What do rates of deposition of dental cementum tell us? Functional and evolutionary hypotheses in red deer.

Cementum is a bone connective tissue that provides a flexible attachment for the tooth to the alveolar bone in many mammalian species. It does not undergo continuous remodelling, unlike non-dental bone, which combined with its growth pattern of seasonal layering makes this tissue uniquely suitable as a proxy for tracking changes in body repair investment throughout an animal´s life. We tested functional and sexual selection hypotheses on the rate of cementum deposition related to the highly polygynous mating strategy of red deer. We used a sample of 156 first lower molars from wild Scottish red deer of known age between 1 and 17 years old, approximately balanced by sex and age class. Cementum deposition on the inter-radicular pad increased with age at a constant average rate of 0.26 mm per year, with no significant differences between sexes. Cementum deposition was independent of (i) tooth wear, other than that associated with age, and (ii) enamel and dentine micro-hardness. The results partially supported the hypothesis that the main function of cementum is the repositioning of the tooth to maintain opposing teeth in occlusion. However, teeth that had more wear or males´ teeth that had faster rates of tooth wear than those of females did not present the expected higher rates of cementum deposition

Parallel Online Time Warping for Real-Time Audio-to-Score Alignment in Multi-core Systems

[EN] The Audio-to-Score framework consists of two separate stages: pre- processing and alignment. The alignment is commonly solved through offline Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), which is a method to find the path over the distortion matrix with the minimum cost to determine the relation between the performance and the musical score times. In this work we propose a par- allel online DTW solution based on a client-server architecture. The current version of the application has been implemented for multi-core architectures (x86, x64 and ARM), thus covering either powerful systems or mobile devices. An extensive experimentation has been conducted in order to validate the software. The experiments also show that our framework allows to achieve a good score alignment within the real-time window by using parallel computing techniques.This work has been partially supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER under Projects TEC2012-38142-C04-01, TEC2012-38142-C04-03, TEC2012-38142-C04-04, TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R, TEC2015-67387-C4-3-R, TEC2015-67387-C4-4-R, the European Union FEDER (CAPAP-H5 network TIN2014-53522-REDT), and the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEOII/2014/003.Alonso-Jordá, P.; Cortina, R.; Rodríguez-Serrano, F.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Alonso-González, M.; Ranilla, J. (2017). Parallel Online Time Warping for Real-Time Audio-to-Score Alignment in Multi-core Systems. The Journal of Supercomputing. 73(1):126-138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1647-5S126138731Joder C, Essid S, Richard G (2011) A conditional random field framework for robust and scalable audio-to-score matching. IEEE Trans Speech Audio Lang Process 19(8):2385–2397McNab RJ, Smith LA, Witten IH, Henderson CL, Cunningham SJ (1996) Towards the digital music library: tune retrieval from acoustic input. In: DL 96: Proceedings of the first ACM international conference on digital libraries. ACM, New York, pp 11–18Dannenberg RB (2007) An intelligent multi-track audio editor. In: Proceedings of international computer music conference (ICMC), vol 2, pp 89–94Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J Sel Topics Signal Process 5(6):1205–1215Dixon S (2005) Live tracking of musical performances using on-line time warping. In: Proceedings of the international conference on digital audio effects (DAFx), Madrid, Spain, pp 92–97Orio N, Schwarz D (2001) Alignment of monophonic and polyphonic music to a score. In: Proceedings of the international computer music conference (ICMC), pp 129–132Simon I, Morris D, Basu S (2008) MySong: automatic accompaniment generation for vocal melodies. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, pp 725–734Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Duan Z, Vera-Candeas P, Pardo B, Carabias-Orti JJ (2015) Online score-informed source separation with adaptive instrument models. J New Music Res Lond 44(2):83–96Arzt A, Widmer G, Dixon S (2008) Automatic page turning for musicians via real-time machine listening. In: Proceedings of the 18th European conference on artificial intelligence. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp 241–245Carabias-Orti JJ, Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Canadas-Quesada FJ, Ruiz-Reyes N (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: 16th International Society for music information retrieval conference, pp 742–748Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Menéndez-Canal J, Vidal A, Cañadas-Quesada FJ, Cortina R (2015) A DTW based score following method for score-informed sound source separation. In: Proceedings of the 12th sound and music computing conference 2015 (SMC-15), Ireland, pp 491–496Carabias-Ortí JJ, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Cañadas-Quesada FJ, Ruíz-Reyes N (2013) Constrained non-negative sparse coding using learnt instrument templates for realtime music transcription. Eng Appl Artif Intell 26(7):1671–1680Raphael C (2006) Aligning music audio with symbolic scores using a hybrid graphical model. Mach Learn 65:389–409Schreck-Ensemble (2001–2004) ComParser 1.42. http://home.hku.nl/~pieter.suurmond/SOFT/CMP/doc/cmp.html . Accessed Sept 2015Itakura F (1975) Minimum prediction residual principle applied to speech recognition. IEEE Trans Acoust Speech Signal Process 23:52–72Dannenberg R, Hu N (2003) Polyphonic audio matching for score following and intelligent audio editors. In: Proceedings of the international computer music conference. International Computer Music Association, San Francisco, pp 27–34Mueller M, Kurth F, Roeder T (2004) Towards an efficient algorithm for automatic score-to-audio synchronization. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on music information retrieval, Barcelona, SpainMueller M, Mattes H, Kurth F (2006) An efficient multiscale approach to audio synchronization. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on music information retrieval, Victoria, CanadaKaprykowsky H, Rodet X (2006) Globally optimal short-time dynamic time warping applications to score to audio alignment. In: IEEE ICASSP, Toulouse, France, pp 249–252Fremerey C, Müller M, Clausen M (2010) Handling repeats and jumps in score-performance synchronization. In: Proceedings of ISMIR, pp 243–248Arzt A, Widmer G (2010) Towards effective any-time music tracking. In: Proceedings of starting AI researchers symposium (STAIRS), Lisbon, Portugal, pp 24–3

Impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on non-COVID inpatient care in southern Spain

We assessed the impact of the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic on non-COVID hospital admissions, non-COVID mortality, factors associated with non-COVID mortality, and changes in the profile of non-COVID patients admitted to hospital. We used the Spanish Minimum Basic Data Set with diagnosis grouped according to the Diagnostic Related Groups. A total of 10,594 patients (3% COVID-19; 97% non-COVID) hospitalised during the first wave in 2020 (27-February/07-June) were compared with those hospitalised within the same dates of 2017-2019 (average annual admissions: 14,037). We found a decrease in non-COVID medical (22%) and surgical (33%) hospitalisations and a 25.7% increase in hospital mortality among non-COVID patients during the first pandemic wave compared to pre-pandemic years. During the officially declared sub-period of excess mortality in the area (17-March/20-April, in-hospital non-COVID mortality was even higher (58.7% higher than the pre-pandemic years). Non-COVID patients hospitalised during the first pandemic wave (compared to pre-pandemic years) were older, more frequently men, with longer hospital stay and increased disease severity. Hospitalisation during the first pandemic wave in 2020, compared to hospitalisation during the pre-pandemic years, was an independent risk factor for non-COVID mortality (HR 1.30, 95% CI 1.07-1.57, p = 0.008), reflecting the negative impact of the pandemic on hospitalised patients

Validation of a method to estimate direct normal irradiance of UVA and PAR bands from global horizontal measurements for cloudless sky conditions in Valencia, Spain, by a measurement campaign

A method is proposed to provide measurement of direct normal solar irradiance of bands with wavelength ranges (315-400 nm, 400-700 nm) from measurements of global horizontal band irradiance for cloudless sky conditions in Valencia. Global and normal direct irradiance data for every air mass were obtained by applying the SMART2 model to the atmosphere of Valencia. The direct normal to global irradiance ratio was parameterized versus the relative optical air mass. A measurement campaign of global horizontal and diffuse irradiance of UVA and PAR bands was carried out in Valencia, after which, the inferred direct normal irradiance was compared with those provided by the method. The result of the comparison shows that the method is acceptably accurate. The proposed model tends to underestimate the direct normal irradiance of the UVA band by 6%, although for values below 25 W/m2 the model overestimates the direct irradiance by 6%, while for values above 25 W/m2 the model underestimates it by 10%. The other two error estimators used ranging from 11% to 15% are similar in the defined interval measurements in relation to the whole UVA band. Regarding the PAR band, the model overestimates the direct normal irradiance of the PAR band by only 2.2%. With this, the results of the PAR band are more conclusive, as it has been found that for direct normal irradiance values higher than 280 W/m2 the MBE error is almost zero and the other two estimator errors are small, about 5%. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.This work was supported by the Spanish Government through MEC grant MAT2009-14625-C03-03, and is a part of the activities of the Grup d'Optoelectronica i Semiconductors of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The translation of this paper was funded by the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain.Serrano Jareño, MA.; Boscá Berga, JV. (2011). Validation of a method to estimate direct normal irradiance of UVA and PAR bands from global horizontal measurements for cloudless sky conditions in Valencia, Spain, by a measurement campaign. Theoretical and Applied Climatology. 103(1):95-101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-010-0284-9S951011031Barth J, Cadet J, Césarini JP, Fitzpatrick TB, McKinlay A, Mutzhas M, Pathak M, Peak M, Sliney D, Urbach F (1999) TC 6-26 report: Standardization of the terms UV-A1, UV-A2 and UV-B, CIE 134-1999 ISBN 3-900-734-94-1Batlles FJ, Olmo FJ, Alados-Arboledas L (1995) On shadowband correction methods for diffuse irradiance measurements. Solar Energy 54(5):105–114Drummond AJ (1956) On the measurement of sky radiation. Arch 602 Meteor Geophys Bioklim B 7:413–436Gueymard C (1995) SMARTS2: a simple model of the atmospheric radiative transfer of sunshine: algorithms and performance assessment. FSEC-PF-270-95, Florida Solar Energy CenterGueymard C (2003) SMARTS2 code, versión 2.9.2. User’s Manual, Solar Consulting Services Bailey CO. Available from http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/models/SMARTS/smarts_index.htmlGueymard C (2004) The sun’s total and spectral irradiance for solar energy applications and solar radiation models. Solar Energy 76:423–453Häder DP, Lebert M, Marangoni R, Colombetti G (1999) ELDONET-European light dosimeter network hardware and software. J Photochem Photobiol B: Biol 52:51–58Häder DP, Lebert M, Colombetti G, Figueroa F (2001) European light dosimeter network (ELDONET). Helgol Mar Res 55:35–44Iqbal M (1983) An introduction to solar radiation. Academic, TorontoKudish AI, Evseev EG (2008) The assessment of four different correction models applied to the diffuse radiation measured with a shadow ring using global and normal beam radiation measurements for Beer Sheva, Israel. Solar Energy 82(2):144–156LeBaron BA, Michalsky JJ, Perez R (1990) A simple procedure for correcting shadowband data for all sky conditions. Solar Energy 44:249–256Marín Fernández MJ (2007) Estudio de la irradiancia solar ultravioleta y eritemática en la Comunidad Valenciana. Doctoral Thesis University of Valencia (Spain)Perez R, Ineichen P, Seals R, Michalsky JJ, Stewart R (1990) Modelling daylight availability and irradiance components from direct and global irradiance. Sol Energy 44:271–289Pinazo JM, Cañada J, Bosca JV (1995) A new method to determine Ångström's turbidity coefficient: its application for Valencia. Solar Energy 54:219–226Serrano MA, Boscá JV, Cañada J (2008) The determination of a band factor to express irradiance of UV and PAR wavelength ranges in a clean and dry atmosphere at Valencia (Spain). Int J Ambient Energy 29(4):171–180Utrillas MP, Boscà JV, Martinez-Lozano JA, Cañada J, Tena F, Pinazo JM (1998) A comparative study of Spectral2, and Smarts2 parameterised models based on spectral irradiance measurements at Valencia, Spain. Solar Energy 63:161–171Utrillas MP, Marín MJ, Esteve AR, Tena F, Cañada J, Estellés V, Martínez Lozano JA (2007) Diffuse UV erythemal radiation experimental values. J Geophy Res 112:387–39

Real-time Soundprism

[EN] This paper presents a parallel real-time sound source separation system for decomposing an audio signal captured with a single microphone in so many audio signals as the number of instruments that are really playing. This approach is usually known as Soundprism. The application scenario of the system is for a concert hall in which users, instead of listening to the mixed audio, want to receive the audio of just an instrument, focusing on a particular performance. The challenge is even greater since we are interested in a real-time system on handheld devices, i.e., devices characterized by both low power consumption and mobility. The results presented show that it is possible to obtain real-time results in the tested scenarios using an ARM processor aided by a GPU, when this one is present.This work has been supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" of Spain and FEDER under projects TEC2015-67387-C4-{1,2,3}-R.Muñoz-Montoro, AJ.; Ranilla, J.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Combarro, EF.; Alonso-Jordá, P. (2019). Real-time Soundprism. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1594-1609. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2703-0S15941609753Alonso P, Cortina R, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Alonso-González M, Ranilla J (2017) Parallel online time warping for real-time audio-to-score alignment in multi-core systems. J Supercomput 73:126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1647-5Carabias-Orti JJ, Cobos M, Vera-Candeas P, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ (2013) Nonnegative signal factorization with learnt instrument models for sound source separation in close-microphone recordings. EURASIP J Adv Signal Process 2013:184. https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-6180-2013-184Carabias-Orti JJ, Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Canadas-Quesada FJ, Ruiz-Reyes N (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, pp 742–748Díaz-Gracia N, Cocaña-Fernández A, Alonso-González M, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Cortina R, García-Mollá VM, Alonso P, Ranilla J (2014) NNMFPACK: a versatile approach to an NNMF parallel library. In: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering, pp 456–465Díaz-Gracia N, Cocaña-Fernández A, Alonso-González M, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Cortina R, García-Mollá VM, Vidal AM (2015) Improving NNMFPACK with heterogeneous and efficient kernels for $$\beta$$ β -divergence metrics. J Supercomput 71:1846–1856. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1363-yDriedger J, Grohganz H, Prätzlich T, Ewert S, Müller M (2013) Score-informed audio decomposition and applications. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp 541–544Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J Sel Top Signal Process 5(6):1205–1215Duong NQ, Vincent E, Gribonval R (2010) Under-determined reverberant audio source separation using a full-rank spatial covariance model. IEEE Trans Audio Speech 18(7):1830–1840. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2010.2050716Ewert S, Müller M (2011) Estimating note intensities in music recordings. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, pp 385–388Ewert S, Pardo B, Mueller M, Plumbley MD (2014) Score-informed source separation for musical audio recordings: an overview. IEEE Signal Process Mag 31:116–124. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2013.2296076Fastl H, Zwicker E (2007) Psychoacoustics. Springer, BerlinGanseman J, Scheunders P, Mysore GJ, Abel JS (2010) Source separation by score synthesis. Int Comput Music Conf 2010:1–4Goto M, Hashiguchi H, Nishimura T, Oka R (2002) RWC music database: popular, classical and jazz music databases. In: ISMIR, vol 2, pp 287–288Goto M (2004) Development of the RWC music database. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2004), ppp 553–556Hennequin R, David B, Badeau R (2011) Score informed audio source separation using a parametric model of non-negative spectrogram. In: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp 45–48. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5946324Itoyama K, Goto M, Komatani K et al (2008) Instrument equalizer for query-by-example retrieval: improving sound source separation based on integrated harmonic and inharmonic models. In: ISMIR. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.324.7341.827Marxer R, Janer J, Bonada J (2012) Low-latency instrument separation in polyphonic audio using timbre models. In: International Conference on Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation, pp 314–321Miron M, Carabias-Orti JJ, Janer J (2015) Improving score-informed source separation for classical music through note refinement. In: ISMIR, pp 448–454Ozerov A, Févotte C (2010) Multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization in convolutive mixtures for audio source separation. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 18:550–563. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2009.2031510Ozerov A, Vincent E, Bimbot F (2012) A general flexible framework for the handling of prior information in audio source separation. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 20:1118–1133. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2011.2172425Pätynen J, Pulkki V, Lokki T (2008) Anechoic recording system for symphony orchestra. Acta Acust United Acust 94:856–865. https://doi.org/10.3813/AAA.918104Raphael C (2008) A classifier-based approach to score-guided source separation of musical audio. Comput Music J 32:51–59. https://doi.org/10.1162/comj.2008.32.1.51Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Duan Z, Vera-Candeas P, Pardo B, Carabias-Orti JJ (2015) Online score-informed source separation with adaptive instrument models. J New Music Res 44:83–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2014.989174Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Carabias-Orti JJ, Vera-Candeas P, Martinez-Munoz D (2016) Tempo driven audio-to-score alignment using spectral decomposition and online dynamic time warping. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol 8:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2926717Sawada H, Araki S, Makino S (2011) Underdetermined convolutive blind source separation via frequency bin-wise clustering and permutation alignment. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 19(3):516–527. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2010.2051355Vincent E, Araki S, Theis F et al (2012) The signal separation evaluation campaign (2007–2010): achievements and remaining challenges. Signal Process 92:1928–1936. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sigpro.2011.10.007Vincent E, Bertin N, Gribonval R, Bimbot F (2014) From blind to guided audio source separation: how models and side information can improve the separation of sound. IEEE Signal Process Mag 31:107–115. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2013.229744

HReMAS: Hybrid Real-time Musical Alignment System

[EN] This paper presents a real-time audio-to-score alignment system for musical applications. The aim of these systems is to synchronize a live musical performance with its symbolic representation in a music sheet. We have used as a base our previous real-time alignment system by enhancing it with a traceback stage, a stage used in offline alignment to improve the accuracy of the aligned note. This stage introduces some delay, what forces to assume a trade-off between output delay and alignment accuracy that must be considered in the design of this type of hybrid techniques. We have also improved our former system to execute faster in order to minimize this delay. Other interesting improvements, like identification of silence frames, have also been incorporated to our proposed system.This work has been supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" of Spain and FEDER under Projects TEC2015-67387-C4-{1,2,3}-R.Cabañas-Molero, P.; Cortina-Parajón, R.; Combarro, EF.; Alonso-Jordá, P.; Bris-Peñalver, FJ. (2019). HReMAS: Hybrid Real-time Musical Alignment System. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1001-1013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2265-1S10011013753Alonso P, Cortina R, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Alonso-González M, Ranilla J (2017) Parallel online time warping for real-time audio-to-score alignment in multi-core systems. J Supercomput 73(1):126–138Alonso P, Vera-Candeas P, Cortina R, Ranilla J (2017) An efficient musical accompaniment parallel system for mobile devices. J Supercomput 73(1):343–353Arzt A (2016) Flexible and robust music tracking. Ph.D. thesis, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, ÖsterreichArzt A, Widmer G, Dixon S (2008) Automatic page turning for musicians via real-time machine listening. In: Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), Amsterdam, pp 241–245Carabias-Orti J, Rodríguez-Serrano F, Vera-Candeas P, Ruiz-Reyes N, Cañadas-Quesada F (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: Proceedings of ISMIR, pp 742–748Cont A (2006) Realtime audio to score alignment for polyphonic music instruments, using sparse non-negative constraints and hierarchical HMMs. In: 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings, vol 5. pp V–VCont A, Schwarz D, Schnell N, Raphael C (2007) Evaluation of real-time audio-to-score alignment. In: International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), ViennaDannenberg RB, Raphael C (2006) Music score alignment and computer accompaniment. Commun ACM 49(8):38–43Devaney J, Ellis D (2009) Handling asynchrony in audio-score alignment. In: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference Computer Music Association. pp 29–32Dixon S (2005) An on-line time warping algorithm for tracking musical performances. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). pp 1727–1728Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J Sel Top Signal Process 5(6):1205–1215Ewert S, Muller M, Grosche P (2009) High resolution audio synchronization using chroma onset features. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2009 (ICASSP 2009). pp 1869–1872Hu N, Dannenberg R, Tzanetakis G (2003) Polyphonic audio matching and alignment for music retrieval. In: 2003 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics. pp 185–188Kaprykowsky H, Rodet X (2006) Globally optimal short-time dynamic time warping, application to score to audio alignment. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, vol 5. pp. V–VLi B, Duan Z (2016) An approach to score following for piano performances with the sustained effect. IEEE/ACM Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 24(12):2425–2438Miron M, Carabias-Orti JJ, Bosch JJ, Gómez E, Janer J (2016) Score-informed source separation for multichannel orchestral recordings. J Electr Comput Eng 2016(8363507):1–19Muñoz-Montoro A, Cabañas-Molero P, Bris-Peñalver F, Combarro E, Cortina R, Alonso P (2017) Discovering the composition of audio files by audio-to-midi alignment. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering. pp 1522–1529Orio N, Schwarz D (2001) Alignment of monophonic and polyphonic music to a score. In: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), pp 155–158Pätynen J, Pulkki V, Lokki T (2008) Anechoic recording system for symphony orchestra. Acta Acust United Acust 94(6):856–865Raphael C (2010) Music plus one and machine learning. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pp 21–28Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Carabias-Orti JJ, Vera-Candeas P, Martinez-Munoz D (2016) Tempo driven audio-to-score alignment using spectral decomposition and online dynamic time warping. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol 8(2):22:1–22:2

Soil water content effects on net ecosystem CO2 exchange and actual evapotranspiration in a Mediterranean semiarid savanna of Central Chile

Biosphere-atmosphere water and carbon fluxes depend on ecosystem structure, and their magnitudes and seasonal behavior are driven by environmental and biological factors. We studied the seasonal behavior of net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE), Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), Ecosystem Respiration (RE), and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) obtained by eddy covariance measurements during two years in a Mediterranean Acacia savanna ecosystem (Acacia caven) in Central Chile. The annual carbon balance was −53 g C m−2 in 2011 and −111 g C m−2 in 2012, showing that the ecosystem acts as a net sink of CO2, notwithstanding water limitations on photosynthesis observed in this particularly dry period. Total annual ETa was of 128 mm in 2011 and 139 mm in 2012. Both NEE and ETa exhibited strong seasonality with peak values recorded in the winter season (July to September), as a result of ecosystem phenology, soil water content and rainfall occurrence. Consequently, the maximum carbon assimilation rate occurred in wintertime. Results show that soil water content is a major driver of GPP and RE, defining their seasonal patterns and the annual carbon assimilation capacity of the ecosystem, and also modulating the effect that solar radiation and air temperature have on NEE components at shorter time scales.This work was funded by FONDECYT projects 1120713 and 1170429, a grant from the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) [grant number CRN3056], which is supported by the US National Science Foundation [grant number GEO-1128040], and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness project GEI Spain (CGL2014-52838-C2-1-R), including ERDF founds. F. Bravo-Martínez is grateful to CONICYT for the grants “Formación de Capital Humano Avanzado-2009′′, “Beca de Apoyo al término de la tesis doctoral-2012′′, and CORFO INNOVA Grant N° 09CN14-5704. We thank to Enrique Pérez Sanchez-Cañete and Borja Ruíz- Reverter for technical support. We also thank “CODELCO–División Andina” for use of the site. C. Montes acknowledges the NASA Postdoctoral Program and to Universities Space Research Association

Assessment of genetically modified maize MIR604 for renewal authorisation under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 (application EFSA‐GMO‐RX‐013)

Following the submission of application EFSA‐GMO‐RX‐013 under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 from Syngenta Crop Protection NV/SA, the EFSA Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) was asked to deliver a scientific risk assessment on the data submitted in the context of the renewal of authorisation application for the insect‐resistant genetically modified maize MIR604, for food and feed uses, excluding cultivation within the EU. The data received in the context of this renewal application contained post‐market environmental monitoring reports, a systematic search and evaluation of literature, updated bioinformatic analyses, and additional documents or studies performed by or on behalf of the applicant. The GMO Panel assessed these data for possible new hazards, modified exposure or new scientific uncertainties identified during the authorisation period and not previously assessed in the context of the original application. Under the assumption that the DNA sequence of the event in maize MIR604 considered for renewal is identical to the corrected sequence of the originally assessed event, the GMO Panel concludes that there is no evidence in renewal application EFSA‐GMO‐RX‐013 for new hazards, modified exposure or scientific uncertainties that would change the conclusions of the original risk assessment on maize MIR604

Clonal human fetal ventral mesencephalic dopaminergic neuron precursors for cell therapy research

A major challenge for further development of drug screening procedures, cell replacement therapies and developmental studies is the identification of expandable human stem cells able to generate the cell types needed. We have previously reported the generation of an immortalized polyclonal neural stem cell (NSC) line derived from the human fetal ventral mesencephalon (hVM1). This line has been biochemically, genetically, immunocytochemically and electrophysiologically characterized to document its usefulness as a model system for the generation of A9 dopaminergic neurons (DAn). Long-term in vivo transplantation studies in parkinsonian rats showed that the grafts do not mature evenly. We reasoned that diverse clones in the hVM1 line might have different abilities to differentiate. In the present study, we have analyzed 9 hVM1 clones selected on the basis of their TH generation potential and, based on the number of v-myc copies, v-myc down-regulation after in vitro differentiation, in vivo cell cycle exit, TH+ neuron generation and expression of a neuronal mature marker (hNSE), we selected two clones for further in vivo PD cell replacement studies. The conclusion is that homogeneity and clonality of characterized NSCs allow transplantation of cells with controlled properties, which should help in the design of long-term in vivo experimentsThis work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (formerly Science and Innovation; PLE2009-0101, SAF2010-17167), Comunidad Autónoma Madrid (S2011-BMD-2336), Instituto Salud Carlos III (RETICS TerCel, RD06/0010/0009) and European Union (Excell, NMP4-SL-2008-214706). This work was also supported by an institutional grant from Foundation Ramón Areces to the Center of Molecular Biology Severo Ocho