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e-LICO: An e-Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research in Data Mining and Data-Intensive Science

"It is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice that goods should be distributed to individuals according to their contribution, i.e., people should receive equal pay for equal work (equity principle)...Recently, neuroscientific studies have begun to address neural processes underlying social and economic phenomena like e.g., reactions to norm violations, status concerns, and reactions to unfair behavior. These studies have convergingly identified brain regions that are important for these aspects of social behavior. One consistent finding is that activations of the dopaminergic mesolimbic ("reward") system, especially the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) do not exclusively reflect material self-interest, but also social aspects

"Social interactions require fast and efficient person perception, which is best achieved through the process of categorization. However, this process can produce pernicious outcomes, particularly in the case of stigma. This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates involved in forming both explicit ("Do you like or dislike this person?") and implicit ("Is this a male or female?") judgments of people possessing well-established stigmatized conditions (obesity, facial piercings, transsexuality, and unattractiveness), as well as normal controls. Participants also made post-scan disgust ratings on all the faces that they viewed during imaging. These ratings were subsequently examined (modeled linearly) in a parametric analysis. Regions of interest that emerged include areas previously demonstrated to respond to aversive and disgust-inducing material (amygdala and insula), as well as regions strongly associated with inhibition and control (anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortex). Further, greater differences in activation were observed in the implicit condition for both the amygdala and prefrontal cortical regions in response to the most negatively perceived faces. Specifically, as subcortical responses (e.g., amygdala) increased, cortical responses (e.g., lateral PFC and anterior cingulate) also increased, indicating the possibility of inhibitory processing. These findings help elucidate the neural underpinnings of stigma"

The goals of this effort is to design and implement a configurable and extensible semantic eScience framework. Configuration will require some research into accommodating different levels of semantic expressivity and user requirements from use cases. Extensibility will be achieved in a modular approach to the semantic encodings (i.e. ontologies) performed in a community setting, i.e. an ontology framework into which specific applications all the way up to communities can extend the semantics for their needs.

Recent formulations of sexual selection theory emphasise how mate choice can be affected by environmental factors, such as predation risk and resource quality. Women vary greatly in the extent to which they prefer male masculinity and this variation is hypothesised to reflect differences in how women resolve the trade-off between the costs (e.g., low investment) and benefits (e.g., healthy offspring) associated with choosing a masculine partner. A strong prediction of this trade-off theory is that women's masculinity preferences will be stronger in cultures where poor health is particularly harmful to survival. We investigated the relationship between women's preferences for male facial masculinity and a health index derived from World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancies, and the impact of communicable disease. Across 30 countries, masculinity preference increased as health decreased. This relationship was independent of cross-cultural differences in wealth or women's mating strategies. These findings show non-arbitrary cross-cultural differences in facial attractiveness judgments and demonstrate the utility of trade-off theory for investigating cross-cultural variation in women's mate preferences.

When a cycad is ready to reproduce, it grows a large colorful cone, rich with pollen or seed. It signals its readiness by radiating heat or sending out attractive odors to pollinators, who travel back and forth. Once fertilized, the seed-rich cone is ripped apart by hungry seed carriers (who've included over the years, not just birds and insects, but dinosaurs, pterosaurs, bats; these trees have been eaten by just about everybody). But what if you can't find a mate? The tree in London (and its clones that are now growing in botanical gardens all over the world) is a male. It can make pollen. But it can't make the seeds. That requires a female. Researchers have wandered the Ngoya forest and other woods of Africa, looking for an E. woodii that could pair with the one in London. They haven't found a single other specimen. They're still searching. Unless a female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never mate with one of its own. It can be cloned. It can have the occasional fling with a closely related species. Hybrid cycads are sold at plant stores, but those plants aren't the real deal. The tree that sits in London can't produce a true offspring. It sits there, the last in its long line, waiting for a companion that may no longer exist.

"The creation of E-ZPass lanes over the past 15 years has significantly improved the health of newborn babies living near highways in the Northeast, according to a Columbia study. The researchers found that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass lanes reduced premature birthrates by 10.8 percent and low birth weight by 11.8 percent among infants born within 2 kilometers of toll plazas. The net effect has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in saved medical costs."

If you are a Retailer then this blog can help you select the SaaS and custom e-commerce solution for your retail business.

