Data report: Seismic structure beneath the North Cascadia drilling transect of IODP Expedition 311

Between 1999 and 2004, new seismic data became available for the study of gas hydrates on the northern Cascadia margin. These data consist of multi- and single-channel data with two- and partly three-dimensional subsurface coverage and were acquired and used in support of the proposal for Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 311 carried out in 2005. The working area lies across the continental slope off the coast of central Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, with water depths ranging from 2600 m in the trench to 500 m on the upper slope, where it is well above the minimum depth for gas hydrate stability. This paper gives the details of the data acquisition and conventional processing and then focuses on describing the new data at six individual sites along a transect across the gas hydrate zone. Five of the sites were drilled during the Expedition 311. The transect of sites commences at the almost undeformed incoming sediments seaward of the region where gas hydrates are observed; these ocean basin sediments were drilled at a site 40 km southeast during Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 146. The transect continues up the continental slope into the area of hydrate stability, with a site on top of the frontal accretionary ridge where normal faulting indicates margin parallel extension; a site in the first slope basin overlying a buried ridge near a reflectivity wipe-out zone; a site adjacent to Site 889 of Leg 146 and therefore acting as a tie hole; the most landward site at the shallowest end of the hydrate stability field; and a cold vent site at one of several blank zones close to a bright spot region in the seismic records

Gas hydrate concentration estimates from chlorinity, electrical resistivity and seismic velocity

Gas hydrate beneath the N. Cascadia continental slope off Vancouver Island occurs as a regional diffuse layer above the BSR and as local high concentrations in large vent or upwelling structures. Regional concentrations of gas hydrate beneath the N. Cascadia continental slope off Vancouver Island have been estimated earlier using multichannel seismic, seafloor electrical, and IODP Leg 146 downhole data. The concentrations of between 15 and 30% of pore saturation in a 100 m thick layer above the BSR are much higher than estimated elsewhere where there is good data, especially the Blake Ridge and central Cascadia off Oregon on ODP Leg 204. Although both of these other studies involved different sediment environments, a careful re-evaluation of the N. Cascadia estimates seemed desirable. We have re-evaluated the methods used to calculate the gas hydrate concentrations from pore-water chlorinity (salinity), electrical resistivity, and seismic velocity, describing in detail the assumptions and uncertainties. Use of the pore-water chlorinity/salinity and electrical resistivity directly have low reliability because of the effect on the no-hydrate reference of hydrate formation and dissociation, and the effect of pore fluid freshening by clay dehydration. At ODP Site 889/890 hydrate concentrations range from 5–10% to 30–40%, depending on the no-hydrate reference salinity used. Use of core salinity data along with the downhole and seafloor electrical resistivity data allows calculation of both the in situ reference salinity and the hydrate concentrations. The most important uncertainty in this method is the relation between resistivity and porosity, i.e., Archie’s Law parameters. Significantly different relations were determined from the ODP Leg 146 core and downhole log data, the log data resistivity-porosity relation giving much lower concentrations. Finally, seismic velocities from sonic-logs and multichannel data can be used to calculate gas hydrate concentrations, if an appropriate no-hydrate velocity-depth profile can be estimated. A velocity-hydrate concentration relation is also required. Depending on which no-hydrate/no-gas velocity baseline is used, estimated hydrate concentrations range from as low as 5% to above 25% saturation. In spite of having three nearly independent methods of estimating hydrate concentrations, it is concluded that the data allow regional concentrations in the 100 m layer above the BSR from less than 5% to over 25% saturation (3-13% of sediment volume). ODP drilling in the region scheduled for the fall of 2005 should help resolve the uncertainties

Organizational Chart Inference

Nowadays, to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a new family of online social networks has been adopted in many companies, which are called the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). ESNs can provide employees with various professional services to help them deal with daily work issues. Meanwhile, employees in companies are usually organized into different hierarchies according to the relative ranks of their positions. The company internal management structure can be outlined with the organizational chart visually, which is normally confidential to the public out of the privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we want to study the IOC (Inference of Organizational Chart) problem to identify company internal organizational chart based on the heterogeneous online ESN launched in it. IOC is very challenging to address as, to guarantee smooth operations, the internal organizational charts of companies need to meet certain structural requirements (about its depth and width). To solve the IOC problem, a novel unsupervised method Create (ChArT REcovEr) is proposed in this paper, which consists of 3 steps: (1) social stratification of ESN users into different social classes, (2) supervision link inference from managers to subordinates, and (3) consecutive social classes matching to prune the redundant supervision links. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world online ESN dataset demonstrate that Create can perform very well in addressing the IOC problem.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. The paper is accepted by KDD 201

