32151 research outputs found
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Genotype and social environment influence female-female interactions in a non-social insect
Get PDFThis work was funded by a UK Natural Environment Research Council grant to N.W.B. (NE/T0006191/1) and an Iapetus2 PhD studentship (NE/S007431/1) to A.D.Factors shaping social interactions between females are understudied in non-social insects. We tested whether female–female investigation, aggression and same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB) are influenced by genotypic and environmental factors in the Hawaiian field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus. Males ordinarily sing to attract females, but some are silenced by an X-linked mutation (flatwing) that protects males against an eavesdropping parasitoid fly and impacts female gene expression. To test how the rapid evolution of silence impacts female social behaviour, we matched or mismatched females by genotype and observed them in paired trials exposed to male song or silence. The song treatment mimicked normal cricket populations versus those in which flatwing has fixed. Most female–female interactions involved social investigation characterized by unescalated antennal contact. Aggression and SSB also occurred but were less frequent. Female pairs interacted more in the presence of male song, and this plasticity was augmented when female genotypes matched. This implies that male song is a catalyst for female social interaction, and its evolved loss may reduce investment in female intrasexual interactions in a genotype-dependent manner. We advocate for wider investigation of the function and fitness consequences of female–female behaviour, a phenomenon likely to be neglected in many taxa.Peer reviewe
A model of the impact of government revenue and the quality of governance on electricity and clean fuel use
Get PDFWhen governments have more revenue, they can invest in infrastructure, such as the provision of electricity or clean fuels, which is more effective in well-governed countries. Here, we use an equilibrium correction model to empirically investigate the relationship between government revenue per capita, six indicators of quality of governance, and the proportion of the population with access to electricity and clean fuels, using an unbalanced panel dataset that includes nearly all countries in the world. The results suggest a strong effect over time: as government revenue increases, the provision of electricity and clean fuels increases, and the magnitude of this influence is mediated significantly by a country’s quality of governance. This model offers the ability to demonstrate the impact of increases and decreases in government revenue in an individual country, while accounting for the impact of revenue on governance and on the provision of electricity and clean fuels.Peer reviewe
Self-care tooling innovation in a disabled kea (Nestor notabilis)
Get PDFFunding: This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation (AHT), a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (AHT), and a Prime Minister’s McDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize (AHT). It was also supported by the ÚNKP-20-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (KH).Tooling is associated with complex cognitive abilities, occurring most regularly in large-brained mammals and birds. Among birds, self-care tooling is seemingly rare in the wild, despite several anecdotal reports of this behaviour in captive parrots. Here, we show that Bruce, a disabled parrot lacking his top mandible, deliberately uses pebbles to preen himself. Evidence for this behaviour comes from five lines of evidence: (i) in over 90% of instances where Bruce picked up a pebble, he then used it to preen; (ii) in 95% of instances where Bruce dropped a pebble, he retrieved this pebble, or replaced it, in order to resume preening; (iii) Bruce selected pebbles of a specific size for preening rather than randomly sampling available pebbles in his environment; (iv) no other kea in his environment used pebbles for preening; and (v) when other individuals did interact with stones, they used stones of different sizes to those Bruce preened with. Our study provides novel and empirical evidence for deliberate self-care tooling in a bird species where tooling is not a species-specific behaviour. It also supports claims that tooling can be innovated based on ecological necessity by species with sufficiently domain-general cognition.Peer reviewe
Expert evaluation of large language models for clinical dialogue summarization
