Proceedings of The Global Conference on Ergot of Sorghum

In June 1996, several of us had the opportunity to see sorghum ergot in Brazil and the damage that the disease can do. We saw severe damage in seed production plots and witnessed the pain that seed producers had to go through to deal with this new problem. There was a wide spread scare in the sorghum community in the Americas because of the infamous reputation of the disease in causing damage in seed production fields. As a silver lining, we also observed first hand, the excellent research program that the Brazilians had in place. It became apparent that all of the sorghum researchers, seed producers and regulators of plant pathogens worldwide needed to come together to study and review this disease. There could be no better venue for such a Global Conference than Sete Lagoas, Brazil. Hence this meeting was proposed and with the support and assistance of the Director of Sorghum and Maize Research (CNPMS) of EMBRAPA, this meeting has been arranged. At the time the meeting was proposed, the disease was known only in a few countries but it has spread today to include much of the Americas and Australia. Obviously, we can no longer avoid the disease, we can only learn to live with it and manage it in future growing seasons. It has been my pleasure to work with the research leaders on ergot at EMBRAPA in developing this conference, to receive cooperation from many of the global leaders on ergot to bring their knowledge to the conference and financial support from the American Seed Trade Association, as well as the support and encouragement from Texas A & M University and INTSORMIL in recognizing the importance of our collaboration on combating sorghum ergot. In this conference, we will learn from the experiences of countries where ergot had existed for a long time while examining the ergot situation in newly invaded countries. We have several dedicated papers dealing with the biology of the pathogen, the epidemiology of the disease, and disease management strategies. We will also chart the movement of the disease and plot ideas on how to collaboratively work to lessen the impact of sorghum ergot in the Americas

Weighted maximal regularity estimates and solvability of non-smooth elliptic systems II

We continue the development, by reduction to a first order system for the conormal gradient, of $L^2$ \textit{a priori} estimates and solvability for boundary value problems of Dirichlet, regularity, Neumann type for divergence form second order, complex, elliptic systems. We work here on the unit ball and more generally its bi-Lipschitz images, assuming a Carleson condition as introduced by Dahlberg which measures the discrepancy of the coefficients to their boundary trace near the boundary. We sharpen our estimates by proving a general result concerning \textit{a priori} almost everywhere non-tangential convergence at the boundary. Also, compactness of the boundary yields more solvability results using Fredholm theory. Comparison between classes of solutions and uniqueness issues are discussed. As a consequence, we are able to solve a long standing regularity problem for real equations, which may not be true on the upper half-space, justifying \textit{a posteriori} a separate work on bounded domains.Comment: 76 pages, new abstract and few typos corrected. The second author has changed nam

Refined asymptotics for the infinite heat equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions

The nonnegative viscosity solutions to the infinite heat equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions are shown to converge as time increases to infinity to a uniquely determined limit after a suitable time rescaling. The proof relies on the half-relaxed limits technique as well as interior positivity estimates and boundary estimates. The expansion of the support is also studied

Resolvent Estimates in L^p for the Stokes Operator in Lipschitz Domains

We establish the $L^p$ resolvent estimates for the Stokes operator in Lipschitz domains in $R^d$, $d\ge 3$ for $|\frac{1}{p}-1/2|< \frac{1}{2d} +\epsilon$. The result, in particular, implies that the Stokes operator in a three-dimensional Lipschitz domain generates a bounded analytic semigroup in $L^p$ for (3/2)-\varep < p< 3+\epsilon. This gives an affirmative answer to a conjecture of M. Taylor.Comment: 28 page. Minor revision was made regarding the definition of the Stokes operator in Lipschitz domain

What Makes Co-Teaching Work? Identifying The Essential Elements

This paper will share the process used in the development of the What Makes Co-teaching Work instrument used to support the successful implementation of a co-teaching model of student teaching

Persistent sleep problems among people in recovery from substance use disorders: a mixed methods study

