Three Gottschalk children digging in the sand; Nordeney, Germany. Portraits; Children

Digital Image

Three Gottschalk children digging in the sand; Nordeney, Germany. Portraits; Children

Digital Image

Relationship Between the Levels of Non-structural Carbohydrates, Digging Date, Nursery-growing Environment, and Chilling in Strawberry Transplants in a Subtropical Environment

Experiments were conducted to study the effect of time of digging and nursery-growing environment on the levels of non-structural carbohydrates in 'Festival' strawberry transplants (Fragaria xananassa) over 2 years in southeastern Queensland, Australia. We were interested in determining whether there was a strong relationship between the potential productivity of this material and reserves in the plants. First, bare-rooted plants were obtained from Stanthorpe in southern Queensland from early March to mid-April/late April. Second, bare-rooted plants were sourced from Stanthorpe (a warm-growing area) or from Toolangi in Victoria (a cool-growing area). In Year 1 of the experiments, the nursery material from the different treatments was grown at Nambour in southeastern Queensland and fruit yield determined. The total weight of nonstructural carbohydrates/plant increased as digging was delayed and was higher in the plants from Stanthorpe than the plants from Toolangi. Plants dug on 17 Mar. in Year 1 had higher weights of non-structural carbohydrates [292 mg/plant dry weight (DW)] than plants dug on 3 Mar. (224 mg/plant) and higher early yield to the end of June or to the end of July and higher total yield to mid-October adjusted by the length of the growing season for the different treatments. Plants dug on 1 Apr. (408 mg/plant) or on 13 Apr. (445 mg/plant) had higher reserves than the plants dug on 17 Mar. but lower yields. Only the differences in yields between the plants dug on 3 Mar. and 17 Mar. reflected the differences in carbohydrates. The stock from Stanthorpe had greater reserves (408 mg/plant) than the stock from Toolangi (306 mg/plant) but similar yields in Year 1 possibly because of poorer flowering in the nursery plants. It was concluded that carbohydrate reserves in transplants only partially reflect their productivity in this environment.

Digging into signs: Developing standard annotation practices for cross-linguistic, quantitative analysis of sign language data. Final Report.

For sign languages used by deaf communities, linguistic corpora have until recently been unavailable, due to the lack of a writing system and a written culture in these communities, and the very recent advent of digital video. Recent improvements in video and computer technology have now made larger sign language datasets possible; however, large sign language datasets that are fully machine-readable are still elusive. This is due to two challenges. 1. Inconsistencies that arise when signs are annotated by means of spoken/written language. 2. The fact that many parts of signed interaction are not necessarily fully composed of lexical signs (equivalent of words), instead consisting of constructions that are less conventionalised. As sign language corpus building progresses, the potential for some standards in annotation is beginning to emerge. But before this project, there were no attempts to standardise these practices across corpora, which is required to be able to compare data crosslinguistically. This project thus had the following aims: 1. To develop annotation standards for glosses (lexical/word level) 2. To test their reliability and validity 3. To improve current software tools that facilitate a reliable workflow Overall the project aimed not only to set a standard for the whole field of sign language studies throughout the world but also to make significant advances toward two of the world’s largest machine-readable datasets for sign languages – specifically the BSL Corpus (British Sign Language, http://bslcorpusproject.org) and the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands, http://www.ru.nl/corpusngt).

Digging into Data 3 Progress Meeting

On Wednesday 17th June, the UK projects funded under round 3 of the Digging into Data challenge gathered together at Paddington for the mid-term progress meeting. This workshop provided projects with the opportunity to present, not just on progress to their plan, but on highlights, issues, challenges and share this information with the funders and other projects.

