Inconsistent Performances Research Articles

Neither an Individualised Nor a Standardised Sodium Bicarbonate Strategy Improved Performance in High-Intensity Repeated Swimming, or a Subsequent 200 m Swimming Time Trial in Highly Trained Female Swimmers.

Inconsistent swimming performances are often observed following sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) ingestion, possibly because the time taken to reach peak blood buffering capacity is highly variable between individuals. Personalising NaHCO3 ingestion based on time-to-peak blood bicarbonate (HCO3-) could be a solution; however, this strategy is yet to be explored in swimming, or adequately compared to standardised NaHCO3 approaches. Therefore, six highly trained female swimmers ingested 0.3 g·kg BM-1 NaHCO3 in capsules to pre-determine their individual time-to-peak blood HCO3-. They then participated in three experimental trials, consisting of a 6 × 75 m repeated sprint swimming test, followed by a 200 m maximal time trial effort after 30 min active recovery. These experiments were conducted consuming a supplement at three different timings: individualised NaHCO3 (IND: 105-195 min pre-exercise); standardised NaHCO3 (STND: 150 min pre-exercise); and placebo (PLA: 90 min pre-exercise). Both NaHCO3 strategies produced similar increases in blood HCO3- prior to exercise (IND: +6.8 vs. STND: +6.1 mmol·L-1, p < 0.05 vs. PLA) and fully recovered blood HCO3- during active recovery (IND: +6.0 vs. STND: +6.3 mmol·L-1 vs. PLA, p < 0.05). However, there were no improvements in the mean 75 m swimming time (IND: 48.2 ± 4.8 vs. STND: 48.9 ± 5.8 vs. PLA: 49.1 ± 5.1 s, p = 0.302) nor 200 m maximal swimming (IND: 133.6 ± 5.0 vs. STND: 133.6 ± 4.7 vs. PLA: 133.3 ± 4.4 s, p = 0.746). Regardless of the ingestion strategy, NaHCO3 does not appear to improve exercise performance in highly trained female swimmers.

Ecophysiological responses of Phragmites australis populations to a tidal flat gradient in the Yangtze River Estuary, China.

Phragmites australis is a prevalent species in the Chongming Dongtan wetland and is capable of thriving in various tidal flat environments, including high salinity habitats. P. australis population displays inconsistent ecological performances, highlighting the need to uncover their survival strategies and mechanisms in tidal flats with diverse soil salinities. Upon comparing functional traits of P. australis at multiple tidal flats (low, middle, and high) and their responses to soil physicochemical properties, this study aimed to clarify the salt-tolerant strategy of P. australis and the corresponding mechanisms. These results showed that leaf characteristics, such as specific leaf area and leaf dry matter content, demonstrated more robust stability to soil salinity than shoot height and dry weight. Furthermore, as salt stress intensified, the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and peroxisome (POD) in P. australis leaves at low tidal flat exhibited an increased upward trend compared to those at other tidal flats. The molecular mechanism of salt tolerance in Phragmites australis across various habitats was investigated using transcriptome sequencing. Weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) combined with differentially expressed genes (DEGs) screened out 3 modules closely related to high salt tolerance and identified 105 core genes crucial for high salt tolerance. Further research was carried out on the few degraded populations at low tidal flat, and 25 core genes were identified by combining WGCNA and DEGs. A decrease in the activity of ferroptosis marker gonyautoxin-4 and an increase in the content of Fe3+ in the degenerated group were observed, indicating that ferroptosis might participate in degradation. Furthermore, correlation analysis indicated a possible regulatory network between salt tolerance and ferroptosis. In short, this study provided new insights into the salt tolerance mechanism of P. australis population along tidal flats.

Full 3-D modulation transfer function estimation of tomosynthesis system using modified Richardson-Lucy deconvolution.

Tomosynthesis systems are three-dimensional (3-D) medical imaging devices that operate over limited acquisition angles using low radiation dosages. To measure the spatial resolution performance of a tomosynthesis system, the modulation transfer function (MTF) is widely used as a quantitative evaluationmetric. We previously introduced a method to estimate the full 3-D MTF of a cone-beam computed tomography system using two-dimensional (2-D) Richardson-Lucy (RL) deconvolution with Tikhonov-Miller regularization. However, this method can not be applied directly to estimate the 3-D MTF of a tomosynthesis system, since the unique artifacts (i.e., shadow artifacts, spreading tails, directional blurring, and high-level noise) of the system produce several errors that lower the estimation performance. Varying positions of the negative pixels due to shadow artifacts and spreading tails cause inconsistent deconvolution performances at each of the directional projections, and the severe noise in the reconstructed images cause noise amplification during estimation. This work proposes several modifications to the previous method to resolve the inconsistent performance and noise amplification errors to increase the full 3-D MTF estimationaccuracy. Three modifications were introduced to the 2-D RL deconvolution to prevent estimation errors and improve MTF estimation performance: non-negativity relaxation function, cost function to terminate the iterative process of RL deconvolution, and regularization strength for noise control. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed modifications, we reconstructed sphere phantoms from simulation and experimental tomosynthesis studies in the iso-center and offset-center positions as well as estimated the full 3-D MTFs using the previous and proposed methods. We compared the 3-D render images, central plane images, and center profiles of the estimated 3-D MTFs and calculated the full widths at half and tenth maximum for quantitativeevaluation. The previous method cannot estimate the full 3-D MTF of a tomosynthesis system; its inaccurate negative pixel relaxation produces circular-shaped errors, and the mean squared error based simple cost function for termination causes inconsistent estimation at each directional projection to diminish the clear edges of the low-frequency drop and missing sample regions. Noise amplification from lack of noise regularization is also seen in the previous method results. Compared to the previous method, the proposed method shows superior estimation performance at reducing errors in both the simulation and experimental studies regardless of object position. The proposed method preserves the low-frequency drop, missing sample regions from the limited acquisition angles, and missing cone region from the offset-center position; the estimated MTFs also show FWHM and FWTM values close to those of the ideal MTFs than with the previousmethod. This work presents a method to estimate the full 3-D MTF of a tomosynthesis system. The proposed modifications prevent circular-shaped errors and noise amplification due to the geometry for limited acquisition angles and high noise levels. Compared to our previous method, the proposed scheme show better performance for estimating the 3-D MTF of the tomosynthesissystem.

Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Internal Ensemble Learning Transformer

Recently, vision transformers (ViTs) have been investigated in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVC) and are now considered state of the art. However, most ViT-based works ignore the different learning performances of the heads in the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism and its layers. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel internal ensemble learning transformer (IELT) for FGVC. The proposed IELT involves three main modules: multi-head voting (MHV) module, cross-layer refinement (CLR) module, and dynamic selection (DS) module. To solve the problem of the inconsistent performances of multiple heads, we propose the MHV module, which considers all of the heads in each layer as weak learners and votes for tokens of discriminative regions as cross-layer feature based on the attention maps and spatial relationships. To effectively mine the cross-layer feature and suppress the noise, the CLR module is proposed, where the refined feature is extracted and the assist logits operation is developed for the final prediction. In addition, a newly designed DS module adjusts the token selection number at each layer by weighting their contributions of the refined feature. In this way, the idea of ensemble learning is combined with the ViT to improve fine-grained feature representation. The experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results compared with the state of the art on five popular FGVC datasets. Source code has been released and can be found at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/mobulan/IELT</uri> .

