Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in participatory video, but accounts have often been celebratory and uncritical. At the same time there has been an ever-increasing multiplicity ...of interpretations, thus making participatory video seem 'nebulous' and 'perplexing'. This special section seeks to develop some of the critiques developed over the past five years, by bringing together a series of provocative thought pieces. Through this special section we seek to continue to develop a critique of participatory video as both a methodology and method. We also call on researchers, practitioners and participants to commit to engaging in rigorous public debate and intellectual critique in order to strengthen the field.
Glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide, is linked with environmental harm and there is a drive to replace it in agricultural systems. We model the impacts of discontinuing glyphosate use and ...replacing it with cultural control methods. We simulate winter wheat arable systems reliant on glyphosate and typical in northwest Europe. Removing glyphosate was projected to increase weed abundance, herbicide risk to the environment, and arable plant diversity and decrease food production. Weed communities with evolved resistance to non-glyphosate herbicides were not projected to be disproportionately affected by removing glyphosate, despite the lack of alternative herbicidal control options. Crop rotations with more spring cereals or grass leys for weed control increased arable plant diversity. Stale seedbed techniques such as delayed drilling and choosing ploughing instead of minimum tillage had varying effects on weed abundance, food production, and profitability. Ploughing was the most effective alternative to glyphosate for long-term weed control while maintaining production and profit. Our findings emphasize the need for careful consideration of trade-offs arising in scenarios where glyphosate is removed. Integrated Weed Management (IWM) with more use of cultural control methods offers the potential to reduce chemical use but is sensitive to seasonal variability and can incur negative environmental and economic impacts.
Species response traits mediate environmental effects on species distribution. Traits are used in joint and multispecies distribution models (JSDMs and MSDMs) to enable community‐wide shared ...parameters that characterise niche filtering along environmental gradients. Multispecies machine learning SDMs, however, do not use traits as their inclusion requires an additional taxonomic dimension that is incompatible with their usual tabular inputs. This has confined trait mediation in SDMs to hierarchical Bayesian models. Here we provide a novel artificial neural network (ANN) architecture that solves this dimensionality problem.
Our ANN includes species traits (via a time distributed layer) and is therefore able to identify not only species‐specific responses to the environment, but also shared responses across the community that are mediated by species traits. Model performance evaluated at the species level not only quantifies the reliability of species predictions, but also their departure from an average response dictated by traits only.
We apply our model to two unique long‐term spatio‐temporal of butterfly and moth datasets collected across the United Kingdom between 1990 and 2019. In addition to species traits, predictors include numerous metrics derived from weather, land‐cover and topology data. For butterflies and moths we show convincing model performance for classifying species occupancy. We use SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) to explain the ANN and show how trait‐mediated and species‐specific responses can be approximated, hence yielding ecological insights on the key drivers of species distribution. We highlight a range of drivers of change that determine occupancy, including wind, temperature as well as habitat type.
We demonstrate that a trait‐based approach can be encoded as an ANN by using a time distributed layer. This brings ANNs unmatched predictive capabilities to the field of MSDMs, at the same time of lifting their reputed drawback of poor explainability.
A 2006 randomized trial demonstrated a 16-month survival benefit with intraperitoneal and intravenous (IP/IV) chemotherapy administered to patients who had ovarian cancer, compared with IV ...chemotherapy alone, but more treatment-related toxicities. The objective of this study was to examine the use and effectiveness of IP/IV chemotherapy in clinical practice.
Prospective cohort study of 823 women with stage III, optimally cytoreduced ovarian cancer diagnosed at six National Comprehensive Cancer Network institutions. We examined IP/IV chemotherapy use in all patients diagnosed between 2003 and 2012 (N = 823), and overall survival and treatment-related toxicities with Cox regression and logistic regression, respectively, in a propensity score-matched sample (n = 402) of patients diagnosed from 2006 to 2012, excluding trial participants, to minimize selection bias.
Use of IP/IV chemotherapy increased from 0% to 33% between 2003 and 2006, increased to 50% from 2007 to 2008, and plateaued thereafter. Between 2006 and 2012, adoption of IP/IV chemotherapy varied by institution from 4% to 67% (P < .001) and 43% of patients received modified IP/IV regimens at treatment initiation. In the propensity score-matched sample, IP/IV chemotherapy was associated with significantly improved overall survival (3-year overall survival, 81% v 71%; hazard ratio, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.47 to 0.99), compared with IV chemotherapy, but also more frequent alterations in chemotherapy delivery route (adjusted rates discontinuation or change, 20.4% v 10.0%; adjusted odds ratio, 2.83; 95% CI, 1.47 to 5.47).
Although the use of IP/IV chemotherapy increased significantly at National Comprehensive Cancer Network centers between 2003 and 2012, fewer than 50% of eligible patients received it. Increasing IP/IV chemotherapy use in clinical practice may be an important and underused strategy to improve ovarian cancer outcomes.
