The Constructing of “Chinese-ness”: The Culinary Identity of Chinese Restaurants in Gettysburg, PA.

General Tso’s Chicken. Egg Rolls. Fried Rice. Fortune Cookies. Since the creation of Chop Suey in 1849, Chinese restaurants have not only displayed one of the most fascinating ethnic cuisines in the US but also become a commonly recognizable cultural symbol for Chinese-ness in the American “melting pot. Then what kind of “Chinese-ness” is presented and how is it constructed by these restaurants? Does its Otherness prevent it from fitting into mainstream American society or does its Americanization make this identity less ‘authentic’? By taking the Chinese restaurants in Gettysburg, PA, as a case study, this research studies the construction of their culinary identity through the strategic crafting of food, space, and customer experience. It argues that the constructed Chinese-ness reveals a complex process of cultural negotiation with the larger American society, including its entrenched racism. This process not only reflects the fluid and performative nature of the culinary identity of these restaurants but also the power of ethnic agency to find its own positioning in mainstream American society

Risk factors for failure of outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy (OPAT) in infective endocarditis

Objectives: To identify risk factors for failure of outpatient antibiotic therapy (OPAT) in infective endocarditis (IE). Patients and methods: We identified IE cases managed at a single centre over 12 years from a prospectively maintained database. ‘OPAT failure’ was defined as unplanned readmission or antibiotic switch due to adverse drug reaction or antibiotic resistance. We analysed patient and disease-related risk factors for OPAT failure by univariate and multivariate logistic regression. We also retrospectively collected follow-up data on adverse disease outcome (defined as IE-related death or relapse) and performed Kaplan–Meier survival analysis up to 36 months following OPAT. Results: We identified 80 episodes of OPAT in IE. Failure occurred in 25/80 episodes (31.3%). On multivariate analysis, cardiac or renal failure [pooled OR 7.39 (95% CI 1.84–29.66), P = 0.005] and teicoplanin therapy [OR 8.69 (95% CI 2.01–37.47), P = 0.004] were independently associated with increased OPAT failure. OPAT failure with teicoplanin occurred despite therapeutic plasma levels. OPAT failure predicted adverse disease outcome up to 36 months (P = 0.016 log-rank test). Conclusions: These data caution against selecting patients with endocarditis for OPAT in the presence of cardiac or renal failure and suggest teicoplanin therapy may be associated with suboptimal OPAT outcomes. Alternative regimens to teicoplanin in the OPAT setting should be further investigated

Four rural cemeteries in central western NSW: Islands of Australiana in a European sea?

Vascular plants present in groundstoreys of variously–managed areas in four cemeteries in central western NSW – two on the Central Western Slopes (Garra and Toogong) and two on the Central Tablelands (Lyndhurst and Carcoar) – were recorded over periods of 6–10 years. It was hypothesised that (a) areas of the cemeteries with a history of nil or low disturbance would represent high quality remnant vegetation (i.e. contain a diversity of native species but few naturalised species), and (b) that clearing of woody vegetation, together with similar management (e.g. regular mowing) would result in homogenisation of the groundstoreys such that many species, native and naturalised, would be common to all sites. 344 species (176 native, 154 naturalised and 14 non–naturalised exotics) were recorded across the four cemeteries. Many native species that were rare in the surrounding agricultural lands were present in the cemeteries (enhancing their value as conservation areas) but no cemetery contained areas of groundstorey that would qualify as ‘pristine’. Across all management areas, the proportions of naturalised species in the native + naturalised floras of the cemeteries ranged from 46 to 55 %. Though never dominant, naturalised species also comprised high proportions (42 to 51 %) of the floras of the least disturbed (nil or infrequently mown) areas within each cemetery. Many (40 %) of the species recorded occurred at only one cemetery. This partly explained why the floras of similarly– managed parts of cemeteries on the Central Western Slopes were, contrary to expectations, markedly different to those on the Central Tablelands. However, within the same botanic subdivision, floras – particularly of naturalised species in regularly mown grasslands – were more similar (‘homogenised’) than those of nil or infrequently mown grasslands

Factorised spatial representation learning: application in semi-supervised myocardial segmentation

The success and generalisation of deep learning algorithms heavily depend on learning good feature representations. In medical imaging this entails representing anatomical information, as well as properties related to the specific imaging setting. Anatomical information is required to perform further analysis, whereas imaging information is key to disentangle scanner variability and potential artefacts. The ability to factorise these would allow for training algorithms only on the relevant information according to the task. To date, such factorisation has not been attempted. In this paper, we propose a methodology of latent space factorisation relying on the cycle-consistency principle. As an example application, we consider cardiac MR segmentation, where we separate information related to the myocardium from other features related to imaging and surrounding substructures. We demonstrate the proposed method's utility in a semi-supervised setting: we use very few labelled images together with many unlabelled images to train a myocardium segmentation neural network. Specifically, we achieve comparable performance to fully supervised networks using a fraction of labelled images in experiments on ACDC and a dataset from Edinburgh Imaging Facility QMRI. Code will be made available at https://github.com/agis85/spatial_factorisation.Comment: Accepted in MICCAI 201