A Study Suggests Geosteers Often Are Missing the Target

Horizontal drilling makes it possible to drill through the most-productive rock, but based on the following charts, oil companies may often be missing that opportunity. The heavy black bars show the most-productive rock in two producing wells—one unconventional onshore and, the other, offshore and conventional. The tangle of thin, colored lines on and around it are the well paths chosen by 329 competitors in a geosteering contest showing that many of them got lost on the way. The charts are from a paper that analyzed 10,000 geosteering decisions made during the 2021 Rogii Geosteering World Cup, an annual competition started by the maker of geosteering software. The work by Rogii and a team of Norwegian researchers studying drilling decision making was presented at this year’s Unconventional Resources Technical Conference (URTeC 3722510). The results showed about half the contestants earned scores of 30% or less based on the percentage of the well in the target zone—weighted 75%—and their rate of penetration—25%. Only 14 of the 329 participants scored 60% or more, with the balance somewhere in between. To some extent, this dim view of geosteering is a product of the contest rules. Competitors were asked to geosteer two difficult wells at breakneck speed—a decision every 2 minutes based on data from the last 100 m drilled—with minimal information upfront about the wells chosen because they were difficult to steer. In the contest, there was no professional downside for poor performance. Still, it is the rare public attempt to measure how well drillers do at adjusting well plans to maintain contact with the most-productive rock. While the nature of the competition suggests it is not trying to replicate actual drilling conditions, it does raise questions about how well oil companies are doing at maximizing reservoir contact. They observed that some top performers in one well did poorly on the next, and luck played a significant role in some of the results. “The inconsistent performances of players in the two rounds/poor average scores/and significantly different well trajectories planned by geosteerers represent a lack of unified guidelines for stratigraphic-based steering,” Yasaman Cheraghi, a PhD fellow in computational engineering at the University of Stavanger, wrote in an email. Geography was not a good predictor of performance. While 40% of the participants were working in North America, where the greatest number of horizontal wells have been drilled, their results were not better despite their experience. Those involved in the geosteering simulations, based on wells in the Duverney shale in Western Canada and the Xihu Sub-Basin (Yuquan discovery) of the East China Sea, would say they were using a standard method—stratigraphic-based steering. That approach uses the data gathered while drilling and other data about the formation to predict how the layers of rock in the reservoir—the stratigraphy—are likely to change ahead of the steering.

Hydrodynamics and film formation characteristics in a horizontal self‐cleaning twin‐shaft kneader for polymer devolatilization

AbstractA deep understanding of hydrodynamics and film formation characteristics is a prerequisite for the design of twin‐shaft kneaders. In this work, the hydrodynamics and film formation characteristics of a self‐cleaning twin‐shaft kneader are investigated using computational fluid dynamics method. Because of the intermeshing interaction and scratching action of the kneader rods, both bounded films and free films coexist in the kneader. Since both shafts rotate clockwise, more liquid is accumulated in the left cylinder. The liquid level of the left cylinder is higher which reduces the film formation rate of the left zone. The film formation rate in the right zone is 1.3–1.8 times that of the left zone and overlapping zone. The differences between the left and right cylinders would cause inconsistent devolatilization performances. To reduce the negative effects of asymmetric level, a static kneading rod is used to reduce the liquid level of the left zone and increase the film formation rate by 15%. We notice that adding a static kneading rod reduces the power consumption by 10%–30% compared with increasing the rotating speed to the same film formation rate. It could be an efficient method for polymer devolatilization.

Impact of reactive oxygen species on cell activity and structural integrity of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria in electrochemical disinfection system

High efficiency, eco-friendly, and without disinfection byproducts rendered the hydroxyl radical-dominated electrochemical process a promising disinfection technology. Inconsistent disinfection performances have been reported for Gram-positive (G+) and Gram-negative (G−) bacteria in *OH-dominated disinfection system. To thoroughly present and elucidate the different responses of G+ and G−, Fe-Co/CA cathode and Ru-Ir/Ti anode was fabricated. Under 22.73 mA/cm2, E. coli were completely inactivated within 45 min, while there were about 2 logs of S. aureus were inactivated. Moreover, the sublethal injury of E. coli outperformed that of S. aureus as well. However, when E. coli and S. aureus coexisted, the disinfection efficiencies were inhibited for both E. coli and S. aureus. The subcellular damage of E. coli and S. aureus were different as well. With the reaction, cell surface hydrophobicity for both E. coli and S. aureus increased. However, E. coli obtained increased negative zeta potential after treatment, which promoted the development of electrochemical disinfection, while S. aureus obtained decreased negative zeta potential which resulted in significant agglomeration. The determination of malondialdehyde (MDA), phosphate concentration, and the leakage of Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), as well as the degradation of protein, TOC, and nucleic acid, and SEM observation, illustrated the cell well and cell outer membrane were the first barrier to OH-dominated disinfection. The thick and rigid cell wall and the stable structure of peptidoglycan (PGN) in S. aureus cells contributed to the high resistance of S. aureus.

