Life-cycle modification in open oceans accounts for genome variability in a cosmopolitan phytoplankton

Emiliania huxleyi is the most abundant calcifying plankton in modern oceans with substantial intraspecific genome variability and a biphasic life cycle involving sexual alternation between calcified 2N and flagellated 1N cells. We show that high genome content variability in Emiliania relates to erosion of 1N-specific genes and loss of the ability to form flagellated cells. Analysis of 185 E. huxleyi strains isolated from world oceans suggests that loss of flagella occurred independently in lineages inhabiting oligotrophic open oceans over short evolutionary timescales. This environmentally linked physiogenomic change suggests life cycling is not advantageous in very large/diluted populations experiencing low biotic pressure and low ecological variability. Gene loss did not appear to reflect pressure for genome streamlining in oligotrophic oceans as previously observed in picoplankton. Life-cycle modifications might be common in plankton and cause major functional variability to be hidden from traditional taxonomic or molecular markers.

Life-cycle modification in open oceans accounts for genome variability in a cosmopolitan phytoplankton

Emiliania huxleyi is the most abundant calcifying plankton in modern oceans with substantial intraspecific genome variability and a biphasic life cycle involving sexual alternation between calcified 2N and flagellated 1N cells. We show that high genome content variability in Emiliania relates to erosion of 1N-specific genes and loss of the ability to form flagellated cells. Analysis of 185 E. huxleyi strains isolated from world oceans suggests that loss of flagella occurred independently in lineages inhabiting oligotrophic open oceans over short evolutionary timescales. This environmentally linked physiogenomic change suggests life cycling is not advantageous in very large/diluted populations experiencing low biotic pressure and low ecological variability. Gene loss did not appear to reflect pressure for genome streamlining in oligotrophic oceans as previously observed in picoplankton. Life-cycle modifications might be common in plankton and cause major functional variability to be hidden from traditional taxonomic or molecular markers.

The Role of the Ocean Economy in the National Income Accounts of Indonesia

This paper presents the role of the Ocean Economy in the National Income Accounts of Indonesia including the concept and methodology used to estimate the contribution of this ecosystem to Indonesian value added. Currently, the national income account of Indonesia only recognizes the fishery sector. Fishery activities have been considered as one of the sub-sectors of agricultural sector together with sub-sectors of farm food crops, plantation or non-food crops, forestry, and livestock. There are some drawbacks in the concept of national income accounts, since it follows the UN system of national accounts (SNA) that recognize only economic sectors or activities which produce the value added, while it does not recognize the ecosystems such as lakes and river ecosystems, forests as well as terrestrial and ocean ecosystems as production sectors. The present concept of the SNA produces an undervaluation of forest and ocean sectors, which in turn may direct the policy makers to have a tendency to deplete the forestry and fishery resources in order to increase the contribution of those two sectors to the national income accounts. Otherwise, the two sectors will be allocated small national budget for their operations. Therefore the paper concludes that a new concept of national income accounts based on ecosystem products and services to be developed, as a satellite account to the national income account is needed. Furthermore the new concept of national income account for the ocean economy should adopt the UN System of Environmental and Economic Accounts, which takes into account the extractive and non-extractive products as environmental and biological services in to the ocean income account. The new concept of ocean accounting based on both extractive and non-extractive products instead of only based on the extractive one which have market values may guarantee the sustainability of the ocean in particular and will be good for the whole economy of the country in generally. Hence the national income accounts of the ocean economy will show how the blue economy or the ocean economy really function as one of the important sectors for the whole economy of the country.

Measurement of the Ocean Economy From National Income Accounts to the Sustainable Blue Economy

The widespread efforts to incorporate the economic values of oceans into national income accounts have reached a stage where coordination of national efforts is desirable. A symposium held in 2015 began this process by bringing together representatives from ten countries. The symposium concluded that a definition of core ocean industries was possible but beyond that core the definition of ocean industries is in flux. Better coordination of ocean income accounts will require addressing issues of aggregation, geography, partial ocean industries, confidential, and imputation is also needed. Beyond the standard national income accounts, a need to incorporate environmental resource and ecosystem service values to gain a complete picture of the economic role of the oceans was identified. The U.N. System of Environmental and Economic Accounts and the Experimental Ecosystem Service Accounts provide frameworks for this expansion. This will require the development of physical accounts of environmental assets linked to the economic accounts as well as the adaptation of transaction and welfare based economic valuation methods to environmental resources and ecosystem services. The future development of ocean economic data is most likely to require cooperative efforts at development of metadata standards and the use of multiple platforms of opportunity created by policy analysis, economic development, and conservation projects to both collect new economic data and to sustain ocean economy data collection into the future by building capacity in economic data collection and use..

