The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report

Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change

Biomodd [LDNw]

Biomodd [LDNw] was a 4-day Biomodd workshop held at Create Space London (Chesterfield House), UK, from 24 July 2015 until 27 July 2015. It was co-facilitated by Angelo Vermeulen, Diego Maranan, and Pieter Steyaert; produced by the Biomodd London chapter; and co-created by twelve workshop participants from a variety of fields--design, architecture, permaculture, computational arts, visual arts, and political studies, among others. The exhibited opened 27 July 2015, 6:30 pm-10:00pm, at Chesterfield House. The series of installations from the 3-day course integrates plants, technology, and people in order to challenge presumed notions of opposition between nature and technology. In Biomodd, nature and technology are fused into hybrid art installations in different cultures throughout the world. Computer networks, built from upcycled computer components, are provided with internal living ecosystems. In a symbiotic exchange, plants and algae live alongside electronics and use the waste heat to thrive. Biomodd installations have been co-created by curious minds in communities all over the planet including the Philippines, Slovenia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, New York, Germany, and Kosovo

Low-power, low-penalty, flip-chip integrated, 10Gb/s ring-based 1V CMOS photonics transmitter

Modulation with 7.5dB transmitter penalty is demonstrated from a novel 1.5Vpp differential CMOS driver flip-chip integrated with a Si ring modulator, consuming 350fJ/bit from a single 1V supply at bit rates up to 10Gb/s

Low-power, 10-Gbps 1.5-Vpp differential CMOS driver for a silicon electro-optic ring modulator

We present a novel driver circuit enabling electro-optic modulation with high extinction ratio from a co-designed silicon ring modulator. The driver circuit provides an asymmetric differential output at 10Gbps with a voltage swing up to 1.5V(pp) from a single 1.0V supply, maximizing the resonance-wavelength shift of depletion-type ring modulators while avoiding carrier injection. A test chip containing 4 reconfigurable driver circuits was fabricated in 40nm CMOS technology. The measured energy consumption for driving a 100fF capacitive load at 10Gbps was as low as 125fJ/bit and 220fJ/bit at 1V(pp) and 1.5V(pp) respectively. After flip-chip integration with ring modulators on a silicon-photonics chip, the power consumption was measured to be 210fJ/bit and 350fJ/bit respectively

Special issue: Innovations in farming systems approaches: Introduction

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Predictability of marine nematode biodiversity

In this paper, we investigated: (1) the predictability of different aspects of biodiversity, (2) the effect of spatial autocorrelation on the predictability and (3) the environmental variables affecting the biodiversity of free-living marine nematodes on the Belgian Continental Shelf. An extensive historical database of free-living marine nematodes was employed to model different aspects of biodiversity: species richness, evenness, and taxonomic diversity. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), often considered as “black boxes”, were applied as a modeling tool. Three methods were used to reveal these “black boxes” and to identify the contributions of each environmental variable to the diversity indices. Since spatial autocorrelation is known to introduce bias in spatial analyses, Moran's I was used to test the spatial dependency of the diversity indices and the residuals of the model. The best predictions were made for evenness. Although species richness was quite accurately predicted as well, the residuals indicated a lack of performance of the model. Pure taxonomic diversity shows high spatial variability and is difficult to model. The biodiversity indices show a strong spatial dependency, opposed to the residuals of the models, indicating that the environmental variables explain the spatial variability of the diversity indices adequately. The most important environmental variables structuring evenness are clay and sand fraction, and the minimum annual total suspended matter. Species richness is also affected by the intensity of sand extraction and the amount of gravel of the sea bed

Prediction of super-secondary structure in α-helical and β-barrel transmembrane proteins

International audienceA dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to predict the structure of different families of proteins and is tested with the b-barrel transmembrane proteins.Un algorithme est proposé qui permet, par programmation dynamique, de prédire la strucutre de différentes familles de protéines. Il est testé sur les proteeines transmembranaires (beta)