(1871–1957): Eclectic Theoretician of the Earth

structural geology, physiography, geophysics, and marine geology who wrote cogent syntheses that considered Earth from several vantages. In his earliest book, he presented what he called an “eclectic theory ” of volcanic action and magmatic differentiation, and thus I describe him as an “eclectic theoretician of the Earth.” The son of a tea merchant and a minister’s daughter, Daly was born on a farm near Napanee, southeastern Ontario, the youngest of four sons and five daughters. Late in his career, he recalled the simple life of a small town, the high standards of conduct expected by his parents, and an early introduction to the importance of hard work and wide reading. He was educated in public schools and attended Victoria College in Ontario (B.A., 1891; S.B., 1892; instructor in mathematics, 1892). There, inspired by Professor A.P. Coleman’s description of granite (“This is made of crystals.”), he decided on a career in geology. Encouraged by interviews with Nathaniel Southgate Shaler an

Information transmission in oscillatory neural activity

Periodic neural activity not locked to the stimulus or to motor responses is usually ignored. Here, we present new tools for modeling and quantifying the information transmission based on periodic neural activity that occurs with quasi-random phase relative to the stimulus. We propose a model to reproduce characteristic features of oscillatory spike trains, such as histograms of inter-spike intervals and phase locking of spikes to an oscillatory influence. The proposed model is based on an inhomogeneous Gamma process governed by a density function that is a product of the usual stimulus-dependent rate and a quasi-periodic function. Further, we present an analysis method generalizing the direct method (Rieke et al, 1999; Brenner et al, 2000) to assess the information content in such data. We demonstrate these tools on recordings from relay cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the cat.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Biological Cybernetic

Sexual Gender-Based Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This thesis explores the issue of Sexual Gender-Based Violence in the Democratic of Congo, focusing specifically on the Eastern region of the country. An analysis of the United Nations peacekeeping operation forms a large part the study because the operation remains the most significant multilateral attempt to protect Congolese civilians from sexual violence and other human rights abuses. The objective of the thesis is to highlight the issue of Sexual Gender-Based Violence, describe the background to the continued violence in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and offer an explanation of the causal factors behind the sexual crimes being perpetrated. By also focusing on the efforts of the peacekeeping operation this work will attempt to identify any obstacles to protecting civilians, and how these might be overcome. The method of research is based on analysis of secondary sources, including official United Nations report, journal articles, reports of non-governmental organizations, and media coverage of the region. This research is supplemented by primary source interviews with individuals working on, or with direct knowledge of, the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The research has unveiled the deep complexity of the conflict occurring in the East and shows that a combination of factors, that include poverty and lack of development, are creating an environment conducive to unlawful and destructive behavior. Equally complex is the task of finding a solution. However, one realization is clear, the region, and the wider country, need several issues to be addressed simultaneously. Developing the country\u27s infrastructure and boosting its economy should be significant priorities. Alongside this is a reform of the security sector, which will not only safeguard the rule of law, but also ensure the future safety of civilians

The Portrait Anatomised

The Portrait Anatomised is a suite of five lenticular prints and forty-five mono-prints, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, with an accompanying catalogue. Aldworth was commissioned by Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity in 2009 to make a series of works exploring epilepsy. The research dimension of Aldworth’s project was the production of novel modes of expressing visually the experience of living with the disorder. Based as artist-in-residence in the neurophysiology department at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, Aldworth met with three patients, each with a different type of epilepsy. Weaving together their neuroscientific, clinical, and personal narratives revealed two aspects of the patients’ experience: (1) that they saw their epileptic seizures as an aspect of a more complex personality; and (2) the lack of visual representation of the ‘absences’ that characterize how epilepsy occurs in patients’ experience. In response to (1), Aldworth created portraits of her three correspondents by tiling together nine monotype prints to suggest the complexity of human personality. As regards (2), visual representations of the disorder tend to be confined either to EEGs (electroencephalographic modes of recording electrical activity) or to witnessing a person having an epileptic seizure. These represent physical manifestations of the epilepsy but leave unaddressed the subjective feel of the ‘absences’. In response, Aldwoth adopted the ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ property of lenticulars to create pictures of absence. The lenticulars were part of an exhibition at the Key of Life Festival, Scheltema Contemporary Gallery, Leiden, Netherlands, 2010. The lenticulars are now permanently installed at St Thomas’s Hospital, London. Aldworth recounted her production of the portraits in an edition of BBC Radio 3’s programme Between the Ears, entitled Anatomising a Portrait: An Epileptic Journey, broadcast on 21 May 2011. Dissemination is ongoing

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The contribution of fog to the water balance along the eastern escarpment of South Africa.

