A Dynamic Network Approach to Breakthrough Innovation

This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries use those ideas. The approach is grounded in novel measures of the extent to which an innovation amplifies or disrupts the status quo. Those measures index the effects inventions have on subsequent uses of prior discoveries. In so doing, they characterize a theoretically important but elusive feature of innovation. We validate our approach by showing it: (1) discriminates among innovations of similar impact in analyses of U.S. patents; (2) identifies discoveries that amplify and disrupt technology streams in select case studies; (3) implies disruptive patents decrease the use of their predecessors by 60% in difference-in-differences estimation; and, (4) yields novel findings in analyses of patenting at 110 U.S. universities.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

A pilot project for indigenous forest reversion

This paper describes preliminary work on establishing a pilot project for carbon sequestration. The project is intended to simulate the structure of the Permanent Forest Sinks Initiative, a program that may extend to the national level under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. In the process of establishing the project, we will identify opportunities and barriers for landowners to engage in the management system of “carbon farming”. We will also use the results of the process to inform policymakers of potential improvements to the Permanent Forest Sinks Initiative and to demonstrate to landowners the benefits of this management system.Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, International Relations/Trade, Land Economics/Use,

Promoting Mitochondrial Biogenesis with the SIRTI Activator SRT1720 to Improve Mitochondrial and Renal Function after Acute Kidney Injury

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a primary pathological consequence of acute kidney injury (AKI). Induction of mitochondrial biogenesis via the nuclear coactivator of transcription PPARγ-coactivator-1α (PGC-1α), the master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis, rescues mitochondrial function in renal cells after oxidant injury. The primary goal of this project was to evaluate the recovery of mitochondrial function after in vivo AKI, and to determine the influence of mitochondrial biogenesis during the repair process. Deacetylation of PGC-1α by the class III HDAC SIRT1 produces a more active form of the protein and stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis. The potent SIRT1 activator SRT1720 induced deacetylation of PGC-1α, increased mitochondrial proteins, and elevated mitochondrial respiration and total cellular ATP levels in primary renal proximal tubule cell (RPTC) cultures. The effects of SRT1720 occurred in a SIRT1-dependent manner and exposure of SRT1720 following oxidant injury to RPTC expedited recovery of mitochondrial and cellular functions. Acute kidney injury (AKI), either by ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) or glycerol-induced myoglobinuric injury, produced persistent proximal tubule damage even in the face of recovered glomerular filtration. Tubule pathology was determined histologically, by the continued presence of dilated, flattened tubules, and the loss of Na+, K+-ATPase expression. The persistent tubule injury was associated with sustained loss of mitochondrial protein expression, alterations in fusion/fission proteins, and elevated mitochondrial biogenesis proteins. Treating with SRT1720 after I/R injury in rats induced PGC-1α deacetylation and restored mitochondrial protein expression and function by 144h after reperfusion, but not at 72h. Restoration of mitochondrial function was associated with attenuated kidney injury molecule-I (Kim-1), recovery of Na+, K+-ATPase expression and localization, and normalized vimentin expression. The results suggested that recovery of mitochondrial function correlates with faster recovery of a normal, differentiated, polarized proximal tubule epithelium. Taken together, we have demonstrated that mitochondrial biogenesis is an essential component of renal cell repair following AKI, and by promoting faster recovery of mitochondrial function, we can expedite recovery of the differentiated tubule epithelium with basolateral-apical polarity. These discoveries may ultimately point towards new therapeutic techniques that can be further examined as potential interventions to treat AKI and other disorders associated with sustained mitochondrial dysfunction

