bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Spirometric assessment of wheelchair athletes at home and during the Paralympics in Beijing 2008
Authors: Perret C.  , Leuppi J.  , Michel F.  , Strupler M.
Published: February 2025

The aim of the present study was to assess possible effects of expected air pollution on lung function of Swiss wheelchair athletes at the Paralympic Games 2008 in Beijing. For this purpose forced vital capacity, forced expiratory volume in 1s and peak expiratory flow was determined during the medical examination of the Swiss wheelchair athletes (n=13, whereof 4 asthmatics) at home (pre-test) as well as between day 2-7 (post-test 1) and 15-20 (post-test 2) after the arrival at the Paralympic Village in Beijing. Concomitantly concentration of particulate matters (PM10) was measured. Post-test lung function measurements where performed 4.1 ± 1.6 days and 16.7 ± 0.5 days after arrival at the Paralympic Village. Analysis of variance revealed no differences concerning pre- and post-test lung function measurements. Average daily concentration of PM10 ranged between 22 and 119 μg/m3. No significant correlations were found between PM10 concentrations and lung function measurements. In conclusion, although quite high at some days, air pollution was less than suspected in advance of the Paralympic Games 2008 presumably due to restrictive sanctions (reduced traffic, closing down of factories) of the organising committee. The measured PM10 concentrations seemed to have no effect on lung function as none of the athletes showed any respiratory complications or decreased lung function during the stay at the Paralympic Village.
Supporting the Paralympic Athlete: focus on wheeled sports
Authors: Goosey-Tolfrey V.L.
Published: February 2025

The complexity of wheelchair sports provide the scientist with a unique challenge. There are two major components that contribute towards ‘wheeled sports’ performance, these are the athlete and the chair. It is the interaction of these two that enable wheelchair propulsion and the sporting movements required within a given sport. This presentation will provide an insight into the applied sport science research that has been provided to the Great Britain wheelchair athletes over the last decade. It will focus on four sports; wheelchair racing, wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis and wheelchair rugby. This session will discuss how sport scientists have worked with coaches and practitioners to help optimise training leading to a major competition through evidence base practise. As changes in different mechanical variables have been shown to affect the energy requirements of wheelchair propulsion then the first topic will discuss the concept of pushing economy and mechanical efficiency of wheelchair propulsion. The second topic will illustrate the concept of sports classification, and show how training volume ‘in terms of basketball shooting’ may need to be individually assigned. The third topic will show how technology assists the coaching process and finally future research within wheelchair team sports and chair configurations will be examined.
The Need for WMD Threat Assessment in the Chemical Industry: Plant Site Level
Authors: Clagett Donald C.
Published: February 2025

The size of chemical industry and rapid advances in science and technology increase the potential for illicit use of chemicals. There is a need for industry to contribute to threat assessment and can do so by considering several factors including the chemicals, their availability, quantities and likelihood of use.
Independent Scientists and Ballistic Missile Defense
Authors: Neuneck Götz
Published: February 2025

Efforts to erect a defense against attacking missiles were considered and pushed forward from the beginning of the missile age by the superpowers. Cold War deterrence was based on massive nuclear deterrent arsenals and offensive missiles with intercontinental ranges. Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) advocates argue that missile defense is feasible and necessary to discourage proliferation. Opponents claim that missile defenses can be easily fooled and would lead to new arms races. This chapter describes the history and development of BMD programmes, the role scientists played in these developments, and the current debate to establish BMD systems, which reflects the old arguments about invulnerability, feasibility, costs and the implications for arms control.
The Role of Independent Scientists in Analyzing the Ballistic Missile Threat
Authors: Forden Geoffrey
Published: February 2025

