4,742 research outputs found
Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity
Adjusted for many other determinants, beauty affects earnings; but does it lead directly to the differences in productivity that we believe generate earnings differences? We take a large sample of student instructional ratings for a group of university professors, acquire six independent measures of their beauty and a number of other descriptors of them and their classes. Instructors who are viewed as better looking receive higher instructional ratings, with the impact of a move from the 10th to the 90th percentile of beauty being substantial. This impact exists within university departments and even within particular courses, and is larger for male than for female instructors. Disentangling whether this outcome represents productivity or discrimination is, as with the issue generally, probably impossible.
Ten polymorphic microsatellite primers in the tropical tree caimito, Chrysophyllum cainito (Sapotaceae).
UnlabelledPremise of the studyWe developed microsatellite primers for the tropical tree Chrysophyllum cainito (Sapotaceae) to determine the native range of the species, investigate the origin of cultivated populations, and examine the partitioning of genetic diversity in wild and cultivated populations. •Methods and resultsWe developed 10 polymorphic primers from C. cainito genomic DNA libraries enriched for di-, tri-, and tetranucleotide repeat motifs. The loci amplified were polymorphic in samples collected from Jamaica and Panama. The number of alleles per locus ranged from two to 10 and three to 12, while observed heterozygosities ranged from 0.074 to 0.704 and 0.407 to 0.852 in Jamaica and Panama, respectively. •ConclusionsThe microsatellite primers will be useful in future population genetic studies as well as those aimed at understanding the geographic origin(s) of wild and cultivated populations
Retrieval Practice as Process in Self-Directed Learning: New Philosophical Directions for Self-Directed Learning
We explain retrieval practice and its potential benefits for adult self-directed learners. Moreover, we argue functional contextualism as an alternative research philosophy to self-directed learning’s humanist assumptions
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Declining Burden of Plasmodium vivax in a Population in Northwestern Thailand from 1995 to 2016 before Comprehensive Primaquine Prescription for Radical Cure.
All Plasmodium cases have declined over the last decade in northwestern Thailand along the Myanmar border. During this time, Plasmodium vivax has replaced Plasmodium falciparum as the dominant species. The decline in P. falciparum has been shadowed by a coincidental but delayed decline in P. vivax cases. This may be due to early detection and artemisinin-based therapy, species-specific diagnostics, and bed net usage all of which reduce malaria transmission but not P. vivax relapse. In the absence of widespread primaquine use for radical cure against P. vivax hypnozoites, the decline in P. vivax may be explained by decreased hypnozoite activation of P. vivax relapses triggered by P. falciparum. The observed trends in this region suggest a beneficial effect of decreased P. falciparum transmission on P. vivax incidence, but elimination of P. vivax in a timely manner likely requires radical cure
Gravity-induced vacuum dominance
It has been widely believed that, except in very extreme situations, the
influence of gravity on quantum fields should amount to just small,
sub-dominant contributions. This view seemed to be endorsed by the seminal
results obtained over the last decades in the context of renormalization of
quantum fields in curved spacetimes. Here, however, we argue that this belief
is false by showing that there exist well-behaved spacetime evolutions where
the vacuum energy density of free quantum fields is forced, by the very same
background spacetime, to become dominant over any classical energy-density
component. This semiclassical gravity effect finds its roots in the infrared
behavior of fields on curved spacetimes. By estimating the time scale for the
vacuum energy density to become dominant, and therefore for backreaction on the
background spacetime to become important, we argue that this vacuum dominance
may bear unexpected astrophysical and cosmological implications.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett
Semiparametric inference of effective reproduction number dynamics from wastewater pathogen surveillance data
Concentrations of pathogen genomes measured in wastewater have recently
become available as a new data source to use when modeling the spread of
infectious diseases. One promising use for this data source is inference of the
effective reproduction number, the average number of individuals a newly
infected person will infect. We propose a model where new infections arrive
according to a time-varying immigration rate which can be interpreted as a
compound parameter equal to the product of the proportion of susceptibles in
the population and the transmission rate. This model allows us to estimate the
effective reproduction number from concentrations of pathogen genomes while
avoiding difficult to verify assumptions about the dynamics of the susceptible
population. As a byproduct of our primary goal, we also produce a new model for
estimating the effective reproduction number from case data using the same
framework. We test this modeling framework in an agent-based simulation study
with a realistic data generating mechanism which accounts for the time-varying
dynamics of pathogen shedding. Finally, we apply our new model to estimating
the effective reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2 in Los Angeles, California,
using pathogen RNA concentrations collected from a large wastewater treatment
facility.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures in main te
New Frontiers in Managing Clival Tumors — The Extended Endoscopic Endonasal Approach
Clival lesions still represent a challenge for neurosurgeons. A variety of expansive process, either benign or malignant, may be identified in the clival and paraclival region
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