Parrot Interpreter: Representation, Extinction and the Electronic Information Environment

Humans, it seems, can’t get enough of parrots. Ethnography, folklore, psychology, and, of course, imaginative literature all offer copious evidence of our fantasy of living with, communicating with and even being parrots. The natural history of parrots and the cultural history of parrots present something of a conundrum: on the one hand, a massive destructiveness (illegal bird and feather trade, environment destruction, scientific collections); on the other, an often erotically inflected sympathetic identification leading to the production of new forms. It’s strange to realise that Europe is infested with a shadow population of captive and inbred budgerigars, whose numbers far exceed those remaining in the wild and who can never return to their origins. If, as our privileged other, our uncanny mimic and double, the parrot still fails to survive, what does this tell us about our economy of desire? It seems that to know is to consume and destroy; and that the apparent contrast between the operations of the rainforest loggers and bird-trappers and the sentimental representations and transformations parrot suffers in human society is overdrawn. How is this contradiction to be explained

Evidence for Three Subpopulations of Globular Clusters in the Early-Type Post-Starburst Shell Galaxy AM 0139-655

We present deep HST ACS images of the post-starburt shell galaxy AM 0139-655. We find evidence for the presence of three distinct globular cluster subpopulations associated with this galaxy: a centrally concentrated young population (~ 0.4 Gyr), an intermediate age population (~ 1 Gyr) and an old, metal-poor population similar to that seen around normal galaxies. The g-I color distribution of the clusters is bimodal with peaks at 0.85 and 1.35. The redder peak at g-I=1.35 is consistent with the predicted color for an old metal-poor population. The clusters associated with the peak at g-I=0.85 are centrally concentrated and interpreted as a younger and more metal-rich population. We suggest that these clusters have an age of ~ 0.4 Gyr and solar metallicity based on a comparison with population synthesis models. The luminosity function of these "blue" clusters is well represented by a power law. Interestingly, the brightest shell associated with the galaxy harbors some of the youngest clusters observed. This seems to indicate that the same merger event was responsible for the formation of both the shells and the young clusters. The red part of the color distribution contains several very bright clusters, which are not expected for an old, metal-poor population. Furthermore, the luminosity function of the "red" GCs cannot be fit well by either a single gaussian or a single power law. A composite (gaussian + power law) fit to the LF of the red clusters yields both a low rms and very plausible properties for an old population plus an intermediate-age population of GCs. Hence, we suggest that the red clusters in AM 0139-655 consist of two distinct GC subpopulations, one being an old, metal-poor population as seen in normal galaxies and one having formed during a recent dissipative galaxy merger.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A

Power spectrum multipoles on the curved sky: an application to the 6-degree Field Galaxy Survey

The peculiar velocities of galaxies cause their redshift-space clustering to depend on the angle to the line-of-sight, providing a key test of gravitational physics on cosmological scales. These effects may be described using a multipole expansion of the clustering measurements. Focussing on Fourier-space statistics, we present a new analysis of the effect of the survey window function, and the variation of the line-of-sight across a survey, on the modelling of power spectrum multipoles. We determine the joint covariance of the Fourier-space multipoles in a Gaussian approximation, and indicate how these techniques may be extended to studies of overlapping galaxy populations via multipole cross-power spectra. We apply our methodology to one of the widest-area galaxy redshift surveys currently available, the 6-degree Field Galaxy Survey, deducing a normalized growth rate f*sigma_8(z=0.06) = 0.38 +/- 0.12 in the low-redshift Universe, in agreement with previous analyses of this dataset using different techniques. Our framework should be useful for processing future wide-angle galaxy redshift surveys.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, version accepted by MNRA

Better duplicate detection for systematic reviewers: Evaluation of Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module

