The Arabidopsis Information Portal (https://www.araport.org) is a new online resource for plant biology research. It houses the Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequence and associated annotation. It was conceived as a framework that allows the research community to develop and release ‘modules’ that integrate, analyze and visualize Arabidopsis data that may reside at remote sites. The current implementation provides an indexed database of core genomic information. These data are made available through feature-rich web applications that provide search, data mining, and genome browser functionality, and also by bulk download and web services. Araport uses software from the InterMine and JBrowse projects to expose curated data from TAIR, GO, BAR, EBI, UniProt, PubMed and EPIC CoGe. The site also hosts ‘science apps,’ developed as prototypes for community modules that use dynamic web pages to present data obtained on-demand from third-party servers via RESTful web services. Designed for sustainability, the Arabidopsis Information Portal strategy exploits existing scientific computing infrastructure, adopts a practical mixture of data integration technologies and encourages collaborative enhancement of the resource by its user community.

We study the free (associative, non-commutative) Baxter algebra on one generator. The first explicit description of this object is due to Ebrahimi-Fard and Guo. We provide an alternative description in terms of a certain class of trees, which form a linear basis for this algebra. We use this to treat other related cases, particularly that in which the Baxter map is required to be quasi-idempotent, in a unified manner. Each case corresponds to a different class of trees. Our main focus is on the underlying combinatorics. In several cases, we provide bijections between our various classes of trees and more familiar combinatorial objects including certain Schröder paths and Motzkin paths. We calculate the dimensions of the homogeneous components of these algebras (with respect to a bidegree related to the number of nodes and the number of angles in the trees) and the corresponding generating series. An important feature is that the combinatorics is captured by the idempotent case; the others are obtained from this case by various binomial transforms. We also relate free Baxter algebras to Loday's dendriform trialgebras and dialgebras. We show that the free dendriform trialgebra (respectively, dialgebra) on one generator embeds in the free Baxter algebra with a quasi-idempotent map (respectively, with a quasi-idempotent map and an idempotent generator). This refines results of Ebrahimi-Fard and Guo.

Nursing professionals working in Emergency Care suffer from the physical symptoms of stress in their everyday activity. The objective of this study was to characterize these symptoms using the Occupational Stress Indicator, a semi-structured instrument. To do this, the authors created open questions that were applied in interviews that were recorded and analyzed. The researchers listed the following physical symptoms: headache, a sensation of fatigue, leg pain, and tachycardia. According to reports form the workers, pain always resulted from emotional stress or appeared after providing emergency care, which suggests the workers find it very difficult to differentiate physical from mental stress. The investigation found that there is a need for measures to follow workers in their working activity. A manual was created, containing basic suggestions to improve the quality of life of the health team.

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We report on extensive testing carried out on the optical fibers for the VIRUS instrument. The primary result of this work explores how 10+ years of simulated wear on a VIRUS fiber bundle affects both transmission and focal ratio degradation (FRD) of the optical fibers. During the accelerated lifetime tests we continuously monitored the fibers for signs of FRD. We find that transient FRD events were common during the portions of the tests when motion was at telescope slew rates, but dropped to negligible levels during rates of motion typical for science observation. Tests of fiber transmission and FRD conducted both before and after the lifetime tests reveal that while transmission values do not change over the 10+ years of simulated wear, a clear increase in FRD is seen in all 18 fibers tested. This increase in FRD is likely due to microfractures that develop over time from repeated flexure of the fiber bundle, and stands in contrast to the transient FRD events that stem from localized stress and subsequent modal diffusion of light within the fibers. There was no measurable wavelength dependence on the increase in FRD over 350 nm to 600 nm. We also report on bend radius tests conducted on individual fibers and find the 266 µm VIRUS fibers to be immune to bending-induced FRD at bend radii of R ≥ 10 cm. Below this bend radius FRD increases slightly with decreasing radius. Lastly, we give details of a degradation seen in the fiber bundle currently deployed on the Mitchell Spectrograph (formally VIRUS-P) at McDonald Observatory. The degradation is shown to be caused by a localized shear in a select number of optical fibers that leads to an explosive form of FRD. In a few fibers, the overall transmission loss through the instrument can exceed 80%. These results are important for the VIRUS instrument, and for both current and proposed instruments that make use of optical fibers, particularly when the fibers are in continual motion during an observation, or experience repeated mechanical stress during their deployment. Subject headings: Optical Fibers, Focal Ratio Degradation, VIRUS, VIRUS-P, Mitchell Spectrograph, HETDEX1. INTRODUCTION First proposed for use in astronomical instrumentation by Angel et al. (1977) optical fibers have revolutionized the field over the past 3 decades. This revolution has come about due to the flexibility optical fibers offer in re-routing the light from thetelescope focal plane to a more convenient location. The gain for this technological advance is clear as issues of instrument weight, size, stability, and temperature control are made largely obsolete. However, this advantage comes at a cost as fibers constitute an added element in the instrument's optical path. Moreover, optical fibers are not entirely stable light guides, and while their characteristics have been studied in a comprehensive and systematic way by several groups (Ramsey 1988;Schmoll et al. 2003;Crause et al. 2008; Poppett & Allington-Smith 2010b), little work has been focused on their behavior during periods of ...