European Resuscitation Council Guidelines for Resuscitation.

Neonicotinoid insecticides are successfully applied to control pests in a variety of agricultural crops; however, they may not only affect pest insects but also non-target organisms such as pollinators. This review summarizes, for the first time, 15 years of research on the hazards of neonicotinoids to bees including honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees. The focus of the paper is on three different key aspects determining the risks of neonicotinoid field concentrations for bee populations: (1) the environmental neonicotinoid residue levels in plants, bees and bee products in relation to pesticide application, (2) the reported side-effects with special attention for sublethal effects, and (3) the usefulness for the evaluation of neonicotinoids of an already existing risk assessment scheme for systemic compounds. Although environmental residue levels of neonicotinoids were found to be lower than acute/chronic toxicity levels, there is still a lack of reliable data as most analyses were conducted near the detection limit and for only few crops. Many laboratory studies described lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoids on the foraging behavior, and learning and memory abilities of bees, while no effects were observed in field studies at field-realistic dosages. The proposed risk assessment scheme for systemic compounds was shown to be applicable to assess the risk for side-effects of neonicotinoids as it considers the effect on different life stages and different levels of biological organization (organism versus colony). Future research studies should be conducted with field-realistic concentrations, relevant exposure and evaluation durations. Molecular markers may be used to improve risk assessment by a better understanding of the mode of action (interaction with receptors) of neonicotinoids in bees leading to the identification of environmentally safer compounds.

/pdf/neonicotinoids-in-bees-a-review-on-concentrations-side-2xp7dar74f.pdf

Neonicotinoids in bees: a review on concentrations, side-effects and risk assessment

Reported widespread declines of wild and managed insect pollinators have serious consequences for global ecosystem services and agricultural production. Bees contribute approximately 80% of insect pollination, so it is important to understand and mitigate the causes of current declines in bee populations . Recent studies have implicated the role of pesticides in these declines, as exposure to these chemicals has been associated with changes in bee behaviour and reductions in colony queen production. However, the key link between changes in individual behaviour and the consequent impact at the colony level has not been shown. Social bee colonies depend on the collective performance of many individual workers. Thus, although field-level pesticide concentrations can have subtle or sublethal effects at the individual level, it is not known whether bee societies can buffer such effects or whether it results in a severe cumulative effect at the colony level. Furthermore, widespread agricultural intensification means that bees are exposed to numerous pesticides when foraging, yet the possible combinatorial effects of pesticide exposure have rarely been investigated. Here we show that chronic exposure of bumblebees to two pesticides (neonicotinoid and pyrethroid) at concentrations that could approximate field-level exposure impairs natural foraging behaviour and increases worker mortality leading to significant reductions in brood development and colony success. We found that worker foraging performance, particularly pollen collecting efficiency, was significantly reduced with observed knock-on effects for forager recruitment, worker losses and overall worker productivity. Moreover, we provide evidence that combinatorial exposure to pesticides increases the propensity of colonies to fail.

/pdf/combined-pesticide-exposure-severely-affects-individual-and-4lvxnvso2j.pdf

Combined pesticide exposure severely affects individual- and colony-level traits in bees

https://www.isi.edu/~gil/papers/jws-trust-07.pdf

A survey of trust in computer science and the Semantic Web

A machine-implemented social networking system builds up and repeatedly refreshes a hierarchy tree containing topic nodes. New nodes are added as new topics emerge in online public forums. Each topic node can link to an on-topic real time chat room whose occupants are currently discussing the topic of the node. A chat room can be pointed to by more than one node if the room is discussing multiple topics. Rooms can migrate from node to node as room topic dynamically changes. A system user who explicitly or inferentially wishes to be invited into a chat room which is on-topic with what the user is currently focused upon can do so by use of a node-seeking automated process. The process operates in the background and seeks out nodes of the hierarchy tree that currently have topics appearing to be the same as or similar to what topics the user appears to have in mind. Content browsing experience of the user is enhanced by addition of an invitations displaying subsystem that automatically invites him or her to co-compatible chat rooms currently discussing the topic(s) the user appears to have in mind. One of the many topics that a user may inferentially have in mind is that of being at a given location as reported by the user's GPS and wondering what best to do at that location and time.

social network driven indexing system for instantly clustering people with concurrent focus on same topic into on-topic chat rooms and/or for generating on-topic search results tailored to user preferences regarding topic

Policies are being increasingly used for automated system management and controlling the behavior of complex systems. The use of policies allows administrators to modify system behavior without changing source code or requiring the consent or cooperation of the components being governed. Early approaches to policy representation have been restrictive in many ways. However semantically-rich policy representations can reduce human error, simplify policy analysis, reduce policy conflicts, and facilitate interoperability. In this paper, we compare three approaches to policy representation, reasoning, and enforcement. We highlight similarities and differences between Ponder, KAoS, and Rei, and sketch out some general criteria and properties for more adequate approaches to policy semantics in the future.

/pdf/semantic-web-languages-for-policy-representation-and-2liyb21p6k.pdf

Semantic web languages for policy representation and reasoning: a comparison of KAoS, Rei, and Ponder

The provisioning of Web services over the wireless Internet introduces novel challenging issues for service design and implementation: from user/terminal mobility during service execution, to wide heterogeneity of portable access devices and unpredictable modifications in accessible resources. In this scenario, there are frequent provision-time changes in the context, defined as the logical set of accessible resources depending on client location, access terminal capabilities, and system/service management policies. The development of context-dependent services requires novel middlewares with full context visibility. We propose a middleware for context-aware resource management, called CARMEN, capable of supporting the automatic reconfiguration of wireless Internet services in response to context changes without any intervention on the service logic. CARMEN determines the context on the basis of metadata, which include declarative management policies and profiles for user preferences, terminal capabilities, and resource characteristics. In addition, CARMEN exploits the mobile agent technology to implement mobile middleware components that follow the provision-time movement of clients to support locally their customized service access. The proposed middleware shows how metadata and mobile agents can favor component reusability and automatic service reconfiguration, by reducing the development/ deployment complexity.

