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Eastpak - New brand, Now in stock



We are pleased to announce that we are now adding the Eastpak brand to our product range. Eastpak is a renowned manufacturer of high-quality backpacks, bags and luggage.

Eastpak is characterized by its modern design, durable workmanship and innovative functions, which is why the brand is very synonymous with quality and reliability.

The products are available online as well as in our BMX shops in Stuttgart and Berlin and we are happy to be able to offer them to you from now on.

Best regards
Your kunstform BMX shop team




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Pope Francis Moves Part of Vatican Library and Archive to Rome Seminary

cna




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Pele's former club Santos returns to the top tier of Brazilian soccer with an eye on Neymar

Santos secured its return to the top tier of Brazilian soccer next year when it hopes that star striker Neymar will be back at the club which achieved a global following with Pele.




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Jesus Isn't A Brand Name

Jesus Isn't A Brand Name covers how Christians tend to use brands or logos as symbols to set themselves apart from others, sometimes in not so flattering ways...and what to do about it.




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LOVERRO: Brown, Bailey and Branch head new D.C. Hall of Fame class

The Washington metro area is a hotbed for basketball talent. You can find all the proof you need of the area's hoops legacy at the Washington D.C. Basketball Hall of Fame.




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F1 braces for more Verstappen-Norris drama and Hamilton to drive revered Senna's car

Max Verstappen suggests he won't change his aggressive driving this weekend at the Brazilian Grand Prix as he bids for a fourth successive Formula 1 title.




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Verstappen handed 5-place grid penalty in Brazil after another engine change

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen has received a five-place grid penalty at the Brazilian Grand Prix after he again decided to change his engine.




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McLaren's Lando Norris wins sprint race at Brazilian Grand Prix

McLaren driver Lando Norris won Saturday's Formula 1 sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix to cut his deficit to championship leader Max Verstappen.




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Norris will start Brazilian Grand Prix from pole with Verstappen 16th after rain-affected qualifying

McLaren driver Lando Norris will start Sunday's Brazilian Grand Prix from pole with Formula One championship leader Max Verstappen in 16th after struggling in his Red Bull during a rain-affected qualifying session that was marred by five crashes.




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Emotional Hamilton drives Senna's car before Brazilian Grand Prix, regrets he can't race with it

British driver Lewis Hamilton has won seven Formula One titles, holds multiple records and has clocked some of the fastest laps in history. But the greatest honor of his career, according to the 39-year-old, came on Sunday as he drove the late Ayrton Senna's title-winning car around Interlagos ahead of this afternoon's Brazilian Grand Prix.




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Sauber has signed Brazilian driver Gabriel Bortoleto to partner Nico Hulkenberg in F1 for 2025

Sauber has signed 20-year-old Brazilian driver Gabriel Bortoleto to make his debut in Formula 1 next year as Nico Hulkenberg's teammate.




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Ohtani, Dodgers celebrate World Series victory with parade and stadium celebration

The Los Angeles Dodgers, including Shohei Ohtani and his dog, celebrated their eighth World Series championship with a downtown parade on Friday.




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LA Dodgers fan severely injures hands while lighting firework to celebrate World Series win

A Los Angeles Dodgers fan severely injured his hands after he lit a firework while celebrating the team's World Series victory over the New York Yankees.




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Bummer reaches $13M, 2-year deal with Braves, who guarantee additional $4M to Lopez

Left-hander Aaron Bummer agreed Saturday to a $13 million, two-year contract with the Atlanta Braves, who reached a revised $30 million, three-year deal with All-Star Reynaldo Lopez that guarantees the right-hander an additional $4 million.




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Queen Camilla will miss the U.K.'s annual Remembrance Sunday events due to chest infection

Queen Camilla will miss Britain's annual remembrance weekend events to honor fallen service personnel while she recovers from a chest infection, Buckingham Palace said Saturday.




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France throws one last party to celebrate the Paris Olympics

The curtain will come down on the Paris' feel-good summer with a grand parade of French athletes on the Champs Elysees on Saturday as the country throws one last party to celebrate the Olympic and Paralympic Games.







