Pace and Process of Active Folding and Fluvial Incision Across the Kantishna Hills Anticline, Central Alaska

Rates of northern Alaska Range thrust system deformation are poorly constrained. Shortening at the system\u27s west end is focused on the Kantishna Hills anticline. Where the McKinley River cuts across the anticline, the landscape records both Late Pleistocene deformation and climatic change. New optically stimulated luminescence and cosmogenic 10Be depth profile dates of three McKinley River terrace levels (~22, ~18, and ~14–9 ka) match independently determined ages of local glacial maxima, consistent with climate-driven terrace formation. Terrace ages quantify rates of differential bedrock incision, uplift, and shortening based on fault depth inferred from microseismicity. Differential rock uplift and incision (≤1.4 m/kyr) drive significant channel width narrowing in response to ongoing folding at a shortening rate of ~1.2 m/kyr. Our results constrain northern Alaska Range thrust system deformation rates, and elucidate superimposed landscape responses to Late Pleistocene climate change and active folding with broad geomorphic implications

The growth of northeastern Tibet and its relevance to large-scale continental geodynamics: A review of recent studies

Recent studies of the northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau have called attention to two emerging views of how the Tibetan Plateau has grown. First, deformation in northern Tibet began essentially at the time of collision with India, not 10–20 Myr later as might be expected if the locus of activity migrated northward as India penetrated the rest of Eurasia. Thus, the north-south dimensions of the Tibetan Plateau were set mainly by differences in lithospheric strength, with strong lithosphere beneath India and the Tarim and Qaidam basins steadily encroaching on one another as the region between them, the present-day Tibetan Plateau, deformed, and its north-south dimension became narrower. Second, abundant evidence calls for acceleration of deformation, including the formation of new faults, in northeastern Tibet since ~15 Ma and a less precisely dated change in orientation of crustal shortening since ~20 Ma. This reorientation of crustal shortening and roughly concurrent outward growth of high terrain, which swings from NNE-SSW in northern Tibet to more NE-SW and even ENE-WSW in the easternmost part of northeastern Tibet, are likely to be, in part, a consequence of crustal thickening within the high Tibetan Plateau reaching a limit, and the locus of continued shortening then migrating to the northeastern and eastern flanks. These changes in rates and orientation also could result from removal of some or all mantle lithosphere and increased gravitational potential energy per unit area and from a weakening of crustal material so that it could flow in response to pressure gradients set by evolving differences in elevation

The governors of school markets? : Local education authorities, school choice and equity in Finland and Sweden

As one of the key elements of the Nordic welfare model, education systems are based on the idea of providing equal educational opportunities, regardless of gender, social class and geographic origin. Since the 1990s, Nordic welfare states have undergone a gradual but wide-ranging transformation towards a more market-based mode of public service delivery. Along this trajectory, the advent of school choice policy and the growing variation in the between-school achievement results have diversified the previously homogenous Nordic education systems. The aim of our paper is to analyse how Finnish and Swedish local education authorities comprehend and respond to the intertwinement of the market logic of school choice and the ideology of equality. The data consist of two sets of in-depth thematic interviews with staff from the local providers of education, municipal education authorities. The analysis discloses the ways in which national legislation has authorized municipal authorities to govern the provision of education.Peer reviewe

Corpus annotation for mining biomedical events from literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Advanced Text Mining (TM) such as semantic enrichment of papers, event or relation extraction, and intelligent Question Answering have increasingly attracted attention in the bio-medical domain. For such attempts to succeed, text annotation from the biological point of view is indispensable. However, due to the complexity of the task, semantic annotation has never been tried on a large scale, apart from relatively simple term annotation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have completed a new type of semantic annotation, event annotation, which is an addition to the existing annotations in the GENIA corpus. The corpus has already been annotated with POS (Parts of Speech), syntactic trees, terms, etc. The new annotation was made on half of the GENIA corpus, consisting of 1,000 Medline abstracts. It contains 9,372 sentences in which 36,114 events are identified. The major challenges during event annotation were (1) to design a scheme of annotation which meets specific requirements of text annotation, (2) to achieve biology-oriented annotation which reflect biologists' interpretation of text, and (3) to ensure the homogeneity of annotation quality across annotators. To meet these challenges, we introduced new concepts such as Single-facet Annotation and Semantic Typing, which have collectively contributed to successful completion of a large scale annotation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The resulting event-annotated corpus is the largest and one of the best in quality among similar annotation efforts. We expect it to become a valuable resource for NLP (Natural Language Processing)-based TM in the bio-medical domain.</p

Molecular and Evolutionary Bases of Within-Patient Genotypic and Phenotypic Diversity in Escherichia coli Extraintestinal Infections

Although polymicrobial infections, caused by combinations of viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, are being recognised with increasing frequency, little is known about the occurrence of within-species diversity in bacterial infections and the molecular and evolutionary bases of this diversity. We used multiple approaches to study the genomic and phenotypic diversity among 226 Escherichia coli isolates from deep and closed visceral infections occurring in 19 patients. We observed genomic variability among isolates from the same site within 11 patients. This diversity was of two types, as patients were infected either by several distinct E. coli clones (4 patients) or by members of a single clone that exhibit micro-heterogeneity (11 patients); both types of diversity were present in 4 patients. A surprisingly wide continuum of antibiotic resistance, outer membrane permeability, growth rate, stress resistance, red dry and rough morphotype characteristics and virulence properties were present within the isolates of single clones in 8 of the 11 patients showing genomic micro-heterogeneity. Many of the observed phenotypic differences within clones affected the trade-off between self-preservation and nutritional competence (SPANC). We showed in 3 patients that this phenotypic variability was associated with distinct levels of RpoS in co-existing isolates. Genome mutational analysis and global proteomic comparisons in isolates from a patient revealed a star-like relationship of changes amongst clonally diverging isolates. A mathematical model demonstrated that multiple genotypes with distinct RpoS levels can co-exist as a result of the SPANC trade-off. In the cases involving infection by a single clone, we present several lines of evidence to suggest diversification during the infectious process rather than an infection by multiple isolates exhibiting a micro-heterogeneity. Our results suggest that bacteria are subject to trade-offs during an infectious process and that the observed diversity resembled results obtained in experimental evolution studies. Whatever the mechanisms leading to diversity, our results have strong medical implications in terms of the need for more extensive isolate testing before deciding on antibiotic therapies