Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of uncertainties in natural forcing records on simulated temperature during the last millennium

Abstract. Here we investigate how uncertainties in the solar and volcanic forcing records of the past millennium affect the large-scale temperature response using a two-box impulse response model. We use different published solar forcing records and present a new volcanic forcing ensemble that accounts for random uncertainties in eruption dating and sulfur injection amount. The simulations are compared to proxy reconstructions from PAGES 2k and Northern Hemispheric tree ring data. We find that low solar forcing is most consistent with all the proxy reconstructions, even when accounting for volcanic uncertainty. We also find that the residuals are in line with CMIP6 control variability at centennial timescales. Volcanic forcing uncertainty induces a significant spread in the temperature response, especially at periods of peak forcing. For individual eruptions and superposed epoch analyses, volcanic uncertainty can strongly affect the agreement with proxy reconstructions and partly explain known proxy–model discrepancies.
Diabetic Distress and its Relationship with Demographic and Clinical Characteristics of patients with Type 2 Diabetes in Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in 2019

Background: Diabetes is a chronic and progressive metabolic disease with profound effects on mental health. Objectives: This study aimed to determine diabetic distress status and its relationship with some demographic characteristics and clinical outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods: This study was part of a larger study on psychological adjustment and diabetic distress. Data were collected using a demographic questionnaire and a standard 17-item tool for measuring diabetic distress and were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics, including mean (standard deviation), independent t-test, analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation coefficient, in SPSS version 22 software. Results : The mean (SD) of distress score in patients with type 2 diabetes was 2.12 (0.75). The prevalence of distress worthy of clinical attention was 11.4%. Regarding distress dimensions, the highest mean distress score was related to the emotional burden dimension 2.82 (1.06), and the lowest mean score was obtained in the dimension of interpersonal distress 1.48 (0.84). The overall distress score was significantly associated with hospitalization history (P ≤0.001) and history of diabetes-related problems (P=0.001). Also, the total distress score was significantly related to physical complications of diabetes (P=0.001), type of treatment (P=0.001), and occupation (P=0.018). The overall distress score significantly correlated with monthly income (r=-0.171, P=0.001), disease duration (r=0.268, P=0.001), and HbA 1 c level (r=0.115, P=0.032). Conclusion: Since the level of distress shows interindividual variations and is influenced by demographic, clinical, and social features, it is recommended that those in charge of providing care to diabetic patients consider individualized distress coping training for patients with diabetes.
Multi-dimensional reconstruction of seismic data

In seismic data processing, we often need to interpolate and extrapolate missing data at spatial locations. The reconstruction problem can be posed as an inverse problem where from inadequate and incomplete data we attempt to reconstruct the seismic wavefield at locations where measurements were not acquired. This thesis presents a wavefield reconstruction scheme called minimum weighted norm interpolation (MWNI) for spatially band limited signals. The method entails the solution of an inverse problem where a wavenumber domain regularization term is included. The regularization term is not only used to constrain the solution to be spatially band limited but also to impose a priori spectral shape. The numerical algorithm is quite efficient since the method of conjugate gradients in conjunction with fast matrix-vector multiplication, implemented via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), were adopted. In addition, its computational efficiency allows for feasible extensions to higher dimensional interpolation schemes. In this thesis, the MWNI method is used to interpolate prestack seismic data before wave equation amplitude versus angle imaging. Synthetic data were used to investigate the effectiveness of the 2-D/3-D MWNI scheme at the time of preconditioning seismic data for wave equation AVA imaging where a regular and dense data sampling is required to accurately estimate angle gathers. Two field data examples are presented to illustrate the application of the multi-dimensional MWNI schemes to real-world datasets.
ToO observations of GRO J1655-40 in outburst with INTEGRAL

In this paper we present the results of the analysis of the INTEGRAL data for the black hole transient GRO J1655-40. The observations consist of four ToO (100 ks each) observations's AO-3 spread from February to April of 2005. We present here the preliminary spectral analysis of this source between 5 and 200 keV. Also, some comments of the light curves obtained during this period are shown.
Epsilon Factorized Diﬀerential Equations for Elliptic Feynman Integrals

This is a contribution to the proceedings of the 2022 “Loops and Legs” conference. It is based on a talk discussing recent work on epsilon factorized diﬀerential equations for Feynman integrals which are beyond polylogarithmic and have an elliptic highest sector. It introduces a systematic method to ﬁnd such epsilon factorized bases, that works by requiring the period matrix of the integrands to be diagonal. In this contribution we will go through a new example (the elliptic box-triangle) not discussed in the original publication.
Status of the cheetah ( Acinonyx jubatus ) in Ethiopia: A review

Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), one of the wide-ranging scarce carnivores, was widespread some decades back in Ethiopia's wild lands. However, its natural habitats are currently fragmented and shrinking due to anthropogenic factors. Regardless of this general overview, there appears to be a lack of up-to-date information which reveals the past and existing status of cheetahs in Ethiopia since they are relatively understudied compared to other large carnivores. Available published and unpublished reports, manuscripts, and policy-focused documents on the target species were reviewed to explore and document the status of the cheetah in Ethiopia. Based on our review, we concluded that the cheetah population size is extremely small (below 500) while large ranges (65% of projected habitat area) have been identified through field assessments and sightings undertaken since 2015. Besides, the incidence and extent of its threats are increasing and changing over time. It is therefore recommended that there is a need to conduct a countrywide assessment to examine the status of the existing populations and review the developed national action plan based on up-to-date information on the potential threats to the populations of the cheetah.
Visual Analysis of RIS Data for Endmember Selection

Reflectance Imaging Spectroscopy (RIS) is a hyperspectral imaging technique used for investigating the molecular composition of materials. It can help identify pigments used in a painting, which are relevant information for art conservation and history. For every scanned pixel, a reflectance spectrum is obtained and domain experts look for pure representative spectra, called endmembers, which could indicate the presence of particular pigments. However, the identification of endmembers can be a lengthy process, which requires domain experts to manually select pixels and visually inspect multiple spectra in order to find accurate endmembers that belong to the historical context of an investigated painting. We propose an integrated interactive visual-analysis workflow, that combines dimensionality reduction and linked visualizations to identify and inspect endmembers. Here, we present initial results, obtained in collaboration with domain experts.
Conductance-Based Phenomenological Nonspiking Model: A Dimensionless and Simple Model That Reliably Predicts the Effects of Conductance Variations on Nonspiking Neuronal Dynamics

Abstract The modeling of single neurons has proven to be an indispensable tool in deciphering the mechanisms underlying neural dynamics and signal processing. In that sense, two types of single-neuron models are extensively used: the conductance-based models (CBMs) and the so-called phenomenological models, which are often opposed in their objectives and their use. Indeed, the first type aims to describe the biophysical properties of the neuron cell membrane that underlie the evolution of its potential, while the second one describes the macroscopic behavior of the neuron without taking into account all of its underlying physiological processes. Therefore, CBMs are often used to study “low-level” functions of neural systems, while phenomenological models are limited to the description of “high-level” functions. In this letter, we develop a numerical procedure to endow a dimensionless and simple phenomenological nonspiking model with the capability to describe the effect of conductance variations on nonspiking neuronal dynamics with high accuracy. The procedure allows determining a relationship between the dimensionless parameters of the phenomenological model and the maximal conductances of CBMs. In this way, the simple model combines the biological plausibility of CBMs with the high computational efficiency of phenomenological models, and thus may serve as a building block for studying both high-level and low-level functions of nonspiking neural networks. We also demonstrate this capability in an abstract neural network inspired by the retina and C. elegans networks, two important nonspiking nervous tissues.
PECULIARITIES OF DEVELOPING A STRATEGY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM ENTREPRENEURSHIP ENTITIES OF TERRITORIAL COMMUNITIES

At the current stage, to start any business, it is necessary to think strategically. In general, a similar business approach is just as appropriate to choose for the formation and promotion of the tourist brand of the territorial community, because tourism, in general, should focus on potential profit. When starting or planning tourism in the community by the authority or local self-government bodies, the tourism entrepreneurship strategy will have certain features. Unlike the usual tourism business, here the general public interest will be more important than the satisfaction of consumer demand. For local authorities, it is more important to consider the potential long-term impact of tourism projects than their short-term results. One of the most important conditions for successful tourism entrepreneurship of territorial communities is the constant determination of the relationship between the demand and supply of tourist services, which is based on the analysis of the interaction of factors that form the market situation. Therefore, the degree of expediency of making important strategic decisions is determined, first of all, based on the analysis of the state of development of the tourist market. Given the significant fluctuations in the volume of the domestic tourist market and the intensification of competition between enterprises in the field of tourism, it can be argued that the above fully applies to the market of tourist services. Implementation of the strategic development of tourism entrepreneurship entities of territorial communities will be possible based on the effective interaction of two important and necessary elements: the state regulatory system and market entrepreneurial initiatives. The need to improve the state regulation of tourism entrepreneurship of territorial communities is justified by a significant lag behind the similar one in European countries and accordingly requires updating the legal framework and adapting it to European requirements, progressive regulations and reproduction conditions, methodical, organizational, technical measures and other modern communicative conditions. On the other hand, a free market entrepreneurial initiative will make it possible to practically realize the socio-economic and ecological tasks of tourism entrepreneurship in the form of a branched network, various types of the corresponding tourist product. In our opinion, the strategy for the development of tourism entrepreneurship entities of territorial communities should be understood as a comprehensive program of measures aimed at implementing the mission (general goal) of the territorial community and achieving its multiple goals.
European heatwaves in present and future climate simulations: a Lagrangian analysis

