24,414 research outputs found
"So bigge as bigge may be": tracking size and shape change in domestic livestock in London (AD 1220-1900)
This study presents the analysis of 7966 individual cattle, sheep, pig and domestic hen bone measurements from 105 sites excavated in London dating to the period AD 1220–1900. Multiple episodes of size change are identified, although the speed and timing varies by species. The earliest evidence for size change in cattle and sheep occurs in the early 14th century and may be connected to the need to restock livestock populations following the outbreaks of murrain in the first half of that century. Subsequent size increases in livestock size may have occurred as a combined consequence of agricultural innovations in the wake of the Black Death, the increasing commercialisation of animal farming, as the meat requirements of an expanding London grew, and the rise of the ethic of improvement
An experimental design approach to the chemical characterisation of pectin polysaccharides extracted from Cucumis melo Inodorus
Extracted pectins have been utilised in a number of applications in both the food and pharmaceutical industries where they are generally used as gelling agents, thickeners and stabilisers, although a number of pectins have been shown to be bioactive. These functional properties will depend upon extraction conditions.
A statistical experimental design approach was used to study the effects of extraction conditions pH, time and temperature on pectins extracted from Cucumis melo Inodorus.
The results show that the chemical composition is very sensitive to these conditions and that this has a great influence on for example the degree of branching. Higher temperatures, lower pHs and longer extraction times lead to a loss of the more acid labile arabinofuranose residues present on the pectin side chain. The fitting of regression equations relating yield and composition to extraction conditions can therefore lead to tailor-made pectins for specific properties and/ or applications
Place of death in the Morecambe Bay area : patterns and preferences for place of final care and death among terminally ill cancer patients and their carers.
Monodromy Substitutions and Rational Blowdowns
We introduce several new families of relations in the mapping class groups of
planar surfaces, each equating two products of right-handed Dehn twists. The
interest of these relations lies in their geometric interpretation in terms of
rational blowdowns of 4-manifolds, specifically via monodromy substitution in
Lefschetz fibrations. The simplest example is the lantern relation, already
shown by the first author and Gurtas to correspond to rational blowdown along a
-4 sphere; here we give relations that extend that result to realize the
"generalized" rational blowdowns of Fintushel-Stern and Park by monodromy
subsitution, as well as several of the families of rational blowdowns
discovered by Stipsicz-Szab\'o-Wahl.Comment: 28 pages, many figures. v2: minor edits; this version accepted for
publication in Journal of Topolog
Deploying Jupyter Notebooks at scale on XSEDE resources for Science Gateways and workshops
Jupyter Notebooks have become a mainstream tool for interactive computing in
every field of science. Jupyter Notebooks are suitable as companion
applications for Science Gateways, providing more flexibility and
post-processing capability to the users. Moreover they are often used in
training events and workshops to provide immediate access to a pre-configured
interactive computing environment. The Jupyter team released the JupyterHub web
application to provide a platform where multiple users can login and access a
Jupyter Notebook environment. When the number of users and memory requirements
are low, it is easy to setup JupyterHub on a single server. However, setup
becomes more complicated when we need to serve Jupyter Notebooks at scale to
tens or hundreds of users. In this paper we will present three strategies for
deploying JupyterHub at scale on XSEDE resources. All options share the
deployment of JupyterHub on a Virtual Machine on XSEDE Jetstream. In the first
scenario, JupyterHub connects to a supercomputer and launches a single node job
on behalf of each user and proxies back the Notebook from the computing node
back to the user's browser. In the second scenario, implemented in the context
of a XSEDE consultation for the IRIS consortium for Seismology, we deploy
Docker in Swarm mode to coordinate many XSEDE Jetstream virtual machines to
provide Notebooks with persistent storage and quota. In the last scenario we
install the Kubernetes containers orchestration framework on Jetstream to
provide a fault-tolerant JupyterHub deployment with a distributed filesystem
and capability to scale to thousands of users. In the conclusion section we
provide a link to step-by-step tutorials complete with all the necessary
commands and configuration files to replicate these deployments.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced
Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US
Invasive Diseases and Fruit Tree Production: Economic Tradeoffs of Citrus Greening Control on Florida's Citrus Industry
An investment model of Florida oranges was used to evaluate various management strategies for controlling Huanglongbing, or citrus greening, a highly destructive disease. This analysis will enable the Florida citrus industry to make more informed decisions about the economic tradeoffs among current citrus greening management alternatives.Crop Production/Industries,
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