Using local experts as benchmarks for household local ecological knowledge: scoring in South African savannas

It is well recognised that local ecological knowledge is an important facet of natural resource management in rural regions of the developing world. However, techniques to assess levels and to integrate it into formal or informal management approaches require further development. In particular, quantitative tools are missing, which would allow more robust analysis of the factors that positively or negatively affect local ecological knowledge and vice versa. This paper reports on a quick assessment approach that provides a quantitative score of generalist local ecological knowledge at the household level. It does so by comparing responses to the knowledge of local people identified as experts within the community. In this way it is both locally constructed and contextualized, and thereby avoids pitfalls of trying to score local ecological knowledge relative to conventional scientific knowledge which frequently cannot account for local constructs. The approach is applied at eight villages throughout the savanna biome in South Africa

Level-Based Analysis of the Population-Based Incremental Learning Algorithm

The Population-Based Incremental Learning (PBIL) algorithm uses a convex combination of the current model and the empirical model to construct the next model, which is then sampled to generate offspring. The Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA) is a special case of the PBIL, where the current model is ignored. Dang and Lehre (GECCO 2015) showed that UMDA can optimise LeadingOnes efficiently. The question still remained open if the PBIL performs equally well. Here, by applying the level-based theorem in addition to Dvoretzky--Kiefer--Wolfowitz inequality, we show that the PBIL optimises function LeadingOnes in expected time $\mathcal{O}(n\lambda \log \lambda + n^2)$ for a population size $\lambda = \Omega(\log n)$, which matches the bound of the UMDA. Finally, we show that the result carries over to BinVal, giving the fist runtime result for the PBIL on the BinVal problem.Comment: To appea

Advances in startercultures and cultured foods

With 2005 retail sales close to $4.8 million, cultured dairy products are driving the growth of dairy foods consumption. Starter cultures are of great industrial significance in that they play a vital role in the manufacturing, flavor, and texture development of fermented dairy foods. Furthermore, additional interest in starter bacteria has been generated because of the data accumulating on the potential health benefits of these organisms. Today, starter cultures for fermented foods are developed mainly by design rather than by the traditional screening methods and trial and error. Advances in genetics and molecular biology have provided opportunities for genomic studies of these economically significant organisms and engineering of cultures that focuses on rational improvement of the industrially useful strain. Furthermore, much research has been published on the health benefits associated with ingesting cultured dairy foods and probiotics, particularly their role in modulating immune function. The aim of this review is to describe some of the major scientific advances made in starter and non-starter lactic acid bacteria during the past 10 yr, including genomic studies on dairy starter cultures, engineering of culture attributes, advances in phage control, developments in methods to enumerate lactic acid bacteria and probiotics in dairy foods, and the potential role of cultured dairy foods in modulation of immune function

Dilepton and Photon Emission Rates from a Hadronic Gas

We analyze the dilepton and photon emission rates from a hadronic gas using chiral reduction formulas and a virial expansion. The emission rates are reduced to pertinent vacuum correlation functions, most of which can be assessed from experiment. Our results indicate that in the low mass region, the dilepton and photon rates are enhanced compared to most of the calculations using chiral Lagrangians. The enhancement is further increased through a finite pion chemical potential. An estimate of the emission rates is also made using Haag's expansion for the electromagnetic current. The relevance of these results to dilepton and photon emission rates in heavy-ion collisions is discussed.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX using revTeX, 6 figures imbedded in text. Figures slightly changed, text left unchange

Bioinformatics tools in predictive ecology: Applications to fisheries

This article is made available throught the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copygith @ 2012 Tucker et al.There has been a huge effort in the advancement of analytical techniques for molecular biological data over the past decade. This has led to many novel algorithms that are specialized to deal with data associated with biological phenomena, such as gene expression and protein interactions. In contrast, ecological data analysis has remained focused to some degree on off-the-shelf statistical techniques though this is starting to change with the adoption of state-of-the-art methods, where few assumptions can be made about the data and a more explorative approach is required, for example, through the use of Bayesian networks. In this paper, some novel bioinformatics tools for microarray data are discussed along with their ‘crossover potential’ with an application to fisheries data. In particular, a focus is made on the development of models that identify functionally equivalent species in different fish communities with the aim of predicting functional collapse

