Quantifying the abundance of four large epiphytic fern species in remnant complex notophyll vine forest on the Atherton Tableland, north Queensland, Australia

Epiphytes are generally considered rare in complex forests on the western edge of the Atherton Tablelands, north Queensland. This assertion is based on comparisons with wetter forests in the Wet Tropics bioregion, but is of limited use in restoration projects where targets need to be quantified. We quantified ‘rarity’ for a subset of the epiphyte community in one of the largest remaining patches of Type 5b rainforest at Wongabel State Forest(17°18' S, 145°28' E). The bundance of large individuals of the epiphytic fern species Asplenium australasicum, Drynaria rigidula, Platycerium bifurcatum, and Platycerium superbum were recorded from 100 identified midstorey or canopy trees. Epiphytes were less rare than the canopy trees sampled, averaging 1.7 individuals per tree. A clumped distribution was suggested with large epiphytes only occurring on 57 of the 100 trees. As tree size increased so did the number of individuals and species of large epiphytes recorded; only trees taller than 20 m yielded more than one epiphyte. Trees from the Meliaceae and Rutaceae hosted the most epiphytes, but host tree specificity patterns were not conclusive. Techniques for including epiphytes in restoration planning and projects are considered, and a quantified restoration target for epiphyte communities in Type 5b plantings is outlined

How Boats Change: Explaining Morphological Variation in European Watercraft, based on an Investigation of Logboats from Bohemia and Moravia, Czech Republic

This thesis examines questions regarding aspects of cultural change in prehistoric and early modern Europe, specifically the transmittal of skills, knowledge and technology. Dugout logboats from Bohemia and Moravia (Czech Republic) are used as proxy artifacts to make this transmittal visible. Boats in general and riverine watercraft specifically, are an unusual class of artifact, as they are neither completely portable nor permanently fixed in place. The movement of watercraft is restricted to a relatively narrow corridor through the landscape. The morphology and construction of logboats are reflective of skill sets and technological traditions. Pre-literate boat construction traditions and technology, spread through personal contact and experience, may thus be traced through close examination of the technical features of surviving examples. In many parts of Europe, however, dugout logboats remain an extremely uncontextualized category of artefact. Placing these vessels in their appropriate geographic, environmental, and human contexts helps us to understand their meaning and forms (and the behavior of their builders and operators). The geographic element of this investigation is especially significant, as the spread of information and skill sets in physical space is a main focus of the thesis. The Czech Lands sit astride one of Europe’s main continental divides, and rivers originating on this territory flow to the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea. Topographic conditions have funneled travel and transport in this region through the river valleys and across a few key passes or watershed boundaries. Water transport, far more efficient than overland haulage, was likely an important element in trans-continental trade and exchange. Analysis of the surviving logboats from this region indicates that different construction traditions prevailed in different watershed areas. These data also suggest a model explaining the mechanisms by which boats can change. Key elements of the model include an inherent conservatism of boat design; internal change, driven by social or environmental factors; and external change, adopted through the personal experience of the boat builder or operator. The model is subsequently tested against case studies of vessels from other regions of Europe, and other types of watercraft

A phase transition in excursions from infinity of the "fast" fragmentation-coalescence process

An important property of Kingman's coalescent is that, starting from a state with an infinite number of blocks, over any positive time horizon, it transitions into an almost surely finite number of blocks. This is known as `coming down from infinity'. Moreover, of the many different (exchangeable) stochastic coalescent models, Kingman's coalescent is the `fastest' to come down from infinity. In this article we study what happens when we counteract this `fastest' coalescent with the action of an extreme form of fragmentation. We augment Kingman's coalescent, where any two blocks merge at rate $c>0$, with a fragmentation mechanism where each block fragments at constant rate, $\lambda>0$, into it's constituent elements. We prove that there exists a phase transition at $\lambda=c/2$, between regimes where the resulting `fast' fragmentation-coalescence process is able to come down from infinity or not. In the case that $\lambda<c/2$ we develop an excursion theory for the fast fragmentation-coalescence process out of which a number of interesting quantities can be computed explicitly.Comment: 1 figur

The Active Tail in the MMS Era: An Ion Perspective

The Earth\u27s magnetic field has a complex and dynamic relationship with the greater solar system. The solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field extend the influence of the Sun\u27s atmosphere to the orbit of Earth and well beyond, carrying charged particles in a constant stream of varying density and velocity. These solar influences carry energy which interacts with every object they encounter, including the Earth and its magnetic field. The primary mechanism for the energetic interaction and exchange of energy between the Earth\u27s magnetic field and the solar wind is called Magnetic Reconnection, a process by which two opposing magnetic fields may cancel each other in a limited region and allow the plasma restrained by each to cross the boundary between magnetic fields and interact. The effects of this interactions are as varied as they are wonderful, including the aurora, intercontinental radio communications, and threats to orbiting satellites. As such, understanding magnetic reconnection and its effects is an important task for space science research. This work is devoted to characterizing and identifying magnetic reconnection region in one part of the Earth\u27s magnetosphere, the magnetotail, as well as the conditions in the magnetotail necessary for reconnection to begin. This is done through the analysis of data from the Magnetospheric Multi-Scale Mission, a fleet of four identical orbiting observatories designed specifically to study reconnection. Methods to identify reconnection derived from historical assumptions as well relatively new techniques, so-called Scalar Parameters, are employed and compared. Finally, a combination of these methods is brought to bear in an attempt to understand why magnetic reconnection in the magnetotail occurs more often in some locations than others

