A data assimilation method for using low-resolution Earth observation data in heterogeneous ecosystems

We present an approach for dealing with coarse-resolution Earth observations (EO) in terrestrial ecosystem data assimilation schemes. The use of coarse-scale observations in ecological data assimilation schemes is complicated by spatial heterogeneity and nonlinear processes in natural ecosystems. If these complications are not appropriately dealt with, then the data assimilation will produce biased results. The “disaggregation” approach that we describe in this paper combines frequent coarse-resolution observations with temporally sparse fine-resolution measurements. We demonstrate the approach using a demonstration data set based on measurements of an Arctic ecosystem. In this example, normalized difference vegetation index observations are assimilated into a “zero-order” model of leaf area index and carbon uptake. The disaggregation approach conserves key ecosystem characteristics regardless of the observation resolution and estimates the carbon uptake to within 1% of the demonstration data set “truth.” Assimilating the same data in the normal manner, but without the disaggregation approach, results in carbon uptake being underestimated by 58% at an observation resolution of 250 m. The disaggregation method allows the combination of multiresolution EO and improves in spatial resolution if observations are located on a grid that shifts from one observation time to the next. Additionally, the approach is not tied to a particular data assimilation scheme, model, or EO product and can cope with complex observation distributions, as it makes no implicit assumptions of normality.

Improving insight and non-insight problem solving with brief interventions

Developing brief training interventions that benefit different forms of problem solving is challenging. In earlier research, Chrysikou (2006) showed that engaging in a task requiring generation of alternative uses of common objects improved subsequent insight problem solving. These benefits were attributed to a form of implicit transfer of processing involving enhanced construction of impromptu, on-the-spot or ‘ad hoc’ goal-directed categorizations of the problem elements. Following this, it is predicted that the alternative uses exercise should benefit abilities that govern goal-directed behaviour, such as fluid intelligence and executive functions. Similarly, an indirect intervention – self-affirmation (SA) – that has been shown to enhance cognitive and executive performance after self-regulation challenge and when under stereotype threat, may also increase adaptive goal-directed thinking and likewise should bolster problem-solving performance. In Experiment 1, brief single-session interventions, involving either alternative uses generation or SA, significantly enhanced both subsequent insight and visual–spatial fluid reasoning problem solving. In Experiment 2, we replicated the finding of benefits of both alternative uses generation and SA on subsequent insight problem-solving performance, and demonstrated that the underlying mechanism likely involves improved executive functioning. Even brief cognitive– and social–psychological interventions may substantially bolster different types of problem solving and may exert largely similar facilitatory effects on goal-directed behaviours.

Good practice transfer within small construction specialist trade contractors

Government and institutionally-driven ‘good practice transfer’ initiatives are consistently presented as a means to enhance construction firm and industry performance. Two implicit tenets of these initiatives appear to be: knowledge embedded in good practice will transfer automatically; and, the potential of implementing good practice will be capitalised regardless of the context where it is to be used. The validity of these tenets is increasingly being questioned and, concurrently, more nuanced knowledge production understandings are being developed which recognise and incorporate context-specificity. This research contributes to this growing, more critical agenda by examining the actual benefits accrued from good practice transfer from the perspective of a small specialist trade contracting firm. A concept model for successful good practice transfer is developed from a single longitudinal case study within a small heating and plumbing firm. The concept model consists of five key variables: environment, strategy, people, technology, and organisation of work. The key findings challenge the implicit assumptions prevailing in the existing literature and support a contingency approach that argues successful good practice transfer is not just adopting and mechanistically inserting into the firm, but requires addressing ‘behavioural’ aspects. For successful good practice transfer, small specialist trade contracting firms need to develop and operationalise organisation slack, mechanisms for scanning external stimuli and absorbing knowledge. They also need to formulate and communicate client-driven external strategies; to motive and educate people at all levels; to possess internal or accessible complementary skills and knowledge; to have ‘soft focus’ immediate/mid-term benefits at a project level; and, to embed good practice in current work practices.

