When the fingers do the talking: A study of group participation for different kinds of shareable surfaces

and other research outputs When the fingers do the talking: A study of group par-ticipation for different kinds of shareable surface

Creativity in the printing industry: The Context of organizational change

The printing industry is undergoing numerous changes. The advancement of digital technologies has profoundly impacted the ways in which information is conveyed to consumers and has given people the ability to produce documents on their own, thereby limiting reliance on traditional print companies. As an example of this phenomenon, Freeman and Rothenberg (2006) report on decreasing demand for traditional print products, citing statistics from the Newspaper Association of America that mark a decrease in newsprint consumption of 14%

Storing Directionality in Axial Lines using Complex Node Depths

Abstract This paper proposes that in order to implement an angular-based choice 1 algorithm it is first necessary to implement a new type of depth definition. Such a depth algorithm would not only calculate the 'minimum' angular depth from any origin to any destination (as per Dalton, 2001) but specifically stores the depth as complex number, which additionally represents the cumulative angle that facilitated that particular minimum angular depth calculation. By using such a representation it becomes possible to compute the unique angle of intersection of any two axial lines, where the starting-direction of a hypothetical individual travelling from one axial line to another is known. This paper concludes with the suggestion that the use of complex number depths (namely depths that have a real and imaginary component) is an interesting and valuable extension of the concept of depth; originally depth could take only an integer value, this was then extended to a real numbers (angular depth) and finally has been extended once more by utilising complex numbers. The use of such an algorithm, as will be described in this paper, to calculate complex depth can then be used to compute true angular depth and hence angular choice for any given axial system. This paper will present the proposed algorithm and new measure in full

Prototyping a method for the assessment of real-time EEG sonifications

This paper presents a first step in the development of a methodology to compare the ability of different sonifications to convey the fine temporal detail of the Electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave signal in real time. In EEG neurofeedback a person‟s EEG activity is monitored and presented back to them, to help them to learn how to modify their brain activity. Learning theory suggests that the more rapidly and accurately the feedback follows behaviour the more efficient the learning will be. Therefore a critical issue is how to assess the ability of a sonification to convey rapid and temporally complex EEG data for neurofeedback. To allow for replication, this study used sonifications of pre-recorded EEG data and asked participants to try and track aspects of the signal in real time using a mouse. This study showed that, although imperfect, this approach is a practical way to compare the suitability of EEG sonifications for tracking detailed EEG signals in real time and that the combination of quantitative and qualitative data helped characterise the relative efficacy of different sonifications

Assessment of the usefulness of genomic information in the Latxa dairy sheep breeding program.

