Character Complexes Research Articles

Morphometric Characters and Feeding Habits in the Early Ontogenesis of Kildin Cod Gadus morhua kildinensis (Gadidae) from Lake Mogilnoe (Kildin Island, Barents Sea)

Kildin cod Gadus morhua kildinensis is a subspecies of Atlantic cod with extremely small population size, listed in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation, which inhabits the waters of a small meromictic lake on the Kildin Island (Barents Sea). Comparative studies of morphobiological characteristics and feeding habits of Kildin cod in the juvenile period were conducted for the first time. Comparison of sample sets of adult Kildin cod and fingerlings on the basis of multivariate analysis of variance demonstrates a high degree of differences in the complex of morphometric characters. The diet of the analyzed sample set of Kildin cod fingerlings consisted of ostracodes (Ostracoda), larvae of polychaetas (Polychaeta), cladocerans (Cladocera), and gammarids (Gammaridae). The special features of changes in the diet of Kildin cod in the early ontogenesis are discussed.

Self-Adaptive Hybridized Lion Optimization Algorithm With Transfer Learning for Ancient Tamil Character Recognition in Stone Inscriptions

Tamil character recognition is an important field of research in pattern recognition and it is a technical challenge than other languages due to similarity and complexity of characters. Stone inscriptions reveal the details of lavishness, lifestyle, economic conditions, culture, and also of the managerial regulations followed by various rulers and dynasties particular to those regions. However, due to the long history of ancient stone inscription, natural erosion and lack of early protection measures, there are lot of noise in the existing ancient stone inscriptions, which create adverse effects on reading these stone inscriptions and their aesthetic appreciation. The research challenge in recognizing Tamil characters is mainly because of the characters with a number of holes, loops and curves. The number of letters in Tamil language is higher when compared to other languages. Even though there are various approaches provided by the researchers, challenges and issues still prevail in recognition of tamil text in stone inscriptions. In the existing systems, detection algorithms fail to produce desired accuracy and hence stone inscription recognition using transfer learning, a promising method is proposed in this paper. Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) is applied to optimize brightness and contrast and then stone inscription images are pre-processed for noise removal and then each character is separated by identifying contours. Characters are recognized using Transfer Learning (TL), a Deep Convolution Neural Network-based multi classification approach. The proposed hybrid model Self-Adaptive Lion Optimization Algorithm with Transfer Learning (SLOA-TL) when implemented in images of stone inscriptions achieves better accuracy and speed than other existing methods. It serves as an efficient design for recognition of tamil characters in stone inscriptions and preserving tamil traditional knowledge.

Teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers: A scoping review

The complexity of Chinese characters and the differences in learners’ cultural backgrounds make the process of teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers of Chinese challenging. This review provides a comprehensive examination of five key strategies used in this instructional context: individualized instruction, contextualized instruction, technology-assisted instruction, innovative materials and resource development, and interdisciplinary integration. The ultimate approach to teaching non-native speakers of Chinese may come from the effective integration of these five strategies, so future research should focus on developing integrated instructional models that effectively combine these strategies. Further empirical research is also needed to verify the effectiveness of these strategies and to refine their implementation in different educational contexts.

Nuclear Cytoplasmic Conflict in Hybrids of Roach <i>Rutilus rutilus</i> and Bream <i>Abramis brama</i> as a Consequence of the Divergence Species in Body and Genome Sizes

