Social factors affecting early developmental behaviour in laboratory mouse pups (Mus musculus)

Experiments were conducted to establish the effect of litter size, maternal experience and the presence of the father on laboratory mouse development. Behaviour was recorded from day 3» at the earliest, to day 30» at the latest, with the minimum of disturbance to the subjects. Daily observations were made to establish the proportion of time the pups spent exhibiting certain activities. On day 30» open field tests were conducted and the pups* body weights were measured. The main experiment involved a 2 x 2 x 2 design so that the main effects of the three factors, and their interactions, could be assessed. Although all three factors influenced pup behaviour, paternal presence was the factor with the greatest number of significant main effects. Paternal presence had five main effects and litter size had four. Maternal experience had only one main effect, but was involved in all eight of the significant interactions. It was concluded that both the presence of the father and the small litter size increased the developmental rate of mouse pups, whereas maternal experience was involved in indirect effects. Two further experiments were conducted to investigate routes by which the father's effect might be operating. The Split Litter experiment exposed pups to the father, in the absence of the mother. The father displayed a range of care taking activities, very similar to the mother's, and the results and general observations indicated that the father was directly influencing offspring behaviour. The Split Gage experiment showed that the mother's caretaking behaviour was affected by the presence of the father and was associated with changed pup behaviour. It was concluded that the father affected pups directly, mainly by providing them with thermal insulation and tactile stimulation, and also affected them via a maternal mediation route by eliciting an increased display of maternal behaviour

Contextual Parameter Generation for Universal Neural Machine Translation

We propose a simple modification to existing neural machine translation (NMT) models that enables using a single universal model to translate between multiple languages while allowing for language specific parameterization, and that can also be used for domain adaptation. Our approach requires no changes to the model architecture of a standard NMT system, but instead introduces a new component, the contextual parameter generator (CPG), that generates the parameters of the system (e.g., weights in a neural network). This parameter generator accepts source and target language embeddings as input, and generates the parameters for the encoder and the decoder, respectively. The rest of the model remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. We show how this simple modification enables the system to use monolingual data for training and also perform zero-shot translation. We further show it is able to surpass state-of-the-art performance for both the IWSLT-15 and IWSLT-17 datasets and that the learned language embeddings are able to uncover interesting relationships between languages.Comment: Published in the proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 201

Untapped Potential: The Neglected Urban Interest in Secondary Agriculture

Agriculture in a secondary school context in Australia has had a poor reputation amongst students and parents. Consequently, there have been historically low enrolments for many decades. This has contrasted with the reality of well-paid, knowledge-intense and increasingly urban-based jobs in the sector. This disparity has led to a significant shortage of university agricultural graduates needed to fill vital jobs to support the economy and society. Through a case study at one high school, this paper demonstrates how the reputation of the subject in the view of students and parents can be changed to more closely align with the modern reality of jobs in the agriculture sector. It shows that urban high school students, who traditionally would not be expected to take roles in agriculture, are not only interested in the concept of ‘paddock to plate’ but are willing to devote their lives to a career in the industry in order to make a difference

Maximal motor unit discharge rates of the medial and lateral gastrocnemeii of young males

The triceps surae is composed of the mono-articular soleus and the bi-articular gastrocnemeii. Mean maximal motor unit discharge rates (MUDRs) reported for the soleus (~16Hz) are lower than other limb muscles tested (Dalton et al., 2009). Because of differences in fibre-type and functional anatomy it is important to determine maximal MUDRs in the two heads of gastrocnemeii, as compared with the soleus, to fully understand the interplay of these three muscles for plantar flexion. The purpose of the study was to record maximal MUDRs of the medial (MG) and lateral gastrocnemeii (LG) in 9 recreationally active, young men (age 24.2 ± 1.6y; 81.3 ± 8.1kg; 180.3 ± 5.3cm). During 3 separate visits to the lab, participants performed a series of 6-8, 7s maximal voluntary isometric contractions (MVC) of the plantar flexors with a knee joint angle of 90 degrees, with 5 minutes of rest between contractions. Maximum voluntary activation of the plantar flexors using the interpolated twitch technique was calculated. Custom tungsten microelectrodes were inserted individually into the belly of the lateral and medial gastrocnemeii and gently manipulated during the contractions to sample from as many distinct motor units throughout the muscle as possible. Action potential trains were analyzed offline to calculate discharge rates for each identified motor unit. All subjects were capable of high % of voluntary activation (\u3e96%) and achieved a mean maximal plantar flexor torque of 194.6 ± 57.1Nm. A total of 198 and 117 motor unit action potential trains were identified in the MG and LG, respectively. The mean maximal motor unit discharge rates were 22.7 ± 8.6Hz and 22.4 ± 8.1 Hz (Range: 5.5 - 64Hz) in the MG and LG, respectively, and were not significantly different from one another, p \u3e 0.05. The coefficient of variation of discharge frequencies in the identified trains were 14.6 ± 1.4% and 14.3 ± 2.2% in the MG and LG respectively, and were not significantly different, p \u3e 0.05. Maximal MUDRs in both heads of the gastrocnemeii are greater than in the soleus, but are not different from one another. Despite their similar roles in plantar flexion, the amount and degree of habitual activation (phasic vs. tonic) or their functional role (flexor vs. extensor) may account for motor unit discharge rate differences between the gastrocnemeii and soleus during plantar flexion actions

