Technical note: Graph theory-based heuristics to aid in the implementation of optimized drinking water network sectorization

Drinking water distribution networks form an essential part of modern-day critical infrastructure. Sectorizing a network into district metered areas is a key technique for pressure management and water loss reduction. Sectorizing an existing network from scratch is, however, an exceedingly complex design task that designs in a well-studied general mathematical problem. Numerical optimization techniques such as evolutionary algorithms can be used to search for near-optimal solutions to such problems, but doing so within a reasonable timeframe remains an ongoing challenge. In this work, we introduce two heuristic tricks that use information of the network structure and information of the operational requirements of the drinking water distribution network to modify the basic evolutionary algorithm used to solve the general problem. These techniques not only reduce the time required to find good solutions, but also ensure that these solutions better match the requirements of drinking water practice. Both techniques were demonstrated by applying them in the sectorization of the actual distribution network of a large city.

Updated distribution of seven Trichosanthes L. (Cucurbitales: Cucurbitaceae) taxa in India, along with taxonomic notes

In India, lack of revisionary work in the genus Trichosanthes L. (Cucurbitales: Cucurbitaceae) over the past 38 years had resulted in several taxonomic and nomenclatural issues, which had implications in determining actual distribution status of taxa. Based on field observations, collected specimens, data from various specimens in herbaria and critical study of all the resources available, here we confirm the extended distribution of T. anaimalaiensis Bedd. in the states of Manipur and Nagaland; T. cordata Roxb. in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; T. cucumerina L. subsp. sublobata (Kundu) K. Pradheep, D.R. Pani & K.C. Bhatt in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha; T. dicaelosperma C.B. Clarke in Nagaland; T. kerrii Craib in Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur; T. majuscula (C.B. Clarke) Kundu in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Assam; and T. truncata C.B. Clarke in Nagaland. Two taxa, namely, Trichosanthes dicaelosperma and T. majuscula, earlier subsumed with T. ovigera Blume or T. cucumeroides (Ser.) Maxim., and T. dunniana H. Lév., respectively, have been resurrected at the rank of species. Lectotypes were designated for the names of above two species. For the first time, female plants of T. majuscula have been described. This communication provides an updated distribution status of seven taxa of Trichosanthes in India along with field and taxonomic notes, and additional taxonomic characters.

Accumulation and maintenance of information in evolution

Selection accumulates information in the genome - it guides stochastically evolving populations towards states (genotype frequencies) that would be unlikely under neutrality. This can be quantified as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the actual distribution of genotype frequencies and the corresponding neutral distribution. First, we show that this population-level information sets an upper bound on the information at the level of genotype and phenotype, limiting how precisely they can be specified by selection. Next, we study how the accumulation and maintenance of information is limited by the cost of selection, measured as the genetic load or the relative fitness variance, both of which we connect to the control-theoretic KL cost of control. The information accumulation rate is upper bounded by the population size times the cost of selection. This bound is very general, and applies across models (Wright-Fisher, Moran, diffusion) and to arbitrary forms of selection, mutation and recombination. Finally, the cost of maintaining information depends on how it is encoded: specifying a single allele out of two is expensive, but one bit encoded among many weakly specified loci (as in a polygenic trait) is cheap.

Weakly Supervised Ternary Stream Data Augmentation Fine-Grained Classification Network for Identifying Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Due to the high incidence of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) worldwide as well as its rapid and fatal progression, timely microscopy screening of peripheral blood smears is essential for the rapid diagnosis of ALL. However, screening manually is time-consuming and tedious and may lead to missed or misdiagnosis due to subjective bias; on the other hand, artificially intelligent diagnostic algorithms are constrained by the limited sample size of the data and are prone to overfitting, resulting in limited applications. Conventional data augmentation is commonly adopted to expand the amount of training data, avoid overfitting, and improve the performance of deep models. However, in practical applications, random data augmentation, such as random image cropping or erasing, is difficult to realistically occur in specific tasks and may instead introduce tremendous background noises that modify actual distribution of data, thereby degrading model performance. In this paper, to assist in the early and accurate diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, we present a ternary stream-driven weakly supervised data augmentation classification network (WT-DFN) to identify lymphoblasts in a fine-grained scale using microscopic images of peripheral blood smears. Concretely, for each training image, we first generate attention maps to represent the distinguishable part of the target by weakly supervised learning. Then, guided by these attention maps, we produce the other two streams via attention cropping and attention erasing to obtain the fine-grained distinctive features. The proposed WT-DFN improves the classification accuracy of the model from two aspects: (1) in the images can be seen details since cropping attention regions provide the accurate location of the object, which ensures our model looks at the object closer and discovers certain detailed features; (2) images can be seen more since erasing attention mechanism forces the model to extract more discriminative parts’ features. Validation suggests that the proposed method is capable of addressing the high intraclass variances located in lymphocyte classes, as well as the low interclass variances between lymphoblasts and other normal or reactive lymphocytes. The proposed method yields the best performance on the public dataset and the real clinical dataset among competitive methods.

Research on Distribution Network Reliability Investment Estimation Method Based on Sequence Linearization Correlation Analysis

This paper presents an estimation method of distribution network reliability planning Investment Based on sequence linearization correlation analysis. Firstly, the planning business index closely related to reliability are selected, and the control objectives of reliability index are decomposed into the promotion objectives of each planning business index through sequence linearization correlation analysis. Then, the typical engineering construction scenarios corresponding to each planning business index are constructed, and the investment required to achieve the corresponding promotion objectives of business index is estimated according to the typical scenarios, Finally, the total investment of reliability planning is obtained. The example shows that the method can be applied to the actual distribution network with complex grid conditions and various planning schemes, and can provide powerful guidance for power supply enterprises to improve the efficiency of capital use

New discoveries of Geometridae (Lepidoptera) from the extreme southwest of the Russian Far East – result of climate impact?

New founds of 4 species of East Asian Geometridae: Megabiston plumosaria (Leech, 1891), Photoscotosia lucicolens (Butler, 1878), Callabraxas fabiolaria (Oberthür, 1884), and Dysstroma cinereata (Moore, 1867) in the extreme southwest of the Russian Far East are presented and discussed due to the actual distribution and its current trends. From them Ph. lucicolens is recorded from Russia and China (Jilin) for the first time. Identity of specimens of "Photoscotosia atrostrigata" and "Dysstroma cinereata" in Barcode of Life Database is revised to Ph. lucicolens and Paradysstroma corussaria (Oberthür, 1880) respectively. These founds probably indicate northern expansion of ranges of geometrid moth in accordance with the current climatic trend of global warming. Potential harmfulness of M. plumosaria in RFE is assumed. The validity of Dysstroma cinerea cesa Koçak & Kemal, 2001, as a substitute name for Dysstroma cinereata japonica (Heydemann, 1929) is substantiated.

An Alternative Tool for Production Logging in Horizontal Wells

From year to year, well drilling is becoming more technologically advanced and more complex, therefore we observe the active development of drilling technologies, well completion and production intensification. It forms the trend towards the complex well geometry and growth of the length of horizontal sections and therefore an increase of the hydraulic fracturing stages at each well. It's obvious, that oil producing companies frequently don't have proved analytical data on the actual distribution of formation fluid in the inflow profiles for some reasons. Conventional logging methods in horizontal sections require coiled tubing (CT) or downhole tractors, and the well preparation such as drilling the ball seat causing technical difficulties, risks of downhole equipment getting lost or stuck in the well. Sometimes the length of horizontal sections is too long to use conventional logging methods due to their limitations. In this regard, efficient solution of objectives related to the production and development of fields with horizontal wells is complicated due to the shortage of instruments allowing to justify the horizontal well optimal length and the number of MultiFrac stages, difficulties in evaluating the reservoir management system efficiency, etc. A new method of tracer based production profiling technologies are increasingly applied in the global oil industry. This approach benefits through excluding well intervention operations for production logging, allows continuous production profiling operations without the necessity of well shut-in, and without involving additional equipment and personal to be located at wellsite.

