An Integrated XRF/XRD Instrument for Mars Exobiology and Geology Experiments

By employing an integrated x-ray instrument on a future Mars mission, data obtained will greatly augment those returned by Viking; details characterizing the past and present environment on Mars and those relevant to the possibility of the origin and evolution of life will be acquired. A combined x-ray fluorescence/x-ray diffraction (XRF/XRD) instrument was breadboarded and demonstrated to accommodate important exobiology and geology experiment objectives outlined for MESUR and future Mars missions. Among others, primary objectives for the exploration of Mars include the intense study of local areas on Mars to establish the chemical, mineralogical, and petrological character of different components of the surface material; to determine the distribution, abundance, and sources and sinks of volatile materials, including an assessment of the biologic potential, now and during past epoches; and to establish the global chemical and physical characteristics of the Martian surface. The XRF/XRD breadboard instrument identifies and quantifies soil surface elemental, mineralogical, and petrological characteristics and acquires data necessary to address questions on volatile abundance and distribution. Additionally, the breadboard is able to characterize the biogenic element constituents of soil samples providing information on the biologic potential of the Mars environment. Preliminary breadboard experiments confirmed the fundamental instrument design approach and measurement performance

Demonstration of the feasibility of an integrated x ray laboratory for planetary exploration

The identification of minerals and elemental compositions is an important component in the geological and exobiological exploration of the solar system. X ray diffraction and fluorescence are common techniques for obtaining these data. The feasibility of combining these analytical techniques in an integrated x ray laboratory compatible with the volume, mass, and power constraints imposed by many planetary missions was demonstrated. Breadboard level hardware was developed to cover the range of diffraction lines produced by minerals, clays, and amorphous; and to detect the x ray fluorescence emissions of elements from carbon through uranium. These breadboard modules were fabricated and used to demonstrate the ability to detect elements and minerals. Additional effort is required to establish the detection limits of the breadboard modules and to integrate diffraction and fluorescence techniques into a single unit. It was concluded that this integrated x ray laboratory capability will be a valuable tool in the geological and exobiological exploration of the solar system

Overview of PAN'17: Author Identification, Author Profiling, and Author Obfuscation

[EN] The PAN 2017 shared tasks on digital text forensics were held in conjunction with the annual CLEF conference. This paper gives a high-level overview of each of the three shared tasks organized this year, namely author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation. For each task, we give a brief summary of the evaluation data, performance measures, and results obtained. Altogether, 29 participants submitted a total of 33 pieces of software for evaluation, whereas 4 participants submitted to more than one task. All submitted software has been deployed to the TIRA evaluation platform, where it remains hosted for reproducibility purposes.The work at the Universitat Politècnica de València was funded by the MINECO research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P).Potthast, M.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Tschuggnall, M.; Stamatatos, E.; Rosso, P.; Stein, B. (2017). Overview of PAN'17: Author Identification, Author Profiling, and Author Obfuscation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 10456:275-290. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65813-1_25S27529010456Amigó, E., Gonzalo, J., Artiles, J., Verdejo, F.: A comparison of extrinsic clustering evaluation metrics based on formal constraints. Inf. Retrieval 12(4), 461–486 (2009)Bagnall, D.: Authorship clustering using multi-headed recurrent neural networks—notebook for PAN at CLEF 2016. In: Balog et al. [3] (2016). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Balog, K., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Macdonald, C. (eds.): CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 5–8 September, Évora, Portugal. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org (2016). http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesClarke, C.L., Craswell, N., Soboroff, I., Voorhees, E.M.: Overview of the TREC 2009 web track. Technical report, DTIC Document (2009)García, Y., Castro, D., Lavielle, V., Noz, R.M.: Discovering author groups using a $$\beta$$ β -compact graph-based clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Glavaš, G., Nanni, F., Ponzetto, S.P.: Unsupervised text segmentation using semantic relatedness graphs. In: Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)Gollub, T., Stein, B., Burrows, S.: Ousting ivory tower research: towards a web framework for providing experiments as a service. In: Hersh, B., Callan, J., Maarek, Y., Sanderson, M. (eds.) 35th International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2012), pp. 1125–1126. ACM, August 2012Gómez-Adorno, H., Aleman, Y., no, D.V., Sanchez-Perez, M.A., Pinto, D., Sidorov, G.: Author clustering using hierarchical clustering analysis. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2017: safety evaluation revisited. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Halvani, O., Graner, L.: Author clustering based on compression-based dissimilarity scores. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hearst, M.A.: TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages. Comput. Linguist. 23(1), 33–64 (1997)Kiros, R., Zhu, Y., Salakhutdinov, R.R., Zemel, R., Urtasun, R., Torralba, A., Fidler, S.: Skip-thought vectors. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 3294–3302 (2015)Kocher, M., Savoy, J.: UniNE at CLEF 2017: author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Koppel, M., Akiva, N., Dershowitz, I., Dershowitz, N.: Unsupervised decomposition of a document into authorial components. In: Lin, D., Matsumoto, Y., Mihalcea, R. (eds.) Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1356–1364 (2011)Misra, H., Yvon, F., Jose, J.M., Cappe, O.: Text segmentation via topic modeling: an analytical study. In: Proceedings of CIKM 2009, pp. 1553–1556. ACM (2009)Pevzner, L., Hearst, M.A.: A critique and improvement of an evaluation metric for text segmentation. Comput. Linguis. 28(1), 19–36 (2002)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: Notebook Papers of the 5th Evaluation Lab on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse (PAN), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2011Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Improving the reproducibility of PAN’s shared tasks: plagiarism detection, author identification, and author profiling. In: Kanoulas, E., Lupu, M., Clough, P., Sanderson, M., Hall, M., Hanbury, A., Toms, E. (eds.) CLEF 2014. LNCS, vol. 8685, pp. 268–299. Springer, Cham (2014). doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-11382-1_22Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B.: Author obfuscation: attacking the state of the art in authorship verification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing interaction logs to understand text reuse from the web. In: Fung, P., Poesio, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 13), pp. 1212–1221. Association for Computational Linguistics (2013). http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/p13-1119Rangel, F., Celli, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 8–11 September, Toulouse, France. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Chugur, I., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Halvey, M., Kraaij, W. (eds.) CLEF 2014 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 15–18 September, Sheffield, UK. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, September 2014Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Franco-Salvador, M.: A low dimensionality representation for language variety identification. In: 17th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing. LNCS. Springer (2016). arXiv:1705.10754Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013. In: Forner, P., Navigli, R., Tufis, D. (eds.) CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 23–26 September, Valencia, Spain (2013)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th author profiling task at PAN 2017: gender and language variety identification in Twitter. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th author profiling task at PAN 2016: cross-genre evaluations. In: Balog et al. [3]Riedl, M., Biemann, C.: TopicTiling: a text segmentation algorithm based on LDA. In: Proceedings of ACL 2012 Student Research Workshop, pp. 37–42. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)Scaiano, M., Inkpen, D.: Getting more from segmentation evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. pp. 362–366. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)Stamatatos, E., Tschuggnall, M., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Stamatatos, E., Tschuggnall, M., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016Tschuggnall, M., Stamatatos, E., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2017: style breach detection and author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 201

