Introduction: Toward an anthropology of tourism imaginaries

In this edited volume, we conceptualize imaginaries as socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people's personal imaginings and that are used as meaning-making and world-shaping device

Preparing the DSN operations concepts

Operations concepts are prepared to support a specific application and can, therefore, be classified accordingly. Studies of NASA and military operations concepts suggest three major types: data services, customer services, and systems oriented. Data services concepts concentrate on data types (e.g., telemetry and command) and how these data are processed and delivered to the user. Such concepts are normally used by data-processing centers to describe data-coding schemes and data formats. Customer services concepts concentrate on the customers' requirements and describe how these requirements are met using the systems available to the operation. Project centers use such concepts to describe the various types of data as they flow from the source (e.g., a spacecraft) to the end user (i.e., the customer). Systems oriented concepts concentrate on the use of systems for processing and delivering customer data. This paper examines the latter type and the 'concepts' that are inherent within them

Seedling development traits in Brassica napus examined by gene expression analysis and association mapping

BACKGROUND: An optimal seedling development of Brassica napus plants leads to a higher yield stability even under suboptimal growing conditions and has therefore a high importance for plant breeders. The objectives of our study were to (i) examine the expression levels of candidate genes in seedling leaves of B. napus and correlate these with seedling development as well as (ii) detect genome regions associated with gene expression levels and seedling development traits in B. napus by genome-wide association mapping. RESULTS: The expression levels of the 15 candidate genes examined in the 509 B. napus inbreds showed an averaged standard deviation of 5.6 across all inbreds and ranged from 3.2 to 8.8. The gene expression differences between the 509 B. napus inbreds were more than adequate for the correlation with phenotypic variation of seedling development. The average of the absolute value correlations of the correlation coefficients of 0.11 were observed with a range from 0.00 to 0.39. The candidate genes GER1, AILP1, PECT, and FBP were strongly correlated with the seedling development traits. In a genome-wide association study, we detected a total of 63 associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and the seedling development traits and 31 SNP-gene associations for the candidate genes with a P-value < 0.0001. For the projected leaf area traits we identified five different association hot spots on the chromosomes A2, A7, C3, C6, and C7. CONCLUSION: A total of 99.4% of the adjacent SNPs on the A genome and 93.0% of the adjacent SNPs on the C genome had a distance smaller than the average range of linkage disequilibrium. Therefore, this genome-wide association study is expected to result on average in 14.7% of the possible power. Compared to previous studies in B. napus, the SNP marker density of our study is expected to provide a higher power to detect SNP-trait/-gene associations in the B. napus diversity set. The large number of associations detected for the examined 14 seedling development traits indicated that these are genetically complex inherited. The results of our analyses suggested that the studied genes ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase small subunit (RBC) on the chromosomes A4 and C4 and fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase precursor (FBP) on the chromosomes A9 and C8 are cis-regulated. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12870-015-0496-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Retinal blood vessels extraction using probabilistic modelling

© 2014 Kaba et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The analysis of retinal blood vessels plays an important role in detecting and treating retinal diseases. In this review, we present an automated method to segment blood vessels of fundus retinal image. The proposed method could be used to support a non-intrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology for early detection of retinal diseases, treatment evaluation or clinical study. This study combines the bias correction and an adaptive histogram equalisation to enhance the appearance of the blood vessels. Then the blood vessels are extracted using probabilistic modelling that is optimised by the expectation maximisation algorithm. The method is evaluated on fundus retinal images of STARE and DRIVE datasets. The experimental results are compared with some recently published methods of retinal blood vessels segmentation. The experimental results show that our method achieved the best overall performance and it is comparable to the performance of human experts.The Department of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University