Models of parental investment typically assume that populations are well mixed and homogeneous and have devoted little attention to the impact of spatial variation in the local environment. Here, in a patch-structured model with limited dispersal, we assess to what extent resource-rich and resource-poor mothers should alter the size of ...

The aim of the present work is to assess the potential long-distance effect of a high-speed railway line on the distribution of the European tree frog (Hyla arborea) in eastern France by combining graph-based analysis and species distribution models. This combination is a way to integrate patch-level connectivity metrics on ...

PURPOSE: To verify the robustness and fundamental value of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and AFM-based assays to rapidly examine the molecular homogeneity and physical stability of amorphous solid dispersions on Hot-Melt-Extrudates. METHODS: Amorphous solid dispersions were prepared with a Hot-Melt Extruder (HME) and profiled by Raman Microscopy and AFM following ...

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated ...

Separating microbial- and physical-induced effects on the isotope signals of contaminants has been identified as a challenge in interpreting compound-specific isotope data. In contrast to simple analytical tools, such as the Rayleigh equation, reactive transport models can account for complex interactions of different fractionating processes. The question arises how complex ...

Concentrations of particulate emissions from a quarry located in hilly terrain were calculated by two common atmospheric dispersion models, AERMOD and CALPUFF. Evaluation of these models for emissions from quarries/open pit mines that are located in complex topography is missing from the literature. Due to severe uncertainties in the input ...

We examined the consequences of the spatial heterogeneity of atmospheric ammonia (NH3) by measuring and modelling NH3 concentrations and deposition at 25 m grid resolution for a rural landscape containing intensive poultry farming, agricultural grassland, woodland and moorland. The emission pattern gave rise to a high spatial variability of modelled mean ...

This study investigates the potential real world application of passive control systems to reduce personal pollutant exposure in an urban street canyon in Dublin, Ireland. The implementation of parked cars and/or low boundary walls as a passive control system has been shown to minimise personal exposure to pollutants on footpaths ...

Abstract The Referee: Dr Uttam Garg, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Kansas City School of Medicine, University of MO, Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, Kansas City, MO, USA clinical laboratory plays a critical role in healthcare delivery by providing objective data on specific biomarkers that directly aid in the ...

INTRODUCTION: In recent years, the anesthetized guinea pig has been used increasingly to evaluate the cardiovascular effects of drug-candidate molecules during lead optimization prior to conducting longer, more resource intensive safety pharmacology and toxicology studies. The aim of these studies was to evaluate the correlations between pharmacologically-induced ECG changes in ...

Backgrounds and AimsThe spatial separation of stigmas and anthers (herkogamy) in flowering plants functions to reduce self-pollination and avoid interference between pollen dispersal and receipt. Little is known about the evolutionary relationships among the three main forms of herkogamy - approach, reverse and reciprocal herkogamy (distyly) - or about transitions ...

It is not rare to encounter the patient response on the ordinal scale in a randomized clinical trial (RCT). Under the assumption that the generalized odds ratio (GOR) is homogeneous across strata, we consider four asymptotic interval estimators for the GOR under stratified random sampling. These include the interval estimator ...

For many infectious disease processes such as emerging zoonoses and vaccine-preventable diseases, [Formula: see text] and infections occur as self-limited stuttering transmission chains. A mechanistic understanding of transmission is essential for characterizing the risk of emerging diseases and monitoring spatio-temporal dynamics. Thus methods for inferring [Formula: see text] and the ...

Baseline adjustment is an important consideration in thorough QT studies for nonantiarrhythmic drugs. For crossover studies with period-specific baseline days, we propose an analysis of covariance model with change from time-matched baseline as response, time-matched baseline for the current treatment, day-averaged baseline for the current treatment, time-matched baseline averaged across ...

BACKGROUND: In parallel thorough QT (TQT) studies, it has been speculated that either baseline correction should be omitted, under the assumption that it only adds noise to the data, or a time-averaged baseline instead of a time-matched baseline correction should be considered in order to reduce the study variability. OBJECTIVE: ...

Two inverse methods using dipole models for noninvasive assessment of local repolarization changes were investigated and compared in the simulation study. Lesions with changed repolarization were modeled by shortening of the action potential durations in ventricular regions typically influenced by occlusion of coronary arteries. Corresponding body surface potentials were computed ...

