From Regional to National Clouds: TV Coverage in the Czech Republic

Media, and particularly TV media, have a great impact on the general public. In recent years, spatial patterns of information and the relevance of intangible geographies have become increasingly important. Gatekeeping plays a critical role in the selection of information that is transformed into media. Therefore, gatekeeping, through national media, also co-forms the generation of mental maps. In this paper, correspondence analysis (a statistical method) combined with cloud lines (a new visual analytics technique) is used to analyze how individual major regional events in one of the post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, penetrate into the media on a national scale. Although national news should minimize distortions about regions, this assumption has not been verified by our research. Impressions presented by the media of selected regions that were markedly influenced by one or several events in those regions demonstrate that gatekeepers, especially news reporters, functioned as a filter by selecting only a few specific, and in many cases, unusual events for dissemination.     

Use of an artificial antigen simulating the Salmonella O-determinant 4 for determining antibodies to Salmonella group B O-antigen in immunoenzyme analysis

The use of the artificial antigen abequosylmannoside copolymer with acrylamide in the enzyme immunoassay for the determination of antibodies in the sera of salmonellosis patients has enhanced the specificity of the serological diagnosis of group B salmonellosis in comparison with the use of the natural antiren, S. typhimurium lipopolysaccharide.     

EPR study of iron status in human body during intensive physical activity

The iron metabolism was studied in serum blood samples collected from 26 professional sportsmen undergoing intensive physical exercises using EPR combined with hematological and biochemical laboratory tests. Only 23% of EPR spectra (n = 6) were practically normal while in the rest spectra additional abnormal absorption lines were detected. Presumably, the significant portion of new signals may be caused by different cytochromes. Moreover, the anisotropic signals with g ₁ ? 2.02; g ₂ ? 1.94 and g ₃ ? 1.86 registered in some spectra pointed to the sulfur-iron centers. There was nearly linear correlation between the concentration of Fe³⁺ in transferrin (Fe³⁺-Tf) obtained from the EPR spectra and the serum iron concentration measured by absorption photometry both for sportsmen and controls (healthy individuals and patients with different diseases). At equal serum iron concentrations the Fe³⁺-Tf level was higher in sportsmen than that in controls. The Pearson correlation coefficient (r) for Fe³⁺-Tf and serum iron values was equal to 0.89 in sportsmen versus r = 0.97 in controls. Additional new lines in serum EPR spectra of professional sportsmen prove the suitability of EPR assay for scheduled medical exams since routine biochemical and hematological tests are insufficient to discover all abnormalities in iron metabolism under intensive physical exercises.     

Slow Cortical Potentials Preceeding Visually Guided Saccades in Schizophrenics

The parameters of saccades and presaccadic slow potentials were studied in right-handed men with a dominant right eye, including 19 schizophrenics and 12 healthy subjects. For visual stimulation, three light-emitting diodes were used, which were located in the center of the visual field (the central fixation stimulus) and 10° to the right and left of it (peripheral stimuli). Two stimulation protocols were used: with a simultaneous switching off of the central fixation stimulus and switching on of the peripheral stimuli (test 1) and with an interstimulus gap of 200 ms (test 2). According to the latency, saccades were divided into anticipatory, express, and regular. Slow EEG potentials preceding regular saccades were analyzed. It was found that the proportion of anticipatory saccades is considerably higher than the normal value in schizophrenia. The analysis of the presaccadic potentials demonstrated a significant decrease in the amplitude of negative potentials in the vertex region at early stages of presaccadic preparation and its increase in the occipital region at late stages. Test 2 in the patients demonstrated an increase in the positivity focus in the frontal region of the right hemisphere. It was assumed that the alterations found in schizophrenia result from the deficit of frontal cortical fields.     

Advantages of Task-Specific Multi-Objective Optimisation in Evolutionary Robotics

The application of multi-objective optimisation to evolutionary robotics is receiving increasing attention. A survey of the literature reveals the different possibilities it offers to improve the automatic design of efficient and adaptive robotic systems, and points to the successful demonstrations available for both task-specific and task-agnostic approaches (i.e., with or without reference to the specific design problem to be tackled). However, the advantages of multi-objective approaches over single-objective ones have not been clearly spelled out and experimentally demonstrated. This paper fills this gap for task-specific approaches: starting from well-known results in multi-objective optimisation, we discuss how to tackle commonly recognised problems in evolutionary robotics. In particular, we show that multi-objective optimisation (i) allows evolving a more varied set of behaviours by exploring multiple trade-offs of the objectives to optimise, (ii) supports the evolution of the desired behaviour through the introduction of objectives as proxies, (iii) avoids the premature convergence to local optima possibly introduced by multi-component fitness functions, and (iv) solves the bootstrap problem exploiting ancillary objectives to guide evolution in the early phases. We present an experimental demonstration of these benefits in three different case studies: maze navigation in a single robot domain, flocking in a swarm robotics context, and a strictly collaborative task in collective robotics.     

Environmental stability affects phenotypic evolution in a globally distributed marine picoplankton

Marine phytoplankton can evolve rapidly when confronted with aspects of climate change because of their large population sizes and fast generation times. Despite this, the importance of environment fluctuations, a key feature of climate change, has received little attention—selection experiments with marine phytoplankton are usually carried out in stable environments and use single or few representatives of a species, genus or functional group. Here we investigate whether and by how much environmental fluctuations contribute to changes in ecologically important phytoplankton traits such as C:N ratios and cell size, and test the variability of changes in these traits within the globally distributed species Ostreococcus. We have evolved 16 physiologically distinct lineages of Ostreococcus at stable high CO₂ (1031±87 μatm CO₂, SH) and fluctuating high CO₂ (1012±244 μatm CO₂, FH) for 400 generations. We find that although both fluctuation and high CO₂ drive evolution, FH-evolved lineages are smaller, have reduced C:N ratios and respond more strongly to further increases in CO₂ than do SH-evolved lineages. This indicates that environmental fluctuations are an important factor to consider when predicting how the characteristics of future phytoplankton populations will have an impact on biogeochemical cycles and higher trophic levels in marine food webs.