Robust study design is as important on the social as it is on the ecological side of applied ecological research

1. The effective management of natural systems often requires resource users to change their behaviour. This has led to many applied ecologists using research tools developed by social scientists. This comes with challenges as ecologists often lack relevant disciplinary training. 2. Using an example from the current issue of Journal of Applied Ecology that investigated how conservation interventions influenced conservation outcomes, we discuss the challenges of conducting interdisciplinary science. We illustrate our points using examples from research investigating the role of law enforcement and outreach activities in limiting illegal poaching and the application of the theory of planned behaviour to conservation. 3. Synthesis and applications. Interdisciplinary research requires equal rigour to be applied to ecological and social aspects. Researchers with a natural science background need to access expertise and training in the principles of social science research design and methodology, in order to permit a more balanced interdisciplinary understanding of social–ecological system

Adaptive robotic tutors for scaffolding self-regulated learning

This thesis explores how to utilise social robotic tutors to tackle the problem of providing children with enough personalised scaffolding to develop Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills. SRL is an important 21st century skill and correlates with measures of academic performance. The dynamics of social interactions when human tutors are scaffolding SRL are modelled, a computational model for how these strategies can be personalised to the learner is developed, and a framework for long-term SRL guidance from an autonomous social robotic tutor is created. To support the scaffolding of SRL skills the robot uses an Open Learner Model (OLM) visualisation to highlight the developing skills or gaps in learners' knowledge. An OLM shows the learner's competency or skill level on a screen to help the learner reflect on their performance. The robot also supports the development of meta-cognitive planning or forethought by summarising the OLM content and giving feedback on learners' SRL skills. Both short and longer-term studies are presented, which show the benefits of fully autonomous adaptive robotic tutors for scaffolding SRL skills. These benefits include the learners reflecting more on their developing competencies and skills, greater adoption SRL processes, and increased learning gain

Attention Is All You Need

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Consistency Conditions for an AdS/MERA Correspondence

The Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network that provides an efficient way of variationally estimating the ground state of a critical quantum system. The network geometry resembles a discretization of spatial slices of an AdS spacetime and "geodesics" in the MERA reproduce the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for the entanglement entropy of a boundary region in terms of bulk properties. It has therefore been suggested that there could be an AdS/MERA correspondence, relating states in the Hilbert space of the boundary quantum system to ones defined on the bulk lattice. Here we investigate this proposal and derive necessary conditions for it to apply, using geometric features and entropy inequalities that we expect to hold in the bulk. We show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the MERA lattice can only describe physics on length scales larger than the AdS radius. Further, using the covariant entropy bound in the bulk, we show that there are no conventional MERA parameters that completely reproduce bulk physics even on super-AdS scales. We suggest modifications or generalizations of this kind of tensor network that may be able to provide a more robust correspondence.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figure

