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Decapitation is an ancient practice in Asia with inadequate research. The present study reports on the osteological examination of a headless skeleton excavated from a high-status tomb in Chu State style dating back to the late Warring States Period (ca. 3th century BC) in Lu’an, Anhui, China. The individual is identified as a victim of decapitation with five peri-mortem sharp force cut marks on the posterior parts of the cervical vertebrae, and another one on the right second metacarpal. Microscopic observation of the kerfs, the historical records and archaeological evidence support the speculation that the individual could be a warrior of Chu State, who is decapitated after being wounded during the war against the Qin State. The hacking implement and the sequences of the cut marks are further discussed to reconstruct the process of execution. This multidisciplinary reconstruction is the first scientific osteological analysis of the decapitation on the human remains from the Chinese Bronze Age. Moreover, it will enrich our knowledge of the decapitation phenomenon in terms of war and execution in ancient China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the current state of knowledge of British boarding axes. It examines the two models of boarding axe used by the Royal Navy as well as British made axes privately purchased for use in merchant ships. It gives an overview of their use, identifies the main types and records the known manufacturers. It also uncovers an axe that may have been used by the Royal Navy in between the two types already recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Neotropical region hosts one of the highest levels of small non-volant mammal species diversity worldwide, but sampling therein is often intractable due to high logistic and labour costs. While most common sampling methods include live trapping (LT) and pitfall trapping (PT), camera trapping (CT) is potentially a useful technique. Studies assessing data acquisition efficiency for neotropical small mammals are mostly limited to LT and PT, and no small mammal study to date included CT. We provide a comparative assessment of the efficiency of LT (Sherman and wire-mesh traps), PT and CT in surveying small mammal species across 25 sites in an Amazonian archipelagic landscape. Based on 26,184 trap nights, we obtained 782 small mammal records representing at least 18 species. Most species were detected by both LT (72.2%) and PT (83.3%), but each of these methods exclusively recorded additional species, whereas CT detected only nearly one-fourth (N = 4) of all species recorded. Nevertheless, for nearly all species detected by CT, the probability of detecting individual species was similar or higher than that of LT. Species detected by CT represented the largest-bodied rodents and marsupials (> 200 g). Pitfall traps are an important complement to LT, and CT comprises an efficient technique to sample large-bodied small mammals. Improvements in the efficiency of camera traps in recording and identifying small-bodied species are both needed and possible, but we recommend the combination of LT and PT methods to enhance the completeness of community-wide small mammal sampling in neotropical forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The use of traps is extremely important in several types of ecological studies, and may assist in the capture of individuals in areas that are difficult to access. In the present study, we compared the effectiveness of wooden (Schramm) versus "Tomahawk" traps to capture Salvator merianae (Duméril & Bibron, 1839) lizards. The study was conducted in Eldorado do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Field data were collected from August 2013 to March 2015, during the reproductive period of the species. The study involved two types of baited traps: i) "Tomahawk", made of galvanized steel; and ii) Schramm, a wooden trap. The capture rate of the Schramm wooden traps was 1.63 individuals/day, and of the "Tomahawk" was 0.36 individuals/day. These results are important for researchers working with large lizards and may help to increase sampling efficiency for these organisms.

The use of traps is extremely important in several types of ecological studies, and may assist in the capture of individuals in areas that are difficult to access. In the present study, we compared the effectiveness of wooden (Schramm) versus "Tomahawk" traps to capture Salvator merianae (Duméril & Bibron, 1839) lizards. The study was conducted in Eldorado do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Field data were collected from August 2013 to March 2015, during the reproductive period of the species. The study involved two types of baited traps: i) "Tomahawk", made of galvanized steel; and ii) Schramm, a wooden trap. The capture rate of the Schramm wooden traps was 1.63 individuals/ day, and of the "Tomahawk" was 0.36 individuals/day. These results are important for researchers working with large lizards and may help to increase sampling efficiency for these organisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneity and parallelism in MPSoCs for 4G (and beyond) communications signal processing are inevitable in order to meet stringent power constraints and performance requirements. The question arises on how to cope with the problem of system programmability and runtime management incurred by the statically or even dynamically varying number and type of processing elements. This work addresses this challenge by proposing the concept of a heterogeneous many-core platform called Tomahawk. Apart from the definition of the system architecture, in this approach a unified framework including a model of computation, a programming interface and a dedicated runtime management unit called CoreManager is proposed. The increase of system complexity in terms of application parallelism and number of resources may lead to a dramatic increase of the management costs, hence causing performance degradation. For this reason, the efficient implementation of the CoreManager becomes a major issue in system design. This work compares the performance and capabilities of various CoreManager HW/SW solutions, based on ASIC, RISC and ASIP paradigms. The results demonstrate that the proposed ASIP-based solution approaches the performance of the ASIC realization, while preserving the full flexibility of the software (RISC-based) implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile can be launched from a ship or submarine, and can deliver its warhead precisely to a target at long range. There are several variants of the Tomahawk missile, each with specialized capabilities. For each Tomahawk Missile Sequence Number (MSN) task (i.e., mission), the Tomahawk missile variants can be ranked with respect to their ability and cost effectiveness to perform that task. A given land attack strike order may involve a large number of Tomahawk missiles and numerous Tomahawk launch platforms. Operational planners select, in real time, feasible launch platforms to execute Tomahawk taskings. The Tomahawk tasking in a strike order includes not only primary assignments but also backup assignments. On board each launch platform, the precise allocation of specific Tomahawk missiles to the Tomahawk MSN task assigned is optimized with a model described here. We help naval operational planners select, in real time, appropriate feasible launch platforms to fulfill the Tomahawk tasking in a strike order. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 58: 281-294, 2011 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Navy's audacious Maritime Strategy of the 1980s is often credited with acting as a key catalyst to the demise of the USSR. In assessing the role of strategic missile submarine “bastions” in the country's overall military strategy, the authors are skeptical of the above thesis, explaining that Moscow actually viewed deployments of Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles on to US submarines (versus direct threats against the Soviet Navy itself) as the most alarming threat. The authors concede that the arms race played a role in the collapse of the USSR, but deny a direct connection with Soviet naval development citing the relatively minor naval proportion of overall defense spending. For the difficulties facing the fleet at the end of the Cold War, they instead blame deep systemic problems internal to the Soviet Navy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]