Federal and local authorities ramped up security measures across downtown Washington, D.C. this weekend, with businesses installing protective barriers and federal buildings receiving additional fortification ahead of Tuesday's presidential election.

"Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5 -- but that doesn't mean we'll know who won the election on that date. With each passing election, more and more Americans are casting mail-in ballots, which take longer to count than in-person votes because they need to be opened and verified. That means that finding out the winner on election night may be a thing of the past," advises ABC News in a brief analysis.

Election Day is finally here, the polls are open and the news media are in frantic mode. There's a little serenity around, though. Millions of Americans already have cast their votes early by mail or in person -- and likely glad that they did.

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The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating after an individual reportedly placed screws in the road near a ballot box in the 1300 block of 5th Street NE in the District of Columbia on Tuesday.

It seems every year, around Christmas time, a debate begins between Christians and the rest of the World over whether Christmas symbols should be displayed and the traditional greeting "Merry Christmas" should be used as opposed to something more inclusive, like "Happy Holidays." This debate reveals that both sides suffer a deep ignorance of the whole celebration. All religions regard God as a distant, all-powerful being, whose presence and blessings we have to earn by certain religious practices. This, predictably, places a barrier between those practicing a specific religion and all others. Christmas celebrates just the opposite...an inclusive God who loves us all so much and wants to be so close to us, He becomes human and lives with us.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark R. Warner says that if the Nov. 5 vote is as close as anticipated, U.S. adversaries can be expected to ramp up digital disinformation operations with the goal of sowing chaos, discord and confusion among Americans during the days immediately following the election.

Bobby Allison, founder of racing's "Alabama Gang" and a NASCAR Hall of Famer, died Saturday. He was 86.

40 Days is part of our Top New Christian Music Library.

A senior police officer warned Tuesday of calls for more rioting in Amsterdam, after dozens of people armed with sticks and firecrackers set a tram on fire Monday night as the city faces tensions following violence last week targeting fans of an Israeli soccer club.

The Washington Commanders woke up in second place in the NFC East on Monday morning. Sunday's loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Commanders' third of the season, allowed the rival Philadelphia Eagles to slip into the top spot in the division.

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.

The ASEAN-EU Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Days will take place between 21-23 January 2014 in Bangkok, Thailand.  As a part of the conference EU BON is  going to hold a workshop called "Integration of biodiversity data recording and information management systems for environmental sustainability: a call for EU-ASEAN collaboration" (22nd January).

The agenda of the EU BON workshop includes:

• Review and compare the situation regarding relevant biodiversity and Earth observation data and information sources/providers in EU and ASEAN;

• Examine linkages between regional/national ASEAN and EU efforts with international / global biodiversity information systems (in particular GBIF, GEO BON);

• Assess and discuss national vs. regional level priorities and needs with regard to integrated biodiversity information in ASEAN and Europe;

• Identify common challenges and needs towards further integration of different types, levels, and scopes of available data and information systems;

• To address how S&T cooperation between Europe and ASEAN in the area of biodiversity and Earth observation could be further developed to better serve policy needs (especially in light of IPBES), and to contribute to common goals towards sustainable economic development

The ASEAN-EU Science, Technology and Innovation Days serve as a visible forum for cooperation activities between the two regions in the field of STI. The event addresses researchers from most thematic areas – with a focus on the societal challenges with relevance to both regions – as well policy makers, research conducting companies and innovation managers. It takes place annually, alternating between an ASEAN and a European country. High-level policy makers as well as many research projects and companies seize the chance to network, discuss, exchange and inform themselves.

The ASEAN-EU STI Days took place between 21-23 January 2014 in Bangkok, Thailand.  During the event a special workshop "Integration of biodiversity data recording and information management systems for environmental sustainability: a call for EU-ASEAN collaboration" has been organized to stimulate EU-ASEAN collaboration in research on biodiversity informatics and integrative environmental information management.

A special EU BON dedicated presentation was given by Dr. Christoph Häuser at the workshop, which took place on 22 January. As a regional component of the Group of Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), the EU BON project presented an innovative approach towards integration of biodiversity information systems from on-ground to remote sensing data, for addressing policy and information needs in a timely and customized manner.

Such an approach requires integration between social networks of science and policy, and technological networks of interoperating IT infrastructures. While focussing on Europe, EU BON is expected to connect and reach out globally, especially towards regions with many biodiversity hotspots such as SE-Asia.

