Helianthus inexpectatus (Asteraceae), a Tetraploid Perennial New Species from Southern California

Helianthus inexpectatus is described as a new species from the Newhall Ranch of northern Los Angeles County, California. It is a tetraploid (2n = 68) perennial that is morphologically similar to--—and intermediate in some characters between--—the diploid H. nuttallii and the hexaploid H. californicus

Bengkayang Students' Strategies to Improve Their Pronunciation

Pronunciation is one of the main keys in mastering English speaking. Without correct pronunciation in speaking English, EFL students cannot communicate well and it will be hard for others to understand what they are saying. The study aimed to find out the strategies used by the English Language Education Program students from Bengkayang's strategies in improving their pronunciation skills at the Faculty of Language and Arts in Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Salatiga. The participants of the study were twenty-one (21) students from batch 2019 who had taken the Pronunciation Practice class in Semester 1 of the 2021/2022 academic year. This study was conducted to answer one research question: What are Bengkayang students' strategies to improve their pronunciation skills?. There were 21 participants from Bengkayang EFL students batch 2019. They were chosen randomly to be the participants because they were all from Bengkayang, a province in Kalimantan Barat, Indonesia, who had various ways of pronouncing words. The researcher used a set of questionnaire questions which consisted of close-ended, open-ended and semi-structured interview questions to collect the data from the students. The findings showed that the strategies used by the students were watching online video(s), listening to songs in English, practicing with friends, and using an online application (ELSA). The students were familiar with the strategies used because those strategies were suggested by the teachers in the classroom. Eventually, this study hopes to provide information for teachers or other students outside Bengkayang who faced the same problem

Temperature-Sensitive and Circadian Oscillators of Neurospora crassa Share Components

In Neurospora crassa, the interactions between products of the frequency (frq), frequency-interacting RNA helicase (frh), white collar-1 (wc-1), and white collar-2 (wc-2) genes establish a molecular circadian clockwork, called the FRQ-WC-Oscillator (FWO), which is required for the generation of molecular and overt circadian rhythmicity. In strains carrying nonfunctional frq alleles, circadian rhythms in asexual spore development (conidiation) are abolished in constant conditions, yet conidiation remains rhythmic in temperature cycles. Certain characteristics of these temperature-synchronized rhythms have been attributed to the activity of a FRQ-less oscillator (FLO). The molecular components of this FLO are as yet unknown. To test whether the FLO depends on other circadian clock components, we created a strain that carries deletions in the frq, wc-1, wc-2, and vivid (vvd) genes. Conidiation in this ΔFWO strain was still synchronized to cyclic temperature programs, but temperature-induced rhythmicity was distinct from that seen in single frq knockout strains. These results and other evidence presented indicate that components of the FWO are part of the temperature-induced FLO

Shrinkage of Outerwood, Middlewood, and Corewood of Two Sweetgum Trees

Two sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua L.) trees were used to determine the shrinkage properties of green outerwood, middlewood, and corewood. Samples were taken at various heights along the boles from each side of a disk. Shrinkage displayed the following general pattern: corewood > middlewood > outerwood. This pattern was reversed for the specific gravity of samples from each of these wood types from tree 1, but tree 2 maintained a relatively uniform specific gravity among wood types

Examining "The end of revolution": a foretaste of Wang Hui’s thought

Wang Hui is a significant contemporary Chinese thinker and a key representative of Chinese New Left thought. This article provides a critical review of some of the themes that emerge from Wang’s The End of Revolution as a means of situating his position in China’s intellectual landscape, with a particular mind to exploring the historicity of Wang’s thought as it informs his views. The essay engages some of the key discursive threads in The End of Revolution and provides a critical overview of Wang’s positions on neoliberalism, the tension between Western articulations of modernity and China’s own self-image

More Continuity than Change? Re-evaluating the Contemporary Socio-economic and Housing Characteristics of Suburbs

Suburbs that developed in metropolitan Canada post-World War II have historically been depicted as homogeneous landscapes of gendered domesticity, detached housing, White middle-class nuclear families, and heavy automobile use. We find that key features of this historical popular image do in fact persist across the nation’s contemporary metropolitan landscape, particularly at the expanding fringes and in mid-sized cities near the largest metropolitan areas. Th e findings reflect suburbanization into new areas, point to enduring social exclusion, and recall the negative environmental consequences arising from suburban ways of living such as widespread automobile use and continuing sprawl. However, the analysis also points to the internal diversity thatmarks suburbanization today and to the growing presence of suburban ways of living in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineff ective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineffective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs

An Approach to Nonparametric Inference on the Causal Dose Response Function

The causal dose response curve is commonly selected as the statistical parameter of interest in studies where the goal is to understand the effect of a continuous exposure on an outcome.Most of the available methodology for statistical inference on the dose-response function in the continuous exposure setting requires strong parametric assumptions on the probability distribution. Such parametric assumptions are typically untenable in practice and lead to invalid inference. It is often preferable to instead use nonparametric methods for inference, which only make mild assumptions about the data-generating mechanism. We propose a nonparametric test of the null hypothesis that the dose-response function is equal to a constant function. We argue that when the null hypothesis holds, the dose-response function has zero variance. Thus, one can test the null hypothesis by assessing whether there is sufficient evidence to claim that the variance is positive. We construct a novel estimator for the variance of the dose-response function, for which we can fully characterize the null limiting distribution and thus perform well-calibrated tests of the null hypothesis. We also present an approach for constructing simultaneous confidence bands for the dose-response function by inverting our proposed hypothesis test. We assess the validity of our proposal in a simulation study. In a data example, we study, in a population of patients who have initiated treatment for HIV, how the distance required to travel to an HIV clinic affects retention in care.Comment: 39 pages, 5 figure