Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives; small and warm organisms grow and reproduce quickly and live short lives. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) predicts equal and opposite scaling exponents of mass-specific biological rates (e.g., respiration, growth, and reproduction) and times (e.g., development, lifespan, and generation) as a function of size. However, empirical support for these predictions varies depending on trait and taxon. Here I: 1) provide background and mixed support for the quarter-power scaling exponents for life history rates and times predicted by MTE, 2) discuss possible explanations, including effects of natural selection on taxonomic and functional groups, and inadequate data for life history traits, 3) briefly summarize the Equal Fitness Paradigm (EFP) as a unifying theory of bioenergetics, life history and demography that does not depend on any particular allometric scalings, and 4) discuss ramifications of the EFP for other biological phenomena, including physiological performance metrics and trophic energetics of ecosystems. I draw mostly from my knowledge of mammals, yet in many cases the mammalian examples can be generalized to other organisms. I end with prospects for further evaluating and extending the EFP.
This study aims to assess satisfaction with the quality of education in educational institutions in Algeria and to determine the factors that significantly influence it. The study was based on a survey of inspectors representing the primary control body for educational institutions in Algeria. The questionnaire contained questions based on which the inspectors assessed the quality of education in 1,101 schools (representative sample). A three-point Likert scale was used to evaluate inspectors' agreement with the statements included in the questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of 7 factors that characterize the quality of the professional development of pedagogical workers, the educational program, textbooks, the educational process, the conditions of school education, the evaluation process, and the effectiveness of the teacher's work. Correspondence of the data to the normal law of distribution was confirmed with the help of SENWEKS (asymmetry coefficient/skewness coefficient) and KIRTOSIS (variation coefficient or excess) indicators. The reliability of the research tools and the possibility of relying on the questionnaire data were confirmed using Cronbach's alpha coefficient and validity - using the overall internal consistency coefficient. The internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed using Pearson's linear correlation coefficients between the factors and the total score of the questionnaire. The study proved that the factors of the quality of education, with the highest level of satisfaction expressed by the respondents, were the quality of educational programs (inspectors have a favourable opinion about the educational content, considering it relevant and well structured) and textbooks (inspectors appreciate the clarity and richness of the content of the textbook, emphasizing its essential role in student learning), while they were the least satisfied with the quality of learning conditions (inspectors point to a lack of educational resources, inadequate infrastructure and a large number of students in the classroom). One-sample Student's t-test (one-sample T-Student Test) was used to identify the factors that have the most significant impact on measuring the quality of education in educational institutions in Algeria. The most important factors were the effectiveness of the teachers, the quality of the curriculum and the quality of the textbooks. The research emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adequate support for teachers.
Sociology (General), Economic history and conditions
Artikkelen omhandler barnehagens hverdagsliv under covid-19-pandemien. Oppmerksomheten rettes mot hvordan barna ble berørt av de nasjonale smitteverntiltakene barnehagene ble pålagt. Det empiriske materialet som ligger til grunn for artikkelen, er dagboknotater fra barnehageansatte nedtegnet i april, mai og juni 2020. I diskusjonen av de empiriske funnene trekker vi veksler på Foucaults teori om biopolitikk, der hygiene betraktes som verktøy for sosial kontroll, og Nadesans forståelse av biopolitikk-begrepet, der barndom og oppvekst vies spesiell oppmerksomhet. Smitteverntiltakene i barnehagene ble innført «ovenfra», men måtte forvaltes og praktiseres «nedenfra». Resultatene viser at tiltakene både var disiplinerende (fjerning av leker, forbud mot å leke med bestemte andre) og selvdisiplinerende (barna ble opplært til å passe på egen og andres håndvask). Vi ser også hvordan en institusjon som er regulert i tid og rom, under pandemien i enda større grad ble regulert gjennom krav om «redusert kontakthyppighet» og segregering av barnegruppene. Tiltak som var motivert ut fra helse og sikkerhet for alle landets innbyggere, satte preg på barns hverdagsliv både gjennom konkrete begrensninger og ved at de måtte forholde seg til ekstraordinære hygienekrav og frykt for smitte.
