Management of locusts and grasshoppers in China

Locusts and grasshoppers are major economic pests in China and are controlled by a strategy of preventive management where about 1.5 million ha are treated each year. The preventive management system aims to keep locusts and grasshoppers at lower densities, so that the dense swarms seen in the past are no longer common and crop and pasture damage minimized. There is substantial cultural control, including conservation of natural enemies and reducing the area of favorable habitats through habitat modification. Even with substantial cultural control, locust and grasshopper infestations are still widespread, with 127 field stations having more than 2000 technicians involved in monitoring and control. These officers monitor and treat locust and grasshopper infestations and the data collected are integrated into a national computer-based platform. These data are analyzed and news bulletins are issued on where and when the densest infestations are likely to be so that extra resources can be provided when needed as part of coordinating an effective locust and grasshopper management program. In the past, treatments were by chemical pesticides, but in recent years there has been an increasing use of bio pesticides: namely, the naturally occurring fungus Metarhizium acridum and the microsporidian Paranosema locustae. While such products were used in only 5% of treatments during 2004, their use has increased to over 30% in recent years, which amounts to over 100,000 ha per year sprayed. These applications of bio pesticides against locusts and grasshoppers are more than all of the rest of the world combined

Determining the safety and effectiveness of Tai Chi: a critical overview of 210 systematic reviews of controlled clinical trials

Background - This overview summarizes the best available systematic review (SR) evidence on the health effects of Tai Chi. Methods - Nine databases (PubMed, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Medline, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Scientific Journal Database (VIP), Sino-Med, and Wanfang Database) were searched for SRs of controlled clinical trials of Tai Chi interventions published between Jan 2010 and Dec 2020 in any language. Effect estimates were extracted from the most recent, comprehensive, highest-quality SR for each population, condition, and outcome. SR quality was appraised with AMSTAR 2 and overall certainty of effect estimates with the GRADE method. Results - Of the 210 included SRs, 193 only included randomized controlled trials, one only included non-randomized studies of interventions, and 16 included both. Common conditions were neurological (18.6%), falls/balance (14.7%), cardiovascular (14.7%), musculoskeletal (11.0%), cancer (7.1%), and diabetes mellitus (6.7%). Except for stroke, no evidence for disease prevention was found; however, multiple proxy-outcomes/risks factors were evaluated. One hundred and fourteen effect estimates were extracted from 37 SRs (2 high, 6 moderate, 18 low, and 11 critically low quality), representing 59,306 adults. Compared to active and/or inactive controls, 66 of the 114 effect estimates reported clinically important benefits from Tai Chi, 53 reported an equivalent or marginal benefit, and 6 an equivalent risk of adverse events. Eight of the 114 effect estimates (7.0%) were rated as high, 43 (37.7%) moderate, 36 (31.6%) low, and 27 (23.7%) very low certainty evidence due to concerns with risk of bias (92/114, 80.7%), imprecision (43/114, 37.7%), inconsistency (37/114, 32.5%), and publication bias (3/114, 2.6%). SR quality was often limited by the search strategies, language bias, inadequate consideration of clinical, methodological, and statistical heterogeneity, poor reporting standards, and/or no registered SR protocol. Conclusions - The findings suggest Tai Chi has multidimensional effects, including physical, psychological and quality of life benefits for a wide range of conditions, as well as multimorbidity. Clinically important benefits were most consistently reported for Parkinson’s disease, falls risk, knee osteoarthritis, low back pain, cerebrovascular, and cardiovascular diseases including hypertension. For most conditions, higher-quality SRs with rigorous primary studies are required

Recurrent deletions of ULK4 in schizophrenia : a gene crucial for neuritogenesis and neuronal motility

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Optimal Strouhal number for swimming animals

