Confirming the presence of Staphylococcus aureus enterotoxin SEB from campus wide swabbing

Samples taken from the CSP community were previously isolated and characterized as Staphylococcus aureus. In this study, the DNA from those positive samples were purified through a genomic prep and ran through a polymerase chain reaction for the SEB toxin gene. A DNA gel electrophoresis was ran and imaged displaying the results

The Parthenon, September 9, 2020

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2018 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published one day a week (and once every other week during the summer). The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, September 2, 2020

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2018 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published one day a week (and once every other week during the summer). The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching

This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain image classification framework that matches observed images to product images. Since product images are readily available for a wide range of objects (e.g., from the web), the system works out-of-the-box for novel objects without requiring any additional training data. Exhaustive experimental results demonstrate that our multi-affordance grasping achieves high success rates for a wide variety of objects in clutter, and our recognition algorithm achieves high accuracy for both known and novel grasped objects. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 1st place in the stowing task at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. All code, datasets, and pre-trained models are available online at http://arc.cs.princeton.eduComment: Project webpage: http://arc.cs.princeton.edu Summary video: https://youtu.be/6fG7zwGfIk

Kleptoparasitic Hawk-Dove Games

The Hawk-Dove game is a classical game-theoretical model of potentially aggressive animal conflicts. In this paper, we apply game theory to a population of foraging animals that may engage in stealing food from one another. We assume that the population is composed of two types of individuals, Hawks and Doves. Hawks try to escalate encounters into aggressive contests while Doves engage in non-aggressive displays between themselves or concede to aggressive Hawks. The fitness of each type depends upon various natural parameters, such as food density, the mean handling time of a food item, as well as the mean times of conflicts over the food. We find the Evolutionarily Stable States (ESSs) for all parameter combinations and show that there are two possible ESSs, pure Hawks, or a mixed population of Hawks and Doves. We demonstrate that for any set of parameter values there is exactly one ESS

The Parthenon, September 16, 2020

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2018 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published one day a week (and once every other week during the summer). The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, September 30, 2020

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2018 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published one day a week (and once every other week during the summer). The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content