Molecular mechanisms regulating perivascular adipose tissue - potential pharmacological targets?

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Intermediate coupling between aboveground and belowground biomass maximises the persistence of grasslands

Aboveground and belowground biomass compartments of vegetation fulfil different functions and they are coupled by complex interactions. These compartments exchange water, carbon and nutrients and the belowground biomass compartment has the capacity to buffer vegetation dynamics when aboveground biomass is removed by disturbances such as herbivory or fire. However, despite their importance, root-shoot interactions are often ignored in more heuristic vegetation models. Here, we present a simple two-compartment grassland model that couples aboveground and belowground biomass. In this model, the growth of belowground biomass is influenced by aboveground biomass and the growth of aboveground biomass is influenced by belowground biomass. We used the model to explore how the dynamics of a grassland ecosystem are influenced by fire and grazing. We show that the grassland system is most persistent at intermediate levels of aboveground-belowground coupling. In this situation, the system can sustain more extreme fire or grazing regimes than in the case of strong coupling. In contrast, the productivity of the system is maximised at high levels of coupling. Our analysis suggests that the yield of a grassland ecosystem is maximised when coupling is strong, however, the intensity of disturbance that can be sustained increases dramatically when coupling is intermediate. Hence, the model predicts that intermediate coupling should be selected for as it maximises the chances of persistence in disturbance driven ecosystems

Tax law improvement in Australia and the UK: the need for a strategy for simplification

In both Australia and the UK, programmes are under way to simplify tax legislation by rewriting it. This paper demonstrates that tax simplification is a complicated concept and concludes that sustainable improvement is unlikely to be achieved if reform is limited only to linguistic changes. Tax law is complicated because there are powerful pressures that tend to increase the complexity of modern tax systems and these should also be considered in any simplification programme. In addition, tax simplification may be promoted by the greater use of purposive legislation — that is, legislation drafted in terms of general principles rather than much more comprehensive legislation designed to deal with every likely possibility. The paper examines the progress of the Australian Tax Law Improvement Project and argues that what is needed is a strategy for tax simplification that is incorporated into the process of generating tax policy itself.

Improving Runtime Overheads for detectEr

We design monitor optimisations for detectEr, a runtime-verification tool synthesising systems of concurrent monitors from correctness properties for Erlang programs. We implement these optimisations as part of the existing tool and show that they yield considerably lower runtime overheads when compared to the unoptimised monitor synthesis.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437

An evaluation of referral tickets for acute psychiatric admissions

Background Tickets of referral assist in clerking and the enforcement of the Mental Health Act. Initial reviewers of the patient who may be more aware of his/her background may provide this information when transferring a patient to Mount Carmel Hospital, Malta’s psychiatric hospital. Objectives The aims of this study were to assess whether key information on referral tickets was lacking as well as to justify the importance of such information when referring a new case and raise awareness on appropriate referral. Methods Permission to review the tickets of referral for new admissions from the community to Mount Carmel Hospital during the month of June 2015 was obtained from the Chairman of Psychiatry. The files of new admissions were assessed to see if the following were present: official referral ticket; drug history; next of kin details; handover to staff at Mount Carmel Hospital. The place of initial assessment was also noted. All data was anonymised and data input was done using a prepared proforma. Patients referred from the civil prison and by the caring consultant’s firm were not included. Results Seventy admissions were assessed. Eighty-nine per cent (n=62) of these admissions included an official ticket of referral. Most referrals came from health centres: 31% (n=22). Seventy-four per cent (n=51) had a drug history present. Seventy-six per cent (n=53) were lacking next of kin details. Forty per cent (n=28) of the cases had documentation of a handover to a senior on call. Conclusions Poor quality referral tickets with missing information are often present which makes it difficult for the on-call staff at Mount Carmel Hospital to clerk the patient and come up with a provisional treatment plan.peer-reviewe

Piano Genie

We present Piano Genie, an intelligent controller which allows non-musicians to improvise on the piano. With Piano Genie, a user performs on a simple interface with eight buttons, and their performance is decoded into the space of plausible piano music in real time. To learn a suitable mapping procedure for this problem, we train recurrent neural network autoencoders with discrete bottlenecks: an encoder learns an appropriate sequence of buttons corresponding to a piano piece, and a decoder learns to map this sequence back to the original piece. During performance, we substitute a user's input for the encoder output, and play the decoder's prediction each time the user presses a button. To improve the intuitiveness of Piano Genie's performance behavior, we impose musically meaningful constraints over the encoder's outputs.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ACM IUI 201