An evolving revolution in wet site research on the northwest coast of North America

Since 1950 AD, with the onset of larger-scale systematic archaeology on the southern Northwest Coast of North America, archaeologists have known that wet site deposits with perishable artefacts were occasionally encountered at the watertable depths of shellmidden excavations. The 1960s witnessed a testing of three large wet sites, Bider­bost, Hoko River and Ozette Village. The 1970s represented a flowering of wet site exploration, with ten sites hydrauli­cally excavated and reported in an overview conference volume. This peak decade of field investigations has been followed by attempts to incorporate the unique wet site data sets into the overall picture of Northwest Coast prehistory. Numerous surprises have arisen. The perishable artefacts demonstrate very contrary patterns of cultural evolution when compared with patterns represented by stone, bone and shell artefacts, causing a complete rethinking of the meaning of previously defined phase sequences along the Northwest Coast. The understanding of prehisioric eco­nomies and of the possible continuities of ethnic traditions has been greatly revised as well. Following England's Captain James Cook's visit to Noot­ka Sound on March 29, 1778, the Western world was first exposed to the unique and exceptionally rich hunter-fisher­gatherer cultures to be found along the Northwest Coast of North America (Fig. 12.1). Villages, or perhaps better termed towns, of thousands of people, with huge cedar plank houses, hundreds of large cedar dugout canoes, a stylized and large-scale art tradition, lived off efficient and intense fishing, hunting (including capture of even the largest mammal, the whale) and gathering of shellfish and plant foods. How these coastal people had evolved into the last re­maining highly complex societies based solely on hunting, fishing and gathering fascinated the. earliest North Ameri­can anthropologists, with considerable early ethnographic focus on recording their cultures. However the actual roots of this complexity could properly be approached only through archaeology, with one major problem: the majority of their often monumental structures, art and material cul­ture was made of wood and fibre. In fact Philip Drucker, one of the first anthropologists to explore the archaeological potential in this area in the late 1930s, attributed the long neglect of archaeological research on the Northwest Coast to "the belief that the coastal sites are small and few, that they are poor in artifactual material, and that much of what material they contain is so poorly preserved ... as to be irrecoverable

Adequate symptom relief justifies hepatic resection for benign disease

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the long-term results of partial liver resection for benign liver lesions. METHODS: All patients operated on for benign liver lesions from 1991 to 2002 were included. Information was retrieved from medical records, the hospital registration system and by a telephonic questionnaire. RESULTS: Twenty-eight patients with a median age of 41 years (17–71) were operated on (M/F ratio 5/23). The diagnosis was haemangioma in 8 patients, FNH in 6, HCA in 13 and angiomyolipoma in 1. Eight patients were known to have relevant co-morbidity. Median operating time was 207 minutes (45–360). The morbidity rate was 25% and no postoperative mortality was observed. Twenty-two patients (79%) had symptoms (mainly abdominal pain) prior to surgery. Twenty-five patients were reached for a questionnaire. The median follow up was 55 months (4–150). In 89% of patients preoperative symptoms had decreased or disappeared after surgery. Four patients developed late complications. CONCLUSION: Long-term follow up after liver surgery for benign liver lesions shows considerable symptom relief and patient satisfaction. In addition to a correct indication these results justify major surgery with associated morbidity and mortality

Feature-based diversity optimization for problem instance classification

Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIVUnderstanding the behaviour of heuristic search methods is a challenge. This even holds for simple local search methods such as 2-OPT for the Traveling Salesperson problem. In this paper, we present a general framework that is able to construct a diverse set of instances that are hard or easy for a given search heuristic. Such a diverse set is obtained by using an evolutionary algorithm for constructing hard or easy instances that are diverse with respect to different features of the underlying problem. Examining the constructed instance sets, we show that many combinations of two or three features give a good classification of the TSP instances in terms of whether they are hard to be solved by 2-OPT.Wanru Gao, Samadhi Nallaperuma, and Frank Neuman

