How a little bit of technology can fix the editing and production processes for the social sciences.

Academic text production faces many challenges. Some of them are of a technical nature. Johannes Wilm, initiator behind Fidus Writer, argues that by adapting the text editing environment for scientific articles in the social sciences, the amount of manual labour going into journal and book production can be cut dramatically while making the product accessible to a wider audience, and enhancing the quality of research

The Significance of the Agrarian reform in Nicaragua

The term "land reform" is in Nicaragua often-times presented as a feature only associated with the government of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) of the 1980s (see for example Rocha, 2010; “Land reform reformed,†1997; Zalkin, 1990), yet in this article I argue that some type of land redistribution has been the policy of all governments both before and after the 1980s, and that this process continues during the current FSLN government, but that the direction and the magnitude of the redistribution has changed significantly over time. One needs to understand this history and the considerations about Nicaraguans make about previous land redistribution patterns in order to make sense of what land ownership means in this country. While the land reform of the 1980s was the most direct redistribution, this article argues that land reform in favor of small-scale producers has been taken up again after 2007, even though it does not form part of official government policy. At the same time other factors seem to be if more importance in lowering economic differences

Nicaraguan Sandinismo, back from the Dead? An anthropological study of popular participation within the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional

Thirty years after redefining the political landscape of Nicaragua, Sandinismo is both a unifying discourse and one driven by different interpretations by adherents. This thesis examines the complex legacy of Sandinismo by focusing on the still widely acclaimed notion of Sandinismo as an idiom of popular participation. A central point is the current unity of the movement, as it is perceived by Sandinistas, depends on a limited number of common reference points over the last 100 years of Nicaraguan history, which are interpreted very differently Sandinistas and other groups, but which always emphasise the part Nicaraguans play in international relations and the overall importance of popular mass participation in Nicaraguan politics, rather than agreement on current, day-to-day politics. Through my analysis, this thesis questions the view often expressed in anthropological studies and the mainstream press on the development of the Sandinista movement since the 1980s as being one of decay. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Nicaragua in 2008/09 among mainly urban Sandinistas and some non-Sandinistas in the cities on the Pacific coast, involving formal and informal interviews, the thesis concludes that Sandinismo continues to involve grassroot elements of popular participation and that Nicaragua interpretations of history across ideological groups have in common that the actions of individual Nicaraguans are seen as shaping historical changes, which in turn validates and lends importance to such grassroots elements

Decentralized creation of academic documents using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server

Scholarly document creation continues to face various obstacles. Scholarly text production requires more complex word processors than other forms of texts because of the complex structures of citations, formulas and figures. The need for peer review, often single-blind or double-blind, creates needs for document management that other texts do not require. Additionally, the need for collaborative editing, security and strict document access rules means that many existing word processors are imperfect solutions for academics. Nevertheless, most papers continue to be written using Microsoft Word (Sadeghi et al. 2017). We here analyze some of the problems with existing academic solutions and then present an argument why we believe that running an open source academic writing solution for academic purposes, such as Fidus Writer, on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server could be a viable alternative.Comment: 15 pages, paper presented at the Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication workshop co-located with the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2017

Skin Doctor: Machine learning models for skin sensitization prediction that provide estimates and indicators of prediction reliability

The ability to predict the skin sensitization potential of small organic molecules is of high importance to the development and safe application of cosmetics, drugs and pesticides. One of the most widely accepted methods for predicting this hazard is the local lymph node assay (LLNA). The goal of this work was to develop in silico models for the prediction of the skin sensitization potential of small molecules that go beyond the state of the art, with larger LLNA data sets and, most importantly, a robust and intuitive definition of the applicability domain, paired with additional indicators of the reliability of predictions. We explored a large variety of molecular descriptors and fingerprints in combination with random forest and support vector machine classifiers. The most suitable models were tested on holdout data, on which they yielded competitive performance (Matthews correlation coefficients up to 0.52; accuracies up to 0.76; areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves up to 0.83). The most favorable models are available via a public web service that, in addition to predictions, provides assessments of the applicability domain and indicators of the reliability of the individual predictions. View Full-Text Keywords: skin sensitization potential; prediction; in silico models; machine learning; local lymph node assay (LLNA); cosmetics; drugs; pesticides; chemical space; applicability domainpublishedVersio

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives