Universal power-law diet partitioning by marine fish and squid with surprising stability–diversity implications

A central question in community ecology is how the number of trophic links relates to community species richness. For simple dynamical food-web models, link density (the ratio of links to species) is bounded from above as the number of species increases; but empirical data suggest that it increases without bounds. We found a new empirical upper bound on link density in large marine communities with emphasis on fish and squid, using novel methods that avoid known sources of bias in traditional approaches. Bounds are expressed in terms of the diet-partitioning function (DPF): the average number of resources contributing more than a fraction f to a consumer's diet, as a function of f. All observed DPF follow a functional form closely related to a power law, with power-law exponents indepen- dent of species richness at the measurement accuracy. Results imply universal upper bounds on link density across the oceans. However, the inherently scale-free nature of power-law diet partitioning suggests that the DPF itself is a better defined characterization of network structure than link density.

Limitations of instantaneous water quality sampling in surface-water catchments: Comparison with near-continuous phosphorus time-series data.

The validity of load estimates from intermittent, instantaneous grab sampling is dependent on adequate spatial coverage by monitoring networks and a sampling frequency that re?ects the variability in the system under study. Catchments with a ?ashy hydrology due to surface runoff pose a particular challenge as intense short duration rainfall events may account for a signi?cant portion of the total diffuse transfer of pollution from soil to water in any hydrological year. This can also be exacerbated by the presence of strong background pollution signals from point sources during low flows. In this paper, a range of sampling methodologies and load estimation techniques are applied to phosphorus data from such a surface water dominated river system, instrumented at three sub-catchments (ranging from 3 to 5 km2 in area) with near-continuous monitoring stations. Systematic and Monte Carlo approaches were applied to simulate grab sampling using multiple strategies and to calculate an estimated load, Le based on established load estimation methods. Comparison with the actual load, Lt, revealed signi?cant average underestimation, of up to 60%, and high variability for all feasible sampling approaches. Further analysis of the time series provides an insight into these observations; revealing peak frequencies and power-law scaling in the distributions of P concentration, discharge and load associated with surface runoff and background transfers. Results indicate that only near-continuous monitoring that re?ects the rapid temporal changes in these river systems is adequate for comparative monitoring and evaluation purposes. While the implications of this analysis may be more tenable to small scale ?ashy systems, this represents an appropriate scale in terms of evaluating catchment mitigation strategies such as agri-environmental policies for managing diffuse P transfers in complex landscapes.

The Library of Essays on Law and Privacy

Privacy has now become a major topic not only in law but in computing, psychology, economics and social studies, and the explosion in scholarship has made it difficult for the student to traverse the field and identify the significant issues across the many disciplines. This series brings together a collection of significant papers with a multi-disciplinary approach which enable the reader to navigate through the complexities of the issues and make sense of the prolific scholarship published in this field.

The three volumes in this series address different themes: an anthropological approach to what privacy means in a cultural context; the issue of state surveillance where the state must both protect the individual and protect others from that individual and also protect itself; and, finally, what privacy might mean in a world where government and commerce collect data incessantly. The regulation of privacy is continually being called for and these papers help enable understanding of the ethical rationales behind the choices made in the sphere of regulation of privacy.

The articles presented in each of these collections have been chosen for the quality of their scholarship and their utility to the researcher, and feature a variety of approaches. The articles which debate the technical context of privacy are accessible to those from the arts and humanities; overall, the breadth of approach taken in the choice of articles has created a series which is an invaluable and important resource for lecturers, researchers and student.

Export Cartels: Is it Legal to Target your Neighbour? Analysis in Light of Recent Case Law

Despite the growing sophistication of antitrust regimes around the world, export cartels benefit from special treatment: they are almost universally tolerated, if not encouraged in the countries of origin. Economists do not offer an unambiguous policy recommendation on how to deal with them in part due to the lack of empirical data. This article discusses arguments for and against export cartels and it identifies the existing gaps in the present regulatory framework. The theoretical part is followed by an analysis of the recent case law: a US cartel challenged with different outcomes in India and South Africa, as well as Chinese export cartels pursued in the USA. The Chinese cases are particularly topical as the conduct at stake, apart from being subject to private antitrust actions before US courts, was also challenged within the WTO dispute settlement framework, pointing out to the existing interface between trade and competition. While the recent developments prove that unaddressed issues tend not to vanish, the new South-North dimension has the potential of placing export cartels again on the international agenda. Pragmatic thinking suggests looking for the solution within the WTO framework.