Los avances acaecidos en el área de la genética molecular y de la informática han revolucionado el campo de la mejora genética animal, ya que abren la posibilidad de incorporar la información genómica de cada individuo en los modelos de evaluación genética. La implementación de la selección genómica (SG) en programas de ovino lechero ha sido limitada, principalmente debido a la presencia de una gran variedad de razas con tamaños poblacionales pequeños, un menor uso de la inseminación artificial (IA), controles de rendimientos heterogéneos y un menor valor económico. Por todo ello, la implementación de la SG en ovino lechero ha seguido diferentes estrategias en función de cada raza y sus características.La raza Latxa es una población autóctona de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca y Navarra, está dividida en tres variedades (Latxa Cara Negra de Euskadi: LCNEUS; Latxa Cara Rubia: LCR y Latxa Cara Negra de Navarra: LCNNAF) y cada una de ellas dispone de su propio programa de selección. Estudios previos sobre la inclusión de información genómica en las evaluaciones arrojaron resultados no concluyentes. Por lo tanto, el principal objetivo de esta tesis doctoral es analizar la potencial implantación de la SG y el uso de la información genómica en la raza de ovino lechero Latxa.El primer estudio analizó la estima de coeficientes de consanguinidad, parentesco y censo efectivo (N_e) en base a información de pedigrí e información genómica, empleando dos metodologías diferentes en el último caso. El incremento de la consanguinidad obtenido fue moderado en todos los casos, reflejando el correcto manejo realizado dentro del esquema para controlar la consanguinidad. Como es de esperar, los resultados fueron diferentes en función de la fuente de información y metodología empleadas. Sin embargo, los resultados fueron consistentes y mostraron que las poblaciones negras (LCNEUS y LCNNAF) tienen un mayor aumento de la consanguinidad y menores N_e que la población LCR. Esto se atribuye a que esta última variedad, desde el año 2010 está importando de forma sistematica material genético de la raza francesa Manech Tête Rousse (MTR) y en consecuencia presenta un mayor N_e, un menor aumento de consanguinidad y simultáneamente un aumento significativo del parentesco entre ambas poblaciones.El segundo estudio abordó el efecto de incluir información genómica en las evaluaciones para producción de leche comparando mediante validación cruzada la precisión obtenida en evaluaciones por pedigrí (BLUP) frente a la obtenida en evaluaciones genómicas (ssGBLUP). En una primera fase se utilizó la información genómica disponible que correspondía a machos de IA y se modeló la genealogía faltante a través de metafundadores. Aunque los resultados mostraron sesgos y dispersiones favorables, la inclusión de la información genómica no aumentó ni disminuyó la precisión de predicción para ninguna de las razas.Posteriormente, en una segunda fase se repitió el análisis al disponer de un mayor número de animales genotipados que además de machos de IA incluía machos de monta natural y hembras. Se aplicó la misma metodología (excepto por el uso de grupos genéticos en lugar de metafundadores) y se evaluaron las tres poblaciones de Latxa. Los resultados fueron similares para ambas metodologías de evaluación en términos de sesgo y pendiente. Sin embargo, a diferencia del estudio anterior, incluir la nueva información genómica mejoró la precisión de las predicciones genómicas. Concretamente, el aumento de precisión en las poblaciones de LCNEUS y LCR estuvo en torno al 14 %, con poblaciones genotipadas cercanas a 1000 individuos, mientras que en LCNNAF, con una población genotipada 50 % menor, el aumento de precisión se situó en torno al 5 %.Finalmente, el tercer estudio fue un trabajo de simulación desarrollado con el fin de comparar diferentes estrategias de genotipado para conformar la población de referencia. Dicha comparación se realizó en términos de precisión de predicción de evaluaciones genéticas (BLUP) y genómicas (ssGBLUP) para producción de leche. La simulación se realizó en base a la estructura fenotípica, genómica y genealógica real de las poblaciones de raza Latxa, limitando el número máximo de individuos genotipados al año teniendo en cuenta las restricciones económicas del esquema. Como se esperaba, el aumento del tamaño de la población genotipada aumenta la precisión de predicción. Sin embargo, la estructura de dicha población influye de forma importante. Así, el genotipado de machos no conectados genealógicamente con la población no influyó en la precisión, por mayor que fuera el número. También se constató que la inclusión de hembras en la población de referencia es muy beneficiosa, obteniéndose aumentos de precisión de entre 10 y 50 %. Diferentes proporciones del número de machos y hembras genotipadas no reportaron diferencias de precisión.Por lo tanto, teniendo en cuenta los estudios realizados en el contexto de esta tesis, se puede concluir que el uso de la información genómica en las evaluaciones genéticas para producción de leche en la raza Latxa es beneficioso y que dadas las características de la raza, incluir hembras en la población genotipada de referencia sería una buena opción. Además, disponer de información genómica ha permitido obtener estimas de consanguinidad y parentesco precisas de las poblaciones de Latxa, mostrándose como una herramienta de gran utilidad para la gestión de las poblaciones.<br /

What Did Farming Ever Do For Us? The value of cultural farmed landscapes for nature recovery and climate action in the Lake District

A booklet designed for farmers to recognise the value of their farmed cultural landscape and how they can use that to address nature recovery and climate action

Diverging and Converging: Integrative Insights on a Paradox Meta-perspective

Paradox theory stands at an exciting moment in organization and management theory. Scholars increasingly seek out insights about the nature and management of contradictory demands to explain a wide array of organizational phenomena across multiple levels of analysis. Our two reviews in the 2016 Academy of Management Annals attest to this growing breadth and depth, each integrating and expanding related, yet different bodies of research. Schad, Lewis, Raisch, and Smith (2016) emphasize the depth of scholarship by analyzing an increasing number of paradox studies within management science. Putnam, Fairhurst, and Banghart (2016) highlight the breadth of scholarship by comparing paradoxes that emerge from multiple theories and paradigms that embrace an interdisciplinary orientation. By drawing on distinct literatures, these two manuscripts reveal diverse insights and reflections about paradoxical demands in organizations. In this integrative reflection, we juxtapose our two review articles, surface distinct assumptions and emphases, highlight complementarities, and raise questions for future scholarship. In doing so, we hope to fuel insights toward a meta-perspective on paradox