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EUBrazilOpenBio announces 2 new training tools covering Ecological Niche Modeling and Cross-mapping

The EUBrazilOpenBio project  announces two new training tools as a part of its e-training Programme aiming at educating and enabling current and potential users of EUBrazilOpenBio to unlock new knowledge and shape effective policy on biodiversity challenges. The new tools cover the following use cases: Ecological Niche Modeling and Cross-mapping.

The EUBrazilOpenBio anytime, anywhere eTraining tools are designed for researchers in the spheres of Biodiversity, Life science, Climate Change, application Developers as well as regulatory authorities and policy decision-makers.

EUBrazilOpenBio is focused on tackling the complexity of biodiversity science such as the diversity of multidisciplinary datasets spanning from climatology to earth sciences by integrating advanced computing resources with data sources across Europe and Brazil.

For more informationand to try out the new tools click here.





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EUBrazilOpenBio final newsletter is now available

The final EUBrazilOpenBio newsletter for November 2013 is now available. The  newsletter presents the final press release showcasing the main results of 2 year collaborative work, namely: the innovative, web-based working environment designed to serve biodiversity scenarios; the new version of the Catalogue of Life cross-mapping tool developed in the i4Life project; the provision of the Ecological Niche Modelling tool as a service through the openModeller extended web service, and its application in collaboration with BioVeL; the EUBrazilOpenBio Joint Action Plan.

This newsletter highlights:

  • EUBrazilOpenBio Joint Action Plan - drawing on policy strategies, analysing  current progress in contributing to international targets and defining actions for future collaborative research. It defines common actions with the aim of contributing to relevant Aichi Targets in the years ahead.
  • EGI federatec use case on ecology - Over the last two years, BioVeL and EUBrazilOpenBio have joined forces to make openModeller ready for cloud deployment. Work within the EGI Federated Cloud Task Force has led to considerable success in enabling the openModeller service on the EGI Federated Cloud.
  • EUBrazilOpenBio results - EUBrazilOpenBio Technical developments, training materials and sessions, publications and papers, media spotlights and policy results all collected in one page.
  • A vision from the Experts - "The Crossmapper itself is a great tool, and an ideal way to identify errors and updates". Dr Christina Flann is one of the experts providing their vision on EUBrazilOpenBio story.

You can find an online version of the final EUBrazilOpenBio newsletter here.

 





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VIBRANT: New virtual research communities to create and share data on biodiversity

Data sharing tools developed by an EU project are helping scientists worldwide understand more about the planet’s millions of species. A new article published on CORDIS and DAE looks into the benefits of the FP7 funded project VIBRANT.

One of the biggest challenges facing natural history experts is how to classify and share the mass of data constantly being collected on the Earth’s millions of species.

The three-year VIBRANT project developed a network of online scientific communities collecting data on biodiversity and equipped them with the tools for sharing and publishing their data. Through these activities the project contributed to reducing the fragmentation of efforts aiming to develop biodiversity informatics systems and software.
Based on Scratchpads, an open-source and free to use online platform, VIBRANT has helped create hundreds of new online communities.

The communities are linked together online and feed their data into the most important international biodiversity databases. VIBRANT helps users prepare papers for publication, build bibliographic databases and create reference collections of images and observations. A tool for rapid geospatial analysis of species distributions, a citizen-science marine monitoring platform as well as a biodiversity data analysis framework are also part of the ecosystem of services developed by VIBRANT.

ANTS TO BATS, LOBSTERS TO WHALES

VIBRANT has grown the number of user communities from around 100 under EDIT, an earlier EU project, to over 580 today. Some 6 500 active users are investigating an enormous range of species, at global scale. One site alone on stick insects (phasmids) has over 1 000 users, revealing the large community of people interested in culturing phasmid species.

‘My taxonomic background is in parasitic lice, of which there are about 5 000 particular species that live on about 5 000 mammals and 10 000 birds. Fighting to study that group, I found it enormously difficult to manage all this information,’ explained VIBRANT coordinator Dr Vince Smith, of London’s Natural History Museum.
Using the Scratchpads template, professional and amateur scientists, wherever they are based in the world, create their own subject-specific websites hosted at the museum.

