Estimating Rooftop Solar Potential in Urban Environments: A Generalized Approach and Assessment of the Galápagos Islands

Presently, many island communities are largely dependent on fossil fuel resources for energy, leaving the abundance of renewable energy resources largely untapped. Although various solar energy potential modeling tools have been developed, most require high-resolution data, which do not presently exist for many developing countries or remote areas. Here, we calculate the potential of rooftop solar systems using low-cost, readily obtainable data and methods. This approach can be replicated by local communities and decision-makers to obtain an estimate of solar potential before investing in more detailed analysis. We illustrate the use of these methods on the two major urban centers on the Galápagos Islands (Ecuador), Puerto Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora. Our results show that a minimum of 21% and 27% of the total rooftop area must be covered with today's solar energy production technology to meet the current electricity demand of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora, respectively. Additionally, the results demonstrate that Puerto Baquerizo Moreno has a higher production potential than Puerto Ayora, making it an attractive option for solar development that does not compete with the scarce land resources, most of which must be preserved as natural protected areas

Caça e pastorícia no calcolítico do NW de Portugal: o caso da estação arqueológica de Bitarados

Os autores publicam as primeiras evidências arqueozoológicas relacionadas com a pastorícia e com a caça detectadas no Calcolítico do Noroeste do País, recolhidas no sítio arqueológico de Bitarados (concelho de Esposende) as quais foram objecto de comparação com os resultados obtidos para outras áreas do Noroeste Peninsular.Hunting and pastoralism in the Calcolithic of the NW of Portugal: the case study of Bitarados - The authors publish the first bones of animals related to the pastoral and the hunting found in the Calcolithic of the Northwest of Portugal, collected in the archaeological site of Bitarados (municipality of Esposende) which have been compared with results for other areas of the Northwest of Iberia

The Bayesian Origins of Growth Rates in Stochastic Environments

Stochastic multiplicative dynamics characterize many complex natural phenomena such as selection and mutation in evolving populations, and the generation and distribution of wealth within social systems. Population heterogeneity in stochastic growth rates has been shown to be the critical driver of diversity dynamics and of the emergence of wealth inequality over long time scales. However, we still lack a general statistical framework that systematically explains the origins of these heterogeneities from the adaptation of agents to their environment. In this paper, we derive population growth parameters resulting from the interaction between agents and their knowable environment, conditional on subjective signals each agent receives. We show that average growth rates converge, under specific conditions, to their maximal value as the mutual information between the agent's signal and the environment, and that sequential Bayesian learning is the optimal strategy for reaching this maximum. It follows that when all agents access the same environment using the same inference model, the learning process dynamically attenuates growth rate disparities, reversing the long-term effects of heterogeneity on inequality. Our approach lays the foundation for a unified general quantitative modeling of social and biological phenomena such as the dynamical effects of cooperation, and the effects of education on life history choices.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Contributions to the biography of a place : the tomb 1 of the Campo de Caparinho in the microregional context:

Publicam-se os resultados dos trabalhos de escavação, realizados em Setembro de 2003, numa estrutura tumular neolítica de Campo de Caparinho, freguesia de Vilar de Perdizes, concelho de Montalegre. A escavação deste monumento tornou-se particularmente importante, quer pelas suas especificidades arquitectónicas que traduzem integração de elementos geomorfológicos pré-existentes, quer pelo facto de ter permitido comprovar a existência de estruturas tumulares em área de importantes gravuras rupestres. Partindo do princípio de que estas construções e as acções que lhe são inerentes são actuantes na criação e na manutenção da identidade grupal e da memória, discute-se o seu papel social no contexto de Campo de Caparinho, um lugar de grande significação símbólica desde o Neolítico até à Idade do Bronze.This article discusses the results of the diggings of a pre-historic tomb surveyed in September 2003. They lie within the archaeological group at Campo de Caparinho in the parish of Vilar de Perdizes, municipality of Montalegre. This tomb is located in an area containing important archaeological remains, in which there are also rock engravings and several places where ceramic and stone artefacts have been found, all of which can generally be dated between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The importance of this tomb is related with the geomorphology context, its architectonic particularities and with the evidence of human actions related with fire, with different rocks and, eventually, with water. Assuming that these buildings and the actions that are inherent are working in the development and maintenance of group identity and memory, it discusses its social role in the context of Caparinho, a place of great symbolic significance since the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.Núcleo de Arqueologia da Universidade do Minho (NARQ) financiado no âmbito do Contrato Plurianual com a FCT;Câmara Municipal de Montalegre

Identification of functional information subgraphs in complex networks

We present a general information theoretic approach for identifying functional subgraphs in complex networks where the dynamics of each node are observable. We show that the uncertainty in the state of each node can be expressed as a sum of information quantities involving a growing number of correlated variables at other nodes. We demonstrate that each term in this sum is generated by successively conditioning mutual informations on new measured variables, in a way analogous to a discrete differential calculus. The analogy to a Taylor series suggests efficient search algorithms for determining the state of a target variable in terms of functional groups of other degrees of freedom. We apply this methodology to electrophysiological recordings of networks of cortical neurons grown it in vitro. Despite strong stochasticity, we show that each cell's patterns of firing are generally explained by the activity of a small number of other neurons. We identify these neuronal subgraphs in terms of their mutually redundant or synergetic character and reconstruct neuronal circuits that account for the state of each target cell.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure