253 research outputs found
Bringing the Tiger Back from the Brink—The Six Percent Solution
This article does not have an abstract
A tablet computer-assisted motor and language skills training programme to promote communication development in children with autism: development and pilot study
Autism is a heterogenous condition, encompassing many different subtypes and presentations. Of those people with autism who lack communicative speech, some are more skilled at receptive language than their expressive difficulty might suggest. This disparity between what can be spoken and what can be understood correlates with motor and especially oral motor abilities, and thus may be a consequence of limits to oral motor skill. Point OutWords, tablet-based software targeted for this subgroup, builds on autistic perceptual and cognitive strengths to develop manual motor and oral motor skills prerequisite to communication by pointing or speaking. Although typical implementations of user-centred design rely on communicative speech, Point OutWords users were involved as co-creators both directly via their own nonverbal behavioural choices and indirectly via their communication therapists’ reports; resulting features include vectorised, high-contrast graphics, exogenous cues to help capture and maintain attention, customisable reinforcement prompts, and accommodation of open-loop visuomotor control
Relational approaches to poverty in rural India: social, ecological and technical dynamics
Poverty is now widely recognised as multidimensional, with indicators including healthcare, housing and sanitation. Yet, relational approaches that foreground political-cultural processes remain marginalised in policy discourses. Focusing on India, we review a wide range of relational approaches to rural poverty. Beginning with early approaches that focus on structural reproduction of class, caste and to a lesser extent gender inequality, we examine new relational approaches developed in the last two decades. The new approaches examine diverse ways in which poverty is experienced and shapes mobilisations against deprivation. They draw attention to poor people’s own articulations of deprivation and alternate conceptions of well-being. They also show how intersecting inequalities of class, caste and gender shape governance practices and political movements. Despite these important contributions, the new relational approaches pay limited attention to technologies and ecologies in shaping the experience of poverty. Reviewing studies on the Green Revolution and wider agrarian transformations in India, we then sketch the outlines of a hybrid relational approach to poverty that combines socio-technical and -ecological dynamics. We argue that such an approach is crucial to challenge narrow economising discourses on poverty and to bridge the policy silos of poverty alleviation and (environmentally) sustainable development
Collective oscillations of a stored deuteron beam close to the quantum limit
We investigated coherent betatron oscillations of a deuteron beam in the
storage ring COSY, excited by a detuned radio-frequency Wien filter. These beam
oscillations were detected by conventional beam position monitors, read out
with lock-in amplifiers. The response of the stored beam to the detuned Wien
filter was modelled using the ring lattice and time-dependent 3D field maps of
the radio-frequency Wien filter. The influence of uncertain system parameters
related to manufacturing tolerances and electronics was investigated using the
polynomial chaos expansion. With the currently available apparatus, we show
that oscillation amplitudes down to \SI{1}{\micro \meter} can be detected.
Future measurements of the electric dipole moment of protons will, however,
require control of the relative position of counter-propagating beams in the
sub-picometer range. Since the stored beam can be considered as a rarefied gas
of uncorrelated particles, we moreover demonstrate that the amplitudes of the
zero-point betatron oscillations of individual particles are within a factor of
10 of the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. As a consequence of this, we conclude
that quantum mechanics does not preclude the control of the beam centroids to
sub-picometer accuracy. The smallest Lorentz force exerted on a single particle
that we have been able to determine is \SI{10}{aN}.Comment: 38 pages, 16 figure
STROCSS 2021: Strengthening the reporting of cohort, cross-sectional and case-control studies in surgery
Introduction: Strengthening The Reporting Of Cohort Studies in Surgery (STROCSS) guidelines were developed in 2017 in order to improve the reporting quality of observational studies in surgery and updated in 2019. In order to maintain relevance and continue upholding good reporting quality among observational studies in surgery, we aimed to update STROCSS 2019 guidelines. /
Methods: A STROCSS 2021 steering group was formed to come up with proposals to update STROCSS 2019 guidelines. An expert panel of researchers assessed these proposals and judged whether they should become part of STROCSS 2021 guidelines or not, through a Delphi consensus exercise. /
Results: 42 people (89%) completed the DELPHI survey and hence participated in the development of STROCSS 2021 guidelines. All items received a score between 7 and 9 by greater than 70% of the participants, indicating a high level of agreement among the DELPHI group members with the proposed changes to all the items. /
Conclusion: We present updated STROCSS 2021 guidelines to ensure ongoing good reporting quality among observational studies in surgery
Spin decoherence and off-resonance behavior of radiofrequency-driven spin rotations in storage rings
Radiofrequency-driven resonant spin rotators are routinely used as standard
instruments in polarization experiments in particle and nuclear physics.