They share their data by publishing it online, while retaining ownership over it and respecting the terms and conditions of the network set up by VIBRANT.
Scratchpads also provides ready access to a range of analytical tools, identification keys and databases that have been developed or enhanced throughout the project.
VIBRANT has also set up a novel, community peer-reviewed, open-access journal, the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ). Scratchpads users can input their research into a template which then makes it possible for them to produce a specific paper, publishing it internationally, online, in the BDJ and crediting them for the research. This is made possible via the development of the Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), which is a leading example of the next generation of scholarly publishing. The PWT is acting as an integrated authoring, peer-review publishing and online collaborative platform which links the Scratchpads to the BDJ.

BIG DATA IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONSERVATION EFFORT

VIBRANT helps all researchers to easily share and link their data with major biodiversity repositories. For example, the Scratchpads collaborate with GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility), PESI (the EU’s Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure), the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the online collaborative Encyclopedia of Life, which is aiming to document all the planet’s 1.9 million known living species.

Dr Thomas Couvreur in Cameroon is maintaining a Scratchpads community on African palms and the tropical plant family Annonaceae. ‘They provide a professional platform for collaboration between my colleagues around the world, allowing us to share resources such as photos of species, datasets, bibliography and general information,’ he commented. Another coordinator, Eli Sarnat, in California, USA, has one on ants: ‘The platform has solved a big challenge for me: what biodiversity data I should be recording and how I should be recording it.’

The VIBRANT project ran from December 2010 to November 2013. It involved 17 partners from 9 countries, led by the Natural History Museum, London, and received FP7 funding of 4.75 million euros.




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Northern lights and solar eclipse celebrate new data standards for biodiversity observation

EU BON and CETAF informatics groups had an astronomically successful meeting at Digitarium in Joensuu, Finland, 17-20 March 2015. The event coincided with solar eclipse and show of the decade for northern lights.

Major progress in data standards for information exchange took place during the week when the Biodiversity Information Standards TDWG organisation announced ratification of five new terms for quantitative biodiversity data, which had been proposed by the EU BON project one year earlier. The new terms include, in particular, organismQuantity and sampleSizeValue. This allows for exchange of ecological data in much wider scale than what has been possible until now. The participants of the meeting applauded for this occasion.

Northern lights over Joensuu Science Park 2015-03-18. Photo: Riitta Tegelberg

The meeting included a training workshop on new data sharing tools, and working sessions for designing the EU BON portal, which will allow using biodiversity observation data in research.

The 40 attendees came from 18 different countries.

Participants at the meeting.

During the meeting the attendees also were given presentations and demonstrations of Digitarium's equipment and methods for high-performance digitisation.

 





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EU BON Workshop in Manaus, Brazil

An  EU BON workshop took place on 20-23 July in Manaus, Brasil for a targeted group of representatives of the different EU BON WPs or task forces. The workshop was attended by European representatives of EU BON and INPA to discuss potential options to further the integration between European teams and the Brazilian team.

Among topics discussed at the workshop were issues of designing and running biodiversity monitoring observatories (i.e. optimization and guidelines for planning biodiversity monitoring); analyses of biodiversity data to be addressed for assessing changes and patterns; and linkage of (meta-) data to EU BON portal.

  
Images from the workshop; Credit: William Magnusson (INPA) & Israel Peer (GlueCAD)

Being hosted in Manaus, this workshop also looked into facilitationg the integration of Brazilian and European expertise, for instance by updating about the progress made by Brazil in starting participatory resource monitoring in Brazilian National parks and the development of databases to integrate this information. 

Besides presentation and discussions, INPA organized an excursion to show their log-term biodiversity monitoring field sites (RAPELD) and to explain the rationale and methodology behind their design and organization. 

