The turtles of the Purbeck Limestone Group of Dorset, southern England

The turtles from the Purbeck Limestone are revised and it is concluded that there are four shell-based cryptodire species present, namely Pleurosternon bullockii, ‘Glyptops’typocardium comb. nov., Helochelydra anglica comb. nov.,Hylaeochelys latiscutata. There is also one skull-based species, Dorsetochelys delairi, which may prove to be the skull of ‘Glyptops’, Hylaeochelys or an unknown shell-type. All other taxa are junior synonyms except ‘Chelone’obovata Owen, 1842 and Tretosternon punctatum Owen, 1842 which are nomina dubia, the material being unfigured and either lost or incorrectly associated. Other taxonomic conclusions are that (1) because Tretosternon is a nomen dubium, the next senior name for this Purbeck–Wealden genus is Helochelydra Nopcsa, 1928; (2) ‘Pleurosternon’typocardium and ‘Glyptops’ruetimeyeri are synonymous, the senior combination being ‘Glyptops’typocardium; (3) the Purbeck ‘Tretosternon’ material is combined with the holotype and only specimen of Platychelys? anglica as Helochelydra anglica comb. nov.; (4) Hylaeochelys emarginata and H. sollasi are junior synonyms of Hylaeochelys latiscutata; (5) one of Owen's ‘lost’ syntypes of ‘Tretosternon punctatum’ has been recognised and is a plastron of Hylaeochelys latiscutata

Using local ecological knowledge to assess the status of the Critically Endangered Chinese giant salamander Andrias davidianus in Guizhou Province, China

The Critically Endangered Chinese giant salamander Andrias davidianus, the world's largest amphibian, is severely threatened by unsustainable exploitation of wild individuals. However, field data with which to assess the salamander's status, population trends, or exploitation across its geographical range are limited, and recent field surveys using standard ecological field techniques have typically failed to detect wild individuals. We conducted community-based fieldwork in three national nature reserves (Fanjingshan, Leigongshan and Mayanghe) in Guizhou Province, China, to assess whether local ecological knowledge constitutes a useful tool for salamander conservation. We collected a sample of dated salamander sighting records and associated data from these reserves for comparative assessment of the relative status of salamander populations across the region. Although Fanjingshan and Leigongshan are still priority sites for salamander conservation, few recent sightings were recorded in either reserve, and respondents considered that salamanders had declined locally at both reserves. The species may already be functionally extinct at Mayanghe. Although respondent data on threats to salamanders in Guizhou are more difficult to interpret, overharvesting was the most commonly suggested explanation for salamander declines, and it is likely that the growing salamander farming industry is the primary driver of salamander extraction from Guizhou's reserves. Questionnaire-based surveys can collect novel quantitative data that provide unique insights into the local status of salamander populations, and we advocate wide-scale incorporation of this research approach into future salamander field programmes

Framing the Discourse, Advancing the Work: Philanthropy at the Nexus of Peace and Social Justice and Arts andCulture

Framing the Discourse, Advancing the Work Philanthropy at the Nexus of Peace and Social Justice and Arts andCulture is based on Moukhtar Kocache's research and his experience in this field of work; and information gathered through interviews with artists, cultural producers and philanthropy practitioners; and in a convening held in August 2013 in Ontario, Canada.It presents an overview of the relationship between progressive social change work and the arts, explores the role of philanthropy in supporting this work and sets out recommendations for how philanthropy might further its engagement with work at this nexus. The objective of the report is to stimulate further reflection and exchange of lessons and opportunities for inculcating practices in philanthropy for supporting arts and culture work as a means to advance social justice and peace.The process of compiling this report has been a journey and, like all journeys, it has involved changes of perspective and, like some journeys, a revision of ideas. During its course, it has become clear to us that arts and culture are not just a matter of better tools for supporting change; they are often central to personal and social transformation. The arts often reach us -- and influence us - in ways that direct explanation cannot. The call to philanthropy that seeks to support progressive social change is to recognise this transformational power of arts and culture and to engage with it as a holistic strategy.This argument will be presented more extensively in a brief paper (to be published in August 2014) entitled, 'Making the Case for the Arts to Social Justice Funders'

Regular Expression Matching and Operational Semantics

Many programming languages and tools, ranging from grep to the Java String library, contain regular expression matchers. Rather than first translating a regular expression into a deterministic finite automaton, such implementations typically match the regular expression on the fly. Thus they can be seen as virtual machines interpreting the regular expression much as if it were a program with some non-deterministic constructs such as the Kleene star. We formalize this implementation technique for regular expression matching using operational semantics. Specifically, we derive a series of abstract machines, moving from the abstract definition of matching to increasingly realistic machines. First a continuation is added to the operational semantics to describe what remains to be matched after the current expression. Next, we represent the expression as a data structure using pointers, which enables redundant searches to be eliminated via testing for pointer equality. From there, we arrive both at Thompson's lockstep construction and a machine that performs some operations in parallel, suitable for implementation on a large number of cores, such as a GPU. We formalize the parallel machine using process algebra and report some preliminary experiments with an implementation on a graphics processor using CUDA.Comment: In Proceedings SOS 2011, arXiv:1108.279

Defining parody and satire: Australian copyright law and its new exception: Part 2 - Advancing ordinary definitions

© 2008 LexisNexis and authors. Published version of the paper reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from LexisNexisIn Part 1 of ‘Defining Parody and Satire’ we sought to show that, for the purposes of the new exception to infringement of the Copyright Act in ss 41A and 103AA (the ‘new exception’), it is unsafe to construe parody and satire according either to US law on the matter or to available dictionary definitions. In this part we propose working definitions for parody and satire which, we suggest, are more congruent with both the intention of the Act to protect the free speech of Australian humorists and with the ordinary meanings of the words. There are four categories of artistic practice that the new Australian exceptions would seem designed to protect. The largest two groups combine the two terms: (1) satirical parodies in which copyright material is reused and distorted for the satirical effect of ridiculing that material. These are the staple of many literary, theatrical, video and digital media. We propose a metaphor of the satirical fist of critical intent animating the parodic glove of formal reuse to help comprehend this group particularly. (2) A group of satirical parodies where the target is not the artistic form parodied, but where the parody, for example of a popular song, provides a vehicle for satirical comment of some other person, group, or event. (3) Pure parody — formal play without discernible satirical intent either towards the vehicle text or any other potential target. This is, perhaps, most common these days in the visual arts, where a layering of pre-existing images creates juxtapositions which defy rhetorical purpose; there is also an established tradition of affectionate literary and dramatic parody. (4) Straight or pure satire, which may be independent of parody, but which may also quote its object so that the audience can know what the target is, without distorting the form of that object (text or image) in parodic ways. This category would include the use of excerpts of television broadcasts which became the subject of Australian copyright litigation in the well known ‘Panel’ case decided before the introduction of the new exception. We submit that unlicensed use of copyright material in all of these categories should enjoy the protection of the new Australian exception, subject to the issues of ‘fairness’ and possibly also moral rights in particular instances — a consideration of which is beyond the scope of this article. The definitions of parody and satire we will propose are: Parody: the borrowing from, imitation, or appropriation of a text, or other cultural product or practice, for the purpose of commenting, usually humorously, upon either it or something else; Satire: the critical impulse manifesting itself in some degree of denigration, almost invariably through attempted humour; the artistic results (usually humorous) of expression of such a critical impulse.Nth Ryde NS