Species divergence in body size is often associated with changes in genome size and the rate of evolution of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which can lead to problems of nuclear-cytoplasmic compatibility and embryonic genome activation and reduce the fitness of hybrids. The bream Abramis brama (L.) is larger than the roach Rutilus rutilus (L.) in body and genome sizes. In the first generation of hybrids according to the ITS1 region of ribosomal DNA, a change in the donor genome of male to the level of the maternal species was previously established, which can affect the inheritance of traits from the male and, in particular, body size. Body length and height, a complex of diagnostic morphological characters, and genotyping (ITS1 rDNA and cyt b mtDNA) of underyearlings and mature individuals of bream, roach, F1 hybrids and underyearlings of backcrosses (Fb) were analyzed. Sexually mature hybrids of both directions of crossing are close in body length to R. rutilus, which indicates a violation of the paternal effect when inheriting the body length of a larger of species. Violation of the inheritance of bream body length in hybrids of cross R. rutilus × A. brama (♀ ♂, RA) is considered as a developmental deviation, which, obviously, can affect the adaptation of hybrids and determines the rarity of this variant in nature. At the same time, alloplasmic ARR backcrosses restore the body length of the bream even in the presence of the roach nuclear genome, which indicates the influence of mitochondrial genes on the development of this trait. The observed decrease in the fitness of first-generation hybrids with roach mtDNA may be associated with to an insufficient level of transcription of ribosomal genes due to a decrease in the number and variability of copies of the donor bream rDNA. Moreover, the high level of changes of mtDNA roach indicate a suboptimal mitochondrial-nuclear correspondence of respiratory a complexes in hybrids RA, which negatively affects key physiological processes, including growth and development of a large body size. Presumably, the development of large body size, as a complex trait with high aerobic fitness, is blocked in RA hybrids for energy reasons. The paper shows that differences families of repeated sequences rDNA and mtDNA in terms of the number and variability of copies in genome of R. rutilus and A. brama can lead to regulatory nuclear-cytoplasmic incompatibility of genomes and affect the fitness of hybrids already in the first generation.

PORTRAIT PAINTING AT THE ACADEMIC EXHIBITION OF 1833

The article is devoted to portrait painting presented at the St. Petersburg Academic Exhibition of 1833, a detailed analysis of which has not been carried out yet. This is primarily due to the small number of surviving works that were shown at that exhibition. Based on the sources (the index of the exhibition and the article by M.E. Lobanov), the author reconstructs the composition of the participants and their works. The main attention in the article is paid to three capital works: the paintings "Newspaper Readers in Naples" by O.A. Kiprensky, "Portrait of L.P. Wittgenstein's Children" by K.P. Bryullov, and "Portrait of the Dowager Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna" by P.V. Basin. The possible artistic sources and impressions that could contribute to the creation of these works are considered, the opinions of contemporaries on the problems of artistic form are given, the coexistence of two lines in the portrait genre of the first half of the 1830s - illusionism and decorativeness - is emphasized, the tendency associated with the desire to combine portrait and genre painting is noted. Briefly dwelling on the masters of the "second row" (students and graduates of the Academy of Arts), the author examines the works of the French painter F. Riss, noting a certain trend in the portrait of this time associated with the desire for complex and pretentious movements of characters, which is associated with the search for a new artistic language and an attempt to get away from boring portrait stamps.

Population variability of vegetative organs of Dahurian larch in Eastern Transbaikalia

The available information on the morphological diversity and localization of the morphological forms of Dahurian larch (Larix gmelinii) in Siberia is currently insufficient. This research seeks to fill the knowledge gaps to some extent. The paper describes the population variability of vegetative organs of Larix gmelinii growing in Eastern Transbaikalia, Russia. The problem is approached by studying a complex of morphological characters of natural Larix gmelinii populations along the Transbaikalian rivers. Also, the habitat conditions of Dahurian larch coenopopulations were recorded for further analysis of the connection between the morphological characters and the habitat parameters. The study established the values of morphological characters and their variability limits and traced the localization patterns of the morphological forms of Dahurian larch in the river basins. Moreover, the morphological characters of larch vegetative organs were found to relate to the location and the habitat conditions of the coenopopulations. The research materials can be useful for correcting the larch seeding zones in Transbaikalia, establishing larch genetic reserves, and introducing new morphological forms into the selection for urban beautification and protective plantations. The study provides additional information on the morphological variability patterns of Larix gmelinii for the area of species in general. Keywords: Eastern Transbaikalia, Larix gmelinii, vegetative organs, population variability

INVASIVE POTENTIAL OF CAUCASUS PLANTS IN THE TSITSIN BOTANICAL GARDEN OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