California’s methane super-emitters

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is targeted for emissions mitigation by the US state of California and other jurisdictions worldwide. Unique opportunities for mitigation are presented by point-source emitters—surface features or infrastructure components that are typically less than 10 metres in diameter and emit plumes of highly concentrated methane. However, data on point-source emissions are sparse and typically lack sufficient spatial and temporal resolution to guide their mitigation and to accurately assess their magnitude4. Here we survey more than 272,000 infrastructure elements in California using an airborne imaging spectrometer that can rapidly map methane plumes. We conduct five campaigns over several months from 2016 to 2018, spanning the oil and gas, manure-management and waste-management sectors, resulting in the detection, geolocation and quantification of emissions from 564 strong methane point sources. Our remote sensing approach enables the rapid and repeated assessment of large areas at high spatial resolution for a poorly characterized population of methane emitters that often appear intermittently and stochastically. We estimate net methane point-source emissions in California to be 0.618 teragrams per year (95 per cent confidence interval 0.523–0.725), equivalent to 34–46 per cent of the state’s methane inventory for 2016. Methane ‘super-emitter’ activity occurs in every sector surveyed, with 10 per cent of point sources contributing roughly 60 per cent of point-source emissions—consistent with a study of the US Four Corners region that had a different sectoral mix. The largest methane emitters in California are a subset of landfills, which exhibit persistent anomalous activity. Methane point-source emissions in California are dominated by landfills (41 per cent), followed by dairies (26 per cent) and the oil and gas sector (26 per cent). Our data have enabled the identification of the 0.2 per cent of California’s infrastructure that is responsible for these emissions. Sharing these data with collaborating infrastructure operators has led to the mitigation of anomalous methane-emission activity

Investigating fairness in global supply chains: applying an extension of the living wage to the Western European clothing supply chain.

YesThis paper explores the issue of fairness in global supply chains. Taking the Western European clothing supply chain as a case study, we demonstrate how applying a normative indicator in Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) can contribute academic and practical insights into debates on fairness. To do so, we develop a new indicator that addresses some of the limitations of the living wage for SLCA. We extend the standard form of living wage available for developing countries to include income tax and social security contributions. We call this extension 'living labour compensation'. Using publically available data, we estimate net living wages, gross living wages, and living labour compensation rates for Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) in 2005. We then integrate living labour compensation rates into an input-output framework, which we use to compare living labour compensation and actual labour compensation in the BRIC countries in the Western European clothing supply chain in 2005. We find that in 2005, actual labour compensation in the Western European clothing supply chain was around half of the living labour compensation level, with the greatest difference being in the Agricultural sector. Therefore, we argue that BRIC pay in the Western European clothing supply chain was unfair. Furthermore, our living labour compensation estimates for BRIC in 2005 are ~ 35% higher than standard living wage estimates. Indeed, adding income taxes and employee social security contributions alone increases the living wage by ~ 10%. Consequently, we argue there is a risk that investigations based on living wages are not using a representative measure of fairness from the employee's perspective and are substantially underestimating the cost of living wages from an employer's perspective. Finally, we discuss implications for retailers and living wage advocacy groups. Living labour compensation extends the living wage, maintaining its strengths and addressing key weaknesses. It can be estimated for multiple countries from publically available data and can be applied in an input-output framework. Therefore, it is able to provide a normative assessment of fairness in complex global supply chains. Applying it to the Western European clothing supply chain, we were able to show that pay for workers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China is unfair, and draw substantive conclusions for practice

Metabolic pathway alignment between species using a comprehensive and flexible similarity measure

