Showing papers in "Springer US in 2016"

Recon 2.2: from reconstruction to model of human metabolism

Abstract: Introduction The human genome-scale metabolic reconstruction details all known metabolic reactions occurring in humans, and thereby holds substantial promise for studying complex diseases and phenotypes Capturing the whole human metabolic reconstruction is an on-going task and since the last community effort generated a consensus reconstruction, several updates have been developed

Solving Stochastic Ship Fleet Routing Problems with Inventory Management Using Branch and Price

Abstract: This chapter describes a stochastic ship routing problem with inventory management. The problem involves finding a set of least cost routes for a fleet of ships transporting a single commodity when the demand for the commodity is uncertain. Storage at supply and consumption ports is limited and inventory levels are monitored in the model. Consumer demands are at a constant rate within each time period, and in the stochastic problem, the demand rate for a period is not known until the beginning of that period. The demand situation over the time periods is described by a scenario tree with corresponding probabilities. A decomposition formulation is given and it is solved using a Branch and Price framework. A master problem (set partitioning with extra inventory constraints) is built, and the subproblems, one for each ship, are solved by stochastic dynamic programming and yield the columns for the master problem. Each column corresponds to one possible tree of actions for one ship giving its schedule loading/unloading quantities for all demand scenarios. Computational results are given showing that medium sized problems can be solved successfully.

Migration and immigrants in Europe: A historical and demographic perspective

Abstract: In this chapter we outline the general developments of migration within and towards Europe as well as patterns of settlement of migrants. We provide a comprehensive historical overview of the changes in European migration since the 1950s. Main phases in immigration, its backgrounds, and its determinants across the continent are described making use of secondary literature and data. Different European regions are covered in the analyses, based on available statistics and an analysis of secondary material. This allows us to distinguish between different origins of migrants as well as migration motives. In addition to migration from outside Europe this chapter pays ample attention to patterns of mobility within Europe. The analyses cover the individual level with as much detail as possible with the available statistics and particularly take the demographic characteristics of migrants into account. The analyses on flows of migration are supplemented by a sketch of the residing immigrant population across Europe.

Handbook of Antenna Technologies

Abstract: Microwave radiometry is concerned with purely passive sensing of naturally generated microwave radiation of thermal origin. Microwave radiometers are corresponding measuring devices typically designed and built as a very low-noise receiver followed by a signal recording unit. Usually, radiometers contain an antenna as the first reception component collecting the incoming radiation, and they measure radiation power expressed in an apparent temperature called brightness temperature. The observable brightness temperature of any object or surface depends on various chemical and physical quantities, whose concurrence is expressed by the objects’ emission (absorption), reflection, and transmission properties and its true temperature. Since the Earth has a temperature typically close to 300 K and the universe close to 3 K, a nearly arbitrary mixture of these two extreme temperatures can be expected. Consequently, our environment can show quite different brightness temperature values depending on the direction of actual observation. On the one hand, radiometer measurements are carried out stationary with respect to the antenna pointing direction in order to observe time-dependent variations of the brightness temperature. On the other hand, the brightness temperature of a whole scene is scanned in order to acquire locally changing one- or two-dimensional profiles, while the latter ones are assembled as a two-dimensional image comparable to a conventional photograph. Depending on the specific application, various antenna types are considered, where usually hard requirements with respect to beam width, side-lobe level, scan capability, and losses have to be addressed (▶Transmission Lines). Radiometric measurements are performed for Earth or planetary observation in space (▶Space Antennas including Terahertz Antennas), from aircraft platforms on the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, or on the ground, either sensing the environment or sensing the universe, the latter being performed in radio astronomy (▶Antennas in Radio Telescope Systems). Usually, the brightness temperature is rarely used as the physical quantity of interest. More often, it is transferred via adequate physical models to other secondary or third quantities for more direct use in the case of Earth observation (e.g., soil moisture, ocean salinity, rain rate, snow cover, etc.), being performed already since the 1950s of the last century. However, in the last decades, microwave radiometry is as well used in many safety- and security-related applications, for which often only sufficient temperature contrast between an object and its surrounding is required besides spatial resolution for detection and recognition purposes. In this chapter relevant fundamentals of microwave radiometry are outlined for better understanding of antenna requirements, followed by an overview of typical types of radiometer antenna systems. Some existing antenna systems are discussed in order to illustrate the variability with respect to applications. A section on basic antenna quantities addresses key figures for practical design and verification and illustrates the results exemplarily for selected cases. Finally, a brief summary and an outlook on possible future implementations and other frequency ranges are given.

Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences; Theory, Methods and Applications

Abstract: This volume provides new insights into the functioning of organizational, managerial and market societies. Multilevel analysis and social network analysis are described and the authors show how they can be combined in developing the theory, methods and empirical applications of the social sciences. This book maps out the development of multilevel reasoning and shows how it can explain behavior, through two different ways of contextualizing it. First, by identifying levels of influence on behavior and different aggregations of actors and behavior, and complex interactions between context and behavior. Second, by identifying different levels as truly different systems of agency: such levels of agency can be examined separately and jointly since the link between them is affiliation of members of one level to collective actors at the superior level. It is by combining these approaches that this work offers new insights. New case studies and datasets that explore new avenues of theorizing and new applications of methodology are presented. This book will be useful as a reference work for all social scientists, economists and historians who use network analyses and multilevel statistical analyses. Philosophers interested in the philosophy of science or epistemology will also find this book valuable. ​

NK Cells in HIV Disease

Abstract: Natural killer (NK) cells play a critical role in viral immunity. In the setting of HIV infection, epidemiologic and functional evidence support a role for NK cells in both protection from new infection and in viral control. Specifically, NK cells directly mediate immune pressure leading to virus evolution, and NK cell receptor genotypic profiles, clonal repertoires, and functional capacity have all been implicated in virus containment. In addition, indirect NK cell-mediated antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity has been linked to vaccine-induced protective immunity against HIV infection. With recent advances in our understanding of NK cell deficiency, development, memory-like responses, and editing of the adaptive immune system, the opportunities to direct and exploit NK cell antiviral immunity to target HIV have exponentially grown. In this review, we seek to highlight the intersections between discoveries in basic NK cell biology and the challenges of HIV chronic infection, vaccine development, and cure/eradication strategies.

Who is the academic entrepreneur? The role of graduate students in the development of university spinoffs

Abstract: Abstract Academic entrepreneurship, the establishment of new companies based on technologies derived from university research, is a well-recognized driver of regional and national economic development. For more than a decade, scholars have conceptualized individual university faculty as the primary agents of academic entrepreneurship. Recent research suggests that graduate students also play a critical role in the establishment and early development of university spinoff companies, but the nature of their involvement through the entrepreneurial process is not yet fully understood. Employing a case study approach, this paper investigates the role of graduate students in early-stage university spinoff companies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We find that graduate students play role similar to that of individual faculty entrepreneurs in university spinoffs, both in terms of making the initial establishment decision and in reconfiguring the organization for marketable technology development. We also find that student entrepreneurs face unique challenges involving conflicts with faculty advisors and other students.

North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment

Abstract: This book offers an up-to-date review of our current understanding of climate change in the North Sea and adjacent areas, as well as its impact on ecosystems and socio-economic sectors. It provides a detailed assessment of climate change based on published scientific work compiled by independent international experts from climate-related disciplines such as oceanography, atmospheric sciences, marine and terrestrial ecology, using a regional evaluation and review process similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of our changing climate, discussing a wide range of topics including past, current and future climate change, and climate-related changes in marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. It also explores the impact of climate change on socio-economic sectors such as fisheries, agriculture, coastal zone management, coastal protection, urban climate, recreation/tourism, offshore activities/energy, and air pollution.

Public health ethics : cases spanning the globe

Abstract: This Open Access book highlights the ethical issues and dilemmas that arise in the practice of public health. It is also a tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue regarding public health ethics. Although the practice of public health has always included consideration of ethical issues, the field of public health ethics as a discipline is a relatively new and emerging area. There are few practical training resources for public health practitioners, especially resources which include discussion of realistic cases which are likely to arise in the practice of public health. This work discusses these issues on a case to case basis and helps create awareness and understanding of the ethics of public health care. The main audience for the casebook is public health practitioners, including front-line workers, field epidemiology trainers and trainees, managers, planners, and decision makers who have an interest in learning about how to integrate ethical analysis into their day to day public health practice. The casebook is also useful to schools of public health and public health students as well as to academic ethicists who can use the book to teach public health ethics and distinguish it from clinical and research ethics.

