What determines habitat quality for a declining woodland bird in a fragmented environment: the grey-crowned babbler pomatostomus temporalis in South-Eastern Australia?

Understanding what constitutes high quality habitat is crucial for the conservation of species, especially those threatened with extinction. Habitat quality frequently is inferred by comparing the attributes of sites where a species is present with those where it is absent. However, species presence may not always indicate high quality habitat. Demographic parameters are likely to provide a more biologically relevant measure of quality, including a species' ability to successfully reproduce. We examined factors believed to influence territory quality for the grey-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus temporalis), a cooperatively breeding woodland bird that has experienced major range contraction and population decline in south-eastern Australia. Across three broad regions, we identified active territories and determined the presence of fledglings and the size of family groups, as surrogates of territory quality. These measures were modelled in relation to habitat attributes within territories, the extent of surrounding wooded vegetation, isolation from neighbouring groups, and the size of the neighbourhood population. Fledgling presence was strongly positively associated with group size, indicating that helpers enhance breeding success. Surprisingly, no other territory or landscape-scale variables predicted territory quality, as inferred from either breeding success or group size. Relationships between group size and environmental variables may be obscured by longer-term dynamics in group size. Variation in biotic interactions, notably competition from the noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala), also may contribute. Conservation actions that enhance the number and size of family groups will contribute towards reversing declines of this species. Despite associated challenges, demographic studies have potential to identify mechanistic processes that underpin population performance; critical knowledge for effective conservation management.

Functional system maps as boundary objects in complex system development

A trend towards the provision of product-service packaging and the proliferation of service businesses introduces both tangible and intangible elements into system design. In this paper, we consider the utility of hierarchical system models as a way of flexibly combining such elements by focusing on requisite functionality. Four cases illustrate how the same approach may be used to clarify the requirements of business or socio-technical systems during system development, operation or reengineering stages. It is suggested that a suitable loosely coupled model has significant utility as a 'boundary object' - a term first coined in the study of museum artefacts. Discussion of such objects requires the use of imagination, which may support innovative system design and development. It is suggested that a well-crafted model has multiple uses - as a foundation for system development, in combining traditional and agile project management strategies and in providing a framework to facilitate the capture and organisation of project knowledge.

David Cross in conversation with Cameron Bishop

We live in denial of the foreigner within due to the (often feigned) dexterous self-regard we bring to our social and spatial encounters. You, as the literal foreign body in your own work, inviting the participant to pump, breath, hold, slide or catch, deny that self-assurance, not only to the viewer but also to yourself. Framed at a psychosocial level the denial of the foreigner within plays out in all kinds of ways in our treatment of those others who are seen to breach our borders, at a personal, political and national level. The work you create, in this context, may be seen as an interrogation of the western subject’s conventional experience of territories, from the body, to the museum and to the nation. As you suggest, the physical and cognitive thresholds you give to the participant invite the unguarded moment, the other side of which prompts the viewer to ponder their physical relations to others, as fragmented, fragile beings. But key to this is you, the artist, who presents as partial and foreign inside these objects. How are these objects extensions of your own body, and your own athleticism?

Learning vector representation of medical objects via EMR-driven nonnegative restricted Boltzmann machines (eNRBM)

Electronic medical record (EMR) offers promises for novel analytics. However, manual feature engineering from EMR is labor intensive because EMR is complex - it contains temporal, mixed-type and multimodal data packed in irregular episodes. We present a computational framework to harness EMR with minimal human supervision via restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). The framework derives a new representation of medical objects by embedding them in a low-dimensional vector space. This new representation facilitates algebraic and statistical manipulations such as projection onto 2D plane (thereby offering intuitive visualization), object grouping (hence enabling automated phenotyping), and risk stratification. To enhance model interpretability, we introduced two constraints into model parameters: (a) nonnegative coefficients, and (b) structural smoothness. These result in a novel model called eNRBM (EMR-driven nonnegative RBM). We demonstrate the capability of the eNRBM on a cohort of 7578 mental health patients under suicide risk assessment. The derived representation not only shows clinically meaningful feature grouping but also facilitates short-term risk stratification. The F-scores, 0.21 for moderate-risk and 0.36 for high-risk, are significantly higher than those obtained by clinicians and competitive with the results obtained by support vector machines.