BACKGROUND: A major problem arising from searching across bibliographic databases is the retrieval of duplicate citations. Removing such duplicates is an essential task to ensure systematic reviewers do not waste time screening the same citation multiple times. Although reference management software use algorithms to remove duplicate records, this is only partially successful and necessitates removing the remaining duplicates manually. This time-consuming task leads to wasted resources. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a newly developed deduplication program against EndNote. METHODS: A literature search of 1,988 citations was manually inspected and duplicate citations identified and coded to create a benchmark dataset. The Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module (SRA-DM) was iteratively developed and tested using the benchmark dataset and compared with EndNote’s default one step auto-deduplication process matching on (‘author’, ‘year’, ‘title’). The accuracy of deduplication was reported by calculating the sensitivity and specificity. Further validation tests, with three additional benchmarked literature searches comprising a total of 4,563 citations were performed to determine the reliability of the SRA-DM algorithm. RESULTS: The sensitivity (84%) and specificity (100%) of the SRA-DM was superior to EndNote (sensitivity 51%, specificity 99.83%). Validation testing on three additional biomedical literature searches demonstrated that SRA-DM consistently achieved higher sensitivity than EndNote (90% vs 63%), (84% vs 73%) and (84% vs 64%). Furthermore, the specificity of SRA-DM was 100%, whereas the specificity of EndNote was imperfect (average 99.75%) with some unique records wrongly assigned as duplicates. Overall, there was a 42.86% increase in the number of duplicates records detected with SRA-DM compared with EndNote auto-deduplication. CONCLUSIONS: The Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module offers users a reliable program to remove duplicate records with greater sensitivity and specificity than EndNote. This application will save researchers and information specialists time and avoid research waste. The deduplication program is freely available online

Beyond BAO: improving cosmological constraints from BOSS with measurement of the void-galaxy cross-correlation

We present a measurement of the anisotropic void-galaxy cross-correlation function in the CMASS galaxy sample of the BOSS DR12 data release. We perform a joint fit to the data for redshift space distortions (RSD) due to galaxy peculiar velocities and anisotropies due to the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) effect, for the first time using a velocity field reconstruction technique to remove the complicating effects of RSD in the void centre positions themselves. Fits to the void-galaxy function give a 1% measurement of the AP parameter combination $D_A(z)H(z)/c = 0.4367\pm 0.0045$ at redshift $z=0.57$, where $D_A$ is the angular diameter distance and $H$ the Hubble parameter, exceeding the precision obtainable from baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) by a factor of ~3.5 and free of systematic errors. From voids alone we also obtain a 10% measure of the growth rate, $f\sigma_8(z=0.57)=0.501\pm0.051$. The parameter degeneracies are orthogonal to those obtained from galaxy clustering. Combining void information with that from BAO and galaxy RSD in the same CMASS sample, we measure $D_A(0.57)/r_s=9.383\pm 0.077$ (at 0.8% precision), $H(0.57)r_s=(14.05\pm 0.14)\;10^3$ kms$^{-1}$Mpc$^{-1}$ (1%) and $f\sigma_8=0.453\pm0.022$ (4.9%), consistent with cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements from Planck. These represent a factor \sim2 improvement in precision over previous results through the inclusion of void information. Fitting a flat cosmological constant $\Lambda$CDM model to these results in combination with Planck CMB data, we find up to an 11% reduction in uncertainties on $H_0$ and $\Omega_m$ compared to use of the corresponding BOSS consensus values. Constraints on extended models with non-flat geometry and a dark energy of state that differs from $w=-1$ show an even greater improvement.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.D. v2 corrects small error in likelihood analysis; minor changes to figures and text, cosmological results unchanged. Reconstruction and void-finding code available at https://github.com/seshnadathur/Revolver, likelihood analysis code available at https://github.com/seshnadathur/void-galaxy-cosmo-fitte

Transition to adult services for children and young people with palliative care needs : a systematic review

Objective: To evaluate the evidence on the transition process from child to adult services for young people with palliative care needs. Design: Systematic review Setting: Child and adult services and interface between healthcare providers. Patients: Young people aged 13 to 24 years with palliative care conditions in the process of transition. Main outcome measures: Young people and their families’ experiences of transition, the process of transition between services and its impact on continuity of care, and models of good practice. Results: 92 studies included. Papers on transition services were of variable quality when applied to palliative care contexts. Most focused on common life threatening and life limiting conditions. No standardised transition programme identified and most guidelines used to develop transition services were not evidence based. Most studies on transition programmes were predominantly condition-specific (e.g. cystic fibrosis, cancer) services. Cystic fibrosis services offered high quality transition with the most robust empirical evaluation. There were differing condition-dependent viewpoints on when transition should occur but agreement on major principles guiding transition planning and probable barriers. There was evidence of poor continuity between child and adult providers with most originating from within child settings. Conclusions: Palliative care was not, in itself, a useful concept for locating transition-related evidence. It is not possible to evaluate the merits of the various transition models for palliative care contexts, or their effects on continuity of care, as there are no long-term outcome data to measure their effectiveness. Use of validated outcome measures would facilitate research and service development