Clinical enzymology of the dog and cat Oikonomidis, IL; Milne, E
Australian veterinary journal,
December 2023, 2023-12-00, 20231201, Letnik:
101, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Clinical enzymology studies the enzyme activity in serum or other body fluids for the diagnosis, prognosis or monitoring of a variety of diseases. Clinical enzymology has greatly benefited from ...advances in technology and is now an integral part of laboratory analysis. However, to maximise the clinical benefits of serum enzyme measurement, clinicians and clinical pathologists must have a good understanding of the pathophysiology behind serum enzyme alterations. They must also be aware of the preanalytical and analytical factors that can affect the accuracy of serum enzyme activity measurement. This review article first covers the basic concepts of clinical enzymology and the general mechanisms related to serum enzyme alterations. Then, the review discusses the potential effects of various preanalytical and analytical factors on enzyme activity measurement. Lastly, it explores the pathophysiology and clinical use of various serum enzymes in canine and feline medicine. The present review article aims to be a comprehensive one‐stop source for clinical pathologists and small animal practitioners.
Diseases in humans, animals and plants remain an important challenge in our society. Effective control of invasive pathogens often requires coordinated concerted action of a large group of ...stakeholders. Both epidemiological and human behavioural factors influence the outcome of a disease control campaign. In mathematical models that are frequently used to guide such campaigns, human behaviour is often ill-represented, if at all. Existing models of human, animal and plant disease that do incorporate participation or compliance are often driven by pay-offs or direct observations of the disease state. It is however very well known that opinion is an important driving factor of human decision making. Here we consider the case study of Citrus Huanglongbing disease (HLB), which is an acute bacterial disease that threatens the sustainability of citrus production across the world. We show how by coupling an epidemiological model of this invasive disease with an opinion dynamics model we are able to answer the question: What makes or breaks the effectiveness of a disease control campaign? Frequent contact between stakeholders and advisors is shown to increase the probability of successful control. More surprisingly, we show that informing stakeholders about the effectiveness of control methods is of much greater importance than prematurely increasing their perceptions of the risk of infection. We discuss the overarching consequences of this finding and the effect on human as well as plant disease epidemics.
A new catalyst system for the Pd-catalyzed cross-coupling of organozinc reagents with aryl halides (Negishi coupling) has been developed. This system permits efficient preparation of hindered biaryls ...(tri- and tetra-ortho-substituted), functions effectively at low levels of catalyst, and tolerates a wide range of functional groups and heterocyclic substrates. A systematic study of ligand structure was performed and was correlated with catalyst activity.
Artificial grammars (AG) are designed to emulate aspects of the structure of language, and AG learning (AGL) paradigms can be used to study the extent of nonhuman animals' structure-learning ...capabilities. However, different AG structures have been used with nonhuman animals and are difficult to compare across studies and species. We developed a simple quantitative parameter space, which we used to summarize previous nonhuman animal AGL results. This was used to highlight an under-studied AG with a forward-branching structure, designed to model certain aspects of the nondeterministic nature of word transitions in natural language and animal song. We tested whether two monkey species could learn aspects of this auditory AG. After habituating the monkeys to the AG, analysis of video recordings showed that common marmosets (New World monkeys) differentiated between well formed, correct testing sequences and those violating the AG structure based primarily on simple learning strategies. By comparison, Rhesus macaques (Old World monkeys) showed evidence for deeper levels of AGL. A novel eye-tracking approach confirmed this result in the macaques and demonstrated evidence for more complex AGL. This study provides evidence for a previously unknown level of AGL complexity in Old World monkeys that seems less evident in New World monkeys, which are more distant evolutionary relatives to humans. The findings allow for the development of both marmosets and macaques as neurobiological model systems to study different aspects of AGL at the neuronal level.
Dietary zinc (Zn) deficiency is widespread globally, and in particular among people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In Malawi, dietary sources of Zn are dominated by maize and spatially dependent ...variation in grain Zn concentration, which will affect dietary Zn intake, has been reported at distances of up to ~ 100 km. The aim of this study was to identify potential soil properties and environmental covariates which might explain this longer-range spatial variation in maize grain Zn concentration. Data for maize grain Zn concentrations, soil properties, and environmental covariates were obtained from a spatially representative survey in Malawi (n = 1600 locations). Labile and non-labile soil Zn forms were determined using isotopic dilution methods, alongside conventional agronomic soil analyses. Soil properties and environmental covariates as potential predictors of the concentration of Zn in maize grain were tested using a priori expert rankings and false discovery rate (FDR) controls within the linear mixed model (LMM) framework that informed the original survey design. Mean and median grain Zn concentrations were 21.8 and 21.5 mg kg
, respectively (standard deviation 4.5; range 10.0-48.1). A LMM for grain Zn concentration was constructed for which the independent variables: soil pH
, isotopically exchangeable Zn (Zn
), and diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA) extractable Zn (Zn
) had predictive value (p < 0.01 in all cases, with FDR controlled at < 0.05). Downscaled mean annual temperature also explained a proportion of the spatial variation in grain Zn concentration. Evidence for spatially dependent variation in maize grain Zn concentrations in Malawi is robust within the LMM framework used in this study, at distances of up to ~ 100 km. Spatial predictions from this LMM provide a basis for further investigation of variations in the contribution of staple foods to Zn nutrition, and where interventions to increase dietary Zn intake (e.g. biofortification) might be most effective. Other soil and landscape factors influencing spatially dependent variation in maize grain Zn concentration, along with factors operating over shorter distances such as choice of crop variety and agronomic practices, require further exploration beyond the scope of the design of this survey.
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