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases

Data report: A downhole electrical resistivity study of northern Cascadia marine gas hydrate

Downhole electrical resistivity measurements can be exploited for gas hydrate concentration estimates. However, to do so requires that several assumptions be made, in particular about in situ pore water salinity and porosity. During Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 311, electrical resistivity was measured in four boreholes along a transect across the northern Cascadia margin, offshore Vancouver Island, Canada. Logging-while-rilling and conventional wireline logging data of resistivity, density, and neutron-porosity are used together with measurements of porosity and pore water salinity of the recovered core to systematically estimate gas hydrate concentrations at these four sites. Using Ar- chie’s law, empirical parameters a and m are determined from gas hydrate–free zones by means of a Pickett plot. The in situ salinity baseline trend for each site was estimated directly from the measured pore water salinity values, as well as indirectly by calculating the trend using Archie’s law and simultaneously solving for gas hydrate saturation and in situ salinity. Results showed that the in situ salinities at Sites U1325, U1326, and U1329 were well determined from a smooth trend through the highest measured salinity values of the recovered core. Only Site U1327 exhibitsstrongly decreasing pore water salinity, reaching 22‰ at the base of the gas hydrate stability field. This regional low salinity requires special analyses to estimate gas hydrate concentration from resistivity and introduces a large uncertainty. It is suggested that the decreased salinity results largely (90%) from a deeper fresh water source with the remaining freshening being the result of dissociation of pervasive gas hydrate (~3% of the pore space). Considering estimates from density porosity to be the most accurate, gas hydrate saturations average ~9% ± 7% at Site U1326, ~10% ± 7% at Site U1325, and 11% ± 7% at Site U1327 over the entire range of gas hydrate occurrence. No significant gas hydrate is inferred at Site U1329, although small am ounts may be present just above the bottom-simulating reflector. In two localized zones at Site U1326 (60–100 mbsf [meters below seafloor]) and Site U1327 (120–150 mbsf), significantly higher gas hydrate concentrations of >30% of the pore space were encountered

Stochastic Feedback and the Regulation of Biological Rhythms

We propose a general approach to the question of how biological rhythms spontaneously self-regulate, based on the concept of ``stochastic feedback''. We illustrate this approach by considering the neuroautonomic regulation of the heart rate. The model generates complex dynamics and successfully accounts for key characteristics of cardiac variability, including the $1/f$ power spectrum, the functional form and scaling of the distribution of variations, and correlations in the Fourier phases. Our results suggest that in healthy systems the control mechanisms operate to drive the system away from extreme values while not allowing it to settle down to a constant output.Comment: 15 pages, latex2e using rotate and epsf, with 4 ps figures. Submitted to PR

The fate of fluids released from subducting slab in northern Cascadia

Large amounts of water carried down in subduction zones are driven upward into the overlying forearc upper mantle and crust as increasing temperatures and pressure dehydrate the subducting crust. Through seismic tomography velocities we show (a) the overlying forearc mantle in northern Cascadia is hydrated to serpentinite, and (b) there is low Poisson's ratio at the base of the forearc lower crust that may represent silica deposited from the rising fluids. From the velocities observed in the forearc mantle, the volume of serpentinite estimated is ∼30 %. This mechanically weak hydrated forearc region has important consequences in limits to great earthquakes and to collision tectonics. An approximately 10 km thick lower crustal layer of low Poisson's ratio (σ = 0.22) in the forearc is estimated to represent a maximum addition of ∼14 % by volume of quartz (σ = 0.09). If this quartz is removed from rising silica-saturated fluids over long times, it represents a significant addition of silica to the continental crust and an important contributor to its average composition