The results of alien plant’s naturalization in the Caucasus flora exposition of the Main Botanical Garden of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) are presented. In order to identify the characters contributing to the potential success of invasion, the naturalized and nonnaturalized species were compared. Out of the 1246 taxa have been intentionally introduced for 76 years, 57 species (4.5%) showed the ability to naturalize, while 12 species (less than 1%) actually "escaped" from the culture. The dispersal of resistant unpretentious plants was facilitated by the weakening of collection care in the 1990s. After the revision carried out in 2020, another 17 species have successfully naturalized. Apiaceae and Boraginaceae showed the highest degree of naturalization. Self- reproduction was observed in 440 species, and the greatest number of naturalized taxa (19%) belonged to plants that were reproduced both by vegetative propagation and by self-seeding, while among those propagated only by self-seeding, 16% of species were naturalized and among those propagated vegetatively, only 6%. Plants of subalpine tall grasses and forest communities of the Caucasus were the most adapted to the conditions of Moscow. None of the species confined to semi-deserts, arid sparse forests, upland xerophytic communities, steppes, alpine meadows, high-altitude rocks and screes and subtropical forests of Colchis and Talysh became invasive. Short-rooted and long-rooted perennial herbaceous plants prevailed among the naturalized plants. The widespread opinion about the difficulty of introducing endemic plants was not confirmed. In terms of the proportion of naturalized species, they were insignificantly inferior to wide range species, and superior to them in terms of the number of highly invasive and invasive species. The complex of characters that can predict a high probability of transformation of intentionally introduced plant species into invasive ones has been revealed. The results of the analysis of invasiveness of Caucasian species will be used to prevent the introduction of aggressive alien plants and to develop a scientifically based approach to plant exhibiting.

Real-time high quality font generation with Conditional Font GAN

Designing and generating novels fonts manually is a laborious and time-consuming process owing to the large number and complexity of characters in the majority of language systems. Recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have significantly improved font generation. These GAN-based approaches either handle the font generation as a vanilla GAN problem (that is, by synthesizing characters from a uniform latent vector) or an image-to-image translation problem. While the former approach has no limitation in generating diverse font styles, the generated fonts contain artifacts and can operate only on low-resolution images, thus impairing their usability. The latter approach generates high-quality font images for previously observed fonts, but the quality degrades during the inference phase while designing novel fonts. Furthermore, additional fine-tuning steps are required to achieve photorealistic results, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address the shortcomings of these approaches, we propose a font generation method that employs the vanilla GAN approach to generate an infinite number of font styles but focuses on the real-time generation of photo-realistic font images. Additionally, we strive to create high-resolution images that can be used in practical applications. To accomplish this, we propose a conditional font GAN (CFGAN) with a sophisticated network architecture that is designed to generate novel style-consistent diverse font character sets. We control the generated characters in the proposed network using a non-trainable fixed character vector, while the style variation sampled from a Gaussian distribution is fused at all blocks of the generator through adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) operation. Thus, the generator architecture can simultaneously generate an infinite number of font styles with style consistency and diversity during inference. We conducted various quantitative and qualitative experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of both image quality and computational cost.

New Data on Nephron Microanatomy and Ultrastructure of Senegal Bichir (Polypterus senegalus).

Simple SummaryTransitional forms of animals between Pisces and Amphibia are interesting to study, as they are the first to begin the development of a new environment - terrestrial. Such a transitional form are amphibious fish. The study of the structure of the nephron, the main structure that performs an osmoregulatory function, makes it possible to build evolutionary series that describe the processes of transition from the aquatic environment to the terrestrial one. Bichirs is a monophyletic group that arose in the Devonian and formed a species complex only in the Neogene. They share features with lungfish and amphibians, which formed convergently in the early stages of evolution. Therefore Bichirs are of great interest as a transitional form of animals. This study presents new data on the nephron age of Polypterus senegalus. Two groups of features are described. The first group consists of ancestral traits that have been preserved in the modern population of P. senegalus and are associated with habitat conditions in the aquatic environment. The second group is a complex of characters associated with the adaptation of P. senegalus to air breathing and periodic ground migrations.This study presents new data on the microanatomy and ultrastructure of Polypterus senegalus nephrons. It was shown that the diameter and ultrastructure of renal corpuscles, a well-developed neck segment, and ultrastructure of two types of epithelial cells of the proximal tubule are ancestral signs of the modern population of P. senegalus associated with habitat conditions in the aquatic environment. The outer diameter of the tubules, the height of the epitheliocytes, the presence of two types of epithelial cells of the intermediate and distal tubules of the corresponding ultrastructure, and a large area of nephrogenic tissue are progressive features of the modern population of P. senegalus, associated with adaptation to air respiration and periodic terrestrial migrations, which were formed at the early stages of evolution of P. senegalus convergently with lungfish and amphibians.

