Contract cheating refers to students paying a third party to complete university assessments for them. Although opportunities for commercial contract cheating are widely available in the form of ...essay mills, only about 3% of students engage in this behaviour. This study examined the reasons why most students do
not
engage in contract cheating. Students (
n
= 1204) completed a survey on why they do not engage in contract cheating as well as measures of several individual differences, including self-control, grit and the Dark Triad traits. Morality and motivation for learning received the greatest endorsement for why students do not engage in contract cheating. Controlling for gender, individual differences predicted students’ reasons for not contract cheating. This study supports the use of criminological theories relating to rational choice, self-control and opportunity to explain why students do not engage in contract cheating. Practically, this study may inform academic policies and assessment design that may reduce contract cheating.
An efficient methodology for the synthesis of benzofuropyridines and dibenzofurans from fluoropyridines or fluoroarenes and 2-bromophenyl acetates is reported. This streamlined one-pot procedure ...consists of a four-step directed
-lithiation, zincation, Negishi cross-coupling, and intramolecular nucleophilic aromatic substitution, allowing for the facile assembly of a diverse set of fused benzofuro heterocycles.
Cold-stimulated adaptive thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue (BAT) to increase energy expenditure is suggested as a possible therapeutic target for the treatment of obesity. We have recently shown ...high prevalence of BAT in adult humans, which was inversely related to body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage (BF%), suggesting that obesity is associated with lower BAT activity. Here, we examined BAT activity in morbidly obese subjects and its role in cold-induced thermogenesis (CIT) after applying a personalized cooling protocol. We hypothesize that morbidly obese subjects show reduced BAT activity upon cold exposure.
After applying a personalized cooling protocol for maximal non-shivering conditions, BAT activity was determined using positron-emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT). Cold-induced BAT activity was detected in three out of 15 morbidly obese subjects. Combined with results from lean to morbidly obese subjects (n = 39) from previous study, the collective data show a highly significant correlation between BAT activity and body composition (P<0.001), respectively explaining 64% and 60% of the variance in BMI (r = 0.8; P<0.001) and BF% (r = 0.75; P<0.001). Obese individuals demonstrate a blunted CIT combined with low BAT activity. Only in BAT-positive subjects (n = 26) mean energy expenditure was increased significantly upon cold exposure (51.5±6.7 J/s versus 44.0±5.1 J/s, P = 0.001), and the increase was significantly higher compared to BAT-negative subjects (+15.5±8.9% versus +3.6±8.9%, P = 0.001), indicating a role for BAT in CIT in humans.
This study shows that in an extremely large range of body compositions, BAT activity is highly correlated with BMI and BF%. BAT-positive subjects showed higher CIT, indicating that BAT is also in humans involved in adaptive thermogenesis. Increasing BAT activity could be a therapeutic target in (morbid) obesity.
A systematic range of o-hydroxyphenyl ketones were reduced under asymmetric transfer hydrogenation conditions using the C3-tethered catalyst 2. Two directing effects, i.e., an o-hydroxyphenyl coupled ...to a bulky aromatic on the opposite side of the ketone substrate, combine in a matched manner to deliver reduction products with very high enantiomeric excess.
Tumor hypoxia is associated with a poor prognosis, hypoxia modification improves outcome, and hypoxic status predicts benefit from treatment. Yet, there is no universal measure of clinical hypoxia. ...The aim of this study was to investigate whether a 26-gene hypoxia signature predicted benefit from hypoxia-modifying treatment in both cancer types.
Samples were available from 157 T2-T4 laryngeal cancer and 185 T1-T4a bladder cancer patients enrolled on the accelerated radiotherapy with carbogen and nicotinamide (ARCON) and bladder carbogen nicotinamide (BCON) phase III randomized trials of radiotherapy alone or with carbogen and nicotinamide (CON) respectively. Customized TaqMan low density arrays (TLDA) were used to assess expression of the 26-gene signature using quantitative real-time PCR. The median expression of the 26 genes was used to derive a hypoxia score (HS). Patients were categorized as TLDA-HS low (≤median) or TLDA-HS high (>median). The primary outcome measures were regional control (RC; ARCON) and overall survival (BCON).
Laryngeal tumors categorized as TLDA-HS high showed greater benefit from ARCON than TLDA-HS low tumors. Five-year RC was 81% (radiotherapy alone) versus 100% (CON) for TLDA-HS high (P=0.009). For TLDA-HS low, 5-year RC was 91% (radiotherapy alone) versus 90% (CON; P=0.90). TLDA-HS did not predict benefit from CON in bladder cancer.
The 26-gene hypoxia signature predicts benefit from hypoxia-modifying treatment in laryngeal cancer. These findings will be evaluated in a prospective clinical trial.
