COLLABORATIVE VALIDATION OF USER-CONTRIBUTED DATA USING A GEOSPATIAL BLOCKCHAIN APPROACH: THE SIMILE CASE STUDY

Abstract. Internet decentralization nowadays represents a critical topic to be addressed. It protects the users' privacy, promotes data ownership, eliminates single points of failure and data censorship. An element that has an important role in decentralization is blockchain technology. Although blockchain has revolutionised sectors like the financial one with Bitcoin, there are still some fields where it needs to be further developed. One of these is geospatial data sharing and citizen science, where features like decentralization, immutability and transparency are needed. This study focuses on the description of a decentralized application developed specifically for geospatial data-point sharing and validation. As an example, the Informative System for the Integrated Monitoring of Insubric Lakes and their Ecosystems (SIMILE) is used. This application is developed in the Velas blockchain infrastructure and implements a combination of a Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) with smart contracts. Two types of smart contracts were created, a cell and a registry smart contract. The cell smart contracts are individual for each DGGS partition and contain the list of observations present in a specific area. The registry smart contracts keep track of all the DGGS cells added to the system. Currently, SIMILE observations are validated by public authorities, which requires time that is not always available. Therefore, a fully working prototype was developed to solve this. Here users can add and manage personal observations and validate the ones belonging to other users. This work demonstrates the feasibility of creating decentralized applications for geographical data validation as a citizen science solution

Differences in Reach Scores Between Three Upper Quarter Y-Balance Test Versions in Older Adults

The Upper Quarter Y-Balance Test (UQYBT) is often used to measure shoulder mobility and stability and screen for upper extremities musculoskeletal disorders in the physically active and athletic population. Shoulder injuries are typical among older adults, often decreasing the quality of life. There are no studies investigating the functionality of the UQYBT in older adults. PURPOSE: To examine the functionality of the UQYBT and two variations on the older population, 50 years old and older. METHODS: Eight individuals (2 males and 6 females) participated in this study (56.8±3.9 years, 166.0±10.0 cm, 69.6±13.5 kg). Each participant completed a five-minute warm-up on an arm ergometer followed by an arm length measurement. Participants completed the three UQYBT variations in a randomized order; Standard push-up position (SUQYBT), Modified push-up position (MUQYBT), and Wall push-up position (WUQYBT). In each variation, participants completed three reaches in the medial, inferolateral, and superolateral directions for the right and left hands. Highest score for each reach from the different UQYBT variations and supporting hand were saved to further analysis. Relative reach scores were calculated using the right arm length as reference. Composite scores were calculated by averaging the reach scores of the three directions. Repeated measured ANOVAs were used to compare reach score between the UQYBT variations in the older population. This was followed by post-hoc analysis; alpha level was set to 0.05. RESULTS: Significant main effects were identified in the medial reach (p-value CONCLUSION: Several differences were observed between the three UQYBT variations. When the reach was outside of the participant’s base of support (medial and superolateral reaches) WUQYBT had the highest score followed by MUQYBT and last SUQYBT. During the inferolateral reach, participants were able to get similar reach scores between the different UQYBT variations. Further studies should study the option to use the two UQYBT variations in the older population

Overview of the CLEF-2019 Checkthat! LAB: Automatic identification and verification of claims. Task 2: Evidence and factuality

We present an overview of Task 2 of the second edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2019. Task 2 asked (A) to rank a given set of Web pages with respect to a check-worthy claim based on their usefulness for fact-checking that claim, (B) to classify these same Web pages according to their degree of usefulness for fact-checking the target claim, (C) to identify useful passages from these pages, and (D) to use the useful pages to predict the claim's factuality. Task 2 at CheckThat! provided a full evaluation framework, consisting of data in Arabic (gathered and annotated from scratch) and evaluation based on normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) for ranking, and F1 for classification. Four teams submitted runs. The most successful approach to subtask A used learning-to-rank, while different classifiers were used in the other subtasks. We release to the research community all datasets from the lab as well as the evaluation scripts, which should enable further research in the important task of evidence-based automatic claim verification

Diagnosis of Laboratories of Physics and Chemistry in the Universidad Tecnica De Manabi

The following work tries to diagnose the capacities in function of the management of the maintenance of the infrastructure of the laboratories of Physics and Chemistry of the Technical University of Manabí, having as reference the external and internal relations of the processes of maintenance, for the fulfillment Of this purpose a strategic diagnosis of the Universidad Técnica de Manabí (UTM) and the identification of the critical relations of the activities of maintenance of the laboratories of Physics and Chemistry of the UTM and its evaluation of the level of integration is realized

