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The quality protection and improvement of the aquatic ecosystems and achievement of "good status" for all water bodies until 2015, involved integration of key ecosystem principles into water policies and a series of new management elements. Thus, the "health" status of aquatic ecosystems is a new objective for European water policy which is reflected in the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems, being defined by the biological, morphological and physico-chemical quality components as well as the presence of specific pollutants (synthetic and non-synthetic). In order to achieve good ecological status / good ecological potential for all water bodies (rivers) of Romania, the paper presents an innovative approach regarding monitoring of hydromorphological quality component and its integration in the assessment of ecological status of water bodies. In this approach the river system is seen in the context of stream corridor as a complex of ecosystems which includes not only the river, but also the riparian zone with the species of plants and animals that inhabit this space. The river corridor is responsible for shaping the river bad, retaining the water and sediments, and also constitutes the support for creating a variety of habitats / microhabitats for communities of aquatic organisms underlying the assessment of ecological status of rivers. In this context, the paper presents hydromorphological indicators set identified in accordance with the requirements of the WFD and a hydromorphological classification system of rivers in five quality classes which should represent a scientific basis for the water monitoring and evaluation system and assists in a judicious way the decision makers to improve water quality in Romania.

I propose that meta-learned models, and in particular the situation-aware deployment of "learning-to-infer" modules can be advantageously extended to domains commonly thought to lie outside the cognitive, such as motivations and preferences on one hand, and the effectuation of micro- and coping-type behaviors.

I argue for a more complicated but nonetheless computationally feasible and algorithmically intelligible interplay between exploration and exploitation and for admitting into our conceptual toolkit regimes of exploitative exploration and exploratory exploitation that can enhance the novelty and usefulness of the results of either problemistic or serendipitous search.

I consider the dynamics of regulator-agent interactions in situations in which there are significant mismatches in their abilities to discern and register information and calculate and act upon successful inferences.

Depending on what we mean by "explanation," challenges to the explanatory depth and reach of deep neural network models of visual and other forms of intelligent behavior may need revisions to both the elementary building blocks of neural nets (the explananda) and to the ways in which experimental environments and training protocols are engineered (the explanantia). The two paths assume and imply sharply different conceptions of how an explanation explains and of the explanatory function of models.

Can we explain the advantage natural languages enjoy over ideographies in a way that enables us to attempt the design of an ideography that "works"? I deploy an adapted version of Shannon's source- and channel-coding partitioning of a communication system to explain the communicative dynamics and shortfalls of ideographies, and reveal ways in which entrenchable, generalist ideographies could be designed.

In this paper, we study distributed inference and learning over networks which can be modeled by a directed graph. A subset of the nodes observes different features, which are all relevant/required for the inference task that needs to be performed at some distant end (fusion) node. We develop a learning algorithm and an architecture that can combine the information from the observed distributed features, using the processing units available across the networks. In particular, we employ information-theoretic tools to analyze how inference propagates and fuses across a network. Based on the insights gained from this analysis, we derive a loss function that effectively balances the model's performance with the amount of information transmitted across the network. We study the design criterion of our proposed architecture and its bandwidth requirements. Furthermore, we discuss implementation aspects using neural networks in typical wireless radio access and provide experiments that illustrate benefits over state-of-the-art techniques.

Conducting hydromorphological assessments for evaluating the ecological status of rivers is a key requirement of the Directive 2000/60/EC (Water Framework Directive - WFD) within European Union (EU) Member States. This paper aims at understanding how this requirement was implemented, through an original comparative review of methodologies for rivers' hydromorphological assessment in three EU Member States, which joined the EU at different times, and with many differences in terms of hydrographic features, socio-economic and water management systems: France, Romania, and Croatia. More precisely, the paper aims at identifying and understanding the main principles guiding the hydromorphological assessment methodologies, elements and data used, giving an overview of the results of hydromorphological river status assessment, and concluding on the stage of hydromorphological assessment implementation. France developed numerous methodologies for physical habitat survey since the 1990s and it is currently conducting a rigorous hydromorphological field survey, but it does not yet have any national methodology for rivers' hydromorphological status assessment, nevertheless foreseen for the next cycle of the WFD. Besides, Romania and Croatia have already started the assessment of the hydromorphological status of rivers within the two cycles of the River Basin Management Plans and are making efforts to improve the hydromorphological monitoring activity. The methods generally differ in indicators, data used, and spatial scale of analysis, which makes it difficult to compare the results of the assessments. Despite a common water policy, the methodological dissimilarities seem to be rather usual between EU Member States. Therefore, the standardization of methodologies appears to be necessary, but the current results could be useful for setting priorities for river restoration and for achieving a better status at a national scale., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Understanding how microbial diversity influences ecosystem properties is of paramount importance. Cellular traits-which determine responses to the abiotic and biotic environment-may help us rigorously link them. However, our capacity to measure traits in natural communities has thus far been limited. Here we compared the predictive power of trait richness (trait space coverage), evenness (regularity in trait distribution) and divergence (prevalence of extreme phenotypes) derived from individual-based measurements with two species-level metrics (taxonomic richness and evenness) when modelling the productivity of natural phytoplankton communities. Using phytoplankton data obtained from 28 lakes sampled at different spatial and temporal scales, we found that the diversity in individual-level morphophysiological traits strongly improved our ability to predict community resource-use and biomass yield. Trait evenness-the regularity in distribution of individual cells/colonies within the trait space-was the strongest predictor, exhibiting a robust negative relationship across scales. Our study suggests that quantifying individual microbial phenotypes in trait space may help us understand how to link physiology to ecosystem-scale processes. Elucidating the mechanisms scaling individual-level trait variation to microbial community dynamics could there improve our ability to forecast changes in ecosystem properties across environmental gradients.

