A global database of sea surface dimethylsulfide (DMS) measurements and a procedure to predict sea surface DMS as a function of latitude, longitude, and month

47 pages, 13 figures, 7 tablesA database of 15,617 point measurements of dimethylsulfide (DMS) in surface waters along with lesser amounts of data for aqueous and particulate dimethylsulfoniopropionate concentration, chlorophyll concentration, sea surface salinity and temperature, and wind speed has been assembled. The database was processed to create a series of climatological annual and monthly 1°x1°latitude-longitude squares of data. The results were compared to published fields of geophysical and biological parameters. No significant correlation was found between DMS and these parameters, and no simple algorithm could be found to create monthly fields of sea surface DMS concentration based on these parameters. Instead, an annual map of sea surface DMS was produced using an algorithm similar to that employed by Conkright et al. [1994]. In this approach, a first-guess field of DMS sea surface concentration measurements is created and then a correction to this field is generated based on actual measurements. Monthly sea surface grids of DMS were obtained using a similar scheme, but the sparsity of DMS measurements made the method difficult to implement. A scheme was used which projected actual data into months of the year where no data were otherwise presen

Improved clinical investigation and evaluation of high-risk medical devices: the rationale and objectives of CORE-MD (Coordinating Research and Evidence for Medical Devices)

: In the European Union (EU) the delivery of health services is a national responsibility but there are concerted actions between member states to protect public health. Approval of pharmaceutical products is the responsibility of the European Medicines Agency, whereas authorizing the placing on the market of medical devices is decentralized to independent 'conformity assessment' organizations called notified bodies. The first legal basis for an EU system of evaluating medical devices and approving their market access was the medical device directives, from the 1990s. Uncertainties about clinical evidence requirements, among other reasons, led to the EU Medical Device Regulation (2017/745) that has applied since May 2021. It provides general principles for clinical investigations but few methodological details-which challenges responsible authorities to set appropriate balances between regulation and innovation, pre- and post-market studies, and clinical trials and real-world evidence. Scientific experts should advise on methods and standards for assessing and approving new high-risk devices, and safety, efficacy, and transparency of evidence should be paramount. The European Commission recently awarded a Horizon 2020 grant to a consortium led by the European Society of Cardiology and the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, that will review methodologies of clinical investigations, advise on study designs, and develop recommendations for aggregating clinical data from registries and other real-world sources. The CORE-MD project (Coordinating Research and Evidence for Medical Devices) will run until March 2024; here we describe how it may contribute to the development of regulatory science in Europe

Background-noise effects on modelling transitional shear flows

Presented in this article is an experimental and numerical study aimed at analysing the wake dynamics downstream of a cylinder in an unsteady flow. The experimental study was carried out by measuring the mean velocity field with a laser Doppler anemometer, visualizing the fluid field by means of laser induced fluorescence, and performing a statistical analysis of the instantaneous velocity signals using Fourier and wavelet transforms. The visualized images were processed to determine the mean-statistical characteristics of large-scale structures in the wake. Experimental results provided the essential information for the numerical investigations of the temporal evolution of large-scale structures. A theoretical model based on the theory of dynamical systems with few degrees of freedom was adopted. The effects induced by the unsteady nature of the incoming flow were simulated. Experimental and numerical results were in excellent agreement, underlining the validity of the methods of analysis and simulation proposed

On the role of hemodynamics in predicting rupture of the abdominal aortic aneurysm

Hemodynamics plays a crucial role in the growth of an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and its possible rupture. Due to the serious consequences that arise from the aneurysm rupture, the ability to predict its evolution and the need for surgery are of primary importance in the medical field. Furthermore, the presence of intraluminal thrombus (ILT) strongly affects the evolution of the pathology. In this study, we analyzed the influence of hemodynamics on the growth and possible rupture of AAAs. Numerical investigations of pulsatile non-Newtonian blood flow were performed in six patient-specific AAAs reconstructed from diagnostic images, having different sizes and shapes, and with or without ILT. Wall shear stress and vorticity distribution in the bulge and their evolution during the cardiac cycle were analyzed. The results indicate that blood flow dynamics acts synergistically with atherosclerotic degeneration in the development of the disease. The high surface complexity and tortuosity of the aneurysms significantly affect the blood motion, and the presence of inflection in the aneurysm centerline has a noticeable effect on the vortex dynamics. Links between regions of slow recirculating flows, low values of time-averaged wall shear stress, high values of oscillatory shear index, and zones of ILT deposition were found. In the absence of ILT, possible thrombus accumulation areas and consequent aneurysm growth were identified. The findings of this study highlight the importance of hemodynamics in assessing the vulnerability of the aortic wall and underline the crucial role of patient-specific investigations in predicting the rupture of individual aneurysms

Petroleum hydrocarbons at sea

Environmental aspects of sea contamination due to oil spills are discussed with particular reference to possible actions to be assumed for the bioremediation of the impacted waters and cosats

Another Evaluation of Anaphora Resolution Algorithms and a Comparison with GETARUNS' Knowledge Rich Approach

1 Abstract In this paper we will present an evaluation of current state-of-the-art algorithms for Anaphora Resolution based on a segment of Susanne corpus (itself a portion of Brown Corpus), a much more comparable text type to what is usually required at an international level for such application domains as Question/Answering, Information Extraction, Text Understanding, Language Learning. The portion of text chosen has an adequate size which lends itself to significant statistical measurements: it is portion A, counting 35,000 tokens and some 1000 third person pronominal expressions. The algorithms will then be compared to our system, GETARUNS, which incorporates an AR algorithm at the end of a pipeline of interconnected modules that instantiate standard architectures for NLP. F- measure values reached by our system are significantly higher (75%) than the other ones

Coping with semantic uncertainty with VENSES

As in the previous RTE Challenge, we present a linguistically-based approach for semantic inference which is built around a neat division of labour between two main components: a grammatically-driven subsystem which is responsible for the level of predicate-arguments well-formedness and works on the output of a deep parser that produces augmented head-dependency structures. A second subsystem tries allowed logical and lexical inferences on the basis of different types of structural transformation intended to produce a semantically valid meaning corrispondence. Grammatical relations and semantic roles are used to generate a weighted score. In the current challenge, a number of additional modules have been added to cope with fine- grained inferential triggers which were not present in the previous dataset. Different levels of argumenthood have been devised in order to cope with semantic uncertainty generated by nearly-inferrable Text/Hypothesis pairs where the interpretation needs reasoning

Utilizzo di un concentrato tanninico per il contenimento dei coccidi nel capretto

At the ArcheObjets3D workshop (29-30 Juni 2016, Maison de l'Orient, Lyon) we were treated to some fine examples of high resolution scanning and the beautiful results that they can produce. As in many things though, there is a trade-off between quality and quantity. Unless you have a dedicated scanning lab like the Israel Antiquities Authority, it is necessary to come to some compromise between the two. My own work has always taken a statistical approach to the analysis of stone artefacts in o..