Genotype × environment interaction and adaptation of cowpea genotypes across six planting seasons

Cowpea exhibits significantly inconsistent performances across different environments, and hence demands performance evaluation of genotypes prior release or cultivation in every breeding program. Hence, the goal of this study was to compare 16 cowpea genotypes over six planting seasons (2014-2019) in Akungba-Akoko, Nigeria for their stability and adaptation through Finlay and Wilkinson (FW), Additive Main Effects and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI) and Genotype and Genotype × Environment (GGE) analyses. ANOVA revealed high significant genotype (15.33%), environment (14.71%) and GEI (64.34%) effects for seed yield among genotypes. All analyses were able to pinpoint stable high-yielding genotypes including G14 and G9. Genotypes G14, G3, G4, G5, G6 and G9 were high yielding and stable according to FW; AMMI showed G10, G9, G16, G14 and G13 stable high-yielding while GGE showed G14, G16, G9 and G13 as stable high-yielding. As analyses explored the variation in the data due to GEI, they also complemented one another, in that where one erroneously included a wrong genotype as stable; the other excluded such genotype, making recommendation possible on the basis of consistency to gain reliability.

3D active dynamic actuation model for offshore cranes

AbstractThe handling of offshore payloads is a critical operation that presents numerous challenges, in particular related to the required precision in controlling their oscillations in a safe and accurate manner. The uncontrolled payload oscillations induced by the rolling movement of the vessel have been historically mitigated by the experience of on‐deck operators by means of taglines. The availability of experienced personnel is not always present, and a manual control operation still presents inconsistent performances and a high risk for the safety of men and machines. This study presents a novel approach to an antisway control conceived to mitigate such problems and possibly to automate some of the operations concerning the payload sway control that are currently done manually. In particular, a system consisting of a translating trolley actuated through a proportional–integral–derivative controller is taken into consideration to mitigate the oscillations induced by the vessel's rolling and pitching motion onto a three‐dimensional 8 degrees of freedom with double‐pendulum model representing the hanging payload. The study is completed through an analysis aimed to characterize the bandwidth and frequency response of the controlled closed‐loop system and highlight all the potential areas of interest for which further characterization is needed.

Forecasting performance of cruise passengers: the Spanish ports case

AbstractThis contribution examines the passenger forecasting performance of the SARIMA method applied to cruise activities in the main Spanish ports. In this port system, the cruise activity market is characterized by different seasonal patterns (i.e., once‐ or twice‐yearly peaks, which means unimodal or bimodal behavior) due to repositioning strategy. The outcome of standard indicators for accuracy testing reveals inconsistent prediction performances among ports. These inconsistencies are analyzed using an index of bimodality and seasonal variability. The forecasted values for a high‐level of bimodality and seasonal variability show worse prediction performances than unimodal patterns and low seasonal variability. Ports with less passenger activity entail larger predictions errors. Exponential and linear models were adjusted between the error metrics and the mentioned indexes.

Exploiting the diverse photoluminescence behaviors of NaLuF4:xEu3+ nanoparticles and g-C3N4 to realize versatile applications in white light-emitting diode and optical thermometer

To overcome the existence challenge of the luminescent materials in versatile applications, NaLuF4:xEu3+ nanopariticles and NaLuF4:0.15Eu3+@yg-C3N4 composites were designed. Under irradiation of 394 nm, dazzling red emissions with high color purity of 87.6% are observed in the NaLuF4:xEu3+ nanoparticles and the optimizing content of the dopants is 15 mol%. The electric dipole-dipole interaction leads to the concentration dependent quenching effect. Through assessing the resistance performance of the resultant nanoparticles to the temperature, the studied samples are certified to show high thermal stability. Furthermore, the proper color rendering index (80.2), low correlated color temperature (5014 K) and suitable luminous efficiency (12.1 lm/W) of packaged white light-emitting diode reveal that the NaLuF4:0.15Eu3+ nanoparticles can be employed as the red component for white light-emitting diode. On account of the inconsistent photoluminescence performances of the NaLuF4:0.15Eu3+ nanoparticles and g-C3N4, the thermometric properties of the NaLuF4:0.15Eu3+@yg-C3N4 composites are explored. The maximum absolute and relative sensitivities of the designed composites are 0.0057 K−1 and 0.455% K−1, respectively, and their values are able to be manipulated via composition regulation. This work proposes a new sight into the exploitation of diverse photoluminescence behaviors of the g-C3N4 and NaLuF4:xEu3+ nanoparticles to realize versatile applications.