PseudoSloan: A perimetric-complexity and area-controlled font for vision and reading research.

Artificial orthographies have long been used in studies of verbal learning and reading. These orthographies, also known as pseudo or false fonts, are designed to match the letters of an existing alphabet on a range of visual features, isolating effects of orthography from those owing to lexical processing. In a parallel line of research, there has been much interest in the design of optotypes for measuring visual acuity that have good properties in terms of character complexity and graceful degradation under blur. Here we merge these two traditions by designing a fully scalable pseudofont, “PseudoSloan,” that is based on the design rubric of the widely used Sloan optotypes. The font includes 26 Latin letters as well as two sets of letter-like symbols matching the Latin alphabet on a letter-by-letter basis. Quantitative matching of the pairs of Sloan and PseudoSloan glyphs is done on the basis of ink area and perimetric complexity. We provide the installable PseudoSloan font in TrueType and OpenType formats, plus a large number of PseudoSloan glyphs in .svg format that vary over wide ranges in their perimetric complexity and ink area (https://osf.io/qhj2b/).

New or rare Madagascar tiger beetles26. A new species of the genus Pogonostoma Klug from northwestern Madagascar and a revised key to the Pogonostoma (P.) srnkai species-group (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae).

A new species of the genus Pogonostoma Klug, 1835, P. (Pogonostoma) mahimborondrense Moravec Wiesner sp. nov. is described as new to science from the Mahimborondro protected area in Northern Highlands, northwestern Madagascar. By its unique complex of diagnostic characters, the new species is incomparable to any other species within the genus. It is placed here into the Pogonostoma (P.) srnkai species-group (in the concept presented in the monograph of the genus by Moravec 2007). A revised key to species of the species-group is presented in order to supplement the key in the monograph. Habitus and diagnostic characters of the new species are illustrated in colour photographs. Maps and photos of the occurrence of the new species in Mahimborondro are also presented.

Inferiority complex in women's oppression on Medea & The Glass Menagerie

The purpose of this study is to analyze the inferiority complex of women characters from various eras based on their stories. This study uses the id, ego, superego, and defense mechanism by Freud and inferiority complex by Heidbreder. Through the descriptive analytical method, this analyze is to help the interpretation of the women characters state of minds including their stress coping mechanism and classify their types of inferior complex. The results of this study shows that Medea had a high tendency to feel insecure as a result of her husband’s betrayal, and she mostly used projection as a defense mechanism to revenge her husband. Meanwhile, Amanda demonstrates the use of identification as a stress escapement from societal pressure, as well as her inferiority complex when faced with a guy caller. Due to the stress of high expectations in attracting gentleman caller, Laura mostly used rationalization as a defense mechanism.
 
 Keywords: Inferiority Complex, Defense Mechanism, Psychoanalysis, Oppression.

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

An Examination of Students’ Moral Character Experiences Using the Four Component Model and Self-Evolution Theory

In this article, we introduce the four component model (FCM), which describes both the internal processes that play distinct roles in the production of moral behavior and their associated sets of relevant, teachable skills. We use this model as an analytic framework to examine college students’ moral character experiences reported in the Wabash National Study. We also examine whether the skills they used were related to their progress toward self-authorship. We report which FCM skills were used most frequently and that participants who were more self-authored used different sets of skills than their counterparts who held less complex meaning-making assumptions. We conclude by discussing the complexity of moral character and the implications of using the FCM for practitioners and researchers working in this domain.