Abstract. Heatwaves are prolonged periods of anomalously high temperatures that can have devastating impacts on the environment, society and economy. In recent history, heatwaves have become more intense and more numerous over most continental areas, and it is expected that this trend will continue due to the ongoing global temperature rise. This general intensification may be modified by changes also in the underlying thermodynamical and dynamical processes. In order to study potential changes in heatwave characteristics and dynamics, we compare Lagrangian backward trajectories of airstreams associated with historic (1991–2000) and future (2091–2100) heatwaves in six different European regions. We use a percentile-based method (Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily) to identify heatwaves in a large ensemble of climate simulations (Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESM-LE) with 35 members). The simulations have been forced by historical representative concentration pathways (RCPs) up to 2005 and by the RCP8.5 scenario afterwards. In general, we find that air parcels associated with heatwaves are located to the east or inside the respective regions 3 d prior to the events. For future heatwaves, the model projects a north-/northeastward shift of the origin of the air masses in most study regions. Compared to climatological values, airstreams associated with heatwaves show a larger temperature increase along their trajectory, which is connected to stronger descent and/or stronger diabatic heating when the air parcels enter the boundary layer. We find stronger descent associated with adiabatic warming in the northern, more continental regions and increased diabatic heating in all regions (except of the British Isles) in the simulated future climate. The enhanced diabatic heating is even more pronounced for heatwaves over continental regions. Diabatic temperature changes of near-surface air are driven by sensible heat fluxes, which are stronger over dry soils. The amplified diabatic heating associated with future heatwaves may thus be explained by an additional drying of the land surface.
Impact of correct and simulated focus cues on perceived realism

The natural accommodation of the human eye to different distances results in focus cues, which contribute to depth perception and appearance. Since focus cues are very difficult to reproduce in an electronic display, it is desirable to know how much they contribute to realistic image appearance. In this work we quantify the potential benefit of focus cues in terms of increased realism compared to regular stereo image presentation. As a secondary goal, we evaluate whether three depth-of-field rendering techniques, which reproduce defocus blur at three different degrees of accuracy, can reintroduce the benefits of focus cues. Our findings confirm the importance of focus cues for realistic image appearance, and also show that they cannot easily be substituted by depth-of-field rendering.
Information Structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. http://dx.doi. org/10.3765/sp.5. 6 BibTeX info
Maximum power point tracking charge controllers for telecom applications-analysis and economics

Simple charge controllers connect photovoltaic modules directly to the battery bank resulting in a significant power loss if the battery bank voltage differs greatly from the PV Maximum Power Point (MPP) voltage. Modeling work at AES has shown that DC-DC converter type MPP tracking charge controllers can deliver more than 30% more energy from PV modules to the battery when the PV modules are cool and the battery state of charge is low-this is typically both the worst case condition (i.e., winter) and also the design condition that determines the PV array size. Economic modeling, based on typical telecom system installed costs shows benefits of more than $3/Wp for MPPT over conventional charge controllers in this application-a value that greatly exceeds the additional cost of the DC-DC converter.
Dense Captioning Objects in 3D Environments using Natural Language