Drought effects on soil enzyme activity

Soil extracellular enzyme activity (EEA) is a strong predictor for soil health. EEA cycle nutrients within terrestrial systems, processing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous, while also mineralizing and stabilizing gas. These processes are susceptible to disruption from global change drivers. How EEA responds to global change drivers remains poorly understood, however. My objectives were to examine how EEA is affected by drought treatment. Here I conduct a global meta-analysis to observe the EEA of 7 enzymes in response to drought using 384 paired observations from 37 studies. These studies are globally distributed and encompass multiple ecosystems. I then calculated natural log response ratios of EEA values under drought treatment to the control. I tested whether the natural log response ratios differed from zero, and whether they were influenced drought intensity, drought duration, soil depth and aridity. Within this analysis, I evaluated the response of enzymes by distinguishing class, nutrient cycle, and individual identity. This allowed for the comparison between hydrolytic and oxidative functioning while also examining how specific nutrient cycles were impacted. On average across all studies, EEA did not show a significant response to drought treatments. When analyzed by individual groups, the responses of neither hydrolytic nor oxidative enzymes to drought were statistically significant on average. Similarly, there was no significant responses when EEA were classified by element cycles, i.e., carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous. Among all individual enzymes studied, only alkaline phosphomonoesterase displayed the significant response to drought treatment, showing reduced average alkaline phosphomonoesterase activity under drought than in the control. Further, contrary to our hypothesis, drought intensity and drought duration on average did not significantly influence EEA response to drought. However, the responses of EEA were dependent on soil depth and aridity EEA in the topsoil’s (<10 cm) experienced decreases in activity, whereas those in subsoil (>10 cm in depth) experienced significant increases. Across a global gradient of aridity index (0.092 to 2.28), the responses of EEAs to drought treatments decreased as climatic humidity increased, showing null or even positive responses in arid climates but negative responses in humid climates. My finding showed the evidence that responses of EEA to drought are EEA type-, soil depth- and aridity-dependent responses. This study indicates a stimulation of enzyme activity in deeper soil layers under drought conditions. Furthermore, this increase in EEA response to drought is exacerbated by aridity, wherein more arid regions showed higher susceptibility to increases in EEA under drought. Therefore, arid regions can be expected to be most adversely affected by drought, through the potential vulnerability of soil organic matter loss due to an increase in EEA

Worlds turned back to front: the politics of the mirror universe in Doctor Who and Star Trek

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Ingenta in The Journal of Popular Television on 01/06/2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv.6.2.257_1 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.It is a curious parallel that unquestionably the most successful science fiction television series to emerge from the UK and the US both began in the 1960s, endured lengthy hiatuses, oscillated between mainstream and cult appreciation, and both currently revel in their cross-media commercial appeal. Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-present) and Star Trek (1966-9), through their lengthy broadcast histories, might be used to chart any number of cultural shifts in their host communities. Far from being abstruse and introspective creations of geeky fandoms, both have been central to the popular culture of their respective societies – Matt Hills noted that ‘for much of its cultural life Doctor Who has actually occupied the mainstream of British television programming’ (Hills 2010: 98); John Tulloch’s and Henry Jenkins’ examination of science fiction audiences make it clear that in creating Star Trek Gene Roddenberry evinced a ‘desire to reach a mass viewership and a desire to address the burning social issues of the day’ (Jenkins and Tulloch 1995: 7). Popular television in general has always been a prime site for the exploration of pressing social concerns (Williams 1974: 58), and science fiction is also often politically engaged: Hassler and Wilcox point out that ‘[p]olitical science often addresses many of the same questions as those raised in science fiction…the role of the state…the nature of the just society’ (Hassler and Wilcox 1997: 1). Doctor Who and Star Trek are both notable for openly or covertly addressing the distinctive social and political problems faced by their respective societies. Star Trek returned to the question of the Vietnam War’s legitimacy multiple times (Franklin 2000: 131-50), ‘and other episodes were commentaries on race relations, feminism, and the hippies of the 1960s’ (Reagin 2013: 2). Under Russell T. Davies’ revival Doctor Who continually referenced the ‘war on terror’ (Charles 2008), but the ‘classic’ serial also engaged with contemporary British politics: the Sylvester McCoy series were openly anti-Thatcherite (O’Day 2010: 271-8), while in the 1970s under producer Barry Letts many Doctor Who serials dealt with environmental issues and their politics (Orthia 2011: 26-30). The disparate political engagements present in Doctor Who are generally anti-authoritarian, and the Doctor ‘has consistently … [the] liberal-populist role in criticising “sectionalist” forces of “Left” and “Right”, and in rebuking the “official” and the powerful’ (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983: 52). This pragmatic politics, however, was not available to Star Trek, which ‘was created as a style of social commentary, intent on criticising America in the late 1960s during a period of extreme social and political turmoil’, and therefore wrestling with the contradictions between the philosophical absolutes of American exceptionalism and ‘manifest destiny’ (Geraghty 2007: 72)