There is nothing like an oat

The items reports on first year trials in of the “Quoats” project. It’s well known that oats are generally a good fit in organic rotations and the “Quoats” project – Harnessing new technologies for sustainable oat production and utilisation – aims to make them even better. This five year (2009 – 2014) research project, led by IBERS, Aberystwyth University, brings together a wide range of organisations in the supply chain, from breeders to end-users, to improve the quality and performance of oats. As part of the project, ORC is carrying out field trials to assess the suitability of new oat lines for organic management systems, with particular emphasis on nutrient use efficiency. Eight varieties are being trialled at Wakelyns Agroforestry, Suffolk, including some naked oats, i.e. hull-less oats. The paper reports some first results

Flood modelling with hydraTE: 2+1-dimensional smoothed-particle hydrodynamics

We present HydraTE, our own implementation of the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics technique for shallow water that uses the adaptive size of the smoothing kernel as a proxy for the local water depth. We derive the equa- tions of motion for this approach from the Lagrangian before demonstrating that we can model the depth of water in a trough, implement vertical walls, recover the correct acceleration and terminal velocity for water flowing down a slope and obtain a stable hydraulic jump with the correct jump condition. We demonstrate that HydraTE performs well on two of the UK Environ- ment Agency flood modelling benchmark tests. Benchmark EA3 involves flow down an incline into a double dip depression and studies the amount of water that reaches the second dip. Our results are in agreement with those of the other codes that have attempted this test. Benchmark EA6 is a dam break into a horizontal channel containing a building. HydraTE again pro- duces results that are in good agreement with the other methods and the experimetal validation data except where the vertical velocity structure of the flow is expected to be multi-valued, such as the hydralic jump where the precise location is not recovered even though the pre- and post- jump water heights are. We conclude that HydraTE is suitable for a wide range of flood modelling problems as it preforms at least as well as the best available commercial alternatives for the problems we have tested

The Performance of Untrained Humans Verifying Children and Adults in a Face Matching Task

This item is only available electronically.Identifying children is a high priority in numerous government agencies not only in border checks, but to aid against child exploitation. However, research suggests children are hard to identify due to childhood facial development. Face matching is a common form of identification in areas such as border checks and investigative applications. A recent study demonstrated that trained facial practitioners found it more difficult to verify child identities compared to adult identities in a one-to-one unfamiliar face matching task, but there is a significant gap in research on whether it is naturally challenging to verify child identities. Thus, the present study primarily aimed to determine whether people with no training or experience find it naturally harder to match child compared to adult faces. The study secondly aimed to find if these people performed better determining whether two faces belonged to the same person, or different people. Students (N = 35) were asked to perform 200 one-to-one face matching trials, determining whether pairs of faces belonged to the same or different people and rate their confidence. The results demonstrated novices were significantly less accurate, confident and slower comparing child images compared to adult images, although performance when image pairs were the same versus different people had mixed results. The findings indicate people are naturally worse at verifying children, providing an argument for child specific training for human facial practitioners. Future research should compare people with and without training and experience, for an extensive analysis on whether this effects human face matching performance.Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 201

„So it really is a series of tubes." Google's data centers, noo-politics and the architecture of hegemony in cyberspace

In recent years, the physical manifestation and infrastructure of the informational age has increasingly drawn the attention both of the popular imagination and of architectural theorists. This paper focuses on an aspect mostly overlooked to date, namely on its artistic representation. It provides a critical analysis of a series of data center photographs published by Google in October 2012 under the name "Where the internet lives”. The photographs are examined as carefully staged constructions of a specific imagination of information technology that, transcending a purely aesthetical or corporate critique, has broad political, socio-geographical and economical implications. A first analysis of their composition, digital manipulation and visual impact situates the images within a recent photographic current of the so called "anthropogenic Sublime”. The paper then zooms out to reframe the photographs as a continuation of the euphoric techno-utopian discourse that surrounded the popular dissemination of the internet in the early nineteen-nineties. This discourse hailed the internet as an inherently moral and emancipatory vehicle that, because of the non-physical nature of cyberspace, would liberate its users from traditional hegemonic dispositifs based on techniques of physical coercion. Tracing the transition from bio-political (Foucault) to noo-political dispositifs (Lazarrato, Deleuze) and discussing the inextricable connection between information technology, territorial conflict and socio-geographic inequality, the article goes on to account for the demise of the dream of a "bodiless and moral internet”. Finally, the data center images are re-read in more detail and discussed as part of the life-support system of a failed utopia - sustaining a popular yet reductionist understanding of the informational society and its key players

