Old Licenses and New Uses: Motion Picture and Television Rights

There are many possible ways to perform the attitude control of a quadcopter and, recently, the subject of event-triggered control has become relevant in the scientic community. This thesis deals with the analysis and implementation of a saturating attitude controller for a quadcopter system, together with the derivation of an event-triggering rule to work with it. Two distinct rules are presented, one that ensures the stability of the closed loop system, the other, a linearised version that does not. The way those were derived consists in the use of a Lyapunov based approach. The stability of the system when under these rules was veried experimentally

Parallel assessment of male reproductive function in workers and wild rats exposed to pesticides in banana plantations in Guadeloupe

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There is increasing evidence that reproductive abnormalities are increasing in frequency in both human population and among wild fauna. This increase is probably related to exposure to toxic contaminants in the environment. The use of sentinel species to raise alarms relating to human reproductive health has been strongly recommended. However, no simultaneous studies at the same site have been carried out in recent decades to evaluate the utility of wild animals for monitoring human reproductive disorders. We carried out a joint study in Guadeloupe assessing the reproductive function of workers exposed to pesticides in banana plantations and of male wild rats living in these plantations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study was performed to assess semen quality and reproductive hormones in banana workers and in men working in non-agricultural sectors. These reproductive parameters were also assessed in wild rats captured in the plantations and were compared with those in rats from areas not directly polluted by humans.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>No significant difference in sperm characteristics and/or hormones was found between workers exposed and not exposed to pesticide. By contrast, rats captured in the banana plantations had lower testosterone levels and gonadosomatic indices than control rats.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Wild rats seem to be more sensitive than humans to the effects of pesticide exposure on reproductive health. We conclude that the concept of sentinel species must be carefully validated as the actual nature of exposure may varies between human and wild species as well as the vulnerable time period of exposure and various ecological factors.</p

Judging the difference between attractiveness and health: does exposure to model images influence the judgments made by men and women?

Recent research has shown facial adiposity (apparent weight in the face) to be a significant predictor of both attractiveness and health, thus making it an important determinant of mate selection. Studies looking at the relationship between attractiveness and health have shown that individuals differentiate between the two by preferring a lower weight for attractiveness than for health in female faces. However, these studies have either been correlational studies, or have investigated weight perceived from only the face. These differences have been discussed with regard to sociocultural factors such as pressure from parents, peers and also media, which has been seen to have the highest influence. While exposure to media images has been shown to influence women’s own body image, no study has yet directly tested the influence of these factors on people’s preferred weight in other women’s bodies. Here we examine how a short exposure to images of models influences men’s and women’s judgments of the most healthy looking and attractive BMI in Malaysian Chinese women’s bodies by comparing differences in preferences (for attractiveness and health) between groups exposed to images of models of varying attractiveness and body weight. Results indicated that participants preferred a lower weight for attractiveness than for health. Further, women’s but not men’s preferred BMI for attractiveness, but not health, was influenced by the type of media images to which they were exposed, suggesting that short term exposure to model images affect women’s perceptions of attractiveness but not health

Dogs and humans respond to emotionally competent stimuli by producing different facial actions

The commonality of facial expressions of emotion has been studied in different species since Darwin, with most of the research focusing on closely related primate species. However, it is unclear to what extent there exists common facial expression in species more phylogenetically distant, but sharing a need for common interspecific emotional understanding. Here we used the objective, anatomically-based tools, FACS and DogFACS (Facial Action Coding Systems), to quantify and compare human and domestic dog facial expressions in response to emotionally-competent stimuli associated with different categories of emotional arousal. We sought to answer two questions: Firstly, do dogs display specific discriminatory facial movements in response to different categories of emotional stimuli? Secondly, do dogs display similar facial movements to humans when reacting in emotionally comparable contexts? We found that dogs displayed distinctive facial actions depending on the category of stimuli. However, dogs produced different facial movements to humans in comparable states of emotional arousal. These results refute the commonality of emotional expression across mammals, since dogs do not display human-like facial expressions. Given the unique interspecific relationship between dogs and humans, two highly social but evolutionarily distant species sharing a common environment, these findings give new insight into the origin of emotion expression