Genetic and genomic analysis of age at first insemination in Israeli dairy cattle

We performed a genetic analysis of age at first insemination, including estimation of the heritability and genetic correlations with other economic traits, and the consequences of including this trait in the Israeli selection index. The genetic factors affecting age at first insemination were determined via GWAS. Five data sets were analyzed. Data sets 1, 2, and 3 were used to compute variance components among age at first insemination, first calving age, days from first insemination to calving, and the 9 traits included in the Israel breeding index. Heritabilities for age at first insemination, calving age, and days from first insemination to calving in Israeli Holsteins as computed by REML individual animal model analyses of 273,239 Israeli Holstein cows were 0.072, 0.042, and 0.014. The estimated genetic correlation between the first 2 traits was 0.88. In addition to the fact that heritability of age at first insemination is 1.7 times the heritability for calving, the former trait has the advantage that the number of records is greater, and the records are generated earlier. Absolute values of the genetic and residual correlations between age at first insemination and the 9 traits included in the Israeli index were all less than 0.2. Data set 4 included first insemination dates of 1,181,600 calves born from 1985 through 2018. Genetic evaluations were computed by a single trait animal model. Annual phenotypic and genetic trends for age at first calving for calves born since 1985 were “positive,” that is, economically negative, at 0.320 ± 0.003 and 0.169 ± 0.005 d, respectively. Applying the GCTA-GREML software, 54% of variance in the transmitting ability of 1,585 sires could be explained by considering all 40,498 markers included in the GWAS analysis. The significant markers were mainly associated with milk production genes. The SNP UA-IFASA-8854 on chromosome 11 had the lowest probability value, 1.2 × 10^?24. This marker is located between the genes RETSAT and ELMOD3, both of which are overexpressed in human mammary glands. The gene RETSAT is reported to be essential for lipid accumulation and adipogenesis promotion. Gene enrichment analysis found that genes in the genomic region flanking significant markers are associated with vasopressin receptor activity, which was shown to mediate puberty in humans. If age at first insemination is included in the index with a weighting to account for 9% of the index, reductions of 2.8 and 2.6 d for age at first insemination and first calving age after 10 yr of selection are predicted, as compared with reductions of 1.4 and 1.1 d with the current index. Gains for the other index traits are only marginally affected. We suggest selection on age at first insemination as an alternative to selection for early calving.     

土木工程施工课程线上平台教学实践

土木工程施工课程作为土木工程及工程管理专业的学科基础课和核心专业课程,在疫情防控期间"停课不停教""停课不停学"的要求下,通过线上平台进行授课。由于土木工程施工课程内容庞杂、综合性强、实践性强,且章节之间关联性较弱,探究既能使学生快速适应,又能保证教学质量的在线教学方法至关重要。以华南某高校土木工程施工课程为例,基于中国大学MOOC、建筑云课、腾讯课堂、QQ群等线上平台讲授教学内容,并运用问卷调查对课程线上教学效果进行评价。结果表明,线上教学为学生提供了丰富灵活的学习方式,显著提高了学生的自主学习能力,扩大了学生的知识面,达到了较好的学习效果。     

Similarities and differences between male and female novice designers on color‐concept associations for warnings,action required,and signs and equipment status messages

This research examined the male and female novice designers toward color associations for the concepts used for ‘warnings’, ‘action required’, and ‘signs and equipment status’ through a questionnaire‐based study. A total of 178 Hong Kong Chinese final year undergraduate design students (89 males and 89 females) participated in the study. The test used required the participants to indicate their choice of one of nine colors to associations with each of 38 concepts in a color‐concept table, so that any one color could be associated with any one of the concepts. For both male and female groups of novice designers, chi‐square tests revealed a strong color association for each concept tested in this study (P < .05). The results showed males and females agreed on some color‐concept association stereotypes which were therefore gender neutral. The male and female novice designers had the same color associations and similar levels of stereotype strengths for 21 concepts. The nine strongest and therefore most useful color‐concept association stereotypes for both male and female novice designers were: red‐danger, red‐fire, red‐hot, red‐stop, red‐emergency, red‐error, blue‐cold, blue‐male, and green‐exit. However, the male and female novice designers had different color association stereotypes for the standby (green vs. yellow), emergency exit (green vs. red), and toxic (purple vs. black) concepts, and the strengths of the 14 remaining associations for both groups were not at equivalent levels. Overall, it is anticipated that the findings of this study will act as a useful reference for novice designers and other design practitioners to optimize color coding in the design of ‘warnings’, ‘action required’, and ‘signs and equipment status’ messages.     

A proposed expert system for word sense disambiguation: deductive ambiguity resolution based on data mining and forward chaining

One of the major issues in the process of machine translation is the problem of choosing the proper translation for a multi‐sense word referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). Two commonly used approaches to this problem are statistical and example‐based methods. In statistical methods, ambiguity resolution is mostly carried out by making use of some statistics extracted from previously translated documents or dual corpora of source and target languages. Example‐based methods follow a similar approach as they also make use of bilingual corpora. However, they perform the task of matching at run‐time (i.e. online matching). In this paper, by looking at the WSD problem from a different viewpoint, we propose a system, which consists of two main parts. The first part includes a data mining algorithm, which runs offline and extracts some useful knowledge about the co‐occurrences of the words. In this algorithm, each sentence is imagined as a transaction in Market Basket Data Analysis problem, and the words included in a sentence play the role of purchased items. The second part of the system is an expert system whose knowledge base consists of the set of association rules generated by the first part. Moreover, in order to deduce the correct senses of the words, we introduce an efficient algorithm based on forward chaining in order to be used in the inference engine of the proposed expert system. The encouraging performance of the system in terms of precision and recall as well as its efficiency will be analysed and discussed through a set of experiments.     

