A novel and effective technology for mitigating nitrous oxide emissions from land-applied manures

Land-applied manures produce nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas (GHG). Land application can also result in ammonia (NH3) volatilisation, leading to indirect N2O emissions. Here, we summarise a glasshouse investigation into the potential for vermiculite, a clay with a high cation exchange capacity, to decrease N2O emissions from livestock manures (beef, pig, broiler, layer), as well as urea, applied to soils. Our hypothesis is that clays adsorb ammonium, thereby suppressing NH3 volatilisation and slowing N2O emission processes. We previously demonstrated the ability of clays to decrease emissions at the laboratory scale. In this glasshouse work, manure and urea application rates varied between 50 and 150 kg nitrogen (N)/ha. Clay : manure ratios ranged from 1 : 10 to 1 : 1 (dry weight basis). In the 1-year trial, the above-mentioned N sources were incorporated with vermiculite in 1 L pots containing Sodosol and Ferrosol growing a model pasture (Pennisetum clandestinum or kikuyu grass). Gas emissions were measured periodically by placing the pots in gas-tight bags connected to real-time continuous gas analysers. The vermiculite achieved significant (P ≤ 0.05) and substantial decreases in N2O emissions across all N sources (70% on average). We are currently testing the technology at the field scale; which is showing promising emission decreases (~50%) as well as increases (~20%) in dry matter yields. This technology clearly has merit as an effective GHG mitigation strategy, with potential associated agronomic benefits, although it needs to be verified by a cost–benefit analysis.