A Continuous Semantic Embedding Method for Video Compact Representation

Video compact representation aims to obtain a representation that could reflect the kernel mode of video content and concisely describe the video. As most information in complex videos is either noisy or redundant, some researchers have instead focused on long-term video semantics. Recent video compact representation methods heavily rely on the segmentation accuracy of video semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to address these challenges. Specifically, we designed a novel continuous video semantic embedding model to learn the actual distribution of video words. First, an embedding model based on the continuous bag of words method is proposed to learn the video embeddings, integrated with a well-designed discriminative negative sampling approach, which helps emphasize the convincing clips in the embedding while weakening the influence of the confusing ones. Second, an aggregated distribution pooling method is proposed to capture the semantic distribution of kernel modes in videos. Finally, our well-trained model can generate compact video representations by direct inference, which provides our model with a better generalization ability compared with those of previous methods. We performed extensive experiments on event detection and the mining of representative event parts. Experiments on TRECVID MED11 and CCV datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Our method could capture the semantic distribution of kernel modes in videos and shows powerful potential to discover and better describe complex video patterns.

Human fascioliasis in Africa: A systematic review

Fascioliasis is a globally distributed, parasitic zoonosis, caused by Fasciola hepatica and F. gigantica. A comprehensive overview of the epidemiology of human fascioliasis in Africa is missing up to now. Therefore, our objective was to conduct a systematic review aiming to summarize recent knowledge on the distribution, prevalence, and risk factors of human fascioliasis in Africa. A key word search was performed in PubMed, Web of Science and Africa Wide, to gather relevant literature, published between the 1st of January 2000 and 31st of December 2020. A total of 472 records were initially retrieved, with 40 full text articles retained for the qualitative synthesis. Human fascioliasis was reported in 12 African countries, namely Algeria, Angola, Cape Verde, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South-Africa, Tanzania and Tunisia. The majority of the studies was conducted in Egypt. A total of 28 records were population surveys. Coproscopy was the most commonly used tool for fascioliasis diagnosis in these surveys. Gender (being female), consumption of raw vegetables/seeds, age, owning livestock, and use of unsafe drinking water sources, were identified as risk factors in 7 studies. Furthermore, 43 case reports were retrieved, described in 12 studies. Eosinophilia was present in 39 of these cases, while 11 had positive coproscopy results. Eight cases described having eaten raw wild vegetables. Overall, the low number and quality of records retrieved indicates that human fascioliasis remains a truly neglected disease in Africa, and more epidemiological studies are urgently needed to both establish the actual distribution as well as risk factors on the continent.

Molecular data attest to the occurrence of autochthonous Daphnia pulex (Crustacea, Branchiopoda) populations in Sicily, Italy

Biological invasions are known to be among the most important threats to the long-term conservation of native biota, and their effects might be even more difficult to contrast when they are cryptic, i.e., when the non-native invaders cannot be easily recognised based on morphology, and can thus be confused with native taxa. Such cryptic invasions are known to widely occur in the cladoceran genus Daphnia O.F. Müller, 1785, so that the actual distribution and status of most species and lineages need to be checked with a genetic approach. In the frame of this work, we investigated if the Sicilian populations of D. (Daphnia) pulex Leydig, 1860 belonged to the allochthonous North American lineage, which is known to occur in several regions of the Palearctic and Afrotropical biogeographical regions, or rather to the autochthonous European lineage of the species. The molecular results obtained, based on a fragment of the mitochondrial gene encoding for NADH subunit dehydrogenase 5 (ND5), allowed us to rule out the allochthonous status of the species, confirming the presence of autochthonous relictual lineages of D. pulex in Sicily. The native status of these populations is in agreement with their local distribution, limited to natural and poorly-impacted water bodies mostly located in wooded areas at medium and high altitudes. The current local distribution of D. pulex in Sicily is possibly linked to the end of the last glacial maximum and the onset of warmer climatic conditions in the early Holocene, which led the species to take refuge in colder microthermal refugia located at high altitudes, determining their current relictual distribution.