QGIS AND OPEN DATA CUBE APPLICATIONS FOR LOCAL CLIMATE ZONES ANALYSIS LEVERAGING PRISMA HYPERSPECTRAL SATELLITE DATA

Climate change poses a significant threat to humans and biodiversity, impacting various aspects of livelihoods, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Understanding climate change and its interaction with the environment is crucial for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Local Climate Zones (LCZ) play a key role in comprehending climate change by categorizing urban areas also based on their thermal characteristics. This study presents prototype open-source software tools developed to integrate ground and satellite data for LCZ analysis in the Metropolitan City of Milan (Northern Italy). These tools consist of a QGIS plugin to access and preprocess ground-based meteorological sensor data and a client-server platform, based on the Open Data Cube and Docker technologies, for the exploitation of multispectral and hyperspectral satellite data in LCZ mapping and analysis. The tools’ architecture, data retrieval methods, and analysis capabilities are described in detail. The QGIS plugin facilitates the access and preprocessing of ground-based sensor data within the user-friendly QGIS environment. The platform enables seamless ground-sensor and satellite data management and analysis, using Jupyter Notebooks as an interface to support programmatic operations on the data. The proposed tools provide a framework for studying climate change and its local impacts on urban environments, with the potential of empowering users to effectively analyze and mitigate its effects

Regulation of amyloid-β dynamics and pathology by the circadian clock

Nighttime restlessness and daytime drowsiness are common and early symptoms of Alzheimer\u27s Disease (AD). This symptomology implicates dysfunctional biological timing, yet the role of the circadian system in AD pathogenesis is unknown. To evaluate the role of the circadian clock in amyloid-β (Aβ) dynamics and pathology, we used a mouse model of β-amyloidosis and disrupted circadian clock function either globally or locally in the brain via targeted deletion of the core clock gen

Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 1: Check-Worthiness

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims, with focus on Task 1: Check-Worthiness. The task asks to predict which claims in a political debate should be prioritized for fact-checking. In particular, given a debate or a political speech, the goal was to produce a ranked list of its sentences based on their worthiness for fact checking. We offered the task in both English and Arabic, based on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the Lab and seven teams actually submitted systems for Task 1. The most successful approaches used by the participants relied on recurrent and multi-layer neural networks, as well as on combinations of distributional representations, on matchings claims' vocabulary against lexicons, and on measures of syntactic dependency. The best systems achieved mean average precision of 0.18 and 0.15 on the English and on the Arabic test datasets, respectively. This leaves large room for further improvement, and thus we release all datasets and the scoring scripts, which should enable further research in check-worthiness estimation

Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 2: Factuality

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims, with focus on Task 2: Factuality. The task asked to assess whether a given check-worthy claim made by a politician in the context of a debate/speech is factually true, half-true, or false. In terms of data, we focused on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign (we also provided translations in Arabic), and we relied on comments and factuality judgments from factcheck.org and snopes.com, which we further refined manually. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the lab, and five of them actually submitted runs. The most successful approaches used by the participants relied on the automatic retrieval of evidence from the Web. Similarities and other relationships between the claim and the retrieved documents were used as input to classifiers in order to make a decision. The best-performing official submissions achieved mean absolute error of .705 and .658 for the English and for the Arabic test sets, respectively. This leaves plenty of room for further improvement, and thus we release all datasets and the scoring scripts, which should enable further research in fact-checking

Utilización de hábitat por reptiles en estados sucesionales de selvas tropicales de Campeche, México

This study documents patterns of habitat use by reptiles in low and medium height tropical forest in three successional stages: less than 10 years old, between 10 and 25 years old, and mature (>30 years old) forests. The investigation took place between April 1997 and January 1998 in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Campeche, Mexico. Sampling took place throughout one year period to include the three predominant seasons in the region: dry, wet and nortes. To avoid sampling biases, we used complementary methods: direct search in transects and outside transects, and trapping. We used multivariate and ordination techniques to identify trends in habitat use. Once that patterns of habitat use were identified, we used analysis of variance to test differences in abundance. We identified 10 species with high abundance, inhabiting at least in five of the six treatments, which were used to compare differences between preserved and disturbed sites.Este estudio documenta la utilización de hábitat por reptiles en selvas mediana y baja, con tres estados sucesionales: menor de 10 años, entre 10 y 25 años y selvas maduras (> 30 años). La investigación se llevó a cabo entre abril de 1997 y enero de 1998 en la Reserva de la Biosfera Calakmul, Campeche, México. Los muestreos se realizaron a lo largo de un año para incluir las tres estaciones climáticas predominantes en la región: nortes, secas y lluvias. Utilizamos métodos complementarios de muestreo: búsqueda directa en transectos y fuera de ellos, y muestreo con trampas, para evitar sesgos. La información recabada se analizó mediante técnicas multivariadas y de ordenación, para identificar tendencias o afinidades de las especies hacia cierto estado de la vegetación. Se encontraron 10 especies en mayor abundancia y representación en al menos 5 de los 6 tratamientos, que fueron utilizadas para comparar las diferencias entre los sitios conservados de los perturbados