English abstract
Infection Control, Biopolitics and Early Childhood Education and Care. How Children Were Directly Affected by Infection Prevention Measures in Kindergartens During Spring 2020
The article concerns everyday life in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Attention is focused on how children were affected by the infection control measures that kindergartens were required to implement. The empirical data that forms the basis of the article are diary notes from kindergarten staff recorded in April, May, and June 2020. In the discussion of the empirical findings, we draw on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, where hygiene is considered as a tool for social control. The infection control measures in the kindergartens were introduced “from above”, but had to be managed and practiced “from below”. The measures were both about discipline (removal of toys, restrictions on allowed playmates) and dissemination of knowledge and self-discipline (the children were taught to take responsibility for their own hand-washing, as well as that of the other children). We also consider how an institution regulated in time and space was regulated to an even greater extent during the pandemic through requirements for reduced frequency of contact and segregation of smaller groups of children. Measures motivated by the protection of public health and safety affected children’s everyday lives, both through specific restrictions and due to the fact that they had to deal with extraordinary hygiene requirements and fear of infection.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social sciences (General)
Introduction: Pseudoaneurysms of the pancreaticoduodenal arcade are rare, accounting for approximately 2% of all visceral artery aneurysms. They typically arise as complications of chronic pancreatitis, peptic ulcer disease, trauma, pancreatic and biliary surgery, or pancreas transplantation. Diagnosis often occurs only after rupture, leading to life-threatening internal bleeding. Bleeding may occur within a pseudocyst, with blood passing through the Vater’s papilla into the digestive tract, or may result in the formation of a retroperitoneal hematoma that can rupture into the abdominal cavity, causing hemoperitoneum. The cell-saver is a tool that can be utilized for intraoperative blood cell salvage and autologous transfusions.
Case Report: Our patient, a 54-year-old male, an untreated alcoholic with no prior medical history or documented treatment, presented to the Clinic for Emergency Surgery at the University Clinical Center of Serbia with a sudden onset of upper abdominal pain. A quick ultrasound of the abdomen was performed, followed by an urgent CT scan of the chest and abdomen, revealing a hematoma extending from the right retroperitoneum and mesentery of the intestine, measuring 150x109x180mm in diameter, with signs of active bleeding in the region beneath the pancreas, indicative of hemoperitoneum. Due to hemodynamic instability, accompanied by a drop in arterial blood pressure and hemoglobin levels, an urgent laparotomy was performed. Active bleeding was identified from a ruptured pseudoaneurysm originating from the pancreaticoduodenal arcade. Hemostasis was achieved followed by tamponade, and the tampons were removed 30 hours post-surgery. The patient remained hemodynamically stable thereafter, recovered well from the surgery, and was discharged home in good general condition.
Intraoperatively, we utilized the Cell-saver to collect the patient’s blood and subsequently administered autologous transfusion.
Conclusion: In patients with chronic pancreatitis presenting with sudden abdominal pain and hemodynamic instability accompanied by a drop in arterial pressure, hemoglobin, and hematocrit levels, the possibility of a ruptured pseudoaneurysm in the pancreatic or peripancreatic region should be considered. Timely diagnosis and prompt surgical intervention are crucial for a successful outcome. Effective collaboration among radiologists, anesthesiologists, and surgeons is essential. The utilization of the Cell-saver system significantly aids in maintaining cardiac output and hemodynamic stability in these patients.
With the widespread availability of high-speed networks, it becomes feasible to outsource computing to remote providers and to federate resources from many locations. Such observations motivated the development, from the mid-1990s onwards, of a range of innovative Grid technologies, applications, and infrastructures. We review the history, current status, and future prospects for Grid computing.