Down scaling to regional assessment of greenhouse gas emissions to enable consistency in accounting for emissions reduction projects and national inventory accounts for northern beef production in Australia

This paper explores the effect of using regional data for livestock attributes on estimation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the northern beef industry in Australia, compared with using state/territory-wide values, as currently used in Australia’s national GHG inventory report. Regional GHG emissions associated with beef production are reported for 21 defined agricultural statistical regions within state/territory jurisdictions. A management scenario for reduced emissions that could qualify as an Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) project was used to illustrate the effect of regional level model parameters on estimated abatement levels. Using regional parameters, instead of state level parameters, for liveweight (LW), LW gain and proportion of cows lactating and an expanded number of livestock classes, gives a 5.2% reduction in estimated emissions (range +12% to –34% across regions). Estimated GHG emissions intensity (emissions per kilogram of LW sold) varied across the regions by up to 2.5-fold, ranging from 10.5 kg CO2-e kg–1 LW sold for Darling Downs, Queensland, through to 25.8 kg CO2-e kg–1 LW sold for the Pindan and North Kimberley, Western Australia. This range was driven by differences in production efficiency, reproduction rate, growth rate and survival. This suggests that some regions in northern Australia are likely to have substantial opportunities for GHG abatement and higher livestock income. However, this must be coupled with the availability of management activities that can be implemented to improve production efficiency; wet season phosphorus (P) supplementation being one such practice. An ERF case study comparison showed that P supplementation of a typical-sized herd produced an estimated reduction of 622 t CO2-e year–1, or 7%, compared with a non-P supplemented herd. However, the different model parameters used by the National Inventory Report and ERF project means that there was an anomaly between the herd emissions for project cattle excised from the national accounts (13 479 t CO2-e year–1) and the baseline herd emissions estimated for the ERF project (8 896 t CO2-e year–1) before P supplementation was implemented. Regionalising livestock model parameters in both ERF projects and the national accounts offers the attraction of being able to more easily and accurately reflect emissions savings from this type of emissions reduction project in Australia’s national GHG accounts.

IG II(2) 1611 – Accounts of the naval commissioners

Squeezes

IG II(2) 1613+1614 – Accounts of the naval commissioners

Squeezes

Images of Childhood in Mothers' Accounts of Contemporary Childrearing

This article examines how a sample of first-time mothers in the UK constitute childhood in general, and their own children in particular, in and through their talk about the mundane practices of child-care. The data analysed are drawn from a longitudinal qualitative interview study which followed a sample of mothers from late pregnancy until their babies were two years old. The analysis explores links between mothers’ representations of childhood and the actualities of their child-rearing practices. The extent to which both the representations of childhood and the practices of individual mothers are consistent or contradictory, and change or remain constant over time, is also examined.

Anticipatory Accounts

C. Wright Mills called for a truly sociological analysis of actors’ “motive talk,” which decouples the commonsense link between the reasons actors give for their actions and their mental state prior to those actions. Subsequent theoretical and empirical work has focused almost entirely on actors’ retrospective accounting for untoward conduct that has already taken place. The other aspect of Mills’s program, the reasons actors give for potentially untoward future conduct and in particular the empirical investigation of the link between the availability of an acceptable vocabulary of motives for anticipated conduct and the eventual enactment of that conduct, has been largely ignored. This article seeks to rehabilitate these lost dimensions using data from a longitudinal study of mothers’ infant feeding choices and practices. It examines how mothers account, in advance, for the possibility that they may eventually feed their babies in ways they consider suboptimal. Thirty of the thirty-six women interviewed indicated that they intended to breastfeed, emphasizing the benefits of this practice to their babies. However, seventeen of these women also anticipated that they might abandon breastfeeding and presented elaborate accounts of the motives that could lead them to do so. The findings support Mills’s claim that the availability of an acceptable vocabulary of motives for untoward conduct increases the probability that one will engage in such conduct. Mothers who had offered elaborate anticipatory accounts for abandoning breastfeeding were much more likely to do so than those who did not offer such accounts.

