Impacts of docks on seagrass and effects of management practices to ameliorate these impacts

© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. Seagrasses have high conservation and human-use values, but around the world they are being damaged by human activities. Compared to the larger spatial scale at which some human activities affect estuaries and their seagrasses (e.g. catchment disturbance, dredging, pollution, trawling), recreational boating and infrastructure of moorings and docks act at smaller scales. However, the cumulative effects contribute to stresses acting on seagrass beds. This study assessed the effects of docks on the native seagrass Zostera muelleri subsp. capricorni in an estuary in south-east Australia and of current management practices designed to reduce dock impacts on this seagrass. A field survey found that seagrass biomass was significantly reduced below docks, and the effects were not influenced by dock orientation. Management practices requiring the use of a mesh decking to provide greater light penetration reduced, but did not eliminate, the reduction in seagrass biomass caused by docks. A modified beyond BACI experiment provided evidence for a causal link between the installation of wooden or mesh docks and reductions in biomass of seagrass. The reduction in biomass was apparent 6 mo after dock installation, and by 26 mo seagrass biomass had declined by at least 90%. Faced with increasing coastal populations, increases in recreational use, and continued pressures from other human activities, alternative management practices that further minimize the effects of docks are needed

Stuck between a Rock and a Meth Cooking Husband: What Breaking Bad\u27s Skyler White Reaches about How the War on Drugs and Public Antipathy Constrain Women in Circumstance\u27s Choices

Part I begins with an analysis of how the criminal justice system functions as a patriarchal tool of the state to control and constrain the behavior of women of circumstance. In the War on Drugs, patriarchy within the criminal justice system leads women to distrust law enforcement and the courts, and forecloses their access to assistance from a system that uses them as pawns in its pursuit of male drug operatives who are often these women’s intimate partners. Part II examines how these legal constraints upon women of circumstance intersect with women’s gendered roles in their families to eliminate viable options for extracting themselves from the tenuous situations that are not of their making. Ultimately, the legal bind discussed in Part I does not exist in a vacuum, but is preconditioned by the woman’s family situation and this results in additional constraints on women of circumstance’s choices. Finally, Part III examines how the wide acceptance of stereotypes about what is and what is not appropriate female behavior results in public antipathy toward women involved with male drug operatives and works to substantiate the legal system’s problematic treatment of these women. Importantly, these hegemonic beliefs about women’s roles also stymy reforms geared at remediating the Scylla and Charybdis-like situation faced by women of circumstance. While theoretically illuminating, understanding the combined effect of these institutional, familial and social constraints is also of practical importance for reformers seeking to change a legal system that systematically ignores or preys upon the constraints that bind women of circumstance. Part IV offers mechanisms designed to affect meaningful reform in this area of the law

Audio Fingerprinting to Identify Multiple Videos of an Event

The proliferation of consumer recording devices and video sharing websites makes the possibility of having access to multiple recordings of the same occurrence increasingly likely. These co-synchronous recordings can be identified via their audio tracks, despite local noise and channel variations. We explore a robust fingerprinting strategy to do this. Matching pursuit is used to obtain a sparse set of the most prominent elements in a video soundtrack. Pairs of these elements are hashed and stored, to be efficiently compared with one another. This fingerprinting is tested on a corpus of over 700 YouTube videos related to the 2009 U.S. presidential inauguration. Reliable matching of identical events in different recordings is demonstrated, even under difficult conditions

Audio Fingerprinting to Identify Multiple Videos of an Event

The proliferation of consumer recording devices and video sharing websites makes the possibility of having access to multiple recordings of the same occurrence increasingly likely. These co-synchronous recordings can be identified via their audio tracks, despite local noise and channel variations. We explore a robust fingerprinting strategy to do this. Matching pursuit is used to obtain a sparse set of the most prominent elements in a video soundtrack. Pairs of these elements are hashed and stored, to be efficiently compared with one another. This fingerprinting is tested on a corpus of over 700 YouTube videos related to the 2009 U.S. presidential inauguration. Reliable matching of identical events in different recordings is demonstrated, even under difficult conditions

Performance of an environmental test to detect Mycobacterium bovis infection in badger social groups

A study by Courtenay and others (2006) demonstrated that the probability of detecting Mycobacterium bovis by PCR in soil samples from the spoil heaps of main badger setts correlated with the prevalence of excretion (infectiousness) of captured badgers belonging to the social group. It has been proposed that such a test could be used to target badger culling to setts containing infectious animals (Anon 2007). This short communication discusses the issues surrounding this concept, with the intention of dispelling any misconceptions among relevant stakeholders (farmers, policy makers and conservationists)

Characteristics of historical precipitation in high mountain asia based on a 15-year high resolution dynamical downscaling

The mountains of High Mountain Asia serve as an important source of water for roughly one billion people living downstream. This research uses 15 years of dynamically downscaled precipitation produced by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to delineate contrasts in precipitation characteristics and events between regions dominated by the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) versus westerly disturbances during the cool season (December to March). Cluster analysis reveals a more complex spatial pattern than indicated by some previous studies and illustrates the increasing importance of westerly disturbances at higher elevations. Although prior research suggests that a small number of westerly disturbances dominate precipitation in the western Himalaya and Karakoram, the WRF-downscaled precipitation is less dominated by infrequent large events. Integrated vapor transport (IVT) and precipitation are tightly coupled in both regions during the cool season, with precipitation maximizing for IVT from the south-southwest over the Karakoram and southeast-southwest over the western Himalaya. During the ISM, Karakoram precipitation is not strongly related to IVT direction, whereas over the western Himalaya, primary and secondary precipitation maxima occur for flow from the west-southwest and northwest, respectively. These differences in the drivers and timing of precipitation have implications for hydrology, glacier mass balance, snow accumulation, and their sensitivity to climate variability and change

Spectral vs. spectro-temporal features for acoustic event detection

Automatic detection of different types of acoustic events is an interesting problem in soundtrack processing. Typical approaches to the problem use short-term spectral features to describe the audio signal, with additional modeling on top to take temporal context into account. We propose an approach to detecting and modeling acoustic events that directly describes temporal context, using convolutive non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). NMF is useful for finding parts-based decompositions of data; here it is used to discover a set of spectro-temporal patch bases that best describe the data, with the patches corresponding to event-like structures. We derive features from the activations of these patch bases, and perform event detection on a database consisting of 16 classes of meeting-room acoustic events. We compare our approach with a baseline using standard short-term mel frequency cepstal coefficient (MFCC) features. We demonstrate that the event-based system is more robust in the presence of added noise than the MFCC-based system, and that a combination of the two systems performs even better than either individually

Patterns of comorbidity and psychopharmacology in adults with intellectual disability and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: an UK national cross-sectional audit.

Background: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is higher in people with intellectual disability (ID) compared to the general population. Available limited evidence suggests this population has increased psychological problems, diagnostic overshadowing and psychotropic prescribing. This audit Identifies and analyzes real-world characteristics, diagnostic practices, treatment, and management of ADHD in adults with ID.Research Design and Methods: Pooled retrospective case note data for people with ID and ADHD, collected from 30 organizations across the UK, were analyzed. Patients were classified into mild and moderate-profound ID groups. Associated mental health and neurodevelopmental co-morbidity, Demographics, concomitant psychotropics, and mental and behavioral concerns were collected. Group differences were reported using logistic regression models.Results: Of 445 participants, 73% had co-occurring autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 65% were prescribed ADHD medications. Those on ADHD medication were less likely to be prescribed antipsychotics (p < 0.001) and antidepressants (p < 0.001). Multiple significant differences were found in ADHD medication response between ID groups and those with/without co-morbid ASD but not associated with challenging behavior reduction.Conclusions: High levels of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric comorbidity were found. ID severity and the presence of ASD appear to influence the use of certain psychotropic medications. Appropriate use of ADHD medication appears to reduce psychotropic polypharmacy

Joint Audio-Visual Signatures for Web Video Analysis

Presentation of video classification project