Elemental, biomarker, palynology and maceral data from Seam 1, Schöningen and associated interbeds

Sphagnum moss is the dominant plant type in modern boreal and (sub)arctic ombrotrophic bogs and is of particular interest due to its sensitivity to climate and its important role in wetland biogeochemistry. Here we reconstruct the occurrence of Sphagnum moss - and associated biogeochemical change - within a thermally immature, early Paleogene (~55 Ma) lignite from Schöningen, NW Germany using a high-resolution, multi-proxy approach. Changes in the abundance of Sphagnum-type spores and the C23/C31n-alkane ratio indicate the expansion of Sphagnum moss within the top of the lignite seam. This Sphagnum moss expansion is associated with the development of waterlogged conditions, analogous to what has been observed within modern ombrotrophic bogs. The similarity between biomarkers and palynology also indicates that the C23/C31n-alkane ratio may be a reliable chemotaxonomic indicator for Sphagnum during the early Paleogene. The d13C value of bacterial hopanes and mid-chain n-alkanes indicates that a rise in water table is not associated with a substantial increase in aerobic methanotrophy. The absence of very low d13C values within the top of the seam could reflect either less methanogenesis or less efficient methane oxidation under waterlogged sulphate-rich conditions.

Computational Tracking of Mental Health in Youth: Latin American Contributions to a Low-Cost and Effective Solution for Early Psychiatric Diagnosis

The early onset of mental disorders can lead to serious cognitive damage, and timely interventions are needed in order to prevent them. In patients of low socioeconomic status, as is common in Latin America, it can be hard to identify children at risk. Here, we briefly introduce the problem by reviewing the scarce epidemiological data from Latin America regarding the onset of mental disorders, and discussing the difficulties associated with early diagnosis. Then we present computational psychiatry, a new field to which we and other Latin American researchers have contributed methods particularly relevant for the quantitative investigation of psychopathologies manifested during childhood. We focus on new technologies that help to identify mental disease and provide prodromal evaluation, so as to promote early differential diagnosis and intervention. To conclude, we discuss the application of these methods to clinical and educational practice. A comprehensive and quantitative characterization of verbal behavior in children, from hospitals and laboratories to homes and schools, may lead to more effective pedagogical and medical intervention

An evaluation of home range models for marine fish tracking and fine scale habitat use and movement patterns of age 1 Greenland cod (Gadus macrocephalus ogac)

My thesis examines fine-scale habitat use and movement patterns of age 1 Greenland cod (Gadus macrocephalus ogac) tracked using acoustic telemetry. Recent advances in tracking technologies such as GPS and acoustic telemetry have led to increasingly large and detailed datasets that present new opportunities for researchers to address fine-scale ecological questions regarding animal movement and spatial distribution. There is a growing demand for home range models that will not only work with massive quantities of autocorrelated data, but that can also exploit the added detail inherent in these high-resolution datasets. Most published home range studies use radio-telemetry or satellite data from terrestrial mammals or avian species, and most studies that evaluate the relative performance of home range models use simulated data. In Chapter 2, I used actual field-collected data from age-1 Greenland cod tracked with acoustic telemetry to evaluate the accuracy and precision of six home range models: minimum convex polygons, kernel densities with plug-in bandwidth selection and the reference bandwidth, adaptive local convex hulls, Brownian bridges, and dynamic Brownian bridges. I then applied the most appropriate model to two years (2010-2012) of tracking data collected from 82 tagged Greenland cod tracked in Newman Sound, Newfoundland, Canada, to determine diel and seasonal differences in habitat use and movement patterns (Chapter 3). Little is known of juvenile cod ecology, so resolving these relationships will provide valuable insight into activity patterns, habitat use, and predator-prey dynamics, while filling a knowledge gap regarding the use of space by age 1 Greenland cod in a coastal nursery habitat. By doing so, my thesis demonstrates an appropriate technique for modelling the spatial use of fish from acoustic telemetry data that can be applied to high-resolution, high-frequency tracking datasets collected from mobile organisms in any environment.

