Characteristics of direct human impacts on the rivers Karun and Dez in lowland south-west Iran and their interactions with earth surface movements

Two of the primary external factors influencing the variability of major river systems, over river reach scales, are human activities and tectonics. Based on the rivers Karun and Dez in south-west Iran, this paper presents an analysis of the geomorphological responses of these major rivers to ancient human modifications and tectonics. Direct human modifications can be distinguished by both modern constructions and ancient remnants of former constructions that can leave a subtle legacy in a suite of river characteristics. For example, the ruins of major dams are characterised by a legacy of channel widening to 100's up to c. 1000 m within upstream zones that can stretch to channel distances of many kilometres upstream of former dam sites, whilst the legacy of major, ancient, anthropogenic river channel straightening can also be distinguished by very low channel sinuosities over long lengths of the river course. Tectonic movements in the region are mainly associated with young and emerging folds with NW–SE and N–S trends and with a long structural lineament oriented E–W. These earth surface movements can be shown to interact with both modern and ancient human impacts over similar timescales, with the types of modification and earth surface motion being distinguishable. This paper examines the geomorphological evidence and outlines the processes involved in the evolution of these interactions through time. The analysis shows how interactions between earth surface movements and major dams are slight, especially after ancient dam collapse. By contrast, interactions between earth surface movements and major anthropogenic river channel straightening are shown to be a key factor in the persistence of long, near-straight river courses. Additionally, it is suggested that artificial river development, with very limited river channel lateral migration, may promote incision across an active fold at unusually long distances from the fold “core” and may promote markedly increased sinuosity across a structural lineament

Facilitating the analysis of COVID-19 literature through a knowledge graph

At the end of 2019, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) of the outbreak of a new strain of the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, which struck humanity by an unprecedented disaster a few months later. In response to this pandemic, a publicly available dataset was released on Kaggle which contained information of over 63,000 papers. In order to facilitate the analysis of this large mass of literature, we have created a knowledge graph based on this dataset. Within this knowledge graph, all information of the original dataset is linked together, which makes it easier to search for relevant information. The knowledge graph is also enriched with additional links to appropriate, already existing external resources. In this paper, we elaborate on the different steps performed to construct such a knowledge graph from structured documents. Moreover, we discuss, on a conceptual level, several possible applications and analyses that can be built on top of this knowledge graph. As such, we aim to provide a resource that allows people to more easily build applications that give more insights into the COVID-19 pandemic

A 1500‐year record of North Atlantic storm flooding from lacustrine sediments, Shetland Islands (UK)

Severe storm flooding poses a major hazard to the coasts of north‐western Europe. However, the long‐term recurrence patterns of extreme coastal flooding and their governing factors are poorly understood. Therefore, high‐resolution sedimentary records of past North Atlantic storm flooding are required. This multi‐proxy study reconstructs storm‐induced overwash processes from coastal lake sediments on the Shetland Islands using grain‐size and geochemical data, and the re‐analysis of historical data. The chronostratigraphy is based on Bayesian age–depth modelling using accelerator mass spectrometry 14 C and 137 Cs data. A high XRF‐based Si/Ti ratio and the unimodal grain‐size distribution link the sand layers to the beach and thus storm‐induced overwash events. Periods with more frequent storm flooding occurred 980–1050, 1150–1300, 1450–1550, 1820–1900 and 1950–2000 ce, which is largely consistent with a positive North Atlantic Oscillation mode. The Little Ice Age (1400–1850 ce ) shows a gap of major sand layers suggesting a southward shift of storm tracks and a seasonal variance with more storm floods in spring and autumn. Warmer phases shifted winter storm tracks towards the north‐east Atlantic, indicating a possible trend for future storm‐track changes and increased storm flooding in the northern North Sea region

BESOCIAL: Report on WP2 Preparation of pilot for social media archiving and WP3 Pilot for access to social media archive.

This report aggregates the results from Work Package 2 (WP2) and Work Package 3 (WP3) of the BELSPO funded, KBR coordinated BESOCIAL project. The aim of WP2 was to develop a strategy before the start of the real pilot in the third work package. It’s the preparation phase before the start of WP3. Here, among other things, several tools and their functionalities were tested. What is possible, what is feasible, what are the needs of researchers when using a social media archive to conduct their research, what works for this project and what does not, how we will select the hashtags and accounts etc. All this with a view to the main pilot. The aim of WP3 was to develop a social media harvester and harvest the entire seedlist created in WP2. After this, the quality of the data content was checked. A preservation plan was also drawn up for archiving social media data in Belgium. In this report, the two work packages are combined to build a bridge between the preparation and execution phases. This is in order to anticipate and prevent potential problems. The preparatory phase within BESOCIAL takes on an equally important role as execution

Effect of stigma reduction intervention strategies on HIV test uptake in low- and middle-income countries: a realist review protocol

Background Several stigma reduction intervention strategies have been developed and tested for effectiveness in terms of increasing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) test uptake. These strategies have been more effective in some contexts and less effective in others. Individual factors, such as lack of knowledge and fear of disclosure, and social-contextual factors, such as poverty and illiteracy, might influence the effect of stigma reduction intervention strategies on HIV test uptake in low- and middle-income countries. So far, it is not clearly known how the stigma reduction intervention strategies interact with these contextual factors to increase HIV test uptake. Therefore, we will conduct a review that will synthesize existing studies on stigma reduction intervention strategies to increase HIV test uptake to better understand the mechanisms underlying this process in low- and middle-income countries. Methods A realist review will be conducted to unpack context-mechanism-outcome configurations of the effect of stigma reduction intervention strategies on HIV test uptake. Based on a scoping review, we developed a preliminary theoretical framework outlining a potential mechanism of how the intervention strategies influence HIV test uptake. Our realist synthesis will be used to refine the preliminary theoretical framework to better reflect mechanisms that are supported by existing evidence. Journal articles and grey literature will be searched following a purposeful sampling strategy. Data will be extracted and tested against the preliminary theoretical framework. Data synthesis and analysis will be performed in five steps: organizing extracted data into evidence tables, theming, formulating chains of inference from the identified themes, linking the chains of inference and developing generative mechanisms, and refining the framework. Discussion This will be the first realist review that offers both a quantitative and a qualitative exploration of the available evidence to develop and propose a theoretical framework that explains why and how HIV stigma reduction intervention strategies influence HIV test uptake in low- and middle-income countries. Our theoretical framework is meant to provide guidance to program managers on identifying the most effective stigma reduction intervention strategies to increase HIV test uptake. We also include advice on how to effectively implement these strategies to reduce the rate of HIV transmission.status: publishe

An ecosystem for linked humanities data

The main promise of the digital humanities is the ability to perform scholar studies at a much broader scale, and in a much more reusable fashion. The key enabler for such studies is the availability of suciently well described data. For the eld of socio-economic history, data usually comes in a tabular form. Existing eorts to curate and publish datasets take a top-down approach and are focused on large collections. This paper presents QBer and the underlying structured data hub, which address the long tail of research data by catering for the needs of individual scholars. QBer allows researchers to publish their (small) datasets, link them to existing vocabularies and other datasets, and thereby contribute to a growing collection of interlinked datasets.We present QBer, and evaluate our rst results by showing how our system facilitates two use cases in socio-economic history

Advanced Electron Tomography to Investigate the Growth and Stability of Complex Metal Nanoparticles

The funding for this project was provided by European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant 815128, REALNANO)