Global Change and the World's Mountains-Research Needs and Emerging Themes for Sustainable Development A Synthesis From the 2010 Perth II Conference

The conference on Global Change and the World’s Mountains held in Perth, Scotland, in 2010 offered a unique opportunity to analyze the state and progress of mountain research and its contribution to sustainable mountain development, as well as to reflect on required reorientations of research agendas. In this paper we provide the results of a three-step assessment of the research presented by 450 researchers from around the world. First, we determined the state of the art of mountain research and categorized it based on the analytical structure of the Global Land Project (GLP 2005). Second, we identified emerging themes for future research. Finally, we assessed the contribution of mountain research to sustainable development along the lines of the Grand Challenges in Global Sustainability Research (International Council for Science 2010). Analysis revealed that despite the growing recognition of the importance of more integrative research (inter- and transdisciplinary), the research community gathered in Perth still focuses on environmental drivers of change and on interactions within ecological systems. Only a small percentage of current research seeks to enhance understanding of social systems and of interactions between social and ecological systems. From the ecological systems perspective, a greater effort is needed to disentangle and assess different drivers of change and to investigate impacts on the rendering of ecosystem services. From the social systems perspective, significant shortcomings remain in understanding the characteristics, trends, and impacts of human movements to, within, and out of mountain areas as a form of global change. Likewise, sociocultural drivers affecting collective behavior as well as incentive systems devised by policy and decision makers are little understood and require more in-depth investigation. Both the complexity of coupled social– ecological systems and incomplete data sets hinder integrated systems research. Increased understanding of linkages and feedbacks between social and ecological systems will help to identify nonlinearities and thresholds (tipping points) in both system types. This presupposes effective collaboration between ecological and social sciences. Reflections on the Grand Challenges in Sustainability Research put forth by the International Council for Science (2010) reveal the need to intensify research on effective responses and innovations. This will help to achieve sustainable development in mountain regions while maintaining the core competence of mountain research in forecasting and observation.

Rapid Manufacturing - auch mit SLM

Rapid Manufacturing (RM) wurde als Schlagwort in der letzten Zeit insbesondere aus dem Bereich des Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) bekannt. In dieser inzwischen über 15-jährigen Technologieentwicklung wurden in den vergangenen Jahren bedeutende Fortschritte erzielt, die die Bauteileigenschaften nahe an die Anforderungen für End-Teile heran brachten. So ist das RM denn auch weniger aus der Sicht grösserer Losgrösse zu verstehen. Viel mehr bedeutet Rapid Manufacturing, dass die Bauteile nach einer generativen Fertigung direkt im Endprodukt resp. der Endanwendung zum Einsatz kommt. Das Selective Laser Melting, mit welchem aus metallischen Pulvermaterialien direkt Metallteile in Standardmaterialien hergestellt werden können, ist aufgrund der guten Materialeigenschaften für RM prädestiniert. In den ersten Anwendungsfeldern des SLM–Verfahrens standen die Herstellung von Werkzeugeinsätzen mit konturnaher Kühlung (Conformal Cooling) im Vordergrund, wobei diese Werkzeuge unter dem Begriff RM verstanden werden müssen, da die Werkzeuge direkt für die Endanwendung - den Spritzgussprozess - verwendet werden. Aktuelle Trends gehen jedoch in Richtung der Fertigung von Funktionsteilen z.B. für den Maschinenbau. Obwohl sich in der Fertigung komplexer Funktionsteile noch Probleme, z.B. mit in Bezug auf die generative Baurichtung überhängender Bauteilstrukturen ergeben, zeigen sich trotzdem erhebliche Vorteile eines RM mittels SLM. Neben klaren Vorteilen durch das mögliche Customizing von Bauteilen können bei kleineren Bauteilgrössen auch erhebliche Kostenvorteile erzielt werden. Allerdings zeigen die Grenzen der aktuellen Möglichkeiten, in welchen Bereichen das SLM-Verfahren weiterer Entwicklung bedarf. Themen wie Produktivität, die Problematik der nach wie vor notwendigen Supportstrukturen wie auch Qualitätssicherung müssen in den nächsten Jahren angegangen werden, wenn dieses Verfahren den Schritt hin zu einem etablierten Produktionsverfahren und damit zu breiterer Akzeptanz und Anwendung finden soll

General practitioner involvement in follow-up of childhood cancer survivors: a systematic review

