scholarly journals Efficient Monitoring of Adult and Immature Mosquitoes Through Metabarcoding of Bulk Samples: A Case Study for Non-Model Culicids With Unique Ecologies

Author(s):  
Pedro M Pedro ◽  
Ivy Luizi Rodrigues de Sá ◽  
Martha Virginia Ribeiro Rojas ◽  
Jandui Almeida Amorim ◽  
Allan Kardec Ribeiro Galardo ◽  
...  

Abstract The rapid and economical monitoring of mosquitos is imperative to understanding the dynamics of both disease vectors and nuisance species. In light of technological advances in mosquito sampling and DNA sequencing, health agencies can now utilize the full potential of metabarcoding pipelines for rapid and standardizable surveillance. Here, we describe mosquito spatial and temporal variation, with particular focus on Mansonia Blanchard species, in the Madeira (Rondônia State) and the Ribeira (São Paulo) watersheds, Brazil using metabarcoding of the D2 rDNA marker. Sampling and molecular pipelines were used to evaluate the taxonomic contribution of mosquitos in pools of culicids collected en masse from macrophyte-roots (immatures) and from Mosquito Magnet traps and protected human landings (adults). Results for adult captures are comparable to morphological diagnoses and clarify previously unknown temporal and spatial species turnover. Metabarcoding of immature stages also confirmed the extent of the geographical distribution of some species and each taxon’s association with macrophyte species. Given the benefits of metabarcoding, such as taxonomic acuity, high throughput processing, and objectivity, we suggest such techniques should be more fully incorporated into culicid monitoring schemes. The metabarcoding protocol described herein paired with standardized field sampling schemes, when used by mosquito monitoring professionals, offers substantial improvements in terms of practicality, speed and cost.

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry G Silverman ◽  
Michael Johns ◽  
Ransom Weaver ◽  
Josh Mosley

This paper describes initial efforts at providing some of the technological advances of the videogame genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators. By providing these capabilities inside an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games may eventually be realized. Sections 1 and 2 postulate three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 3 and 4 present progress on those tools and an in-depth case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create a large interactive drama. We close with lessons learned to date and a look at the remaining challenges: the unpleasant reality that state-of-the-art tools are not yet able to boost the productivity of edutainment authors.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eny Puspita Ningrum

Education is an important thing that has become a necessity for every human being in order to achieve a better quality of life. Education cannot be separated from the educational curriculum, which is where the curriculum continues to develop following every development of society and technological advances. The curriculum is the heart of education and is dynamic in nature where the curriculum must always be updated or changed. From this curriculum reform and change, it is a challenge for teachers to continue to innovate to improve the quality of education. By using a qualitative research method a case study approach, it is hoped that it can explain the real picture that is being experienced by the teacher at SMK Ibnu Sina. which focuses on the Sharia Banking major due to changes in the adjusted curriculum because the world is being faced by COVID-19. In the era of COVID-19, the educational curriculum must be adjusted, which in the beginning learning can be face-to-face now has turned into a distance learning online learning model.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (22) ◽  
pp. 6672
Author(s):  
Rob Bemthuis ◽  
Maria-Eugenia Iacob ◽  
Paul Havinga

The sooner disruptive emergent behaviors are detected, the sooner preventive measures can be taken to ensure the resilience of business processes execution. Therefore, organizations need to prepare for emergent behaviors by embedding corrective control mechanisms, which help coordinate organization-wide behavior (and goals) with the behavior of local autonomous entities. Ongoing technological advances, brought by the Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems of systems paradigms, can support integration within complex enterprises, such as supply chains. In this paper, we propose a reference enterprise architecture for the detection and monitoring of emergent behaviors in enterprises. We focus on addressing the need for an adequate reaction to disruptions. Based on a systematic review of the literature on the topic of current architectural designs for understanding emergent behaviors, we distill architectural requirements. Our architecture is a hybrid as it combines distributed autonomous business logic (expressed in terms of simple business rules) and some central control mechanisms. We exemplify the instantiation and use of this architecture by means of a proof-of-concept implementation, using a multimodal logistics case study. The obtained results provide a basis for achieving supply chain resilience “by design”, i.e., through the design of coordination mechanisms that are well equipped to absorb and compensate for the effects of emergent disruptive behaviors.


Designs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christos Panagopoulos ◽  
Andreas Menychtas ◽  
Panayiotis Tsanakas ◽  
Ilias Maglogiannis

As the world’s population is ageing, the field dealing with technology adoption by seniors has made headway in the scientific community. Recent technological advances have enabled the development of intelligent homecare systems that support seniors’ independent living and allow monitoring of their health status. However, despite the amount of research to understand the requirements of systems designed for the elderly, there are still unresolved usability issues that often prevent seniors from enjoying the benefits that modern ICT technologies may offer. This work presents a usability assessment of “HeartAround”, an integrated homecare solution incorporating communication functionalities, as well as health monitoring and emergency response features. An assessment with the system usability scale (SUS) method, along with in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis, has provided valuable insights for designing homecare systems for seniors, and validated some effective practical guidelines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-192
Author(s):  
Thomas Krayenbuehl ◽  
Nadeem Balushi ◽  
Stephane Gesbert

