The effect of charge location in ion mobility mass spectrometry for small molecule analytes

In travelling wave IM-MS an electric field is applied across the IMS cell and analyte collisions with the inert gas give rise to a relationship between the drift time and the molecular shape and overall charge. Recent findings show near baseline IMS separation (R>1) where shape and overall charge appear not to explain the IMS separation. Multiple ion mobility peaks are observed for a single m/z including the fluoroquinolone antibiotics norfloxacin and lomefloxacin, the pesticide indoxacarb and a number of steroids

AgroPortal: a vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy

Many vocabularies and ontologies are produced to represent and annotate agronomic data. However, those ontologies are spread out, in different formats, of different size, with different structures and from overlapping domains. Therefore, there is need for a common platform to receive and host them, align them, and enabling their use in agro-informatics applications. By reusing the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO) BioPortal technology, we have designed AgroPortal, an ontology repository for the agronomy domain. The AgroPortal project re-uses the biomedical domain’s semantic tools and insights to serve agronomy, but also food, plant, and biodiversity sciences. We offer a portal that features ontology hosting, search, versioning, visualization, comment, and recommendation; enables semantic annotation; stores and exploits ontology alignments; and enables interoperation with the semantic web. The AgroPortal specifically satisfies requirements of the agronomy community in terms of ontology formats (e.g., SKOS vocabularies and trait dictionaries) and supported features (offering detailed metadata and advanced annotation capabilities). In this paper, we present our platform’s content and features, including the additions to the original technology, as well as preliminary outputs of five driving agronomic use cases that participated in the design and orientation of the project to anchor it in the community. By building on the experience and existing technology acquired from the biomedical domain, we can present in AgroPortal a robust and feature-rich repository of great value for the agronomic domain. Keyword

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Report of the PICES/ICES Working Group on Forecasting Climate Change Impacts on Fish and Shellfish

In 2008, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) approved the formation of an interdisciplinary Working Group on Forecasting Climate Change Impacts on Fish and Shellfish (WG-FCCIFS). This Working Group was designed to enagage the PICES and ICES scientific communities in an effort to discuss and assess our current understanding of the implications of climate change on marine fish and fisheries. The group was quite active, and the products of WG-FCCIFS include one major scientific symposium, a symposium volume and several peer reviewed journal articles. WG-FCCIFS’s primary accomplishments and research findings are described in this report. The group promoted research on climate change impacts on marine ecosystems by scientists in PICES and ICES member countries through coordinated communication, exchange of methodology, and organization of meetings to discuss and publish results. In collaboration with relevant expert groups in PICES and ICES, WG-FCCIFS developed frameworks and methodologies for projecting the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems, with particular emphasis on shifts in the distribution, abundance and production of commercial fish and shellfish. WG-FCCIFS members met to review the results of designated case studies to test methods. Given the limitations of our forecasts, they also explored techniques for estimating and communicating uncertainty in forecasts and strategies for research and management under climate change scenarios. As the 3-year term for WG-FCCIFS approached, it was clear that PICES and ICES were well positioned to serve as world leaders in advancing science on assessments of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems. This recognition led to the formation of the ICES Strategic Initiative on Climate Change Effects on Marine Ecosystems (SICCME), referred to as the Section on Climate Change Effects on Marine Ecosystems (S-CCME) within PICES

Intégration holistique et entreposage automatique des données ouvertes

Statistical Open Data present useful information to feed up a decision-making system. Their integration and storage within these systems is achieved through ETL processes. It is necessary to automate these processes in order to facilitate their accessibility to non-experts. These processes have also need to face out the problems of lack of schemes and structural and sematic heterogeneity, which characterize the Open Data. To meet these issues, we propose a new ETL approach based on graphs. For the extraction, we propose automatic activities performing detection and annotations based on a model of a table. For the transformation, we propose a linear program fulfilling holistic integration of several graphs. This model supplies an optimal and a unique solution. For the loading, we propose a progressive process for the definition of the multidimensional schema and the augmentation of the integrated graph. Finally, we present a prototype and the experimental evaluations.Les statistiques présentes dans les Open Data ou données ouvertes constituent des informations utiles pour alimenter un système décisionnel. Leur intégration et leur entreposage au sein du système décisionnel se fait à travers des processus ETL. Il faut automatiser ces processus afin de faciliter leur accessibilité à des non-experts. Ces processus doivent pallier aux problèmes de manque de schémas, d'hétérogénéité structurelle et sémantique qui caractérisent les données ouvertes. Afin de répondre à ces problématiques, nous proposons une nouvelle démarche ETL basée sur les graphes. Pour l'extraction du graphe d'un tableau, nous proposons des activités de détection et d'annotation automatiques. Pour la transformation, nous proposons un programme linéaire pour résoudre le problème d'appariement holistique de données structurelles provenant de plusieurs graphes. Ce modèle fournit une solution optimale et unique. Pour le chargement, nous proposons un processus progressif pour la définition du schéma multidimensionnel et l'augmentation du graphe intégré. Enfin, nous présentons un prototype et les résultats d'expérimentations

Ontology-Driven Semantic Data Integration in Open Environment

Collaborative intelligence in the context of information management can be defined as A shared intelligence that results from the collaboration between various information systems . In open environments, these collaborating information systems can be heterogeneous, dynamic and loosely-coupled. Information systems in open environment can also possess a certain degree of autonomy. The integration of data residing in various heterogeneous information systems is essential in order to drive the intelligence efficiently and accurately. Because of the heterogeneous, loosely-coupled, and dynamic nature of open environment, the integration between these information systems in the data level is not efficient. Several approaches and models have been proposed in order to perform the task of data integration. Many of the existing approaches for data integration are designed for closed environment, tightly-coupled systems and enterprise data integration. They make explicit, or implicit, assumptions about the semantic structure of the data. Because of the heterogeneous and loosely-coupled nature of open environment, such assumptions are deemed unintuitive. Data integration approaches based on model that are extensional in nature are also inadequate for open environment. This is because they do not account for the dynamic nature of open environment. The need for an adequate model for describing data integration systems in open environment is quite evident. Intensional based modeling is found to be an adequate and natural choice for modeling in open environment. This is because it addresses the dynamic and loosely-coupled nature of open environment. In this work, an intensional model for the conceptualization is presented. This model is based on the theory of Properties Relations and Propositions (PRP). The proposed description takes the concepts, relations, and properties as primitive and as such, irreducible entities. The formal intensional account of both Ontology and Ontological Commitment are also proposed in light of the intensional model for conceptualization. An intensional model for ontology-driven mediated data integration in open environment is also proposed. The proposed model accounts for the dynamic nature of open environment and also intensionally describes the information of data sources. The interface between global and local ontologies and the formal intensional semantics of the query answering are then described

Eye quietness and quiet eye in expert and novice golf performance: an electrooculographic analysis

Quiet eye (QE) is the final ocular fixation on the target of an action (e.g., the ball in golf putting). Camerabased eye-tracking studies have consistently found longer QE durations in experts than novices; however, mechanisms underlying QE are not known. To offer a new perspective we examined the feasibility of measuring the QE using electrooculography (EOG) and developed an index to assess ocular activity across time: eye quietness (EQ). Ten expert and ten novice golfers putted 60 balls to a 2.4 m distant hole. Horizontal EOG (2ms resolution) was recorded from two electrodes placed on the outer sides of the eyes. QE duration was measured using a EOG voltage threshold and comprised the sum of the pre-movement and post-movement initiation components. EQ was computed as the standard deviation of the EOG in 0.5 s bins from –4 to +2 s, relative to backswing initiation: lower values indicate less movement of the eyes, hence greater quietness. Finally, we measured club-ball address and swing durations. T-tests showed that total QE did not differ between groups (p = .31); however, experts had marginally shorter pre-movement QE (p = .08) and longer post-movement QE (p < .001) than novices. A group × time ANOVA revealed that experts had less EQ before backswing initiation and greater EQ after backswing initiation (p = .002). QE durations were inversely correlated with EQ from –1.5 to 1 s (rs = –.48 - –.90, ps = .03 - .001). Experts had longer swing durations than novices (p = .01) and, importantly, swing durations correlated positively with post-movement QE (r = .52, p = .02) and negatively with EQ from 0.5 to 1s (r = –.63, p = .003). This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring ocular activity using EOG and validates EQ as an index of ocular activity. Its findings challenge the dominant perspective on QE and provide new evidence that expert-novice differences in ocular activity may reflect differences in the kinematics of how experts and novices execute skills

Radiolabeled Compounds for Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer

Radiopharmaceuticals are used in the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, especially cancer. In general, radiopharmaceuticals are either salts of radionuclides or radionuclides bound to biologically active molecules, drugs, or cells. Tremendous progress has been made in discovering, developing, and commercializing numerous radiopharmaceuticals for the imaging and therapy of cancer. Significant research is ongoing in academia and the pharmaceutical industry to develop more novel radiolabeled compounds as potential radiopharmaceuticals for unmet needs. This Special Issue aims to focus on all aspects of the design, characterization, evaluation, and development of novel radiolabeled compounds for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and the application of new radiochemistry and methodologies for the development of novel radiolabeled compounds. Outstanding contributions presented in this Special Issue will significantly add to the field of radiopharmaceuticals