Predator control promotes invasive dominated ecological states

Invasive species are regarded as one of the top five drivers of the global extinction crisis. In response, extreme measures have been applied in an attempt to control or eradicate invasives, with little success overall. We tested the idea that state shifts to invasive dominance are symptomatic of losses in ecosystem resilience, due to the suppression of apex predators. This concept was investigated in Australia where the high rate of mammalian extinctions is largely attributed to the destructive influence of invasive species. Intensive pest control is widely applied across the continent, simultaneously eliminating Australia’s apex predator, the dingo (Canis lupus dingo). We show that predator management accounts for shifts between two main ecosystem states. Lethal control fractures dingo social structure and leads to bottom-up driven increases in invasive mesopredators and herbivores. Where control is relaxed, dingoes re-establish top–down regulation of ecosystems, allowing for the recovery of biodiversity and productivity.

Conflict at deals for top Year 12s

Tensions at the University of Melbourne over the fairness of providing guaranteed postgraduate pathways only to students with high Year 12 scores, has underlined the high-wire act institutions face in balancing equity and the pursuit of prestige.

The 1997 'top ten' survey : students' views of what makes news

Have you ever wondered how journalism students learn to differentiate the 'important' story from the daily dross that journalism inevitably throws up? We have. This paper examines the choices journalism students make when they're asked to nominate a 'top ten' from a finite list of stories. It suggests the possible news values they apply to their selection of the ten 'best' stories over a 12 month period. As a second measure of ability to comprehend and apply news values we also examine the students' ability to correctly locate countries on a map: a test of their 'political geography'. We offer some tentative conclusions about our students' willingness to engage with the 'difficult' stories about politics and economics, rather than the 'easy shot' news of celebrities, disasters and sporting heroes.

Social intelligence and top management team: an exploratory study of external knowledge acquisition for strategic change in global IT service providers in India

This paper focuses on the processes by which firms, particularly knowledge intensive firms, can augment their overall knowledge stock by tapping into external sources of knowledge. It is argued that Top Management Teams' (TMTs') social intelligence is a critical learning capability in acquiring external knowledge that leads to strategic change. Social intelligence involves social awareness, social understanding and social skills. The study draws from the experience of 11 of the largest Information Technology Service Providers (ITSPs) in India and based on in-depth interviews. The findings show that TMTs' learning capability in the context of social intelligence to interact with external stakeholders is important to ITSPs in facilitating external knowledge acquisition and allowing new knowledge emerge within and across networks. The findings provide significant insights into ITSPs emerging in other developing countries such as in China. Research limitation and future research direction are also provided.

Ecosystem restoration with teeth : what role for predators?

Recent advances highlight the potential for predators to restore ecosystems and confer resilience against globally threatening processes, including climate change and biological invasions. However, releasing the ecological benefits of predators entails significant challenges. Here, we discuss the economic, environmental and social considerations affecting predator-driven ecological restoration programmes, and suggest approaches for reducing the undesirable impacts of predators. Because the roles of predators are context dependent, we argue for increased emphasis on predator functionality in ecosystems and less on the identities and origins of species and genotypes. We emphasise that insufficient attention is currently given to the importance of variation in the social structures and behaviours of predators in influencing the dynamics of trophic interactions. Lastly, we outline experiments specifically designed to clarify the ecological roles of predators and their potential utility in ecosystem restoration.

Predators select against high growth rates and risk-taking behaviour in domestic trout populations

Domesticated (farm) salmonid fishes display an increased willingness to accept risk while foraging, and achieve high growth rates not observed in nature. Theory predicts that elevated growth rates in domestic salmonids will result in greater risk–taking to access abundant food, but low survival in the presence of predators. In replicated whole–lake experiments, we observed that domestic trout (selected for high growth rates) took greater risks while foraging and grew faster than a wild strain. However, survival consequences for greater growth rates depended upon the predation environment. Domestic trout experienced greater survival when risk was low, but lower survival when risk was high. This suggests that animals with high intrinsic growth rates are selected against in populations with abundant predators, explaining the absence of such phenotypes in nature. This is, to our knowledge, the first large–scale field experiment to directly test this theory and simultaneously quantify the initial invasibility of domestic salmonid strains that escape into the wild from aquaculture operations, and the ecological conditions affecting their survival.

Scandalous women: gender and identity in top-notch smut

Examining a diverse range of texts offering controversial representations of female sexuality, this paper demonstrates a persistent link between literary scandal and anxieties about women's sexuality. Texts from Madame Bovary (1857) to The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) have provoked various arguments, from debates about the need to restrain the unruly bodies of women to contestations about aesthetic merit, morality, and obscenity. Indeed, the scandalous literature of sexual women is distinguished by efforts to reduce its transgressions into something manageable, whether through naming and categorisation (‘chick lit’ and ‘posh porn’), textual analysis, public censure, or critical excoriation. The desire to manage controversial material signifies a discourse of containment that suggests both women and literature require strict control. As this paper will argue, the relationship between women, literature, and scandal is one marked by both intra- and extra-textual efforts to restrain not only the unpredictability and power of female sexuality, but also the unruly energies of literature itself.

