Policy impacts on regulating ecosystem services: looking at the implications of 60 years of landscape change on soil erosion prevention in a Mediterranean silvo-pastoral system

Context: Policy decisions form a major driver of land use change, with important implications for socially and environmentally susceptible regions. It is well known that there can be major unintended consequences, especially where policies are not tailored to regionally specific contexts. Objectives: In this paper we assess the implications of 60 years of agricultural policies on soil erosion prevention (SEP) by vegetation, an essential regulating ecosystem service in Mediterranean Europe. Methods: To assess these implications we produced and analysed a time series of land cover/use and environmental conditions datasets (from 1951 to 2012) in relation to changing agricultural policies for a specific region in the southern Portugal. A set of indicators related to SEP allowed us to identify that land use intensification as increased soil erosion in the last 60 years. Results: Particularly in the last 35 years, as a consequence of headage payments for cattle, the agricultural policy had a significant effect in the density and renewal of the tree cover, resulting in drastic effects for the provision of the SEP service. These are more significant after 1986, coinciding with the implementation of several Common Agricultural Policy instruments focused on increasing the modernization and productivity capacity of farm systems. Conclusions: The results show some unintended effects of agricultural policy mechanisms on ecosystem service provision and highlight the need for context-based policies, tailored to the environmental constrains and potentials of each region

Assessing the ability of rural areas to fulfill multiple societal demands

Rural areas are changing through a process of multifunctional transition. New societal expectations, including countryside consumption and protection, increasingly determine the way rural space is used. There is a pressing need to grasp the new relative balance between these drivers of the rural space, in each particular area, in order to target public intervention. Tackling differentiation within rural space will definitely contribute to developing the potential and vocation of each area while supporting territorial cohesion. In this context, sound analytical knowledge that reveals and characterizes this differentiation is required and novel analytical approaches are needed for this knowledge to be obtained. Based on the conceptual framework proposed by Holmes (2006, 2012), this paper presents two methodological pathways for defining a typology of European regions that considers the multifunctionality of rural areas today and the relative weight of the dimensions of production, protection and consumption. The classification is produced at Nomenclature Territorial Unit NUTS 2 level, using information derived from European statistical datasets compiling different cartographic sources. One of the methods used to develop a typology was a clustering approach while the other method used was an expert-based analytical procedure. Even when the limitations stemming from the data available for the whole of Europe are considered, the results are encouraging. The results show two different regional distributions in Europe. These distributions, which have some similarities but also certain differences, both reveal the general characteristics of NUTS 2 regions and shed new light on the ways in which societal expectations for production, protection and consumption might be spatially reconciled. The expert-based approach seems to produce a more faithful classification. Both typologies result in most regions being classified as pluri-active, or complex or multifunctional, which may indicate that multiple modes of rural occupancy are widely found in each region and therefore that a more detailed scale of analysis would be more likely to enable evidence-based decisions to be made

Temperature inversion symmetry in the Casimir effect with an antiperiodic boundary condition

We present explicitly another example of a temperature inversion symmetry in the Casimir effect for a nonsymmetric boundary condition. We also give an interpretation for our result.Comment: 4 page

Storage constraint satisfaction for embedded processor compilers

Increasing interest in the high-volume high-performance embedded processor market motivates the stand-alone processor world to consider issues like design flexibility (synthesizable processor core), energy consumption, and silicon efficiency. Implications for embedded processor architectures and compilers are the exploitation of hardware acceleration, instruction-level parallelism (ILP), and distributed storage files. In that scope, VLIW architectures have been acclaimed for their parallelism in the architecture while orthogonality of the associated instruction sets is maintained. Code generation methods for such processors will be pressured towards an efficient use of scarce resources while satisfying tight real-time constraints imposed by DSP and multimedia applications. Limited storage (e.g. registers) availability poses a problem for traditional methods that perform code generation in separate stages, e.g. operation scheduling followed by register allocation. This is because the objectives of scheduling and register allocation cause conflicts in code generation in several ways. Firstly, register reuse can create dependencies that did not exist in the original code, but can also save spilling values to memory. Secondly, while a particular ordering of instructions may increase the potential for ILP, the reordering due to instruction scheduling may also extend the lifetime of certain values, which can increase the register requirement. Furthermore, the instruction scheduler requires an adequate number of local registers to avoid register reuse (since reuse limits the opportunity for ILP), while the register allocator would prefer sufficient global registers in order to avoid spills. Finally, an effective scheduler can lose its achieved degree of instruction-level parallelism when spill code is inserted afterwards. Without any communication of information and cooperation between scheduling and storage allocation phases, the compiler writer faces the problem of determining which of these phases should run first to generate the most efficient final code. The lack of communication and cooperation between the instruction scheduling and storage allocation can result in code that contains excess of register spills and/or lower degree of ILP than actually achievable. This problem called phase coupling cannot be ignored when constraints are tight and efficient solutions are desired. Traditional methods that perform code generation in separate stages are often not able to find an efficient or even a feasible solution. Therefore, those methods need an increasing amount of help from the programmer (or designer) to arrive at a feasible solution. Because this requires an excessive amount of design time and extensive knowledge of the processor architecture, there is a need for automated techniques that can cope with the different kinds of constraints during scheduling. This thesis proposes an approach for instruction scheduling and storage allocation that makes an extensive use of timing, resource and storage constraints to prune the search space for scheduling. The method in this approach supports VLIW architectures with (distributed) storage files containing random-access registers, rotating registers to exploit the available ILP in loops, stacks or fifos to exploit larger storage capacities with lower addressing costs. Potential access conflicts between values are analyzed before and during scheduling, according to the type of storage they are assigned to. Using constraint analysis techniques and properties of colored conflict graphs essential information is obtained to identify the bottlenecks for satisfying the storage file constraints. To reduce the identified bottlenecks, this method performs partial scheduling by ordering value accesses such that to allow a better reuse of storage. Without enforcing any specific storage assignment of values, the method continues until it can guarantee that any completion of the partial schedule will also result in a feasible storage allocation. Therefore, the scheduling freedom is exploited for satisfaction of storage, resource, and timing constraints in one phase