A deep learning-based approach for 3D people tracking

Questa tesi si occupa dell’estensione di un framework software finalizzato all'individuazione e al tracciamento di persone in una scena ripresa da telecamera stereoscopica. In primo luogo è rimossa la necessità di una calibrazione manuale offline del sistema sfruttando algoritmi che consentono di individuare, a partire da un fotogramma acquisito dalla camera, il piano su cui i soggetti tracciati si muovono. Inoltre, è introdotto un modulo software basato su deep learning con lo scopo di migliorare la precisione del tracciamento. Questo componente, che è in grado di individuare le teste presenti in un fotogramma, consente ridurre i dati analizzati al solo intorno della posizione effettiva di una persona, escludendo oggetti che l’algoritmo di tracciamento sarebbe portato a individuare come persone.

Using individual tracking data to validate the predictions of species distribution models

The authors would like to thank the College of Life Sciences of Aberdeen University and Marine Scotland Science which funded CP's PhD project. Skate tagging experiments were undertaken as part of Scottish Government project SP004. We thank Ian Burrett for help in catching the fish and the other fishermen and anglers who returned tags. We thank José Manuel Gonzalez-Irusta for extracting and making available the environmental layers used as environmental covariates in the environmental suitability modelling procedure. We also thank Jason Matthiopoulos for insightful suggestions on habitat utilization metrics as well as Stephen C.F. Palmer, and three anonymous reviewers for useful suggestions to improve the clarity and quality of the manuscript.

Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace : Tracking If and How we Share Ideas

Peer reviewed

Parsing mathematical constructs:results from a preliminary eye tracking study

The semantic model described in this paper is based on ones developed for arithmetic (e.g. McCloskey et al. 1985, Cohene and Dehaene 1995), natural language processing (Fodor 1975, Chomsky 1981) and work by the author on how learners parse mathematical structures. The semantic model highlights the importance of the parsing process and the relationship between this process and the mathematical lexicon/grammar. It concludes by demonstrating that for a learner to become an efficient, competent mathematician a process of top-down parsing is essential.

The roles of EFN-1 and seam cell V2 in the transmission of a stop cue for the posterior lateral microtubule in Caenorhabditis elegans

A functional nervous system requires the precise arrangement of all nerve cells and their neurites. To achieve this correct assembly, a myriad of molecular guidance cues works together to direct the outgrowth of neurites to their correct positions. The small nematode C. elegans provides the ideal model system to study the complex mechanisms of neurite guidance due to its relatively simple nervous system, composed of 302 neurons. I used two mechanosensory neurons, called the posterior lateral microtubule (PLM), to investigate the role of the ephrin and Eph receptor protein family in neurite termination in C. elegans. Activation of the C. elegans Eph receptor VAB-1 on the PLM growth cone is sufficient to cause PLM termination, but the identity and location of the activating ligand has not been established. In my thesis I investigated the ability of the ephrin ligand EFN-1 to activate VAB-1 to cause PLM termination when expressed on the same cell (in cis) and on opposing cells (in trans) to the receptor. I showed that EFN-1 is able to activate VAB-1 in cis and in trans to cause PLM termination. I also assessed the hypodermal seam cells as the source of the ephrin stop cue using fluorescently labelled and seam cell mutant transgenic worms. I found that although the PLM shows consistent termination on the seam cell V2 in wild type worms independent of PLM length, this process is not significantly disrupted in seam cell mutants. With this information I have created a new hypothesis that the PLM neurite is able the provide a positional cue for the developing seam cells, and have created a new transgenic strain which can be used to assess the impact of PLM and ALM cell ablation on seam cell position. My research is the first to demonstrate the ability of an ephrin ligand to activate its ephrin receptor in cis, and further research can investigate if this finding has in vivo applications.

An adaptive motion model for person tracking with instantaneous head-pose features

This letter presents novel behaviour-based tracking of people in low-resolution using instantaneous priors mediated by head-pose. We extend the Kalman Filter to adaptively combine motion information with an instantaneous prior belief about where the person will go based on where they are currently looking. We apply this new method to pedestrian surveillance, using automatically-derived head pose estimates, although the theory is not limited to head-pose priors. We perform a statistical analysis of pedestrian gazing behaviour and demonstrate tracking performance on a set of simulated and real pedestrian observations. We show that by using instantaneous `intentional' priors our algorithm significantly outperforms a standard Kalman Filter on comprehensive test data.