Paper 99: design guidelines versus practices for the Upper Seascheldt, the inland waterway connection between Antwerp and Ghent

Design guidelines for inland waterways are so far a national matter. PIANC InCom Working Group 141 "Design Guidelines for Inland Waterways" is nevertheless working on a report with a summary of existing guidelines and a methodology for the concept and detailed design of canals and rivers. For tidal rivers the design is a difficult process and an example is given through the accessibility of the Upper-Seascheldt for CEMT class IV and Va inland vessels between the port of Antwerp and the locks in Merelbeke. A combined evaluation based on concept design guidelines for canals, practices measured during a full-scale voyage and detailed design using ship handling simulators is discussed and illustrated

Remote sensing analysis of natural oil and gas seeps on the continental slope of the northern Gulf of Mexico

Natural hydrocarbon seeps harbor distinctive geological, chemical, and biological features in the marine environment. This thesis verified remote sensing signatures of seeps using in-situ observation and repeated collections of satellite imagery. Bubble streams in the Gulf of Mexico water column from four natural seep sites on the upper continental slope were imaged by a side-scan sonar, which was operated from a submarine near the seafloor, and by acoustic profilers, which were operated from surface ships. These data were correlated with sea surface slicks imaged by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) on the RADARSAT satellite. Comparing non-oily bubble streams from rapidly venting mud volcanoes with oily bubble streams from shallow deposits of gas hydrate showed that they produced notably different signatures. Non-oily bubbles produced high backscatter on the side-scan sonar records, but were difficult to detect with the acoustic profilers. Oily bubbles from hydrate deposits produced acoustic shadows on the side-scan sonar records. The oily bubbles generated clear signatures extending from the seafloor to the near surface on the acoustic profile records. RADARSAT SAR images verified the presence of surface oil slicks over the hydrate deposits, but not over the mud volcanoes. This indicates that SAR imagery will not be able to capture every oil and gas seep in a region because non-oily bubble streams do not create surface oil slicks. A total of 113 natural oily seep sources were identified based on surface slicks in eleven SAR images collected over the northern continental slope. A persistence analysis verified that SAR is a dependable tool for capturing oil slicks because 93.5% of the slick sources identified in the 2001 images were corroborated with slicks in the 2002 images. The sources ranged in depth from 100 to 2000 m and 79% of the sources were in 900 meters or greater of water. Seventy-six percent of the seep sources were associated with salt less than 1500 m below the seafloor and none of the sources were located in the bottom of salt withdrawal basins. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) proved to be a useful tool in these analyses

Context

For centuries, the Scheldt and its tributaries have ensured a wellwatered country bursting with dynamism. But tidal rivers may also bring a great deal of water-based misery. Protecting Flanders more effectively against flooding by the Scheldt and its tributaries is the main objective of the Sigma Plan. All at once, the wonderful nature of the Scheldt will be restored in numerous places. Thousands of walkers and cyclists can then enjoy it to the fullest. The Sigma Plan also has an eye on the economic role of the Scheldt as one of Europe’s busiest rivers.In this chapter, you will find out all about the work in Bergenmeersen, a subsector of the Kalkense Meersen Cluster Sigma Project. You will discover how the Sigma Plan originated and how that progressive plan evolved into a smart project for the future that goes far beyond flood management

Case report: "Proust phenomenon" after right posterior cerebral artery occlusion.

Odors evoking vivid and intensely felt autobiographical memories are known as the "Proust phenomenon," delineating the particularity of olfaction in being more effective with eliciting emotional memories than other sensory modalities. The phenomenon has been described extensively in healthy participants as well as in patients during pre-epilepsy surgery evaluation after focal stimulation of the amygdalae and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this study, we provide the inaugural description of aversive odor-evoked autobiographical memories after stroke in the right hippocampal, parahippocampal, and thalamic nuclei. As potential underlying neural signatures of the phenomenon, we discuss the disinhibition of limbic circuits and impaired communication between the major networks, such as saliency, central executive, and default mode network

Core Hunter II: fast core subset selection based on multiple genetic diversity measures using Mixed Replica search

BACKGROUND: Sampling core subsets from genetic resources while maintaining as much as possible the genetic diversity of the original collection is an important but computationally complex task for gene bank managers. The Core Hunter computer program was developed as a tool to generate such subsets based on multiple genetic measures, including both distance measures and allelic diversity indices. At first we investigate the effect of minimum (instead of the default mean) distance measures on the performance of Core Hunter. Secondly, we try to gain more insight into the performance of the original Core Hunter search algorithm through comparison with several other heuristics working with several realistic datasets of varying size and allelic composition. Finally, we propose a new algorithm (Mixed Replica search) for Core Hunter II with the aim of improving the diversity of the constructed core sets and their corresponding generation times. RESULTS: Our results show that the introduction of minimum distance measures leads to core sets in which all accessions are sufficiently distant from each other, which was not always obtained when optimizing mean distance alone. Comparison of the original Core Hunter algorithm, Replica Exchange Monte Carlo (REMC), with simpler heuristics shows that the simpler algorithms often give very good results but with lower runtimes than REMC. However, the performance of the simpler algorithms is slightly worse than REMC under lower sampling intensities and some heuristics clearly struggle with minimum distance measures. In comparison the new advanced Mixed Replica search algorithm (MixRep), which uses heterogeneous replicas, was able to sample core sets with equal or higher diversity scores than REMC and the simpler heuristics, often using less computation time than REMC. CONCLUSION: The REMC search algorithm used in the original Core Hunter computer program performs well, sometimes leading to slightly better results than some of the simpler methods, although it doesn’t always give the best results. By switching to the new Mixed Replica algorithm overall results and runtimes can be significantly improved. Finally we recommend including minimum distance measures in the objective function when looking for core sets in which all accessions are sufficiently distant from each other. Core Hunter II is freely available as an open source project at http://www.corehunter.org