Relationship of Sweet Corn Silking Stage to Oviposition by the Corn Earworm

It is commonly believed that corn earworm (CEW) do not oviposit (i.e., lay eggs) on sweet corn silks after they have dried. If true, insecticide treatments could logically cease at some predetermined time interval after pollination, because silks commence drying within hours of pollination. Problematic however, is that neither conventional wisdom, nor the historical literature, precisely defines the point at which silks are sufficiently dry to become unattractive for oviposition. We hypothesized that CEW cease to oviposit on silks that are 50% dried

An African PhD Program in Information Systems: The Case of Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

This case study is about the first Information Systems PhD program in Ethiopia and the region, a collaborative effort of thirteen universities around the globe. Fifteen faculty members traveled to Ethiopia to launch the program for classes, which will start in 2009. This paper depicts the program design and program development and an outline of the overall program. The authors share their personal experience in the development of this unique IS PhD program

The UK myotonic dystrophy patient registry: facilitating and accelerating clinical research

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is the most frequent muscular dystrophy worldwide with complex, multi-systemic, and progressively worsening symptoms. There is currently no treatment for this inherited disorder and research can be challenging due to the rarity and variability of the disease. The UK Myotonic Dystrophy Patient Registry is a patient self-enrolling online database collecting clinical and genetic information. For this cross-sectional “snapshot” analysis, 556 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of DM1 registered between May 2012 and July 2016 were included. An almost even distribution was seen between genders and a broad range of ages was present from 8 months to 78 years, with the largest proportion between 30 and 59 years. The two most frequent symptoms were fatigue and myotonia, reported by 79 and 78% of patients, respectively. The severity of myotonia correlated with the severity of fatigue as well as mobility impairment, and dysphagia occurred mostly in patients also reporting myotonia. Men reported significantly more frequent severe myotonia, whereas severe fatigue was more frequently reported by women. Cardiac abnormalities were diagnosed in 48% of patients and more than one-third of them needed a cardiac implant. Fifteen percent of patients used a non-invasive ventilation and cataracts were removed in 26% of patients, 65% of which before the age of 50 years. The registry’s primary aim was to facilitate and accelerate clinical research. However, these data also allow us to formulate questions for hypothesis-driven research that may lead to improvements in care and treatment

FroDO: From Detections to 3D Objects

Object-oriented maps are important for scene understanding since they jointly capture geometry and semantics, allow individual instantiation and meaningful reasoning about objects. We introduce FroDO, a method for accurate 3D reconstruction of object instances from RGB video that infers object location, pose and shape in a coarse-to-fine manner. Key to FroDO is to embed object shapes in a novel learnt space that allows seamless switching between sparse point cloud and dense DeepSDF decoding. Given an input sequence of localized RGB frames, FroDO first aggregates 2D detections to instantiate a category-aware 3D bounding box per object. A shape code is regressed using an encoder network before optimizing shape and pose further under the learnt shape priors using sparse and dense shape representations. The optimization uses multi-view geometric, photometric and silhouette losses. We evaluate on real-world datasets, including Pix3D, Redwood-OS, and ScanNet, for single-view, multi-view, and multi-object reconstruction.Comment: To be published in CVPR 2020. The first two authors contributed equall

Internet banking acceptance model: Cross-market examination

This article proposes a revised technology acceptance model to measure consumers’ acceptance of Internet banking, the Internet Banking Acceptance Model (IBAM). Data was collected from 618 university students in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. The results suggest the importance of attitude, such that attitude and behavioral intentions emerge as a single factor, denoted as “attitudinal intentions” (AI). Structural equation modeling confirms the fit of the model, in which perceived usefulness and trust fully mediate the impact of subjective norms and perceived manageability on AI. The invariance analysis demonstrates the psychometric equivalence of the IBAM measurements between the two country groups. At the structural level, the influence of trust and system usefulness on AI vary between the two countries, emphasizing the potential role of cultures in IS adoption. The IBAM is robust and parsimonious, explaining over 80% of AI

Variants in the estrogen receptor alpha gene and its mRNA contribute to risk for schizophrenia

Estrogen modifies human emotion and cognition and impacts symptoms of schizophrenia. We hypothesized that the variation in the estrogen receptor alpha (ESR1) gene and cortical ESR1 mRNA is associated with schizophrenia. In a small case–control genetic association analysis of postmortem brain tissue, genotype CC (rs2234693) and haplotypes containing the C allele of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in intron1 (PvuII) were more frequent in African American schizophrenics (P = 0.01–0.001). In a follow-up family-based association analysis, we found overtransmission of PvuII allele C and a PvuII C-containing haplotype (P = 0.01–0.03) to African American and Caucasian patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenics with the ‘at risk’ PvuII genotype had lower ESR1 mRNA levels in the frontal cortex. Eighteen ESR1 splice variants and decreased frequencies of the wild-type ESR1 mRNA were detected in schizophrenia. In one patient, a unique ESR1 transcript with a genomic insert encoding a premature stop codon and a truncated ESR1 protein lacking most of the estrogen binding domain was the only transcript detected. Using a luciferase assay, we found that mRNA encoding a truncated ESR1 significantly attenuates gene expression at estrogen-response elements demonstrating a dominant negative function. An intron 6 SNP [rs2273207(G)] was associated with an ESR1 splice variant missing exon seven. The T allele of another intron 6 SNP was part of a 3′ haplotype less common in schizophrenia [rs2273206(T), rs2273207(G), rs2228480(G)]. Thus, the variation in the ESR1 gene is associated with schizophrenia and the mechanism of this association may involve alternative gene regulation and transcript processing

Pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A is an independent short-time predictor of mortality in patients on maintenance haemodialysis

Aims Mortality of maintenance haemodialysis (HD) patients is very high due to polymorbidity, mostly from metabolic and cardiovascular disease. In order to identify patients with high risk for life-threatening complications, reliable prognostic markers would be helpful. Pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A) has been shown to predict cardiovascular events and death in patients with stable coronary artery disease as well as in acute coronary syndrome in patients with normal renal function. It was the aim of this study to evaluate PAPP-A as a marker for death in patients on maintenance HD. Methods and results PAPP-A serum levels were measured in 170 patients participating in the monitor! trial, a prospective dynamic dialysis cohort multicenter study in Switzerland. Patients were followed up for a median time of 17 months after measuring PAPP-A, and evaluated for death of any cause. Survivors and non-survivors were compared with regard to baseline PAPP-A concentrations. A multivariate logistic regression analysis for death was performed including PAPP-A, age, sex, number of comorbidities, dialysis vintage, Kt/V, IL-6, C-reactive protein, parathyroid hormone (PTH), Ca × PO4 product, and total serum cholesterol. A cut-off value for PAPP-A was calculated for discrimination between patients with low and high mortality risk, respectively. A total of 23 deaths occurred during follow-up, equalling an incidence rate of 0.1. Baseline median PAPP-A levels were 40% higher in non-survivors vs. survivors (P = 0.023). In a multivariate analysis, only PAPP-A, age, and Ca × PO4 product were independent predictors of mortality. A cut-off value of 24 mIU/L discriminates significantly (P = 0.015) between patients at low or high risk for death with a negative predictive value of 91%. Conclusion PAPP-A is a novel and independent short-time predictor of mortality in a maintenance HD population. The pathogenetic relevance of PAPP-A, particularly in the development of cardiovascular disease, remains to be further elucidate