Report of the Marine Protected Areas Working Group meeting, Penang, Malaysia, 11-12 February, 2014

The objectives of the workshop were to review and update Marine Protected Area (MPA) data, finalise policy briefs for each country and recommend future actions and policies for sustainable management of MPAs

Long-Term Trends in Calcifying Plankton and pH in the North Sea

Relationships between six calcifying plankton groups and pH are explored in a highly biologically productive and data-rich area of the central North Sea using time-series datasets. The long-term trends show that abundances of foraminiferans, coccolithophores, and echinoderm larvae have risen over the last few decades while the abundances of bivalves and pteropods have declined. Despite good coverage of pH data for the study area there is uncertainty over the quality of this historical dataset; pH appears to have been declining since the mid 1990s but there was no statistical connection between the abundance of the calcifying plankton and the pH trends. If there are any effects of pH on calcifying plankton in the North Sea they appear to be masked by the combined effects of other climatic (e.g. temperature), chemical (nutrient concentrations) and biotic (predation) drivers. Certain calcified plankton have proliferated in the central North Sea, and are tolerant of changes in pH that have occurred since the 1950s but bivalve larvae and pteropods have declined. An improved monitoring programme is required as ocean acidification may be occurring at a rate that will exceed the environmental niches of numerous planktonic taxa, testing their capacities for acclimation and genetic adaptation

Trichosanthes dioica root extract induces tumor proliferation and attenuation of antioxidant system in albino mice bearing Ehrlich ascites carcinoma

Trichosanthes dioica Roxb. (Cucurbitaceae), called pointed gourd in English, is a dioecious climber grown widely in the Indian subcontinent. The present study assessed the influence of treatment of hydroalcoholic extract of Trichosanthes dioica root (TDA) on Ehrlich ascites carcinoma (EAC) in Swiss albino mice with effects on antioxidant systems. Twenty-four hours after intraperitoneal inoculation of tumor (EAC) cells in mice, TDA was administered at 25 and 50 mg/kg for 8 consecutive days. On the 9th day, half of the mice were sacrificed for estimation of tumor proliferation, hematological, and hepatic antioxidative parameters. The rest were kept for assessment of survival parameters. TDA exhibited dose dependent and significant increase in tumor weight, tumor volume, packed cell volume and viable cells and reduced non-viable cells and life span of EAC bearing animals. Hematological parameters were significantly worsened in TDA-treated mice. TDA treatment significantly aggravated the hepatic antioxidative parameters. The present study demonstrated that T. dioica root possessed tumor promoting activity in EAC bearing albino mice, plausibly mediated by attenuation of endogenous antioxidant systems

An Analytical Study of Mass Transfer Efficiency in Double-Pass Parallel-Plate Mass Exchangers under Uniform Wall Fluxes

[[abstract]]A permeable barrier was inserted to divide an open duct into two subchannels of uniform wall fluxes for conducting double-pass laminar countercurrent operations. The mass transfer rate of such a double-pass device was substantially improved and has been investigated theoretically by using an eigenfunction expansion in power series. The theoretical predictions of mass-transfer efficiency enhancement in double-pass parallel-plate mass exchangers were represented graphically and compared with those in an open duct of single-pass operation (without a permeable barrier inserted). The results show that the double-pass operation can effectively enhance the mass transfer efficiency and especially when the permeable-barrier position is appropriately adjusted.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]E

Marine protected areas in the coral triangle: progress, issues, and options

The six Coral Triangle countries-Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste-each have evolving systems of marine protected areas (MPAs) at the national and local levels. More than 1,900 MPAs covering 200,881 km (1.6% of the exclusive economic zone for the region) have been established within these countries over the last 40 years under legal mandates that range from village level traditional law to national legal frameworks that mandate the protection of large areas as MPAs. The focus of protection has been primarily on critical marine habitats and ecosystems, with a strong emphasis on maintaining and improving the status of near-shore fisheries, a primary food and economic resource in the region. This article brings together for the first time a consistent set of current data on MPAs for the six countries and reviews progress toward the establishment of MPAs in these countries with regard to (i) coverage of critical habitat (e.g., 17.8% of the coral reef habitat within the region lies within an MPA), (ii) areas under effective management, and (iii) actions needed to improve the implementation of MPAs as a marine conservation and resource management strategy. The contribution of MPAs to the Coral Triangle MPA System as called for in the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security Regional Plan of Action is clarified. Options for scaling up existing MPAs to networks of MPAs that are more ecologically linked and integrated with fisheries management and responsive to changing climate through the Coral Triangle MPA System development are discussed. A key point is the need to improve the effectiveness of existing MPAs, and plan in a manner leading to ecosystem-based management

The Coral Triangle Atlas: An Integrated Online Spatial Database System for Improving Coral Reef Management

In this paper we describe the construction of an online GIS database system, hosted by WorldFish, which stores bio-physical, ecological and socio-economic data for the ‘Coral Triangle Area’ in South-east Asia and the Pacific. The database has been built in partnership with all six (Timor-Leste, Malaysia, Indonesia, The Philippines, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea) of the Coral Triangle countries, and represents a valuable source of information for natural resource managers at the regional scale. Its utility is demonstrated using biophysical data, data summarising marine habitats, and data describing the extent of marine protected areas in the region

Determinants of quality, latency, and amount of Stack Overflow answers about recent Android APIs

Stack Overflow is a popular crowdsourced question and answer website for programming-related issues. It is an invaluable resource for software developers; on average, questions posted there get answered in minutes to an hour. Questions about well established topics, e.g., the coercion operator in C++, or the difference between canonical and class names in Java, get asked often in one form or another, and answered very quickly. On the other hand, questions on previously unseen or niche topics take a while to get a good answer. This is particularly the case with questions about current updates to or the introduction of new application programming interfaces (APIs). In a hyper-competitive online market, getting good answers to current programming questions sooner could increase the chances of an app getting released and used. So, can developers anyhow, e.g., hasten the speed to good answers to questions about new APIs? Here, we empirically study Stack Overflow questions pertaining to new Android APIs and their associated answers. We contrast the interest in these questions, their answer quality, and timeliness of their answers to questions about old APIs. We find that Stack Overflow answerers in general prioritize with respect to currentness: questions about new APIs do get more answers, but good quality answers take longer. We also find that incentives in terms of question bounties, if used appropriately, can significantly shorten the time and increase answer quality. Interestingly, no operationalization of bounty amount shows significance in our models. In practice, our findings confirm the value of bounties in enhancing expert participation. In addition, they show that the Stack Overflow style of crowdsourcing, for all its glory in providing answers about established programming knowledge, is less effective with new API questions

Mobility prediction in mobile ad hoc networks using a lightweight genetic algorithm

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes creating a network without using any existing infrastructure. Much research has been carried out to find out an optimal routing protocol for the successful transmission of data in this network. The main hindrance is the mobility of the network. If the mobility pattern of the network can be predicted, it will help in improving the QoS of the network. This paper discusses a novel approach to mobility prediction using movement history and existing concepts of genetic algorithms, to improve the MANET routing algorithms. The proposed lightweight genetic algorithm performs outlier removal on the basis of heuristics and parent selection using the weighted roulette wheel algorithm. After performing the genetic operations a node to node adjacency matrix is obtained from which the predicted direction of each node is calculated using force directed graphs and vector calculations. The technique proposes a new approach to mobility prediction which does not depend on probabilistic methods and which is completely based on genetic algorithms