Forage Fact Sheet : Gliricidia

2 páginasGliricidia is one of the major tropical forage trees due to its high nutritive value, fast growing capacity and its ability to adapt to a variety of conditions. It is a perennial, medium-sized (1 to15 m high) legume tree. Imparipinnate; leaflets are ovate, 2-7 cm long x 1-3 cm broad

A fast sparse block circulant matrix vector product

In the context of computed tomography (CT), iterative image reconstruction techniques are gaining attention because high-quality images are becoming computationally feasible. They involve the solution of large systems of equations, whose cost is dominated by the sparse matrix vector product (SpMV). Our work considers the case of the sparse matrices being block circulant, which arises when taking advantage of the rotational symmetry in the tomographic system. Besides the straightforward storage saving, we exploit the circulant structure to rewrite the poor-performance SpMVs into a high-performance product between sparse and dense matrices. This paper describes the implementations developed for multi-core CPUs and GPUs, and presents experimental results with typical CT matrices. The presented approach is up to ten times faster than without exploiting the circulant structure.Romero Alcalde, E.; Tomás Domínguez, AE.; Soriano Asensi, A.; Blanquer Espert, I. (2014). A fast sparse block circulant matrix vector product. En Euro-Par 2014 Parallel Processing. Springer. 548-559. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-09873-9_46S548559Bian, J., Siewerdsen, J.H., Han, X., Sidky, E.Y., Prince, J.L., Pelizzari, C.A., Pal, X.: Evaluation of sparse-view reconstruction from flat-panel-detector cone-beam ct. Physics in Medicine and Biology 55, 6575–6599 (2010)Dalton, S., Bell, N.: CUSP: A C++ templated sparse matrix library version 0.4.0 (2014), http://cusplibrary.github.com/Feldkamp, L., Davis, L., Kress, J.: Practical cone-beam algorithm. Journal of the Optical Society of America 1, 612–619 (1984)Ganine, V., Legrand, M., Michalska, H., Pierre, C.: A sparse preconditioned iterative method for vibration analysis of geometrically mistuned bladed disks. Computers & Structures 87(5-6), 342–354 (2009)Hara, A.K., Paden, R.G., Silva, A.C., Kujak, J.L., Lawder, H.J., Pavlicek, W.: Iterative reconstruction technique for reducing body radiation dose at CT: Feasibility study. American Journal of Roentgenology 193, 764–771 (2009)Heroux, M.A., Bartlett, R.A., Howle, V.E., Hoekstra, R.J., Hu, J.J., Kolda, T.G., Lehoucq, R.B., Long, K.R., Pawlowski, R.P., Phipps, E.T., Salinger, A.G., Thornquist, H.K., Tuminaro, R.S., Willenbring, J.M., Williams, A., Stanley, K.S.: An overview of the Trilinos project. ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 31(3), 397–423 (2005)Im, E.J., Yelick, K., Vuduc, R.: Sparsity: Optimization framework for sparse matrix kernels. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 18(1), 135–158 (2004)Jones, E., Oliphant, T., Peterson, P., et al.: SciPy: Open source scientific tools for Python (2001), http://www.scipy.org/Kaveh, A., Rahami, H.: Block circulant matrices and applications in free vibration analysis of cyclically repetitive structures. Acta Mechanica 217(1-2), 51–62 (2011)Kourtis, K., Goumas, G., Koziris, N.: Optimizing sparse matrix-vector multiplication using index and value compression. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Computing Frontiers, CF 2008, pp. 87–96. ACM, New York (2008)Krotkiewski, M., Dabrowski, M.: Parallel symmetric sparse matrix–vector product on scalar multi-core CPUs. Parallel Computing 36(4), 181–198 (2010)Lee, B., Vuduc, R., Demmel, J., Yelick, K.: Performance models for evaluation and automatic tuning of symmetric sparse matrix-vector multiply. In: International Conference on Parallel Processing, ICPP 2004, vol. 1, pp. 169–176 (2004)Leroux, J.D., Selivanov, V., Fontaine, R., Lecomte, R.: Accelerated iterative image reconstruction methods based on block-circulant system matrix derived from a cylindrical image representation. In: Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, NSS 2007, vol. 4, pp. 2764–2771. IEEE (2007)NVIDIA: CUSPARSE library (2014), https://developer.nvidia.com/cusparsePan, X., Sidky, E.Y., Vannier, M.: Why do commercial CT scanners still employ traditional, filtered back-projection for image reconstruction? Inverse Problems 25, 123009 (2008)Rodríguez-Alvarez, M.J., Soriano, A., Iborra, A., Sánchez, F., González, A.J., Conde, P., Hernández, L., Moliner, L., Orero, A., Vidal, L.F., Benlloch, J.M.: Expectation maximization (EM) algorithms using polar symmetries for computed tomography CT image reconstruction. Computers in Biology and Medicine 43(8), 1053–1061 (2013)Sheep, L., Vardi, Y.: Maximum likelihood reconstruction for emmision tomography. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 1, 113–122 (1982)Sidky, E.Y., Pan, X.: Image reconstruction in circular cone-beam computed tomography by constrained, total-variation minimization. Physics in Medicine and Biology 53, 4777–4807 (2008)Soriano, A., Rodríguez-Alvarez, M.J., Iborra, A., Sánchez, F., Carles, M., Conde, P., González, A.J., Hernández, L., Moliner, L., Orero, A., Vidal, L.F., Benlloch, J.M.: EM tomographic image reconstruction using polar voxels. Journal of Instrumentation 8, C01004 (2013)Thibaudeau, C., Leroux, J.D., Pratte, J.F., Fontaine, R., Lecomte, R.: Cylindrical and spherical ray-tracing for ct iterative reconstruction. In: 2011 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference (NSS/MIC), pp. 4378–4381 (2011)Vuduc, R., Demmel, J.W., Yelick, K.A.: OSKI: A library of automatically tuned sparse matrix kernels. Journal of Physics: Conference Series 16(1), 521 (2005)Vuduc, R.W., Moon, H.-J.: Fast sparse matrix-vector multiplication by exploiting variable block structure. In: Yang, L.T., Rana, O.F., Di Martino, B., Dongarra, J. (eds.) HPCC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3726, pp. 807–816. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Williams, S., Oliker, L., Vuduc, R., Shalf, J., Yelick, K., Demmel, J.: Optimization of sparse matrix-vector multiplication on emerging multicore platforms. Parallel Computing 35(3), 178–194 (2009

