Raspberry Pi nest cameras: An affordable tool for remote behavioral and conservation monitoring of bird nests.

Bespoke (custom-built) Raspberry Pi cameras are increasingly popular research tools in the fields of behavioral ecology and conservation, because of their comparative flexibility in programmable settings, ability to be paired with other sensors, and because they are typically cheaper than commercially built models.Here, we describe a novel, Raspberry Pi-based camera system that is fully portable and yet weatherproof-especially to humidity and salt spray. The camera was paired with a passive infrared sensor, to create a movement-triggered camera capable of recording videos over a 24-hr period.

Full body gait analysis with Kinect.

Human gait is an important indicator of health, with applications ranging from diagnosis, monitoring, and rehabilitation. In practice, the use of gait analysis has been limited. Existing gait analysis systems are either expensive, intrusive, or require well-controlled environments such as a clinic or a laboratory.

Spatio-temporal stochastic modelling of Clostridium difficile.

Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhoea (CDAD) occurs sporadically or in small discrete outbreaks. Stochastic models may help to inform hospital infection control strategies. Bayesian framework using data augmentation and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods were applied to a spatio-temporal model of CDAD.

An improved saddlepoint approximation.

Given a set of third- or higher-order moments, not only is the saddlepoint approximation the only realistic 'family-free' technique available for constructing an associated probability distribution, but it is 'optimal' in the sense that it is based on the highly efficient numerical method of steepest descents. However, it suffers from the problem of not always yielding full support, and whilst [S. Wang, General saddlepoint approximations in the bootstrap, Prob.

Spatial heterogeneity and the stability of reaction states in autocatalysis.

The impact of stochasticity and spatial heterogeneity on the quadratic autocatalytic system is studied. In a nonspatial setting the reactive state of the system is found to be unstable in small volumes where internal fluctuations drive the system to the unreactive state. This phenomena is of potential importance to the stability of reactions in biological cells.