Quantum Correlation in One-dimensional Extend Quantum Compass Model

We study the correlations in the one-dimensional extended quantum compass model in a transverse magnetic field. By exactly solving the Hamiltonian, we find that the quantum correlation of the ground state of one-dimensional quantum compass model is vanishing. We show that quantum discord can not only locate the quantum critical points, but also discern the orders of phase transitions. Furthermore, entanglement quantified by concurrence is also compared.Comment: 8 pages, 14 figures, to appear in Eur. Phys. J.

Estudio de la influencia de los diferentes residuos de carbón como aluminosilicatos en las propiedades mecánicas y la microestructura de los cementos activados alcalinamente

Coal mining wastes are associated with serious environmental problems; they have potential as building materials, including alkali-activated cement. In this study, the effect of different coal mining wastes on the mechanical properties and microstructural development of alkali-activated materials (AAMs) was evaluated through XRD, SEM and FTIR spectroscopy. Different alkali-activated compounds were produced; the alkaline solution was composed of NaOH+Na2SiO3. The results obtained using the calcined coal sludge showed excellent mechanical performance, with compressive strength higher than 60 MPa. However, addition of metakaolin and ordinary Portland cement was necessary to increase the mechanical performance of calcined coal gangue materials. The formation of N-A-S-H gel and the incorporation of iron ions into the cementitious matrix were evidenced. Ultrasonic pulse velocity indicated the early polymerization during the reaction processes. The study verified that the different characteristics of the wastes influence the performance of alkali-activated materials.Los residuos de minería de carbón causan serios problemas ambientales, no obstante, tienen potencial como material de construcción, destacándose los cementos activados alcalinamente. El efecto de los residuos de carbón sobre las propiedades mecánicas y el desarrollo microestructural de los cementos activados alcalinamente son objeto de este estudio. Para ello, se utilizaron las técnicas de DRX, SEM y FTIR. Se produjeron diferentes compuestos activados alcalinamente, utilizando NaOH + Na2SiO3 como activador alcalino y curado térmico (50 °C durante 24 h). Los resultados obtenidos a partir del lodo de carbón calcinado mostraron un excelente rendimiento mecánico, con una resistencia a la compresión superior a 60 MPa. Sin embargo, en el caso de los materiales obtenidos a partir de la ganga de carbón calcinada, fue necesaria la adición de metacaolín y cemento Portland para aumentar sus resistencias mecánicas. Asimismo, se evidenció la formación de gel N-A-S-H y la incorporación de iones de hierro en la matriz cementante. El ensayo de velocidad de pulso ultrasónica indicó la polimerización inicial durante el proceso de reacción. Gracias a este se ha comprobado que las diferentes características de los residuos influyen en las propiedades y comportamiento de los correspondientes materiales activados alcalinamente

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

Atmospheric effects on extensive air showers observed with the Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory

Atmospheric parameters, such as pressure (P), temperature (T) and density, affect the development of extensive air showers initiated by energetic cosmic rays. We have studied the impact of atmospheric variations on extensive air showers by means of the surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The rate of events shows a ~10% seasonal modulation and ~2% diurnal one. We find that the observed behaviour is explained by a model including the effects associated with the variations of pressure and density. The former affects the longitudinal development of air showers while the latter influences the Moliere radius and hence the lateral distribution of the shower particles. The model is validated with full simulations of extensive air showers using atmospheric profiles measured at the site of the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Update on the correlation of the highest energy cosmic rays with nearby extragalactic matter

Data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory through 31 August 2007 showed evidence for anisotropy in the arrival directions of cosmic rays above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min energy threshold, \nobreak{$6\times 10^{19}$eV}. The anisotropy was measured by the fraction of arrival directions that are less than $3.1^\circ$ from the position of an active galactic nucleus within 75 Mpc (using the V\'eron-Cetty and V\'eron $12^{\rm th}$ catalog). An updated measurement of this fraction is reported here using the arrival directions of cosmic rays recorded above the same energy threshold through 31 December 2009. The number of arrival directions has increased from 27 to 69, allowing a more precise measurement. The correlating fraction is $(38^{+7}_{-6})$, compared with $21$ expected for isotropic cosmic rays. This is down from the early estimate of $(69^{+11}_{-13})$. The enlarged set of arrival directions is examined also in relation to other populations of nearby extragalactic objects: galaxies in the 2 Microns All Sky Survey and active galactic nuclei detected in hard X-rays by the Swift Burst Alert Telescope. A celestial region around the position of the radiogalaxy Cen A has the largest excess of arrival directions relative to isotropic expectations. The 2-point autocorrelation function is shown for the enlarged set of arrival directions and compared to the isotropic expectation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics on 31 August 201