Comparative analysis of metabolic networks in multiple species yields important information on their evolution, and has great practical value in metabolic engineering, human disease analysis, drug design etc. In this work, we aim to systematically search for conserved pathways in two species, quantify their similarities, and focus on the variations between themElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Competition and quality indicators in the health care sector: empirical evidence from the Dutch hospital sector

textabstractThere is much debate about the effect of competition in healthcare and especially the effect of competition on the quality of healthcare, although empirical evidence on this subject is mixed. The Netherlands provides an interesting case in this debate. The Dutch system could be characterized as a system involving managed competition and mandatory healthcare insurance. Information about the quality of care provided by hospitals has been publicly available since 2008. In this paper, we evaluate the relationship between quality scores for three diagnosis groups and the market power indicators of hospitals. We estimate the impact of competition on quality in an environment of liberalized pricing. For this research, we used unique price and production data relating to three diagnosis groups (cataract, adenoid and tonsils, bladder tumor) produced by Dutch hospitals in the period 2008–2011. We also used the quality indicators relating to these diagnosis groups. We reveal a negative relationship between market share and quality score for two of the three diagnosis groups studied, meaning that hospitals in competitive markets have better quality scores than those in concentrated markets. We therefore conclude that more competition is associated with higher quality scores

Algorithms for effective querying of compound graph-based pathway databases

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Graph-based pathway ontologies and databases are widely used to represent data about cellular processes. This representation makes it possible to programmatically integrate cellular networks and to investigate them using the well-understood concepts of graph theory in order to predict their structural and dynamic properties. An extension of this graph representation, namely hierarchically structured or compound graphs, in which a member of a biological network may recursively contain a sub-network of a somehow logically similar group of biological objects, provides many additional benefits for analysis of biological pathways, including reduction of complexity by decomposition into distinct components or modules. In this regard, it is essential to effectively query such integrated large compound networks to extract the sub-networks of interest with the help of efficient algorithms and software tools.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Towards this goal, we developed a querying framework, along with a number of graph-theoretic algorithms from simple neighborhood queries to shortest paths to feedback loops, that is applicable to all sorts of graph-based pathway databases, from PPIs (protein-protein interactions) to metabolic and signaling pathways. The framework is unique in that it can account for compound or nested structures and ubiquitous entities present in the pathway data. In addition, the queries may be related to each other through "AND" and "OR" operators, and can be recursively organized into a tree, in which the result of one query might be a source and/or target for another, to form more complex queries. The algorithms were implemented within the querying component of a new version of the software tool P<smcaps>ATIKA</smcaps><it>web </it>(Pathway Analysis Tool for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition) and have proven useful for answering a number of biologically significant questions for large graph-based pathway databases.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The P<smcaps>ATIKA</smcaps> Project Web site is <url>http://www.patika.org</url>. P<smcaps>ATIKA</smcaps><it>web </it>version 2.1 is available at <url>http://web.patika.org</url>.</p

The Significance of African Lions for the Financial Viability of Trophy Hunting and the Maintenance of Wild Land

Recent studies indicate that trophy hunting is impacting negatively on some lion populations, notably in Tanzania. In 2004 there was a proposal to list lions on CITES Appendix I and in 2011 animal-welfare groups petitioned the United States government to list lions as endangered under their Endangered Species Act. Such listings would likely curtail the trophy hunting of lions by limiting the import of lion trophies. Concurrent efforts are underway to encourage the European Union to ban lion trophy imports. We assessed the significance of lions to the financial viability of trophy hunting across five countries to help determine the financial impact and advisability of the proposed trade restrictions. Lion hunts attract the highest mean prices (US$24,000–US$71,000) of all trophy species. Lions generate 5–17% of gross trophy hunting income on national levels, the proportional significance highest in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia. If lion hunting was effectively precluded, trophy hunting could potentially become financially unviable across at least 59,538 km2 that could result in a concomitant loss of habitat. However, the loss of lion hunting could have other potentially broader negative impacts including reduction of competitiveness of wildlife-based land uses relative to ecologically unfavourable alternatives. Restrictions on lion hunting may also reduce tolerance for the species among communities where local people benefit from trophy hunting, and may reduce funds available for anti-poaching. If lion off-takes were reduced to recommended maximums (0.5/1000 km2), the loss of viability and reduction in profitability would be much lower than if lion hunting was stopped altogether (7,005 km2). We recommend that interventions focus on reducing off-takes to sustainable levels, implementing age-based regulations and improving governance of trophy hunting. Such measures could ensure sustainability, while retaining incentives for the conservation of lions and their habitat from hunting