Diet selection, immune-competence, and parasite-host interactions in a migratory songbird

Rezension zu: Metzger B J 2012: Diet selection, immune-competence, and parasite-host interactions in a migratory songbird. Vogelwarte 50: 39-40. Dissertation an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Fakultät für Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, betreut durch Prof. Dr. Franz Bairlei

Different Words, Same Song: Advice for Substantively Interpreting Duration Models

Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019. The use of duration models in political science continues to grow, more than a decade after Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (2004). However, several common misconceptions about the models still persist. To improve scholars\u27 use and interpretation of duration models, we point out that they are a type of regression model and therefore follow the same rules as other more commonly used regression models. In this article, we present four maxims as guidelines. We survey the various duration model interpretation strategies and group them into four categories, which is an important organizational exercise that does not appear elsewhere. We then discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these strategies, noting that all are correct from a technical perspective. However, some strategies make more sense than others for nontechnical reasons, which ultimately informs best practices

How Machines are Serviced - Design of a Virtual Reality-based Training System for Technical Customer Services

Training service provider is a crucial factor for high-quality service delivery. Due to the rise of new devices, reviving Virtual Reality (VR) offer great opportunities to overcome current training challenges. As various new interaction and visualization systems push into market, guidance on how to design VR-based training systems is necessary. The presented use case is based on technicians in technical customer services (TCS) who tackle increasing complexity of machines. We fill the research gap of design knowledge by (1) analyzing the domain in a multi-method approach to elicit meta-requirements, (2) proposing design principles, and (3) instantiating them in a prototype. The interaction of the user with the training system was identified as key aspect to foster learning. We follow a design science research approach (DSR) combing the build-phase with agile evaluation cycles obtaining focus groups and demonstration with a prototype

Team Mobile Turns Industry on its Ear

T-Mobile was going down and At&T was wanting to buy them. The government stepped in and did not allow this to go threw because it would created a monopoly. T-Mobile then created a new plan by doing away with contracts. This has now made the company profitable

A rapid malaria appraisal in the Venezuelan Amazon

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Fine-grained Population Mapping from Coarse Census Counts and Open Geodata

Fine-grained population maps are needed in several domains, like urban planning, environmental monitoring, public health, and humanitarian operations. Unfortunately, in many countries only aggregate census counts over large spatial units are collected, moreover, these are not always up-to-date. We present POMELO, a deep learning model that employs coarse census counts and open geodata to estimate fine-grained population maps with 100m ground sampling distance. Moreover, the model can also estimate population numbers when no census counts at all are available, by generalizing across countries. In a series of experiments for several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the maps produced with POMELOare in good agreement with the most detailed available reference counts: disaggregation of coarse census counts reaches R2 values of 85-89%; unconstrained prediction in the absence of any counts reaches 48-69%

Natural infection of Plasmodium brasilianum in humans: Man and monkey share quartan malaria parasites in the Venezuelan Amazon

AbstractBackgroundThe quartan malaria parasite Plasmodium malariae is the widest spread and best adapted human malaria parasite. The simian Plasmodium brasilianum causes quartan fever in New World monkeys and resembles P. malariae morphologically. Since the genetics of the two parasites are nearly identical, differing only in a range of mutations expected within a species, it has long been speculated that the two are the same. However, no naturally acquired infection with parasites termed as P. brasilianum has been found in humans until now.MethodsWe investigated malaria cases from remote Yanomami indigenous communities of the Venezuelan Amazon and analyzed the genes coding for the circumsporozoite protein (CSP) and the small subunit of ribosomes (18S) by species-specific PCR and capillary based-DNA sequencing.FindingsBased on 18S rRNA gene sequencing, we identified 12 patients harboring malaria parasites which were 100% identical with P. brasilianum isolated from the monkey, Alouatta seniculus. Translated amino acid sequences of the CS protein gene showed identical immunodominant repeat units between quartan malaria parasites isolated from both humans and monkeys.InterpretationThis study reports, for the first time, naturally acquired infections in humans with parasites termed as P. brasilianum. We conclude that quartan malaria parasites are easily exchanged between humans and monkeys in Latin America. We hypothesize a lack of host specificity in mammalian hosts and consider quartan malaria to be a true anthropozoonosis. Since the name P. brasilianum suggests a malaria species distinct from P. malariae, we propose that P. brasilianum should have a nomenclatorial revision in case further research confirms our findings. The expansive reservoir of mammalian hosts discriminates quartan malaria from other Plasmodium spp. and requires particular research efforts

Involvement of institutions and local communities in turtles and cetacean monitoring and conservation in Maltese waters through networking

The loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) are regularly found around Maltese waters, especially the former. However, until recently, information on the populations and conservation status of both species in the area was lacking. The EU LIFE+ project MIGRATE (LIFE11 NAT/MT/1070) was carried out to address these information gaps by aiming to obtain more biotic data on these species and to identify areas essential for the life cycle and reproduction of these protected species in Maltese waters. To achieve these aims, amongst others, a citizen science approach was chosen, with the involvement of a number of institutes like the Maritime Squadron of the Armed Forces of Malta (AFM) and that of the Civil Protection Department (CPD) as well as local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other sea-user communities such as divers.peer-reviewe