Fluid reasoning and the developing brain.

Fluid reasoning is the cornerstone of human cognition, both during development and in adulthood. Despite this, the neural mechanisms underlying the development of fluid reasoning are largely unknown. In this review, we provide an overview of this important cognitive ability, the method of measurement, its changes over the childhood and adolescence of an individual, and its underlying neurobiological underpinnings. We review important findings from psychometric, cognitive, and neuroscientific literatures, and outline important future directions for this interdisciplinary research

Automated Dynamic Resource Provisioning and Monitoring in Virtualized Large-Scale Datacenter

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a pay-as-you go based cloud provision model which on demand outsources the physical servers, guest virtual machine (VM) instances, storage resources, and networking connections. This article reports the design and development of our proposed innovative symbiotic simulation based system to support the automated management of IaaS-based distributed virtualized data enter. To make the ideas work in practice, we have implemented an Open Stack based open source cloud computing platform. A smart benchmarking application "Cloud Rapid Experimentation and Analysis Tool (aka CBTool)" is utilized to mark the resource allocation potential of our test cloud system. The real-time benchmarking metrics of cloud are fed to a distributed multi-agent based intelligence middleware layer. To optimally control the dynamic operation of prototype data enter, we predefine some custom policies for VM provisioning and application performance profiling within a versatile cloud modeling and simulation toolkit "CloudSim". Both tools for our prototypes' implementation can scale up to thousands of VMs, therefore, our devised mechanism is highly scalable and flexibly be interpolated at large-scale level. Autonomic characteristics of agents aid in streamlining symbiosis among the simulation system and IaaS cloud in a closed feedback control loop. The practical worth and applicability of the multiagent-based technology lies in the fact that this technique is inherently scalable hence can efficiently be implemented within the complex cloud computing environment. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we have deployed an intelligible lightweight representative scenario in the context of monitoring and provisioning virtual machines within the test-bed. Experimental results indicate notable improvement in the resource provision profile of virtualized data enter on incorporating our proposed strategy

Flow Preferences of Benthic Macroinvertebrates in Three Scottish Rivers

Scottish freshwaters have been described as a national resource of international significance. The high quality of Scotland's lotic systems is integral to the formation of this view. The research presented here aims to provide an insight into the interaction between benthic invertebrates and their hydraulic habitat within some of Scotland's lotic systems. A further aim of this project is that this information presented here will aid the design of river rehabilitation and management schemes thereby helping maintain the integrity of the opening statement. There is a large amount of literature existing which addresses the interactions between benthic invertebrates and flow parameters, substrate type, vegetation, velocity, depth and near bed stresses. However significant gaps remain in our understanding, particularly at the level of individual taxa preferences. Furthermore, little work has been done in Scotland. To address these gap in the data the distribution of macroinvertebrates in relation to flow parameters were assessed for three rivers representative of highland (River Etive), central belt (Blane Water) and borders rivers (Duneaton Water). The importance of deep and shallow reaches as habitat units for benthic invertebrates was analysed and the methods for categorising reaches into riffles, runs and pools assessed. The analysis showed that at the sites examined differences between invertebrate community in deep and shallow reaches were minimal and limited to the preferences of a number of key species. Categorising reaches into riffles, runs and pools on purely visual grounds was insufficient and some measures of velocity and depth are required if the work is to be used for between site comparisons. Benthic invertebrates did show preferences for flow parameters. At the physical scale examined (Surber sample) community structure was influenced in a limited manner by flow parameters; velocity and depth wre the most important. A gradient from erosional to depositional conditions was observed at two of the sites. Limitations of Instream Flow Incremental Methodology (IFIM) as applied to benthic invertebrate habitat identification were identified. Estimates of near bed flow parameters based on point measurements of velocity profiles to samples collected at the scale of Surber samples do not explain any additional variation in the distribution of benthic invertebrates. Analysis of individual flow preferences of macroinvertebrates suggest that to identify flow preference curves, an aim of IFIM, finer scale habitat measurements are needed. Laboratory experiments were carried out to identify the upper velocity tolerances of some benthic invertebrates; Tipulidae and Gammarns pulex. The results show that individuals were flexible in their responses to high velocities. What constituted 'high' velocity was taxa specific Benthic invertebrate community structure was investigated in areas of the Blane Water vegetated with Callitriche instagnalis. Submerged vegetated patches supported a greater abundance of invertebrates than bare substrate. The hydraulic habitat of the macrophyte stands was more diverse than that of bare substrate with higher velocities occurring on the outside of the macrophyte stands than on the bare substrate. Simuliidae dominated the outside of the stands, the area exposed to the highest velocities. The invertebrate community on the outside of the plant stands was less equitable than that found at the root-substrate interface. It is suggested that macrophytes can be used as a tool in the rehabilitation of hydraulic habitat for benthic invertebrates in Scottish rivers. The importance of these results are discussed in the context of river rehabilitation and our ecological understanding of benthic invertebrate community structure

Flight investigation of the effects of Apollo heat-shield singularities on ablator performance

Launch vehicle flight tests of effects of Apollo heat shield irregularities on ablative material performanc

GANs and alternative methods of synthetic noise generation for domain adaption of defect classification of Non-destructive ultrasonic testing

This work provides a solution to the challenge of small amounts of training data in Non-Destructive Ultrasonic Testing for composite components. It was demonstrated that direct simulation alone is ineffective at producing training data that was representative of the experimental domain due to poor noise reconstruction. Therefore, four unique synthetic data generation methods were proposed which use semi-analytical simulated data as a foundation. Each method was evaluated on its classification performance of real experimental images when trained on a Convolutional Neural Network which underwent hyperparameter optimization using a genetic algorithm. The first method introduced task specific modifications to CycleGAN, to learn the mapping from physics-based simulations of defect indications to experimental indications in resulting ultrasound images. The second method was based on combining real experimental defect free images with simulated defect responses. The final two methods fully simulated the noise responses at an image and signal level respectively. The purely simulated data produced a mean classification F1 score of 0.394. However, when trained on the new synthetic datasets, a significant improvement in classification performance on experimental data was realized, with mean classification F1 scores of 0.843, 0.688, 0.629, and 0.738 for the respective approaches.Comment: 16 Page

Magmatic Products by Ocean Floor Spreading in MAR : Preliminary Analyses of Peridotites from IODP Exp.304/305 at Atlantis Massif, MAR 30°N

金沢大学大学院自然科学研究科4the International Symposium of the Kanazawa University 21st-Century COE Program,　Promotion Envirnmental Research in Pan-Japan Sea Area -Young Researchers\u27 Network- , DATE:March 8-10,2006, PLACE: Kanazawa Excel Hotel Tokyu, Japan, Sponsors: Japan Sea Research Institute / UNU-IAS(United Nation University Institute of Advanced Studies), Ishikawa Prefectural Government, City of Kanazaw

A note on a proposed census-based irish social-class scale for epidemiological health research

Precis: The social class/prestige scales currently used in Irish research are examained and considered unsuitable for epidemiological research as they are not census-based. The historical development of Socio-Economic Groups in Ireland is outlined and a Social Class Scale based on such groupings is proposed