Accurate flood inundation forecasts have the potential to minimize socioeconomic losses, but uncertainties in inflows propagated from the precipitation forecasts result in large prediction errors. ...Recent studies suggest that by assimilating independent flood observations, inherent uncertainty in hydraulic flood inundation modeling can be mitigated. Satellite observations from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, with demonstrated flood monitoring capability, can thus be used to reduce flood forecast uncertainties through assimilation. However, researchers have struggled to develop an appropriate cost function to determine the innovation to be applied at each assimilation time step. Thus, a novel likelihood function based on mutual information (MI) is proposed here, for use with a particle filter‐based (PF) flood extent assimilation framework. Using identical twin experiments, synthetic SAR‐based probabilistic flood extents were assimilated into the hydraulic model LISFLOOD‐FP using the proposed PF‐MI algorithm. The 2011 flood event in the Clarence Catchment, Australia was used for this study. The impact of assimilating flood extents was evaluated in terms of subsequent flood extent evolution, floodplain water depths, flow velocities and channel water levels (WLs). Water depth and flow velocity simulations improved by ∼60% over the open loop on an average and persisted for up to 7 days, following the sequential assimilation of two post‐peak flood extent observations. Flood extents and channel WLs also showed mean improvements of ∼10% and ∼80% in accuracy, respectively, indicating that the proposed MI likelihood function can improve flood extent assimilation.
Plain Language Summary
Accurate forecasts of flood inundation can minimize socioeconomic losses from the frequent and often disastrous flood events occurring world‐wide. However, numerical models used to generate flood predictions are strongly dependent on the quality of inputs such as inflows and topography, which typically fail to meet the required accuracy standards. Recent studies suggest that integrating independent flood observations into these numerical models can mitigate some of the errors and increase the reliability of the resulting flood forecasts. Remotely sensed radar data, which has all‐weather/all‐day imaging capabilities, can thus accurately observe flooded areas. These flood extent observations can then be used to improve flood forecasts through model‐data integration, but studies have struggled to develop an effective approach to combine these with numerical models, as the area under water only varies slightly with time. Consequently, this study proposed a novel model‐data integration method, sensitive to slight variations in the flooded area, and verified its performance through synthetic experiments. At each time step shared information between the model predicted and the observed flooded area is quantified and used to combine their information content. This led to persistent improvements in predictions of flood extent, depth, and velocity, demonstrating the potential of the proposed integration method.
Key Points
A novel mutual information‐based metric is proposed as the likelihood function for particle filter‐based flood extent assimilation
Distributed impacts of the assimilation on simulated flood depth and flow velocities are illustrated for different lead times
Improvements in simulated water levels of ∼80% over the open loop are shown, persistent for up to one week after the assimilation
– We report physical properties (bulk and grain density, magnetic susceptibility, and porosity) measured using nondestructive and noncontaminating methods for 195 stones from 63 carbonaceous ...chondrites. Grain densities over the whole population average 3.44 g cm−3, ranging from 2.42 g cm−3 (CI1 Orgueil) to 5.66 g cm−3 (CB Bencubbin). Magnetic susceptibilities (in log units of 10−9 m3 kg−1) averaged log χ = 4.22, ranging from 3.23 (CV3 Axtell) to 5.79 (CB Bencubbin). Porosities averaged 17%, ranging from 0 (for a number of meteorites) to 41% (for one stone of the CO Ornans). Notably, we found significant differences in porosity between the oxidized and reduced CV subgroups, with the porosities of CVo averaging approximately 20% and CVr porosities approximately 4%. Overall, porosities of carbonaceous chondrite falls trend with petrographic type, from type 1 (CI) near 35%, type 2 (CM, CR) averaging 23%, type 3 (CV, CO) 21%, to type 4 (CK and some CO) averaging 15%. There is also a significant decrease in porosity between meteorites of shock stage S1 and those of S2, indicative of shock compression.
More than twice as much carbon is held in soils as in vegetation or the atmosphere, and changes in soil carbon content can have a large effect on the global carbon budget. The possibility that ...climate change is being reinforced by increased carbon dioxide emissions from soils owing to rising temperature is the subject of a continuing debate. But evidence for the suggested feedback mechanism has to date come solely from small-scale laboratory and field experiments and modelling studies. Here we use data from the National Soil Inventory of England and Wales obtained between 1978 and 2003 to show that carbon was lost from soils across England and Wales over the survey period at a mean rate of 0.6% yr-1 (relative to the existing soil carbon content). We find that the relative rate of carbon loss increased with soil carbon content and was more than 2% yr-1 in soils with carbon contents greater than 100 g kg-1. The relationship between rate of carbon loss and carbon content is irrespective of land use, suggesting a link to climate change. Our findings indicate that losses of soil carbon in England and Wales--and by inference in other temperate regions--are likely to have been offsetting absorption of carbon by terrestrial sinks.
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