Fighting Authorship Linkability with Crowdsourcing

Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or service reviews, is an important and increasingly popular type of content that is being used as a foundation of many trendy community-based reviewing sites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. Some recent results have shown that, due partly to their specialized/topical nature, sets of reviews authored by the same person are readily linkable based on simple stylometric features. In practice, this means that individuals who author more than a few reviews under different accounts (whether within one site or across multiple sites) can be linked, which represents a significant loss of privacy. In this paper, we start by showing that the problem is actually worse than previously believed. We then explore ways to mitigate authorship linkability in community-based reviewing. We first attempt to harness the global power of crowdsourcing by engaging random strangers into the process of re-writing reviews. As our empirical results (obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk) clearly demonstrate, crowdsourcing yields impressively sensible reviews that reflect sufficiently different stylometric characteristics such that prior stylometric linkability techniques become largely ineffective. We also consider using machine translation to automatically re-write reviews. Contrary to what was previously believed, our results show that translation decreases authorship linkability as the number of intermediate languages grows. Finally, we explore the combination of crowdsourcing and machine translation and report on the results

An environmental assessment of risk in achieving good environmental status to support regional prioritisation of management in Europe

The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) aims to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) in Europe's Seas. The requirement for regional sea authorities to identify and prioritise issues for management has meant that standardized methods to assess the current level of departure from GES are needed. The methodology presented here provides a means by which existing information describing the status of ecosystem components of a regional sea can be used to determine the effort required to achieve GES. A risk assessment framework was developed to score departure from GES for 10 out of the 11 GES descriptors, based on proposed definitions of 'good' status, and current knowledge of environmental status in each of the four regional seas (North-East Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea and Black Sea). This provides an approach for regional evaluation of environmental issues and national prioritisation of conservation objectives. Departure from GES definitions is described as 'high', 'moderate' or low' and the implications for management options and national policy decisions are discussed. While the criteria used in this study were developed specifically for application toward MSFD objectives, with modification the approach could be applied to evaluate other high-level social, economic or environmental objectives. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

ANALYSIS OF ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS IN THE BLACK SEA DURING THE LAST FOUR DECADES: A MODELLING STUDY

participantThis work investigates the Black Sea ecosystem and the changes it had undergone in the second half of the 20th century focusing on ecological interactions between ecosystem components using concepts derived from fundamental ecology coupled with ecological modelling. Different states of the Black Sea ecosystem were modelled using 5 mass-balance scenarios: Scenario 1, represents the quasi-pristine conditions of the Black Sea ecosystem during early 1960s; Scenario 2, represents the over-enrichment period of the ecosystem during early 1980s; Scenario 3, represents the changes in the ecosystem along with the outburst of Mnemiopsis in 1989; Scenario 4, represents the aftermath effects in the Black Sea ecosystem just after the collapse of the fisheries; and Scenario 5, represents the recovery period of the fish stocks in the very beginning of 1990s. According to the findings, from a healthy ecological state in early 1960s, the Black Sea ecosystem outgrew to a vulnerable state in 1980s. In this new state, a great proportion of system production ended in dead-end groups indicating the vulnerability of the system to perturbations due to its poor “ecological health”. In 1989, the balance of the ecosystem was disturbed due to the continuous development of favourable conditions for the outburst of Mnemiopsis via over-exploitation of dominant fish groups. The loss in the system production fell short for the development of two dominant groups in the ecosystem and shifted the balance of the system in favour of Mnemiopsis because of its high growth rate and exhausting reproductive capacity

Current state of overfishing and its regional differences in the Black Sea

Long-term (1950-2006) changes of fish landings in combination with some ecosystem indicators are used to evaluate the status and sustainability of the Black Sea fishery. Following the depletion of large pelagic predator and demersal fish stocks during the 1950-1960s, the main fishery was targetted on small and medium pelagics that declined abruptly to similar to 200 kton (kton 10(3) t) at 1989-1991 after a highly productive (similar to 750 kton) but overfished state in the 1980s. Thereafter, total landings in all the Black Sea countries except Turkey remained at most 10% level of the previous phase. For Turkey, only the low cost anchovy fishery was able to maintain at the mean catch size of 368 +/- 74 kton for 1992-2006 that however represented roughly twice of the maximum sustainable catch. The absence of fish within the western, eastern and northern regions and the presence of only a fluctuating heavily exploited anchovy fishery in the southern region during the last 20 years demand an immediate common ecosystem-based fishery management policy and actions by all the coastal states

The effect of Bacillus sp. OSU-142 inoculation at various levels of nitrogen fertilization on growth, tuber distribution and yield of potato (Solanum tuberosum L.)

No Abstrac

From science to policy A road map for a sustainable resource management in Turkey's marine EEZs

This study provides a scientific base for Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) decisions for Turkey’s exclusive economic zones in the Black Sea, the Marmara Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. For this aim, an interdisciplinary holistic approach is employed to explore the linkages and feedbacks between changing national societal and economic needs, managerial decisions, environmental pressures and the health of regional marine ecosystems through derived socioeconomic and ecological indicators from statistical and field data as well as Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) model results. Results quantified the level of human induced pressures driven by increasing societal and economic demands due to human population increase, national economic crises and corresponded governmental subsidies. Cumulative effects of these pressures together with changing climatic conditions deteriorated the marine resources and, as a consequence, limited the socio-economic services provided by ecosystems (e.g. nation-wide decreases in weight (-47%) and value (-37%) of landings, economic profitability (-61%) and per capita fish consumption (-29%) over the last decade). Even though the pressures increased correspondingly in all the marine regions, their consequences in the regional marine ecosystems realized differently. Observed trends in socioeconomic and ecologic indicators and past and future model scenario simulations done by Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) model provided region-specific optimum EBFM options. Research results were synthesized specific to each responsible stakeholder groups and communicated by means of regional stakeholder meetings, project web-side, social and national media and scientific platforms. Present study is expected to increase the stakeholders’ awareness for sustainable, responsible resource co-management and will be integrated into decision-making processes and serve as a model case study

An indicator-based evaluation of Black Sea food web dynamics during 1960-2000

Four Ecopath mass-balance models were implemented for evaluating the structure and function of the Black Sea ecosystem using several ecological indicators during four distinctive periods (1960s, 1980-1987, 1988-1994 and 1995-2000). The results exemplify how the Black Sea ecosystem structure started to change after the 1960s as a result of a series of trophic transformations, i.e., shifts in the energy flow pathways through the food web. These transformations were initiated by anthropogenic factors, such as eutrophication and overfishing, that led to the transfer of large quantities of energy to the trophic dead-end species, which had no natural predators in the ecosystem, i.e., jellyfish whose biomass increased from 0.03 g C m −2 in 1960-1969 to 0.933 g C m −2 in 1988-1994. Concurrently, an alternative short pathway for energy transfer was formed that converted significant amounts of system production back to detritus. This decreased the transfer efficiency of energy flow from the primary producers to the higher trophic levels from 9% in the 1960s to 3% between 1980 and 1987. We conclude that the anchovy stock collapse and successful establishment of the alien comb-jelly Mnemiopsis in 1989 were rooted in the trophic interactions in the food web, all of which were exacerbated because of the long-term establishment of a combination of anthropogenic stressors