Song development in birds tutored with phrase pairs

Journal ArticleA study of the developmental trajectory of bird song can offer insight into the process of vocal learning. In a previous experiment we tutored white-crowned sparrows with isolated phrase pairs taken from adult conspecific songs consisting of 5 phrases

Intergenerational Pathways From Reflective Functioning to Infant Attachment Through Parenting

The aim of this prospective study was to examine temporal pathways from mothers’ reflective functioning (RF) through parenting to infant attachment measured more than 16 months later. Participants were 88 mother–infant dyads from demographically diverse backgrounds and included a group of mothers with histories of childhood maltreatment. RF was assessed using the RF rating of the Adult Attachment Interview before the birth of the baby. Parenting was assessed when the infants were 6 months old using the Maternal Sensitivity scale, as well as when they were 16 months using the Disconnected and Extremely Insensitive Parenting scale. Infant attachment was assessed when the infants were 16 months old using the Strange Situation. As hypothesised, the study findings showed that mothers’ mentalization regarding their own early attachment relationships was associated with later parenting and infant attachment. Negative parenting behaviours explained the link between mothers’ RF about their own attachment relationships and infant attachment disorganization. The findings suggest that mothers’ mentalization about their early attachment relationships has important implications in the transition to becoming parents themselves. Mentalization appears to be particularly important in helping mothers screen and inhibit negative parenting behaviours that would otherwise undermine infant attachment security and organization

Biografo: An integrated tool for forensic writer identification

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20125-2_17The design and performance of a practical integrated tool for writer identification in forensic scenarios is presented. The tool has been designed to help forensic examiners along the complete identification process: from the data acquisition to the recognition itself, as well as with the management of large writer-related databases. The application has been implemented using JavaScript running over a relational database which provides the whole system with some very desirable and unique characteristics such as the possibility to perform all type of queries (e.g., find individuals with some very discriminative character, find a specific document, display all the samples corresponding to one writer, etc.), or a complete control over the set of parameters we want to use in a specific recognition task (e.g., users in the database to be used as control set, set of characters to be used in the identification, size of the ranked list we want as final result, etc.). The identification performance of the tool is evaluated on a real-case forensic database showing some very promising results.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Dirección General de la Guardia Civil, and projects Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485) from CAM, Bio-Challenge (TEC2009-11186) from Spanish MICINN, BBfor2 (ITN-2008-238803) from the European Commision, and Cátedra UAM-Telefónica

Neuronal Variability during Handwriting: Lognormal Distribution

We examined time-dependent statistical properties of electromyographic (EMG) signals recorded from intrinsic hand muscles during handwriting. Our analysis showed that trial-to-trial neuronal variability of EMG signals is well described by the lognormal distribution clearly distinguished from the Gaussian (normal) distribution. This finding indicates that EMG formation cannot be described by a conventional model where the signal is normally distributed because it is composed by summation of many random sources. We found that the variability of temporal parameters of handwriting - handwriting duration and response time - is also well described by a lognormal distribution. Although, the exact mechanism of lognormal statistics remains an open question, the results obtained should significantly impact experimental research, theoretical modeling and bioengineering applications of motor networks. In particular, our results suggest that accounting for lognormal distribution of EMGs can improve biomimetic systems that strive to reproduce EMG signals in artificial actuators

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

In situ commissioning of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter with cosmic muons

In 2006, ATLAS entered the {\it in situ} commissioning phase. The primary goal of this phase is to verify the detector operation and performance with cosmic muons. Using a dedicated cosmic muon trigger from the hadronic Tile calorimeter, a sample of approximately $120\,000$ events was collected in several modules of the barrel electromagnetic (EM) calorimeter between August 2006 and March 2007. As cosmic events are generally non-projective and arrive asynchronously with respect to the trigger clock, methods to improve the standard signal reconstruction for this situation are presented. Various selection criteria for projective muons and clustering algorithms have been tested, leading to preliminary results on calorimeter uniformity in $\eta$ and timing performance

T-systems and Y-systems in integrable systems

The T and Y-systems are ubiquitous structures in classical and quantum integrable systems. They are difference equations having a variety of aspects related to commuting transfer matrices in solvable lattice models, q-characters of Kirillov-Reshetikhin modules of quantum affine algebras, cluster algebras with coefficients, periodicity conjectures of Zamolodchikov and others, dilogarithm identities in conformal field theory, difference analogue of L-operators in KP hierarchy, Stokes phenomena in 1d Schr\"odinger problem, AdS/CFT correspondence, Toda field equations on discrete space-time, Laplace sequence in discrete geometry, Fermionic character formulas and combinatorial completeness of Bethe ansatz, Q-system and ideal gas with exclusion statistics, analytic and thermodynamic Bethe ans\"atze, quantum transfer matrix method and so forth. This review article is a collection of short reviews on these topics which can be read more or less independently.Comment: 156 pages. Minor corrections including the last paragraph of sec.3.5, eqs.(4.1), (5.28), (9.37) and (13.54). The published version (JPA topical review) also needs these correction

Existing benchmark systems for assessing global warming potential of buildings – Analysis of IEA EBC Annex 72 cases

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly being used as a tool by the building industry and actors to assess the global warming potential (GWP) of building activities. In several countries, life cycle based requirements on GWP are currently being incorporated into building regulations. After the establishment of general calculation rules for building LCA, a crucial next step is to evaluate the performance of the specific building design. For this, reference values or benchmarks are needed, but there are several approaches to defining these. This study presents an overview of existing benchmark systems documented in seventeen cases from the IEA EBC Annex 72 project on LCA of buildings. The study characterizes their different types of methodological background and displays the reported values. Full life cycle target values for residential and non-residential buildings are found around 10-20 kg CO$_2$e/m$^2$/y, whereas reference values are found between 20-80 kg CO$_2$e/m$^2$/y. Possible embodied target- and reference values are found between 1-12 kg CO$_2$e/m$^2$/y for both residential and non-residential buildings. Benchmark stakeholders can use the insights from this study to understand the justifications of the background methodological choices and to gain an overview of the level of GWP performance across benchmark systems

Existing benchmark systems for assessing global warming potential of buildings – Analysis of IEA EBC Annex 72 cases

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly being used as a tool by the building industry and actors to assess the global warming potential (GWP) of building activities. In several countries, life cycle based requirements on GWP are currently being incorporated into building regulations. After the establishment of general calculation rules for building LCA, a crucial next step is to evaluate the performance of the specific building design. For this, reference values or benchmarks are needed, but there are several approaches to defining these. This study presents an overview of existing benchmark systems documented in seventeen cases from the IEA EBC Annex 72 project on LCA of buildings. The study characterizes their different types of methodological background and displays the reported values. Full life cycle target values for residential and non-residential buildings are found around 10-20 kg CO2e/m2/y, whereas reference values are found between 20-80 kg CO2e/m2/y. Possible embodied target- and reference values are found between 1-12 kg CO2e/m2/y for both residential and non-residential buildings. Benchmark stakeholders can use the insights from this study to understand the justifications of the background methodological choices and to gain an overview of the level of GWP performance across benchmark systems.publishedVersio