Lipophrys pholis is larger, grows faster and is in better condition in protected than in unprotected rocky shores

Intertidal fish are a key component of littoral food webs, contributing to the diets of birds and commercial fish species. Ascertaining their growth and condition can therefore help understand the health status of local communities. Lipophrys pholis is a fish of the rocky intertidal with a wide distribution throughout the North-eastern Atlantic (NE Atlantic) that has been recommended for use as an indicator in the environmental biomonitoring of marine ecosystems. However, it is unclear yet if this species is sensitive to the reserve effect. In this study, the size, growth and body condition of specimens caught at protected and unprotected rocky shores of two contrasting marine provinces of the NE Atlantic were analysed to address whether L. pholis is sensitive to the reserve effect. L. pholis were larger, grew faster in weight and were in better condition in the protected shores of both provinces. A faster growth rate was observed in the populations of the warmer province. Inshore waters of unprotected sites in the Northern European Seas sampled in this study have recently been incorporated into a protected area. Thus, these results can help assess the success of the marine conservation programme and the time L. pholis needs to improve its population's health at these shores. Regulating access to shores to avoid trampling and harvesting is a protection measure that can help enhance the health and conservation of L. pholis populations

Amygdala and fusiform gyrus temporal dynamics: Responses to negative facial expressions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The amygdala habituates in response to repeated human facial expressions; however, it is unclear whether this brain region habituates to schematic faces (i.e., simple line drawings or caricatures of faces). Using an fMRI block design, 16 healthy participants passively viewed repeated presentations of schematic and human neutral and negative facial expressions. Percent signal changes within anatomic regions-of-interest (amygdala and fusiform gyrus) were calculated to examine the temporal dynamics of neural response and any response differences based on face type.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The amygdala and fusiform gyrus had a within-run "U" response pattern of activity to facial expression blocks. The initial block within each run elicited the greatest activation (relative to baseline) and the final block elicited greater activation than the preceding block. No significant differences between schematic and human faces were detected in the amygdala or fusiform gyrus.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The "U" pattern of response in the amygdala and fusiform gyrus to facial expressions suggests an initial orienting, habituation, and activation recovery in these regions. Furthermore, this study is the first to directly compare brain responses to schematic and human facial expressions, and the similarity in brain responses suggest that schematic faces may be useful in studying amygdala activation.</p

A Comparative experimental study of media access protocols for wireless radio networks

We conduct a comparative experimental analysis of three well known media access protocols: 802.11, CSMA, and MACA for wireless radio networks. Both fixed and ad-hoc networks are considered. The experimental analysis was carried out using GloMoSim: a tool for simulating wireless networks. The main focus of experiments was to study how (i) the size of the network, (ii) number of open connections, (iii) the spatial location of individual connections, (iv) speed with which individual nodes move and (v) protocols higher up in the protocol stack (e,g. routing layer) affect the performance of the media access sublayer protocols. The performance of the protocols was measured w.r.t. three important parameters: (1) number of received packets, (2) average latency of each packet, and (3) throughput. The following general qualitative conclusions were obtained; some of the conclusions reinforce the earlier claims by other researchers. (1) Although 802.11 performs better than the other two protocols with respect to fairness of transmission, packets dropped, and latency, its performance is found to (i) show a lot of variance with changing input parameters and (ii) the overall performance still leaves a lot of room for improvement. (2) CSMA does not perform too well under the fairness criteria, however, was the best in terms of the latency criteria. (3) MACA also shows fairness problems and has poor performance at high packet injection rates. (4) Protocols in the higher level of the protocol stack affect the MAC layer performance. The main general implications of our work is two folds: (1) No single protocol dominated the other protocols across various measures of efficiency. This motivates the design of a new class of parameterized protocols that adapt to changes in the network connectivity and loads. We refer to these class of protocols as parameterized dynamically adaptive efficient protocols and as a first step suggest key design requirements for such a class of protocols. (2) Performance analysis of protocols at a given level in the protocol stack need to be studied not locally in isolation but as a part of the complete protocol stack. The results suggest that in order to improve the performance of a communication network, it will be important to study the entire protocol stuck as a single algorithmic construct; optimizing individual layers in the 7 layer OSI stack will not yield performance improvements beyond a point

EFFECT OF MOBILITY ON PERFORMANCE OF WIRELESS AD-HOC NETWORK PROTOCOLS.

