Working With Wildlife: Urban Canada Goose Management

Warmer temperatures and longer days of spring also bring an increase in the activities of many species of wildlife, including Canada geese (Branta canadensis). At the turn of the 20th century, Canada geese were almost extirpated from most parts of North America. However, populations of Canada geese have rebounded dramatically, primarily due to the concerted efforts of wildlife mangers across the country and the ability of Canada geese to adapt to habitats found in urban and suburban areas. As human populations increase, so do the conflicts associated with urban/suburban sprawl; and because of this, complaints of goose droppings, lawn damage, and aggressive geese are commonplace every year

Producers\u27 Opinions on What Makes Demonstrations Effective

Despite the widespread and long-standing use of demonstration sites in Extension, there is little empirical evidence to inform how best to design them. We report data from 513 producers in three regions of Indiana whom we surveyed about sources of information for farm management decisions, the usefulness of demonstrations, and preferences and factors that influence their attendance at demonstrations. In general, respondents had positive opinions about demonstration events and high levels of agreement regarding their usefulness. Lack of awareness of demonstrations was the greatest single factor leading to nonattendance. We provide recommendations for organizing demonstration events based on the preferences of producers we surveyed

Classification of likely functional class for ligand binding sites identified from fragment screening

Fragment screening is used to identify binding sites and leads in drug discovery, but it is often unclear which binding sites are functionally important. Here, data from 37 experiments, and 1309 protein structures binding to 1601 ligands were analysed. A method to group ligands by binding sites is introduced and sites clustered according to profiles of relative solvent accessibility. This identified 293 unique ligand binding sites, grouped into four clusters (C1-4). C1 includes larger, buried, conserved, and population missense-depleted sites, enriched in known functional sites. C4 comprises smaller, accessible, divergent, missense-enriched sites, depleted in functional sites. A site in C1 is 28 times more likely to be functional than one in C4. Seventeen sites, which to the best of our knowledge are novel, in 13 proteins are identified as likely to be functionally important with examples from human tenascin and 5-aminolevulinate synthase highlighted. A multi-layer perceptron, and K-nearest neighbours model are presented to predict cluster labels for ligand binding sites with an accuracy of 96% and 100%, respectively, so allowing functional classification of sites for proteins not in this set. Our findings will be of interest to those studying protein-ligand interactions and developing new drugs or function modulators

Sensemaking through the storm: how postpartum depression shapes personal work–family narratives.

Many women experience psychological and emotional challenges during their transition to becoming a working mother. Postpartum depression (PPD) is one common, salient aspect of motherhood that can serve as a work–life shock event and profoundly shape women’s work and nonwork lives yet has evaded discussion in the organizational sciences. Taking a grounded theory approach, we interviewed 41 women who experienced PPD as well as key informants who provided additional insights about PPD (e.g., an obstetrician, women working for organizations that support postpartum health). Our analysis highlights how being diagnosed with PPD activates a complex sensemaking process in which women process an imposing identity—a concept we introduce to the identity and work–family literatures reflecting an unexpected, undesirable identity that imposes upon existing (e.g., work) and/or provisional identities that may or may not be fully elaborated (e.g., motherhood), ultimately shifting how women think about the intersection of work and family. We also delineate how supports and antisupports (i.e., overt acts dismissive of women’s PPD) shape the aforementioned processes. Combined, our research aims to advance the discussion of PPD within organizational scholarship, rendering significant implications for both theory and practice

Consistent Anisotropic Repulsions for Simple Molecules

We extract atom-atom potentials from the effective spherical potentials that suc cessfully model Hugoniot experiments on molecular fluids, e.g., $O_2$ and $N_2$. In the case of $O_2$ the resulting potentials compare very well with the atom-atom potentials used in studies of solid-state propertie s, while for $N_2$ they are considerably softer at short distances. Ground state (T=0K) and room temperatu re calculations performed with the new $N-N$ potential resolve the previous discrepancy between experimental and theoretical results.Comment: RevTeX, 5 figure

Retrospective observational study to assess the clinical management and outcomes of hospitalised patients with complicated urinary tract infection in countries with high prevalence of multidrug resistant Gram-negative bacteria (RESCUING)

INTRODUCTION: The emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR) Gram-negative bacteria (GNB), including carbapenemase-producing strains, has become a major therapeutic challenge. These MDR isolates are often involved in complicated urinary tract infection (cUTI), and are associated with poor clinical outcomes. The study has been designed to gain insight into the epidemiology, clinical management, outcome and healthcare cost of patients with cUTI, especially in countries with high prevalence of MDR GNB. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This multinational and multicentre observational, retrospective study will identify cases from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2014 in order to collect data on patients with cUTI as a cause of hospital admission, and patients who develop cUTI during their hospital stay. The primary end point will be treatment failure defined as the presence of any of the following criteria: (1) signs or symptoms of cUTI present at diagnosis that have not improved by days 5–7 with appropriate antibiotic therapy, (2) new cUTI-related symptoms that have developed within 30 days of diagnosis, (3) urine culture taken within 30 days of diagnosis, either during or after completion of therapy, that grows ≥104 colony-forming unit/mL of the original pathogen and (4) death irrespective of cause within 30 days of the cUTI diagnosis. SAMPLE SIZE: 1000 patients afford a power of 0.83 (α=0.05) to detect an absolute difference of 10% in the treatment failure rate between MDR bacteria and other pathogens. This should allow for the introduction of about 20 independent risk factors (or their interaction) in a logistic regression model looking at risk factors for failure. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Approval will be sought from all relevant Research Ethics Committees. Publication of this study will be considered as a joint publication by the participating investigator leads, and will follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)