Effect of Aquathol K on Hydrilla verticillata (L.F.) Royle

A recently synthesized herbicide Aquathol K was tested on the water weed Hydrilla verticil. Results from the laboraoty tests indicated that Aquathol K with concentrations ranging from 1.0 mg/l to 2.0 mg/l can kill this weed. EVidently, 100% injury was achieved within 10 days for the plants treated with the highest concentration., 2. 0 mg/l of Aquathol K. The rate of 100% injury was recorded much slower with 1.0 mg/l. With lower concentration O.Smg/1 and 0.1 mg/l, 100% injury was never achieved within 25 days. Therefore, the herbicide was not very effective at lower concentrations

Using an introduction website to start a family: implications for users and health practitioners

Donor insemination treatment offered in licensed clinics protects the donor, recipient and offspring both medically and legally. The internet has opened up novel, unregulated ways of donating sperm through ‘introduction websites’ and social media forums. Broadly three categories of women use introduction websites: those who want to have a child with no further involvement of the donor; those who wish to know the identity of the donor from the start and those who intend to electively co-parent, that is, to bring up the child together with the donor/father. Donors may choose to donate through introduction websites for altruistic reasons and/or in order to have greater involvement with the child. There are some donors who are motivated by the prospect of a sexual encounter, advertising their preference for natural insemination, via sexual intercourse or partial intercourse. When people make their own arrangements online, they may do so in the absence of clear, accurate information. In this article, we set out some of the issues that recipients and donors ought to consider before embarking on unregulated sperm donation

Recurrent stroke in Takayasu arteritis: a case report and review of literature

Takayasu Arteritis is a rare inflammatory vasculitis affecting medium to large blood vessels. Neurologic complications are seen in 10-20% of cases. A 28 year old female came in due to acute onset left sided weakness and numbness, with absent arterial pulses and blood pressure on the left extremities. She had a history of recurrent right-sided weakness and numbness. Imaging showed an infarct on the right thalamus and multiple chronic infarcts. CT aortogram was consistent with Takayasu Arteritis Type V. The patient was started dual antiplatelet consisting of Aspirin and Clopidogrel, and was started on Prednisone and Methotrexate with good clinical response

Automatic detection of cognitive impairment with virtual reality

Cognitive impairment features in neuropsychiatric conditions and when undiagnosed can have a severe impact on the affected individual's safety and ability to perform daily tasks. Virtual Reality (VR) systems are increasingly being explored for the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of cognitive impairment. In this paper, we describe novel VR-derived measures of cognitive performance and show their correspondence with clinically-validated cognitive performance measures. We use an immersive VR environment called VStore where participants complete a simulated supermarket shopping task. People with psychosis (k=26) and non-patient controls (k=128) participated in the study, spanning ages 20-79 years. The individuals were split into two cohorts, a homogeneous non-patient cohort (k=99 non-patient participants) and a heterogeneous cohort (k=26 patients, k=29 non-patient participants). Participants' spatio-temporal behaviour in VStore is used to extract four features, namely, route optimality score, proportional distance score, execution error score, and hesitation score using the Traveling Salesman Problem and explore-exploit decision mathematics. These extracted features are mapped to seven validated cognitive performance scores, via linear regression models. The most statistically important feature is found to be the hesitation score. When combined with the remaining extracted features, the multiple linear regression model resulted in statistically significant results with R2 = 0.369, F-Stat = 7.158, p(F-Stat) = 0.000128

The SYZ conjecture via homological mirror symmetry

These are expository notes based on a talk given at the Superschool on derived categories and D-branes at University of Alberta in July of 2016. The goal of these notes is to give a motivated introduction to the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow (SYZ) conjecture from the point of view of homological mirror symmetry.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the Superschool on derived categories and D-brane

Clinical prompt learning with frozen language models

When the first transformer-based language models were published in the late 2010s, pretraining with general text and then fine-tuning the model on a task-specific dataset often achieved the state-of-the-art performance. However, more recent work suggests that for some tasks, directly prompting the pretrained model matches or surpasses fine-tuning in performance with few or no model parameter updates required. The use of prompts with language models for natural language processing (NLP) tasks is known as prompt learning. We investigated the viability of prompt learning on clinically meaningful decision tasks and directly compared this with more traditional fine-tuning methods. Results show that prompt learning methods were able to match or surpass the performance of traditional fine-tuning with up to 1000 times fewer trainable parameters, less training time, less training data, and lower computation resource requirements. We argue that these characteristics make prompt learning a very desirable alternative to traditional fine-tuning for clinical tasks, where the computational resources of public health providers are limited, and where data can often not be made available or not be used for fine-tuning due to patient privacy concerns. The complementary code to reproduce the experiments presented in this work can be found at https://github.com/NtaylorOX/Public_Clinical_Prompt

Realising stratified psychiatry using multidimensional signatures and trajectories

BACKGROUND: Stratified or personalised medicine targets treatments for groups of individuals with a disorder based on individual heterogeneity and shared factors that influence the likelihood of response. Psychiatry has traditionally defined diagnoses by constellations of co-occurring signs and symptoms that are assigned a categorical label (e.g. schizophrenia). Trial methodology in psychiatry has evaluated interventions targeted at these categorical entities, with diagnoses being equated to disorders. Recent insights into both the nosology and neurobiology of psychiatric disorder reveal that traditional categorical diagnoses cannot be equated with disorders. We argue that current quantitative methodology (1) inherits these categorical assumptions, (2) allows only for the discovery of average treatment response, (3) relies on composite outcome measures and (4) sacrifices valuable predictive information for stratified and personalised treatment in psychiatry. METHODS AND FINDINGS: To achieve a truly ‘stratified psychiatry’ we propose and then operationalise two necessary steps: first, a formal multi-dimensional representation of disorder definition and clinical state, and second, the similar redefinition of outcomes as multidimensional constructs that can expose within- and between-patient differences in response. We use the categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia—conceptualised as a label for heterogeneous disorders—as a means of introducing operational definitions of stratified psychiatry using principles from multivariate analysis. We demonstrate this framework by application to the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness dataset, showing heterogeneity in both patient clinical states and their trajectories after treatment that are lost in the traditional categorical approach with composite outcomes. We then systematically review a decade of registered clinical trials for cognitive deficits in schizophrenia highlighting existing assumptions of categorical diagnoses and aggregate outcomes while identifying a small number of trials that could be reanalysed using our proposal. CONCLUSION: We describe quantitative methods for the development of a multi-dimensional model of clinical state, disorders and trajectories which practically realises stratified psychiatry. We highlight the potential for recovering existing trial data, the implications for stratified psychiatry in trial design and clinical treatment and finally, describe different kinds of probabilistic reasoning tools necessary to implement stratification

Migration Pathways, Behavioural Thermoregulation and Overwintering Grounds of Blue Sharks in the Northwest Atlantic

The blue shark Prionace glauca is the most abundant large pelagic shark in the Atlantic Ocean. Although recaptures of tagged sharks have shown that the species is highly migratory, migration pathways towards the overwintering grounds remain poorly understood. We used archival satellite pop-up tags to track 23 blue sharks over a mean period of 88 days as they departed the coastal waters of North America in the autumn. Within 1–2 days of entering the Gulf Stream (median date of 21 Oct), all sharks initiated a striking diel vertical migration, taking them from a mean nighttime depth of 74 m to a mean depth of 412 m during the day as they appeared to pursue vertically migrating squid and fish prey. Although functionally blind at depth, calculations suggest that there would be a ∼2.5-fold thermoregulatory advantage to swimming and feeding in the markedly cooler deep waters, even if there was any reduced foraging success associated with the extreme depth. Noting that the Gulf Stream current speeds are reduced at depth, we used a detailed circulation model of the North Atlantic to examine the influence of the diving behaviour on the advection experienced by the sharks. However, there was no indication that the shark diving resulted in a significant modification of their net migratory pathway. The relative abundance of deep-diving sharks, swordfish, and sperm whales in the Gulf Stream and adjacent waters suggests that it may serve as a key winter feeding ground for large pelagic predators in the North Atlantic