Overview of PAN 2018. Author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation

[EN] PAN 2018 explores several authorship analysis tasks enabling a systematic comparison of competitive approaches and advancing research in digital text forensics.More specifically, this edition of PAN introduces a shared task in cross-domain authorship attribution, where texts of known and unknown authorship belong to distinct domains, and another task in style change detection that distinguishes between single author and multi-author texts. In addition, a shared task in multimodal author profiling examines, for the first time, a combination of information from both texts and images posted by social media users to estimate their gender. Finally, the author obfuscation task studies how a text by a certain author can be paraphrased so that existing author identification tools are confused and cannot recognize the similarity with other texts of the same author. New corpora have been built to support these shared tasks. A relatively large number of software submissions (41 in total) was received and evaluated. Best paradigms are highlighted while baselines indicate the pros and cons of submitted approaches.The work at the Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia was funded by the MINECO research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P)Stamatatos, E.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Tschuggnall, M.; Stein, B.; Kestemont, M.; Rosso, P.; Potthast, M. (2018). Overview of PAN 2018. Author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 11018:267-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98932-7_25S26728511018Argamon, S., Juola, P.: Overview of the international authorship identification competition at PAN-2011. In: Petras, V., Forner, P., Clough, P. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2011 Labs and Workshops, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2011. http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesBird, S., Klein, E., Loper, E.: Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol (2009)Bogdanova, D., Lazaridou, A.: Cross-language authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014, pp. 2015–2020 (2014)Choi, F.Y.: Advances in domain independent linear text segmentation. In: Proceedings of the 1st North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (NAACL), pp. 26–33. Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, April 2000Custódio, J.E., Paraboni, I.: EACH-USP ensemble cross-domain authorship attribution. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedDaneshvar, S.: Gender identification in Twitter using n-grams and LSA. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedDaniel Karaś, M.S., Sobecki, P.: OPI-JSA at CLEF 2017: author clustering and style breach detection. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Giannella, C.: An improved algorithm for unsupervised decomposition of a multi-author document. The MITRE Corporation. Technical Papers, February 2014Glover, A., Hirst, G.: Detecting stylistic inconsistencies in collaborative writing. In: Sharples, M., van der Geest, T. (eds.) The New Writing Environment, pp. 147–168. Springer, London (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1482-6_12Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2017: safety evaluation revisited. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2018. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org (2018)Hellekson, K., Busse, K. (eds.): The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City (2014)Juola, P.: An overview of the traditional authorship attribution subtask. In: Forner, P., Karlgren, J., Womser-Hacker, C. (eds.) CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 17–20 September 2012, Rome, Italy, September 2012. http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesJuola, P.: The rowling case: a proposed standard analytic protocol for authorship questions. Digital Sch. Humanit. 30(suppl–1), i100–i113 (2015)Kestemont, M., Luyckx, K., Daelemans, W., Crombez, T.: Cross-genre authorship verification using unmasking. Engl. Stud. 93(3), 340–356 (2012)Kestemont, M., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2018: cross-domain authorship attribution and style change detection. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org (2018)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Bonchek-Dokow, E.: Measuring differentiability: unmasking pseudonymous authors. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 8, 1261–1276 (2007)Overdorf, R., Greenstadt, R.: Blogs, Twitter feeds, and reddit comments: cross-domain authorship attribution. Proc. Priv. Enhanc. Technol. 2016(3), 155–171 (2016)Pedregosa, F., et al.: Scikit-learn: machine learning in Python. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2825–2830 (2011)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: Notebook Papers of the 5th Evaluation Lab on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse (PAN), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2011Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B.: Author obfuscation: attacking the state of the art in authorship verification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing interaction logs to understand text reuse from the web. In: Fung, P., Poesio, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013), pp. 1212–1221. Association for Computational Linguistics, August 2013. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P13-1119Rangel, F., Celli, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, Toulouse, France, pp. 8–11. CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Rangel, F., et al.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Halvey, M., Kraaij, W. (eds.) CLEF 2014 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, Sheffield, UK, pp. 15–18. CEUR-WS.org, September 2014Rangel, F., Rosso, P., G’omez, M.M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 6th author profiling task at pan 2018: multimodal gender identification in Twitter. In: CLEF 2018 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org (2017)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013. In: Forner, P., Navigli, R., Tufis, D. (eds.) CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 23–26 September 2013, Valencia, Spain, September 2013Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th author profiling task at PAN 2017: gender and language variety identification in Twitter. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th author profiling task at PAN 2016: cross-genre evaluations. In: Balog, K., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Macdonald, C. (eds.) CLEF 2016 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, September 2016Safin, K., Kuznetsova, R.: Style breach detection with neural sentence embeddings. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Sapkota, U., Bethard, S., Montes, M., Solorio, T.: Not all character n-grams are created equal: a study in authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 93–102 (2015)Sapkota, U., Solorio, T., Montes, M., Bethard, S., Rosso, P.: Cross-topic authorship attribution: will out-of-topic data help? In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Technical Papers, pp. 1228–1237 (2014)Stamatatos, E.: Intrinsic plagiarism detection using character $$n$$n-gram Profiles. In: Stein, B., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Koppel, M., Agirre, E. (eds.) SEPLN 2009 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (PAN 2009), pp. 38–46. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and CEUR-WS.org, September 2009. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-502Stamatatos, E.: On the robustness of authorship attribution based on character n-gram features. J. Law Policy 21, 421–439 (2013)Stamatatos, E.: Authorship attribution using text distortion. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Long Papers, vol. 1, pp. 1138–1149. Association for Computational Linguistics (2017)Stamatatos, E., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 8–11 September 2015, Toulouse, France. CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Stamatatos, E., et al.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Takahashi, T., Tahara, T., Nagatani, K., Miura, Y., Taniguchi, T., Ohkuma, T.: Text and image synergy with feature cross technique for gender identification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedTellez, E.S., Miranda-Jiménez, S., Moctezuma, D., Graff, M., Salgado, V., Ortiz-Bejar, J.: Gender identification through multi-modal tweet analysis using microtc and bag of visual words. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedTschuggnall, M., Specht, G.: Automatic decomposition of multi-author documents using grammar analysis. In: Proceedings of the 26th GI-Workshop on Grundlagen von Datenbanken. CEUR-WS, Bozen, October 2014Tschuggnall, M., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2017: style breach detection and author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1866. CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1866

Experimental evidence for inherent Lévy search behaviour in foraging animals

Recently, Lévy walks have been put forward as a new paradigm for animal search and many cases have been made for its presence in nature. However, it remains debated whether Lévy walks are an inherent behavioural strategy or emerge from the animal reacting to its habitat. Here, we demonstrate signatures of Lévy behaviour in the search movement of mud snails (Hydrobia ulvae) based on a novel, direct assessment of movement properties in an experimental set-up using different food distributions. Our experimental data uncovered clusters of small movement steps alternating with long moves independent of food encounter and landscape complexity. Moreover, size distributions of these clusters followed truncated power laws. These two findings are characteristic signatures of mechanisms underlying inherent Lévy-like movement. Thus, our study provides clear experimental evidence that such multi-scale movement is an inherent behaviour rather than resulting from the animal interacting with its environmen