BACKGROUND An increasing number of childhood cancer survivors need long-term follow-up care. Different models address this problem, including that of follow-up by general practitioners (GP). We describe models that involve GPs in follow-up for childhood cancer survivors, their advantages and disadvantages, clinics that employ these models, and the elements essential to high-quality, GP-led follow-up care. PROCEDURE We searched four databases (PubMed [including Medline], Embase, Cochrane, and CINAHL) without language restrictions. RESULTS We found 26 publications, which explicitly mentioned GP-led follow-up. Two models were commonly described: GP-only, and shared care between GP and pediatric oncology or late effects clinic. The shared care model appears to have advantages over GP-only follow-up. We found four clinics using models of GP-led follow-up, described in five papers. We identified well-organized transition, treatment summary, survivorship care plan, education of GPs and guidelines as necessary components of successful follow-up. CONCLUSION Scarcity of literature necessitated a review rather than a meta-analysis. More research on the outcomes of GP-led care is necessary to confirm the model for follow-up of childhood cancer survivors in the long term. However, with the necessary elements in place, the model of GP-led follow-up, and shared care in particular, holds promise.

Crystal structure of the Anabaena sensory rhodopsin transducer.

We present crystal structures of the Anabaena sensory rhodopsin transducer (ASRT), a soluble cytoplasmic protein that interacts with the first structurally characterized eubacterial retinylidene photoreceptor Anabaena sensory rhodopsin (ASR). Four crystal structures of ASRT from three different spacegroups were obtained, in all of which ASRT is present as a planar (C4) tetramer, consistent with our characterization of ASRT as a tetramer in solution. The ASRT tetramer is tightly packed, with large interfaces where the well-structured beta-sandwich portion of the monomers provides the bulk of the tetramer-forming interactions, and forms a flat, stable surface on one side of the tetramer (the beta-face). Only one of our four different ASRT crystals reveals a C-terminal alpha-helix in the otherwise all-beta protein, together with a large loop from each monomer on the opposite face of the tetramer (the alpha-face), which is flexible and largely disordered in the other three crystal forms. Gel-filtration chromatography demonstrated that ASRT forms stable tetramers in solution and isothermal microcalorimetry showed that the ASRT tetramer binds to ASR with a stoichiometry of one ASRT tetramer per one ASR photoreceptor with a K(d) of 8 microM in the highest affinity measurements. Possible mechanisms for the interaction of this transducer tetramer with the ASR photoreceptor via its flexible alpha-face to mediate transduction of the light signal are discussed.

The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets

The vast diversity of planetary systems detected to date is defying our capability of understanding their formation and evolution. Well-defined volume-limited surveys are the best tool at our disposal to tackle the problem, via the acquisition of robust statistics of the orbital elements. We are using the HARPS spectrograph to conduct our survey of ≈850 nearby solar-type stars, and in the course of the past nine years we have monitored the radial velocity of HD 103774, HD 109271, and BD-061339. In this work we present the detection of five planets orbiting these stars, with msin   (i) between 0.6 and 7 Neptune masses, four of which are in two multiple systems, comprising one super-Earth and one planet within the habitable zone of a late-type dwarf. Although for strategic reasons we chose efficiency over precision in this survey, we have the capability to detect planets down to the Neptune and super-Earth mass range as well as multiple systems, provided that enough data points are made available.

Justifying induction on modal μ-formulae

We define a rank function for formulae of the propositional modal μ-calculus such that the rank of a fixed point is strictly bigger than the rank of any of its finite approximations. A rank function of this kind is needed, for instance, to establish the collapse of the modal μ-hierarchy over transitive transition systems. We show that the range of the rank function is ωω. Further we establish that the rank is computable by primitive recursion, which gives us a uniform method to generate formulae of arbitrary rank below ωω.

Adaptable Visualisation Based On User Needs

Software developers often ask questions about software systems and software ecosystems that entail exploration and navigation, such as who uses this component?, and where is this feature implemented?. Software visualisation can be a great aid to understanding and exploring the answers to such questions, but visualisations require expertise to implement effectively, and they do not always scale well to large systems. We propose to automatically generate software visualisations based on software models derived from open source software corpora and from an analysis of the properties of typical developers queries and commonly used visualisations. The key challenges we see are (1) understanding how to match queries to suitable visualisations, and (2) scaling visualisations effectively to very large software systems and corpora. In the paper we motivate the idea of automatic software visualisation, we enumerate the challenges and our proposals to address them, and we describe some very initial results in our attempts to develop scalable visualisations of open source software corpora.

