Th first four files are for blog 4 questions and the

HLSC 710 Discussion Assignment Instructions You will complete 8 Discussions in this

HLSC 710

Discussion Assignment Instructions

You will complete 8 Discussions in this course. You will post one thread of at least 450 words by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Thursday of the assigned Module: Week. You must then post 2 replies of at least 200 words by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Sunday of the assigned Module: Week. For Module 8: Week 8, submit your replies by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Friday. For each thread, you must support their assertions with at least 2 scholarly citations in APA format. Each reply must incorporate at least 2 scholarly citations in APA format. Acceptable sources include the textbook, peer-reviewed journal articles, government sources, professional association websites, etc. Each original discussion will also require a biblical reference/quote (which is not a part of the original source count).[supanova_question]

For your paper, you will select a recent economics topic, issue,

For your paper, you will select a recent economics topic, issue, event, or economics report to analyze and relate to the basic principles of microeconomics covered in the course. To write a quality paper, your topic must have sufficient current information (within one year) from at least five quality publications.[supanova_question]

Min or Max Task?

Writing Assignment Help Select either the minimum or maximum function. Identify a task – personal or professional – that could be modeled mathematically through your chosen function. Explain how the chosen function can be used in making good decisions.

Examples of tasks might be:

Make the largest garden possible using a given amount of fencing.
Configure an airplane to create the least amount of drag for an airplane in flight.
Be creative!
Write a 300-word post (about 3 paragraphs) that includes your chosen function, shows an equation, and explains how it could be used to make good decisions.[supanova_question]

The Party’s use of media as control of the populous

Specifically looking for examples of control of Party through media, with concrete examples from the book.
Other uses of control or manipulations aren’t sought here.

5 sources, MLA style.[supanova_question]

How important is natural selection in the wild? Is it pervasive

How important is natural selection in the wild? Is it pervasive or does it act episodically or only on certain traits? Answering these questions requires the ability to infer whether selection is operating in nature. In this lab we are going to examine patterns of selection using an important measure of fitness: survival. We will do this outside in a wild, unmanipulated population. If the trait we measure is linked to survival and if the trait that we are measuring is heritable it will evolve.
Survival, especially pre-reproductive survival, is a key component of fitness. If organisms don’t live long enough to reproduce their fitness is nil. For this reason, survival is one of the most commonly used measures of fitness. We will study patterns of survival in gall flies. These flies induce plants to form galls. They do this by tricking the plant; they produce chemicals identical to the growth hormones made by the plant (Mapes and Davies 2001). Normally these hormones function to regulate plant development. However, by secreting these plant hormones, the flies subvert this process and a mass of plant tissue is formed around the young fly larva, protecting and nourishing the larva.
Study system
Gall flies of the genus Eurosta lay eggs at the tip of goldenrod shoots in mid-late summer (Figure 1). A few days later, the larva hatches, bores into the plant stem and initiates the formation of a gall. Galls reach their full size by late summer. In the fall, the plant stem dies but remains standing. Within the galls, the larva continues to mature and overwinters in the larval state.
Figure 1: A female Eurosta; adult flies are 7 to 9 mm in length (A). Galls are visible around three weeks after females lay their eggs (B). After eggs hatch, larval flies excrete a plant hormone that induces gall formation by the plant. The galls have a hard, corky exterior but the interior is composed of specialized nutritive tissues, which serve as the source of food for the developing fly. The galls continue to protect and nourish the larva after the plant stem has senesced in late summer and early fall (C). At this stage, the fly larva excavates a tunnel that it will use to leave the gall in the spring. The larval fly then enters diapause for the winter. Photo credit: Dr. Warren Abrahamson
Several animals attack goldenrod galls to feed on the developing fly larvae, including insects (the parasitoid wasps Eurytoma gigantea and E. obtusiventris, and the beetle Mordellistena unicolor; Figure 2) and birds [namely downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) and black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus). The two parasitoid wasps attack the larvae during the summer months while birds attack the larvae over the winter. It is straight forward to determine which of these animals have eaten the flies within their galls. If wasps or beetles attacked the fly larva, you will find wasp or beetle larva(e) in the gall instead of a fly larva. If a bird has eaten the fly larva, you will see a hole in the gall that was made by the bird (Figure 3).
Sources of gall fly mortality
Parasitoid wasps – Parasitoids are insects that lay their eggs on or in a host, but whose effect is to kill the host (unlike a true parasite). The wasp Eurytoma gigantea is a parasitoid – the female inserts eggs into the central chamber of goldenrod galls using her ovipositor. Her offspring eats the fly larva and then switches to a vegetarian diet, eating gall tissue for the rest of the growing season. Flies in smaller galls may be more susceptible to attack by this parasitoid wasp because wasps can only attack fly larvae that are within reach of the wasp’s ovipositor. As a result, larger galls should be protected from parasitoid attack. Therefore, when wasps are present we can predict that gall size should be subject to directional selection, with flies that induce larger galls having higher fitness than flies that induce smaller galls.
Beetles – The stems and galls of the goldenrods are attacked by a number of herbivorous insects. One common herbivore found in the galls is Mordellistena unicolor, a beetle species that lays its eggs on the surface of galls in early summer. Even though the beetle larvae do not eat the fly, when many beetle larvae burrow into the gall they cause the death of the fly. Because the ability of beetles to burrow into the gall is not limited by the size of the gall, bettles are an unlikely source of selection on gall size.

