Intraspecific Variation in Taxonomic Characteristics of the Mayfly \u3ci\u3ePotamanthus Myops\u3c/i\u3e (Walsh)

Data collected from an ecological study of the mayfly Potamanthus rnyops (Walsh) in Michigan showed intraspecific variability in taxonomic characteristics that have been employed by previous investigators for species separation. Nymphal dorsal maculation patterns varied considerably within a single population. Also, the ratio of mandibular tusk length to head length increased with successive nymphal instars. Certain adult taxonomic characteristics, particularly relative male imago eye size and distance of separation, were either too poorly defined or too variable to be conclusive in species identification

Land Use Strategy (LUS) Delivery Evaluation Project : Volume 1: Main Report

Scotland’s first Land Use Strategy (LUS) – Getting the best from our land – was published in March 2011. The LUS is a requirement of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, highlighting the important contribution that Scottish Ministers expect land use and land management to make towards the climate change agenda in Scotland. The crucial component of the LUS are its ten principles for sustainable land use – the LUS Principles. The LUS Principles are the key mechanism by which the strategic intent of the national level LUS can be translated into regional and local level planning and decision-making, through existing land use delivery mechanisms, to inform action on the ground. The overall aim of the LUS Delivery Evaluation Project therefore was “to evaluate the range of current land use delivery mechanisms, to ascertain their effectiveness in translating the strategic Principles of the LUS into decision-making on the ground”. The evaluation considered eleven case study land use delivery mechanisms ranging from an urban Local Development Plan (LDP) to the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Partnership Plan

Using the Space Glove to Teach Spatial Thinking

The challenge of extending students' skills in spatial thinking to astronomical scales was the central focus of our K-8 curriculum development. When the project's lead teacher requested a curriculum that cumulatively built on each prior year's learning in a spiral fashion, I knew exactly what the school was asking for. Second and third graders began by noticing the cyclical patters that the sun, moon, and stars make in the sky. Fourth graders explored the phases of the moon by taking turns modeling and sketching them in their classroom and then comparing them to the real sky. Sixth !graders used real telescopes to observe a moving model of our solar system and walked a scale model of the planets' orbits. The curriculum is designed to expand students' capacity to visualize space in a hierarchical fashion that asks them to imagine themselves from a broader number of spatial perspectives through hands-on activities. The "situational awareness" Peter's story describes is a hallmark of high-performance engineering and innovation. Keeping in mind the potential outcomes of multiple paths of pursuit from multiple perspectives while keeping track of their relative merits and performance requirements is a demanding spatial task. What made it possible for Peter to transform the failure of his first glove into triumph was the mental space in which that failure provided exactly the information needed for a new breakthrough. In at least two cases, Peter could immediately "see" the full implications of what his hands were telling him. He tells the story of how putting his hands in a Phase VI astronaut glove instantly transformed his understanding of the glove challenge. Six months into his development, the failure of circumferentially wrapped cords to produce a sufficiently flexible glove again forced him to abandon his assumptions. His situational awareness was so clear and compelling it became a gut-level response. Peter's finely developed spatial skills enabled him to almost instinctively focus his full energy on a carefully constructed set of experiments. The finger's ability to sense pressure, force, and work gave him the immediate feedback required to solve this one central problem. Once properly understood, his failure quickly led to the magical "Aha!" moment of discovery; the rest is history. Just as children need opportunities to develop hands-on understanding, engineers need to explore new possibilities through incremental hands-on failure. High-performance innovation is all about learning to make maximum use of thinking spatially to direct this process. Peter Homer's glove also reminds us that efficient engineering decisions need to be made as close to the hardware as possible. Whether we're doing hands-on education or hands-on engineering, it is when we trust in our ability to "feel our way" through failure that we reach our highest potential

Keynote Address to the Atlas Conference: “International Business Disputes In An Era Of Receding Globalism”