The role of independent scientists in evaluating the threat posed by the development of ballistic missiles is reviewed. This includes assisting the legislative branch, informing the public debate, and, in particular, countering the military's inflation of the threat that the missiles of developing countries present. The last of these issues is covered in more detail as a special case. Following a long history of threat inflation by government agencies intent on increasing their budgets, the present US Missile Defense Agency continues this tradition and takes a number of opportunities to inflate the threat from Iran's missile development program. These financial motivations are not, unfortunately, limited to government agencies and affect even supposedly independent analysts. One way of preventing this is for independent scientists to publish their research results in peer-reviewed journals or, because such journals are fairly rare, subject their research to other review mechanisms. A new way of doing this is to present results on established blogs. Finally the funding and career paths of independent scientists are reviewed and it is found that universities are fundamentally ill-suited for supporting new, multidisciplinary areas of study. Without some sort of academic home, this field is likely to dry up in the coming harsh funding environment.
Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Process of Croatia's Accession to NATO in the Light of WMD Threat Assessment
Authors: Mahecic Zvonimir
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the role of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the present security environment from the point of view of a small transitional state like Croatia. Attention is focused on the existing contemporary strategic documents, their approach to the possible WMD threat, and the kinds of instruments and tools they prescribe to deal with this threat. We explore the similarities and differences within society, from the political institutions to the general public, regarding the NATO accession discussions and what specific role WMD played in these discussions. Finally, we attempt to clarify the interaction between the politics and the science that followed, or preceded, discussions connected with the eventual Croatian membership, especially those in NATO. Finally we offer some favourable and not so favourable conclusions based on first hand experience of these discussions, with the emphasis on what might have been, or still may be, improved in order to reach a better understanding between the public, science and politics in the Croatian social and political spheres, and try to reconsider the importance of the WMD threat in the future world.
Significance of Noninvasive Cardiology Care in Present-Day Peculiarities of Hazardous Regions
Authors: Shurygin M.G.
Published: February 2025

In this article diagnosis and treatment of traumatic cardiac injuries and cardiac pathology due to psychotic disturbance are discussed. It is necessary to stress that management of traumatic heart injury is very difficult. Programs for the management of stress-induced cardiac pathology, especially in vulnerable aged populations, are not yet formulated.
Learning from Catastrophe: Lessons for Pandemic Planning
Authors: Gursky Elin A.  , Batni Sweta R.
Published: February 2025

Twenty-first-century natural and deliberate catastrophic health events have demonstrated their potential to strain existing medical and public health systems’ capacities. Changing climates, the emergence of new diseases, globalization, and limited global health governance each has the potential to further challenge the delivery of public health and medical care in the coming decades. World leaders must now prepare for the threat of an influenza pandemic that could disrupt lives, devastate communities, and destroy economies. NATO has extensive experience in planning and conducting multinational operations and is uniquely positioned to guide nations’ pandemic preparedness efforts. From November 30, 2008, to December 8, 2008, the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program sponsored an Advanced Studies Institute in Milan, Italy, to help regional leaders to better prepare for pandemic threats. Over the course of two weeks, 60 participants from almost 20 countries collaborated and shared knowledge and training learned from current pandemic planning efforts. This paper attempts to summarize some of the major critical lessons from past catastrophes – lessons that are intended to inform future NATO pandemic preparedness efforts by member countries.
Legal and Political Implications of a Pandemic and Biological Threats. Ethical Dilemmas in Disasters
Authors: Caruso Antonio  , Rossodivita Alessandra
Published: February 2025

The emergence of life-threatening infections such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), viral hemorrhagic fevers (e.g. Ebola and Marburg viral infections), the new resurgence in terrorism after September 11, 2001, and the threat of bio-terrorism, highlighted the urgent need for efficient control practices in health care. A dramatic increase in the need to develop countermeasures including civilian protection against bio-terrorism and emergency preparedness drive the policy-makers to develop new strategy and management guidelines. New codes in ethics and laws for bio-terrorism and disaster emergencies and related research have been improved over the last five years. Failure to apply infection control measures favors the spread of pathogens, and the health care setting can act as amplifiers of outbreaks, with an impact on both hospital and community health. The recent pandemics and environmental emergencies suggest that it is necessary to redefine the roles of states, municipalities, and nations under the principles of federalism and on the national and international levels in different countries. In the era of globalization and international laws the authors would highlight and focus the attention of the new International Health Regulations (IHR), put forward by the WHO, in which it is underlined the importance of human rights principles linked with the concept and need to balance the effective response to risk of diseases compared to fundamental individual freedoms. The authors would like to focus the attention on human rights from an international perspective in order to better understand the international point of view on this matter, concerning the legal and political implications of a pandemic or a biological threat, terrorism and counter-terrorism health consequences and related issues.
Ukraine Against Herself: To Be Euro-Atlantic, Eurasian, or Neutral?
Authors: Simon Jeffrey
Published: February 2025

Since independence Ukraine has been evenly split between those who desire to be part of the Euro-Atlantic community and those who gravitate toward Eurasia. During the 1990s Ukraine was able to have it both ways. Since the Orange Revolution, Ukraine has made significant progress developing a Euro-Atlantic-style democratic political system, a vibrant open media and civil society and civilian oversight of military which has built strong ties with NATO. Despite this progress Ukrainian opinion remains sharply divided on integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions. Profound political instability makes Ukraine a less appealing candidate for membership in either the European Union or NATO. Under these circumstances, the challenge is to provide Ukraine sufficient time to consolidate democratic governance and develop domestic consensus.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Authors: Cikotić Selmo  , Beridan Izet
Published: February 2025