• Premise: The evolution of dioecy in plants is usually modeled as a consequence of self-fertilization. While increased seed and pollen production and dispersal patterns of specialized unisexuals have been examined, mating among relatives and interaction effects have been largely ignored. Here, we examine multiple variables simultaneously providing a more ...

INTRODUCTION: Drugs that prolong the QT interval on the electrocardiogram present a major safety concern for pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies. Despite a range of assays performed to assess compound effects on the QT interval, QTprolongation remains a major cause of attrition during compound development. In silico assays could alleviate ...

Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) of concentration-double-delta QTc intervals (QTc intervals corrected for placebo and baseline effects) assume that the concentration measurement error is negligible, which is an incorrect assumption. Previous studies have shown in linear models that independent variable error can attenuate the slope estimate with a corresponding increase in ...

MOTIVATION: RNA-Seq experiments produce digital counts of reads that are affected by both biological and technical variation. To distinguish the systematic changes in expression between conditions from noise, the counts are frequently modeled by the Negative Binomial distribution. However in experiments with small sample size the per-gene estimates of the ...

Marine and terrestrial animals show a mosaic of lineage extinctions and diversifications during the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition. However, despite its potential importance in shaping animal evolution, few palaeontological studies have focussed on this interval and the possible climate and biotic drivers of its faunal turnover. In consequence evolutionary patterns in most ...

We reiterate that geological observations do not require Grand Canyon carving coeval with Colorado River integration. (U-Th)/He data from the western canyon, totaling 29 reproducible analyses from six samples and two labs, compellingly support an ancient canyon. Three dispersed analyses from one anomalous sample do not refute this conclusion, nor ...

The physical and chemical characteristics of aircraft plumes at the take-off phase are simulated with the mesoscale CAMx model using the individual plume segment approach, in a highly resolved domain, covering the Athens International Airport. Emission indices during take-off measured at the Athens International Airport are incorporated. Model predictions are ...

The Jack Rabbit Test Program was sponsored in April and May 2010 by the Department of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration to generate source data for large releases of chlorine and ammonia from transport tanks. In addition to a variety of data types measured at the release location, concentration versus ...

Biological systems exhibit a wide range of contextual effects, and this often makes it difficult to construct valid mathematical models of their behaviour. In particular, mathematical paradigms built upon the successes of Newtonian physics make assumptions about the nature of biological systems that are unlikely to hold true. After discussing ...

We study a logistic model with a nonlinear random diffusion in a Fokker-Planck type law, but not in Fick's law. In the model individuals are assumed to increase their motility if they starve. Any directional information to resource is not assumed in this starvation driven diffusion and individuals disperse in ...

Global positioning system (GPS) technology is increasingly used to assess geographically varying exposure in population studies. However, there has been limited evaluation of accuracy and completeness of personal GPS data. The ability of a GPS data logger to assess location of children during usual activity was evaluated. Data collected for ...

Although interwetland dispersal is thought to play an important role in regional persistence of pond-breeding amphibians, few researchers have modeled amphibian metapopulation or source-sink dynamics. Results of recent modeling studies suggest anthropogenic stressors, such as pollution, can negatively affect density and population viability of amphibians breeding in isolated wetlands. Presumably ...

The general effective fragment potential (EFP) method provides model potentials for any molecule that is derived from first principles, with no empirically fitted parameters. The EFP method has been interfaced with most currently used ab initio single-reference and multireference quantum mechanics (QM) methods, ranging from Hartree-Fock and coupled cluster theory ...

ABSTRACT: This paper presents readily understood, technically defensible, risk-based containment and air monitoring criteria, which are developed from fundamental physical principles. The key for the development of each criterion was the use of a calculational de minimis level, in this case chosen to be 100 mrem (or 40 DAC-h). Examples ...

The black twig borer, Xylosandrus compactus (Eichhoff) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae), is a serious pest of coffee (Coffea arabica L.) in the Kona region of the island of Hawaii, the center of the largest area of coffee production within the state of Hawaii. This study indirectly characterizes the spatial distribution of ...

McPhail-type traps baited with ammonium acetate and putrescine were used to monitor populations of Anastrepha obliqua (Macquart) and Anastrepha suspensa (Loew) in two orchards with hosts of these flies (mango, Mangifera indica L., and carambola, Averrhoa carambola L.), as well as in forest fragments bordering these orchards. Contour maps were ...

