Cumulative effects of incorrect use of pesticides can lead to catastrophic outbreaks of pests

Modeling external perturbations such as chemical control within each generation of discrete populations is challenging. Based on a method proposed in the literature, we have extended a discrete single species model with multiple instantaneous pesticide applications within each generation, and then discuss the existence and stability of the unique positive equilibrium. Further, the effects of the timing of pesticide applications and the instantaneous killing rate on the equilibrium were investigated in more detail and we obtained some interesting results, including a paradox and the cumulative effects of the incorrect use of pesticides on pest outbreaks. In order to show the occurrences of the paradox and of hormesis, several special models have been extended and studied. Further, the biological implications of the main results regarding successful pest control are discussed. All of the results obtained confirm that the cumulative effects of incorrect use of pesticides may result in more severe pest outbreaks and thus, in order to avoid a paradox in pest control, control strategies need to be designed with care, including decisions on the timing and number of pesticide applications in relation to the effectiveness of the pesticide being used

PASTA: Table-Operations Aware Fact Verification via Sentence-Table Cloze Pre-training

Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, in this paper we introduce PASTA, a novel state-of-the-art framework for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence-table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence-table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence-table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pretrains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two table-based fact verification benchmarks: TabFact and SEM-TAB-FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms the previous state of the art by 4.7 points (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small TabFact test set is narrowed to just 1.5 points (90.6% vs. 92.1%).Comment: EMNLP 202

Analyzing the association between fish consumption and osteoporosis in a sample of Chinese men

Background: The main purpose of this study was to estimate the associations between frequency of fish food consumption and osteoporosis (OP) in general Chinese men. Methods: We conducted a large-scale, community-based, cross-sectional study to investigate the associations by using self-report questionnaire to access frequency of fish food intake. A total of 1092 men were available for data analysis in this study. Multiple regression models controlling for confounding factors to include frequency of fish food consumption variable were performed to investigate the relationships for OP. Results: Positive correlations between frequency of fish food consumption and T score were reported (\u3b2 = 0.084, P value = 0.025). Multiple regression analysis indicated that the frequency of fish food consumption was significantly associated with OP (P < 0.05 for model 1 and model 2). The men with high frequency of fish food consumption had a lower prevalence of OP. Conclusions: The findings indicated that frequency of fish food consumption was independently and significantly associated with OP. The prevalence of OP was less frequent in Chinese men preferring fish food habits. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02451397 retrospectively registered 28 May 2015

Subjective evaluation of the frequency of coffee intake and relationship to osteoporosis in Chinese men

Background: The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the associations between frequency of coffee intake and osteoporosis (OP) in a general Chinese male sample. Methods: We conducted a large-scale, community-based, cross-sectional study to investigate the associations by using a self-report questionnaire to estimate the frequency of coffee intake. A total of 992 men were available for data analysis in this study. Multiple regression models controlling for confounding factors to include frequency of coffee intake variable were performed to investigate the relationships for OP. Results: Positive correlations between frequency of coffee intake and T-score were reported (\u3b2 = 0.211, P = 0.024). Multiple regression analysis indicated that the frequency of coffee intake was significantly associated with OP (P < 0.05 for model 1 and model 2). The men with moderate frequency of coffee intake had a lower prevalence of OP. Conclusions: The findings indicated that consumption of coffee was independently and significantly associated with OP. The prevalence of OP was less frequent in Chinese men with moderate coffee intake. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT0245139

Load prediction with an improved feature selection method for building energy management of an office park

Load prediction plays a significant role in building energy management. An accurate HVAC load prediction model highly depends on the feature selection and the quality of training data. In previous work on load prediction, the input features are majorly manually selected by expertise, which is relatively subjective and lacks theoretical supports. Using the real building operational data collected from an office park located in Hangzhou, this paper developed a short-term cooling load prediction model, in which the input features are selected based on an analysis on the heat transfer process. Combined with qualitative analysis of the real data, several features such as outdoor air enthalpy and indoor black-bulb temperatures from different orientations are introduced into the model. The proposed model was then applied to the HVAC control system of the office park. Compared to the load prediction model with commonly used features, the proposed model reduced CRVMSE by 21% and MAPE by 30% during the operation period of the system. Furthermore, the impacts of training dataset size and prediction time range on model’s accuracy and training time were discussed

The Involvement of the Cas9 Gene in Virulence of Campylobacter jejuni

Campylobacter jejuni is considered as the leading cause of gastroenteritis all over the world. This bacterium has the CRISPR–cas9 system, which is used as a gene editing technique in different organisms. However, its role in bacterial virulence has just been discovered; that discovery, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. The purpose of this study is to find out the relationship between cas9 and virulence both phenotypically and genotypically in C. jejuni NCTC11168. Understanding both aspects of this relationship allows for a much deeper understanding of the mechanism of bacterial pathogenesis. The present study determined virulence in wild and mutant strains by observing biofilm formation, motility, adhesion and invasion, intracellular survivability, and cytotoxin production, followed by the transcriptomic analysis of both strains. The comparative gene expression profile of wild and mutant strains was determined on the basis of De-Seq transcriptomic analysis, which showed that the cas9 gene is involved in enhancing virulence. Differential gene expression analysis revealed that multiple pathways were involved in virulence, regulated by the CRISPR-cas9 system. Our findings help in understanding the potential role of cas9 in regulating the other virulence associated genes in C. jejuni NCTC11168. The findings of this study provide critical information about cas9's potential involvement in enhancing the virulence of C. jejuni, which is a major public health threat