Towards a Cloud-Based Service for Maintaining and Analyzing Data About Scientific Events

We propose the new cloud-based service OpenResearch for managing and analyzing data about scientific events such as conferences and workshops in a persistent and reliable way. This includes data about scientific articles, participants, acceptance rates, submission numbers, impact values as well as organizational details such as program committees, chairs, fees and sponsors. OpenResearch is a centralized repository for scientific events and supports researchers in collecting, organizing, sharing and disseminating information about scientific events in a structured way. An additional feature currently under development is the possibility to archive web pages along with the extracted semantic data in order to lift the burden of maintaining new and old conference web sites from public research institutions. However, the main advantage is that this cloud-based repository enables a comprehensive analysis of conference data. Based on extracted semantic data, it is possible to determine quality estimations, scientific communities, research trends as well the development of acceptance rates, fees, and number of participants in a continuous way complemented by projections into the future. Furthermore, data about research articles can be systematically explored using a content-based analysis as well as citation linkage. All data maintained in this crowd-sourcing platform is made freely available through an open SPARQL endpoint, which allows for analytical queries in a flexible and user-defined way.Comment: A completed version of this paper had been accepted in SAVE-SD workshop 2017 at WWW conferenc

Integer Flows with Multipliers 1 and 2

The problem to find a valid Integer generalized flow is long known to be NP-complete (S. Sahni, 1974). We show that the problem is still hard restricted to multipliers 1 and 2 and that optimal solutions with (almost) arbitrary fractions can occur. In some (still NP-hard) application motivated network instances optimal solutions are halfintegral. To solve the latter (optimally) we modify the Successive Shortest Path Algorithm and try to (heuristically) find acceptable integral solutions

Aplicación móvil bajo la Plataforma Android para la Agenda de Actividades del Centro Cultural ¨Pablo Antonio Cuadra¨, año 2014

Los dispositivos móviles constituyen cada vez más una realidad que ofrece al usuario en un mismo y reducido aparato, funciones de comunicación y procesamiento de datos que van mucho más allá de simples llamadas telefónicas. En el presente proyecto se muestra el análisis y el diseño de una aplicación móvil aunado con un software de escritorio para el Centro Cultural Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Primeramente se dan a conocer historia, objetivos, requerimientos y necesidades del Centro Cultural PAC, los cuales fueron apoyo para la creación de la aplicación móvil y el sistema de escritorio. Luego se detallan los objetivos planteados para estos proyectos y los procedimientos y herramientas utilizadas para el desarrollo de la aplicación móvil y el software de escritorio. Al final se muestra los resultados del análisis y el desarrollo para estos dos proyecto

Expanding the clinical spectrum associated with defects in CNTNAP2 and NRXN1

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract Background Heterozygous copy-number and missense variants in CNTNAP2 and NRXN1 have repeatedly been associated with a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric disorders such as developmental language and autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy and schizophrenia. Recently, homozygous or compound heterozygous defects in either gene were reported as causative for severe intellectual disability. Methods 99 patients with severe intellectual disability and resemblance to Pitt-Hopkins syndrome and/or suspected recessive inheritance were screened for mutations in CNTNAP2 and NRXN1. Molecular karyotyping was performed in 45 patients. In 8 further patients with variable intellectual disability and heterozygous deletions in either CNTNAP2 or NRXN1, the remaining allele was sequenced. Results By molecular karyotyping and mutational screening of CNTNAP2 and NRXN1 in a group of severely intellectually disabled patients we identified a heterozygous deletion in NRXN1 in one patient and heterozygous splice-site, frameshift and stop mutations in CNTNAP2 in four patients, respectively. Neither in these patients nor in eight further patients with heterozygous deletions within NRXN1 or CNTNAP2 we could identify a defect on the second allele. One deletion in NRXN1 and one deletion in CNTNAP2 occurred de novo, in another family the deletion was also identified in the mother who had learning difficulties, and in all other tested families one parent was shown to be healthy carrier of the respective deletion or mutation. Conclusions We report on patients with heterozygous defects in CNTNAP2 or NRXN1 associated with severe intellectual disability, which has only been reported for recessive defects before. These results expand the spectrum of phenotypic severity in patients with heterozygous defects in either gene. The large variability between severely affected patients and mildly affected or asymptomatic carrier parents might suggest the presence of a second hit, not necessarily located in the same gene.Peer Reviewe

Bottom-up effects of plant diversity on multitrophic interactions in a biodiversity experiment