      
Images from the excursion; Credit: Charlie Marsh 

 





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Interview: Clint Alibrandi from REDIAM on the benefits of an European Biodiversity Portal

One of the main outputs of EU BON will be the establishment of an European Biodiversity Portal based on data collected and compiled from a variety of sources including earth observations but also observations and monitoring data from (local) sites. One of the main points of this portal is to serve as a substantial building block of a global biodiversity portal planned by the Group of Earth Observations project GEO BON.

But how will this portal be useful to stakeholders on a more local level - for example for people involved in questions connected to biodiversity across European regions? What will be the real benefits of it for biodiversity monitoring and conservation? Just a couple of weeks after the Third EU BON Stakeholder Round Table in Granada, Spain, Mr Clint Alibrandi from REDIAM (Environment and Water Agency in Andalusia) gives us his views on these questions.


Picture:  Excursion to Sierra Nevada.; Credit: Katrin Vohland

Q: REDIAM shares a mission with EU BON in its attempt to collect, standardize and distribute available biodiversity data. What will be the expected benefits and challenges in the process of making this type of datasets available for society and environmental policy?

A: Among the responsibilities of the Regional Environmental Government of Andalusia are promoting Social Environmental Awareness, Managing a vast, diverse and very complex territory, Control and Mitigate any threats posed to the fragile ecosystems present in our region as well as all the responsibilities derived from the management and planning of the existing natural resources.

Considering these facts, it is necessary to be able to account for the best environmental information available. Since the early 80’s the Regional Environmental Government of Andalusia has been working on its Environmental Information System with the purpose of generating, compiling, standardizing and analyzing Environmental Information covering topics such as Climate, Water, Air Quality and Biodiversity by means of ICTs. This the REDIAM. The name comes from the Spanish Acronym "REd De Información AMbiental de Andalucía" which means the Environmental Information Network of Andalusia. It serves as a Unified Regional Environmental Information Registry.

From this effort, the information obtained by the REDIAM is made publicly available to be then employed in Decision Making processes and Management Planning on behalf of the Administrations, for Dissemination and Awareness as well as for Research purposes.

As such, it is of vital importance for the REDIAM to be able to account for updated and verifiable Information and Data Sources and this is what we consider to be the most important benefit on behalf of EU BON, as it will offer the possibility to have a higher level reference covering a larger perspective, allowing stakeholders, be it either from a local, regional or national level, to consult or work with data, tools and have reference to relevant policies concerning Biodiversity on the European scale in order to be able to better transpose them to a more local context.

Yet the greatest challenge we believe that EU BON might come to face is the fact that the different contexts that exist over the whole European territory make it very difficult to tailor tools and information formats which can cover the different priorities or needs that exist in the diverse makeup of stakeholders that exist from a local, regional and national perspective. The same can most probably apply to the feedback, queries or requests made to EU BON on behalf of the stakeholder and user community. It is never easy to reach a common base level and from the regional perspective, REDIAM has faced the same type of situations.

Q: What type of stakeholders do you hope to engage through your network - who is using your data and for what purposes?

A: The stakeholders which are currently engaged with the REDIAM consist in Universities, Research Centres, Public Bodies, Local Administrations, Private Companies just to name a few examples. There are over 150 organizations which are partners of the REDIAM, they provide relevant Environmental Information to the REDIAM and are responsible for updating the information.

And as can be expected,the information provided is as diverse as the makeup of stakeholders that are part of the REDIAM, with the following formats being made available: Cartography, Satellites Images, Databases, Reports, Statistics, Applications, Management Plans and Programmes, Orthophotos, Indicators, Studies.

Additionally the REDIAM offers the user community different alternatives in order to access the previously indicated information. The REDIAM Channel is a web portal with a Catalogue and Information Search System, OGC Services, Query and Viewer tools, Downloader. The user community is able to access its information and services. This community consists in Citizens, Universities, Public Administrations and Companies from the Public and Private Sector.

Q: Where do you see the cross section between REDIAM’s work and EU BON - what are the products from EU BON and other European projects that would be helpful for the work that you are doing?

