Community Structure Characterization

This entry discusses the problem of describing some communities identified in a complex network of interest, in a way allowing to interpret them. We suppose the community structure has already been detected through one of the many methods proposed in the literature. The question is then to know how to extract valuable information from this first result, in order to allow human interpretation. This requires subsequent processing, which we describe in the rest of this entry

Anaerobic digestion of screenings for biogas recovery

Screenings comprise untreatable solid materials that have found their way into the sewer. They are removed during preliminary treatment at the inlet work of any wastewater treatment process using a unit operation termed as a screen and at present are disposed of to landfill. These materials, if not removed, will damage mechanical equipment due to its heterogeneity and reduce overall treatment process, reliability and effectiveness. That is why this material is retained and prevented from entering the treatment system before finally being disposed of. The amount of biodegradable organic matter in screenings often exceeds the upper limit and emits a significant amount of greenhouse gases during biodegradation on landfill. Nutrient release can cause a serious problem of eutrophication phenomena in receiving waters and a deterioration of water quality. Disposal of screenings on landfill also can cause odour problem due to putrescible nature of some of the solid material. In view of the high organic content of screenings, anaerobic digestion method may not only offer the potential for energy recovery but also nutrient. In this study, the anaerobic digestion was performed for 30,days, at controlled pH and temperature, using different dry solids concentrations of screenings to study the potential of biogas recovery in the form of methane. It was found screenings have physical characteristics of 30% total solids and 93% volatile solids, suggesting screenings are a type of waste with high dry solids and organic contents. Consistent pH around pH 6.22 indicates anaerobic digestion of screenings needs minimum pH correction. The biomethane potential tests demonstrated screenings were amenable to anaerobic digestion with methane yield of 355,m3/kg VS, which is comparable to the previous results. This study shows that anaerobic digestion is not only beneficial for waste treatment but also to turn waste into useful resources

Automatic Data Curation for Self-Supervised Learning: A Clustering-Based Approach

Self-supervised features are the cornerstone of modern machine learning systems. They are typically pre-trained on data collections whose construction and curation typically require extensive human effort. This manual process has some limitations similar to those encountered in supervised learning, e.g., the crowd-sourced selection of data is costly and time-consuming, preventing scaling the dataset size. In this work, we consider the problem of automatic curation of high-quality datasets for self-supervised pre-training. We posit that such datasets should be large, diverse and balanced, and propose a clustering-based approach for building ones satisfying all these criteria. Our method involves successive and hierarchical applications of $k$-means on a large and diverse data repository to obtain clusters that distribute uniformly among data concepts, followed by a hierarchical, balanced sampling step from these clusters. Extensive experiments on three different data domains including web-based images, satellite images and text show that features trained on our automatically curated datasets outperform those trained on uncurated data while being on par or better than ones trained on manually curated data. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ssl-data-curation

Odor from anaerobic digestion of swine slurry: influence of pH, temperature and organic loading

Farm slurry management from storage and/or treatment is the main source of odors from swine production, which are determined by factors such as operational variations (organic loading), cleaning of facilities and animal diet (pH) or environmental conditions (temperature). The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of pH, temperature and organic loading on odor generation during anaerobic digestion of swine slurry. The methodology employed batch experimental units under controlled pH (6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and 8.0) and temperature (20, 35 and 55 °C) conditions. Additionally, an Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) system was operated under two Organic Loading Rate (OLR) conditions as Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) (Phase I: 0.4 g L-1 d-1 of COD, Phase II: 1.1 g L-1 d-1 of COD). Odor (batch and UASB reactor) was evaluated by detection and recognition threshold as Dilution Threshold (D-T). Acidic conditions (pH 6.0) and thermophilic temperatures (55 °C) increased odors (1,358 D-T) and acidified the system (Intermediate/Total Alkalinity ratio (IT/TA): 0.85) in batch experiments. Increasing OLR on UASB reactor reduced odors from 6.3 to 9.6 D-T d-1 due to an increase in the production of biogas (0.4 to 0.6 g g-1 COD removed of biogas)

