The main question of this article is about whether cryptocurrencies, within their decentralization aspects, are a real commodity or/and a virtual currency. To resolve such a dilemma, we compare 7 ...cryptocurrencies with a sample of the three types of monetary systems: 28 fiat money, 2 commodities, 2 commodity based indices, and 3 financial market indices. We use the matrix correlation method. We display dendrograms and observe “hierarchy clustering”, as a function of data coarse graining.
In fact, we confirm that the cryptocurrencies are not decentralized. We observe also that most of the currencies in the world are not significantly correlated or present a weak correlation with cryptocurrencies. Our results show that the cryptocurrency market and Forex market belong to different system communities (or regions).
The rapid growth of social media networks has resulted in the generation of a vast data amount, making it impractical to conduct manual analyses to extract newsworthy events. Thus, automated event ...detection mechanisms are invaluable to the community. However, a clear majority of the available approaches rely only on data statistics without considering linguistics. A few approaches involved linguistics, only to extract textual event details without the corresponding temporal details. Since linguistics define words’ structure and meaning, a severe information loss can happen without considering them. Targeting this limitation, we propose a novel method named WhatsUp to detect temporal and fine-grained textual event details, using linguistics captured by self-learned word embeddings and their hierarchical relationships and statistics captured by frequency-based measures. We evaluate our approach on recent social media data from two diverse domains and compare the performance with several state-of-the-art methods. Evaluations cover temporal and textual event aspects, and results show that WhatsUp notably outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also analyse the efficiency, revealing that WhatsUp is sufficiently fast for (near) real-time detection. Further, the usage of unsupervised learning techniques, including self-learned embedding, makes our approach expandable to any language, platform and domain and provides capabilities to understand data-specific linguistics.
In this work we present a clustering technique called multi-level conformal clustering (MLCC). The technique is hierarchical in nature because it can be performed at multiple significance levels ...which yields greater insight into the data than performing it at just one level. We describe the theoretical underpinnings of MLCC, compare and contrast it with the hierarchical clustering algorithm, and then apply it to real world datasets to assess its performance. There are several advantages to using MLCC over more classical clustering techniques: Once a significance level has been set, MLCC is able to automatically select the number of clusters. Furthermore, thanks to the conformal prediction framework the resulting clustering model has a clear statistical meaning without any assumptions about the distribution of the data. This statistical robustness also allows us to perform clustering and anomaly detection simultaneously. Moreover, due to the flexibility of the conformal prediction framework, our algorithm can be used on top of many other machine learning algorithms.
Human interferences have caused groundwater contamination in alluvial aquifers which subsequently affects the health of exposed population. In the present study, 74 groundwater samples from the ...semi-arid region of Panipat district, falling under Yamuna sub-basin, India was evaluated to know the potential non-carcinogenic human health risk in local adult and child population. The major objective of the present study was to know the non-carcinogenic human health risk due to intake of fluoride and nitrate contaminated water, using two different approaches: deterministic and probabilistic (Monte Carlo simulation). The values of hazard quotient (HQ) determined by deterministic as well as probabilistic approach were nearly identical. The hazard index (HI) value of 40.8% samples was above the unity in case of adults while 69.7% samples indicated HI value greater than unity for children thus indicating children are more prone to non-carcinogenic health risk than the adult population. Sensitivity analysis was performed to identify the influence of the non-carcinogenic human health risk predictor variables for the prediction of risk and concentration factor (CF) was the most influential variable. Multivariate statistical techniques were employed to know the positive and negative relationship of fluoride and nitrate with other parameters. Results of principal component analysis/factor analysis (PCA/FA) indicated that the concentration of fluoride is controlled by the presence of calcium due to their negative correlation in groundwater samples. The hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HCA) also supported the outcome of PCA/FA and both indicated anthropogenic sources of fluoride and nitrate in groundwater.
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•NHHR of F− & NO3− in groundwater was gaged by deterministic & probabilistic methods.•Both, deterministic & probabilistic method gave nearly identical results.•F− contributed more in NHHR than NO3− and children were at high risk than adults.•CF was the most influential factor for HQ in adults and children.•Groundwater in major part of study area is not fit for direct consumption.
Estuarine environment is complex and receives different contaminants from numerous sources that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic. The distribution, source, contamination and ecological risk ...status of heavy metals in sediment of Brisbane River, Australia were investigated. Sediment samples were analysed for major and minor elements using LA-ICP-MS. Principal component analysis and cluster analysis identified three main sources of metals in the samples: marine sand intrusion, mixed lithogenic and sand intrusion as well as transport related. To overcome inherent deficiencies in using a single index, a range of sediment quality indices, including contamination factor, enrichment factor, index of geo-accumulation, modified degree of contamination, pollution index and modified pollution index were utilised to ascertain the sediment quality. Generally, the sediment is deemed to be “slightly” to “heavily” polluted. A further comparison with the Australian Sediment Quality Guidelines indicated that Ag, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn had the potential to rarely cause biological effects while Hg could frequently cause biological effects. Application of potential ecological risk index (RI) revealed that the sediment poses moderate to considerable ecological risk. However, RI could not account for the complex sediment behaviour because it uses a simple contamination factor. Consequently, a modified ecological risk index (MRI) employing enrichment factor is proposed. This provides a more reliable understanding of whole sediment behaviour and classified the ecological risk of the sediment as moderate to very high. The results demonstrate the need for further investigation into heavy metal speciation and bioavailability in the sediment to ascertain the degree of toxicity.
