Tropical Pacific observing system

This paper reviews the design of the Tropical Pacific Observing System (TPOS) and its governance and takes a forward look at prospective change. The initial findings of the TPOS 2020 Project embrace new strategic approaches and technologies in a user-driven design and the variable focus of the Framework for Ocean Observing. User requirements arise from climate prediction and research, climate change and the climate record, and coupled modeling and data assimilation more generally. Requirements include focus on the upper ocean and air-sea interactions, sampling of diurnal variations, finer spatial scales and emerging demands related to biogeochemistry and ecosystems. One aim is to sample a diversity of climatic regimes in addition to the equatorial zone. The status and outlook for meeting the requirements of the design are discussed. This is accomplished through integrated and complementary capabilities of networks, including satellites, moorings, profiling floats and autonomous vehicles. Emerging technologies and methods are also discussed. The outlook highlights a few new foci of the design: biogeochemistry and ecosystems, low-latitude western boundary currents and the eastern Pacific. Low latitude western boundary currents are conduits of tropical-subtropical interactions, supplying waters of mid to high latitude origin to the western equatorial Pacific and into the Indonesian Throughflow. They are an essential part of the recharge/discharge of equatorial warm water volume at interannual timescales and play crucial roles in climate variability on regional and global scales. The tropical eastern Pacific, where extreme El Niño events develop, requires tailored approaches owing to the complex of processes at work there involving coastal upwelling, and equatorial cold tongue dynamics, the oxygen minimum zone and the seasonal double Intertropical Convergence Zone. A pilot program building on existing networks is envisaged, complemented by a process study of the East Pacific ITCZ/warm pool/cold tongue/stratus coupled system. The sustainability of TPOS depends on effective and strong collaborative partnerships and governance arrangements. Revisiting regional mechanisms and engaging new partners in the context of a planned and systematic design will ensure a multi-purpose, multi-faceted integrated approach that is sustainable and responsive to changing needs

25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016

Abstracts of the 25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016 Seogwipo City, Jeju-do, South Korea. 2–7 July 201

Craft-oriented hybrid analogue/digital practices; their values and our future relations with technology

This paper focuses on a hybrid digital/analogue making project that sought to investigate the aesthetic opportunities that digital design and production technologies holds for the craftsperson. It is presented as a demonstration of how a disruptive craft-based approach to engaging with digital making tools can act as a stimulus to reconsider the relationship between hand and machine, and our wider relationship with technologies and how we assess their role and value. Through challenging some assumptions about what digital technologies are ‘good’ for, it proposes a digital craft ethos that aspires to: fidelity not accuracy, sensitive making not efficient manufacturing, affective not effective technologies, to augment existing practices not replace established ways of working, uniqueness not infinite replicability, and continual ‘hands-on’ interaction with tools not full automation. Taking this digital craft ethos beyond the boundaries of the sector, the paper will conclude with an argument that our relationship with making technologies needs to evolve. If we continue to only use an established industrially focused myopic lens to view and assess the value of all technologies, (i.e. their productive efficiency, their speed, and their ability to accurately achieve predetermined goals), then as automation and machine learning have an increasing impact on labour markets and work, questions arise such as; what is the future of making? and what can, and do we want, our roles to be

Sex differences in cued fear discrimination: a combined behavioural, computational and electrophysiological study

Women are up to twice as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than men. Failure to discriminate between cues predicting threat and safety is associated with PTSD, yet sex differences in fear discrimination remain poorly understood. Here, we examined sex differences in auditory fear discrimination in rats using a combination of behavioural, computational and electrophysiological methods. In the initial behavioural study, males and naturally cycling females underwent 1-3 days of discrimination training, consisting of pairings of one tone (CS+) with shock and presentations of another tone (CS-) alone. After one day of training, females, but not males, discriminated between the CS+ and CS-. With 2-3 days of training, however, males discriminated and females generalised between the CS+ and CS-. Further testing also revealed that males successfully encode the CS- as a safety signal, whereas females do not. Using reduced computational models, we investigated how both ‘discrimination’ and ‘generalisation’ phenotypes can be generated in silico. We achieved this through a simulation of neural activity produced via ‘fear’ and ‘safety’ neural sub-populations of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in response to CS+ and CS- cues. By using a model representation of extended fear discrimination training and retrieval, we found that generalisation between the CS+ and CS- could be produced from reduced inhibition, or increased excitation, of fear neurons. Due to their involvement in regulating learned fear, we additionally aimed to investigate the roles of the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) cortices of themedial prefrontal cortex in fear discrimination. By concurrently recording activity from the PL, IL and BLA in awake behaving animals during retrieval of the CS+ and CS- after extended discrimination training, we examined the individual contributions and functional interactions of these regions during this learning paradigm. We found that, in males, the PL showed an increase in power at both theta (4-12 Hz) and gamma (30-120 Hz) frequencies during presentations of the CS- compared to the CS+, whereas this increase was largely absent in females. Taken together, these results indicate that, while females show fear discrimination with limited training, they generalise with extended training. We hypothesised that this generalisation in females is likely due to impaired safety learning, which may result, in part, from sex differences in the neural circuitry underlying fear discrimination

A course in human relations for Belmont Senior High School

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Medical image synthesis using generative adversarial networks: towards photo-realistic image synthesis

This proposed work addresses the photo-realism for synthetic images. We introduced a modified generative adversarial network: StencilGAN. It is a perceptually-aware generative adversarial network that synthesizes images based on overlaid labelled masks. This technique can be a prominent solution for the scarcity of the resources in the healthcare sector