Settlement of the Kansai International Airport Islands

The Kansai International Airport was constructed 5km off the coast of Senshu in 18m to 20m deep sea water to avoid noise pollution, and land acquisition disputes that had been experienced at Itami and Narita Airports. Construction of Island I began in 1987 and the Island I runway began operation in 1994. Construction of Island II began in 1999 and the Island II runway began operation in 2007. Utilizing over 2 million vertical sand drains and 400 million cubic meters of reclamation fill material for construction of two airport islands, the project is viewed as an engineering marvel. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers named the airport one of the “Civil Engineering Monuments of the Millennium”. As part of the original design considerations, the surface elevation of the airport islands were to remain above +4m Chart Datum Level (CDL) to avoid the erosive action of waves overtopping the seawall (Arai, 1991). However, as of December 2012, the average seabed settlement has exceeded 12.9m and 14.2m, respectively, for Airport Islands I and II (NKIAC, 2012). Much of the surface elevation of Island I is already below +4m CDL, and the surface elevation of part of Island II is predicted to be at +4m CDL in September 2023. Furthermore, Island I is predicted to be at sea level in June 2067, and part of Island II is expected to be at sea level in January 2056. The Kansai Airport project has received considerable attention in geotechnical engineering literature in part because of the scale of the project; Island I is 511ha in approximately 18m deep seawater and Island II is 545ha in approximately 20m deep seawater. The project is also significant because of the sufficiently detailed subseabed information as well as observations of settlement and porewater pressure reaching depths up to 350m below the seabed. The projected or observed consolidation behavior of the subseabed has been arrogated in an ongoing debate on the uniqueness of the end-of-primary void ratio – effective vertical stress relationship of clay and silt deposits. Some have explicity argued against application of the uniqueness principle to settlement and porewater pressure predictions at the Kansai Airport site (Hight and Leroueil, 2003; Mimura and Jang, 2005; Rocchi et al., 2006), while others have made settlement calculations for the Kansai International Airport using rheological models that assume separate and independent effective stress and time compressiblities (Imai et al., 2005; Oda et al., 2005; Tanaka, 2005). Additionally, in connection to secondary compression behavior of Osaka Bay clays, potentially misleading interpretations have been published as a result of possible misinterpretation of laboratory oedometer tests as well as settlement observations at the airport site. This study includes a review of the geologic history of Osaka Bay as well as a careful evaluation of the available subseabed data for 14 marine clay layers, 8 non-marine clay layers, and 20 sand layers that are contained within the up to 350m depth below seabed contributing to settlement of the Kansai Airport islands. Additionally, the reclamation process used to construct the airport islands and the instrumentation installed for settlement and porewater pressure observations were carefully examined as part of this study. Explicit finite difference techniques were developed within the ILLICON framework (Mesri and Rokhsar, 1974; Choi, 1982; Lo, 1991; Mesri et al., 1994) to facilitate settlement and porewater pressure calculations at the Kansai International Airport site. Settlement and porewater pressure calculations were performed at the Kansai International Airport Island I and Island II based on the assumption of uniqueness of end-of-primary void ratio – effective vertical stress relationship, together with the Cα/Cc law of compressibility to compute secondary compression. Settlement calculations for the Holocene marine clay layer (Ma13), which is fully penetrated by forty centimeter diameter displacement type vertical sand drains at the Kansai Airport site, are in good agreement with observations. Therefore, the uniqueness principle satisfactorily explains the magnitude of vertical compression of Ma13 at Kansai Airport. End-of-primary compression for the 17m to 24m Ma13 clay layer ranges from 6.2m to 8.3m at the airport site. End-of-primary compression for Ma13 was reached 2 to 4 years after start of reclamation for Airport Island I and Island II. Therefore, the majority of the post-construction seabed settlement for the Kansai Airport Islands will result from compression of the Pleistocene clay layers underlying Ma13. The ILLICON program was used together with settlement and porewater pressure observations to back-calculate equivalent permeabilities (keq) for the Pleistocene sand layers to compute the post-construction settlement projections of the Pleistocene layers. The permeability values used in the ILLICON analysis are comparable to values used by Mimura and Jang (2005) and Shibata and Karube (2005) in their settlement analysis for Kansai Airport. Calculated settlements and excess porewater pressures for the Pleistocene layers are in good agreement with observations that are available up to 2011. Seabed settlement, including contributions from the Holocene clay layer and the Pleistocene clay layers, is expected to be 15.7m at Island I and 24.9m at Island II in the year 2100. The uniqueness principle together with the Cα/Cc law of compressibility sufficiently explains settlement and porewater pressure observations reported for the Kansai International Airport project

‘I was there from the start’: The identity maintenance strategies used by fans to combat the threat of losing

On-field performances are a key, yet uncontrollable, determinant of team identification. In this research, we explore how fans of a new team, with an overwhelming loss to win ratio, maintain a positive social identity. Qualitative data gathered from 20 semi-structured interviews were used to address this research objective. Our findings indicated fans use social creativity and social mobility strategies to help preserve a positive and distinctive group identity. In the absence of success, fans evaluated the group on dimensions that reflected positively on, and emphasised the distinctiveness of, group membership. Fans also sought to increase their status in the group to increase the positivity of this association. We use these findings to extend understanding of social identity theory and provide recommendations for sport organisations with unfavourable performance records. Recommendations are themed around highlighting the unique nature of the group and and favourable status comparisons between members of the in-group

Automated analysis of medial gastrocnemius muscle-tendon junction displacements in heathy young adults during isolated contractions and walking using deep neural networks

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Direct measurement of muscle-tendon junction (MTJ) position is important for understanding dynamic tendon behavior and muscle-tendon interaction in healthy and pathological populations. Traditionally, obtaining MTJ position during functional activities is accomplished by manually tracking the position of the MTJ in cine B-mode ultrasound images - a laborious and time-consuming process. Recent advances in deep learning have facilitated the availability of user-friendly open-source software packages for automated tracking. However, these software packages were originally intended for animal pose estimation and have not been widely tested on ultrasound images. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to evaluate the efficacy of deep neural networks to accurately track medial gastrocnemius MTJ positions in cine B-mode ultrasound images across tasks spanning controlled loading during isolated contractions to physiological loading during treadmill walking. METHODS: Cine B-mode ultrasound images of the medial gastrocnemius MTJ were collected from 15 subjects (6M/9F, 23 yr, 71.9 kg, 1.8 m) during treadmill walking at 1.25 m/s and during maximal voluntary isometric plantarflexor contractions (MVICs). Five deep neural networks were trained using 480 manually-labeled images collected during walking, defined as the ground truth, and were then used to predict MTJ position in images from novel subjects: 1) during walking (novel-subject) and 2) during MVICs (novel-condition). RESULTS: We found an average mean absolute error of 1.26±1.30 mm and 2.61±3.31 mm between the ground truth and predicted MTJ positions in the novel-subject and novel-condition evaluations, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide support for the use of open-source software for creating deep neural networks to reliably track MTJ positions in B-mode ultrasound images. We believe this approach to MTJ position tracking is an accessible and time-saving solution, with broad applications for many fields, such as rehabilitation or clinical diagnostics