Fish Immune Responses to Myxozoa

Myxozoans evoke important economic losses in aquaculture production, but there is almost a total lack of disease control methods as no vaccines or commercial treatments are currently available. Knowledge of the immune responses that lead to myxozoan elimination and subsequent disease resistance is vital for shaping the future development of disease control measures. Different fish immune factors triggered by myxozoan parasites are reviewed in this chapter. Detailed information on the phenotypic and underlying molecular aspects of innate and adaptive responses, at both cellular and humoral levels, is provided for some well-studied fishmyxozoan systems. The importance of the local immune response, mainly at mucosal sites, is also highlighted. Myxozoan tactics to disable or avoid immune responses, such as modulation of immune gene transcription and immune evasion, are also reviewed. The existence of innate and acquired resistance to some myxozoan species suggest promising possibilities for controlling myxozooses through immune-based strategies, such as genetic selection for host resistance, vaccination, immune therapies and administration of immunostimulants.

Recounting the Hurricane of 1938: local memories of a regional disaster

The Hurricane of 1938 was one of those defining moments that divide time into parts that either precede or follow. It was transformative, impacting human lives and settlements as well as natural systems, coastal and inland, aquatic and terrestrial, with a force unsurpassed in the region’s living memory. Seventy years have now passed since that hurricane made its historic landfall on the afternoon of September 21, 1938. Humans have regrouped and rebuilt and nature has regenerated and reclaimed, but the memories of those who lived through the Hurricane of ‘38 remain.

An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architecture

The increasing complexity of current software systems is encouraging the development of self-managed software architectures, i.e. systems capable of reconfiguring their structure at runtime to fulfil a set of goals. Several approaches have covered different aspects of their development, but some issues remain open, such as the maintainability or the scalability of self-management subsystems. Centralized approaches, like self-adaptive architectures, offer good maintenance properties but do not scale well for large systems. On the contrary, decentralized approaches, like self-organising architectures, offer good scalability but are not maintainable: reconfiguration specifications are spread and often tangled with functional specifications. In order to address these issues, this paper presents an aspect-oriented autonomic reconfiguration approach where: (1) each subsystem is provided with self-management properties so it can evolve itself and the components that it is composed of; (2) self-management concerns are isolated and encapsulated into aspects, thus improving its reuse and maintenance. Povzetek: Predstavljen je pristop s samo-preoblikovanjem programske arhitekture.

Using Cross-Lingual Explicit Semantic Analysis for Improving Ontology Translation

Semantic Web aims to allow machines to make inferences using the explicit conceptualisations contained in ontologies. By pointing to ontologies, Semantic Web-based applications are able to inter-operate and share common information easily. Nevertheless, multilingual semantic applications are still rare, owing to the fact that most online ontologies are monolingual in English. In order to solve this issue, techniques for ontology localisation and translation are needed. However, traditional machine translation is difficult to apply to ontologies, owing to the fact that ontology labels tend to be quite short in length and linguistically different from the free text paradigm. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance machine translation of ontologies based on exploiting the well-structured concept descriptions contained in the ontology. In particular, our approach leverages the semantics contained in the ontology by using Cross Lingual Explicit Semantic Analysis (CLESA) for context-based disambiguation in phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). The presented work is novel in the sense that application of CLESA in SMT has not been performed earlier to the best of our knowledge.

Theory of intermittency applied to classical pathological cases

The classical theory of intermittency developed for return maps assumes uniform density of points reinjected from the chaotic to laminar region. Though it works fine in some model systems, there exist a number of so-called pathological cases characterized by a significant deviation of main characteristics from the values predicted on the basis of the uniform distribution. Recently, we reported on how the reinjection probability density (RPD) can be generalized. Here, we extend this methodology and apply it to different dynamical systems exhibiting anomalous type-II and type-III intermittencies. Estimation of the universal RPD is based on fitting a linear function to experimental data and requires no a priori knowledge on the dynamical model behind. We provide special fitting procedure that enables robust estimation of the RPD from relatively short data sets (dozens of points). Thus, the method is applicable for a wide variety of data sets including numerical simulations and real-life experiments. Estimated RPD enables analytic evaluation of the length of the laminar phase of intermittent behaviors. We show that the method copes well with dynamical systems exhibiting significantly different statistics reported in the literature. We also derive and classify characteristic relations between the mean laminar length and main controlling parameter in perfect agreement with data provided by numerical simulations

Evaluating social choice techniques into intelligent environments by agent based social simulation

The primary hypothesis stated by this paper is that the use of social choice theory in Ambient Intelligence systems can improve significantly users satisfaction when accessing shared resources. A research methodology based on agent based social simulations is employed to support this hypothesis and to evaluate these benefits. The result is a six-fold contribution summarized as follows. Firstly, several considerable differences between this application case and the most prominent social choice application, political elections, have been found and described. Secondly, given these differences, a number of metrics to evaluate different voting systems in this scope have been proposed and formalized. Thirdly, given the presented application and the metrics proposed, the performance of a number of well known electoral systems is compared. Fourthly, as a result of the performance study, a novel voting algorithm capable of obtaining the best balance between the metrics reviewed is introduced. Fifthly, to improve the social welfare in the experiments, the voting methods are combined with cluster analysis techniques. Finally, the article is complemented by a free and open-source tool, VoteSim, which ensures not only the reproducibility of the experimental results presented, but also allows the interested reader to adapt the case study presented to different environments.