Background The aims of this study are to examine the one-year trajectory of sleep problems, identify clinical correlates, and describe subjective experiences related to persistent sleep problems during recovery from substance use disorders (SUD). Methods This study builds on a sequential mixed method design. The quantitative component features data from a prospective longitudinal study of 127 poly-SUD patients in the Stavanger area in Norway, while the qualitative component describes a thematic analysis of interviews with 16 persons from this study still experiencing sleep problems after at least one year of abstinence. Results The prevalence of sleep problems at baseline for the whole cohort was 79%. Among the 59 patients who were abstinent after one year, N = 20 (33.9%) had moderate and N = 11 (18.6%) had severe sleep problems. Persistent sleep problems were associated with psychological distress and were experienced as a major challenge in the struggle to stay drug free. Establishing daily routines related to work, school, and care for children were coping strategies for participants with persistent sleep problems. Conclusions Persistent sleep problems are often overlooked in a clinical setting. Based on our findings, these issues pose a major challenge in the struggle to stay drug free. For patients with psychological distress, and lack of responsibilities that established daily routines, sleep difficulties may result in increased risk of drug use episodes that result in relapse. These results argue that screening and evidence-based methods for insomnia and sleep health-programs should be commonplace adjunct intervention for patients with SUDs.publishedVersio

Performance, Politics and Media: How the 2010 British General Election leadership debates generated ‘talk’ amongst the electorate.

During the British General Election 2010 a major innovation was introduced in part to improve engagement: a series of three live televised leadership debates took place where the leader of each of the three main parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative, answered questions posed by members of the public and subsequently debated issues pertinent to the questions. In this study we consider these potentially ground breaking debates as the kind of event that was likely to generate discussion. We investigate various aspects of the ‘talk’ that emerged as a result of watching the debates. As an exploratory study concerned with situated accounts of the participants experiences we take an interpretive perspective. In this paper we outline the meta-narratives (of talk) associated with the viewing of the leadership debates that were identified, concluding our analysis by suggesting that putting a live debate on television and promoting and positioning it as a major innovation is likely to mean that is how the audience will make sense of it – as a media event

Deriving Telescope Mueller Matrices Using Daytime Sky Polarization Observations

Telescopes often modify the input polarization of a source so that the measured circular or linear output state of the optical signal can be signficantly different from the input. This mixing, or polarization "cross-talk", is defined by the optical system Mueller matrix. We describe here an efficient method for recovering the input polarization state of the light and the full 4 x 4 Mueller matrix of the telescope with an accuracy of a few percent without external masks or telescope hardware modification. Observations of the bright, highly polarized daytime sky using the Haleakala 3.7m AEOS telescope and a coude spectropolarimeter demonstrate the technique.Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS

Intra-Articular Fms-Like Tyrosine Kinase 3 Ligand Expression Is a Driving Force in Induction and Progression of Arthritis

Background: One of the hallmarks of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is hyperplasia and inflammation of the synovial tissue being characterized by in situ occurrence of highly differentiated leukocytes. Fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 (Flt3) has a crucial role in hematopoiesis, regulation of cell proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. Typically, Flt3 is expressed on early myeloid and lymphoid progenitors and is activated by its soluble ligand (Flt3-L). The highly differentiated cellular pattern in the synovium of the RA patients made us hypothesize that Flt3-L, with its ability to induce proliferation and differentiation, could be of importance in induction and/or progression of arthritis. Methodology/Principal Findings: To investigate occurrence of Flt3-L in RA we have measured its levels in matched serum and synovial fluid samples from 130 patients and 107 controls. To analyse the pro-inflammatory role of Flt3-L, we continuously overexpressed this protein locally in healthy mouse joints using homologous B-cell line transfected with Flt3-L gene. Additionally, recombinant Flt3-L was instillated intra-articularly in combination with peptidoglycans, a Toll Like Receptor 2-ligand with stong arthritogenic properties. Our results show significantly higher levels of Flt3-L in the synovial fluid as compared to serum levels in RA subjects (p = 0.0001). In addition, RA synovial fluid levels of Flt-3-L were significantly higher than these obtained from synovial fluids originating from non-inflammatory joint diseases (p = 0.022). Intra-articular administration of B-cell line transfected with Flt3-L gene resulted in highly erosive arthritis while inoculation of the same B-cell line without hyperexpression of Flt3-L did not induce erosivity and only in a minority of cases caused synovial proliferation! Flt3-ligand potentiated peptidoglycan induced arthritis as compared to mice injected with peptidoglycan alone (p<0.05). Conclusions/Significance: Our findings indicate that Flt3-L is strongly expressed at the site of inflammation in human RA. It exerts both pro-inflammatory and tissue destructive properties once in the joint cavity. Owing to these properties, treatment attempts to neutralize this molecule should be considered in RA