Behavioural aspects of foraging in the parasitoid Nemeritis canescens

Imperial Users onl

Potential for Coordinated Facilities Management Along the Northern Front Range

2 pages

Protection of Witnesses and Sensitive Information in U.K. Criminal Prosecutions

This Article examines the film Closed Circuit, as it portrays the legal issues surrounding a British judge’s decision to hold a hearing in camera. As in the United States, holding in camera hearings safeguards the use of witnesses and protects confidential information before it is shared with all parties to a criminal case or the jury. Closed Circuit accurately portrays some aspects of the United Kingdom’s legal standards that govern these hearings including the judicial deference to the Crown’s national security interests, the appointment of cleared special counsel to represent the accused, and the use of pseudonyms to protect witnesses in open court. The film depicts a complicated relationship that arises out of the government’s use of an informant. The informant is the son of an accused criminal who sells materials used in a deadly terrorist attack. The next section will present a description of the United Kingdom’s distinctive procedure regarding in camera hearings. The sections that follow discuss the film and the accuracy of its portrayal of the U.K. legal system

Enter Middle-earth: A Comparison of The Lord of the Rings Online with The Lord of the Rings

The purpose of this study has been to explore how the story in The Lord of the Rings is experienced in the game, The Lord of the Rings Online, compared to the book. The focus has been on the concepts of narrative, interaction, immersion, and themes. I have used my own experience from the game in addition to other academic sources when I have examined how the game differs from the book, and when exploring the themes in the book, I have relied on influential Tolkien scholars. What I have found is that the outcome of the narrative is different in the game due to the players’ interaction. The players are a part of the narrative, and they also create their own narrative while playing. The story is also experienced differently due to the different points of view. Immersion gets a new meaning when the players are 'bodily' immersed in the storyworld through avatars, instead of just mentally immersed. Spatial immersion in the game leads to a better understanding of the scope of the storyworld when reading the book. The maps are no longer used only for strategic purposes, but also have affective value due to emotional spatial immersion since the places they depict have become familiar and filled with memories. Since the themes from the book are mainly integrated into the gameplay of combat and the aesthetics of the landscape, they are approached in a more playful way as opposed to the serious approach that the book has. The book’s message is lost because the point of view is from the players, and therefore they do not get insight into the main characters’ thoughts. However, on some occasions, players are directly involved in the story. Instead of reading about the heroic deeds of the main characters, the players themselves are the heroes, which changes the narrative and makes the players the protagonists in their own adventures

Understanding the relationship between environment, agriculture and health: An interdisciplinary challenge

In an editorial last year, Prof. Kathryn Monk explained the importance to environmental research of an interdisciplinary approach. She has asked me to share with readers some further, personal thoughts on this topic. I am an ecologist by training, but I spent much of my career managing agricultural research programmes in tropical regions. For the last ten years, I have held a position in a school of public health. This varied disciplinary experience has given me the opportunity to explore and understand interactions between environment, agriculture and human health. It is helpful to think of environment, agriculture, and health as points in a triangle, each having specific interactions with an adjacent sector, but also being influenced by more complex, three-way interactions. For environmental scientists, the interactions with agriculture are probably the most familiar. Extensive planting of crops like rice and oil palm has dramatic effects on biological diversity, water systems and their function, and soils. The importance of healthy environments to agriculture is repeatedly demonstrated. Thirty years ago, I had the opportunity to review the Indonesian national programme on integrated pest management in rice. Use of pesticides on rice was, paradoxically, causing severe outbreaks of pests like brown planthopper. The environmental processes behind this were actually quite complex. Soon after flooding, aquatic arthropods colonizing rice paddies provided a food source for generalist predators that moved in and built levels capable of suppressing subsequent pest invasion. Pesticides killed off this general predator community, while the pests, which lay their eggs inside plants, were less affected and their populations exploded in this predator-free environment (Settle et al. 1996).  Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on rice, pioneered in countries like Indonesia, was for many years a leading example of the value of integrating environmental and agricultural research.Environmental scientists will be less familiar, perhaps, with the interactions between agriculture and health, so here is a short introduction. Agricultural systems have two impacts on health, which for historical reasons have been treated as separate disciplines in the health sector. They produce food that contributes to nutrition, which is usually, but not always, a health benefit, and they produce distinct health risks, including diseases associated with food and food production, and toxins associated with agriculture, such as the pesticide just mentioned