Get PDFWe assessed the performance of large language models’ summarizing clinical dialogues using computational metrics and human evaluations. The comparison was done between automatically generated and human-produced summaries. We conducted an exploratory evaluation of five language models: one general summarisation model, one fine-tuned for general dialogues, two fine-tuned with anonymized clinical dialogues, and one Large Language Model (ChatGPT). These models were assessed using ROUGE, UniEval metrics, and expert human evaluation was done by clinicians comparing the generated summaries against a clinician generated summary (gold standard). The fine-tuned transformer model scored the highest when evaluated with ROUGE, while ChatGPT scored the lowest overall. However, using UniEval, ChatGPT scored the highest across all the evaluated domains (coherence 0.957, consistency 0.7583, fluency 0.947, and relevance 0.947 and overall score 0.9891). Similar results were obtained when the systems were evaluated by clinicians, with ChatGPT scoring the highest in four domains (coherency 0.573, consistency 0.908, fluency 0.96 and overall clinical use 0.862). Statistical analyses showed differences between ChatGPT and human summaries vs. all other models. These exploratory results indicate that ChatGPT’s performance in summarizing clinical dialogues approached the quality of human summaries. The study also found that the ROUGE metrics may not be reliable for evaluating clinical summary generation, whereas UniEval correlated well with human ratings. Large language models may provide a successful path for automating clinical dialogue summarization. Privacy concerns and the restricted nature of health records remain challenges for its integration. Further evaluations using diverse clinical dialogues and multiple initialization seeds are needed to verify the reliability and generalizability of automatically generated summaries.Peer reviewe
Novel method for the rapid establishment of antibiotic susceptibility profiles in bacterial strains linked to musculoskeletal infections using Scattered Light Integrated Collector technology
Get PDFFunding: This study was funded by the collaborative research grant of the universities St Andrews and Bonn, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC2151—390873048, and the John Templeton Foundation (grant #62214).Bacterial antibiotic resistance is an important challenge that the healthcare system is continually battling and a major problem in the treatment of musculoskeletal infections such as periprosthetic joint infections. Current methods to identify infectious microbes and define susceptibility to antibiotics require two to ten days from isolation to the establishment of an antibiogram. This slow process limits advances in antimicrobial drug discovery and, in the clinical context, delays the delivery of targeted treatments, with potentially devastating outcomes for patients. With this in mind, we strived to establish a quicker and more sensitive method to deliver antibiotic susceptibility profiles of clinically relevant microbes using Scattered Light Integrated Collector (SLIC) technology. We established antibiotic panels to obtain an approximate identification of a wide variety of microbes linked to periprosthetic joint infections and determine their susceptibility to antibiotics. We challenged microbes isolated from patients with our tailored antibiotic panels and found that SLIC detects perturbations in bacterial growth accurately and reproducibly within minutes of culture. Indeed, we could show that SLIC can be used to measure the dose-dependent inhibitory or bacteriolytic activity of broad classes of antibiotics. Our panel design enabled us to establish a profile similar to an antibiogram for the tested bacteria within 90 min. Our method can provide information on the class of bacteria tested and potential treatment avenues in parallel. Our proof-of-principle experiments using isolated clinical strains of bacteria demonstrate that SLIC, together with our specifically designed antibiotic panels, could be used to rapidly provide information on the identity of an infecting microbe, such as those associated with periprosthetic joint infections, and guide physicians to prescribe targeted antibiotic treatment early-on. The constant emergence of resistant strains of bacteria pushes the pharmaceutical industry to develop further effective drugs. Our optimized method could significantly accelerate this work by characterizing the efficacy of new classes of compounds against bacterial viability within minutes, a timeframe far shorter than the current standards.Peer reviewe
“Even though I’m not an incel, I’m still an involuntary celibate” : a journey in and out of inceldom
Get PDFIncels, or involuntary celibates, represent a sub-section of the manosphere: an informal confederacy of digital communities where men construct and strengthen anti-feminist/male hegemonic narratives. Inceldom represents a beta masculine identity, with members placing themselves at the bottom of a natural hierarchy. Bonded by a shared belief in their genetic inferiority and ensuing sexual marginalization, they are depressed and angered by the perceived permanence of their circumstances. In extreme cases, this outlook has been linked to acts of mass murder. The present study investigated how these digital communities attract young men, why they stay, and how they can be supported to leave. Online interviews were conducted with ex-incels to study why they joined incel communities, stayed in them, and later left. Thematic analysis identified six key themes, representing key stages across their journey in and out of inceldom: i) involuntary celibacy before inceldom; ii) “fucked by the world;” iii) failing with women = failing at life; iv) a safe space; vi) online de-radicalization; and vi) residue. Combined, they demonstrate how insular online spaces further isolate and radicalize socially inhibited young men.Peer reviewe
Housing governance and racialisation: : ‘inclusivity’ in housing access and experience
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council for the project ‘Exploring racial and ethnic inequality in a time of crisis' (ES/V013475/1) and ‘The social, cultural and economic impacts of the pandemic on ethnic and racialised groups in the UK’ (ES/W000849/1).In March 2022, the UK government refined its approach to tackling systemic inequalities with a seemingly innocuous refrain: ‘inclusivity’. The instilling of shared values and economic development were discursively framed in central government rhetoric as the solutions to existing disparities and processes that were linked to places deemed as deprived. Drawing on data from forty-seven interviews with policy practitioners, anti-racist networks, and racially minoritised residents in two UK sites (Oldham and Glasgow), this article examines the persistent ways that racialised discourses, structures and ideologies shape housing access and experience. The insights generated from this article shed light on housing policy in three ways: firstly, by identifying the pervasiveness of racialisation and racism in social housing allocation systems; secondly, by evidencing the devaluing of anti-racist knowledge and the role of urban development initiatives in erasing anti-racist networks; and, thirdly, by exploring how local practitioners identify the problems of housing inclusivity as rooted in lack of residential mixing and inter-personal racism, rather than operating institutionally. The article concludes that adopting an approach that is attentive to institutional forms of whiteness and racialisation enhances understanding of the policy landscapes within which practitioners operate, and the existing racial injustices in housing experience that are reproduced.Peer reviewe
Catholic print networks in Restoration England, 1660-1688
No full textThis thesis explores the activities of those who engaged in the Catholic print trade, primarily in London, throughout the reigns of Charles II and James VII & II. It proposes that there persisted a small, but thriving, market in Catholic books produced in London, particularly around Somerset House, that served England and Wales. This Catholic print trade functioned through a series of cross-confessional networks built on commercial, geographical, religious, and social bonds. These networks involved avowed Catholics and Protestants as well as a number of printers and booksellers with unknown or shifting religious affiliations. The trade was aided by the social and legal ambiguity over what made a text ‘popish’, and this sometimes enabled ostensibly ‘Catholic’ books to become bestsellers. To produce and disperse the printed works, networks used methods common to missionary and recusant populations as well as the illicit book trade. However, the operation of the trade also reflected Restoration-era developments and an awareness of the post-1660 legal context, including the 1662 Licensing Act. Changes in the political situation continued to alter these networks, most significantly during the Popish Plot and ‘tory reaction’ and the reign of the Catholic James VII & II. In particular, the latter superimposed a more homogeneously Catholic, royally backed network onto the market. By reconstructing the networks of people who produced Catholic texts, this thesis restores the agency of many Catholics, fleshing out the lives of previously obscure bookmen while simultaneously offering reassessments of major figures including James and Catherine of Braganza. At the same time, it demonstrates the benefits of placing Catholics’ experiences within a broader English context and showcases the multifaceted relationships between early modern persons. Finally, it offers a basis for exploring overlapping English Catholic and English Protestant public spheres by showing how, even when illicit, Catholic print never existed in isolation
Synthesis Methods and Reporting Tool (SMART) for research syntheses in applied linguistics
Get PDFThis article presents the Synthesis Methods and Reporting Tool (SMART), a guide on methodological and reporting practices for all types of research synthesis (RS) in applied linguistics. SMART is developed based on published RSs and methodological publications on RS in applied linguistics and RS checklists in other disciplines. To ensure SMART is field-specific, a group of RS specialists in applied linguistics provided input and feedback. SMART is underpinned by four principles (STAR): systematicity, transparency, accessibility, and reflexivity, and comprises three key stages (preparation, method, and reporting); it aims to cover all procedures and practices that need to be considered before, during, and after conducting an RS. A unique feature of SMART is the inclusion of baseline and preferred practices: ‘baseline practices' refer to minimum requirements that an RS needs to meet while ‘preferred practices' provide suggestions that researchers are encouraged to implement. The introduction of SMART provides the applied linguistics community, especially those new to RS, with an easy-to-use tool to guide RS methodologies. While the intention is not to replace other RS tools, SMART is developed to be responsive to the development, standard, and characteristics of RS in applied linguistics.Peer reviewe
Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre. By Amina ElHalawani.
Get PDFStaging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre. By Amina ElHalawani. London and New York: Routledge, 2024; pp. 170 + x.Non peer reviewe
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