Production and comprehension of English and Hindi in multilingual transcortical aphasia

This study investigates the two later-acquired but proficient languages, English and Hindi, of two multilingual individuals with transcortical aphasia (right basal ganglia lesion in GN and brain stem lesion in GS). Dissociation between lexical and syntactic profiles in both the languages with a uniform performance across the languages at the lexical level and an uneven performance across the languages at the syntactic level was observed. Their performances are discussed in relation to the implicit/explicit language processes (Paradis, 1994 and Paradis, 2004) and the declarative/procedural model (Ullman, 2001b and Ullman, 2005) of bilingual language processing. Additionally, their syntactic performance is interpreted in relation to the salient grammatical contrasts between English and Hindi.

Sleepwalking certainties: agency, aesthetics, and incapacity in W.G. Sebald’s 'Austerlitz' and Hermann Broch’s 'The Sleepwalkers'

When we first encounter the narrator of Austerlitz, he is wandering around the unfamiliar town of Antwerp with, he tells us, “unsicheren Schritten” (1; 9). As well as reflecting the unfamiliarity of the locale, these “uncertain steps” evince a proud modesty characteristic of the classic Sebaldian narrator, a wanderer who discreetly relays the stories of the people and places he is privileged to encounter. Although Sebald does not use the phrase, steps of this sort, unpurposed yet unerring, are made with what is commonly known in German as somnambule Sicherheit: the legendary surefootedness of the sleepwalker. The convergence of sleepwalking and certainty in a single phrase poses an interesting challenge to one of the central tenets of the English-language canonization of Sebald, for his writing has been most highly valued for its ability to move the reader through apparent certainties towards a salutary uncertainty. But somnambule Sicherheit also presents the possibility that the current may be reversed, that narrative may move under cover of uncertainty towards certainty. That Sebald criticism has not been more troubled by this possibility is in no small part due to the fact that it tends to deploy the notion of sleepwalking with a minimum of reflection on its theoretical ramifications. To evoke some of the complexities of this matter, I first offer a brief cultural history of sleepwalking, as well as a brief account of the topic of uncertainty in Sebald criticism. Most of my argument, however, involves an extended comparative analysis of sleepwalking in Sebald's Austerlitz and Hermann Broch's 1933 trilogy The Sleepwalkers. Although these writers have not previously been the object of any sustained comparison, sleepwalking in Broch's novels illuminates much that is left implicit on the topic in Sebald's fiction and points toward some difficult questions regarding the role of aesthetics and agency in Sebald's work.

How difficult is it to recover from dangerous levels of global warming?

Climate models provide compelling evidence that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at present rates, then key global temperature thresholds (such as the European Union limit of two degrees of warming since pre-industrial times) are very likely to be crossed in the next few decades. However, there is relatively little attention paid to whether, should a dangerous temperature level be exceeded, it is feasible for the global temperature to then return to safer levels in a usefully short time. We focus on the timescales needed to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases and associated temperatures back below potentially dangerous thresholds, using a state-of-the-art general circulation model. This analysis is extended with a simple climate model to provide uncertainty bounds. We find that even for very large reductions in emissions, temperature reduction is likely to occur at a low rate. Policy-makers need to consider such very long recovery timescales implicit in the Earth system when formulating future emission pathways that have the potential to 'overshoot' particular atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and, more importantly, related temperature levels that might be considered dangerous.

When do export subsidies have a redistributional role?

If an export subsidy is efficient, that is, has a surplus-transfer role, then there exists an implicit function relating the optimal level of the subsidy to the income target in the agricultural sector. If an export subsidy is inefficient no such function exists. We show that dependence exists in large-export equilibrium, not in small-export equilibrium and show that these results remain robust to concerns about domestic tax distortions. The failure of previous work to produce this result stems from its neglect of the income constraint on producer surplus in the programming problem transferring surplusfrom consumersand taxpayers to farmers.