Neural Correlates of Reach Planning and Execution

Humans and other primates often interact with the world by reaching and grabbing objects with their hands. This seemingly simple activity is a challenging computational problem that requires the nervous system to transform sensory input into muscle activations that move the hand appropriately through space. This dissertation investigates neural activity in the dorsal premotor cortex of the macaque monkey while simple and complex reaching movements are planned and executed. A novel virtual-reality obstacle-avoidance task is used to decorrelate the direction of the initial segment of the trajectory from the direction of the final target. An unobstructed center-out task is used as a comparison. The firing rates of many neurons are modulated by kinematic factors including hand position and movement direction. During obstacle-avoidance reaching, both the initial segment and final target directions are represented in the firing of dorsal premotor neurons. Population decoders for position, velocity and target direction were built using the indirect optimal linear estimator method, a variant of the population vector algorithm. The decoding model constructed from the direct-reaching task ultimately predicts the direction of movement, not the final target, during the planning period before movement begins. A separate decoding model predicts the target direction when the hand must move elsewhere initially. The time course of neural activity during planning suggests that the two monkeys utilized different preparatory strategies during the obstacle-avoidance task, leading to differences in performance on a subset of trials. A position-based population decoder predicts the hand trajectory during movement, anticipating the real hand position by approximately 200 ms. These findings demonstrate that multiple kinematic parameters of hand movement are represented in dorsal premotor cortex during planning and execution of voluntary reaching behavior. A simple linear decoding scheme based on roughly cosine-tuned spiking activity can extract relevant information from the population of neurons. This work contributes to the overall understanding of the factors that influence dorsal premotor cortical activity during complex reaching movements

Hydra: A Parallel Adaptive Grid Code

We describe the first parallel implementation of an adaptive particle-particle, particle-mesh code with smoothed particle hydrodynamics. Parallelisation of the serial code, ``Hydra'', is achieved by using CRAFT, a Cray proprietary language which allows rapid implementation of a serial code on a parallel machine by allowing global addressing of distributed memory. The collisionless variant of the code has already completed several 16.8 million particle cosmological simulations on a 128 processor Cray T3D whilst the full hydrodynamic code has completed several 4.2 million particle combined gas and dark matter runs. The efficiency of the code now allows parameter-space explorations to be performed routinely using $64^3$ particles of each species. A complete run including gas cooling, from high redshift to the present epoch requires approximately 10 hours on 64 processors. In this paper we present implementation details and results of the performance and scalability of the CRAFT version of Hydra under varying degrees of particle clustering.Comment: 23 pages, LaTex plus encapsulated figure

Hydra: An Adaptive--Mesh Implementation of PPPM--SPH

We present an implementation of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) in an adaptive-mesh PPPM algorithm. The code evolves a mixture of purely gravitational particles and gas particles. The code retains the desirable properties of previous PPPM--SPH implementations; speed under light clustering, naturally periodic boundary conditions and accurate pairwise forces. Under heavy clustering the cycle time of the new code is only 2--3 times slower than for a uniform particle distribution, overcoming the principal disadvantage of previous implementations\dash a dramatic loss of efficiency as clustering develops. A 1000 step simulation with 65,536 particles (half dark, half gas) runs in one day on a Sun Sparc10 workstation. The choice of time integration scheme is investigated in detail. A simple single-step Predictor--Corrector type integrator is most efficient. A method for generating an initial distribution of particles by allowing a a uniform temperature gas of SPH particles to relax within a periodic box is presented. The average SPH density that results varies by $\sim\pm1.3$\%. We present a modified form of the Layzer--Irvine equation which includes the thermal contribution of the gas together with radiative cooling. Tests of sound waves, shocks, spherical infall and collapse are presented. Appropriate timestep constraints sufficient to ensure both energy and entropy conservation are discussed. A cluster simulation, repeating Thomas andComment: 29 pp, uuencoded Postscrip

The orientation of galaxy dark matter haloes around cosmic voids

Using the Millennium N-body Simulation we explore how the shape and angular momentum of galaxy dark matter haloes surrounding the largest cosmological voids are oriented. We find that the major and intermediate axes of the haloes tend to lie parallel to the surface of the voids, whereas the minor axis points preferentially in the radial direction. We have quantified the strength of these alignments at different radial distances from the void centres. The effect of these orientations is still detected at distances as large as 2.2 Rvoid from the void centre. Taking a subsample of haloes expected to contain disc-dominated galaxies at their centres we detect, at the 99.9 per cent confidence level, a signal that the angular momentum of those haloes tends to lie parallel to the surface of the voids. Contrary to the alignments of the inertia axes, this signal is only detected in shells at the void surface (1 < R < 1.07 Rvoid) and disappears at larger distances. This signal, together with the similar alignment observed using real spiral galaxies, strongly supports the prediction of the Tidal Torque theory that both dark matter haloes and baryonic matter have acquired, conjointly, their angular momentum before the moment of turnaround

Developing modern multifunctional agroforestry systems for sustainable intensification

Agroforestry is a land-use system that integrates trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock production. It has been identified by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, 2008) as a ‘win-win’ approach that balances the production of commodities (food, feed, fuel, fibre, etc.) with non-commodity outputs such as environmental protection and cultural and landscape amenities. This paper will review the potential of agroforestry as part of a multifunctional working landscape in temperate regions, and will consider management and policy implications of widespread adoption of this form of land-use