Pararhabdodon Isonensis and Tsintaosaurus Spinorhinus: A New Clade of Lambeosaurine Hadrosaurids from Eurasia

We present new anatomical information showing that Koutalisaurus kohlerorum, from the Maastrichtian of Lleida Province, northeastern Spain, is most probably the junior synonym of Pararhabdodon isonensis from the same region. Dentary and maxillary characters previously considered as autapomorphies of K. kohlerorum and P isonensis, respectively, are shown to be synapomorphies uniting the latter with Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus from the Campanian of the Wangshi Group, Shandong Province, China. This study provided conclusive evidence of the presence of the Lambeosaurinae in Europe. Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus and Pararhabdodon isonensis were inferred to form a clade of basal lambeosaurines characterized by a maxilla with an elevated articular facet for the jugal (continuous with the ectopterygoid ridge) and an extremely medially projected symphyseal region of the dentary. This clade originated in Asia during the middle or late Campanian. Pararhabdodon isonensis or its ancestors migrated from Asia to the Iberian island of the European archipelago. Reconstruction of ancestral areas by Fitch parsimony attributes the European occurrence of P isonensis to a single dispersal event from Asia no later than middle to late Campanian. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Charlotte and Walter Kohler Charitable TrustFlorida State UniversityNational Science Foundation EAR 0207744, DBI 0446224Field Museum of Natural HistoryDepartments of Geosciences and Civil EngineeringGraduate School at Texas Tech UniversityScience Department at South Plains CollegeSigma Xi National Scientific HonoraryUniversity of Texas at AustinNSF IGERTMinistry of Education and Science of Spain CGL2005-07878-C02-01Geological Science

Combination Strategies for Semantic Role Labeling

This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback

Continuing Professional Education and Competency: Implications for Social Work Practice

Competent professional practice requires ongoing professional development. Not only to enhance current competency but also to develop the necessary competency to address new and emerging issues within and given profession. Though it has long been understood that a training need exists when an individual lacks the skill or knowledge to perform adequately, many professions, including social work, historically did not pay attention to the relationship between training and improved practitioner performance. However, with public expectations of competent performance and credentialing activities to insure such, the professions are aware that they must maintain high levels of competence and that Continuing Professional Education (CPE) is a valuable tool in achieving such. This article is a discussion of how CPE can play a significant role in developing and enhancing professional social work practice competency

Chiral extrapolation of light resonances from one and two-loop unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory versus lattice results

We study the pion mass dependence of the rho(770) and f_0(600) masses and widths from one and two-loop unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory. We show the consistency of one-loop calculations with lattice results for the M_rho, f_pi and the isospin 2 scattering length a_20.Then, we develop and apply the modified Inverse Amplitude Method formalism for two-loop ChPT. In contrast to the f_0(600), the rho(770) is rather sensitive to the two-loop ChPT parameters --our main source of systematic uncertainty. We thus provide two-loop unitarized fits constrained by lattice information on M_rho, f_pi, by the qqbar leading 1/N_c behavior of the rho and by existing estimates of low energy constants. These fits yield relatively stable predictions up to m_pi\simeq 300-350 MeV for the rho coupling and width as well as for all the f_0(600) parameters. We confirm, to two-loops, the weak m_pi dependence of the rho coupling and the KSRF relation, and the existence of two virtual f_0(600) poles for sufficiently high m_pi. At two loops one of these poles becomes a bound state when m_pi is somewhat larger than 300 MeV.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Tunable BODIPY derivatives amenable to "click" and peptide chemistry

Novel azido- and amino- functionalised fluorescent probes based on the BODIPY framework have been developed. The probes can be easily and cheaply synthesised, exhibit the highly desirable BODIPY fluorescent properties, and are amenable to “click” and peptide chemistry methodologies. These probes provide a stable and readily available tool amenable for the visualisation of both solution and solid supported events