Estado de conservación de la ictiofauna arrecifal en sitios de buceo turístico de cuatro regiones del Archipiélago Sabana-Camagüey, Cuba.

Los peces constituyen uno de los atractivos principales en los arrecifes coralinos para el buceo turístico, por lo cual resulta necesario monitorear su abundancia y valores estéticos. El objetivo de esta investigación fue evaluar el estado de conservación de las asociaciones de peces arrecifales en cuatro de los principales polos turísticos del Archipiélago Sabana-Camagüey, Cuba en el año 2010. Se muestrearon 23 sitios de buceo turísticos en áreas adyacentes a las regiones de Varadero (5 sitios), cayos de Villa Clara (6 sitios), Cayo Coco (6 sitios) y Santa Lucia (6 sitios). En cada uno de ellos se realizaron seis réplicas de censos visuales de todas las especies de peces en recorridos lineales de 50 m de largo por 2 m de ancho, ocupando un área total de 600 m2. El puntaje más alto de conservación lo presentó los cayos de Villa Clara (37), siguiéndole en orden decreciente Cayo Coco (35), y con valores más bajos Varadero (24) y Santa Lucia (22). Los puntajes de las cuatro regiones fueron inferiores a los encontrados en otros arrecifes de Cuba y el Caribe. Los valores de Varadero y Santa Lucia se correspondieron con los de arrecifes de hábitats degradados y sometidos a explotación pesquera. En general, en la mayoría de las regiones predominaron peces de talla pequeña (<20 cm) pertenecientes a las familias Pomacentridae y Labridae y hubo poca abundancia de peces carnívoros y herbívoros de mediana (20-40 cm) y gran talla (>40 cm). ABSTRACT Fish are one of the main attractions on coral reefs for diving tourism; therefore, it is necessary to monitor their condition and aesthetic values. The objective of this research was to evaluate the status of reef fish assemblages in four tourist areas of Sabana-Camaguey Archipelago, Cuba in 2010. Twentythree tourist diving sites were sampled in adjacent areas to regions of Varadero (five sites), Villa Clara keys (6 sites), Coco key (6 sites) and Santa Lucia (6 sites). In each region, six replicated visual census of all fish species were conducted along belt transects of 50 m length and 2 m width, occupying a total area of 600 m2. The highest conservation score was obtained by Villa Clara keys (37), followed in decreasing order by Coco key (35), and with lower values Varadero (24) and St. Lucia (22). The scores of the four regions were lower than the values of other Cuban and Caribbean reefs. The values of Varadero and Santa Lucia corresponded to reefs with degraded habitats and subject to overfishing. In general, small fish (< 20 cm) from families Pomacentridae and Labridae, and low abundance of carnivore and herbivore fish of middle (20-40 cm) and large size (> 40 cm) predominated in most regions.

