Auditing technology uses within a global voluntary organisation

WAGGGS, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, is the umbrella organization for Member Organizations from 145 countries around the world. As such one of its remits is to provide programmes that promote leadership development and opportunities for girls and young women to advocate on issues they care about. One of the ways WAGGGS is exploring to do this more widely and efficiently is through the use of digital technologies. This paper presents the results of an audit undertaken of the technologies already used by potential participants in online communities and courses and investigates the challenges faced in using technology to facilitate learning, within this context.

Guiding e-learning: introducing online informal learning to a global voluntary organisation

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) is the umbrella organisation for Member Organisations from 145 countries around the world, with a total membership of ten million. While Member Organisations offer training and development within their own countries, WAGGGS offers international opportunities. This project seeks to explore how technology can be used to offer similar opportunities to those provided by the face-to-face courses to a much wider audience, while retaining the community and interactive learning aspects of the existing programmes.

Tackling regional climate change by leaf albedo bio-geoengineering

The likelihood that continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will lead to an unmanageable degree of climate change [1] has stimulated the search for planetary-scale technological solutions for reducing global warming [2] (“geoengineering”), typically characterized by the necessity for costly new infrastructures and industries [3]. We suggest that the existing global infrastructure associated with arable agriculture can help, given that crop plants exert an important influence over the climatic energy budget 4 and 5 because of differences in their albedo (solar reflectivity) compared to soils and to natural vegetation [6]. Specifically, we propose a “bio-geoengineering” approach to mitigate surface warming, in which crop varieties having specific leaf glossiness and/or canopy morphological traits are specifically chosen to maximize solar reflectivity. We quantify this by modifying the canopy albedo of vegetation in prescribed cropland areas in a global-climate model, and thereby estimate the near-term potential for bio-geoengineering to be a summertime cooling of more than 1°C throughout much of central North America and midlatitude Eurasia, equivalent to seasonally offsetting approximately one-fifth of regional warming due to doubling of atmospheric CO2[7]. Ultimately, genetic modification of plant leaf waxes or canopy structure could achieve greater temperature reductions, although better characterization of existing intraspecies variability is needed first.

Anthropogenic natal environmental effects on life histories in a wild bird population

Recent work suggests that the environment experienced in early life can alter life histories in wild populations [1, 2, 3, 4 and 5], but our understanding of the processes involved remains limited [6 and 7]. Since anthropogenic environmental change is currently having a major impact on wild populations [8], this raises the possibility that life histories may be influenced by human activities that alter environmental conditions in early life. Whether this is the case and the processes involved remain unexplored in wild populations. Using 23 years of longitudinal data on the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus), a tropical forest specialist, we found that females born in territories affected by anthropogenic habitat change shifted investment in reproduction to earlier in life at the expense of late life performance. They also had lower survival rates as young adults. This shift in life history strategy appears to be adaptive, because fitness was comparable to that of other females experiencing less anthropogenic modification in their natal environment. Our results suggest that human activities can leave a legacy on wild birds through natal environmental effects. Whether these legacies have a detrimental effect on populations will depend on life history responses and the extent to which these reduce individual fitness.

Millennial timescale regeneration in a moss from Antarctica

Mosses, dominant elements in the vegetation of polar and alpine regions, have well-developed stress tolerance features permitting cryptobiosis. However, direct regeneration after longer periods of cryptobiosis has been demonstrated only from herbarium and frozen material preserved for 20 years at most. Recent field observations of new moss growth on the surface of small moss clumps re-exposed from a cold-based glacier after about 400 years of ice cover have been accompanied by regeneration in culture from homogenised material, but there are no reported instances of regrowth occurring directly from older preserved material.

Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution

Background: Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicon—a phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family. Results: Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree. Including regular sound changes yielded an approximately 4-fold improvement in the characterization of linguistic change over a simpler model of sporadic change, improved phylogenetic inference, and returned more reliable and plausible dates for events on the phylogenies. The historical timings of the concerted changes closely follow a Poisson process model, and the sound transition networks derived from our model mirror linguistic expectations. Conclusions: We demonstrate that a model with no prior knowledge of complex concerted or regular changes can nevertheless infer the historical timings and genealogical placements of events of concerted change from the signals left in contemporary data. Our model can be applied wherever discrete elements—such as genes, words, cultural trends, technologies, or morphological traits—can change in parallel within an organism or other evolving group.

Pseudopod growth and evolution during cell movement is controlled through SCAR/WAVE dephosphorylation

Regulated dephosphorylation of a fraction of the cellular SCAR pool is a key step in SCAR activation during pseudopod growth. Phosphorylation increases autoinhibition of the intact complex. Dephosphorylation weakens this interaction and facilitates SCAR activation but also destabilizes the protein. We show that SCAR is specifically dephosphorylated in pseudopods, increasing activation by Rac and lipids and supporting positive feedback of pseudopod growth.