A: The REDIAM has great interest in the following issues and we believe that EU BON would be up to the task of providing solutions and/or guidelines on how to be able to proceed to solve them:

  • The elaboration of a common tool for the description and localization of species throughout the European Territory. This can prove a very useful service for Environmental Impact Assessments by providing a more complete view on different species distribution on determined area.
  • Defining a standardized list of species which contains the taxonomically correct name for each one of them. EU BON could serve as a base reference to set guidelines for standardizing the taxonomical classification of species.
  • Support and guidance in defining specific biodiversity indicators as proposed by EUROSTAT, a methodological and assessment guide of some sort.

Q: In your opinion what are the three greatest benefits of a European level biodiversity portal?

A: 1) Offering an opportunity of Standardizing and Harmonizing Biodiversity related information. We all speak the same "language" when referring to Biodiversity, but it is necessary that we all be able to follow the same "rules" as well. This is the first and most important pillar we believe that a European level Biodiversity portal can bring into play.

2) It would allow for and facilitate a widespread exchange of information amongst stakeholders throughout the whole European Territory.

3) And finally, it would allow a common analysis on a European level which would provide a general assessment on how different efforts and policies are effective, value which is the real status of Biodiversity and/or specific species independently from the limit of administrative or country borders.

About REDIAM:

The Environmental Information Network REDIAM has onboard experts from the Regional Ministry of Environment in Andalusia and its Water and Environmental Agency. With a team expertise ranging from local to regional and European level and from technical know-how to regional and thematic assessment, the main aim of the network is to integrate all spatially-referenced biodiversity data produced in Andalusia. Raw data are used to generate knowledge and improve its distribution, making it accessible and comprehensible for the general public.





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GEO BON - EU BON Workshop in Manaus, Brazil

An GEO BON - EU BON workshop iis scheduled for 20-24 July in Manaus, Brasil for a targeted group of representatives of the different EU BON WPs or task forces.

The workshop will specifically target the following:

– Issues of designing and running biodiversity monitoring observatories (i.e. optimization and guidelines for planning biodiversity monitoring)

– Analyses of biodiversity data to be addressed for assessing changes and patterns

– Linkage of (meta-) data to EU BON portal

Being hosted in Manaus, this workshop will facilitate the integration of Brazilian and European expertise, for instance by updating about the progress made by Brazil in starting participatory resource monitoring in Brazilian National parks and the development of databases to integrate this information. The workshop will be held at the Federal University of Amazonas Experimental Site.











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Michael Bennett recalled how Bill Belichick treated Tom Brady as harshly as other Patriots

"They never really called out Russell on certain things, but Bill would call Tom out on everything," Bennett said, comparing the Seahawks and Patriots in the 2010s.

The post Michael Bennett recalled how Bill Belichick treated Tom Brady as harshly as other Patriots appeared first on Boston.com.








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D8.1 Project branding (logo, flyer, PowerPoint and policy briefs templates), website, online libraries





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Streamlining the use of BOLD specimen data to record species distributions: a case study with ten Nearctic species of Microgastrinae (Hymenoptera: Braconidae)




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Fauna Europaea: Annelida – Hirudinea, incl. Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea




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Fauna Europaea: Diptera – Brachycera




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Matches and mismatches between national and EU-wide priorities: Examining the Natura 2000 network in vertebrate species conservation








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Brain Gain

"Brain Drain" is what happens to a country when its best and brightest minds leave and don't return. The flip side of this is called "Brain Gain." But even when countries benefit from new arrivals, they don’t always make it easy for them.

We meet Maria Merza, working hard to overcome bureaucratic and social obstacles standing in the way of her education. Also: We visit a school in California that provides classes for parents as they drop their children off in the morning; We look at new training programmes for skilled trade jobs, aimed at immigrants; Also, Francenette SaintLouis Défonce was a nurse in Haiti, but the US won’t recognise her qualifications or experience; Finally, Harvard University student Jin Park pushes the boundaries of who can become a Rhodes Scholar.

(Ayat Alfares, left, is a “super senior” at Grace M. Davis High School in Modesto, California. Sarah Yousif, right, graduated from the school when she was 21 years old. Both students came to the US as teenagers and began high school later than most of their classmates. Credit: Maria Merza/The World)