Convergent Surface Water Distributions in U.S. Cities

Earth's surface is rapidly urbanizing, resulting in dramatic changes in the abundance, distribution and character of surface water features in urban landscapes. However, the scope and consequences of surface water redistribution at broad spatial scales are not well understood. We hypothesized that urbanization would lead to convergent surface water abundance and distribution: in other words, cities will gain or lose water such that they become more similar to each other than are their surrounding natural landscapes. Using a database of more than 1 million water bodies and 1 million km of streams, we compared the surface water of 100 US cities with their surrounding undeveloped land. We evaluated differences in areal (A WB) and numeric densities (N WB) of water bodies (lakes, wetlands, and so on), the morphological characteristics of water bodies (size), and the density (D C) of surface flow channels (that is, streams and rivers). The variance of urban A WB, N WB, and D C across the 100 MSAs decreased, by 89, 25, and 71%, respectively, compared to undeveloped land. These data show that many cities are surface water poor relative to undeveloped land; however, in drier landscapes urbanization increases the occurrence of surface water. This convergence pattern strengthened with development intensity, such that high intensity urban development had an areal water body density 98% less than undeveloped lands. Urbanization appears to drive the convergence of hydrological features across the US, such that surface water distributions of cities are more similar to each other than to their surrounding landscapes. © 2014 The Author(s).

The abelianization of the Johnson kernel

We prove that the first complex homology of the Johnson subgroup of the Torelli group Tg is a non-trivial, unipotent Tg-module for all g ≥ 4 and give an explicit presentation of it as a Sym H 1(Tg,C)-module when g ≥ 6. We do this by proving that, for a finitely generated group G satisfying an assumption close to formality, the triviality of the restricted characteristic variety implies that the first homology of its Johnson kernel is a nilpotent module over the corresponding Laurent polynomial ring, isomorphic to the infinitesimal Alexander invariant of the associated graded Lie algebra of G. In this setup, we also obtain a precise nilpotence test. © European Mathematical Society 2014.

Sensory information and associative cues used in food detection by wild vervet monkeys.

Understanding animals' spatial perception is a critical step toward discerning their cognitive processes. The spatial sense is multimodal and based on both the external world and mental representations of that world. Navigation in each species depends upon its evolutionary history, physiology, and ecological niche. We carried out foraging experiments on wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) at Lake Nabugabo, Uganda, to determine the types of cues used to detect food and whether associative cues could be used to find hidden food. Our first and second set of experiments differentiated between vervets' use of global spatial cues (including the arrangement of feeding platforms within the surrounding vegetation) and/or local layout cues (the position of platforms relative to one another), relative to the use of goal-object cues on each platform. Our third experiment provided an associative cue to the presence of food with global spatial, local layout, and goal-object cues disguised. Vervets located food above chance levels when goal-object cues and associative cues were present, and visual signals were the predominant goal-object cues that they attended to. With similar sample sizes and methods as previous studies on New World monkeys, vervets were not able to locate food using only global spatial cues and local layout cues, unlike all five species of platyrrhines thus far tested. Relative to these platyrrhines, the spatial location of food may need to stay the same for a longer time period before vervets encode this information, and goal-object cues may be more salient for them in small-scale space.

