Inbreeding depression for various traits in two cultured populations of the American bay scallop, Argopecten irradians irradians Lamarck (1819) introduced into China

This paper examines the effect of inbreeding level of population on the magnitude of inbreeding depression expressed by comparing them between two cultured populations (A and B) in the hermaphroditic animal of the bay scallop Argopecten irradians irradians. Population A is expected to have less genetic variations and higher inbreeding level due to longer cultured history (20 generations) and less "ancestral" individuals (26 individuals) than population B due to shorter cultured history (4 generations) and more "ancestral" individuals (406 individuals). Two groups within each population were produced, one using self-fertilization and one using mass-mating within the same population. Selfed offspring (AS and BS) from two populations both had lower fitness components than their mass-mated counterparts (AM and BM) and exhibited inbreeding depression for all examined traits, e.g. lower hatching, less viability and slower growth, indicating that inbreeding depression is a common feature in this animal. Fitness components in all traits of offspring from population A significantly differed those from population B and the magnitude of inbreeding depression for all traits in population A with higher inbreeding level was significantly smaller than that in population B with lower inbreeding level, indicating that both fitness components and magnitude of inbreeding depression were significantly affected by inbreeding level of populations and genetic load harbored in population A may be partially purged through inbreeding. Moreover, the magnitude of inbreeding depression in the two populations both varied among traits and life history stages. The present results support the partial-dominance hypothesis of inbreeding depression. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Decline in medicinal and forage species with warming is mediated by plant traits on the Tibetan Plateau

Experimental studies of how global changes and human activities affect plant diversity often focus on broad measures of diversity and discuss the implications of these changes for ecosystem function. We examined how experimental warming and grazing affected species within plant groups of direct importance to Tibetan pastoralists: medicinal plants used by humans and palatable plants consumed by livestock. Warming resulted in species losses from both the medicinal and palatable plant groups; however, differential relative vulnerability to warming occurred. With respect to the percent of warming-induced species losses, the overall plant community lost 27%, medicinal plants lost 21%, and non-medicinal plants lost 40% of species. Losses of palatable and non-palatable species were similar to losses in the overall plant community. The deep-rootedness of medicinal plants resulted in lowered sensitivity to warming, whereas the shallow-rootedness of non-medicinal plants resulted in greater sensitivity to warming; the variable rooting depth of palatable and non-palatable plants resulted in an intermediate response to warming. Predicting the vulnerability of plant groups to human activities can be enhanced by knowledge of plant traits, their response to specific drivers, and their distribution within plant groups. Knowledge of the mechanisms through which a driver operates, and the evolutionary interaction of plants with that driver, will aid predictions. Future steps to protect ecosystem services furnished by medicinal and palatable plants will be required under the novel stress of a warmer climate. Grazing may be an important tool in maintaining some of these services under future warming.

人口空间数据误差分析研究

Spatial population data, obtained through the pixeling method, makes many related researches more convenient. However, the limited methods of precision analysis prevent the spread of spatial distribution methods and cumber the application of the spatial population data. This paper systematically analyzes the different aspects of the spatial population data precision, and re-calculates them with the reformed method, which makes breakthrough for the spread of the pixeling method and provides support and reference for the application of spatial population data. The paper consists of the following parts: (2) characters of the error; (2) origins of the error; (3) advancement on the calculating methods of the spatial population data. In the first place, based on the analysis of the error trait, two aspects of the spatial population data precision are characterized and analyzed: numerical character and spatial distributing character. The later one, placed greater emphasis on in this paper, is depicted in two spatial scales: county and town. It is always essential and meaningful to the research in this paper that spatial distribution is as important as numerical value in analyzing error of the spatial distributed data. The result illustrates that the spatial population data error appears spatially in group, although it is random in the aspect of data statistics, all of that shows there lies spatial systematic error. Secondly, this paper comes to conclude and validate the lineal correlation between the residential land area (from 1:50000 map and taken as real area) and population. Meanwhile, it makes particular analysis on the relationship between the residential land area, which is obtained from the land use map and the population in three different spatial scales: village, town and county, and makes quantitative description of the residential density variation in different topological environment. After that, it analyzes the residential distributing traits and precision. With the consideration of the above researches, it reaches the conclusion that the error of the spatial distributed population is caused by a series of factors, such as the compactness of the residents, loss of the residential land, the population density of the city. Eventually, the paper ameliorates the method of pixeling the population data with the help of the analysis on error characters and causes. It tests 2-class regionalization based on the 1-class regionalization of China, and resorts the residential data from the land use map. In aid of GIS and the comprehensive analysis of various data source, it constructs models in each 2-class district to calculate spatial population data. After all, LinYi Region is selected as the study area. In this area, spatial distributing population is calculated and the precision is analyzed. All it illustrates is that new spatial distributing population has been improved much. The research is fundamental work. It adopts large amounts of data in different types and contains many figures to make convincing and detailed conclusions.

