The visual preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation : four case studies in Finland

The overall aim of this dissertation was to study the public's preferences for forest regeneration fellings and field afforestations, as well as to find out the relations of these preferences to landscape management instructions, to ecological healthiness, and to the contemporary theories for predicting landscape preferences. This dissertation includes four case studies in Finland, each based on the visualization of management options and surveys. Guidelines for improving the visual quality of forest regeneration and field afforestation are given based on the case studies. The results show that forest regeneration can be connected to positive images and memories when the regeneration area is small and some time has passed since the felling. Preferences may not depend only on the management alternative itself but also on the viewing distance, viewing point, and the scene in which the management options are implemented. The current Finnish forest landscape management guidelines as well as the ecological healthiness of the studied options are to a large extent compatible with the public's preferences. However, there are some discrepancies. For example, the landscape management instructions as well as ecological hypotheses suggest that the retention trees need to be left in groups, whereas people usually prefer individually located retention trees to those trees in groups. Information and psycho-evolutionary theories provide some possible explanations for people's preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation, but the results cannot be consistently explained by these theories. The preferences of the different stakeholder groups were very similar. However, the preference ratings of the groups that make their living from forest - forest owners and forest professionals - slightly differed from those of the others. These results provide support for the assumptions that preferences are largely consistent at least within one nation, but that knowledge and a reference group may also influence preferences.Väitöskirjassa tutkittiin ihmisten maisemapreferenssejä (maisemallisia arvostuksia) metsänuudistamishakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten suhteen sekä analysoitiin näiden preferenssien yhteyksiä maisemanhoito-ohjeisiin, vaihtoehtojen ekologiseen terveyteen ja preferenssejä ennustaviin teorioihin. Väitöskirja sisältää neljä tapaustutkimusta, jotka perustuvat hoitovaihtoehtojen visualisointiin ja kyselytutkimuksiin. Tapaustutkimusten pohjalta annetaan ohjeita siitä, kuinka uudistushakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten visuaalista laatua voidaan parantaa. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että uudistamishakkuut voivat herättää myös myönteisiä mielikuvia ja muistoja, jos uudistusala on pieni ja hakkuun välittömät jäljet ovat jo peittyneet. Preferensseihin vaikuttaa hoitovaihtoehdon lisäksi mm. katseluetäisyys, katselupiste ja ympäristö, jossa vaihtoehto on toteutettu. Eri viiteryhmien (metsäammattilaiset, pääkaupunkiseudun asukkaat, ympäristönsuojelijat, tutkimusalueiden matkailijat, paikalliset asukkaat sekä metsänomistajat) maisemapreferenssit olivat hyvin samankaltaisia. Kuitenkin ne ryhmät, jotka saavat ainakin osan elannostaan metsästä - metsänomistajat ja metsäammattilaiset - pitivät metsänhakkuita esittävistä kuvista hieman enemmän kuin muut ryhmät. Nämä tulokset tukevat oletusta, että maisemapreferenssit ovat laajalti yhteneväisiä ainakin yhden kansan tai kulttuurin keskuudessa, vaikka myös viiteryhmä saattaa vaikuttaa preferensseihin jonkin verran. Nykyiset metsämaisemanhoito-ohjeet ovat pitkälti samankaltaisia tässä väitöskirjassa havaittujen maisemapreferenssien kanssa. Myöskään tutkittujen vaihtoehtoisten hoitotapojen ekologisen paremmuuden ja niihin kohdistuvien maisemallisten arvostusten välillä ei ollut suurta ristiriitaa. Kuitenkin joitakin eroavaisuuksia oli; esimerkiksi sekä maisemanhoito-ohjeiden että ekologisten hypoteesien mukaan säästöpuut tulisi jättää ryhmiin, kun taas ihmiset pitivät eniten yksittäin jätetyistä puista. Informaatiomalli ja psyko-evolutionaarinen teoria tarjoavat mahdollisia selityksiä uudistushakkuisiin ja pellonmetsitykseen kohdistuville preferensseille, vaikkakaan tutkimuksen tuloksia ei voida täysin selittää näillä teorioilla

The Kinetic Basis of Morphogenesis

It has been shown recently (Shalygo, 2014) that stationary and dynamic patterns can arise in the proposed one-component model of the analog (continuous state) kinetic automaton, or kinon for short, defined as a reflexive dynamical system with active transport. This paper presents extensions of the model, which increase further its complexity and tunability, and shows that the extended kinon model can produce spatio-temporal patterns pertaining not only to pattern formation but also to morphogenesis in real physical and biological systems. The possible applicability of the model to morphogenetic engineering and swarm robotics is also discussed.Comment: 8 pages. Submitted to the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL-2015) on March 10, 2015. Accepted on April 28, 201

Decoupling of brain function from structure reveals regional behavioral specialization in humans

The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways. Brain activity is expressed on and constrained by this substrate. Therefore, statistical dependencies between functional signals in directly connected areas can be expected higher. However, the degree to which brain function is bound by the underlying wiring diagram remains a complex question that has been only partially answered. Here, we introduce the structural-decoupling index to quantify the coupling strength between structure and function, and we reveal a macroscale gradient from brain regions more strongly coupled, to regions more strongly decoupled, than expected by realistic surrogate data. This gradient spans behavioral domains from lower-level sensory function to high-level cognitive ones and shows for the first time that the strength of structure-function coupling is spatially varying in line with evidence derived from other modalities, such as functional connectivity, gene expression, microstructural properties and temporal hierarchy

