Models relating crop production to resource capture and resource use efficiency (RESCAP) may be combined with the phenotype model applied in breeding that identifies sources of variation for traits. Estimating the parameters of the RESCAP models with low-cost non-destructive methods can improve the attribution of sources of variation in the phenotype model and, therefore, improve breeding effic...

BACKGROUND Recent studies have found substantial variation in hospital resource use by expired Medicare beneficiaries with chronic illnesses. By analyzing only expired patients, these studies cannot identify differences across hospitals in health outcomes like mortality. This study examines the association between mortality and resource use at the hospital level, when all Medicare beneficiaries...

1. Wildlife managers often rely on resource users, such as recreational or commercial hunters, to achieve management goals. The use of hunters to control wildlife populations is especially common for predators and ungulates, but managers cannot assume that hunters will always fill annual quotas set by the authorities. It has been advocated that resource management models should account for unce...

Female ungulate reproductive success is dependent on the survival of their young, and affected by maternal resource selection, predator avoidance, and nutritional condition. However, potential hierarchical effects of these factors on reproductive success are largely unknown, especially in multi-predator landscapes. We expanded on previous research of neonatal white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virgi...

Spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are large mammalian carnivores, but their societies, called 'clans', resemble those of such cercopithecine primates as baboons and macaques with respect to their size, hierarchical structure, and frequency of social interaction among both kin and unrelated group-mates. However, in contrast to cercopithecine primates, spotted hyenas regularly hunt antelope and co...

STUDY DESIGN Multicenter, retrospective analysis, prospective database, consecutive case series. OBJECTIVE This study examines multicenter variability in patient-level surgical resource use, including implants, biologics, and length of stay (LOS), alongside health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) improvements after adult spinal deformity (ASD) surgery. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Efficiency i...

variation of frequency and voltage by load changes in a microgrid is a challenge in droop control method. centralized restoration frequency or voltage in a microgrid requires communication link and therefore affects the advantage of decentralized droop control such as reliability, simplicity and inexpensiveness. this paper proposes a decentralized method that restores the frequency of a microgr...

Since 1949, China's progress in mortality reduction has far exceeded that experienced by other developing countries with comparable levels of national income. This achievement has taken place in the context of a development strategy oriented, in part, to the elimination of the worst aspects of poverty. Using recent cross-section data, this paper provides a statistical assessment of the extent t...

Mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation and evolution. Mutation accumulation (MA) experiments are an alternative approach to study de novo mutation events directly. We have constructed a resource of Spontaneous Mutation Accumulation Lines (SMAL; http://cefg.uestc.edu.cn/smal), which contains all the current publicly available MA lines identified by high-throughput sequencing. We ha...

This paper reports on an initial and necessary step toward the construction of a Pan-Chinese lexical resource. We investigated the regional variation of lexical items in two specific domains, finance and sports; and explored how much of such variation is covered in existing Chinese synonym dictionaries, in particular the Tongyici Cilin. The domain-specific lexical items were obtained from subse...