Attraction ofCarpophilus spp. (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae) to synthetic aggregation pheromones and host-related coattractants in Australian stone fruit orchards: Beetle phenology and pheromone dose studies

Synthetic aggregation pheromones ofCarpophilus hemipterus (L.) andCarpophilus mutilatus Erichson were field tested during a 10-month period in southern New South Wales stone fruit orchards to determineCarpophilus spp. phenology and the effect of two pheromone doses on attraction. Aggregation pheromones synergize the attraction of host volatiles toCarpophilus spp. Four major species,C. hemipterus, C. mutilatus, C. davidsoni Dobson andC. (Urophorus) humeralis (F.), were trapped, with greater numbers of each species inC. hemipterus pheromone/fermenting whole-wheat breaddough-baited traps, than in dough-only-traps. InC. mutilatus pheromone/ fermenting-dough-baited traps, onlyC. mutilatus andC. davidsoni responded in greater numbers than to dough-only traps. Beetles first appeared in traps in late September (early spring) when daily maximum temperatures averaged 17.5C. Trappings reached a peak during October and declined to very low levels in November–December (late spring-early summer). Numbers trapped of all species increased during February–March (late summer–early autumn), presumably due to the presence of abundant host resources (ripening and fallen fruit), and continued at high levels until May (late autumn). An 18-week study demonstrated significantly greater responses byCarpophilus spp. to 5000-g than to 500-g doses of C.hemipterus andC. mutilatus pheromones. Greatest responses to 5000g were recorded forC. hemipterus andC. mutilatus responding to their own pheromones (increased attraction over dough alone of 259x and 21.2x respectively). Implications of the study and the potential for using synthetic aggregation pheromones for managingCarpophilus spp. populations in Australian stone fruit are discussed.     

Sleep-induced breathing instability. University of Wisconsin-Madison Sleep and respiration Research Group

We present a view of the neuromechanical regulation of breathing and causes of breathing instability during sleep. First, we would expect transient increases in upper airway resistance to be a major cause of transient hypopnea. This occurs in sleep because a hypotonic upper airway is more susceptible to narrowing and because the immediate excitatory increase in respiratory motor output in response to increased loads is absent in non-REM sleep. Secondly, sleep predisposes to an increased occurrence of ventilatory "overshoots", in part because abruptly changing sleep states cause transient changes in upper airway resistance and in the gain of the respiratory controller. Following these ventilatory overshoots, breathing stability will be maintained if excitatory short-term potentiation is the prevailing influence. On the other hand, apnea and hypopnea will occur if inhibitory mechanisms dominate following the ventilatory overshoot. These inhibitory mechanisms include: a) hypocapnia-if transient, will inhibit carotid chemoreceptors and cause hypopnea, but if prolonged will inhibit medullary chemoreceptors and cause apnea; b) a persistent inhibitory effect from lung stretch; c) baroreceptor stimulation, from a transient rise in systemic blood pressure immediately following termination of apnea or hypopnea may partially suppress the accompanying hyperpnea; d) depression of central respiratory motor output via prolonged brain hypoxia. Once apneas are initiated, reinitiation of inspiration is delayed even though excitatory stimuli have risen well above their apneic thresholds, and these prolonged apneas are commonly accompanied by tonic EMG activation of expiratory muscles of the chest wall and upper airway.     

Cognitive performance-altering effects of electronic medical records: an application of the human factors paradigm for patient safety

According to the human factors paradigm for patient safety, health care work systems and innovations such as electronic medical records do not have direct effects on patient safety. Instead, their effects are contingent on how the clinical work system, whether computerized or not, shapes health care providers’ performance of cognitive work processes. An application of the human factors paradigm to interview data from two hospitals in the Midwest United States yielded numerous examples of the performance-altering effects of electronic medical records, electronic clinical documentation, and computerized provider order entry. Findings describe both improvements and decrements in the ease and quality of cognitive performance, both for interviewed clinicians and for their colleagues and patients. Changes in cognitive performance appear to have desirable and undesirable implications for patient safety as well as for quality of care and other important outcomes. Cognitive performance can also be traced to interactions between work system elements, including new technology, allowing for the discovery of problems with “fit” to be addressed through design interventions.     

Confidence intervals for dependent data: Equating non-overlap with statistical significance

We revisit the problem of determining confidence interval widths for the comparison of means. For the independent two-sample (two-sided) case, Goldstein and Healy (1995) draw attention to the fact that comparisons based on 95% error bars are not very effective in assessing the statistical significance of the difference in means and derive the correct confidence interval for such a comparison. We provide an extension to Goldstein and Healy (1995) to account for the correlation structure and unequal variances. We use the results to develop rules of thumb for evaluating differences, in an exploratory manner, like Moses (1987) and Cumming (2009), from the independent case. We illustrate the method for the simple comparison of two means in a real data set, provide R code that may be easily implemented in practice, and discuss the extension of the method to other applied problems.     

MLP bilinear separation

In this paper, we present a thorough mathematical analysis of the use of neural networks to solve a specific classification problem consisting of a bilinear boundary. The network under consideration is a three-layered perceptron with two hidden neurons having the sigmoid serving as the activation function. The analysis of the hidden space created by the outputs of the hidden neurons will provide results on the network’s capacity to isolate two classes of data in a bilinear fashion, and the importance of the value of the sigmoid parameter is highlighted. We will obtain an explicit analytical function describing the boundary generated by the network, thus providing information on the effect each parameter has on the network’s behavior. Generalizations of the results are obtained with additional neurons, and a theorem concerned with analytical reproducibility of the boundary function is established.