Borrowed alleles and convergence in serpentine adaptation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank members of the L.Y. and K.B. laboratories for helpful discussions. This work was supported through the European Research Council Grant StG CA629F04E (to L.Y.); a Harvard University Milton Fund Award (to K.B.); Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award 1 F32 GM096699 from the NIH (to L.Y.); National Science Foundation Grant IOS-1146465 (to K.B.); NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences Grant 2R01GM078536 (to D.E.S.); and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Grant BB/L000113/1 (to D.E.S.)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Community Participation in Tourism: Examining the Nexus of Collaboration between the Community of Mesomagor and the Management of the Kakum National Park in Ghana

This study aims at examining community participation in the maintenance and management of tourist sites with particular reference to the Kakum National Park in Ghana. The research, therefore, selected the Mesomagor Township and its surrounding communities like Kruwa and Mfoum as the focus of its analysis. The accidental sampling technique was used in selecting 60 people including the Chief and other opinion leaders out of a total population of 188 to gather data for the study. The data collected was analysed using version 21 of the SPSS software. The data revealed among others that the local forest users have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of local resources and resource problem. Due to this, the study recommends that a consensus model of planning and consultation with the local people be done at every level in the planning and development of tourism facilities in Ghana and also the management of Kakum National Park should involve the members of the communities close to the park in the decision making process as this will go a long way to affect the park and the people positively

Do Our Airmen Value Their CCAF Degree?

A recent article, “CCAF Continues to Provide Value to Air Force, Enlisted Members,” posted in the Community College of the Air Force (CCAF) alumni group on LinkedIn generated over 100 comments from CCAF graduates regarding the value of that college’s degree.1 Their perceptions of the worth of the CCAF degree ranged from no value at all to its having a tremendous impact on careers and goals.2The foregoing served as the catalyst for this two-phased research. Only by comparing both sides of the problem will we have truly answered the question regarding the value of the degree. Phase one consisted of the current research project, focused on the collection and analysis of CCAF graduates’ perceptions regarding the value of their degree. Phase two will involve the collection of data collected from hiring managers from various fields of industry regarding their perception of the CCAF degree and their estimation of it during a review of an applicant’s credentials

Dynamic cerebral autoregulation is intact in chronic kidney disease

Article describes how chronic kidney disease patients experience an elevated risk for cerebrovascular disease, and a factor that may contribute to this is an impairment in dynamic cerebral autoregulation. The authors test their hypothesis by comparing dynamic cerebral autoregulation between CKD patients stages III-IV and matched controls (CON) without CKD

Aberrant axial mineralization precedes spinal ankylosis: a molecular imaging study in ank/ank mice

Abstract Introduction The diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis is made from a combination of clinical features and the presence of radiographic evidence that may be detected only after many years of inflammatory back pain. It is not uncommon to have a diagnosis confirmed 5 to 10 years after the initial onset of symptoms. Development of a more-sensitive molecular imaging technology to detect structural changes in the joints would lead to earlier diagnosis and quantitative tracking of ankylosis progression. Progressive ankylosis (ank/ank) mice have a loss of function in the Ank gene, which codes for a regulator of PPi transport. In this study, we used these ank/ank mutant mice to assess a noninvasive, quantitative measure of joint ankylosis with near-infrared (NIR) molecular imaging in vivo. Methods Three age groups (8, 12, and 18 weeks) of ank/ank (15 mice) and wild-type littermates (12 +/+ mice) were assessed histologically and radiographically. Before imaging, OsteoSense 750 (bisphosphonate pamidronate) was injected i.v. Whole-body images were analyzed by using the multispectral Maestro imaging system. Results OsteoSense 750 signals in the paw joints were higher in ank/ank mice in all three age groups compared with controls. In the spine, significantly higher OsteoSense 750 signals were detected early, in 8-week-old ank/ank mice compared with controls, although minimal radiographic differences were noted at this time point. The molecular imaging changes in the ank/ank spine (8 weeks) were supported by histologic changes, including calcium apatite crystals at the edge of the vertebral bodies and new syndesmophyte formation. Conclusions Changes in joint pathology of ank/ank mice, as evaluated by histologic and radiographic means, are qualitative, but only semiquantitative. In contrast, molecular imaging provides a quantitative assessment. Ankylosis in ank/ank mice developed simultaneously in distal and axial joints, contrary to the previous notion that it is a centripetal process. NIR imaging might be feasible for early disease diagnosis and for monitoring disease progression in ankylosing spondylitis

Discovering Representations for Black-box Optimization

The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main insight is that this process can be automated by generating a dataset of high-performing solutions with a quality diversity algorithm (here, MAP-Elites), then learning a representation with a generative model (here, a Variational Autoencoder) from that dataset. Our second insight is that this representation can be used to scale quality diversity optimization to higher dimensions -- but only if we carefully mix solutions generated with the learned representation and those generated with traditional variation operators. We demonstrate these capabilities by learning an low-dimensional encoding for the inverse kinematics of a thousand joint planar arm. The results show that learned representations make it possible to solve high-dimensional problems with orders of magnitude fewer evaluations than the standard MAP-Elites, and that, once solved, the produced encoding can be used for rapid optimization of novel, but similar, tasks. The presented techniques not only scale up quality diversity algorithms to high dimensions, but show that black-box optimization encodings can be automatically learned, rather than hand designed.Comment: Presented at GECCO 2020 -- v2 (Previous title 'Automating Representation Discovery with MAP-Elites'