聋童与正常儿童中文阅读信息加工过程的比较研究

Based upon the experiments showing three traits of Chinese characters as stimulus, the comparison has been made between the hearing-impaired and normal children in RT functions for the judgment involved in the verbal recording. The results show that the function of semantic code is more strongly correlated with recognition of Chinese character than the phonetic code and graphic code for both the hearing-impaired and normal children. For hearing-impaired children, a direct access that a semantic code is produced directly from the graphic code is observed. However, for normal children the strategly of grapheme-phoneme conversion rules to interpret the meaning of words is used. It's shown that no significant differences of mental processing has been found between the hearing-impaired and normal children. Perhaps both the direct access and the grapheme-phoneme conversion form a comprehensive information procession activating each other. In reading Chinese character, the hearing-impaired and normal children is significantly effected by stroke under and character frequency. It is found that the normal children have more depth processing in reading Chinese sentences than the hearing-impaired children.

A Phylogenetic Mixture Model for Detecting Pattern-Heterogeneity in Gene Sequence or Character-State Data

Mark Pagel, Andrew Meade (2004). A phylogenetic mixture model for detecting pattern-heterogeneity in gene sequence or character-state data. Systematic Biology, 53(4), 571-581. RAE2008

Japonia w życiu i w twórczości Amélie Nothomb

Wydział Neofilologii: Instytut Filologii Romańskiej

Constructivist Character of the Technique of Role-Playing Games and its Autonomizing Values in the Glottodidactic Process

To Augustyn Surdyk numerous assumptions of constructivism and constructionism in the educational context seem to correspond with the idea of autonomisation in foreign language didactics. He presents a comparison of selected aspects of the three theories in question on the example of an innovative communicative technique of Role-Playing Games applied in the process of teaching foreign languages at an advanced level. The conventions of the technique with its simplified rules have been borrowed from popular parlour games and adapted by the author to the conditions of language didactics. The elements of play and simulation incorporated in the technique allow it to be rated among techniques of ludic strategy. (from Preface to the book)

Komizm w teorii i praktyce antycznej powieści greckiej

The topic of the study entitled humour in the ancient greek novels: the theoretical conceptions and the lite- rary practice is significance of humour in ancient Greek novels. In the first part of this study the theoretical aspects are examined with reference to the conceptions of contemporary researchers of Greek novels. The influence of the humour on the character of the world presented in particular novels is considered in the second part of the article.

True Greatness: A Discourse on the character of Rev. Wilbur Fisk

Memorial discourse

Christian Witness on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Narrative, Nonviolence, and the Formation of Character