Surface Shape Perception in Volumetric Stereo Displays

In complex volume visualization applications, understanding the displayed objects and their spatial relationships is challenging for several reasons. One of the most important obstacles is that these objects can be translucent and can overlap spatially, making it difficult to understand their spatial structures. However, in many applications, for example medical visualization, it is crucial to have an accurate understanding of the spatial relationships among objects. The addition of visual cues has the potential to help human perception in these visualization tasks. Descriptive line elements, in particular, have been found to be effective in conveying shape information in surface-based graphics as they sparsely cover a geometrical surface, consistently following the geometry. We present two approaches to apply such line elements to a volume rendering process and to verify their effectiveness in volume-based graphics. This thesis reviews our progress to date in this area and discusses its effects and limitations. Specifically, it examines the volume renderer implementation that formed the foundation of this research, the design of the pilot study conducted to investigate the effectiveness of this technique, the results obtained. It further discusses improvements designed to address the issues revealed by the statistical analysis. The improved approach is able to handle visualization targets with general shapes, thus making it more appropriate to real visualization applications involving complex objects

Visualizing Set Relations and Cardinalities Using Venn and Euler Diagrams

In medicine, genetics, criminology and various other areas, Venn and Euler diagrams are used to visualize data set relations and their cardinalities. The data sets are represented by closed curves and the data set relationships are depicted by the overlaps between these curves. Both the sets and their intersections are easily visible as the closed curves are preattentively processed and form common regions that have a strong perceptual grouping effect. Besides set relations such as intersection, containment and disjointness, the cardinality of the sets and their intersections can also be depicted in the same diagram (referred to as area-proportional) through the size of the curves and their overlaps. Size is a preattentive feature and so similarities, differences and trends are easily identified. Thus, such diagrams facilitate data analysis and reasoning about the sets. However, drawing these diagrams manually is difficult, often impossible, and current automatic drawing methods do not always produce appropriate diagrams. This dissertation presents novel automatic drawing methods for different types of Euler diagrams and a user study of how such diagrams can help probabilistic judgement. The main drawing algorithms are: eulerForce, which uses a force-directed approach to lay out Euler diagrams; eulerAPE, which draws area-proportional Venn diagrams with ellipses. The user study evaluated the effectiveness of area- proportional Euler diagrams, glyph representations, Euler diagrams with glyphs and text+visualization formats for Bayesian reasoning, and a method eulerGlyphs was devised to automatically and accurately draw the assessed visualizations for any Bayesian problem. Additionally, analytic algorithms that instantaneously compute the overlapping areas of three general intersecting ellipses are provided, together with an evaluation of the effectiveness of ellipses in drawing accurate area-proportional Venn diagrams for 3-set data and the characteristics of the data that can be depicted accurately with ellipses

Proceedings of Abstracts Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2019

© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Note: Keynote: Fluorescence visualisation to evaluate effectiveness of personal protective equipment for infection control is © 2019 Crown copyright and so is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Under this licence users are permitted to copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application. Where you do any of the above you must acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/This book is the record of abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at the Inaugural Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference held 17th April 2019 at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This conference is a local event aiming at bringing together the research students, staff and eminent external guests to celebrate Engineering and Computer Science Research at the University of Hertfordshire. The ECS Research Conference aims to showcase the broad landscape of research taking place in the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The 2019 conference was articulated around three topical cross-disciplinary themes: Make and Preserve the Future; Connect the People and Cities; and Protect and Care

Information Theory’s failure in neuroscience: on the limitations of cybernetics

In Cybernetics (1961 Edition), Professor Norbert Wiener noted that “The role of information and the technique of measuring and transmitting information constitute a whole discipline for the engineer, for the neuroscientist, for the psychologist, and for the sociologist”. Sociology aside, the neuroscientists and the psychologists inferred “information transmitted” using the discrete summations from Shannon Information Theory. The present author has since scrutinized the psychologists’ approach in depth, and found it wrong. The neuroscientists’ approach is highly related, but remains unexamined. Neuroscientists quantified “the ability of [physiological sensory] receptors (or other signal-processing elements) to transmit information about stimulus parameters”. Such parameters could vary along a single continuum (e.g., intensity), or along multiple dimensions that altogether provide a Gestalt – such as a face. Here, unprecedented scrutiny is given to how 23 neuroscience papers computed “information transmitted” in terms of stimulus parameters and the evoked neuronal spikes. The computations relied upon Shannon’s “confusion matrix”, which quantifies the fidelity of a “general communication system”. Shannon’s matrix is square, with the same labels for columns and for rows. Nonetheless, neuroscientists labelled the columns by “stimulus category” and the rows by “spike-count category”. The resulting “information transmitted” is spurious, unless the evoked spike-counts are worked backwards to infer the hypothetical evoking stimuli. The latter task is probabilistic and, regardless, requires that the confusion matrix be square. Was it? For these 23 significant papers, the answer is No