Detecting changes in fish behaviour in real time to alert managers to thresholds of potential concern

Fish behaviour is one biological organisational level regularly used to assess the state of freshwater ecosystems and can be monitored using fish telemetry methods. The development of activity sensors incorporated into fish telemetered tags allows for non-spatial movement to be detected and is increasingly used to understand the energy budgets and response and fine-scale behaviour of fishes. In addition, detecting tagged fish remotely and in real time highlights the need to process fish activity data in near real time to make it relevant to managers in the water resource sector. Our study on Labeobarbus natalensis, a cyprinid, in the uMngeni River in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, adapted and then tested the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), as developed for financial predictive modelling, using activity data from fish. To determine changes in behaviour, we compared the EWMA-predicted fish behaviour against the present fish behaviour. We showed that the EWMA could adequately detect changes in behaviour on both individual and population levels. Changes in behaviour are potentially indicative of a change in environmental conditions and thus were developed into management alerts. We conducted further analyses using generalised additive mixed models (GAMM) to determine the relationship between fish activity and the environmental data collected. The GAMMs helped determine the potential drivers for changes in behaviour where the EWMA could detect these in real time. Detecting changes in behaviour in real time as a result of environmental variables can identify thresholds of potential concern influencing management decisions and allow managers to respond, contributing to improving effective freshwater management.     

A Jitter Injection Signal Generation and Extraction System for Embedded Test of High-Speed Data I/O

An instrument for on-chip measurement of transceiver transmission capability is described that is fully realizable in CMOS technology and embeddable within an SoC. The instrument can be used to inject and extract the timing and voltage information associated with signals in high-speed transceiver circuits that are commonly found in data communication applications. At the core of this work is the use of ΣΔ amplitude- and phase-encoding techniques to generate both the voltage and timing (phase) references, or strobes used for high-speed sampling. The same technique is also used for generating the test stimulant for the device-under-test.     

Interference Mitigation in MIMO Systems by Subset Antenna Transmission

This paper investigates subset antenna transmission (SAT) for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the presence of strong dominant co-channel interferer. The capacity gain from SAT is investigated in the context of optimal antenna subset selection and power allocation. The SAT does not require channel state information of the co-channel interference, and achieves capacity gains by distributing the transmit power equally over a selected subset of the transmit antennas. The capacity gain of the SAT method is analyzed in terms of transmit power and eigenvalues of channel matrix, and its performance in V-BLAST MIMO systems with various signal constellations is evaluated by computer simulation.     

L2imbo: A distributed systems platform for mobile computing

Mobile computing environments increasingly consist of a range of supporting technologies offering a diverse set of capabilities to applications and end-systems. Such environments are characterised by sudden and dramatic changes in the quality-of-service (QoS) available to applications and users. Recent work has shown that distributed systems platforms can assist applications to take advantage of these changes in QoS and, more specifically, facilitate applications to adapt to their environment. However, the current state-of-the-art in these platforms reflects their fixed network origins through their choice of synchronous connection-oriented communications paradigms. In this paper we argue that these paradigms are not well suited to operation in the emerging mobile environments. Furthermore, we offer an alternative programming paradigm based on tuple spaces which, we believe, offers a number of benefits within a mobile context. The paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a new platform based on this paradigm. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Spread Spectrum PN Code Acquisition Using Hybrid Correlator Architectures

A hybrid correlator architecture is described which combines the serial structure of an active correlator with the parallel structure of a matched filter correlator. The mean PN code acquisition time performance of this hybrid serial-parallel correlator structure is analysed. Results are shown which compare the acquisition performance of the serial, parallel, and serial-parallel structures. The results are for a PN code length of 64 code chips and assumes a Gaussian channel with the receiver detection threshold set to obtain a constant false alarm rate. An enhancement to the serial-parallel acquisition algorithm is also described which can increase the acquisition time performance by about 15% for typical operating conditions. Overall the results demonstrate that the hybrid correlator can provide rapid code acquisition with a limited receiver complexity.     

Chromatographic analysis of species specific odor profiles inMastomys natalensis andM. coucha (Rodentia: Muridae)

Whole-body volatiles from males of the cryptic multimammate mouse speciesMastomys natalensis andM. coucha were analyzed by dynamic solvent effect sampling and capillary gas chromatography. One compound, 3-nonene-2-one, was always present, sometimes as the major component, in volatiles fromM. coucha and absent, or present only at low levels, in volatiles fromM. natalensis. The mean ±SD of the 3-nonen-2-one peak area forM. coucha was 8599 ±9630 and forM. natalensis 148 ±486. Chromatographic analysis was more reliable in identifying a male's species than were a female's in a two-choice olfactorium.     

Energy Storage in Ceramic Dielectrics

Historically, multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLC's) have not been considered for energy storage applications for two primary reasons. First, physically large ceramic capacitors were very expensive and, second, total energy density obtainable was not nearly so high as in electrolytic capacitor types. More recently, the fabrication technology for MLC's has improved significantly, permitting both significantly higher energy density and significantly lower costs. Simultaneously, in many applications, total energy storage has become smaller, and the secondary requirements of very low effective series resistance and effective series inductance (which, together, determine how efficiently the energy may be stored and recovered) have become more important. It is therefore desirable to reexamine energy storage in ceramics for contemporary commercial and near-commercial dielectrics. Stored energy is proportional to voltage squared only in the case of paraelectric insulators, because only they have capacitance that is independent of bias voltage. High dielectric constant materials, however, are ferroics (that is ferroelectric and/or antiferroelectric) and display significant variation of effective dielectric constant with bias voltage. The common ferroelectric materials, whether based upon barium titanate or lead manganese niobate (PMN), in the high-field limit, exhibit an energy storage which increases linearly with bias voltage. Mixed phase, ferroelectric plus antiferroelectric, dielectrics from the lead lanthanum zirconate titanate (PLZT) system, as predicted theoretically, show the best energy density at low to moderate fields. Surprisingly, maximum energy storage is not obtained in high dielectric constant materials but in those materials which display intermediate dielectric constant and the highest ultimate breakdown voltages.     

Glycosidic linkages of legume,grass and cereal straw cell walls before and after extensive degradation by rumen microorganisms

The technique of methylation analysis for the location of glycosidic linkages in cell wall polysaccharides was applied directly (after dry milling in liquid nitrogen) to whole wheat and barley straws, cell wall preparations from early- and late-cut perennial ryegrass and white clover, and their extensively degraded residues recovered from the rumen. The addition of an internal standard, methyl-β-D-allo-pyranose, to milled samples enabled the recovery of partially-methylated sugars to be quantified, and the recovery of parent sugars from methylated material to be compared with values obtained by direct estimation of monosaccharides by the alditol acetate method. Recovery of sugars from methylated samples was generally higher than that predicted by the alditol acetate method, particularly from digested residues. All four samples of Gramineae showed similar proportions of glycosidic linkages in which (1 →4)-linked xylose and glucose units accounted for more than 80% of total identified partially-methylated sugars. The proportions of glycosidic linkages found in digested residues of straws were essentially the same as those found in the parent material. In residues of the more digestible ryegrass there was a two- to three-fold increase in (1→4)-linked xylose units without branch points at the O-2/O-3 positions, the proportions of these branch points being substantially reduced. A corresponding reduction in the proportion of (1→2)-, (1→3)-and terminally-linked arabinose units was also found. The proportion of both (1→4)- and (1→3)-linked glucose units were also reduced in digested residues. These changes were greater in the early-cut than in the late-cut sample. White clover differed from the Gramineae in a number of respects. Galactose units predominantly in the form of (1→4)-, (1→6)- and terminally-linked units, were the major non-cellulosic sugars present. The proportion of all forms of galactose was reduced in digested residues, but (1→6)-linked units appeared more resistant to degradation than (1→4)-linked units. Like ryegrass, the proportion of xylose units increased in digested residues from clover, while the proportion of glucose decreased. The proportion of (1→4)-linked mannose units, initially present at levels ten times as great as in the Gramineae, was also substantially reduced.     

Demonstration of all-photonic spectral label-switching for optical MPLS networks

All-photonic label-switching of weight four spectral packet labels (concurrent quadruple wavelength conversion) is demonstrated for optical multiprotocol label-switching networks. The experimental setup is based on cross-gain modulation in a fiber ring laser using a semiconductor optical amplifier gain medium and uses commercially available components. Static transfer functions and step response measurements for various input-output label-switching combinations show that a noisy input label with small extinction ratio can be switched to a clean, amplified, output label.     

Nevoscopy: three-dimensional computed tomography of nevi and melanomas in situ by transillumination

The thickness of a malignant nevus has been found to be an important prognostic factor for patients with melanoma. We have designed a new method of imaging nevi that permits their thickness to be measured in situ. Using fiber optics directed into the surrounding skin, we transilluminate the nevus. Three images are picked up by a digitizing TV camera: the vertical image (90 degrees ), a glancing image (180 degrees ), and one at 45 degrees , obtained by using two front-silvered mirrors held next to the nevus in a "nevoscope." The digitized images are used in a computed tomography algorithm to calculate approximate vertical cross sections of the nevus. The algorithm is one we recently developed to permit reconstruction from a very few projections. Our method is completely noninvasive. It may be used to check all the nevi on a patient. Without excisions, we could establish a baseline three-dimensional shape for each nevus, follow any changes in time, and obtain an early warning of increase in thickness and possible malignancy.