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Targeting burrows improves detection in giant pangolin Smutsia gigantea camera trap surveys
Get PDFThe Endangered giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) is rare and elusive across its central African range. Due to its solitary and nocturnal nature, the species is difficult to study and subsequently its ecology is poorly known. Pangolins are considered the World’s most-trafficked mammals. Therefore, accurately confirming presence and monitoring trends in distribution and abundance is essential to inform and prioritise conservation efforts. Camera traps are a popular tool for surveying rare and cryptic species. However non-targeted camera trap surveys yield low camera trapping rates for pangolins. Here we use camera trap data from surveys conducted within three protected areas in Uganda to test whether targeted placement of cameras improves giant pangolin detection probability in occupancy models. The results indicate that giant pangolin detection probability is highest when camera traps are targeted on burrows. The median number of days from camera deployment to first giant pangolin event was 12, with 97.5% of events captured within 32 days from deployment. The median interval between giant pangolin events at a camera trap site was 33 days. We demonstrate that camera trap surveys can be designed to improve detection of giant pangolins and outline a set of recommendations to maximise the effectiveness of efforts to survey and monitor the species
The Nineteenth-Century Sex Worker: Avoiding Surveillance, Stereotypes, and Scandal
Get PDFThis is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in [The Routledge handbook of Victorian scandals in literature and culture] on [01/12/2022], available online: http://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Victorian-Scandals-in-Literature-and-Culture/Ayres-Maier/p/book/9781032259963The subject of female sex work was a source of scandal throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the writing of two males who defied the conventional approach to the topic, publishing three controversial texts which presented the female sex worker in an unseen light. Initially, the chapter studies William’s Acton Prostitution Considered in its Social, Moral, and Sanitary Aspects (1857, 1870) as a concerted effort to suppress the subject of female sex work. Geary-Jones analyzes Acton’s deeply rooted beliefs surrounding the working-class sex worker, investigating his traditional narratives that advocated and then supported the regulation of female sex work during the first and second editions of his publication. In particular, Geary-Jones examines the physician’s attack against a series of sex worker stereotypes which had been firmly embedded in cultural ideology since the beginning of the century. These stereotypes come under scrutiny in George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), demonstrating the author’s defiance of any conventional approach to the topic of female sex work in both his novels and personal relationships, resulting in scandal. This analysis is positioned against the cultural impact of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) in England and Jeremy Bentham’s The Panopticon Writings (1791)
Virility, Venality and Victory: Three Faces of Masculinity in Jurassic Park
Get PDFLike many of the blockbuster films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park (1993) is a story of survival, pitting humans against a force of nature: in this case, the imposing, genetically-engineered dinosaurs that cannot be contained by the science that created them. Beyond this, another survival story is woven into the narrative. This concerns the fate of the film’s men. When Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) reflects on the role of humans in nature – “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs” – Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) retorts presciently, “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.” “Clever girls” – Ellie, the velociraptor who outwits Robert Muldoon, computer whiz Lex – abound in the narrative, while around them the men struggle with their place in this new landscape.
Masculinity is bound up, variously, with cowardice (Gennaro), venality (Nedry), misplaced hubris (Hammond) and incautious virility (Malcolm). Even Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill), though ultimately victorious, must be reformed, trading individualism for family and reneging on his earlier opposition to children. The contours of American masculinity were increasingly under scrutiny in the 1990s, and Jurassic Park reflects various related anxieties, constructing images of flawed men in need of punishment or redemption. This chapter will explore the film’s representation of masculinity through a number of its male characters, exploring how their survival is tempered by negotiation, compromise and critique
Evaluation of Drinking Water Quality and Bacterial Antibiotic Sensitivity in Wells and Standpipes at Household Water Points in Freetown, Sierra Leone
Get PDFWater quality surveillance can help to reduce waterborne diseases. Despite better access to safe drinking water in Sierra Leone, about a third of the population (3 million people) drink water from unimproved sources. In this cross-sectional study, we collected water samples from 15 standpipes and 5 wells and measured the physicochemical and bacteriological water quality, and the antimicrobial sensitivity of Escherichia coli (E. coli) in two communities in Freetown, Sierra Leone in the dry and wet seasons in 2021. All water sources were contaminated with E. coli, and all five wells and 25% of standpipes had at least an intermediate risk level of E. coli. There was no antimicrobial resistance detected in the E. coli tested. The nitrate level exceeded the WHO's recommended standard (>10 parts per million) in 60% of the wells and in less than 20% of the standpipes. The proportion of samples from standpipes with high levels of total dissolved solids (>10 Nephelometric Turbidity Units) was much higher in the rainy season (73% vs. 7%). The level of water contamination is concerning. We suggest options to reduce E. coli contamination. Further research is required to identify where contamination of the water in standpipes is occurring
Unlocked: Writing from the Cheshire Prize for Literature 2020
No full textThe 2020 Cheshire Prize for Literatur
Alchemy: Brian Clough & Peter Taylor at Hartlepools United
No full textThis book is not available through ChesterRep.Boxing Day 1962: Sunderland’s star striker Brian Clough suffers a career-ending knee injury when he collides with an outrushing goalkeeper. After a forlorn battle to regain fitness, he retires early and sinks into deep despair.