Defining parody and satire: Australian copyright law and its new exception

© 2008 LexisNexis and authors. Published version of the paper reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from LexisNexis .The new exceptions to the Copyright Act in ss 41A and 103AA, providing protection of re-use for ‘the purpose of parody or satire’ seem clearly intended to provide protection for both parody and satire, not merely some confection of the two artistic practices. As these practices are not contiguous and separable genres, as pastoral and epic poetry, or situation comedies and current affairs programs are, it is important to have a model for understanding how these two practices can operate together and separately. The threshold issue of what will legally qualify as parody or satire under the new exception is critical in determining its scope. The answer to this question will determine how far new forms of Australian artistic practice can use existing copyright material before they become infringements, however creative they are. In Part 1 of this article, we argue that it is not safe to rely solely on dictionary definitions of the terms, as the available definitions from the most commonly used dictionaries depend on lexicography too completely shaped by narrowly literary theories of the practice. Moreover, their definitions do not take into account the sort of multi-media re-use that is most likely to cause hard cases to come before Australian courts in the twenty-first century. In our view this caution would be consistent with a judicial approach which surveys a range of dictionaries as one element of the interpretive approach supporting the primary task of textual analysis. Neither is it safe to simply import the US jurisprudence on the terms, for two reasons: broadly, that it has developed in jurisdictions with very different laws, especially those concerning free speech, and narrowly, that the course of US case law has generated a very idiosyncratic distinction between parody and satire which may serve a convenient legal purpose in that jurisdiction, but which does not correspond to the normal meanings of either term in Australia, among practitioners, theorists, and (to the extent they think it through) audiences. In Part 2 of this article (forthcoming) we develop a better theoretical framework for interpreting and applying the threshold definitional part of the new exception.Nth Ryde NS

A new method for imaging nuclear threats using cosmic ray muons

Muon tomography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate three dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Advantages of this technique are the ability of cosmic rays to penetrate significant overburden and the absence of any additional dose delivered to subjects under study above the natural cosmic ray flux. Disadvantages include the relatively long exposure times and poor position resolution and complex algorithms needed for reconstruction. Here we demonstrate a new method for obtaining improved position resolution and statistical precision for objects with spherical symmetry

Cauliflower mosaic virus Protein P6 Inhibits Signaling Responses to Salicylic Acid and Regulates Innate Immunity

Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) encodes a multifunctional protein P6 that is required for translation of the 35S RNA and also acts as a suppressor of RNA silencing. Here we demonstrate that P6 additionally acts as a pathogenicity effector of an unique and novel type, modifying NPR1 (a key regulator of salicylic acid (SA)- and jasmonic acid (JA)-dependent signaling) and inhibiting SA-dependent defence responses We find that that transgene-mediated expression of P6 in Arabidopsis and transient expression in Nicotiana benthamiana has profound effects on defence signaling, suppressing expression of representative SA-responsive genes and increasing expression of representative JA-responsive genes. Relative to wild-type Arabidopsis P6-expressing transgenics had greatly reduced expression of PR-1 following SA-treatment, infection by CaMV or inoculation with an avirulent bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato (Pst). Similarly transient expression in Nicotiana benthamiana of P6 (including a mutant form defective in translational transactivation activity) suppressed PR-1a transcript accumulation in response to Agrobacterium infiltration and following SA-treatment. As well as suppressing the expression of representative SA-regulated genes, P6-transgenic Arabidopsis showed greatly enhanced susceptibility to both virulent and avirulent Pst (titres elevated 10 to 30-fold compared to non-transgenic controls) but reduced susceptibility to the necrotrophic fungus Botrytis cinerea. Necrosis following SA-treatment or inoculation with avirulent Pst was reduced and delayed in P6-transgenics. NPR1 an important regulator of SA/JA crosstalk, was more highly expressed in the presence of P6 and introduction of the P6 transgene into a transgenic line expressing an NPR1:GFP fusion resulted in greatly increased fluorescence in nuclei even in the absence of SA. Thus in the presence of P6 an inactive form of NPR1 is mislocalized in the nucleus even in uninduced plants. These results demonstrate that P6 is a new type of pathogenicity effector protein that enhances susceptibility to biotrophic pathogens by suppressing SA-but enhancing JA-signaling responses.</p