Australian National University

About: Australian National University is a education organization based out in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 34419 authors who have published 109261 publications receiving 4315448 citations. The organization is also known as: The Australian National University & ANU.

Effects of salt stress on the growth, ion content, stomatal behaviour and photosynthetic capacity of a salt-sensitive species, Phaseolus vulgaris L.

Abstract: Phaseolus vulgaris (cv. Hawkesbury Wonder) was grown over a range of NaCl concentrations (0–150 mM), and the effects on growth, ion relations and photosynthetic performance were examined. Dry and fresh weight decreased with increasing external NaCl concentration while the root/shoot ratio increased. The Cl- concentration of leaf tissue increased linearly with increasing external NaCl concentration, as did K+ concentration, although to a lesser degree. Increases in leaf Na+ concentration occurred only at the higher external NaCl concentrations (≧100 mM). Increases in leaf Cl- were primarily balanced by increases in K+ and Na+. X-ray microanalysis of leaf cells from salinized plants showed that Cl- concentration was high in both the cell vacuole and chloroplast-cytoplasm (250–300 mM in both compartments for the most stressed plants), indicating a lack of effective intracellular ion compartmentation in this species. Salinity had little effect on the total nitrogen and ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (RuBP) carboxylase (EC 4.1.1.39) content per unit leaf area. Chlorophyll per unit leaf area was reduced considerably by salt stress, however. Stomatal conductance declined substantially with salt stress such that the intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) was reduced by up to 30%. Salinization of plants was found to alter the δ13C value of leaves of Phaseolus by up to 5‰ and this change agreed quantitatively with that predicted by the theory relating carbon-isotope fractionation to the corresponding measured intercellular CO2 concentration. Salt stress also brought about a reduction in photosynthetic CO2 fixation independent of altered diffusional limitations. The initial slope of the photosynthesis versus Ci response declined with salinity stress, indicating that the apparent in-vivo activity of RuBP carboxylase was decreased by up to 40% at high leaf Cl- concentrations. The quantum yield for net CO2 uptake was also reduced by salt stress.

Antimicrobial Resistance: a One Health Perspective.

Abstract: One Health is the collaborative effort of multiple health science professions to attain optimal health for people, domestic animals, wildlife, plants, and our environment. The drivers of antimicrobial resistance include antimicrobial use and abuse in human, animal, and environmental sectors and the spread of resistant bacteria and resistance determinants within and between these sectors and around the globe. Most of the classes of antimicrobials used to treat bacterial infections in humans are also used in animals. Given the important and interdependent human, animal, and environmental dimensions of antimicrobial resistance, it is logical to take a One Health approach when addressing this problem. This includes taking steps to preserve the continued effectiveness of existing antimicrobials by eliminating their inappropriate use and by limiting the spread of infection. Major concerns in the animal health and agriculture sectors are mass medication of animals with antimicrobials that are critically important for humans, such as third-generation cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones, and the long-term, in-feed use of medically important antimicrobials, such as colistin, tetracyclines, and macrolides, for growth promotion. In the human sector it is essential to prevent infections, reduce over-prescribing of antimicrobials, improve sanitation, and improve hygiene and infection control. Pollution from inadequate treatment of industrial, residential, and farm waste is expanding the resistome in the environment. Numerous countries and several international agencies have included a One Health approach within their action plans to address antimicrobial resistance. Necessary actions include improvements in antimicrobial use regulation and policy, surveillance, stewardship, infection control, sanitation, animal husbandry, and alternatives to antimicrobials. WHO recently has launched new guidelines on the use of medically important antimicrobials in food-producing animals, recommending that farmers and the food industry stop using antimicrobials routinely to promote growth and prevent disease in healthy animals. These guidelines aim to help preserve the effectiveness of antimicrobials that are important for human medicine by reducing their use in animals.

An architecture for parallel topic models

Abstract: This paper describes a high performance sampling architecture for inference of latent topic models on a cluster of workstations. Our system is faster than previous work by over an order of magnitude and it is capable of dealing with hundreds of millions of documents and thousands of topics.The algorithm relies on a novel communication structure, namely the use of a distributed (key, value) storage for synchronizing the sampler state between computers. Our architecture entirely obviates the need for separate computation and synchronization phases. Instead, disk, CPU, and network are used simultaneously to achieve high performance. We show that this architecture is entirely general and that it can be extended easily to more sophisticated latent variable models such as n-grams and hierarchies.

Utilitarianism: A critique of utilitarianism

Abstract: If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how . – Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols Introductory This essay is not designed as a reply to Smart's. It has been written after it, in knowledge of it, and from an opposed point of view, but it does not try to answer his arguments point for point, nor to cover just the same ground. Direct criticism of Smart's text is largely confined to parts of section 6, where I have tried to show that a certain ambiguity in Smart's defence of act-utilitarianism, as against other sorts, arises from a deep difficulty in the whole subject. I have not attempted, either, to give an account of all the important issues in the area, still less a critical survey of the major items in the literature; I have pursued those questions which seemed to me the most interesting and have deliberately left out a number of things which are often discussed. Like Smart, I have very largely treated utilitarianism as a system of personal morality rather than as a system of social or political decision, but I have tried to say something, very much in outline, about political aspects in section 7.

Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning with Odd-One-Out Networks

Abstract: We propose a new self-supervised CNN pre-training technique based on a novel auxiliary task called odd-one-out learning. In this task, the machine is asked to identify the unrelated or odd element from a set of otherwise related elements. We apply this technique to self-supervised video representation learning where we sample subsequences from videos and ask the network to learn to predict the odd video subsequence. The odd video subsequence is sampled such that it has wrong temporal order of frames while the even ones have the correct temporal order. Therefore, to generate a odd-one-out question no manual annotation is required. Our learning machine is implemented as multi-stream convolutional neural network, which is learned end-to-end. Using odd-one-out networks, we learn temporal representations for videos that generalizes to other related tasks such as action recognition. On action classification, our method obtains 60.3% on the UCF101 dataset using only UCF101 data for training which is approximately 10% better than current state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods. Similarly, on HMDB51 dataset we outperform self-supervised state-of-the art methods by 12.7% on action classification task.