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.

Do cladistic and morphometric data capture common patterns of morphological disparity

Abstract: The distinctly non-random diversity of organis- mal form manifests itself in discrete clusters of taxa that share a common body plan. As a result, analyses of disparity require a scalable comparative framework. The difficulties of applying geometric morphometrics to disparity analyses of groups with vastly divergent body plans are overcome partly by the use of cladistic characters. Character-based disparity analyses have become increasingly popular, but it is not clear how they are affected by character coding strategies or revi- sions of primary homology statements. Indeed, whether cla- distic and morphometric data capture similar patterns of morphological variation remains a moot point. To address this issue, we employ both cladistic and geometric morpho- metric data in an exploratory study of disparity focussing on caecilian amphibians. Our results show no impact on relative intertaxon distances when different coding strategies for cla- distic characters were used or when revised concepts of homology were considered. In all instances, we found no sta- tistically significant difference between pairwise Euclidean and Procrustes distances, although the strength of the corre- lation among distance matrices varied. This suggests that cla- distic and geometric morphometric data appear to summarize morphological variation in comparable ways. Our results support the use of cladistic data for characteriz- ing organismal disparity.

Effects of the tropospheric large‐scale circulation on European winter temperatures during the period of amplified Arctic warming

Abstract: We investigate factors influencing European winter (DJFM) air temperatures for the period 1979–2015 with the focus on changes during the recent period of rapid Arctic warming (1998–2015). We employ meteorological reanalyses analysed with a combination of correlation analysis, two pattern clustering techniques, and back‐trajectory airmass identification. In all five selected European regions, severe cold winter events lasting at least 4 days are significantly correlated with warm Arctic episodes. Relationships during opposite conditions of warm Europe/cold Arctic are also significant. Correlations have become consistently stronger since 1998. Large‐scale pattern analysis reveals that cold spells are associated with the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO‐) and the positive phase of the Scandinavian (SCA+) pattern, which in turn are correlated with the divergence of dry‐static energy transport. Warm European extremes are associated with opposite phases of these patterns and the convergence of latent heat transport. Airmass trajectory analysis is consistent with these findings, as airmasses associated with extreme cold events typically originate over continents, while warm events tend to occur with prevailing maritime airmasses. Despite Arctic‐wide warming, significant cooling has occurred in northeastern Europe owing to a decrease in adiabatic subsidence heating in airmasses arriving from the southeast, along with increased occurrence of circulation patterns favouring low temperature advection. These dynamic effects dominated over the increased mean temperature of most circulation patterns. Lagged correlation analysis reveals that SCA‐ and NAO+ are typically preceded by cold Arctic anomalies during the previous 2–3 months, which may aid seasonal forecasting.

The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy

Abstract: I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour.

The effects of exercise on cigarette cravings and brain activation in response to smoking-related images

Abstract: Rationale Smokers show heightened activation toward smoking-related stimuli and experience increased cravings which can precipitate smoking cessation relapse. Exercise can be effective for modulating cigarette cravings and attenuating reactivity to smoking cues, but the mechanism by which these effects occur remains uncertain.

From Pixels to Response Maps: Discriminative Image Filtering for Face Alignment in the Wild

Abstract: We propose a face alignment framework that relies on the texture model generated by the responses of discriminatively trained part-based filters. Unlike standard texture models built from pixel intensities or responses generated by generic filters (e.g. Gabor), our framework has two important advantages. First, by virtue of discriminative training, invariance to external variations (like identity, pose, illumination and expression) is achieved. Second, we show that the responses generated by discriminatively trained filters (or patch-experts) are sparse and can be modeled using a very small number of parameters. As a result, the optimization methods based on the proposed texture model can better cope with unseen variations. We illustrate this point by formulating both part-based and holistic approaches for generic face alignment and show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple ”wild” databases. The code and dataset annotations are available for research purposes from http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources.