining much higher rates of star formation.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

INFLUENCE OF PHOSPHATE SOURCE ON VESICULAR-ARBUSCULAR MYCORRHIZAE OF \u3ci\u3eBOUTELOUA GRACILIS\u3c/i\u3e

Non-mycorrhizal and vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal Bouteloua gracilis infected with Glomus fasciculatus were grown in defined media containing different phosphate sources and compared with respect to phosphate content and form, biomass, chlorophyll concentration, and root phosphatase activity. The phosphate sources were sodium monobasic phosphate, a mixture of sodium monobasic phosphate and calcium phytate, and calcium phytate. Inositol and inositol plus calcium were added to the sodium phosphate medium as additional treatments. Mycorrhizal infection was highest in roots of plants grown in the presence of phytate (75%). Lower root infection levels were noted in plants from the sodium phosphate (19%) and mixed phosphate (22%) media. No penetration by fungi occurred in plants from the sodium phosphate plus inositol or inositol and calcium media. Dry wts of non-mycorrhizal plants were highest when grown in media containing phytate and sodium phosphate plus inositol and calcium followed in decreasing order by sodium phosphate plus inositol, mixed phosphates, and sodium phosphate. Mycorrhizal infection increased leaf dry wt in plants from the sodium phosphate medium and root dry wt from the phytate medium. Phosphate concentrations in the plants were highest when grown in mixed phosphate medium followed by sodium phosphate and phytate. Mycorrhizal infection always increased significantly leaf phosphate concentrations but increased root phosphate concentrations only in the phytate medium. Phosphates were found predominantly as organicallybound compounds in leaves of mycorrhizal plants whereas in leaves of non-mycorrhizal plants, most of the phosphate was inorganic. Chlorophyll concentrations increased significantly with mycorrhizal infection with no change in a/b ratios. Mycorrhizal plants grown in the phytate medium had substantially higher alkaline phosphatase activity than did non-mycorrhizal plants; acid phosphatase activity was not affected by mycorrhizal condition. These results suggest that form of the phosphate in the root environment influences naycorrhizal establishment and effect of mycorrhizae on plant growth

INFLUENCE OF PHOSPHATE SOURCE ON VESICULAR-ARBUSCULAR MYCORRHIZAE OF \u3ci\u3eBOUTELOUA GRACILIS\u3c/i\u3e

Non-mycorrhizal and vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal Bouteloua gracilis infected with Glomus fasciculatus were grown in defined media containing different phosphate sources and compared with respect to phosphate content and form, biomass, chlorophyll concentration, and root phosphatase activity. The phosphate sources were sodium monobasic phosphate, a mixture of sodium monobasic phosphate and calcium phytate, and calcium phytate. Inositol and inositol plus calcium were added to the sodium phosphate medium as additional treatments. Mycorrhizal infection was highest in roots of plants grown in the presence of phytate (75%). Lower root infection levels were noted in plants from the sodium phosphate (19%) and mixed phosphate (22%) media. No penetration by fungi occurred in plants from the sodium phosphate plus inositol or inositol and calcium media. Dry wts of non-mycorrhizal plants were highest when grown in media containing phytate and sodium phosphate plus inositol and calcium followed in decreasing order by sodium phosphate plus inositol, mixed phosphates, and sodium phosphate. Mycorrhizal infection increased leaf dry wt in plants from the sodium phosphate medium and root dry wt from the phytate medium. Phosphate concentrations in the plants were highest when grown in mixed phosphate medium followed by sodium phosphate and phytate. Mycorrhizal infection always increased significantly leaf phosphate concentrations but increased root phosphate concentrations only in the phytate medium. Phosphates were found predominantly as organicallybound compounds in leaves of mycorrhizal plants whereas in leaves of non-mycorrhizal plants, most of the phosphate was inorganic. Chlorophyll concentrations increased significantly with mycorrhizal infection with no change in a/b ratios. Mycorrhizal plants grown in the phytate medium had substantially higher alkaline phosphatase activity than did non-mycorrhizal plants; acid phosphatase activity was not affected by mycorrhizal condition. These results suggest that form of the phosphate in the root environment influences naycorrhizal establishment and effect of mycorrhizae on plant growth

Deep Long Short-term Memory Structures Model Temporal Dependencies Improving Cognitive Workload Estimation

Using deeply recurrent neural networks to account for temporal dependence in electroencephalograph (EEG)-based workload estimation is shown to considerably improve day-to-day feature stationarity resulting in significantly higher accuracy (p \u3c .0001) than classifiers which do not consider the temporal dependence encoded within the EEG time-series signal. This improvement is demonstrated by training several deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures, a feedforward Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models on data from six participants who each perform several Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) sessions on five separate days spread out over a month-long period. Each participant-specific classifier is trained on the first four days of data and tested using the fifth’s. Average classification accuracy of 93.0% is achieved using a deep LSTM architecture. These results represent a 59% decrease in error compared to the best previously published results for this dataset. This study additionally evaluates the significance of new features: all combinations of mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis of EEG frequency-domain power distributions. Mean and variance are statistically significant features, while skewness and kurtosis are not. The overall performance of this approach is high enough to warrant evaluation for inclusion in operational systems