Short-term morphological changes after sand-digging during a sand sculpture activity

The morphology of the beach backshore and foreshore at Huiquan Bay, Qingdao, China, is characterized by a single intertidal sandbar system with a spring tide range of 4.59 m. The beach was measured with a laser total station of Leica TPS402. Contours of the beach were generated using data collected in March and November 2005. The survey method provided 2 mm measuring accuracy and 4-10 m horizontal spacing. The net accretion volume of the foreshore was about 11, 215 m(3) from March to November. After sand sculpture activity, the axis of the sand trough migrated onshore from about 3.5 m to 17.5 m on the foreshore beach in November. At the same time, the axis of the sandbar crest migrated onshore no more than 42.25 m on the northwest foreshore; and it migrated offshore no more than 23.75 m on the southeast foreshore. On the northwest and southeast foreshore beach, two strips of erosion areas with a thickness of 0-0.2 m appeared on the sandbar crest. Accretion occurred at the bottom of the sand trough with a thickness of similar to 0.2-0.6 m. The sandbar height decreased after sand sculpture activity, and it was no more than 0.7 m in March and 0.6 m in November. Human activities, such as sand digging on the sandbar crest during sand sculpture activity, also can disturb the beach morphology of intertidal bar systems. This phenomenon also was validated by comparison of beach morphology, the results of a color artificial tracer experiment and a sediment transportation trend prediction.

Burrow architecture and digging activity in the Cape dune mole rat

While females are traditionally thought to invest more time and energy into parental care than males, males often invest more resources into searching and displaying for mates, obtaining mates and in male-male conflict. Solitary subterranean mammals perform these activities in a particularly challenging niche, necessitating energetically expensive burrowing to both search for mates and forage for food. This restriction presumably affects males more than females as the former are thought to dig longer tunnels that cover greater distances to search for females. We excavated burrow systems of male and female Cape dune mole rats Bathyergus suillus the, largest truly subterranean mammal, to investigate whether male burrows differ from those of females in ways that reflect mate searching by males. We consider burrow architecture (length, internal dimensions, fractal dimension of tunnel systems, number of nesting chambers and mole mounds on the surface) in relation to mating strategy. Males excavated significantly longer burrow systems with higher fractal dimensions and larger burrow areas than females. Male burrow systems were also significantly farther from one another than females were from other females' burrow systems. However, no sex differences were evident in tunnel cross-sectional area, mass of soil excavated per mound, number of mounds produced per unit burrow length or mass of soil excavated per burrow system. Hence, while males may use their habitat differently from females, they do not appear to differ in the dimensions of the tunnels they create. Thus, exploration and use of the habitat differs between the sexes, which may be a consequence of sex differences in mating behaviour and greater demands for food.

Digging up the future

Malone, C. and S. Stoddart,. , in Nonesuch - magazine of University of Bristol. 1995, University of Bristol: Bristol. p. 40-42.

Stonehenge:Digging in the Past Series.

Malone, C. and N. Bernard, Stonehenge. 2004, New York, Oxford University Press.

Digging Beckman Hall foundation, Chapman University, Orange, California

Digging the foundation for the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Business and Technology Hall, Chapman University, Orange, California, ca. 1997. Turner Construction, contractor.

Digging the foundation for Beckman Hall, Chapman University, Orange, California

Digging the foundation for the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Business and Technology Hall, Chapman University, Orange, California, ca. 1997. Turner Construction, contractor.

Note from the Port Dalhousie and Thorold Railway to Mrs. E. Parnell with prices for digging a well, moving a hog pen and repairing a fence

Note from the Port Dalhousie and Thorold Railway to Mrs. E. Parnell with prices for digging a well, moving a hog pen and repairing a fence, n.d.

Romanian politics: struggling with the grass roots and digging for democracy. EPIN Commentary No. 11, 29 August 2012

Romania was on a good trajectory to meet the European standards in democracy. This process began before the country’s accession to the EU in 2007 and has continued since thanks to the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM). The recent political turmoil has put in danger this trajectory. 2012 will continue to remain a very difficult year for Romania, economically and politically, especially in light of the referendum’s result invalidating the suspension of the President and the upcoming parliamentary elections due to take place at the end of this year. Now is time to restore the process of strengthening Romania’s democratic institutions and rule of law. There are important roles to be played in this process both by the Romanian political class and the European institutions.