Circular 117

The annual flower trials were planted from 30 May through 4 June, 1999 in the Perennial Landscape and All America Selections Display Garden of the Georgeson Botanical Garden (64°51N, 147°52W). Fairbanks silt loam soil was fertilized with 1 0 -2 0 -2 0 S (4 lbs per 100 sq feet, 195 g per sq meter) on 28 May. With the exception of dahlias, all flowers were grown as seedling transplants and were hardened off outdoors for one week prior to transplanting. Tuberous roots of dahlias were planted in containers five weeks prior to transplanting and were hardened off

TURNING TEENS INTO FOSSILPHILES: CITIZEN SCIENCE AND ADVANCED VISUALIZATION OF PALEONTOLOGY COLLECTIONS

In 2016, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) received funding from NSF’s Collections in Support of Biological Research Program to launch a new citizen science initiative—FossilPhiles—aimed at improving publically accessible natural history specimen data. The FossilPhiles project supported NCMNS’ ongoing efforts to digitize paleontology collections and provide STEM opportunities for historically underrepresented student populations by engaging middle and high school students in authentic data collection. Five students were chosen from area schools with underserved populations to digitize highly significant or visually impactful vertebrate, invertebrate, and paleobotanical fossil specimens (e.g., type specimens, rare collections, specimens of high public interest). Students were trained in specimen handling, collections data, and archiving. They collected standard measurement data, photographed specimens in 2D, and constructed 3D photorealistic models using photogrammetry. Over a period of six months, students took over 13,000 photos, documenting 176 specimens in 2D and 137 in 3D. Of these, 124 photos have already been uploaded to the NCMNS’ open-access collections database, accessible through the NCMNS’ website, GBIF, VertNet, and iDigBio. Future project plans include creation of a publicly accessible, interactive portal of the 3D specimen models. Throughout their internships, FossilPhiles students were provided training and opportunities to communicate their experiences with the broader community. The entirety of the FossilPhiles project took place within the glass-walled Paleontology Research Lab (PRL) in the Nature Research Center of the NCMNS, on view to NCMNS’ ~1 million annual visitors. Additionally, students were regularly engaged with communicating about the project in real-time via social media outlets (e.g., Twitter, blogs), sharing photos of fossils they worked on, facts and skills that they learned, and challenges they overcame. FossilPhiles students also partnered with peers engaged in non-STEM museum internships to promote cross-learning. They collaborated with the NCMNS’ Teen Newsroom program to produce a video interview about their evolving impressions on what it means to be a scientist

Incidence of Interval Colorectal Cancer After Negative Results From First-Round Fecal Immunochemical Screening Tests, by Cutoff Value and Participant Sex and Age

Background & Aims: We evaluated the incidence of interval cancers between the first and second rounds of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening with the FOB-Gold fecal immunochemical test (FIT), and the effects of different cutoff values and patient sex and age. Methods: We collected data from participants in a population-based

Reproducibility of Standing Posture for X-Ray Radiography: A Feasibility Study of the BalancAid with Healthy Young Subjects

Unreliable spinal X-ray radiography measurement due to standing postural variability can be minimized by using positional supports. In this study, we introduce a balancing device, named BalancAid, to position the patients in a reproducible position during spinal X-ray radiography. This study aimed to investigate the performance of healthy young subjects’ standing posture on the BalancAid compared to standing on the ground mimicking the standard X-rays posture in producing a reproducible posture for the spinal X-ray radiography. A study on the posture reproducibility measurement was performed by taking photographs of 20 healthy young subjects with good balance control standing on the BalancAid and the ground repeatedly within two consecutive days. We analyzed nine posterior–anterior (PA) and three lateral (LA) angles between lines through body marks placed in the positions of T3, T7, T12, L4 of the spine to confirm any translocations and movements between the first and second day measurements. No body marks repositioning was performed to avoid any error. Lin’s CCC test on all angles comparing both standing postures demonstrated that seven out of nine angles in PA view, and two out of three angles in LA view gave better reproducibility for standing on the BalancAid compared to standing on the ground. The PA angles concordance is on average better than that of the LA angles

Brain Potentials Highlight Stronger Implicit Food Memory for Taste than Health and Context Associations

Increasingly consumption of healthy foods is advised to improve population health. Reasons people give for choosing one food over another suggest that non-sensory features like health aspects are appreciated as of lower importance than taste. However, many food choices are made in the absence of the actual perception of a food's sensory properties, and therefore highly rely on previous experiences of similar consumptions stored in memory. In this study we assessed the differential strength of food associations implicitly stored in memory, using an associative priming paradigm. Participants (N = 30) were exposed to a forced-choice picture-categorization task, in which the food or non-food target images were primed with either non-sensory or sensory related words. We observed a smaller N400 amplitude at the parietal electrodes when categorizing food as compared to non-food images. While this effect was enhanced by the presentation of a food-related word prime during food trials, the primes had no effect in the non-food trials. More specifically, we found that sensory associations are stronger implicitly represented in memory as compared to non-sensory associations. Thus, this study highlights the neuronal mechanisms underlying previous observations that sensory associations are important features of food memory, and therefore a primary motive in food choice.</p

Community Data Mobilization in Wikidata: A paleontology perspective

Wikidata offers a centralized, accessible platform for working collaboratively to disambiguate entities, e.g., people associated with biodiversity collections, and to mobilize information about them. This shared information can be used to improve connections across institutions and individuals, to augment local data records, and to encourage expertise-sharing. Over the past year, the Paleo Data Working Group has organized several events to bring the Wikidata movement to paleontological collections. This talk will share key products and findings generated by these efforts, and note parallels to disciplines beyond paleontology.In the global collections community, momentum has been building to leverage linked data principles and facilitate data discovery using the Wikidata platform. An example of this is the increasing adoption of Wikidata specifically for the purpose of storing biographical information about people associated with collections, because doing so facilitates discovery about who is doing what work across multiple institutions, and with what impact (Groom et al. 2020, Güntsch et al. 2021). In March 2022, thirty participants gathered virtually for a participatory workshop, Using Wikidata to capture and share information about people in paleontology. This workshop was an introduction to finding, editing, and using data in Wikidata, focusing on people associated with paleontology collections (e.g., collectors, researchers, collections staff) as subjects. Together, workshop participants created or enhanced Wikidata records for around 100 individuals from a shared list, including a dozen female collectors previously known only by their husbands’ names, e.g., “Mrs. Paul E. Drez,” who we now know is Nancy Sue Drez. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants collaborated on an open-access document to share the findings. The goal of Guidelines for Using Wikidata to Mobilize Information about People in Collections: A Paleontology Perspective (see Bauer et al. 2022 for repository) is to further encourage uptake in the paleontological and collections communities.The first workshop was focused almost exclusively on the people connected to paleontological collections. A follow-up workshop in October 2022 entitled, Using Wikidata to capture and share information about paleontological collecting sites, significantly broadens this scope by exploring how Wikidata can be used to mobilize community knowledge about specimen collecting events, such as sites or expeditions. Paleontological collecting sites pose an information management challenge because they tend to be detail rich, attached to local but stable identifier schemes, and associated with specimens curated in multiple institutions. Participants in this workshop established a defined scope of information associated with a paleontological collection site–including flagging aspects of the data that may be problematic to share publicly–and subsequently were able to assess how these information needs might, or might not, fit into a linked data model on Wikidata. These findings are particularly relevant to the global collections community where we see a trend towards sharing specimen data from an event-based perspective (Schindel and Cook 2018, Robertson et al. 2019), as has long been the norm for paleontological specimens