Coral health and disease in the Pacific: vision for action

Shallow coral reefs in the IndoPacific contain the highest diversity of marine organisms in the world, with approximately 1500 described species of fish, over 500 species of scleractinian corals, and an estimated 1-10 million organisms yet to be characterized (Reaka-Kudla et al. 1994). These centers of marine biodiversity are facing significant, multiple threats to reef community and habitat structure and function, resulting in local to wide-scale regional damage. Wilkinson (2004) characterized the major pressures as including (1) global climate change, (2) diseases, plagues and invasive species, (3) direct human pressures, (4) poor governance and lack of political will, and (5) international action or inaction. Signs that the natural plasticity of reef ecosystems has been exceeded in many areas from the effects of environmental (e.g., global climate change) and anthropogenic (e.g., land use, pollution) stressors is evidenced by the loss of 20% of the world’s coral reefs (Wilkinson 2004). Predictions are that another 24% (Wilkinson 2006) are under imminent risk of collapse and an additional 26% are under a longer term threat from reduced fitness, disease outbreaks, and increased mortality. These predictions indicate that the current list of approximately 30-40 fatal diseases impacting corals will expand as will the frequency and extent of “coral bleaching” (Waddell 2005; Wilkinson 2004). Disease and corallivore outbreaks, in combination with multiple, concomitant human disturbances are compromising corals and coral reef communities to the point where their ability to rebound from natural disturbances is being lost.

Manufacturing vision and competitiveness

Discusses a refinement to the process by which manufacturing strategy is created. Builds on an existing strategy process (Platts, 1990) and adapts it to fit more closely within the dynamic manufacturing vision. The method for creating a manufacturing vision allows a business to do this in a two- to three-week period as part of a 10-12 week manufacturing strategy project. A conceptual model of manufacturing vision has been developed that enables practitioners to explore the factors that influenced the potential competitive contribution of manufacturing and to agree an explicit direction for change. Describes the successful application of the process in six manufacturing organizations and highlights the practical limitations of the approach.

A vision-based remote control

This Chapter presents a vision-based system for touch-free interaction with a display at a distance. A single camera is fixed on top of the screen and is pointing towards the user. An attention mechanism allows the user to start the interaction and control a screen pointer by moving their hand in a fist pose directed at the camera. On-screen items can be chosen by a selection mechanism. Current sample applications include browsing video collections as well as viewing a gallery of 3D objects, which the user can rotate with their hand motion. We have included an up-to-date review of hand tracking methods, and comment on the merits and shortcomings of previous approaches. The proposed tracker uses multiple cues, appearance, color, and motion, for robustness. As the space of possible observation models is generally too large for exhaustive online search, we select models that are suitable for the particular tracking task at hand. During a training stage, various off-the-shelf trackers are evaluated. From this data differentmethods of fusing them online are investigated, including parallel and cascaded tracker evaluation. For the case of fist tracking, combining a small number of observers in a cascade results in an efficient algorithm that is used in our gesture interface. The system has been on public display at conferences where over a hundred users have engaged with it. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

3D multi-car tracking based on monocular video

We propose a system that can reliably track multiple cars in congested traffic environments. Our system's key basis is the implementation of a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, which introduces robustness against problems arising due to the proximity between vehicles. By directly modelling occlusions and collisions between cars we obtain promising results on an urban traffic dataset. Extensions to this initial framework are also suggested. © 2010 IEEE.

Parallel and Convergent Evolution of the Dim-Light Vision Gene RH1 in Bats (Order: Chiroptera)

Rhodopsin, encoded by the gene Rhodopsin (RH1), is extremely sensitive to light, and is responsible for dim-light vision. Bats are nocturnal mammals that inhabit poor light environments. Megabats (Old-World fruit bats) generally have well-developed eyes, while microbats (insectivorous bats) have developed echolocation and in general their eyes were degraded, however, dramatic differences in the eyes, and their reliance on vision, exist in this group. In this study, we examined the rod opsin gene (RH1), and compared its evolution to that of two cone opsin genes (SWS1 and M/LWS). While phylogenetic reconstruction with the cone opsin genes SWS1 and M/LWS generated a species tree in accord with expectations, the RH1 gene tree united Pteropodidae (Old-World fruit bats) and Yangochiroptera, with very high bootstrap values, suggesting the possibility of convergent evolution. The hypothesis of convergent evolution was further supported when nonsynonymous sites or amino acid sequences were used to construct phylogenies. Reconstructed RH1 sequences at internal nodes of the bat species phylogeny showed that: (1) Old-World fruit bats share an amino acid change (S270G) with the tomb bat; (2) Miniopterus share two amino acid changes (V104I, M183L) with Rhinolophoidea; (3) the amino acid replacement I123V occurred independently on four branches, and the replacements L99M, L266V and I286V occurred each on two branches. The multiple parallel amino acid replacements that occurred in the evolution of bat RH1 suggest the possibility of multiple convergences of their ecological specialization (i.e., various photic environments) during adaptation for the nocturnal lifestyle, and suggest that further attention is needed on the study of the ecology and behavior of bats.