The Fraud Act 2006 : The E-crime Prosecutor’s Champion or the Creator of a New Inchoate Offence?

An analysis of whether the Fraud Act 2006 is sufficently rebust to be able to tackle the challenges of e-crimePeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

A Target Restricted Assembly Method (TRAM) for Phylogenomics

While next generation sequencing technology can produce sequences covering the entire genome, assembly and annotation are still prohibitive steps for many phylogenomics applications. Here we describe a method of Target Restricted Assembly (TRAM) of a single lane of Illumina sequences for genes of relevance to phylogeny reconstruction, i.e. single copy protein-coding genes. This method has the potential to produce a data set of hundreds of genes using only one Illumina lane per taxon

Time-Domain Isolated Phoneme Classification Using Reconstructed Phase Spaces

This paper introduces a novel time-domain approach to modeling and classifying speech phoneme waveforms. The approach is based on statistical models of reconstructed phase spaces, which offer significant theoretical benefits as representations that are known to be topologically equivalent to the state dynamics of the underlying production system. The lag and dimension parameters of the reconstruction process for speech are examined in detail, comparing common estimation heuristics for these parameters with corresponding maximum likelihood recognition accuracy over the TIMIT data set. Overall accuracies are compared with a Mel-frequency cepstral baseline system across five different phonetic classes within TIMIT, and a composite classifier using both cepstral and phase space features is developed. Results indicate that although the accuracy of the phase space approach by itself is still currently below that of baseline cepstral methods, a combined approach is capable of increasing speaker independent phoneme accuracy

Nonlocalized modulation of periodic reaction diffusion waves: The Whitham equation

In a companion paper, we established nonlinear stability with detailed diffusive rates of decay of spectrally stable periodic traveling-wave solutions of reaction diffusion systems under small perturbations consisting of a nonlocalized modulation plus a localized perturbation. Here, we determine time-asymptotic behavior under such perturbations, showing that solutions consist to leading order of a modulation whose parameter evolution is governed by an associated Whitham averaged equation

New World nine-primaried oscine relationships: constructing a molecular framework

Historically, a paucity of comparative morphological characters has led to much debate regarding relationships within and among the major lineages of New World nine-primaried oscines. More recently, DNA-DNA hybridization studies have provided novel and testable hypotheses of relationships, although no consensus has been reached. For 40 songbird taxa, we obtained 1,929 base pairs (bp) of DNA sequence from the mitochondrial cytochrome-b (894 bp) and NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 (1,035 bp) genes. Phylogenetic analyses confirm the monophyly of this assemblage as traditionally defined. The lineages delineated historically on morphological grounds are retained; finches (Fringillinae) are sister to a well-supported clade (Emberizinae) containing blackbirds (Icterini), sparrows (Emberizini), wood-warblers (Parulini), tanagers (Thraupini), and cardinal-grosbeaks (Cardinalini). However, each tribe individually is either paraphyletic or polyphyletic with respect to most recent songbird classifications. Our results suggest that Euphonia is not a tanager but perhaps represents a derived form of cardueline finch. Piranga, traditionally considered a typical tanager, is a cardinaline in all of our analyses. Calcarius falls outside the sparrow lineage in all of our analyses, but its true affinities remain unclear. Elements of four different AOU families are represented in our clade Thraupini. The inclusion of several “tanager-finches” (Haplospiza, Diglossa, Tiaris, Volatinia, Sporophila) and a nectarivore (Coereba) in this clade is consistent with findings from other molecular phylogenies in suggesting that convergence in feeding specializations among some lineages has confounded traditional morphological classifications. We obtained a novel arrangement of relationships among tribes in our “best” topology; Cardinalini is sister to the rest of the Emberizinae assemblage (as defined by Sibley and Ahlquist [1990]), and Thraupini is sister to a clade containing Icterini, Emberizini, and Parulini. Despite nearly 2,000 bp of sequence for each taxon, and a high degree of stability across most weighting schemes and analytical methods, most nodes lack strong bootstrap support. The ND2 gene provided higher resolution than did cytochrome b, but combining genes provided the most highly supported and resolved topology. We consider the phylogeny a working hypothesis to be used as a guide for further studies within the nine-primaried oscine assemblage

Bar coding MS2 spectra for metabolite identification

[Image: see text] Metabolite identifications are most frequently achieved in untargeted metabolomics by matching precursor mass and full, high-resolution MS(2) spectra to metabolite databases and standards. Here we considered an alternative approach for establishing metabolite identifications that does not rely on full, high-resolution MS(2) spectra. First, we select mass-to-charge regions containing the most informative metabolite fragments and designate them as bins. We then translate each metabolite fragmentation pattern into a binary code by assigning 1’s to bins containing fragments and 0’s to bins without fragments. With 20 bins, this binary-code system is capable of distinguishing 96% of the compounds in the METLIN MS(2) library. A major advantage of the approach is that it extends untargeted metabolomics to low-resolution triple quadrupole (QqQ) instruments, which are typically less expensive and more robust than other types of mass spectrometers. We demonstrate a method of acquiring MS(2) data in which the third quadrupole of a QqQ instrument cycles over 20 wide isolation windows (coinciding with the location and width of our bins) for each precursor mass selected by the first quadrupole. Operating the QqQ instrument in this mode yields diagnostic bar codes for each precursor mass that can be matched to the bar codes of metabolite standards. Furthermore, our data suggest that using low-resolution bar codes enables QqQ instruments to make MS(2)-based identifications in untargeted metabolomics with a specificity and sensitivity that is competitive to high-resolution time-of-flight technologies