Oregon Authors Project as a Collection Development Resource

The Oregon Authors Project is an online resource that provides information and resources about authors who call or have called Oregon their home. Not only does it feature new publications by local authors, but it also highlights authors who identify as BIPOC as well as LGBTQIA+ which can be very helpful in collection development for these communities. There are shockingly few resources that highlight these communities and even fewer that are Oregon-specific. The Oregon Authors Project seeks to change this by increasing the visibility of these writers. Ultimately, the Oregon Authors Project would like to become a crucial resource for libraries across Oregon and to the general public by identifying publications of local BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ authors

Evolution des pratiques d'alimentation et de transhumance des éleveurs de la Laiterie du berger (Sénégal)

La Laiterie Du Berger (LDB) s'est installée depuis 2006 au nord du Sénégal et collecte du lait dans des systèmes sahéliens pastoraux et agro-pastoraux. Afin d'assurer sa pérennité, elle se doit de stabiliser son approvisionnement en lait pendant la longue saison sèche. A cette période les volumes livrés décroissent au fur et à mesure de la raréfaction des ressources fourragères et de la mobilité des éleveurs, diminuant la rentabilité de la collecte. Notre étude évalue l'efficacité du service de livraison d'aliments complémentaires, service mis en place par la laiterie pour améliorer la productivité laitière des troupeaux en saison sèche. En avril 2013, au coeur de la saison sèche, notre travail montre que l'aliment utilisé par un échantillon de 60 éleveurs provient en majorité (73 %) de la laiterie, qu'il est destiné en priorité aux noyaux sédentarisés de vaches laitières (94 %) et que le lait trait est livré en grande partie (68 %) à la LDB. Ces résultats confirment ceux obtenus en 2012. Ils indiquent le bien fondé du service de complémentation alimentaire. Pourtant l'efficience de ces aliments demeure globalement dépendante des conditions climatiques de la zone, celles-ci étant très variables d'une année à l'autre. L'aliment concentré, ne peut se substituer à la ration de base. Autrement dit, lorsque l'hivernage est médiocre, l'efficacité de l'aliment concentré diminue. De plus le système d'élevage demeure à dominante allaitante, et aux yeux des éleveurs la place du veau dans " la consommation " du lait reste primordiale. (Résumé d'auteur

Rhythmic interactions between the mediodorsal thalamus and prefrontal cortex precede human visual perception

The thalamus is much more than a simple sensory relay. High-order thalamic nuclei, such as the mediodorsal thalamus, exert a profound influence over animal cognition. However, given the difficulty of directly recording from the thalamus in humans, next-to-nothing is known about thalamic and thalamocortical contributions to human cognition. To address this, we analysed simultaneously-recorded thalamic iEEG and whole-head MEG in six patients (four female, two male; plus MEG recordings from twelve healthy controls) as they completed a visual detection task. We observed that the phase of both ongoing mediodorsal thalamic and prefrontal low-frequency activity was predictive of perceptual performance. Critically however, mediodorsal thalamic activity mediated prefrontal contributions to perceptual performance. These results suggest that it is thalamocortical interactions, rather than cortical activity alone, that is predictive of upcoming perceptual performance and, more generally, highlights the importance of accounting for the thalamus when theorising about cortical contributions to human cognition

Material modeling for numerical simulation of elastomer O-rings with experimental verification at low temperatures

peer reviewedElastomer O-ring seals are used in many technical applications and their requirements are becoming increasingly challenging for high-pressure applications like hydrogen storage systems. We analyze the performance of such seals at low temperatures and highlight the essential effects of primary leakage. Linear viscoelastic material modeling is described and defined with the help of Dynamic Mechanical Thermal Analysis (DMTA), Time-Temperature Superposition Principle (TTSP), and the shift function of Williams-Landel-Ferry (WLF) by assuming thermo-rheological simple material behavior. Numerical calculations and experimental validation are done for strain-rate dependent uniaxial tensile tests, Temperature Retraction (TR), Compression Set (CS), and specific leakage tests with O-rings. Thanks to Finite Element Analysis (FEA) it is possible to identify the most significant influences on the sealing tightness. Thermal shrinkage and the increasingly limited recovery of elastomer O-rings are mainly responsible for primary leakage at low temperatures and can be enforced by time-temperature dependent stress relaxation and manufacturing tolerances.7. Affordable and clean energ

Inconsistent effects of stochastic resonance on human auditory processing

It has been demonstrated that, while otherwise detrimental, noise can improve sensory perception under optimal conditions. The mechanism underlying this improvement is stochastic resonance. An inverted U-shaped relationship between noise level and task performance is considered as the signature of stochastic resonance. Previous studies have proposed the existence of stochastic resonance also in the human auditory system. However, the reported beneficial effects of noise are small, based on a small sample, and do not confirm the proposed inverted U-shaped function. Here, we investigated in two separate studies whether stochastic resonance may be present in the human auditory system by applying noise of different levels, either acoustically or electrically via transcranial random noise stimulation, while participants had to detect acoustic stimuli adjusted to their individual hearing threshold. We find no evidence for behaviorally relevant effects of stochastic resonance. Although detection rate for near-threshold acoustic stimuli appears to vary in an inverted U-shaped manner for some subjects, it varies in a U-shaped manner or in other manners for other subjects. Our results show that subjects do not benefit from noise, irrespective of its modality. In conclusion, our results question the existence of stochastic resonance in the human auditory system

Emergence of Sound in a Tunable Fermi Fluid

Landau's Fermi-liquid (FL) theory has been successful at the phenomenological description of the normal phase of many different Fermi systems. Using a dilute atomic Fermi fluid with tunable interactions, we investigate the microscopic basis of Landau's theory with a system describable from first principles. We study transport properties of an interacting Fermi gas by measuring its density response to a periodic external perturbation. In an ideal Fermi gas, we measure for the first time the celebrated Lindhard function. As the system is brought from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic regime, we observe the emergence of sound, and find that the experimental observations are quantitatively understood with a first-principle transport equation for the FL. When the system is more strongly interacting, we find deviations from such predictions. Finally, we observe the shape of the quasiparticle excitations directly from momentum-space tomography and see how it evolves from the collisionless to the collisional regime. Our study establishes this system as a clean platform for studying Landau's theory of the FL and paves the way for extending the theory to more exotic conditions, such as nonlinear dynamics and FLs with strong correlations in versatile settings

Hierarchical structure in sequence processing: How to measure it and determine its neural implementation

In many domains of human cognition, hierarchically structured representations are thought to play a key role. In this paper, we start with some foundational definitions of key phenomena like “sequence” and “hierarchy," and then outline potential signatures of hierarchical structure that can be observed in behavioral and neuroimaging data. Appropriate behavioral methods include classic ones from psycholinguistics along with some from the more recent artificial grammar learning and sentence processing literature. We then turn to neuroimaging evidence for hierarchical structure with a focus on the functional MRI literature. We conclude that, although a broad consensus exists about a role for a neural circuit incorporating the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, and the arcuate fasciculus, considerable uncertainty remains about the precise computational function(s) of this circuitry. An explicit theoretical framework, combined with an empirical approach focusing on distinguishing between plausible alternative hypotheses, will be necessary for further progress