Lateral fricatives and lateral emphatics in southern Saudi Arabia and Mehri

Arabic was traditionally described as lughat al-Ρād ‘the language of Ρād’ due to the perceived unusualness of the sound. From Sībawayhi’s description, early Arabic Ρād was clearly a lateral or lateralized emphatic. Lateral fricatives are assumed to have formed part of the phoneme inventory of Proto-Semitic, and are attested in Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) today. In Arabic, a lateral realization of Ρād continues to be attested in some recitations of the QurΜān. For Arabic, the lateral Ρād described by Sībawayhi was believed to be confined to dialects spoken in ДaΡramawt. Recent fieldwork by Asiri and al-Azraqi, however, has identified lateral and lateralized emphatics in dialects of southern ΚAsīr and the Saudi Tihāmah. These sounds differ across the varieties, both in their phonation (voicing) and manner of articulation — sonorants and voiced and voiceless fricatives — in their degree of laterality, and in their phonological behaviour: the lateralized Ρād in the southern Yemeni dialect of GhaylΉabbān, for example, has a non-lateralized allophone in the environment of /r/ or /l/. Recent phonetic work conducted by Watson on the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, shows a similar range of cross-dialect variety in the realization of the lateral(ized) emphatic. In this paper, we discuss different reflexes of lateral(ized) emphatics in four dialects of the Saudi Tihāmah; we show that some of these dialects contrast cognates of *Ρ and *·; and we show that lateral emphatics attested in dialects of the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, spoken in areas considerably to the south of the Saudi Tihāmah, show a similar degree of variation to that of the Arabic dialects of the Saudi Tihāmah

Fractal analysis of CE CT lung tumours images

AIM The fractal dimension (FD) of a structure provides a measure of its complexity. This pilot study aims to determine FD values for lung cancers visualised on Computed Tomography (CT) and to assess the potential for tumour FD measurements to provide an index of tumour aggression. METHOD Pre-and post-contrast CT images of the thorax acquired from 15 patients with lung cancers of greater than 10mm were transformed to fractal dimension images using a box-counting algorithm at various scales. A region of interest (ROI) was determined covering tumour locations, which were more apparent on FD images as compared to images before processing. The average tumour FD (FDavg) was computed and compared with the intensity average before FD processing. FD values were correlated with 2 markers of tumour aggression: tumour stage and tumour uptake of fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) as determined by Positron Emission Tomography. RESULTS For pre-contrast images, the tumour FDavg correlated with tumour stage (r = 0.537, p = 0.0387) and FDG uptake (r= 0.64, p< 0.001). FDavg decreased following contrast enhancement for most tumours. CONCLUSION Fractal analysis of CT images of lung tumours could potentially provide additional information about likely tumour aggression and so impact on clinical management decisions and choice of treatment

Texture analysis of aggressive and nonaggressive lung tumor CE CT images

This paper presents the potential for fractal analysis of time sequence contrast-enhanced (CE) computed tomography (CT) images to differentiate between aggressive and nonaggressive malignant lung tumors (i.e., high and low metabolic tumors). The aim is to enhance CT tumor staging prediction accuracy through identifying malignant aggressiveness of lung tumors. As branching of blood vessels can be considered a fractal process, the research examines vascularized tumor regions that exhibit strong fractal characteristics. The analysis is performed after injecting 15 patients with a contrast agent and transforming at least 11 time sequence CE CT images from each patient to the fractal dimension and determining corresponding lacunarity. The fractal texture features were averaged over the tumor region and quantitative classification showed up to 83.3% accuracy in distinction between advanced (aggressive) and early-stage (nonaggressive) malignant tumors. Also, it showed strong correlation with corresponding lung tumor stage and standardized tumor uptake value of fluoro deoxyglucose as determined by positron emission tomography. These results indicate that fractal analysis of time sequence CE CT images of malignant lung tumors could provide additional information about likely tumor aggression that could potentially impact on clinical management decisions in choosing the appropriate treatment procedure

