Adaptive Optics: introduction to the feature issue

This Applied Optics feature issue is a companion to the Journal of the Optical Society of America A feature issue on the same topic. The feature highlights the expansion of adaptive optics to different applications as well as its development to routine applications brought about because of significant advances in component technologies

Biodiversity and ecosystem function in the bird's nest fern

Understanding the relationship between the biodiversity and functioning of an ecosystem is a key component of ecological studies. Given the importance of soil as the basis for life on earth, understanding this relationship across the multiple trophic levels of the brown food web is vital. The thesis begins by trialling methods of soil analysis at the Eden Project, determining the relationship between microbial communities, their contribution to decomposition and the physical conditions of the soil which they inhabit. The thesis goes on to use the bird’s nest fern as a natural microcosm to explore patterns in soil biodiversity and functioning. Using a canopy simulation tool at the Eden Project, microbial community functioning was characterised using a method tracing the isotopic enrichment of microorganisms during decomposition. At Eden, the role of the physical conditions experienced by suspended soils in determining microbial community composition was demonstrated, before this finding was confirmed with suspended soil samples collected from the Nouragues reserve in French Guiana. In order to explore the multi-trophic relationship between microbial functioning and invertebrate biodiversity, a largescale experiment was performed at Danum Valley in Malaysian Borneo. Bird’s nest fern microcosms were prepared to manipulate levels of invertebrate diversity and access to isotopically enriched organic matter. Tracing the enrichment of organic matter over time demonstrated that increasing invertebrate diversity resulted in increased rates of decomposition within the soil body. Subsequent analysis of microbial enrichment demonstrated the interacting effect of invertebrate biodiversity on microbial functioning. Increases in invertebrate species stimulated microorganisms to decompose organic matter and assimilate released carbon into their cell walls at higher rates. By characterising microbial community composition, and quantifying their contributions to the decomposition under simulated reductions in invertebrate diversity, this thesis supports the view that the loss of biodiversity will have negative effects on the functioning of ecosystems

Child Representation in America: Progress Report from the National Quality Improvement Center

Few dispute that children in the child welfare system need effective representation. In October 2009, the U.S. Children\u27s Bureau named the University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). The QIC-ChildRep is a five-year, multimillion dollar project, charged with gathering, developing, and communicating knowledge on child representation. In addition, the QIC-ChildRep is tasked with promoting a consensus on the role of the child\u27s legal representative and providing one of the first random assignment experimental design research projects on the legal representation of children

The Structure of Neutral Monotonic Social Functions

In [6], Guha gave a complete characterization of path independent social decision functions which satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition, the strong Pareto principle, and UII, i.e., unanimous indifference implies social indifference. These conditions necessarily imply that a path independent social decision function is neutral and monotonic. In this paper, we extend Guha’s characterization to the class of neutral monotonic social functions. We show that neutral monotonic social functions and their specializations to social decision functions, path independent social decision functions, and social welfare functions can be uniquely represented as a collection of overlapping simple games, each of which is defined on a nonempty set of concerned individuals. Moreover, each simple game satisfies intersection conditions depending on the number of social alternatives; the number of individuals belonging to the concerned set under consideration; and the collective rationality assumption. We also provide a characterization of neutral, monotonic and anonymous social decision functions, where the number of individuals in society exceeds the (finite) number of social alternatives, that generalizes both the representation theorem of May [10] and the representation theorems of Ferejohn and Grether [5]

Physical conditions regulate the fungal to bacterial ratios of a tropical suspended soil

As a source of ‘suspended soils’, epiphytes contribute large amounts of organic matter to the canopy of tropical rain forests. Microbes associated with epiphytes are responsible for much of the nutrient cycling taking place in rain forest canopies. However, soils suspended far above the ground in living organisms differ from soil on the forest floor, and traditional predictors of soil microbial community composition and functioning (nutrient availability and the activity of soil organisms) are likely to be less important. We conducted an experiment in the rain forest biome at the Eden Project in Cornwall to explore how biotic and abiotic conditions determine microbial community composition and functioning in a suspended soil. To simulate their natural epiphytic lifestyle, 20 bird’s nest ferns (Asplenium nidus) were placed on a custom-built canopy platform suspended 8m above the ground. Ammonium nitrate and earthworm treatments were applied to ferns in a factorial design. Extracellular enzyme activity and Phospholipid Fatty Acid (PLFA) profiles were determined at zero, three and six months. We observed no significant differences in either enzyme activity or PLFA profiles between any of the treatments. Instead, we observed decreases in β-glucosidase and N-acetyl-glucosaminidase activity, and an increase in phenol oxidase activity across all treatments and controls. An increase in the relative abundance of fungi during the experiment meant that the microbial communities in the Eden Project ferns after six months were comparable with 20 ferns sampled from pristine tropical rain forest in Borneo