University of Lincoln

About: University of Lincoln is a education organization based out in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2341 authors who have published 7025 publications receiving 124797 citations.

Unconstrained Video Monitoring of Breathing Behavior and Application to Diagnosis of Sleep Apnea

Abstract: This paper presents a new real-time automated infrared video monitoring technique for detection of breathing anomalies, and its application in the diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. We introduce a novel motion model to detect subtle, cyclical breathing signals from video, a new 3-D unsupervised self-adaptive breathing template to learn individuals' normal breathing patterns online, and a robust action classification method to recognize abnormal breathing activities and limb movements. This technique avoids imposing positional constraints on the patient, allowing patients to sleep on their back or side, with or without facing the camera, fully or partially occluded by the bed clothes. Moreover, shallow and abdominal breathing patterns do not adversely affect the performance of the method, and it is insensitive to environmental settings such as infrared lighting levels and camera view angles. The experimental results show that the technique achieves high accuracy (94% for the clinical data) in recognizing apnea episodes and body movements and is robust to various occlusion levels, body poses, body movements (i.e., minor head movement, limb movement, body rotation, and slight torso movement), and breathing behavior (e.g., shallow versus heavy breathing, mouth breathing, chest breathing, and abdominal breathing).

Social referencing and cat–human communication

Abstract: Cats’ (Felis catus) communicative behaviour towards humans was explored using a social referencing paradigm in the presence of a potentially frightening object. One group of cats observed their owner delivering a positive emotional message, whereas another group received a negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate whether cats use the emotional information provided by their owners about a novel/unfamiliar object to guide their own behaviour towards it. We assessed the presence of social referencing, in terms of referential looking towards the owner (defined as looking to the owner immediately before or after looking at the object), the behavioural regulation based on the owner’s emotional (positive vs negative) message (vocal and facial), and the observational conditioning following the owner’s actions towards the object. Most cats (79 %) exhibited referential looking between the owner and the object, and also to some extent changed their behaviour in line with the emotional message given by the owner. Results are discussed in relation to social referencing in other species (dogs in particular) and cats’ social organization and domestication history.

Assessing the Effects of Tourist Provisioning on the Health of Wild Barbary Macaques in Morocco

Abstract: Feeding wildlife is a very popular tourist activity, largely because it facilitates the close observation of animals in their natural habitat. Such provisioning may benefit animals by improving their survival and reproductive success, especially during periods of natural food shortage. However, provisioning by tourists may also have negative impacts on the health of the animals involved; to date such impacts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effects of tourist provisioning on the health of wild adult Barbary macaques, Macaca sylvanus, in Morocco. We compared health measures between a heavily provisioned group and a group that received negligible food from tourists and, in the former group, we also assessed health measures in relation to the intensity of provisioning. We used a broad range of non-invasive health measures relating to birth rate and survival, disease and injury risk, body size and condition, and physiological stress. Our findings indicate that feeding by tourists may overall have negative impacts on the health of Barbary macaques, being linked in particular to larger body size, elevated stress levels and more alopecia. Finally, we propose a framework to help consider the potential costs and benefits of provisioning, which may facilitate future research and management decisions on whether—and how much—provisioning is acceptable.

Abrupt landscape change post–6 Ma on the central Great Plains, USA

Abstract: The principal control on landscape evolution in the central Great Plains of the United States over the past 10 m.y. is a contentious subject. New sedimentary data collected from Late Miocene Ogallala Group and Pliocene Broadwater Formation of the Nebraskan Great Plains demonstrates a twofold increase in the median grain size (from 20 mm to >40 mm) exported from the Rocky Mountains across the Miocene-Pliocene boundary. Paleoslope reconstructions derived from these data support the tilting of the Miocene Ogallala Group after 6 Ma, but demonstrate that the transport slope of the lower part of the unconformably overlying Pliocene succession is identical to the present-day slope. These data allow us to constrain the timing of differential uplift in the Great Plains to between 6 and 3.7 m.y.; the wavelength and short duration of this tilting are best explained by the initiation of localized dynamic topography. Our results also suggest a threefold to fourfold increase in specific stream power at this time, meaning that Pliocene rivers draining the central Rockies were considerably more competent than their Miocene predecessors. Incision during this period was not continuous. A significant episode of aggradation from 3.7 to 2.5 Ma is best explained by high rates of sediment supply relating to the warm, wet mid-Pliocene climate optimum. The modern pattern of incision on the Great Plains occurred from 2.5 Ma, and not from the end of the Miocene as is sometimes supposed, reflecting the onset of major Northern Hemisphere glaciation.

The trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption in airport ground movement

Abstract: Environmental issues play an important role across many sectors. This is particularly the case in the air transportation industry. One area which has remained relatively unexplored in this context is the ground movement problem for aircraft on the airport’s surface. Aircraft have to be routed from a gate to a runway and vice versa and a key area of study is whether fuel burn and environmental impact improvements will best result from purely minimising the taxi times or whether it is also important to avoid multiple acceleration phases. This paper presents a newly developed multi-objective approach for analysing the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption during taxiing. The approach consists of a combination of a graph-based routing algorithm and a population adaptive immune algorithm to discover different speed profiles of aircraft. Analysis with data from a European hub airport has highlighted the impressive performance of the new approach. Furthermore, it is shown that the trade-off between taxi time and fuel consumption is very sensitive to the fuel-related objective function which is used.