The main objectives of the workshop were to:

• Review and compare the situation regarding relevant biodiversity and Earth observation data and information sources/providers in EU and ASEAN;
• Examine linkages between regional/national ASEAN and EU efforts with international / global biodiversity information systems (in particular GBIF, GEO BON);
• Assess and discuss national vs. regional level priorities and needs with regard to integrated biodiversity information in ASEAN and Europe;
• Identify common challenges and needs towards further integration of different types, levels, and scopes of available data and information systems;
• To address how S&T cooperation between Europe and ASEAN in the area of biodiversity and Earth observation could be further developed to better serve policy needs (especially in light of IPBES), and to contribute to common goals towards sustainable economic development.

Five other presentations were given at the workshop on behalf of Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), FishBase Information and Research Group, Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM), National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC), and Thailand Bioresource Research Center (TBRC). Presentations from the meeting are available to view below, or alternatively visit: http://www.stidays.net/?page_id=510

Presentations:

Christoph L. Häuser (EU BON) on "The EU BON approach for information integration" (introduction to the workshop)

Tim Hirsch (GBIF) on "The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – collaborating to promote data access for research and policy"

Sheila G. Vergara (ACB) on "Knowledge sharing for biodiversity conservation in the ASEAN Region"

Christine Casal (FishBase) on "Using FishBase and AquaMaps to predict IAS establishment, species ranges and risk assessment"

Leng Guan Saw (FRIM) on "Herbarium Data and Plant Conservation in Malaysia"

Lily Eurwilaichitr (TBRC) on "TBRC as an online information intermediary: towards the sustainability of biological resources"

Researchers and the public can now have immediate access to data underlying discovery of new species of life on Earth, under a new streamlined system linking taxonomic research with open data publication.

The partnership paves the way for unlocking and preserving a wealth of 'small data' backing up research conclusions, which often become lost within a few years of an article's publication in an academic journal.

In the first example of the new collaboration in action, the Biodiversity Data Journal carries a peer-reviewed description of a new species of spider discovered during a field course in Borneo just one month ago. At the same time, the data showing location of the spider's occurrence in nature are automatically harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and richer data such as images and the species description are exported to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

This contrasts with an average 'shelf life' of twenty-one years between field discovery of a new species and its formal description and naming, according to a recent study in Current Biology.

A group of scientists and students discovered the new species of spider during a field course in Borneo, supervised by Jeremy Miller and Menno Schilthuizen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, based in Leiden, the Netherlands. The species was described and submitted online from the field to the Biodiversity Data Journal through a satellite internet connection, along with the underlying data . The manuscript was peer-reviewed and published within two weeks of submission. On the day of publication, GBIF and EOL have harvested and included the data in their respective platforms.

The new workflow established between GBIF, EOL and Pensoft Publishers' Biodiversity Data Journal, with the support of the Swiss NGO Plazi, automatically exports treatment and occurrence data into a Darwin Core Archive, a standard format used by GBIF and other networks to share data from many different sources. This means GBIF can extract these data on the day of the article's publication, making them immediately available to science and the public through its portal and web services, further enriching the biodiversity data already freely accessible through the GBIF network. Similarly, the information and multimedia resources become accessible via EOL's species pages.

One of the main purposes of the partnership is to ensure that such data remain accessible for future use in research. A recent study published in Current Biology found that 80 % of scientific data are lost in less than 10 years following their creation.

Donald Hobern, GBIF's Executive Secretary, commented: "A great volume of extremely important information about the world's species is effectively inaccessible, scattered across thousands of small datasets carefully curated by taxonomic researchers. I find it very exciting that this new workflow will help preserve these 'small data' and make them immediately available for re-use through our networks."

"Re-use of data published on paper or in PDF format is a huge challenge in all branches of science", said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft and founder of the Biodiversity Data Journal. "This problem has been tackled firstly by our partners from Plazi who created a workflow to extract data from legacy literature and submit it to GBIF. The workflow currently launched by GBIF, EOL and the Biodiversity Data Journal radically shortens the way from publication of data to their sharing and re-use and makes the whole process cost efficient", added Prof. Penev.

The elaboration of the workflow from BDJ and Plazi to GBIF through Darwin Core Archive was supported by the EU-funded project EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, grant No 308454). The basic concept has been initially discussed and outlined in the course of the pro-iBiosphere project (Coordination and policy development in preparation for a European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, addressing Acquisition, Curation, Synthesis, Interoperability and Dissemination, grant No 312848).

