Structural Origin of Sinjar Anticline, NW Iraq

The Sinjar anticline is a double plunging, trending almost E-W in the northwestern part of Iraq. It extends in Syria for about 42 km, whereas in Iraq, its length is about 91 km, and the width is about 31 km. The northern limb (45° - 80°) is steeper than the southern limb (15° - 25°), with average plunges dip of 35° and axial plane dipping of 47.5° southwards. The exposed rocks in the anticline range in age from Upper Cretaceous, represented by the Shiranish Formation, to Upper Miocene, represented by the Injana Formation. Google Earth image was used to calculate structural data, which were used to indicate the structural origin of the Sinjar anticline. This was achieved by calculating the Aspect Ratio (AR), Fold Symmetry Index (IFS or IFS), and length of the mountain front (FS). Accordingly, it was found that the structural origin of the Sinjar anticline is a fault-bend fold.

Multiple Communication Channels in Literary Texts

The statistical theory of language translation is used to compare how a literary character speaks to different audiences by diversifying two important linguistic communication channels: the “sentences channel” and the “interpunctions channel”. The theory can “measure” how the author shapes a character speaking to different audiences, by modulating deep-language parameters. To show its power, we have applied the theory to the literary corpus of Maria Valtorta, an Italian mystic of the XX-century. The likeness index , ranging from 0 to 1, allows to “measure” how two linguistic channels are similar, therefore implying that a character speaks to different audiences in the same way. A 6-dB difference between the signal-to-noise ratios of two channels already gives IL ≈ 0.5, a threshold below which the two channels depend very little on each other, therefore implying that the character addresses different audiences differently. In conclusion, multiple linguistic channels can describe the “fine tuning” that a literary author uses to diversify characters or distinguish the behavior of the same character in different situations. The theory can be applied to literary corpora written in any alphabetical language.

A cautionary note on some phylogenetic dissimilarity measures

Aims Measures of plot-to-plot phylogenetic dissimilarity and beta diversity are providing a powerful tool for understanding the complex ecolog-ical and evolutionary mechanisms that drive community assembly.Methods Here,we review the properties of some previously published dis-similarity measures that are based on minimum or average phylo-genetic dissimilarity between species in different plots.Important Findings We first show that some of these measures violate the basic condi-tion that for two identical plots the measures take the value zero.They also violate the condition that the dissimilarity between two identical plots should always be lower than that between two differ-ent plots.Such erratic behavior renders these measures unsuitable for measuring plot-to-plot phylogenetic dissimilarity.We next pro-pose a new measure that satisfies these conditions,thus providing a more reasonable way for measuring phylogenetic dissimilarity.