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The role of priming and memory in rice environmental stress adaptation:current knowledge and perspectives
Get PDFPlant responses to abiotic stresses are dynamic, following the unpredictable changes of physical environmental parameters such as temperature, water and nutrients. Physiological and phenotypical responses to stress are intercalated by periods of recovery. An earlier stress can be remembered as ‘stress memory’ to mount a response within a generation or transgenerationally. The ‘stress priming’ phenomenon allows plants to respond quickly and more robustly to stressors to increase survival, and therefore has significant implications for agriculture. Although evidence for stress memory in various plant species is accumulating, understanding of the mechanisms implicated, especially for crops of agricultural interest, is in its infancy. Rice is a major food crop which is susceptible to abiotic stresses causing constraints on its cultivation and yield globally. Advancing the understanding of the stress response network will thus have a significant impact on rice sustainable production and global food security in the face of climate change. Therefore, this review highlights the effects of priming on rice abiotic stress tolerance and focuses on specific aspects of stress memory, its perpetuation and its regulation at epigenetic, transcriptional, metabolic as well as physiological levels. The open questions and future directions in this exciting research field are also laid out
The Changing Reputation of Saladin in the Latin West, c.1170 to c.1220
Get PDFIt is an apparent paradox that the Latin West’s perception of Saladin, the Ayyubid sultan who conquered Jerusalem in 1187, changed so drastically over a few years. From being identified as one of the heads of the seven-headed dragon of Revelation 13, by the end of the Third Crusade Saladin’s image began to take on a much more positive aspect, with the virtues of mercy and especially generosity writ large. The lengthy diplomatic exchanges of the Third Crusade did much to bring these (and other) recognisably chivalric attributes to the attention of the crusaders and thereby effect the transformation noted above. The article closely traces this evolution across a wide range of sources from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries
Language Modeling on a SpiNNaker2 Neuromorphic Chip
Get PDFAs large language models continue to scale in size rapidly, so too does the computational power required to run them. Event-based networks on neuromorphic devices offer a potential way to reduce energy consumption for inference significantly. However, to date, most event-based networks that can run on neuromorphic hardware, including spiking neural networks (SNNs), have not achieved task performance even on par with LSTM models for language modeling. As a result, language modeling on neuromorphic devices has seemed a distant prospect. In this work, we demonstrate the first-ever implementation of a language model on a neuromorphic device – specifically the SpiNNaker2 chip – based on a recently published event-based architecture called the EGRU. SpiNNaker2 is a many-core neuromorphic chip designed for large-scale asynchronous processing, and the EGRU is architected to leverage such hardware efficiently while maintaining competitive task performance. This implementation marks the first time a neuromorphic language model matches LSTMs, setting the stage for taking task performance to the level of large language models. We also demonstrate results on a gesture recognition task based on inputs from a DVS camera. Overall, our results showcase the feasibility of this neuro-inspired neural network in hardware, highlighting significant gains versus conventional hardware in energy efficiency for the common use case of single batch inference.<br/
Coercive control & mother-child relationships: Exploring mothers’ experiences of talking with their children about the abuse
Get PDFCoBrS:Cough Breath Segmentation for the reduction of class-confounding characteristics in dataset curation
Get PDFCough segmentation using Machine Learning is known to be sensitive to the effects of class-confounding char-acteristics in the training data, significantly skewing predictions with the introduction of bias. Mechanisms by which bias may permeate a dataset include small sample sizes and noise in the samples. In this paper, we propose a novel audio segmentation algorithm as a means to solve these issues through automatic isolation and extraction of biological audio events. Our algorithm, CoBrS, is based on heuristics derived from physiological assumptions and is designed to accurately isolate all cough types, including the complex peal cough, and provides segmentation support for breaths, a previously undocumented modality in segmentation literature. CoBrS was validated on three public cough datasets with varying segmentation complexity (Coswara, COUGHVID, Virufy) against two state-of-the-art algorithms (COUGHVID and Virufy), achieving mean signal quality increases of 169.3%, 274.2%, and 39.8%, and sample size increases of 250% and 280 % respectively. Our findings were also manually verified by two human raters who reported a 94% peal cough segmentation rate and that 88 % of coughs in the moderate noise test subset are of high quality. Our algorithm is capable of effectively isolating cough and breath events of all types from samples with low to moderate noise, whilst improving signal quality and retaining high-frequency information that is often lost in the process
Deletion-Contraction and the Surface Tutte Polynomial
Get PDFIn this paper we unify two families of topological Tutte polynomials. The first family is that coming from the surface Tutte polynomial, a polynomial that arises in the theory of local flows and tensions. The second family arises from the canonical Tutte polynomials of Hopf algebras. Each family includes the Las Vergnas, Bollobas–Riordan, and Krushkal polynomials. As a consequence we determine a deletion–contraction definition of the surface Tutte polynomial and recursion relations for the number of local flows and tensions in an embedded graph
Benefits over threats associated with host-country nationals’ acculturation preferences:examining a stereotype content and threat benefit model
Get PDFUrinary incontinence indicates mortality, disability and infections in hospitalised stroke patients
Get PDFObjectivesTo assess the impact of urinary incontinence (UI) on health outcomes over the entire spectrum of acute stroke severity (National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale [NIHSS] scores: 0–42), due to a paucity of data on patients with milder strokes.Patients and MethodsData were prospectively collected (2014–2016) from the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (1593 men, 1591 women; mean [SD] age 76.8 [13.3] years) admitted to four UK hyperacute stroke units (HASUs). Relationships between variables were assessed by multivariable logistic regression. Data were adjusted for age, sex, comorbidities, pre-stroke disability and intra-cranial haemorrhage, and presented as odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals.ResultsAmongst patients with no symptoms or a minor stroke (NIHSS scores of 0–4), compared to patients without UI, patients with UI had significantly greater risks of poor outcomes including: in-hospital mortality; disability at discharge; in-hospital pneumonia; urinary tract infection within 7 days of admission; prolonged length of stay on the HASU; palliative care by discharge; activity of daily living (ADL) support, and new discharge to care home. In patients with more moderate stroke (NIHSS score of 5–15) the same outcomes were identified; being at greater risk for patients with UI, except for palliative care by discharge and ADL support. With the highest stroke severity group (NIHSS score of 16–48) all outcomes were identified except in-patient mortality, pneumonia, and ADL support. However, odds ratios diminished as NIHSS scores increased.ConclusionsUrinary incontinence is a useful indicator of poor short-term outcomes in older patients with an acute stroke, but irrespective of stroke severity. This provides valuable information to healthcare professionals to identify at-risk individuals
Are Right-wing Populists More Likely to Justify Political Violence?
Get PDFDo individuals with right-wing populist ideologies have higher violence-justification attitudes than those supporting different political ideologies? While the literature has confirmed the association between political violence and populism, research on which components of populist ideologies relate to individual attitudes towards political violence is relatively scarce. Based on 18 European democracies, this research note examines whether right-wing populist individuals are more likely to justify political violence to pursue their political goals. The analyses reveal that right-wing populists are generally more likely to justify political violence compared to mainstream voters and non-voters. Additionally, left-wing populist voters also support political violence, although the effect size is comparatively smaller. This indicates that voters’ radicalisation depends on populist ideologies rather than left-right ideological distinctions. The effect among right-wing populists depends on city residence, gender and immigration status. Subsequent analyses suggest that right-wing populists’ attitudes towards violence are not conditional on nativism or anti-immigration perceptions. These findings contribute to the general understanding of the nature and consequences of populism
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