Anglicisation in the letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar and her family: a sociolinguistic perspective

This study aims to further our understanding of the development of the Scots language by focusing on the family letters of the elite noblewoman, political influencer, patron of the arts and mother of 12, Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar (1576–1644). The multilingual circumstances of Stewart’s life as a French-born Jacobean courtier turned Scottish Covenanter establish her as a fascinating research subject. Stewart’s extant letters preserved in the National Library of Scotland archival collections, along with those sent by her husband John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar and their children, date from the first half of the seventeenth century and were written during the period of anglicisation in Scotland initiated by the Reformation and reinforced by the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Almost entirely overlooked by scholars until now, these remarkable manuscripts present a rare opportunity to explore how different members of the same family responded to the linguistic change. A historical sociolinguistic, pragmatic approach will uncover the conditioning factors that influenced the senders’ language, such as sex, recipient, and sender location. Corpus linguistic techniques track 23 iconic features of Early Modern Scots in a purpose-built corpus compiled from new diplomatic transcriptions of 47 manuscripts. Then a methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative variation analyses compares the senders’ use of linguistic forms. The dissertation concludes that micro-level studies of small numbers of language users can produce the nuanced picture that many scholars now consider necessary to pinpoint the complexity of what happens during linguistic change. The findings reveal a range of levels of anglicisation within a single family’s correspondence, their behaviour serving to augment our understanding of Scotland’s compelling linguistic history

From Mendel’s discovery on pea to today’s plant genetics and breeding

In 2015, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the presentation of the seminal work of Gregor Johann Mendel. While Darwin’s theory of evolution was based on differential survival and differential reproductive success, Mendel’s theory of heredity relies on equality and stability throughout all stages of the life cycle. Darwin’s concepts were continuous variation and “soft” heredity; Mendel espoused discontinuous variation and “hard” heredity. Thus, the combination of Mendelian genetics with Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the process that resulted in the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Although biology, genetics, and genomics have been revolutionized in recent years, modern genetics will forever rely on simple principles founded on pea breeding using seven single gene characters. Purposeful use of mutants to study gene function is one of the essential tools of modern genetics. Today, over 100 plant species genomes have been sequenced. Mapping populations and their use in segregation of molecular markers and marker–trait association to map and isolate genes, were developed on the basis of Mendel's work. Genome-wide or genomic selection is a recent approach for the development of improved breeding lines. The analysis of complex traits has been enhanced by high-throughput phenotyping and developments in statistical and modeling methods for the analysis of phenotypic data. Introgression of novel alleles from landraces and wild relatives widens genetic diversity and improves traits; transgenic methodologies allow for the introduction of novel genes from diverse sources, and gene editing approaches offer possibilities to manipulate gene in a precise manner

Using video acquired from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to measure fracture orientation in an open-PIT mine

This project explored the feasibility of using video images acquired with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to obtain three-dimensional (3D) point clouds using structure from motion (SfM) software. Missions were flown using an Aeryon Scout: a lightweight, vertical take-off and landing quadrotor micro UAV with a miniature video camera. The initial mission captured urban scene images that were used to assess system performance while the main mission focused on rock walls where 3D images were used to successfully measure fracture orientations. Point clouds generated from this combination of technologies were sparse, but in the future, improvements in the resolution of original video images would cascade through the processing and improve the overall results. Such a system could have a multitude of applications in the mining industry, contributing to both safety and financial considerations