A Mathematical Hydrodynamic Circulation Model of Great Salt Lake for Resource Management

In the Great Basin region of this country, the resource which has always been of great importance is water. In Utah, the proper management of the resources of Great Salt Lake and the watersheds tributary to it, has become a topic of increasing concern. Recently, much emphasis has been placed on developing the recreational and industrial resources of Great Salt Lake. For optimum economic and social benefits from future development plans, the lake and its tributary watersheds need to be considered in terms of a single entity. In this regard, the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) has conducted several studies which involve hydrologic basins tributary to Great Salt Lake. Significantly lacking, however, was a comprehensive study of Great Salt Lake itself. The reserach reported herein is directed towards the development of a comprehensive predictive hydrodynamic model of Great Salt Lake (see Figure 1). This model provides two general types of information. First, it provides circulation patterns within the lake for configurations and conditions imposed by the planner. This information is necessary to predict movement of pollutants, paths of freshwater inflows, and other phenomena which depend on currents. Second, the model provides information on the distribution of salinity throughout the lake. This informatino is vital to the industries around the lake which extract minerals from the brines of the lake. These capabilities of the model will also be valuable in providing data to be used by quality models. It could be argued that because of a lack of field data for model verification, the development of a mathematical model was premature. Some field data on salinity are being collected regularly and the data base is steadily growing. Hopefully, the Utah Separtment of Natural Resources will implement a program of measuring velocities and circulation patterns to provide a data base for calibrating the hydraulic model. In any case, the initial development of a mathematical model is appropriate so that over the next few years, it can be improved and adjusted as more data become available. It seemed unwise to wait for a complete data base before launching a lengthy program of development of a mathematical model. The objectives of the research were as follows: 1. To develop new mathematical models or incorporate existing models of the flow through the Southern Pacific causeway embankment and culverts to act as boundary conditions in mathementical circulation models of the southern and northern arms of the Great Salt Lake. 2. To develop an upper-layer hydrodynamic circulation model of Great Salt Lake. As a first step toward developing a more comprehensive two-layer model, it was recognized that the main function of the lower layer within the lake may be to act as a reservoir for passing salinity from the north arm to the surface layer in the south arm. If this is indeed the case, then an upper-layer model could be constucted based on the assumption that the interface is a horizontal boundary which feeds salinity itno the upper layer in some reasonable fashion to maintain continuity. 3. To attempt to develop a coupled two-layer model of Great Salt Lake. It was proposed to use the finite element technique to generate a hydrodynamic model of the circulation patterns in both the upper and lower layers. The finite element representation incorporates cubic velocity variations in the two layers to more accurately simulate the recircualtion flow patterns caused by wind action on the surface and fresh water flow from the contributing streams. 4. To perform a laboratory experiment devised to evaluate the rate of salinity exchange from the lower high-density layer through the interfacial shear zone into the upper layer. It was believed that the exchange of salinity between the two layers is a direct function of the intensity of the interfacial shear and the resulting turbulent mixing at the interface. 5. To attempt to adjust the model to Great Salt Lake. All available velocity and salinity concentration data collected by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey (UGMS) during recent years was used. 6. To cooperate with researchers who are studying other aspects of the lake by making the mathematical model available to them. A modeling appraoch utilizing equations based on the fundamental laws of physics, coupled with the application of the versatile finite element method gives the hydrodynamic and convetion-dispersion models of Great Salt Lake the versatility required to examine the spectrum of management alternatives. The predictive capability is greatly enhanced in this approach by minimizing the number of empirical constants to be evlatued. It seems clear that the development of these comprehensive models of the lake is a necessary step in the subsequent development and use of both water quality and management models of this important natural resource

Doming Modes and Dynamics of Model Heme Compounds

Synchrotron far-IR spectroscopy and density-functional calculations are used to characterize the low-frequency dynamics of model heme FeCO compounds. The “doming” vibrational mode in which the iron atom moves out of the porphyrin plane while the periphery of this ring moves in the opposite direction determines the reactivity of oxygen with this type of molecule in biological systems. Calculations of frequencies and absorption intensities and the measured pressure dependence of vibrational modes in the model compounds are used to identify the doming and related normal modes

Two Approaches to Solving the Inversion Problem for Eddy Current NDE

The eddy current NDE inversion problem is to determine flaw parameters from eddy current sensor impedance changes. Two approaches to solving this problem are discussed for geometries with two components of eddy current. The first is to use the Finite Element Method of numerical analysis to compute the sensor impedance change for each flaw parameter value. The second approach is to combine the Finite Element Method with an analytical scattering technique. These two approaches are applied to the problem of an infinitely long coil surrounding an infinitely long conducting bar with an infinitely long surface crack. The calculated impedance changes show good agreement with known analytical and experimental results

Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms

Sarcasm is a peculiar form of sentiment expression, where the surface sentiment differs from the implied sentiment. The detection of sarcasm in social media platforms has been applied in the past mainly to textual utterances where lexical indicators (such as interjections and intensifiers), linguistic markers, and contextual information (such as user profiles, or past conversations) were used to detect the sarcastic tone. However, modern social media platforms allow to create multimodal messages where audiovisual content is integrated with the text, making the analysis of a mode in isolation partial. In our work, we first study the relationship between the textual and visual aspects in multimodal posts from three major social media platforms, i.e., Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, and we run a crowdsourcing task to quantify the extent to which images are perceived as necessary by human annotators. Moreover, we propose two different computational frameworks to detect sarcasm that integrate the textual and visual modalities. The first approach exploits visual semantics trained on an external dataset, and concatenates the semantics features with state-of-the-art textual features. The second method adapts a visual neural network initialized with parameters trained on ImageNet to multimodal sarcastic posts. Results show the positive effect of combining modalities for the detection of sarcasm across platforms and methods.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, final version published in the Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 201

Does consumer protection enhance disclosure credibility in reward crowdfunding?

We study how the interplay of disclosure and regulation shapes capital allocation in reward crowdfunding. Using data from Kickstarter, the largest online reward crowdfunding platform, we show that, even in the absence of clear regulation and enforcement mechanisms, disclosure helps entrepreneurs access capital for their projects and bolsters engagement with potential project backers, consistent with the notion that disclosure mitigates moral hazard. We further document that, subsequent to a change in Kickstarter’s terms of use that increases the threat of consumer litigation, the association between project funding and disclosure becomes stronger. This evidence suggests that consumer protection regulation enhances the perceived credibility of disclosure. We find the effect of the change in terms of use to be more pronounced in states with stricter consumer protection regulations. Taken together, our findings yield important insights on the role of disclosure, as well as on the potential effects of increased regulation on crowdfunding platforms

Exploiting the Bipartite Structure of Entity Grids for Document Coherence and Retrieval

International audienceDocument coherence describes how much sense text makes in terms of its logical organisation and discourse flow. Even though coherence is a relatively difficult notion to quantify precisely, it can be approximated automatically. This type of coherence modelling is not only interesting in itself, but also useful for a number of other text processing tasks, including Information Retrieval (IR), where adjusting the ranking of documents according to both their relevance and their coherence has been shown to increase retrieval effectiveness.The state of the art in unsupervised coherence modelling represents documents as bipartite graphs of sentences and discourse entities, and then projects these bipartite graphs into one–mode undirected graphs. However, one–mode projections may incur significant loss of the information present in the original bipartite structure. To address this we present three novel graph metrics that compute document coherence on the original bipartite graph of sentences and entities. Evaluation on standard settings shows that: (i) one of our coherence metrics beats the state of the art in terms of coherence accuracy; and (ii) all three of our coherence metrics improve retrieval effectiveness because, as closer analysis reveals, they capture aspects of document quality that go undetected by both keyword-based standard ranking and by spam filtering. This work contributes document coherence metrics that are theoretically principled, parameter-free, and useful to IR

Suboptimal Activation of Antigen-Specific CD4+ Effector Cells Enables Persistence of M. tuberculosis In Vivo

Adaptive immunity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis controls progressive bacterial growth and disease but does not eradicate infection. Among CD4+ T cells in the lungs of M. tuberculosis-infected mice, we observed that few produced IFN-γ without ex vivo restimulation. Therefore, we hypothesized that one mechanism whereby M. tuberculosis avoids elimination is by limiting activation of CD4+ effector T cells at the site of infection in the lungs. To test this hypothesis, we adoptively transferred Th1-polarized CD4+ effector T cells specific for M. tuberculosis Ag85B peptide 25 (P25TCRTh1 cells), which trafficked to the lungs of infected mice and exhibited antigen-dependent IFN-γ production. During the early phase of infection, ∼10% of P25TCRTh1 cells produced IFN-γ in vivo; this declined to <1% as infection progressed to chronic phase. Bacterial downregulation of fbpB (encoding Ag85B) contributed to the decrease in effector T cell activation in the lungs, as a strain of M. tuberculosis engineered to express fbpB in the chronic phase stimulated P25TCRTh1 effector cells at higher frequencies in vivo, and this resulted in CD4+ T cell-dependent reduction of lung bacterial burdens and prolonged survival of mice. Administration of synthetic peptide 25 alone also increased activation of endogenous antigen-specific effector cells and reduced the bacterial burden in the lungs without apparent host toxicity. These results indicate that CD4+ effector T cells are activated at suboptimal frequencies in tuberculosis, and that increasing effector T cell activation in the lungs by providing one or more epitope peptides may be a successful strategy for TB therapy

RNAi in the regulation of mammalian viral infections

Although RNA interference (RNAi) is known to play an important part in defense against viruses of invertebrates, its contribution to mammalian anti-viral defense has been a matter of dispute. This is surprising because all components of the RNAi machinery necessary for robust RNAi-mediated restriction of viruses are conserved in mammals, and the introduction of synthetic small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) into cells efficiently silences the replication of viruses that contain siRNA complementary sequences in those cells. Here, I discuss the reasons for the dispute, and review the evidence that RNAi is a part of the physiological defense of mammalian cells against viral infections

Prevalence of emergency contraceptive pill use among Spanish adolescent girls and their family and psychological profiles

The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background:Adolescent girls’ family context and psychological characteristics play important roles in their sexual behavior, including the use of the emergency contraceptive pill (ECP). This study aims to (1) determine the prevalence of ECP use among girls who have had sexual intercourse and (2) comparatively analyze their family and psychological profiles according to whether they have used ECPs. Methods:The sample of 1735 Spanish girls aged 15 to 18 came from a representative sample of the 2014 edition of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. Of this sample, 398 girls had sexual intercourse and reported their ECP use. Data collection for the HBSC study was performed through an online questionnaire to which adolescents responded anonymously in school. Data analyses were descriptive and bivariate and were performed with the statistical program IBM SPSS Statistics 23.Results:The results demonstrated that 30.65% of girls who had sexual intercourse used ECPs. Noticeable differences in paternal knowledge and communication with the father were observed between girls who used the ECP at least once and those who did not use it. In contrast, differences between girls who used the ECP once and those who used it twice or more were pronounced with regard to parental knowledge, communication with parents, maternal affection,life satisfaction, sense of coherence and depression. Conclusions:This work demonstrates a high prevalence of ECP use and a more positive family and psychological profile for girls who used ECP once compared with those who used it twice or more.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio