Your search

Vineyards in the New England region of the USA were surveyed for the occurrence of grapevine viruses. A total of ten vineyards were visited and 62 composite samples of leaves with the petioles were collected from symptomatic grapevines (Vitis spp.). All of the samples were assayed by double-antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (DAS-ELISA) using antibodies specific for four major grapevine leafroll-associated viruses (GLRaV-1, GLRaV-2, GLRaV-3, and GLRaV-4), grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV), tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), and tomato ringspot virus (ToRSV). Positive ELISA samples were further tested by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) with primers specific for each of the viruses to confirm the ELISA results. Twenty-two samples were infected with at least one of the viruses tested. GLRaV-3 (24.19%) was the most prevalent virus detected followed by GLRaV-1 (12.90%), ToRSV (3.23%), and GLRaV-2 and TRSV (1.61%). This is the first study reporting on the presence of grapevine viruses in New England. Extensive surveys need to be conducted to evaluate the prevalence and economic impact of these viruses on New England vineyards. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Economists have long been intrigued by an influential literature in psychology positing that monetary pay lowers performance on enjoyable tasks by crowding out agents’ intrinsic interest in them. But typical experiments in this literature do not report a full set of performance metrics, which might reveal conflicting evidence on crowding out. Further, they may suffer from confounds. To evaluate these issues, we review over 100 prior tests and run a field experiment building on the canonical two-session test for crowding out wherein agents receive pay for an interesting activity in session 1 that is withdrawn unexpectedly in session 2. We test whether pay harms performance using a comprehensive set of performance measures, and if so, whether unmet pay expectations might also contribute to this decline. Our results on output, productivity and quits are most consistent with a standard economics model than with a crowding-out one. Additional, though more speculative, evidence suggests that unmet pay expectations may harm output quality. © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Social workers have always worked with and within uncertainties in practice, but the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying the frequency and degree of uncertainty across ecological levels. Social workers need enhanced capacity to work with these uncertainties and the impact on individual and collective wellbeing. The RE/UN/DIScover heuristic guides social workers’ responses to the wide range of practice uncertainties experienced in the moment and over time. Drawing on understandings of embodied wellbeing from interpersonal neurobiology and the power relations manifest in intersectional positionality, RE/UN/DIScover offers embodied, iterative practices to access the wealth of capabilities within self and others. IMPLICATIONS Disruptions and uncertainties connected with pandemics, economic recessions, continued systemic injustices and other human-made problems can challenge social workers and impact the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Heuristics are guides that sort, order, and inform decisions and actions. The RE/UN/DIScover heuristic uses knowledge about embodied wellbeing and various forms of power to guide social workers. RE/UN/DIScover offers social workers practices to use with uncertainties both in the moment and over time. © 2020 Australian Association of Social Workers.

Meta-heuristic search algorithms were successfully used to solve a variety of problems in engineering, science, business, and finance. Meta-heuristic algorithms share common features since they are population-based approaches that use a set of tuning parameters to evolve new solutions based on the natural behavior of creatures. In this paper, we present a novel nature-inspired search optimization algorithm called the capuchin search algorithm (CapSA) for solving constrained and global optimization problems. The key inspiration of CapSA is the dynamic behavior of capuchin monkeys.The basic optimization characteristics of this new algorithm are designed by modeling the social actions of capuchins during wandering and foraging over trees and riverbanks in forests while searching for food sources. Some of the common behaviors of capuchins during foraging that are implemented in this algorithm are leaping, swinging, and climbing. Jumping is an effective mechanism used by capuchins to jump from tree to tree. The other foraging mechanisms exercised by capuchins, known as swinging and climbing, allow the capuchins to move small distances over trees, tree branches, and the extremities of the tree branches. These locomotion mechanisms eventually lead to feasible solutions of global optimization problems. The proposed algorithm is benchmarked on 23 well-known benchmark functions, as well as solving several challenging and computationally costly engineering problems. A broad comparative study is conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of CapSA over several prominent meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of optimization precision and statistical test analysis. Overall results show that CapSA renders more precise solutions with a high convergence rate compared to competitive meta-heuristic methods. © 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

This paper presents a study on 80 countries that evaluates the socioeconomic factors in containing the spread and mortality of COVID-19. Our results show that the long-term social factors such as lower personal freedom, better education in science, and past coronavirus outbreak experience are more effective than the economic factors such as higher healthcare-associated factors per 1000 population and larger GDP. However, using GDP per capita as the instrumental variable, we also find that the richer countries with a high degree of personal freedom have a higher number of infection or death cases per million population because they would be less likely to adhere to and implement the policy of the movement restrictions to restrict their access to goods and services. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

