A Lattice Model for Two Different Life-History Strategies of Corals in a Coral Reef

Coral reefs form important marine ecosystems and simultaneously are at risk of deterioration due to rapidly changing environments as a consequence of human actions. Understanding their dynamics is thus important in order to be able to protect them from being destroyed. In this thesis we construct a lattice model for two life-history strategies of corals, brooders and spawners. These two strategies differ mainly in their modes of sexual reproduction, but also differences in growth and death rates as well as competitive ability are considered. We use pair approximation to help analyse the model while keeping its spatial structure. Numerical analysis is used to find the equilibria of the system as well as their stabilities, first for a single strategy and then for the two-strategy system. We find that the two strategies are able to coexist if the spawners have a higher growth rate and higher death rate and are competitively superior to brooders. This requires some reproduction over distance and a trade-off between growth and death rates. Thus we find that brooders are focusing a bigger part of their energy on long-distance reproduction, while spawners are dominating over short distances and having a higher turnover. We also find that both mutual invasibility and coexistence in the broader sense are only possible for low rates of sexual reproduction for both strategies. For higher rates of sexual reproduction we find that whichever strategy invades the lattice first will stay and the other cannot invade. Lastly we look at the effect of a change in environmental conditions, namely the acidification and temperature increase of oceans, on the two strategies and find that it affects the two strategies differently. The spawners are quickly driven to extinction by the change in environmental conditions, while brooders initially benefit from the changing conditions and only start to suffer themselves after the spawners have gone extinct

Att skapa och upprätthålla lärande på Räddningstjänsten Syd

Räddningstjänsten Syd är ett kommunalförbund i Skåne vars vision är att skapa ett olycksfritt samhälle. Arbetet utförs efter tydligt utformade processer där en av förbundets huvudprocesser har som syfte att utvärdera och lära av tidigare olyckor och insatser. Enligt uppdragsgivaren för studien bidrar inte processen till det önskade lärandet. Studien syftar därför till att ur ett lednings-perspektiv kartlägga vilka faktorer som förbättrar lärandet. Fenomenet som studien undersöker är lärande och den syftar till att kartlägga vilka faktorer som påverkar lärandet i organisationen. Den fenomenografiska ansatsen genomsyrar studien och det empiriska materialet har inhämtats via kvalitativa semi- strukturerade intervjuer med fem medarbetare på ledningsnivå i organisationen. Empirin sammanställs i fyra kategorier som identifieras utifrån respondenternas uppfattningar. Kategorierna är lärande, mål, uppföljning och kommunikation, varav de tre sistnämnda anses behöva fungera för att skapa förutsättningar för lärande. Det som framkommer i studien är att de viktigaste faktorerna för att skapa lärande i organisationen är gemensamma, tydligt kommunicerade mål samt uppföljning i form av feedback, reflektion och utvärdering

School absenteeism among students in Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom:

School absenteeism is a challenge in many countries. Still, there are few comparisons between countries, which is partly due to a lack of shared definitions of concepts. This article makes use of PISA data to compare self-reported student absenteeism in Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK). Three data sets are used, from 2012, 2015, and 2018. The self-reported absenteeism, which is referred to as truancy in the PISA studies, was measured as having skipped a whole school day at least once in the two full weeks before students completed the PISA student questionnaire. The results show great variation between the studied countries, from 24.4% in the UK in 2015 to 1.5% in Japan in 2012. The percentage of students who reported having skipped school is much higher in the UK than in the other three countries. The differences between the countries concerning the percentage of students reporting having been absent from school are significant for all years, except between Sweden and Germany in 2015. Germany and the UK have a similar pattern in development, with the highest percentages in 2015, while Sweden and Japan have small (albeit not significant) increases from 2012 to 2018. The UK is the only country where the changes between 2012 and 2015 as well as between 2015 and 2018 were significant. It is not possible to see any obvious patterns between the countries that might be linked to differences related to their welfare regimes, education systems, or values. To find such patterns, it may be necessary either to include more countries in a study or to conduct more in-depth studies on each country

