Sensitivity of Pagurus bernhardus (L.) to substrate-borne vibration and anthropogenic noise

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. Despite the prevalence of vibration produced by anthropogenic activities impacting the seabed there are few data and little information as to whether these are detected by crustaceans and whether they interfere with their behaviour. Here the sensitivity of unconditioned Pagurus bernhardus to substrate-borne vibration was quantified by exposure to sinusoidal vibrations of 5-410Hz of varied amplitudes using the staircase method of threshold determination, with threshold representing the detection of the response and two behavioural responses used as reception indicators: movement of the second antenna and onset or cessation of locomotion. Thresholds were compared to measured vibrations close to anthropogenic operations and to the time in captivity prior to tests. Behaviour varied according to the strength of the stimulus with a significant difference in average threshold values between the two behavioural indicators, although there was an overlap between the two, with overall sensitivity ranging from 0.09-0.44ms -2 (root mean squared, RMS). Crabs of shortest duration in captivity prior to tests had significantly greater sensitivity to vibration, down to 0.02ms -2 (RMS). The sensitivity of P. bernhardus fell well within the range of vibrations measured near anthropogenic operations. The data indicate that anthropogenic substrate-borne vibrations have a clear effect on the behaviour of a common marine crustacean. The study emphasises that these vibrations are an important component of noise pollution that requires further attention to understand the long term effects on marine crustaceans

Pre-hospital management of acute Addison’s Disease – Audit of patients attending a referral hospital in a regional area

Context: Adrenal crises (AC) cause morbidity and mortality in patients with Addison’s disease [primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI)]. Patient-initiated oral stress dosing, with parenteral hydrocortisone, is recommended to avert ACs. While these should be effective, the continued incidence of ACs remains largely unexplained. Methods: Audit of all attendances between 2000 and 2017 by adult patients with treated PAI to one large regional referral centre in New South Wales, Australia. Measurements were those taken on arrival at hospital. Results: There were 252 attendances by 56 patients with treated PAI during the study period. Women comprised 60.7% (n=34) of the patients. The mean age of attendees was 53.7 (19.6) years. Nearly half (45.2%, n=114) the patients had an infection. There were 61 (24.2%) ACs diagnosed by the treating clinician. Only 17.9% (n=45) of the hospital presentations followed any form of stress dosing. IM hydrocortisone was used before 7 (2.8%) attendances only. Among patients with a clinician diagnosed AC, only 32.8% (n=20) had used stress dosing before presentation. Vomiting was reported by 47.6% (n=120) of the patients but only 33 (27.5%) of these attempted stress dosing and 5 patients with vomiting used IM hydrocortisone. The number of prior presentations was a significant independent predictor of use of stress doses [1.05 (1.01,1.09)]. Conclusion: Dose escalation strategies are not used universally or correctly by unwell patients with PAI, many patients do not use IM or SC hydrocortisone injections. Previous hospital treatment increases the likelihood of stress dosing and offers the opportunity for reinforcement of prevention strategies

Research for better aid: an evaluation of DFAT’s investments

Assesses the degree to which the investment by the Australian aid program into research has been appropriate, effective and efficient, and provides recommendations for improving DFAT’s future management of research investment. Foreword Explores how research investment can be best managed to ensure DFAT supports aid innovation and high-quality aid program and policy decision-making. The evaluation focuses on whether the management of DFAT’s considerable development research investment has been appropriate, effective and efficient. Employing a multi-dimensional evaluation method, it draws on the experiences of DFAT staff and stakeholders, as well as the available expenditure data, in arriving at a set of well-supported findings and recommendations. The report makes several important points about the need for DFAT to have a clear sense about why and how it funds research. The department’s managers and officers need especially to be conscious of the effectiveness and efficiency risks implicit in their highly devolved form of research investment management. These risks will be reduced if robust knowledge management systems and a strong culture of research use are embedded in the department. The experience of other aid donors indicates that achieving this will be a significant challenge. The evaluation also makes a finding with clear implications for the way the department engages with research institutions in partner countries. It shows that, while the department’s research funding to Australian institutions increased significantly from 2005 to 2013, the level of direct funding to partner country institutions did not increase to the same extent and was, indeed, flat over the last five years of that period. There are clear benefits to be had in building research capacity in those institutions, either directly or through partnerships with Australian and international researchers. Given Australia’s ongoing investment in the Pacific, this may be a region in which future research funding can be focused.   &nbsp

Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics, Justice and the Human Beyond Being.

Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics, Justice and the Human beyond Being. Levinas finds the early twentieth century to be marked by a rejection of the concept of humanity, at the moment of its awakening to its own brutality. While accepting the anti-humanist position, insofar as it questions the primacy of free will, and an unquestionable security in its attachment to a pregiven, universal Reason, Levinas' work questions the value of rethinking the human in terms of being. This thesis traces Levinas' attempt to rehabilitate humanity from its devotion to ontology as first philosophy. It argues that Levinas offers a reinterpretation of the relation of being and the human, tracing the movement in Levinas' work from a critical attempt to rethink the human and being, to the notion of the human beyond being. The thesis begins with a critical engagement with Heideggerian ontology suggesting that Levinas' renewal of the question of being in his prewar essays reflects a concern for the meaning of subjective existence and its relation to the social and political totality. These concerns lie behind his reinterpretation of the relation of existence and the existent in his essays of the 1940's in which Levinas undertakes a critique of a Platonic social totality and introduces a notion of the alterity of eros which does not have its value determined in terms of a teleology of social production. From this basis, Levinas is shown to address the question of justice by articulating the essentially ambiguous relation between the subject and another in terms of the ambivalence of the face, and contrasting this with the alterity of love. The development of these ideas is traced across Levinas' major works. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that the response to the singular other is conceived of as the event of the production of a universal which affirms the tertiality of the social totality, that is, attests to the whole of humanity. In Otherwise than Being, the relation of ethics and justice is discussed in different terms, those of the relation of the ethical Saying and the realm of the Said or being's justice. Levinas juxtaposes the ontological tertiality of the third, with the notion of an ethical tertiality, which he calls illeity. Illeity is found to not be reducible to the ontological tertiality of the third party, but to name the exceeding of subjectivity in terms of an absolute susceptibility to the Other, and is an excessive concept of a singular universal: the human beyond being

Uranium series, major and trace element geochemistry of lavas from Tenerife and Lanzarote, Canary Islands

Ocean Islands Basalts provide important windows into the compositional variations of the Earth's mantle, which in tum constrains models for mantle convection and evolution. The Canary Islands show contrasting styles of eruption and evolution of magmas in an ocean island setting. U-Th-Ra disequilibrium have been used to constrain rates and timescales of melt generation and differentiation beneath ocean islands, and to estimate the buoyancy flux, potential mantle temperature and the depth and degree of melting. The Canary Islands provide a rare opportunity to observe U-Th-Ra disequilibrium, because they are underlain by a region of low buoyancy flux, and were expected to show significant disequilibrium. Tenerife is underlain by numerous magma chambers, in which magmas have time to differentiate from basanites to phonolites, erupting to form large strato-volcano complexes. The fissure and small vent eruptions of unusually primitive basanites and alkali basalts from Lanzarote show little evidence of magma chambers, unless of substantial size and longevity at depth. The U-Th results indicate that lavas underwent rapid transport from the melt region. The historic and recent pre-historic eruptions (1824, 1730-36, Corona) from Lanzarote have some of the most primitive compositions found on oceanic islands with low SiO2 contents (230Th/238U) disequilibrium with 230Th excesses of 6 - 81 %. This was modelled by dynamic melting giving a calculated melt rate of 0.125 x 10-3 kg.m-1.yr-1, a timescale of melt generation (matrix transfer time) of 270 ka for the 1 % melt and 1,100 ka for the 4 % melt. A consistent upwelling rate of I cm.yr-1 and an assumption that the melting process has remained consistent over tens of km at depth. The Teide-Pico Viejo complex lavas have undergone fractionation and mixing to form compositions from basanite to phonolite. Crystallising phases differ in the Pico Viejo series, where amphibole is dominant in the more evolved lavas, and Pico Teide series, where olivine in the major control. The more evolved lavas require assimilation and fractional crystallisation to explain the range in 87Sr/86Sr. (230Th/238U) ranges from 1.004-1.39 and gives information regarding the timescales of differentiation within the magma chambers, not least because the youngest mafic rocks have the highest (230Th/238U) and the most evolved phonolites have the lowest. The timescale of differentiation from basanite to phonolite is of the order of 150,000 years, which links to the periodicity of the eruption cycles on the island. A Ra-Th 'pseudo' whole rock isochron gave an age of fractionation for the Montafia Blanca eruption of 2.3 ka ± 80, which is a maximum of 300 years prior to eruption, indicating that fractionation of plagioclase as a possible trigger of an eruption

Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics, Justice and the Human Beyond Being.

Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics, Justice and the Human beyond Being. Levinas finds the early twentieth century to be marked by a rejection of the concept of humanity, at the moment of its awakening to its own brutality. While accepting the anti-humanist position, insofar as it questions the primacy of free will, and an unquestionable security in its attachment to a pregiven, universal Reason, Levinas' work questions the value of rethinking the human in terms of being. This thesis traces Levinas' attempt to rehabilitate humanity from its devotion to ontology as first philosophy. It argues that Levinas offers a reinterpretation of the relation of being and the human, tracing the movement in Levinas' work from a critical attempt to rethink the human and being, to the notion of the human beyond being. The thesis begins with a critical engagement with Heideggerian ontology suggesting that Levinas' renewal of the question of being in his prewar essays reflects a concern for the meaning of subjective existence and its relation to the social and political totality. These concerns lie behind his reinterpretation of the relation of existence and the existent in his essays of the 1940's in which Levinas undertakes a critique of a Platonic social totality and introduces a notion of the alterity of eros which does not have its value determined in terms of a teleology of social production. From this basis, Levinas is shown to address the question of justice by articulating the essentially ambiguous relation between the subject and another in terms of the ambivalence of the face, and contrasting this with the alterity of love. The development of these ideas is traced across Levinas' major works. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that the response to the singular other is conceived of as the event of the production of a universal which affirms the tertiality of the social totality, that is, attests to the whole of humanity. In Otherwise than Being, the relation of ethics and justice is discussed in different terms, those of the relation of the ethical Saying and the realm of the Said or being's justice. Levinas juxtaposes the ontological tertiality of the third, with the notion of an ethical tertiality, which he calls illeity. Illeity is found to not be reducible to the ontological tertiality of the third party, but to name the exceeding of subjectivity in terms of an absolute susceptibility to the Other, and is an excessive concept of a singular universal: the human beyond being

Holocene Palynology of the Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea: Using Modern Palynomorph Distribution to Better Constrain Paleoenvironmental Changes

Multiple NSF (National Science Foundation)-funded MARGINS Source-to-Sink cruises were conducted in the Gulf of Papua (GoP), Papua New Guinea (PNG), from 2003 through 2005 to better understand how sediment is created, transported, and deposited. Although much work has been done on the data collected during these cruises, palynological analysis has never been conducted on the hundreds of available cores. The first phase of this project (Chapters 2 and 3) examines the connection between modern depositional regimes in the GoP and species assemblages recovered. Statistical analysis of palynomaceral assemblages (Chapter 2) indicates a correlation between their distribution and bathymetry, sedimentation rate, and distance from shore. In particular, wood and cuticular material is found closer to shore and in areas with higher sedimentation rates, while SOM increases in abundance with increasing distance from shore and lower sedimentation rates. Characteristic palynomaceral assemblages appear in certain major depositional environments. Palynomorph assemblages (Chapter 3) also indicate a clear correlation with bathymetry, sedimentation rate, and distance from shore. Major groups found in palynological slides reflect the composition of vegetation on mainland PNG. Reworked palynomorphs also provide an indication of sediment source (e.g., from the Ok Tedi mine on the mainland), but this is complicated, because many ages of reworking (e.g., a mix of Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene, and Recent palynomorphs) are found in samples. The second phase of this project (Chapter 4) includes a paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the last ~14.5 kyr in the GoP. Three long cores (MD-50, MV-41, MV-46) were selected for this analysis. Changes in palynomorph assemblages allow delineation of four major climate intervals from 14.5 kyr to present, including the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial (14.5 to 12.5 kyr BP), the Younger Dryas (12.5 to 11.5 kyr BP), Meltwater Pulse-1B (11.5 to 10.5 kyr BP), and the Holocene (10.5 kyr BP to present). Results indicate that mangrove pollen and marine indicators clearly delineate the end of the transgression between 5 to 6 kyr BP Palynomorph data and oxygen-18 isotopes from MD-50 also indicate an increase in El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity at approximately 5 kyr BP