Morphology of Metzgeria conjugata Lindb. (Metzgeriales, Hepaticopsida)

Scanning electron microscopy and light microscopy were used to elucidate the morphology of Metzgeria conjutata Lindb. and confirm the presence of 2 rows of epidermal cells on the dorsal surface, (21-3) rows on the ventral surface, midrib with cells in (3-51-6) tiers; hirsute, short hairs, straight on the thallus-margin and on the ventral surface of midrib; marginal hairs paired, single or in groups of three; male branches globose or subglobose; female involucres obovate and hirsute at the margin, calyptra fleshy, pyriform to club-shaped, hirsute on the outer surface, hairs long and straight

Changes in the Human Brain Cortex in Response to Learning Click-Based Echolocation: A Virtual Navigation Paradigm

Traditionally, sensory areas within the human brain are viewed as being tied to specific modalities. However, an emerging perspective suggests the brain may be organised in a flexible way, with sensory areas being driven by the task at hand. To investigate the functional organisation of the brain, we trained sighted people in echolocation related tasks and examined BOLD activity associated with the processing of echoic information before and after training. We then compared this activity to that observed in expert echolocators completing the same task. Despite sighted participants showing an improvement in echolocation ability, the brain regions recruited by expert echolocators and sighted participants appear to be somewhat different. When we isolated the processing of echoes, we found an increase in BOLD activation in the occipital cortex of expert echolocators, but not in sighted participants after training. Despite this, both groups displayed common activations within the primary auditory cortex. Similar results were also found when we compared the processing of all sounds to silence. When we investigated the processing of spatially coherent routes, compared to scrambled routes, we found activations within the occipital cortex of expert echolocators and sighted participants as a result of training. Our results suggest that the brain of expert echolocators may be organised in a flexible way, with sensory areas, such as the primary ‘visual’ cortex being recruited for the processing of auditory information. Furthermore, recruitment of the calcarine cortex in sighted people, after training, may hint at the possibility that the sighted brain is also organised in a flexible way, with areas typically devoted to vision, namely the occipital cortex, possibly processing spatial information conveyed by echoes

Retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh, NC: Social Factors

New automated methods for large-scale acoustic analysis bring expanded opportunities for investigating social factors influencing variation and change in vowel systems. This paper explores social factors in a 108-speaker subset of a 250-speaker conversational corpus from Raleigh, North Carolina, where the community has shifted in nearly uniform fashion from a Southern vowel system to an aregional standard system. Age, occupation, parents\u27 occupation, sex, and neighborhood are evaluated using linear mixed-effects models, with Z2-Z1 for each of the 5 front vowels as a separate dependent variable. While there are some significant occupational effects, year of birth is the strongest and most consistent social factor, indicating considerable uniformity during the course of change. Adding more speakers from the corpus will facilitate the use of other socioeconomic variables such as education level as well as finer-grained occupation variables, which may provide insight as to the mechanisms by which professional speakers lead the shift

Trading Intraday Volatility

Many people believe that there is no way to profit off of anomalies in the markets because the markets are either completely random or they always accurately reflect outside information and events. Others, however, believe that models can be found through historical testing that successfully beat the market (Williams, 2011, p. 13-15). This thesis presents a method for beating the market by trading intraday volatility. The researcher focused on trading corn futures contracts. A futures contract is simply a derivative that can be bought and sold. It represents an agreement to buy or sell at a future date. Futures contracts rarely result in the exchange of any physical product, however, because the contracts are usually traded away prior to the due date (Oxley, 2012, p. 192). The researcher proposes a strategy to profit by buying and selling futures contracts on a daily basis

The wider electoral advantages of the Green Party's opposition to fracking

One of the ways the Greens set themselves apart from others is by claiming to be the only mainstream political party to oppose fracking. While this opposition is sincere, the party's anti-fracking rhetoric shows that there are also pragmatic considerations at work, explains Ashley Dodsworth

Network Embeddedness and the Retreat from Southern Vowels in Raleigh

This paper introduces the social network procedure of cohesive blocking (Moody & White 2003) as a strategy for fine-grained quantitative network analysis in sociolinguistics. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the Southern Vowel Shift is reversing, due in part to large-scale migration from outside the South since the mid-20th century. Acoustic analysis of the five front vowels from a 140-speaker subset of the conversational Raleigh corpus reveals steady change across apparent time. The community\u27s network structure is considered via a bipartite, or two-mode, network of schools and individuals. Cohesive blocking generates a network hierarchy in which individuals are nested at different levels. Nestedness is then tested as a predictor of linguistic variation in linear mixed effects models, which reveal significant nestedness effects for three of the five vowels, net of age, sex, and occupation. Speakers with higher nestedness lead the retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift

Design and construction of the IMACS-IFU, a 2000-element integral field unit

The IMACS-IFU is an Integral Field Unit built for the IMACS spectrograph at the Magellan-I-Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. It consists of two rectangular fields of 5 by 7 arcseconds, separated by roughly one arcminute. With a total number of 2000 spatial elements it is the second largest fiber-lenslet based IFU worldwide, working in a wavelength range between 400 and 900 nm. Due to the equally sized fields classical background subtraction, beam switching and shuffling are possible observation techniques. One particular design challenge was the single, half a metre long curved slit in combination with a non telecentric output. Besides the construction some preliminary results are described.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Proceedings for SPIE poster 5492-175 of SPIE Symposium "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation", June 2004, Glasgo

Developing a Writing Intensive (WI) Microbiology Lab Course

Students at CSUSB will be required to take two courses designated as writing intensive (WI) after the quarter-to-semester (Q2S) transition in Fall 2020. Having WI courses in the Biology major will allow Biology students to satisfy the WI requirement and a major requirement/elective with one course, and having WI course in the major will help students develop discipline-specific critical thinking and writing skills. The current upper-division Microbiology course involves a significant amount of writing. Here I present plans for augmentation and modification of the writing activities and assignments in this Microbiology course associated with Q2S to potentially fulfill the WI requirements. These plans include better scaffolding of major writing assignments, writing in different genres appropriate to the discipline, and allowing more opportunities for feedback and revision of student writing such as peer review of first drafts