This paper is a study of the history of the transplant of mathematical tools using negative feedback for macroeconomic stabilization policy from 1948 to 1975 and the subsequent break of the use of control for stabilization policy which occurred from 1975 to 1993. New-classical macroeconomists selected a subset of the tools of control that favored their support of rules against discretionary stabilization policy. The Lucas critique and Kydland and Prescott's time-inconsistency were over-statements that led to the "dark ages" of the prevalence of the stabilization-policy-ineffectiveness idea. These over-statements were later revised following the success of the Taylor rule.
Ivan de Martino, Mariafelicia De Laurentis, Salvatore Capozziello
Cosmic history can be traced considering further curvature contributions inside the gravitational action. Assuming that standard General Relativity can be extended by other curvature invariants, we discuss the possibility that an action containing higher-order curvature terms can fit, in principle, the whole universe evolution. In particular, a theory like $F(R,{\cal G})$, with $R$ the Ricci scalar and $\cal G$ the Gauss-Bonnet topological term, contains all the curvature invariants that, depending on the energy regime, can address inflation, matter dominated and dark energy regimes. In this paper, we investigate this possibility considering how $F(R,{\cal G})$ models can lead gravity from ultraviolet to infrared scales. Specifically, we will take into account a cosmographic approach for this purpose.
Visual Dialog involves "understanding" the dialog history (what has been discussed previously) and the current question (what is asked), in addition to grounding information in the image, to generate the correct response. In this paper, we show that co-attention models which explicitly encode dialog history outperform models that don't, achieving state-of-the-art performance (72 % NDCG on val set). However, we also expose shortcomings of the crowd-sourcing dataset collection procedure by showing that history is indeed only required for a small amount of the data and that the current evaluation metric encourages generic replies. To that end, we propose a challenging subset (VisDialConv) of the VisDial val set and provide a benchmark of 63% NDCG.
The first determination of the surface temperature of stars other than the Sun is due to the Hungarian astrophysicist Béla Harkányi. Prompted by the recent unprecedented increase in the availability of stellar temperature estimates from Gaia, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Harkányi's birth, this article presents the life and work of this neglected, yet remarkable figure in the context of the history of stellar astrophysics.
En la experiencia que aquí se presenta, estudiantes de la Universidad de Murcia dejaron las aulas por unas horas para llevar a cabo un aprendizaje situado de la historia del arte mediante un itinerario didáctico sobre la Murcia medieval. De este modo, se rompen las barreras físicas del aula y se integran los elementos de aprendizaje con el propio paisaje urbano por donde los estudiantes pasan a diario. El itinerario didáctico partía desde el antiguo Alcázar Seguir de la ciudad, hoy Convento de clausura, pasando por la plaza de Santo Domingo, antigua plaza del zoco; la conjunción urbana de “las cuatro esquinas”, donde convergen las calles de los principales gremios de la ciudad; la catedral de Murcia, donde se conservan los restos de la antigua mezquita Al-Jama y, finalmente, en el conjunto monumental de San Juan de Dios, donde aún es visible el nicho del mihrab del antiguo oratorio del Alcázar mayor medieval. Los resultados de la investigación se basan en el análisis de un pre-test y un post-test que el alumnado contestó sobre sus conocimientos de la Murcia medieval. La progresión de aprendizaje del alumnado participante fue positiva mejorando en el post-test los resultados previos.
The paper deals with midwives’ practice in the first half of the 20th century. The issue is based on the analysis of serial sources, so-called birth diaries. The research analyses ten series of birth diaries in the pre-printed form in which the midwives recorded information on the course of deliveries. The diaries are kept in Czech and Moravian archives and provide data on obstetric practice in various regions of the Czech lands. That makes it possible for us to compare the circumstances under which the midwives worked as well as their performance in different geographical, demographic, and social conditions, both in industrial and agrarian areas. The obtained data provide answers to several questions, e.g. the beginnings of assistants’ careers, their performance, the social structure of their clientele, as well as medical aspects of obstetric practice and cooperation with physicians. The research attempts to define the links between these indicators and also focuses on the financial gains of the midwives in their obstetric practice.
