Generalized food-deceptive orchid species flower earlier and occur at lower altitudes than rewarding ones

Aims Food-deceptive pollination, in which plants do not offer any food reward to their pollinators, is common within the Orchidaceae. As food-deceptive orchids are poorer competitors for pollinator visitation than rewarding orchids, their occurrence in a given habitat may be more constrained than that of rewarding orchids. In particular, the success of deceptive orchids strongly relies on several biotic factors such as interactions with co-flowering rewarding species and pollinators, which may vary with altitude and over time. Our study compares generalized food-deceptive (i.e. excluding sexually deceptive) and rewarding orchids to test whether (i) deceptive orchids flower earlier compared to their rewarding counterparts and whether (ii) the relative occurrence of deceptive orchids decreases with increasing altitude. Methods To compare the flowering phenology of rewarding and deceptive orchids, we analysed data compiled from the literature at the species level over the occidental Palaearctic area. Since flowering phenology can be constrained by the latitudinal distribution of the species and by their phylogenetic relationships, we accounted for these factors in our analysis. To compare the altitudinal distribution of rewarding and deceptive orchids, we used field observations made over the entire Swiss territory and over two Swiss mountain ranges. Important Findings We found that deceptive orchid species start flowering earlier than rewarding orchids do, which is in accordance with the hypotheses of exploitation of naive pollinators and/or avoidance of competition with rewarding co-occurring species. Also, the relative frequency of deceptive orchids decreases with altitude, suggesting that deception may be less profitable at high compared to low altitude.

Iowa Problem Indentification for Federal 402 State and Community Highway Safety Programs, Iowa Department of Public Safety, January, 2002

The major objective of this problem identification document is the determination of the relative severity of traffic safety problems in each of the 99 counties. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Iowa Governor's Traffic Safety Bureau are committed to the reduction of death and injury on the nation's roads. As part of its duty in administering federal traffic safety funds in the State of Iowa, the Governor's Traffic Safety Bureau conducts a comprehensive Problem Identification update each year.

Women Sports Journalists in Switzerland: Between Assignment and Negotiation of Roles

In this paper, we analyze working experiences of female sports journalists in the French-speaking Swiss daily press. We draw on Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field to examine how structures of power shape these journalists' lives. Based on 27 semistructured interviews and observations in the field, we found that women journalists' work experiences depend on the relationship between their position in the field and their ethos and hexis. We identified three main strategies through which the women journalists negotiated their experiences: (1) conforming to the dominant male ethos (2) threatening the orthodoxy (3) resisting while hijacking the assigned role.

Intramolecular basis set superposition error effects on the planarity of benzene and other aromatic molecules: A solution to the problem

Recently, the surprising result that ab initio calculations on benzene and other planar arenes at correlated MP2, MP3, configuration interaction with singles and doubles (CISD), and coupled cluster with singles and doubles levels of theory using standard Pople’s basis sets yield nonplanar minima has been reported. The planar optimized structures turn out to be transition states presenting one or more large imaginary frequencies, whereas single-determinant-based methods lead to the expected planar minima and no imaginary frequencies. It has been suggested that such anomalous behavior can be originated by two-electron basis set incompleteness error. In this work, we show that the reported pitfalls can be interpreted in terms of intramolecular basis set superposition error (BSSE) effects, mostly between the C–H moieties constituting the arenes. We have carried out counterpoise-corrected optimizations and frequency calculations at the Hartree–Fock, B3LYP, MP2, and CISD levels of theory with several basis sets for a number of arenes. In all cases, correcting for intramolecular BSSE fixes the anomalous behavior of the correlated methods, whereas no significant differences are observed in the single-determinant case. Consequently, all systems studied are planar at all levels of theory. The effect of different intramolecular fragment definitions and the particular case of charged species, namely, cyclopentadienyl and indenyl anions, respectively, are also discussed

A generalized mechanistic codon model.

Models of codon evolution have attracted particular interest because of their unique capabilities to detect selection forces and their high fit when applied to sequence evolution. We described here a novel approach for modeling codon evolution, which is based on Kronecker product of matrices. The 61 × 61 codon substitution rate matrix is created using Kronecker product of three 4 × 4 nucleotide substitution matrices, the equilibrium frequency of codons, and the selection rate parameter. The entities of the nucleotide substitution matrices and selection rate are considered as parameters of the model, which are optimized by maximum likelihood. Our fully mechanistic model allows the instantaneous substitution matrix between codons to be fully estimated with only 19 parameters instead of 3,721, by using the biological interdependence existing between positions within codons. We illustrate the properties of our models using computer simulations and assessed its relevance by comparing the AICc measures of our model and other models of codon evolution on simulations and a large range of empirical data sets. We show that our model fits most biological data better compared with the current codon models. Furthermore, the parameters in our model can be interpreted in a similar way as the exchangeability rates found in empirical codon models.

La dysménorrhée: un problème pour le pédiatre [Dysmenorrhea: a problem for the pediatrician?].