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•In-depth investigation of heavy metal pollution of river sediments.•Current pollution indices found to provide poor indication of risk.•A modified ecological Index (MRI) is proposed.•MRI provides an improved method for assessing ecological risk.
A modified ecological risk index is proposed based on in-depth investigation of Brisbane River sediment.
Understanding the relationship between road-deposited sediments (RDS) and total suspended solids (TSS) is essential for managing non-point pollution. Studying the heavy metal concentrations of RDS ...and TSS in rainfall is important to the development of RDS management strategies and to the design of effective stormwater management practices. We investigated the heavy metal (V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Mo, Cd, Sn, Pb) in RDS and TSS in rainfall runoff to assess the metal pollution level and to evaluate the contribution of RDS heavy metal pollution in the TSS. The heavy metal pollution in RDS and TSS in industrial areas was relatively higher in small particles (<125 μm), while TSS had a higher heavy metal concentration than RDS. In addition, the concentration of heavy metals in TSS increased rapidly during the initial rainfall. The amount of particles larger than 125 μm also increased, suggesting that large metal particles accumulated in industrial areas were also discharged in the form of non-point pollution. The amount of RDS per unit of industrial area (g/m2) and the accumulation of heavy metals (Pb, Cu, and Zn) (mg/m2) were 15- and 8–54-fold higher than those of urban areas, respectively. Considering particles <125 μm, which can be easily transported or discharged during rainfall, the contribution rate of RDS to TSS was 41.3%, but the average contribution rate to heavy metals in TSS was 22.1%. The average load of heavy metals from industrial areas in TSS was 77.9%. The load of Cu, Ni, As, Cd, and Sn exceeded 90%, indicating that most of these metals were attributed to industrial activities related to metal processing. Our results suggest the importance of efficient road cleaning and rainfall runoff management strategies to solve the heavy metal pollution problem caused by non-point sources in industrial areas.
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•Heavy metals in road-deposited sediments (RDS) increases with decreasing size.•Heavy metals of total suspended solids (TSS) in runoff was higher that RDS.•Metal pollution in TSS has a greater influence on the industrial activities than RDS.•In industrial area, efficient runoff managements to control pollution is important.
•Only 2 out of 46 acidobacterial strains representing 7 subdivisions contain brGDGTs.•Strains of SDs 1, 3, 4, and 6 produce their building block, i.e. iso-diabolic acid.•Iso-diabolic acid occurs in a ...(mono) ether-bound form in SD 4 Acidobacteria.•The gene cluster responsible for the formation of this ether bond is identified.•Methylation of iso-diabolic acid occurs at C-5 and C-6 as observed for brGDGTs.
13,16-Dimethyl octacosanedioic acid (iso-diabolic acid) is a major membrane-spanning lipid of subdivisions (SDs) 1, 3 and 4 of the Acidobacteria, a highly diverse phylum within the Bacteria. It has been suggested that these lipids are potential building blocks for the orphan bacterial glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGT) that occur widely in a variety of environmental settings. Here, we expand the knowledge on the occurrence of iso-diabolic acid in Acidobacteria by examining the lipid composition of six strains belonging to SDs 6, 8, 10, and 23 of the Acidobacteria, not previously analyzed for these lipids. In addition, we examined 12 new strains belonging to SDs 1, 3 and 4. Acid hydrolysis of total cell material released iso-diabolic acid in substantial quantities (25–39% of all fatty acids) from the strains of SDs 1 and 3 (except “Candidatus Solibacter usitatus”), and, for the first time, strains of SD 6 (6–25%), but not from SDs 8, 10, and 23. The monoglycerol ether derivative of iso-diabolic acid was only dominantly present in SD 4 strains (17–34%), indicating that the occurrence of ether-bound iso-diabolic acid is mainly restricted to SD 4 species. Methylated iso-diabolic acid derivatives were encountered in SDs 1, 3, 4, and 6, but only SD 4 species produced 5-methyl iso-diabolic acid derivatives, whereas the other SDs formed 6-methyl iso-diabolic acids. This suggests that the position of methylation of iso-diabolic acid may be controlled by the phylogenetic affiliation within the Acidobacteria and thus may not be a direct but an indirect response environmental to environmental conditions as inferred from the bacterial GDGT distributions in soil, peat and rivers.
