Powerful Aids Research Articles

Identification of cryptic species and morphotypes in male Euglossa: morphometric analysis of forewings (Hymenoptera: Euglossini)

Males of sibling orchid bees Euglossa viridissima and Euglossa dilemma are morphologically cryptic, exceptforthenumberandshapeofmandibularteeth. AnalternativemorphofE.viridissima hasathirdtoothsimilar to males of E. dilemma. We used this model system to evaluate the potential of wing morphometrics for the resolution of these groups. We found differences in the size characters of forewings of E. viridissima and E. dilemma albeit with substantial overlapping amongst them. However, geometric morphometrics of forewing veinintersectionsseparatedbothspeciesand,toalesserextent,morphotypes.Adiscriminantanalysisoftheshapeof the radial cell showed separation between all three groups, too, albeit with higher misclassification between E. viridissima and E. dilemma. We show that sibling cryptic species and morphotypes can be identified by geometric morphometrics, supporting its application with other methods as powerful aids to infrageneric taxonomy in bees.

Assessing Vertical Development in Experiential Learning Curriculum

For 30 years, management educators have supported competency-based management education (CBME). When applying CBME, educators stimulate students’ lateral development, known as the acquisition of subject-specific knowledge and competencies that deepen their current perceptions and task performance. We contend CBME is necessary but not sufficient to develop future leaders in an increasingly complex world. Concurrently, educators must design curricula to stimulate students’ vertical development, described as “how we learn to see the world through new eyes, how we change our interpretations of experience and how we transform our views of reality.” This study examines the impact of an 8-month internship course on students’ lateral and vertical development. The findings support our contention that experiential learning (EL) curricula developed with both lateral and vertical development components are powerful aids in preparing students to address complex work-related challenges.

Extraction of oil from oil sands using thermoresponsive polymeric surfactants.

Several thermoresponsive block copolymers constituted of a poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) and a poly(2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethyl methacrylate) (PMEO2MA) block were prepared by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and their ability to extract oil from oil sands was evaluated. The chemical composition of the PEG113-b-PMEO2MAX block copolymers was determined by (1)H NMR and gel permeation chromatography (GPC) with X-values ranging between 48 and 80. Aqueous solutions of block copolymers showed a cloud point of 34 ± 1 °C as determined by turbidimetry and dynamic light scattering (DLS) measurements. DLS experiments indicated that these polymers formed stable block copolymer micelles due to association of the PMEO2MA blocks at temperatures greater than 45 °C with a unimodal distribution of hydrodynamic diameters. Since characterization of the block copolymer solutions as a function of temperature indicated the formation of hydrophobic domains in water for T > 45 °C, extractions of oil from oil sands with the block copolymers were conducted at T = 45 and 50 °C. At these temperatures, 15 mL of a 1 mg/mL PEG113-b-PMEO2MA77 aqueous solution extracted 100% of the oil trapped in 1 g of oil sand if 60 mg of toluene was added to the mixture. When the extraction was conducted under the same experimental conditions without block copolymer, a poor oil recovery of less than 30% was achieved. Starting with a 1 mg/mL block copolymer concentration, the block copolymer aqueous solution could be recycled up to five successive extractions while maintaining satisfying oil recovery. Each extraction cycle led to a 22% mass loss of block copolymer, certainly due to association with the toluene, oil, and sand particles. Together these experiments demonstrate that thermoresponsive block copolymers can be powerful aids to enhance the oil recovery of oil sands.

Improved Segmentation of Suspicious Regions of Masses in Mammograms by Watershed Transform

Screening mammograms are powerful aids in early detection of breast cancer. This work deals with segmentation of suspicious region of anomalies known as masses in mammogram. The proposed method is based on watershed transform of morphologically reconstructed image. The suspicious mass regions are isolated and the results are compared with two current methods: thresholding of graph based saliency map of preprocessed mammogram and morphological extraction from saliency. Quantitative analysis and comparison of results are performed using similarity measures and classifier performance and found that the proposed method gives better results achieving 0.95 similarity measure and 83% of ROC area.

Microsatellites for genetic and taxonomic research on thyme (Thymus L.)

Microsatellites are considered the marker of choice in modern research. However, there is no application of microsatellites in the research on the genus Thymus due to the scarcity of specific primer pairs. Using in silico data of several genera in the family Lamiaceae, 23 microsatellite primer pairs (LT) were developed and evaluated in 48 samples representing 9 species and subspecies of the genus Thymus. Codominant and multiallelic LT microsatellite markers were not only useful in the determination of genetic structure and variation within and between the species but also were powerful taxonomic aids in the molecular phylogeny of Thymus L. Moreover, some LT primer pairs successfully cross-amplified microsatellite markers in Salvia and Origanum, indicating that they could be used in other genera in the family Lamiaceae. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of genic microsatellite markers for the genus Thymus.

An approach toward wireless brain-computer interface system using EEG signals: A review

The wireless brain–computer interface (BCI) system can become as powerful aids for people with disability (PWD), especially to help them move independently. The BCI system captures the user’s brain activity and classifies into a signal to which a robot or a computer device can respond. In this article, a review of various electrodes for capturing the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, key techniques, and their applications of wireless BCI headset along with future development issues proposed by many researchers have been discussed. The central idea is a study on the brain rhythm related to the user’smovements for the control of mobile robots, humanoids, and robotic wheelchair. The BCI system is capable of improving and enriching the lives of PWD and people with neuromuscular disorder and bringing back the quality of free movement for PWD.

ChemInform Abstract: The Renaissance of Organic Radical Chemistry — Deja Vu All over Again

AbstractReview: 33 refs.

Toward a Methodology for the Use of Oral Sources in Historical Archaeology

Recent advances in the use of objects in memory studies and in reminiscence work demonstrate the potential for using objects in archaeological oral-history projects. It is proposed that an artifact-centered interview model provides a framework that is well suited for use in archaeological research. Observations from recent studies in the fields of historical archaeology and memory studies, alongside results from research ongoing at Newcastle University, have informed the development of an artifact-centered approach to oral-data collection. By recognizing that the fragmentary material uncovered through excavation is often unfamiliar to non-archaeologists, the artifact-centered approach uses complete “exemplar” objects to fill the interpretive gap between sherds in artifact bags and actual 19th-century domestic interiors. Results show that exemplar objects are powerful mnemonic aids, and interviews conducted with elderly working-class women in northeastern England demonstrate that it is possible to conduct interviews today that directly influence the interpretation of 19th-century archaeological material.

EEG based Robot through a BCI Interface for Coal Mines

EEG-based brain-controlled mobile robots will serve as powerful aids for severely disabled individuals in their everyday life, especially to assist them move voluntarily. During this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the entire systems, key techniques, and analysis problems with brain-controlled mobile robots along side some insights into connected future analysis and development problems. We initial review and classify varied complete systems of brain-controlled mobile robots into 2 classes from the attitude of their operational modes. We tend to then describe key techniques that square measure used in these brain-controlled mobile robots together with the braincomputer interface techniques and shared management techniques. This description is followed by an analysis of the analysis problems with brain-controlled mobile robots together with participants, tasks and environments, and analysis metrics. We tend to conclude this paper with a discussion of the present challenges and future analysis directions.

The renaissance of organic radical chemistry – deja vu all over again

The renaissance of organic radical chemistry – deja vu all over again

Różnicowanie niedosłuchów ciężkich od głębokich u niemowląt i małych dzieci przy użyciu ASSR „CE-Chirp”

IntroductionOne of the most difficult tasks in pediatric audiology is to assess the precisely hearing level of the child in the first months of life. It is rather impossible to acquire frequency specific responses precisely in hard of hearing infants using tone bursts or clicks. But the distinction between severe and profound hearing loss is clearly meaningful and significant with regard to aural rehabilitation and selection of powerful hearing aids versus cochlear implants.In recent years, the “CE-Chirp” stimuli have been introduced in the “Interacoustics” ASSR system to maintain a larger quantity of hair cells in the response, thus making the response more robust and easier to detect. Input compensation of “CE-Chirp” allows low frequency acoustics segments to initiate before high frequencies, causing sequential frequencies to reach their destinations along the basilar membrane at the same time.Clinical testing involving subjects with normal hearing demonstrates that the Chirp ABR is 1.5–2.0 times larger than the corresponding click ABR. But there is a lack of research that shows convincing advantages of chirps in testing hard of hearing infants. AimThe aim of the study has been to assess hearing levels with ASSR “CE-Chirp” in children who have no, or residual response in the first year of life. Materials and methodsEleven children were included in the study. These patients had no, or residual response between the ages of 3 and 6 months, in click and tone bursts ABR. Eight infants were referred for cochlear implantation.In the ages between 12 and 18 months we tested these hearings using Interacoustics ASSR “CE-Chirp”. ResultsSix patients of the tested group were recognized as severely hard of hearing (mean 60–80dB nHl), three as profoundly hard of hearing (≥90dB nHl). In two children we did not find any response. ConclusionsThe ABR tone bursts and click tests can overestimate hearing loss in the first six months of life.We can evaluate the quantity of hearing more exactly in infants and toddlers, with ASSR “CE-Chirp”.

EEG-Based Brain-Controlled Mobile Robots: A Survey

EEG-based brain-controlled mobile robots can serve as powerful aids for severely disabled people in their daily life, especially to help them move voluntarily. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the complete systems, key techniques, and evaluation issues of brain-controlled mobile robots along with some insights into related future research and development issues. We first review and classify various complete systems of brain-controlled mobile robots into two categories from the perspective of their operational modes. We then describe key techniques that are used in these brain-controlled mobile robots including the brain-computer interface techniques and shared control techniques. This description is followed by an analysis of the evaluation issues of brain-controlled mobile robots including participants, tasks and environments, and evaluation metrics. We conclude this paper with a discussion of the current challenges and future research directions.

