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Prospective clinical evaluation of texture‐based features analysis of ultrasound ovarian scans for distinguishing benign and malignant adnexal tumors
No full textBook review: War or Peace: The Struggle for World Power
Get PDFAt the beginning of the third chapter of this book, Lal makes reference to the political historian, Francis Fukuyama, and his highly influential “End of History”, published in the heady days following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. This is apt, as, in many ways, Lal’s “War or Peace” is reminiscent of that earlier analysis of the state of the world at a major geopolitical turning point. In Lal’s words, Fukuyama presented a thesis of “the global victory of the market over the plan” (p.111). While things have not quite turned out the way Fukuyama expected, in the sense that authoritarian powers such as China and Russia have not only survived the fin de siècle but arguably flexed their muscles on the international stage with renewed confidence, Lal advocates a similar formula for the way ahead in no uncertain terms
An investigation into potential correlations between the placement of Neolithic Cursus Monuments and Large Herbivore Movement
Get PDFThis thesis identifies a very strong correlation between the placement and alignment of Neolithic Cursus Monuments with previous cattle movement and therefore makes an original contribution to the Cursus Monument debate. The thesis explores the proposal that a correlation exists between the placement of Cursus Monuments within the landscape and the movement of domestic cattle throughout that landscape. Any possible correlation between these monuments and the movement of Neolithic pastoralist communities within the area has not been well explored in extant research. Previous Cursus Monument studies have tended to focus on the construction or post-construction phases of the monument, rather than on the reasons behind a Neolithic community’s decision to locate and align these monuments where they did.
The research in this study uses quantifiable data gathered by George et al (2007), who fitted GPS collars to American range cattle to determine the terrain over which cattle move, combined with GIS elevation and slope data from a GIS software programme supplied by Environmental Systems Research Institute. This has enabled a quantifiable examination of the landscape next to 50 Cursus Monument sites on or adjacent to the English chalkland belt to determine the movement of cattle, across the landscape at each individual monument site. Investigation into areas of natural restriction to the landscape and areas affected by winter flooding of pasture has enabled the identification of areas that could have aided cattle movement and husbandry at prime points during the early spring. The inclusion of boots-on-the-ground field observations across each of the 50 monument sites have helped overcome issues associated with previous studies where answers from a few ideal examples appear to have then been extrapolated to the rest.
The linking of data on cattle movement (George et al 2007) to mainstream archaeological research has identified that the natural topography of the study group landscape has a very strongly correlation with the alignment of each Cursus Monument, where Cursus Monument sites appear to align with the potential route of cattle across the valley profile. It does not, however, appear to determine the precise location upon which the monument was constructed. Further investigation into areas affected by winter flooding of pasture, resulting in earlier nutritional grass growth upon which the cattle could feed, has identified that the precise location of Cursus Monument sites appears to have a strong correlation with these areas. The thesis identifies a strong correlation with cattle husbandry and determines individual factors such as association with spring meadows and an association with leading cattle to water which appear to have been significant factors in establishing the exact location for Cursus Monument sites.
The thesis potentially suggests that Cursus Monuments commenced life as droveways, thereby perhaps identifying an initial practical function to the landscape prior to their probable ritual importance as Cursus Monument sites. A case study is undertaken to re-evaluate these ideas using research undertaken in the Milfield Basin in Northumberland, an area that appears to have had a droveway which did not develop into a Cursus Monument.
Establishing a correlation between Cursus Monuments and earlier cattle movement opens the way for future study, through expanding the use of the methodology to upland Cursus Monument sites and Scottish Timber Cursus Monument sites
The Threat from Big States
No full textWe might imagine that cyber threats from big states like Russia and China are primarily
the concern of state intelligence agencies such as GCHQ and MI5. This, however, is the
wrong way to look at the situation. Due to increasingly blurry lines between activists,
criminals and states, everyone now needs to think about the threat from the big state
actors, from governments to businesses, large and small.