Mutual dependency: Young male migrants from the Central African Republic in urban Cameroon

Source at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24888294?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.Abstract. Rural Central and Western Africa is losing its population to cities (Adepoju, 2005). The young men described in this article have left poor economic conditions in the Central African Republic for a better life in Cameroon. They are mostly orphans who left their homes before the age of 15 and, through various paths, found their way to Tongo, a Muslim neighbourhood in the centre of the fastgrowing city Ngaoundéré in northern Cameroon. All those ‘who come’ rely on whatever opportunities they can carve out in the relation between themselves as individuals and the host community. Available work is mostly within petty-service which was the work for slaves in the 19th and most of the 20th century. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a period of ten years, this article asks: What strategies are used by the young men coming to urban Ngaoundéré to gain access to work and to survive? In this specific setting, the quality of the relation between the young men who have come and the Muslim women is of special concern. Accepting slave like working conditions, following certain rules of respectability and a reciprocal logic, with the work providers; some migrants find their surviving strategies. Not accepting or not being able to negotiate such work conditions is work access denied, witch is extremely dramatic for young men with out any social network in the city. The article merges approaches from visual anthropology and ‘the ethnography of the particular’ (Abu-Lughod, 1991), and aims at making a fresh contribution to the study of migration and youths in urban Africa

The type Fox Hills Formation, Cretaceous (Maestrichtian), South Dakota Part 1. Stratigraphy and paleoenvironments

Exposures of the Fox Hills Formation in Dewey, Ziebach and Corson counties, northwest-central South Dakota, include its historical type locality and constitute its type area….https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/peabody_museum_natural_history_bulletin/1026/thumbnail.jp

A case study of route solving for oversized transport : the use of GIS functionalities in transport of transformers, as part of maintaining a reliable power infrastructure

Power supply is a social necessity, and will so continue to be in the near future. Therefore, safe and steady deliverance of power supply is a fundamental duty of the societies and the preparedness of the vulnerability of the infrastructures is highly prioritized. The power supply comprises every component needed for transmission of electrical power from generation to consumption, power transformers are key components of this network, transforming electrical power to customized levels. The aim of this master thesis was to present methods on how to improve the establishment of power transformers. More specifically, the scope of the aim was to improve the timeframe for the exchange of transformers by simplifying and improving the aspect of route planning, and thereby to generate improved transformer preparedness. This was done using Geographical Information Systems, involving the building of a multimodal network dataset and performing route calculations. The location of the study was set to southern Norway and the distance between the connector stations Sylling and Stølen. The analysis was based on information about the sea ways, landfalls, electronic road network, height, road block, weight, speed and distance. A method for effective route planning was developed and the distance Sylling-Stølen was used in a case study, where modeled and actual transport routines were compared. The results show a difference between the actual and the modeled routes, both on duration and path, mainly due to a low focus on bridges and to inaccurate data. The overall difference in time was minor, the modeled route diverging only one hour from the actual, the difference on specific stretches were however greater, either witnessing of potential of faster transport or data which has not been adapted close enough to the actual situation.Strømforsyning er et nødvendig gode for dagens samfunn og vil være det i fremtiden. Å sikre en trygg og stabil leveranse av strøm er en grunnleggende oppgave for samfunnet, beredskapen av den kritiske infrastruktur må derfor være høyt prioritert. Strømforsyningen omfatter alle komponenter som er nødvendige for overføring av elektrisitet fra produsent til forbruker. Transformatorer er sentrale komponenter i strømnettet og har som oppgave å transformere strømmen til et brukertilpasset nivå. Målet for denne masteroppgaven har vært å utvikle metoder som forbedrer prosessen rundt transformator bytte. Nærmere bestemt så har oppgaven sett på om det er mulig å redusere tiden på et transformatorbytte, ved å forenkle og utvikle ruteplanlegging. Det er et håp å generere bedre beredskap av transformatorer på denne måten. I oppgaven har det vært bygget multimodale nettverks datasett og utført rute beregninger i Geografiske informasjonssystemer. Studieområdet har omfattet Sør-Norge, nærmere bestemt strekningen mellom Sylling og Stølen. Analysen har vært basert på data om farleder, landingsplasser, elektronisk vegnett, høyde-, vekt- og farts restriksjoner, veg sperringer og ikke minst avstander. Det ble i løpet av prosjektet utviklet en metode for effektiv ruteplanlegging hvor strekningen Sylling - Stølen ble brukt som utgangspunkt. Resultatene fra den modellerte og den faktiske ruten ble til slutt sammenliknet. Resultatene viser en differanse mellom den faktiske og den modellerte ruten, både i forhold til tidsbruk og veivalg, først og fremst grunnet et for lavt fokus på bro-attributtene og unøyaktige data. Den overordnede forskjellen i tid var liten, faktisk bare en time, differansen mellom mer spesifikke strekninger derimot var større. Resultatet beskriver at det enten er mulig å redusere den virkelige tidsbruken, eller at dataene ikke har vært tilpasset virkeligheten godt nok