Captured by Evil: The Idea of Corruption in Law

Corruption is one of the most powerful words in the English language. When it comes to the treatment of corruption by law, however, corruption is a troubled concept. With increasing recognition of the costs of corruption for economic development, democratic governance, international aid programs, and other world goals, attempts to articulate what this destructive force is have led to an avalanche of theoretical writing. In the last fifteen years, corruption has been variously defined as the violation of law, a public servant\u27s breach of public duty, an agent\u27s betrayal of a principal\u27s interests, the pursuit of secrecy, the denial of equality in political influence, and other ways. In the end, however, all of these efforts fall short. Corruption is more than law-breaking: it is more than breaching public duties. To say that A is a thief or that A has breached his duty is not to say that A is corrupt. The latter is far more powerful, far more emotional, far more essential than the others. It is more than secrecy, or the denial of equal opportunity. It is a searing indictment, somehow, not only of A\u27s act but of A\u27s character. It is a statement not only of what A has done, but of what A has become. Corruption is, I argue, a far more powerful idea than these existing legal understandings have articulated: it is the idea of capture by evil, the possession of the individual by evil, in law. Just as we once believed in corruption of the blood in American law, which decreed that offspring of those who had committed crimes were believed to be irrevocably tainted by their parents\u27 depravity, so we still retain - through the idea of corruption - the belief that individual evil extends beyond acts of wrongdoing, or the denial of equal opportunity, or breach of the public trust. It is this idea of corruption, I argue - the idea of capture by evil - that, although unarticulated, drives our understandings of corruption in law. It drives our understanding of corrupt judges, who, once corrupt, we believe will act so in every case. It drives our understanding of campaign finance reform, where we fear deep corruption of the process from the occurrence of corrupt acts. It drives our understanding of corruption as a systemic effect and systemic influence, which presents institutional dangers that are greater than other crimes, and that requires purgation rather than simple law enforcement. This Article explores this deeper understanding of corruption, its impacts in areas such as judicial corruption and campaign finance reform, and its implications for the principle of the rule of law

Roughness Encoding in Human and Biomimetic Artificial Touch: Spatiotemporal Frequency Modulation and Structural Anisotropy of Fingerprints

The influence of fingerprints and their curvature in tactile sensing performance is investigated by comparative analysis of different design parameters in a biomimetic artificial fingertip, having straight or curved fingerprints. The strength in the encoding of the principal spatial period of ridged tactile stimuli (gratings) is evaluated by indenting and sliding the surfaces at controlled normal contact force and tangential sliding velocity, as a function of fingertip rotation along the indentation axis. Curved fingerprints guaranteed higher directional isotropy than straight fingerprints in the encoding of the principal frequency resulting from the ratio between the sliding velocity and the spatial periodicity of the grating. In parallel, human microneurography experiments were performed and a selection of results is included in this work in order to support the significance of the biorobotic study with the artificial tactile system

Prediction of lithium response using genomic data

Predicting lithium response prior to treatment could both expedite therapy and avoid exposure to side effects. Since lithium responsiveness may be heritable, its predictability based on genomic data is of interest. We thus evaluate the degree to which lithium response can be predicted with a machine learning (ML) approach using genomic data. Using the largest existing genomic dataset in the lithium response literature (n = 2210 across 14 international sites; 29% responders), we evaluated the degree to which lithium response could be predicted based on 47,465 genotyped single nucleotide polymorphisms using a supervised ML approach. Under appropriate cross-validation procedures, lithium response could be predicted to above-chance levels in two constituent sites (Halifax, Cohen's kappa 0.15, 95% confidence interval, CI [0.07, 0.24]; and Würzburg, kappa 0.2 [0.1, 0.3]). Variants with shared importance in these models showed over-representation of postsynaptic membrane related genes. Lithium response was not predictable in the pooled dataset (kappa 0.02 [- 0.01, 0.04]), although non-trivial performance was achieved within a restricted dataset including only those patients followed prospectively (kappa 0.09 [0.04, 0.14]). Genomic classification of lithium response remains a promising but difficult task. Classification performance could potentially be improved by further harmonization of data collection procedures

Combining schizophrenia and depression polygenic risk scores improves the genetic prediction of lithium response in bipolar disorder patients

Lithium is the gold standard therapy for Bipolar Disorder (BD) but its effectiveness differs widely between individuals. The molecular mechanisms underlying treatment response heterogeneity are not well understood, and personalized treatment in BD remains elusive. Genetic analyses of the lithium treatment response phenotype may generate novel molecular insights into lithium's therapeutic mechanisms and lead to testable hypotheses to improve BD management and outcomes. We used fixed effect meta-analysis techniques to develop meta-analytic polygenic risk scores (MET-PRS) from combinations of highly correlated psychiatric traits, namely schizophrenia (SCZ), major depression (MD) and bipolar disorder (BD). We compared the effects of cross-disorder MET-PRS and single genetic trait PRS on lithium response. For the PRS analyses, we included clinical data on lithium treatment response and genetic information for n = 2283 BD cases from the International Consortium on Lithium Genetics (ConLi+Gen; www.ConLiGen.org). Higher SCZ and MD PRSs were associated with poorer lithium treatment response whereas BD-PRS had no association with treatment outcome. The combined MET2-PRS comprising of SCZ and MD variants (MET2-PRS) and a model using SCZ and MD-PRS sequentially improved response prediction, compared to single-disorder PRS or to a combined score using all three traits (MET3-PRS). Patients in the highest decile for MET2-PRS loading had 2.5 times higher odds of being classified as poor responders than patients with the lowest decile MET2-PRS scores. An exploratory functional pathway analysis of top MET2-PRS variants was conducted. Findings may inform the development of future testing strategies for personalized lithium prescribing in BD