Mining topological relations from the web

Topological relations between geographic regions are of interest in many applications. When the exact boundaries of regions are not available, such relations can be established by analysing natural language information from web documents. In particular we demonstrate how redundancy-based techniques can be used to acquire containment and adjacency relations, and how fuzzy spatial reasoning can be employed to maintain the consistency of the resulting knowledge base

Assessing the potential economic benefits to farmers from various GM crops becoming available in the European Union by 2025: results from an expert survey

This paper reports on a study that identified a range of crop-trait combinations that are: agronomically suited to the EU; provide advantages to arable farmers and consumers; and are either already available in international markets, or advancing along the development pipeline and likely to become available by 2025. An expert stakeholder panel was recruited and asked for their views, using the Delphi approach, on the impact of these crop-traits on enterprise competitiveness, through changes to yields, production costs and product prices. In terms of input traits, there was consensus that traits such as herbicide tolerant/insect resistant (HT/IR) maize, HT sugar beet and HT soya bean would provide positive benefits for farmers. Output-side traits such as winter-sown rape with reduced saturated fats, were seen as offering benefits to consumers, but were either likely to be restricted to niche markets, or offer relatively modest price premia to farmers growing them. Our analysis of the financial impact of the adoption of GM crops more widely in the EU, showed that the competitiveness of the agricultural sector could well be improved by this. However, such improvements would be relatively small-scale in that large-scale national natural advantages from either economic or environmental conditions is unlikely to be overturned

Growth-induced mass flows in fungal networks

Cord-forming fungi form extensive networks that continuously adapt to maintain an efficient transport system. As osmotically driven water uptake is often distal from the tips, and aqueous fluids are incompressible, we propose that growth induces mass flows across the mycelium, whether or not there are intrahyphal concentration gradients. We imaged the temporal evolution of networks formed by Phanerochaete velutina, and at each stage calculated the unique set of currents that account for the observed changes in cord volume, while minimising the work required to overcome viscous drag. Predicted speeds were in reasonable agreement with experimental data, and the pressure gradients needed to produce these flows are small. Furthermore, cords that were predicted to carry fast-moving or large currents were significantly more likely to increase in size than cords with slow-moving or small currents. The incompressibility of the fluids within fungi means there is a rapid global response to local fluid movements. Hence velocity of fluid flow is a local signal that conveys quasi-global information about the role of a cord within the mycelium. We suggest that fluid incompressibility and the coupling of growth and mass flow are critical physical features that enable the development of efficient, adaptive, biological transport networks.Comment: To be published in PRSB. 20 pages, plus 8 pages of supplementary information, and 3 page bibliograph

Differential dependencies of monocytes and neutrophils on dectin-1, dectin-2 and complement for the recognition of fungal particles in inflammation

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Twentieth-century Trends in the Annual Cycle of Temperature across the Northern Hemisphere

The annual cycle of surface air temperature is examined across Northern Hemisphere land areas (north of 25°N) by comparing the results from CRUTS against four reanalysis datasets: two versions of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR and 20CRC) and two versions of the ERA-CLIM reanalyses (ERA-20C and ERA-20CM). The Modulated Annual Cycle is adaptively derived from an Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) filter, and is used to define the phase and amplitude of the annual cycle. The EEMD method does not impose a simple sinusoidal shape of the annual cycle. None of the reanalysis simulations assimilate surface temperature data, but differ in the parameters that are included: both ERA-20C and 20CR assimilate surface pressure data; ERA-20C also includes surface wind data over the oceans; ERA-20CM does not assimilate any of these synoptic data; and none of the reanalyses assimilate land-use data. It is demonstrated that synoptic variability is critical for explaining the trends and variability of the annual cycle of surface temperature across the northern hemisphere. The CMIP5 forcings alone are insufficient to explain the observed trends and decadal-scale variability, particularly with respect to the decline in the amplitude of the annual cycle throughout the twentieth century. The variability in the annual cycle during the latter half of the twentieth century was unusual in the context of the twentieth century, and was most likely related to large-scale atmospheric variability, although uncertainty in the results is greatest before ca. 1930