Offshoring Clinical Trials: The Mutable Ethics, Weak Protections and Vulnerable Subjects of EU Law

In this paper I engage with science and technology studies work on pharmaceuticalisation to explore how European Union (EU) law helps to produce and support the preference for pharmaceutical responses in public health governance, while authorising the production of vulnerable subjects through the growing off-shoring of clinical trials. Drawing on the analysis of legal and policy documents, I demonstrate how EU law allows and legitimates the use of data procured from vulnerable subjects abroad for market authorisation and corporate profitability at home. This is possible because the EU has (de)selected international ethical frameworks in order to support the continued and growing use of clinical trials data from abroad. This has helped to stimulate the revision of international ethical frameworks in light of market needs, inscribing EU public health law within specific politics (that often remained obscured by the joint workings of legal and technological discourses). I suggest that law operates as part of a broader ‘technology’ – encompassing ethics and human rights discourses – that functions to optimise life through resort to market reasoning. Law is thereby reoriented, instrumentalised and deployed as part of a broader project aimed at (re)defining and limiting the boundaries of the EU's responsibility for public health, including the broader social production of public health problems and the unequal global order that the EU represents and helps to depoliticise and perpetuate. Overall, this limits the EU's responsibility and accountability for these failures, as well as another: the weak and mutable protections and insecure legacies for vulnerable trial subjects abroad.

Spatial statistics to estimate peat thickness using airborne radiometric data

Soil carbon stores are a major component of the annual returns required by EU governments to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Peat has a high proportion of soil carbon due to the relatively high carbon density of peat and organic-rich soils. For this reason it has become increasingly important to measure and model soil carbon stores and changes in peat stocks to facilitate the management of carbon changes over time. The approach investigated in this research evaluates the use of airborne geophysical (radiometric) data to estimate peat thickness using the attenuation of bedrock geology radioactivity by superficial peat cover. Remotely sensed radiometric data are validated with ground peat depth measurements combined with non-invasive geophysical surveys. Two field-based case studies exemplify and validate the results. Variography and kriging are used to predict peat thickness from point measurements of peat depth and airborne radiometric data and provide an estimate of uncertainty in the predictions. Cokriging, by assessing the degree of spatial correlation between recent remote sensed geophysical monitoring and previous peat depth models, is used to examine changes in peat stocks over time. The significance of the coregionalisation is that the spatial cross correlation between the remote and ground based data can be used to update the model of peat depth. The result is that by integrating remotely sensed data with ground geophysics, the need is reduced for extensive ground-based monitoring and invasive peat depth measurements. The overall goal is to provide robust estimates of peat thickness to improve estimates of carbon stocks. The implications from the research have a broader significance that promotes a reduction in the need for damaging onsite peat thickness measurement and an increase in the use of remote sensed data for carbon stock estimations.

Open Data: European Ambitions and Local Efforts. Experiences from Austria

The member states of the European Union are faced with the challenges of handling “big data” as well as with a growing impact of the supranational level. Given that the success of efforts at European level strongly depends on corresponding national and local activities, i.e., the quality of implementation and the degree of consistency, this chapter centers upon the coherence of European strategies and national implementations concerning the reuse of public sector information. Taking the City of Vienna’s open data activities as an illustrative example, we seek an answer to the question whether and to what extent developments at European level and other factors have an effect on local efforts towards open data. We find that the European Commission’s ambitions are driven by a strong economic argumentation, while the efforts of the City of Vienna have only very little to do with the European orientation and are rather dominated by lifestyle and administrative reform arguments. Hence, we observe a decoupling of supranational strategies and national implementation activities. The very reluctant attitude at Austrian federal level might be one reason for this, nationally induced barriers—such as the administrative culture—might be another. In order to enhance the correspondence between the strategies of the supranational level and those of the implementers at national and regional levels, the strengthening of soft law measures could be promising.

Clinical Trials Abroad: The Marketable Ethics, Weak Protections and Vulnerable Subjects of EU Law

This chapter explores how the EU is a largely overlooked exporter of normative power through its facilitation and use of clinical trials data produced abroad for the marketing of safe pharmaceuticals at home; a move that helps to foster the growing resort to pharmaceuticals as a fix for public health problems. This is made possible by the EU’s (de)selection of international ethical frameworks in preference to the international technical standards it co-authors with other global regulators. Clinical trials abroad underscore how ethics are contingent and revisable in light of market needs, producing weak protections for the vulnerable subjects of EU law. I argue that these components and effects of the regime are ultimately about that which undergirds, shapes and directs regulatory design. That is, I point to the use, infiltration, perpetuation and extension of market-oriented ideas, values and rationalities into formally non-market domains like biomedical knowledge production and public health. I explain how these are central to efforts at producing and legitimating the EU, its related imagined socio-political order based on a more innovative, profitable and competitive pharmaceutical sector in order to foster economic growth, jobs and prosperity, and with them the project of European integration. ‘Bioethics as risk’ is highlighted as a way to reshape and redirect the regulatory regime in ways that are more consistent with the spirit and letter of the ethical standards (and through them the human rights) the EU claims to uphold.

Compositional Data Analysis in Forensic Geoscience

Statistics are regularly used to make some form of comparison between trace evidence or deploy the exclusionary principle (Morgan and Bull, 2007) in forensic investigations. Trace evidence are routinely the results of particle size, chemical or modal analyses and as such constitute compositional data. The issue is that compositional data including percentages, parts per million etc. only carry relative information. This may be problematic where a comparison of percentages and other constraint/closed data is deemed a statistically valid and appropriate way to present trace evidence in a court of law. Notwithstanding an awareness of the existence of the constant sum problem since the seminal works of Pearson (1896) and Chayes (1960) and the introduction of the application of log-ratio techniques (Aitchison, 1986; Pawlowsky-Glahn and Egozcue, 2001; Pawlowsky-Glahn and Buccianti, 2011; Tolosana-Delgado and van den Boogaart, 2013) the problem that a constant sum destroys the potential independence of variances and covariances required for correlation regression analysis and empirical multivariate methods (principal component analysis, cluster analysis, discriminant analysis, canonical correlation) is all too often not acknowledged in the statistical treatment of trace evidence. Yet the need for a robust treatment of forensic trace evidence analyses is obvious. This research examines the issues and potential pitfalls for forensic investigators if the constant sum constraint is ignored in the analysis and presentation of forensic trace evidence. Forensic case studies involving particle size and mineral analyses as trace evidence are used to demonstrate the use of a compositional data approach using a centred log-ratio (clr) transformation and multivariate statistical analyses.

Data storage system for wireless sensor networks

Dissertação de mestrado, Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015

The role of implicit theories in the formation of expert opinion in portuguese criminal law

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências e Tecnologias da Saúde (Medicina Legal e Ciências Forenses), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, 2014

Portugal's Quota-Parity Law: An Analysis of its Adoption

In August 2006, Portugal approved a new quota law, called the parity law. According to this, all candidate lists presented for local, parliamentary, and European elections must guarantee a minimum representation of 33 per cent for each sex. This article analyses the proximate causes that led to the adoption of gender quotas by the Portuguese Parliament. The simple answer is that the law’s passage was a direct consequence of a draft piece of legislation presented by the Socialist Party (PS), which enjoyed a majority. However, the reasons that led the PS to push through a quota law remain unclear. Using open-ended interviews with key women deputies from all the main Portuguese political parties, and national public opinion data, among other sources, the role of four actors/factors that were involved in the law’s adoption are critically examined: notably, civil society actors, state actors, international and transnational actors, and the Portuguese political context.