We empirically study the effect of mobility on the performance of protocols designed for wireless adhoc networks. An important ohjective is to study the interaction of the Routing and MAC layer protocols under different mobility parameters. We use three basic mobility models: grid mobility model, random waypoint model, and exponential correlated random model. The performance of protocols was measured in terms of (i) latency, (ii) throughput, (iii) number of packels received, (iv) long term fairness and (v) number of control packets at the MAC layer level. Three different commonly studied routing protocols were used: AODV, DSR and LAR1. Similarly three well known MAC protocols were used: MACA, 802.1 1 and CSMA. The inair1 conclusion of our study include the following: 1. 'I'he performance of the: network varies widely with varying mobility models, packet injection rates and speeds; and can ba in fact characterized as fair to poor depending on the specific situation. Nevertheless, in general, it appears that the combination of AODV and 802.1 I is far better than other combination of routing and MAC protocols. 2. MAC layer protocols interact with routing layer protocols. This concept which is formalized using statistics implies that in general it is not meaningful to speak about a MAC or a routing protocol in isolation. Such an interaction leads to trade-offs between the amount of control packets generated by each layer. More interestingly, the results wise the possibility of improving the performance of a particular MAC layer protocol by using a cleverly designed routing protocol or vice-versa. 3. Routing prolocols with distributed knowledge about routes are more suitable for networks with mobility. This is seen by comparing the performance of AODV with DSR or LAR scheme 1. In DSli and IAR scheme 1, information about a computed path is being stored in the route query control packct. 4. MAC layer protocols have varying performance with varying mobility models. It is not only speed that influences the performance but also node degree and connectivity of the dynamic network that affects the protocol performance. 'The main implication of OUI' work is that performance analysis of protocols at a given level in the protocol stack need to be studied not locally in isolation but as a part of the complete protocol stack. The results suggest that in order to improve the pcrlormance of a communication network, it will be important to study the entire protocol stack as a single algorithmic construct; optimizing individual layers in the 7 layer OS1 stilck will not yield performance improvements beyond a point. A methodological contribution of this paper is the use of statistical methods such as design of experinierits arzd aiialysis qf variance methods to characterize the interaction between the protocols, mobility patterns and speed. This allows us to mako much more informed conclusions about the performance of thc protocols than would have been possible by merely running these experiments and observing the data. These ideas are of independtmt interest and are applicable in other contexts wherein one experimentally analyzes algorithms

Characterizing the Interaction Between Routing and MAC Protocols in Ad-Hoc Networks

We empirically study the effect of mobility on the performance of protocols designed for wireless ad-hoc networks. An important objective is to study the interaction of the Routing and MAC layer protocols under different mobility parameters. We use three basic mobility models: grid mobility model, random waypoint model, and exponential correlated random model. The performance of protocols is measured in terms of (i) latency, (ii) throughput, (iii) number of packets received, (iv) long term fairness and (v) number of control packets at the MAC and routing layer level. Three different commonly studied routing protocols are used: AODV, DSR and LAR1. Similarly three well known MAC protocols are used: MACA, 802.1 1 and CSMA. Our main contribution is simulation based experiments coupled with rigorous statistical analysis to characterize the interaction of MAC layer protocols with routing layer protocols in ad-hoc networks. From the results, we can conclude the following: e No single MAC or Routing protocol dominated the other protocols in their class. Probably more interestingly, no MAURouting protocol combination was better than other combinations over all scenarios and response variables. 0 In general, it is not meaningful to speak about a MAC or a routing protocol in isolation. Presence of interaction leads to trade-offs between the amount of control packets generated by each layer. The results raise the possibility of improving the performance of a particular MAC layer protocol by using a cleverly designed routing protocol or vice-versa. Thus in order to improve the performanceof a communication network, it is important to study the entire protocol stack as a single algorithmic construct; optimizing individual layers in the seven layer OS1 stack will not yield performance improvements beyond a point. A methodological contribution of this paper is the use of statistical methods such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), to characterize the interaction between the protocols, mobility patterns and speed. Such methods allow us to analyze complicated experiments with large input space in a systematic manner

Complexity of analysis and verification problems for communicating automata and discrete dynamical systems.

