BonFIRE: A multi-cloud test facility for internet of services experimentation

BonFIRE offers a Future Internet, multi-site, cloud testbed, targeted at the Internet of Services community, that supports large scale testing of applications, services and systems over multiple, geographically distributed, heterogeneous cloud testbeds. The aim of BonFIRE is to provide an infrastructure that gives experimenters the ability to control and monitor the execution of their experiments to a degree that is not found in traditional cloud facilities. The BonFIRE architecture has been designed to support key functionalities such as: resource management; monitoring of virtual and physical infrastructure metrics; elasticity; single document experiment descriptions; and scheduling. As for January 2012 BonFIRE release 2 is operational, supporting seven pilot experiments. Future releases will enhance the offering, including the interconnecting with networking facilities to provide access to routers, switches and bandwidth-on-demand systems. BonFIRE will be open for general use late 2012

Open Peer Review Module (OPRM). Final Report

Research productivity is increasing at an unprecedented rate. Technological innovations, a surge in available computing power, and the ease with which digital information is stored and communicated is helping researchers to cross experimentation boundaries, to increase data availability, and to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. As a result, traditional research is being transformed into a dynamic and globally interconnected effort where ideas, tools and results can be made instantly accessible to the entire academic community. Institutional and multidisciplinary open access repositories play a crucial role in this emerging landscape by enabling immediate accessibility to all kinds of research output. One important element still missing from open access repositories, however, is a quantitative assessment of the hosted research items that will facilitate the process of selecting the most relevant and distinguished content. Common currently available metrics, such as number of visits and downloads, do not reflect the quality of a research work, which can only be assessed directly by peers offering their expert opinion together with quantitative ratings based on specific criteria. To address this issue we developed an Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) to be installed on existing open access repositories and offered as an overlay service. Any digital research work hosted in a compliant repository can then be evaluated by an unlimited number of peers who offer not only a qualitative assessment in the form of text, but also quantitative measures that are used to build the reputation of the research work and its authors. Crucially, this evaluation system is open and transparent. By open we mean that the full text of the peer reviews are publicly available along with the original research work. By transparent we mean that the identity of the reviewers is disclosed to the authors and to the public. In our model, openness and transparency are two elemental aspects we consider necessary to address the issue of biased or non-expert opinions, which is inherent in the anonymous peer review model, characterized by the unaccountability of reviewers. Importantly, our open peer review module includes a reviewer reputation system based on the assessment of reviews themselves by other peer reviewers. This allows a sophisticated scaling of the importance of each review on the overall assessment of a research work, based on the reputation of the reviewer. The implementation of a peer review layer on top of institutional repositories could have the potential to transform the current academic publication landscape by introducing new scholarly workflows where a research item can be openly evaluated by the world’s experts right at the institutional repository of its authors, before being submitted to an academic journal. This workflow challenges the current practices of peer review research evaluation. In most cases, journals, acting as brands in a competitive market, foster academic competition for a limited number of publication slots, instead of promoting open scholarship and collaboration. The integration of peer review in repositories will enable direct and transparent academic collaboration between authors and reviewers. In addition, the use of the OPRM will produce novel metrics directly reflecting the perceived quality of a research work by expert peers, contrary to current available altmetrics that only indirectly account for quality through usage statistics.OpenAIR

Selection of Evolutionary Multicriteria Strategies: Application in Designing a Regional Water Restoration Management Plan

Sustainability of water resources has become a challenging problem worldwide, as the pollution levels of natural water resources (particularly of rivers) have increased drastically in the last decades. Nowadays, there are many Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) technologies that provide different levels of efficiency in the removal of water pollutants, leading to a great number of combinations of different measures (PoM) or strategies. The management problem, then, involves finding which of these combinations are efficient, regarding the desired objectives (cost and quality). Therefore, decisions affecting water resources require the application of multi-objective optimization techniques which will lead to a set of tradeoff solutions, none of which is better or worse than the others, but, rather, the final decision must be one particular PoM including representative features of the whole set of solutions. Besides, there is not a universally accepted standard way to assess the water quality of a river. In order to consider simultaneously all these issues, we present in this work a hydroinformatics management tool, designed to help decision makers with the selection of a PoM that satisfies the WFD objectives. Our approach combines: 1) a Water Quality Model (WQM), devised to simulate the effects of each PoM used to reduce pollution pressures on the hydrologic network; 2) a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA), used to identify efficient tradeoffs between PoMs’ costs and water quality; and 3) visualization of the Pareto optimal set, in order to extract knowledge from optimal decisions in a usable form. We have applied our methodology in a real scenario, the inner Catalan watersheds with promising results

Uso de gonadotrofina corionica equina em programas de transferencia de embriões bovinos a tempo fixo

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Efeito da idade sobre os índices de parição em vacas de corte

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Open Peer Review Module for Open Access Repositories