A multistage biometric verification system uses multiple biometrics and/or multiple biometric verifiers to generate a verification decision. The core of a multistage biometric verification system is reject option which allows a stage not to give a genuine/impostor decision when it is not confident enough. This paper studies the effectiveness of symmetric rejection for multistage biometric verification systems. The symmetric rejection method determines the reject region by symmetrically rejecting equal proportion of genuine and impostor scores. The applicability of a multistage biometric verification system depends on how secure and user convenient it is, which is measured by the performance–cost trade-off. This paper analyzes the performance–cost trade-off of symmetric rejection method by conducting extensive experiments. Experiments are performed on two biometric databases: (1) publicly available NIST database and (2) a keystroke database. In addition, the symmetric rejection method is empirically compared with two existing rejection methods: (1) sequential probability ratio test-based method, which uses score-fusion and (2) Marcialis et al.’s method, which does not use score fusion. Results demonstrate strong effect of symmetric rejection method on creating a secure and user convenient multistage biometric verification system.

Students may lack the motivation to read for many reasons, including inadequate access to interesting texts, limited encouragement to read for pleasure from adults, instructional practices that do not foster engagement in learning, or a history of reading failure. This article focuses on students with reading disabilities who may have a long-standing dislike of reading born of repeated negative experiences with learning to read. Motivating these students to read for pleasure may seem like an unattainable goal. However, past difficulties in reading do not necessarily mean that children will dislike reading forever. In conjunction with appropriate academic interventions, student interest in reading might be improved by motivational interventions aligned with a theoretical framework discussed in this article: (a) choosing interesting texts to read, (b) stimulating knowledge-based interest, and (c) enhancing task-based interest.

Following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, there is widespread interest in understanding how derivative use drives bank lending behavior. Our paper examines the impact of bank ownership structure on the relationship between derivative use and lending activities of U.S. banks. We find that lending recovered faster in larger banks than smaller banks post-crisis and in line with Diamond’s (Diamond DW 1984 Financial intermediation and delegated monitoring. Rev Econ Stud 51:393–414) systemic risk reduction theory, derivative use is positively associated with lending growth. Ownership is significant in explaining the magnitude of the relationship even after controlling for alternative specifications of the derivative use variable. In both normal and crisis periods, the speed of adjustment of lending to derivatives use by stock banks lags that of mutual banks. We suggest that speculative trading in derivatives substitutes for lending growth to a larger extent for stock banks compared to mutual banks. These findings may have important implications for investors and bank regulators. © 2020, Academy of Economics and Finance.

The Kepler mission and subsequent ground-based follow-up observations have revealed a number of exoplanet host stars with nearby stellar companions. This study presents speckle observations of 57 Kepler objects of interest (KOIs) that are also double stars, each observed over a 3-8 yr period, which has allowed us to track their relative motions with high precision. Measuring the position angle and separation of the companion with respect to the primary can help determine if the pair exhibits common proper motion, indicating it is likely to be a bound binary system. We report on the motions of 34 KOIs that have close stellar companions, three of which are triple stars, for a total of 37 companions studied. Eighteen of the 34 systems are confirmed exoplanet hosts, including one triple star, while four other systems have been subsequently judged to be false positives and twelve are yet to be confirmed as planet hosts. We find that 21 are most likely to be common proper motion pairs, 4 are line-of-sight companions, and 12 are of an uncertain disposition at present. The fraction of the confirmed exoplanet host systems that are common proper motion pairs is approximately 86% in this sample. In this subsample, the planets are exclusively found with periods of less than 110 days, so that in all cases the stellar companion is found at a much larger separation from the planet host star than the planet itself. A preliminary period-radius relation for the confirmed planets in our sample suggests no obvious differences at this stage with the full sample of known exoplanets. © 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Facial expression emojis are commonly used in digital communications and marketing campaigns. However, it is less known how the design of emojis may affect consumer responses. To address this gap, this research examines the impact of emojis’ facial asymmetry levels on consumer judgments. Findings across four studies demonstrate that compared with their symmetric counterparts, asymmetric facial expression emojis are more likely to receive favorable consumer evaluations. This effect is driven by perceptions of human expression resemblance and emotional expression strength and tends to be more prominent among consumers with a higher level of emotional sensitivity. Moreover, marketing messages including an asymmetric (vs. a symmetric) emoji are more likely to generate positive consumer responses.

