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The effects of oxytocin on proximity - seeking behavior and vocalizations in shelter cats
Get PDFThe aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of intranasally administered oxytocin on the sociability of adult, neutered, male and female shelter cats, as measured by proximity-seeking behavior and meow vocalizations. Two local Humane Societies were sampled in this study. The shelter cats were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a control group or an oxytocin (OT) group. The control group received intranasally administered saline and the OT group received intranasally administered OT. A Paired Attachment Test (PAT) conducted with each cat consisted of a 2 – minute phase in which each cat was allowed to freely explore the testing room. Each time the subject would fully enter either of the circles, they would be greeted with 2 pets from either the handler or administrator. Each session was analyzed and coded for specific behaviors/actions including frequency of contact with each tester, duration of time spent in the 1m half - circle to each tester, and frequency of meow vocalizations. Although an increase in pro-social behaviors such as meow vocalizations and proximity – seeking were expected, only the frequency of approaches by the shelter cats to the testers after given OT was statistically significant. These results may be applicable in increasing pro – social behaviors of cats in shelter settings seeking adoption
The Evolution of Software Entropy in Open Source projects: An Empirical Study
Get PDFSoftware entropy impacts the overall quality of software systems. High entropy hinders developers from understanding the purpose of a piece of code and can cause developers to make sub-optimal changes and introduce bugs. Researchers have used entropy scores to measure the naturalness of code. However, thus far, no one has investigated how entropy evolves in real-life software over time and how that relates to software evolution. We perform a large scale study of 158 open-source Java projects and find that in general, entropy shows an increasing trend among the open-source projects.We also find that on average week wise entropy of a project has a moderate correlation with project metrics (number of active contributors per week, total methods per week, and total files per week) used to investigate project evolution. Our findings contribute to understanding the evolution of software entropy, which hint towards the need for tools to provide real-time entropy scores to the developers to help them organize the code
Vegetation Community Data to Inform Climate-Adaptation Management; Gardiner, New York
Get PDFClimate change represents an increasing threat to northeastern temperate forests. Nearly all forest communities have been affected by climate change and require climate-adaptation management (Jandl et al. 2018). Climate-adaptation management (CAM) promotes the viability of forested systems and the ecosystem services they provide under current and future climatic conditions (Bolte et al. 2010). To effectively engage in CAM, land managers must have a thorough understanding of vegetation community composition, as well as an understanding of each vegetation community’s vulnerabilities and risks. The study site —Mohonk Preserve— is owned by a land trust located in the Northern Shawangunk Ridge of Ulster County, New York. This vulnerability assessment considered the dominant vegetation communities found at Mohonk Preserve — Appalachian oak-hickory, beech-maple mesic, chestnut oak, hemlock-northern hardwood forest, and pitch pine-oak-heath. The assessment synthesizes existing research on climate change associated vulnerabilities of each forest community and discusses selected disturbance risks. The relative risk that climate change poses to each vegetation community was qualitatively evaluated using data from the Mid-Atlantic Forest Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment, the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas, The Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Land Mapping Tool, silvics data, spatial analysis, and information from Mohonk Preserve’s land managers. Appalachian oak-hickory and beech-maple mesic forests were found to have a moderate-low vulnerability. Chestnut oak forests were rated as moderate-high vulnerability. Eastern hemlock-northern hardwood forests were rated as a high vulnerability. No rating was given to the pitch pine-oak-heath community due to inconsistencies between data sources
Compiling Dataparallel C for efficient execution on tightly coupled multiprocessors
Get PDFWe describe a set of data flow techniques and code transformations that translate a single instruction stream, multiple data stream (SIMD) Dataparallel C program into a semantically equivalent single program, multiple data stream (SPMD) C program suitable for execution on shared memory multiprocessor computers, such as the Sequent Balance and Sequent Symmetry. The technique consists of identifying those areas in the original synchronous SIMD program where barrier synchronizations must be enforced to preserve the semantics, and then rewriting the. program as a loosely synchronous SPMD C program that includes calls to barrier synchronization library routines. The run-time model used by the translated program is also presented. We discuss a Dataparallel C compiler we have implemented using our proposed methodology. Finally, we present some performance results for our compiler, and we discuss techniques to improve these results
An attributed-based database structure for small computers
Get PDFContemporary database systems are used in a variety of business applications requiring rapid retrieval of online data. When records contain unique information indexed by a single key, the retrieval operation can be simplified. However, when added generality and flexibility is needed, inverted files and sophisticated data models result in a system of interconnecting pointers and their associated data management programs. These, in turn, add unnecessary complexity to the overall system.
This paper develops a simplified data representation that overcomes many of the object1ons of other flexible database representations. In particular, we solve the following problems inherent in other database techniques employing a technique called the hashed index arrays.
