Changes in Livestock Farming and Reestablishment of Host Organizations of the Ovoo Ritual in Mongolia with Emphasis on Otog Area in Inner Mongolia

Lately, local governments in Inner Mongolia have been spending an enormous amount of public money on carrying out once-forgotten traditional rituals to revitalize the countryʼs traditional culture. In livestock farming regions, local governments take the initiative in the resurgence of the traditional culture by facilitating the performance of the Ovoo ritual that takes place every summer. Various events are held in the name of the Ovoo Cultural Festival. 　Many previous studies examined the Ovoo ritual-related public events organized at league and banner levels under the authority of local governments to find out how the ritual has been handed down through generations as a rite in livestock farming culture. In the livestock sector, the form of farming is undergoing various changes. However, only a few academics have studied the influence of these changes on traditional livestock farming rites including the Ovoo ritual and directions of local groups and host organizations that have been passing down the ritual for generations. 　This paper will take a close look at typical livestock farming villages in the Otog area in Inner Mongolia in reference to previous studies on the Ovoo ritual. Since the 1980s, pastureland there has been distributed to local farmers, and they settled down as a farming community. How that has affected and changed local livestock farming will also be discussed. Moreover, information obtained from a field study will be used to examine how the ritual performed by local farming groups was revived amid Chinaʼs efforts to revitalize its traditional cultural activities, changes that host organizations have gone through and conditions needed to host the ritual, thereby identifying characteristics in the establishment of new host organizations. 　Hosts of the Ovoo ritual are responsible for passing it down from generation to generation. Therefore, understanding their organizational features is the key to understanding its history and future development. Such understanding is also crucial in terms of the continuation of the folk ritual.論

Post-training corticosterone inhibits the return of fear evoked by platform stress and a subthreshold conditioning procedure in Sprague-Dawley rats

The return of fear is an important issue in anxiety disorder research. Each time a fear memory is reactivated, it may further strengthen overactivation of the fear circuit, which may contribute to long-term maintenance of the fear memory. Recent evidence indicates that glucocorticoids may help attenuate pathological fear, but its role in the return of fear is unclear. In the present study, systemic corticosterone (CORT; 25 mg/kg) administration 1 h after fear conditioning did not impair the consolidation process but significantly suppressed the return of fear evoked by a subthreshold conditioning (SC) procedure and elevated platform (EP) stress. Compared with the SC-induced return of fear, acute stress-induced return was state-dependent. In addition, post-training CORT treatment increased the adrenocorticotropic response after EP stress, which indicates that the drug-induced suppression of the return of fear may possibly derive from its regulation effect of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis reactivity to stress. These results suggest that post-training CORT administration may help inhibit the return of fear evoked by EP or SC stress. The possible mechanisms involved in the high-dose CORT-induced suppression of the SC- and EP-induced return of fear are discussed. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.</p

Comparative study of discretization methods of microarray data for inferring transcriptional regulatory networks

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Microarray data discretization is a basic preprocess for many algorithms of gene regulatory network inference. Some common discretization methods in informatics are used to discretize microarray data. Selection of the discretization method is often arbitrary and no systematic comparison of different discretization has been conducted, in the context of gene regulatory network inference from time series gene expression data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, we propose a new discretization method "bikmeans", and compare its performance with four other widely-used discretization methods using different datasets, modeling algorithms and number of intervals. Sensitivities, specificities and total accuracies were calculated and statistical analysis was carried out. Bikmeans method always gave high total accuracies.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results indicate that proper discretization methods can consistently improve gene regulatory network inference independent of network modeling algorithms and datasets. Our new method, bikmeans, resulted in significant better total accuracies than other methods.</p

Optimization of Raw Material Composition in an Agricultural Biogas Plant

We analyzed the operation of a typical agricultural biogas plant in Hungary. Our aim was to optimize the composition of substrates for the biogas production and make a correct recommendation for completing feedstock recipes by considering the raw materials and technologies analyzed. The calculations were based on a very detailed database (including the daily operating data of 1673 days). Distribution of the biogas yields in summer and winter periods was normal based on the One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, while the variance of data was homogeneous based on the Levene-test. Factor analysis of the biogas yield was performed with the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy probe (0.616) and the Bartlett's Test. According to the objectivity of our LP (linear program) model, we believe that a significant excess biogas yield (18-66%) could be achieved by the use of our model compared to the actual measured data. Although the amount of corn silage, grass silage, and the extract – as variables – was minimal in the recipe, they played a crucial role in the total biogas yield of the recipe because of their significantly higher organic matter contents and specific biogas yields. Our results could provide a reliable foundation for optimizing of the recipe in biogas plants with raw material base similar to the analyzed plants.Citation: Mézes, L., Bai, A., Nagy, D., Cinka, I., and Gabnai, Z. (2017). Optimization of Raw Material Composition in an Agricultural Biogas Plant. Trends in Renewable Energy, 3(1), 61-75. DOI: 10.17737/tre.2017.3.1.003

2-[(E)-2-(Benzyl­idene­amino)­eth­yl]-3′,6′-bis­(diethyl­amino)­spiro­[isoindoline-1,9′-xanthen]-3-one

In the title compound, C37H40N4O2, the xanthene and spiro­lactam rings are almost planar, with r.m.s. deviations from the mean planes of 0.223 (2) and 0.057 (2) Å, respectively, and form a dihedral angle of 85.76 (3)°. The dihedral angle between the xanthene mean plane and the benzene ring is 87.16 (5)°. One of the two ethyl groups of one of the diethyl­amino groups is disordered over two sets of sites [0.76 (1):0.24 (1)]