Remote sensed-based rainfall estimations over the East and West Africa regions for disaster risk management

Satellite precipitation products are very useful as proxies for gauged observations, especially in Africa, where there are sparse in-situ precipitation-measuring weather stations. The two most commonly used satellite precipitation products in Africa (Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) and Tropical Applications of Meteorology Using Satellite and Ground-based Observations (TAMSAT)) and the relatively new Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM early run (IMERG-ER) of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM) with soil moisture (GPM+SM2RAIN) are evaluated in comparison to the in-situ observations from the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory (TAHMO) project on daily, monthly and annual scales in West (Ghana) and East (Uganda) Africa. Statistical verification methods such as continuous and categorical methods were examined. For both countries, the results showed that all the products showed weak performance in capturing daily precipitation. For the monthly and seasonal scales, all the satellite product performances were very good. Also, small precipitation thresholds (2–5 mm/day) were relatively better detected by all the satellite products. All the products failed to detect intermediate (10–20 mm/day) and large threshold precipitation (>30 mm/day). When the products were examined for disaster management applications over a select number of stations in Ghana and Uganda, the results showed inconsistent and poor performances. Using all the metrics, both CHIRPS and TAMSAT showed similar performances, confirming that their common underlying algorithms are bias-adjusted, whereas GPM+SM2RAIN was different because of its independence from in-situ observations. All the products performed better in Ghana compared to Uganda, which may be due to the latter’s complex terrain. It is possible that CHIRPS and TAMSAT may be better suited for hydrological applications like seasonal forecasting, irrigation scheduling, reservoir operations than for daily or sub-daily processes like flash floods. While all these satellite products have their strengths and weaknesses for various environmental applications in Africa, there is a need for a central platform in Africa for a better or improved precipitation analysis based on the assimilation of climate forecasts, in-situ observations, radar, and satellite observations. This will provide higher temporal (3 hr–6 hr) and spatial (~2 km) resolutions. This study is applicable for scientists, water managers, and decision-makers involved in disaster risk management studies in Africa.

Are Workers Rewarded for Inconsistent Performance?

This paper examines whether workers are rewarded for inconsistent performances by salary premia. Some earlier research suggests that performance inconsistency leads to salary premia while other research finds premia for consistent performances. Using detailed salary and performance data, we find that inconsistency is rewarded for some dimensions of performance, specifically those where creativity is important and outcomes have higher variance. We find salary penalties for inconsistent performances in those dimensions that are basic requirements of successful team production.

Investigating the impacts of driving factors on urban heat islands in southern China from 2003 to 2015

Southern China is susceptible to urban heat island (UHI) effect due to the rapid urbanization and subtropical climate. However, comprehensively assessing long-term UHI and its driving factors across southern China remains elusive. In this study, we investigate the UHI effect and its relationship with several critical factors in the urban agglomerations of southern China from 2003 to 2015 using remotely sensed derived products and land surface Noah model outputs. Results indicate that (1) the UHI intensity (UHII) in southern China is 1.49 K with an increasing trend of 0.011 ± 0.004 K per year. This relates to the land cover changes caused by the urbanization, which explains ∼40% of UHII trend variance; (2) Resided in the subtropical maritime climate, UHII across southern China is closely related to two climate factors: solar radiation and precipitation. Specifically, the adverse impact of precipitation on UHII is significant across southern China, where sufficient rainfall can modify soil moisture condition and improve the thermal regulation of watershed; (3) Diurnal temperature range and surface net radiation that describes surface property cannot fully explain UHII across southern China. Nevertheless, variations of sensible flux and latent flux correlate better with UHII. The sensible flux (associated with aerodynamic roughness) is responsible for 32% of UHII while the latent flux (attributed to evaporation cooling) is responsible for 13% of UHII. This result underscores the substantial contribution of sensible flux on UHI. In addition, our study suggests the effect of anthropogenic intervention may could explain the inconsistent performances of heat fluxes in responding to UHI. Our findings highlight the significance of land-atmosphere controlling factors on UHI, which have practical implications for researching urban climate.