MedZIM: Mediation analysis for Zero-Inflated Mediators with applications to microbiome data

The human microbiome can contribute to the pathogenesis of many complex diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease by mediating disease-leading causal pathways. However, standard mediation analysis is not adequate in the context of microbiome data due to the excessive number of zero values in the data. Zero-valued sequencing reads, commonly observed in microbiome studies, arise for technical and/or biological reasons. Mediation analysis approaches for analyzing zero-inflated mediators are still lacking largely because of challenges raised by the zero-inflated data structure: (a) disentangling the mediation effect induced by the point mass at zero; and (b) identifying the observed zero-valued data points that are actually not zero (i.e., false zeros). We develop a novel mediation analysis method under the potential-outcomes framework to fill this gap. We show that the mediation effect of the microbiome can be decomposed into two components that are inherent to the two-part nature of zero-inflated distributions. The first component corresponds to the mediation effect attributable to a unit-change over the positive relative abundance and the second component corresponds to the mediation effect attributable to discrete binary change of the mediator from zero to a non-zero state. With probabilistic models to account for observing zeros, we also address the challenge with false zeros. A comprehensive simulation study and the applications in two real microbiome studies demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing mediation analysis approaches.Comment: Corresponding: Zhigang L

Development and Evaluation of an Undergraduate Science Communication Module

This paper describes the design and evaluation of an undergraduate final year science communication module for the Science Faculty at the University of East Anglia. The module focuses specifically on science communication and aims to bring an understanding of how science is disseminated to the public. Students on the module are made aware of the models surrounding science communication and investigate how the science culture interfaces with the public. During the module they learn how to adapt science concepts for different audiences and how to talk confidently about science to a lay-audience. Student motivation for module choice centres on the acquisition of transferable skills and students develop these skills through designing, running and evaluating a public outreach event at a school or in a public area. These transferable skills acquired include communication, interaction with different organisations such as museums and science centres, developing understanding of both the needs of different audiences and the importance of time management. They also develop skills relating to self-reflection and how to use this as a tool for future self development. The majority of students completing the module go on to further study, either a PhD, MSc or teacher training. The module can be sustained in its present formed if capped at 40 students, however it is recognised that to increase cohort size, further investment of faculty time and resources would be required

Evading the annotation bottleneck: using sequence similarity to search non-sequence gene data.

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.BACKGROUND: Non-sequence gene data (images, literature, etc.) can be found in many different public databases. Access to these data is mostly by text based methods using gene names; however, gene annotation is neither complete, nor fully systematic between organisms, and is also not generally stable over time. This provides some challenges for text based access, especially for cross-species searches. We propose a method for non-sequence data retrieval based on sequence similarity, which removes dependence on annotation and text searches. This work was motivated by the need to provide better access to large numbers of in situ images, and the observation that such image data were usually associated with a specific gene sequence. Sequence similarity searches are found in existing gene oriented databases, but mostly give indirect access to non-sequence data via navigational links. RESULTS: Three applications were built to explore the proposed method: accessing image data, literature and gene names. Searches are initiated with the sequence of the user's gene of interest, which is searched against a database of sequences associated with the target data. The matching (non-sequence) target data are returned directly to the user's browser, organised by sequence similarity. The method worked well for the intended application in image data management. Comparison with text based searches of the image data set showed the accuracy of the method. Applied to literature searches it facilitated retrieval of mostly high relevance references. Applied to gene name data it provided a useful analysis of name variation of related genes within and between species. CONCLUSION: This method makes a powerful and useful addition to existing methods for searching gene data based on text retrieval or curated gene lists. In particular the method facilitates cross-species comparisons, and enables the handling of novel or otherwise un-annotated genes. Applications using the method are quick and easy to build, and the data require little maintenance. This approach largely circumvents the need for annotation, which can be a major obstacle to the development of genomic scale data resources

Arming the Outlaws: On the Moral Limits of the Arms Trade

There is a general presumption against arming outlaw states. But can that presumption sometimes be overturned? The argument considered here maintains that outlaw states can have legitimate security interests, and that transferring weapons to these states can be an appropriate way of promoting those interests. Weapons enable governments to engage in wrongful oppression and aggression, but they also enable them to fend off predators in a manner that can be beneficial to their citizens. It clearly does not follow from the fact that a state is oppressive or aggressive that it will never be a victim of wrongful aggression itself, and while an outlaw state’s primary aim in repelling such aggression will often be the preservation of its own power, its defensive manoeuvres will sometimes also serve its citizens’ interests. In short, supplying weapons to outlaw states may sometimes contribute to the protection of innocents