Increasing arousal enhances inhibitory control in calm but not excitable dogs

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.The emotional-reactivity hypothesis proposes that problem-solving abilities can be constrained by temperament, within and across species. One way to test this hypothesis is with the predictions of the Yerkes–Dodson law. The law posits that arousal level, a component of temperament, affects problem solving in an inverted U-shaped relationship: Optimal performance is reached at intermediate levels of arousal and impeded by high and low levels. Thus, a powerful test of the emotional-reactivity hypothesis is to compare cognitive performance in dog populations that have been bred and trained based in part on their arousal levels. We therefore compared a group of pet dogs to a group of assistance dogs bred and trained for low arousal (N = 106) on a task of inhibitory control involving a detour response. Consistent with the Yerkes–Dodson law, assistance dogs, which began the test with lower levels of baseline arousal, showed improvements when arousal was artificially increased. In contrast, pet dogs, which began the test with higher levels of baseline arousal, were negatively affected when their arousal was increased. Furthermore, the dogs’ baseline levels of arousal, as measured in their rate of tail wagging, differed by population in the expected directions. Low-arousal assistance dogs showed the most inhibition in a detour task when humans eagerly encouraged them, while more highly aroused pet dogs performed worst on the same task with strong encouragement. Our findings support the hypothesis that selection on temperament can have important implications for cognitive performance.

Upgrading automation for nuclear fuel in-core management: from the symbolic generation of configurations to the neural adaptation of heuristics

FUELCON is an expert system in nuclear engineering. Its task is optimized refueling-design, which is crucial to keep down operation costs at a plant. FUELCON proposes sets of alternative configurations of fuel-allocation; the fuel is positioned in a grid representing the core of a reactor. The practitioner of in-core fuel management uses FUELCON to generate a reasonably good configuration for the situation at hand. The domain expert, on the other hand, resorts to the system to test heuristics and discover new ones, for the task described above. Expert use involves a manual phase of revising the ruleset, based on performance during previous iterations in the same session. This paper is concerned with a new phase: the design of a neural component to carry out the revision automatically. Such an automated revision considers previous performance of the system and uses it for adaptation and learning better rules. The neural component is based on a particular schema for a symbolic to recurrent-analogue bridge, called NIPPL, and on the reinforcement learning of neural networks for the adaptation.

Culture-bound technological solutions: An artificial theoretic insight

Sometimes, technological solutions to practical problems are devised that conspicuously take into account the constraints to which a given culture is subjecting the particular task or the manner in which it is carried out. The culture may be a professional culture (e.g., the practice of law), or an ethnic-cum-professional culture (e.g., dance in given ethnic cultures from South-East Asia), or, again, a denominational culture prescribing an orthopraxy impinging on everyday life through, for example, prescribed abstinence from given categories of workday activities, or dietary laws. Massimo Negrotti's Theory of the artificial is a convenient framework for discussing some of these techniques. We discuss a few examples, but focus on the contrast of two that are taken from the same cultural background, namely, technological applications in compliance with Jewish Law orthopraxy. •Soya-, mycoprotein- or otherwise derived meat surrogates are an example ofnaturoid; they emulate the flavours and olfactory properties, as well as the texture and the outer and inner appearance, of the meat product (its kind, cut, form) they set out to emulate (including amenability to cooking in the usual manner for the model), while satisfying cultural dietary prohibitions. •In contrast, the Sabbath Notebook, a writing surrogate we describe in this paper, is atechnoid: it emulates a technique (writing to store alphanumeric information), while satisfying the prohibition of writing at particular times of the liturgical calendar (the Sabbath and the major holidays).

Investigating the impact of occupant response time on computer simulations of the WTC North Tower evacuation

This work explores the impact of response time distributions on high-rise building evacuation. The analysis utilises response times extracted from printed accounts and interviews of evacuees from the WTC North Tower evacuation of 11 September 2001. Evacuation simulations produced using these “real” response time distributions are compared with simulations produced using instant and engineering response time distributions. Results suggest that while typical engineering approximations to the response time distribution may produce reasonable evacuation times for up to 90% of the building population, using this approach may underestimate total evacuation times by as much as 61%. These observations are applicable to situations involving large high-rise buildings in which travel times are generally expected to be greater than response times

Global synchrony of an accelerating risein sea surface temperature

The oceans have shown a recent rapid and accelerating rise in temperature with, given the close link between temperature and marine organisms, pronounced effects on ecosystems. Here we describe for the first time a globally synchronous pattern of pulsed short period (�1 year long) emanations of warm sea surface temperature anomalies from tropical seas towards the poles on the shelf/slope with an intensification of the warming after the 1976/1977, 1986/1987 and 1997/1998 El Nin˜os. On the eastern margins of continents the anomalies propagate towards the poles in part by largely baroclinic boundary currents, reinforced by regional atmospheric warming. The processes contributing to the less continuous warm anomalies on western margins are linked to the transfer of warmth from adjacent western boundary currents. These climate induced events show a close parallelism with the timing of ecosystem changes in shelf seas, important for fisheries and ecosystem services, and melting of sea-ice.