By: Kandil AA, AE Sharief, Ola S.A. Shereif Key Words: Canola, Cultivars, Salinity stress, seedlings characters. Int. J. Agr. Agri. Res. 8(2), 10-18, February 2016. Abstract To study the effect of salinity concentrations on seedlings parameters of some canola cultivars, a laboratory experiment was conducted at Agronomy Department Laboratory of Seed Testing, Faculty of Agriculture, Mansoura University, Egypt, during December 2013. The experiment included two factor, the first factor included three cultivars of canola i.e. Serw 4, Serw 6 and Serw 51 and the second factor included ten concentrations of salinity as NaCl i.e. 0.0 (control treatment), 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, and 1.8 % NaCl). The results showed that Serw 6 cultivar significantly exceeded the other studied cultivars in root and shoot lengths and shoot fresh and dry weights. Whilst, Serw 51 cultivar significantly exceeded the other studied cultivars in root fresh and dry weights, seedling height reduction (SHR), relative dry weight and chlorophyll content in leaves. Salinity stress significantly affected seedlings characters of canola. Due to increasing salinity levels from 0 (control) to 1.8% NaCl, seedlings characters of canola was significantly decreased. It could be concluded that for maximizing canola seedlings parameters, germinated seeds of Serw 6 or Serw 51 cultivars under control treatment (without salinity stress) or under conditions of 0.2% NaCl.

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative: planning of education projects linked with the development of free content; development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning; work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs. networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

The vision for EdITLib, the Digital Library for Education & Information Technology, is to facilitate learning, discovery and innovation by connecting scholarly research on Educational Technology/E-Learning with learning opportunities.

Building Public Health capacity using Internet-based e-learning.

"The Open University is the world's leading provider of flexible, high quality online degrees and distance learning/e learning, serving students across the globe with highly respected degree qualifications, including the triple accredited MBA degree."

Synote makes multimedia resources such as video and audio easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture. Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers. Synote actually provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording,i.e. the media fragments.

The Intelligence in Wikipedia Project aims to accelerate the extraction of Wikipedia knowledge, e.g. with construction of infoboxes, and link the resulting schemata together to form a knowledge base of outstanding size. Not only will this `semantified Wikipedia' be an even more valuable resource for AI, but it will support Faceted browsing and simple forms of inference that may increase the recall of question-answering systems.

"These findings clearly state that there is a relationship between summer suicide rates and biochemical (e.g., plasma L-TRP and melatonin levels, [3H]paroxetine binding to blood platelets), metabolic (serum total cholesterol, calcium and magnesium concentrations), and immune (number of peripheral blood lymphocytes and serum sIL-2R) variables.[18] Another study focused on the association between depression, suicide, and the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). They state that "depression is accompanied by a depletion of n-3 poly-unsaturated fatty acids".[22] Their methodology involved taking periodic blood samples-every month for one year-of healthy volunteers, allowing them to analyze the "PUFA composition in serum phospholipids and [relating] those data to the annual variation in the mean weekly number of suicides". They used an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to document their results, finding that PUFA like arachidonic acid, eicosapentaenoic acid, and docosahexaenoic acid all occurred at significantly lower rates in winter than in summer months. The association between depression, suicide, and PUFA rates is indicative of there being a biological factor in seasonal effects on suicide rates"

"Great inventions and innovations were nearly always @ the overlapping edges of 2 or more disciplines, e.g. optics / microscope: http://ed.iiQii.de/gallery/VictimsOfGroupThink/PersistenceOfMemory_wikipedia_org But think to IT 1) human genome project / Craig Venter and to socialmedia 2) http://coturnix.org/ 3) http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/ 4) http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/reinventing-discovery/ 5 ) „Science is an assault on ignorance, Its legacies are concepts,technologies and databases. As with many walks in life, the most glamorous legacies tend to get the most attention and the least are neglected" http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/maureretal_nature.pdf"

Our passion for developing e-learning material for the automotive sector allows us to realize the full potential of what computers and the Internet can achieve. The Electude team is driven by a vision that we must fundamentally change the way people acquire and retain knowledge and skills - by making it fun, effective and efficient.

"The project was kick-started by a huge public response to the team's research into the genetics of gut bacteria. In a previous study the researchers found that certain gut-specific genetic markers were related to obesity and other diseases. "I got between 50 and 100 e-mails from regular people having problems with the stomach or diarrhoea and wondering if we can help them," Peer Bork, a biochemist and co-creator of MyMicrobes, told Nature. This new website will build on that work, whilst also providing support for concerned members of the public."

"Science is a scheme for thinking and solving issues using evidence. It requires hypotheses, i.e. potential truths that require examination. A hypothesis or scientific idea is only as strong as the evidence to support it. Strong evidence is predictive and reproducible, weak evidence is less so. Scientific thinking gives greater weight to the stronger evidence base."