Dilepton and Photon Emission Rates from a Hadronic Gas III

We extend our early analyses of the dilepton and photon emission rates from a hadronic gas to account for strange mesons using a density expansion. The emission rates are reduced to vacuum correlation functions using three-flavor chiral reduction formulas, and the latters are assessed in terms of empirical data. Using a fire-ball, we compare our results to the low and intermediate mass dilepton data available from CERN. Our results suggest that a baryon free hadronic gas does not account for the excess of low mass dielectrons observed at CERES but do well in accounting for the intermediate dimuons at HELIOS. The same observations apply to the recent low and high $p_t$ dielectron rates from CERES.Comment: 12 pages LaTeX, 11 eps figure

Parametric amplification with a friction in heavy ion collisions

We study the effects of the expansion of the system and the friction on the parametric amplification of mesonic fields in high energy heavy ion collisions within the linear $\sigma$ model . The equation of motion which is similar to Mathieu equation is derived to describe the time development of classical fields in the last stage of a heavy ion collision after the freezeout time. The enhanced mode is extracted analytically by comparison with Mathieu equation and the equation of motion is solved numerically to examine whether soft modes will be enhanced or not. It is found that the strong peak appears around 267 MeV in the pion transverse momentum distribution in cases with weak friction and high maximum temperature. This enhancement can be extracted by taking the ratio between different modes in the pion transverse momentum distribution.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures LaTeX: appendix adde

A 60 yr record of atmospheric carbon monoxide reconstructed from Greenland firn air

We present the first reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) high latitude atmospheric carbon monoxide (CO) mole fraction from Greenland firn air. Firn air samples were collected at three deep ice core sites in Greenland (NGRIP in 2001, Summit in 2006 and NEEM in 2008). CO records from the three sites agree well with each other as well as with recent atmospheric measurements, indicating that CO is well preserved in the firn at these sites. CO atmospheric history was reconstructed back to the year 1950 from the measurements using a combination of two forward models of gas transport in firn and an inverse model. The reconstructed history suggests that Arctic CO in 1950 was 140–150 nmol mol-1, which is higher than today's values. CO mole fractions rose by 10–15 nmol mol-1 from 1950 to the 1970s and peaked in the 1970s or early 1980s, followed by a ˜ 30 nmol mol-1 decline to today's levels. We compare the CO history with the atmospheric histories of methane, light hydrocarbons, molecular hydrogen, CO stable isotopes and hydroxyl radicals (OH), as well as with published CO emission inventories and results of a historical run from a chemistry-transport model. We find that the reconstructed Greenland CO history cannot be reconciled with available emission inventories unless unrealistically large changes in OH are assumed. We argue that the available CO emission inventories strongly underestimate historical NH emissions, and fail to capture the emission decline starting in the late 1970s, which was most likely due to reduced emissions from road transportation in North America and Europe

RoboTAP: Target priorities for robotic microlensing observations

Context. The ability to automatically select scientifically-important transient events from an alert stream of many such events, and to conduct follow-up observations in response, will become increasingly important in astronomy. With wide-angle time domain surveys pushing to fainter limiting magnitudes, the capability to follow-up on transient alerts far exceeds our follow-up telescope resources, and effective target prioritization becomes essential. The RoboNet-II microlensing program is a pathfinder project, which has developed an automated target selection process (RoboTAP) for gravitational microlensing events, which are observed in real time using the Las Cumbres Observatory telescope network. Aims. Follow-up telescopes typically have a much smaller field of view compared to surveys, therefore the most promising microlensing events must be automatically selected at any given time from an annual sample exceeding 2000 events. The main challenge is to select between events with a high planet detection sensitivity, with the aim of detecting many planets and characterizing planetary anomalies. Methods. Our target selection algorithm is a hybrid system based on estimates of the planet detection zones around a microlens. It follows automatic anomaly alerts and respects the expected survey coverage of specific events. Results. We introduce the RoboTAP algorithm, whose purpose is to select and prioritize microlensing events with high sensitivity to planetary companions. In this work, we determine the planet sensitivity of the RoboNet follow-up program and provide a working example of how a broker can be designed for a real-life transient science program conducting follow-up observations in response to alerts; we explore the issues that will confront similar programs being developed for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and other time domain surveys