Rapid evolution of the cerebellum in humans and other great apes

Humans’ unique cognitive abilities are usually attributed to a greatly expanded neocortex, which has been described as “the crowning achievement of evolution and the biological substrate of human mental prowess” [1]. The human cerebellum, however, contains four times more neurons than the neocortex [2] and is attracting increasing attention for its wide range of cognitive functions. Using a method for detecting evolutionary rate changes along the branches of phylogenetic trees, we show that the cerebellum underwent rapid size increase throughout the evolution of apes, including humans, expanding significantly faster than predicted by the change in neocortex size. As a result, humans and other apes deviated significantly from the general evolutionary trend for neocortex and cerebellum to change in tandem, having significantly larger cerebella relative to neocortex size than other anthropoid primates. These results suggest that cerebellar specialization was a far more important component of human brain evolution than hitherto recognized and that technical intelligence was likely to have been at least as important as social intelligence in human cognitive evolution. Given the role of the cerebellum in sensory-motor control and in learning complex action sequences, cerebellar specialization is likely to have underpinned the evolution of humans’ advanced technological capacities, which in turn may have been a preadaptation for language.

Plasmodium falciparum Accompanied the Human Expansion out of Africa

Plasmodium falciparum is distributed throughout the tropics and is responsible for an estimated 230 million cases of malaria every year, with a further 1.4 billion people at risk of infection [1-3]. Little is known about the genetic makeup of P. falciparum populations, despite variation in genetic diversity being a key factor in morbidity, mortality, and the success of malaria control initiatives. Here we analyze a worldwide sample of 519 P. falciparum isolates sequenced for two housekeeping genes (63 single nucleotide polymorphisms from around 5000 nucleotides per isolate). We observe a strong negative correlation between within-population genetic diversity and geographic distance from sub-Saharan Africa (R(2) = 0.95) over Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In contrast, regional variation in transmission intensity seems to have had a negligible impact on the distribution of genetic diversity. The striking geographic patterns of isolation by distance observed in P. falciparum mirror the ones previously documented in humans [4-7] and point to a joint sub-Saharan African origin between the parasite and its host. Age estimates for the expansion of P. falciparum further support that anatomically modern humans were infected prior to their exit out of Africa and carried the parasite along during their colonization of the world.

Tackling trigonometry - up the slippery slope?

This paper challenges mathematics teachers to go back and re-examine ideas as far as possible from the genuine beginner's point of view rather than in terms of being experts on the subject. It suggests tasks that teachers can do to achieve this. Topics covered are the shock of the new, the best single short lesson on trigonometry, the difficulty of remembering not knowing, first student trigonometric steps (scouts and flagpoles), first human steps in trigonometry (examining the stars), rotation becomes number, showing relations and learning ideas, plus a lengthy discussion on trigonometry.

Be(ing) prepared : girl guides, colonial life, and national strength

This paper seeks to bridge a gap in feminist critique of gender and empire with regard to the founding of the Girl Guide movement in 1909. In contrast with previous studies of the Boy Scouts, which have briefly considered Guides as a mere derivative organisation, it suggests that the formation of the Guides, and printed material such as the first handbook How Girls Can Help Build Up the Empire (1912), were grounded in notions of the part which women, and girls specifically, could play in the imperial project. This paper proposes that, although tempered by an emphasis on raising children in order to prevent the “degeneration” of the British race, the Guide handbook permits increased non-domestic activity for Edwardian girls, which is justified by aims of preparing for home defence in case of foreign attack and for life in the colonies.

Great bowerbirds create theaters with forced perspective when seen by their audience

Birds in the infraorder Corvida [1] (ravens, jays, bowerbirds) are renowned for their cognitive abilities [2–4], which include advanced problem solving with spatial inference [4–8], tool use and complex constructions [7–10], and bowerbird cognitive ability is associated with mating success [11]. Great bowerbird males construct bowers with a long avenue from within which females view the male displaying over his bower court [10]. This predictable audience viewpoint is a prerequisite for forced (altered) visual perspective [12–14]. Males make courts with gray and white objects that increase in size with distance from the avenue entrance. This gradient creates forced visual perspective for the audience; court object visual angles subtended on the female viewer’s eye are more uniform than if the objects were placed at random. Forced perspective can yield false perception of size and distance [12, 15]. After experimental reversal of their size-distance gradient, males recovered their gradients within 3 days, and there was little difference from the original after 2 wks. Variation among males in their forced-perspective quality as seen by their female audience indicates that visual perspective is available for use in mate choice, perhaps as an indicator of cognitive ability. Regardless of function, the creation and maintenance of forced visual perspective is clearly important to great bowerbirds and suggests the possibility of a previously unknown dimension of bird cognition.

Vocal mimicry

What is vocal mimicry? Vocal mimicry occurs when an individual learns a sound from another species or the environment. It differs from other animal vocalisations such as bird song or human speech, as these are learned from members of the same species (conspecifics). Parrots are the most renowned mimics, with reports of their talents dating back at least to the early 1500s with Henry VIII of England's pet African grey parrot, Psittacus erithacus, which mimicked his servants' voices.

Bowerbirds, art and aesthetics : are bowerbirds artists and do they have an aesthetic sense?

Male bowerbirds create and decorate a structure called a bower which serves only to attract females for mating, and females visit and choose one among many bower owners before deciding which male to mate with. Is what they do art, and do they have an aesthetic sense? I propose operational definitions of art, judgement, and an aesthetic sense which depend upon communication theory which allow one to get explicit answers to this question. By these definitions Great Bowerbirds are artists, judge art, and therefore have an aesthetic sense.