The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives

The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, the University of Waterloo, and York University. We’d like to thank Jeremy Wiebe, Ryan Deschamps, and Gursimran Singh for their contributions

Nanoethics and Human Enhancement: A Critical Evaluation of Recent Arguments

Human enhancement – our ability to use technology to enhance our bodies and minds, as opposed to its application for therapeutic purposes – is a critical issue facing nanotechnology. It will be involved in some of the near-term applications of nanotechnology, with such research labs as MIT’s Institute for Soldier Technologies working on exoskeletons and other innovations that increase human strength and capabilities. It is also a core issue related to far-term predictions in nanotechnology, such as longevity, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence and other issues

Content-Based Exploration of Archival Images Using Neural Networks

We present DAIRE (Deep Archival Image Retrieval Engine), an image exploration tool based on latent representations derived from neural networks, which allows scholars to "query" using an image of interest to rapidly find related images within a web archive. This work represents one part of our broader effort to move away from text-centric analyses of web archives and scholarly tools that are direct reflections of methods for accessing the live web. This short piece describes the implementation of our system and a case study on a subset of the GeoCities web archive.This research was supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Introduction: Nanotechnology, Society, and Ethics*

Nanoethics, or the study of nanotechnology's ethical and social implications, is an emerging but controversial field. Outside of the industry and academia, most people are first introduced to nanotechnology through fictional works that posit scenarios -which scientists largely reject -of self-replicating "nanobots" running amok like a pandemic virus But within the nanotechnology industry, there is a strange schizophrenia afoot. We have heard about the wonderful things that nanotechnology might enable -not just today's mundane products, such as better sports equipment or cosmetics, but the truly fantastic applications. Our imagination seems to be our only limit, as scientists and other experts predict such innovations as: toxin-eating nanobots; exoskeletons that enable us to leap walls in a single bound; affordable space travel for everyone; nanofactories that can make anything we want; and even near-immortality. Yet nearly in the same breath, many advocates continue to deny or to ignore that nanotechnology will cause any significant disruptions or raise any serious ethical questions that we have to worry about -dismissively labeling these as "hype" (New Atlantis, 2004). But how is this possible? How can such a brave new science, one that is so full of potential that it has been called the "Next Industrial Revolution" by governments and scientists, not also impact our relationships, society, environment, economy, or even global politics in profound ways? 1 Let's take a step back and consider any given technology we have created: gunpowder, the printing press, the camera, the automobile, nuclear power, the computer, Prozac, Viagra, the mobile phone, the Internet. Undoubtedly, these have brought us much good, but each has also changed society in important, fundamental ways and caused new problems, such as increased pollution, urban sprawl, cyber-crimes, privacy concerns, intellectual property concerns, drug dependencies, new cases of * Part of this paper is based upon earlier works, includin

Strontium as a tracer of weathering processes in a silicate catchment polluted by acid atmospheric inputs, Strengbach, France

This paper determines the weathering and atmospheric contributions of Ca in surface water from a small spruce forested silicate catchment (N–E France) receiving acid atmospheric inputs. The bedrock is a granite with K-feldspar and albite as dominant phases. The calcium content in plagioclase is low and the Ca/Na ratio in surface water is high, reflecting other sources of calcium from those expected from the weathering of major mineral phases. The biotite content is low. Only traces of apatite were detected while no calcite was found in spite of a major hydrothermal event having affected the granite. The strontium isotopic ratio 87Sr/86Sr and Sr content was used as a tracer of weathering and was determined in minerals and bulk bedrock, open field precipitation, throughfall, soil solution, spring and stream water. The Sr isotopic ratio of the reacting weathering end-member was predicted by simulating the alteration of the granite minerals by incorporating strontium into the water–rock interaction kinetic code KINDIS. In the early stages of water–rock interaction, K-feldspar and biotite strongly influence the isotopic composition of the weathering solution whereas, the Na-rich plagioclase appears to be the main long-term reactive weathering end-member. Approximately 50% of dissolved Sr in streamwater are atmospherically derived. The 87Sr/86Sr ratios of exchangeable Sr in the fine fraction at 1-m depth from a soil profile indicate that the amount of exchangeable Sr seems essentially controlled by atmospheric inputs. The exception is the deep saprolite where weathering processes could supply the Sr (and Ca). Na-Plagioclase weathering obviously control the chemistry and the isotopic composition of surface waters. The weathering of trace mineral plays a secondary role, the exception is for apatite when plagioclase is absent. Our hydrochemical, mineralogical and isotopic investigations show that a major part of the strong Ca losses detected in catchment hydrochemical budgets that result from the neutralization of acid precipitation has an atmospheric origin. Consequently, in the long term, in such areas, the availability of such an exchangeable base cation might be strongly limited and surface waters consequently acidified

Arrangement of Annexin A2 tetramer and its impact on the structure and diffusivity of supported lipid bilayers

Annexins are a family of proteins that bind to anionic phospholipid membranes in a Ca2+-dependent manner. Annexin A2 forms heterotetramers (Anx A2t) with the S100A10 (p11) protein dimer. The tetramer is capable of bridging phospholipid membranes and it has been suggested to play a role in Ca2+-dependent exocytosis and cell-cell adhesion of metastatic cells. Here, we employ x-ray reflectivity measurements to resolve the conformation of Anx A2t upon Ca2+-dependent binding to single supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) composed of different mixtures of anionic (POPS) and neutral (POPC) phospholipids. Based on our results we propose that Anx A2t binds in a side-by-side configuration, i.e., both Anx A2 monomers bind to the bilayer with the p11 dimer positioned on top. Furthermore, we observe a strong decrease of lipid mobility upon binding of Anx A2t to SLBs with varying POPS content. X-ray reflectivity measurements indicate that binding of Anx A2t also increases the density of the SLB. Interestingly, in the protein-facing leaflet of the SLB the lipid density is higher than in the substrate-facing leaflet. This asymmetric densification of the lipid bilayer by Anx A2t and Ca2+ might have important implications for the biochemical mechanism of Anx A2t-induced endo- and exocytosis.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures; supplementary material available upon request from the author

Genome-wide association analysis on pre-harvest sprouting resistance and grain color in US winter wheat

Citation: Lin, M., Zhang, D. D., Liu, S. B., Zhang, G. R., Yu, J. M., Fritz, A. K., & Bai, G. H. (2016). Genome-wide association analysis on pre-harvest sprouting resistance and grain color in US winter wheat. Bmc Genomics, 17, 16. doi:10.1186/s12864-016-3148-6Background: Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) in wheat can cause substantial reduction in grain yield and end-use quality. Grain color (GC) together with other components affect PHS resistance. Several quantitative trait loci (QTL) have been reported for PHS resistance, and two of them on chromosome 3AS (TaPHS1) and 4A have been cloned. Methods: To determine genetic architecture of PHS and GC and genetic relationships of the two traits, a genome-wide association study (GWAS) was conducted by evaluating a panel of 185 U.S. elite breeding lines and cultivars for sprouting rates of wheat spikes and GC in both greenhouse and field experiments. The panel was genotyped using the wheat 9K and 90K single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. Results: Four QTL for GC on four chromosomes and 12 QTL for PHS resistance on 10 chromosomes were identified in at least two experiments. QTL for PHS resistance showed varied effects under different environments, and those on chromosomes 3AS, 3AL, 3B, 4AL and 7A were the more frequently identified QTL. The common QTL for GC and PHS resistance were identified on the long arms of the chromosome 3A and 3D. Conclusions: Wheat grain color is regulated by the three known genes on group 3 chromosomes and additional genes from other chromosomes. These grain color genes showed significant effects on PHS resistance in some environments. However, several other QTL that did not affect grain color also played a significant role on PHS resistance. Therefore, it is possible to breed PHS-resistant white wheat by pyramiding these non-color related QTL

Spitzer Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy of Infrared Luminous Galaxies at z~2 III: Far-IR to Radio Properties and Optical Spectral Diagnostics

We present the far-IR, millimeter, and radio photometry as well as optical and near-IR spectroscopy of a sample of 48 z~1-3 Spitzer-selected ULIRGs with IRS mid-IR spectra. Our goals are to compute their bolometric emission, and to determine both the presence and relative strength of their AGN and starburst components. We find that strong-PAH sources tend to have higher 160um and 1.2mm fluxes than weak-PAH sources. The depth of the 9.7um silicate feature does not affect MAMBO detectability. We fit the far-IR SEDs of our sample and find an average ~7x10^{12}Lsun for our z>1.5 sources. Spectral decomposition suggests that strong-PAH sources typically have ~20-30% AGN fractions. Weak-PAH sources by contrast tend to have >~70% AGN fractions, with a few sources having comparable contributions of AGN and starbursts. The optical line diagnostics support the presence of AGN in the bulk of the weak-PAH sources. With one exception, our sources are narrow-line sources, show no obvious correspondence between the optical extinction and the silicate feature depth, and, in two cases, show evidence for outflows. Radio AGN are present in both strong-PAH and weak-PAH sources. This is supported by our sample's far-IR-to-radio ratios (q) being consistently below the average value of 2.34 for local star-forming galaxies. We use survival analysis to include the lower-limits given by the radio-undetected sources, arriving at =2.07+/-0.01 for our z>1.5 sample. In total, radio and, where available, optical line diagnostics support the presence of AGN in 57% of the z>1.5 sources, independent of IR-based diagnostics. For higher-z sources, the AGN luminosities alone are estimated to be >10^{12}Lsun, which, supported by the [OIII] luminosities, implies that the bulk of our sources host obscured quasars.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in Ap