Emergence of collective changes in travel direction of starling flocks from individual birds' fluctuations

One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external alarm cue, directional switching can also emerge from the intrinsic fluctuations in individual behaviour. However, the cause and the mechanism by which such collective changes of direction occur are not fully understood yet. Here, we present an experimental study of spontaneous collective turns in natural flocks of starlings. We employ a recently developed tracking algorithm to reconstruct three-dimensional trajectories of each individual bird in the flock for the whole duration of a turning event. Our approach enables us to analyse changes in the individual behaviour of every group member and reveal the emergent dynamics of turning. We show that spontaneous turns start from individuals located at the elongated tips of the flocks, and then propagate through the group. We find that birds on the tips deviate from the mean direction of motion much more frequently than other individuals, indicating that persistent localized fluctuations are the crucial ingredient for triggering a collective directional change. Finally, we quantitatively verify that birds follow equal-radius paths during turning, the effects of which are a change of the flock''s orientation and a redistribution of individual locations in the group.     

Efficient automatic parallelization of a single GPU program for a multiple GPU system

Single GPU scaling is unable to keep pace with the soaring demand for high throughput computing. As such executing an application on multiple GPUs connected through an off-chip interconnect will become an attractive option to explore. However, much of the current code is written for a single GPU system. Porting such a code for execution on multiple GPUs is difficulty task. In particular, it requires programmer effort to determine how data is partitioned across multiple GPU cards and then launch the appropriate thread blocks that mostly accesses the data that is local to that card. Otherwise, cross-card data movement is an expensive operation. In this work we explore hardware support to efficiently parallelize a single GPU code for execution on multiple GPUs. In particular, our approach focuses on minimizing the number of remote memory accesses across the off-chip network without burdening the programmer to perform data partitioning and workload assignment. We propose a data-location aware thread block scheduler to schedule the thread blocks on the GPU that has most of its input data. The scheduler exploits well known observation that GPU workloads tend to launch a kernel multiple times iteratively to process large volumes of data. The memory accesses of the thread block across different iterations of a kernel launch exhibit correlated behavior. Our data location aware scheduler exploits this predictability to track memory access affinity of each thread block to a specific GPU card and stores this information to make scheduling decisions for future iterations. To further reduce the number of remote accesses we propose a hybrid mechanism that enables migrating or copying the pages between the memory of multiple GPUs based on their access behavior. Hence, most of the memory accesses are to the local GPU memory. Over an architecture consisting of two GPUs, our proposed schemes are able to improve the performance by 1.55× when compared to single GPU execution across widely used Rodinia [17], Parboil [18], and Graph [23] benchmarks.     

英东油田成藏条件及勘探开发关键技术

英东油田是柴达木盆地单个油藏储量规模最大、丰度最高、物性最好、开发效益最佳的整装油气田。通过对英东油田的地质再认识，对成藏条件及技术难题进行了攻关研究。研究结果表明：英雄岭地区位于柴西地区茫崖生烃凹陷，油源条件丰富，新近系油砂山组以宽缓的三角洲前缘-滨浅湖沉积为主，砂、泥岩纵向交替出现，砂体分布广泛且物性较好，泥岩为主要盖层，与古近系优质烃源岩形成一套完整的下生上储式生-储-盖组合；英东地区的大型滑脱断层沟通了古近系优质烃源岩和中、浅层构造圈闭，使早期聚集的油气藏发生调整，同时后期形成的油气持续运聚，深、浅层断裂形成"接力式"输导，在浅层晚期形成的构造圈闭中聚集成藏；中、浅层断层具备良好的侧向封堵性能，有利于油气的保存。针对英东地区复杂的地形地貌和油藏特征，形成了复杂山地三维地震采集处理解释一体化技术，为落实油气勘探目标奠定了基础。针对英东油田含油气井段长、流体识别难度大等问题，建立了长井段多油气水系统油藏开发模式、多条件约束复杂断块地质建模技术。通过明确英东油田的成藏机理，攻克工程复杂关键技术，为实现英东油田的高效开发和增储上产提供了重要的地质理论支撑和技术保障。     

Which is more prominent for fighter pilots under different flight task difficulties: Visual alert or verbal alert?

To explore the behavioural and cognition patterns of fighter pilots under visual and verbal alert conditions, 20 right-handed subjects participated in the experiment after 200 h of flight task training, and ERP technology was used to conduct EEG experiments under four conditions: high time pressure visual alert, low time pressure visual alert, fast speech speed verbal alert, and slow speech speed verbal alert. The results indicated the following: 1) the highest accuracy rate and shortest reaction time could be achieved under the slow speech speed verbal alert condition, indicating that the slow speech speed alert performance was optimal. 2) Subjects in the verbal alert trial showed a “right hemisphere advantage”, and the brain function area was located in the right temporal lobes. The speech speed correlated negatively with the latency and amplitude of P80.3) Subjects in the visual alert trial showed a “left hemisphere advantage”, and the brain activity was located in the left parietal lobes. 4) The latency of P80 evoked by verbal alert was earlier than that of N140 evoked by visual alert, indicating that a verbal alert causes an earlier attention effect in pilots. Based on the eye movement experiment, the performance of visual and verbal dual-channel alert was significantly higher than that of visual alert.     

