Transfer of Training Between Tracking Tasks Employing Quickened and Unquickened Displays

Man\u27s propensity for solving complex non-linear operations during continuous tracking is high. If the situation demands it he can readily learn to differentiate a displayed signal after the mechanism he is controlling has integrated it. If the tracking is made more and more complicated, however, accuracy falls off rapidly and learning time increases. For any specific task, it is usually possible to design a machine to assume the human operator\u27s functions, but it is not always desirable to replace a man with another machine in a complex tracking task. Non-linear automatic systems are difficult and expensive to build. Most important, however, they are usually restricted to one application and do not share man\u27s flexibility. For practicality and economy, then, it is desirable to try to simplify the operator\u27s task in situations that call for more accuracy than a man ordinarily gives

Behaviour therapy : conceptual basis, practice and evaluation

This is an essay for a Masters Degree in Applied Psychology (by course work). For the duration of this course my objective has been to obtain skills for helping people with psychological problems. To do this competently, I felt the need for a conceptual framework from which to view abnormal behaviour and in which the skills to be applied were grounded. It can readily be appreciated therefore that there is no joy for a person planning to begin practice as a clinical psychologist with an orientation to the use of behaviour therapy to read statements such as the following. Present day behaviour therapy "has no universally accepted definition, no consensus as to goals, concepts or underlying philosophy, no agreement as to its purview, no monolithic point of view, no overriding strategy or core technique, no single founding father, no general agreement about matters of training, and there is no single profession to which primary allegiance is declared".(Lazarus and Wilson, 1976). Certainly behaviour therapy has changed and developed since its "modern11 beginning with Wolpe's Reciprocal Inhibition in the mid 1950's, and the most obvious characteristic of this change has been a broadening of its scope, with a concomitant growth in techniques practised under a behaviour therapy heading. However, for my part, behaviour therapy does have a different conceptual tradition to the other psychotherapies and is distinguished from them by a distinctive approach (or methodology) for the practice of therapy. This essay then attempts to establish what behaviour therapy is today by identifying its conceptual framework and against that background to set out an approach by which therapy with the individual client may be practised. My main purpose in adopting this approach was heuristic - I wanted to use the writing of the essay as a method of confirming my understanding of behaviour therapy and to provide a grounding for beginning practice. By choosing such a broad objective the difficulty in writing was to determine to what level of detail the full field and each issue within it was to be treated. I have tried to solve this problem by focussing firstly on the two directions in which the "theory" has moved in recent years, i.e. the admission of cognitive processes to a functional role in the behavioural equation and development of the social learning perspective. In doing so it has been recommended that a new emphasis be given in behaviour therapy practice to the research in social psychology on the interactional influence of persons and situations in determining behaviour emitted and, in turn, being influenced by the behaviour produced. Secondly the practice of behaviour therapy has been examined as a methodology to establish the phases of an intervention programme and their purposes and to offer a comparison of the models and methods which may be adopted in each phase. To conclude the essay the final chapter discusses the worth of behaviour therapy as a clinically effective and efficient approach to psychotherapy

Indigenous children's multimodal communication of emotions through visual imagery

Billions of images are shared worldwide on the internet via social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter every few days. The social web and mobile devices make it quicker and easier than ever before for young people to communicate emotions through digital images. There is a need for greater knowledge of how to educate children and young people formally in the sophisticated, multimodal language of emotions. This includes semiotic choices in visual composition, such as gaze, facial expression, posture, framing, actor-goal relations, camera angles, backgrounds, props, lighting, shadows and colour. In particular, enabling Indigenous students to interpret and communicate emotions in contemporary ways is vital because multimodal language skills are central to academic, behavioural and social outcomes. This paper reports original research of urban, Indigenous, upper primary students' visual imagery at school. A series of full-day, digital imagery workshops were conducted over several weeks with 56 students. The photography workshops formed part of a three-year participatory community research project with an Indigenous school in Southeast Queensland, Australia. The archived student images were organised and analysed to identify attitudinal meanings from the appraisal framework, tracing types and subtypes of affect, and their positive and negative forms. The research has significant implications for teaching students how to design high-quality, visual and digital images to evoke a wide range of positive and negative emotions, with particular considerations for Australian Indigenous students

Evaluation of Poetic Creativity: Predictors and the Role of Expertise - A Multilevel Approach

Poetry is one of the most creative expressions of language, but how we evaluate the creativity of a poem is not properly characterized. The present study investigated the role of various subjective qualities – clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, arousal, and surprise – in predicting the creativity judgment of English poems. Participants (N=129) were presented with a broad range of English poems; they rated each poem on six characteristics: clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, felt arousal, surprise and overall creativity. Linear multilevel analysis showed that aesthetic appeal was the strongest predictor of poetic creativity, followed by surprise and felt valence. Multilevel mediation analysis indicated significant mediation by surprise and felt valence on the relationship between aesthetic appeal and creativity at both within and between-participant levels. Further, expertise in English literature was found to significantly moderate the effects of all three predictors on the evaluation of creativity. The study simultaneously captured the surprise-evoking line(s). Using the semantic distance computing approach, we have shown the objective validation of the subjectively chosen line(s) of surprise. Altogether, our findings suggest a parsimonious model of evaluation of creativity of poems and its interaction with expertise

