Secondary neolithic in Great Britain

This thesis re-examines the material included by Piggott in his Secondary Neolithic cultures. A detailed study has been made of the pottery styles known as Peterborough and Rinyo Clacton and a catalogue of this pottery accompanies the textThe Peterborough pottery style, previously only studied in depth for south-eastern England, is found to extend over the greater part of England, and the chronological series of Ebbsfleet, Mortlake and Fengate styles found to be applicable throughout. A fourth style, Peterborough Northern, is recognised in the north of England and southern and central Scotland. This is seen to develop as a result of southern Peterborough influence upon localised Neolithic pottery forms. An examination of the sites upon which Peterborough pottery is found and the artifacts with which it is associated supports the thesis that the Peterborough complex is a continuation of the earlier Neolithic culture of Great Britain.Rinyo Clacton pottery is divided into four styles: Skara Brae, Clacton, Woodhenge and Woodlands. The associated artifacts include certain types not known in earlier Neolithic contexts and at least one new type of site, henge monuments. This would indicate that Rinyo Clacton pottery represents the development of a new culture. The decorative techniques and motifs of the pottery and certain of the artifacts suggest that the origins of this culture lie in the strong Irish influence present in western and northern Scotland in the second half of the third millennium. The continued use of earlier Neolithic artifacts and the Neolithic Round Barrow emphasises the strong native tradition continuing within the Rinyo Clacton culture

Simultaneous transmission and reception on all elements of an array: binary code excitation

Pulse-echo arrays are used in radar, sonar, seismic, medical and non-destructive evaluation. There is a trend to produce arrays with an ever-increasing number of elements. This trend presents two major challenges: (i) often the size of the elements is reduced resulting in a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and (ii) the time required to record all of the signals that correspond to every transmit–receive path increases. Coded sequences with good autocorrelation properties can increase the SNR while orthogonal sets can be used to simultaneously acquire all of the signals that correspond to every transmit–receive path. However, a central problem of conventional coded sequences is that they cannot achieve good autocorrelation and orthogonality properties simultaneously due to their length being limited by the location of the closest reflectors. In this paper, a solution to this problem is presented by using coded sequences that have receive intervals. The proposed approach can be more than one order of magnitude faster than conventional methods. In addition, binary excitation and quantization can be employed, which reduces the data throughput by roughly an order of magnitude and allows for higher sampling rates. While this concept is generally applicable to any field, a 16-element system was built to experimentally demonstrate this principle for the first time using a conventional medical ultrasound probe

The size, concentration, and growth of biodiversity-conservation nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in efforts to conserve biodiversity. Their success in this regard will be determined in part by how effectively individual nonprofits and the sector as a whole are structured. One of the most fundamental questions about an organization’s structure is how large it should be, with the logical counterpart being how concentrated the whole sector should be. We review empirical patterns in the size, concentration, and growth of over 1700 biodiversity-conservation nonprofits registered for tax purposes in the United States within the context of relevant economic theory. Conservation-nonprofit sizes vary by six to seven orders of magnitude and are positively skewed. Larger nonprofits access more revenue streams and hold more of their assets in land and buildings than smaller or midsized nonprofits do. The size of conservation nonprofits varies with the ecological focus of the organization, but the growth rates of nonprofits do not

The Political Economy of Australian Housing Policy : Beyond the Vaunted History of Ideas

Given the growing presence and multidimensional nature of housing problems in Australia, it is important to critically reflect upon the ways in which scholars have analysed the origins of housing problems and the policies designed to tackle them. In mainstream debates, housing is viewed as a technical problem potentially solved through isolated measures such as better construction technology, fewer planning laws or different zoning regulations. This thesis argues that this view overlooks the systemic character of housing problems, and the forces that shape the state’s policy responses. The thesis combines a number of state-theoretical insights with historical and contemporary investigations of housing policy development, and highlights the importance of using theory to improve strategies for housing reform

Resilience: Easy to use but hard to define

First conceptualized in the 1970s, resilience has become a popular term in the ecological literature, used in the title, abstract, or keywords of approximately 1% of papers identified by ISI Web of Science in the field of environmental sciences and ecology in 2011. However, many papers make only passing reference to the term and do not explain what resilience means in the context of their study system, despite there being a number of possible definitions. In an attempt to determine how resilience is being used in ecological studies, we surveyed 234 papers published between 2004 and 2011 that were identified under the topic “resilience” by ISI Web of Science. Of these, 38% used the word resilience fewer than three times (often in the abstract or keyword list), 66% did not define the term, and 71% did not provide a citation to the resilience literature. Studies that defined resilience most often discussed it as pertaining to an entire ecosystem under continuous rather than discrete disturbance. Given the complex nature of this concept, we believe that care should be taken to properly describe what is meant by the term resilience in ecological studies

Formulation and conservation of a pharmaceutical form with leaf extracts from Acacia aroma Gill. ex Hook et Arn

Leaf fluid extracts of Acacia aroma GILL. ex Hook et Arn showed antibacterial activity against antibiotic multi-resistant bacteria isolated from clinical samples, antioxidant and antiinflammatory activities. Toxicological studies carried out on Artemia salina and Allium cepa attested none toxicity potential. The aim of this work was to elaborate a formulation of topical antibacterial hydrogel with Carbopol acrylic acid polymer containing an A. aroma fluid extract in order to compare with a hydrogel containing commercial antibiotic. The optimal extract concentration in this formulation was determined according to the values of minimal inhibitory concentration and minimal bactericidal concentration for Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant (F7) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (F352) . Physical, chemical, rheological and microbiological stability was observed at least during one year. The hydrogel containing Acacia leaves fluid extract shows remarkable antibacterial effect with a broad-spectrum efficacy against Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria at low concentration.Fil: Arias, M. E.. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Bioquímica, Química y Farmacia; ArgentinaFil: Gomez, J. D.. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Bioquímica, Química y Farmacia; ArgentinaFil: Vatuone, M. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Bioquímica, Química y Farmacia; ArgentinaFil: Isla, Maria Ines. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tucumán. Instituto de Química del Noroeste. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Bioquímica, Química y Farmacia. Instituto de Química del Noroeste; Argentin

Aboveground biomass corresponds strongly with drone-derived canopy height but weakly with greenness (NDVI) in a shrub tundra landscape

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IOP Publishing via the DOI in this recordData accessibility: The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5285/61C5097B-6717-4692-A8A4-D32CCA0E61A9)Arctic landscapes are changing rapidly in response to warming, but future predictions are hindered by difficulties in scaling ecological relationships from plots to biomes. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS, hereafter 'drones') are increasingly used to observe Arctic ecosystems over broader extents than can be measured using ground-based approaches and facilitate the interpretation of coarse-grained remotely-sensed datasets. However, more information is needed about how drone-acquired remote sensing observations correspond with ecosystem attributes such as aboveground biomass. Working across a willow shrub-dominated alluvial fan at a focal study site in the Canadian Arctic, we conducted peak season drone surveys with a RGB camera and multispectral multi camera array to derive photogrammetric reconstructions of canopy and normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) maps along with in situ point intercept measurements and biomass harvests from 36, 0.25 m2 plots. We found high correspondence between canopy height measured using in situ point intercept compared to drone-photogrammetry (concordance correlation coefficient = 0.808), although the photogrammetry heights were positively biased by 0.14 m relative to point intercept heights. Canopy height was strongly and linearly related to aboveground biomass, with similar coefficients of determination for point framing (R2 = 0.92) and drone-based methods (R2 = 0.90). NDVI was positively related to aboveground biomass, phytomass and leaf biomass. However, NDVI only explained a small proportion of the variance in biomass (R2 between 0.14 and 0.23 for logged total biomass) and we found moss cover influenced the NDVI-phytomass relationship. Biomass is challenging to infer from drone-derived NDVI, particularly in ecosystems where bryophytes cover a large proportion of the land surface. Our findings suggest caution with broadly attributing change in fine-grained NDVI to biomass differences across biologically and topographically complex tundra landscapes. By comparing structural, spectral and on-the-ground ecological measurements, we can improve understanding of tundra vegetation change as inferred from remote sensing.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)Dartmouth CollegeAarhus University Research FoundationEuropean Union Horizon 202