Mining topological relations from the web

Topological relations between geographic regions are of interest in many applications. When the exact boundaries of regions are not available, such relations can be established by analysing natural language information from web documents. In particular we demonstrate how redundancy-based techniques can be used to acquire containment and adjacency relations, and how fuzzy spatial reasoning can be employed to maintain the consistency of the resulting knowledge base

Assessing the potential economic benefits to farmers from various GM crops becoming available in the European Union by 2025: results from an expert survey

This paper reports on a study that identified a range of crop-trait combinations that are: agronomically suited to the EU; provide advantages to arable farmers and consumers; and are either already available in international markets, or advancing along the development pipeline and likely to become available by 2025. An expert stakeholder panel was recruited and asked for their views, using the Delphi approach, on the impact of these crop-traits on enterprise competitiveness, through changes to yields, production costs and product prices. In terms of input traits, there was consensus that traits such as herbicide tolerant/insect resistant (HT/IR) maize, HT sugar beet and HT soya bean would provide positive benefits for farmers. Output-side traits such as winter-sown rape with reduced saturated fats, were seen as offering benefits to consumers, but were either likely to be restricted to niche markets, or offer relatively modest price premia to farmers growing them. Our analysis of the financial impact of the adoption of GM crops more widely in the EU, showed that the competitiveness of the agricultural sector could well be improved by this. However, such improvements would be relatively small-scale in that large-scale national natural advantages from either economic or environmental conditions is unlikely to be overturned

Negative priming in free recall reconsidered

Recent investigations of the phenomenon of forgetting have been driven mostly by the development of a novel theoretical framework which places great emphasis on inhibitory control (Anderson, 2003; Anderson & Spellman, 1995; Bjork, 1989). Whereas traditional, interference-based theories consider forgetting to be a by-product of storing new information, the inhibitory framework postulates a specialized mechanism, or a group of mechanisms, that serves the function of ‘deactivating’ information which is currently irrelevant. This process of inhibiting currently irrelevant information is thought to have lasting consequences, affecting memory for the irrelevant information on subsequent tests. The active and functional perspective on forgetting embedded in the inhibitory framework opens new fields for examining the role of forgetting in cognitive functioning. Differences in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information have been postulated to play important roles in a range of clinical conditions (e.g., Soriano, Jiménez, Román, & Bajo, 2009; Storm & White, 2010) and the trajectory of cognitive development (e.g., Aslan & Bäuml, 2010) as well as contributing to individual differences in many other cognitive and social domains (Redick, Heitz, & Engle, 2007)

Twentieth-century Trends in the Annual Cycle of Temperature across the Northern Hemisphere

The annual cycle of surface air temperature is examined across Northern Hemisphere land areas (north of 25°N) by comparing the results from CRUTS against four reanalysis datasets: two versions of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR and 20CRC) and two versions of the ERA-CLIM reanalyses (ERA-20C and ERA-20CM). The Modulated Annual Cycle is adaptively derived from an Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) filter, and is used to define the phase and amplitude of the annual cycle. The EEMD method does not impose a simple sinusoidal shape of the annual cycle. None of the reanalysis simulations assimilate surface temperature data, but differ in the parameters that are included: both ERA-20C and 20CR assimilate surface pressure data; ERA-20C also includes surface wind data over the oceans; ERA-20CM does not assimilate any of these synoptic data; and none of the reanalyses assimilate land-use data. It is demonstrated that synoptic variability is critical for explaining the trends and variability of the annual cycle of surface temperature across the northern hemisphere. The CMIP5 forcings alone are insufficient to explain the observed trends and decadal-scale variability, particularly with respect to the decline in the amplitude of the annual cycle throughout the twentieth century. The variability in the annual cycle during the latter half of the twentieth century was unusual in the context of the twentieth century, and was most likely related to large-scale atmospheric variability, although uncertainty in the results is greatest before ca. 1930

The dynamics of the national minimum wage: transitions between different labour market states

An important policy issue is whether the National Minimum Wage (NMW) introduced in Britain in April 1999, is a stepping stone to higher wages or traps workers in a low-wage no-wage cycle. In this paper we utilise the longitudinal element of the Labour Force Survey over the period 1999 to 2003 to model transitions between different labour market states payment at or below the NMW, above the NMW, unemployment and inactivity, using a multinomial logit approach. It appears that for many workers payment at or below the NMW is of relatively short duration and a substantial number move into higher paid jobs

In Memoriam: Keith R. Briffa, 1952–2017

Keith R. Briffa was one of the most influential palaeoclimatologists of the last 30 years. His primary research interests lay in Late-Holocene climate change with a geographical emphasis on northern Eurasia. His greatest impact was in the field of dendroclimatology, a field that he helped to shape. His contributions have been seminal to the development of sound methods for tree-ring analysis and in their proper application to allow the interpretation of climate variability from tree rings. This led to the development of many important records that allow us to understand natural climate variability on timescales from years to millennia and to set recent climatic trends in their historical context

A persistence model of the national minimum wage

This paper utilises the panel element of the BHPS (waves 9 to 14) to examine the dynamics of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) introduced to Britain in 1999. Specifically a persistence measure based on a random effects probit model for those affected by the NMW is constructed. The conditional probabilities imply some degree of state dependence, but there is also a considerable amount of turnover from one year to the next among those affected by the NM

Discrete mode laser diodes with ultra narrow linewidth emission <3kHz

Ex-facet, free-running ultra-low linewidth (<3 kHz), single mode laser emission is demonstrated using low cost, regrowth-free ridge waveguide discrete mode Fabry-Perot laser diode chips

Identifying GM crops for future cultivation in the EU through a Delphi forecasting exercise

This paper reports on a Delphi forecasting exercise carried out to identify crop traits that could feasibly be introduced to the advantage of arable farmers, and for the general benefit of the public, in EU member states. An expert stakeholder panel was recruited and asked for opinions on scenarios concerning the availability of GM events, and also scenarios that envisage novel crops developed using advanced technology not classified as GM. In a second round of consultation, panel members commented anonymously on opinions elicited in the first phase. Results indicate that crops with input traits most likely to become available in the EU before 2025 are HTIR maize, HT sugarbeet and HT soybean; these are already widely adopted outside Europe. The crops with output traits most likely to become available and offering benefits to consumers are winter-sown varieties of rape with reduced saturated fats, spring varieties of which are already available outside EU (notably Canadian Canola)