Discovery of stop regions for understanding repeat travel behaviors of moving objects

GPS trajectory dataset with high sampling-rates is usually in large volume that challenges the processing efficiency. Most of the data points on trajectories are useless. This paper summarizes trajectories using stop points. We define a new concept of stay stability (i.e., time dividing distance or reciprocal of speed) between any two GPS points to detect stop points on individual trajectories. We propose a novel Mining Repeat Travel Behaviors Using Stop Regions (MRTBUSR) method. In MRTBUSR, a stop region is a popular region containing a certain number of close stop points that can be grouped into a cluster. We then retrieve common sequences of stop regions to denote repeat route patterns and further analyze the stop durations on a stop region to find repeat travel behaviors. The experiments on 20 labeled trajectories selected from GeoLife demonstrated the semantic effect, accuracy and near linear efficiency of our proposed method.

DoSTra: Discovering common behaviors of objects using the duration of staying on each location of trajectories

Since semantic trajectories can discover more semantic meanings of a user's interests without geographic restrictions, research on semantic trajectories has attracted a lot of attentions in recent years. Most existing work discover the similar behavior of moving objects through analysis of their semantic trajectory pattern, that is, sequences of locations. However, this kind of trajectories without considering the duration of staying on a location limits wild applications. For example, Tom and Anne have a common pattern of Home→Restaurant → Company → Restaurant, but they are not similar, since Tom works at Restaurant, sends snack to someone at Company and return to Restaurant while Anne has breakfast at Restaurant, works at Company and has lunch at Restaurant. If we consider duration of staying on each location we can easily to differentiate their behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for discovering common behaviors by considering the duration of staying on each location of trajectories (DoSTra). Our approach can be used to detect the group that has similar lifestyle, habit or behavior patterns and predict the future locations of moving objects. We evaluate the experiment based on synthetic dataset, which demonstrates the high effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Ranging patterns of François' langur in a fragmented habitat in fusui reserve, Guangxi province, China

Studies of animal ranging patterns and the influencing ecological factors are useful for understanding the relationship between aspects of animal behavior and ecology. In a year-long study, we investigated the ranging behavior and other determining factors for a group of Francois' langur in an isolated habitat of approximately 25.7 ha in Fusui Reserve, China. The Francois' langur home range was estimated to be 15.3 ha, covering ∼60% of their total habitat. The mean yearly day range length estimate was 802.5 m (SD =295.5 m). Langurs changed sleeping sites approximately every 3 days, resulting in increases in the amount of grid cells used and the range length. Food availability of flowers and fruits were seasonal, whereas both mature and immature leaves of most trees were perennial. Ranging behavior was not significantly correlated with the availability of mature leaves, immature leaves, buds, fruits (ripe and unripe fruits) or seeds (p =0.05). These results suggested that variations in food type availability were not factors influencing ranging behavior for this langur group, whereas sleeping site changes, and probably predation avoidance, are factors that influence the ranging patterns of the langur group.

Husserl and the problem of abstract objects

One major difficulty confronting attempts to clarify the epistemological and ontological status of abstract objects is determining the sense, if any, in which such entities may be characterised as mind and language independent. Our contention is that the tolerant reductionist position of Michael Dummett can be strengthened by drawing on Husserl's mature account of the constitution of ideal objects and mathematical objectivity. According to the Husserlian position we advocate, abstract singular terms pick out weakly mind-independent sedimented meaning-contents. These meaning-contents serve as the 'thin' referents of abstract singular terms, but are ultimately founded in prior acts of meaning-constitution.

Is the matrix important to butterflies in fragmented landscapes?

The quality and extent of the 'matrix' in terrestrial fragmented landscapes may influence the persistence and behaviour of patch-associated fauna. Butterflies are a popular target group for fragmentation studies and represent an ideal assemblage to explore the impact and role of the matrix in patchy landscapes. To date, there has been no attempt to synthesise available research and assess the extent to which the matrix is included in studies of fragmented butterfly populations. Addressing this issue is important for improved understanding of habitat use in fragmented landscapes, and for the successful management and conservation of butterfly biodiversity. Our systematic review of 100 empirical research papers spans 50 years, and identifies how (and indeed if) the matrix is recognised in studies of butterfly populations in fragmented landscapes. We found that it was significantly more likely for studies not to include the matrix in their experimental design. This is of particular concern given 60 % of papers that excluded the matrix in their research did so in systems where the matrix was expected to contain resources of value for patch-associated species (as it was either a heterogeneous landscape or had similar structure to patches). Of the papers that did consider the matrix, 80 % (n = 24) reported a negative effect of the matrix on butterfly species and/or communities. Matrix effects may influence the survival and persistence of faunal groups in a world increasingly dominated by fragmented habitats. Our review suggests that future research should clearly define the matrix, and incorporate it in appropriate experimental designs.