A proposal for a fundamental theory is described in which classical and quantum physics as a representation of the universe as a gigantic dendrogram are unified. The latter is the explicate order ...structure corresponding to the purely number-theoretical implicate order structure given by p-adic numbers. This number field was zero-dimensional, totally disconnected, and disordered. Physical systems (such as electrons, photons) are sub-dendrograms of the universal dendrogram. Measurement process is described as interactions among dendrograms; in particular, quantum measurement problems can be resolved using this process. The theory is realistic, but realism is expressed via the the Leibniz principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. The classical-quantum interplay is based on the degree of indistinguishability between dendrograms (in which the ergodicity assumption is removed). Depending on this degree, some physical quantities behave more or less in a quantum manner (versus classic manner). Conceptually, our theory is very close to Smolin’s dynamics of difference and Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics. The presence of classical behavior in nature implies a finiteness of the Universe-dendrogram. (Infinite Universe is considered to be purely quantum.) Reconstruction of events in a four-dimensional space type is based on the holographic principle. Our model reproduces Bell-type correlations in the dendrogramic framework. By adjusting dendrogram complexity, violation of the Bell inequality can be made larger or smaller.
The domestic cat (Felis catus) is a small carnivorous mammal belonging to the feline family. It is characterised by significant variability in terms of breeds, with females commonly smaller than ...males. Cats are one of the most popular pet species worldwide, though there is growing evidence that their large populations are having negative effects on the environment. Cats exhibit noticeable polymorphisms, particularly related to the colour, pattern, and texture of their coat, which can be easily recognised by visual inspection. This makes data collection a straightforward procedure. Cats are an ideal species for population studies because they are cosmopolitan animals and form a panmictic population. Genetic population analyses of cats are essential for understanding the history of their evolution and for developing phylogenetic hypotheses about allele relationships. However, despite the importance of these studies, global information availability is limited and, in some areas, completely absent. The aim of this study wasto determine the level of genetic diversity and structure in domestic cat populations using coat markers in Valledupar, Cesar. Random sampling was conducted between February and September 2022, and 365 adult animals were phenotypically identified in twelve neighbourhoods of the locality. The genes studied included Orange, Agouti, Dilution, Tabby, Long Hair, Siamese, Manx, Spotting White, and Dominant White. The Non-agoutimarker showed the highest frequency (0.740), while the Manx gene exhibited the lowest value. Most of the genetic diversity was found within populations and was limited between populations. Additionally, high gene flow, an excess of heterozygotes, and reduced genetic differentiation between populations were observed. The Spotting White locus showed a departure from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Genetic distance between populations and the obtained dendrogram revealed low significant values, indicating that the populations as a whole are closely related.
Domaća mačka (Felis catus) mali je sisavac, mesožder koji pripada porodici mačaka.Karakterizira ju značajna varijabilnost u smislu pasmine, s tim da su ženke obično veličinom manjeod mužjaka. Mačke su jedna od najpopularnijih vrsta kućnih ljubimaca diljem svijeta, ali postojisve više dokaza da njihove velike populacije imaju negativan učinak na okoliš. Mačke se odlikujuzamjetnim polimorfizmima, posebno bojom, uzorkom i teksturom njihovog krzna, što je lakomoguće prepoznati vizualno. To čini prikupljanje podataka jednostavnim postupkom. Uz to,mačke su idealna vrsta za studije populacije, jer su to kozmopolitske životinje i čine panmiktičkupopulaciju. Genetske analize populacije mačaka ključne su za razumijevanje povijesti njihoveevolucije i za razvoj filogenetskih hipoteza vezano uz odnosa alela. Međutim, unatoč važnostiovih studija, globalna dostupnost informacija je ograničena pa čak i potpuno odsutna u nekim područjima. Cilj je ove studije bio je utvrditi razinu genetske raznolikosti i strukture u populacijama domaćih mačaka (Felis catus) uporabom markera krzna u Valleduparu, Cesar. Nasumično uzorkovanje je provedeno između veljače i rujna 2022. godine te je fenotipski identificirano 365 odraslih životinja u dvanaest kvartova lokaliteta. Proučavani geni uključivali su Orange, Agouti, Dilution, Tabby, Long Hair, Siamese, Manx, Spotting White i Dominant White. Non-agouti marker pokazao je najveću učestalost (0,740), dok je Manx gen pokazao najnižu vrijednost. Najviše genetske raznolikosti otkriveno je unutar populacija, a bilo je ograničeno između populacija. Uz to, zamijećen je i visoki genski tok, obilje heterozigota i smanjena genetska diferencijacija između populacija. Spotting White locus pokazao je otklon od Hardy-Weinberg ekvilibrija. Genetska udaljenost između populacija i dobiveni dendrogram otkrili su niske značajne vrijednosti, ukazujući da su populacije općenito u uskom srodstvu.
We establish universality and ultra-homogeneity of (U,uGH), the collection of all compact ultrametric spaces endowed with the so-called Gromov-Hausdorff ultrametric. This result also gives rise to a ...novel construction of the so-called R-Urysohn universal ultrametric space for each countable subset R⊂R≥0 containing 0.
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