The concept of interaction classes (iClasses) for multi-environment trial data was introduced to address the problem of summarising variety performance across environments in the presence of variety by environment interaction (VEI). The approach involves the fitting of a factor analytic linear mixed model (FALMM), with the resultant estimates of factor loadings being used to form groups of environments (iClasses) that discriminate varieties with different patterns of VEI. It is then meaningful to summarise variety performance across environments within iClasses. The iClass methodology was developed with respect to a FALMM in which the genetic effects for different varieties were assumed independent. This was done for pedagogical reasons but it was pointed out that the accuracy of variety selection is greatly enhanced by considering the genetic relatedness of varieties, either via ancestral or genomic information. The focus of the current paper is therefore to extend the iClass approach for FALMMs which incorporate such information. In addition a measure of stability of variety performance across iClasses is defined. The utility of the approach for variety selection is illustrated using a multi-environment trial dataset from the lentil breeding program operated by Agriculture Victoria.

Earth’s land cover consists of forests, agricultural land, urban settlements and a large, heterogeneous category that includes deserts, grasslands, savannas, shrublands and tundra. This heterogeneous category has eluded a collective designation comparable to that of forests, which has contributed to its omission from multilateral programs and critical global initiatives. Potential designations for this land category – drylands, grasslands, grassy biomes, open ecosystems and rangelands – were evaluated for their relative advantages and disadvantages. Grassy biome is recommended as the most appropriate designation because it conveys a meaning that is distinct from forests, emphasizes that grasses often coexist with other plant growth forms and has great utility for use by multilateral organizations. However, the criteria of tree canopy cover >10% used by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to define forests represents a major obstacle to implementation of the grassy biome designation. This minimal canopy cover infringes on global savannas that occupy 20–25% of global land area. An assessment of the functional plant traits determining the shade and fire tolerance of savanna and forest trees indicates that a minimal tree canopy cover of 45% represents an ecologically appropriate demarcation between savannas and forests.

The issue of simplification of taxation law has been an important part of the fiscal agenda in Australia since the establishment of the Tax Law Improvement Project (TLIP) back in December 1993. The TLIP, which aimed to simplify income tax legislation embodied in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (Cth) through the use of shorter and clearer sentences and the use of plain English, was conceived in response to widespread criticism that the income tax legislation was difficult to read and understand.

It has been contended that this inherent difficulty in understanding income tax legislation due to the length and complexity of the legislation led to increased costs, both for the taxpayer in the form of increased tax compliance costs, and for the Federal Government in the form of increased tax administration costs. The TLIP's role was to rewrite the primary income tax legislation which culminated in the development of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (Cth).

The rater agreement literature is complicated by the fact that it must accommodate at east two different properties of rating data: the number of raters (two versus more than two) and the rating scale level (nominal versus metric). While kappa statistics are most widely used for nominal scales, intraclass correlation coefficients have been preferred for metric scales. In this paper, we suggest a dispersion-weighted kappa framework for multiple raters that integrates some important agreement statistics by using familiar dispersion indices as weights for expressing disagreement. These weights are applied to ratings identifying cells in the traditional inter-judge contingency table. Novel agreement statistics can be obtained by applying less familiar indices of dispersion in the same way.

International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) billing data used in outpatient stewardship metrics is under-described for acute and chronic sinusitis. We found that different sinusitis ICD-10 definitions impacted antibiotic prescribing rates (APRs). Chronic sinusitis ICD-10s dilute overall sinusitis APR, particularly in primary care settings and should be examined separately.

Galba truncatula is one of the most distributed intermediate hosts of Fasciola hepatica across Europe, North Africa and South America. Therefore, understanding the environmental preferences of this species is vital for developing control strategies for fascioliasis and other trematodes such as Calicophoron daubneyi. This systematic literature review evaluates the current understanding of the snail's environmental preferences to identify factors which might aid control and areas where further research is needed. Searches were conducted using Google Scholar and PubMed and included papers published up to August 2023. After filtration, 198 papers with data from 64 countries were evaluated, and data regarding habitat type and habitat pH were noted, along with any other information pertaining to the snail's environmental preferences. The results show that G. truncatula can survive in a diverse range of climates and habitats, generally favours shallow slow-moving water or moist bare mud surfaces, temperatures between 10 and 25°C and was found in habitats with a water pH ranging from 5.0 to 9.4. However, there is limited understanding of the impact of several factors, such as the true optimum pH and temperature preferences within the respective tolerance limits or the reason for the snail's apparent aversion to peatland. Further research is needed to clarify the impact of biotic and abiotic factors on the snail to create robust risk assessments of fluke infection and assess opportunities for environmental control strategies, and for predicting how the snail and fluke transmission may be impacted by climate change.

In order to study the structure and temperature distribution within high-mass star-forming clumps, we employed the Australia Telescope Compact Array to image the $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (J,K) = (1,1) through (6,6) and the (2,1) inversion transitions, the $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ $6_{16}$-$5_{23}$ maser line at 22.23508 GHz, several $\mathrm{CH}_3\mathrm{OH}$ lines and hydrogen and helium recombination lines. In addition, 22- and 24-GHz radio continuum emission was also imaged.

The $\mathrm{NH}_3$ lines probe the optical depth and gas temperature of compact structures within the clumps. The $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ maser pinpoints the location of shocked gas associated with star formation. The recombination lines and the continuum emission trace the ionised gas associated with hot OB stars. The paper describes the data and presents sample images and spectra towards select clumps. The technique for estimating gas temperature from $\mathrm{NH}_3$ line ratios is described. The data show widespread hyperfine intensity anomalies in the $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (1,1) images, an indicator of non-LTE $\mathrm{NH}_3$ excitation. We also identify several new $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (3,3) masers associated with shocked gas. Towards AGAL328.809+00.632, the $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ $6_{16}$-$5_{23}$ line, normally seen as a maser, is instead seen as a thermally excited absorption feature against a strong background continuum. The data products are described in detail.

The crisis over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses exposed the contrasting ways Western and Muslim actors understand the place of religion in international order and the responsibilities of states in religious controversies. No other Muslim national leader supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death in 1989, but many Muslims expressed anger and disbelief that Britain and Western powers could not restrict a book that caused so much international disturbance. This paper seeks to understand this discord through the overlapping but conflicted language games of Western and Muslim national leaders. It analyses a previously unreported exchange of letters between British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with other recently released archival material from the diplomatic crisis. These letters reflected different unwritten rules informing the actors’ understandings and practices of international order, despite their shared acceptance of the sovereignty of national states. For Mahathir, the Western world was itself a religious identity, and its collective propagation of The Satanic Verses compounded a religious insult to the Muslim world. But Thatcher and other British actors did not see religious identities, especially their own, as basic elements of international relations, instead reasserting the secular primacy of national states.

Harpetid and trinucleid trilobites share a similar and unusual morphology, the most striking feature of which is a wide, flattened cephalic brim with many pits or holes. This similarity was once interpreted as a sign that these two groups of trilobites were closely related, but in recent years it has instead been assumed that the ‘harpiform’ brim arose in both groups independently. However, relatedness and similarity can be difficult to disentangle in fossil taxa without close living relatives, and this assumption about the harpiform brim has never been explicitly tested. Our study re-evaluates the relationship between Harpetida and Trinucleioidea in order to test a longstanding assumption about trilobite relationships and as a case study in evaluating different kinds of morphological similarity in extinct groups. We inferred a new phylogenetic tree using parsimony methods and discrete morphological character data from a broad sampling of harpetids, trinucleids, and their relatives. Despite their gross morphological similarities, we found that harpetids and trinucleids were readily distinguished in our analyses, a result consistent with a hypothesis of multiple origins for the harpiform brim. By mapping brim-related characters across our new phylogeny, we identified a sequence of morphological innovations that arose in parallel in both groups and led ultimately in each case to the evolution of the harpiform brim. These results indicate that harpiform brims are a prime example of parallel evolution—the similar development of a morphological trait in distantly related taxa that nevertheless share a similar original morphology. In addition, our phylogeny supports the idea that trinucleids are specialized, harpiform asaphids, rather than an independent order of trilobites. We also provide new information on the relationships of the putative ‘basal-most’ members of Trinucleioidea, the Liostracinidae, and confirm recent assessments that this family is more distantly related to trinucleids.

In this article, we describe and explain patterns of variation in acceptance of amn’t in varieties of Scots, drawing upon data from the Scots Syntax Atlas. Partly in line with findings from Bresnan (2001), we show that amn’t is much more widely accepted in inversion environments (amn’t I?) than in declaratives (I amn’t), but nevertheless, amn’t in declaratives is still accepted in certain regions of Scotland. We combine the productivity-based explanation of the amn’t gap in Yang (2016, 2017) with new insights into the syntax of Scots negation from Thoms et al. (2023) to provide a predictive account of the attested variation.

In December 2018, an outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis infections was identified in Canada by whole-genome sequencing (WGS). An investigation was initiated to identify the source of the illnesses, which proved challenging and complex. Microbiological hypothesis generation methods included comparisons of Salmonella isolate sequence data to historical domestic outbreaks and international repositories. Epidemiological hypothesis generation methods included routine case interviews, open-ended centralized re-interviewing, thematic analysis of open-ended interview data, collection of purchase records, a grocery store site visit, analytic comparison to healthy control groups, and case–case analyses. Food safety hypothesis testing methods included food sample collection and analysis, and traceback investigations. Overall, 83 cases were identified across seven provinces, with onset dates from 6 November 2018 to 7 May 2019. Case ages ranged from 1 to 88 years; 60% (50/83) were female; 39% (22/56) were hospitalized; and three deaths were reported. Brand X profiteroles and eclairs imported from Thailand were identified as the source of the outbreak, and eggs from an unregistered facility were hypothesized as the likely cause of contamination. This study aims to describe the outbreak investigation and highlight the multiple hypothesis generation methods that were employed to identify the source.

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

Background: Multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria are a major cause of sepsis among hospitalized neonates globally. Aqueous chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) skin antisepsis has been shown to be safe for use in infants; however, its sustained effectiveness in preventing Gram-negative pathogen colonization, bloodstream infection (BSI), and mortality is unclear. Methods: We conducted a period prevalence survey, with 26 sampling events over 12 months (18 October 2022 – 31 October 2023) at a 33-bed neonatal unit in a tertiary public hospital in Botswana where ESBL-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae and carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii are leading causes of BSI. Perirectal and periumbilical skin swabs were collected every two weeks from all inpatients. Swabs were inoculated onto chromogenic media selective and differential for extended-spectrum beta-lactamase producing Enterobacterales (ESBL-E) and Acinetobacter spp. (CHROMagar™ ESBL, Acinetobacter). Colonization status was determined based on culture growth and colony morphology. Contemporaneous data on all-cause mortality and BSI were abstracted from routine surveillance records. Pre- and post-CHG prevalences were compared using a simple Chi-square test. During the surveillance period, an outbreak of K. pneumoniae linked to contaminated multi-use vials was detected, thus BSIs and deaths during the outbreak period (2 February–6 April, 2023) were excluded. In February 2023, the hospital infection prevention and control (IPC) team introduced twice-weekly whole-body cleansing with commercially available 2% aqueous CHG, performed by caregivers and healthcare workers on neonates >24 hours old and weighing ≥1 kg until discharge. Results: There were significant decreases in ESBL-E and Acinetobacter skin and perirectal colonization following the CHG intervention (Table 1; Figure 1). After the CHG intervention, the incidence of Acinetobacter BSIs declined significantly and there was a trend toward a decline in other BSIs and mortality. No adverse events associated with CHG were reported. Conclusions: Twice-weekly CHG application was temporally associated with significant reductions in neonatal ESBL-E and Actinetobacter skin and perirectal colonization and Acinetobacter BSI. This analysis was limited by a short pre-intervention surveillance period and thus may have been influenced by confounders such as seasonality, and intensified IPC efforts following the outbreak. Analysis of the routine CHG use in other settings and over longer surveillance periods are needed to better understand its effectiveness as an IPC strategy in settings where neonatal sepsis incidence is high. Table 1. Colonization prevalence, BSI incidence, and mortality surrounding introduction of CHG skin cleansing in a neonatal unit, 18 October 2022 – 31 October 2023.

A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this article we present data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, which employs sociolinguistic methodologies in spoken data alongside the results of acceptability judgments. We target three morphosyntactic variables and compare and contrast these across the two data types in order to assess the reliability of the judgment data at community level. The results show that reliability is variable-dependent. For some variables, there is clear correlation; with others, it appears that, as Labov (1996) phrased it, ‘intuitions fail’. We discuss how factors such as salience, social stigma and local identity combine to govern the reliability of judgment data.

While clozapine has risks, relative risk of fatality is overestimated. The UK pharmacovigilance programme is efficient, but comparisons with other drugs can mislead because of reporting variations. Clozapine actually lowers mortality, partly by reducing schizophrenia-related suicides, but preventable deaths still occur. Clozapine should be used earlier and more widely, but there should be better monitoring and better management of toxicity.