Selectable Markers and Reporter Genes: A Well Furnished Toolbox for Plant Science and Genetic Engineering

Marker genes (MGs) are essential tools for plant research and biotechnology. Positive selectable marker genes (SMGs) are used in genetic transformation to allow only transgenic cells to grow and develop and are necessary for efficient transformation. Negative SMGs confer a selective disadvantage to the cells that express them, and have several uses in both basic and applied research. Reporter genes (RGs) make it possible to easily screen cells or tissues for their expression. Several tens of different genes from bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals have been demonstrated to function as SMGs. Here, SMGs are classified based on the mechanism of action of the gene products. To provide the readers with practically useful information, details on transformation and selection efficiency are given. RGs are the object of intense research. Refinement of existing RGs and development of new ones is constant, and has provided powerful aids for fine studies on cell biology and more efficient genetic engineering. They are classified as vital and non vital, depending on the possibility to screen their expression in living cells. The effect of MG expression on the phenotype and their safety in crops is briefly discussed. The picture emerging from this literature review is that a plentiful array of powerful and versatile tools for basic and applied research is available.

Radioactive decay data: powerful aids in medical diagnosis and therapy, analytical science and other applications

Abstract Decay data are commonly used to characterise and quantify radioactive material, and provide an important means of understanding the properties and structure of the nucleus. Experimental measurement techniques are reviewed, with the emphasis placed on recent developments that represent a potential quantum leap in advancing our knowledge, particularly by means of γ-ray spectroscopy. A select number of internationally-accepted decay-data evaluations and compilations are also discussed in terms of their contents. Both energy and non-energy related applications require the input of well-defined decay data, and such activities have been reviewed. Various important decay-data issues are assessed, and note taken of any significant requirements for better quantified data.

Dual pairing of symmetry and dynamical groups in physics

This article reviews many manifestations and applications of dual representations of pairs of groups, primarily in atomic and nuclear physics. Examples are given to show how such paired representations are powerful aids in understanding the dynamics associated with shell-model coupling schemes and in identifying the physical situations for which a given scheme is most appropriate. In particular, they suggest model Hamiltonians that are diagonal in the various coupling schemes. The dual pairing of group representations has been applied profitably in mathematics to the study of invariant theory. We show that parallel applications to the theory of symmetry and dynamical groups in physics are equally valuable. In particular, the pairing of the representations of a discrete group with those of a continuous Lie group or those of a compact Lie with those of a non-compact Lie group makes it possible to infer many properties of difficult groups from those of simpler groups. This review starts with the representations of the symmetric and unitary groups, which are used extensively in the many-particle quantum mechanics of bosonic and fermionic systems. It gives a summary of the many solutions and computational techniques for solving problems that arise in applications of symmetry methods in physics and which result from the famous Schur-Weyl duality theorem for the pairing of these representations. It continues to examine many chains of symmetry groups and dual chains of dynamical groups associated with the several coupling schemes in atomic and nuclear shell models and the valuable insights and applications that result from this examination.

Baha solutions for patients with severe mixed hearing loss

Patients with a mixed hearing loss present special challenges. The amplification demands of mixed hearing loss can drive powerful digital hearing aids to their limits and introduce distortion through saturation. Conversely, the Baha® System effectively bypasses the conductive component and focuses on compensating for the sensorineural component of the hearing loss. Ten patients with a mixed hearing loss participated in the present study. Results indicate that Baha provided significant benefits (p < 0.01) over conventional air conduction hearing instruments across the dimensions of audibility, speech understanding and sound quality. Given the increased output force of the latest Baha instruments, once the conductive component of a severe mixed hearing loss becomes greater than 30 dB, a Baha should be considered and evaluated on audiological grounds alone to provide optimal amplification. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Complexity Theory: Developing New Understandings of Child Protection in Field Settings and in Residential Child Care

The protection of children, whether living at home or in residential care, is a core endeavour of residential and field social work with children. Yet, despite broad support from politicians, policy makers and the majority of the public for this work, child protection practice and practitioners are frequently criticized for perceived or actual failures to protect. Successive inquiries produce reports with similar recommendations, yet children continue to be abused and harmed, sometimes fatally. Clearly, better understandings and more effective protective practices need to be developed. Current research in the area of complexity theory is encouraging the development of concepts and applications which are powerful aids to understanding the issues that child protection practitioners experience daily. Child protection is not simple because of the multiplicity of factors that result in children being at risk. Complexity theory provides a framework for understanding the processes involved but without the problems of reductionism. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore the potential contribution of complexity theory and concepts that have relevance to the protection of children in both field and residential child care practice. It is argued that complexity theory offers new and helpful ways to conceptualize and work with the processes which underpin keeping children safe.