Efficiently retrieving longest common route patterns of moving objects by summarizing turning regions

The popularity of online location services provides opportunities to discover useful knowledge from trajectories of moving objects. This paper addresses the problem of mining longest common route (LCR) patterns. As a trajectory of a moving object is generally represented by a sequence of discrete locations sampled with an interval, the different trajectory instances along the same route may be denoted by different sequences of points (location, timestamp). Thus, the most challenging task in the mining process is to abstract trajectories by the right points. We propose a novel mining algorithm for LCR patterns based on turning regions (LCRTurning), which discovers a sequence of turning regions to abstract a trajectory and then maps the problem into the traditional problem of mining longest common subsequences (LCS). Effectiveness of LCRTurning algorithm is validated by an experimental study based on various sizes of simulated moving objects datasets. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Inter-Frame Change Directing online clustering of multiple moving objects for video-based sensor networks

Recognition of multiple moving objects is a very important task for achieving user-cared knowledge to send to the base station in wireless video-based sensor networks. However, video based sensor nodes, which have constrained resources and produce huge amount of video streams continuously, bring a challenge to segment multiple moving objects from the video stream online. Traditional efficient clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN cannot run time-efficiently and even fail to run on limited memory space on sensor nodes, because the number of pixel points is too huge. This paper provides a novel algorithm named Inter-Frame Change Directing Online clustering (IFCDO clustering) for segmenting multiple moving objects from video stream on sensor nodes. IFCDO clustering only needs to group inter-frame different pixels, thus it reduces both space and time complexity while achieves robust clusters the same as DBSCAN. Experiment results show IFCDO clustering excels DBSCAN in terms of both time and space efficiency. © 2008 IEEE.

When Catholics turn right: the effects of the Islamic terrorism threat on the fragmented Catholic Italian voters

Italy, as well as most European countries, has been hit by a wave of anxiety arising from groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, whose effects on political attitudes are still under-examined. This article investigates the effect of the perceived threat of Islamic terrorism as a potential driver for a ‘right turn’ in the Catholic Italian electorate with open-ended interviews and an Internet-based experiment in which voters were randomly assigned to a terrorism threat manipulation and to a control condition (N = 138). The results show that the Islamic terroristic threat significantly increased the support for centre-right leaders who promoted in-group identity and out-group hostility towards Muslims. Implications for the debate about the effects of perceived threat on political opinions and the relevance of the findings beyond the Italian case are discussed at the end of the article.

A fragmented discourse of religious leadership in France: Muslim youth between citizenship and radicalization

At a time when public debates about radicalization of Muslim youth in the West are taking center stage and when questions about “home-grown” security threats are increasing in the wake of a number of terrorist attacks in many émigré societies, this article provides fresh empirical insights from the perspective of religious leadership. It outlines a picture of a highly diverse Muslim religious landscape where competing religious discourses are struggling to attract and support Muslim youth facing social dislocation and identity crises within increasingly contested social milieus. The article argues that a typology of religious leadership is clearly emerging where a spectrum of faith-based orientations and religious practice emphasize, to different degrees, notions of attachment to universal ethics and individual agency. The fact that conservative, sometimes radical, interpretations of such contestations represent a minority of voices is heartening even though the actual damage by such minority is often disproportionate to its actual size within the so-called silent majority. The empirical insights provided by the religious leaders interviewed for this study offer hope that the future of Western Muslims is more positive than we are led to think, if the possibility of combining devout faith with local political engagement becomes a real and sustainable conduit towards social inclusion and intercultural understanding and if necessary support and understanding are extended by the host communities.

Species conservation in fragmented landscapes: implications for the Grey-Crowned Babbler

The Grey-crowned Babbler is a bird species under threat in Victoria and this research describes how they are using the limited and fragmented habitat available and the dire affects habitat fragmentation is having on their genetic processes