Effects of predator control on behaviour of an apex predator and indirect consequences for mesopredator suppression

1. Apex predators can benefit ecosystems through top–down control of mesopredators and herbivores. However, apex predators are often subject to lethal control aimed at minimizing attacks on livestock. Lethal control can affect both the abundance and behaviour of apex predators. These changes could in turn influence the abundance and behaviour of mesopredators.

2. We used remote camera surveys at nine pairs of large Australian rangeland properties, comparing properties that controlled dingoes Canis lupus dingo with properties that did not, to test the effects of predator control on dingo activity and to evaluate the responses of a mesopredator, the feral cat Felis catus.

3. Indices of dingo abundance were generally reduced on properties that practiced dingo control, in comparison with paired properties that did not, although the effect size of control was variable. Dingoes in uncontrolled populations were crepuscular, similar to major prey. In populations subject to control, dingoes became less active around dusk, and activity was concentrated in the period shortly before dawn.

4. Shifts in feral cat abundance indices between properties with and without dingo control were inversely related to corresponding shifts in indices of dingo abundance. There was also a negative relationship between predator visitation rates at individual camera stations, suggesting cats avoided areas where dingoes were locally common. Reduced activity by dingoes at dusk was associated with higher activity of cats at dusk.

5. Our results suggest that effective dingo control not only leads to higher abundance of feral cats, but allows them to optimize hunting behaviour when dingoes are less active. This double effect could amplify the impacts of dingo control on prey species selected by cats. In areas managed for conservation, stable dingo populations may thus contribute to management objectives by restricting feral cat access to prey populations.

6. Synthesis and applications. Predator control not only reduces indices of apex predator abundance but can also modify their behaviour. Hence, indicators other than abundance, such as behavioural patterns, should be considered when estimating a predator's capacity to effectively interact with lower trophic guilds. Changes to apex predator behaviour may relax limitations on the behaviour of mesopredators, providing enhanced access to resources and prey.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches to motor skill assessment of children : are child-report and parent-report perceptions predictive of children's performance-based assessment results?

Background/ Aim: Therapists use different types of tests, scales, and instruments to assess children's motor skills, including those classified as being top-down and bottom-up. The aim of the study was to investigate the ability of measures of children's motor skill performance from the perspectives of children and parents (a type of top-down assessment) to predict children's performance-based motor ability test results (a type of bottom-up assessment).
Methods: A convenience sample of 38 children and parents was recruited from Victoria, Australia. Motor skill performance was evaluated from a top-down perspective using the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire (PSDQ) and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children – Second Edition (MABC-2) Checklist to measure children's and parents' perspectives respectively. Motor skill performance was also evaluated from a bottom-up approach using the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency – Second Edition (BOT-2). Data were analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis to determine whether the PSDQ or MABC-2 Checklist was predictive of the children's BOT-2 performance results.
Results: Two predictive relationships were identified based on parents' perspectives, where the total score of the MABC-2 Checklist was found to be a significant predictor of the BOT-2 Manual Coordination motor composite score, accounting for 8.35% of its variance, and the BOT-2 Strength and Agility motor composite score, accounting for 11.6% of its variance. No predictive relationships were identified between the children's self-report PSDQ perspectives and the BOT-2 performance scores.
Conclusions: Therapists are encouraged to utilize a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches and purposefully to seek parents' and children's perspectives when evaluating children's motor skill performance.

Improving Top-N recommendations with user consuming profiles

In this work, we observe that user consuming styles tend to change regularly following some profiles. Therefore, we propose a consuming profile model to capture the user consuming styles, then apply it to improve the Top-N recommendation. The basic idea is to model user consuming styles by constructing a representative subspace. Then, a set of candidate items can be estimated by measuring its reconstruction error from its projection on the representative subspace. The experiment results show that the proposed model can improve the accuracy of Top-N recommendations much better than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Learning rating patterns for Top-N recommendations

Two rating patterns exist in the user × item rating matrix and influence each other: the personal rating patterns are hidden in each user's entire rating history, while the global rating patterns are hidden in the entire user × item rating matrix. In this paper, a Rating Pattern Subspace is proposed to model both of the rating patterns simultaneously by iteratively refining each other with an EM-like algorithm. Firstly, a low-rank subspace is built up to model the global rating patterns from the whole user × item rating matrix, then, the projection for each user on the subspace is refined individually based on his/her own entire rating history. After that, the refined user projections on the subspace are used to improve the modelling of the global rating patterns. Iteratively, we can obtain a well-trained low-rank Rating Pattern Subspace, which is capable of modelling both the personal and the global rating patterns. Based on this subspace, we propose a RapSVD algorithm to generate Top-N recommendations, and the experiment results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform the other state-of-the-art Top-N recommendation methods in terms of accuracy, especially on long tail item recommendations.