Remote sensing of effects of land use practices on water quality

An intensive study was conducted to determine the utility of manual densitometry and color additive viewing of aircraft and LANDSAT transparencies for monitoring land use and land use change. The relationship between land use and selected water quality parameters was also evaluated. Six watersheds located in the Cumberland Plateau region of eastern Kentucky comprised the study area for the project. Land uses present within the study area were reclaimed surface mining and forestry. Fertilization of one of the forested watersheds also occurred during the study period

Deep Chronnectome Learning via Full Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks for MCI Diagnosis

Brain functional connectivity (FC) extracted from resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has become a popular approach for disease diagnosis, where discriminating subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from normal controls (NC) is still one of the most challenging problems. Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), consisting of time-varying spatiotemporal dynamics, may characterize "chronnectome" diagnostic information for improving MCI classification. However, most of the current dFC studies are based on detecting discrete major brain status via spatial clustering, which ignores rich spatiotemporal dynamics contained in such chronnectome. We propose Deep Chronnectome Learning for exhaustively mining the comprehensive information, especially the hidden higher-level features, i.e., the dFC time series that may add critical diagnostic power for MCI classification. To this end, we devise a new Fully-connected Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (Full-BiLSTM) to effectively learn the periodic brain status changes using both past and future information for each brief time segment and then fuse them to form the final output. We have applied our method to a rigorously built large-scale multi-site database (i.e., with 164 data from NCs and 330 from MCIs, which can be further augmented by 25 folds). Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches with an accuracy of 73.6% under solid cross-validations. We also made extensive comparisons among multiple variants of LSTM models. The results suggest high feasibility of our method with promising value also for other brain disorder diagnoses.Comment: The paper has been accepted by MICCAI201

Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation

Energy disaggregation estimates appliance-by-appliance electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole home's electricity demand. Recently, deep neural networks have driven remarkable improvements in classification performance in neighbouring machine learning fields such as image classification and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we adapt three deep neural network architectures to energy disaggregation: 1) a form of recurrent neural network called `long short-term memory' (LSTM); 2) denoising autoencoders; and 3) a network which regresses the start time, end time and average power demand of each appliance activation. We use seven metrics to test the performance of these algorithms on real aggregate power data from five appliances. Tests are performed against a house not seen during training and against houses seen during training. We find that all three neural nets achieve better F1 scores (averaged over all five appliances) than either combinatorial optimisation or factorial hidden Markov models and that our neural net algorithms generalise well to an unseen house.Comment: To appear in ACM BuildSys'15, November 4--5, 2015, Seou

Polar methane accumulation and rainstorms on Titan from simulations of the methane cycle

Titan has a methane cycle akin to Earth's water cycle. It has lakes in polar regions, preferentially in the north; dry low latitudes with fluvial features and occasional rainstorms; and tropospheric clouds mainly (so far) in southern middle latitudes and polar regions. Previous models have explained the low-latitude dryness as a result of atmospheric methane transport into middle and high latitudes. Hitherto, no model has explained why lakes are found only in polar regions and preferentially in the north; how low-latitude rainstorms arise; or why clouds cluster in southern middle and high latitudes. Here we report simulations with a three-dimensional atmospheric model coupled to a dynamic surface reservoir of methane. We find that methane is cold-trapped and accumulates in polar regions, preferentially in the north because the northern summer, at aphelion, is longer and has greater net precipitation than the southern summer. The net precipitation in polar regions is balanced in the annual mean by slow along-surface methane transport towards mid-latitudes, and subsequent evaporation. In low latitudes, rare but intense storms occur around the equinoxes, producing enough precipitation to carve surface features. Tropospheric clouds form primarily in middle and high latitudes of the summer hemisphere, which until recently has been the southern hemisphere. We predict that in the northern polar region, prominent clouds will form within about two (Earth) years and lake levels will rise over the next fifteen years

The Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry

The document attached has been archived with permission from the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. An external link to the publisher’s copy is included.In the financial year ending June 2002, 26 689 hip replacements and 26089 knee replacements (total, 52778) were performed in Australia. Hip and knee replacement procedures have increased between 5%-10% each year for the past 10 years, with a combined increase in hip and knee replacement of 13.4% in the past year. The revision rate for hip replacement surgery in Australia is unknown but is estimated to be 20%-24%; the revision rate for hip replacement surgery in Sweden is 7%. Although data collection for the Registry is voluntary, it has 100% compliance from hospitals undertaking joint-replacement surgery.Stephen E Graves, David Davidson, Lisa Ingerson, Philip Ryan, Elizabeth C Griffith, Brian F J McDermott, Heather J McElroy and Nicole L Prat

Genetic Sequencing Methodologies to Assess Human Contributions of Fecal Coliforms to a Freshwater Receiving Stream