基于改进关联规则算法的警情数据分析

针对传统Apriori算法挖掘警情数据的缺点，提出一种改进的Apriori算法。该算法首先在关联规则发现阶段引入权值参数，设计支持度阈值函数，以挖掘不常发生的重大案情发生规律；然后提出一种压缩矩阵优化算法，将数据压缩存储在只有0或1的矩阵中，并用2个数组来记录矩阵中每一行及每一列1的总数，可多次压缩矩阵，提升挖掘效率；最后将改进的算法用于实际的警情数据挖掘分析，给出关联规则挖掘结果。实验表明，改进算法不仅执行效率较传统算法有所提升，且针对警情数据的挖掘结果准确性也有所提高。     

黑龙江荒沟抽水蓄能电站主变压器运输方案论证与研究

抽水蓄能电站一般地处偏远山区,大件运输较为困难,且为节约投资,地下主变压器洞室尺寸及运输通道一般较小,因此主变压器运输较为复杂和困难.针对荒沟抽水蓄能电站主变压器洞及主变压器搬运通道已经完成开挖支护的基础上,取消永久搬运轨道,优化主变压器运输,结合国内大中型主变压器厂家运输方案,论证和研究荒沟抽水蓄能电站取消搬运轨道的合理性与可行性.     

A novel approach to adaptive relational association rule mining

The paper focuses on the adaptive relational association rule mining problem. Relational association rules represent a particular type of association rules which describe frequent relations that occur between the features characterizing the instances within a data set. We aim at re-mining an object set, previously mined, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. An adaptive relational association rule method, based on the discovery of interesting relational association rules, is proposed. This method, called ARARM (Adaptive Relational Association Rule Mining) adapts the set of rules that was established by mining the data before the feature set changed, preserving the completeness. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running the mining algorithm again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method's performance on several case studies are also reported. The obtained results highlight the efficiency of the ARARM method and confirm the potential of our proposal.     

Shotgun metagenomics of dust microbiome from flight deck and cabin in civil aviation aircraft

Microbial exposure is related to the health of passengers on commercial aircraft, but no studies characterized the microbial composition at the species level and identified their ecological determinants. We collected vacuum dust from floor and seat surfaces in flight decks and cabins of 18 aircraft, and amplification-free shotgun metagenomics was conducted to characterize the microbial composition. In total, 7437 microbial taxa were identified. The relative abundance for bacteria, eukaryote, viruses, and archaea was 96.9%, 1.8%, 0.3%, and 0.03%, respectively. The top bacterial species mainly derived from outdoor air and human skin included Sphingomonas, Corynebacterium, Micrococcus luteus, Variovorax paradoxus, Paracoccus dentrificans, and Propionibacterium acnes. The abundance of NIAID-defined pathogens was low, accounted for only 0.23% of total microbes. The microbial species and functional composition were structured by the indoor surface type (R² = 0.38, Adonis), followed by the manufacturer of the aircraft (R² = 0.12) and flight duration (R² = 0.07). Indoor surfaces affected species derived from different habitats; the abundance of dry skin and desiccated species was higher on textile surfaces, whereas the abundance of moist and oily skin species was higher on leather surfaces. The growth rates for most microbes were stopped and almost stopped.     

基于关联规则的网络行为分析

网络用户访问网站的过程中,产生了大量的用户浏览网页的相关记录,隐含着用户在上网过程中的行为习惯。但其中潜在的用户信息难以发现。因此,急需有效的方法提取这些数据中的信息,数据挖掘应用而生。其中,关联规则技术是应用广泛的技术之一。文中利用Apriori算法对Web结构数据进行关联规则挖掘,所得到的规则反映出页面之间的链接关系。分析挖掘结果可得到用户访问的行为规律,为相关网站的安全性和优化改进提供有效的决策依据。     

Learned color taste associations in a repeated brief exposure paradigm

Individuals can learn to associate tastes with odors through repeated exposure. We adapted this paradigm, testing whether individuals can learn to associate tastes with colors, and whether these learned color-taste associations generalize to unconditioned, but qualitatively similar stimuli. Experiment 1 tested if individuals could learn color-taste associations for prototypical tastes, while Experiment 2 tested if individuals could learn to discriminate specific bitter compounds using color-taste associations. Conditioned stimuli in Experiment 1 consisted of solutions representing four different prototypical taste qualities. Conditioned stimuli in Experiment 2 consisted of three different bitter stimuli and a sucrose control. Both experiments consisted of six laboratory visits. On day 1, participants rated intensities of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. On days 2–5 participants completed triangle tests, where a color was systematically paired with high/low intensity combinations of the conditioned stimuli. On day 6, participants matched colorless solutions containing the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli to one of four colors in a forced choice task. In Experiment 1, group performance was significantly above chance (25%) when matching the conditioned taste stimulus to the previously paired color. Also, learning generalized to unconditioned stimuli with a similar taste quality. In Experiment 2, group performance versus chance (25%) indicated participants learned associated sweetness with the previously paired color, both for sucrose (conditioned stimulus) and aspartame (unconditioned stimulus). However, matching performance did not exceed chance for the three different bitterants. These data suggest that particular color-taste associations can be learned with repeated exposure, even when the exposure period is relatively brief.