Social Networks Usage Profile: Descriptive study with students in the University of Murcia

Telematic tools are very important for our lives in the present era and moreover this idea is made more evident if we analyse young people behaviours. However, it seems that the possibilities that these tools allow subjects from a professional point of view, beyond the purely playful aspects, are still not fully exploited both by subjects, neither by educational institutions where they learn. Our work studies the uses of social media in the context of university students. In order to this we have designed a research based on quantitative methodology with a survey. We have applied a questionnaire to students in the University of Murcia. The questionnaire was answered by 487 students in the first half of 2014. The survey results confirm our hypothesis that social networks are part of the basic and habitual tools of communication between the youth of our university and eminently used for leisure purposes, and that the tools used for more academic activities are those allowing greater control of privacy.

Alegoría: su pertinencia en la predicación y uso en "La novena maravilla"

En este artículo se focaliza el recurso de la alegoría como método exegético en la composición de los sermones panegíricos de Juan Espinosa Medrano (Perú, siglo XVII). Se traza el recorrido de la alegoría (y las humanidades en general) en relación –siempre tensa– con el cristianismo a lo largo de su historia; y se llega a la Contrarreforma y el uso exacerbado del método en la predicación barroca; particularmente en la oratoria sagrada de Espinosa Medrano, quien abarca elementos diversos y extraídos de distintas fuentes (filosofía natural, mitología clásica, tradición emblemática, relatos bíblicos), a los que hace funcionar como signos de otra verdad mayor, la sagrada. Si bien las preceptivas sagradas impulsaban una predicación más llana y simple, la profusión de alegorías mitológicas, que el autor resemantiza según su interés de guiar la interpretación, pueden explicarse por varias circunstancias, motivos de estudio en este trabajo.

Novel dermaseptin, adenoregulin and caerin homologs from the Central American red-eyed leaf frog, Agalychnis callidryas, revealed by functional peptidomics of defensive skin secretion

By integrating systematic peptidome and transcriptome studies of the defensive skin secretion of the Central American red-eyed leaf frog, Agalychnis callidryas, we have identified novel members of three previously described antimicrobial peptide families, a 27-mer dermaseptin-related peptide (designated DRP-AC4), a 33-mer adenoregulin-related peptide (designated ARP-AC1) and most unusually, a 27-mer caerin-related peptide (designated CRP-AC1). While dermaseptin and adenoregulin were originally isolated from phyllomedusine leaf frogs, the caerins, until now. had only been described in Australian frogs of the genus, Litoria. Both the dermaseptin and adenoregulin were C-terminally amidated and lacked the C-terminal tripeptide of the biosynthetic precursor sequence. In contrast, the caerin-related peptide, unlike the majority of Litoria analogs. was not C-terminally amidated. The present data emphasize the need for structural characterization of mature peptides to ensure that unexpected precursor cleavages and/or post-translational modifications do not produce mature peptides that differ in structure to those predicted from cloned biosynthetic precursor cDNA. Additionally, systematic study of the secretory peptidome can produce unexpected results such as the CRP described here that may have phylogenetic implications. It is thus of the utmost importance in the functional evaluation of novel peptides that the primary structure of the mature peptide is unequivocally established - something that is often facilitated by cloning biosynthetic precursor cDNAs but obviously not reliable using such data alone. (C) 2008 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.