Viewing DVM via general behaviors of zooplankton: A way bridging the success of individual and population

In this paper, we viewed the diel vertical migration (DVM) of copepod in the context of the animal's immediate behaviors of everyday concerns and constructed an instantaneous behavioral criterion effective for DVM and non-DVM behaviors. This criterion employed the function of 'venturous revenue' (VR), which is the product of the food intake and probability of the survival, to evaluate the gains and losses of the behaviors that the copepod could trade-off. The optimal behaviors are to find the optimal habitats to maximize VR. Two types of VRs are formulated and tested by the theoretical analysis and simulations. The sensed VR, monitoring the real-time changes of trade-offs and thereby determining the optimum habitat, is validated to be the effective objective function for the optimization of the behavior; whereas, the realized VR, quantifying the actual profit obtained by an optimal copepod in the sensed-VR-determined habitat, defines the life history of a specific age cohort. The achievement of a robust copepod overwintering stock through integrating the dynamics of the constituent age cohorts subjected to the instantaneous behavioral criterion for DVM clearly exemplified a possible way bridging the immediate pursuit of an individual and the end success of the population. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

强流脉冲离子束辐照45钢表面热效应的模拟

以Fourier瞬态传热方程为基础,确定了强流脉冲离子束(HIPIB)热效应的基本传热方程,对靶材45钢进行不同能量参数的HIPIB辐照热效应的模拟计算.针对离子注入金属内部的情况,在模拟束流加载方式上分别采用体加载和面加载,比较了两种加载计算结果之间的差距.本算法的另一个改进就是在高能量辐照下,用单元死活法对蚀坑部分材料的消失进行模拟.结果表明,用单元死活法模拟单元的失效,更能符合HIPIB辐照金属表面热效应的蚀坑机制;单元死活法对靶材的升温过程没有明显影响,但对冷却阶段,可以显著提高模拟的精度.

北祁连与块状硫化物矿床有关的早古生代火山岩的地球化学研究

Different conclusions from previous work are made from the geochemical study for the early Paleozoic volcanic rocks hosting massive sulfide deposits in the north Qilian Orogen. The main points are: (1)The geochemical characteristics of the basalts and rhyolites from the Baiyin deposit are not consistent with that of the volcanic rocks in the continental rift setting, but show the relationship with subduction. The basalts and rhyolites from the Baiyin deposit are probably individual tectonic slice piled by subduction, and there is no bimodal volcanic rock suite occurred in the Baiyin deposit. Zircon U-Pb dating constrains the magmatic emplacement of basalts and rhyolites at 475±10Ma and 453±12Ma, respectively. The basalts are characterized by enriched Th and Sr, and depleted Nb, Ta and Ti. They have relatively high Th/Nb ratios between 0.9 and 1.3. Their εNd(T) values vary from -1.2 to +3.4. The chemical and isotopic compositions display a typical subduction-related signature, and they suggest that an enriched component with the isotopic composition of EMII might have contributed to the generation of the Baiyin basalts. The basalts were likely formed in a mature island-arc or a volcanic arc built on comparatively young or thin continental crust in an active continental margin. The rhyoIites have low concentrations of LILE compared to the basalts. They do not seen to have a relationship with the basalts, because of their significantly higher εNd(T) values (+4.3～+7.7). The high and positive εNd(T) values also rule out their derivation from anatexis of the continental crust. A modeling study suggests that the source.of the Zhe-Huo and Xiaotieshan rhyolites is similar to boninite and IAT (island-arc tholeiite), and hence indicating an intra-oceanic arc environment. (2) The formation of the Shangliugou volcanic rocks from .Qilian area is also related to subduction. The basaltic andesite have low TiO_2(0.45～0.63%) and P_2O_5(0.04～0.09) content, and high Th/Nb ratios (0.3～0.6). They show flat REE patterns. Their εNd(T) values vary in a narrow range from +4.8 to +6.4. The chemical and isotopic compositions indicate that they are derived from a slightly depleted mantle source and are fromed in intra-island arc setting. The rhyolites show calc-alkaline trend. They show enriched LREE and fiat HREE patterns with obvious negative Eu anomaly. They have high Th/Ta ratios (5.0 ～ 11.7) and large negative εNd(T) values (-2.6 ～ -8.4). The rhyolites are formed in active continental margin and result from a mixed process of two endmembers, or crust assimilation. (3) The metal elements of the volcanic-hosted massive sulfide deposit have two sources, the copper and zinc are derived from rhyolitic magmas whereas the lead are probably related to old sediments overlying the rhyolites. (4) It is suggested here that the volcanic rocks hosting massive sulfide deposit in the north Qilian orogen, which are previously considered as a bimodal suite of Neo-proterozoic to middle Cambrian age in a continental rift, are virtually related to subduction magmatism in Ordovician age, and there might have no continental rift magmatism of Neo-proterozoic to middle Cambrian in the north Qilian.

Internet Fish

I have invented "Internet Fish," a novel class of resource-discovery tools designed to help users extract useful information from the Internet. Internet Fish (IFish) are semi-autonomous, persistent information brokers; users deploy individual IFish to gather and refine information related to a particular topic. An IFish will initiate research, continue to discover new sources of information, and keep tabs on new developments in that topic. As part of the information-gathering process the user interacts with his IFish to find out what it has learned, answer questions it has posed, and make suggestions for guidance. Internet Fish differ from other Internet resource discovery systems in that they are persistent, personal and dynamic. As part of the information-gathering process IFish conduct extended, long-term conversations with users as they explore. They incorporate deep structural knowledge of the organization and services of the net, and are also capable of on-the-fly reconfiguration, modification and expansion. Human users may dynamically change the IFish in response to changes in the environment, or IFish may initiate such changes itself. IFish maintain internal state, including models of its own structure, behavior, information environment and its user; these models permit an IFish to perform meta-level reasoning about its own structure. To facilitate rapid assembly of particular IFish I have created the Internet Fish Construction Kit. This system provides enabling technology for the entire class of Internet Fish tools; it facilitates both creation of new IFish as well as additions of new capabilities to existing ones. The Construction Kit includes a collection of encapsulated heuristic knowledge modules that may be combined in mix-and-match fashion to create a particular IFish; interfaces to new services written with the Construction Kit may be immediately added to "live" IFish. Using the Construction Kit I have created a demonstration IFish specialized for finding World-Wide Web documents related to a given group of documents. This "Finder" IFish includes heuristics that describe how to interact with the Web in general, explain how to take advantage of various public indexes and classification schemes, and provide a method for discovering similarity relationships among documents.

Specialization of Perceptual Processes

In this report, I discuss the use of vision to support concrete, everyday activity. I will argue that a variety of interesting tasks can be solved using simple and inexpensive vision systems. I will provide a number of working examples in the form of a state-of-the-art mobile robot, Polly, which uses vision to give primitive tours of the seventh floor of the MIT AI Laboratory. By current standards, the robot has a broad behavioral repertoire and is both simple and inexpensive (the complete robot was built for less than $20,000 using commercial board-level components). The approach I will use will be to treat the structure of the agent's activity---its task and environment---as positive resources for the vision system designer. By performing a careful analysis of task and environment, the designer can determine a broad space of mechanisms which can perform the desired activity. My principal thesis is that for a broad range of activities, the space of applicable mechanisms will be broad enough to include a number mechanisms which are simple and economical. The simplest mechanisms that solve a given problem will typically be quite specialized to that problem. One thus worries that building simple vision systems will be require a great deal of {it ad-hoc} engineering that cannot be transferred to other problems. My second thesis is that specialized systems can be analyzed and understood in a principled manner, one that allows general lessons to be extracted from specialized systems. I will present a general approach to analyzing specialization through the use of transformations that provably improve performance. By demonstrating a sequence of transformations that derive a specialized system from a more general one, we can summarize the specialization of the former in a compact form that makes explicit the additional assumptions that it makes about its environment. The summary can be used to predict the performance of the system in novel environments. Individual transformations can be recycled in the design of future systems.

Uso de equipamentos de proteção individual na pulverização de videiras.

