Adaptive mutation using statistics mechanism for genetic algorithms

Copyright @ 2004 Springer-Verla

'What vision?': experiences of Team members in a community service for adults with intellectual disabilities.

BACKGROUND: In the UK, the closure of 'long-stay' hospitals was accompanied by the development of community teams (CTs) to support people with intellectual disabilities (IDs) to live in community settings. The self-reported experiences of staff working in such teams have been neglected. METHODS: Focusing on a single county-wide service, comprising five multi-disciplinary and inter-agency CTs, we measured perceptions among the health care and care management Team members of (1) their personal well-being; (2) the functioning of their team; and (3) the organisation's commitment to quality, and culture. RESULTS: Almost three-quarters of the questionnaires were returned (73/101; 72%). The scores of health care practitioners and care managers were very similar: (1) the MBI scores of more than half the respondents were 'of concern'; (2) similarly, almost four in ten respondents' scores on the Vision scale of the TCI were 'of concern'; (3) the perceived commitment to quality (QIIS-II Part 2) was uncertain; and (4) the organisational culture (QIIS-II, Part 1) was viewed as primarily hierarchical. DISCUSSION: The perceived absence of a vision for the service, combined with a dominant culture viewed by its members as strongly focussed on bureaucracy and process, potentially compromises the ability of these CTs to respond proactively to the needs of people with IDs. Given the changes in legislation, policy and practice that have taken place since CTs were established, it would be timely to revisit their role and purpose.We are grateful to all our participants in the IDP, without whom the study could not have taken place, to Professor Eivor Oborn (Warwick Business School) for her insights in the development of the study. Funding was provided by the NIHR’s Collaboration for Health Research & Care (CLAHRC) for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough. The preparation of the paper was funded by the NIHR’s CLAHRC East of England (ICHC, KAW, AJH, AL, EJ, APW). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via https://doi.org/10.1111/jir.1231

SARS-related Virus Predating SARS Outbreak, Hong Kong

Using immunofluorescence and neutralization assays, we detected antibodies to human severe acute respiratory syndrome–associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and/or animal SARS-CoV–like virus in 17 (1.8%) of 938 adults recruited in 2001. This finding suggests that a small proportion of healthy persons in Hong Kong had been exposed to SARS-related viruses at least 2 years before the recent SARS outbreak

Earth science: Redox state of early magmas

International audienceA study of cerium in zircon minerals has allowed an assessment of the redox conditions that prevailed when Earth's earliest magmas formed. The results suggest that the mantle became oxidized sooner than had been though

Soil methane sink capacity response to a long-term wildfire chronosequence in Northern Sweden

Boreal forests occupy nearly one fifth of the terrestrial land surface and are recognised as globally important regulators of carbon (C) cycling and greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon sequestration processes in these forests include assimilation of CO2 into biomass and subsequently into soil organic matter, and soil microbial oxidation of methane (CH4). In this study we explored how ecosystem retrogression, which drives vegetation change, regulates the important process of soil CH4 oxidation in boreal forests. We measured soil CH4 oxidation processes on a group of 30 forested islands in northern Sweden differing greatly in fire history, and collectively representing a retrogressive chronosequence, spanning 5000 years. Across these islands the build-up of soil organic matter was observed to increase with time since fire disturbance, with a significant correlation between greater humus depth and increased net soil CH4 oxidation rates. We suggest that this increase in net CH4 oxidation rates, in the absence of disturbance, results as deeper humus stores accumulate and provide niches for methanotrophs to thrive. By using this gradient we have discovered important regulatory controls on the stability of soil CH4 oxidation processes that could not have not been explored through shorter-term experiments. Our findings indicate that in the absence of human interventions such as fire suppression, and with increased wildfire frequency, the globally important boreal CH4 sink could be diminished

Evaluating the importance of metamorphism in the foundering of continental crust

The metamorphic conditions and mechanisms required to induce foundering in deep arc crust are assessed using an example of representative lower crust in SW New Zealand. Composite plutons of Cretaceous monzodiorite and gabbro were emplaced at ~1.2 and 1.8 GPa are parts of the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss (WFO); examples of the plutons are tectonically juxtaposed along a structure that excised ~25 km of crust. The 1.8 GPa Breaksea Orthogneiss includes suitably dense minor components (e.g. eclogite) capable of foundering at peak conditions. As the eclogite facies boundary has a positive dP/dT, cooling from supra-solidus conditions (T > 950 ºC) at high-P should be accompanied by omphacite and garnet growth. However, a high monzodioritic proportion and inefficient metamorphism in the Breaksea Orthogneiss resulted in its positive buoyancy and preservation. Metamorphic inefficiency and compositional relationships in the 1.2 GPa Malaspina Pluton meant it was never likely to have developed densities sufficiently high to founder. These relationships suggest that the deep arc crust must have primarily involved significant igneous accumulation of garnet–clinopyroxene (in proportions >75%). Crustal dismemberment with or without the development of extensional shear zones is proposed to have induced foundering of excised cumulate material at P > 1.2 GPa

