Impact of the Kuroshio intrusion on the nutrient inventory in the upper northern South China Sea: insights from an isopycnal mixing model

Based on four cruises covering a seasonal cycle in 2009-2011, we examined the impact of the Kuroshio intrusion, featured by extremely oligotrophic waters, on the nutrient inventory in the central northern South China Sea (NSCS). The nutrient inventory in the upper 100m of the water column in the study area ranged from similar to 200 to similar to 290 mmol m(-2) for N+N (nitrate plus nitrite), from similar to 13 to similar to 24 mmol m(-2) for soluble reactive phosphate and from similar to 210 to similar to 430 mmol m(-2) for silicic acid. The nutrient inventory showed a clear seasonal pattern with the highest value appearing in summer, while the N+N inventory in spring and winter had a reduction of similar to 13 and similar to 30 %, respectively, relative to that in summer. To quantify the extent of the Kuroshio intrusion, an isopycnal mixing model was adopted to derive the proportional contribution of water masses from the SCS proper and the Kuroshio along individual isopycnal surfaces. The derived mixing ratio along the isopycnal plane was then employed to predict the genuine gradients of nutrients under the assumption of no biogeochemical alteration. These predicted nutrient concentrations, denoted as N-m, are solely determined by water mass mixing. Results showed that the nutrient inventory in the upper 100m of the NSCS was overall negatively correlated to the Kuroshio water fraction, suggesting that the Kuroshio intrusion significantly influenced the nutrient distribution in the SCS and its seasonal variation. The difference between the observed nutrient concentrations and their corresponding Nm allowed us to further quantify the nutrient removal/addition associated with the biogeochemical processes on top of the water mass mixing. We revealed that the nutrients in the upper 100m of the water column had a net consumption in both winter and spring but a net addition in fall.Based on four cruises covering a seasonal cycle in 2009-2011, we examined the impact of the Kuroshio intrusion, featured by extremely oligotrophic waters, on the nutrient inventory in the central northern South China Sea (NSCS). The nutrient inventory in the upper 100m of the water column in the study area ranged from similar to 200 to similar to 290 mmol m(-2) for N+N (nitrate plus nitrite), from similar to 13 to similar to 24 mmol m(-2) for soluble reactive phosphate and from similar to 210 to similar to 430 mmol m(-2) for silicic acid. The nutrient inventory showed a clear seasonal pattern with the highest value appearing in summer, while the N+N inventory in spring and winter had a reduction of similar to 13 and similar to 30 %, respectively, relative to that in summer. To quantify the extent of the Kuroshio intrusion, an isopycnal mixing model was adopted to derive the proportional contribution of water masses from the SCS proper and the Kuroshio along individual isopycnal surfaces. The derived mixing ratio along the isopycnal plane was then employed to predict the genuine gradients of nutrients under the assumption of no biogeochemical alteration. These predicted nutrient concentrations, denoted as N-m, are solely determined by water mass mixing. Results showed that the nutrient inventory in the upper 100m of the NSCS was overall negatively correlated to the Kuroshio water fraction, suggesting that the Kuroshio intrusion significantly influenced the nutrient distribution in the SCS and its seasonal variation. The difference between the observed nutrient concentrations and their corresponding Nm allowed us to further quantify the nutrient removal/addition associated with the biogeochemical processes on top of the water mass mixing. We revealed that the nutrients in the upper 100m of the water column had a net consumption in both winter and spring but a net addition in fall

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

An Intimate Neighborhood, Care living for Aged People

The purpose of the project is to understand how care is provided to aged people in today’s context, and discuss how care environment should be designed in order to fit in with today’s demands. The intention of design is to create an care living environment that offer several gradients of privacy so that it could suit the need of different aged group. The project also tries to find a proper position to its existing context, the Schilderswijk in Den Haag, by introducing a proper building scale. A passage was also created which links this new project to the existing neighborhood.Architecture and The Built EnvironmentArchitectur

Supporting Human-Machine Interaction in Ship Collision Avoidance Systems

Ship collision is a classical problem for maritime practitioners and researchers. Human error is a major cause of collision accidents, which motivates researchers to develop automation systems replacing navigators on board. However, before autonomous ships fully replace conventional ships, supporting the situational awareness of human operators is still a rigid demand. Moreover, how to prevent automation performing out of the human’s expectations (e.g., violation of regulations) is another challenge. Therefore, the design of human-machine interactions (HMIs) becomes crucial. This dissertation developed the Human-Machine Interaction oriented Collision Avoidance System (HMI-CAS) that allows human operators and automation to share their intelligence. Specifically, the HMI-CAS not only offers one (optimal) solution to human operators but also visualizes the solution space with both dangerous solutions and feasible solutions. Thus, the decision process of automation becomes transparent for human operators. The human operators can not only read and understand the solutions offered by the machine but also validate and modify the solutions via the interface of the HMI-CAS. Without human interventions, the HMI-CAS also can work automatically. Moreover, to support the humans take evasive action in time, the measure of collision risk utilizing a concept called “room-for-maneuver” is proposed, which offers alerts before collisions become inevitable.In brief, instead of replacing humans on board, the proposed HMI-CAS aims at bridging the intelligence of humans and machines, which enriches the choice of collision avoidance systems for supporting human operators and for developing autonomous ships. Safety and Security Scienc