(1) Space consuming redundancy inherent in inverted files or linked structures is reduced to a minimum, thus making the indexed array structure attractive for small systems.
(2) Records may be indexed by multiple keys (combined domain values). Each key field need not store a unique value, thus providing multi-attribute processing via a hashing function.
(3) Fast retrieval, updates, and database "growth" is possible without excessive complexity. This is made possible by using extendible array structures based on shells rather than rows and columns
Decision analysis using the Hybrid Uncertainty Manager
Get PDFWe present an extended mapping in the Hybrid Uncertainty Manager so that all the components of an influence diagram can be represented. This will allow us to perform decision analysis on a decision problem. Specifically, a representation for decision nodes, value node, and informational arcs will be given. With these components, calculations in decision analysis such as expected value, expected value with information, and expected value of information can be performed. Reasoning about actions under uncertainty using decision analysis provides an axiomatic framework; this makes the verification of the results easier and checking for the validity of the results meaningful
Video Object Segmentation by Jointly Tracking Foreground and Background
Get PDFThis report presents an efficient method for semi-supervised video object segmentation – the problem of identifying foreground pixels occupied by a target object. The target is specified by the ground-truth mask in the first video frame. While the state of the art achieves a segmentation accuracy greater than 80%, it runs relatively slow at less than 10 frames per second. This limits their application in many domains. In addition, accuracy of existing approaches typically suffers on cases of target occlusion by moving background objects. We address these two shortcomings of prior work by a novel deep architecture aimed at jointly tracking both foreground and background in the video in an efficient manner. Our key hypothesis is that explicitly tracking the dynamic background of the target object helps improve segmentation in cases of target occlusion. We propose using two deep neural networks that work in parallelone for foreground object segmentation, and the other for background segmentation. They use the same architecture. Their output is integrated in another network for fusing the initial foreground and background segmentation into a more accurate target object segmentation. We perform experiments using various configurations of the proposed architecture on the DAVIS 2016 dataset. Our results support the key hypothesis where the joint tracking of the dynamic foreground and background indeed outperforms a baseline that tracks only the target object. On DAVIS 2016, our accuracy is 70.61%, while operating at over 100 frames per second
Social reconstruction in dam-induced displacement: A case study of four resettlement projects on the Lancang River, China
Get PDFInvoluntary movement, also known as forced displacement, has affected millions of people worldwide. At the end of 20th century, approximately 80 million people had been displaced due to hydropower projects, including approximately 22.5 million people in China. Dam-induced migration not only causes material loss, such as loss of homes and agricultural lands, but this migration also causes social capital loss, disrupting individuals’ long term sustainable social networks. In order to understand the factors that might affect social reconstruction in resettled communities, this research studies community social environments at four dam sites (Manwan, Dachaoshan, Xiaowan, and Nuozhadu) on the Lancang River in China. Data is drawn from the “Community Environment” section of The Lancang River Dam-induced Resettlement Survey (2010). This survey asked questions about participants’ economic health, social networks, and perceived well-being. Chi-square tests were used to compare the differences in survey answers between non-resettled and resettled communities at each dam site. The result indicated that the resettled communities of Manwan, Dachaoshan and Nuozhadu have higher community environment satisfaction than their non-resettled counterparts, while Xiaowan shows the opposite. Factors, like time for adaption, type of relocation compensation, as well as households’ income, labor, and other resources, and demographics (ethnicity and age), might affect social reconstruction in resettled communities. Identifying potential relationships among these factors and social capital will help to promote strategies for social reconstruction necessitated by future dam-induced displacement.Keywords: Yunnan, Resettlement, Community Reconstruction, Social Network, Social Capita
The Social Construction of the Deserving Poor within Renewable Energy Policy
Get PDFRenewable energy policy serves as a tool to combat the hazards that fossil energy sources pose to human health and the global environment. It is also being used to achieve additional social and economic goals alongside environmental policy, namely, bringing equitable liberation to populations disproportionately affected by increasing global temperatures. Legislation such as the Green New Deal serves to bring awareness to the United States’ obligation to create a future of zero emissions energy sources, clean water, air, and healthy food for all citizens, and high-wage jobs within the green jobs sector. Likewise, Oregon’s Green Jobs Growth Bill and Clean Electricity and Coal Transition Bill aim at doing away with coal-fired energy and growing the green jobs sector within the State by providing unskilled, prevailing wage jobs through the growth of renewable energy manufacturing and production. The analysis looks at the language employed within the Green Jobs Growth Plan, Coal Transition Plan, and Green New Deal to examine how the working poor and the coal industry are represented within the current debate over renewable energy. Using the Social Construction Framework, the analysis addresses the manner in which these legislative efforts have adopted an approach that not only describes, but helps to construct, the idea that different actors impacted by renewable energy policy are deserving of government action to provide support and prosperity