The relationship between Bosnia and Herzegovina and NATO has been a multidimensional and complex process. NATO has strongly supported the process of reconciliation among the recently warring factions. The decision of state institutions and consensus among the ethno-political structures to seek membership in NATO and EU paved the way to mutual understanding and to resolving numerous unsettled issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its immediate neighborhood.
Effective Analysis of Infinite State Stochastic Processes Games
Authors: Kučera Antonín
Published: February 2025

We consider the classes of Markov chains, Markov decision processes, and stochastic games definable by pushdown automata with probabilistic and non-deterministic choice. We give an overview of the existing results and present selected concepts and techniques that have been used to establish these results.
Using Argumentation to Understand Ambiguous Situations in Intelligent Environments
Authors: Muñoz Andrés  , Botía Juan A.  , Augusto Juan Carlos
Published: February 2025

Intelligent Environments provide the infrastructure to deliver Ambient Assisted Living such that elderly people can remain at home and independent for longer. An important part of an Ambient Assisted Living provision is the monitoring, detection and follow up of unsafe situations. One problem these systems have to perform that task is that they only observe the world through incomplete, sometimes unreliable, sensing devices. This naturally leads to uncertain, inconsistent and incomplete perceptions of the world. This paper shows how argumentation, a well established field in computer science, can help to disambiguate some of those confusing (sometimes even inconsistent) situations.
Parallelization Strategies for ODE Solvers on Multicore Cluster Systems
Authors: Rauber Thomas  , Rünger Gudula
Published: February 2025

Mathematical models involving ordinary differential equation (ODEs) arise in many diverse applications, such as fluid flows, physics-based animation, mechanical systems, mathematical finances, or chemical reaction. The realistic simulation of these applications depends on fast methods for the numerical solution of ODEs as well as adequate parallel computation schemes exploiting the potential parallelism in an optimal way. Due to the advent of multicore technology, parallel resources are now widely available in form of multicore processors or clusters. It is required to revisit parallel computation schemes of ODE solvers for the use on these multicore platforms. The objective of this article is a survey and classification of computational techniques for the numerical integration of ODE systems. The emphasis lies on a computational model which captures the specifics of ODE codes as well as a hierarchical architectural model of multicore systems.
Real time ultrasound image sequence segmentation on multicores
Authors: Casaburi D.  , D'Amore L.  , Marcellino L.  , Murli A.
Published: February 2025

Echography (ultrasound imaging of the heart) is one of the driving application areas of medical imaging. Our focus is to track the motion of endocardium during a complete cardiac cycle to allow clinicians for estimating the left ventricle and atrium (LVA) area deformations. The main challenge is to do this in a suitable response time. We describe a PETSc-based parallel software designed to detect and delineate the LV contour during a complete cardiac cycle. LV segmentation is performed by applying a three steps algorithm: speckle reduction, optic flow computation and spatio-temporal level-set segmentation. Using a scale-space approach each step is mathematically described by nonlinear time dependent PDE. Experiments on real data are obtained on a parallel computing platform made of 16 blades Dell PowerEdge M6000 each one consisting of 2 processors quad-core (Intel Xeon E5410@2.33GHz (64 bit)) connected by high performance network InfiniBand and located at the University of Naples Federico II.
RPC/MPI Hybrid Implementation of OpenFMO
Authors: Inadomi Yuichi  , Takami Toshiya  , Maki Jun  , Kobayashi Taizo  , Aoyagi Mutsumi
Published: February 2025

Robust and effective implementations for large-scale realistic application programs are analyzed under the assumption that they are executed on the next-generation supercomputer system. In order to estimate performance of all-electron calculations of a ribosome, a discrete-event simulation for the parallel program is introduced, in which execution of program components and communications between them is emulated. Through the analysis, it is realized that middleware developed for Grids is still valid and useful even for massively-parallel supercomputer systems since they have a huge number of cores and full stability over weeks is not guaranteed.
When Clouds become Green: the Green Open Cloud Architecture
Authors: Orgerie Anne-Cécile  , Lefèvre Laurent
Published: February 2025

