Radiocarbon dating on cold-water corals and planktonic foraminifera, grain size analysis, stable oxygen isotopes, and XRF data of sediment cores from the Alboran Sea

Cold-water corals are common along the Moroccan continental margin off Melilla in the Alboran Sea (western Mediterranean Sea), where they colonise and largely cover mound and ridge structures. Radiocarbon ages of the reef-forming coral species Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata sampled from those structures, reveal that they were prolific in this area during the last glacial-interglacial transition with pronounced growth periods covering the Bølling-Allerød interstadial (13.5-12.8 ka BP) and the Early Holocene (11.3-9.8 ka BP). Their proliferation during these periods is expressed in vertical accumulation rates for an individual coral ridge of 266-419 cm ka**-1 that consists of coral fragments embedded in a hemipelagic sediment matrix. Following a period of coral absence, as noted in the records, cold-water corals re-colonised the area during the Mid-Holocene (5.4 ka BP) and underwater photographs indicate that corals currently thrive there. It appears that periods of sustained cold-water coral growth in the Melilla Coral Province were closely linked to phases of high marine productivity. The increased productivity was related to the deglacial formation of the most recent organic rich layer in the western Mediterranean Sea and to the development of modern circulation patterns in the Alboran Sea.

Water temperature and salinity data from southern elephant seals from Marion Island

Over the last decade, several hundred seals have been equipped with conductivity-temperature-depth sensors in the Southern Ocean for both biological and physical oceanographic studies. A calibrated collection of seal-derived hydrographic data is now available, consisting of more than 165,000 profiles. The value of these hydrographic data within the existing Southern Ocean observing system is demonstrated herein by conducting two state estimation experiments, differing only in the use or not of seal data to constrain the system. Including seal-derived data substantially modifies the estimated surface mixedlayer properties and circulation patterns within and south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Agreement with independent satellite observations of sea ice concentration is improved, especially along the East Antarctic shelf. Instrumented animals efficiently reduce a critical observational gap, and their contribution to monitoring polar climate variability will continue to grow as data accuracy and spatial coverage increase.

Industrial Development and the Innovation System of the Ethanol Sector in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to analyze innovations and the innovation system and its dynamics in the ethanol sector in the State of Sao Paulo. More specifically, this paper focuses on the development process in the sector, the public policies taken to promote the sector, and the organizations and key players involved in these policies and their responses to unforeseeable changes in economic, social and technological environments. To this end, this paper takes an historical perspective and reviews data on the cultivation of sugar cane, the production of ethanol, and on sugar cane yields as indicators of the innovations achieved in the sector. The geographical distribution of these indicators is also examined. Next, several cases in Piracicaba and Campinas in the State of Sao Paulo are presented; these give us a more concrete idea of the processes involved in innovation and technology transfer. Based on these observations, the ethanol cluster and the innovation system of the State of Sao Paulo are discussed from the viewpoint of the flowchart approach to industrial cluster policy.

Integrated program debugging, verification, and optimization using abstract interpretation (and the Ciao system preprocessor)

The technique of Abstract Interpretation has allowed the development of very sophisticated global program analyses which are at the same time provably correct and practical. We present in a tutorial fashion a novel program development framework which uses abstract interpretation as a fundamental tool. The framework uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation to obtain information about the program. This information is used to validate programs, to detect bugs with respect to partial specifications written using assertions (in the program itself and/or in system libraries), to generate and simplify run-time tests, and to perform high-level program transformations such as multiple abstract specialization, parallelization, and resource usage control, all in a provably correct way. In the case of validation and debugging, the assertions can refer to a variety of program points such as procedure entry, procedure exit, points within procedures, or global computations. The system can reason with much richer information than, for example, traditional types. This includes data structure shape (including pointer sharing), bounds on data structure sizes, and other operational variable instantiation properties, as well as procedure-level properties such as determinacy, termination, nonfailure, and bounds on resource consumption (time or space cost). CiaoPP, the preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm programming system, which implements the described functionality, will be used to illustrate the fundamental ideas.

A new approach for publishing workflows: abstractions, standards, and linked data

In recent years, a variety of systems have been developed that export the workflows used to analyze data and make them part of published articles. We argue that the workflows that are published in current approaches are dependent on the specific codes used for execution, the specific workflow system used, and the specific workflow catalogs where they are published. In this paper, we describe a new approach that addresses these shortcomings and makes workflows more reusable through: 1) the use of abstract workflows to complement executable workflows to make them reusable when the execution environment is different, 2) the publication of both abstract and executable workflows using standards such as the Open Provenance Model that can be imported by other workflow systems, 3) the publication of workflows as Linked Data that results in open web accessible workflow repositories. We illustrate this approach using a complex workflow that we re-created from an influential publication that describes the generation of 'drugomes'.

Program development using abstract interpretation (and the ciao system preprocessor)

The technique of Abstract Interpretation has allowed the development of very sophisticated global program analyses which are at the same time provably correct and practical. We present in a tutorial fashion a novel program development framework which uses abstract interpretation as a fundamental tool. The framework uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation to obtain information about the program. This information is used to validate programs, to detect bugs with respect to partial specifications written using assertions (in the program itself and/or in system librarles), to genérate and simplify run-time tests, and to perform high-level program transformations such as múltiple abstract specialization, parallelization, and resource usage control, all in a provably correct way. In the case of validation and debugging, the assertions can refer to a variety of program points such as procedure entry, procedure exit, points within procedures, or global computations. The system can reason with much richer information than, for example, traditional types. This includes data structure shape (including pointer sharing), bounds on data structure sizes, and other operational variable instantiation properties, as well as procedure-level properties such as determinacy, termination, non-failure, and bounds on resource consumption (time or space cost). CiaoPP, the preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm programming system, which implements the described functionality, will be used to illustrate the fundamental ideas.