The principles and benefits of seismic sequence stratigraphy have withstood the test of time, but the application of seismic sequence stratigraphy is still carried out mostly manually. Several tool kits have been developed to semiautomatically extract dense stacks of horizons from seismic data, but they stop short of exploiting the full potential of seismo-stratigraphic models. We introduce novel geometric seismic attributes that associate relative geologic age models with seismic geomorphological models. We propose that a relative sea level curve can be derived from the models. The approach is demonstrated on a case study from the Lower Cretaceous Kahmah Group in the northwestern part of Oman where it helps in sweet-spotting and derisking elusive stratigraphic traps.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Chappell-Maor ◽  
Masha Kolesnikov ◽  
Jonathan Grozovski ◽  
Jung-Seok Kim ◽  
Anat Shemer ◽  
...  

AbstractConditional mutagenesis and fate mapping have contributed considerably to our understanding of physiology and pathology. Specifically, Cre recombinase-based approaches allow the definition of cell type-specific contributions to disease development and inter-cellular communication circuits in respective animals models. Here we compared Cx3cr1CreER and Sall1CreER transgenic mice and their use to decipher the brain macrophage compartment as a showcase to discuss recent technological advances. Specifically, we highlight the need to define the accuracy of Cre recombinase expression, as well as strengths and pitfalls of these particular systems that should be taken into consideration when applying these models.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Hanae AIT HATTANI

<p>With English becoming the world’s lingua franca and the proliferating scientific and technological advances, English language education has been gradually shifting from its classical applications such as EFL (English as a foreign language) or ESL (English as a second language) toward new paradigms like English for specific purposes (ESP). The most important and problematic question in ESP teaching and learning is whether the course is effective or not. ESP is student-task oriented, thus, measuring its effectiveness is strongly related to measuring learners’ attitudes, needs, expectations, satisfaction, and achievement. For this purpose, this study attempted to investigate ESP needs analysis of Moroccan university students, case study of renewable energy engineering students at the Higher School of Technology (ESTF).  The research was conducted using quantitative surveys d. The data was gathered from 30 undergraduate renewable energy engineering students. The study findings confirmed that the participant students have highly favorable attitudes towards English language for both their personal and professional careers. However, the survey results indicated that these students have some difficulties with English language productive skills, namely speaking and writing, in addition to some other sub-skills. Therefore, this research suggests a reform at the level of ESP teaching and learning curricular, focusing on the incorporation of innovative approached and methods that aims at enhancing students’ language acquisition and competency.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Michael Cornelius dos Santos ◽  
Bruna Karine dos Santos ◽  
César Gabriel dos Santos

Abstract: Due to technological advances, trade politicies and society's consumption patterns, competitiveness among companies has increased considerably, requiring practices that provide a constant improvement in production indicators and product quality. In this context, the use of Toyota Production System tools, also known as Lean Manufacturing, have a fundamental role in the elimination of waste and continuous improvement of industrial production levels. Thus, this work aims to implement a standardized work routine among employees working in a market of parts in an Agricultural Machinery industry, which lacks production methods. To represent this situation, real data were used, which correspond to the needs of the assembly line, and which served as the basis for the analysis and implementation of a new work routine. The results obtained enabled the creation of a standardized work routine, which was obtained by balancing activities between operators and eliminating activities that did not add value to the product.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britta Hale ◽  
Douglas L. Van Bossuyt ◽  
Nikolaos Papakonstantinou ◽  
Bryan O’Halloran

Abstract Fuelled by recent technological advances, Machine Learning (ML) is being introduced to safety and security-critical applications like defence systems, financial systems, and autonomous machines. ML components can be used either for processing input data and/or for decision making. The response time and success rate demands are very high and this means that the deployed training algorithms often produce complex models that are not readable and verifiable by humans (like multi layer neural networks). Due to the complexity of these models, achieving complete testing coverage is in most cases not realistically possible. This raises security threats related to the ML components presenting unpredictable behavior due to malicious manipulation (backdoor attacks). This paper proposes a methodology based on established security principles like Zero-Trust and defence-in-depth to help prevent and mitigate the consequences of security threats including ones emerging from ML-based components. The methodology is demonstrated on a case study of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with a sophisticated Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) module.


Crowdsourcing ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1419-1432
Author(s):  
Nina Helander ◽  
Hannu Kärkkäinen ◽  
Jari Jussila

In knowledge society the utilization of social media as a communication channel between people, groups and even companies is increasing. Current innovation and social media research has already shown the potential of crowdsourcing in the business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. The authors argue in this paper, however, that crowdsourcing has a great and yet partly undiscovered potential also in the context of business-to-business (B2B) markets. In order to get the full potential, a more detailed understanding of the logic of value creation in crowdsourcing activities between multiple stakeholders in B2B context is needed. This paper presents an exploratory study that is carried out as an empirical netnography-based multiple case study. The study opens up potential future research avenues by starting the discussion of value creation logic in B2B crowdsourcing. Practical implications are created through cases revealing what kind of value companies have already been able to gain from crowdsourcing in B2B context.


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