Master of Science in Hydrology. University of KwaZulu-Natal Pitermaritzburg, 2017.Fog is a frequent phenomenon in South Africa, occurring mostly on the west coast and along the mountains forming the southern and eastern escarpments. Fog measurements are, however, neglected in water balance studies, resulting in an underestimate of the precipitation input to catchments that experience frequent fog occurrences. World-wide, tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF) studies have proven that fog deposition, facilitated via the interception of fog droplets by vegetation, can represent a significant fraction of the total hydrological input. In South Africa, limited literature exists on the contribution of fog to the country’s water yielding catchments. In particular, information on fog patterns and its contribution to the water balance is extremely scarce in the mountains forming South Africa’s eastern escarpment, where only one study has been previously conducted. Additionally, no forestry studies in the country have attempted to quantify fog. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine the contribution of fog to the water balance of two research catchments of different land use types and altitudes, situated along South Africa’s eastern escarpment. These sites included the Cathedral Peak research catchments and Two Streams; Cathedral Peak is a high altitude montane grassland catchment, whereas Two Streams is at a lower altitude and afforested by exotic plantations. At Two Streams, fog and the climatic conditions were monitored over a 16-month period (July 2015 to October 2016) and additional measurements of throughfall, stemflow and soil water content were carried out in an Acacia mearnsii plantation, to further determine the fog contribution in a forest plantation. At the Cathedral Peak research catchments, fog and the climatic conditions were monitored at three sites, including Mike’s Pass Meteorological Station, Catchment VI and a High Altitude site. Monitoring was conducted over a 14-month period (September 2015 to October 2016) at Mike’s Pass and over a two-month period (August 2015 to September 2015) at Catchment VI and the High Altitude site. Fog was found to be prevalent, occurring frequently and for long durations, potentially contributing fairly substantial amounts of water to the water balance. It occurred all year round, but was predominantly a summer phenomenon, however, it comprised a greater proportion of the total precipitation during the dry winter season. At Mike’s Pass, fog represented a contribution of almost 30 % during several drier months. At Two Streams, during the driest month of August 2015, fog represented a contribution of approximately 38 % of the total precipitation. Fog increased with altitude as a whole, but changes in other topographic features (i.e. hillslope orientation and slope) over short distances, meant that the delivery of fog was not uniform from one point to another at the same altitude. Fog occurrence and water yield increased with wind speed, although this was not found to be a very significant relationship. A stronger relationship between wind direction and fog was observed, particularly at Mike’s Pass, the higher altitude site, which was better exposed to fog-bearing winds. At Two Streams, fog did not facilitate throughfall of rainfall or contribute to soil water. The indirect effects of limiting wet canopy evaporation and transpiration rates were suggested to be a more relevant effect of fog on the water balance. These findings further the understanding of the contribution of fog to the water balance along the eastern escarpment of South Africa and will assist in future long-term climatological studies of fog and low cloud occurrence in the region

Representation of Time-Varying Stimuli by a Network Exhibiting Oscillations on a Faster Time Scale

Sensory processing is associated with gamma frequency oscillations (30–80 Hz) in sensory cortices. This raises the question whether gamma oscillations can be directly involved in the representation of time-varying stimuli, including stimuli whose time scale is longer than a gamma cycle. We are interested in the ability of the system to reliably distinguish different stimuli while being robust to stimulus variations such as uniform time-warp. We address this issue with a dynamical model of spiking neurons and study the response to an asymmetric sawtooth input current over a range of shape parameters. These parameters describe how fast the input current rises and falls in time. Our network consists of inhibitory and excitatory populations that are sufficient for generating oscillations in the gamma range. The oscillations period is about one-third of the stimulus duration. Embedded in this network is a subpopulation of excitatory cells that respond to the sawtooth stimulus and a subpopulation of cells that respond to an onset cue. The intrinsic gamma oscillations generate a temporally sparse code for the external stimuli. In this code, an excitatory cell may fire a single spike during a gamma cycle, depending on its tuning properties and on the temporal structure of the specific input; the identity of the stimulus is coded by the list of excitatory cells that fire during each cycle. We quantify the properties of this representation in a series of simulations and show that the sparseness of the code makes it robust to uniform warping of the time scale. We find that resetting of the oscillation phase at stimulus onset is important for a reliable representation of the stimulus and that there is a tradeoff between the resolution of the neural representation of the stimulus and robustness to time-warp. Author Summary Sensory processing of time-varying stimuli, such as speech, is associated with high-frequency oscillatory cortical activity, the functional significance of which is still unknown. One possibility is that the oscillations are part of a stimulus-encoding mechanism. Here, we investigate a computational model of such a mechanism, a spiking neuronal network whose intrinsic oscillations interact with external input (waveforms simulating short speech segments in a single acoustic frequency band) to encode stimuli that extend over a time interval longer than the oscillation's period. The network implements a temporally sparse encoding, whose robustness to time warping and neuronal noise we quantify. To our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that a biophysically plausible model of oscillations occurring in the processing of auditory input may generate a representation of signals that span multiple oscillation cycles.National Science Foundation (DMS-0211505); Burroughs Wellcome Fund; U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Researc

Validity and reliability of an objective test of cricket skills

This study was conducted to assess the validity and reliability of four self-designed, objective tests of cricket batting, bowling, fielding and general ability skills. The batting test requires the batsman to hit a suspended ball at a target area as many times as possible in 60 seconds. His score is doubled to give his score for the batting test. In the bowling test the bowler is required to bowl ten balls at target areas marked on the pitch. Each delivery is recorded to give him a score out of 100. The fielding test requires the fielder to catch and field seven balls in a predetermined sequence. Each fielded ball that is not thrown through the target area incurs a penalty of three seconds. The total time taken is used to obtain the fielding test score out of 100. In the general ability test the player is required to hit a ball up and down twenty-five times. He then has to run along a predetermined path and field three balls and then bowl three balls at a target. A penalty of three seconds is added onto the time taken for each ball that does not pass through the target area. The actual score, out of 100, is determined from the total time taken. To determine the validity of the objective tests of batting, bowling, fielding and general ability, 155 subjects were subjectively assessed in these four categories by experienced coaches. The four objective tests were then conducted on these subjects and the scores compared. Forty-four subjects were assessed by experienced and inexperienced testers to determine the reliability of the tests when administered by different testers. To determine the reliability of the tests when repeatedly administered by one tester 23 subjects were assessed on five consecutive days. Significant correlations (p < 0,05) were found for the tests of validity between subjective and objective assessment (0,43 to 0,81) and the test for objectivity between experienced and inexperienced testers (0,41 to 0,78). A significant improvement (p < 0,05) in scores occurred during repeated testing, but most of this improvement took place between the first two tests. The results indicate that the tests are valid and reliable tests of cricket batting, bowling, fielding and general ability, if sufficient pre-test practice is allowed