The interplay between short-term, mild physicochemical forcing and plankton dynamics in a coastal area

Two intensive surveys were conducted in the coastal waters of Barcelona (northwest Mediterranean) to assess short-term variations of biological parameters in relation to environmental conditions. Surveys lasted 1 week, with three to four samplings per day, and were carried out in autumn and spring. Rather than exploring extreme events, we aimed to study the effects of regular low or moderate perturbations, such as meteorological fronts, on the dynamics of the system. We focused on two attributes: wave height, as a proxy for mechanical energy entering the system, and nutrient inputs, whose variability in total load and relative composition is a central characteristic of coastal areas. The effects of the temporal coupling or uncoupling of both factors were examined. Sudden nutrient fluxes uncoupled from water motion tended to favor bacteria and heterotrophic nanoflagellates, while their concurrence with some water column mixing shaped a favorable scenario for large autotrophs. Ultimately, these two distinct biological responses pointed toward two main disturbance scenarios: episodes of nutrient enrichment uncoupled from mixing, mostly related to episodic water spills from the nearby city that contributed to high relative loads of ammonium and organic compounds; and episodes of increased wind caused by passing weather fronts that promoted some water column mixing and the entrainment of nutrients from bottom sediments or from adjacent water masses

Fractional Driven Damped Oscillator

The resonances associated with a fractional damped oscillator which is driven by an oscillatory external force are studied. It is shown that such resonances can be manipulated by tuning up either the coefficient of the fractional damping or the order of the corresponding fractional derivatives.Comment: 5 pages, 1 Figure. A misprint appearing in Eq. (6) of the published version is amended. Based on the work presented by F. Olivar-Romero in the Quantum Fest 2016: International Conference on Quantum Phenomena, Quantum Control and Quantum Optics, 17-21 October 2016, Mexico City, Mexic

Moral Principles Under Market Rules

In a republican society, the government must generally carry out the moral values of its constituents, ranging from physical protection to economic stability to social equality. This is done by Congress passing laws and the executive branch, upon the President approving those laws, executing them faithfully. Because the federal government is enormous, agencies and departments established for the laws can be carried out effectively. However, like any government, they are limited to a budget to carry out those laws. These agencies can easily monetize materials when estimating the policies’ impact, but it is not easy to monetize moral values. The agencies’ solution is through the willingness to pay. Therefore, by using the willingness to pay in their cost-benefit analysis, agencies can get a better idea as to what policies or regulations are most effective in implementing the moral values of the Congress and the people

The Constitutionality of Section 5

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act serves as the constitutional response to the sins of voting discrimination perpetrated against minorities. The Founders of the Fifteenth Amendment envisioned the extinction of voting discrimination towards minorities and the prosperity of a government that is responsive to all Americans. Unfortunately, some states in the Union continued to block minorities from participating in elections through legal, political, and social means

Public v. Private Organizations

People always hear on the news politicians arguing with each other on the effectiveness of government. They both agree that government agencies can do a lot better than what they are doing right now, but disagree on how to resolve it. The left argues for providing more funding to these public agencies to have better performance; however, that will require an increase in taxes which most Americans do not want. The right argues for privatizing these public agencies so that there is no bureaucratic involvement in the procedure, as well as this, will determine which agencies succeed and which ones fail in the open market. I would have agreed more on the left’s opinion simply because this will eliminate the agency’s focus on profit over people; however, I realized that private administration is a more effective and better way to approach many services. The priorities that “private” emphasizes, while not perfect, are more efficient and effective than those that exist when these services remain with the public sector

NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

The Irrationalness of Game Theory

In February 1909, at a time where political scientists were confused as to their purpose to society, the Right Honorable James Bryce highlighted the three most important criteria for effective research of political science at the fifth annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. He declares that political scientists “1) must be critical, 2) must beware of superficial resemblances, and 3) must endeavor to disengage the personal or accidental from the general causes at work” (numbers added) (8). These specific criteria ensure that any political science research conducted leads society to increase its understanding of the laws that govern themselves. Decades later, a new theory has taken political science by storm; relying on mathematical theories used by economists to explain why citizens and institutions act the way they do

How triathletes mount their bikes after first transition (T1). A proposal of classification

A proposal is submit for the classification referring to the different ways in which triathletes mount their bikes to start pedalling. This action happens at the end of the transition area (T1) after having gone across on foot, with the bikes at their side, or, led across by hand, in a specific way (Fernández, Romero, Merino and April, 2015). These are unique aspects of this sport, compared to other sports in which a bike is also used. The purpose of this research was concentrates in describing and classifying the motor behaviours that occur at the end of the transition area, in front of the “judge’s line”. This study was bassed on participants of 3 Spanish Elite Championships of different distances (407 triathletes). It was filmed in the moment when they picked up their bikes, passed through the transition area and mounted their bikes. Eleven different ways were discovered on how to mount a bike when passing the judge’s line.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec