A spatially explicit and quantitative vulnerability assessment of ecosystem service change in Europe

Environmental change alters ecosystem functioning and may put the provision of services to human at risk. This paper presents a spatially explicit and quantitative assessment of the corresponding vulnerability for Europe, using a new framework designed to answer multidisciplinary policy relevant questions about the vulnerability of the human-environment system to global change. Scenarios were constructed for a range of possible changes in socio-economic trends, land uses and climate. These scenarios were used as inputs in a range of ecosystem models in order to assess the response of ecosystem function as well as the changes in the services they provide. The framework was used to relate the impacts of changing ecosystem service provision for four sectors in relation to each other, and to combine them with a simple, but generic index for societal adaptive capacity. By allowing analysis of different sectors, regions and development pathways, the vulnerability assessment provides a basis for discussion between stakeholders and policymakers about sustainable management of Europe¿s natural resource

Improving a joint inversion of GRACE, GPS and modelled ocean bottom pressure by using in-situ data.

To investigate the changes in ocean bottom pressure (OBP) and ocean mass Rietbroek et al. (2009) performed a joint least square inversion of weekly GRACE solutions, patterns of large-scale deformation measured by a network of GPS stations and modelled OBP from the Finite Element Sea ice Ocean Model (FESOM). The correlation of this inversion with in-situ OBP ranges between 0.7 and 0.8 in some regions but for example in the tropical Atlantic the correlation is below 0.4. To improve the agreement of the inversion with in-situ data, a part of the in-situ data is included directly into the inversion. The in-situ OBP data was taken from the global OBP data base of Macrander et al. (2010) and averaged to weekly means. Depending on the weight put on the in-situ data, the correlation and regression increases significantly to a value larger than 0.9. The variance of the system is locally reduced by almost 50% at the locations included into the inversion while the difference of the global ocean mean is on average below 10%. Furthermore the global ocean mean is used to compute a bias term for correcting the global ocean mean obtained by the FESOM model

A Characterisation of the Weylian Structure of Space-Time by Means of Low Velocity Tests

The compatibility axiom in Ehlers, Pirani and Schild's (EPS) constructive axiomatics of the space-time geometry that uses light rays and freely falling particles with high velocity, is replaced by several constructions with low velocity particles only. For that purpose we describe in a space-time with a conformal structure and an arbitrary path structure the radial acceleration, a Coriolis acceleration and the zig-zag construction. Each of these quantities give effects whose requirement to vanish can be taken as alternative version of the compatibility axiom of EPS. The procedural advantage lies in the fact, that one can make null-experiments and that one only needs low velocity particles to test the compatibility axiom. We show in addition that Perlick's standard clock can exist in a Weyl space only.Comment: to appear in Gen.Rel.Gra

Thoracic duct drainage before and after cadaveric kidney transplantation

Twenty-seven consecutive recipients of cadaveric kidneys, including five with pre-existing warm cytotoxic antibodies, were treated with thoracic duct drainage before and after transplantation. Fourteen patients who had lymph drainage for 26 to 58 days before transplantation had minor cytotoxic antibody responses after grafting, even if the antibodies had been present before therapy. Only one of the 14 recipients had any rejection during the follow-up periods of one to six months. There were two deaths. The 13 patients pretreated for 17 to 23 days exhibited stronger cytotoxic antibody responsiveness, and five of these recipients had significant rejections of which four were reversible. One of the latter 13 patients died. These clinical and immunologic studies have established the value and have defined the appropriate timing of preoperative thoracic duct drainage in kidney transplantation. They have also directed attention to the rationale and the probable value of using other immunosuppressive methods for preparatory host conditioning instead of beginning such therapy at the time of transplantation

Stationary state volume fluctuations in a granular medium

A statistical description of static granular material requires ergodic sampling of the phase space spanned by the different configurations of the particles. We periodically fluidize a column of glass beads and find that the sequence of volume fractions phi of post-fluidized states is history independent and Gaussian distributed about a stationary state. The standard deviation of phi exhibits, as a function of phi, a minimum corresponding to a maximum in the number of statistically independent regions. Measurements of the fluctuations enable us to determine the compactivity X, a temperature-like state variable introduced in the statistical theory of Edwards and Oakeshott [Physica A {\bf 157}, 1080 (1989)].Comment: published with minor change

The quality of life after liver transplantation

The quality of life after liver transplantation ranges from poor to superior. The social and vocational outcome is dependent on the quality of homograft function and on the steroid doses necessary to maintain function. A good long-term prognosis is usually evident by 1 year postoperatively. The complete rehabilitation of so many patients has encouraged us to continue our efforts in this difficult field

Liver transplantation - 1978

The development of liver transplantation has been made difficult because of the enormous technical difficulties of the procedure and because the postoperative management in early cases was defective in many instances. With surgical and medical improvements, the prospects for success have markedly increased recently. The wider use of thoracic duct fistula as an adjuvant measure during the first 1 or 2 postoperative months is being explored

Do Stack Traces Help Developers Fix Bugs?

A widely shared belief in the software engineering community is that stack traces are much sought after by developers to support them in debugging. But limited empirical evidence is available to confirm the value of stack traces to developers. In this paper, we seek to provide such evidence by conducting an empirical study on the usage of stack traces by developers from the ECLIPSE project. Our results provide strong evidence to this effect and also throws light on some of the patterns in bug fixing using stack traces. We expect the findings of our study to further emphasize the importance of adding stack traces to bug reports and that in the future, software vendors will provide more support in their products to help general users make such information available when filing bug reports

Potential Energy Surface for H_2 Dissociation over Pd(100)

The potential energy surface (PES) of dissociative adsorption of H_2 on Pd(100) is investigated using density functional theory and the full-potential linear augmented plane wave (FP-LAPW) method. Several dissociation pathways are identified which have a vanishing energy barrier. A pronounced dependence of the potential energy on ``cartwheel'' rotations of the molecular axis is found. The calculated PES shows no indication of the presence of a precursor state in front of the surface. Both results indicate that steering effects determine the observed decrease of the sticking coefficient at low energies of the H_2 molecules. We show that the topology of the PES is related to the dependence of the covalent H(s)-Pd(d) interactions on the orientation of the H_2 molecule.Comment: RevTeX, 8 pages, 5 figures in uufiles forma