2012 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Exploring Opportunities for Collaborative Water Research, Policy and Managemen

Andean Land Use And Biodiversity: Humanized Landscapes In A Time Of Change

Some landscapes Cannot be understood without reference., to the kinds. degrees, kinds, degrees, and history of human-caused modifications to the Earth's surface. The tropical latitudes of the Andes represent one such place, with agricultural land-use systems appearing in the Early Holocene. Current land use includes both intensive and extensive grazing and crop- or tree-based agricultural systems found across virtually the, entire range of possible elevations and humidity regimes. Biodiversity found in or adjacent to such humanized landscapes will have been altered in abundance. composition, and distribution in relation to the resiliency of the native Species to harvest, hold cover modifications, and other deliberate or inadvertent human land uses. In addition, the geometries of land cover, resulting flout difference among the shapes, sizes, connectivities, and physical structures of the patches, corridors, and matrices that compose landscape mosaics, will constrain biodiversity, often in predictable ways. This article proposes a conceptual model that alter ins that the Continued persistence of native species may depend as much oil the shifting Of Andean landscape mosaics as on species characteristics, themselves. Furthermore, mountains such as the Andes display long gradients of environmental Conditions that after in relation to latitude, soil moisture, aspect, and elevation. Global environmental change will shift these, especially temperature and humidity regimes along elevational gradients, causing Changes outside the historical range of variation for some species. Both land-use systems and Conservation efforts will need to respond spatially to these shifts in the future, at both landscape and regional scales.Geography and the Environmen

Cleaning graphene : a first quantum/classical molecular dynamics approach

Graphene outstanding properties created a huge interest in the condensed matter community and unprecedented fundings at the international scale in the hope of application developments. Recently, there have been several reports of incomplete removal of the polymer resists used to transfer as-grown graphene from one substrate to another, resulting in altered graphene transport properties. Finding a large-scale solution to clean graphene from adsorbed residues is highly desirable and one promising possibility would be to use hydrogen plasmas. In this spirit, we couple here quantum and classical molecular dynamics simulations to explore the kinetic energy ranges required by atomic hydrogen to selectively etch a simple residue, a CH3 group, without irreversibly damaging the graphene. For incident energies in the 2-15 eV range, the CH3 radical can be etched by forming a volatile CH4 compound which leaves the surface, either in the CH4 form or breaking into CH3+H fragments, without further defect formation. At this energy, adsorption of H atoms on graphene is possible and further annealing will be required to recover pristine graphene.Comment: 9 figures, 27 page

Diffusion-Limited Reactions In Spherical Cavities

We study a quenching reaction occurring at sinks within a spherical cavity and at the cavity surface. One may think of reactions at these two, distinct locations as two, coupled reactive channels. Reactions of the type D* + A--\u3eD + A are studied in the limit of nondilute A, present at both locations, and dilute D, present within the cavity. We use a Monte Carlo algorithm to compute mean rates, pseudo-first-order rates and branching ratios, and compare with results obtained by assuming that the two reactive channels operate in parallel. The ratio of activities of the two channels are varied; static and moving sinks are studied. We discuss an application to the determination of pore structure by NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance)

Effect of Statistical Fluctuation in Monte Carlo Based Photon Beam Dose Calculation on Gamma Index Evaluation

The gamma-index test has been commonly adopted to quantify the degree of agreement between a reference dose distribution and an evaluation dose distribution. Monte Carlo (MC) simulation has been widely used for the radiotherapy dose calculation for both clinical and research purposes. The goal of this work is to investigate both theoretically and experimentally the impact of the MC statistical fluctuation on the gamma-index test when the fluctuation exists in the reference, the evaluation, or both dose distributions. To the first order approximation, we theoretically demonstrated in a simplified model that the statistical fluctuation tends to overestimate gamma-index values when existing in the reference dose distribution and underestimate gamma-index values when existing in the evaluation dose distribution given the original gamma-index is relatively large for the statistical fluctuation. Our numerical experiments using clinical photon radiation therapy cases have shown that 1) when performing a gamma-index test between an MC reference dose and a non-MC evaluation dose, the average gamma-index is overestimated and the passing rate decreases with the increase of the noise level in the reference dose; 2) when performing a gamma-index test between a non-MC reference dose and an MC evaluation dose, the average gamma-index is underestimated when they are within the clinically relevant range and the passing rate increases with the increase of the noise level in the evaluation dose; 3) when performing a gamma-index test between an MC reference dose and an MC evaluation dose, the passing rate is overestimated due to the noise in the evaluation dose and underestimated due to the noise in the reference dose. We conclude that the gamma-index test should be used with caution when comparing dose distributions computed with Monte Carlo simulation