Formation and preservation of pedogenic carbonates in South India, links with paleo-monsoon and pedological conditions: Clues from Sr isotopes, U-Th series and REEs

The influence of the pedogenic and climatic contexts on the formation and preservation of pedogenic carbonates in a climosequence in the Western Ghats (Karnataka Plateau, South West India) has been studied. Along the climosequence, the current mean annual rainfall (MAR) varies within a 80 km transect from 6000 mm at the edge of the Plateau to 500 mm inland. Pedogenic carbonates occur in the MAR range of 500-1200 mm. In the semi-arid zone (MAR: 500-900 mm), carbonates occur (i) as rhick hardpan calcretes on pediment slopes and (ii) as nodular horizons in polygenic black soils (i.e. vertisols). In the sub-humid zone (MAR: 900-1500 mm), pedogenic carbonates are disseminated in the black soil matrices either as loose, irregular and friable nodules of millimetric size or as indurated botryoidal nodules of centimetric to pluricentimetric size. They also occur at the top layers of the saprolite either as disseminated pluricentimetric indurated nodules or carbonate-cemented lumps of centimetric to decimetric size. Chemical and isotopic (Sr-87/Sr-86) compositions of the carbonate fraction were determined after leaching with 0.25 N HCl. The corresponding residual fractions containing both primary minerals and authigenic clays were digested separately and analyzed. The trend defined by the Sr-87/Sr-86 signatures of both labile carbonate fractions and corresponding residual fractions indicates that a part of the labile carbonate fraction is genetically linked to the local soil composition. Considering the residual fraction of each sample as the most likely lithogenic source of Ca in carbonates, it is estimated that from 24% to 82% (55% on average) of Ca is derived from local bedrock weathering, leading to a consumption of an equivalent proportion of atmospheric CO2. These values indicate that climatic conditions were humid enough to allow silicate weathering: MAR at the time of carbonate formation likely ranged from 400 to 700 mm, which is 2- to 3-fold less than the current MAR at these locations. The Sr, U and Mg contents and the (U-234/U-238) activity ratio in the labile carbonate fraction help to understand the conditions of carbonate formation. The relatively high concentrations of Sr, U and Mg in black soil carbonates may indicate fast growth and accumulation compared to carbonates in saprolite, possibly due to a better confinement of the pore waters which is supported by their high (U-234/U-238) signatures, and/or to higher content of dissolved carbonates in the pore waters. The occurrence of Ce, Mn and Fe oxides in the cracks of carbonate reflects the existence of relatively humid periods after carbonate formation. The carbonate ages determined by the U-Th method range from 1.33 +/- 0.84 kyr to 7.5 +/- 2.7 kyr and to a cluster of five ages around 20 kyr, i.e. the Last Glacial Maximum period. The young occurrences are only located in the black soils, which therefore constitute sensitive environments for trapping and retaining atmospheric CO2 even on short time scales. The maximum age of carbonates depends on their location in the climatic gradient: from about 20 kyr for centimetric nodules at Mule Hole (MAR = 1100 mm/yr) to 200 kyr for the calcrete at Gundlupet (MAR = 700 mm/yr, Durand et al., 2007). The intensity of rainfall during wet periods would indeed control the lifetime of pedogenic carbonates and thus the duration of inorganic carbon storage in soils. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Costs and Benefits of a Shared Digital Long-Term Preservation System

This paper describes the cost-benefit analysis of digital long-term preservation (LTP) that was carried out in the context of the Finnish National Digital Library Project (NDL) in 2010. The analysis was based on the assumption that as many as 200 archives, libraries, and museums will share an LTP system. The term ‘system’ shall be understood as encompassing not only information technology, but also human resources, organizational structures, policies and funding mechanisms. The cost analysis shows that an LTP system will incur, over the first 12 years, cumulative costs of €42 million, i.e. an average of €3.5 million per annum. Human resources and investments in information technology are the major cost factors. After the initial stages, the analysis predicts annual costs of circa €4 million. The analysis compared scenarios with and without a shared LTP system. The results indicate that a shared system will have remarkable benefits. At the development and implementation stages, a shared system shows an advantage of €30 million against the alternative scenario consisting of five independent LTP solutions. During the later stages, the advantage is estimated at €10 million per annum. The cumulative cost benefit over the first 12 years would amount to circa €100 million.

