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With relatively few exceptions, dendrochronological records in Australia have been developed from conifer species. Over the last 20 years, some effort has successfully extracted records from some Eucalyptus species and Toona ciliata. However, very little attempt has been made to examine a broader range of species. There has been some success with extracting records from the African Boab species. We collected 10mm core samples from around 30 A. gregorii trees in the Kimberly and will be assessing the potential of the species by examining variability in vessel characteristics, isotopic and elemental tracers. We hope to use elemental tracers in the wood to corroborate a fire record from speleothems in the region. 

With relatively few exceptions, dendrochronological records in Australia have been developed from conifer species. Over the last 20 years, some effort has successfully extracted records from some Eucalyptus species and Toona ciliata. However, very little attempt has been made to examine a broader range of species. There has been some success with extracting records from the African Boab species. We collected 10mm core samples from around 30 A. gregorii trees in the Kimberly and will be assessing the potential of the species by examining variability in vessel characteristics, isotopic an elemental traces. We hope to use elemental traces in the wood to corroborate a fire record from speleothems in the region. 

The presence of spin and spatial symmetry breaking upon variational optimization of mean-field wavefunctions is known to be an indicator of nondynamical electron correlation. However, a single mean-field wavefunction may not have sufficient flexibility to flag the correlated orbital space where there are multiple correlation mechanisms present. In such situations, there are multiple nearly degenerate self-consistent field solutions that describe different correlation mechanisms, but it is often not possible to know a priori when such situations will occur or if sufficient solutions have been obtained. In this work, we examine the role of spin and spatial symmetries of nonorthogonal multiconfigurational self-consistent field (NOMCSCF) calculations in revealing correlation mechanisms. We provide details of the theory for optimization of NOMCSCF wavefunctions with desired symmetries, establish which types of symmetries recover the most correlation energy when the symmetry constraints are relaxed, and discuss how the different-orbitals for different-configuration wavefunctions reveal the different correlation mechanisms present. 

Abstract Parthenogenetic wasps provide an ideal natural experiment to study the heritability, plasticity, and microevolutionary dynamics of body size. Dinocampus coccinellae (Hymenoptera:Braconidae, Euphorinae) is a solitary, generalist braconid parasitoid wasp that reproduces through thelytokous parthenogenesis, and parasitizes over fifty diverse species of coccinellid ladybeetles worldwide as hosts. Here we designed an experiment with parthenogenetic lines of D. coccinellae presented with three different host ladybeetle species of varying sizes, across multiple generations to investigate heritability, and plasticity of body size measured via a combination of morphometric variables such as thorax width, abdominal width, and wing length in D. coccinellae. We expected positively correlated parent-offspring parasitoid regressions, indicative of heritable size variation, from unilineal (parent and offspring reared on same host species) lines, since these restrict environmental variation in phenotypes. In contrast, because multilineal (parent and offspring reared on different host species) lines would induce phenotypic plasticity of clones reared in varying environments, we expected negatively correlated parent-offspring parasitoid regressions. Our results indicate (1) little heritable variation in body size, (2) strong independence of offspring size on the host environment, (3) small mothers produce larger offspring, and vice versa, independent of host. We then model the evolution of size and host-shifting under a constrained fecundity advantage model of Cope’s Law using a Hidden Markov Model, showing that D. coccinellae likely has fitness advantages to maintain plasticity in body size despite parthenogenetic reproduction. 

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) succeed in human-guided conversations such as instruction following and question answering, the potential of LLM-guided conversations-where LLMs direct the discourse and steer the conversation's objectives-remains under-explored. In this study, we first characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: (i) Goal Navigation; (ii) Context Management; (iii) Empathetic Engagement, and propose GuideLLM as an installation. We then implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLM-guided conversation. Specifically, various topics are involved in this environment for comprehensive interviewing evaluation, resulting in around 1.4k turns of utterances, 184k tokens, and over 200 events mentioned during the interviewing for each chatbot evaluation. We compare GuideLLM with 6 state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4o and Llama-3-70b-Instruct, from the perspective of interviewing quality, and autobiography generation quality. For automatic evaluation, we derive user proxies from multiple autobiographies and employ LLM-as-a-judge to score LLM behaviors. We further conduct a human-involved experiment by employing 45 human participants to chat with GuideLLM and baselines. We then collect human feedback, preferences, and ratings regarding the qualities of conversation and autobiography. Experimental results indicate that GuideLLM significantly outperforms baseline LLMs in automatic evaluation and achieves consistent leading performances in human ratings.