Estimating saturation flow under weak discipline traffic conditions, case study: Iran

Intersections, as the critical elements and the major bottleneck points of urban street networks, may have inconsistent performances in different countries. This is largely due to the fact that the factors affecting their performance e.g. driving behavior, vehicle characteristics, control methods, and environmental conditions may vary from one country to another. It is, therefore required to take into account these factors when developing or applying available models and methodologies for their capacity analysis or signal control setting. This is particularly important for the countries with heterogeneous and weak discipline traffic streams such as Iran. Meanwhile, estimating the saturation flow rate, which is a key parameter in capacity and delay analysis and in optimal timing of traffic signals, is of great importance. In this study, the possibility of identifying and or developing appropriate models for estimating the saturation flow rate at the signalized intersections in these situations has been explored. For this purpose, a case study performed at the signalized intersections located in the city of Yazd, a medium sized city located in the middle of Iran. Using the data obtained from several intersections together with the application of analytical procedures proposed by American, Australian, Canadian, Indonesian, Iranian and Malaysian highway capacity guides, the saturation flow rate was estimated from both field observations and analytical methods. A comparison of these results indicated that in the protected left-turn situations, the Australian guide produced the best comparable results with the field data. On the other hand, in the permitted left-turn situations, the method proposed in the American Highway Capacity Manual guide produced the best comparable results with the field data. Furthermore, three new models were developed for estimating the saturation flow rate in three different situations namely, unopposed mixed straight and turning traffic movements, opposed mixed straight and turning traffic movements and merely straight through movement. The effective width, traffic composition, and opposite oncoming through traffic flow were considered as the effective parameters in the proposed models. Moreover, using the multivariate regression analysis, the Passenger Car Equivalent coefficients for motorcycles and heavy vehicles were calculated as 0.51 and 2.09, respectively.

Comparing the prediction of joint species distribution models with respect to characteristics of sampling data

Biotic interactions have been rarely included in traditional species distribution models, wherein joint species distribution models (JSDMs) emerge as a feasible approach to incorporate environmental factors and interspecific interactions simultaneously, making it a powerful tool for analyzing the structure and assembly processes of biotic communities. However, the predictability and statistical robustness of JSDMs are largely unknown because of the lack of research efforts for those newly developed models. This study systematically evaluated the performances of five JSDMs in predicting the occurrence and biomass of multiple species, with a particular focus on diverse characteristics of sampling data, including type of response variables, number of sampling sites, and the number of species included in models. In general, most models yielded satisfactory performances on fitting to observed data and on the estimation of environmental effects; however, they showed less well performances in evaluating species associations, and their predictability had large variations. The JSDMs showed inconsistent performances between the goodness‐of‐fit and predictability in cross‐validation, and the Boral model was relatively robust than others. The predictability of JSDMs was less influenced by sample sizes and substantially improved by incorporating rare species. This study contributes to an appropriate model selection and application of JSDMs.

HOW COMPETITION DRIVES BUSINESS TO DISARRAY??

'Competition brings the best out' is an adage. We have had instances wherein few businesses benefitted from the intense competition, few acquired a gradual death and few an instant death. Today, competition has not gone well with many companies, who eventually failed to turn it in their favour. But, consumers surely have had a sweet bite in majority of the cases. This research article brings out the truth about the competition; how companies take competition, how is their preparedness to tackle competition, what an intense competition is likely to cause. Nowadays average firms react sharply to the competition. granddaddy of all mistakes is competing to be the best, going down the same path as everybody else and thinking that somehow you can achieve better says Michael Porter in his book Essential Guides to Competition and Strategy. Firms tend to be reactive and act instantly while dealing with competition. They formulate strategies to garner immediate increase in sales, thereby compromising on fundamentals. If they do so, their ideology suffers, the principles on which they are built shatter. The infrastructure might start collapsing, resulting in betrayal of customers' trust in the long run. The research article examines various strategies used by two different firms and the results obtained thereafter. Firms have traditionally treated the strategies as the function of competition. The outcome of such strategies followed in line with the competition is unsettled results, inconsistent performances, loss of market share, etc. This cannot be substituted with disruptive approach for the very reason of it being unsustainable.