Objectives: The objective of the research was to construct a conceptual framework that explains the process of personal transformation within a primary care context for people living with chronic illnesses., Methods: A literature search of articles published from 1990 to 2007 in CINAHL, ERIC, Healthstar, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, dissertation abstracts and SocINFO databases, was conducted to identify qualitative research studies investigating personal change in chronic illness or disability. Five hundred and fifty-six articles were identified; the researchers conducted a metasynthesis of a subgroup of these articles whose focus was on transformation in primary care (n = 5)., Results: The metasynthesis project presents a model of the conceptualizations of transformation. Transformation in chronic illness is presented as a process of learning about self and the chronic illness in an iterative and continually changing manner. The primary care context has its greatest influence on critical reflection, which occurs in the first phase (initial response)., Discussion: This model illustrates the complex processes that occur for someone living with a chronic illness. Health practitioners who understand why and how people transform in living with chronic illnesses will be able to apply this model in determining people's needs and how to assist people during the transformative process.

Objectives: Toothbrushes are rapidly contaminated with different microorganisms, which colonize the oral cavity and interdental spaces. This can represent a possible cause of infection or reinfection. In this study, the ozone experimental effect upon toothbrushes microflora was estimated microbiologically before and after saturation with ozone gas., Methods: Fifty used toothbrushes coming from children and adults were entered our study. Microorganisms were enumerated and identified. Bristles from each brush were soaked in ozone saturated PBS solution for 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 min and the total microbial population was reassessed., Results: Counts of microorganisms isolated per brush varied between 10(2) and 10(7) CFU. Candida albicans was present in used toothbrushes. No obligate anaerobes were isolated. Members of Streptococcaceae family were regularly found (65.2%) belonging to the following species: Streptococcus pyogenes, S. mutans, S. mitis, S. oralis, S. sobrinus, S. viridans, S. salivarius, S. sanguis, Aerococcus viridans. A. viridans and S. mutans were more frequently isolated on children toothbrushes while Staphylococcus aureus and S. epidermidis were found on adults brushes. Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas sp. and Enterococcus sp., were also recovered. We found that the ozone treatment decreased gradually the microbial load. However, a bacterial re-growth was effective following short ozonation period. Decontamination was complete after an extended exposure to ozone for 30 min., Conclusions: Ozone application was found to remove the toothbrushes bristles microbiota following conventional brushing. Maximum decontamination efficacy of ozone treatment was observed after 30 min while exposure for short time periods seems to be inefficient which probably reflect the low dose of ozone used in this study.

The authors argue that the ways in which people-scientists and laymen-use probabilistic reasoning is predicated on a set of often questionable assumptions that are implicit and frequently go untested. They relate to the correspondence between the terms of a theory and the observations used to validate the theory and to the implicit understandings of intention and prior knowledge that arise between the conveyer and the receiver of information. The authors show several ways in which the use of probabilistic reasoning rests on a priori commitments to a partitioning of an outcome space and demonstrate that there are many more assumptions underlying the use of probabilistic reasoning than are usually acknowledged. They unfold these assumptions to show how several different interpretations of the same results in behavioral decision theory and cognitive psychology are equally well supported by "the facts." They then propose a more comprehensive approach to mapping cognitive processes than those currently used, one that is based on the analysis of all of the relevant alternative interpretations presented in the article.