N-of-1 : better living through self-experimentation

This project's aim was to create a platform for personalized health data analysis, testing, and prediction, making it easier for ordinary people who are interested in N-of-1 trials to do their own self-experiments and take control of their mental and physical health. In these studies a single subject is observed and different interventions are systematically evaluated on them over time. These are typically longitudinal, occurring over weeks or months, with several rounds of treatments and evaluations in the form of a number of AB assignments. In these studies wearable technology, trackers, apps, sensors, and other IoT devices may be used to record information about the subject multiple times per day or week, if not constantly. In this study a singular self-experimenter collected data on themselves from several different sources such as mood questionnaires and a Fitbit wearable, among others. This data from the various sources was merged so that a variety of statistical methods could be performed. A few different modes of experimenting went into this study. One experiment tested the claim that spending 15 minutes per day writing in a gratitude journal had an effect on the subject's mood. This was achieved through a BABABA crossover phase design study, with each of the three phases being 28 days, for a total of 84 days in the experiment. The tests done for this experiment were the more traditional ANOVARM and ANCOVA, which were used to discover whether the intervention (B) phases were significantly different from the baseline (A), with relation to the subject's mood. Another test compared the claim that there was a difference in the subject's mood between the two groups of pre-experiment and during the experimental phase, through a Mann-Whitney U test. The last part of the study was a more complex machine learning (ML) pipeline that sought to predict the subject's mood based on over 3 years of daily collected data. The ML pipeline ingested the data, created several different ML models such as random forests and support vector machines, and compared which model was best at predicting the subject's mood. Feature importance was extracted from the best model through SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), where the weight of the various feature effects on the target, in this case the subject's mood, was obtained. This notified the subject which behaviors had an effect on their mood. These different modes of experimenting were then compared, to see which was easier to implement or understand for future self-experimenters.Includes bibliographical references

Integrated pest management portfolios in UK arable farming: results of a farmer survey.

Farmers are faced with a wide range of pest management (PM) options that can be adopted in isolation or alongside complementary or substitute strategies. This paper presents the results of a survey of UK cereal producers, focusing on the character and diversity of PM strategies currently used by, or available to, farmers. In addition, the survey asked various questions pertaining to agricultural policy participation, attitude towards environmental issues, sources of PM advice and information and the important characteristics of PM technologies. The results indicate that many farmers do make use of a suite of PM techniques, and that their choice of integrated PM (IPM) portfolio appears to be jointly dictated by farm characteristics and government policy. Results also indicate that portfolio choice does affect the number of subsequent insecticide applications per crop. These results help to identify the type of IPM portfolios considered to be adoptable by farmers and highlight the importance of substitution in IPM portfolios. As such, these results will help to direct R&D effort towards the realisation of more sustainable PM approaches and aid the identification of potential portfolio adopters. These findings highlight the opportunity that a revised agri-environmental policy design could generate in terms of enhancing coherent IPM portfolio adoption