The Woods, Late April

CRISPRing into the woods

The CRISPR/Cas9 technology is a welcome breakthrough for genome editing, owing to its precision, efficiency, versatility and ease of adoption. We recently reported the first application of CRISPR/Cas9 for biallelic mutations in stably transformed Populus, extending the species range of this powerful technology to woody perennials. An underappreciated obstacle in genome editing of outcrossing sp...

Deep Woods

Recent theoretical studies indicate that deep architectures [4, 2] are needed to efficiently model complex distributions and to achieve better generalization performance on challenging recognition tasks. The belief that additional levels of functional composition will yield increased representational and modeling power is not new [13, 9, 16]. In practice, learning in deep architectures had prov...

Ambient Sounds in the Woods

In this paper we describe research in which we have used sound as part of a mobile multimedia learning experience for children. In this work we have classified sound clips into categories that appear to have differing effectiveness. We have also observed unexpected behaviour by the children indicating that our devices are capable of further development. We propose further research using sound t...

Fears for the woods and the trees

Two hundred years ago, when the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected folk legends and fairy tales (first published in two volumes in 82 and 85), central European forests were still seen as dark and dangerous places, with threats ranging from wolves to criminal gangs. Many of the tales, along with other literature of the Romantic era, reflect this fearful perception of the woods. However, ...

Trees outside woods