The quality of some approximation formulas in a continuous review inventory model

Statistical Methods

Policing the ‘Bastard Boys’: Reality and Significance of the Police-Union ‘Accord’ during the National Waterfront Dispute

ABC Channel 2’s compelling and controversial dramatisation of the bitter and protracted 1998 national waterfront dispute, ‘Bastard Boys’, contained fleeting glimpses of friendly police accommodation of the sacked wharfies. One scene, depicting operational police dancing the macarena with the picketing wharfies, trivialised both the significance of the police peacekeeping strategy and the intricacies of the tense police-union relationship. This paper argues that police around Australia generally adopted a negotiated, conciliatory, non-confrontational approach with the Maritime Union of Australia picketers and supporters. This strategy was based on protocols and procedures that had been developing between the police and the union movement for a decade. Police, however, maintained the capacity to use force at any stage of the conflict. The paper contends that the police strategy rejected pressure and criticism from a New Right agenda that clamoured for violent police intervention

Macroevolution of microhabitat, climate, and morphology in lungless salamanders (Family: Plethodontidae).

Biologists have long sought to understand how ecological selective pressures drive evolutionary responses. Defining how morphology, life history, and abiotic conditions interact across deep time can reveal the selective pressures responsible for shaping various axes of biodiversity. I used this three-pronged framework to investigate the macroevolution of the family of lungless salamanders (Plethodontidae), well-known for its impressive ecological and geographic diversity while exhibiting little apparent morphological diversity. Employing ancestral state estimation methods, geometric morphometrics, and various phylogenetic comparative approaches, I first investigated the macroevolutionary responses of functional morphology to microhabitat-use across the clade\u27s history. From these analyses, I estimated at least five independent transitions towards arboreality and over 60 transitions away from arboreality across the plethodontid tree of life. This suggests that arboreality may represent an evolutionarily transitory state for lungless salamanders, with a high tendency to abandon arboreal habitats to return to the ancestral terrestrial habitat. I also found no evidence of morphologically distinct body shapes or foot shapes in arboreal species, suggesting that it is unlikely that the tendency to occupy or abandon arboreal microhabitats is driven by biomechanical constraints. I next explored the relationship between microhabitat use and abiotic conditions, revealing that arboreal species occupy warmer, wetter climates than terrestrial species as measured by coarse environmental data summarized across entire species\u27 ranges. This pattern was explicated using phylogenetic comparative methods and corroborated with a novel implementation of ecological niche modeling. From this analysis, I concluded that the availability of arboreal microhabitats is largely determined by the abiotic conditions of the species range. Finally, following our discovery of the importance of climate in determining these species\u27 ecological patterns, I investigated the macroevolution of the morphological trait, surface area to volume ratios (SA:V), across the family with respect to climatic variation. SA:V is particularly relevant for climatic conditions as lungless salamanders display little cutaneous resistance to water-loss and are thus prone to environmentally-induced desiccation. I developed a method to estimate SA:V which strongly outperformed traditional estimates of SA:V and revealed that salamanders in less-desiccation prone climates exhibit higher and more disparate SA:Vs. This is consistent with our hypothesis that drier climates restrict the evolution of body forms conferring high SA:Vs. Altogether, these results reveal that broad climatic patterns may be the most important ecological selective pressure in shaping the macroevolution of morphology and microhabitat use for plethodontids

Bulbar ALS Detection Based on Analysis of Voice Perturbation and Vibrato

On average the lack of biological markers causes a one year diagnostic delay to detect amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). To improve the diagnostic process an automatic voice assessment based on acoustic analysis can be used. The purpose of this work was to verify the sutability of the sustain vowel phonation test for automatic detection of patients with ALS. We proposed enhanced procedure for separation of voice signal into fundamental periods that requires for calculation of perturbation measurements (such as jitter and shimmer). Also we proposed method for quantitative assessment of pathological vibrato manifestations in sustain vowel phonation. The study's experiments show that using the proposed acoustic analysis methods, the classifier based on linear discriminant analysis attains 90.7\% accuracy with 86.7\% sensitivity and 92.2\% specificity.Comment: Proc. of International Conference Signal Processing Algorithms, Architectures, Arrangements, and Applications (SPA 2019