Power law and entropy analysis of catastrophic phenomena

Catastrophic events, such as wars and terrorist attacks, tornadoes and hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides, are always accompanied by a large number of casualties. The size distribution of these casualties has separately been shown to follow approximate power law (PL) distributions. In this paper, we analyze the statistical distributions of the number of victims of catastrophic phenomena, in particular, terrorism, and find double PL behavior. This means that the data sets are better approximated by two PLs instead of a single one. We plot the PL parameters, corresponding to several events, and observe an interesting pattern in the charts, where the lines that connect each pair of points defining the double PLs are almost parallel to each other. A complementary data analysis is performed by means of the computation of the entropy. The results reveal relationships hidden in the data that may trigger a future comprehensive explanation of this type of phenomena.

Modelling adhesive joints with cohesive zone models: effect of the cohesive law shape of the adhesive layer

Adhesively-bonded joints are extensively used in several fields of engineering. Cohesive Zone Models (CZM) have been used for the strength prediction of adhesive joints, as an add-in to Finite Element (FE) analyses that allows simulation of damage growth, by consideration of energetic principles. A useful feature of CZM is that different shapes can be developed for the cohesive laws, depending on the nature of the material or interface to be simulated, allowing an accurate strength prediction. This work studies the influence of the CZM shape (triangular, exponential or trapezoidal) used to model a thin adhesive layer in single-lap adhesive joints, for an estimation of its influence on the strength prediction under different material conditions. By performing this study, guidelines are provided on the possibility to use a CZM shape that may not be the most suited for a particular adhesive, but that may be more straightforward to use/implement and have less convergence problems (e.g. triangular shaped CZM), thus attaining the solution faster. The overall results showed that joints bonded with ductile adhesives are highly influenced by the CZM shape, and that the trapezoidal shape fits best the experimental data. Moreover, the smaller is the overlap length (LO), the greater is the influence of the CZM shape. On the other hand, the influence of the CZM shape can be neglected when using brittle adhesives, without compromising too much the accuracy of the strength predictions.

Qualification et quantification de l'obligation de sécurité informationnelle dans la détermination de la faute civile

L'obligation de sécurité informationnelle - c'est-à-dire la tâche qui incombe aux entreprises d'assurer l'intégrité, la confidentialité et la disponibilité de l'information découle, tant en droit québécois que dans une majorité de juridictions occidentales, d'une série de dispositions législatives imposant non pas l'adoption de comportements ou l'utilisation de technologies ou de procédés identifiables, mais bien l'implantation de mesures de sécurité «raisonnables », «adéquates », ou « suffisantes ». Or, dans un domaine aussi embryonnaire et complexe que celui de la sécurité informationnelle, domaine dans lequel les solutions disponibles sont multiples et où la jurisprudence est éparse, comment une entreprise peut-elle jauger avec justesse l'étendue de son obligation? Bref, comment établir ce que ferait une entreprise raisonnablement prudente et diligente dans un domaine où il n'existe actuellement aucune balise législative, jurisprudentielle ou même coutumière permettant de fixer avec justesse le niveau de diligence imposé par le législateur? L'absence de sécurité juridique offerte par une telle situation est patente et nécessite une reconfiguration du cadre opératoire de l'obligation de sécurité informationnelle afin d'en identifier les composantes et les objectifs. Cet exercice passera par la redéfinition de l'obligation de sécurité informationnelle comme obligation de réduire les risques qui guettent l'information à un niveau socialement acceptable. En effet, la sécurité pouvant être définie comme étant la gestion du risque, c'est donc le risque qui réside au cœur de cette obligation. Or, en analysant les risques qui guettent un système, soit en analysant les menaces qui visent à exploiter ses vulnérabilités, il est possible d'établir quelles contre-mesures s'avèrent utiles et les coûts associés à leur mise en œuvre. Par la suite, il devient envisageable, en recourant à la définition économique de la négligence et en prenant compte des probabilités de brèches de sécurité et des dommages escomptés, d'établir les sommes optimales à investir dans l'achat, l'entretien et la mise à jour de ces contre-mesures. Une telle analyse permet ainsi de quantifier avec un certain degré de précision l'étendue de l'obligation de sécurité informationnelle en offrant aux entreprises un outil s'inspirant de données matérielles auxquelles elles ont librement accès et s'intégrant aisément dans le contexte juridique contemporain.