We identify several simple but powerful concepts, techniques, and results; and we use them to characterize the complexities of a number of basic problems II, that arise in the analysis and verification of the following models M of communicating automata and discrete dynamical systems: systems of communicating automata including both finite and infinite cellular automata, transition systems, discrete dynamical systems, and succinctly-specified finite automata. These concepts, techniques, and results are centered on the following: (1) reductions Of STATE-REACHABILITY problems, especially for very simple systems of communicating copies of a single simple finite automaton, (2) reductions of generalized CNF satisfiability problems [Sc78], especially to very simple communicating systems of copies of a few basic acyclic finite sequential machines, and (3) reductions of the EMPTINESS and EMPTINESS-OF-INTERSECTION problems, for several kinds of regular set descriptors. For systems of communicating automata and transition systems, the problems studied include: all equivalence relations and simulation preorders in the Linear-time/Branching-time hierarchies of equivalence relations and simulation preorders of [vG90, vG93], both without and with the hiding abstraction. For discrete dynamical systems, the problems studied include the INITIAL and BOUNDARY VALUE PROBLEMS (denoted IVPs and BVPs, respectively), for nonlinear difference equations over many different algebraic structures, e.g. all unitary rings, all finite unitary semirings, and all lattices. For succinctly specified finite automata, the problems studied also include the several problems studied in [AY98], e.g. the EMPTINESS, EMPTINESS-OF-INTERSECTION, EQUIVALENCE and CONTAINMENT problems. The concepts, techniques, and results presented unify and significantly extend many of the known results in the literature, e.g. [Wo86, Gu89, BPT91, GM92, Ra92, HT94, SH+96, AY98, AKY99, RH93, SM73, Hu73, HRS76, HR78], for communicating automata including both finite and infinite cellular automata and for finite automata specified by special kinds of context-free grammars, by regular operations augmented with squaring and intersection, and specified succinctly as in [AY98, AKY99]. Moreover, our development of these concepts, techniques, and results shows how several ideas, techniques, and results, for the individual models M above can be extended to apply to all or to most of these models. As one example of this and paraphrasing [BPTBl] , we show that most of these models M exhibit computationally-intractable sensitive dependence on initial conditions, for the same reason. These computationally-intractable sensitivities range from PSPACE-hard to undecidable

Sequential dynamical systems with threshold functions.

A sequential dynamical system (SDS) (see [BH+01] and the references therein) consists of an undirected graph G(V,E) where each node {nu} {epsilon} V is associated with a Boolean state (s{sub {nu}}) and a symmetric Boolean function f{sub {nu}} (called the local transition function at {nu}). The inputs to f{sub {nu}} are s{sub {nu}} and the states of all the nodes adjacent to {nu}. In each step of the SDS, the nodes update their state values using their local transition functions in the order specified by a given permutation {pi} of the nodes. A configuration of the SDS is an n-tuple (b{sub 1}, b{sub 2}...,b{sub n}) where n = |V| and b{sub i} {epsilon} {l_brace}0,1{r_brace} is the state value of node {nu}{sub i}. The system starts in a specified initial configuration and each step of the SDS produces a (possibly new) configuration

To what extent can headteachers be held to account in the practice of social justice leadership?

Internationally, leadership for social justice is gaining prominence as a global travelling theme. This article draws from the Scottish contribution to the International School Leadership Development Network (ISLDN) social justice strand and presents a case study of a relatively small education system similar in size to that of New Zealand, to explore one system's policy expectations and the practice realities of headteachers (principals) seeking to address issues around social justice. Scottish policy rhetoric places responsibility with headteachers to ensure socially just practices within their schools. However, those headteachers are working in schools located within unjust local, national and international contexts. The article explores briefly the emerging theoretical analyses of social justice and leadership. It then identifies the policy expectations, including those within the revised professional standards for headteachers in Scotland. The main focus is on the headteachers' perspectives of factors that help and hinder their practice of leadership for social justice. Macro systems-level data is used to contextualize equity and outcomes issues that headteachers are working to address. In the analysis of the dislocation between policy and reality, the article asks, 'to what extent can headteachers be held to account in the practice of social justice leadership?

Diversification and agrarian change under environmental constraints in rural China: Evidence from a poor township of Beijing municipality

Working paper du GATE 2007-11This article illustrates the impact of changes related to market reforms and environmental policies on the economic structure in rural China by providing a comparative analysis of several villages in a poor township in Beijing municipality. Two main concomitant phenomena are affecting agricultural and non-agricultural choices in the studied area. First, the introduction of market mechanisms is encouraging local population to engage in new activities that are closer to local comparative advantages. Second, rural households are facing new constraints in the form of environmental protection measures, which have weakened traditional insurance channels provided by forest resources and cattle stock. Drawing on household-level survey data and interviews with village heads conducted in ten villages of Labagoumen township in December 2003, this article analyzes households decisions in response to market reforms and environmental constraints. We find large disparities both between villages and households in the diversification process and discuss the reasons of observed inertia in the region, most households still heavily relying on corn production