The influence of ship motion of manual control skills

The effects of ship motion on a range of typical manual control skills were examined on the Warren Spring ship motion simulator driven in heave, pitch, and roll by signals taken from the frigate HMS Avenger at 13 m/s (25 knots) into a force 4 wind. The motion produced a vertical r.m.s. acceleration of 0.024g, mostly between 0.1 and 0.3 Hz, with comparatively little pitch or roll. A task involving unsupported arm movements was seriously affected by the motion; a pursuit tracking task showed a reliable decrement although it was still performed reasonably well (pressure and free moving tracking controls were affected equally by the motion); a digit keying task requiring ballistic hand movements was unaffected. There was no evidence that these effects were caused by sea sickness. The differing response to motion of the different tasks, from virtual destruction to no effect, suggests that a major benefit could come from an attempt to design the man/control interface onboard ship around motion resistant tasks

First Year Projects and Activities of the Environmental Remote Sensing Applications Laboratory (ERSAL)

Activities, pilot projects, and research that will effectively close the gap between state-of-the-art remote sensing technology and the potential users and beneficiaries of this technological and scientific progress are discussed in light of the first year of activity. A broad spectrum of resource and man-environment problems are described in terms of the central thrust of the first-year program to support land use planning decisions with information derived from the interpretation of NASA highlight and satellite imagery

The effects of treadmill training in hemi-parkinsonian rats

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether locomotor training, in the form of treadmill training, could ameliorate neurochemical changes and behavioural deficits in the 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) rat model of Parkinson’s disease. It has been recently demonstrated that rehabilitative forelimb motor training can attenuate dopamine loss and some deficits in forelimb movements in this animal model. In addition, brief locomotor treadmill training has been shown to attenuate forelimb deficits in 6-OHDA treated rats. However, it is not known whether locomotor training could result in an amelioration of locomotor deficits in these animals. Rats were lesioned with 6-OHDA injected intracerebrally. Lesioned rats were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: early treadmill trained, late treadmill trained and untrained. Animals in the treadmill groups were trained to trot on a moving treadmill for 2 x 20 minute sessions daily for 30 days, beginning either 24 hours or 7 days after 6-OHDA injection. Untrained animals were exposed to a stationary treadmill for the same time periods. All animals were assessed on their abilities to perform several behavioural tasks designed to test locomotor and forelimb movement abilities prior to 6-OHDA injection and again at 3 and 6 weeks post-injection. These tests included measurement of ground reaction forces during overground locomotion, paw placements during a ladder crossing task, forelimb useage during exploratory behaviour and ability to initiate forelimb stepping movements. In addition, assessments of dopamine depletion in the striatum were carried out first in vivo, by measuring apomorphine-induced rotations at 2 weeks post 6-OHDA injection, and subsequently by post-mortem analysis of dopamine levels in the striatum using HPLC at the conclusion of the study. Treadmill training resulted in attenuation of dopamine depletion compared to non-treadmill trained animals, as measured by both apomorphine injection and HPLC. However, treadmill training produced no difference in behavioural deficits on a variety of tests compared to untrained animals. In some cases, early treadmill trained animals tended to display more severe behavioural deficits compared to untrained animals. Late treadmill training had a similar but smaller effect compared to early treadmill training. We conclude that treadmill training does not ameliorate locomotor deficits, in the 6-OHDA model of Parkinson’s disease, even though this same training results in attenuation of dopamine loss in the striatum

Football Fandom, Mobilisation and Herbert Blumer: A Social Movement Analysis of F.C. United of Manchester

This article explores the establishment and development of fan-owned association football club, F.C. United of Manchester. It does this by drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, observations and an analysis of multiple texts, such as fanzines, web-based and media reports materials and discusses this using Herbert Blumer’s theory of collective behavior. As such, the article addresses two research questions: first, what the empirical case example of F.C. United of Manchester offers to the critical understanding of Blumer’s theory and second, what the theory can give to the understanding of twenty-first century protests in popular culture. Therefore this article contributes to contemporary debates on association football fandom, social movements and the theories of Herbert Blumer

Response of three cereal crops in continuous arable or ley-arable rotations to fertiliser nitrogen and soil nitrogen at Rothamsted's Woburn Ley-arable experiment

The concept of improving soil fertility by ley-arable farming, developed in the 1930s in England, was practised on many “mixed” farms that had both arable crops and permanent grass. The practice declined from the 1960s as farms became predominantly arable or grassland. However, there is increasing interest in including leys in arable farming to fix carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in soil organic matter (SOM). For example, in the United Kingdom a project “Grass and herbal leys in farm network” was launched in 2018 (adas.uk, 2020) and in the European Union (EU) farmers are now required to grow a wider range of crops (ec. europa.eu, 2020. The Woburn Ley-arable experiment started in 1938 has compared six rotations, two with 3-yr leys, two with 8-yr leys and two with continuous arable crops on the yields of two cereal test crops. The effect of these rotations on SOM is given elsewhere (Johnston et al., 2017). Here we give the yields of both test crops in each of the six rotations for 21 years starting in 1981. We discuss the response to four levels of applied fertiliser nitrogen (N), the effect of rotation, the level of SOM and the availability of soil N. Where no fertiliser N was added, crop yields increased as % N in soil increased, but, with sufficient fertiliser N there was little benefit from the extra N in the soil. Yields of winter wheat were larger after the 3-year grass ley than in the all-arable rotations and larger again following the grass/clover ley. Less fertiliser N was needed to achieve the yields after the leys than in the all-arable rotations. Yields of the second cereal crop following 3- or 8-yr leys were also larger than those in all-arable rotations but there was no difference between the leys. However, the extra N available from the leys and the increases in yield were modest. If leys are to be introduced into mainly arable farming systems, they may need to be subsidised to make them financially viable