The collaborative relationship between transport and tourism in Scottish islands: from policy to practice

Despite a ubiquitous interest, the concept of collaboration remains elusive. Regardless, the pervasiveness of discourse pertaining to it continues to infiltrate policy as public sector reform advocates for behaviour and practice driven by an ethos of “joining-up”. The interdependency of the transport-tourism relationship provides an opportunity to consider collaboration in a context where the benefits of integration can be substantial. Within island domains the reliance of tourism economies on efficient transport systems is intensified. Consequently this research presents an analysis of the scope, role and nature of collaboration between industries whose sustainability is to a large extent symbiotic and critical to local prosperity. A review of the literature demonstrates a lack of focus on research pertaining to a stakeholder perspective of the transport-tourism relationship. Within the island environment, studies on this scenario of cross-industry engagement further diminish although the argument expressing the significance of transport in tourism is vociferous. Gaps were also identified in the conceptualisation of collaboration inhibiting a universal definition and thus a comprehensive understanding. The primary research adopted a qualitative approach. Data was collected through a series of semi-structured interviews from stakeholders across transport and tourism who fulfilled pre-considered criteria. The key findings identify constraints to collaboration in the form of structural disparity while divergent industry objectives further impede practical integration. Despite this, the role of “islandness” neutralises barriers to engagement. The propensity to cultivate social capital within these boundaried geographies provides an environment naturally conducive to the creation of collaborative capacity. Consensual development of shared goals between collaborating parties manifested as intrinsic for the purpose of buy-in and commitment throughout the collaborative process. Similarly, an absence of leadership in practice resulted in highlighting the fundamental role it delivers within collaboration. The empirical findings provide both practical and theoretical contribution. Further they present policy-makers with evidence-informed suggestions to address impediments which prevent the practice of collaboration.sub_behunpub1931_ethesesunpu

Vision based behavior recognition of laboratory animals for drug analysis and testing

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2009.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2009.Includes bibliographical references leaves 92-101.In pharmacological experiments, a popular method to discover the effects of psychotherapeutic drugs is to monitor behaviors of laboratory mice subjected to drugs by vision sensors. Such surveillance operations are currently performed by human observers for practical reasons. Automating behavior analysis of laboratory mice by vision-based methods saves both time and human labor. In this study, we focus on automated action recognition of laboratory mice from short video clips in which only one action is performed. A two-stage hierarchical recognition method is designed to address the problem. In the first stage, still actions such as sleeping are separated from other action classes based on the amount of the motion area. Remaining action classes are discriminated by the second stage for which we propose four alternative methods. In the first method, we project 3D action volume onto 2D images by encoding temporal variations of each pixel using discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Resulting images are modeled and classified by hidden Markov models in maximum likelihood sense. The second method transforms action recognition problem into a sequence matching problem by explicitly describing pose of the subject in each frame. Instead of segmenting the subject from the background, we only take temporally active portions of the subject into consideration in pose description. Histograms of oriented gradients are employed to describe poses in frames. In the third method, actions are represented by a set of histograms of normalized spatio-temporal gradients computed from entire action volume at different temporal resolutions. The last method assumes that actions are collections of known spatio-temporal templates and can be described by histograms of those. To locate and describe such templates in actions, multi-scale 3D Harris corner detector and histogram of oriented gradients and optical flow vectors are employed, respectively. We test the proposed action recognition framework on a publicly available mice action dataset. In addition, we provide comparisons of each method with well-known studies in the literature. We find that the second and the fourth methods outperform both related studies and the other two methods in our framework in overall recognition rates. However, the more successful methods suffer from heavy computational cost. This study shows that representing actions as an ordered sequence of pose descriptors is quite effective in action recognition. In addition, success of the fourth method reveals that sparse spatio-temporal templates characterize the content of actions quite well.Sandıkcı, SelçukM.S

