The role of the horse in Europe. Editorial

The horse has a unique place in European society. Historically, it has played a major part in shaping political and agricultural advances. Today, the horse has diverse roles ranging from the companion and leisure horse, to the sporting athlete. The horse continues to work on the land in many European countries, it serves in the police and the armed forces, and in some regions is a source of food. This has resulted in a vast range of horse-human interactions and relationships. Despite the long association between man and the horse we still have a great deal to learn about their behaviour and the constraints that domestication has placed on them. The WATHAM Symposium on “The Role of the Horse in Europe”, organized in association with the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Southampton, brought together researchers involved in the student of equine behaviour management and horsehuman interactions to present some of their recent work and to identify fruitful areas for future research. In addition to the main programme papers, the Symposium also featured a series of poster presentations on a range of topics including the evolution and domestication of horses; their husbandry, behaviour and welfare; and the role of the horse in modern society. The horse industry, and indeed, equine research, appears to be very fragmented by both discipline and country; and European collaboration provides a greater research potential than exists within countries or disciplines. The WALTHAM Symposium was successful, not only in highlighting common areas of interest, but also in revealing gaps in our knowledge where the paucity of information stands a barrier to the advancement of the equine industry, as a whole, across Europe

An event-related potential study on changes of violation and error responses during morphosyntactic learning

Based on recent findings showing electrophysiological changes in adult language learners after relatively short periods of training, we hypothesized that adult Dutch learners of German would show responses to German gender and adjective declension violations after brief instruction. Adjective declension in German differs from previously studied morphosyntactic regularities in that the required suffixes depend not only on the syntactic case, gender, and number features to be expressed, but also on whether or not these features are already expressed on linearly preceding elements in the noun phrase. Violation phrases and matched controls were presented over three test phases (pretest and training on the first day, and a posttest one week later). During the pretest, no electrophysiological differences were observed between violation and control conditions, and participants’ classification performance was near chance. During the training and posttest phases, classification improved, and there was a P600-like violation response to declension but not gender violations. An error-related response during training was associated with improvement in grammatical discrimination from pretest to posttest. The results show that rapid changes in neuronal responses can be observed in adult learners of a complex morphosyntactic rule, and also that error-related electrophysiological responses may relate to grammar acquisition

Development of fiber shields for engine containment

Tests were conducted in translational launchers and spin pits to generate empirical data used in the design of a Kevlar shield for containing engine burst debris. Methods are given for modeling the relationship of fragment characteristics to shielding requirements. The change in relative importance of shield mounting provisions as fragment energy is increased is discussed

Exploiting multi-agent system technology within an autonomous regional active network management system

This paper describes the proposed application of multi-agent system (MAS) technology within AuRA-NMS, an autonomous regional network management system currently being developed in the UK through a partnership between several UK universities, distribution network operators (DNO) and a major equipment manufacturer. The paper begins by describing the challenges facing utilities and why those challenges have led the utilities, a major manufacturer and the UK government to invest in the development of a flexible and extensible active network management system. The requirements the utilities have for a network automation system they wish to deploy on their distribution networks are discussed in detail. With those requirements in mind the rationale behind the use of multi-agent systems (MAS) within AuRA-NMS is presented and the inherent research and design challenges highlighted including: the issues associated with robustness of distributed MAS platforms; the arbitration of different control functions; and the relationship between the ontological requirements of Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent (FIPA) compliant multi-agent systems, legacy protocols and standards such as IEC 61850 and the common information model (CIM)

Wave Function of a Brane-like Universe

Within the mini-superspace model, brane-like cosmology means performing the variation with respect to the embedding (Minkowski) time $\tau$ before fixing the cosmic (Einstein) time $t$. The departure from Einstein limit is parameterized by the 'energy' conjugate to $\tau$, and characterized by a classically disconnected Embryonic epoch. In contrast with canonical quantum gravity, the wave-function of the brane-like Universe is (i) $\tau$-dependent, and (ii) vanishes at the Big Bang. Hartle-Hawking and Linde proposals dictate discrete 'energy' levels, whereas Vilenkin proposal resembles $\alpha$-particle disintegration.Comment: Revtex, 4 twocolumn pages, 3 eps figures (accepted for publication in Class. Quan. Grav.

Analysis of memory use for improved design and compile-time allocation of local memory

Trace analysis techniques are used to study memory referencing behavior for the purpose of designing local memories and determining how to allocate them for data and instructions. In an attempt to assess the inherent behavior of the source code, the trace analysis system described here reduced the effects of the compiler and host architecture on the trace by using a technical called flattening. The variables in the trace, their associated single-assignment values, and references are histogrammed on the basis of various parameters describing memory referencing behavior. Bounds are developed specifying the amount of memory space required to store all live values in a particular histogram class. The reduction achieved in main memory traffic by allocating local memory is specified for each class

The long memory model of political support: some further results

This paper extends the results of Byers, Davidson and Peel (1997) on long memory in support for the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK using longer samples and additional poll series. It finds continuing support for the ARFIMA(0,d,0) model though with somewhat smaller values of the long memory parameter. We find that the move to telephone polling in the mid-1990s has no apparent effect on the estimated value of d for either party. Finally, we find that we cannot reject the hypotheses that the parties share a common long memory parameter which we estimate at around 0.65.