The Maxey-Riley equation has been extensively used by the fluid dynamics community to study the dynamics of small inertial particles in fluid flow. However, most often, the Basset history force in this equation is neglected. Including the Basset force in numerical solutions of particulate flows involves storage requirements which rapidly increase in time. Thus the significance of the Basset history force in the dynamics has not been understood. In this paper, we show that the Maxey-Riley equation in its entirety can be exactly mapped as a forced, time-dependent Robin boundary condition of the one-dimensional heat equation, and solved using the Unified Transform Method. We obtain the exact solution for a general homogeneous time-dependent flow field, and apply it to a range of physically relevant situations. In a particle coming to a halt in a quiescent environment, the Basset history force speeds up the decay as stretched-exponential at short time while slowing it down to a power-law relaxation, $\sim t^{-3/2}$, at long time. A particle settling under gravity is shown to relax even more slowly to its terminal velocity ($\sim t^{-1/2}$), whereas this relaxation would be expected to take place exponentially fast if the history term were to be neglected. For a general flow, our approach makes possible a numerical scheme for arbitrary but smooth flows without increasing memory demands and with spectral accuracy. We use our numerical scheme to solve an example spatially varying flow of inertial particles in the vicinity of a point vortex. We show that the critical radius for caustics formation shrinks slightly due to history effects. Our scheme opens up a method for future studies to include the Basset history term in their calculations to spectral accuracy, without astronomical storage costs. Moreover our results indicate that the Basset history can affect dynamics significantly.
Didier Cataldo,1 Jean-Louis Corhay,1 Eric Derom,2 Renaud Louis,1 Eric Marchand,3,4 Alain Michils,5 Vincent Ninane,6 Rudi Peché,7 Charles Pilette,8 Walter Vincken,9 Wim Janssens10 1Department of Respiratory Diseases, CHU Liège, University of Liège, Liège, 2Department of Respiratory Medicine, Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, 3Department of Respiratory Medicine, CHU – UCL – Namur, Université catholique de Louvain, Yvoir, 4Molecular Physiology Research Unit (URPhyM)-NARILIS, Laboratory of General Physiology, University of Namur, Namur, 5Chest Department, Erasme University Hospital, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 6Department of Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital Saint-Pierre, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 7Department of Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital Vésale, Montigny-le-Tilleul, 8Department of Respiratory Medicine, Cliniques universitaires St Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, 9Respiratory Division, University Hospital Brussels (UZ Brussel), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 10Department of Respiratory Diseases, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Introduction: Patients with chronic airway disease may present features of both asthma and COPD, commonly referred to as asthma–COPD overlap syndrome (ACOS). Recommendations on their diagnosis are diffuse and inconsistent. This survey aimed to identify consensus on criteria for diagnosing ACOS.Methods: A Belgian expert panel developed a survey on ACOS diagnosis, which was completed by 87 pulmonologists. Answers chosen by ≥70% of survey respondents were considered as useful criteria for ACOS diagnosis. The two most frequently selected answers were considered as major criteria, others as minor criteria. The expert panel proposed a minimal requirement of two major criteria and one minor criterion for ACOS diagnosis. Respondents were also asked which criteria are important for considering inhaled corticosteroids prescription in a COPD patient.Results: To diagnose ACOS in COPD patients, major criteria were “high degree of variability in airway obstruction over time (change in forced expiratory volume in 1 second ≥400 mL)” and “high degree of response to bronchodilators (>200 mL and ≥12% predicted above baseline)”. Minor criteria were “personal/family history of atopy and/or IgE sensitivity to ≥1 airborne allergen”, “elevated blood/sputum eosinophil levels and/or increased fractional exhaled nitric oxide”, “diagnosis of asthma <40 years of age”; “symptom variability”, and “age (in favor of asthma)”. To diagnose ACOS in asthma patients, major criteria were “persistence of airflow obstruction over time (forced expiratory volume in 1 second/forced vital capacity ratio <0.7)” and “exposure to noxious particles/gases, with ≥10 pack-years for (ex-)smokers”; minor criteria were “lack of response on acute bronchodilator test”; “reduced diffusion capacity”; “limited variability in airway obstruction”; “age >40 years”; “emphysema on chest computed tomography scan”.Conclusion: Specific criteria were identified that may guide physicians to a more uniform diagnostic approach for ACOS in COPD or asthma patients. These criteria are largely similar to those used to prescribe inhaled corticosteroids in COPD. Keywords: ACOS, airway obstruction, asthma, COPD, diagnosis, inhaled corticosteroids
This text is a foreword to the proceedings of the International Conference The Making of Jerusalem: constructed spaces and historic communities, Jerusalem, St. James Monastery, 2-4 July 2014.