Behavioral thermoregulation in the American lobster Homarus americanus

It is generally accepted that water temperature has a strong influence on the behavior of the American lobster Homarus americanus. However, there is surprisingly little behavioral evidence to support this view. To haracterize the behavioral responses of lobsters to thermal gradients, three different experiments were conducted. In the first, 40 lobsters acclimated to summer water temperatures (summer-acclimated, 15.5±0.2 °C, mean ±S.E.M.) were placed individually in an experimental shelter, and the temperature in the shelter was gradually raised until the lobster moved out. Lobsters avoided water warmer than 23.5±0.4 °C, which was an increase of 8.0±0.4 °C from ambient summer temperatures. When this experiment was repeated with lobsters acclimated to winter temperatures (winter-acclimated, 4.3±0.1 °C), the lobsters (N=30) did not find temperature increases of the same magnitude (∆T=8.0±0.4 °C) aversive. The second experiment was designed to allow individual summer-acclimated lobsters (N=22) to select one of five shelters, ranging in temperature from 8.5 to 25.5 °C. After 24 h, 68 % of the lobsters occupied the 12.5 °C shelter, which was slightly above the ambient temperature (approximately 11 °C). In a similar experiment, winter-acclimated lobsters (N=30) were given a choice between two shelters, one at ambient temperature (4.6±0.2 °C) and one at a higher temperature (9.7±0.3 °C). Winter-acclimated lobsters showed a strong preference (90 %) for the heated shelter. In the final experiment, summer-acclimated lobsters (N=9) were allowed to move freely in a tank having a thermal gradient of approximately 10 °C from one end to the other. Lobsters preferred a thermal niche of 16.5±0.4 °C and avoided water that was warmer than 19 °C or colder than 13 °C. When standardized for acclimation temperature, lobsters preferred water 1.2±0.4 °C above their previous ambient temperature. Collectively, the results of these studies indicate that lobsters are capable of sensing water temperature and use this information to thermoregulate behaviorally. The implications of these findings for lobster behavior and distribution in their natural habitat are discussed

A Stratal OT Account of Word Stress in the Mehri of Bit Thuwar

In this paper, we provide a synchronic account of word stress in the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, as spoken by members of the Bit Thuwar tribe. The data is taken from the first author’s own fieldwork working in Central Dhofar with members of the Bit Thuwar sub-tribes–Bit Iqhōr in Rabkut and parts of the mountains that receive the monsoon rains, and Bit Āmawsh in Dhahbun–with reference, where appropriate, to Johnstone (1987). This paper is a significant expansion and a partial revision of the short discussion on word stress in Watson (2012: 34–35). We begin with a brief background to Mehri within Modern South Arabian. We then discuss word stress patterns in Mehri, following Hayes’ (1995) metrical stress theory; here we show that Mehri is a head-first or trochaic language, namely that in (Cv)CvCv(C) forms, stress is placed on the left-most syllable. We show that in contrast to Arabic trochaic dialects, the domain of stress is the stem and the stem with stem-level suffixes rather than the entire prosodic word. The implications for this is that Mehri exhibits an opacity with regard to stress as seen in Arabic dialects in which three consonant clusters receive vowel epenthesis after the left-most consonant, as in: šuft-ha > šufitha ‘she said it f.’. (These are termed vC-dialects in Kiparsky 2003, so called due to the position of the epenthetic vowel in relation to the medial consonant in a sequence of three). By opacity, we mean that word stress is not assigned as would be predicted by the stress algorithm. In contrast to Arabic vC-dialects, however, opacity is due not to the interaction of epenthesis and syncope (cf. Kiparsky 2003), but rather to the lack of visibility of word-level suffixes to stress. In line with van Oostendorp’s (2002) analysis of unstressable suffixes in Dutch, we argue that word-level suffixes are invisible to stress because they are not incorporated into the prosodic word, but rather adjoined to it. The adoption of Kiparsky’s Stratal Optimality Theory approach enables us to capture Mehri stress assignment succinctly: stress is assigned at the stem-level according to weight and position, and suffixation of word-level suffixes can no longer affect stress assignment due to the high ranking of STRESSIDENT (Collie 2007), which requires stress to remain on the stressed syllable of the stem, and the low ranking of *ADJOIN, which mitigates against the adjunction of affixes to the prosodic word. We also show that Mehri exhibits limited lexical stress, and suggest that attempts to account for stress in these cases in terms of a quantity model on the part of many researchers, including the main author of the current paper, has led to the incorrect transcription and interpretation of these elements

Functional correlates of positional and gender-specific renal asymmetry in drosophila

Accordingly, the physical asymmetry of the tubules in the body cavity is directly adaptive. Now that the detailed machinery underlying internal asymmetry is starting to be delineated, our work invites the investigation, not just of tissues in isolation, but in the context of their unique physical locations and milieux