October 1965: Clough persuades ex-Middlesbrough teammate Peter Taylor to join him in managing perennial North-East strugglers Hartlepools United, lying next to bottom of the Fourth Division.
A magical football odyssey has begun.
Alchemy reveals the bittersweet reality of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor’s first management job together. Lower-league Hartlepools United are penniless, with a meddling chairman, a ramshackle ground and want-away players. Yet the management pair tackle every challenge head-on, forging a winning blueprint that later transforms unfashionable Derby County and Nottingham Forest into League and European Cup champions.
Exploiting a wealth of archive newspapers, plus interviews with those present at the creation, Alchemy exposes the humble origins of Clough & Taylor’s meteoric rise to the top of the football tree
FireNet-v2: Improved Lightweight Fire Detection Model for Real-Time IoT Applications
Get PDFFire hazards cause huge ecological, social and economical losses in day to day life. Due to the rapid increase in the prevalence of fire accidents, it has become vital to equip the assets with fire prevention systems. There have been numerous researches to build a fire detection model in order to avert such accidents, with recent approaches leveraging the enormous improvements in computer vision deep learning models. However, most deep learning models have to compromise with their performance and accurate detection to maintain a reasonable inference time and parameter count. In this paper, we present a customized lightweight convolution neural network for early detection of fire. By virtue of low parameter count, the proposed model is amenable to embedded applications in real-time fire monitoring equipment, and even upcoming fire monitoring approaches such as unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). The fire detection results show marked improvement over the predecessor low-parameter-count models, while further reducing the number of trainable parameters. The overall accuracy of FireNet-v2, which has only 318,460 parameters, was found to be 98.43% when tested over Foggia's dataset
AFOM: Advanced Flow of Motion Detection Algorithm for Dynamic Camera Videos
Get PDF©2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The surveillance videos taken from dynamic cam-eras are susceptible to multiple security threats like replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, pixel correlation attacks etc. Using unsupervised learning, it is a challenge to detect objects in such surveillance videos, as fixed objects may appear to be in motion alongside the actual moving objects. But despite this challenge, the unsupervised learning techniques are efficient as they save object labelling and model training time, which is usually a case with supervised learning models. This paper proposes an effective computer vision-based object identification algorithm that can detect and separate stationary objects from moving objects in such videos. The proposed Advanced Flow Of Motion (AFOM) algorithm takes advantage of motion estimation between two consecutive frames and induces the estimated motion back to the frame to provide an improved detection on the dynamic camera videos. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the proposed AFOM outperforms a traditional dense optical flow (DOF) algorithm with an average increased difference of 56 % in accuracy, 61 % in precision, and 73 % in pixel space ratio (PSR), and with minimal higher object detection timing
When My Work is Found Wanting: Power, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and the reflexive feminist researcher
Get PDFThis is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society on 31/12/2021, available online: http://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Religion-Gender-and-Society/Starkey-Tomalin/p/book/9781138601901Feminist research emerges out of a struggle with power. Ingrained in feminist studies of religion is the identification and dismantling of religious hierarchies and structures that disempower. Feminist scholarship has contended with the essentialist categories of ‘woman’ and ‘women’s experience’ without questioning that its rendering of ‘religion’ and ‘gender’ was premised on and benefited from its own modes of dominance and suppression, conditioned by Western colonialism. Taking up feminist research is a reflexive position that can assist in upsetting the established hierarchies of power and the binary oppositions of researcher and researched, knower and known, political and personal. However, feminist thinking in religion and gender, like the author own, has not always been reflexively attentive to its almost exclusive focus on the relationships between religion and gender and its own power as the product of Western, colonial, secular discourses
Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input
Get PDFPrice-Williams, D., & Davies, M., Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input, First Language (Journal Volume Number 43 and Issue Number 1) pp. 112–134. Copyright © [2022] (The Authors). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for inputbased language acquisition theories. Two
analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children’s (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents’ use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child’s use of inflectional affixes and their lexical restrictedness was compared with their father’s equalised sample. Second, the children’s spontaneous case-marking errors were analysed in context and measured against type and token frequencies in both parents’ data and the child-directed speech (CDS) corpus. Findings in both analyses accord with constructivist theory: near adult-like knowledge of Polish inflections hiding a range of use that is more lexically restricted than in their caregivers’ speech; low error rates hiding much higher ‘pockets of ignorance’ for specific inflectional contexts; and patterns of error that correspond closely to token/type frequencies in the CDS, though with the older sibling making some errors that were not frequency-based. Potential effects of syncretism, case ambiguity and semantics are also discussed
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