Measuring capabilities an empirical investigation of the sen-nussbaum approach to well-being

This thesis argues for the view that Amartya Sen's capabilities approach is a preferable approach to the measurement of welfare by addressing three questions: can the capability approach be operationalised? what is the relationship between capabilities and satisfaction with life.? how do capabilities respond to changes over time? Chapter 1 provides a discussion of a widely used economic evaluation model of welfare focussing on some of its key problems and concludes with a discussion of Sen's alternative capabilities approach. Chapter 2 discusses the three key relationships that Sen uses in evaluating wellbeing and discusses the identification of capabilities based on the account developed by Martha Nussbaum

Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Current state-of-the-art NMT systems use large neural networks that are not only slow to train, but also often require many heuristics and optimization tricks, such as specialized learning rate schedules and large batch sizes. This is undesirable as it requires extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we propose a curriculum learning framework for NMT that reduces training time, reduces the need for specialized heuristics or large batch sizes, and results in overall better performance. Our framework consists of a principled way of deciding which training samples are shown to the model at different times during training, based on the estimated difficulty of a sample and the current competence of the model. Filtering training samples in this manner prevents the model from getting stuck in bad local optima, making it converge faster and reach a better solution than the common approach of uniformly sampling training examples. Furthermore, the proposed method can be easily applied to existing NMT models by simply modifying their input data pipelines. We show that our framework can help improve the training time and the performance of both recurrent neural network models and Transformers, achieving up to a 70% decrease in training time, while at the same time obtaining accuracy improvements of up to 2.2 BLEU

Digital Loyalty Programmes: Pull Strategies in B2B Channel Marketing

Digital loyalty programmes are an increasingly common tool for business-to-business marketers hoping to increase repeat sales through deeper customer engagement. In consumer markets, such programmes do little to influence behavioural loyalty and disproportionately attract the firm's existing heavy buyers. Industrial buying, however, relies on direct sales channels and features negotiation and reciprocity. Loyalty effects may therefore differ in B2B, and although no clear picture yet exists, such knowledge is important as B2C digital loyalty programmes grow in popularity. Here, the authors describe programme membership's evolving characteristics over in a B2B scheme that was launched in the US metal-cutting tools manufacturer customer base. Findings are consistent with the idea that the scheme recruited the heaviest buyers earliest and had an insignificant effect on total revenue. The authors discuss managerial implications, particularly about (1) managing the rollout of similar schemes and (2) refocussing on the programme objectives to maintain sales from the lightest rather than the heaviest buyers

Sexual function in 16- to 21-year-olds in Britain

Purpose: Concern about young people's sexuality is focused on the need to prevent harmful outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy. Although the benefit of a broader perspective is recognized, data on other aspects of sexuality, particularly sexual function, are scant. We sought to address this gap by measuring the population prevalence of sexual function problems, help seeking, and avoidance of sex in young people. Methods: A cross-sectional stratified probability sample survey (Natsal-3) of 15,162 women and men in Britain (response rate: 57.7%), using computer-assisted self-interviews. Data come from 1875 (71.9%) sexually active, and 517 sexually inactive (18.7%), participants aged 16–21 years. Measures were single items from a validated measure of sexual function (the Natsal-SF). Results: Among sexually active 16- to 21-year-old participants, 9.1% of men and 13.4% of women reported a distressing sexual problem lasting 3 months or more in the last year. Most common among men was reaching a climax too quickly (4.5%), and among women was difficulty in reaching climax (6.3%). Just over a third (35.5%) of men and 42.3% of women reporting a problem had sought help, but rarely from professional sources. Among those who had not had sex in the last year, just >10% of young men and women said they had avoided sex because of sexual difficulties. Conclusions: Distressing sexual function problems are reported by a sizeable minority of sexually active young people. Education is required, and counseling should be available, to prevent lack of knowledge, anxiety, and shame progressing into lifelong sexual difficulties