Portuguese National Accounts : a network approach

In recent years, the Portuguese economy has gone through a severe adjustment process, which aected almost every sector of the economy. Therefore, it is important to study how the structure of the economy changed during this period. To that end, using data on the annual output by industry and product from National Accounts, we developed a network of industries for the years 2010 and 2013. By comparing the Minimal Spanning Trees and a set of topological coecients for the years considered, we evaluate the structural evolution of the economy. In order to get a long term view, we extended the analysis to the period between 1995 and 2010. We found that the industries linked to trade activities maintained their centrality, although they decreased their importance over time. Together with construction activities, they were among the most severely aected industries.

Deleuze's secret dualism? competing accounts of the relationship between the virtual and the actual

There are competing accounts of the precise way in which the virtual and the actual are related in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. As his philosophy gains a more
widespread readership, especially in a diverse range of disciplines, it is important to review differing interpretations put forward as to the precise meanings of Deleuze’s key concepts. Much interdisciplinary work that incorporates Deleuze’s philosophy does so by using the concept of the virtual, usually by offering different accounts of this very important concept. To confound this many readers of Deleuze present differing ‘standard’ definitions, as we will see. As such there is a lack of clarity within the wider academic community and within Deleuze scholarship that stems from a divergence of opinion at best, or an unfortunate misreading at worst. In light of the current landscape this paper will both investigate this lack of consensus, and more importantly, provide a more precise reading of the relationship between the virtual and the actual as presented by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1994). Through a close reading of the fourth and fifth chapters we will be able to account for the movement of virtual Ideas to their actualised form, as well as to describe the precise relationship between actualisation and the process of individuation. Ultimately we will find that intensity holds the key to uncovering the precise relationship between the virtual and the actual as the domain though which objects are both actualised and individuated.

Guidelines for teachers to elicit detailed and accurate narrative accounts from children

This paper provides interview strategies for teachers who talk to children about serious events, including bullying, truancy, and suspected maltreatment. With regard to the latter, teachers are among the largest group of professionals reporting child abuse, but also tend to evince low substantiation rates. We review research on best practice interviewing, with a focus on its application in school settings. Interview phases are described chronologically, with interview excerpts included for illustrative purposes. Gaps in knowledge about the appropriateness of techniques are highlighted, and recommendations for future research specifically within the school setting are made. It is proposed that teachers receive basic training in best practice interviewing so that, when required, they can confidently ask about difficulties in children's lives while minimizing the potential for contamination of children's responses.

Distributed data possession checking for securing multiple replicas in geographically-dispersed clouds

Distributing multiple replicas in geographically-dispersed clouds is a popular approach to reduce latency to users. It is important to ensure that each replica should have availability and data integrity features; that is, the same as the original data without any corruption and tampering. Remote data possession checking is a valid method to verify the replicass availability and integrity. Since remotely checking the entire data is time-consuming due to both the large data volume and the limited bandwidth, efficient data-possession- verifying methods generally sample and check a small hash (or random blocks) of the data to greatly reduce the I/O cost. Most recent research on data possession checking considers only single replica. However, multiple replicas data possession checking is much more challenging, since it is difficult to optimize the remote communication cost among multiple geographically-dispersed clouds. In this paper, we provide a novel efficient Distributed Multiple Replicas Data Possession Checking (DMRDPC) scheme to tackle new challenges. Our goal is to improve efficiency by finding an optimal spanning tree to define the partial order of scheduling multiple replicas data possession checking. But since the bandwidths have geographical diversity on the different replica links and the bandwidths between two replicas are asymmetric, we must resolve the problem of Finding an Optimal Spanning Tree in a Complete Bidirectional Directed Graph, which we call the FOSTCBDG problem. Particularly, we provide theories for resolving the FOSTCBDG problem through counting all the available paths that viruses attack in clouds network environment. Also, we help the cloud users to achieve efficient multiple replicas data possession checking by an approximate algorithm for tackling the FOSTCBDG problem, and the effectiveness is demonstrated by an experimental study. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.

Setting the record straight: assessing the reliability of retrospective accounts of change

Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Ecological degradation is accelerating, reducing our ability to detect and reverse declines. Resource user accounts have the potential to provide critical information on past change but their reliability can rarely be tested, hence they are often perceived as less valid than other forms of scientific data. We compared individual fishers' catch records, recorded 1-50 years ago, with their memories of past good, typical and poor catches for the corresponding time period. Good and poor catches were recalled with reasonable accuracy, matching variability in recorded catch with no significant change observed over time. Typical recalled catches were overestimated and became significantly more exaggerated over time, but were more comparable to mean than median recorded values. While accuracy of resource users' memory varied with the type of information recalled, our results suggest that carefully structured interview questions can produce reliable quantitative data to inform resource management, even after several decades have elapsed.