Progress report of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force

This report describes work by the Interagency Climate Change Task Force. The group's goals include forming recommendations for a national strategy for climate change adaptation, improving the resilience and adaptive capacity of the federal government towards climate change, and improving public understanding of specific climate change vulnerabilities

Asymmetric interlimb transfer of concurrent adaptation to opposing dynamic forces

Interlimb transfer of a novel dynamic force has been well documented. It has also been shown that unimanual adaptation to opposing novel environments is possible if they are associated with different workspaces. The main aim of this study was to test if adaptation to opposing velocity dependent viscous forces with one arm could improve the initial performance of the other arm. The study also examined whether this interlimb transfer occurred across an extrinsic, spatial, coordinative system or an intrinsic, joint based, coordinative system. Subjects initially adapted to opposing viscous forces separated by target location. Our measure of performance was the correlation between the speed profiles of each movement within a force condition and an ‘average’ trajectory within null force conditions. Adaptation to the opposing forces was seen during initial acquisition with a significantly improved coefficient in epoch eight compared to epoch one. We then tested interlimb transfer from the dominant to non-dominant arm (D → ND) and vice-versa (ND → D) across either an extrinsic or intrinsic coordinative system. Interlimb transfer was only seen from the dominant to the non-dominant limb across an intrinsic coordinative system. These results support previous studies involving adaptation to a single dynamic force but also indicate that interlimb transfer of multiple opposing states is possible. This suggests that the information available at the level of representation allowing interlimb transfer can be more intricate than a general movement goal or a single perceived directional error

Book Review: the adaptation industry: the cultural economy of contemporary literary adaptation

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. Until now, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts. Casey Brienza finds that the book is a fantastic contribution to the social scientific literature on cultural production and highly recommends it to all scholars in that fiel

Effect of hypokinesia on contractile function of cardiac muscle

Rats were subjected to hypokinesia for two months and the contractile function of isolated papillary muscle was studied. Hypokinesia reduced significantly the isotonic contraction rate which depended on the ATPase activity of the myofibrils; it also reduced the rate and index of relaxation which depended on the functional capacity of the Ca(++) pump of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. The maximum force of isometric contraction determined by the quantity of actomyosin bridges in the myofibrils did not change after hypokinesia. This complex of changes is contrary to that observed in adaptation to exercise when the rate of isotonic contraction and relaxation increases while the force of isometric contraction does not change. The possible mechanism of this stability of the contractile force during adaptation and readaptation of the heart is discussed

A meta level to LAG for adaptation language re-use

Recently, a growing body of research targets authoring of content and adaptation strategies for adaptive systems. The driving force behind it is semantics-based reuse: the same adaptation strategy can be used for various domains, and vice versa. E.g., a Java course can be taught via a strategy differentiating between beginner and advanced users, or between visual versus verbal users. Whilst using an Adaptation Language (LAG) to express reusable adaptation strategies, we noticed, however, that: a) the created strategies have common patterns that, themselves, could be reused; b) templates based on these patterns could reduce the designers' work; c) there is a strong preference towards XML-based processing and interfacing. This has lead us to define a new meta-language for the LAG Adaptation Language, facilitating the extraction of common design patterns. This paper provides more insight into the LAG language, as well as describes this meta-language, and shows how introducing it can overcome some redundancy issues

Reuse patterns in adaptation languages : creating a meta-level for the LAG adaptation language

A growing body of research targets authoring of content and adaptation strategies for adaptive systems. The driving force behind it is semantics-based reuse: the same strategy can be used for various domains, and vice versa. Whilst using an adaptation language (LAG e.g.) to express reusable adaptation strategies, we noticed, however, that: a) the created strategies have common patterns that, themselves, could be reused; b) templates based on these patterns could reduce the designers' work; c) there is a strong preference towards XML-based processing and interfacing. This has leaded us to define a new meta-language for LAG, extracting common design patterns. This paper provides more insight into some of the limitations of Adaptation Languages like LAG, as well as describes our meta-language, and shows how introducing the meta-level can overcome some redundancy issues