Titania-doped tantala/silica coatings for gravitational-wave detection

Reducing thermal noise from optical coatings is crucial to reaching the required sensitivity in next generation interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Here we show that adding TiO2 to Ta2O5 in Ta2O5/SiO2 coatings reduces the internal friction and in addition present data confirming it reduces thermal noise. We also show that TiO2-doped Ta2O5/SiO2 coatings are close to satisfying the optical absorption requirements of second generation gravitational-wave detectors

Heritage Quay: What Will You Discover? Transforming the Archives of the University of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, UK

The Heritage Quay project is changing how archive services at the University of Huddersfield are delivered. This article examines how the Staff/Space/Collections dependency model and Customer Service Excellence framework have been used, and what lessons can be drawn for other archives

Natural quorum sensing inhibitors effectively downregulate gene expression of Pseudomonas aeruginosa virulence factors

At present, anti-virulence drugs are being considered as potential therapeutic alternatives and/or adjuvants to currently failing antibiotics. These drugs do not kill bacteria but inhibit virulence factors essential for establishing infection and pathogenesis through targeting non-essential metabolic pathways reducing the selective pressure to develop resistance. We investigated the effect of naturally isolated plant compounds on the repression of the quorum sensing (QS) system which is linked to virulence/pathogenicity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Our results show that trans-cinnamaldehyde (CA) and salicylic acid (SA) significantly inhibit expression of QS regulatory and virulence genes in P. aeruginosa PAO1 at sub-inhibitory levels without any bactericidal effect. CA effectively downregulated both the las and rhl QS systems with lasI and lasR levels inhibited by 13- and 7-fold respectively compared to 3- and 2-fold reductions with SA treatment, during the stationary growth phase. The QS inhibitors (QSI) also reduced the production of extracellular virulence factors with CA reducing protease, elastase and pyocyanin by 65%, 22% and 32%, respectively. The QSIs significantly reduced biofilm formation and concomitantly with repressed rhamnolipid gene expression, only trace amount of extracellular rhamnolipids were detected. The QSIs did not completely inhibit virulence factor expression and production but their administration significantly lowered the virulence phenotypes at both the transcriptional and extracellular levels. This study shows the significant inhibitory effect of natural plant-derived compounds on the repression of QS systems in P. aeruginosa

Crop Updates 2000 - Cereals part 2

This session covers twenty papers from different authors: DISEASE 1. Forecasting aphid and virus risk in cereals, Debbie Thackray, Jenny Hawkes and Roger Jones, Agriculture Western Australia and Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture 2. Cereal Diagnostics, Dominie Wright, Agriculture Western Australia 3. The economic returns from spraying for leaf rust in the central wheatbelt in 1999, Peter Carlton, Trials Coordinator, Elders Limited 4. Impact and Management of Yellow Spot and Leaf Rust in the Northern Agricultural Region, Jat Bhathal and Robert Loughman, Agriculture Western Australia 5. Leaf disease management in wheat and barley in the southern agricultural region, K. Jayasena, R. Loughman and J. Majewski, Agriculture Western Australia 6. Root nematode update, R. Loughman1, S. Kelly1, G. Holloway2, N. Venn1 and D. Diepeveen1 1 Agriculture Western Australia, 2Agriculture Victoria WHEAT AGRONOMY 7. Small Grain Screenings in wheat - the agronomic issues, Brenda Shackley, Agriculture Western Australia, 8. Response of New Wheat Varieties to Seed Rate and applied Nitrogen in the North, Darshan Sharma and Wal Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 9. Seen vigour in wheat, Darshan Sharma and Wal Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 10. Influence of the Time of Sowing on New Wheat Varieties in the North, Darshan Sharma and Wal Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 11, Wheat performance in a high disease season on the South Coast. 1. Disease and grain quality on the Esperance sandplain, Mohammad Amjad, Vanessa Dooley and Wal Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 12. Wheat performance in a high disease season on the South Coast. 2. Leaf area, disease and yield at Gibson and Salmon Gums, Mohammad Amjad, Vanessa Dooley and Wal Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 13. Agronomic Evaluation of Wheat in the Central Wheatbelt of Western Australia, Peter Burgess and Ashley Bacon, Agritech Crop Research 14. Mechanisms influencing grain susceptibility to black point in wheat, Frances Hoyle, University of Western Australia and Agriculture Western Australia 15. Improving paddock productivity using renovation cropping techniques on heavier soils, Frances Hoyle, Agriculture Western Australia 16. Improving paddock productivity using renovation cropping techniques on sandplain soils, Frances Hoyle and Keith Devenish, Agriculture Western Australia 17. Increasing profit - Is it possible using high input package approach for cereal production? M. Appelbee, IAMA Agri Services 18. Improving wheat yield, soil physical and chemical fertility by a package of deep ripping, gypsum and complete nutrients, M.A. Hamza and W.K. Anderson, Agriculture Western Australia 19. Organic Wheat - Production System Guidelines, Steven McCoy, Centre for New Industries Development 20. Durum wheat obtains a premium over bread wheat, Steven Penny, Agriculture Western Australi

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead