Background: Pregnancy and delivery are considered as pleasant physiological phenomena. This period, however, sometimes leads to variable mood states in women and makes them more sensitive to psychological stimuli and problems. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the role of breastfeeding, type of delivery, contraceptive method, planned pregnancy, and history of infertility on th...

Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-...

This study addresses the effect of specific monochloramine concentration on biofilm density and bacterial functional potential in nutrient-limited water. The efficacy of monochloramine residual maintenance on biofilm density was studied at a range of 0.5 to 2.0 mg/l, using a 3:1 (w/w) dosing ratio of chlorine to ammonia, with the provision of low-nutrient water (0.18 mg/l as total organic carbo...

BACKGROUND Community-level analysis of the human microbiota has culminated in the discovery of relationships between overall shifts in the microbiota and a wide range of diseases and conditions. However, existing work has primarily focused on analysis of relatively simple dichotomous or quantitative outcomes, for example, disease status or biomarker levels. Recently, there is also considerable ...

To begin identifying what behavioral details might be needed to characterize community dynamics and stability, we examined the effect of prey behavioral responses to predation risk on community dynamics and stability. We considered the case of prey altering their foraging effort to trade off energy gain and predation risk. We used state-dependent dynamic optimization to calculate the optimal tr...

User profiles can be used to identify persons inside a community with similar interests. Folksonomy systems allow users to individually tag the objects of a common set (e.g., web pages). In this paper, we propose to create user profiles from the data available in such folksonomy systems by letting users specify the most relevant objects in the system. Instead of using the objects directly to re...

Aeration improves the capacity of leachfields to decontaminate and reduce the nutrient load of wastewater. To gain a better understanding of the effects of aeration, we examined the faunal and microbial communities of septic system leachfield soil (0–4 and 4–13 cm) using replicated (n 5 3) mesocosms that were actively aerated (AIR) or unaerated (LEACH). Protozoa were 40 to 140 times more abunda...

Tutorial dialogue has been the subject of increasing attention in recent years, and it has become evident that empirical studies of human-human tutorial dialogue can contribute important insights to the design of computational models of dialogue. Students with particular characteristics may have specific dialogue profiles, and knowledge of such profiles could inform the design of tutorial dialo...