Sushi gets serious:the draft genome sequence of the pufferfish Fugu rubripes

The publication of the Fugu rubripes draft genome sequence will take this fish from culinary delicacy to potent tool in deciphering the mysteries of human genome function

Polyploidy, infraspecific cytotype variation, and speciation in Goldenrods: The cytogeography of Solidago subsect. Humiles (Asteraceae) in North America

Polyploidy is an important evolutionary mechanism in plants, and in some genera (e.g., Solidago in Asteraceae) it is particularly widespread and is hypothesized to have played a major role in diversification. Goldenrods are notorious for their ploidy variation, with roughly 14% and 32% of recognized North American species being polyploid or including multiple cytotypes, respectively. We used traditional chromosome counts and flow cytometry to examine cytogeographic patterns, biogeographic and evolutionary hypotheses, and species boundaries in S. subsect. Humiles. Chromosome numbers and DNA ploidy determinations are reported for 337 individuals, including 148 new reports. Cytotypes show significant geographic structuring. Solidago simplex and S. spathulata were uniformly diploid (2n = 18) in western North America, while cytogeographic patterns in eastern North America were regionally complex and included 2n, 4n, and 6n cytotypes. Cytotypes within S. simplex were ecogeographically segregated and mixed‐ploidy populations were rare. Data from this study and additional biosystematic data indicate that cytotypes in S. simplex fulfill the requirements of multiple species concepts and should best be treated as distinct species. Polyploid cytotypes possibly formed recurrently, however, and evolution and species boundaries within poly ploid S. simplex will require additional study. Results from this study and accumulated data from other studies suggest that biological species diversity in Solidago is considerably higher than currently recognized taxonomically.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147108/1/tax611014-sup-001-PDF.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147108/2/tax611014.pd

Nearly 85% of tobacco smoke is invisible - a confirmation of previous claims

Contributors The original concept for the article came from AC, when researching the provenance of the claim that 85% of tobacco smoke is invisible. ILG led both the data analysis and the drafting of the paper with significant contributions from SS and AW. All contributors reviewed and edited the final manuscript. Ivan Gee is the guarantor for the article

Cognitive bias in a non-human primate: husbandry procedures influence cognitive indicators of psychological well-being in captive rhesus macaques

The measurement of 'cognitive bias' has recently emerged as a powerful tool for assessing animal welfare. Cognitive bias was initially, and widely, studied in humans, and describes the way in which particular emotions are associated with biases in information processing. People suffering from clinical levels of anxiety or depression, for example, interpret ambiguous events more negatively than do non-anxious or non-depressed people. Development of methods for use with non-human animals has revealed similar biases in several species of mammals and birds, and one invertebrate. However, cognitive bias has not been previously explored in any species of non-human primate, despite specific concerns raised about the welfare of these animals in captivity. Here, we describe a touchscreen-based cognitive-bias task developed for use with captive rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Monkeys were initially trained on a 'Go/No-Go' operant task, in which they learned to touch one of two lines that differed in size in order to receive a reward (food), and to desist from touching the other line to avoid a mildly aversive stimulus (delay to the next trial and white noise). In testing sessions, the monkeys were presented with lines of intermediate size. We measured whether touchscreen responses to these ambiguous stimuli were affected by husbandry procedures (environmental enrichment, and a statutory health check involving restraint and ketamine hydrochloride injection) presumed to induce positive and negative shifts in affective state, respectively. Monkeys made fewer responses to ambiguous stimuli post health check compared to during the phase of enrichment suggesting greater expectation of negative outcomes following the health check compared to during enrichment. Shifts in affective state following standard husbandry procedures may therefore be associated with changes in information processing similar to those demonstrated in anxious and depressed humans, and in a number of other taxa

Emotion evaluation and response slowing in a non-human primate: New directions for cognitive bias measures of animal welfare

The cognitive bias model of animal welfare assessment is informed by studies with humans demonstrating that the interaction between emotion and cognition can be detected using laboratory tasks. A limitation of cognitive bias tasks is the amount of training required by animals prior to testing. A potential solution is to use biologically relevant stimuli that trigger innate emotional responses. Here; we develop a new method to assess emotion in rhesus macaques; informed byparadigms used with humans: emotional Stroop; visual cueing and; in particular; response slowing. In humans; performance on a simple cognitive task can become impaired when emotional distractor content is displayed. Importantly; responses become slower in anxious individuals in the presence of mild threat; a pattern not seen in non-anxious individuals; who are able to effectively process and disengage from the distractor. Here; we present a proof-of-concept study; demonstrating that rhesus macaques show slowing of responses in a simple touch-screen task when emotional content is introduced; but only when they had recently experienced a presumably stressful veterinary inspection. Our results indicate the presence of a subtle “cognitive freeze” response; the measurement of which may provide a means of identifying negative shifts in emotion in animals