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Cybersecurity and data privacy are important fields today. Basic education in these two interconnected areas should already be offered in schools, as practically everyone today can encounter the dangers and risks of the Internet in terms of data theft, data manipulation or the like. However, the topics of cybersecurity and data privacy are generally abstract, and many people are not interested in such rather technical topics. To arouse interest and provide a certain basic education, we used ‘peer instruction’ combined with storytelling as a promising method. Within the framework of an EU project called GEIGER and with the support of students who have learned data privacy by means of the presented method, the method has been further developed, applied, tested, reflected, and iteratively improved. In summary, the method presented is useful for the topics of cybersecurity and data privacy, but the recommendations compiled must be considered in particular with regard to careful preparation and testing.

Information on the real-world experience of Canadians diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is limited. This study was conducted to report treatment patterns and outcomes of CLL using Ontario administrative data. A retrospective cohort study was conducted in patients diagnosed with CLL between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2017 identified in the Ontario Cancer Registry (OCR). Data were accessed using the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), which collects various population-level health information. In the Ontario Cancer Registry, 2887 CLL patients receiving treatment and diagnosed between 2010–2017 were identified. Fludarabine, cyclophosphamide and rituximab (FCR) chemoimmunotherapy was most frequently used as a first line, but use declined since ibrutinib and obinutuzumab combinations were funded in 2015. In patients treated with frontline FCR, survival at year one was 89% pre-2015 and 96% post-2015; at year four, survival was 73% and 87%, respectively. Survival in patients treated with frontline chlorambucil was 76% pre-2015 and 75% post-2015 in year 1, and 45% and 56% in year 3. Our analysis shows that, as the treatment landscape for CLL has shifted, use of newer and novel agents as a first line or earlier in the relapsed/refractory setting has resulted in improved survival outcomes.

Exposure is a central concept of the health and behavioural sciences needed to study the influence of the environment on the health and behaviour of people within a spatial context. While an increasing number of studies measure different forms of exposure, including the influence of air quality, noise, and crime, the influence of land cover on physical activity, or of the urban environment on food intake, we lack a common conceptual model of environmental exposure that captures its main structure across all this variety. Against the background of such a model, it becomes possible not only to systematically compare different methodological approaches but also to better link and align the content of the vast amount of scientific publications on this topic in a systematic way. For example, an important methodical distinction is between studies that model exposure as an exclusive outcome of some activity versus ones where the environment acts as a direct independent cause (active vs. passive exposure). Here, we propose an information ontology design pattern that can be used to define exposure and to model its variants. It is built around causal relations between concepts including persons, activities, concentrations, exposures, environments and health risks. We formally define environmental stressors and variants of exposure using Description Logic (DL), which allows automatic inference from the RDF-encoded content of a paper. Furthermore, concepts can be linked with data models and modelling methods used in a study. To test the pattern, we translated competency questions into SPARQL queries and ran them over RDF-encoded content. Results show how study characteristics can be classified and summarized in a manner that reflects important methodical differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In geographic information systems (GIS), analysts answer questions by designing workflows that transform a certain type of data into a certain type of goal. Semantic data types help constrain the application of computational methods to those that are meaningful for such a goal. This prevents pointless computations and helps analysts design effective workflows. Yet, to date it remains unclear which types would be needed in order to ease geo-analytical tasks. The data types and formats used in GIS still allow for huge amounts of syntactically possible but nonsensical method applications. Core concepts of spatial information and related geo-semantic distinctions have been proposed as abstractions to help analysts formulate analytic questions and to compute appropriate answers over geodata of different formats. In essence, core concepts reflect particular interpretations of data which imply that certain transformations are possible. However, core concepts usually remain implicit when operating on geodata, since a concept can be represented in a variety of forms. A central question therefore is: Which semantic types would be needed to capture this variety and its implications for geospatial analysis? In this article, we propose an ontology design pattern of core concept data types that help answer geo-analytical questions. Based on a scenario to compute a liveability atlas for Amsterdam, we show that diverse kinds of geo-analytical questions can be answered by this pattern in terms of valid, automatically constructible GIS workflows using standard sources.

Contextualization: M. scabrella is a native tree species of the Brazilian Mixed Ombrophilous Forest, with a high ecological importance and economic potential. Knowledge gap: There is a lack of information about the use of resources that favour the seedlings production of this species. Purpose: This study aimed to determine the most appropriate doses of controlled-release fertilizer (CRF) combined with the addition of remineralizer for production of M. scabrella seedlings. Methodology: Seedlings were produced using four doses of CRF (0, 4, 8, and 12 kg m-3) and four doses of remineralizer (0 %, 10 %, 20 %, and 30 %), in a 4 x 4 factorial scheme. At 180 days of seedling production, growth in height and stem diameter, shoot (SDB), root (RDB) and total biomass (TDB), and Dickson quality index (DQI) were evaluated. Results and conclusions: The use of remineralizer provided an increase in density and water retention capacity of substrates, as well as a reduction of macroporosity and total porosity. Combined with doses of 4 and 8 kg m-3, CRF contributed to the increase of biomass and DQI. The addition of 10 % remineralizer, associated with 4.0 kg m-3 CRF, provides adequate growth to produce M. scabrella seedlings. Above this percentage of remineralizer and CRF dose, species growth rate is reduced.

This paper presents local and global bifurcation results for radially symmetric solutions of the cubic Helmholtz system

Geographic information has become central for data scientists of many disciplines to put their analyzes into a spatio-temporal perspective. However, just as the volume and variety of data sources on the Web grow, it becomes increasingly harder for analysts to be familiar with all the available geospatial tools, including toolboxes in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), R packages, and Python modules. Even though the semantics of the questions answered by these tools can be broadly shared, tools and data sources are still divided by syntax and platform-specific technicalities. It would, therefore, be hugely beneficial for information science if analysts could simply ask questions in generic and familiar terms to obtain the tools and data necessary to answer them. In this article, we systematically investigate the analytic questions that lie behind a range of common GIS tools, and we propose a semantic framework to match analytic questions and tools that are capable of answering them. To support the matching process, we define a tractable subset of SPARQL, the query language of the Semantic Web, and we propose and test an algorithm for computing query containment. We illustrate the identification of tools to answer user questions on a set of common user requests.