Growth and yield responses of upland NERICAs to variable water management under field conditions

This study aimed to investigate the possible causes for inconsistent performances of upland New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties in uplands and lowlands, while identifying important determinants in grain yield under deficient soil moisture. We compared the growth and yield of NERICA 1 and NERICA 5 to those of Yumenohatamochi, a Japanese upland variety, and Hinohikari, a Japanese lowland variety, subjected to different water management regimes (continually flooded, supplementary irrigation, and non-irrigation). Under conditions of deficient soil moisture, panicle number per square meter, spikelet number per panicle, and 1000-grain weight of NERICAs decreased, whereas the panicle number of the Japanese varieties experienced little change. In contrast, the grain filling ratio was unaffected by water management, irrespective of variety. The primary source of yield reduction under low soil water conditions was a decrease in spikelet number per panicle, and water stress intensity was the primary factor for the degree of this reduction. Variation in the abortion of secondary rachis-branches caused differences between NERICAs in their spikelet number response to soil moisture deficiency. The inconsistency in NERICA performance across uplands vs. lowlands can be partially attributed to variation in yield response to low soil water conditions. Moreover, water stress intensity and the presence of a water gradient along the vertical soil profile may combine to affect the fluctuation in NERICA performance under upland conditions.

Spring spotlight counts provide reliable indices to track changes in population size of mountain‐dwelling red deer Cervus elaphus

Monitoring changes in animal abundance is a central issue in conservation biology. Population indices may be a valuable support to wildlife managers in coarse‐scale survey programs, as they normally represent more intuitive and less expensive monitoring tools if compared with absolute estimates. Reliable indices of relative abundance, however, require validation against some known standards. We used mark‐resight estimates to investigate the performance of indices derived from spring spotlight surveys to track changes in a mountain‐dwelling population of red deer Cervus elaphus within the Stelvio National Park, central Italian Alps. Every spring between 2008 and 2015 we conducted four sessions of roadside‐counts using spotlights, recording all sightings of marked and unmarked individuals; the zero‐truncated Poisson log‐normal estimator was applied in a robust‐design fashion to return absolute estimates of spring abundance. We then compared the mark‐resight estimates with two indices of abundance, the maximum number (MNC) and the average number (ANC) of deer counted every spring in the four sampling occasions, using linear models on log‐transformed data. Both the MNC and the ANC proved reliable indices of relative abundance, as their relationships with mark‐resight estimates were positive and highly significant, and the beta coefficients of linear models were not significantly different from 1. The same analysis conducted on subsets of secondary sampling occasions suggested that at least 3 repeated counts every spring are necessary to consistently track changes in deer population size. The reliability of spotlight‐based indices to monitoring deer population changes has been widely debated, possibly owing to inconsistent performances of the method in different landscapes. For mountain‐dwelling deer populations living in similar habitats, our results suggest that spring spotlight surveys represent valuable tools in support of wildlife managers for long‐term, large‐scale monitoring programs; furthermore, they can provide appropriate indices to estimating population growth rates and thus modelling deer population dynamics.

Department of pathology and laboratory medicine at Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital striving for quality: external quality assessment scheme in hematology

Introduction: Quality Assurance comprising External Quality Assessment Scheme (EQAS) and Internal Quality Control (IQC) is an indispensible part of the laboratory analytical process to ensure reliable results from the laboratories. However, due to various challenges in many developing countries such as limitations in resources and manpower, EQAS samples are often given less importance at laboratories. The objective of this study is to assess performance on hematology EQAS samples received from Pacific Paramedical Training Center- External Quality Assesment Scheme (PPTC-EQAS) and International External Quality Assesment Scheme-United Kingdom (IEQAS-UK)since 2007 and 2008 respectively. The findings from this study will be helpful to establish an effective system to ensure timely follow up and corrective actions to improve the quality of laboratory services. Methods:The feedback of the EQAS results submitted thrice a year to the PPTC-EQAS and six times a year to the IEQAS-UK since 2007 and 2008 respectively were reviewed to assess the laboratory’s performance and to determine the effectiveness of EQAS participation for improving the performance of laboratory hematology in Bhutan. Results:For PPTC-EQAS, the average yearly scores were 69.00%, 75.00%, 87.66%, 87.50%, 70.00%, 80.33%, 80.50%, 85.00% for the years 2007-2014. For IEQAS-UK, the average yearly scores were 76.66%, 75.95%, 77.91%, 85.83%, 92.50%, 63.88% and 98.14% for the years 2008-2014. Our results show inconsistent performances on both EQAS samples despite gradual improvement over the last seven years. Conclusions:We conclude that, strengthening the system for regular follow up and implementing corrective actions for the outlying results in addition to replacement of the equipment could improve the trend and ensure consistency of the performance.