Life with Concepts: Allegory, Recognition, and Adaptation

This essay examines questions around teaching allegory to undergraduates in a liberal arts setting, with a focus on the uses for both reading and inviting students to write contemporary adaptations of premodern works. The complexities of literary character are sometimes reflexively disallowed to the personified figures of premodern allegory. A better tack, without assimilating medieval literary modes into modern ones, might have us attend to the variety of ways in which concepts are given embodied, social life in allegory. Adaptation assignments can invite self-involving hermeneutic engagement, analytic rigor, and creative response from students. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Everybody, a recent adaptation of Everyman, is looked to here as a model conversation partner for such a pedagogical approach.

Trends in Quality Controlled Precipitation Indicators in the United States Midwest and Great Lakes Region

Changes in precipitation can have broad and significant societal impacts. A number of previous studies that analyzed changes in precipitation across the Great Lakes and Midwest for a variety of time periods and using a range of quality-control standards and methods observed increased precipitation rates and totals, although there was considerable site-to-site variability, even for sites in close physical proximity. Biases and discontinuities in precipitation observations may contribute to this variability. This study identifies and examines changes in precipitation utilizing a unique approach to observation series screening over a region encompassing the Great Lakes and broader Midwestern region of the United States for the period 1951–2019. A multiple tier procedure was utilized to identify high quality input data series from the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily dataset. Annual and seasonal time series of precipitation indicators were calculated and subjected to breakpoint analysis as further quality control. Trends were analyzed across a broad range of related indicators, from totals and frequencies of threshold events to event duration and potential linkages with total precipitable water. Results indicate that annual precipitation has generally increased across the region in terms of totals, although there is substantial variation across the study domain in the significance and magnitude of annual trends by indicator. Annual trends were spatially most consistent across eastern areas of the study domain while relatively greater station-to-station variability in trend significance and magnitude was observed across northern and western portions. Significant trends were generally fewer in number for seasonal precipitation indicators and less spatially coherent. The greatest number of significant trends occurred in fall with the fewest in spring. Correlation of indicator trends with trends of mean total precipitable water suggests weak correlations annually and moderate correlations at the seasonal scale. The trends of the precipitation indicators in our study exhibited more coherent spatial patterns when compared with studies with different quality control criteria, illustrating the importance of quality control of observations in climatic studies and highlighting the complexity of the changing character of precipitation.

The Relationship Between History and Mythology in Sondheim and Weidman’s 'Assassins'

This article analyses Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins to explore the way in which historical events are transformed into mythology. Following Barthes’ (1972) Mythologies, I propose that Assassins demonstrates how mythology simplifies history to serve a dominant narrative. Assassins creates a dialogue between contrasting historical narratives through the Balladeer, who embodies a simplified mythology, providing ironic contrast to Sondheim’s complex characterisation of the assassins. The characterisation of Guiteau provides an example to examine Sondheim’s character in comparison with historical and fictional accounts, in order to appreciate how mythology alters the perception of this figure. The scene with Lee Harvey Oswald invites discussion of cultural mythologies defining American national identity: the American Dream, independent freedoms and gun culture. These mythologies arise from historical mythology, but also through commodity fetishism and conspiracy theories. Assassins restores the complexity of characters who are otherwise reduced by mythology to consider how cultural mythology leads to the formation of these assassins, and to challenge the biased narrative of American historical mythology. By comparing Assassins to the historical accounts and folk songs it references, we can better understand the role of mythology in Assassins, illuminating the process by which historical mythology is produced, and indeed produces the fictionalised assassins.

