134 research outputs found
EFFECTS OF RISK ON OPTIMAL NITROGEN FERTILIZATION DATES IN WINTER WHEAT PRODUCTION AS AFFECTED BY DISEASE AND NITROGEN SOURCE
Optimal fertilization dates were found for two nitrogen sources in the presence of two diseases for wheat farmers with different risk preferences. Risk was independent of fertilization date. Ammonium Nitrate and Urea-Ammonium Nitrate did not affect risk differently. Ammonium Nitrate applied on March 9 was optimal regardless of risk preferences.Crop Production/Industries,
EFFECTS OF RISK, DISEASE, AND NITROGEN SOURCE ON OPTIMAL NITROGEN FERTILIZATION RATES IN WINTER WHEAT PRODUCTION
Interactions among nitrogen (N) fertilization rate, N source, and disease severity can affect mean yield and yield variance in conservation tillage wheat production. A Just-Pope model was used to evaluate the effects of N rate, N source, and disease on the spring N-fertilization decision. Ammonium nitrate (AN) was the utility-maximizing N source regardless of risk preferences. The net-return-maximizing AN rate was 92 lb N/acre, providing 35.11/acre.Crop Production/Industries,
Vaccine hesitancy: clarifying a theoretical framework for an ambiguous notion.
Today, according to many public health experts, public confidence in vaccines is waning. The term "vaccine hesitancy" (VH) is increasingly used to describe the spread of such vaccine reluctance. But VH is an ambiguous notion and its theoretical background appears uncertain. To clarify this concept, we first review the current definitions of VH in the public health literature and examine its most prominent characteristics. VH has been defined as a set of beliefs, attitudes, or behaviours, or some combination of them, shared by a large and heterogeneous portion of the population and including people who exhibit reluctant conformism (they may either decline a vaccine, delay it or accept it despite their doubts) and vaccine-specific behaviours. Secondly, we underline some of the ambiguities of this notion and argue that it is more a catchall category than a real concept. We also call into question the usefulness of understanding VH as an intermediate position along a continuum ranging from anti-vaccine to pro-vaccine attitudes, and we discuss its qualification as a belief, attitude or behaviour. Thirdly, we propose a theoretical framework, based on previous literature and taking into account some major structural features of contemporary societies, that considers VH as a kind of decision-making process that depends on people's level of commitment to healthism/risk culture and on their level of confidence in the health authorities and mainstream medicine
Developmental Methylmercury Exposure Affects Swimming Behavior and Foraging Efficiency of Yellow Perch (Perca flavescens) Larvae
Methylmercury (MeHg) is a pervasive and ubiquitous environmental neurotoxicant within aquatic ecosystems, known to alter behavior in fish and other vertebrates. This study sought to assess the behavioral effects of developmental MeHg exposure on larval yellow perch (Perca flavescens)--a nonmodel fish species native to the Great Lakes. Embryos were exposed to MeHg (0, 30, 100, 300, and 1000 nM) for 20 h and then reared to 25 days post fertilization (dpf) for analyses of spontaneous swimming, visual motor response (VMR), and foraging efficiency. MeHg exposures rendered total mercury (THg) body burdens of 0.02, 0.21, 0.95, 3.14, and 14.93 μg/g (wet weight). Organisms exposed to 1000 nM exhibited high mortality; thus, they were excluded from downstream behavioral analyses. All MeHg exposures tested were associated with a reduction in spontaneous swimming at 17 and 25 dpf. Exposure to 30 and 100 nM MeHg caused altered locomotor output during the VMR assay at 21 dpf, whereas exposure to 100 nM MeHg was associated with decreased foraging efficiency at 25 dpf. For the sake of comparison, the secondlowest exposure tested here rendered a THg burden that represents the permissible level of consumable fish in the United States. Moreover, this dose is reported in roughly two-thirds of consumable fish species monitored in the United States, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Although the THg body burdens reported here were higher than expected in the environment, our study is the first to analyze the effects of MeHg exposure on fundamental survival behaviors of yellow perch larvae and advances in the exploration of the ecological relevance of behavioral end points
CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison
Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve
expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present
CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240
patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14
observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertainties inherent in
radiograph interpretation. We investigate different approaches to using the
uncertainty labels for training convolutional neural networks that output the
probability of these observations given the available frontal and lateral
radiographs. On a validation set of 200 chest radiographic studies which were
manually annotated by 3 board-certified radiologists, we find that different
uncertainty approaches are useful for different pathologies. We then evaluate
our best model on a test set composed of 500 chest radiographic studies
annotated by a consensus of 5 board-certified radiologists, and compare the
performance of our model to that of 3 additional radiologists in the detection
of 5 selected pathologies. On Cardiomegaly, Edema, and Pleural Effusion, the
model ROC and PR curves lie above all 3 radiologist operating points. We
release the dataset to the public as a standard benchmark to evaluate
performance of chest radiograph interpretation models.