History (General) and history of Europe, Social sciences (General)
The history force is one of the hydrodynamic forces which act on a particle moving through a fluid. It is an integral over the full time history of the particle's motion and significantly complicates the equations of motion (accordingly it is often neglected). We present here a study of the influence of this force on particles moving in a turbulent flow, for a wide range of particle parameters. It is shown that the magnitude of history force can be significant and that it can have a considerable effect on the particles' slip velocity, acceleration, preferential concentration and collision rate. We also investigate the parameter dependence of the strength of these effects.
Danor Aharon, Alessandra Mastrobuono Battisti, Hagai B. Perets
The tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole (MBH) is thought to produce a transient luminous event. Such tidal disruption events (TDEs) may play an important role in the detection and characterization of MBHs and probe the properties and dynamics of their nuclear stellar clusters (NSCs) hosts. Previous studies estimated the recent rates of TDEs in the local universe. However, the long-term evolution of the rates throughout the history of the universe has been hardly explored. Here we consider the TDE history, using evolutionary models for the evolution of galactic nuclei. We use a 1D Fokker-Planck approach to explore the evolution of MBH-hosting NSCs, and obtain the disruption rates of stars during their evolution. We complement these with an analysis of TDEs history based on N-body simulation data, and find them to be comparable. We consider NSCs that are built-up from close-in star-formation (SF) or from SF/clusters-dispersal far-out, a few pc from the MBH. We also explore cases where primordial NSCs exist and later evolve through additional star-formation/cluster-dispersal processes. We study the dependence of the TDE history on the type of galaxy, as well as the dependence on the MBH mass. These provide several scenarios, with a continuous increase of the TDE rates over time for cases of far-out SF and a more complex behavior for the close-in SF cases. Finally, we integrate the TDE histories of the various scenarios to provide a total TDE history of the universe, which can be potentially probed with future large surveys (e.g. LSST).
In this paper, we propose local matrix generalizations of the classical $W$-algebras based on the second Hamiltonian structure of the $\mathcal{Z}_m$-valued KP hierarchy, where $\mathcal{Z}_m$ is a maximal commutative subalgebra of $gl(m,\mathbb{C})$.
Naoki Fujiwara Tsujii, Kotone Tokunaga, Toshiharu Akino
et al.
The Japanese queenless ponerine ant Diacamma sp. from Japan employs tandem running during nest relocation, in which a leader ant guides nestmate followers one at a time. We replicated this process by presenting one entire abdominal part of a leader, except for the petiole to followers. When the abdominal part had been rinsed with n-hexane, however, it attracted significantlyfewer followers. This suggests that chemicals on the leader’s abdominal part evoke tandem running. Dissection of abdominal major exocrine glands revealed that the Dufour’s gland was the source of this chemical signal. The chemicals were eluted in the hydrocarbon fraction by silica-gel column chromatography, and the quantitatively major component was estimated as heptadecene (C17:1) through gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS) analysis. The position of the double bond was estimated to be between the 8th and 9th carbons through analysis of the epoxidized compound. Only (Z)-isomers of 8-heptadecene evoked tandem running in the followers. We identified the tandem running pheromone of this ant species to be (Z)-8- heptadecene. (163)