Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics?<strong><strong> </strong></strong>

Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non -human worlds — whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds’ nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of nature, troubling the latter’s ontological stability. In this Introduction to the special issue Digital Natures: Reconfiguring Ontologies, Epistemologies, and Politics we claim that the digital, when considered beyond an epistemological register, is a productive and political force that is unsettling, rather than reinforcing, the boundaries between society and nature. We review the extensive body of work from across geography and the social sciences that is actively engaging with digital –nature intersections, and historicise current debates through reference to the figures of the cyborg, technonatures, biomimicry and digital organisms. Asking whether digitalized practices of sensing, abstraction and algorithmic recombination simply mirror a pre -existing and external Nature, or whether they advance a reconceptualization of nature, we set out to trace the progressive political potential of a digitally -entangled ontological redefinition of nature. We discuss how, within emerging digital natures , agencies are entangled in a reimagining of what both nature and society are about. Here, we argue, lies the transformative potential of digital natures —precisely in challenging and subverting the ontological place of an external Nature. The introduction finishes by simultaneously outlining a research agenda for digital natures and presenting the six papers that comprise the special issue

Live Service Migration in Mobile Edge Clouds

Mobile edge clouds (MECs) bring the benefits of the cloud closer to the user, by installing small cloud infrastructures at the network edge. This enables a new breed of real-time applications, such as instantaneous object recognition and safety assistance in intelligent transportation systems, that require very low latency. One key issue that comes with proximity is how to ensure that users always receive good performance as they move across different locations. Migrating services between MECs is seen as the means to achieve this. This article presents a layered framework for migrating active service applications that are encapsulated either in virtual machines (VMs) or containers. This layering approach allows a substantial reduction in service downtime. The framework is easy to implement using readily available technologies, and one of its key advantages is that it supports containers, which is a promising emerging technology that offers tangible benefits over VMs. The migration performance of various real applications is evaluated by experiments under the presented framework. Insights drawn from the experimentation results are discussed

Intake, digestibility, and growth by steers compared under continuous and frontal grazing

Last updated: 10/22/201

Is undergraduate otorhinolaryngology teaching relevant to junior doctors working in accident and emergency departments?

Undergraduate ENT teaching provides junior doctors with skills and knowledge useful for the practice of medicine. However, ENT has been removed from the curriculum of nine of the 29 medical schools in the United Kingdom, as it was not deemed relevant to general medical practice. A telephone survey was performed of 20 senior house officers working in accident and emergency (A&E) departments across the United Kingdom. The results showed that 90 per cent felt their undergraduate ENT teaching was directly beneficial to working in A&E, 75 per cent felt they had not received enough undergraduate ENT teaching and 45 per cent currently received no postgraduate teaching whilst working in A&E. These results illustrate the importance of ENT teaching in the undergraduate curriculum and its value to practising doctors. They highlight the fact that prospective studies are required to examine the effect on junior doctors of changing the curriculum

Emergency ambulance service involvement with residential care homes in the support of older people with dementia : an observational study

© 2014 Amador et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.BACKGROUND: Older people resident in care homes have a limited life expectancy and approximately two-thirds have limited mental capacity. Despite initiatives to reduce unplanned hospital admissions for this population, little is known about the involvement of emergency services in supporting residents in these settings.METHODS: This paper reports on a longitudinal study that tracked the involvement of emergency ambulance personnel in the support of older people with dementia, resident in care homes with no on-site nursing providing personal care only. 133 residents with dementia across 6 care homes in the East of England were tracked for a year. The paper examines the frequency and reasons for emergency ambulance call-outs, outcomes and factors associated with emergency ambulance service use. RESULTS: 56% of residents used ambulance services. Less than half (43%) of all call-outs resulted in an unscheduled admission to hospital. In addition to trauma following a following a fall in the home, results suggest that at least a reasonable proportion of ambulance contacts are for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. An emergency ambulance is not likely to be called for older rather than younger residents or for women more than men. Length of residence does not influence use of emergency ambulance services among older people with dementia. Contact with primary care services and admission route into the care home were both significantly associated with emergency ambulance service use. The odds of using emergency ambulance services for residents admitted from a relative's home were 90% lower than the odds of using emergency ambulance services for residents admitted from their own home. CONCLUSIONS: Emergency service involvement with this vulnerable population merits further examination. Future research on emergency ambulance service use by older people with dementia in care homes, should account for important contextual factors, namely, presence or absence of on-site nursing, GP involvement, and access to residents' family, alongside resident health characteristics.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

What Range Herbivores Eat -- and Why

12 pp., 4 figures, 1 table, 8 illustrations, resource listDifferent range animals have different diets. Some eat grass, some eat browse (leaves from woody plants) and forbs (wildflowers, weeds, etc.), and some eat all three. The differences in their diets allow many types of range animals to co-exist on the same range. Understanding the diets of range herbivores allows the landowner to use the rangeland resource more wisely

Understanding Forage Intake in Range Animals

6 pp., 2 tables, 5 graphsForage intake is as important as forage quality. This publication explains the factors affecting forage intake. Available in Spanish as E-100S

Why Range Forage Quality Changes

8 pp., 6 illustrations, 1 tableRange plants vary in nutritional quality. Forage quality is determined by the plant part eaten, plant age, season, soils and range sites, stocking rates, and other factors. Periods of high animal nutritional demand must match periods of high forage quality and supply