Selenium supplemented fertilization - effects on the selenium content of foods and the selenium intake in Finland

The effect of Se fertilization was distinct. Winter cereals were not affected as much as spring cereals due to the different cultivation and fertilization practice. The variation between the farms was large. In organic cultivation Se content of cereals was low

The Minimal Length of a Lagrangian Cobordism between Legendrians

To investigate the rigidity and flexibility of Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds, we investigate the minimal length of such a cobordism, which is a $1$-dimensional measurement of the non-cylindrical portion of the cobordism. Our primary tool is a set of real-valued capacities for a Legendrian submanifold, which are derived from a filtered version of Legendrian Contact Homology. Relationships between capacities of Legendrians at the ends of a Lagrangian cobordism yield lower bounds on the length of the cobordism. We apply the capacities to Lagrangian cobordisms realizing vertical dilations (which may be arbitrarily short) and contractions (whose lengths are bounded below). We also study the interaction between length and the linking of multiple cobordisms as well as the lengths of cobordisms derived from non-trivial loops of Legendrian isotopies.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures. v2: Minor corrections in response to referee comments. More general statement in Proposition 3.3 and some reorganization at the end of Section

Rhetorical Strategies Implemented By The American Medical Association To Identify Roles Within The Interprofessional Healthcare Team

PURPOSE: Healthcare reform is introducing new models of care to serve complex patient needs, including expanded roles for nursing. This has resulted in interested parties debating formal definitions of provider roles in healthcare teams. The purpose of this study is to conduct a rhetorical criticism of content produced by the American Medical Association (AMA) concerning the role of providers within the healthcare team. THEORETICAL/CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: This study’s framework uses rhetorical criticism, an analysis of an organization’s “strategic use of symbols to generate meaning” (Hoffman & Ford, 2010). This analysis evaluates the rhetoric on its potential function both to influence the definition of provider roles and to critique how the organization’s potential power may be implemented. By understanding what the organization displays in its public texts, one can potentially infer the intentions of the organization. METHOD: Press releases and newsletter articles publicly available from the AMA website from 2010 to 2014 were selected based on their relevance to the discussion of healthcare team leadership. The texts were analyzed using a systematic approach to identify and describe rhetorical strategies. This is a systematic, rigorous method for deconstructing texts in order to draw conclusions about the choices a rhetor made in achieving a goal. The analysis was then further enhanced with relevant contextual and historical research, analyzing the development of health care professions as disciplines in the US, and the organization’s history itself in its development as a trade association. RESULTS: Rhetorical strategies used by the AMA include: Appealing to the values of patient safety, teamwork, and competent leaders of teams; and making logical arguments based on contradictions in lay definitions of teamwork and independence. These are used to argue for maintaining legal and financial interests for physicians within healthcare systems. Limitations include analyzing select materials publicly available without an AMA membership. CONCLUSIONS: Defining the role of members within the interprofessional team is of interest to healthcare providers and their representative organizations as new models of care attempt to increase quality, access, and value within the system. As nursing organizations attempt to expand nursing scope of practice at the state level, oppositional views of these bills should be understood to provide counterarguments and effectively engage stakeholders

A Hardy inequality in twisted waveguides

We show that twisting of an infinite straight three-dimensional tube with non-circular cross-section gives rise to a Hardy-type inequality for the associated Dirichlet Laplacian. As an application we prove certain stability of the spectrum of the Dirichlet Laplacian in locally and mildly bent tubes. Namely, it is known that any local bending, no matter how small, generates eigenvalues below the essential spectrum of the Laplacian in the tubes with arbitrary cross-sections rotated along a reference curve in an appropriate way. In the present paper we show that for any other rotation some critical strength of the bending is needed in order to induce a non-empty discrete spectrum.Comment: LaTeX, 20 page

Stability of the magnetic Schr\"odinger operator in a waveguide

The spectrum of the Schr\"odinger operator in a quantum waveguide is known to be unstable in two and three dimensions. Any enlargement of the waveguide produces eigenvalues beneath the continuous spectrum. Also if the waveguide is bent eigenvalues will arise below the continuous spectrum. In this paper a magnetic field is added into the system. The spectrum of the magnetic Schr\"odinger operator is proved to be stable under small local deformations and also under small bending of the waveguide. The proof includes a magnetic Hardy-type inequality in the waveguide, which is interesting in its own