SNPs for Parentage Testing and Traceability in Globally Diverse Breeds of Sheep

DNA-based parentage determination accelerates genetic improvement in sheep by increasing pedigree accuracy. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers can be used for determining parentage and to provide unique molecular identifiers for tracing sheep products to their source. However, the utility of a particular ‘‘parentage SNP’’ varies by breed depending on its minor allele frequency (MAF) and its sequence context. Our aims were to identify parentage SNPs with exceptional qualities for use in globally diverse breeds and to develop a subset for use in North American sheep. Starting with genotypes from 2,915 sheep and 74 breed groups provided by the International Sheep Genomics Consortium (ISGC), we analyzed 47,693 autosomal SNPs by multiple criteria and selected 163 with desirable properties for parentage testing. On average, each of the 163 SNPs was highly informative (MAF ≥ 0.3) in 48±5 breed groups. Nearby polymorphisms that could otherwise confound genetic testing were identified by whole genome and Sanger sequencing of 166 sheep from 54 breed groups. A genetic test with 109 of the 163 parentage SNPs was developed for matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization– time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The scoring rates and accuracies for these 109 SNPs were greater than 99% in a panel of North American sheep. In a blinded set of 96 families (sire, dam, and non-identical twin lambs), each parent of every lamb was identified without using the other parent’s genotype. In 74 ISGC breed groups, the median estimates for probability of a coincidental match between two animals (PI), and the fraction of potential adults excluded from parentage (PE) were 1.1×10(−39) and 0.999987, respectively, for the 109 SNPs combined. The availability of a well-characterized set of 163 parentage SNPs facilitates the development of high-throughput genetic technologies for implementing accurate and economical parentage testing and traceability in many of the world’s sheep breeds