水稻灌浆期籽粒与 胚乳发育的蛋白质组学分析

籽粒的灌浆是将光合器官合成的有机物贮存在籽粒中的过程。这一过程直接决定了籽粒的产量及品质。先前研究表明灌浆籽粒中贮存物质的累积是各种代谢活动和细胞学过程协同作用的结果，但灌浆的分子机制目前还不是非常清楚。水稻是研究籽粒灌浆的优良模式材料，不仅因为它是世界上最重要的淀粉食物来源，更重要的是其全基因组的测序完成为分子机制的研究带来极大的便利。我们对发育水稻籽粒的观察表明在开花后6 天，籽粒就已完成了胚的分化和胚乳的细胞化；此后籽粒经历了一个显著的细胞增大过程，并在开花后12 天左右达到成熟籽粒的大小；而籽粒的灌浆过程起始于开花后6 天，这个过程一直持续到开花后20 天。因此，我们将开花后6 天到20 天的籽粒分为8 个连续的发育阶段进行动态的蛋白质组分析，396个蛋白点的表达在灌浆过程中发生了两倍以上变化。质谱鉴定得到的345 个差异表达的蛋白划分为10 个不同的功能类别。其中新陈代谢类（45%）和蛋白合成/终点（destination）类（20%）两个功能类别中就包括了大多数的差异表达蛋白，预示着这两类蛋白在籽粒发育中的重要性。蛋白功能群的表达分析显示与淀粉合成和乙醇发酵相关的蛋白在发育过程中大幅度的上调，而与碳代谢中心过程（糖酵解和三羧酸循环）相关蛋白呈现明显的下调趋势。大多数的功能类或（亚类）也呈现出下调的表达趋势，如细胞生长/分裂类，蛋白合成类，水解类，信号传导类和转录类。蛋白表达分析的结果表明蛋白的表达随籽粒的发育发生了显著的变化，这些变化与籽粒在不同阶段的发育和代谢过程密切相关并协调一致，是细胞从生长分裂过渡到以淀粉合成为中心的物质基础。同时也说明代谢重点由中心碳代谢向乙醇发酵的转变对于籽粒的发育和淀粉的合成与累积具有重要意义。 籽粒发育的研究表明在长到成熟籽粒大小后（开花后12 天），籽粒的代谢集中到淀粉累积途径上，一直持续到进入脱水期（18 天），绝大多数淀粉合成相关蛋白在这期间到达表达的顶点。为了解淀粉累积关键时期淀粉合成关键部位（胚乳）的发育规律，我们进一步应用DIGE 技术对这一淀粉累积关键时期（灌浆中后期，开花后12 到18 天）的蛋白表达特性进行分析。细胞学的观察发现胚乳在灌浆后期先后经历了过氧化氢的爆发、半透明胚乳的形成以及胚乳细胞死亡事件。相应的DIGE 分析显示有321 个蛋白点在胚乳的后期发育中发生了显著的表达变化。细胞学的观察结合DIGE 分析显示胚乳的后期发育是一个典型的衰老过程：细胞结构的崩溃；氧化自由基的爆发；脱水干燥；蛋白、脂类和DNA 由同化作用向异化作用的代谢转化。与代谢转化相伴随的细胞营养的重新分配是胚乳后期发育的一个显著过程。DIGE分析全面展示了参与营养重新分配相关蛋白在后期发育中的表达变化，为细胞学中观察到的有机物向淀粉的转化提供了清晰的蛋白水平的证据支持。在鉴定的差异表达蛋白中有2/3 的蛋白是已知的对氧化电位变化敏感的蛋白，表明由H2O2 爆发形成的氧化压力将引起氧化还原调控从而对胚乳的后期发育进行全面的影响。而其中与碳元素代谢相关的代谢途径中尤其富含氧化还原电位敏感的蛋白，表明后期的营养重新分配以及淀粉的累积受到氧化还原电位的紧密调控。另一方面，H2O2 的爆发激发了胚乳中的抗氧化体系。由抗氧化蛋白（如thioredoxin、抗坏血酸和超氧化物歧化酶等）、氧化还原敏感蛋白、代谢中间产物以及glyoxalase 构成的抗氧化体系在胚乳后期发育中协同作用调节氧化还原电位的变化，从而控制胚乳细胞衰老的节奏。另外，我们发现与RraA 相关的转录本的调控在胚乳发育末期急剧上调，在调控的代谢途径、调控时间以及调控的部位与氧化还原调控相重叠，并且支持RraA 活动有利于胚乳细胞对氧化压力的适应。所有这些结果表明内生的过氧化氢（或氧化自由基）在胚乳的后期发育和淀粉累积中起到核心的调控作用。

Studies on transportation of fish. Pt. 1. Packaging of frozen fish in insulated containers

The paper deals with certain technological aspects of transportation of fish. Frozen fish packed in thermocole insulated plywood box (tea chests) and transported has been found to remain in good condition, for 3 to 4 days. Fish reaching the destination in a thawed state can be stored in crushed ice for a further period of 2-3 days. The effect of initial temperature of frozen fish on the storage life, the maximum storage period for different types of frozen fish packed in the insulated container and the changes in chemical and organoleptic qualities of different varieties of fish under condition of transport are also discussed.

Private sector to invest in off-shore fishing and to encourage the financial incentives to be introduced for deep-sea fishing in Sri Lanka

The author discusses the financial aspects of private sector investment in off-shore fishing, with particular attention to tax incentives, such as those offered to tourist hotels, which are considered applicable to the current case of fishing vessel purchase, and the operation of the vessels themselves, hiring, publicity and profitability. Tax incentives which were introduced to encourage investment in the tourist industry should be introduced to encourage investment in the fishing industry on the lines presented. It is essential that wide publicity be given for the incentives introduced so as to achieve the desired results.

Cross-Lingual spoken language understanding from unaligned data using discriminative classification models and machine translation

This paper investigates several approaches to bootstrapping a new spoken language understanding (SLU) component in a target language given a large dataset of semantically-annotated utterances in some other source language. The aim is to reduce the cost associated with porting a spoken dialogue system from one language to another by minimising the amount of data required in the target language. Since word-level semantic annotations are costly, Semantic Tuple Classifiers (STCs) are used in conjunction with statistical machine translation models both of which are trained from unaligned data to further reduce development time. The paper presents experiments in which a French SLU component in the tourist information domain is bootstrapped from English data. Results show that training STCs on automatically translated data produced the best performance for predicting the utterance's dialogue act type, however individual slot/value pairs are best predicted by training STCs on the source language and using them to decode translated utterances. © 2010 ISCA.

Natural actor and belief critic: Reinforcement algorithm for learning parameters of dialogue systems modelled as POMDPs

This article presents a novel algorithm for learning parameters in statistical dialogue systems which are modeled as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The three main components of a POMDP dialogue manager are a dialogue model representing dialogue state information; a policy that selects the system's responses based on the inferred state; and a reward function that specifies the desired behavior of the system. Ideally both the model parameters and the policy would be designed to maximize the cumulative reward. However, while there are many techniques available for learning the optimal policy, no good ways of learning the optimal model parameters that scale to real-world dialogue systems have been found yet. The presented algorithm, called the Natural Actor and Belief Critic (NABC), is a policy gradient method that offers a solution to this problem. Based on observed rewards, the algorithm estimates the natural gradient of the expected cumulative reward. The resulting gradient is then used to adapt both the prior distribution of the dialogue model parameters and the policy parameters. In addition, the article presents a variant of the NABC algorithm, called the Natural Belief Critic (NBC), which assumes that the policy is fixed and only the model parameters need to be estimated. The algorithms are evaluated on a spoken dialogue system in the tourist information domain. The experiments show that model parameters estimated to maximize the expected cumulative reward result in significantly improved performance compared to the baseline hand-crafted model parameters. The algorithms are also compared to optimization techniques using plain gradients and state-of-the-art random search algorithms. In all cases, the algorithms based on the natural gradient work significantly better. © 2011 ACM.