2006

North Wales Clinical Librarian project. Final project report

Urquhart, C., Durbin, J. & Turner, J. (2005). North Wales Clinical Librarian project. Final project report. Aberystwyth: Department of Information Studies. Summary report, plus individual site summary reports also available from http://users.aber.ac.uk/cju/ Sponsorship: NHS Trusts in North Wales

Individual variation in the milk yield response to bovine somatotropin in dairy cows

M. T. Rose, T. E. C. Weekes and P. Rowlinson (2004). Individual variation in the milk yield response to bovine somatotropin in dairy cows. Journal of Dairy Science, 87(7), 2024-2031. Sponsorship: industry RAE2008

Agressividade e representações sobre a violência em jovens institucionalizados

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Psicologia Clínica e da Saúde.

Searching the Sky with CONFIGR-STARS

SyNAPSE program of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (HRL Laboratories LLC, subcontract #801881-BS under DARPA prime contract HR0011-09-C-0001); CELEST, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center (SBE-0354378)

Practice Links [Issue 45, December 2011]

Practice Links is a free e-publication for practitioners working in Irish social services, voluntary and nongovernmental sectors. Practice Links was created to enable practitioners to keep up-to-date with new publications, electronic resources and conference opportunities. Issue 45 unveils a new, regular section in the publication entitled Practice Signposts. This section aims to promote quality research- informed databases.

Acoustic behaviour, ecology and social structure of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus, Montagu 1821) in the North Atlantic

Communication is important for social and other behavioural interactions in most marine mammal species. The bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus, Montagu, 1821) is a highly social species that use whistles as communication calls to express identity and to initiate and maintain contact between socially interactive individuals. In this thesis, the degree of variability in whistle behaviour and whistle characteristics was examined between different habitats on a range of spatial scales. The whistle characteristics that best discriminated between different communities were investigated, along with exploration of whistle variation in relation to habitat type, levels of social interaction and relatedness. Finally, the use and variability of individually distinctive calls (signature whistles) within and between Irish and US waters were also examined. Relatively high levels of whistle variation were found within a genetically and socially isolated population of dolphins in the Shannon Estuary, reflecting the need for individual identification and distinctive whistles in a population with long term site fidelity and high levels of social cohesion. Variation between reproductively separate communities in Irish waters was relatively small except between animals in inshore compared with continental shelf waters. The greatest differences in whistle structure overall were evident between dolphins using inshore and offshore US waters, likely reflecting social isolation of the two distinct ecotypes that occur in these waters but also variation in behaviour or habitat conditions. Variation found among inshore communities in US waters reflected similarities in habitat use and levels of social interaction. These findings suggest that vocal variation is socially mediated, behaviourally maintained and dependent on levels of social contact between individuals. The findings contribute to our understanding of the interaction of factors influencing vocalisation behaviour in this behaviourally complex and ecologically plastic species.

Physico-chemical properties and component interactions in high solids food systems

The present study aimed to investigate interactions of components in the high solids systems during storage. The systems included (i) lactose–maltodextrin (MD) with various dextrose equivalents at different mixing ratios, (ii) whey protein isolate (WPI)–oil [olive oil (OO) or sunflower oil (SO)] at 75:25 ratio, and (iii) WPI–oil– {glucose (G)–fructose (F) 1:1 syrup [70% (w/w) total solids]} at a component ratio of 45:15:40. Crystallization of lactose was delayed and increasingly inhibited with increasing MD contents and higher DE values (small molecular size or low molecular weight), although all systems showed similar glass transition temperatures at each aw. The water sorption isotherms of non-crystalline lactose and lactose–MD (0.11 to 0.76 aw) could be derived from the sum of sorbed water contents of individual amorphous components. The GAB equation was fitted to data of all non-crystalline systems. The protein–oil and protein–oil–sugar materials showed maximum protein oxidation and disulfide bonding at 2 weeks of storage at 20 and 40°C. The WPI–OO showed denaturation and preaggregation of proteins during storage at both temperatures. The presence of G–F in WPI–oil increased Tonset and Tpeak of protein aggregation, and oxidative damage of the protein during storage, especially in systems with a higher level of unsaturated fatty acids. Lipid oxidation and glycation products in the systems containing sugar promoted oxidation of proteins, increased changes in protein conformation and aggregation of proteins, and resulted in insolubility of solids or increased hydrophobicity concomitantly with hardening of structure, covalent crosslinking of proteins, and formation of stable polymerized solids, especially after storage at 40°C. We found protein hydration transitions preceding denaturation transitions in all high protein systems and also the glass transition of confined water in protein systems using dynamic mechanical analysis.