Olga Diego: transgressive architecture

Olga Diego Freises (Alicante 1969) estudió Bellas Artes en las facultades de Valencia (Universidad Politécnica) y de Altea (Universidad Miguel Hernández) y se tituló en esta última el 2006. Sin embargo su actividad artística empezó antes del ingreso en la facultad (los primeros trabajos reseñables son de mitad de los noventa) y su obra es bastante independiente de la enseñanza reglada. Esta obra comprende la acción, la escultura, el dibujo, el vídeo y la fotografía. En principio, acciones y esculturas serían las dos actividades principales, mientras que dibujos, vídeos y fotografías estarían planteados, sobre todo, como estudio y documentación de acciones y de esculturas. De hecho, ella misma dice que “la escultura es, desde el principio, mi especialidad y donde me resulta más fácil moverme”, como también: “de la performance me interesa la inmediatez en la transmisión de la idea, posibilitando la emoción artística con los espectadores en el mismo momento de ser creada” y también que: “el dibujo es la disciplina con la que disfruto, el momento de idear y desarrollar los proyectos mediante bocetos.” (Diego 2011) Pero el trabajo artístico de Olga Diego en estos cinco campos está absolutamente interrelacionado y en todos ellos resulta profundamente sugerente, crítico e innovador. “Lirismo y profundidad poética” son adjetivos que se han aplicado a su obra de forma acertada. (Rodríguez 2011) Veinte años de trabajo intenso y continuado han originado una obra sólida, abundante, atractiva, sumamente inquietante, de una parte de la cual, aquella que tiene que ver con la representación y el uso del cuerpo humano, haremos a continuación una reseña y una propuesta de lectura, de estudio y de interpretación. Podemos avanzar que la obra de Olga participa de la rebelión, del humor y de la sorpresa, pero a menudo encontramos también en ella la deformación y el dolor propios de muchos dramas humanos contemporáneos, individuales y colectivos

Arctic Acoustic Environments – Federating observations and analyses with the International Quiet Ocean Experiment

Arctic waters are experiencing rapid changes due to global warming, affecting ecosystems and leading to increasing economic activities. Many of these changes can be measured directly or indirectly with underwater acoustics. The Working Group on the Arctic Acoustic Environment (AAE) of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE) aims to stimulate observations of sound (levels and distribution) in the Arctic Ocean and its impacts. We organised a virtual conference in November 2020 to share recent results from the international community and discuss common issues and possible solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified the challenges of Arctic deployments and recoveries, curtailing access to ships at very short notice, but also opening the way for more direct collaboration. The post-COVID task will be to establish more resilient international back-up mechanisms for Arctic operations to support acoustic (and other) observations. The increasing length of the measurements, spanning several decades now, with sampling rates often close to 100,000 samples/second, results in “big data” challenges of storage, sharing, data retrieval and long-term archiving. Discussions also addressed the emerging trends in acoustic propagation models across complex terrains and machine learning (with the need for accessibility and traceability). Finally, the embedding of local and traditional knowledge must be accomplished through dialogue and co-ownership of the science and results

Ocean data publication cookbook

This cookbook is an outcome of the 5th session of the SCOR/IODE/MBLWHOI Library Workshop on Data Publication and is posted here by permission of UNESCO.Executive summary: This “Cookbook” has been written for data managers and librarians who are interested in assigning a permanent identifier to a dataset for the purposes of publishing that dataset online and for the citation of that dataset within the scientific literature. A formal publishing process adds value to the dataset for the data originators as well as for future users of the data. Value may be added by providing an indication of the scientific quality and importance of the dataset (as measured through a process of peer review), and by ensuring that the dataset is complete, frozen and has enough supporting metadata and other information to allow it to be used by others. Publishing a dataset also implies a commitment to persistence of the data and allows data producers to obtain academic credit for their work in creating the datasets. One form of persistent identifier is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). A DOI is a character string (a "digital identifier") used to provide a unique identity of an object such as an electronic document. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI provides more stable linking than simply referring to it by its URL, because if its URL changes, the publisher need only update the metadata for the DOI to link to the new URL. A DOI may be obtained for a variety of objects, including documents, data files and images. The assignment of DOIs to peer-reviewed journal articles has become commonplace. This cookbook provides a step-by-step guide to the data publication process and showcases some best practices for data publication

