Movie Reviews- Unfaithful

Okay, so honestly, the fact that this movie was way hot almost outweighed its flaws. Almost...but not quite. So let’s begin with Richard Gere. First of all, I thought his initial reaction was accurate. Well, not accurate, because I can’t really back that up...but handled in what seemed to be a realistic way. His relationship with Diane Lane was logical up to the point where you believed that she cheated because they were just so mismatched. I don’t much see Gere as a romantic lead (even though some casting directors do), so I really could see Lane growing apart. ~excerpt from pros

Stolen Memories

I was eight when I first tried my hand at deception (actually thievery, to be more specific). I was raised in a house with very strict food regulations. That sounds like it was terrible, but actually it was rather healthy. While other children ate Lunchables™ and cookies, my packed lunch usually consisted of tofu, carrots and a sandwich on wholewheat bread. This brought about issues from my classmates. While other kids were busy making sure their homework was complete and their uniforms were pristine every morning before school, I would carpool into school anticipating how my classmates were going to wrest the lettuce from my whole-wheat sandwich to give to the class turtle. Seriously, I will never own a turtle. I regard them with a general suspicion and truly believe them to be selfish creatures that are only out to please their own hedonistic qualities. Not gonna lie; don’t like the hollow, snappy faced little things. They’re sneaky

Modelling South African cold-water coral habitats

Cold-water corals are found globally but little is known about energy flows associated with these habitats. The degree to which the benthic ecosystems containing cold-water corals are linked to the overlying pelagic ecosystems is also poorly understood. Observational studies have indicated that fish abundance is greater in the waters surrounding coldwater coral reefs compared to nearby waters over barren seafloor, implying enhanced productivity in the cold-water coral ecosystems. Support for this hypothesis is tested in this study using a customised Ecopath with Ecosim model. The model is applied to Childs Bank, a region on the west coast of South Africa located in the southern Benguela eastern boundary ecosystem. A previously constructed Ecopath model of the southern Benguela was modified to represent the main groups of organisms found on Childs Bank and additional groups were added to better represent the main groups associated with cold-water coral. In total, including the additional compartments, the model ecosystem consisted of 34 living compartments and three non-living compartments. Three novel living compartments were considered in the model: Cold-water corals, Sponges and Tube-worms. Two additional non-living compartments comprised Coral skeleton and Coral mucus. The Ecopath model was balanced by assuming that the three additional living groups had the same production to biomass ratios as the Macrobenthos group. The production to consumption ratio of Sponges and Cold-water corals were sourced from literature. An unconstrained non-linear minimisation function was used to solve for the biomass of the Sponge and Cold-water coral groups as their production was needed for the Ecopath model to balance; thus a biomass estimate was required for both these groups. The balanced Ecopath model was used in an Ecosim model, which was applied to three scenarios designed to investigate whether trophic links in the cold-water coral ecosystems could account for increased fish abundance: scenario 1, the removal of both cold-water coral and cold-water coral skeleton; scenario 2, changes in fishing pressure on small pelagic fish; scenario 3, the removal of coldwater coral skeleton without damage to the living coral. Scenario 3 is an artificial scenario designed to isolate the effects of cold-water coral skeleton loss from the trophic interactions from the living cold-water corals. None of the scenarios produced results with notable changes in biomasses of groups in the wider ecosystem. It is thus hypothesised that enhanced fish production results from cold-water corals changing the local oceanographic conditions through their physical structure rather than primarily by their trophic interactions