NOT YOUR FAMILY FARM APICULTURE IN SOUTH,CENTRAL MONTANA

The rolling prairies and sheltering mountain ranges of the Upper Musselshell Valley in Montana are nearly perfect for cattle and sheep grazing. Some areas, more topographically similar to the Great Plains than to the mountainous West, are (at least in wet years) highly conducive to growing alfalfa or wheat. Overall, the pastoral setting calls to mind images of weathered cowboys, grizzled sheepherders, and stoic farmers. However, closer inquiry into the region\u27s agriculture reveals that cattle and wheat are by no means the only product being harvested from the land. Found buzzing around flowering foliage or swarming the rearing hindquarters of a Hereford (which has mistaken another life-form\u27s home for a saltlick) is Apis mellifera: the honeybee

The Upper Musselshell Valley: A Grassroots and Bioregional History

The Upper Musselshell Valley: A Grassroots and Bioregional History chronicles the history of central Montana's Upper Musselshell Valley in an attempt to craft a viable history of region. As a corrective measure or alternate explanation that revises not only historical interpretation, but also takes into account who, or what group, is the driving force behind each distinct narrative stream (i.e. grand narrative history--histories penned by professional scholars and academics--or grassroots perspectives, the history of region as told by local dwellers), which stream is or is not authoritative, and how to modify, adjust, or meld the various interpretations in order to arrive at a more judicious, perceptive, and democratic version of history. The New Regional History is a coalescence of the grand narrative, the grassroots perspective, bioregionalism, and memory studies that is concerned with humankind's interaction with the physical environment, and the succession of cultures within that environment. It examines the use of historical memory in the creation of regional identity in order to expose and explain regional anomalies while providing synthesis and maintaining a stance of critical scholarship. This is much more than a localized case study; it is a novel approach to the history of region that incorporates local and professional scholarship in order craft a much more viable and judicious history of place. The Upper Musselshell Valley of central Montana provides a strong proving ground for a New Regional History. It is a place rich in regional history and lore, provided by a long tradition of local narrators, while fitting within most of the grand narrative paradigms of Montana and the Great Plains in general. As with most comparable regions within the Great Plains, the Upper Musselshell Valley has never been held up to such a standard

Parent-child communication about sex and sexuality: everyday practices, processes and meanings

The sexual health of young people in the UK is a major public health concern. Recent evidence reporting the limited effectiveness of school-based sex education has led to renewed research and policy interest in the wider social and cultural influences on young people's sexual health. Strategies to improve young people's sexual health which involve parents have been identified as a key area for development. There is, however, a lack of qualitative data concerning parents' and children's experiences of communicating with each other about sex and sexuality.This study examines the content, contexts and processes of parent-child communication about these issues. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of 61 parents and young people (aged 11-15) from 23 families in Scotland. Accounts were gathered from multiple members of the same family, enabling insights into the interaction of perspectives within and across families.The thesis highlights parents' and young people's understandings of the challenges of communication, contextualising these within changing dynamics of parent-child relationships as children reach their early teens. The negotiated management of young people's pubertal bodies is identified as a significant mechanism through which 'appropriate' sexuality is implicitly communicated between parents and children. Parents and children found it difficult to describe their interactions about sex and sexuality, suggesting that communication itself is a slippery concept. Indeed, the stereotypical notion of parents and children 'sitting down to talk about the birds and the bees' appeared far removed from these families' experiences of sexual communication. The thesis illuminates parents' and children's understandings of the nuances of communication, which extends the narrow focus on direct talk in much other research. The active construction of familial contexts in which communication is either constrained or encouraged is also explored. Fathers' perspectives on the barriers to communication are particularly elucidated, most notably uncertainty about the boundaries of 'appropriate' involvement in their children's physical and sexual 2 development. The thesis concludes by highlighting the implications for the development of sexual health policy and practice, and the implementation of the sexual health strategy in Scotland

Age and Handedness as Factors in the Performance of a Complex Pursuit Task: Results of a Study at the Iowa State Fair

In connection with systematic studies of the underlying variables which affect the learning and retention of complex skills, it has been found that certain patterns of response-the steering and pointing patterns, in particular--are firmly ingrained in the average person before adulthood is reached. They are so rigidly fixed that alterations of them are extremely difficult to produce in reasonable lengths of time, under laboratory conditions. They depend on a high degree of coordination of perceptual and motor components of behavior, and are presumably acquired during many years of reinforced practice. Steering left when turning right is desired is seemingly as behaviorally abhorrent as pointing up when pointing down is the thing to do. The purpose of the present investigation, made last summer at the State Fair in Des Moines, was to determine whether age and handedness are factors in the performance of a task requiring responses basically like the ordinary ones of steering and pointing. It was hoped that the results would reveal something about the way the steering and pointing habits grow, indicate the approximate age at which they become fully developed, and disclose any interactions between the effects of age and handedness

Recent, independent and anthropogenic origins of Trypanosoma cruzi hybrids.

The single celled eukaryote Trypanosoma cruzi, a parasite transmitted by numerous species of triatomine bug in the Americas, causes Chagas disease in humans. T. cruzi generally reproduces asexually and appears to have a clonal population structure. However, two of the six major circulating genetic lineages, TcV and TcVI, are TcII-TcIII inter-lineage hybrids that are frequently isolated from humans in regions where chronic Chagas disease is particularly severe. Nevertheless, a prevalent view is that hybridisation events in T. cruzi were evolutionarily ancient and that active recombination is of little epidemiological importance. We analysed genotypes of hybrid and non-hybrid T. cruzi strains for markers representing three distinct evolutionary rates: nuclear GPI sequences (n = 88), mitochondrial COII-ND1 sequences (n = 107) and 28 polymorphic microsatellite loci (n = 35). Using Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic approaches we dated key evolutionary events in the T. cruzi clade including the emergence of hybrid lineages TcV and TcVI, which we estimated to have occurred within the last 60,000 years. We also found evidence for recent genetic exchange between TcIII and TcIV and between TcI and TcIV. These findings show that evolution of novel recombinants remains a potential epidemiological risk. The clearly distinguishable microsatellite genotypes of TcV and TcVI were highly heterozygous and displayed minimal intra-lineage diversity indicative of even earlier origins than sequence-based estimates. Natural hybrid genotypes resembled typical meiotic F1 progeny, however, evidence for mitochondrial introgression, absence of haploid forms and previous experimental crosses indicate that sexual reproduction in T. cruzi may involve alternatives to canonical meiosis. Overall, the data support two independent hybridisation events between TcII and TcIII and a recent, rapid spread of the hybrid progeny in domestic transmission cycles concomitant with, or as a result of, disruption of natural transmission cycles by human activities

Towards objective measures of algorithm performance across instance space

This paper tackles the difficult but important task of objective algorithm performance assessment for optimization. Rather than reporting average performance of algorithms across a set of chosen instances, which may bias conclusions, we propose a methodology to enable the strengths and weaknesses of different optimization algorithms to be compared across a broader instance space. The results reported in a recent Computers and Operations Research paper comparing the performance of graph coloring heuristics are revisited with this new methodology to demonstrate (i) how pockets of the instance space can be found where algorithm performance varies significantly from the average performance of an algorithm; (ii) how the properties of the instances can be used to predict algorithm performance on previously unseen instances with high accuracy; and (iii) how the relative strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm can be visualized and measured objectively

Multiple mitochondrial introgression events and heteroplasmy in trypanosoma cruzi revealed by Maxicircle MLST and next generation sequencing

Background Mitochondrial DNA is a valuable taxonomic marker due to its relatively fast rate of evolution. In Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, the mitochondrial genome has a unique structural organization consisting of 20–50 maxicircles (∼20 kb) and thousands of minicircles (0.5–10 kb). T. cruzi is an early diverging protist displaying remarkable genetic heterogeneity and is recognized as a complex of six discrete typing units (DTUs). The majority of infected humans are asymptomatic for life while 30–35% develop potentially fatal cardiac and/or digestive syndromes. However, the relationship between specific clinical outcomes and T. cruzi genotype remains elusive. The availability of whole genome sequences has driven advances in high resolution genotyping techniques and re-invigorated interest in exploring the diversity present within the various DTUs. Methodology/Principal Findings To describe intra-DTU diversity, we developed a highly resolutive maxicircle multilocus sequence typing (mtMLST) scheme based on ten gene fragments. A panel of 32 TcI isolates was genotyped using the mtMLST scheme, GPI, mini-exon and 25 microsatellite loci. Comparison of nuclear and mitochondrial data revealed clearly incongruent phylogenetic histories among different geographical populations as well as major DTUs. In parallel, we exploited read depth data, generated by Illumina sequencing of the maxicircle genome from the TcI reference strain Sylvio X10/1, to provide the first evidence of mitochondrial heteroplasmy (heterogeneous mitochondrial genomes in an individual cell) in T. cruzi. Conclusions/Significance mtMLST provides a powerful approach to genotyping at the sub-DTU level. This strategy will facilitate attempts to resolve phenotypic variation in T. cruzi and to address epidemiologically important hypotheses in conjunction with intensive spatio-temporal sampling. The observations of both general and specific incidences of nuclear-mitochondrial phylogenetic incongruence indicate that genetic recombination is geographically widespread and continues to influence the natural population structure of TcI, a conclusion which challenges the traditional paradigm of clonality in T. cruzi

In Situ Calls Of The Marine Perciform Glaucosoma Hebraicum

West Australian dhufish (Glaucosoma hebraicum), a marine perciform, possess a swim bladder which has associated muscles that are used in sound production. Individuals have been recorded producing sounds during capture that may be associated with disturbance from their normal behaviour. To determine whether individuals produce sound during natural behaviour, a passive sea-noise logger was deployed on the seafloor for one month in close proximity to low-relief artificialsubstrates occupied by G. hebraicum. During this time, both juvenile and sub-adult G. hebraicum were observed within metres of the logger on numerous occasions. At approximately the same time, sounds with characteristics similar to the disturbance calls of G. hebraicum were detected by the logger. Two types of swimbladder generated calls were recorded, one of widely-spaced pulses and the other of pulses in quick succession The maximum received levels and sound exposurelevels of the recorded calls were 132 dB re 1 μPa and 121 dB re 1 μPa2.s, respectively. Based on previously determined G. hebraicum source levels and time of arrival techniques (direct and surface-reflected ray paths), the vocalising fish were estimated at between 1 and 19.5 m from the hydrophone and thus within the area where they had been observed. This study has provided evidence that juvenile G. hebraicum produce sounds at similar source levels to those generated during human induced disturbance. This indicates that sound is produced by individuals of this species during normal behaviour, but may or may not be associated with natural sources of disturbance

Trypanosoma cruzi IIc: phylogenetic and phylogeographic insights from sequence and microsatellite analysis and potential impact on emergent Chagas disease.

Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease, is highly genetically diverse. Numerous lines of evidence point to the existence of six stable genetic lineages or DTUs: TcI, TcIIa, TcIIb, TcIIc, TcIId, and TcIIe. Molecular dating suggests that T. cruzi is likely to have been an endemic infection of neotropical mammalian fauna for many millions of years. Here we have applied a panel of 49 polymorphic microsatellite markers developed from the online T. cruzi genome to document genetic diversity among 53 isolates belonging to TcIIc, a lineage so far recorded almost exclusively in silvatic transmission cycles but increasingly a potential source of human infection. These data are complemented by parallel analysis of sequence variation in a fragment of the glucose-6-phosphate isomerase gene. New isolates confirm that TcIIc is associated with terrestrial transmission cycles and armadillo reservoir hosts, and demonstrate that TcIIc is far more widespread than previously thought, with a distribution at least from Western Venezuela to the Argentine Chaco. We show that TcIIc is truly a discrete T. cruzi lineage, that it could have an ancient origin and that diversity occurs within the terrestrial niche independently of the host species. We also show that spatial structure among TcIIc isolates from its principal host, the armadillo Dasypus novemcinctus, is greater than that among TcI from Didelphis spp. opossums and link this observation to differences in ecology of their respective niches. Homozygosity in TcIIc populations and some linkage indices indicate the possibility of recombination but cannot yet be effectively discriminated from a high genome-wide frequency of gene conversion. Finally, we suggest that the derived TcIIc population genetic data have a vital role in determining the origin of the epidemiologically important hybrid lineages TcIId and TcIIe