Leaf Traits Can Be Used to Predict Rates of Litter Decomposition

Strong relationships exist between litter chemistry traits and rates of litter decomposition. However, leaf traits are more commonly found in online trait databases than litter traits and fewer studies have examined how well leaf traits predict litter decomposition rates. Furthermore, while bulk leaf nitrogen (N) content is known to regulate litter decomposition, few studies have explored the importance of N biochemistry fractions, such as protein and amino acid concentration. Here, we decomposed green leaves and naturally senesced leaf litter of nine species representing a wide range of leaf functional traits. We evaluated the ability of traits associated with leaf and litter physiology, N biochemistry, and carbon quality to predict litter decomposition. The objectives of this study were to determine if 1) N fractions explain variation in decomposition that is not explained by bulk N parameters alone, and 2) green leaf traits, as opposed to litter traits, can accurately determine rates of litter decomposition. We found N biochemistry traits to have similar predictive power to that of bulk N. We also found that leaf N biochemistry traits correlated strongly with each other and aligned on a single axis of variation resembling that of the ‘leaf economic spectrum.’ We noted that green leaf traits associated with this axis, including bulk N, N fractions, leaf mass per area, and lignin, were better predictors of decomposition than litter traits and concluded that leaf trait databases may be used to accurately predict litter decomposition. Future decomposition studies should consider fitting the more flexible Weibull distribution model to litter cohorts, as this model is much less rigid than the classic exponential decay model traditionally used in decomposition studies

Air pollution trends in the EMEP region between 1990 and 2012

The present report synthesises the main features of the evolution over the 1990-2012 time period of the concentration and deposition of air pollutants relevant in the context of the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution: (i) ozone, (ii) sulfur and nitrogen compounds and particulate matter, (iii) heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. It is based on observations gathered in State Parties to the Convention within the EMEP monitoring network of regional background stations, as well as relevant modelling initiatives. Joint Report of: EMEP Task Force on Measurements and Modelling (TFMM), Chemical Co-ordinating Centre (CCC), Meteorological Synthesizing Centre-East (MSC-E), Meteorological Synthesizing Centre-West (MSC-W)

Split-spectrum amplitude-decorrelation angiography with optical coherence tomography

Amplitude decorrelation measurement is sensitive to transverse flow and immune to phase noise in comparison to Doppler and other phase-based approaches. However, the high axial resolution of OCT makes it very sensitive to the pulsatile bulk motion noise in the axial direction. To overcome this limitation, we developed split-spectrum amplitude-decorrelation angiography (SSADA) to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of flow detection. The full OCT spectrum was split into several narrower bands. Inter-B-scan decorrelation was computed using the spectral bands separately and then averaged. The SSADA algorithm was tested on in vivo images of the human macula and optic nerve head. It significantly improved both SNR for flow detection and connectivity of microvascular network when compared to other amplitude-decorrelation algorithms.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01 EY013516)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-EY11289-26)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-10-1-0551

Acclimation capacity of critical thermal maximum varies among populations: Consequences for estimates of vulnerability

Adaptive plasticity in thermal tolerance traits may buffer organisms against changing temperatures, making such responses of particular interest in the face of global climate change. Although population variation is integral to the evolvability of this trait, many studies inferring proxies of physiological vulnerability from thermal tolerance traits extrapolate data from one or a few populations to represent the species. Estimates of physiological vulnerability can be further complicated by methodological effects associated with experimental design. We evaluated how populations varied in their acclimation capacity (i.e., the magnitude of plasticity) for critical thermal maximum (CTmax) in two species of tailed frogs (Ascaphidae), cold-stream specialists. We used the estimates of acclimation capacity to infer physiological vulnerability to future warming. We performed CTmax experiments on tadpoles from 14 populations using a fully factorial experimental design of two holding temperatures (8 and 15°C) and two experimental starting temperatures (8 and 15°C). This design allowed us to investigate the acute effects of transferring organisms from one holding temperature to a different experimental starting temperature, as well as fully acclimated responses by using the same holding and starting temperature. We found that most populations exhibited beneficial acclimation, where CTmax was higher in tadpoles held at a warmer temperature, but populations varied markedly in the magnitude of the response and the inferred physiological vulnerability to future warming. We also found that the response of transferring organisms to different starting temperatures varied substantially among populations, although accounting for acute effects did not greatly alter estimates of physiological vulnerability at the species level or for most populations. These results underscore the importance of sampling widely among populations when inferring physiological vulnerability, as population variation in acclimation capacity and thermal sensitivity may be critical when assessing vulnerability to future warming.publishedVersio