Multimedia recipe reading: Predicting learning outcomes and diagnosing cooking interest using eye-tracking measures

This study aimed to explore the relationships between students' visual behaviors and learning outcomes, and between visual behaviors and prior cooking interest in multimedia recipe learning. An eye-tracking experiment, including pretest, recall test, and retention test, was conducted with a sample of 29 volunteer hospitality majors in Taiwan. The multimedia recipe included a static page showing the ingredients in a text-and-picture representation and a dynamic page showing the knife skills in a text-and-video representation. Total reading time, total fixation duration, number of fixations and inter-scanning count were used to explore the students' visual attention distributions among the different representation elements and their visual strategies for learning the recipe. The results showed that all students paid more visual attention to the text than to the picture information for the static recipe, and paid more visual attention to the video than to the text on the dynamic page. In addition, the visual attention paid to the text on the dynamic page was negatively correlated with the retention of the episodic knowledge of knife skills. In contrast, the visual attention paid to the text on the static ingredient page was positively correlated with students' prior cooking interest. Finally, the inter-scanning count between text and video on the dynamic page was the best index to negatively predict students' learning retention. Total fixation duration on the text information on the static page was the best index to positively predict students' prior cooking interest. Future studies and applications are discussed.     

Can eye-tracking data be measured to assess product design?: Visual attention mechanism should be considered

Eye tracking probes user's perception of real-time reaction to products, while conventional methods (i.e. interviews, focus group, questionnaires and so on) have generally failed because they depend on users' willingness and competency to describe how they feel when they are exposed to a product. Two tasks were designed to explore the indexes of eye movement that can reflect user experience of product, and analyse the attention captured by product attributes and goal-oriented. In task one, participants just browsed two smart phone pictures and evaluated the whole user experience. Binary choices were used in task two to ask participants to select the smart phone picture with higher user experience and then click the mouse. The results showed that in the browsing task, participants had shorter time to first fixation for the smart phone picture with higher level of user experience than the lower. And pupil dilated significantly when participants browse smart phone picture with lower level of user experience. In goal-oriented task, participants' attentions were dominated by visual perception of task driven, mainly reflected on longer fixation time and larger pupil diameter when looking at the smart phone with higher level of user experience. These results support the notion that we cannot assess product design just by several eye-movement indexes without considering the effects of visual attention mechanism.Relevance to industryThe appearance of product plays an important role to attract user's attention and stimulate their intention to experience. And vision is the main channel for users to obtain product information. Hence a thorough research on the inherent mechanism of vision perception can provide technical support for product designers, which in turn can attract more consumers to experience the product, even buy it. Moreover, the seller can find out the real buyers and predict their desired products by tracking user's eyes.     

A spatial decomposition of the shift-share components of labour productivity inequality in Italy

This paper explores the components of aggregate labour productivity inequality between Italian regions from 2000 to 2013. The Gini index of inequality in aggregate labour productivity is decomposed, showing the extent to which sector productivity differentials and differences in industry-mix contribute to regional productivity inequality. In addition, the contribution of the interaction between differences in industry-mix and sector productivity differentials is revealed by the decomposition. Each of these contributions to inequality is measured by considering the spatial dimension of regional inequality, since the contributions of inequality between non-neighbouring regions and inequality between neighbouring regions are separated.     

Foreign firms in core or peripheral areas? The spatial dimension of job creation and wages in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates the within-country location choices of a large sample of foreign and domestic firms in 19 Sub-Saharan African countries. We show that foreign firms are more likely to locate in core regions compared to domestic ones but generate significantly more jobs per productive unit in the periphery. We find some evidence that foreign firms generate relatively better jobs in peripheral areas: more skill intensive and better paid. These results highlight a fundamental role that FDI in peripheral areas might play in rebalancing the spatial distribution of economic opportunities in developing countries where highly congested megacities exercise a strong centripetal force.     

Graduate Student Literature Review: The effect of housing systems on movement opportunity of dairy cows and the implications on cow health and comfort

Intensification within the dairy industry has led to an increase in use of more restrictive indoor housing systems (most commonly tiestalls and freestalls) and less use of the pasture-based housing systems used in past generations. These indoor housing systems are associated with not only a higher level of restriction to cow movement, but also with a higher prevalence of lameness and cow comfort issues on farm, which negatively affects cow welfare, public perceptions, and producer profitability. In looking for solutions to these issues, several studies have investigated different housing and management options that are less restrictive and increase cow movement opportunity. We hypothesized that movement opportunity, briefly summarized as the level of locomotor activity a cow is able to express in her given environment as well as the ease with which said movement can be expressed, can have a direct, substantial effect on cow comfort as well as cow leg and hoof health. Lying behaviors, which serve as common indicators of cow comfort, are affected not only by the ease of movement that comes with providing more movement opportunity within the lying environment, but also by the aforementioned improvements to leg health. This is particularly true regarding the ability to display different lying postures and to rise and lie down with ease. The complexity of the relationship between the different methods by which movement opportunity can be provided to dairy cows and the corresponding effects on outcome measures related to cow health and comfort is an area of research that warrants exploration. In this literature review, we sought to identify how level of movement opportunity, provided though different housing systems and management practices, affects cow hoof and leg, udder, and reproductive health, as well as the effects that it has on cow lying behaviors that are indicative of comfort.     

隧道洞口上方危岩崩塌块石运动规律及其对隧道的危害

为揭示危岩崩塌块石的运动规律及其对下方隧道洞口的危害,以都香高速昭通段乐红隧道洞口高陡边坡危岩区崩塌体为研究对象,运用理论计算与Rockfall数值计算2种形式对危岩区崩塌体失稳后块石的运动特征进行预测,运用Abaqus有限元软件模拟不同初速度、不同冲击落点下块石冲击隧道结构的动力响应,揭示不同因素对块石冲击隧道结构的影响程度.结果 显示:理论计算与Rockfall数值计算结果吻合,崩塌块石经坠落、碰撞、滚动最终会与隧道引洞段上表面发生碰撞;与冲击落点相比,块石初速度对隧道结构的动力响应特性影响更大;块石冲击落点位于隧道圆拱圆心正上方位置时对隧道结构的损伤最大;不同冲击落点对碰撞回弹后块石的速度影响不大.