Detecting hospital-acquired infections: A document classification approach using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting

Peer reviewe

Herbivory in a changing climate-Effects of plant genotype and experimentally induced variation in plant phenology on two summer-active lepidopteran herbivores and one fungal pathogen

With climate change, spring warming tends to advance plant leaf-out. While the timing of leaf-out has been shown to affect the quality of leaves for herbivores in spring, it is unclear whether such effects extend to herbivores active in summer. In this study, we first examined how spring and autumn phenology of seven Quercus robur genotypes responded to elevated temperatures in spring. We then tested whether the performance of two summer-active insect herbivores (Orthosia gothica and Polia nebulosa) and infection by a pathogen (Erysiphe alphitoides) were influenced by plant phenology, traits associated with genotype or the interaction between these two. Warm spring temperatures advanced both bud development and leaf senescence in Q. robur. Plants of different genotype differed in terms of both spring and autumn phenology. Plant phenology did not influence the performance of two insect herbivores and a pathogen, while traits associated with oak genotype had an effect on herbivore performance. Weight gain for O. gothica and ingestion for P. nebulosa differed by a factor of 4.38 and 2.23 among genotypes, respectively. Herbivore species active in summer were influenced by traits associated with plant genotype but not by phenology. This suggest that plant attackers active in summer may prove tolerant to shifts in host plant phenology-a pattern contrasting with previously documented effects on plant attackers active in spring and autumn

Background Speech Effects on Sentence Processing during Reading: An Eye Movement Study

Effects of background speech on reading were examined by playing aloud different types of background speech, while participants read long, syntactically complex and less complex sentences embedded in text. Readers&#39; eye movement patterns were used to study online sentence comprehension. Effects of background speech were primarily seen in rereading time. In Experiment 1, foreign-language background speech did not disrupt sentence processing. Experiment 2 demonstrated robust disruption in reading as a result of semantically and syntactically anomalous scrambled background speech preserving normal sentence-like intonation. Scrambled speech that was constructed from the text to-be read did not disrupt reading more than scrambled speech constructed from a different, semantically unrelated text. Experiment 3 showed that scrambled speech exacerbated the syntactic complexity effect more than coherent background speech, which also interfered with reading. Experiment 4 demonstrated that both semantically and syntactically anomalous speech produced no more disruption in reading than semantically anomalous but syntactically correct background speech. The pattern of results is best explained by a semantic account that stresses the importance of similarity in semantic processing, but not similarity in semantic content, between the reading task and background speech.</p

Dark energy domination in the Virgocentric flow

The standard \LambdaCDM cosmological model implies that all celestial bodies are embedded in a perfectly uniform dark energy background, represented by Einstein's cosmological constant, and experience its repulsive antigravity action. Can dark energy have strong dynamical effects on small cosmic scales as well as globally? Continuing our efforts to clarify this question, we focus now on the Virgo Cluster and the flow of expansion around it. We interpret the Hubble diagram, from a new database of velocities and distances of galaxies in the cluster and its environment, using a nonlinear analytical model which incorporates the antigravity force in terms of Newtonian mechanics. The key parameter is the zero-gravity radius, the distance at which gravity and antigravity are in balance. Our conclusions are: 1. The interplay between the gravity of the cluster and the antigravity of the dark energy background determines the kinematical structure of the system and controls its evolution. 2. The gravity dominates the quasi-stationary bound cluster, while the antigravity controls the Virgocentric flow, bringing order and regularity to the flow, which reaches linearity and the global Hubble rate at distances \ga 15 Mpc. 3. The cluster and the flow form a system similar to the Local Group and its outflow. In the velocity-distance diagram, the cluster-flow structure reproduces the group-flow structure with a scaling factor of about 10; the zero-gravity radius for the cluster system is also 10 times larger. The phase and dynamical similarity of the systems on the scales of 1-30 Mpc suggests that a two-component pattern may be universal for groups and clusters: a quasi-stationary bound central component and an expanding outflow around it, due to the nonlinear gravity-antigravity interplay with the dark energy dominating in the flow component.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Astronomy and Astrophysics (accepted