Preparing to Preserve, Digitize, and Catalog the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum Collection

The proposed project will complete detailed plans for preserving, digitizing, and cataloguing a portion of the incredible wealth of multi-media materials collected by the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. This will be the first step in making the collection accessible to scholars as well as the general public via a searchable, interactive website. The Southeast Chicago Historical Museum emerged in the early 1980s as the regional steel industry was collapsing and became a central repository for area residents to collect and preserve artifacts relating to the industrial as well as social, cultural, and environmental history of this once vibrant region. The proposed work includes: 1) assessing the condition of the collection; 2)developing criteria for prioritizing content for preservation and digitization; 3)creating a metadata scheme that supports exploration and analysis;4)developing technical standards for preserving assets; and 5)structuring a preservation & digitization work plan

Sets of Priors Reflecting Prior-Data Conflict and Agreement

In Bayesian statistics, the choice of prior distribution is often debatable, especially if prior knowledge is limited or data are scarce. In imprecise probability, sets of priors are used to accurately model and reflect prior knowledge. This has the advantage that prior-data conflict sensitivity can be modelled: Ranges of posterior inferences should be larger when prior and data are in conflict. We propose a new method for generating prior sets which, in addition to prior-data conflict sensitivity, allows to reflect strong prior-data agreement by decreased posterior imprecision.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, In: Paulo Joao Carvalho et al. (eds.), IPMU 2016: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, Eindhoven, The Netherland

Ring-billed Gull, Larus delawerensis, Food Piracy on Diving Ducks

One of four Ring-billed Gulls observed 26 April 2002 at Dauphin Lake, Manitoba attacked a group of diving ducks and took abandoned food items

Probable Black Bear, Ursus americana, Retrieval of an Elk, Cervus elaphus, Carcass from a Small Lake in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba

Strong circumstantial evidence indicated that a sow Black Bear (Ursus americana) retrieved an Elk (Cervus elaphus) carcass from near the middle of a small lake to feed herself and three cubs

How mycorrhizal fungal bio-fertilizer impact on seed yield of field pea and wheat across Saskatchewan prairies

Non-Peer Reviewe

Synchronizing nitrogen application with uptake using urease and nitrification inhibitors to maximize nitrogen use in forage seed stands in northeastern Saskatchewan

Non-Peer Reviewe

The Contribution of Heredity to Clinical Obesity

In order to discuss the contribution of heredity to clinical obesity, we first need to define our terms of reference to give us the common ground that is needed to explore the relationship between heredity, the environment, and clinical obesity. This will also serve to introduce these subjects for later chapters of this volume covering other aspects of the relative contributions of heredity and environment to the final clinical outcome of obesity. The importance of understanding the mechanisms underlying obesity cannot be overstated. Global rates of obesity are rising fast in most countries and the economic implications for maintaining the health care systems of those countries under the increasing burden of comorbidities and ill health are enormous [1]. Defining Heredity Heredity can simply be defined as the transmission of characteristic traits from parent to offspring. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mendel took this idea and by painstaking experimentation was able to formalize it as his two laws of heredity: the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment. The study of the science of heredity is genetics. In the twenty-first century, we now know the molecular basis of the principles of heredity and though our understanding of human genetics is by no means complete, the information that we have on DNA, the human genome sequence, epigenetics, and the environment all inform our understanding of heredity. We should be clear from the outset that using the term heredity does not imply that there is a purely genetic mechanism underlying the transmission of a trait. For many common traits, and for common obesity in particular, the influence of the environment is clearly strong

An almost sure limit theorem for super-Brownian motion

We establish an almost sure scaling limit theorem for super-Brownian motion on $\mathbb{R}^d$ associated with the semi-linear equation $u_t = {1/2}\Delta u +\beta u-\alpha u^2$, where $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are positive constants. In this case, the spectral theoretical assumptions that required in Chen et al (2008) are not satisfied. An example is given to show that the main results also hold for some sub-domains in $\mathbb{R}^d$.Comment: 14 page

Robust Inference of Trees

This paper is concerned with the reliable inference of optimal tree-approximations to the dependency structure of an unknown distribution generating data. The traditional approach to the problem measures the dependency strength between random variables by the index called mutual information. In this paper reliability is achieved by Walley's imprecise Dirichlet model, which generalizes Bayesian learning with Dirichlet priors. Adopting the imprecise Dirichlet model results in posterior interval expectation for mutual information, and in a set of plausible trees consistent with the data. Reliable inference about the actual tree is achieved by focusing on the substructure common to all the plausible trees. We develop an exact algorithm that infers the substructure in time O(m^4), m being the number of random variables. The new algorithm is applied to a set of data sampled from a known distribution. The method is shown to reliably infer edges of the actual tree even when the data are very scarce, unlike the traditional approach. Finally, we provide lower and upper credibility limits for mutual information under the imprecise Dirichlet model. These enable the previous developments to be extended to a full inferential method for trees.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

Barriers to hospital and tuberculosis programme collaboration in China: context matters

Background: In many developing countries, programmes for ‘diseases of social importance’, such as tuberculosis (TB), have traditionally been organised as vertical services. In most of China, general hospitals are required to report and refer suspected TB cases to the TB programme for standardised diagnosis and treatment. General hospitals are the major contacts of health services for the TB patients. Despite the implementation of public–public/private mix, directly observed treatment, short-course, TB reporting and referral still remain a challenge. Objective: This study aims to identify barriers to the collaboration between the TB programme and general hospitals in China. Design: This is a qualitative study conducted in two purposefully selected counties in China: one in Zhejiang, a more affluent eastern province, and another in Guangxi, a poorer southwest province. Sixteen in-depth interviews were conducted and triangulated with document review and field notes. An open systems perspective, which views organisations as social systems, was adopted. Results: The most perceived problem appeared to be untimely reporting and referral associated with non-standardised prescriptions and hospitalisation by the general hospitals. These problems could be due to the financial incentives of the general hospitals, poor supervision from the TB programme to general hospitals, and lack of technical support from the TB programme to the general hospitals. However, contextual factors, such as different funding natures of different organisations, the prevalent medical and relationship cultures, and limited TB funding, could constrain the processes of collaboration between the TB programme and the general hospitals. Conclusions: The challenges in the TB programme and general hospital collaboration are rooted in the context. Improving collaboration should reduce the potential mistrust of the two organisations by aligning their interests, improving training, and improving supervision of TB control in the hospitals. In particular, effective regulatory mechanisms are crucial to alleviate the negative impact of the contextual factors and ensure smooth collaboration