Optimal tax theory and the taxation of housing in the US and the UK

First, we survey recent research in the application of optimal tax theory to housing. This work suggests that the under-taxation of housing for owner occupation distorts investment so that owner occupiers are encouraged to over-invest in housing. Simulations of the US economy suggest that this is true there. But, the theoretical work excludes consideration of land and the simulations exclude consideration of taxes other than income taxes. These exclusions are important for the US and UK economies. In the US, the property tax is relatively high. We argue that excluding the property tax is wrong, so that, when the property tax is taken into account, owner occupied housing is not undertaxed in the US. In the UK, property taxes are relatively low but the cost of land has been increasing in real terms for forty years as a result of a policy of constraining land for development. The price of land for housing is now higher than elsewhere. Effectively, an implicit tax is paid by first time buyers which has reduced housing investment. When land is taken into account over-investment in housing is not encouraged in the UK either.

ELMs disease? Corporatism, stewardship and citizenship in the English countryside

Varying concepts of citizenship, implicit within policy providing countryside access opportunities in England and the sometimes contrasting political rhetoric concerning citizenship, are evaluated here. The focus for this paper surrounds the Countryside Stewardship Scheme and, generically, the access elements of Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs) and the implications of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in this context. Policy formulation in respect of countryside access may not be prepared considering the philosophical implications for citizens rights or property rights constructions. However, it is hypothesized that particular modes of regulation and commodification (of certain countryside goods) are imbued with certain values which reflect a neo-Liberal political philosophy. This view is contextualized within present theoretical debates concerning rural society.

Heritage speaker competence differences, language change and input type: inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese

It has been argued that colloquial dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have undergone significant linguistic change resulting in the loss of inflected infinitives (e.g., Pires, 2002, 2006). Since BP adults, at least educated ones, have complete knowledge of inflected infinitives, the implicit claim is that they are transmitted via formal education in the standard dialect. In the present article, I test one of the latent predictions of such claims; namely, the fact that heritage speakers of BP who lack formal education in the standard dialect should never develop native-like knowledge of inflected infinitives. In doing so, I highlight two significant implications (a) that heritage speaker grammars are a good source for testing dialectal variation and language change proposals and (b) incomplete acquisition and/or attrition are not the only sources of heritage language competence differences. Employing the syntactic and semantic tests of Rothman and Iverson (2007), I compare heritage speakers' knowledge to Rothman and Iverson's advanced adult L2 learners and educated native controls. Unlike the latter groups, the data for heritage speakers indicate that they do not have target knowledge of inflected infinitives, lending support to Pires' claims, suggesting that literacy plays a significant role in the acquisition of this grammatical property in BP.

Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on pre-attentive colour perception

It is now established that native language affects one's perception of the world. However, it is unknown whether this effect is merely driven by conscious, language-based evaluation of the environment or whether it reflects fundamental differences in perceptual processing between individuals speaking different languages. Using brain potentials, we demonstrate that the existence in Greek of 2 color terms—ghalazio and ble—distinguishing light and dark blue leads to greater and faster perceptual discrimination of these colors in native speakers of Greek than in native speakers of English. The visual mismatch negativity, an index of automatic and preattentive change detection, was similar for blue and green deviant stimuli during a color oddball detection task in English participants, but it was significantly larger for blue than green deviant stimuli in native speakers of Greek. These findings establish an implicit effect of language-specific terminology on human color perception.

The global distribution of phytoplankton size spectrum and size classes from their light-absorption spectra derived from satellite data

The absorption spectra of phytoplankton in the visible domain hold implicit information on the phytoplankton community structure. Here we use this information to retrieve quantitative information on phytoplankton size structure by developing a novel method to compute the exponent of an assumed power-law for their particle-size spectrum. This quantity, in combination with total chlorophyll-a concentration, can be used to estimate the fractional concentration of chlorophyll in any arbitrarily-defined size class of phytoplankton. We further define and derive expressions for two distinct measures of cell size of mixed populations, namely, the average spherical diameter of a bio-optically equivalent homogeneous population of cells of equal size, and the average equivalent spherical diameter of a population of cells that follow a power-law particle-size distribution. The method relies on measurements of two quantities of a phytoplankton sample: the concentration of chlorophyll-a, which is an operational index of phytoplankton biomass, and the total absorption coefficient of phytoplankton in the red peak of visible spectrum at 676 nm. A sensitivity analysis confirms that the relative errors in the estimates of the exponent of particle size spectra are reasonably low. The exponents of phytoplankton size spectra, estimated for a large set of in situ data from a variety of oceanic environments (~ 2400 samples), are within a reasonable range; and the estimated fractions of chlorophyll in pico-, nano- and micro-phytoplankton are generally consistent with those obtained by an independent, indirect method based on diagnostic pigments determined using high-performance liquid chromatography. The estimates of cell size for in situ samples dominated by different phytoplankton types (diatoms, prymnesiophytes, Prochlorococcus, other cyanobacteria and green algae) yield nominal sizes consistent with the taxonomic classification. To estimate the same quantities from satellite-derived ocean-colour data, we combine our method with algorithms for obtaining inherent optical properties from remote sensing. The spatial distribution of the size-spectrum exponent and the chlorophyll fractions of pico-, nano- and micro-phytoplankton estimated from satellite remote sensing are in agreement with the current understanding of the biogeography of phytoplankton functional types in the global oceans. This study contributes to our understanding of the distribution and time evolution of phytoplankton size structure in the global oceans.

Ancillary narratives: maids, sleepwalking, and agency in nineteenth-century literature and culture

The limited coverage of servants in nineteenth-century literature may plausibly be ascribed to the tenuous nature of the roles they play in primary texts, and especially to the problematic nature of their agency. This idea is implicit in the arguments of Bruce Robbins, whose The Servant’s Hand remains the most cogent approach to giving servants a palpable role in critical narrative: for Robbins, the agency that acts through the servant ‘prosthesis’ rebounds on the master, granting the servant figure a sometimes exorbitant textual agency. The figure of the sleepwalking maid, and the analogies between sleepwalking and domestic service implicit in it, will help to complicate this picture. In anecdotes of spontaneous sleepwalking, and their subsequent appropriation by mesmerists, maids are cast as non-agents in terms of ownership of narrative: their subjectivity is immaterial to the public fate of the story which their acts generate. But this apparent non-agency is itself derived from their spontaneity; from an autonomous, albeit unconscious, self-will. As such, sleepwalking subjectivity is a gift to paternalism; a mastery it does not have to produce. In conclusion, it is this undetermined quality, rather than a simple lack of agency, that characterizes the maid in the novel, and which continues to exclude domestic servants from critical narrative.

Housing or property? The dynamics of housing policy and property principles in the right to buy

This paper examines the interplay and tension between housing law and policy and property law, in the specific context of the right to buy (RTB). It focuses on funding arrangements between the RTB tenant and another party. It first examines how courts determine the parties' respective entitlements in the home, highlighting the difficulty of categorising, under traditional property law principles, a contribution in the form of the statutory discount conferred on the RTB tenant. Secondly, it considers possible exploitation of the RTB scheme, both at the macro level of exploitation of the policy underpinning the legislation and, at the micro level, of exploitation of the tenant. The measures contained in the Housing Act 2004 intended to curb exploitation of the RTB are analysed to determine what can be considered to be legitimate and illegitimate uses of the scheme. It is argued that, despite the government's implicit approval, certain funding arrangements by non-resident relatives fail to give effect to the spirit of the scheme.

Efficient fully nonlinear data assimilation for geophysical fluid dynamics

A potential problem with Ensemble Kalman Filter is the implicit Gaussian assumption at analysis times. Here we explore the performance of a recently proposed fully nonlinear particle filter on a high-dimensional but simplified ocean model, in which the Gaussian assumption is not made. The model simulates the evolution of the vorticity field in time, described by the barotropic vorticity equation, in a highly nonlinear flow regime. While common knowledge is that particle filters are inefficient and need large numbers of model runs to avoid degeneracy, the newly developed particle filter needs only of the order of 10-100 particles on large scale problems. The crucial new ingredient is that the proposal density cannot only be used to ensure all particles end up in high-probability regions of state space as defined by the observations, but also to ensure that most of the particles have similar weights. Using identical twin experiments we found that the ensemble mean follows the truth reliably, and the difference from the truth is captured by the ensemble spread. A rank histogram is used to show that the truth run is indistinguishable from any of the particles, showing statistical consistency of the method.