To evaluate the swimming performances of aquatic animals, an important dimensionless quantity is the Strouhal number, St = fA/U, with f the tail-beat frequency, A the peak-to-peak tail amplitude, and U the swimming velocity. Experiments with flapping foils have exhibited maximum propulsive efficiency in the interval 0.25 < St < 0.35 and it has been argued that animals likely evolved to swim in the same narrow interval. Using Lighthill's elongated-body theory to address undulatory propulsion, it is demonstrated here that the optimal Strouhal number increases from 0.15 to 0.8 for animals spanning from the largest cetaceans to the smallest tadpoles. To assess the validity of this model, the swimming kinematics of 53 different species of aquatic animals have been compiled from the literature and it shows that their Strouhal numbers are consistently near the predicted optimum.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Expertise and the interpretation of computerized physiological data: implications for the design of computerized monitoring in neonatal intensive care

This paper presents the outcomes from a cognitive engineering project addressing the design problems of computerized monitoring in neonatal intensive care. Cognitive engineering is viewed, in this project, as a symbiosis between cognitive science and design practice. A range of methodologies has been used: interviews with neonatal staff, ward observations and experimental techniques. The results of these investigations are reported, focusing specifically on the differences between junior and senior physicians in their interpretation of monitored physiological data. It was found that the senior doctors made better use of the different knowledge sources available than the junior doctors. The senior doctors were able to identify more relevant physiological patterns and generated more and better inferences than did their junior colleagues. Expertise differences are discussed in the context of previous psychological research in medical expertise. Finally, the paper discusses the potential utility of these outcomes to inform the design of computerized decision support in neonatal intensive care

Regularizing made-to-measure particle models of galaxies

Made-to-measure methods such as the parallel code NMAGIC are powerful tools to build galaxy models reproducing observational data. They work by adapting the particle weights in an N-body system until the target observables are well matched. Here we introduce a moving prior regularization (MPR) method for such particle models. It is based on determining from the particles a distribution of priors in phase-space, which are updated in parallel with the weight adaptation. This method allows one to construct smooth models from noisy data without erasing global phase-space gradients. We first apply MPR to a spherical system for which the distribution function can in theory be uniquely recovered from idealized data. We show that NMAGIC with MPR indeed converges to the true solution with very good accuracy, independent of the initial particle model. Compared to the standard weight entropy regularization, biases in the anisotropy structure are removed and local fluctuations in the intrinsic distribution function are reduced. We then investigate how the uncertainties in the inferred dynamical structure increase with less complete and noisier kinematic data, and how the dependence on the initial particle model also increases. Finally, we apply the MPR technique to the two intermediate-luminosity elliptical galaxies NGC 4697 and NGC 3379, obtaining smoother dynamical models in luminous and dark matter potentials.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

The Epicurean Parasite: Horace, Satires 1.1-3

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace\u27s satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk

Improving City of Helena Time Leave Process

The City of Helena is struggling with timesheet management issues as it deals with the complexity of city policy and governance. Our team is using Six Sigma Methodology to understand the core variables in their leave tracking process that lead to negative outcomes, such as incorrect payroll and unrecorded leave. Specifically, we use the D-M-A-I-C stages of Six Sigma process improvement to identify the key variables that drive HR and payroll performance. The team applies statistical analysis to these critical variables to prove significance and impact of the ones that contribute the most to the problem faced, thus allowing improvement ideas to be targeted, measured, and controlled. By using the Six Sigma methodology, the team expects to significantly reduce the costs that the city of Helena faces in terms of time and resources not efficiently allocated

Ethnic In-Group Favoritism Among Minority and Majority Groups: Testing the Self-Esteem Hypothesis Among Preadolescents

The self-esteem hypothesis in intergroup relations, as proposed by social identity theory (SIT), states that successful intergroup discrimination enhances momentary collective self-esteem. This hypothesis is a source of continuing controversy. Furthermore, although SIT is increasingly used to account for children’s group attitudes, few studies have examined the hypothesis among children. In addition, the hypothesis’s generality makes it important to study among children from different ethnic groups. The present study, conducted among Dutch and Turkish preadolescents, examined momentary collective self-feelings as a consequence of ethnic group evaluations. The results tended to support the self-esteem hypothesis. In-group favoritism was found to have a self-enhancing effect among participants high in ethnic identification. This result was found for ethnic majority (Dutch) and minority (Turkish) participants.