Phylogeny and historical biogeography of Lauraceae

Phylogenetic relationships among 122 species of Lauraceae representing 44 of the 55 currently recognized genera are inferred from sequence variation in the chloroplast and nuclear genomes. The trnL-trnF, trnT-trnL, psbA-trnH, and rpll6 regions of cpDNA, and the 5' end of 26S rDNA resolved major lineages, while the ITS/5.8S region of rDNA resolved a large terminal lade. The phylogenetic estimate is used to assess morphology-based views of relationships and, with a temporal dimension added, to reconstruct the biogeographic history of the family. Results suggest Lauraceae radiated when trans-Tethyean migration was relatively easy, and basal lineages are established on either Gondwanan or Laurasian terrains by the Late Cretaceous. Most genera with Gondwanan histories place in Cryptocaryeae, but a small group of South American genera, the Chlorocardium-Mezilauruls lade, represent a separate Gondwanan lineage. Caryodaphnopsis and Neocinnamomum may be the only extant representatives of the ancient Lauraceae flora docu- mented in Mid- to Late Cretaceous Laurasian strata. Remaining genera place in a terminal Perseeae-Laureae lade that radiated in Early Eocene Laurasia. Therein, non-cupulate genera associate as the Persea group, and cupuliferous genera sort to Laureae of most classifications or Cinnamomeae sensu Kostermans. Laureae are Laurasian relicts in Asia. The Persea group and Cinnamomum group (of Cinnamomeae) show tropical amphi-Pacific disjunctions here credited to disruption of boreotropical ranges by Eocene-Oligocene climatic cooling. The Ocotea complex accommodates re- maining Cinnamomeae and shows a trans-Atlantic disjunction possibly derived from a Madrean-Tethyan ancestral distribution. These findings support Laurasian ancestry for most extant Lauraceae, with their considerable neotropical representation primarily derived from Early Miocene radiation of the Ocotea complex upon reaching South America

Advances in Distant Diplomatics: A Stylometric Approach to Medieval Charters

The quantitative analysis of writing style (stylometry) is becoming an increasingly common research instrument in philology. When it comes to medieval texts, such a methodology might be able to help us disentangle the multiple authorial strata that can often be discerned in them (issuer, dictator, scribe, etc.). To deliver a proof of concept in 'distant diplomatics,' we have turned to a corpus of twelfth-century Latin charters from the Cambrai episcopal chancery. We subjected this collection to an (unsupervised) stylometric modelling procedure, based on lexical frequency extraction and dimension reduction. In the absence of a sizable 'ground truth' for this material, we zoomed in on a specific case study, namely the oeuvre of the previously identified dictator-scribe known as 'RogF/JeanE.' Our results offer additional support for the attribution of a diplomatic oeuvre to this individual and even allow us to enlarge it with additional documents. Our analysis moreover yielded the serendipitous discovery of another, previously unnoticed, oeuvre, which we tentatively attribute to a scribe-dictator 'JeanB.' We conclude that the large-scale stylometric analysis is a promising methodology for digital diplomatics. More efforts, however, will have to be invested in establishing gold standards for this method to realize its full potential

UnCommonSense: Informative Negative Knowledge about Everyday Concepts

Commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts is an important asset for AIapplications, such as question answering and chatbots. Recently, we have seenan increasing interest in the construction of structured commonsense knowledgebases (CSKBs). An important part of human commonsense is about properties thatdo not apply to concepts, yet existing CSKBs only store positive statements.Moreover, since CSKBs operate under the open-world assumption, absentstatements are considered to have unknown truth rather than being invalid. Thispaper presents the UNCOMMONSENSE framework for materializing informativenegative commonsense statements. Given a target concept, comparable conceptsare identified in the CSKB, for which a local closed-world assumption ispostulated. This way, positive statements about comparable concepts that areabsent for the target concept become seeds for negative statement candidates.The large set of candidates is then scrutinized, pruned and ranked byinformativeness. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our methodsignificantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. A large dataset of informativenegations is released as a resource for future research.<br

UnCommonSense: Informative Negative Knowledge about Everyday Concepts

Commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts is an important asset for AIapplications, such as question answering and chatbots. Recently, we have seenan increasing interest in the construction of structured commonsense knowledgebases (CSKBs). An important part of human commonsense is about properties thatdo not apply to concepts, yet existing CSKBs only store positive statements.Moreover, since CSKBs operate under the open-world assumption, absentstatements are considered to have unknown truth rather than being invalid. Thispaper presents the UNCOMMONSENSE framework for materializing informativenegative commonsense statements. Given a target concept, comparable conceptsare identified in the CSKB, for which a local closed-world assumption ispostulated. This way, positive statements about comparable concepts that areabsent for the target concept become seeds for negative statement candidates.The large set of candidates is then scrutinized, pruned and ranked byinformativeness. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our methodsignificantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. A large dataset of informativenegations is released as a resource for future research.<br

Digital Innovation Through Partnership Between Nature Conservation Organisations and Academia : A Qualitative Impact Assessment

We would like to thank all interviewees for sharing their experiences of working with academics, and the guest editor and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of the work. The research in this paper is supported by the RCUK dot.rural Digital economy Research Hub, University of Aberdeen (Grant reference: EP/G066051/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Modeling a Consortium-based Distributed Ledger Network with Applications for Intelligent Transportation Infrastructure

Emerging distributed-ledger networks are changing the landscape for environments of low trust among participating entities. Implementing such technologies in transportation infrastructure communications and operations would enable, in a secure fashion, decentralized collaboration among entities who do not fully trust each other. This work models a transportation records and events data collection system enabled by a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network and simulated using a transportation environment modeling tool. A distributed vehicle records management use case is shown with the capability to detect and prevent unauthorized vehicle odometer tampering. Another use case studied is that of vehicular data collected during the event of an accident. It relies on broadcast data collected from the Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET) and submitted as witness reports from nearby vehicles or road-side units who observed the event taking place or detected misbehaving activity by vehicles involved in the accident. Mechanisms for the collection, validation, and corroboration of the reported data which may prove crucial for vehicle accident forensics are described and their implementation is discussed. A performance analysis of the network under various loads is conducted with results suggesting that tailored endorsement policies are an effective mechanism to improve overall network throughput for a given channel. The experimental testbed shows that Hyperledger Fabric and other distributed ledger technologies hold promise for the collection of transportation data and the collaboration of applications and services that consume it

Middle Palaeolithic flint procurement in Central Mediterranean Iberia: IMplications for human mobility.

Different flint types from the Middle Palaeolithic site of Abrigo de la Quebrada (Chelva, Valencia) are characterized, both macro- and microscopically, and compared with types found at other localities in the region. Although procurement predominantly concerned the immediate vicinity of sites, our results show the presence of the same types in assemblages separated by distances of up to 120 km. The long distances involved are suggestive of a pattern of North-South mobility of human groups along the coastline of central Mediterranean Iberia