A web-based high-performance multicriteria decision support system for medical diagnosis

Multicriteria decision making ~MCDM! methods can be powerful aids for evaluating patients’ medical information in medical diagnostic systems. Technique ordered preference by similarity to the ideal solution ~TOPSIS! is one of the more widely used MCDM methods in decision support systems. For the purpose of this work, the TOPSIS method is modified into a more suitable form and used for the implementation of a web-based medical diagnostic system. In our modifiedTOPSIS method, we have utilized fuzzy logic so that users can more accurately describe their symptoms. The data given to the modified TOPSIS method are often massive in proportions and may take a considerable amount of time to generate a ranking of alternatives. TOPSIS lends itself to parallel computation because it is virtually a combination of matrix computations. Therefore, computer parallelism is implemented so that a large amount of input data can be handled simultaneously, hence decreasing overall execution time. In addition, to make our MCDM system more accessible, we have designed our system to be web based. The web-based medical diagnosis system includes a dynamically generated web-based user interface, while the parallel implementation of the modified TOPSIS component, in conjunction with the Common Gateway Interface, forms the back end of the system. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Michigan Molecular Interactions (MiMI): putting the jigsaw puzzle together

Protein interaction data exists in a number of repositories. Each repository has its own data format, molecule identifier and supplementary information. Michigan Molecular Interactions (MiMI) assists scientists searching through this overwhelming amount of protein interaction data. MiMI gathers data from well-known protein interaction databases and deep-merges the information. Utilizing an identity function, molecules that may have different identifiers but represent the same real-world object are merged. Thus, MiMI allows the users to retrieve information from many different databases at once, highlighting complementary and contradictory information. To help scientists judge the usefulness of a piece of data, MiMI tracks the provenance of all data. Finally, a simple yet powerful user interface aids users in their queries, and frees them from the onerous task of knowing the data format or learning a query language. MiMI allows scientists to query all data, whether corroborative or contradictory, and specify which sources to utilize. MiMI is part of the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) and is publicly available at: .

Nutrient emission reduction scenarios in the North Sea: An abatement cost and ecosystem integrity analysis

Economic cost–benefit appraisal (and its sub-set cost-effectiveness) of ecosystem conservation and/or pollution abatement strategies have proved to be powerful decision-making aids. But the monetary economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services (gains and losses) can only provide a good indication of social welfare impacts under certain conditions and in selective contexts. The values derived through this appraisal process will, for a number of measures, be underestimates of the full total system value [Turner, R.K., Paavola, J., Cooper, P. Farber, S., Jessamy, V., Georgiou, S., 2003. Valuing nature: lessons learned and future research directions. Ecol. Econ. 46, 493–510]. The economic analysis is best suited to assessing the value of ‘marginal’ gains and losses in ecosystem goods/services and not the total destruction of whole systems (including life support systems, the value of which is not commensurate with monetary values and/or is infinitely high). In this study economic costs and what we call ‘ecological risk’ analysis are used to appraise the implementation costs and ecological benefits of selected measures for combating eutrophication. Ecological risk is expressed in terms of ecosystem integrity and resilience. The paper presents three regional case studies dealing with the issue of nutrient emission reduction to the southern North Sea, namely the catchments/estuaries of the Humber (UK), the Rhine (Germany and The Netherlands) and the Elbe (Czech Republic and Germany). On the basis of these comparative regional examples, wider implications in the light of international management of the North Sea are presented. A range of nutrient reduction scenarios have been deployed within the overall OSPAR target agreement of 50% nitrogen and phosphorous reduction compared with 1985 levels. Each scenario assumes pollution reduction measures, characterised in terms of their overall implementation costs and nutrient-reduction effects. Specific policy instruments analysed were: the creation of more intertidal habitat via managed coastal realignment in the Humber area, farm-based land cover changes in the Rhine catchment and a mix of agricultural regime and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) improvements in the Elbe area. The ecological consequences associated with each reduction scenario have been modelled [using the ERSEM model, see Baretta, J.W., Ebenhöh, W., Ruardij, P., 1995. An overview over the European Regional Sea Ecosystem Model, a complex marine ecosystem model. Neth. J. Sea Res. 33 (3/4), 233–246] for the coastal zones supplied from the rivers Elbe, Humber and Rhine. The modelled ecological quality indicators, which describe scenario effects on the coastal zone ecosystem, are then aggregated in terms of ecosystem integrity and ecological risk. The results are presented in terms of two selected key-indicators: implementation costs of the abatement measures and changes in ecological risk status, across the different catchments and assuming different scenarios. They thus provide a possible basis for international agreement negotiations at the North Sea scale.