This thesis tackles the problem of dense captioning objects in 3D environments. In this task, we are given a 3D environment, and our aim is to first detect objects and then describe them using natural language. Previously, many works have addressed the problem of image captioning as well as dense captioning in 3D environments. However, no prior work has thoroughly investigated and compared the quality of generated captions from aspects such as the choice of visual input. In this thesis, we first introduce a 3D dense captioning pipeline, and then we show how it compares against prior work. Our investigations show that captioning objects in 3D leads to higher quality captions (compared to captioning with 2D visual inputs). We further show that simple modifications in the type of visual input (e.g. addition of depth to 2D single view images) and careful choice of optimization settings (e.g. optimizer, learning rate, and end-to-end training) can drastically improve the performance of the 2D captioning, and even outperform the 3D captioning on some evaluation metrics.
Evaluation of Crowd-Sourced PM 2.5 Measurements from Low-Cost Sensors for Air Quality Mapping in Stuttgart City 14

Exposure to particulate matter (PM) pollution poses a major risk to the environment and human health. Monitoring PM pollution is thus crucial to understand particle distribution and mitigation. There has been rapid development of low-cost PM sensors and advancement in the ﬁ eld of Internet of Things (IoT) that has led to the deployment of the sensors by technology-aware people in cities. In this study, we evaluate the stability and accuracy of PM measurements from low-cost sensors crowd-sourced from a citizen science project in Stuttgart. Long-term measurements from the sensors show a strong correlation with measurements from reference stations with most of the selected sensors achieving Pearson correlation coef ﬁ cients of r > 0.7. We investigate the stability of the sensors for reproducibility of measurements using ﬁ ve sensors installed at different height levels and horizontal distances. They exhibit minor variations with low correlation of variation (CV) values of between 10 and 14%. A CV of (cid:1) 10% is recommended for low-cost sensors. In a dense network, the sensors enable extraction pollution patterns and trends. We analyse PM measurements from 2 years using space-time pattern analysis and generate two clusters of sensors that have similar trends. The clustering shows the relationship between traf ﬁ c and pollution with most sensors near major roads being in the same cluster.
Open Research Online Theoretical perspectives on mobile language learning diaries and noticing for learners,teachers and researchers

This paper considers the issue of 'noticing' in second language acquisition, and argues for the potential of handheld devices to: (i) support language learners in noticing and recording noticed features 'on the spot', to help them develop their second language system; (ii) help language teachers better understand the specific difficulties of individuals or those from a particular language background; and (iii) facilitate data collection by applied linguistics researchers, which can be fed back into educational applications for language learning. We consider: theoretical perspectives drawn from the second language acquisition literature, relating these to the practice of writing language learning diaries; and the potential for learner modelling to facilitate recording and prompting noticing in mobile assisted language learning contexts. We then offer guidelines for developers of mobile language learning solutions to support the development of language awareness in learners.
Mathematical Model of The Heart Rate

The objective of the present study was to formulate an effective mathematical model of heart rate adolescents, in religious environment with similar activities like mindfulness. Based on an existing model, a system of two coupled differential equations which give the rate of change of heart rate. The modifications introduced to the existing model are justified and discussed. The environment, daily activities, as well as mood are also taken into account. Application of the model provides information regarding the individual’s heart beat and is able to detect next beat from the last two beats found in the data. To demonstrate examples of successful numerical fit of the model, heart rate data sets of two individuals have been selected and numerical optimization was implemented. The proposed model can serve as a powerful tool for a complete means of heart rate analysis, not only in daily activities, but also in the areas of cardiovascular health.
Design and Testing of Planar Inverted-F Antennas with Application to the ORCASat CubeSat

This thesis presents the development of an antenna to transmit telemetry from ORCASat, a two-unit CubeSat. The research includes four alternatives, followed by the in-depth analysis, manufacturing, and testing in an anechoic chamber of the selected configuration. The chosen design operates at 2.4 GHz and combines two Planar Inverted-F Antennas (PIFA) in a crossed configuration with a feeding port in the center and two shorting pins to tune the central frequency. This novel antenna design offers a linear polarization omnidirectional radiation pattern identical to a dipole antenna, but in a flat form factor, and without the need for a deployment system. Thus, the antenna eliminates deployment-associated risks and complexities. When mounted on the satellite end face, the antenna radiation pattern allows communication with Earth for every orientation of the satellite, making this design advantageous when dealing with the initial tumbling phase. Simulations of the antenna show a maximum gain of 2.8 dBi, a reflection coefficient of -29 dB at the 2.46 GHz working frequency and a 10 dB bandwidth of 54 MHz. The prototype was tested with a Virtual Network Analyzer (VNA) and the measured central frequency was 2.37 GHz, an error of 3.6%. The results in the anechoic chamber prove that the radiation pattern is omnidirectional.