In this chapter, I will begin by considering which state actors are the ones to worry
about. We will consider their objectives in the cyber threat landscape; the complex
array of actors involved; the effects their actions have on a range of organisations; and
the key messages we should take away in conclusion
Mixed Methods in a Complex Overseas Environment: Space, Place, and Identity Politics in Karachi, Pakistan
Get PDFThis case study concerned an analysis of a new militant movement that emerged in the Pakistani city of Karachi in the 1980s, and which mobilized itself around a new conception of local ethnic identity. The aim of the research was to establish how and why this movement had emerged, and what the implications were for our understanding of identity politics both in Pakistan and in other similar “postcolonial” environments. A further focus of the research was on how a movement of this nature relates to space and place, in the sense of how a developing-world “mega-city” such as Karachi has shaped and influenced the rise of identity politics. The study deployed a combination of qualitative data in the shape of interviews and analysis of political documents and narratives, and quantitative data in the form of electoral and demographic data. The research delivered a number of observations on the challenges and opportunities of conducting research in complex overseas environments. These include the need to build-in contingency time in periods of fieldwork, the importance of logistical and linguistic assistance, and the need to properly consider security considerations in the research design
SOSE: Smart Offloading Scheme using Computing Resources of Nearby Wireless Devices for Edge Computing Services
Get PDFOffloading of all or part of any cloud service computation, when running processing-intensive Mobile Cloud Computing Services (MCCS), to servers in the cloud introduces time delay and communication overhead. Edge computing has emerged to resolve these issues, by shifting part of the service computation from the cloud to edge servers near the end-devices. An innovative Smart Cooperative Computation Offloading Framework (SCCOF), to leverage computation offloading to the cloud has been previously published by us [1]. This paper proposes SOSE; a solution to offload sub-tasks to nearby devices, on-the-go, that will form an “edge computing resource, we call SOSE_EDGE” so to enable the execution of the MCCS on any end-device. This is achieved by using short-range wireless connectivity to network between available cooperative end-devices. SOSE can partition the MCCS workload to execute among a pool of Offloadees (nearby end-devises; such as Smartphones, tablets, and PC’s), so to achieve minimum latency and improve performance while reducing battery power consumption of the Offloader (end-device that is running the MCCS). SOSE established the edge computing resource by: (1) profiling and partitioning the service workload to sub-tasks, based on a complexity relationship we developed. (2) Establishing peer2peer remote connection, with the available cooperative nearby Offloadees, based on SOSE assessment criteria. (3) Migrating the sub-tasks to the target edge devices in parallel and retrieve results. Scenarios and experiments to evaluate SOSE show that a significant improvement, in terms of processing time (>40%) and battery power consumption (>28%), has been achieved when compared with cloud offloading solutions
Vehicle Activity Recognition using Mapped QTC Trajectories
Get PDFThe automated analysis of interacting objects or vehicles has many uses, including autonomous driving and
security surveillance. In this paper we present a novel method for vehicle activity recognition using Deep
Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). We use Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC) to represent the relative
motion between pair of vehicles, and encode their interactions as a trajectory of QTC states. We then
use one-hot vectors to map the trajectory into 2D matrix which conserves the essential position information
of each QTC state in the sequence. Specifically, we project QTC sequences into a two dimensional image
texture, and subsequently our method adapt layers trained on the ImageNet dataset and transfer this knowledge
to the activity recognition task. We have evaluated our method using two different datasets, and shown
that it out-performs state-of-the-art methods, achieving an error rate of no more than 1.16%. Our motivation
originates from an interest in automated analysis of vehicle movement for the collision avoidance application,
and we present a dataset of vehicle-obstacle interaction, collected from simulator-based experiments
Open Access publishing: the continuing development of the Journal of Nutritional Science
Get PDFThe Journal of Nutritional Science (JNS) was established in the early part of this decade as an initiative between the
Nutrition Society and Cambridge University Press(1), with
the first volume appearing in 2012. The founding
Editor-in-Chief, Professor Philip Calder, was at the time also Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Nutrition (BJN). This reflected the original concept that the JNS would be closely allied to the BJN, with the same Editor-in-Chief and a common Editorial Board. The new journal was in part intended to provide a vehicle for articles that while scientifically sound were not able to be published by the BJN, because of the pressures on space in the Society’s flagship journal. A close association between the JNS and the BJN continued when Professor Graham Burdge took over as Editor-in-Chief of both journals in 2013
Combat Drones: Hives, Swarms, and Autonomous Action?
Get PDFFrom both jus ad bellum and jus in bello perspectives, the lawfulness of unmanned aerial vehicle/combat drone strikes have been examined extensively but not yet
exhaustively. Recent advances in technology allow combat drones to operate as a swarm—similar to their vespidae counterparts. An overly simplistic conclusion would suggest that the current legal tapestry applicable to solo drone usage would ‘automatically’ apply to drones acting collectively or as a swarm. This article, however,
posits a more controversial position that the technological uniqueness of individual drones acting as a swarm necessitates a more thorough deconstruction of the
applicable legal framework. In other words, does the unique way in which a swarm operates lawfully comply with both jus ad bellum and jus in bello parameters? Crucial to this discussion, is to examine the extent to which a swarm is programmed both offensively and defensively—with a view to exploring the algorithm of an automated response from other drones within the swarm. Within this broader question, the article seeks to scrutinise two specific areas. First, to what extent is the drone swarm’s architecture calibrated to comply with the cardinal self-defence parameters of necessity and proportionality should the swarm be attacked? And secondly, is the ‘swarm’ capable of being fully jus in bellow compliant in terms of distinction and proportionality and the duty to take precautions (‘The General Principles’). Would, for example, the chain of command structure in a drone swarm encompass the concept of the ‘reasonable military commander’ when it comes to targeting? The purpose of this article is not to reopen, or indeed close the debate surrounding artificial intelligence and its ethical implications. Rather, it is
to seek to open further discussion surrounding the applicability of 20th century legal thresholds to 21st century phenomena and beyond