Visualizing Object Detection Features

Abstract: We introduce algorithms to visualize feature spaces used by object detectors. Our method works by inverting a visual feature back to multiple natural images. We found that these visualizations allow us to analyze object detection systems in new ways and gain new insight into the detector’s failures. For example, when we visualize the features for high scoring false alarms, we discovered that, although they are clearly wrong in image space, they often look deceptively similar to true positives in feature space. This result suggests that many of these false alarms are caused by our choice of feature space, and supports that creating a better learning algorithm or building bigger datasets is unlikely to correct these errors without improving the features. By visualizing feature spaces, we can gain a more intuitive understanding of recognition systems.

Plant growth-promoting actinobacteria on chickpea seed mineral density: an upcoming complementary tool for sustainable biofortification strategy

Abstract: The present study was evaluated to test the potential of plant growth-promoting actinobacteria in increasing seed mineral density of chickpea under field conditions. Among the 19 isolates of actinobacteria tested, significant (p < 0.05) increase of minerals over the uninoculated control treatments was noticed on all the isolates for Fe (10–38 %), 17 for Zn (13–30 %), 16 for Ca (14–26 %), 9 for Cu (11–54 %) and 10 for Mn (18–35 %) and Mg (14–21 %). The increase might be due to the production of siderophore-producing capacity of the tested actinobacteria, which was confirmed in our previous studies by q-RT PCR on siderophore genes expressing up to 1.4- to 25-fold increased relative transcription levels. The chickpea seeds were subjected to processing to increase the mineral availability during consumption. The processed seeds were found to meet the recommended daily intake of FDA by 24–28 % for Fe, 25–28 % for Zn, 28–35 % for Cu, 12–14 % for Ca, 160–167 % for Mn and 34–37 % for Mg. It is suggested that the microbial inoculum can serve as a complementary sustainable tool for the existing biofortification strategies and substantially reduce the chemical fertilizer inputs.

Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness

Abstract: This book introduces and reviews recent advances in the field in a comprehensive and non-technical way by focusing on the potential of emerging citizen-science and social-computation frameworks, coupled with the latest theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, mathematicians, computer and social scientists to analyse, interpret and visualize complex data sets. There is overwhelming evidence that the current organisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biological ecosystems and human living conditions in the short term, with potentially catastrophic effects in the long term. The need to re-organise the daily activities with the greatest impact energy consumption, transport, housing towards a more efficient and sustainable development model has recently been raised in the public debate on several global, environmental issues. Above all, this requires the mismatch between global, societal and individual needs to be addressed. Recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can trigger important transitions at the individual and collective level to achieve this aim. Based on the findings of the collaborative research network EveryAware the following developments among the emerging ICT technologies are discussed in depth in this volume: Participatory sensing where ICT development is pushed to the level where it can support informed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities for environmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, as well as information presentation and sharing. Web gaming, social computing and internet-mediated collaboration where the Web will continue to acquire the status of an infrastructure for social computing, allowing users cognitive abilities to be coordinated in online communities, and steering the collective action towards predefined goals. Collective awareness and decision-making where the access to both personal and community data, collected by users, processed with suitable analysis tools, and re-presented in an appropriate format by usable communication interfaces leads to a bottom-up development of collective social strategies.

The MASCOT Magnetometer

Abstract: The Mobile Asteroid Scout (MASCOT) is a small lander on board the Hayabusa2 mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to the asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Among the instruments on MASCOT is a fluxgate magnetometer, the MASCOT Magnetometer (MasMag). The magnetometer is a lightweight ( $\sim280~\mbox{g}$ ) and low power ( $\sim0.5~\mbox{W}$ ) triaxial fluxgate magnetometer. Magnetic field measurements during the landing period and during the surface operational phase shall provide information about any intrinsic magnetic field of the asteroid and its remanent magnetization. This could provide important constraints on planet formation and the thermal and aqueous evolution of primitive asteroids.