In this paper, anticipatory co-articulation of the lip protrusion and constriction gestures is investigated in speakers with visual deprivation. Audio-visual recordings of 11 congenitally blind French speakers producing [V-roundC-roundV+round] sequences were measured with a lip shape tracking system. Lip protrusion and constriction values and their relative timings were analyzed. Results ...

Wavelength selection is a critical step for producing better prediction performance when applied to spectral data. Considering the fact that the vibrational and rotational spectra have continuous features of spectral bands, we propose a novel method of wavelength interval selection based on random frog, called interval random frog (iRF). To ...

Objective: A regulatory science priority at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is to promote the development of new innovative tools such as reliable and validated computational (in silico) models. This FDA Critical Path Initiative project involved the development of predictive clinical computational models for decision-support in CDER evaluations of ...

We address the problem of localizing actions, such as opening a door, in hours of challenging video data. We propose a model based on a sequence of atomic action units, termed "actoms", that are semantically meaningful and characteristic for the action. Our Actom Sequence Model (ASM) represents an action as ...

BACKGROUND: Mass spectrometry (MS) has evolved to become the primary high throughput tool for proteomics based biomarker discovery. Until now, multiple challenges in protein MS data analysis remain: large-scale and complex data set management; MS peak identification, indexing; and high dimensional peak differential analysis with the concurrent statistical tests based ...

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a well-known dimensionality reduction technique which is widely used for many purposes. However, conventional LDA is sensitive to outliers because its objective function is based on the distance criterion using L2-norm. This paper proposes a simple but effective robust LDA version based on L1-norm maximization, ...

Characterizing patterns of larval dispersal is essential to understanding the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of marine metapopulations. Recent research has measured local dispersal within populations, but the development of marine dispersal kernels from empirical data remains a challenge. We propose a framework to move beyond point estimates of dispersal towards ...

Abstract Migratory birds are often suggested to be important vectors for long-distance dispersal (LDD) of plant and animal propagules. The scale of such dispersal events (hundreds to thousands of kilometers) can influence landscape-level biological processes and species distributions. However, the few vector species studied and the lack of proper integration ...

We propose a general framework for fast and accurate recognition of actions in video using empirical covariance matrices of features. A dense set of spatio-temporal feature vectors are computed from video to provide a localized description of the action, and subsequently aggregated in an empirical covariance matrix to compactly represent ...

Well-dispersed ammonium aluminum carbonate hydroxide (NH4 -Dw) and γ-AlOOH nanostructures with controlled morphologies have been synthesized by employing an ionic-liquid-assisted hydrothermal process. The basic strategies that were used in this work were: 1) A controllable phase transition from NH4 -Dw to γ-AlOOH could be realized by increasing the reaction temperature and ...

Scene mapping is an integral aspect of processing a scene with scattered human remains. By utilizing the appropriate mapping technique, investigators can accurately document the location of human remains and maintain a precise geospatial record of evidence. One option that has not received much attention for mapping forensic evidence is ...

This paper is devoted to an assessment of the three-step model offered by Gallese and colleagues in support of the thesis that the function of the mirror mechanism is to mindread an agent's intention. The first step of the model is the acceptance of the direct-matching model of action understanding. ...

The use of effect sizes and associated confidence intervals in all empirical research has been strongly emphasized by journal publication guidelines. To help advance theory and practice in the social sciences, this article describes an improved procedure for constructing confidence intervals of the standardized mean difference effect size between two ...

The recent developments in pollutant measurement methods and techniques necessitate improvements in modelling approaches. The models used so far have been based on seasonally averaged data, which is insufficient for making short-term predictions. We have improved the existing modelling tools for pollutant transport and dispersion on three levels. We significantly ...

BACKGROUND: It is unclear whether the Tpeak-Tend interval is an index of the transmural or the total dispersion of repolarization. METHODS: We examined the Tpeak-Tend interval using a computer model of the rabbit heart ventricles based on experimentally measured transmural, apicobasal, and interventricular gradients of action potential duration. RESULTS: Experimentally ...

Models of timing differ on two fundamental issues, the form of the representation and the content of learning. First, regarding the representation of time some models assume a linear encoding, others a logarithmic encoding. Second, regarding the content of learning cognitive models assume that the animal learns explicit representations of ...

[This corrects the article on p. e1001203 in vol. 9.].

[This corrects the article on p. 328 in vol. 28, PMID: 23400211.].