Identifying Robust Plans through Plan Diagram Reduction

Estimates of predicate selectivities by database query optimizers often differ significantly from those actually encountered during query execution, leading to poor plan choices and inflated response times. In this paper, we investigate mitigating this problem by replacing selectivity error-sensitive plan choices with alternative plans that provide robust performance. Our approach is based on the recent observation that even the complex and dense "plan diagrams" associated with industrial-strength optimizers can be efficiently reduced to "anorexic" equivalents featuring only a few plans, without materially impacting query processing quality. Extensive experimentation with a rich set of TPC-H and TPC-DS-based query templates in a variety of database environments indicate that plan diagram reduction typically retains plans that are substantially resistant to selectivity errors on the base relations. However, it can sometimes also be severely counter-productive, with the replacements performing much worse. We address this problem through a generalized mathematical characterization of plan cost behavior over the parameter space, which lends itself to efficient criteria of when it is safe to reduce. Our strategies are fully non-invasive and have been implemented in the Picasso optimizer visualization tool.

Efficiently Approximating Query Optimizer Plan Diagrams

Given a parametrized n-dimensional SQL query template and a choice of query optimizer, a plan diagram is a color-coded pictorial enumeration of the execution plan choices of the optimizer over the query parameter space. These diagrams have proved to be a powerful metaphor for the analysis and redesign of modern optimizers, and are gaining currency in diverse industrial and academic institutions. However, their utility is adversely impacted by the impractically large computational overheads incurred when standard brute-force exhaustive approaches are used for producing fine-grained diagrams on high-dimensional query templates. In this paper, we investigate strategies for efficiently producing close approximations to complex plan diagrams. Our techniques are customized to the features available in the optimizer's API, ranging from the generic optimizers that provide only the optimal plan for a query, to those that also support costing of sub-optimal plans and enumerating rank-ordered lists of plans. The techniques collectively feature both random and grid sampling, as well as inference techniques based on nearest-neighbor classifiers, parametric query optimization and plan cost monotonicity. Extensive experimentation with a representative set of TPC-H and TPC-DS-based query templates on industrial-strength optimizers indicates that our techniques are capable of delivering 90% accurate diagrams while incurring less than 15% of the computational overheads of the exhaustive approach. In fact, for full-featured optimizers, we can guarantee zero error with less than 10% overheads. These approximation techniques have been implemented in the publicly available Picasso optimizer visualization tool.

Protocols for Collection, Preservation and Enumeration of Diatoms from Aquatic Habitats fro Water Quality Monitoring in India

Diatoms have become important organisms for monitoring freshwaters and their value has been recognised in Europe, American and African continents. If India is to include diatoms in the current suite of bioindicators, then thorough testing of diatom-based techniques is required. This paper provides guidance on methods through all stages of diatom collection from different habitats from streams and lakes, preparation and examination for the purposes of water quality assessment that can be adapted to most aquatic ecosystems in India.

On the Production of Anorexic Plan Diagrams

A "plan diagram" is a pictorial enumeration of the execution plan choices of a database query optimizer over the relational selectivity space. We have shown recently that, for industrial-strength database engines, these diagrams are often remarkably complex and dense, with a large number of plans covering the space. However, they can often be reduced to much simpler pictures, featuring significantly fewer plans, without materially affecting the query processing quality. Plan reduction has useful implications for the design and usage of query optimizers, including quantifying redundancy in the plan search space, enhancing useability of parametric query optimization, identifying error-resistant and least-expected-cost plans, and minimizing the overheads of multi-plan approaches. We investigate here the plan reduction issue from theoretical, statistical and empirical perspectives. Our analysis shows that optimal plan reduction, w.r.t. minimizing the number of plans, is an NP-hard problem in general, and remains so even for a storage-constrained variant. We then present a greedy reduction algorithm with tight and optimal performance guarantees, whose complexity scales linearly with the number of plans in the diagram for a given resolution. Next, we devise fast estimators for locating the best tradeoff between the reduction in plan cardinality and the impact on query processing quality. Finally, extensive experimentation with a suite of multi-dimensional TPCH-based query templates on industrial-strength optimizers demonstrates that complex plan diagrams easily reduce to "anorexic" (small absolute number of plans) levels incurring only marginal increases in the estimated query processing costs.

