An environmental assessment of the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park and the Key Largo Coral Reef Marine Sanctuary (Unpublished 1983 Report)

The Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park was established in 1960 and the Key Largo National Marine Sanctuary in 1975. Field studies, funded by NOAA, were conducted in 1980 - 1981 to determine the state of the coral reefs and surrounding areas in relation to changing environmental conditions and resource management that had occurred over the intervening years. Ten reef sites within the Sanctuary and seven shallow grass and hardbottom sites within the Park were chosen for qualitative and quantitative studies. At each site, three parallel transects not less than 400 m long were run perpendicular to the reef or shore, each 300 m apart. Observations, data collecting and sampling were done by two teams of divers. Approximately 75 percent of the bottom within the 18-m isobath was covered by marine grasses, predominantly turtle grass. The general health of the seagrasses appeared good but a few areas showed signs of stress. The inner hardbottom of the Park was studied at the two entrances to Largo Sound. Though at the time of the study the North Channel hardbottom was subjected to only moderate boat traffic, marked changes had taken place over the past years, the most obvious of which was the loss of the extensive beds of Sargassum weed, one of the most extensive beds of this alga in the Keys. Only at this site was the green alga Enteromorpha encountered. This alga, often considered a pollution indicator, may denote the effects of shore run off. The hardbottom at South Channel and the surrounding grass beds showed signs of stress. This area bears the heaviest boat traffic within the Park waters causing continuous turbidity from boat wakes with resulting siltation. The offshore hardbottom and rubble areas in the Sanctuary appeared to be in good health and showed no visible indications of deterioration. Damage by boat groundings and anchors was negligible in the areas surveyed. The outer reefs in general appear to be healthy. Corals have a surprising resiliency to detrimental factors and, when conditions again become favorable, recover quickly from even severe damage. It is, therefore, a cause for concern that Grecian Rocks, which sits somewhat inshore of the outer reef line, has yet to recover from die-off in 1978. The slow recovery, if occurring, may be due to the lower quality of the inshore waters. The patch reefs, more adapted to inshore waters, do not show obvious stress signs, at least those surveyed in this study. It is apparent that water quality was changing in the keys. Water clarity over much of the reef tract was observed to be much reduced from former years and undoubtedly plays an important part in the stresses seen today over the Sanctuary and Park. (PDF contains 119 pages

Towards Real-Time, Country-Level Location Classification of Worldwide Tweets

In contrast to much previous work that has focused on location classification of tweets restricted to a specific country, here we undertake the task in a broader context by classifying global tweets at the country level, which is so far unexplored in a real-time scenario. We analyse the extent to which a tweet's country of origin can be determined by making use of eight tweet-inherent features for classification. Furthermore, we use two datasets, collected a year apart from each other, to analyse the extent to which a model trained from historical tweets can still be leveraged for classification of new tweets. With classification experiments on all 217 countries in our datasets, as well as on the top 25 countries, we offer some insights into the best use of tweet-inherent features for an accurate country-level classification of tweets. We find that the use of a single feature, such as the use of tweet content alone -- the most widely used feature in previous work -- leaves much to be desired. Choosing an appropriate combination of both tweet content and metadata can actually lead to substantial improvements of between 20\% and 50\%. We observe that tweet content, the user's self-reported location and the user's real name, all of which are inherent in a tweet and available in a real-time scenario, are particularly useful to determine the country of origin. We also experiment on the applicability of a model trained on historical tweets to classify new tweets, finding that the choice of a particular combination of features whose utility does not fade over time can actually lead to comparable performance, avoiding the need to retrain. However, the difficulty of achieving accurate classification increases slightly for countries with multiple commonalities, especially for English and Spanish speaking countries.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE

The link between healthcare and energy supply: how joined-up thinking can lead to more synergies between the two policy fields

