Red Flour Beetle Aggregation

The Red flour beetle feeds on grain which is why it is considered a pest. Understanding their aggregation behavior can help us to find new ways to control them. What we don’t yet know is what makes them group together the way they do, whether it be instinctive or a learned behavior. If the beetles are driven by strain-specific behaviors, then we should see a greater proportion of them aggregate with the same strain, which would mean they follow instinctive behavior. The results showed to be contradictory to the original hypothesis. The beetles seemed to show learned behavior due to them grouping more with beetles from the same starting environment rather than the same strain. These results tell us that we need to consider the environment, not just genetic strains, when trying to develop control strategies

The development of a spatially explicit landscape-scale model of migration and its application to investigate the response of trees to climate change.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX189436 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The Damages of Caps in Nebraska

I. Introduction II. Background on the NHMLA [Nebraska Hospital Medical Liability Act] Damage Cap ... A. General Information on the Nature of Damages in Nebraska ... B. The History of NHMLA III. Argument ... A. Interjurisdictional Precedent ... 1. Fifty-State Survey of Caps ... a. Interjurisdictional Legislative Caps ... i. Punitive Damage Caps ... ii. Medical Malpractice Caps ... b. Interjurisdictional Judicial Action on Caps … i. Right to a Jury ... ii. Open Courts ... iii. Equal Protection ... iv. Separation of Powers ... v. Special Legislation … 2. Interjurisdictional Summary ... B. Theories of Unconstitutionality ... 1. Nebraska Constitution ... a. Right to a Jury ... b. Open Courts ... c. Equal Protection ... d. Special Legislation ... e. Takings Clause ... f. Timing Arguments … 2. Economic Damages Distinction ... a. Economic Versus Noneconomic Damages Generally ... b. Nebraska’s Near-Precedent on Economic Damage Distinctions ... c. Severability of the NHMLA Cap ... d. Doctrine of Constitutional Avoidance ... e. Conclusion on Distinguishing Economic from Noneconomic Damages IV. Recommendations ... A. Court Action ... 1. Conformity with Other States ... 2. Constitutional Reconsideration ... 3. Novel Approaches with the Courts ... B. Legislative Action ... 1. Pure Removal of the Cap ... 2. Increasing and Aligning Cap ... 3. Removal of Economic Damages Application ... 4. Adjustment for Inflation V. Conclusio

Towards an automatic speech recognition system for use by deaf students in lectures

According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf people there are nearly 7.5 million hearing-impaired people in Great Britain. Human-operated machine transcription systems, such as Palantype, achieve low word error rates in real-time. The disadvantage is that they are very expensive to use because of the difficulty in training operators, making them impractical for everyday use in higher education. Existing automatic speech recognition systems also achieve low word error rates, the disadvantages being that they work for read speech in a restricted domain. Moving a system to a new domain requires a large amount of relevant data, for training acoustic and language models. The adopted solution makes use of an existing continuous speech phoneme recognition system as a front-end to a word recognition sub-system. The subsystem generates a lattice of word hypotheses using dynamic programming with robust parameter estimation obtained using evolutionary programming. Sentence hypotheses are obtained by parsing the word lattice using a beam search and contributing knowledge consisting of anti-grammar rules, that check the syntactic incorrectness’ of word sequences, and word frequency information. On an unseen spontaneous lecture taken from the Lund Corpus and using a dictionary containing "2637 words, the system achieved 815% words correct with 15% simulated phoneme error, and 73.1% words correct with 25% simulated phoneme error. The system was also evaluated on 113 Wall Street Journal sentences. The achievements of the work are a domain independent method, using the anti- grammar, to reduce the word lattice search space whilst allowing normal spontaneous English to be spoken; a system designed to allow integration with new sources of knowledge, such as semantics or prosody, providing a test-bench for determining the impact of different knowledge upon word lattice parsing without the need for the underlying speech recognition hardware; the robustness of the word lattice generation using parameters that withstand changes in vocabulary and domain

Product design to support creative ageing for people with dementia: a practice-based inquiry

The practice-based research presented in this thesis was an exploration into the impact, context, and potential of co creation to affect the lives of People with Dementia. I present transferrable insight from a year-long Embedded Ethnographic engagement in a Residential Care Home, spent working alongside Participatory Artists, building critical insight into the aesthetic and sensory context of Care. Insights from this Ethnographic research are developed and situated through Research through Design (RtD) practice in two further empirical design studies. Firstly, the co creative development of physical material tools to support Creative Ageing practice. Secondly, the design of co creative activities to allow People with Dementia to individualise elements of the designed environment. My thesis highlights ways in which Product Design expertise can contribute to Creative Ageing practice and extends means by which People with Dementia can engage in the creation of individualised design outcomes, by contributing new methods and a new conceptual lens to the paradigm of Parametric Design, characterised by a questioning, generative and critical approach

Climatic Disequilibrium Threatens Conservation Priority Forests

AcceptedArticle in PressThis is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley Open Access via the DOI in this record.© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.We test the hypothesis that climatic changes since 1800 have resulted in unrealized potential vegetation changes that represent a "climatic debt" for many ecosystems. Caledonian pinewoods, an EU priority forest type, are used as a model system to explore potential impacts of two centuries of climatic change upon sites of conservation importance and surrounding landscapes. Using methods that estimate topographic microclimate, current and preindustrial climates were estimated for 50 m grid cells and simulations made using a dynamic vegetation model. Core Caledonian pinewood areas are now less suitable for growth of pine and more favorable for oak than in 1800, whereas landscapes as a whole are on average more favorable for both. The most favorable areas for pine are now mainly outside areas designated to conserve historical pinewoods. A paradigm shift is needed in formulating conservation strategies to avoid catastrophic losses of this habitat, and of many others globally with trees or other long-lived perennials as keystone species.Natural Environment Research Council. Grant Number: NE/I011234/

Predicting future European breeding distributions of British seabird species under climate change and unlimited/no dispersal scenarios

Understanding which traits make species vulnerable to climatic change and predicting future distributions permits conservation efforts to be focused on the most vulnerable species and the most appropriate sites. Here, we combine climate envelope models with predicted bioclimatic data from two emission scenarios leading up to 2100, to predict European breeding distributions of 23 seabird species that currently breed in the British Isles. Assuming unlimited dispersal, some species would be “winners” (increase the size of their range), but over 65% would lose range, some by up to 80%. These “losers” have a high vulnerability to low prey availability, and a northerly distribution meaning they would lack space to move into. Under the worst-case scenario of no dispersal, species are predicted to lose between 25% and 100% of their range, so dispersal ability is a key constraint on future range sizes. More globally, the results indicate, based on foraging ecology, which seabird species are likely to be most affected by climatic change. Neither of the emissions scenarios used in this study is extreme, yet they generate very different predictions for some species, illustrating that even small decreases in emissions could yield large benefits for conservation

No-deal food planning in UK Brexit

Even for a country with a long history of arguments about food supply, the UK's present situation is remarkable. A country that received 28% of its food in 2018 directly from the European Union (EU), plus 11% more through EU trade deals, is now planning, under the leadership of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to leave the EU (“Brexit”) on Oct 31, 2019, with or without an agreement on how and what the terms are for trade, customs, and food security. The food implications for consumers and public health of a no-deal Brexit are seeping out of government but deserve full scrutiny