A new approach to data publication in ocean sciences

Data are collected from ocean sciences activities that range from a single investigator working in a laboratory to large teams of scientists cooperating on big, multinational, global ocean research projects. What these activities have in common is that all result in data, some of which are used as the basis for publications in peer-reviewed journals. However, two major problems regarding data remain. First, many data valuable for understanding ocean physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and how the oceans operate in the Earth system are never archived or made accessible to other scientists. Data underlying traditional journal articles are often difficult to obtain. Second, when scientists do contribute data to databases, their data become freely available, with little acknowledgment and no contribution to their career advancement. To address these problems, stronger ties must be made between data repositories and academic journals, and a “digital backbone” needs to be created for data related to journal publications

SCOR/IODE/MBLWHOI Library collaboration on data publication [poster] 

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. Accepted by the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 13-17, 2011, Ottawa, CanadaThis poster describes the development of international standards to publish oceanographic datasets. Research areas include the assignment of persistent identifiers, tracking provenance, linking datasets to publications, attributing credit to data providers, and best practices for the physical composition and semantic description of the content.Funding provided by the George Frederick Jewett Foundation

Emerging Role of Librarians in Data Publication

Purpose: This poster demonstrates the procedures and tools developed to deposit datasets in an Institutional Repository (IR) and assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Setting/Participants/Resources: This research is being conducted by a team of librarians, data managers and scientists that are collaborating with representatives from the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). The goal is to identify best practices for tracking data provenance and clearly attributing credit to data collectors/providers. Description: Current literature on the topic of data publication suggests that success is best achieved when there is a partnership between scientists, data managers, and librarians. The Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MBLWHOI) Library and the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) have developed tools and processes to automate the ingestion of metadata from BCO-DMO for deposit with datasets into the Institutional Repository (IR) Woods Hole Open Access Server (WHOAS). The system also incorporates functionality for BCO-DMO to request a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) from the Library. This partnership allows the Library to work with a trusted data repository to ensure high quality data while the data repository utilizes library services and is assured of a permanent archive of the copy of the data extracted from the repository database. While the WHOI Data Library and Archives has long been recognized as a valuable local resource, this project is an example of an important new role for the facility in providing the essential service of scientific data publication. The diversity and volume of modern research data sets precludes their publication in the peer reviewed journals that are the currency of scientific research. The process of developing the initial publication system required active engagement of the research community and the working system provides a valuable resource that supports networked science by improving access to data, enabling accurate reuse of data and facilitating proper citation of data resources. Results/Outcome: The assignment of persistent identifiers enables accurate data citation. The Library can assign a DOI to appropriate datasets deposited in WHOAS. A primary activity is working with authors to deposit datasets associated with published articles. The DOI would ideally be assigned before submission and be included in the published paper so readers can link directly to the dataset, but DOIs are also being assigned to datasets related to articles after publication. WHOAS metadata records link the article to the datasets and the datasets to the article. The assignment of DOIs has enabled another important collaboration with Elsevier, publisher of educational and professional science journals. Elsevier can now link from articles in the Science Direct database to the datasets available from WHOAS that are related to that article. The data associated with the article are freely available from WHOAS and accompanied by a Dublin Core metadata record. In addition, the Library has worked with researchers to deposit datasets in WHOAS that are not appropriate for national, international, or domain specific data repositories. These datasets currently include audio, text and image files. Related Publications: http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewDocumentRecord&docID=2457 http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewDocumentRecord&docID=5437 http://www.iode.org/index.php?option=com_oe&task=viewDocumentRecord&docID=8098 http://tw.rpi.edu/proj/portal.wiki/images/3/3b/JewettSummary.pd

Urban agriculture: a global analysis of the space constraint to meet urban vegetable demand

Urban agriculture (UA) has been drawing a lot of attention recently for several reasons: the majority of the world population has shifted from living in rural to urban areas; the environmental impact of agriculture is a matter of rising concern; and food insecurity, especially the accessibility of food, remains a major challenge. UA has often been proposed as a solution to some of these issues, for example by producing food in places where population density is highest, reducing transportation costs, connecting people directly to food systems and using urban areas efficiently. However, to date no study has examined how much food could actually be produced in urban areas at the global scale. Here we use a simple approach, based on different global-scale datasets, to assess to what extent UA is constrained by the existing amount of urban space. Our results suggest that UA would require roughly one third of the total global urban area to meet the global vegetable consumption of urban dwellers. This estimate does not consider how much urban area may actually be suitable and available for UA, which likely varies substantially around the world and according to the type of UA performed. Further, this global average value masks variations of more than two orders of magnitude among individual countries. The variations in the space required across countries derive mostly from variations in urban population density, and much less from variations in yields or per capita consumption. Overall, the space required is regrettably the highest where UA is most needed, i.e., in more food insecure countries. We also show that smaller urban clusters (i.e., <100 km2 each) together represent about two thirds of the global urban extent; thus UA discourse and policies should not focus on large cities exclusively, but should also target smaller urban areas that offer the greatest potential in terms of physical space