Virtualization solutions appear as alternative approaches for companies to consolidate their operational services on a physical infrastructure, while preserving specific functionalities inside the Cloud perimeter (e.g., security, fault tolerance, reliability). These consolidation approaches are explored to propose some energy reduction while switching OFF unused computing nodes. We study the impact of virtual machines aggregation in terms of energy consumption. Some load-balancing strategies associated with the migration of virtual machines inside the Cloud infrastructures will be showed. We will present the design of a new original energy-efficient Cloud infrastructure called Green Open Cloud.
Exploiting Object-Oriented Abstractions to parallelize Sparse Linear Algebra Codes
Authors: Terboven Christian  , An Mey Dieter  , Kapinos Paul  , Schleiden Christopher  , Merkulow Igor
Published: February 2025

Object-oriented (OO) programming conquered mainstream in the 1990s but the procedural programming languages Fortran and C are still dominating in the High-Performance-Computing (HPC) community. However in recent years, compute kernels or even whole applications have been migrated from C to object-oriented C++ and Fortran has been retrofitted with OO capabilities as well. In this work we illustrate how OO abstractions can be used to introduce Shared-Memory parallelization into existing applications by using the concepts of encapsulation and modularity. For the important domain of sparse linear algebra routines, we discuss several parallel implementation strategies and data type design considerations. We aim to maximize performance and scalability while hiding the implementation details as much as possible.
A framework for detailed multiphase cloud modeling on HPC systems
Authors: Lieber Matthias  , Wolke Ralf  , Grützun Verena  , Müller Matthias S.  , Nagel Wolfgang E.
Published: February 2025

Cloud processes are appreciated to be of increasing importance to the comprehension of the atmosphere. Therefore, weather models have recently been extended by detailed spectral descriptions of cloud processes. However, the high computational costs hinder their practical application. This paper introduces the novel framework FD4 (Four-Dimensional Distributed Dynamic Data structures), which is developed to parallelize and couple cloud models to atmospheric models in an efficient way and to enable a higher scalability on HPC systems. Results of first tests with the regional forecast model COSMO are presented.
Generalized GEMM Kernels on GPGPUs: Experiments and Applications
Authors: Barbieri Davide  , Cardellini Valeria  , Filippone Salvatore
Published: February 2025

General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is fast becoming a common feature of high performance computing centers. In this paper we discuss some implementation issues related to dense linear algebra computations on GPUs, such as the GEneral Matrix-Matrix product, as well as other kernels sharing the same computational pattern, such as the matrix form of the All-Pairs Shortest-Path problem. Our CUDA implementation has shown a significant improvement on the NVIDIA processing units over the vendor's software. We review the optimization techniques that can be employed to implement such operations, as well as outline further development work in connected application domains.
Comparison of Modular Arithmetic Algorithms on GPUs
Authors: Giorgi Pascal  , Izard Thomas  , Tisserand Arnaud
Published: February 2025

We present below our first implementation results on a modular arithmetic library for cryptography on GPUs. Our library, in C++ for CUDA, provides modular arithmetic, finite field arithmetic and some ECC support. Several algorithms and memory coding styles have been compared: local, shared and register. For moderate sizes, we report up to 2.6 speedup compared to state-of-the-art library.
High-Throughput Parallel-I/O using SIONlib for Mesoscopic Particle Dynamics Simulations on Massively Parallel Computers
Authors: Freche Jens  , Frings Wolfgang  , Sutmann Godehard
Published: February 2025

The newly developed parallel Input/Output-libray SIONlib is applied to the highly scalable parallel multiscale code MP2C, which couples a mesoscopic fluid method based on multi-particle collision dynamics to molecular dynamics. It is demonstrated that for fluid-benchmark systems, a significant improvement of scalability under production conditions can be achieved. It is shown that for the BlueGene/P architecture at Jülich a performance close to the bandwidth capacity of 4.7 GByte/sec can be obtained. The article discusses the ease of use of SIONlib from the point of view of application.
Combining Numerical Iterative Solvers
Authors: Ngoko Yanik  , Trystram Denis
Published: February 2025

We are interested in this work by the combination of iterative solvers when solving linear systems of equations in an on-line setting. Our study targets users who may not be able to choose the best solvers for solving a set of linear systems while minimizing the total execution time. We propose a framework and algorithms in which the combination of solvers depends on informations gathered at runtime. The framework is assessed by extensive experiments using 5 SPARSKIT solvers over more than 70 matrices. The results show that the proposed approach is robust for solving linear sytems since we were able to solve more linear systems than each individual solver with an execution time nearly two times equal to those of the worst individual solver. Morever, we were able to predict a set of two solvers containing the best solver on more than 80% cases.
Optimizing Performance and Energy of High Performance Computing Applications
Authors: Brochard Luigi  , Panda Raj  , Desota Don  , Thomas Francois  , Bell Jr. Rob
Published: February 2025