Waiting for Gajah: an elephant mutualist's contingency plan for an endangered megafaunal disperser

Large animals are disproportionately likely to go extinct, and the effects of this on ecosystem processes are unclear. Megaherbivores (weighing over 1000kg) are thought to be particularly effective seed dispersers, yet only a few plant species solely or predominantly adapted for dispersal by megaherbivores have been identified. The reasons for this paradox may be elucidated by examining the ecology of so-called megafaunal fruiting species in Asia, where large-fruited species have been only sparsely researched. We conducted focal tree watches, camera trapping, fruit ageing trials, dung seed counts and germination trials to understand the ecology of Dillenia indica, a large-fruited species thought to be elephant-dispersed, in a tropical moist forest (Buxa Tiger Reserve, India). We find that the initial hardness of the fruit of D.indica ensures that its small (6mm) seeds will primarily be consumed and dispersed by elephants and perhaps other megaherbivores. Elephants removed 63.3% of camera trap-monitored fruits taken by frugivores. If the fruit of D.indica is not removed by a large animal, the seeds of D.indica become available to successively smaller frugivores as its fruits soften. Seeds from both hard and soft fruits are able to germinate, meaning these smaller frugivores may provide a mechanism for dispersal without megaherbivores.Synthesis. Dillenia indica's strategy for dispersal allows it to realize the benefits of dispersal by megaherbivores without becoming fully reliant on these less abundant species. This risk-spreading dispersal behaviour suggests D.indica will be able to persist even if its megafaunal disperser becomes extinct.

Functionality preservation with enhanced mechanical integrity in the nanocomposites of the metal-organic framework, ZIF-8, with BN nanosheets

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and boron nitride both possess novel properties, the former associated with microporosity and the latter with good mechanical properties. We have synthesized composites of the imidazolate based MOF, ZIF-8, and few-layer BN in order to see whether we can incorporate the properties of both these materials in the composites. The composites so prepared between BN nanosheets and ZIF-8 have compositions ZIF-1BN, ZIF-2BN, ZIF-3BN and similar to ZIF-4BN. The composites have been characterized by PXRD, TGA, XPS, electron microscopy, IR, Raman and solid state NMR spectroscopy. The composites possess good surface areas, the actual value decreasing only slightly with the increase in the BN content. The CO2 uptake remains nearly the same in the composites as in the parent ZIF-8. More importantly, the addition of BN markedly improves the mechanical properties of ZIF-8, a feature that is much desired in MOFs. Observation of microporous features along with improved mechanical properties in a MOF is indeed noteworthy. Such manipulation of properties can be profitably exploited in practical applications.

Architectural plan of transcriptional regulation in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Transcriptional regulation enables adaptation in bacteria. Typically, only a few transcriptional events are well understood, leaving many others unidentified. The recent genome-wide identification of transcription factor binding sites in Mycobacterium tuberculosis has changed this by deciphering a molecular road-map of transcriptional control, indicating active events and their immediate downstream effects.

Association Rule Sharing Model for Privacy Preservation and Collaborative Data Mining Efficiency

The disclosure of information and its misuse in Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) systems is a concern to the parties involved. In PPDM systems data is available amongst multiple parties collaborating to achieve cumulative mining accuracy. The vertically partitioned data available with the parties involved cannot provide accurate mining results when compared to the collaborative mining results. To overcome the privacy issue in data disclosure this paper describes a Key Distribution-Less Privacy Preserving Data Mining (KDLPPDM) system in which the publication of local association rules generated by the parties is published. The association rules are securely combined to form the combined rule set using the Commutative RSA algorithm. The combined rule sets established are used to classify or mine the data. The results discussed in this paper compare the accuracy of the rules generated using the C4. 5 based KDLPPDM system and the CS. 0 based KDLPPDM system using receiver operating characteristics curves (ROC).

Establecimiento de plan sanitario y profilactico en la Granja Cunicula Artesanal de Nindiri, departamento de Masaya, Nicaragua

Dado que en Nicaragua la producción cunícula se está convirtiendo en una alternativa de consumo para la población, es necesario que en las granjas cunícula se implementen medidas profilácticas para mejorar las condiciones de salud y por ende la calidad de su carne, por lo cual se propuso este trabajo de investigación que lleva por titulo: Establecimiento de Plan Sanitario y Profiláctico en la Granja Cunícula Artesanal de Nindirí, Departamento de Masaya, Nicaragua. Por lo cual se procedió a establecer los siguientes objetivos: Validar la aplicación de minerales y vitaminas en granjas cuniculas de explotación artesanal, validar la aplicación de Coccidiostáticos en los conejos de diferentes categorías, validar la aplicación de desparasitantes externos e internos en los conejos de diferentes categorías. Este estudio se realizó en un período de seis meses mediante laaplicación de cuatro tipos de tratamiento con frecuencia de aplicación TA (Sulfaprin) mensual, TB (Levamisol) cada tres meses, TC (Ivermectina) cada tres meses, TD (Vitaminas AD3E) semanal, en total se estudiaron 80 animales de diferentes categorías. Los tratamientos aplicados demostraron efectividad en el control de las patologías en la granja. Así el plan sanitario permitió mejorar casi en su totalidad patologías predisponentes. En conclusión se puede decir que la aplicación del plan sanitario acompañado de medidas higiénicas, controló en un 95% la presencia de patologías, disminuyó la tasa de mortalidad y los costos de producción, además se obtuvo mejor calidad de la carne.

