Impact of forestry practices on fitness correlates and population productivity in an open-nesting bird species

In the boreal forests of Fennoscandia, over 99% of the forest area has been altered by forestry practices, which has created forests of differing age structures and stand characteristics than primary forest stands. Although many researchers have investigated how forestry affects species abundance, few have assessed how forestry affects fitness correlates of species living in altered habitats, and this has negatively affected management efforts. We experimentally addressed the effect of standard forestry practices on fitness correlates of an open-nesting, long-lived bird species typical to boreal forests of Eurasia, the Siberian Jay (Perisoreus infaustus L.). Using a before-after comparison of reproductive data on the level of territories, we found that standard forestry practices had a strong negative effect on the breeding success of jays. Both partial thinning of territories and partial clearcutting of territories reduced future breeding success by a factor of 0.35. Forestry practices reduced territory occupancy. Thus, over the 15 years of the study the productivity of the affected population declined over 50% as a result of territory abandonment and reduced breeding success. Results of previous studies on Siberian Jays suggest that the strong effect of forest thinning on fitness is explained by the fact that most common predators of nests and adults are visually oriented, and thinning makes prey and nests more visible to predators. The consequences of thinning we observed are likely to apply to a wide range of species that rely on understory to provide visual protection from predators. Thus, our results are important for the development of effective conservation management protocols and for the refinement of thinning practices

The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch

Research into emotional communication to date has largely focused on facial and vocal expressions. In contrast, recent studies by Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) and Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, and Keltner (2009) exploring nonverbal communication of emotion discovered that people could identify anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness and sympathy from the experience of being touched on either the arm or body by a stranger, without seeing the touch. The study showed that strangers were unable to communicate the self-focused emotions embarrassment, envy and pride, or the universal emotion surprise. Literature relating to touch indicates that the interpretation of a tactile experience is significantly influenced by the relationship between the touchers (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). The present study compared the ability of romantic couples and strangers to communicate emotions solely via touch. Results showed that both strangers and romantic couples were able to communicate universal and prosocial emotions, whereas only romantic couples were able to communicate the self-focused emotions envy and pride

Deception and self-awareness

This paper presents a study conducted for the Shades of Grey EPSRC research project (EP/H02302X/1), which aims to develop a suite of interventions for identifying terrorist activities. The study investigated the body movements demonstrated by participants while waiting to be interviewed, in one of two conditions: preparing to lie or preparing to tell the truth. The effect of self-awareness was also investigated, with half of the participants sitting in front of a full length mirror during the waiting period. The other half faced a blank wall. A significant interaction was found for the duration of hand/arm movements between the deception and self-awareness conditions (F=4.335, df=1;76, p<0.05). Without a mirror, participants expecting to lie spent less time moving their hands than those expecting to tell the truth; the opposite was seen in the presence of a mirror. This finding indicates a new research area worth further investigation

Distinguishing Posed and Spontaneous Smiles by Facial Dynamics

Smile is one of the key elements in identifying emotions and present state of mind of an individual. In this work, we propose a cluster of approaches to classify posed and spontaneous smiles using deep convolutional neural network (CNN) face features, local phase quantization (LPQ), dense optical flow and histogram of gradient (HOG). Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM) is used for micro-expression smile amplification along with three normalization procedures for distinguishing posed and spontaneous smiles. Although the deep CNN face model is trained with large number of face images, HOG features outperforms this model for overall face smile classification task. Using EVM to amplify micro-expressions did not have a significant impact on classification accuracy, while the normalizing facial features improved classification accuracy. Unlike many manual or semi-automatic methodologies, our approach aims to automatically classify all smiles into either `spontaneous' or `posed' categories, by using support vector machines (SVM). Experimental results on large UvA-NEMO smile database show promising results as compared to other relevant methods.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, ACCV 2016, Second Workshop on Spontaneous Facial Behavior Analysi

Pain-Related Fear: A Critical Review of the Related Measures

Objectives: In regards to pain-related fear, this study aimed to: (1) identify existing measures and review their measurement properties, and (2) identify the optimum measure for specific constructs of fear-avoidance, pain-related fear, fear of movement, and kinesiophobia. Design: Systematic literature search for instruments designed to measure fear of pain in patients with persistent musculoskeletal pain. Psychometric properties were evaluated by adjusted Wind criteria. Results: Five questionnaires (Fear-Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ), Fear-Avoidance of Pain Scale (FAPS), Fear of Pain Questionnaire (FPQ), Pain and Anxiety Symptoms Scale (PASS), and the Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia (TSK)) were included in the review. The main findings were that for most questionnaires, there was no underlying conceptual model to support the questionnaire's construct. Psychometric properties were evaluated by diverse methods, which complicated comparisons of different versions of the same questionnaires. Construct validity and responsiveness was generally not supported and/or untested. Conclusion: The weak construct validity implies that no measure can currently identify who is fearful. The lack of evidence for responsiveness restricts the current use of the instruments to identify clinically relevant change from treatment. Finally, more theoretically driven research is needed to support the construct and thus the measurement of pain-related fear

STEPS - an approach for human mobility modeling

In this paper we introduce Spatio-TEmporal Parametric Stepping (STEPS) - a simple parametric mobility model which can cover a large spectrum of human mobility patterns. STEPS makes abstraction of spatio-temporal preferences in human mobility by using a power law to rule the nodes movement. Nodes in STEPS have preferential attachment to favorite locations where they spend most of their time. Via simulations, we show that STEPS is able, not only to express the peer to peer properties such as inter-ontact/contact time and to reflect accurately realistic routing performance, but also to express the structural properties of the underlying interaction graph such as small-world phenomenon. Moreover, STEPS is easy to implement, exible to configure and also theoretically tractable

Explicit simulation of aerosol physics in a cloud-resolving model

International audienceThe role of convection in introducing aerosols and promoting the formation of new particles to the upper troposphere has been examined using a cloud-resolving model coupled with an interactive explicit aerosol module. A baseline simulation suggests good agreement in the upper troposphere between modeled and observed results including concentrations of aerosols in different size ranges, mole fractions of key chemical species, and concentrations of ice particles. In addition, a set of 34 sensitivity simulations has been carried out to investigate the sensitivity of modeled results to the treatment of various aerosol physical and chemical processes in the model. The size distribution of aerosols is proved to be an important factor in determining the aerosols' fate within the convective cloud. Nucleation mode aerosols (02SO4. Accumulation mode aerosols (d>?31.0 nm) are almost completely removed by nucleation (activation of cloud droplets) and impact scavenging. However, a substantial part (up to 10% of the boundary layer concentration) of the Aitken mode aerosol population (5.84 nm<?d<?31.0 nm) reaches the top of the cloud and the free troposphere. These particles may continually survive in the upper troposphere, or over time form ice crystals, both that could impact the atmospheric radiative budget. The sensitivity simulations performed indicate that critical processes in the model causing a substantial change in the upper tropospheric Aitken mode number concentration are coagulation, condensation, nucleation scavenging, nucleation of aerosols and the transfer of aerosol mass and number between different aerosol bins. In particular, for aerosols in the Aitken mode to grow to CCN size, coagulation appears to be more important than condensation. Less important processes are dry deposition, impact scavenging and the initial vertical distribution and concentration of aerosols. It is interesting to note that in order to sustain a vigorous storm cloud, the supply of CCN must be continuous over a considerably long time period of the simulation. Hence, the treatment of the growth of particles is in general much more important than the initial aerosol concentration itself

Global wellposed problem for the 3-D incompressible anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations

In this paper, we consider a global wellposed problem for the 3-D incompressible anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations (\textit{ANS}). In order to do so, we first introduce the scaling invariant Besov-Sobolev type spaces, $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}$ and $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}(T)$, $p\geq2$. Then, we prove the global wellposedness for (\textit{ANS}) provided the initial data are sufficient small compared to the horizontal viscosity in some suitable sense, which is stronger than $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}$ norm. In particular, our results imply the global wellposedness of (\textit{ANS}) with high oscillatory initial data.Comment: 39 page

Extended Calculations of Spectroscopic Data: Energy Levels, Lifetimes and Transition rates for O-like ions from Cr XVII to Zn XXIII

Employing two state-of-the-art methods, multiconfiguration Dirac--Hartree--Fock and second-order many-body perturbation theory, the excitation energies and lifetimes for the lowest 200 states of the $2s^2 2p^4$, $2s 2p^5$, $2p^6$, $2s^2 2p^3 3s$, $2s^2 2p^3 3p$, $2s^2 2p^3 3d$, $2s 2p^4 3s$, $2s 2p^4 3p$, and $2s 2p^4 3d$ configurations, and multipole (electric dipole (E1), magnetic dipole (M1), and electric quadrupole (E2)) transition rates, line strengths, and oscillator strengths among these states are calculated for each O-like ion from Cr XVII to Zn XXIII. Our two data sets are compared with the NIST and CHIANTI compiled values, and previous calculations. The data are accurate enough for identification and deblending of new emission lines from the sun and other astrophysical sources. The amount of data of high accuracy is significantly increased for the $n = 3$ states of several O-like ions of astrophysics interest, where experimental data are very scarce