1,773 research outputs found
How persistent are the impacts of logging roads on Central African forest vegetation?
Logging roads can trigger tropical forest degradation by reducing the integrity of the ecosystem and providing access for encroachment. Therefore, road management is crucial in reconciling selective logging and biodiversity conservation. Most logging roads are abandoned after timber harvesting; however, little is known about their long-term impacts on forest vegetation and accessibility, especially in Central Africa. In 11 logging concessions in the Congo Basin, we field-sampled a chronosequence of roads that, judging from satellite images, had been abandoned between 1985 and 2015. We assessed recovery of timber resources, tree diversity and above-ground biomass in three zones: the road track, the road edge (where forest had been cleared during road construction) and the adjacent logged forest. The density of commercial timber species <15 cm d.b.h. was almost three times higher in the road track (321 individuals haâ1) and edge (267) than in the logged adjacent forest (97). Over time, tree species diversity converged to a comparable level between roads and adjacent forests, along with an increase in canopy closure. The average width of forest clearing for road construction was 20 m, covering a total 0·76% of the forest area inside concessions. After 15 years following abandonment, road tracks had recovered 24 Mg haâ1 of above-ground woody biomass, which was 6% of that in the adjacent forest, while road edges had accumulated 167 Mg haâ1 (42%). Ten years after abandonment, roads were no longer penetrable by poachers on motorcycles. An exotic herb species was fully replaced by dominant Marantaceae that have even higher abundance in the adjacent forest. âą Synthesis and applications. Our evidence of vegetation recovery suggests that logging roads are mostly transient elements in the forest landscapes. However, given the slow recovery of biomass on abandoned road tracks, we advocate both reducing the width of forest clearing for road construction and reopening old logging roads for future harvests, rather than building new roads in intact forests. Road edges seem suitable for post-logging silviculture which needs to be assisted by removing dominant herbs during the early years after abandonment while the road track is still accessible. (RĂ©sumĂ© d'auteur
Outbreak of acute hepatitis C following the use of anti-hepatitis C virus--screened intravenous immunoglobulin therapy
BACKGROUND and AIMS: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection has been associated with intravenous (IV) immunoglobulin (Ig), and plasma donations used to prepare IV Ig are now screened to prevent transmission. Thirty-six patients from the United Kingdom received infusions from a batch of anti-HCV antibody-screened intravenous Ig (Gammagard; Baxter Healthcare Ltd., Thetford, Norfolk, England) that was associated with reports of acute hepatitis C outbreak in Europe. The aim of this study was to document the epidemiology of this outbreak. METHODS: Forty-six patients from the United Kingdom treated with Gammagard (34 exposed and 12 unexposed to the batch) returned epidemiological questionnaires. RESULTS: Eighty-two percent of the exposed patients (28 of 34) became positive for HCV RNA. Eighteen percent of the patients (6 of 34) who had infusions with this batch tested negative for HCV RNA, but 2 of the patients had abnormal liver function and subsequently seroconverted to anti-HCV antibody positive. Twenty-seven percent of the patients (9 of 34) developed jaundice, and 79% (27 of 34) had abnormal liver transferase levels. Virus isolates (n=21), including an isolate from the implicated batch, were genotype 1a and virtually identical by sequence analysis of the NS5 region, consistent with transmission from a single source. CONCLUSIONS: Hepatitis C infection can be transmitted by anti-HCV-screened IV Ig. Careful documentation of IV Ig batch numbers and regular biochemical monitoring is recommended for all IV Ig recipients
Competitiveness and sustainability: can âsmart city regionalismâ square the circle?
Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existenceâor fusionâof these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the ârightâ scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. âNew regionalismâ has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces âsmart (new) city-regionalismâ, derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of âsmartnessâ, as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of âsmartâ as in âsmart growthâ. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective âsmartâ has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting âsmart city regionalismâ is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting âsmartnessâ in the scalar positioning of policy-making
A Categorical Equivalence between Generalized Holonomy Maps on a Connected Manifold and Principal Connections on Bundles over that Manifold
A classic result in the foundations of Yang-Mills theory, due to J. W.
Barrett ["Holonomy and Path Structures in General Relativity and Yang-Mills
Theory." Int. J. Th. Phys. 30(9), (1991)], establishes that given a
"generalized" holonomy map from the space of piece-wise smooth, closed curves
based at some point of a manifold to a Lie group, there exists a principal
bundle with that group as structure group and a principal connection on that
bundle such that the holonomy map corresponds to the holonomies of that
connection. Barrett also provided one sense in which this "recovery theorem"
yields a unique bundle, up to isomorphism. Here we show that something stronger
is true: with an appropriate definition of isomorphism between generalized
holonomy maps, there is an equivalence of categories between the category whose
objects are generalized holonomy maps on a smooth, connected manifold and whose
arrows are holonomy isomorphisms, and the category whose objects are principal
connections on principal bundles over a smooth, connected manifold. This result
clarifies, and somewhat improves upon, the sense of "unique recovery" in
Barrett's theorems; it also makes precise a sense in which there is no loss of
structure involved in moving from a principal bundle formulation of Yang-Mills
theory to a holonomy, or "loop", formulation.Comment: 20 page
Weylâs gauge argument
The standard U(1) âgauge principleâ or âgauge argumentâ produces an exact potential A=dλ and a vanishing field F=ddλ=0. Weyl has his own gauge argument, which is sketchy, archaic and hard to follow; but at least it produces an inexact potential A and a nonvanishing field F=dAâ 0. I attempt a reconstruction
Static avalanches and Giant stress fluctuations in Silos
We propose a simple model for arch formation in silos. We show that small
pertubations (such as the thermal expansion of the beads) may lead to giant
stress fluctuations on the bottom plate of the silo. The relative amplitude
of these fluctuations are found to be power-law distributed, as
, . These fluctuations are related to large
scale `static avalanches', which correspond to long-range redistributions of
stress paths within the silo.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures.p
Informationally complete measurements and groups representation
Informationally complete measurements on a quantum system allow to estimate
the expectation value of any arbitrary operator by just averaging functions of
the experimental outcomes. We show that such kind of measurements can be
achieved through positive-operator valued measures (POVM's) related to unitary
irreducible representations of a group on the Hilbert space of the system. With
the help of frame theory we provide a constructive way to evaluate the
data-processing function for arbitrary operators.Comment: 9 pages, no figures, IOP style. Some new references adde
Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs
© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each otherâs vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in humanâcomputer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated humanâcomputer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in humanâcomputer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for humanâcomputer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the systemâs grammar and lexicon
Characteristics of EGRET Blazars in the VLBA Imaging and Polarimetry Survey (VIPS)
We examine the radio properties of EGRET-detected blazars observed as part of
the VLBA Imaging and Polarimetry Survey (VIPS). VIPS has a flux limit roughly
an order of magnitude below the MOJAVE survey and most other samples that have
been used to study the properties of EGRET blazars. At lower flux levels, radio
flux density does not directly correlate with gamma-ray flux density. We do
find that the EGRET-detected blazars tend to have higher brightness
temperatures, greater core fractions, and possibly larger than average jet
opening angles. A weak correlation is also found with jet length and with
polarization. All of the well-established trends can be explained by
systematically larger Doppler factors in the gamma-ray loud blazars, consistent
with the measurements of higher apparent velocities found in monitoring
programs carried out at radio frequencies above 10 GHz.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, accepted to Ap
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