Figure 2: Several insects attack gall fly larvae, including the parasitoid wasps Eurytoma gigantea (A) and Eurytoma obtusiventris (B) and the stem-boring gall inquiline (an inquiline is an animal that lives in another animal’s home) Mordellistena convicta (C). The wasps use their long ovipositors to pierce the gall and lay an egg in the gall chamber. Because the ovipositor has a fixed length, the success of the wasp’s attack depends on the thickness of the gall wall; if it is thicker than the length of the ovipositor the fly will escape predation by the wasp’s offspring. However, the beetle is a stem borer; the larvae attack the flies from within the stem and the success of attack is independent of the size of the gall. Photo credit: Dr. Warren Abrahamson.

Figure 3: Damage to fly galls caused by woodpeckers (left) and chickadees (right). Photo credit: Dr. Warren Abrahamson
Avian predators – Downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) and black-capped chickadees (Parus atricapillus) also prey on the gall fly larvae. These birds peck through the tissue of the gall and extract the soft-bodied fly larva. These birds are visual predators and thus larvae living in galls more easily seen by birds may suffer higher rates of mortality. If gall size affects the likelihood that a bird will see and attack the gall, then predation by birds will cause directional selection on the size of galls. Chickadees make large irregular holes; bits of gall are torn away to form the hole. Woodpeckers make small, tidy, conical holes in the galls (Figure 3).
Plant interactions – Plants have mechanisms to resist herbivory that cause the death of the herbivore. This may be an explanation of the phenomenon of Early Larval Death for Eurosta flies – a common source of mortality for flies on goldenrods, which often leads to smaller gall sizes because of the early death of the fly larva.

Question: Is selection acting on gall size?
Hypothesis: Selection is acting on gall size.
Prediction: Galls where the larva survived will be larger/smaller (pick one) than where the larva did not survive