Automated Simulation Model Generation

One of today's challenges in the field of modeling and simulation is to model increasingly larger and more complex systems. Complex models take long to develop and incur high costs. With the advances in data collection technologies and more popular use of computer-aided systems, more data has become available in many organizations. This often allows for and requires a certain degree of automation in modeling. The research presented in this dissertation studied how to automatically generate simulation models. The method proposed uses domain specific model components as building blocks for model generation and applies graph transformation based algorithms to compose large simulation models according to the existing data. The method has been applied practically in the domain of light-rail transportation.Multi Actor SystemsTechnology, Policy and Managemen

"Eroding on the edges": Integration Stategy for Western Fringe of Xi'An City as a supportive urban tissue in Mega City Plan 2020+

The project focuses on how to combine the current corridor development and the cultural & historic assets by means of the public space network, in order to counteract the fragmentation at the local level and meanwhile benefit the local inhabitants of western fringe of Xi’an City, supplementing the governmental city model.Studio: complex citiesUrbanismArchitectur

Incremental nonlinear control of hydraulic parallel robots: An application to the SIMONA research simulator

In advanced robotic applications such as robotic locomotion, vehicle and flight simulators, and material test devices, there are higher requirements on stiffness, robustness and power ability for the mechanical structure and the actuator. Hence, it is common for such applications to use parallel manipulators and hydraulic actuators, due to their advantages in these aspects over their counterparts of serialmanipulators and electrical actuators. When high-precision motion control is required for such systems, advanced model-based controllers, including feedback linearization and adaptive control, have been proposed in state-of-the-art studies for both hydraulic and parallel mechanical systems. However, the high complexity, nonlinearity and model uncertainty of these systems raise significant challenges for their motion control accuracy.Control & Simulatio

Exploiting Embedding in Content-Based Recommender systems

XING is a leading career-oriented social networking site in Europe, which usually recommend job ads to their customers. One of the widely used methods in Recomender Systems is content-based filtering, which analyzes the description of item characteristics and the user profile illustrating user's preferences. Due to the sparsity of its dataset, i.e. many job postings are rarely interacted with, XING has been using content-based recommender system to promote the quality of the recommendations. Recent word embedding technique learns semantically meaningful representations for words from co-occurrence in sentences, which enables the effective comparison between words. Based on the Word2Vec technique, XING represents job postings by the average embedding over words they contain. This study explores three alternative methods to represent job postings for the task of recommending jobs to users. In the first experiment, we explore whether the use of a subset of words is more effective to represent the job postings. In the second experiment, instead of averaging over word embeddings, we directly learn document embeddings using Paragraph2Vec. And finally, the third experiment uses Word Mover's Distance to estimate the similarity between job postings. Our experiments show that the embeddings that are learned with Paragraph2Vec result in a better estimation of which job postings are similar, but only when high-dimensional settings are used. The Word Mover's Distance algorithm is computationally expensive, therefore we use existing lower-bounds that allowed us to complete a small-scale experiment within the available time. The results indicate that Word Mover's Distance is not as effective as the average over word embeddings and Paragraph2Vec. In the final part of this thesis, we present the Link2Vec, a novel item representation method based on Word2Vec, which learns semantic representations for items based on the context surrounding the hyperlinks that refer to the item, e.g. hyperlinks to the item's Wikipedia page. Our experiments show that the effectiveness of the embeddings learned with Link2Vec improves with the amount of training data. For the evaluation on the MovieLens dataset, we only obtained a limited set of hyperlinks, which resulted in results that approximate a baseline that uses the average over word embeddings.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer ScienceIntelligent System

Effect of freeze-thaw cycles on shear resistance of reinforced concrete beams strengthened with UHPFRC

Ultra-high performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) has emerged as one of the promising materials for strengthening of concrete structures. For the strengthening application of UHPFRC, one of the primary concerns is to evaluate the degradation of bond behavior and structural re-sponse of strengthened elements under harsh environmental conditions. Therefore, an experi-mental program has been carried out to investigate the interfacial behavior between UHPFRC and normal concrete, as well as the shear performance of UHPFRC-concrete hybrid beams subjected to combined freeze-thaw cycles and mechanical load. In this study, two groups of shear-deficient reinforced concrete beams were first strengthened by UHPFRC precast panels using epoxy resin. Then, the specimens subjected to 0 and 30 freeze-thaw cycles were loaded to failure under three-point bending. The results indicate that the utilization of epoxy resin is an effective bonding tech-nique to ensure the integral performance of the composite beams and the shear capacity is greatly enhanced with the application of UHPFRC. In addition, it is observed that the effect of applied freeze-thaw regime on the UHPFRC-concrete interfacial bond strength and shear resistance of unstrengthened and strengthened beams is negligible.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Concrete Structure