Dysmenorrhea is common in adolescent years, especially after the onset of ovulatory cycles, usually 2 to 3 years after menarche. Pain and symptoms are responsible for school absenteeism and interruption of sports and social activities. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to measure the prevalence of severe dysmenorrhea and its consequences on adolescent girls in Switzerland. Treatment of dysmenorrhea is discussed and recommendations for clinical practice are given. STUDY DESIGN: Cross sectional survey (SMASH 02) on a nationally representative sample of adolescents (n=7548; 3340 females), aged 16 to 20 years who attended post-mandatory education. A self-administered questionnaire was used to assess the severity of dysmenorrhea and its consequences on daily life pursuit of medical help and medications used. RESULTS: Among 3340 girls, 86.6% suffered from dysmenorrhea-related symptoms: 12.4% described having severe dysmenorrhea and 74.2% moderate dysmenorrhea. Girls with severe dysmenorrhea described heavier consequences on daily activities compared with girls without dysmenorrhea: 47.8% of girls with severe dysmenorrhea reported staying at home and 66.5% declared reducing their sportive activities. Yet, fewer than half have consulted a physician for this complaint and even fewer were treated properly. RECOMMENDATION: The pediatrician has a pivotal role in screening young patients for dysmenorrhea, as well as, educating and effectively treating adolescent girls with menstruation-associated symptoms. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are considered the first-line of treatment for dysmenorrhea, and adolescents with symptoms that do not respond to this treatment for 3 menstrual periods should be offered combined oestroprogestative contraception and must be followed up, as non-responders may have an underlying organic pathology. CONCLUSION: Dysmenorrhea is a frequent health problem in adolescent years and adolescent care providers should be able to care for these patients in an efficient way.

Generalized low-density codes with BCH constituents for full-diversity near-outage performance

A new graph-based construction of generalized low density codes (GLD-Tanner) with binary BCH constituents is described. The proposed family of GLD codes is optimal on block erasure channels and quasi-optimal on block fading channels. Optimality is considered in the outage probability sense. Aclassical GLD code for ergodic channels (e.g., the AWGN channel,the i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel, and the i.i.d. binary erasure channel) is built by connecting bitnodes and subcode nodes via a unique random edge permutation. In the proposed construction of full-diversity GLD codes (referred to as root GLD), bitnodes are divided into 4 classes, subcodes are divided into 2 classes, and finally both sides of the Tanner graph are linked via 4 random edge permutations. The study focuses on non-ergodic channels with two states and can be easily extended to channels with 3 states or more.

Source wavelet estimation for waveform inversion of crosshole georadar data

AbstractFor a wide range of environmental, hydrological, and engineering applications there is a fast growing need for high-resolution imaging. In this context, waveform tomographic imaging of crosshole georadar data is a powerful method able to provide images of pertinent electrical properties in near-surface environments with unprecedented spatial resolution. In contrast, conventional ray-based tomographic methods, which consider only a very limited part of the recorded signal (first-arrival traveltimes and maximum first-cycle amplitudes), suffer from inherent limitations in resolution and may prove to be inadequate in complex environments. For a typical crosshole georadar survey the potential improvement in resolution when using waveform-based approaches instead of ray-based approaches is in the range of one order-of- magnitude. Moreover, the spatial resolution of waveform-based inversions is comparable to that of common logging methods. While in exploration seismology waveform tomographic imaging has become well established over the past two decades, it is comparably still underdeveloped in the georadar domain despite corresponding needs. Recently, different groups have presented finite-difference time-domain waveform inversion schemes for crosshole georadar data, which are adaptations and extensions of Tarantola's seminal nonlinear generalized least-squares approach developed for the seismic case. First applications of these new crosshole georadar waveform inversion schemes on synthetic and field data have shown promising results. However, there is little known about the limits and performance of such schemes in complex environments. To this end, the general motivation of my thesis is the evaluation of the robustness and limitations of waveform inversion algorithms for crosshole georadar data in order to apply such schemes to a wide range of real world problems.One crucial issue to making applicable and effective any waveform scheme to real-world crosshole georadar problems is the accurate estimation of the source wavelet, which is unknown in reality. Waveform inversion schemes for crosshole georadar data require forward simulations of the wavefield in order to iteratively solve the inverse problem. Therefore, accurate knowledge of the source wavelet is critically important for successful application of such schemes. Relatively small differences in the estimated source wavelet shape can lead to large differences in the resulting tomograms. In the first part of my thesis, I explore the viability and robustness of a relatively simple iterative deconvolution technique that incorporates the estimation of the source wavelet into the waveform inversion procedure rather than adding additional model parameters into the inversion problem. Extensive tests indicate that this source wavelet estimation technique is simple yet effective, and is able to provide remarkably accurate and robust estimates of the source wavelet in the presence of strong heterogeneity in both the dielectric permittivity and electrical conductivity as well as significant ambient noise in the recorded data. Furthermore, our tests also indicate that the approach is insensitive to the phase characteristics of the starting wavelet, which is not the case when directly incorporating the wavelet estimation into the inverse problem.Another critical issue with crosshole georadar waveform inversion schemes which clearly needs to be investigated is the consequence of the common assumption of frequency- independent electromagnetic constitutive parameters. This is crucial since in reality, these parameters are known to be frequency-dependent and complex and thus recorded georadar data may show significant dispersive behaviour. In particular, in the presence of water, there is a wide body of evidence showing that the dielectric permittivity can be significantly frequency dependent over the GPR frequency range, due to a variety of relaxation processes. The second part of my thesis is therefore dedicated to the evaluation of the reconstruction limits of a non-dispersive crosshole georadar waveform inversion scheme in the presence of varying degrees of dielectric dispersion. I show that the inversion algorithm, combined with the iterative deconvolution-based source wavelet estimation procedure that is partially able to account for the frequency-dependent effects through an "effective" wavelet, performs remarkably well in weakly to moderately dispersive environments and has the ability to provide adequate tomographic reconstructions.