Biodiversity is rapidly declining1, and this may negatively affect ecosystem processes, including economically important ecosystem services. Previous studies have shown that biodiversity has positive effects on organisms and processes4 across trophic levels. However, only a few studies have so far incorporated an explicit food-web perspective. In an eight-year biodiversity experiment, we studied an unprecedented range of above- and below-ground organisms and multitrophic interactions. A multitrophic data set originating from a single long-term experiment allows mechanistic insights that would not be gained from meta-analysis of different experiments. Here we show that plant diversity effects dampen with increasing trophic level and degree of omnivory. This was true both for abundance and species richness of organisms. Furthermore, we present comprehensive above-ground/below-ground biodiversity food webs. Both above ground and below ground, herbivores responded more strongly to changes in plant diversity than did carnivores or omnivores. Density and richness of carnivorous taxa was independent of vegetation structure. Below-ground responses to plant diversity were consistently weaker than above-ground responses. Responses to increasing plant diversity were generally positive, but were negative for biological invasion, pathogen infestation and hyperparasitism. Our results suggest that plant diversity has strong bottom-up effects on multitrophic interaction networks, with particularly strong effects on lower trophic levels. Effects on higher trophic levels are indirectly mediated through bottom-up trophic cascades

Plant Diversity Surpasses Plant Functional Groups and Plant Productivity as Driver of Soil Biota in the Long Term

One of the most significant consequences of contemporary global change is the rapid decline of biodiversity in many ecosystems. Knowledge of the consequences of biodiversity loss in terrestrial ecosystems is largely restricted to single ecosystem functions. Impacts of key plant functional groups on soil biota are considered to be more important than those of plant diversity; however, current knowledge mainly relies on short-term experiments.We studied changes in the impacts of plant diversity and presence of key functional groups on soil biota by investigating the performance of soil microorganisms and soil fauna two, four and six years after the establishment of model grasslands. The results indicate that temporal changes of plant community effects depend on the trophic affiliation of soil animals: plant diversity effects on decomposers only occurred after six years, changed little in herbivores, but occurred in predators after two years. The results suggest that plant diversity, in terms of species and functional group richness, is the most important plant community property affecting soil biota, exceeding the relevance of plant above- and belowground productivity and the presence of key plant functional groups, i.e. grasses and legumes, with the relevance of the latter decreasing in time.Plant diversity effects on biota are not only due to the presence of key plant functional groups or plant productivity highlighting the importance of diverse and high-quality plant derived resources, and supporting the validity of the singular hypothesis for soil biota. Our results demonstrate that in the long term plant diversity essentially drives the performance of soil biota questioning the paradigm that belowground communities are not affected by plant diversity and reinforcing the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning

The instrument suite of the European Spallation Source

An overview is provided of the 15 neutron beam instruments making up the initial instrument suite of the European Spallation Source (ESS), and being made available to the neutron user community. The ESS neutron source consists of a high-power accelerator and target station, providing a unique long-pulse time structure of slow neutrons. The design considerations behind the time structure, moderator geometry and instrument layout are presented. The 15-instrument suite consists of two small-angle instruments, two reflectometers, an imaging beamline, two single-crystal diffractometers; one for macromolecular crystallography and one for magnetism, two powder diffractometers, and an engineering diffractometer, as well as an array of five inelastic instruments comprising two chopper spectrometers, an inverse-geometry single-crystal excitations spectrometer, an instrument for vibrational spectroscopy and a high-resolution backscattering spectrometer. The conceptual design, performance and scientific drivers of each of these instruments are described. All of the instruments are designed to provide breakthrough new scientific capability, not currently available at existing facilities, building on the inherent strengths of the ESS long-pulse neutron source of high flux, flexible resolution and large bandwidth. Each of them is predicted to provide world-leading performance at an accelerator power of 2 MW. This technical capability translates into a very broad range of scientific capabilities. The composition of the instrument suite has been chosen to maximise the breadth and depth of the scientific impact o

A comparison of the strength of biodiversity effects across multiple functions

In order to predict which ecosystem functions are most at risk from biodiversity loss, meta-analyses have generalised results from biodiversity experiments over different sites and ecosystem types. In contrast, comparing the strength of biodiversity effects across a large number of ecosystem processes measured in a single experiment permits more direct comparisons. Here, we present an analysis of 418 separate measures of 38 ecosystem processes. Overall, 45% of processes were significantly affected by plant species richness, suggesting that, while diversity affects a large number of processes not all respond to biodiversity. We therefore compared the strength of plant diversity effects between different categories of ecosystem processes, grouping processes according to the year of measurement, their biogeochemical cycle, trophic level and compartment (above- or belowground) and according to whether they were measures of biodiversity or other ecosystem processes, biotic or abiotic and static or dynamic. Overall, and for several individual processes, we found that biodiversity effects became stronger over time. Measures of the carbon cycle were also affected more strongly by plant species richness than were the measures associated with the nitrogen cycle. Further, we found greater plant species richness effects on measures of biodiversity than on other processes. The differential effects of plant diversity on the various types of ecosystem processes indicate that future research and political effort should shift from a general debate about whether biodiversity loss impairs ecosystem functions to focussing on the specific functions of interest and ways to preserve them individually or in combinatio