Strengthening the impact of plant genetic resources through collaborative collection, conservation, characterisation, and evaluation: a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis

This paper is a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis, who directly and indirectly collected >14 000 accessions across 60 genera of pasture, forage, and crop species and their wild relatives around the Mediterranean basin, Eastern Africa, and Central and South Asia from 1973 to 2005. This was achieved by a collaborative approach that built strong interactions between disparate organisations (ICARDA, VIR, CLIMA, and Australian genebanks) based on germplasm exchange, conservation and documentation, capacity building, and joint collection. These activities greatly strengthened Australian pasture, forage, and crop genebanks, and led to widespread germplasm utilisation that has waned in the last 5 years, reflecting changing priorities among industry funding bodies and research providers. This situation must be reversed, given the pivotal role genetic resource collections must play to broaden the genetic and adaptive base of plant breeding, to meet the challenge of feeding an increasing population in a depleting resource base. Because the use of germplasm subsets that facilitate phenotyping will stimulate wider utilisation of genetic resources, we discuss the application of core collection and germplasm selection through habitat characterisation/filtering in Australian collections. Both are valid entry points into large collections, but the latter has the advantage of enabling both trait discovery and investigation of plant adaptation, and because it is based on a priori hypothesis testing, it increases understanding even when the trait of interest is not identified

Resilience trinity: safeguarding ecosystem functioning and services across three different time horizons and decision contexts

Ensuring ecosystem resilience is an intuitive approach to safeguard the functioning of ecosystems and hence the future provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). However, resilience is a multi‐faceted concept that is difficult to operationalize. Focusing on resilience mechanisms, such as diversity, network architectures or adaptive capacity, has recently been suggested as means to operationalize resilience. Still, the focus on mechanisms is not specific enough. We suggest a conceptual framework, resilience trinity, to facilitate management based on resilience mechanisms in three distinctive decision contexts and time‐horizons: 1) reactive, when there is an imminent threat to ES resilience and a high pressure to act, 2) adjustive, when the threat is known in general but there is still time to adapt management and 3) provident, when time horizons are very long and the nature of the threats is uncertain, leading to a low willingness to act. Resilience has different interpretations and implications at these different time horizons, which also prevail in different disciplines. Social ecology, ecology and engineering are often implicitly focussing on provident, adjustive or reactive resilience, respectively, but these different notions of resilience and their corresponding social, ecological and economic tradeoffs need to be reconciled. Otherwise, we keep risking unintended consequences of reactive actions, or shying away from provident action because of uncertainties that cannot be reduced. The suggested trinity of time horizons and their decision contexts could help ensuring that longer‐term management actions are not missed while urgent threats to ES are given priority

Complex Regimes: Mapping Australia's Cyber Security Regulatory Landscape for Cloud Services

Background and aims The cloud services sector supplies significant benefits to Australia’s economy but the sector itself and its customers rely on robust cyber security protection. In Australia, the sector is undergoing a significant regulatory reset, in part due to the reforms to Australia’s critical infrastructure legislative framework, which include amendments to the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (Cth) (SOCI). This reset is influenced and accentuated by changes in the industry, such as the increased uptake of cloud services by Australian businesses and governments, and new security threats. This report aims to map the relationships between, and obligations of, cloud services providers and other businesses, and government, and specifically in five industry sectors: data storage or processing; transport (freight); water; energy (electricity) and financial markets and services. This includes cloud services providers, who form part of the supply chain for others who have security obligations; and cloud service providers, who have direct obligations, such as being responsible entities for critical infrastructure assets and/or systems of national significance under the critical infrastructure reforms. It aims to assist the cloud industry and its customers navigate new legislation along with existing cyber security regulations and guidance documents. It aims to provide guidance to Parliament and government agencies on current problems with the cyber security obligations placed on cloud services providers, and the best ways to overcome those problems to bolster sustainable and robust cyber security in cloud services provision. Analysis In this report, we critically analyse the current cyber security regulatory regime and its impact on cloud service providers and customers and: (1) identify and describe key elements of existing regulatory and guidance instruments regulating cyber security; (2) identify areas of overlap, duplication, inconsistency, and lack of clarity in those instruments; and (3) provide recommendations on improving the current regulatory framework. Findings The legal and regulatory framework regarding cloud service providers and cyber security is unclear and inconsistent, a problem exacerbated by changes imposing significant new obligations and costs on cloud service providers. Federal and state governments and regulators have implemented numerous legislative, policy, strategy, and guidance instruments to bolster cyber security, which apply to the cloud services sector. However, many of these are not well-aligned, resulting in cyber security obligations and guidance that are unclear, difficult to navigate, and duplicative in many cases. This complex regulatory landscape is likely to result in increased costs, variable compliance, and decreased confidence in provision of cyber security services by cloud service providers. These problems are exacerbated by new obligations on the data storage or processing sector imposed by the legislative reforms relating to critical infrastructure assets and systems of national significance. Recommendations Cloud service providers (particularly SMEs) face significant barriers to consistent and cost-effective cyber security compliance. This may result not only in weaker cyber security protections but a less competitive cloud services sector as well. In summary, we recommend: 1. formalise a forum under terms of reference for collaboration between cyber regulators across jurisdictions and across industry sectors; 2. creation and allocation of a cyber security regulatory unit or role to every sector-specific and cross-sectoral regulator, whose responsibility is to coordinate with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre and provide expert guidance on regulatory matters to their regulator; 3. recommend Standards Australia, in partnership with cyber regulators, review standards relevant to cyber security in the cloud services sector to identify the concerns of users and any blockers to the adoption of international standards in Australia; 4. review supply chain risk management processes between Standards Australia, and cyber regulators to identify opportunities for innovations to securing a cyber supply chain framework fit for purpose; 5. create ‘equivalence’ principles for cyber security standards to inform legislation or guidance

Physical limits of inference

I show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share an underlying mathematical structure. I call devices with that structure "inference devices". I present a set of existence and impossibility results concerning inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws governing our universe. In a limited sense, the impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted, given sufficient knowledge of the present. Alternatively, these impossibility results can be viewed as a non-quantum mechanical "uncertainty principle". Next I explore the close connections between the mathematics of inference devices and of Turing Machines. In particular, the impossibility results for inference devices are similar to the Halting theorem for TM's. Furthermore, one can define an analog of Universal TM's (UTM's) for inference devices. I call those analogs "strong inference devices". I use strong inference devices to define the "inference complexity" of an inference task, which is the analog of the Kolmogorov complexity of computing a string. However no universe can contain more than one strong inference device. So whereas the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is arbitrary up to specification of the UTM, there is no such arbitrariness in the inference complexity of an inference task. I end by discussing the philosophical implications of these results, e.g., for whether the universe "is" a computer.Comment: 43 pages, updated version of Physica D version, which originally appeared in 2007 CNLS conference on unconventional computatio

Quantum Entanglement and Order Parameter in a Paired Finite Fermi System

We study the pairing correlations in a finite Fermi system from quantum entanglement point of view. We investigate the relation between the order parameter, which has been introduced recently to describe both finite and infinite superconductors, and the concurrence. For a proper definition of the concurrence, we argue that a possible generalization of spin flip transformation is time reversal operation. While for a system with indefinite number of particles concurrence is a good measure of entanglement, for a finite system it does not distinguish between normal and superconducting states. We propose that the expectation value of the radial operator for the total pseudospin can be used to identify entanglement of pairing.Comment: submitted to Solid State Communications (the Festschrift in the honor of Prof. Salim Ciraci's 60th birthday

Integration of first-principles methods and crystallographic database searches for new ferroelectrics: Strategies and explorations

In this concept paper, the development of strategies for the integration of first-principles methods with crystallographic database mining for the discovery and design of novel ferroelectric materials is discussed, drawing on the results and experience derived from exploratory investigations on three different systems: (1) the double perovskite Sr(Sb$_{1/2}$Mn$_{1/2}$)O$_3$ as a candidate semiconducting ferroelectric; (2) polar derivatives of schafarzikite $M$Sb$_2$O$_4$; and (3) ferroelectric semiconductors with formula $M_2$P$_2$(S,Se)$_6$. A variety of avenues for further research and investigation are suggested, including automated structure type classification, low-symmetry improper ferroelectrics, and high-throughput first-principles searches for additional representatives of structural families with desirable functional properties.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Habitable Climates: The Influence of Eccentricity

In the outer regions of the habitable zone, the risk of transitioning into a globally frozen "snowball" state poses a threat to the habitability of planets with the capacity to host water-based life. We use a one-dimensional energy balance climate model (EBM) to examine how obliquity, spin rate, orbital eccentricity, and ocean coverage might influence the onset of such a snowball state. For an exoplanet, these parameters may be strikingly different from the values observed for Earth. Since, for constant semimajor axis, the annual mean stellar irradiation scales with (1-e^2)^(-1/2), one might expect the greatest habitable semimajor axis (for fixed atmospheric composition) to scale as (1-e^2)^(-1/4). We find that this standard ansatz provides a reasonable lower bound on the outer boundary of the habitable zone, but the influence of obliquity and ocean fraction can be profound in the context of planets on eccentric orbits. For planets with eccentricity 0.5, our EBM suggests that the greatest habitable semimajor axis can vary by more than 0.8 AU (78%!) depending on obliquity, with higher obliquity worlds generally more stable against snowball transitions. One might also expect that the long winter at an eccentric planet's apoastron would render it more susceptible to global freezing. Our models suggest that this is not a significant risk for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars since such planets are buffered by the thermal inertia provided by oceans covering at least 10% of their surface. Since planets on eccentric orbits spend much of their year particularly far from the star, such worlds might turn out to be especially good targets for direct observations with missions such as TPF-Darwin. Nevertheless, the extreme temperature variations achieved on highly eccentric exo-Earths raise questions about the adaptability of life to marginally or transiently habitable conditions.Comment: References added, text and figures updated, accepted by Ap

Black hole and holographic dark energy

We discuss the connection between black hole and holographic dark energy. We examine the issue of the equation of state (EOS) for holographic energy density as a candidate for the dark energy carefully. This is closely related to the EOS for black hole, because the holographic dark energy comes from the black hole energy density. In order to derive the EOS of a black hole, we may use its dual (quantum) systems. Finally, a regular black hole without the singularity is introduced to describe an accelerating universe inside the cosmological horizon. Inspired by this, we show that the holographic energy density with the cosmological horizon as the IR cutoff leads to the dark energy-dominated universe with $\omega_{\rm \Lambda}=-1$.Comment: 11pages, 1 figure, version to appear in PL

Exile Vol. VI No. 2

EDITORIAL 4-5 Clearing in the Forest (woodcut) by Raymond Berger 6 Haiku (poems) by Jean Ludwig 7 Four in Another Punchbowl (story) 8-15 Untitled (etching) by Patricia Wagenhals 16 Staggering Sky (poem) by Robert Canary 16 Song (poem) by Christine Condit 17 Quadrangle (poem) by James Gallant 18-19 P Stands for Pole (story) by Lee Cullen 20-30 The Beachcomber (poem) by William Bennett 31 Harvest in Kansas (poem) by James Gallant 32 Awarded the semi-annual EXILE-Denison Bookstore Writing Prize: P Stands for Pole by Lee Cullen 20-3