Generalized linear and generalized additive models in studies of species distributions: setting the scene

An important statistical development of the last 30 years has been the advance in regression analysis provided by generalized linear models (GLMs) and generalized additive models (GAMs). Here we introduce a series of papers prepared within the framework of an international workshop entitled: Advances in GLMs/GAMs modeling: from species distribution to environmental management, held in Riederalp, Switzerland, 6-11 August 2001.We first discuss some general uses of statistical models in ecology, as well as provide a short review of several key examples of the use of GLMs and GAMs in ecological modeling efforts. We next present an overview of GLMs and GAMs, and discuss some of their related statistics used for predictor selection, model diagnostics, and evaluation. Included is a discussion of several new approaches applicable to GLMs and GAMs, such as ridge regression, an alternative to stepwise selection of predictors, and methods for the identification of interactions by a combined use of regression trees and several other approaches. We close with an overview of the papers and how we feel they advance our understanding of their application to ecological modeling.

Heritage Sporting Event : An Old Recipe for a New Problem

In the last decades, the globalized competition among cities and regions made them develop new strategies for branding and promoting their territory to attract tourists, investors, companies and residents. Major sports events - such as the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup or World and Continental Championships - have played an integral part in these strategies. Believing, with or without evidence, in the capacity of those events to improve the visibility and the economy of the host destination, many cities, regions and even countries have engaged in establishing sports events hosting strategies. The problem of the globalized competition in the sports events "market" is that many cities and regions do not have the resources - either financial, human or in terms of infrastructure - to compete in hosting major sports events. Consequently, many cities or regions have to turn to second-tier sports events. To organise those smaller events means less media coverage and more difficulty in finding sponsors, while the costs - both financial and in terms of services - stay high for the community. This paper analyses how Heritage Sporting Events (HSE) might be an opportunity for cities and regions engaged in sports events hosting strategies. HSE is an emerging concept that to date has been under-researched in the academic literature. Therefore, this paper aims to define the concept of HSE through an exploratory research study. A multidisciplinary literature review reveals two major characteristics of HSEs: the sustainability in the territory and the authenticity of the event constructed through a differentiation process. These characteristics, defined through multiple variables, give us the opportunity to observe the construction process of a sports event into a heritage object. This paper argues that HSEs can be seen as territorial resources that can represent a competitive advantage for host destinations. In conclusion, academics are invited to further research HSEs to better understand their construction process and their impacts on the territory, while local authorities are invited to consider HSEs for the branding and the promotion of their territory.

ILS-ESP An efficient, simple, and parameter-free algorithm for solving the permutation flow-shop problem

From a managerial point of view, the more effcient, simple, and parameter-free (ESP) an algorithm is, the more likely it will be used in practice for solving real-life problems. Following this principle, an ESP algorithm for solving the Permutation Flowshop Sequencing Problem (PFSP) is proposed in this article. Using an Iterated Local Search (ILS) framework, the so-called ILS-ESP algorithm is able to compete in performance with other well-known ILS-based approaches, which are considered among the most effcient algorithms for the PFSP. However, while other similar approaches still employ several parameters that can affect their performance if not properly chosen, our algorithm does not require any particular fine-tuning process since it uses basic "common sense" rules for the local search, perturbation, and acceptance criterion stages of the ILS metaheuristic. Our approach defines a new operator for the ILS perturbation process, a new acceptance criterion based on extremely simple and transparent rules, and a biased randomization process of the initial solution to randomly generate different alternative initial solutions of similar quality -which is attained by applying a biased randomization to a classical PFSP heuristic. This diversification of the initial solution aims at avoiding poorly designed starting points and, thus, allows the methodology to take advantage of current trends in parallel and distributed computing. A set of extensive tests, based on literature benchmarks, has been carried out in order to validate our algorithm and compare it against other approaches. These tests show that our parameter-free algorithm is able to compete with state-of-the-art metaheuristics for the PFSP. Also, the experiments show that, when using parallel computing, it is possible to improve the top ILS-based metaheuristic by just incorporating to it our biased randomization process with a high-quality pseudo-random number generator.

Performance assessment and league tables. Comparing like with like.

We formulate performance assessment as a problem of causal analysis and outline an approach based on the missing data principle for its solution. It is particularly relevant in the context of so-called league tables for educational, health-care and other public-service institutions. The proposed solution avoids comparisons of institutions that have substantially different clientele (intake).