Investigations on long distance transportation of fish 1. Transportation of frozen fish from Cochin to Calcutta

Oil Sardine (Sardinella longiceps), mackerel (Rastrelliger kanagurta), cat fish (Arius sp.), threadfin bream (Nemipterus japonicus) and ribbon fish (Trichurus sp.) were frozen in glazed/unglazed blocks, packed in expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulated plywood boxes with and without additional ice and despatched in uninsulated parcel vans of trains from Cochin to Calcutta. The consignments reached the destination in excellent condition and were readily disposed off.

Reinforcement learning for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems

Reinforcement techniques have been successfully used to maximise the expected cumulative reward of statistical dialogue systems. Typically, reinforcement learning is used to estimate the parameters of a dialogue policy which selects the system's responses based on the inferred dialogue state. However, the inference of the dialogue state itself depends on a dialogue model which describes the expected behaviour of a user when interacting with the system. Ideally the parameters of this dialogue model should be also optimised to maximise the expected cumulative reward. This article presents two novel reinforcement algorithms for learning the parameters of a dialogue model. First, the Natural Belief Critic algorithm is designed to optimise the model parameters while the policy is kept fixed. This algorithm is suitable, for example, in systems using a handcrafted policy, perhaps prescribed by other design considerations. Second, the Natural Actor and Belief Critic algorithm jointly optimises both the model and the policy parameters. The algorithms are evaluated on a statistical dialogue system modelled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process in a tourist information domain. The evaluation is performed with a user simulator and with real users. The experiments indicate that model parameters estimated to maximise the expected reward function provide improved performance compared to the baseline handcrafted parameters. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Gaussian processes for fast policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue managers

Modelling dialogue as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) enables a dialogue policy robust to speech understanding errors to be learnt. However, a major challenge in POMDP policy learning is to maintain tractability, so the use of approximation is inevitable. We propose applying Gaussian Processes in Reinforcement learning of optimal POMDP dialogue policies, in order (1) to make the learning process faster and (2) to obtain an estimate of the uncertainty of the approximation. We first demonstrate the idea on a simple voice mail dialogue task and then apply this method to a real-world tourist information dialogue task. © 2010 Association for Computational Linguistics.

传值进程模型检测中诊断信息的生成

诊断信息自动生成是模型检测方法的基本特征之一，对分析和排错具有重要的意义，讨论了传值进程模型检测中诊断信息的生成问题，引入了两种诊断信息的表示结构：证明图和示例；提出了两种诊断信息的构造算法，所采用的方法是从检测过程保存的依赖信息中抽取证明图和示例，这样可以继承已有的信息，从而减少计算量，相应的算法已经实现并用实例作了分析测试，实验结果表明该方法是有效的。

时间符号迁移图及其互模拟判定

引入时间符号迁移图的概念，作为既涉及通讯又具有实时性的并发系统的模型。该文给出了这种迁移图时间互模拟的算法，并证明了该算法的正确性。

关于蜕变测试和特殊用例测试的实例研究

提出了基于蜕变测试方法的集成测试环境MTest,进而为检验蜕变测试方法的能力和效率,以稀疏矩阵乘法程序为例设计了一组实验.该实验基于变异分析技术,分别以mutation score和错误发现率为度量指标,定量地分析和对比了特殊用例测试,以特殊测试用例和随机测试用例为源测试用例的蜕变测试这3种方法的测试能力和效率.该实验可在MTest测试环境下自动完成.实验结果表明,蜕变测试与特殊用例测试之间是互补的,而且就蜕变测试的源测试用例而言,随机测试用例在测试能力和效率上优于特殊测试用例.

一种基于模型的并发系统测试目的描述

提出了带约束事件的时序逻辑TLCE,用于描述系统运行中输入/输出事件之间的时序关系以及对事件参数的数据相关性约束.阐述了一种基于模型的并发系统测试框架,采用TLCE描述测试目的以引导测试用例生成.缓存一致性协议和会议协议的实例研究中所生成的测试用例集显著优于随机测试用例集.这说明了TLCE作为测试目的描述的有效性.

传值系统的互模拟与谓词等式系

National Natural Science Foundation of China; Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau of Macau SAR; Companhia de Telecomunicacoes de Macau S.A.R.L.; Macau SAR Government Tourist Office

模型检测:理论、方法与应用

National Natural Science Foundation of China; Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau of Macau SAR; Companhia de Telecomunicacoes de Macau S.A.R.L.; Macau SAR Government Tourist Office