Intersexual conflict influences female reproductive success in a female-dispersing primate

In group-living mammals, individual efforts to maximize reproductive success result in conflicts and compromises between the sexes. Females utilize counterstrategies to minimize the costs of sexual coercion by males, but few studies have examined the effect of such behaviors on female reproductive success. Secondary dispersal by females is rare among group-living mammals, but in western gorillas, it is believed to be a mate choice strategy to minimize infanticide risk and infant mortality. Previous research suggested that females choose males that are good protectors. However, how much female reproductive success varies depending on male competitive ability and whether female secondary dispersal leads to reproductive costs or benefits has not been examined. We used data on 100 females and 229 infants in 36 breeding groups from a 20-year long-term study of wild western lowland gorillas to investigate whether male tenure duration and female transfer rate had an effect on interbirth interval, female birth rates, and offspring mortality. We found that offspring mortality was higher near the end of males’ tenures, even after excluding potential infanticide when those males died, suggesting that females suffer a reproductive cost by being with males nearing the end of their tenures. Females experience a delay in breeding when they dispersed, having a notable effect on birth rates of surviving offspring per female if females transfer multiple times in their lives. This study exemplifies that female counterstrategies to mitigate the effects of male-male competition and sexual coercion may not be sufficient to overcome the negative consequences of male behavior

Deep Cover HCI

The growing popularity of methodologies that turn "to the wild" for real world data creates new ethical issues for the HCI community. For investigations questioning interactions in public or transient spaces, crowd interaction, or natural behaviour, uncontrolled and uninfluenced (by the experimenter) experiences represent the ideal evaluation environment. We argue that covert research can be completed rigorously and ethically to expand our knowledge of ubiquitous technologies. Our approach, which we call Deep Cover HCI, utilises technology-supported observation in public spaces to stage completely undisturbed experiences for evaluation. We complete studies without informed consent and without intervention from an experimenter in order to gain new insights into how people use technology in public settings. We argue there is clear value in this approach, reflect on the ethical issues of such investigations, and describe our ethical guidelines for completing Deep Cover HCI Research

Tangent unit-vector fields: nonabelian homotopy invariants and the Dirichlet energy

Let O be a closed geodesic polygon in S 2 . Maps from O into S 2 are said to satisfy tangent boundary conditions if the edges of O are mapped into the geodesics which contain them. Taking O to be an octant of S 2 , we compute the infimum Dirichlet energy, E(H), for continuous maps satisfying tangent boundary conditions of arbitrary homotopy type H. The expression for E(H) involves a topological invariant – the spelling length – associated with the (nonabelian) fundamental group of the n-times punctured two-sphere, π1 (S 2 − {s1 , . . . , sn }, ∗). The lower bound for E(H) is obtained from combinatorial group theory arguments, while the upper bound is obtained by constructing explicit representatives which, on all but an arbitrarily small subset of O, are alternatively locally conformal or anticonformal. For conformal and anticonformal classes (classes containing wholly conformal and anticonformal representatives respectively), the expression for E(H) reduces to a previous result involving the degrees of a set of regular values s1 , . . . , sn in the target S 2 space. These degrees may be viewed as invariants associated with the abelianization of π1 (S 2 − {s1 , . . . , sn }, ∗). For nonconformal classes, however, E(H) may be strictly greater than the abelian bound. This stems from the fact that, for nonconformal maps, the number of preimages of certain regular values may necessarily be strictly greater than the absolute value of their degrees.\ud \ud This work is motivated by the theoretical modelling of nematic liquid crystals in confined polyhedral geometries. The results imply new lower and upper bounds for the Dirichlet energy (one-constant Oseen-Frank energy) of reflection-symmetric tangent unit-vector fields in a rectangular prism

Preparing Laboratory and Real-World EEG Data for Large-Scale Analysis: A Containerized Approach.

Large-scale analysis of EEG and other physiological measures promises new insights into brain processes and more accurate and robust brain-computer interface models. However, the absence of standardized vocabularies for annotating events in a machine understandable manner, the welter of collection-specific data organizations, the difficulty in moving data across processing platforms, and the unavailability of agreed-upon standards for preprocessing have prevented large-scale analyses of EEG. Here we describe a "containerized" approach and freely available tools we have developed to facilitate the process of annotating, packaging, and preprocessing EEG data collections to enable data sharing, archiving, large-scale machine learning/data mining and (meta-)analysis. The EEG Study Schema (ESS) comprises three data "Levels," each with its own XML-document schema and file/folder convention, plus a standardized (PREP) pipeline to move raw (Data Level 1) data to a basic preprocessed state (Data Level 2) suitable for application of a large class of EEG analysis methods. Researchers can ship a study as a single unit and operate on its data using a standardized interface. ESS does not require a central database and provides all the metadata data necessary to execute a wide variety of EEG processing pipelines. The primary focus of ESS is automated in-depth analysis and meta-analysis EEG studies. However, ESS can also encapsulate meta-information for the other modalities such as eye tracking, that are increasingly used in both laboratory and real-world neuroimaging. ESS schema and tools are freely available at www.eegstudy.org and a central catalog of over 850 GB of existing data in ESS format is available at studycatalog.org. These tools and resources are part of a larger effort to enable data sharing at sufficient scale for researchers to engage in truly large-scale EEG analysis and data mining (BigEEG.org)

Adventitious shoot propagation and cultural inputs in nursery production of a primocane-fruiting blackberry selection

Studies were conducted from January to October 2005 to determine the effect of root-cutting length on adventitious shoot yield and the management practices necessary to produce nurseryquality primocane-fruiting blackberry plants. The first portion of the study measured the average number of shoots produced from 7.6 cm- and 15.2 cm-long root cuttings of APF-44 blackberry—a primocane-fruiting genotype from the University of Arkansas breeding program. Cuttings were forced in a shallow bin containing a soilless potting medium. The average number of shoots per root cutting from 7.6 cm- and 15.2 cm- long root cuttings averaged 1.6 and 2.7 shoots per root cutting, respectively. Rooting percentage for collected shoots was nearly 100% regardless of root-cutting length source. A qualitative comparison of shoots from the two roots lengths was similar. The latter part of the study included various treatments on the rooted shoots that might affect the productivity and quality of the final product intended for nursery sales in early fall. With the aim of producing a flowering/fruiting shrub by late September, three treatments were applied: pot dimension, fertilizer rate, and shoot tipping. Fertilizer rate had the greatest impact of all treatments with the higher rate producing larger and more attractive plants. Above-normal summer/fall temperatures may explain lack of fruiting on APF-44 blackberries, but the dimension and size of some plants provided a portion of the intended aesthetic