/pdf/context-aware-middleware-for-resource-management-in-the-3nma5prar5.pdf

Context-aware middleware for resource management in the wireless Internet

For several years, reports by French and Italian beekeepers have been suggesting a lethal effect of imidacloprid on honey bees; in particular, the molecule has been related to honey bee mortality and decrease of hive populations, affecting the orientation and ability of honey bees to return to the hive. In this paper we investigate the effects of sub-lethal doses of imidacloprid on foraging activity and homing ability of honey bees. Honey bees from one hive were trained to forage on an artificial feeder filled with a 50% sucrose solution. The feeder was gradually moved up to a distance of 500 meters from the hive. Thirty bees, foraging on the sucrose solution, were captured, indi- vidually marked with coloured number tags and transferred into a flying cage, acting as control. The feeder was then replaced with a new one, filled with an imidacloprid supplemented sucrose solution. Again, thirty bees foraging on this feeder were cap- tured, individually marked with different coloured number tags and transferred into an other flying cage. Three concentrations of imidacloprid were tested: 100 ppb, 500 ppb and 1000 ppb. The solutions at 500 ppb and 1000 ppb of imidacloprid had a repellent effect and the bees stopped visiting the feeder, hence only 10 and 20 honey bees, respectively, were captured for the two doses. Since the effects of imidacloprid start half an hour to one hour after ingestion, bees were released from the flying cage 1 hour after confinement. After the release, the behaviour of the bees was followed for 2 hours: two observers at the hive and one observer at the feeding site recorded the arrival and the departure of the marked bees. The presence of the bees at the hive and at the feeder was also recorded for one hour, 5 and 24 hours after the release. The results show that almost all the control honey bees returned to the hive, and started again visiting the feeder between 2 to 5 hours after the release. Honey bees fed with the concentration of 100 ppb also returned to the hive, but they returned to visit the feeder only 24 hours after the release. Honey bees fed with 500 ppb and 1000 ppb completely disappeared after the release, and they were not seen during the following 24 hours, neither at the hive nor at the feeding site.

Effects of sub-lethal imidacloprid doses on the homing rate and foraging activity of honey bees

Wireless connectivity and widespread diffusion of portable devices offer novel opportunities for users to share resources anywhere and anytime, and to form ad-hoc coalitions. Resource access control is crucial to leverage these ad-hoc collaborations. In pervasive scenarios, however, collaborating entities cannot be predetermined and resource availability frequently varies, even unpredictably, due to user/device mobility, thus complicating resource access control. Access control policies cannot be defined based on entity’s identities/roles, as in traditional access control solutions, or be specified a priori to face any operative run time condition, but require continuous adjustments to adapt to the current situation. To address these issues, this paper advocates the adoption of novel access control policy models that follow two main design guidelines: context-awareness to control resource access on the basis of context visibility and to enable dynamic adaptation of policies depending on context changes, and semantic technologies for context/policy specification to allow high-level description and reasoning about context and policies. The paper also describes the design of a semantic context-aware policy model that adopts ontologies and rules to express context and context-aware access control policies and supports policy adaptation.

/pdf/a-semantic-context-aware-access-control-framework-for-secure-1v9m0dzjg4.pdf

A semantic context-aware access control framework for secure collaborations in pervasive computing environments

Under certain circumstances, the effects of imidacloprid on honey bees may not be immediately perceived. The aim of this study was to investigate if imidacloprid, provided in sub-lethal doses, could influence honey bee behaviour in the laboratory. Imidacloprid (supplied as Confidor®) was offered to bees in 50 % sucrose solution at two different concentrations (100 ppb and 500 ppb of active ingredient). Each dose was administered both as single dose and ad libitum, to three sets of 10 honey bee fora- gers. Bees fed with 50% sucrose solution were used as a control. Feeding occurred in holding cages in an incubator in complete darkness. After administration, in each treatment, the behaviour of the bees was recorded with an IR camera, and then analysed with "The Observer" computer program. In each treatment bees were significantly less active (in terms of mobility) than bees in the untreated control. Furthermore, in the treated bees, the communicative capacity seemed to be impaired, and this could cause a decline in the social behaviour. Never- theless, the negative effects appeared only after a certain period of time following administration (30-60 minutes) and vanished after several hours. Imidacloprid therefore has an inhibiting, even though transitory, effect on honey bees. We assume that the period of time in which honey bee behaviour is altered could negatively affect both the individual and the entire colony.

/pdf/effects-of-imidacloprid-administered-in-sub-lethal-doses-on-59jy7igby5.pdf

Rebecca Montanari

Papers

Semantic web languages for policy representation and reasoning: a comparison of KAoS, Rei, and Ponder

Context-aware middleware for resource management in the wireless Internet

Effects of sub-lethal imidacloprid doses on the homing rate and foraging activity of honey bees

A semantic context-aware access control framework for secure collaborations in pervasive computing environments

Effects of imidacloprid administered in sub-lethal doses on honey bee behaviour. Laboratory tests