Naiset, luonto ja uskonto : Ekofeministinen lähestymistapa uskontotieteessä

Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan ekofeminismiä ja sen tarjoamia mahdollisuuksia uskonnollisten luontodiskurssien tutkimiselle. Ekofeminismi on saavuttanut Suomessa yllättävän vähäistä kiinnostusta siitäkin huolimatta, että sekä feministisellä tutkimuksella että toisaalta uskontoekologialla on jalansijansa suomalaisessakin uskontotieteessä. Tutkielman tehtävänä onkin osaltaan paikata tätä tyhjiötä ja paitsi esitellä keskeisiä ekofeministisiä teorioita, niin myös näiden pohjalta kehitellä uudenlaista näkökulmaa uskontotieteelliseen, ihmisen ja luonnon suhdetta koskevaan tutkimukseen. Metodologisena viitekehyksenä tutkielmassa on käytetty sekä van Dijkin kriittisen diskurssianalyysin että Chris Weedonin kuvaileman jälkistrukturalistisen teorian perusperiaatteita, vaikkei diskurssianalyysi olekaan tutkielman pääasiallinen tavoite. Vaikka tutkielmassa sitoudutaan avoimesti ekofeministiseen projektiin, on näkökulma myös käytettyyn tutkimuskirjallisuuteen kriittinen: yhtäältä ekofeminististä näkökulmaa esitetään vaihtoehdoksi ns. perinteisille uskonnontutkimuksen teorioille, toisaalta tarkastellaan itseään ekofeminismiä ja sen lähtökohtia itsekriittisesti. Tutkielmassa käytetty uskonnon määritelmä nojaa Clifford Geerzin määritelmään uskonnosta symbolijärjestelmänä, joka osaltaan muokkaa yhteiskunnallista järjestystä sekä yhteiskunnan jäsenten syvimpiä arvoja ja asenteita. Näin nähtynä uskonnolla on tärkeä asema myös luontodiskurssien muodostamisessa ja ylläpitämisessä, eikä sitä näin ollen ole syytä jättää ekofeministisen tarkastelun ulkopuolelle. Ekofeminismi on 1970-luvulla syntynyt feminismin haara, jonka perustana on ajatus, että kaikki alistamisen muodot ovat verkkomaisessa suhteessa toisiinsa ja niiden taustalla toimivat samat mekanismit, oli kyseessä sitten rotuun, luokkaan, sukupuoleen tai lajiin perustuva sortaminen. Sorron taustalla toimivan ideologian ydin on käsitys järjen vallasta luonnon yli, jolloin alistetut ryhmät sekä naisellistetaan että naturalisoidaan. Tämän käsityksen perustan muodostavat länsimaista ajattelua jäsentävät dualismit kuten järki/tunne, mies/nainen, mieli/ruumis, yhteiskunta/luonto. Myös ympäristökriisin katsotaan nousevan näistä dualismeista, joten niiden tarkastelu, esiinkaivaminen ja purkaminen ovat yksi tärkeä osa ekofeminististä projektia. Näin ollen myös tässä tutkielmassa on kiinnitetty erityishuomio dualismeihin käyttäen apuna Val Plumwoodin teoriaa dualistisista mekanismeista ja toisaalta Karen Warrenin teoriaa dualismeihin nojaavasta herruuden logiikasta. Tutkielmassa luodaan myös katsaus länsimaisen, dualismeille pohjaavan luontosuhteen syntyyn niin filosofiassa, tieteessä kuin kristinuskossakin siten, kuin se ekofeminismin parissa yleisesti käsitetään. Tutkielmassa keskitytään kahteen ekofeministiseen pääsuuntaukseen, materiaaliseen ja kulttuuriseen ekofeminismiin. Näistä ensimmäisen taustalla ovat erilaiset sosialistiset ja marxilaiset teoriat: painotus on biologisesti ja sosiaalisesti sukupuolittuneessa työn jakautumisessa sekä naisen asemassa uusintavan työn tekijänä ja välittäjänä kulttuurin ja luonnon välissä. Kulttuurinen ekofeminismi puolestaan näkee ongelmien juuret enempi kulttuurisina, jolloin pääpaino on patriarkaalisen kulttuurin tavassa väheksyä kaikkea feminiiniseksi luokiteltua ja siten sekä naisia että luontoa. Tutkielmassa nämä kaksi näkökulmaa yhdistetään, sillä symbolis-materiaalisen sortokäsityksen mukaisesti huomio tulee kiinnittää yhtä lailla sorron materiaaliseen kuin kulttuuriseenkin puoleen. Tämän yhdistämisen tuloksena muodostuu uudenlainen näkökulma: ekofeministinen holismi. Ekofeministisen holismin teorian juuret ovat paitsi yllä mainituissa ekofeminismin muodoissa, niin myös pyrkimyksessä ylittää ekofeministisen ajattelun sisäiset dualismit. Teoria nojaa yhtäältä ns. ekologiseen hoivaetiikkaan ja toisaalta ajatukseen ekologisesta holismista: kokonaisuus hahmotetaan osiensa kautta, ja pääpaino on erilaisten suhteiden verkkomaisessa ymmärtämisessä. Huomio kiinnitetään yhtä lailla materiaaliseen kuin diskursiiviseenkin todellisuuteen, sillä valtarakenteet muotoutuvat näiden kahden vuorovaikutuksesta. Ekofeministinen holismi tarjoaakin uskonnollisten luontodiskurssien kriittiseen tarkasteluun monipuolisen näkökulman, jonka avulla on mahdollista paljastaa näiden diskurssien taustalla vaikuttavia dualistisia rakenteita samalla, kun huomioidaan myös näiden rakenteiden materiaaliset ja sosiaaliset vaikutukset. Kasaantuvien ekologisten ja sosiaalisten ongelmien edessä tällainen näkökulma puoltaa paikkaansa myös uskontotieteessä. Avainsanat: ekofeministiset teoriat - länsimainen luontosuhde - dualismit - ekologinen holismi - ekologinen hoivaetiikka - uskonnollinen luontodiskurssi

What people talk about when they talk about quitting

As part of an ongoing project to explore the design of behaviour-change technology for smoking cessation, we analysed a successful community who come together on the popular Reddit website to discuss quitting and to encourage each other's quit attempts. We found that users remain anonymous but identify according to their quit stage. We examined the form and content of posts, finding that narratives about people and events are more common than other rhetorical forms. Many speak of ongoing struggles with quit attempts. Our analysis reveals forms of sociality spontaneously enacted in a self-managed community of quitters. We compare our results with earlier work on social media and behaviour change.

Unbounding the interaction design problem: The contribution of HCI in three interventions for well-being

In this paper we consider HCI's role in technology interventions for health and well-being. Three projects carried out by the authors are analysed by appropriating the idea of a value chain to chart a causal history from proximal effects generated in early episodes of design through to distal health and well-being outcomes. Responding to recent arguments that favour bounding HCI's contribution to local patterns of use, we propose an unbounded view of HCI that addresses an extended value chain of influence. We discuss a view of HCI methods as mobilising this value chain perspective in multi-disciplinary collaborations through its emphasis on early prototyping and naturalistic studies of use.

Animated Mise-en-scene and aesthetic harmony: An expansion of the traditional principles of animation to 3D computer animation

3D Computer Graphics (CG) has become the dominant medium for modern animated feature films. It is widely understood that traditional principles of animation developed in the 1930s at the Walt Disney Studio remain applicable to this new medium and heavily influence the range of aesthetic motion styles in contemporary animation. Via a frame-by-frame textual analysis of four animated feature films, this thesis tests and confirms the validity of the principles of animation and expands upon them by reinterpreting the Disney principle of appeal as aesthetic harmony, which delineates the way in which character posing and transitions between poses contribute to the animated motion styles that animators work in today.

Tied aid, unemployment and welfare

The effect of foreign aid on the welfare levels of both the recipient and the donor country has been a much analysed topic for research in both the theory of international trade and development economics. In the development economics literature, concerns have been raised since the 1960s on the possible adverse effect of foreign aid on domestic savings and growth.1 The trade theory literature in this respect is much older and dates back to the 1920s when Professors Keynes and Ohlin debated on the effect of foreign aid on international terms of trade.2 Ever since, the terms of trade effect has been the cornerstone in the analysis of the welfare effect of foreign aid in the trade theory literature.3 After some early confusion, it is now well established that in a Walrasian stable world economy with two countries, a necessary condition for foreign aid to have perverse effects is that there is some distortion in either of the two countries.4 It is also known that, under normality and substitutability of goods, untied aid cannot be strictly Pareto-improving in a tariff distorted world.5

R1SVM: A randomised nonlinear approach to large-scale anomaly detection

The problem of unsupervised anomaly detection arises in a wide variety of practical applications. While one-class support vector machines have demonstrated their effectiveness as an anomaly detection technique, their ability to model large datasets is limited due to their memory and time complexity for training. To address this issue for supervised learning of kernel machines, there has been growing interest in random projection methods as an alternative to the computationally expensive problems of kernel matrix construction and sup-port vector optimisation. In this paper we leverage the theory of nonlinear random projections and propose the Randomised One-class SVM (R1SVM), which is an efficient and scalable anomaly detection technique that can be trained on large-scale datasets. Our empirical analysis on several real-life and synthetic datasets shows that our randomised 1SVM algorithm achieves comparable or better accuracy to deep auto encoder and traditional kernelised approaches for anomaly detection, while being approximately 100 times faster in training and testing.

R1STM: One-class support tensor machine with randomised kernel

Identifying unusual or anomalous patterns in an underlying dataset is an important but challenging task in many applications. The focus of the unsupervised anomaly detection literature has mostly been on vectorised data. However, many applications are more naturally described using higher-order tensor representations. Approaches that vectorise tensorial data can destroy the structural information encoded in the high-dimensional space, and lead to the problem of the curse of dimensionality. In this paper we present the first unsupervised tensorial anomaly detection method, along with a randomised version of our method. Our anomaly detection method, the One-class Support Tensor Machine (1STM), is a generalisation of conventional one-class Support Vector Machines to higher-order spaces. 1STM preserves the multiway structure of tensor data, while achieving significant improvement in accuracy and efficiency over conventional vectorised methods. We then leverage the theory of nonlinear random projections to propose the Randomised 1STM (R1STM). Our empirical analysis on several real and synthetic datasets shows that our R1STM algorithm delivers comparable or better accuracy to a state-of-the-art deep learning method and traditional kernelised approaches for anomaly detection, while being approximately 100 times faster in training and testing.

Elliptical summary randomisation for sensor-based human activity recognition

Many conventional statistical machine learning al- gorithms generalise poorly if distribution bias ex- ists in the datasets. For example, distribution bias arises in the context of domain generalisation, where knowledge acquired from multiple source domains need to be used in a previously unseen target domains. We propose Elliptical Summary Randomisation (ESRand), an efficient domain generalisation approach that comprises of a randomised kernel and elliptical data summarisation. ESRand learns a domain interdependent projection to a la- tent subspace that minimises the existing biases to the data while maintaining the functional relationship between domains. In the latent subspace, ellipsoidal summaries replace the samples to enhance the generalisation by further removing bias and noise in the data. Moreover, the summarisation enables large-scale data processing by significantly reducing the size of the data. Through comprehensive analysis, we show that our subspace-based approach outperforms state-of-the-art results on several activity recognition benchmark datasets, while keeping the computational complexity significantly low.

Evaluating viewpoint entropy for ribbon representation of protein structure

While many measures of viewpoint goodness have been proposed in computer graphics, none have been evaluated for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. To fill this gap, we conducted a user study on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, collecting human viewpoint preferences from 65 participants for 4 representative su- perfamilies of protein domains. In particular, we evaluated viewpoint entropy, which was previously shown to be a good predictor for human viewpoint preference of other, mostly non-abstract objects. In a second study, we asked 7 molecular biology experts to find the best viewpoint of the same protein domains and compared their choices with viewpoint entropy. Our results show that viewpoint entropy overall is a significant predictor of human viewpoint preference for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. However, the accuracy is highly dependent on the complexity of the structure: while most participants agree on good viewpoints for small, non-globular structures with few secondary structure elements, viewpoint preference varies considerably for complex structures. Finally, experts tend to choose viewpoints of both low and high viewpoint entropy to emphasize different aspects of the respective structure.

Prey of the silver-headed antechinus (Antechinus argentus), a new species of Australian dasyurid marsupial

The silver-headed antechinus (Antechinus argentus) is one of Australia’s most recently described mammals, and the single known population at Kroombit Tops in south-east Queensland is threatened. Nothing is known of the species’ ecology, so during 2014 we collected faecal pellets each month (March–September) from a population at the type locality to gather baseline data on diet composition. A total of 38 faecal pellets were collected from 12 individuals (eight females, four males) and microscopic analysis of pellets identified seven invertebrate orders, with 70% combined mean composition of beetles (Coleoptera: 38%) and cockroaches (Blattodea: 32%). Other orders that featured as prey were ants, crickets/grasshoppers, butterflies/moths, spiders, and true bugs. Given that faecal pellets could only be collected from a single habitat type (Eucalyptus montivaga high-altitude open forest) and location, this is best described as a generalist insectivorous diet that is characteristic of other previously studied congeners.

Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations

Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders1, and Darwin was one of the first to recognize that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness2. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness that is common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power3, 4. Here we use runs of homozygosity to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts, and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in one second, general cognitive ability and educational attainment (P < 1 × 10−300, 2.1 × 10−6, 2.5 × 10−10 and 1.8 × 10−10, respectively). In each case, increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months’ less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing evidence that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples5, 6, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection7, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been.

Innovation is not the only thing

[Book] This Handbook draws on current research and case studies to consider how managers can become more creative across four aspects of their business: innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation – and does so in an accessible, engaging and user-friendly format.