We report the discovery by the ground-based Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) survey of the transiting exoplanet HAT-P-68b, which has a mass of 0.724 ± 0.043 MJ, and radius of 1.072 ± 0.012 RJ. The planet is in a circular P = 2.2984 day orbit around a moderately bright V = 13.937 ± 0.030 magnitude K-dwarf star of mass ${0.673}_{-0.014}^{+0.020}$ M⊙, and radius 0.6726 ± 0.0069 R⊙. The planetary nature of this system is confirmed through follow-up transit photometry obtained with the Fred L. Whipple Observatory (FLWO) 1.2 m telescope, high-precision radial velocities measured using Keck I/High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES), FLWO 1.5 m/Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES), and Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP) 1.9 m/Sophie, and high-spatial-resolution speckle imaging from WIYN 3.5 m/DSSI. HAT-P-68 is at an ecliptic latitude of +3° and outside the field of view of both the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite primary mission and the K2 mission. The large transit depth of 0.036 mag (r band) makes HAT-P-68b a promising target for atmospheric characterization via transmission spectroscopy.

We provide insights into how the market processes going concern audit opinions based on the trading of some well-documented sophisticated investors–short sellers. We find that abnormal short selling increases significantly upon impending going concern disclosures. While prior literature attributed much of short selling around some corporate events to private information, we find evidence that pre-going-concern announcement short selling reflects both privately informed trading and processing of public information by short sellers. Further, a negative relation between pre-announcement short selling and post-announcement short-term stock returns exists for stocks with less short sale constraints. We also find moderate evidence associating short selling with subsequent bankruptcy to some extent. Overall, these results suggest that short sellers front run going concern announcements based on private information and fundamentals, although trading constraints prevent them fully impounding the severity of negative information in the short run, providing a partial explanation for the long-run price drift post-going concern. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Wang Yangming believes that human nature is entirely good. A question naturally arises: where is evil from? It has been argued that Wang’s idealism gives rise to the problem of evil. I first argue that the difficulty for Wang to have a coherent account of evil can be removed when his idealism is understood in a narrow sense. Second, I offer an account of Wang’s view on evil in three steps. First, I argue that evil comes from the interaction between humans and the external world according to Wang. Second, I show that given Wang’s account of human nature with three aspects, there is no contradiction between Wang’s claim that human nature is the same in everyone and Wang’s claim about differences in our natural endowment which affect our moral practice. Third, I argue that Wang’s doctrine of non-distinction of good and evil in the original substance of human nature is uniquely Confucian. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This study examines how across-trial (average) and trial-by-trial (variability in) amplitude and latency of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) reflect temporal integration of pitch accent and beat gesture. Thirty native English speakers viewed videos of a talker producing sentences with beat gesture co-occurring with a pitch accented focus word (synchronous), beat gesture co-occurring with the onset of a subsequent non-focused word (asynchronous), or the absence of beat gesture (no beat). Across trials, increased amplitude and earlier latency were observed when beat gesture was temporally asynchronous with pitch accenting than when it was temporally synchronous with pitch accenting or absent. Moreover, temporal asynchrony of beat gesture relative to pitch accent increased trial-by-trial variability of N400 amplitude and latency and influenced the relationship between across-trial and trial-by-trial N400 latency. These results indicate that across-trial and trial-by-trial amplitude and latency of the N400 ERP reflect temporal integration of beat gesture and pitch accent during language comprehension, supporting extension of the integrated systems hypothesis of gesture-speech processing and neural noise theories to focus processing in typical adult populations. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nurses conduct physical and psychosocial assessments during admissions to healthcare facilities. Patients rely upon nurses to provide support and education during their journey, from periods of health decline to states of optimal wellness. Therefore, nurses are an ideal population to assess spiritual health. The value and necessity of spiritual assessment were explored on an inpatient unit providing medical and palliative care to patients. Two spiritual assessment tools, comprised each of five items, were evaluated by nursing staff and patients. Spiritual Assessment Tool 1 used language that was unaffiliated with religion, nor a belief in God, and Spiritual Assessment Tool 2 used language affiliated with faith and belief in God. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Since the first COVID-19 case was discovered in December 2019, over 12.1 million cases have been reported in more than 188 countries and territories. In the USA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed almost 3.05 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 132 000 deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a particularly dramatic impact on the elderly and those with chronic underlying medical disorders. Before the second outbreak in July, long-term care facilities were the most severely affected in terms of case numbers, especially nursing homes. This article provides information and insight into the potential changes in consumer preferences toward long-term care facility selection and the possible structural change of the long-term care industry in three aspects; structure, conduct and performance. © 2020 MA Healthcare Ltd. All rights reserved.