Authorship Analysis Approaches

This chapter presents an overview of authorship analysis from multiple standpoints. It includes historical perspective, description of stylometric features, and authorship analysis techniques and their limitations

Highly Diverse Phytophthora infestans Populations Infecting Potato Crops in Pskov Region, North-West Russia

There is limited understanding of the genetic variability in Phytophthora infestans in the major potato cultivation region of north-western Russia, where potato is grown primarily by small households with limited chemical treatment of late blight. In this study, the mating type, sensitivity to metalaxyl, and genotype and population genetic diversity (based on 12 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers) of 238 isolates of P. infestans from the Pskov region during the years 2010–2013 were characterized. The aim was to examine the population structure, phenotypic and genotypic diversity, and the prevalent reproductive mode of P. infestans, as well as the influence of the location, time, and agricultural management practices on the pathogen population. The frequency of the A2 mating was stable over the four seasons and ranged from 33 to 48% of the sampled population. Both mating types occurred simultaneously in 90% of studied fields, suggesting the presence of sexual reproduction and oospore production in P. infestans in the Pskov region. Metalaxyl-sensitive isolates prevailed in all four years (72%), however, significantly fewer sensitive isolates were found in samples from large-scale conventional fields. A total of 50 alleles were detected in the 141 P. infestans isolates analyzed for genetic diversity. Amongst the 83 SSR multilocus genotypes (MLGs) detected, 65% were unique and the number of MLGs varied between locations from 3 to 20. These results, together with the high genotypic diversity observed in all the locations and the lack of significance of linkage disequilibrium, suggest that sexual recombination is likely responsible for the unique MLGs and the high genetic diversity found in the Pskov region population, resembling those of north-eastern European populations

Investigating and learning lessons from early experiences of implementing ePrescribing systems into NHS hospitals:a questionnaire study

Background: ePrescribing systems have significant potential to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare, but they need to be carefully selected and implemented to maximise benefits. Implementations in English hospitals are in the early stages and there is a lack of standards guiding the procurement, functional specifications, and expected benefits. We sought to provide an updated overview of the current picture in relation to implementation of ePrescribing systems, explore existing strategies, and identify early lessons learned.Methods: a descriptive questionnaire-based study, which included closed and free text questions and involved both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data generated.Results: we obtained responses from 85 of 108 NHS staff (78.7% response rate). At least 6% (n = 10) of the 168 English NHS Trusts have already implemented ePrescribing systems, 2% (n = 4) have no plans of implementing, and 34% (n = 55) are planning to implement with intended rapid implementation timelines driven by high expectations surrounding improved safety and efficiency of care. The majority are unclear as to which system to choose, but integration with existing systems and sophisticated decision support functionality are important decisive factors. Participants highlighted the need for increased guidance in relation to implementation strategy, system choice and standards, as well as the need for top-level management support to adequately resource the project. Although some early benefits were reported by hospitals that had already implemented, the hoped for benefits relating to improved efficiency and cost-savings remain elusive due to a lack of system maturity.Conclusions: whilst few have begun implementation, there is considerable interest in ePrescribing systems with ambitious timelines amongst those hospitals that are planning implementations. In order to ensure maximum chances of realising benefits, there is a need for increased guidance in relation to implementation strategy, system choice and standards, as well as increased financial resources to fund local activitie

Facilitation shifts paradigms and can amplify coastal restoration efforts

Restoration has been elevated as an important strategy to reversethe decline of coastal wetlands worldwide. Current practice in restorationscience emphasizes minimizing competition between outplantedpropagules to maximize planting success. This paradigmpersists despite the fact that foundational theory in ecology demonstratesthat positive species interactions are key to organism successunder high physical stress, such as recolonization of bare substrate. Asevidence of how entrenched this restoration paradigm is, our surveyof 25 restoration organizations in 14 states in the United States revealedthat >95% of these agencies assume minimizing negative interactions(i.e., competition) between outplants will maximize propagulegrowth. Restoration experiments in both Western and Eastern Atlanticsalt marshes demonstrate, however, that a simple change in plantingconfiguration (placing propagules next to, rather than at adistance from, each other) results in harnessing facilitation and increasedyields by 107% on average. Thus, small adjustments in restorationdesign may catalyze untapped positive species interactions,resulting in significantly higher restoration success with no addedcost. As positive interactions between organisms commonly occur incoastal ecosystems (especially in more physically stressful areas likeuncolonized substrate) and conservation resources are limited, transformationof the coastal restoration paradigm to incorporate facilitationtheory may enhance conservation efforts, shoreline defense, andprovisioning of ecosystem services such as fisheries production