Title (2 marks)
A descriiptive title that conveys the purpose or main finding of your study. Be sure to include the common and scientific name of the gall fly in your title.
Abstract (1 paragraph; 2 marks)
The abstract is a quick summary of your study. It should include your primary objective (1 sentence), how you addressed the objective (1-2 sentences), your main findings (1 to 2 sentences) and your broad conclusion (e.g., “I conclude that the results were consistent with the hypothesis that…”). Essentially, it has one main point or two from each section in your paper. The abstract is usually written once the rest of the paper is written.
Introduction (up to 1 page; 6 marks)
Provide some background information on the topic of natural selection. Introduce the key aspects of the biology of the system with special reference to the causes of mortality of gall flies and the expected direction of selection on the size of the gall for each source of mortality. State the hypothesis examined and a brief statement about how you tested it.
Methods (up to 1 page; 4 marks)
Include enough detail on what you measured and how you measured it that someone else could duplicate what you did. Although you are not conducting the statistical analysis yourself be sure to mention the name of the analysis and how the analysis enables you to test your hypothesis.
Results (up to 1 page plus a figure; 8 marks – 6 for text and 2 for figure captions)
Include Figures 1 and 2 of the class data generated by the TA. Explain clearly what each figure illustrates. In general, Figure 1 shows the mean (average) sizes of galls for fly larvae that have survived compared to those that have not. The plot enables a visual comparison of the data for galls in which fly larvae have survived vs. those in which the larvae have died (without considering the specific source of mortality). The plot consists of two dots indicating the means, each with “whiskers” that indicate the magnitude of the standard deviation (sd). The sd is a measure of how spread out the numbers associated with each mean are. These numbers, the mean and sd, are directly related to the values used to calculate the t-value for the statistical test described above. When you describe the plot in your Results section, describe the degree of overlap (or lack thereof) in the sd of the gall size between flies that were alive vs. dead. If there is a significant difference in the mean size of the galls for flies that were dead vs. alive (see next paragraph), you should also see that the standard deviations for each category of fly are offset from one another, with one mean and sd located substantially higher than the other, corresponding with larger galls for one category of fly compared to the other.
Along with your descriiption of Figure 1, include a clear statement about the result of the statistical test and whether you could reject the null hypothesis (i.e., the statistical hypothesis). Report the results of the t-test (the statistical test used in this lab) using text along the lines of: ‘There was no significant difference in the size of the galls containing larvae that survived vs. those containing larvae that had died (t = 1.78, P = 0.30)’. The value of t (“1.78” in this example) is the value of the test statistic; the larger the value the more likely there is to be a significant difference between the groups being compared (in this case galls in which the fly larva survived vs. galls where the larva did not). The t and P-values are located in the Welch Two Sample t-test output. Note, in this example, there was no significant difference in gall sizes for larvae that died vs. survived. You might find something else! A significant difference in gall sizes between the two categories of fly larvae (alive vs. dead) would be indicated by a P-value of less than 0.05. Refer to the results of this test in the same part of your Results section in which you report the mean gall sizes for each group of flies (dead vs. alive). The test performed is specifically a test of whether the mean gall sizes for the two groups of flies (Alive and Dead) are different.
You will also need to describe Figure 2 which shows the gall sizes for each gall collected organized by source of mortality (or ‘survived’ where the larva survived). For example, you can state which forms were most/least common and whether you notice any trends in gall sizes for the different sources of mortality.
Discussion (up to-3 pages; 8 marks)
This is the critical thinking part of your report. Have you supported or rejected your hypothesis? If there is no significant difference in gall size for flies that survived vs. those that did not, the result is still potentially interesting and should provoke further questions. Keep in mind that the results of your statistical test did NOT consider different sources of mortality since all larvae that didn’t survive were lumped into one group for the test. In your Discussion, think about this might have affected the results of that test and therefore your conclusions in this study.
The variation you have documented may also be due to environmental or genetic factors Think of at least one other hypothesis that could account for your Results. How would you test this additional hypothesis? From what you have observed and read, to what extent do you think the distribution of gall sizes in your study population is the outcome of natural selection in previous generations?
References (3 references to the primary literature; i.e., journal articles; 5 marks)
You will find your textbook and other sources helpful for background information when writing your report, but you should also try to find new references that support your ideas / conclusions or with which you compare and contrast your results. Try to find studies that have used a similar approach or that have used the same (or related) species to investigate a similar topic.

[supanova_question]