Original source:

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

he ASEAN-EU Science, Technology and Innovation Days serve as a visible forum for cooperation activities between the two regions in the field of STI. The event addresses researchers from most thematic areas – with a focus on the societal challenges with relevance to both regions – as well policy makers, research conducting companies and innovation managers. It takes place annually, alternating between an ASEAN and a European country. High-level policy makers as well as many research projects and companies seize the chance to network, discuss, exchange and inform themselves.

EU BON is also going to hold a workshop during the conference  called "Integration of biodiversity data recording and information management systems for environmental sustainability: a call for EU-ASEAN collaboration" (22nd January). The agenda of this workshop (incl. invited speakers) ican also be found here: http://www.stidays.net/?page_id=510

The International BION conference 2014 "Biodiversity today for tomorrow" will take placefrom September 17^th to 19^th in Bonn, Germany.

It will be organized by the BION office and its network partners and the following subthemes have already been proposed:

1: Basic research in biodiversity
2: Monitoring, assessment, prediction – biodiversity in space and time
3: Biodiversity and Human Development
4: Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture / Bioeconomy
5: Ethical aspects of biodiversity
6: Societal (social, cultural, political) impact
7: Capacity Building
8: Interdisciplinary approaches

More information is available on the BION website: http://www.bion-bonn.org/de/de/bion-kongress-2014

Please, see conference programme for details and use the possibility for online registration.

The aim of the event is to inform and guide prospective applicants preparing project proposals, to facilitate sharing of ideas and experiences. It will give participants the chance to network and to find partners for their projects.

ICT-16 is part of Horizon 2020's ICT work programme 2014-2015

The activities supported under this topic contribute to the Big Data challenge by addressing the fundamental research problems related to the scalability and responsiveness of analytics capabilities (such as privacy-aware machine learning, language understanding, data mining and visualization). Special focus is on industry-validated, user-defined challenges like predictions, and rigorous processes for monitoring and measurement.

The current outline of the draft agenda can be found HERE

Registration

The registration to the event is now open and is on the first-come-first-serve basis. Click HERE to register. The closing date is 8 January 2015.

After the registration you will have the possibility to upload a presentation for the ICT-16 networking and partner finding session which will take place in the afternoon (max 3 slides for 3 minutes presentation).

In parallel to the ICT-16 networking session a workshop on multilingual data value chains will be organised. Therefore, you should pay attention to which part of the event you enrol.

Please note that bilateral meetings with EC Project Officers to discuss proposal ideas (proposal clinics) will *not* be possible, in compliance with H2020 regulations.

More information available here.

The ASEAN-EU STI Days 2016 will be organised in Hanoi, Vietnam, from 10-12 May, 2016. This year’s edition of the event will focus on presenting academic/industry collaborations in and between ASEAN and the EU in the context of common key societal challenges for both regions.

The ASEAN-EU Science, Technology and Innovation Days are a forum style event, initiated by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme funded SEA-EU-NET II project. 

For more information and to register, please go to: http://www.stidays.net

Boston College senior, Sarah Dansreau, takes us through her perfect day in Boston's Brighton neighborhood.

The post How to spend the perfect day in Brighton appeared first on Boston.com.

At her first Met Gala, Ayo Edebiri showed out in a youthful white look fading into a garden full of colorful flowers at the bottom by Loewe.

The post The Met Gala was in full bloom with Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Mindy Kaling among the standout stars appeared first on Boston.com.

Sarah Akinbuwa remembers the days when she was bullied over her love of crocheting, a hobby she picked up with her circle of schoolmates as a 12-year-old in Nigeria. Now living in Somerville and devoted to the craft, the 18-year-old is winning acclaim for one of her latest creations: a bright pink, floor-length prom dress […]

The post A Somerville teen crocheted her prom dress in three days. Her video of the design process went viral. appeared first on Boston.com.

Boston City Councilor At-Large, Henry Santana, and Northeastern graduate student, Yadah Ampofo, each share how they would spend a perfect day in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

The post Here’s how to spend the perfect day in Mission Hill appeared first on Boston.com.

Today is the 29th anniversary of the first performance of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is currently the longest-running musical on Broadway. Andrew Lloyd ... Read more

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From his early years taking classical piano lessons, to playing in a rock band during the 1990s, composer Jeff Cardoni has built up a diverse ... Read more

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Zendaya and Robert Pattinson were spotted on the set of "The Drama," a new movie filming in the Boston area this fall.

The post Robert Pattinson and Zendaya are back in Boston filming ‘The Drama’ appeared first on Boston.com.

"The Drama," set to film in Boston throughout the fall, is seeking extras with "distinctive faces" now through the end of November.

The post The new Zendaya and Robert Pattinson movie filming in Boston needs extras appeared first on Boston.com.