Validation of Soil Erosion Risk Assessments in Italy.

Abstract not availableJRC.H-Institute for environment and sustainability (Ispra

Mutation Testing as a Safety Net for Test Code Refactoring

Refactoring is an activity that improves the internal structure of the code without altering its external behavior. When performed on the production code, the tests can be used to verify that the external behavior of the production code is preserved. However, when the refactoring is performed on test code, there is no safety net that assures that the external behavior of the test code is preserved. In this paper, we propose to adopt mutation testing as a means to verify if the behavior of the test code is preserved after refactoring. Moreover, we also show how this approach can be used to identify the part of the test code which is improperly refactored

On the center of mass of Ising vectors

We show that the center of mass of Ising vectors that obey some simple constraints, is again an Ising vector.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX; Claims in connection with disordered systems have been withdrawn; More detailed description of the simulations; Inset added to figure

Future C loss in mid-latitude mineral soils: climate change exceeds land use mitigation potential in France

Many studies have highlighted significant interactions between soil C reservoir dynamics and global climate and environmental change. However, in order to estimate the future soil organic carbon sequestration potential and related ecosystem services well, more spatially detailed predictions are needed. The present study made detailed predictions of future spatial evolution (at 250 m resolution) of topsoil SOC driven by climate change and land use change for France up to the year 2100 by taking interactions between climate, land use and soil type into account. We conclude that climate change will have a much bigger influence on future SOC losses in mid-latitude mineral soils than land use change dynamics. Hence, reducing CO2 emissions will be crucial to prevent further loss of carbon from our soils

Comparing Regional Patterns of Individual Movement Using Corrected Mobility Entropy

In this paper, we propose a correction of the Mobility Entropy indicator (ME) used to describe the diversity of individual movement patterns as can be captured by data from mobile phones. We argue that a correction is necessary because standard calculations of ME show a structural dependency on the geographical density of observation points, rendering results biased and comparisons between regions incorrect. As a solution, we propose the Corrected Mobility Entropy (CME). We apply our solution to a French mobile phone dataset with ∼18.5 million users. Results show CME to be less correlated to cell-tower density (r = –0.17 instead of –0.59 for ME). As a spatial pattern of mobility diversity, we find CME values to be higher in suburban regions compared to their related urban centers, while both decrease considerably with lowering urban center sizes. Based on regression models, we find mobility diversity to relate to factors like income and employment. Additionally, using CME reveals the role of car use in relation to land use, which was not recognized when using ME values. Our solution enables a better description of individual mobility at a large scale, which has applications in official statistics, urban planning and policy, and mobility research

Detecting flood variations in Shanghai over 1949-2009 with Mann-Kendall tests and a newspaper-bases database

A valuable aid to assessing and managing flood risk lies in a reliable database of historical floods. In this study, a newspaper-based flood database for Shanghai (NFDS) for the period 1949-2009 was developed through a systematic scanning of newspapers. After calibration and validation of the database, Mann-Kendall tests and correlation analysis were applied to detect possible changes in flood frequencies. The analysis was carried out for three different flood types: overbank flood, agricultural waterlogging, and urban waterlogging. The compiled NFDS registered 146 floods and 92% of them occurred in the flood-prone season from June to September. The statistical analyses showed that both the annual flood and the floods in June-August increased significantly. Urban waterlogging showed a very strong increasing trend, probably because of insufficient capacity of urban drainage system and impacts of rapid urbanization. By contrast, the decrease in overbank flooding and the slight increase in agricultural waterlogging were likely because of the construction of river levees and seawalls and the upgrade of agricultural drainage systems, respectively. This study demonstrated the usefulness of local newspapers in building a historical flood database and in assessing flood characterization

An experimental model to measure the ability of headphones with active noise control to reduce patient's exposure to noise in an intensive care unit.

BACKGROUND: Defining the association between excessive noise in intensive care units, sleep disturbance and morbidity, including delirium, is confounded by the difficulty of implementing successful strategies to reduce patient's exposure to noise. Active noise control devices may prove to be useful adjuncts but there is currently little to quantify their ability to reduce noise in this complex environment. METHODS: Sound meters were embedded in the auditory meatus of three polystyrene model heads with no headphones (control), with headphones alone and with headphones using active noise control and placed in patient bays in a cardiac ICU. Ten days of recording sound levels at a frequency of 1 Hz were performed, and the noise levels in each group were compared using repeated measures MANOVA and subsequent pairwise testing. RESULTS: Multivariate testing demonstrated that there is a significant difference in the mean noise exposure levels between the three groups (p < 0.001). Subsequent pairwise testing between the three groups shows that the reduction in noise is greatest with headphones and active noise control. The mean reduction in noise exposure between the control and this group over 24 h is 6.8 (0.66) dB. The use of active noise control was also associated with a reduction in the exposure to high-intensity sound events over the course of the day. CONCLUSIONS: The use of active noise cancellation, as delivered by noise-cancelling headphones, is associated with a significant reduction in noise exposure in our model of noise exposure in a cardiac ICU. This is the first study to look at the potential effectiveness of active noise control in adult patients in an intensive care environment and shows that active noise control is a candidate technology to reduce noise exposure levels the patients experience during stays on intensive care

Considering Polymorphism in Change-Based Test Suite Reduction

With the increasing popularity of continuous integration, algorithms for selecting the minimal test-suite to cover a given set of changes are in order. This paper reports on how polymorphism can handle false negatives in a previous algorithm which uses method-level changes in the base-code to deduce which tests need to be rerun. We compare the approach with and without polymorphism on two distinct cases ---PMD and CruiseControl--- and discovered an interesting trade-off: incorporating polymorphism results in more relevant tests to be included in the test suite (hence improves accuracy), however comes at the cost of a larger test suite (hence increases the time to run the minimal test-suite).Comment: The final publication is available at link.springer.co