Development of CD19 binding reagents for targeted nanoparticles

B-cell malignancies like Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL), which often have high numbers of malignant cells in circulation in the blood would be an excellent model system for the early preclinical development and testing of targeted small particle therapeutics. We selected the transmembrane protein CD19 (Cluster of Differentiation 19) as one potential promising target due to its remarkably common over-expression on nearly every case of B-ALL, and on many other types of leukemias and lymphomas with varying frequency. We attempted to create a panel of appropriate CD19-specific targeting reagents for attachment to the surface of perhaps many different small particle platforms currently in development worldwide. We first utilized an M13 bacteriophage random peptide display library to attempt to isolate a short CD19-binding peptide using both a cell-based and a purified protein-based strategy. Despite multiple attempts, neither of these approaches yielded the discovery of such a peptide. We have, however, in process, developed novel phage purification procedures that we demonstrate are particularly important when validating the binding of clones recovered from the library using two cell-based assays; these consist of a simple flow cytometry method and a complex, but higher throughput, assay done in 96-well plates that can measure phage binding to cells with a qPCR approach. As a second strategy for making targeting reagents, we expressed and refolded large quantities of two known anti-CD19 Single-chain Fv fragments from cytoplasmic inclusion bodies in E. coli. We here demonstrate that one of them, HD37 (originally isolated from a mouse hybridoma cell line as an IgG1 subtype) could be refolded into a somewhat active form by using a previously published procedure. A second antibody fragment, FMC 63 (also originally from mouse hybridoma, an IgG2 subtype) did not refold properly by this procedure and work is ongoing to find a suitable refolding strategy for this antibody in particular. Thus, we proffer the recombinant HD37 antibody fragment as the simplest strategy for the production of large quantities of CD19-targeting reagent suitable for attachment to small particle therapeutics, as we find that CD19 is particularly challenging to use as a target for phage display technologies in the cell context

The Numantian Theme in Spanish Literature

Numantia, after years of heroic resistance, fell to the Roman legions in 133 B.C. The conquest of Numantia was so costly that it played an important role in the internal politics of Rome and thus it was singled out and received the attention of the Greek and Roman historians who recorded and analyzed the conquest and colonization of Iberia. Centuries later, when Spain had developed a sense of national unity, the Hispanic chroniclers found in the history of Numantia an authenticated record of Iberian will to resist foreign domination and evidence of a courageous and virtuous national character. The Hispanic writers were pleased to find that the Roman historians had attributed the humiliating ineffectiveness of the Roman legions to a lack of morale and morality, while finding but one fatal flaw in the more primitive Celtiberians: a lack of political unity beyond limited regional loyalties. Certain elements of the siege of Numantia are inherently dramatic and tragic, and thus lend themselves well to literary expansion. Moreover, certain philosophical aspects became associated with Numantia because of the patterns of classical thought contained in the works that mentioned the siege of the Iberian settlement. The stature and significance of Numantia grew with the passage of time so that by the end of the sixteenth century, when Cervantes made the first major literary use of it, it had become a legend which symbolically represented a wide range of philosophical and national considerations. This study first traces the tramsmission of the history of Numantia and its transformation into a literary theme. It then examines the moral, political and esthetic implications of the Numantian plays and poetry which have appeared in almost every Spanish literary movement from the sixteenth century down to the present time

SILC: a new Planck Internal Linear Combination CMB temperature map using directional wavelets

We present new clean maps of the CMB temperature anisotropies (as measured by Planck) constructed with a novel internal linear combination (ILC) algorithm using directional, scale-discretised wavelets --- Scale-discretised, directional wavelet ILC or SILC. Directional wavelets, when convolved with signals on the sphere, can separate the anisotropic filamentary structures which are characteristic of both the CMB and foregrounds. Extending previous component separation methods, which use the frequency, spatial and harmonic signatures of foregrounds to separate them from the cosmological background signal, SILC can additionally use morphological information in the foregrounds and CMB to better localise the cleaning algorithm. We test the method on Planck data and simulations, demonstrating consistency with existing component separation algorithms, and discuss how to optimise the use of morphological information by varying the number of directional wavelets as a function of spatial scale. We find that combining the use of directional and axisymmetric wavelets depending on scale could yield higher quality CMB temperature maps. Our results set the stage for the application of SILC to polarisation anisotropies through an extension to spin wavelets.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures. Minor changes to match version published in MNRAS. Map products available at http://www.silc-cmb.or

Spin-SILC: CMB polarisation component separation with spin wavelets

We present Spin-SILC, a new foreground component separation method that accurately extracts the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation $E$ and $B$ modes from raw multifrequency Stokes $Q$ and $U$ measurements of the microwave sky. Spin-SILC is an internal linear combination method that uses spin wavelets to analyse the spin-2 polarisation signal $P = Q + iU$. The wavelets are additionally directional (non-axisymmetric). This allows different morphologies of signals to be separated and therefore the cleaning algorithm is localised using an additional domain of information. The advantage of spin wavelets over standard scalar wavelets is to simultaneously and self-consistently probe scales and directions in the polarisation signal $P = Q + iU$ and in the underlying $E$ and $B$ modes, therefore providing the ability to perform component separation and $E$-$B$ decomposition concurrently for the first time. We test Spin-SILC on full-mission Planck simulations and data and show the capacity to correctly recover the underlying cosmological $E$ and $B$ modes. We also demonstrate a strong consistency of our CMB maps with those derived from existing component separation methods. Spin-SILC can be combined with the pseudo- and pure $E$-$B$ spin wavelet estimators presented in a companion paper to reliably extract the cosmological signal in the presence of complicated sky cuts and noise. Therefore, it will provide a computationally-efficient method to accurately extract the CMB $E$ and $B$ modes for future polarisation experiments.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Minor changes to match version published in MNRAS. Map products available at http://www.silc-cmb.org. Companion paper: arXiv:1605.01414 "Wavelet reconstruction of pure E and B modes for CMB polarisation and cosmic shear analyses" (B. Leistedt et al.