Identification of deficiencies in seasonal rainfall simulated by CMIP5 climate models

An objective technique for analysing seasonality, in terms of regime, progression and timing of the wet seasons, is applied in the evaluation of CMIP5 simulations across continental Africa. Atmosphere-only and coupled integrations capture the gross observed patterns of seasonal progression and give mean onset/cessation dates within 18 days of the observational dates for 11 of the 13 regions considered. Accurate representation of seasonality over central-southern Africa and West Africa (excluding southern coastline) adds credence for future projected changes in seasonality here. However, coupled simulations exhibit timing biases over the Horn of Africa, with the long rains 20 days late on average. Although both sets of simulations detect biannual rainfall seasonal cycles for East and Central Africa, coupled simulations fail to capture the biannual regime over the southern West African coastline. This is linked with errors in the Gulf of Guinea sea surface temperature (SST) and deficient representation of the SST/rainfall relationship

A Computational Approach for Designing Tiger Corridors in India

Wildlife corridors are components of landscapes, which facilitate the movement of organisms and processes between intact habitat areas, and thus provide connectivity between the habitats within the landscapes. Corridors are thus regions within a given landscape that connect fragmented habitat patches within the landscape. The major concern of designing corridors as a conservation strategy is primarily to counter, and to the extent possible, mitigate the effects of habitat fragmentation and loss on the biodiversity of the landscape, as well as support continuance of land use for essential local and global economic activities in the region of reference. In this paper, we use game theory, graph theory, membership functions and chain code algorithm to model and design a set of wildlife corridors with tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) as the focal species. We identify the parameters which would affect the tiger population in a landscape complex and using the presence of these identified parameters construct a graph using the habitat patches supporting tiger presence in the landscape complex as vertices and the possible paths between them as edges. The passage of tigers through the possible paths have been modelled as an Assurance game, with tigers as an individual player. The game is played recursively as the tiger passes through each grid considered for the model. The iteration causes the tiger to choose the most suitable path signifying the emergence of adaptability. As a formal explanation of the game, we model this interaction of tiger with the parameters as deterministic finite automata, whose transition function is obtained by the game payoff.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables, NGCT conference 201

Listening forward: approaching marine biodiversity assessments using acoustic methods

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Mooney, T. A., Di Iorio, L., Lammers, M., Lin, T., Nedelec, S. L., Parsons, M., Radford, C., Urban, E., & Stanley, J. Listening forward: approaching marine biodiversity assessments using acoustic methods. Royal Society Open Science, 7(8), (2020): 201287, doi:10.1098/rsos.201287.Ecosystems and the communities they support are changing at alarmingly rapid rates. Tracking species diversity is vital to managing these stressed habitats. Yet, quantifying and monitoring biodiversity is often challenging, especially in ocean habitats. Given that many animals make sounds, these cues travel efficiently under water, and emerging technologies are increasingly cost-effective, passive acoustics (a long-standing ocean observation method) is now a potential means of quantifying and monitoring marine biodiversity. Properly applying acoustics for biodiversity assessments is vital. Our goal here is to provide a timely consideration of emerging methods using passive acoustics to measure marine biodiversity. We provide a summary of the brief history of using passive acoustics to assess marine biodiversity and community structure, a critical assessment of the challenges faced, and outline recommended practices and considerations for acoustic biodiversity measurements. We focused on temperate and tropical seas, where much of the acoustic biodiversity work has been conducted. Overall, we suggest a cautious approach to applying current acoustic indices to assess marine biodiversity. Key needs are preliminary data and sampling sufficiently to capture the patterns and variability of a habitat. Yet with new analytical tools including source separation and supervised machine learning, there is substantial promise in marine acoustic diversity assessment methods.Funding for development of this article was provided by the collaboration of the Urban Coast Institute (Monmouth University, NJ, USA), the Program for the Human Environment (The Rockefeller University, New York, USA) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research. Partial support was provided to T.A.M. from the National Science Foundation grant OCE-1536782