The link between the ecology of the prokaryotic rare biosphere and its biotechnological potential

Current research on the prokaryotic low abundance taxa, the prokaryotic rare biosphere, is growing, leading to a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying organismal rarity and its relevance in ecology. From this emerging knowledge it is possible to envision innovative approaches in biotechnology applicable to several sectors. Bioremediation and bioprospecting are two of the most promising areas where such approaches could find feasible implementation, involving possible new solutions to the decontamination of polluted sites and to the discovery of novel gene variants and pathways based on the attributes of rare microbial communities. Bioremediation can be improved through the realization that diverse rare species can grow abundant and degrade different pollutants or possibly transfer useful genes. Further, most of the prokaryotic diversity found in virtually all environments belongs in the rare biosphere and remains uncultivatable, suggesting great bioprospecting potential within this vast and understudied genetic pool. This Mini Review argues that knowledge of the ecophysiology of rare prokaryotes can aid the development of future, efficient biotechnology-based processes, products and services. However, this promise may only be fulfilled through improvements in (and optimal blending of) advanced microbial culturing and physiology, metagenomics, genome annotation and editing, and synthetic biology, to name a few areas of relevance. In the future, it will be important to understand how activity profiles relate with abundance, as some rare taxa can remain rare and increase activity, whereas other taxa can grow abundant. The metabolic mechanisms behind those patterns can be useful in designing biotechnological processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Design das “espumas”: imagem e espaço num Porto comum

Num tempo em que a imagem veicula, aparentemente, um ritmo de consumo excessivo e desgovernado, a cultura contemporânea parece abraçar esta velocidade convulsa sem nunca a contestar. Através de formas de dominação e de fragmentação espacial, a capacidade de colaboração potenciada pelas alterações sociais e tecnológicas introduzidas pelos últimos dois séculos tem sido, em muitos casos, totalmente subvertida. O espaço urbano, que se teria transformado numa entidade permeável, flexível e mutável (o “espaço espumoso”), continua hoje a apresentar-se excessivamente compartimentado e estratificado. Ainda assim, as últimas décadas do século XX terão sido responsáveis por tornar as formas de dominação e estratificação cada vez mais evidentes, conferindo à nossa reflexão um carácter de urgência e pertinência que é exemplificado através da análise do caso portuense. O conceito de “espaço comum” apresenta-se como uma modalidade do “espaço espumoso” que pretende aproveitar essa herança deixada pelo final do século XX para contrariar a continuada oposição entre espaço público e espaço privado. Deste modo, o design(er) parece hoje ter a capacidade de trabalhar no seio das lógicas que dividem o espaço e a cultura contemporânea tendo como finalidade contrariá-las e contrapô-las. Este comportamento poderá suportar-se largamente na imagem, fundamentalmente nas suas propriedades narrativas, expondo-a no “espaço comum” como ferramenta emancipadora que permita e fomente uma maior implicação do design(er) no contexto local

How quorum rules distort referendum outcomes: evidence from a pivotal voter model

In many jurisdictions, whether referendum results are binding depend on certain legally defined quorum requirements. With a pivotal-voter model, we examine how quorum requirements affect voter’s behavior. We conclude that quorums can be the cause of lower turnout and that they can deliver outcomes that are an inadequate basis to make inferences about collective preferences. We further conclude that quorums may help minorities to impose their will on majorities and that they may create a bias against the status quo. Finally, they generate situations under which the secrecy of the vote is called into question.

Sistema de recomendação para alívio de stress

Stress is considered to be a normal part of our lives, especially when taken into account that people are constantly trying to push their limits and the limits of others around them. Whether at home or at their jobs, the idea that to be successful one must work harder is deeply rooted within society because such behavior has shown positive results in the past. Stressful events can work as a reactor for people to feel the necessary motivation to move on with their tasks. However, if uncontrolled, may lead to health-related consequences, such as cardiovascular diseases, sleep deprivation, and anxiety. Therefore, it is important to not only recognize that stress has serious negative impacts in the lives of people but also to find mechanisms to cope with it. This document presents a solution in the form of a web application capable of providing stresseasing and health improving recommendations that adapt to the users of the application by considering their ratings from past recommendation, as well as their profiles. Through an engaging and interactive graphical user interface, users can receive personalized recommendations via system notifications. These notifications are composed of a demonstrative card and a description, as well as a collection of documents with insightful information regarding the recommendations being provided. This web application is supported by three major components, designed to operate both synchronously and asynchronously in a microservices-oriented architecture, promoting the flexibility and scalability of the solution. Furthermore, for the solution to provide recommendations, it was necessary to implement a filtering technique. Among the most common ones, the content-based filtering is the most advantageous, meaning that a content-based recommender system was developed as part of the solution. Lastly, it was concluded that the web application satisfactorily meets the established requirements. However, due to lack of user-generated data, the randomly generated data used to demonstrate how a proper evaluation would be conducted cannot be subject for interpretation.O stress é considerado parte integrante nas nossas vidas, especialmente quando consideramos que as pessoas estão constantemente a tentar superar os seus limites, muitas vezes delegando essas mesmas expectativas àqueles que as rodeiam. Tanto em casa, com os seus parceiros e familiares, como no seu local de trabalho, a ideia de que para se obter sucesso tem de se trabalhar mais está enraizada na sociedade, sendo que comportamentos semelhantes no passado comprovaram resultados positivos nesse sentido. Os eventos de stress podem funcionar como um sentimento de motivação para que as pessoas consigam desempenhar as suas funções diariamente. Contudo, caso não sejam controlados, poderão trazer consequências graves relacionadas com a saúde, tais como doenças cardiovasculares, privação do sono, e problemas de ansiedade. Assim, é importante não apenas reconhecer que o stress tem diversos impactos sérios na vida das pessoas, mas também encontrar formas de o gerir apropriadamente. Este documento apresenta uma solução na forma de uma aplicação web capaz de fornecer recomendações para redução do stress e melhoria de saúde, que se adaptam aos utilizadores da aplicação considerando as suas avaliações a recomendações no passado. Através de uma interface gráfica envolvente e interativa, os utilizadores podem receber recomendações personalizadas por meio de notificações do sistema. Essas notificações são compostas por um cartão demonstrativo e uma descrição, assim como de um conjunto de documentos com informações detalhadas acerca das recomendações fornecidas. Esta aplicação é composta por três componentes principais, desenhados para interagirem entre si tanto de forma síncrona como assíncrona numa arquitetura orientada a microserviços, promovendo a flexibilidade e escalabilidade da solução. Para além disso, para que a solução seja capaz de fornecer recomendações, foi preciso implementar uma técnica de filtragem. Entre as mais comuns, a filtragem baseada em conteúdo demonstrou ser a mais vantajosa, significando que foi desenvolvido um sistema de recomendação baseado em conteúdo como parte da solução. Finalmente, concluiu-se que a aplicação web vai satisfatoriamente de encontro aos requisitos estabelecidos. Contudo, devido à falta de dados gerados pelos utilizadores da aplicação, os dados gerados aleatoriamente para demonstrar de que forma uma avaliação adequada seria realizada, não estão sujeitos a interpretação

Synchronism in Electoral Cycles: How United are the United States?

The role of national, sectional, state, and local forces in driving electoral outcomes in the United States has remained a matter of considerable indeterminacy in the American politics literature. In what concerns House elections, different approaches and methods have yielded widely divergent results. In what concerns presidential elections, considerable doubts remain about the timing and the plausible causes of a long-term trend towards homogeneity. In this paper, we take a new look at the nationalization of politics in the United States. We are particularly interested in the dynamic nationalization in presidential elections, i.e., the extent to which swings and shifts from one election to the next have been similar across states and whether or not that similarity has increased through time. We treat this problem as one of similarity or dissimilarity — and convergence or divergence of — electoral cycles, and use wavelets analysis in order to ascertain the degree to which the national and state election cycles have been synchronized and the degree to which that synchronization has increased or decreased. We determine, first, the states where electoral change has been more in sync with the national cycle and clusters of states defined in terms of the mutual synchronization of their own electoral cycles. Second, we analyze how the degree of synchronization of electoral cycles in the states has changed through time, answering questions as to when, to what extent, and where has the tendency towards a “universality of political trends” in presidential elections been more strongly felt. We present evidence strongly in favor of an increase in the dynamic nationalization of presidential elections taking place in the 1950s, showing that alternative interpretations concerning the historical turning point in this respect are not supported by empirical evidence.

Cycles in Politics: Wavelet Analysis of Political Time-Series

Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time-series. Controversies about cycles, however, tend to revolve about an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address: the possibility of irregular cycles without fixed periodicity throughout the entire time-series. This has led to two main consequences. On the one hand, proponents of cyclical theories have often dismissed established statistical techniques. On the other hand, proponents of established techniques have dismissed the possibility of cycles without fixed periodicity. Wavelets allow the detection of transient and coexisting cycles and structural breaks in periodicity. In this paper, we present the tools of wavelet analysis and apply them to the study to two lingering puzzles in the political science literature: the existence to cycles in election returns in the United States and in the severity of major power wars.

Forecasting Spanish Elections

The behavior of the individual Spanish voter has come to be rather well-understood, thanks to a growing research literature. However, no models have appeared to explain, or to forecast, national election outcomes. The presence of this research gap contrasts sharply with the extensive election forecasting work done on other leading Western democracies. Here we fill this gap. The model, developed from core political economy theory, is parsimonious but statistically robust. Further, it promises considerable prediction accuracy of Spanish general election outcomes, six months before the contest actually occurs. After presenting the model, and carrying out extensive regression diagnostics, we offer an ex ante forecast of the 2012 general election.

VPN Solution Benchmarking for Endpoints Under Fast Network Mobility

This dissertation was proposed by Veniam, a start-up working on vehicular networks. Offering connectivity to moving things over different technologies (DSRC, Wi-Fi, or 4G LTE) while maintaining a good quality of experience for users is a challenging endeavour. In some cases, the use of a VPN can solve many of the issues. However, many popular VPN solutions were developed with a different use case in mind - the out of office worker. These solutions cannot handle mobility well, breaking connections when access points switch, and require considerable processing power. Applying these solutions to the fast moving, low resource devices deployed in Veniam connected fleets results in a severely degraded service. Therefore, other VPNs will be researched and compared, in order to benchmark and pick a suitable VPN solution. The VPN's overhead, namely throughput degradation, latency increase, and CPU usage will be measured, and its capacity to adapt to fast switching over heterogenous networks evaluated. The benchmark results will allow the minimisation of service degradation caused by the use of VPN tunnels in this constrained mobile environment