Roger Bradbury

Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is expected to exceed 500 parts per million and global temperatures to rise by at least 2°C by 2050 to 2100, values that significantly exceed those of at least the past 420,000 years during which most extant marine organisms evolved. Under conditions expected in the 21st century, global warming and ocean acidification will compromise carbonate accretion, with corals becoming increasingly rare on reef systems. The result will be less diverse reef communities and carbonate reef structures that fail to be maintained. Climate change also exacerbates local stresses from declining water quality and overexploitation of key species, driving reefs increasingly toward the tipping point for functional collapse. This review presents future scenarios for coral reefs that predict increasingly serious consequences for reef-associated fisheries, tourism, coastal protection, and people. As the International Year of the Reef 2008 begins, scaled-up management intervention and decisive action on global emissions are required if the loss of coral-dominated ecosystems is to be avoided.

Depletion, degradation, and recovery potential of estuaries and coastal seas.

Estuarine and coastal transformation is as old as civilization yet has dramatically accelerated over the past 150 to 300 years. Reconstructed time lines, causes, and consequences of change in 12 once diverse and productive estuaries and coastal seas worldwide show similar patterns: Human impacts have depleted >90% of formerly important species, destroyed >65% of seagrass and wetland habitat, degraded water quality, and accelerated species invasions. Twentieth-century conservation efforts achieved partial recovery of upper trophic levels but have so far failed to restore former ecosystem structure and function. Our results provide detailed historical baselines and quantitative targets for ecosystem-based management and marine conservation.

Transforming management of tropical coastal seas to cope with challenges of the 21st century

Over 1.3 billion people live on tropical coasts, primarily in developing countries. Many depend on adjacent coastal seas for food, and livelihoods. We show how trends in demography and in several local and global anthropogenic stressors are progressively degrading capacity of coastal waters to sustain these people. Far more effective approaches to environmental management are needed if the loss in provision of ecosystem goods and services is to be stemmed. We propose expanded use of marine spatial planning as a framework for more effective, pragmatic management based on ocean zones to accommodate conflicting uses. This would force the holistic, regional-scale reconciliation of food security, livelihoods, and conservation that is needed. Transforming how countries manage coastal resources will require major change in policy and politics, implemented with sufficient flexibility to accommodate societal variations. Achieving this change is a major challenge - one that affects the lives of one fifth of humanity.

Coral reef science and the new commons

We humans have inadvertently triggered the emergence of a new Earth system: a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2007). It is replacing the Holocene, the epoch in which civilisation evolved. Coral reefs, together with all other ecosystems on the planet, are being swept up in this change. The changes are so complex that they are overwhelming the ability of traditional science to comprehend them, and their consequences are so profound that they demand a new compact between science and society. This compact, we shall argue, is really an old one, but one, nevertheless, that is new to coral reef science. Coral reef science is doomed to irrelevance unless it embraces it. In this view, the issue is not to ‘save’ coral reef ecosystems from humans but to reshape them to survive the Anthropocene together with humans—it is not to conserve species as an end in itself but to retain useful system functions and hence fitness for their joint purpose with humans. This is not to rail against science itself. Coral reefs, like many ecosystems, face an existential crisis, and science is vital to its resolution. But, if there is to be a resolution, it will not be in the way that many reef scientists currently believe. Rather, the solution will be through new science built on an old compact with society. This optimistic compact describes the ‘how and why’ of the application of science to the human condition—engineering in its best and broadest sense. Indeed, we shall argue that the compact needs to drive the creation of a new commons for coral reefs—a closely managed commons that replaces today’s tragedy (Hardin 1968) and actively reshapes coral reefs for the Anthropocene. We suggest that such a commons will restore our science to a healthier place in society. Today, coral reef science may seem to be part of a coral reef industry that sometimes has more to do with ideology than science, and that often places people in opposition to coral reefs. A more relevant coral reef science could foster an optimistic but realistic—an almost Victorian—awareness that coral reefs can be shaped successfully for our beneficial use.

Novel Text Analysis for Investigating Personality: Identifying the Dark Lady in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract With the rise of social media, understanding a person’s sentiment, their mood and anxiety levels, has become just as important to law enforcement agencies as identifying online anonymous blog posts that aim to radicalize, promote terrorism, or criminal activity. Many of these mood and identity techniques rely on basic statistical correlations, word counts, collocated word groups, or keyword density. We claim that an alternative technique that uses word semantics reflecting personality or characteristics of self can provide a more accurate profile of a person. To test this we analyse Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a collection of poems believed to contain a Dark Lady and two other ‘voices’. We use an exploratory combinatorial data analysis technique called seriation in combination with RPAS, a multi-faceted text analysis approach that draws on a writer’s personality, or self, to visualize the 154 sonnets and to investigate whether it is possible to identify subtle characteristics within a person’s writing style from small texts when an author’s identity is known. We find that RPAS, not only clusters the Dark Lady and other sonnets, but also has the potential to discriminate subtle shifts in personality from texts as small as 90 words.

