PCR-based Sex Determination in Cattle using Gene Specific Markers

A single paragraph of about 200 words maximum. For research articles, abstractsshould give a pertinent overview of the work. We strongly encourage authors touse the following style of structured abstracts, but without headings: (1) Background:Place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study;(2) Methods: briefly describe the main methods or treatments applied; (3) Results: summarize the article's main findings; (4) Conclusions: indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. The abstract should be an objective representation of the article and it must not contain results that are not presented and substantiated in the main text and should notexaggerate the main conclusions.

Shaping the ‘inexplicable’: A social constructionist analysis of news reporting of familicide-suicide

Media framing helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of news events, often problematically. This study examines how this process interacts with the phenomenon of familicide-suicide, where a person kills one or more family members before taking their own life. A social constructionist analysis of the print media coverage of three high-profile cases in Ireland highlights framing and discursive patterns, contributing to an explanatory framework that is misleading and lacking in an evidence base. As well as a tendency towards broad and poorly supported claims-making, several primary causal frames are prevalent: mental health; financial debt; fall from grace; and ‘out of the blue’, whilst a domestic violence frame is notable in its absence. Coverage is found to be episodic in character, linked to dramatisation and more simplistic explanatory frames, rather than evidence-based analysis of potential causal factors for these incidents. Findings raise important questions for journalistic practice, regarding processes of selection and salience of sources contributing to overall coverage that is partial and biased, rather than an ‘objective’ representation of the social world.

The ENDS of assumptions; an online tool for the Epistemic Nonparametric Drug-response Scoring

MotivationThe drugs sensitivity analysis is often elucidated from drug dose-response curves. These curves capture the degree of cell viability (or inhibition) over a range of induced drugs, often with parametric assumptions that are rarely validated.ResultsWe present a class of nonparametric models for the curve fitting and scoring of drug dose-responses. To allow a more objective representation of the drug sensitivity, these epistemic models devoid of any parametric assumptions attached to the linear fit, allow the parallel indexing such as IC50 and AUC. Specifically, three nonparametric models including Spline, Monotonic, and Bayesian (npS, npM, npB) and the parametric Logistic (pL) are implemented. Other indices including Maximum Effective Dose (MED) and Drug-response Span Gradient (DSG) pertinent to the npS are also provided to facilitate the interpretation of the fit. The collection of these models are implemented in an online app, standing as useful resource for drug dose-response curve fitting and analysis.AvailabilityThe ENDS is freely available online at https://irscope.shinyapps.io/ENDS/ and source codes can be obtained from https://github.com/AmiryousefiLab/ENDS.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics and https://irscope.shinyapps.io/ENDS/[email protected]; [email protected] conceived the study and developed the models, AA and BW adopted and implemented the methods, JT provided the funding, AA, BW, MJ, and JT wrote the paper.

Operational Research to Inform Programmatic Approaches to the Management of Tuberculosis in Uzbekistan

A single paragraph of about 200 words maximum. For research articles, abstracts should give a pertinent overview of the work. We strongly encourage authors to use the following style of structured abstracts, but without headings: (1) Background: Place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study; (2) Methods: briefly describe the main methods or treatments applied; (3) Results: summarize the article’s main findings; (4) Conclusions: indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. The abstract should be an objective representation of the article and it must not contain results that are not presented and substantiated in the main text and should not exaggerate the main conclusions.

Ωto_abR: A Web Application for the Visualization and Analysis of Click-Evoked Auditory Brainstem Responses

Since its inception by Jewett and Williston in the late 1960s, the auditory brainstem response (ABR) has been an indispensable diagnostic tool, used by audiologists around the world. Click-evoked ABR testing proves to be a reliable tool, as it provides an objective representation of the auditory function, an estimate of hearing thresholds and the ability to pinpoint a potential issue in the auditory neural pathway. The present study describes state-of-the-art ABR analytics-related platforms and provides an overview of their functionality. In conjunction, we introduce the design and development of a newly developed, user-friendly web application, built in R language. This application provides several well-known and newly key characteristics for the analysis of ABR waveforms. These include absolute peak latencies, amplitudes, and interpeak latencies.

Pupil-Linked Arousal Biases Evidence Accumulation Toward Desirable Percepts During Perceptual Decision-Making

People’s perceptual reports are biased toward percepts they are motivated to see. The arousal system coordinates the body’s response to motivationally significant events and is well positioned to regulate motivational effects on perceptual judgments. However, it remains unclear whether arousal would enhance or reduce motivational biases. Here, we measured pupil dilation as a measure of arousal while participants ( N = 38) performed a visual categorization task. We used monetary bonuses to motivate participants to perceive one category over another. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the task accurately, participants were more likely to report seeing the desirable category. Furthermore, higher arousal levels were associated with making motivationally biased responses. Analyses using computational models suggested that arousal enhanced motivational effects by biasing evidence accumulation in favor of desirable percepts. These results suggest that heightened arousal biases people toward what they want to see and away from an objective representation of the environment.

The Map and the Territory: The Use of Country Information in Asylum Assessments

When determining who should be accepted as a refugee, decision-makers use information about asylum-seekers’ home countries to assess the credibility of the claim and the risk of future persecution. As such, country information plays a decisive role in the outcome of asylum claims. Based on asylum case files and interviews with decision-makers in Norway, I investigate the use of country information in the refugee status determination process and compare the specific pieces of country information that decision-makers used in their assessments to landmarks on maps. Landmarks here are understood as decision-makers’ interpretations about places, customs, and political and social conditions in asylum-seekers’ home countries. To come across as credible, applicants had to demonstrate knowledge of landmarks familiar to decision-makers, but they also needed to present a story that testified to their personal experience with the landscape in their home countries. Minor deviations from the landmarks could undermine a claim’s credibility. The metaphor of the map as a seemingly objective representation of reality illustrates the authority of country information in the refugee status determination process. As I demonstrate, however, decision-makers based their knowledge of such landmarks not only on formal sources of information, but also on the narratives of other applicants, assumptions about rational behavior, and their own everyday experience with places. In line with the legal mandate to produce a binary decision, decision-makers had to consolidate uncertain information into solid landmarks that enabled them to clearly distinguish between refugees and non-refugees. Because of their important role in enabling such distinctions, landmarks are key in refugee protection on the one hand and migration control on the other.

From computational indicators to law into technologies: the Internet of Things, data analytics and encoding in COVID-19 contact-tracing apps

This paper investigates the data life-cycle of contact-tracing apps (CTAs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the socio-legal implications resulting from the design and technology choices that software developers inevitably make. These choices are often neglected by policy-makers due to the inherent technical complexity of algorithmic decision systems and to certain naive belief in technological solutionism. In particular, this paper shows, first, that technology-harvested data do not reflect an objective representation of reality, and therefore require a context within which to be understood and interpreted for policy and legal purposes; and, second, that the use of data analytics to extract insights from these data enables the production of computational indicators. By looking at how CTAs are used to implement pandemic-mitigation restrictions such as lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing and testing, the paper ultimately brings forth the ways in which technologies – and thus their bias and ways of framing social reality – become embedded in the law.

Recreating Draupadi: A Study of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions

Mythological retellings have explored those issues of the epics which were submerged in the objective representation of the events. Redefining the existence of the epical characters, these revisionist writings have presented the events from the alternate perspectives. With an attempt to deconstruct the concept of ‘truth’, the contemporary mythological retellings have tried to demystify the dominant ideologies, and for this purpose they had brought into forefront the overlooked characters. In the grand narrative of the epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata the perspectives of the women characters were often overlooked; at the same time the objective representation of the events could not provide the necessary space to delve deep into their psyche. Therefore, ample numbers of the contemporary mythological retellings have highlighted the lives of the women characters of the epics, by presenting the events from their perspectives to explore those facets of the ‘truth’ which were overlooked in the source texts. This research article has attempted to reconstruct the identity of Draupadi of the Mahabharata by focusing on her character as depicted by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in her The Palace of Illusions, a wonderful mythological fiction reinterpreting the events of the epic Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective. Adopting a feminist stance, this research article has explored Draupadi’s resistance to patriarchal domination, and in this way, here an attempt has been undertaken to reassert her individuality and to redetermine her role in the epic.

Formation, Functioning and Development of Historical Concepts in the Teaching Process of History

The article examines the modern historical epoch - from the First World War to the present day, and the related concepts and discussions. Concepts and categories that are of paramount importance for the objective representation of this reality are considered. The formation of historical concepts is of particular importance for the overall process of teaching history. The author considers and analyzes different opinions about the methodological requirements towards the concepts in the teaching process in history, presented in the methodological literature. The role of the teacher in clarifying to students the content of new concepts in modern history is pointed.