Moveable Backdrop: From mere pseud to Mere Pseud … or, it\u27s about time you started thinking about the rerun which seems to be our lives

Flyer for Spring 2015 ICS Faculty Fellow Lecture by Philip Dickinson.https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/ics_fellow_lectures/1093/thumbnail.jp

FPGA-based Anomalous trajectory detection using SOFM

A system for automatically classifying the trajectory of a moving object in a scene as usual or suspicious is presented. The system uses an unsupervised neural network (Self Organising Feature Map) fully implemented on a reconfigurable hardware architecture (Field Programmable Gate Array) to cluster trajectories acquired over a period, in order to detect novel ones. First order motion information, including first order moving average smoothing, is generated from the 2D image coordinates (trajectories). The classification is dynamic and achieved in real-time. The dynamic classifier is achieved using a SOFM and a probabilistic model. Experimental results show less than 15\% classification error, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature and the speed-up over the use of conventional microprocessor as compared to the use of an off-the-shelf FPGA prototyping board

Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks and the Concrete Ecology of Settlement

This essay examines the significance of the practice of walking in Palestine through a reading of Raja Shehadeh's 2007 [Shehadeh, R. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile] memoir, Palestinian Walks, alongside the built architecture of Israeli settlement. It develops a theory of the “concrete ecology”, a phrase that captures the deep human and extra-human entanglements that Shehadeh foregrounds in his decolonizing conception of a “grown together” and historically persistent land, and that registers the increasingly radical aspirations of the material architecture and infrastructure of Israeli settlement. Israeli settlement seeks not only to extend a territorial network but also to build an ecology that materializes the ethno-racial abstractions of colonial ideology, and it does so through the affordance of different possibilities of spatial practice and different senses of the world for Palestinians and Israelis. In this context, Shehadeh’s book elaborates the sarha (walk or roam) as a historically localized activity that emerges from, and reconnects to, land’s depth, its saturation with living, historical and communal presence

Dispossessing Animism:Zong! and Spiritual Baptism

This essay intervenes in the emerging discussions around animism by situating animism within the ongoing projects of colonial bio- and necropolitics. While ‘animism’ is often taken to denote pre- or anti- or counter-modern cosmologies that promise an alternative to the ontologies that sustain colonial violence, it has been recognised that there are in fact a variety of ways in which animism is ‘built in’ to modernity, and in which modernity itself is constituted as animistic. This essay pulls this recognition in a new direction by developing a theory of the ‘distribution of the animate’, describing a system of animist perception and expression by which different kinds of bodies, beings and forces are positioned and differentiated. This theory allows me to explore a shared zone in which the apparently relentless materialism of colonial biopolitics and the supposedly spiritual orientation of animism meet, collide and intertwine. This zone appears in this essay in a range of moments and modes, including the ‘word’ of possession in new world conquest, the anthropological invention of animism itself, the anticolonial resistance and spirit possession of the Hauka, the transubstantiative magic of chattelisation and, via an extended close reading, the text and performance of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s long poem, Zong!. I show that animism is not really the other to colonial modernity: to say this is to buy into a foundational colonial myth. Instead, what is at stake in the theoretical construct of animism are the qualities that distinguish one kind of life from another. The colonial systems for knowing the other (enshrined in anthropology) and dominating the other (exemplified by biopolitics) invent, recruit and disavow animism in order to naturalise the denial of personhood to colonialism’s others. My argument is that for animism to escape these systems of possession it has to become something other than animism, by affirming a dispossession (rather than distribution) of animacy. I locate this dispossession in the sound and performance of Zong! and associate it with the poem’s refusal of more familiar literary projects that try to reclaim and restore voice and personhood

Host movement dominates the predicted effects of climate change on parasite transmission between wild and domestic mountain ungulates

Climate change is shifting the transmission of parasites, which is determined by host density, ambient temperature and moisture. These shifts can lead to increased pressure from parasites, in wild and domestic animals, and can impact the effectiveness of parasite control strategies. Understanding the interactive effects of climate on host movement and parasite life histories will enable targeted parasite management, to ensure livestock productivity and avoid additional stress on wildlife populations. To assess complex outcomes under climate change, we applied a gastrointestinal nematode transmission model to a montane wildlife–livestock system, based on host movement and changes in abiotic factors due to elevation, comparing projected climate change scenarios with the historic climate. The wildlife host, Alpine ibex (Capra ibex ibex), undergoes seasonal elevational migration, and livestock are grazed during the summer for eight weeks. Total parasite infection pressure was more sensitive to host movement than to the direct effect of climatic conditions on parasite availability. Extended livestock grazing is predicted to increase parasite exposure for wildlife. These results demonstrate that movement of different host species should be considered when predicting the effects of climate change on parasite transmission, and can inform decisions to support wildlife and livestock health.<br/

Infrasound Exposure: High-Resolution Measurements Near Wind Power Plants

This chapter focuses on infrasonic (≤20 Hz) noise exposure as captured in and around homes located in the vicinity of wind power plants. Despite persistent noise complaints by local residents, no satisfactory acoustical event has yet been identified to justify this troublesome (worldwide) situation. Continuous (days), high-resolution recordings—spectral segmentation of 1/36 of an octave and 1-second temporal increments—have been acquired in many homes across the world revealing the presence of wind turbine acoustic signatures. These consist of trains of airborne pressure pulses, identified in the frequency domain as harmonic series with the fundamental frequency equal to that of the blade-pass frequency of the wind turbine. This report documents three such cases (Portugal and Scotland). The highest peaks of the wind turbine acoustic signature (up to 25 dB over background noise) occurred within the 0.5–5 Hz window which is classically defined as below the human hearing threshold; and yet these ‘inaudible’ phenomena appear to trigger severe biological reactions. Based on the prominence of the peaks in the harmonic series, a new measure is proposed for use in determining dose–response relationships for infrasonic exposures. This new methodology may be applicable to infrasonic exposures in both environmental and occupational settings

Positive regulation of c-Myc by cohesin is direct, and evolutionarily conserved

AbstractContact between sister chromatids from S phase to anaphase depends on cohesin, a large multi-subunit protein complex. Mutations in sister chromatid cohesion proteins underlie the human developmental condition, Cornelia de Lange syndrome. Roles for cohesin in regulating gene expression, sometimes in combination with CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF), have emerged. We analyzed zebrafish embryos null for cohesin subunit rad21 using microarrays to determine global effects of cohesin on gene expression during embryogenesis. This identified Rad21-associated gene networks that included myca (zebrafish c-myc), p53 and mdm2. In zebrafish, cohesin binds to the transcription start sites of p53 and mdm2, and depletion of either Rad21 or CTCF increased their transcription. In contrast, myca expression was strongly downregulated upon loss of Rad21 while depletion of CTCF had little effect. Depletion of Rad21 or the cohesin-loading factor Nipped-B in Drosophila cells also reduced expression of myc and Myc target genes. Cohesin bound the transcription start site plus an upstream predicted CTCF binding site at zebrafish myca. Binding and positive regulation of the c-Myc gene by cohesin is conserved through evolution, indicating that this regulation is likely to be direct. The exact mechanism of regulation is unknown, but local changes in histone modification associated with transcription repression at the myca gene were observed in rad21 mutants