Hyperspectral remote sensing methods were developed to identify and differentiate post-fire characteristics in burned sagebrush-steppe. This shrub-steppe environment is typical of the Intermountain ...West, where wildfire intervals are frequent. After a 78,000ha wildfire in 2005 in southern Idaho, soil water repellency and fire severity were evaluated with field and airborne spectroscopy measurements. A hyperspectral analysis correctly identified bare ground, low and high fire severity grass areas and low fire severity shrub areas, with accuracies between 74 and 92%. The differentiation of moderate and high fire severity areas was ambiguous, resulting in accuracies between 39 and 54%. The hyperspectral analysis of soil water repellency resulted in a representative map of its distribution with an accuracy of 65%. The analysis techniques conducted in this project signify spectroscopy to be beneficial for differentiating soil characteristics and fire severity classes in burned shrub-steppe areas, where the mostly bare, spectrally homogenous soils exhibit subtle but significant changes in reflectance. The spatial representation of post-fire soil and vegetation conditions may provide a better understanding of post-fire vegetation and surficial processes (water and wind erosion) in shrub-steppe.
OBJECTIVE:A great deal of variability exists in the speech-recognition abilities of postlingually deaf adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients. A number of previous studies have shown that duration of ...deafness is a primary factor affecting CI outcomes; however, there is little agreement regarding other factors that may affect performance. The objective of the present study was to determine the source of variability in CI outcomes by examining three main factors, biographic/audiologic information, electrode position within the cochlea, and cognitive abilities in a group of newly implanted CI recipients.
DESIGN:Participants were 114 postlingually deaf adults with either the Cochlear or Advanced Bionics CI systems. Biographic/audiologic information, aided sentence-recognition scores, a high resolution temporal bone CT scan and cognitive measures were obtained before implantation. Monosyllabic word recognition scores were obtained during numerous test intervals from 2 weeks to 2 years after initial activation of the CI. Electrode position within the cochlea was determined by three-dimensional reconstruction of pre- and postimplant CT scans. Participants’ word scores over 2 years were fit with a logistic curve to predict word score as a function of time and to highlight 4-word recognition metrics (CNC initial score, CNC final score, rise time to 90% of CNC final score, and CNC difference score).
RESULTS:Participants were divided into six outcome groups based on the percentile ranking of their CNC final score, that is, participants in the bottom 10% were in group 1; those in the top 10% were in group 6. Across outcome groups, significant relationships from low to high performance were identified. Biographic/audiologic factors of age at implantation, duration of hearing loss, duration of hearing aid use, and duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss were significantly and inversely related to performance as were frequency modulated tone, sound-field threshold levels obtained with the CI. That is, the higher-performing outcome groups were younger in age at the time of implantation, had shorter duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss, and had lower CI sound-field threshold levels. Significant inverse relationships across outcome groups were also observed for electrode position, specifically the percentage of electrodes in scala vestibuli as opposed to scala tympani and depth of insertion of the electrode array. In addition, positioning of electrode arrays closer to the modiolar wall was positively correlated with outcome. Cognitive ability was significantly and positively related to outcome; however, age at implantation and cognition were highly correlated. After controlling for age, cognition was no longer a factor affecting outcomes.
CONCLUSION:There are a number of factors that limit CI outcomes. They can act singularly or collectively to restrict an individual’s performance and to varying degrees. The highest performing CI recipients are those with the least number of limiting factors. Knowledge of when and how these factors affect performance can favorably influence counseling, device fitting, and rehabilitation for individual patients and can contribute to improved device design and application.
We describe a novel signal processing strategy for cochlear implants designed to emphasize stochastic independence across the excited neural population. The strategy is based on the observation that ...high rate pulse trains may produce random spike patterns in auditory nerve fibers that are statistically similar to those produced by spontaneous activity in the normal cochlea. We call this activity `pseudospontaneous'. A supercomputer-based computational model of a population of auditory nerve fibers suggests that different average rates of pseudospontaneous activity can be created by varying the stimulus current of a fixed-amplitude, high-rate pulse train, e.g. 5000 pps. Electrically-evoked compound action potentials recorded in a human cochlear implant subject are consistent with the hypothesis that such a stimulus can desynchronize the fiber population. This desynchronization may enhance neural representation of temporal detail and dynamic range with a cochlear implant and eliminate a major difference between acoustic and electric hearing.