This is a transcript of the luncheon keynote address by Lord Peter Goldsmith at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Atlanta International Arbitration Society (AtlAS) on October 23, 2017. Lord Peter Goldsmith QC, PC, is London Co-Managing Partner and Chair of European and Asian Litigation at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. He joined the firm after serving as the UK’s Attorney General from 2001-2007, prior to which he was in private practice as one of the leading barristers in London. Lord Goldsmith has a long practice in arbitration and in the interface between arbitration and litigation. He appears as counsel for leading cases in a number of jurisdictions and different arbitral institutions, including LCIA, ICC and SIAC and in ad hoc arbitrations. He is closely connected with the LCIA, ICC (for whom he co-chaired the task force on Arbitration for States and State entities), the HKIAC (of which he is Vice chairman), and SIAC. He also has been appointed or confirmed as arbitrator by LCIA, SIAC and the ICC, and is included in the international arbitration database of the Arbitration Center at the Institute of Modern Arbitration, Moscow. Lord Goldsmith also co-chaired a Task Force on ICC arbitration involving States and State entities, which recommended changes to the ICC rules of arbitration to take account of special issues faced by States in ICC arbitrations. Lord Goldsmith has appeared in numerous cases in the House of Lords, the Privy Council and the Court of Appeal, as well as international and European courts and in the courts of a number of other jurisdictions. Consistently acknowledged for his prominence, The American Lawyer states that “[he has] the advocacy skills of one of the finest barristers of his generation.” He is recommended as a leading lawyer in Chambers UK and Chambers Global for International Arbitration, Public International Law and Corporate Crime and Investigations. The guides have described him as “exceptionally accomplished,” “breathtakingly persuasive” and “one of the great doyens of the English bar.” Lord Goldsmith has a strong history and life-long support for pro bono assistance to bring legal expertise to the disadvantaged. As a young lawyer, he started a legal advice center in the East End of London and, later in his career, founded the Bar of England and Wales’ Pro Bono Unit, a nationwide charity providing the free legal services of thousands of barristers (of which he remains President), the Attorney General’s pro bono coordinating committees (which coordinates pro bono activity in England and Wales), and became first chair of the Access to Justice Foundation, a cross-profession initiative which raises money to support pro bono organisations across the country and is by statute the sole recipient of pro bono costs award (a role in which he continues). Lord Goldsmith was a graduate in law from Cambridge University with double first class honours and a Master’s from University College London. He was admitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 1972, Paris in 1997, Belize in 2010, St. Kitts and Nevis in 2010, New South Wales in 2010 and the British Virgin Islands in 2011. He is also a Registered Foreign Lawyer at the Singapore International Commercial Court

Glaciation and deglaciation of the Stump Cross area, Yorkshire Dales, northern England, determined by terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (10Be) dating.

Terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (l0Be) surface-exposure ages are reported for three glacially-transported gritstone boulders and one glacially-scoured exposure of gritstone bedrock in the vicinity of Stump Cross Caverns, North Yorkshire. Although the ages do not form a statistically consistent cluster, three of them nevertheless indicate that the transport and deposition of boulders was by ice of the last (Late Devensian) glaciation. The ages provide evidence for glacier ice at the Wharfe-Nidd interfluve, in contrast to previously held views that these uplands had remained above the level of the last ice sheet. The youngest of the three ages on boulders (-18.5 ka) is taken as the best estimate for déglaciation of the area. This is consistent both with surface-exposure ages from sites elsewhere around the southern margin of the Yorkshire Dales and with uranium-series dated speleothems in Stump Cross Caverns. Together these results reveal that déglaciation of the Dales was most likely well advanced by ~18-16 ka, facilitating the rejuvenation of surface and subsurface karstic processes

Age grading \u3cem\u3eAn. gambiae\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eAn. arabiensis\u3c/em\u3e using near infrared spectra and artificial neural networks

