France’s recovery boosts Macron’s re-election hopes

Significance Inflation is lower than in other major EU economies and unemployment is falling, albeit from a high base, as the country approaches presidential elections in April. Impacts Macron’s steady lead in the polls will boost investor confidence ahead of the presidential elections. While Spain is calling on the EU to start treating COVID-19 like influenza, France is unlikely to embrace such thinking until after April. The EU recovery fund and more flexible EU fiscal rules will enable the next government to pursue investment-led growth beyond 2022.

Research on 3D Fingerprint Positioning Based on MIMO Base Station

The aim of this article is to solve the problem that the accuracy of traditional positioning algorithm decreases in complex environment and to provide some ideas for the few researches of fingerprint localization algorithm in three-dimensional space. This paper builds a system model in a three-dimensional space, provides three reference point distribution methods, and discusses the positioning performance under these distribution methods. After that, based on the high base station deployment density, multi-point fusion positioning method is used to locate the target, which further improves the positioning accuracy and makes more effective use of reference point resources. Finally, a backward-assisted positioning method is proposed, which uses the position information of the positioned points to assist the positioning of the current point. Research shows that this method can improve the positioning accuracy and has good versatility. (Foundation items: Social Development Projects of Jiangsu Science and Technology Department (No.BE2018704).)

A cluster analytic examination and validation of adult victim sexual offending subtypes in two Canadian samples

The development and validation of sexual offense perpetrator typologies remains a useful endeavor with implications for theory and correctional/clinical practice. Most such typologies—which rely on factors such as the individual’s motivation for offending—have not been validated empirically. The current study utilized a validated sexual violence risk-needs instrument, the Violence Risk Scale—Sexual Offense version (VRS-SO; Wong, Olver, Nicholaichuk, & Gordon [2003, 2017], Regional Psychiatric Centre and University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada), to develop and validate an empirically-derived adult victim sexual offense (AVSO) typology through model-based cluster analysis of dynamic risk-need domains. The study featured two treated samples of men (n = 283 and 169) convicted for contact sexual offenses against adult victims. A three-cluster solution was identified and replicated across the two samples: high antisociality high deviance (HA-HD), high antisociality low deviance (HA-LD), and low antisociality low deviance (LA-LD). External validation analyses demonstrated that HA-HD men had more dense sexual offense histories, were more likely to be diagnosed with a paraphilia, and had the highest rates of sexual recidivism (Sample 2 only). By contrast, the HA-LD men had greater concerns on indexes of nonsexual criminality, particularly high base rates of antisocial personality and substance use disorders, and high rates of general violent recidivism (particularly Sample 1). The findings suggest that the VRS-SO factors may have utility in discriminating between AVSO types to inform sexual offending theory, case formulation, and risk management.

The potential contribution of projected ASEAN Power Grid to emission reduction

This paper analyzed the potential contribution of the projected ASEAN Power Grid (APG) with increased contribution of renewable energy (RE) in the power system, toward emission reduction in South East Asia, both in region and country level, in three different scenarios (Baseline, ASEAN Target, and Optimum RE). Data collection was done with a series of (co-creation) consultation meetings with countries in the region and international energy institutes. Estimation of emission reduction from CO2 and N2O was calculated based on projected solar and wind capacity addition to replace fossil fuel consumption in the APG. We found that the potential contribution of the projected APG toward emission reduction in South East Asia is up to 112,267 million tons of CO2 and 64 thousand tons of N2O by 2040, under the optimum RE scenario. The source of that contribution is varying at the country level. Countries with potential significant contributions are Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Countries like Singapore and Brunei that have a relatively small contribution to the region, also having progressive trends to meet the RE target and its emission reduction. This trend shows a potential progressive improvement for those countries to reduce their emission from the energy sector by 2040. With their current high base scenario, they may reach a higher target in the future to integrate variable RE to the APG and contributing to emission reduction in the region.

Characterization and simulation of metagenomic nanopore sequencing data with Meta-NanoSim

Nanopore sequencing is crucial to metagenomic studies as its kilobase-long reads can contribute to resolving genomic structural differences among microbes. However, platform-specific challenges, including high base-call error rate, non-uniform read lengths, and the presence of chimeric artifacts, necessitate specifically designed analytical tools. Here, we present Meta-NanoSim, a fast and versatile utility that characterizes and simulates the unique properties of nanopore metagenomic reads. Further, Meta-NanoSim improves upon state-of-the-art methods on microbial abundance estimation through a base-level quantification algorithm. We demonstrate that Meta-NanoSim simulated data can facilitate the development of metagenomic algorithms and guide experimental design through a metagenomic assembly benchmarking task.

Fast alignment of reads to a variation graph with application to SNP detection

Sequencing technologies has provided the basis of most modern genome sequencing studies due to its high base-level accuracy and relatively low cost. One of the most demanding step is mapping reads to the human reference genome. The reliance on a single reference human genome could introduce substantial biases in downstream analyses. Pangenomic graph reference representations offer an attractive approach for storing genetic variations. Moreover, it is possible to include known variants in the reference in order to make read mapping, variant calling, and genotyping variant-aware. Only recently a framework for variation graphs, vg [Garrison E, Adam MN, Siren J, et al. Variation graph toolkit improves read mapping by representing genetic variation in the reference. Nat Biotechnol 2018;36:875–9], have improved variation-aware alignment and variant calling in general. The major bottleneck of vg is its high cost of reads mapping to a variation graph. In this paper we study the problem of SNP calling on a variation graph and we present a fast reads alignment tool, named VG SNP-Aware. VG SNP-Aware is able align reads exactly to a variation graph and detect SNPs based on these aligned reads. The results show that VG SNP-Aware can efficiently map reads to a variation graph with a speedup of 40× with respect to vg and similar accuracy on SNPs detection.

Characterization and classification of major coconut growing soils in South Eastern Ghats of Tamil Nadu, India

Six soil series representing major coconut growing soils of the Eastern Ghats in Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu State, India, were evolved from granite gneiss and alluvium parent materials. Characterization of different soil properties was done using a detailed soil survey at 1:10000 scale. The soils were neutral to moderately alkaline in reaction (7.31 to 9.19), non-saline, poor to moderately well-drained and moderately shallow (<75 cm) to very deep (>150 cm) in depth. The soils were sandy to clay in texture, sub-angular blocky to crumb in structure, dark reddish-brown to brown, very low to high in OC content (0.06 to 2.70%), low to medium in AWC (3.44 to 22.39%), low to high in CEC (4.70 to 54.0 cmol (p+) kg-1) and having high base saturation (77 to 100%). The soils also had sizable amounts of exchangeable sodium (4.29 to 33.46%), which was maximum in P5, P6 and P1, and high clay content in P5 and P2. The distribution of CaCO3 in different depths was found to be maximum in P4 and P1. The soil orders identified in the coconut area were Inceptisols, Entisols, Alfisols and Vertisols. Assessment of soil resources and identification of yield-limiting soils factors on coconut could be by way of better management and improved productivity.