Strange bedfellows: Green Hill Fort, archaeology and tourism

Green Hill Fort, Thursday Islalld was constructed between 1891-1893 to defend the Australian colonies against a feared Russian invasion. It retained an operational role until the 1920.'1 and played a minor role in World /t'ar 2. From 1954 to 1993 the site, but not the facilities, was used as a weather station. More recently it has been home ofthe Ton-es Strait Historical Society and Museum Association museum. It is a major attraction during the tourist season and an important local icon. For archaeologists it has sign~ficance as a relatively intact nineteenth-century military installation. Two 'Centenary of Federation' grants have proVided the impetus to undertake conservation and presentation works involving various task -spec~fic, archaeological activities. At the management level archaeologists play the lead role in the project. The project has demonstrated the value oJarchaeology and tourism joining forces. The danger ofa 'theme park 'presentation has been avoided. Technical accuracy and careful site planning has ensured a high degree ofaccuracy is retained. Provided these qualities can be assured then, it is argued, there is an opportunity for archaeology to be a majOl; long-term beneficiary. But to achieve that, the discipline must move from being entrenched in its academic mould and become Jar more receptive to the broader needs ofthe twentyfirst century.

Multiple maps and activity-dependent representational plasticity in the anterior Wulst of the adult barn owl (Tyto alba)

In the present study we addressed the issue of somatosensory representation and plasticity in a nonmammalian species, the barn owl. Multiunit mapping techniques were used to examine the representation of the specialized receptor surface of the claw in the anterior Wulst. We found dual somatotopic mirror image representations of the skin surface of the contralateral claw. In addition, we examined both representations 2 weeks after denervation of the distal skin surface of a single digit. In both representations, the denervated digital representation became responsive to stimulation of the adjacent, mutually functional, digit. The mutability and multiple representations indicates that the Wulst provides the owl with sensory processing capabilities analogous to those in mammals.

Pseudo-randomness of round-off errors in discretized linear maps on the plane

We analyze the sequences of round-off errors of the orbits of a discretized planar rotation, from a probabilistic angle. It was shown [Bosio & Vivaldi, 2000] that for a dense set of parameters, the discretized map can be embedded into an expanding p-adic dynamical system, which serves as a source of deterministic randomness. For each parameter value, these systems can generate infinitely many distinct pseudo-random sequences over a finite alphabet, whose average period is conjectured to grow exponentially with the bit-length of the initial condition (the seed). We study some properties of these symbolic sequences, deriving a central limit theorem for the deviations between round-off and exact orbits, and obtain bounds concerning repetitions of words. We also explore some asymptotic problems computationally, verifying, among other things, that the occurrence of words of a given length is consistent with that of an abstract Bernoulli sequence.