Maintaining the continuous exact parametric spin-resonance condition of the
equality of the spin rotator and the spin precession frequency during operation
constitutes one of the challenges. We present a detailed analytic description
of the impact of detuning the exact spin resonance on the vertical and the
in-plane precessing components of the polarization. An important part of the
formalism presented here is the consideration of experimentally relevant
spin-decoherence effects. We discuss applications of the developed formalism to
the interpretation of the experimental data on the novel pilot bunch approach
to control the spin-resonance condition during the operation of the
radiofrequency-driven Wien filter that is used as a spin rotator in the first
direct deuteron electric dipole moment measurement at COSY. We emphasize the
potential importance of the hitherto unexplored phase of the envelope of the
horizontal polarization as an indicator of the stability of the
radiofrequency-driven spin rotations in storage rings. The work presented here
serves as a satellite publication to the work published concurrently on the
proof of principle experiment about the so-called pilot bunch approach that was
developed to provide co-magnetometry for the deuteron electric dipole moment
experiment at COSY.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 5 table
Pilot bunch and co-magnetometry of polarized particles stored in a ring
In polarization experiments at storage rings, one of the challenges is to
maintain the spin-resonance condition of a radio-frequency spin rotator with
the spin-precessions of the orbiting particles. Time-dependent variations of
the magnetic fields of ring elements lead to unwanted variations of the spin
precession frequency. We report here on a solution to this problem by shielding
(or masking) one of the bunches stored in the ring from the high-frequency
fields of the spin rotator, so that the masked pilot bunch acts as a
co-magnetometer for the other signal bunch, tracking fluctuations in the ring
on a time scale of about one second. While the new method was developed
primarily for searches of electric dipole moments of charged particles, it may
have far-reaching implications for future spin physics facilities, such as the
EIC and NICA.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures + references + supplemental material (6 pages, 2
figures, 6 tables + references
Jaguar Densities across Human-Dominated Landscapes in Colombia: The Contribution of Unprotected Areas to Long Term Conservation
Large carnivores such as jaguars (Panthera onca) are species of conservation concern because they are suffering population declines and are keystone species in their ecosystems. Their large area requirements imply that unprotected and ever-increasing agricultural regions can be important habitats as they allow connectivity and dispersal among core protected areas. Yet information on jaguar densities across unprotected landscapes it is still scarce and crucially needed to assist management and range-wide conservation strategies. Our study provides the first jaguar density estimates of Colombia in agricultural regions which included cattle ranching, the main land use in the country, and oil palm cultivation, an increasing land use across the Neotropics. We used camera trapping across two agricultural landscapes located in the Magdalena River valley and in the Colombian llanos (47–53 stations respectively; >2000 trap nights at both sites) and classic and spatially explicit capture-recapture models with the sex of individuals as a covariate. Density estimates were 2.52±0.46–3.15±1.08 adults/100 km2 in the Magdalena valley, whereas 1.12±0.13–2.19±0.99 adults/100 km2 in the Colombian llanos, depending on analysis used. We suggest that jaguars are able to live across unprotected human-use areas and co-exist with agricultural landscapes including oil-palm plantations if natural areas and riparian habitats persist in the landscape and hunting of both jaguar and prey is limited. In the face of an expanding agriculture across the tropics we recommend land-use planning, adequate incentives, regulations, and good agricultural practices for range-wide jaguar connectivity and survival
Unprecedented within-species chromosome number cline in the Wood White butterfly Leptidea sinapis and its significance for karyotype evolution and speciation
Background: Species generally have a fixed number of chromosomes in the cell nuclei while between-species differences are common and often pronounced. These differences could have evolved through multiple speciation events, each involving the fixation of a single chromosomal rearrangement. Alternatively, marked changes in the karyotype may be the consequence of within-species accumulation of multiple chromosomal fissions/fusions, resulting in highly polymorphic systems with the subsequent extinction of intermediate karyomorphs. Although this mechanism of chromosome number evolution is possible in theory, it has not been well documented. Results: We present the discovery of exceptional intraspecific variability in the karyotype of the widespread Eurasian butterfly Leptidea sinapis. We show that within this species the diploid chromosome number gradually decreases from 2n = 106 in Spain to 2n = 56 in eastern Kazakhstan, resulting in a 6000 km-wide cline that originated recently (8,500 to 31,000 years ago). Remarkably, intrapopulational chromosome number polymorphism exists, the chromosome number range overlaps between some populations separated by hundreds of kilometers, and chromosomal heterozygotes are abundant. We demonstrate that this karyotypic variability is intraspecific because in L. sinapis a broad geographical distribution is coupled with a homogenous morphological and genetic structure. Conclusions: The discovered system represents the first clearly documented case of explosive chromosome number evolution through intraspecific and intrapopulation accumulation of multiple chromosomal changes. Leptidea sinapis may be used as a model system for studying speciation by means of chromosomally-based suppressed recombination mechanisms, as well as clinal speciation, a process that is theoretically possible but difficult to document. The discovered cline seems to represent a narrow time-window of the very first steps of species formation linked to multiple chromosomal changes that have occurred explosively. This case offers a rare opportunity to study this process before drift, dispersal, selection, extinction and speciation erase the traces of microevolutionary events and just leave the final picture of a pronounced interspecific chromosomal difference
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