Computational Music Analysis

Abstract: The first € price and the £ and $ price are net prices, subject to local VAT. Prices indicated with * include VAT for books; the €(D) includes 7% for Germany, the €(A) includes 10% for Austria. Prices indicated with ** include VAT for electronic products; 19% for Germany, 20% for Austria. All prices exclusive of carriage charges. Prices and other details are subject to change without notice. All errors and omissions excepted. D. Meredith (Ed.) Computational Music Analysis

Climate Change and Modern Human Occupation of the Sahara from MIS 6-2

Abstract: We have implemented probability density function (PDF) analysis of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and uranium series (U/Th) dates from humid sites in North Africa from 20 to 200 ka to identify humid periods. We then combine this with maps of Saharan paleohydrology to identify humid corridors across the Sahara that could have provided dispersal routes for anatomically modern humans (AMH). We then apply a similar analysis to the Aterian with a map of the spatial distribution of Aterian sites and a database of dated locations. Results suggest humid periods centered on 76 ka and between 92 and 129 ka provide green corridors across the Sahara that could have allowed AMH to cross it. Aterian sites are found preferentially in the 92 and 129 ka humid corridor, indicating that they may have used it. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that Aterian PDF curve peaks at the time of this corridor. These results suggest that Aterians occupied a “green Sahara,” and this is supported by an analysis of the fauna associated with Aterian sites. However, most of the dated Aterian sites and faunal locations are found in the Maghreb, with few sites from the Sahara. Thus the evidence is not conclusive and further research is needed into Aterian chronology and environmental preferences within the Sahara.

Cold-Water Corals in an Era of Rapid Global Change: Are These the Deep Ocean’s Most Vulnerable Ecosystems?

Abstract: Cold-water corals create highly complex biogenic habitats that promote and sustain high biological diversity in the deep sea and play critical roles in deep-water ecosystem functioning across the globe. However, these often out of sight and out of mind ecosystems are increasingly under pressure both from human activities in the deep sea such as fishing and mineral extraction, and from a rapidly changing climate. This chapter gives an overview of the importance of cold-water coral habitats, the threats they face and how recent advances in understanding of both past and present cold-water coral ecosystems helps us to understand how well they may be able to adapt to current and future climate change. We address key knowledge gaps and the ongoing efforts at national and international scales to promote and protect these important yet vulnerable ecosystems.

Optimal healthcare decision making under multiple mathematical models: application in prostate cancer screening

Abstract: Important decisions related to human health, such as screening strategies for cancer, need to be made without a satisfactory understanding of the underlying biological and other processes. Rather, they are often informed by mathematical models that approximate reality. Often multiple models have been made to study the same phenomenon, which may lead to conflicting decisions. It is natural to seek a decision making process that identifies decisions that all models find to be effective, and we propose such a framework in this work. We apply the framework in prostate cancer screening to identify prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based strategies that perform well under all considered models. We use heuristic search to identify strategies that trade off between optimizing the average across all models’ assessments and being “conservative” by optimizing the most pessimistic model assessment. We identified three recently published mathematical models that can estimate quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of PSA-based screening strategies and identified 64 strategies that trade off between maximizing the average and the most pessimistic model assessments. All prescribe PSA thresholds that increase with age, and 57 involve biennial screening. Strategies with higher assessments with the pessimistic model start screening later, stop screening earlier, and use higher PSA thresholds at earlier ages. The 64 strategies outperform 22 previously published expert-generated strategies. The 41 most “conservative” ones remained better than no screening with all models in extensive sensitivity analyses. We augment current comparative modeling approaches by identifying strategies that perform well under all models, for various degrees of decision makers’ conservativeness.

Assessment of groundwater suitability for irrigation in Madinah City, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: In this study, the suitability of groundwater for irrigation purposes in Madinah city, Saudi Arabia was assessed. Of the 23 wells that were drilled in different locations of the city, 20 wells were sampled for water quality analyses. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) classification of irrigation water that is based on sodium hazard (SAR) and salinity hazard was used for irrigation suitability assessment. In addition, the residual sodium carbonate (RSC) and soluble sodium percentage (%Na) were calculated for all samples and also used for irrigation suitability assessment. Results showed that all groundwater samples are in the acceptable quality range for irrigation based on RSC values, and the majority of the samples had %Na in the acceptable range for irrigation. When SAR and salinity hazard were assessed, results showed that while almost all groundwater samples fell in the acceptable range of SAR, they were either in the high or very high salinity zones, indicating that the water can be used for irrigation after adopting some management practices. Comparing total dissolved solids (TDS) concentration obtained 35 years ago for the study area with the current TDS values indicates that the recent accelerated urban development in the study area did not significantly impact groundwater quality with regard to irrigation suitability.

Whitham Modulation Equations and Application to Small Dispersion Asymptotics and Long Time Asymptotics of Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

Abstract: In this chapter we review the theory of modulation equations or Whitham equations for the travelling wave solution of KdV. We then apply the Whitham modulation equations to describe the long-time asymptotics and small dispersion asymptotics of the KdV solution.