Developing a methodology for the National Frog Survey of Ireland: a pilot study in Co. Mayo.

A National Frog Survey of Ireland is planned for spring 2011. We conducted a pilot survey of 25 water bodies in ten 0.25 km2 survey squares in Co. Mayo during spring 2010. Drainage ditches were the most commonly available site for breeding and, generally, two 100 m stretches of ditch were surveyed in each square. The restricted period for peak spawning activity renders any methodology utilizing only one site visit inherently risky. Consequently, each site was visited three times from late March to early April. Occurrence of spawn declined significantly from 72 % to 44 % between the first and third visit whilst the overall occurrence of spawn at all sites was 76 %. As the breeding season advanced, spawn either hatched or was predated and, therefore, disappeared. In those water bodies where spawning was late, however, greater densities of spawn were deposited than in those sites where breeding was early. Consequently, spawn density and estimated frog density did not differ significantly between site visits. Future surveys should nevertheless include multiple site visits to avoid biased estimation of species occurrence and distribution. Ecological succession was identified as the main threat present at 44 % of sites.

Power Efficient DSP Datapath Configuration Methodology for FPGA

Exploiting the underutilisation of variable-length DSP algorithms during normal operation is vital, when seeking to maximise the achievable functionality of an application within peak power budget. A system level, low power design methodology for FPGA-based, variable length DSP IP cores is presented. Algorithmic commonality is identified and resources mapped with a configurable datapath, to increase achievable functionality. It is applied to a digital receiver application where a 100% increase in operational capacity is achieved in certain modes without significant power or area budget increases. Measured results show resulting architectures requires 19% less peak power, 33% fewer multipliers and 12% fewer slices than existing architectures.

Annotating an Oral Corpus using the Text Encoding Initiative. Methodology, Problems, Solutions

The objective of this paper is to describe and evaluate the application of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines to a corpus of oral French, this being the first corpus of oral French where the TEI has been used. The paper explains the purpose of the corpus, both in creating a specialist corpus of néo-contage that will broaden the range of oral corpora available, and, more importantly, in creating a dataset to explore a variety of oral French that has a particularly interesting status in terms of factors such as conception orale/écrite, réalisation médiale and comportement communicatif (Koch and Oesterreicher 2001). The linguistic phenomena to be encoded are both stylistic (speech and thought presentation) and syntactic (negation, detachment, inversion), and all represent areas where previous research has highlighted the significance of factors such as medium, register and discourse type, as well as a host of linguistic factors (syntactic, phonetic, lexical). After a discussion of how a tagset can be designed and applied within the TEI to encode speech and thought presentation, negation, detachment and inversion, the final section of the paper evaluates the benefits and possible drawbacks of the methodology offered by the TEI when applied to a syntactic and stylistic markup of an oral corpus.