Chapter 19: Vulnerability of coastal and estuarine habitats in the Great Barrier Reef to climate change

This chapter attempts to address the vulnerability of the CEM in the Great Barrier Reef region to global climate change. It does not consider individual habitats (eg reefs or seagrasses) but goes beyond the individual species and habitat assessments, to consider impacts on the whole coastal marine community complex, and the ecological processes that support its functioning.This is Chapter 19 of Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment. The entire book can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11017/13

Porting Decision Tree Algorithms to Multicore using FastFlow

The whole computer hardware industry embraced multicores. For these machines, the extreme optimisation of sequential algorithms is no longer sufficient to squeeze the real machine power, which can be only exploited via thread-level parallelism. Decision tree algorithms exhibit natural concurrency that makes them suitable to be parallelised. This paper presents an approach for easy-yet-efficient porting of an implementation of the C4.5 algorithm on multicores. The parallel porting requires minimal changes to the original sequential code, and it is able to exploit up to 7X speedup on an Intel dual-quad core machine.Comment: 18 pages + cove

Vulnérabilité des ressources halieutiques et aquacoles du Pacifique tropical face au changement climatique : résumé à l'intention des Etats et Territoires insulaires océaniens

En complément de l'ouvrage intitulé "Vulnerability of tropical Pacific fisheries and aquaculture to climate change", qui analyse de manière exhaustive les effets possibles du changement climatique sur les plans visant à maximiser les avantages économiques et sociaux tirés de la pêche et de l'aquaculture en Océanie, le présent document fait la synthèse des conclusions de cette évaluation de la vulnérabilité climatique régionale en ce qui concerne les Territoires français du Pacifique. Les mesures d'adaptation, les politiques et les investissements préconisés devraient permettre à chaque Territoire de réduire les menaces que fait peser le changement climatique sur la pêche et l'aquaculture, tout en tirant le meilleur parti des débouchés qui en découlent. Les recommandations formulées répondent directement aux préoccupations de toutes les parties prenantes et de leurs partenaires dans le développement. (Résumé d'auteur

Vulnerability of tropical Pacific fisheries and aquaculture to climate change : summary for Pacific island countries and territories

The purpose of this summary is to present the main results from the regional vulnerability assessment as they apply to each country and territory, making the information easily to use. The practical adaptations, policies and investments described here are needed to maintain the economic and social benefits of fisheries and aquaculture in the face of climate change. They are essential planning tools

Evaluation of sesamum gum as an excipient in matrix tablets

In developing countries modern medicines are often beyond the affordability of the majority of the population. This is due to the reliance on expensive imported raw materials despite the abundance of natural resources which could provide an equivalent or even an improved function. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of sesamum gum (SG) extracted from the leaves of Sesamum radiatum (readily cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa) as a matrix former. Directly compressed matrix tablets were prepared from the extract and compared with similar matrices of HPMC (K4M) using theophylline as a model water soluble drug. The compaction, swelling, erosion and drug release from the matrices were studied in deionized water, 0.1 N HCl (pH 1.2) and phosphate buffer (pH 6.8) using USP apparatus II. The data from the swelling, erosion and drug release studies were also fitted into the respective mathematical models. Results showed that the matrices underwent a combination of swelling and erosion, with the swelling action being controlled by the rate of hydration in the medium. SG also controlled the release of theophylline similar to the HPMC and therefore may have use as an alternative excipient in regions where Sesamum radiatum can be easily cultivated

Load balancing of indivisible unit size tokens in dynamic and heterogeneous networks

The task of balancing dynamically generated work load occurs in a wide range of parallel and distributed applications. Diffusion based schemes, which belong to the class of nearest neighbor load balancing algorithms, are a popular way to address this problem. Originally created to equalize the amount of arbitrarily divisible load among the nodes of a static and homogeneous network, they have been generalized to heterogeneous topologies. Additionally, some simple diffusion algorithms have been adapted to work in dynamic networks as well. However, if the load is not divisible arbitrarily but consists of indivisible unit size tokens, diffusion schemes are not able to balance the load properly. In this paper we consider the problem of balancing indivisible unit size tokens on dynamic and heterogeneous systems. By modifying a randomized strategy invented for homogeneous systems, we can achieve an asymptotically minimal expected overload in l1, l2 and l1 norm while only slightly increasing the run-time by a logarithmic factor. Our experiments show that this additional factor is usually not required in applications