Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

A Stochastic Model to Assess the Effect of Meat Inspection Practices on the Contamination of the Pig Carcasses

The objective of meat inspection is to promote animal and public health by preventing, detecting, and controlling hazards originating from animals. With the improvements of sanitary level in pig herds, the hazards profile has shifted and the inspection procedures no longer target major foodborne pathogens (i.e., not risk based). Additionally, carcass manipulations performed when searching for macroscopic lesions can lead to cross‐contamination. We therefore developed a stochastic model to quantitatively describe cross‐contamination when consecutive carcasses are submitted to classic inspection procedures. The microbial hazard used to illustrate the model was Salmonella, the data set was obtained from Brazilian slaughterhouses, and some simplifying assumptions were made. The model predicted that due to cross‐contamination during inspection, the prevalence of contaminated carcass surfaces increased from 1.2% to 95.7%, whereas the mean contamination on contaminated surfaces decreased from 1 logCFU/cm² to ?0.87 logCFU/cm², and the standard deviations decreased from 0.65 to 0.19. These results are explained by the fact that, due to carcass manipulations with hands, knives, and hooks, including the cutting of contaminated lymph nodes, Salmonella is transferred to previously uncontaminated carcasses, but in small quantities. These small quantities can easily go undetected during sampling. Sensitivity analyses gave insight into the model performance and showed that the touching and cutting of lymph nodes during inspection can be an important source of carcass contamination. The model can serve as a tool to support discussions on the modernization of pig carcass inspection.     

Sexual Beliefs and Sexual Functioning: The Mediating Role of Cognitive Distraction

Dysfunctional sexual beliefs are vulnerability factors for sexual dysfunction. This cross-sectional study aimed to test the mediating role of cognitive distraction on the relationship between dysfunctional sexual beliefs about sexual functioning shared by men and women and sexual function. The authors used a sample of 421 cisgender heterosexual participants involved in a monogamous relationship. The hypothesized mediation model was tested using a bootstrapped cross product of coefficients approach. Results showed a significant negative, indirect effect between dysfunctional sexual beliefs and women's sexual function through cognitive distraction. The discussion of this study highlights the importance of cognitive factors in sexual functioning.     

What Influences the Location of Nonprofit Organizations? A Spatial Analysis in Brazil

What are the local characteristics influencing where new nonprofits will be established? How important are community needs, available resources, or the existence of similar organizations for nonprofits’ location? This paper analyzes how the characteristics of 5562 Brazilian municipalities in the year 2000 help explain the location of nonprofits formed between 2001 and 2010. Based on geographically weighted regressions, results indicate that neither access to resources nor poor socioeconomic indicators are powerful influences on nonprofit location in Brazilian municipalities. The main predictor of nonprofit entry is a high pre-existing density of nonprofits in that area. These findings, however, vary across regions and nonprofit fields of activity. By mapping the effect of key explanatory variables, this paper helps understand nonprofit location. The methodology and findings on nonprofit location presented here are novel and may contribute to research in other countries.     

Dopamine Genes and Pathological Gambling in Discordant Sib-Pairs

Pathological gambling (PG) is an impulse control disorder that has been considered as a behavioral addiction. Recent studies have suggested the involvement of the dopaminergic system in addictions and impulse control disorders and associations of dopamine receptor genes (DRD1, DRD2, and DRD4) and PG have been reported. In the present study, 140 sib-pairs discordant for the diagnosis of PG (70 males and 70 females on each group) were recruited through the Gambling Outpatient Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of Sao Paulo and were assessed by trained psychiatrists. A family-based association design was chosen to prevent population stratification. All subjects were genotyped for dopamine receptor genes (DRD1 -800 T/C, DRD2 TaqIA RFLP, DRD3 Ser9Gly, DRD4 48bp exon III VNTR, DRD5 (CA) repeat) and the dopamine transporter gene (SCL6A3 40 bp VNTR). Our results suggest the association of PG with DRD1 -800 T/C allele T (P = .03).     

Regression models to dependence for exceedance

Extreme Value Theory (EVT) aims to study the tails of probability distributions in order to measure and quantify extreme events of maximum and minimum. In river flow data, an extreme level of a river may be related to the level of a neighboring river that flows into it. In this type of data, it is very common for flooding of a location to have been caused by a very large flow from an affluent river that is tens or hundreds of kilometers from this location. In this sense, an interesting approach is to consider a conditional model for the estimation of a multivariate model. Inspired by this idea, we propose a Bayesian model to describe the dependence of exceedance between rivers, where we considered a conditionally independent structure. In this model, the dependence between rivers is captured by modeling the excess marginally of one river as a consequence of linear functions of the other rivers. The results showed that there is a strong and positive connection between excesses in one river caused by the excesses of the other rivers.     

抗日战争时期工厂内迁及其对大后方工业的影响

抗日战争爆发后 ,国民政府被迫组织了沿江沿海国营和部分民营工厂迁往我国西南等内地。工厂内迁促进了大后方工业的发展 ,为大后方迅速建立起新的工业基础 ,改变了过去不合理的工业局面。虽然这是在特殊的历史背景下的战时政治经济的产物 ,在很大程度上受制于战争的进展和时局的转换 ,但它却使西部地区的工业在战时短短的数年便走完了平时需要数十年乃至百余年才能走完的历程 ,并为嗣后西部地区工业的发展创设了一些条件和留下了一定的基础。抗日战争时期 ,国民政府主动或被动所采取的有关政策而形成的发展西部地区工业经济的模式 ,至今仍有鉴借意义