This dissertation analyzes the theological and ethical convictions that led the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon to shelter thousands of refugees between 1939 and 1945. It does so by examining the themes of narrative identity, hospitality, character formation, nonviolence, and the contextual witness of church tradition. Though a number of studies have been published about the rescue activity in this region of France during World War II, none have thoroughly analyzed the theological nature of this activity. Using the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon as a case study in theological ethics, the dissertation draws on historical sources as well as the work of contemporary theologians and ethicists to understand, interpret, and analyze the witness of this community. After situating its rescue and resistance work within the Huguenot narrative of persecution and exile, I examine the theological convictions of the Reformed pastor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Trocmé, who played a key role in making the Plateau a place of refuge during the Holocaust. The study highlights the importance of narrative in the actions of this community and discusses the relationship between narrative, character, and ethics. It then examines the nonviolent commitments of key leaders of the rescue effort, using this analysis as a springboard to engage in broader theological reflection about the ethics of nonviolence. After examining the radical hospitality practiced on the Plateau in light of biblical narratives and Reformed history, I investigate the counter-cultural nature of Christian hospitality. The study concludes by analyzing the nature and witness of the church in light of the legacy of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. The dissertation suggests that increased academic and ecclesial attention be given to the relationship between narrative and character, the counter-cultural shape of Christian hospitality, and the active nature of nonviolence. It presents an in-depth analysis of the theological and ethical convictions of the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, arguing that their witness has ongoing significance for communities of faith as they grapple with how to form disciples, relate to the wider society, welcome strangers, and communicate God's shalom in a world of violence.

Online and Offline Character Recognition Using Alignment to Prototypes

Nearest neighbor classifiers are simple to implement, yet they can model complex non-parametric distributions, and provide state-of-the-art recognition accuracy in OCR databases. At the same time, they may be too slow for practical character recognition, especially when they rely on similarity measures that require computationally expensive pairwise alignments between characters. This paper proposes an efficient method for computing an approximate similarity score between two characters based on their exact alignment to a small number of prototypes. The proposed method is applied to both online and offline character recognition, where similarity is based on widely used and computationally expensive alignment methods, i.e., Dynamic Time Warping and the Hungarian method respectively. In both cases significant recognition speedup is obtained at the expense of only a minor increase in recognition error.

Comparative Performance Measures of Fuzzy ARTMAP, Learned Vector Quantization, and Back Propagation for Handwritten Character Recognition

This article compares the performance of Fuzzy ARTMAP with that of Learned Vector Quantization and Back Propagation on a handwritten character recognition task. Training with Fuzzy ARTMAP to a fixed criterion used many fewer epochs. Voting with Fuzzy ARTMAP yielded the highest recognition rates.

Independent evolutionary origins of landlocked alewife populations and rapid parallel evolution of phenotypic traits.

Alewife, Alosa pseudoharengus, populations occur in two discrete life-history variants, an anadromous form and a landlocked (freshwater resident) form. Landlocked populations display a consistent pattern of life-history divergence from anadromous populations, including earlier age at maturity, smaller adult body size, and reduced fecundity. In Connecticut (USA), dams constructed on coastal streams separate anadromous spawning runs from lake-resident landlocked populations. Here, we used sequence data from the mtDNA control region and allele frequency data from five microsatellite loci to ask whether coastal Connecticut landlocked alewife populations are independently evolved from anadromous populations or whether they share a common freshwater ancestor. We then used microsatellite data to estimate the timing of the divergence between anadromous and landlocked populations. Finally, we examined anadromous and landlocked populations for divergence in foraging morphology and used divergence time estimates to calculate the rate of evolution for foraging traits. Our results indicate that landlocked populations have evolved multiple times independently. Tests of population divergence and estimates of gene flow show that landlocked populations are genetically isolated, whereas anadromous populations exchange genes. These results support a 'phylogenetic raceme' model of landlocked alewife divergence, with anadromous populations forming an ancestral core from which landlocked populations independently diverged. Divergence time estimates suggest that landlocked populations diverged from a common anadromous ancestor no longer than 5000 years ago and perhaps as recently as 300 years ago, depending on the microsatellite mutation rate assumed. Examination of foraging traits reveals landlocked populations to have significantly narrower gapes and smaller gill raker spacings than anadromous populations, suggesting that they are adapted to foraging on smaller prey items. Estimates of evolutionary rates (in haldanes) indicate rapid evolution of foraging traits, possibly in response to changes in available resources.