Dinosaur micro-remains from the Middle Jurassic of Britain

In the Middle Jurassic, Great Britain was situated at ~30° north in an area of shallow seas with surrounding low-lying landmasses. Fluctuations in relative sea level resulted in emergent areas preserving snapshots of the terrestrial fauna in microvertebrate sites throughout southern England. Analysis of the dinosaur material, mostly isolated teeth, has resulted in a much more granular view of the taxa present including clades previously unknown or unconfirmed from this period. I developed machine learning techniques, which combined with morphological-based approaches confirms the presence of at least three maniraptoran taxa in the assemblage: three dromaeosaur morphotypes; a troodontid; and a therizinosaur. These results provide the first quantitative support for the presence of maniraptoran theropods, including the oldest occurrences of troodontids and therizinosaurs worldwide, in the Middle Jurassic and are consistent with predictions made by phylogenetic analyses. There are at least six ornithischian taxa in the assemblage; a distinctive highly-ridged morphotype that cannot be referred with certainty to any known ornithischian taxa and therefore represents a new taxon; a number of small teeth with denticles restricted to the upper third of the crown which represent a hitherto unknown occurrence of heterodontosaurids in the Middle Jurassic of the UK; at least one morphotype of a basal thyreophoran; an indeterminate thyreophoran; a stegosaur, which represents one of the oldest stegosaurs worldwide; and a number of ankylosaur morphotypes which make up the vast majority of the isolated ornithischian teeth seen from these sites. The application of machine learning, when combined with traditional morphological comparisons provides a powerful tool for the qualitative assessment of isolated teeth. This analysis increases the known diversity of Middle Jurassic dinosaur taxa in the UK and the confirmation of early maniraptorans, heterodontosaurids and stegosaurs highlights the importance of incorporating microvertebrate remains into faunal and evolutionary analyses

Across Space and Time. Papers from the 41st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Perth, 25-28 March 2013

This volume presents a selection of the best papers presented at the forty-first annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. The theme for the conference was "Across Space and Time", and the papers explore a multitude of topics related to that concept, including databases, the semantic Web, geographical information systems, data collection and management, and more

Challenges posed by the geography of the Scottish Highlands to ecclesiastical endeavour over the centuries

The claim of this thesis is that the landscape of the Scottish Highlands has ever posed a challenge to ecclesiastical endeavour over the centuries and has determined the patterns of religiosity that remain largely extant. The landmass under review conforms to a notional Highland line running north-eastwards from Helensburgh in the west of Stonehaven in the east, but does not include the county of Caithness or the Orkney and Shetland Islands. The time-scale of the thesis focuses mainly upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the twelfth century, the Celtic Church had been fully absorbed into the Church of Rome. At the Calvinist Reformation within Scotland in 1560, Roman Catholicism was proscribed, but due to prevailing factors in the Highlands, mainly connected with the remoteness and inaccessibility of the landscape, the “Old Faith” was never completely eradicated. Of cardinal importance was the ownership of the land, the dearth of a Reformed ministry conversant in the Gaelic language and overlarge parishes that precluded regular contact between congregation and minister and his manse. A serious impediment to Highland Reformed mission was the lack of a translation in Scots-Gaelic vernacular, of the Authorised Bible until 1767 publication of the New Testament in that language. Following the deposition of James VII in 1690, Prelacy was proscribed and Presbyterianism was declared to be the lawful structure of the Reformed Kirk within Scotland. Nevertheless the structure of the Episcopalian Church survived relatively intact and many of its clergy, retained their pulpits in the Highlands. The key to survival, yet again, had been the protective power of the Highland landowner. From the outset, secession and reunion have characterised the Established Church of Scotland, with the most damaging episode, that of the Disruption in 1843, on the platform of patronage. The emergent Free Church retained a legacy of evangelicalism within the Highlands long after the Free Church (Continuing) has declined south of the notional Highland line. It is stressed that in all its many facets, the Highlands displays no uniform pattern in time, place or will; the region is more profitably examined as a collection of localities, each with its own distinctive character. What can scarcely be denied is that the landscape of the Highlands determined the patterns of religiosity that we can still recognise within its boundaries today. The thesis develops its several themes both synthetically – through a geographical reading of existing historical works on religion in the Highlands – and empirically – through a detailed archival inquiry into the story of one particular Highland parish, that of Glenmuick, Tullich and Glengairn, in Upper Deeside, Aberdeenshire