Early executive function predicts children’s Chinese word reading from preschool through Grade 3

The role of executive function (EF) in reading has been widely supported among English-speaking children. Expanding upon existing work on the linkage between EF and Chinese word reading, the current study examined whether early EF would predict the longitudinal trajectories of Chinese word reading from preschool through Grade 3 among a group of children in mainland China (N = 196). Children’s EF was measured during the second year of preschool using a combination of behavior task and parent report. Children’s Chinese word reading abilities were assessed repeatedly over three years between the final preschool year and Grade 3. After controlling for demographic characteristics and children’s initial vocabulary knowledge, children’s working memory predicted their levels of Chinese word reading in preschool. In addition, children’s overall EF assessed using the behavior task and parent-rated inhibition and cognitive flexibility positively predicted children’s rates of growth in Chinese word reading skills. The visual complexity of Chinese characters appears to place high demands on children’s EF. The findings highlight the critical role of EF in Chinese children’s word reading across the first few years of formal schooling.

Comparison of DEM Super-Resolution Methods Based on Interpolation and Neural Networks.

High-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) play a critical role in geospatial databases, which can be applied to many terrain-related studies such as facility siting, hydrological analysis, and urban design. However, due to the limitation of precision of equipment, there are big gaps to collect high-resolution DEM data. A practical idea is to recover high-resolution DEMs from easily obtained low-resolution DEMs, and this process is termed DEM super-resolution (SR). However, traditional DEM SR methods (e.g., bicubic interpolation) tend to over-smooth high-frequency regions on account of the operation of averaging local variations. With the recent development of machine learning, image SR methods have made great progress. Nevertheless, due to the complexity of terrain characters (e.g., peak and valley) and the huge difference between elevation field and image RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) value field, there are few works that apply image SR methods to the task of DEM SR. Therefore, this paper investigates the question of whether the state-of-the-art image SR methods are appropriate for DEM SR. More specifically, the traditional interpolation method and three excellent SR methods based on neural networks are chosen for comparison. Experimental results suggest that SRGAN (Super-Resolution with Generative Adversarial Network) presents the best performance on accuracy evaluation over a series of DEM SR experiments.

Phylogenetic revision of the lichenized family Gomphillaceae (Ascomycota: Graphidales) suggests post-K–Pg boundary diversification and phylogenetic signal in asexual reproductive structures

We present the first broad molecular-phylogenetic revision of the lichenized family Gomphillaceae, based on 408 newly generated sequences of the mitochondrial SSU rDNA and nuclear LSU rDNA, representing 342 OTUs. The phylogenetic analysis of 20 out of the 28 currently accepted genera resulted in 48 clades. Twelve genera were resolved as monophyletic: Actinoplaca, Arthotheliopsis, Bullatina, Caleniopsis, Corticifraga, Gomphillus, Gyalectidium, Gyalidea, Jamesiella, Rolueckia, Rubrotricha, and Taitaia. Two genera resulted paraphyletic, namely Aulaxina (including Caleniopsis) and Asterothyrium (including Linhartia). Six genera were in part highly polyphyletic: Aderkomyces, Calenia, Echinoplaca, Gyalideopsis, Psorotheciopsis, and Tricharia. While ascoma morphology and anatomy has traditionally been considered as main character complex to distinguish genera, our study supported the notion that the characteristic asexual anamorph of Gomphillaceae, the so-called hyphophores, are diagnostic for most of the newly recognized clades. As a result, we recognize 26 new genus-level clades, three of which have names available (Microxyphiomyces, Psathyromyces, Spinomyces) and 23 that will require formal description as new genera. We also tested monophyly for 53 species-level names for which two or more specimens were sequenced: 27 were supported as monophyletic and representing a single species, 13 as monophyletic but with an internal topology suggesting cryptic speciation, four as paraphyletic, and nine as polyphyletic. These data suggest that species richness in the family is higher than indicated by the number of accepted names (currently 425); they also confirm that recently refined species concepts reflect species richness better than the broad concepts applied in Santesson's monograph. A divergence time analysis revealed that foliicolous Gomphillaceae diversified after the K–Pg-boundary and largely during the Miocene, a notion supported by limited data available for other common foliicolous lineages such as Chroodiscus (Graphidaceae), Pilocarpaceae, and Porinaceae. This contradicts recent studies suggesting that only macrofoliose Lecanoromycetes exhibit increased diversification rates in the Cenozoic.