Performance of juvenile turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) fed varying dietary L-carnitine levels at different stocking densities

Commercial farming of turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) at high stocking densities may lead to growth depression and increasing production costs. Moreover, the high levels of accumulated waste in an intensive system may cause rapid deterioration of water quality, which may undermine the production. L-carnitine is known as a growth-enhancer which shows promise as mitigator of crowding effects. The effects of stocking densities (4, 8, 11 and 14 kg m²) on growth performance, feed utilization and body composition were evaluated during 75 days on turbot (75.6 ± 2.8 g) fed two dietary L-carnitine levels (40 or 240 mg kg¹). At the end of the feeding trial, total ammonia excretion (TAN) was measured postprandially for 24h. Specific growth rate and weight gain decreased with increasing stocking density. Fish held at 4 kg m² had higher final body weight (94-96 g) than fish held at higher densities (80-87 g). Protein efficiency ratio was higher in fish held at 4 kg m² (1.33-1.36), in comparison to fish stocked at 8 kg m² (0.98) or 14 kg m² (0.45). Voluntary feed intake decreased from 0.70 to 0.56% BW with increasing stocking density. Dietary L-carnitine supplementation did not affect growth performance and body composition, except for body L-carnitine content which increased from 75 to 128 mg kg¹ BW with supplementation. Fish fed 240 mg L-carnitine supplements had lower TAN that the ones fed 40 mg L-carnitine (p A aquicultura de pregado (Scophthalmus maximus) utilizando elevadas densidades pode reduzir o crescimento e aumentar os custos de produção. Elevados níveis de metabolitos gerados nestes sistemas intensivos provocam rápida deterioração da qualidade da água, podendo também comprometer a performance da produção. A L-carnitina atua como potenciadora do crescimento parecendo ser promissora por atenuar alguns desses efeitos. Os efeitos de densidades (4, 8, 11 e 14 kg m²) no desempenho do crescimento, composição corporal foram avaliados em pregados (75,6 ± 2,8 g) alimentados durante 75 dias a dois níveis dietéticos de L-carnitina (40 ou 240 mg kg¹). Após esse período, determinou-se a excreção de amônia pós-prandial durante 24 horas. Os peixes cultivados na menor densidade, 4 kg m², apresentaram melhores taxas de crescimento e ganho de peso (94-96 g) em comparação aos mantidos em altas densidades (80-87 g). A taxa de eficiência proteica foi mais elevada a 4 kg m² (1,33-1,36), do que a densidades de 8 kg m² (0,98) ou 14 kg m² (0,45). A ingestão voluntária de alimento decresceu de 0,70 para 0,56% do peso corporal com o incremento da densidade. A suplementação de carnitina não afetou o crescimento e a composição corporal, com exceção do conteúdo de carnitine da carcaça que passou de 75 a 128 mg kg¹. Peixes alimentados com suplementos de 240 mg L-carnitina apresentam excreção de amônia mais baixa comparativamente aos alimentados com 40 mg L-carnitina (p < 0,05)

Outlook and challenges for recovering energy and water from complex organic waste using hydrothermal liquefaction

Coupling hydrothermal liquefaction with anaerobic digestion can recover between 54 and 99% of the energy contained in organic wastes, while reducing up to 92% of the chemical oxygen demand of the influent stream.</p

Concentration Indices for Dialogue Dominance Phenomena in TV Series: The Case of the Big Bang Theory

Dialogues in a TV series (especially in sitcoms) represent the main interaction among characters. Dialogues may exhibit concentration, with some characters dominating, or showing instead a choral action, where all characters contribute equally to the conversation. The degree of concentration represents a distinctive feature (a signature) of the TV series. In this paper, we advocate the use of a concentration index (the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index) to examine dominance phenomena in TV series and apply it to the Big Bang Theory TV series. The use of the concentration index allows us to reveal a declining trend in dialogue concentration as well as the decline of some characters and the emergence of others. We find the decline in dominance to be highly correlated with a decline in popularity. A stronger concentration is present for episodes (i.e. by analysing concentration of episodes rather than speaking lines), where the number of characters that dominate episodes is quite small