Investigación de mezclas de caucho, con bajo contenido en cloro, para bandas transportadoras con características ignífugas

El objeto de la tesis doctoral se centra en la obtención de una banda transportadora de minería exenta de halógenos o al menos con el menor contenido posible, es por ello que se ha realizado un estudio de diferentes matrices poliméricas sin halógenos y se han evaluado diferentes sistemas ignifugantes. Se ha partido de mezclas con base polimérica de caucho natural y de estireno butadieno ya que son cauchos sin halógenos y con los que se pueden obtener mezclas de buenas propiedades mecánicas. Los resultados obtenidos durante el desarrollo de la tesis han sido muy satisfactorios, ya que se fabricaron bandas a gran escala para poder realizar los ensayos descritos en la normativa UNE EN 14973. La clasificación adquirida, categoría B1, alcanza dos de los objetivos marcados al inicio de los trabajos de investigación, y por tanto puede dar lugar a: - La fabricación a nivel industrial - La comercialización de una banda retardante de llama para minería y obra subterránea, formulada con un nuevo aditivo que reduce notablemente el contenido en cloro. - Disminución de la contaminación derivada de los humos tóxicos producidos cuando una banda transportadora arde accidentalmente. Los aditivos retardantes de llama sin halógenos, son muy efectivos en dosis elevadas, para la obtención de mezclas con propiedades ignífugas, pero las propiedades mecánicas de las mezclas se debilitan. Se ha buscado un compromiso entre las propiedades ignífugas y mecánicas, por lo que resulta adecuado obtener aditivos que posean un tamaño de partícula tal que actúen como cargas semi-reforzantes para poder utilizarlos en mayor proporción y así poder conseguir las propiedades ignífugas deseadas sin alterar de forma significativa las demás propiedades de la mezcla. ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to obtain a mining conveyor belt with minimal halogen content, with the final objective of being halogen-free. Several polymer matrices without halogen and as well as fireproof systems have been analyzed to achieve this goal. The polymer mixtures studied are based on natural rubber and styrene butadiene, due to the fact that are rubbers without halogens and which their mixtures have good mechanical properties. The outcome of the thesis research is satisfactory, since the results are manufactured conveyor belts that comply with the tests described in the UNE EN 14973. The obtained B1 classification achieves two objectives set at the beginning of the research, and therefore can lead to: - Manufacturing at industrial level - Marketing of a flame retardant conveyor belt for mining and underground works formulated with a new additive that significantly reduces the chlorine content - Reduce pollution produced of the toxic fumes generated when a conveyor accidentally burns Additive flame retardant halogen-free are very effective in high doses to obtain blends with flame retardant properties, but the mechanical properties of the blends are below standards. A compromise between the fire retardant and mechanical properties has been successfully obtained, making possible to obtain additives that show a particle size that act as semi-reinforcing load in order to use a greater extent and thus be able to achieve the pursued fire retardant properties without altering significant other properties of mixture.

SMART Protocols: seMAntic represenTation for experimental protocols

Two important characteristics of science are the ?reproducibility? and ?clarity?. By rigorous practices, scientists explore aspects of the world that they can reproduce under carefully controlled experimental conditions. The clarity, complementing reproducibility, provides unambiguous descriptions of results in a mechanical or mathematical form. Both pillars depend on well-structured and accurate descriptions of scientific practices, which are normally recorded in experimental protocols, scientific workflows, etc. Here we present SMART Protocols (SP), our ontology-based approach for representing experimental protocols and our contribution to clarity and reproducibility. SP delivers an unambiguous description of processes by means of which data is produced; by doing so, we argue, it facilitates reproducibility. Moreover, SP is thought to be part of e-science infrastructures. SP results from the analysis of 175 protocols; from this dataset, we extracted common elements. From our analysis, we identified document, workflow and domain-specific aspects in the representation of experimental protocols. The ontology is available at http://purl.org/net/SMARTprotocol