Objectives: To determine whether a modifiable risk factor, endotracheal tube size, is associated with the diagnosis of postextubation aspiration in survivors of acute respiratory failure. Design: Prospective cohort study. Setting: ICUs at four academic tertiary care medical centers. Patients: Two hundred ten patients who were at least 18 years old, admitted to an ICU, and mechanically ventilated with an endotracheal tube for longer than 48 hours were enrolled. Interventions: Within 72 hours of extubation, all patients received a flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing examination that entailed administration of ice, thin liquid, thick liquid, puree, and cracker boluses. Patient demographics, treatment variables, and hospital outcomes were abstracted from the patient's medical records. Endotracheal tube size was independently selected by the patient's treating physicians. Measurements and Main Results: For each flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing examination, laryngeal pathology was evaluated, and for each bolus, a Penetration Aspiration Scale score was assigned. Aspiration (Penetration Aspiration Scale score ≥ 6) was further categorized into nonsilent aspiration (Penetration Aspiration Scale score = 6 or 7) and silent aspiration (Penetration Aspiration Scale score = 8). One third of patients (n = 68) aspirated (Penetration Aspiration Scale score ≥ 6) on at least one bolus, 13.6% (n = 29) exhibited silent aspiration, and 23.8% (n = 50) exhibited nonsilent aspiration. In a multivariable analysis, endotracheal tube size (≤ 7.5 vs ≥ 8.0) was significantly associated with patients exhibiting any aspiration (Penetration Aspiration Scale score ≥ 6) (p = 0.016; odds ratio = 2.17; 95% CI 1.14-4.13) and with risk of developing laryngeal granulation tissue (p = 0.02). Conclusions: Larger endotracheal tube size was associated with increased risk of aspiration and laryngeal granulation tissue. Using smaller endotracheal tubes may reduce the risk of postextubation aspiration. © 2020 International Anesthesia Research Society.

Background: The bedside swallowing evaluation (BSE) is an assessment of swallowing function and airway safety during swallowing. After extubation, the BSE often is used to identify the risk of aspiration in acute respiratory failure (ARF) survivors. Research Question: We conducted a multicenter prospective study of ARF survivors to determine the accuracy of the BSE and to develop a decision tree algorithm to identify aspiration risk. Study Design and Methods: Patients extubated after ≥ 48 hours of mechanical ventilation were eligible. Study procedures included the BSE followed by a gold standard evaluation, the flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). Results: Overall, 213 patients were included in the final analysis. Median time from extubation to BSE was 25 hours (interquartile range, 21-45 hours). The FEES was completed 1 hour after the BSE (interquartile range, 0.5-2 hours). A total of 33% (70/213; 95% CI, 26.6%-39.2%) of patients aspirated on at least one FEES bolus consistency test. Thin liquids were the most commonly aspirated consistency: 27% (54/197; 95% CI, 21%-34%). The BSE detected any aspiration with an accuracy of 52% (95% CI, 45%-58%), a sensitivity of 83% (95% CI, 74%-92%), and negative predictive value (NPV) of 81% (95% CI, 72%-91%). Using recursive partitioning analyses, a five-variable BSE-based decision tree algorithm was developed that improved the detection of aspiration with an accuracy of 81% (95% CI, 75%-87%), sensitivity of 95% (95% CI, 90%-98%), and NPV of 97% (95% CI, 95%-99%). Interpretation: The BSE demonstrates variable accuracy to identify patients at high risk for aspiration. Our decision tree algorithm may enhance the BSE and may be used to identify patients at high risk for aspiration, yet requires further validation. Trial Registry: ClinicalTrials.gov; No.: NCT02363686; URL: www.clinicaltrials.gov; © 2020 American College of Chest Physicians

Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men’s dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households (n = 45) over a period of 16 weeks (for a total of 120 interviews), the authors find that men and women in comparable circumstances perceive similar risks of COVID-19, but they diverge in their attitudes toward, and responses to, these risks. Connecting scholarship on gender and care work with research on risk, the authors argue that gender differences in attitudes toward risk are influenced by the unique and strenuous care work responsibilities generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which are borne primarily by women—and from which men are exempt. © The Author(s) 2020.