Background Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is currently complementing techniques to age-grade mosquitoes. NIRS classifies lab-reared and semi-field raised mosquitoes into \u3c or ≥ 7 days old with an average accuracy of 80%, achieved by training a regression model using partial least squares (PLS) and interpreted as a binary classifier. Methods and findings We explore whether using an artificial neural network (ANN) analysis instead of PLS regression improves the current accuracy of NIRS models for age-grading malaria transmitting mosquitoes. We also explore if directly training a binary classifier instead of training a regression model and interpreting it as a binary classifier improves the accuracy. A total of 786 and 870 NIR spectra collected from laboratory reared An. gambiae and An. arabiensis, respectively, were used and pre-processed according to previously published protocols. The ANN regression model scored root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.6 ± 0.2 for An. gambiae and 2.8 ± 0.2 for An. arabiensis; whereas the PLS regression model scored RMSE of 3.7 ± 0.2 for An. gambiae, and 4.5 ± 0.1 for An. arabiensis. When we interpreted regression models as binary classifiers, the accuracy of the ANN regression model was 93.7 ± 1.0% for An. gambiae, and 90.2 ± 1.7% for An. arabiensis; while PLS regression model scored the accuracy of 83.9 ± 2.3% for An. gambiae, and 80.3 ± 2.1% for An. arabiensis. We also find that a directly trained binary classifier yields higher age estimation accuracy than a regression model interpreted as a binary classifier. A directly trained ANN binary classifier scored an accuracy of 99.4 ± 1.0 for An. gambiae and 99.0 ± 0.6% for An. arabiensis; while a directly trained PLS binary classifier scored 93.6 ± 1.2% for An. gambiae and 88.7 ± 1.1% for An. arabiensis. We further tested the reproducibility of these results on different independent mosquito datasets. ANNs scored higher estimation accuracies than when the same age models are trained using PLS. Regardless of the model architecture, directly trained binary classifiers scored higher accuracies on classifying age of mosquitoes than regression models translated as binary classifiers. Conclusion We recommend training models to estimate age of An. arabiensis and An. gambiae using ANN model architectures (especially for datasets with at least 70 mosquitoes per age group) and direct training of binary classifier instead of training a regression model and interpreting it as a binary classifier

Cardiac output affects the response to pulsed inhaled nitric oxide in mechanically ventilated anesthetized ponies determined by CT angiography of the lung

OBJECTIVE To measure changes in regional lung perfusion using CT angiography in mechanically ventilated, anesthetized ponies administered pulsed inhaled nitric oxide (PiNO) during hypotension and normotension.ANIMALS 6 ponies for anesthetic 1 and 5 ponies for anesthetic 2.PROCEDURES Ponies were anesthetized on 2 separate occasions, mechanically ventilated, and placed in dorsal recumbency within the CT gantry. Pulmonary arterial, right atrial, and facial arterial catheters were placed. During both anesthet-ics, PiNO was delivered for 60 minutes and then discontinued. Anesthetic 1: hypotension (mean arterial pressure < 70 mmHg) was treated using dobutamine after 30 minutes of PiNO delivery. Following the discontinuation of PiNO, dobutamine administration was discontinued in 3 ponies and was continued in 3 ponies. The lung was imaged at 30, 60, and 105 minutes. Anesthetic 2: hypotension persisted throughout anesthesia. The lung was imaged at 30, 60, and 90 minutes. At all time points, arterial and mixed venous blood samples were analyzed and cardiac output (Qt) was measured. Pulmonary perfusion was calculated from CT image analysis.RESULTS During PiNO delivery, perfusion to well-ventilated lungs increased if ponies were normotensive, leading to increased arterial oxygenation, reduced alveolar dead space, and reduced alveolar to arterial oxygen tension gradient. When PiNO was stopped and dobutamine administration continued, alveolar dead space and venous admixture increased, in contrast to when dobutamine and PiNO were both discontinued.CLINICAL RELEVANCE If PiNO is administered to mechanically ventilated, anesthetized ponies with concurrent hypotension and low Qt, this must be supported to achieve favorable redistribution of pulmonary perfusion to improve pulmonary gas exchange