The dataset is freely available at
https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/competitions/chexpert .Comment: Published in AAAI 201
Aromatase inhibition remodels the clonal architecture of estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancers
Resistance to oestrogen-deprivation therapy is common in oestrogen-receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer. To better understand the contributions of tumour heterogeneity and evolution to resistance, here we perform comprehensive genomic characterization of 22 primary tumours sampled before and after 4 months of neoadjuvant aromatase inhibitor (NAI) treatment. Comparing whole-genome sequencing of tumour/normal pairs from the two time points, with coincident tumour RNA sequencing, reveals widespread spatial and temporal heterogeneity, with marked remodelling of the clonal landscape in response to NAI. Two cases have genomic evidence of two independent tumours, most obviously an ER− ‘collision tumour', which was only detected after NAI treatment of baseline ER+ disease. Many mutations are newly detected or enriched post treatment, including two ligand-binding domain mutations in ESR1. The observed clonal complexity of the ER+ breast cancer genome suggests that precision medicine approaches based on genomic analysis of a single specimen are likely insufficient to capture all clinically significant information
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measurements of the growth of structure and expansion rate at z=0.57 from anisotropic clustering
We analyze the anisotropic clustering of massive galaxies from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Data
Release 9 (DR9) sample, which consists of 264,283 galaxies in the redshift
range 0.43 < z < 0.7 spanning 3,275 square degrees. Both peculiar velocities
and errors in the assumed redshift-distance relation ("Alcock-Paczynski
effect") generate correlations between clustering amplitude and orientation
with respect to the line-of-sight. Together with the sharp baryon acoustic
oscillation (BAO) standard ruler, our measurements of the broadband shape of
the monopole and quadrupole correlation functions simultaneously constrain the
comoving angular diameter distance (2190 +/- 61 Mpc) to z=0.57, the Hubble
expansion rate at z=0.57 (92.4 +/- 4.5 km/s/Mpc), and the growth rate of
structure at that same redshift (d sigma8/d ln a = 0.43 +/- 0.069). Our
analysis provides the best current direct determination of both DA and H in
galaxy clustering data using this technique. If we further assume a LCDM
expansion history, our growth constraint tightens to d sigma8/d ln a = 0.415
+/- 0.034. In combination with the cosmic microwave background, our
measurements of DA, H, and growth all separately require dark energy at z >
0.57, and when combined imply \Omega_{\Lambda} = 0.74 +/- 0.016, independent of
the Universe's evolution at z<0.57. In our companion paper (Samushia et al.
prep), we explore further cosmological implications of these observations.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, submitted to MNRAS, comments welcom
A Two-Component Probability Distribution Function Describes the mid-IR Emission from the Disks of Star-Forming Galaxies
High-resolution JWST-MIRI images of nearby spiral galaxies reveal emission
with complex substructures that trace dust heated both by massive young stars
and the diffuse interstellar radiation field. We present high angular (0."85)
and physical resolution (20-80 pc) measurements of the probability distribution
function (PDF) of mid-infrared (mid-IR) emission (7.7-21 m) from 19 nearby
star-forming galaxies from the PHANGS-JWST Cycle-1 Treasury. The PDFs of mid-IR
emission from the disks of all 19 galaxies consistently show two distinct
components: an approximately log-normal distribution at lower intensities and a
high-intensity power-law component. These two components only emerge once
individual star-forming regions are resolved. Comparing with locations of HII
regions identified from VLT/MUSE H-mapping, we infer that the power-law
component arises from star-forming regions and thus primarily traces dust
heated by young stars. In the continuum-dominated 21 m band, the power-law
is more prominent and contains roughly half of the total flux. At 7.7-11.3
m, the power-law is suppressed by the destruction of small grains
(including PAHs) close to HII regions while the log-normal component tracing
the dust column in diffuse regions appears more prominent. The width and shape
of the log-normal diffuse emission PDFs in galactic disks remain consistent
across our sample, implying a log-normal gas column density
(H)cm shaped by supersonic turbulence with typical
(isothermal) turbulent Mach numbers . Finally, we describe how the
PDFs of galactic disks are assembled from dusty HII regions and diffuse gas,
and discuss how the measured PDF parameters correlate with global properties
such as star-formation rate and gas surface density.Comment: 30 pages without appendix, 17 figures, (with appendix images of full
sample: 56 pages, 39 figures), accepted in A
What we can learn from multi-band observations of black hole binaries
The LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave (GW) interferometers have to-date detected ten merging black hole (BH) binaries, some with masses considerably larger than had been anticipated. Stellar-mass BH binaries at the high end of the observed mass range (with "chirp mass" M ≳ 25M⊙) should be detectable by a space-based GW observatory years before those binaries become visible to ground-based GW detectors. This white paper discusses some of the synergies that result when the same binaries are observed by instruments in space and on the ground. We consider intermediate-mass black hole binaries (with total mass M∼10²−10⁴ M⊙) as well as stellar-mass black hole binaries. We illustrate how combining space-based and ground-based data sets can break degeneracies and thereby improve our understanding of the binary's physical parameters. While early work focused on how space-based observatories can forecast precisely when some mergers will be observed on the ground, the reverse is also important: ground-based detections will allow us to "dig deeper" into archived, space-based data to confidently identify black hole inspirals whose signal-to-noise ratios were originally sub-threshold, increasing the number of binaries observed in both bands by a factor of ∼4−7
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