Crown Ether-Metal ‘Sandwiches’ As Linking Mechanisms in Assembled Nanoparticle Films

Crown ether ligands attached to monolayer-protected clusters (MPCs) were assembled as films and the linking mechanism between the crown ether–metal ion–crown ether bridges between nanoparticles was examined. Thicker films exhibited a red shift in the absorbance maximum for the surface plasmon band which was attributed to the increasing aggregation and cross linking within the film. Quantized double layer charging peaks suggest that film growth is selective toward a specific core size or exchange rate, either of which affect the number of potential linking ligands in the periphery of the MPCs. Multi-layer growth of films was only achieved with metal ions capable of coordinating within the cavity of the 15-crown-5 ether. Our exchange reaction parameters are in stark contrast to other types of MPC film assemblies

Probabilistic approaches for modeling text structure and their application to text-to-text generation

Since the early days of generation research, it has been acknowledged that modeling the global structure of a document is crucial for producing coherent, readable output. However, traditional knowledge-intensive approaches have been of limited utility in addressing this problem since they cannot be effectively scaled to operate in domain-independent, large-scale applications. Due to this difficulty, existing text-to-text generation systems rarely rely on such structural information when producing an output text. Consequently, texts generated by these methods do not match the quality of those written by humans – they are often fraught with severe coherence violations and disfluencies. In this chapter, I will present probabilistic models of document structure that can be effectively learned from raw document collections. This feature distinguishes these new models from traditional knowledge intensive approaches used in symbolic concept-to-text generation. Our results demonstrate that these probabilistic models can be directly applied to content organization, and suggest that these models can prove useful in an even broader range of text-to-text applications than we have considered here.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER grant IIS- 0448168)Microsoft Research. New Faculty Fellowshi

Science and society: The Role of Long-term Studies in Environmental Stewardship

Long-term research should play a crucial role in addressing grand challenges in environmental stewardship. We examine the efforts of five Long Term Ecological Research Network sites to enhance policy, management, and conservation decisions for forest ecosystems. In these case studies, we explore the approaches used to inform policy on atmospheric deposition, public land management, land conservation, and urban forestry, including decisionmaker engagement and integration of local knowledge, application of models to analyze the potential consequences of policy and management decisions, and adaptive management to generate new knowledge and incorporate it into decisionmaking. Efforts to enhance the role of long-term research in informing major environmental challenges would benefit from the development of metrics to evaluate impact; stronger partnerships among research sites, professional societies, decisionmakers, and journalists; and greater investment in efforts to develop, test, and expand practice-based experiments at the interface of science and society

Animistic pragmatism and native ways of knowing: adaptive strategies for overcoming the struggle for food in the sub-Arctic

Background. Subsistence norms are part of the “ecosophy” or ecological philosophy of Alaska Native Peoples in the sub-Arctic, such as the Inupiat of Seward Peninsula. This kind of animistic pragmatism is a special source of practical wisdom that spans over thousands of years and which has been instrumental in the Iñupiat’s struggle to survive and thrive in harsh and evolving environments. Objective. I hope to show how narrative in relationship to the “ecosophy” of Alaska Native peoples can help to promote a more ecological orientation to address food insecurity in rural communities in Alaska. Alaska Native ecosophy recommends central values and virtues necessary to help address concerns in Alaska’s rural communities. Design. Here, I will tease out the nature of this “ecosophy” in terms of animistic pragmatism and then show why this form of pragmatism can be instrumental for problematizing multi-scalar, intergenerational, uncertain and complex environmental challenges like food security. Results. Native elders have been the embodiment of trans-generational distributed cognition,1 for example, collective memory, norms, information, knowledge, technical skills and experimental adaptive strategies. They are human “supercomputers,” historical epistemologists and moral philosophers of a sort who use narrative, a form of moral testimony, to help their communities face challenges and seize opportunities in the wake of an ever-changing landscape. Conclusions. The “ecosophy” of the Iñupiat of Seward Peninsula offers examples of “focal practices”, which are essential for environmental education. These focal practices instil key virtues, namely humility, gratitude, self-reliance, attentiveness, responsibility and responsiveness, that are necessary for subsistence living

PiSpy: an affordable, accessible, and flexible imaging platform for the automated observation of organismal biology and behavior

A great deal of understanding can be gleaned from direct observation of organismal growth, development, and behavior. However, direct observation can be time consuming and influence the organism through unintentional stimuli. Additionally, video capturing equipment can often be prohibitively expensive, difficult to modify to one’s specific needs, and may come with unnecessary features. Here, we describe PiSpy, a low-cost, automated video acquisition platform that uses a Raspberry Pi computer and camera to record video or images at specified time intervals or when externally triggered. All settings and controls, such as programmable light cycling, are accessible to users with no programming experience through an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Importantly, the entire PiSpy system can be assembled for less than $100 using laser-cut and 3D-printed components. We demonstrate the broad applications and flexibility of PiSpy across a range of model and non-model organisms. Designs, instructions, and code can be accessed through an online repository, where a global community of PiSpy users can also contribute their own unique customizations and help grow the community of open-source research solutions

Where, When and Why Brain Activation Differs for Bilinguals and Monolinguals during Picture Naming and Reading Aloud

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that when bilinguals named pictures or read words aloud, in their native or nonnative language, activation was higher relative to monolinguals in 5 left hemisphere regions: dorsal precentral gyrus, pars triangularis, pars opercularis, superior temporal gyrus, and planum temporale. We further demonstrate that these areas are sensitive to increasing demands on speech production in monolinguals. This suggests that the advantage of being bilingual comes at the expense of increased work in brain areas that support monolingual word processing. By comparing the effect of bilingualism across a range of tasks, we argue that activation is higher in bilinguals compared with monolinguals because word retrieval is more demanding; articulation of each word is less rehearsed; and speech output needs careful monitoring to avoid errors when competition for word selection occurs between, as well as within, language

New science, synthesis, scholarship, and strategic vision for society

Harvard Forest LTER (HFR) is a two decade-strong, integrated research and educational program investigating responses of forest dynamics to natural and human disturbances and environmental changes over broad spatial and temporal scales. HFR engages \u3e30 researchers, \u3e200 graduate and undergraduate students, and dozens of institutions in research into fundamental and applied ecological questions of national and international relevance. Through LTER I–IV, HFR has added historical perspectives, expanded its scope to the New England region, integrated social, biological, and physical sciences, and developed education and outreach programs for K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students, along with managers, decision-makers, and media professionals