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

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

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/

Wartime globalization in Asia, 1937-1945, conflicted connections and convergences

Given war's propensity for trampling over and demolishing borders—its literal, one might even say primordial, function as a motor of deterritorialization and reterritorialization—the scant scholarly attention paid to it as a globalizing force remains surprising. An extensive body of literature has responded to the complex role of globalization in the making, as well as the supposed unmaking, of conflict. Liberal economists and political theorists, in an intellectual lineage that dates back to the writings of the European Enlightenment, have made bold claims about global economic integration and the emergence of a ‘capitalist peace’. Critics of their arguments have pointed to the Western imperial violence which, from the mid-eighteenth century on, cleared the ground (and perhaps, more importantly, the seas) to make way for the so-called ‘free’ market world economy, a process which established several of those fundamental worldwide inequalities that have been perpetuated to this day. The hard evidence of a more recent past makes a mockery of the presumption that global capitalist enterprises such as Starbucks and McDonalds might bring about some kind of Big Mac and Frappuccino-mediated universal fraternity. Critical observers of globalization during the ‘Noughties’ (2000–2010) now recognize it as both one of the most interconnected decades in world history, and also one of the bloodiest.</jats:p

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

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

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

The impacts of environmental warming on Odonata: a review

Climate change brings with it unprecedented rates of increase in environmental temperature, which will have major consequences for the earth's flora and fauna. The Odonata represent a taxon that has many strong links to this abiotic factor due to its tropical evolutionary history and adaptations to temperate climates. Temperature is known to affect odonate physiology including life-history traits such as developmental rate, phenology and seasonal regulation as well as immune function and the production of pigment for thermoregulation. A range of behaviours are likely to be affected which will, in turn, influence other parts of the aquatic ecosystem, primarily through trophic interactions. Temperature may influence changes in geographical distributions, through a shifting of species' fundamental niches, changes in the distribution of suitable habitat and variation in the dispersal ability of species. Finally, such a rapid change in the environment results in a strong selective pressure towards adaptation to cope and the inevitable loss of some populations and, potentially, species. Where data are lacking for odonates, studies on other invertebrate groups will be considered. Finally, directions for research are suggested, particularly laboratory studies that investigate underlying causes of climate-driven macroecological patterns

ESTIMATORS OF BINARY SPATIAL AUTOREGRESSIVE MODELS: A MONTE CARLO STUDY

The goal of this paper is to provide a cohesive description and a critical comparison of the main estimators proposed in the literature for spatial binary choice models. The properties of such estimators are investigated using a theoretical and simulation study, followed by an empirical application. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper that provides a comprehensive Monte Carlo study of the estimators' properties. This simulation study shows that the Gibbs estimator performs best for low spatial autocorrelation, while the recursive importance sampler performs best for high spatial autocorrelation. The same results are obtained by increasing the sample size. Finally, the linearized general method of moments estimator is the fastest algorithm that provides accurate estimates for low spatial autocorrelation and large sample size