Presentamos el primer módulo de revisión por pares abierto para repositorios de acceso abierto. El módulo, diseñado en esta primera etapa para la integración con repositorios DSpace, para evitar ‘endogamia’, permite a cualquier especialista ofrecer una evaluación cualitativa y cuantitativa de cualquier trabajo de investigación alojado en un repositorio compatible. El sistema se apoya en el uso de métricas ponderadas de reputación para artículos, revisiones, autores y revisores. Una función de búsqueda avanzada permite a los usuarios del repositorio filtrar u ordenar los trabajos de investigación por su reputación, que se calcula basándose en las revisiones que recibe. La integración de la revisión por pares en los repositorios promueve la discusión abierta al permitir una colaboración directa, abierta y transparente entre los autores y los revisores, y produce nuevas métricas que reflejan directamente la calidad de un trabajo de investigación percibida por los colegas expertos, al contrario que las métricas actuales disponibles que dan cuenta de la calidad solo de manera indirecta a través de las estadísticas de uso. El sistema de revisión por pares implementado permite que los revisores de un trabajo y los autores del mismo (derecho de réplica) que estén en la base de datos del repositorio pueden hacer comentarios sobre las revisiones del trabajo. Esta es una opción que podría ser ampliada a todos los especialistas en la materia registrados en el repositorio pero sin tenerlos en cuenta en las métricas. El módulo de revisión por pares en abierto ya se ha instalado en dos importantes repositorios españoles (DIGITAL.CSIC, e-IEO) con resultados iniciales prometedores.We present the first open peer review module for open access repositories. The module, designed in this first stage for integration with DSpace repositories, in order to avoid “inbreeding”, enables any scholar to offer a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of any research object hosted in a compliant repository. Weighted reputation metrics are calculated for articles, reviews, authors and reviewers. An advanced search function allows repository users to filter or sort research objects based on their reputation, which it is calculated based on the reviews received. The integration of peer review in repositories promotes open scholarship by enabling a direct, open and transparent collaboration between authors and reviewers, and produces novel metrics directly reflecting the perceived quality of a research work by expert peers, contrary to current available metrics that only indirectly account for quality through usage statistics. Reviewers of the work and the authors of the work (right of reply) at the repository data base can comment on the reviews of that work. This option may be extended to all specialists in the field registered at the repository but without taking them into account in metrics. The open peer review module has already been installed in two major Spanish repositories (DIGITAL.CSIC, e-IEO) with promising initial results.OpenAIR

Uso de acetato de medroxiprogesterona associado ou não ao ECG para sincronização e inseminação artificial a tempo fixo de vacas de corte

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Effects of Topically Administered Neuroprotective Drugs in Early Stages of Diabetic Retinopathy:Results of the EUROCONDOR Clinical Trial

The primary objective of this study was to assess whether the topical administration of two neuroprotective drugs (brimonidine and somatostatin) could prevent or arrest retinal neurodysfunction in patients with type 2 diabetes. For this purpose, adults aged between 45 and 75 years with a diabetes duration ≥5 years and an Early Treatment of Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) level of ≤35 were randomly assigned to one of three arms: placebo, somatostatin, or brimonidine. The primary outcome was the change in implicit time (IT) assessed by multifocal electroretinography between baseline and at the end of follow-up (96 weeks). There were 449 eligible patients allocated to brimonidine (n = 152), somatostatin (n = 145), or placebo (n = 152). When the primary end point was evaluated in the whole population, we did not find any neuroprotective effect of brimonidine or somatostatin. However, in the subset of patients (34.7%) with preexisting retinal neurodysfunction, IT worsened in the placebo group (P < 0.001) but remained unchanged in the brimonidine and somatostatin groups. In conclusion, the topical administration of the selected neuroprotective agents appears useful in preventing the worsening of preexisting retinal neurodysfunction. This finding points to screening retinal neurodysfunction as a critical issue to identify a subset of patients in whom neuroprotective treatment might be of benefit

White Paper on Digital and Complex Information

Information is one of the main traits of the contemporary era. Indeed there aremany perspectives to define the present times, such as the Digital Age, the Big Dataera, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the fourth Paradigm of science, and in all ofthem information, gathered, stored, processed and transmitted, plays a key role.Technological developments in the last decades such as powerful computers, cheaperand miniaturized solutions as smartphones, massive optical communication, or theInternet, to name few, have enabled this shift to the Information age. This shift hasdriven daily life, cultural and social deep changes, in work and personal activities,on access to knowledge, information spreading, altering interpersonal relations orthe way we interact in public and private sphere, in economy and politics, pavingthe way to globalizationPeer reviewe

A Theory of Ageements in the Shadow of Conflict: The Genesis of Bargaining Power

We present a novel approach to N-person bargaining, based on the idea that the agreement reached in a negotiation is determined by how the direct conflict resulting from disagreement would be resolved. Our basic building block is the disagreement function, which maps each set of feasible outcomes into a disagreement point. Adding this function to the description of a bargaining problem, a weak axiom based on individual rationality leads to a unique solution: the agreement in the shadow of conflict, ASC. This agreement may be construed as the limit of a sequence of partial agreements, each of which is reached as a function of the parties' relative power in the disagreement scenario. As a result, we identify a link between the circumstances of bargaining and the bargaining powers within it. The rich get the law passed by means of force and arms or get it accepted by fear to their might, aren't things this way? Plato, Republic. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.Esteban gratefully acknowledges financial support from Barcelona Economics (CREA), the European Commission contract CIT2-CT-2004506084, the MCYT research grant SEC-2003-1961 and from the Generalitat de Catalunya.Peer Reviewe