Studies on Resistance to Vegetative (Vip3A) and Crystal (Cry1A) Insecticidal Toxins of Bacillus thuringiensis in Heliothis virescens (Fabricius)

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins expressed in commercial transgenic crop varieties are all δ-endotoxins (Cry toxins) but the identification of novel vegetative insecticidal proteins (Vip toxins) has extended the range of insecticidal proteins derived from Bt. One such Vip toxin, Vip3A, primarily targets the midgut epithelium cells of susceptible insects as Cry toxins do, although they appear to have different binding sites. The present study investigated the comparative toxicity of Vip3A, Cry1Ab and Cry1Ac against Heliothis virescens (tobacco budworm) and the impact of antibiotics on Bt insecticidal activity. The selection of a resistant Vip3A population led to the determination of cross-resistance, the genetics of resistance and fitness effects. There was very little variability in the natural susceptibility to Vip3A, Cry1Ab and Cry1Ac in the populations tested, although the toxicity of Vip3A was much lower compared to the Cry1A toxins. A Vip3A resistant population was successfully established within 13 selected generations, with little or no cross-resistance to Cry1Ab or Cry1Ac. The inheritance of resistance ranged from almost completely recessive to incompletely dominant with a possible paternal influence, was polygenic and relatively stable. Vip3A resistance showed a fitness benefit, reduced larval development time, and fitness costs, including survival to adult eclosion, reduced egg viability and reduced male mating success. The effects of antibiotics on H. virescens larval susceptibility to Bt toxins varied depending on antibiotic treatment, the Bt toxin used and the larval instar tested. Bt cotton expressing both Vip3A and Cry1Ab to provide activity against a wide range of pest Lepidoptera, including H. virescens, a major cotton pest in the USA is in the process of commercialisation. The present work will help to support a suitable insecticide resistance management strategy for continued use of Bt toxin in transgenic crops

Mechanism State Matrices for Spatial Reconfigurable Mechanisms

This paper improves augmented mechanism state matrices by replacing joint code with screw system notation. The proposed substitution allows for a more specific description of the joints in the mechanism and the capability to describe both spatial and planar mechanisms. Examples are provided which elucidate the proposed approach

Fast, Exact Bootstrap Principal Component Analysis for p>1 million

Many have suggested a bootstrap procedure for estimating the sampling variability of principal component analysis (PCA) results. However, when the number of measurements per subject ($p$) is much larger than the number of subjects ($n$), the challenge of calculating and storing the leading principal components from each bootstrap sample can be computationally infeasible. To address this, we outline methods for fast, exact calculation of bootstrap principal components, eigenvalues, and scores. Our methods leverage the fact that all bootstrap samples occupy the same $n$-dimensional subspace as the original sample. As a result, all bootstrap principal components are limited to the same $n$-dimensional subspace and can be efficiently represented by their low dimensional coordinates in that subspace. Several uncertainty metrics can be computed solely based on the bootstrap distribution of these low dimensional coordinates, without calculating or storing the $p$-dimensional bootstrap components. Fast bootstrap PCA is applied to a dataset of sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings ($p=900$, $n=392$), and to a dataset of brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs) ($p\approx$ 3 million, $n=352$). For the brain MRI dataset, our method allows for standard errors for the first 3 principal components based on 1000 bootstrap samples to be calculated on a standard laptop in 47 minutes, as opposed to approximately 4 days with standard methods.Comment: 25 pages, including 9 figures and link to R package. 2014-05-14 update: final formatting edits for journal submission, condensed figure

Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory

The purely retributive moral justification of punishment has a gap at its centre. Having renounced consequentialist justifications, it fails to explain why the punishable person should not be protected by the intuitively powerful moral idea that afflicting another person is always wrong. Attempts to close the gap have taken several different forms, and only one is discussed in this paper. This is the attempt to push aside the ‘protecting’ intuition, using some more powerful intuition specially invoked by the situations to which criminal justice is addressed. In one aspect of his complex defence of pure retributivism, Michael S. Moore attempts to show that the emotions of well-adjusted persons provide evidence of moral facts which, when worked into a valid moral theory, justify the affliction of culpable wrongdoers in retribution for their wrongdoing. In the first part of this strategy, he invokes analogies with our intuitions about the appropriateness of sanctions and entitlements in other legal contexts, such as tort and property rights. In the second part, he appeals to emotions aroused by especially heinous crimes, including the punishment-seeking guilt appropriate to the offender who truly confronts his act. The paper argues that neither part of the strategy is successful: the intuitions appealed to in each case can be at least as plausibly, and perhaps more discriminatingly, accounted for within frameworks of theory which require no commitment to pure retributivism

Recommendations to Improve GSP Labor Rights Criteria and Review Process

Testimony by Brian Campbell of ILRF to the Committee on Ways and Means, Sub-Committee on Trade, recommending the improvement of the generalized System of Preferences labor rights criteria

Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities

[Excerpt] My goal in this book is to examine the formation of labor-environmental alliances that focus on health issues. Health concerns are increasingly a common ground on which blue-green coalitions are developing across the United States. Activists from both movements often see health issues through different lenses, which lends a particular slant to how they approach potential solutions for reducing exposures to toxics. The coalition framework emphasizes the fundamental link between occupational and environmental health, providing an internal cohesion and a politically persuasive agenda based on the centrality of health-related issues. By engaging labor and environmental activists in a common dialogue regarding the need for cooperative action to reduce the risks of community and workplace exposures, blue-green coalitions are creating new opportunities for progressive social change