The connection between the policy fields of energy and health may be hard to grasp at first glance. Nevertheless, the negative externalities resulting from the consumption of fossil fuels are clearly identified. In January 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) named climate change and air pollution as two of the greatest challenges to human health. A differentiated look at infrastructure, availability and quality of energy supply and healthcare as well as at access to both shows how closely intertwined these policy fields are. No modern hospital can operate without secure elec­tricity supply and efficient cold chains are essential for storing vaccines. In line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the two policy fields must be designed and interlinked in such a way that they contribute to human security beyond national borders and take planetary boundaries into account. It is necessary to bring health and energy together and to create synergies between them. This would be an important step towards a swifter implementation of the SDGs. (author's abstract

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia quantified with linear and non-linear techniques to classify dilated and ischemic cardiomyopathy

Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enzymatic hydrolysis of soymilk byproduct (Okara) by proteases extracted from Cynara Cardunculus

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A EXPERIÊNCIA ACADÊMICA DE ALUNO-MONITOR COMO PRÁTICA MOTIVADORA DA ATIVIDADE DOCENTE EM SECRETARIADO

The Monitoring Program developed at the Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) aims to motivate in the participant student the theoretical and practical knowledge and also the interest in act of teaching. Thus, it is the duty of the monitor help the students, develop activities and to follow the professor during classes. At this juncture, this paper aims to report the importance of activities carried during the Monitoring Program in the discipline of Spanish applied in the Secretarial   I, in 2010, both for the secretarial area, as for the job market and for the monitor academic.O Programa de Monitoria desenvolvido na Universidade Estadual do Centro Oeste (UNICENTRO) visa motivar no aluno partícipe da monitoria o aperfeiçoamento de conhecimentos teórico-práticos e o interesse pelo magistério superior. Assim, cabe ao monitor auxiliar na orientação de alunos, elaborar atividades e acompanhar o professor orientador durante as aulas.  Nesta conjuntura, este artigo objetiva relatar a importância das atividades desenvolvidas no Programa de Monitoria Remunerada na disciplina de Espanhol Aplicado ao Secretariado I, no ano de 2010, tanto para a área secretarial e para o mercado de trabalho quanto para o acadêmico/monitor

The most important attributes of beef sensory quality and production variables that can affect it: a review

This work aimed to study and unveil the factors that define the quality of beef from a consumer perspective as well as the production variables affecting it. Price, the designation of origin/brands/certification, appearance/meat colour, presentation, and visible fat are the most valorised factors used by consumers to predict quality. Flavour, tenderness, and juiciness are the most valorised beef quality attributes. It is common worldwide that consumers use price to predict quality and would rather choose meat from its region or country. However, for meat colour, there are countries where consumers generally prefer bright red and others where consumers choose a dark red colour. Regarding marbling, some cultures seek for a high amount of intramuscular fat and countries where health concerned consumers prefer leaner meat. It is consensual worldwide that tender and more juicy meat is largely preferred. The preferences about flavour vary among cultures. Breed, feeding and production system, post-mortem conditions and handling can strongly affect those factors that consumers use to predict quality as well as those quality attributes valorised by the consumers. Pasture-fed animals result in leaner meat with healthier fatty acids profile; however, it can also result in less tender (depending on the muscle) with less juicy meat than an intensively grown one.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Training improves visual processing speed and generalizes to untrained functions

Studies show that manipulating certain training features in perceptual learning determines the specificity of the improvement. The improvement in abnormal visual processing following training and its generalization to visual acuity, as measured on static clinical charts, can be explained by improved sensitivity or processing speed. Crowding, the inability to recognize objects in a clutter, fundamentally limits conscious visual perception. Although it was largely considered absent in the fovea, earlier studies report foveal crowding upon very brief exposures or following spatial manipulations. Here we used GlassesOff's application for iDevices to train foveal vision of young participants. The training was performed at reading distance based on contrast detection tasks under different spatial and temporal constraints using Gabor patches aimed at testing improvement of processing speed. We found several significant improvements in spatio-temporal visual functions including near and also non-trained far distances. A remarkable transfer to visual acuity measured under crowded conditions resulted in reduced processing time of 81 ms, in order to achieve 6/6 acuity. Despite a subtle change in contrast sensitivity, a robust increase in processing speed was found. Thus, enhanced processing speed may lead to overcoming foveal crowding and might be the enabling factor for generalization to other visual functions