Seasonal change in the daily timing of behaviour of the common vole, Microtus arvalis

1. Seasonal effects on daily activity patterns in the common vole were established by periodic trapping in the field and continuous year round recording of running wheel and freeding activity in cages exposed to natural meteorological conditions. 2. Trapping revealed decreased nocturnality in winter as compared to summer. This was paralelled by a winter reduction in both nocturnal wheel running and feeding time in cages. 3. Frequent trap checks revealed a 2 h rhythm in daytime catches in winter, not in summer. Cage feeding activity in daytime was always organized in c. 2 h intervals, but day-to-day variations in phase blurred the rhythm in summer in a summation of individual daily records. Thus both seasonal and short-term temporal patterns are consistent between field trappings and cage feeding records. 4. Variables associated with the seasonal change in daily pattern were: reproductive state (sexually active voles more nocturnal), age (juveniles more nocturnal), temperature (cold days: less nocturnal), food (indicated by feeding experiments), habitat structure (more nocturnal in habitat with underground tunnels). 5. Minor discrepancies between field trappings and cage feeding activity can be explained by assuming increased trappability of voles in winter. Cage wheel running is not predictive of field trapping patterns and is thought to reflect behavioral motivations not associated with feeding but with other activities (e.g., exploratory, escape, interactive behaviour) undetected by current methods, including radiotelemetry and passage-counting. 6. Winter decrease in nocturnality appears to involve a reduction in nocturnal non-feeding and feeding behaviour and is interpreted primarily as an adaptation to reduce energy expenditure in adverse but socially stable winter conditions.

Undergraduate orientations towards higher education in Germany and England: problematizing the notion of ‘student as customer’

There is a great deal of discussion in the academic literature around how the current conditions in higher education frame students as customers. Observers are of the view that rankings and marketing, an increased focus on student satisfaction, and particularly tuition fees, encourage an instrumental, passive attitude towards a university education. Given the volume of attention directed towards this topic, it is perhaps surprising that there is relatively little scholarship that examines it empirically. Some who have addressed it presumed a customer/consumer orientation in students and have been somewhat—but not entirely successful—in generating evidence to confirm those assumptions. It appears that the expectations of this instrumental, passive orientation are being realised in part, but that this is also mediated by other dispositions. What could be considered to be missing from the analysis thus far is an exploration of how students make university­related decisions (not simply what choices are based on) and how they understand the respective roles of the student and university. This study begins to fill that gap, exploring the orientations towards university of undergraduates in Germany and England, two countries where the diffusion of market conditions in higher education policies has been somewhat contrasting. Distinctions between the German and English students did emerge, but these were less based on those countries’ unequal engagement with tuition fees and rankings and more to do with other aspects of their university cultures and the world beyond their degrees. This suggests that how people approach their time as students is more complex than some of the literature assumes. Furthermore, at the very least, any consideration of this topic must include an analysis of how students themselves understand and experience their higher education and broader social contexts

Building connectomes using diffusion MRI: why, how and but

Why has diffusion MRI become a principal modality for mapping connectomes in vivo? How do different image acquisition parameters, fiber tracking algorithms and other methodological choices affect connectome estimation? What are the main factors that dictate the success and failure of connectome reconstruction? These are some of the key questions that we aim to address in this review. We provide an overview of the key methods that can be used to estimate the nodes and edges of macroscale connectomes, and we discuss open problems and inherent limitations. We argue that diffusion MRI-based connectome mapping methods are still in their infancy and caution against blind application of deep white matter tractography due to the challenges inherent to connectome reconstruction. We review a number of studies that provide evidence of useful microstructural and network properties that can be extracted in various independent and biologically-relevant contexts. Finally, we highlight some of the key deficiencies of current macroscale connectome mapping methodologies and motivate future developments

Practical heterogeneous placeholder scheduling in overlay metacomputers: Early experiences

A practical problem faced by users of highperformance computers is: How can I automatically load balance my jobs across different batch queues, which are in different administrative domains, if there is no existing grid infrastructure? It is common to have user accounts for a number of individual high-performance systems (e.g., departmental, university, regional) that are administered by different groups. Without an administration-deployed grid infrastructure, one can still create a purely user-level aggregation of individual computing systems. The Trellis Project is developing the techniques and tools to take advantage of a user-level overlay metacomputer. Because placeholder scheduling does not require superuser permissions to set up or configure, it is well-suited to overlay metacomputers. This paper contributes to the practical side of grid computing by empirically demonstrating that placeholder scheduling can work across different administrative domains, across different local schedulers (i.e., PBS and Sun Grid Engine), and across different programming models (i.e., Pthreads, MPI, and sequential). We also describe a new metaqueue system to manage jobs with explicit workflow dependencies

Layer-specific intracortical connectivity revealed with Diffusion MRI

In this work, we show for the first time that the tangential diffusion component is orientationally coherent at the human cortical surface. Using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), we have succeeded in tracking intracortical fiber pathways running tangentially within the cortex. In contrast with histological methods, which reveal little regarding 3-dimensional organization in the human brain, dMRI delivers additional understanding of the layer dependence of the fiber orientation. A postmortem brain block was measured at very high angular and spatial resolution. The dMRI data had adequate resolution to allow analysis of the fiber orientation within 4 notional cortical laminae. We distinguished a lamina at the cortical surface where diffusion was tangential along the surface, a lamina below the surface where diffusion was mainly radial, an internal lamina covering the Stria of Gennari, where both strong radial and tangential diffusion could be observed, and a deep lamina near the white matter, which also showed mainly radial diffusion with a few tangential compartments. The measurement of the organization of the tangential diffusion component revealed a strong orientational coherence at the cortical surface