Migratory Connectivity of the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus): Patterns of Spring Re-Colonization in Eastern North America

Each year, millions of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) migrate up to 3000 km from their overwintering grounds in central Mexico to breed in eastern North America. Malcolm et al. (1993) articulated two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain how Monarchs re-colonize North America each spring. The ‘successive brood’ hypothesis proposes that monarchs migrate from Mexico to the Gulf Coast, lay eggs and die, leaving northern re-colonization of the breeding range to subsequent generations. The ‘single sweep’ hypothesis proposes that overwintering monarchs continue to migrate northward after arriving on the Gulf coast and may reach the northern portion of the breeding range, laying eggs along the way. To examine these hypotheses, we sampled monarchs throughout the northern breeding range and combined stable-hydrogen isotopes (δD) to estimate natal origin with wing wear scores to differentiate between individuals born in the current vs. previous year. Similar to Malcolm et al. (1993), we found that the majority of the northern breeding range was re-colonized by the first generation of monarchs (90%). We also estimated that a small number of individuals (10%) originated directly from Mexico and, therefore adopted a sweep strategy. Contrary to Malcolm et al. (1993), we found that 62% of monarchs sampled in the Great Lakes originated from the Central U.S., suggesting that this region is important for sustaining production in the northern breeding areas. Our results provide new evidence of re-colonization patterns in monarchs and contribute important information towards identifying productive breeding regions of this unique migratory insect

A compositional analysis of physical activity, sedentary time, and sleep and associated health outcomes in children and adults with Cystic Fibrosis.

This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this record. Data Availability Statement: The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to GDPR regulations and to protect individual privacy but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.This study sought to investigate the association of light physical activity (LPA), moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), sedentary time (SED), and sleep with lung function in children and adults with CF. In total, 86 children (41 females; 13.6 ± 2.8 years; FEV1%predicted: 86 ± 1%) and 43 adults (21 females; 24.6 ± 4.7 years; FEV1%predicted: 63 ± 21%) with CF participated in this study. Wrist-worn accelerometery was used to assess PA, SED and sleep. Compositional linear regression models were conducted following normalisation via isometric log-ratio transformations. Sequential binary partitioning was applied to investigate the impact of reallocating 10 to 30 min between each behaviour on FEV1%predicted. A decline in FEV1%predicted was predicted with the reallocation of 30 min from MVPA to SED or LPA or sleep to any other behaviour in children (-3.04--0.005%) and adults (-3.58--0.005%). Conversely, improvements in FEV1%predicted were predicted when 30 min was reallocated to MVPA from LPA or SED in children (0.12-1.59%) and adults (0.77-2.10%), or when 30 min was reallocated to sleep from any other behaviour in both children (0.23-2.56%) and adults (1.08-3.58%). This study supports the importance of MVPA and sleep for maintaining and promoting lung function in people with CF.Cystic Fibrosis Trust U

What makes a problem hard for a genetic algorithm? Some anomalous results and their explanation

What makes a problem easy or hard for a genetic algorithm (GA)? This question has become increasingly important as people have tried to apply the GA to ever more diverse types of problems. Much previous work on this question has studied the relationship between GA performance and the structure of a given fitness function when it is expressed as a Walsh polynomial . The work of Bethke, Goldberg, and others has produced certain theoretical results about this relationship. In this article we review these theoretical results, and then discuss a number of seemingly anomalous experimental results reported by Tanese concerning the performance of the GA on a subclass of Walsh polynomials, some members of which were expected to be easy for the GA to optimize. Tanese found that the GA was poor at optimizing all functions in this subclass, that a partitioning of a single large population into a number of smaller independent populations seemed to improve performance, and that hillelimbing outperformed both the original and partitioned forms of the GA on these functions. These results seemed to contradict several commonly held expectations about GAs.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/46892/1/10994_2004_Article_BF00993046.pd