Characterising the neck motor system of the blowfly

Flying insects use visual, mechanosensory, and proprioceptive information to control their movements, both when on the ground and when airborne. Exploiting visual information for motor control is significantly simplified if the eyes remain aligned with the external horizon. In fast flying insects, head rotations relative to the body enable gaze stabilisation during highspeed manoeuvres or externally caused attitude changes due to turbulent air. Previous behavioural studies into gaze stabilisation suffered from the dynamic properties of the supplying sensor systems and those of the neck motor system being convolved. Specifically, stabilisation of the head in Dipteran flies responding to induced thorax roll involves feed forward information from the mechanosensory halteres, as well as feedback information from the visual systems. To fully understand the functional design of the blowfly gaze stabilisation system as a whole, the neck motor system needs to be investigated independently. Through X-ray micro-computed tomography (μCT), high resolution 3D data has become available, and using staining techniques developed in collaboration with the Natural History Museum London, detailed anatomical data can be extracted. This resulted in a full 3- dimensional anatomical representation of the 21 neck muscle pairs and neighbouring cuticula structures which comprise the blowfly neck motor system. Currently, on the work presented in my PhD thesis, μCT data are being used to infer function from structure by creating a biomechanical model of the neck motor system. This effort aims to determine the specific function of each muscle individually, and is likely to inform the design of artificial gaze stabilisation systems. Any such design would incorporate both sensory and motor systems as well as the control architecture converting sensor signals into motor commands under the given physical constraints of the system as a whole.Open Acces

Deuteron Dipole Polarizabilities and Sum Rules

The scalar, vector, and tensor components of the (generalized) deuteron electric polarizability are calculated, as well as their logarithmic modifications. Several of these quantities arise in the treatment of the nuclear corrections to the deuterium Lamb shift and the deuterium hyperfine structure. A variety of second-generation potential models are used and a (subjective) error is assigned to the calculations. The zero-range approximation is used to analyze a subset of the results, and a simple relativistic version of this approximation is developed.Comment: 14 pages, LaTex - submitted to Physical Review

The nucleon-sigma coupling constant in QCD Sum Rules

The external-field QCD Sum Rules method is used to evaluate the coupling constant of the light isoscalar-scalar meson (``$\sigma$'' or \epsilon) to the nucleon. The contributions that come from the excited nucleon states and the response of the continuum threshold to the external field are calculated. The obtained value of the coupling constant is compatible with the large value required in one-boson exchange potential models of the two-nucleon interaction.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

European air quality maps 2005 including uncertainty analysis

The objective of this report is (a) the updating and refinement of European air quality maps based on annual statistics of the 2005 observational data reported by EEA Member countries in 2006, and (b) the further improvement of the interpolation methodologies. The paper presents the results achieved and an uncertainty analysis of the interpolated maps and builds upon earlier reports from Horalék et al. (2005; 2007)

Visualization of a data leak : how can visualization assist to determine the scope of an attack?

The potential impact that data leakage can have on a country, both on a national level as well as on an individual level, can be wide reaching and potentially catastrophic. In January 2013, several South African companies became the target of a hack attack, resulting in the breach of security measures and the leaking of a claimed 700000 records. The affected companies are spread across a number of domains, thus making the leak a very wide impact area. The aim of this paper is to analyze the data released from the South African breach and to visualize the extent of the loss by the companies affected. The value of this work lies in its connection to and interpretation of related South African legislation. The data extracted during the analysis is primarily personally identifiable information, such as defined by the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002 and the Protection of Personal Information Bill of 2009