Estudio de la implementación del plan de bioseguridad en granjas de engorde de cuatro empresas avícolas de Nicaragua

El estudio del plan de bioseguridad de granjas de engorde de las cuatro empresas avícolas de engorde de Nicaragua se realizó con el objetivo de evaluar las medidas de bioseguridad, permitiéndonos: conocer las fortalezas y debilidades, desarrollo tecnológico y distribución de las cuatro empresas por departamento. La información se recopiló en el formato de encuesta de medidas de bioseguridad del MAGFOR, que consiste en un stop de 86 preguntas dirigidas a investigar su cumplimiento, las respuestas se analizaron mediante incorporación de datos en hoja electrónica en Excel y procesadas en Acces para estudiarlas con la formula V/TP x 100; El nivel tecnológico se calculó agregando un valor a cada pregunta con un puntaje de 2 a 5 para dar un peso o ponderación especifica, 2 las de menor tecnología y 5 las de mayor nivel ténológico. Encontrándose que el 78% de la encuestas del plan de bioseguridad es aprobado con rango de 98 a 60% de cumplimiento, estas son consideradas fortalezas para las granjas y el 22% tienen un menor nivel de aceptación considerándose las debilidades de las mismas. En el nivel tecnológico 26 de 44 granjas poseen la categoría alta que es mayor o igual al 80% de tecnología, 13 tienen una categoría media del 60% a 79% y 4 poseen un nivel bajo menor al 59%. Todas ellas ubicadas en los departamentos de Carazo, Estelí, Granada, León, Madríz, Managua. Masaya, Matagalpa y nueva Segovia, siendo Masaya la que presenta mayor cantidad de granjas.

Efecto de la eliminación de hospederos sobre la dinámica poblacional de gusano rosado del algodonero Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders) lepidoptera, Gelechidae en plan de erradicación

El presente trabajo es un análisis descriptivo preliminar, sobre las actividades llevadas acabo en el plan de erradicación y contención del gusano rosado del algodonero Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders), el cual se llevó a cabo en la “Isla del Maiz” (Corn lsland). localizada en el Océano Atlántico, en la Región Autónoma Atlantíco Sur (RAAS) de la República de Nicaragua. El objetivo principal de este trabajo consistió en determinar el efecto de la eliminación de los hospederos principales del "Gusano Rosado”, que son : Algodón Silvestre (Gossypium barbadense), Higuerilla (Ricinus communis) y algunos hospederos alternos que interactúan sobra su biologia y dinámica Poblacional. Se ubicaron trampas DELTAS de PRISMA con feromonas, con el objetivo de capturar adultos machos de Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders). Esta plaga es facilmente confundible con el falso Gusano Rosado Colombiano (Sacacioces piralis). Gusano rosado, es una plaga cuarentenada en Nicaragua y restos de países del área Centro Americana; este insecto vive en malvaceas silvestres y cultivadas, atacando órganos reproductivos (Botones florales, flores, bellotas y motas), provoca la destrucción de semillas y las fibras, a la vez que sus daños y residuos fecales pueden ser fuente de infestación de hongos y bacterias fitopatogenas. Se realizaron inspeccionas de manera visual en diferentes áreas de la Isla para ubicar los focos de los hospederos ya determinados y posteriormente eliminarlos de forma mecanico-quimica, aplicándole al herbicida TORDON -101 (Pichloran 2, 4•D) a los tocones cortados y en ocasiones arrancar las plantas de forma manual desde sus raices, esto en dependencia de las dimensiones del tallo y tamaño de la planta en la medida que fuese posible arrancarlo del suelo. De la eliminación mecanico-quimica efectuado sobre los hospederos alimenticios de la plaga ya determinados (Algodón Silvestre e Higuerilla), se puede promediar un 95% de plantas huespedes eliminadas, para ambas especies, durante todo el periodo que duro nuestro trabajo. De igual forma se instalaron un total de 100 trampas DELTAS distribuidas en 5 rutas procurando cubrir el 95 % del territorio de la Isla del Maiz. Producto del monitoreo y el alto indice de capturas de adultos machos efecto de la actividad confucionista de la feromona sexual ubicada en cada una de las trampas, utilizado como método de control y erradicación de la plaga, nos indicaron que la población de adultos de gusano rosado presentaba una reducción considerable; lo cual demuestra que la eliminación de los hospederos afecta eficazmente la dinámica poblacional de esta plaga.