Negative priming in free recall reconsidered

Recent investigations of the phenomenon of forgetting have been driven mostly by the development of a novel theoretical framework which places great emphasis on inhibitory control (Anderson, 2003; Anderson & Spellman, 1995; Bjork, 1989). Whereas traditional, interference-based theories consider forgetting to be a by-product of storing new information, the inhibitory framework postulates a specialized mechanism, or a group of mechanisms, that serves the function of ‘deactivating’ information which is currently irrelevant. This process of inhibiting currently irrelevant information is thought to have lasting consequences, affecting memory for the irrelevant information on subsequent tests. The active and functional perspective on forgetting embedded in the inhibitory framework opens new fields for examining the role of forgetting in cognitive functioning. Differences in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information have been postulated to play important roles in a range of clinical conditions (e.g., Soriano, Jiménez, Román, & Bajo, 2009; Storm & White, 2010) and the trajectory of cognitive development (e.g., Aslan & Bäuml, 2010) as well as contributing to individual differences in many other cognitive and social domains (Redick, Heitz, & Engle, 2007)

CO2, the greenhouse effect and global warming: from the pioneering work of Arrhenius and Callendar to today's Earth System Models

Climate warming during the course of the twenty-first century is projected to be between 1.0 and 3.7 °C depending on future greenhouse gas emissions, based on the ensemble-mean results of state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs). Just how reliable are these projections, given the complexity of the climate system? The early history of climate research provides insight into the understanding and science needed to answer this question. We examine the mathematical quantifications of planetary energy budget developed by Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) and Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964) and construct an empirical approximation of the latter, which we show to be successful at retrospectively predicting global warming over the course of the twentieth century. This approximation is then used to calculate warming in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases during the twenty-first century, projecting a temperature increase at the lower bound of results generated by an ensemble of ESMs (as presented in the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). This result can be interpreted as follows. The climate system is conceptually complex but has at its heart the physical laws of radiative transfer. This basic, or “core” physics is relatively straightforward to compute mathematically, as exemplified by Callendar's calculations, leading to quantitatively robust projections of baseline warming. The ESMs include not only the physical core but also climate feedbacks that introduce uncertainty into the projections in terms of magnitude, but not sign: positive (amplification of warming). As such, the projections of end-of-century global warming by ESMs are fundamentally trustworthy: quantitatively robust baseline warming based on the well-understood physics of radiative transfer, with extra warming due to climate feedbacks. These projections thus provide a compelling case that global climate will continue to undergo significant warming in response to ongoing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere

In Memoriam: Keith R. Briffa, 1952–2017

Keith R. Briffa was one of the most influential palaeoclimatologists of the last 30 years. His primary research interests lay in Late-Holocene climate change with a geographical emphasis on northern Eurasia. His greatest impact was in the field of dendroclimatology, a field that he helped to shape. His contributions have been seminal to the development of sound methods for tree-ring analysis and in their proper application to allow the interpretation of climate variability from tree rings. This led to the development of many important records that allow us to understand natural climate variability on timescales from years to millennia and to set recent climatic trends in their historical context

Interactions of atoms with high‐field single‐cycle infrared radiation

We have studied ionization and excitation of Rydberg atoms by intense sub‐picosecond electromagnetic field pulses of less than one cycle duration. The ionization threshold electric field scales as the binding energy (i.e., n∗−2, rather than the n∗−4 threshold scaling characteristic of static field ionization and high order multiphoton ionization. This altered behavior is due to the short duration and the subcycle nature of the field. We also find a wide distribution of final states produced by these pulses, which are effectively ‘‘in resonance’’ for dozens of transitions simultaneously.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87507/2/227_1.pd