Simple Memes and Complex Cultural Dynamics

Regions and their policies are built on many things, such as ideas, actions, habits, skills, inventions, songs and stories, to name a few. This paper views all of these as selfish Darwinian entities – memes – that, like genes, interact and replicate in complex ways with humans to shape our culture. Perniciously, simple memes can exploit our limited capacity to deal collectively with complex problems. Whether good or bad, a single, omnipotent meme can dominate a local region of meme-space.

Stylometric Techniques for Multiple Author Clustering

In 1598-99 printer, William Jaggard named Shakespeare as the sole author of The Passionate Pilgrim even though Jaggard chose a number of non-Shakespearian poems in the volume. Using a neurolinguistics approach to authorship identification, a four-feature technique, RPAS, is used to convert the 21 poems in The Passionate Pilgrim into a multi-dimensional vector. Three complementary analytical techniques are applied to cluster the data and reduce single technique bias before an alternate method, seriation, is used to measure the distances between clusters and test the strength of the connections. The multivariate techniques are found to be robust and able to allocate nine of the 12 unknown poems to Shakespeare. The authorship of one of the Barnfield poems is questioned, and analysis highlights that others are collaborations or works of yet to be acknowledged poets. It is possible that as many as 15 poems were Shakespeare’s and at least five poets were not acknowledged.

Using Shakespeare's Sotto Voce to Determine True Identity From Text

Little is known of the private life of William Shakespeare, but he is famous for his collection of plays and poems, even though many of the works attributed to him were published anonymously. Determining the identity of Shakespeare has fascinated scholars for 400 years, and four significant figures in English literary history have been suggested as likely alternatives to Shakespeare for some disputed works: Bacon, de Vere, Stanley, and Marlowe. A myriad of computational and statistical tools and techniques have been used to determine the true authorship of his works. Many of these techniques rely on basic statistical correlations, word counts, collocated word groups, or keyword density, but no one method has been decided on. We suggest that an alternative technique that uses word semantics to draw on personality can provide an accurate profile of a person. To test this claim, we analyse the works of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Elizabeth Cary. We use Word Accumulation Curves, Hierarchical Clustering overlays, Principal Component Analysis, and Linear Discriminant Analysis techniques in combination with RPAS, a multi-faceted text analysis approach that draws on a writers personality, or self to identify subtle characteristics within a persons writing style. Here we find that RPAS can separate the known authored works of Shakespeare from Marlowe and Cary. Further, it separates their contested works, works suspected of being written by others. While few authorship identification techniques identify self from the way a person writes, we demonstrate that these stylistic characteristics are as applicable 400 years ago as they are today and have the potential to be used within cyberspace for law enforcement purposes.

Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III

William Shakespeare is believed to be a significant author in the anonymous play, The Reign of King Edward III, published in 1596. However, recently, Thomas Kyd, has been suggested as the primary author. Using a neurolinguistics approach to authorship identification we use a four-feature technique, RPAS, to convert the 19 scenes in Edward III into a multi-dimensional vector. Three complementary analytical techniques are applied to cluster the data and reduce single technique bias before an alternate method, seriation, is used to measure the distances between clusters and test the strength of the connections. We find the multivariate techniques robust and are able to allocate up to 14 scenes to Thomas Kyd, and further question if scenes long believed to be Shakespeares are not his.

The Stylometric Impacts of Ageing and Life Events on Identity

Abstract Using data containing stylometric markers for depression and Alzheimer’s disease, the 45 novels of Iris Murdoch and P.D. James are examined to see if a signature of an individual, their personality, changes over time due to life events and natural ageing. We use variants of the critical slowing down 1-lag autocorrelation and coefficient of skewness techniques with a multivariate identity measure, RPAS to visualize these changes. We find that life events such as depression, anxiety, and Alzheimer’s disease might be identified outside of natural ageing through a tipping point phenomenon. We believe these techniques might be a useful self-help tool to aid in the signalling of depressive episodes, such as averting suicide, and the early identification of Alzheimer’s disease, or for law enforcement personnel monitoring terrorists on watch lists.