Cancer research is essential in evaluating the safety and effectiveness of emerging cancer treatments, which in turn can lead to ground-breaking advancements in cancer care. Given limited research ...funding, allocating resources in alignment with societal burden is essential. However, evidence shows that such alignment does not typically occur. The objective of the present study was to provide an updated overview of site-specific cancer research investment in Canada and to explore potential discrepancies between the site-specific burden and the level of research investment.
The 10 cancer sites with the highest mortality in 2015-which included brain, female breast, colorectal, leukemia, lung, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, ovary, pancreas, prostate, and uterus-were selected for the analysis. Information about site-specific research investment and cancer burden (raw incidence and mortality) was obtained from the Canadian Cancer Research Survey and Statistics Canada's cansim (the Canadian Socio-Economic Information Management System) respectively. The ratio of site-specific research investment to site-specific burden was used as an indicator of overfunding (ratio > 1) or underfunding (ratio < 1).
The 3 cancer sites with the highest research investments were leukemia, prostate, and breast, which together represented 51.3% of 2015 cancer research funding. Conversely, the 3 cancer sites with the lowest investments were uterus, pancreas, and ovary, which together represented 7.8% of 2015 research funding. Relative to site-specific cancer burden, the lung, uterus, and colorectal sites were consistently the most underfunded.
Observed discrepancies between cancer burden and research investment indicate that some cancer sites (such as lung, colorectal, and uterus) seem to be underfunded when site-specific incidence and mortality are taken into consideration.
Community-based forestry
and
community-based natural resource management
have become increasingly common terms in both the scientific and popular press. However, as with so many other concepts ...currently in vogue, rarely do studies invoking them incorporate either a grounded theoretical understanding or practical inclusion of the central term:
community.
Community emerges through communication and interaction among people who care about each other and the place they live. In its purest form, community is marked by its multiple and often conflicting perspectives. This article draws upon recent research experience with the Ford Foundation's community-based forestry initiative to illustrate the importance of solidly framing community in order to successfully link forest ecosystem management with community well-being
.
The High Resolution Fly’s Eye (HiRes) experiment has measured the flux of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays using the stereoscopic air fluorescence technique. The HiRes experiment consists of two ...detectors that observe cosmic ray showers via the fluorescence light they emit. HiRes data can be analyzed in monocular mode, where each detector is treated separately, or in stereoscopic mode where they are considered together. Using the monocular mode the HiRes collaboration measured the cosmic ray spectrum and made the first observation of the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin cutoff. In this paper we present the cosmic ray spectrum measured by the stereoscopic technique. Good agreement is found with the monocular spectrum in all details.
This article uses a history of religions approach and an integrative psychoanalysis procedure in order to demonstrate that Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan's 1985 abduction narrative of ...being carried into Mother Wheel—which he claims can be apprehended as an unidentified flying object—is the most important religious event in the life of the minister. This Wheel, and its adjectival modifier "Mother," is central to understanding cosmology in Farrakhan's NOI. More than a reiteration of the teachings that his mentor and religious leader, Elijah Muhammad, bequeathed to him, the Wheel is encoded with the meaning of black bodies everywhere and with Farrakhan's body in particular. Such UFO counter-narratives—new mythologies—have to be created in order to survive in a hostile culture. They serve the purpose of creating new symbols and figures that one can then idealize and with whom they can merge in the formation of healthy selves with regard to black people generally or who one is, as in Farrakhan's case, individually.
A search for cosmic neutrino point-like sources using the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes over the Southern Hemisphere is presented. The ANTARES data were collected between January 2007 and ...December 2012, whereas the IceCube data ranges from April 2008 to May 2011. An unbinned maximum likelihood method is used to search for a localized excess of muon events in the southern sky assuming an E−2 neutrino source spectrum. A search over a pre-selected list of candidate sources has also been carried out for different source assumptions: spectral indices of 2.0 and 2.5, and energy cutoffs of 1 PeV, 300 TeV and 100 TeV. No significant excess over the background has been found, and upper limits for the candidate sources are presented compared to the individual experiments.
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