Power consumption is a critical consideration in high performance computing systems and it's becoming the limiting factor to build and operate Petascale and Exascale systems. When studying the power consumption of existing systems running HPC workloads, we find power, energy and performance are closely related leading to the possibility to optimize energy without sacrificing (much or at all) performance.
A comparative study of some distributed linear solvers on systems arising from fluid dynamics simulations
Authors: Nuentsa Wakam Désiré  , Erhel Jocelyne  , Canot Édouard  , Atenekeng Kahou Guy-Antoine
Published: February 2025

This paper presents a comparative study of some distributed solvers on a set of linear systems arising from Navier-Stokes equations and provided by an industrial software. Solvers under consideration implement direct, iterative or domain decomposition methods and most of them are freely available packages. Numerical tests with various parameters are made easier by developing a unified toolbox that links with interface functions provided by these libraries. The intensive numerical tests performed on various sets of processors reveal the good performance results achieved by the recently proposed parallel preconditioner for Krylov methods based on an explicit formulation of multiplicative Schwarz [1].
ParaFPGA: Parallel Computing with Flexible Hardware
Authors: D'Hollander Erik H.  , Stroobandt Dirk  , Touhafi Abdellah
Published: February 2025

ParaFPGA 2009 is a Mini-Symposium on parallel computing with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), held in conjunction with the ParCo conference on parallel computing. FPGAs allow to map an algorithm directly onto the hardware, optimize the architecture for parallel execution, and dynamically reconfigure the system in between different phases of the computation. Compared to e.g. Cell processors, GPGPU's (general-purpose GPU's) and other high-performance devices, FPGAs are considered as flexible hardware in the sense that the building blocks of one or more single or multiple FPGAs can be interconnected freely to build a highly parallel system. In this Mini-Symposium the following topics are addressed: clustering FPGAs, evolvable hardware using FPGAs and fast dynamic reconfiguration.
Software vs. Hardware Message Passing Implementations for FPGA Clusters
Authors: Creedon Eoin  , Manzke Michael
Published: February 2025

A parallel algorithm mapped onto multiple Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and CPUs needs to communicate and synchronise data between the FPGAs' digital logic micro-architectures and the CPU(s). A reconfigurable logic API for the FPGA and the CPU can assist the system programmer with mapping the parallel algorithm across the available resources. This work investigates alternative ways of implementing the reconfigurable logic API.
Speeding up combinational synthesis in an FPGA cluster
Authors: Pedraza César  , Castillo Javier  , Martínez José Ignacio  , Huerta Pablo  , Bosque José Luis  , Cano Javier
Published: February 2025

One important issue in the evolvable hardware area is speeding up the combinational circuits synthesis. This can be mainly achieved by using genetic programming techniques combined with parallel systems implementations. This paper presents a parallel genetic program for combinational circuits synthesis implemented specifically for an FPGA cluster. This implementation accelerates the computation of the fitness function by a x400 factor. The experiments test the algorithm and the cluster architecture performance in comparison with the Altamira HPC cluster. Results show that the FPGA cluster architecture delivers an interesting high performance for combinational circuit synthesis of systems with more than eight variables. Being able to tune some parameters can greatly help the algorithms to find new optimized implementations in area or speed.
Applying Parameterizable Dynamic Configurations to Sequence Alignment
Authors: Davidson Tom  , Bruneel Karel  , Devos Harald  , Stroobandt Dirk
Published: February 2025

Hardware acceleration is needed to speed up DNA or protein alignment while keeping the accuracy of the alignment result high enough. The hardware resources used can be effectively optimized by using a new way of run-time reconfiguration, called parameterizable reconfiguration. In this paper, we show how a parameterizable configuration can be used to create a run-time reconfigurable implementation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm. This implementation results in a hardware design that can be implemented on a cheaper FPGA with a performance penalty due to the reconfiguration overhead.
From OpenMP to MPI: first experiments of the STEP source-to-source transformation tool
Authors: Millot Daniel  , Muller Alain  , Parrot Christian  , Silber-Chaussumier Frédérique
Published: February 2025

The STEP tool allows source-to-source transformation of programs, from OpenMP to MPI, for execution on distributed-memory platforms. This paper describes tests of STEP on popular benchmarks, and analyses the results. These experiments provide both encouraging feedback and directions for improvement of the tool.
Performance Tool Integration in a GPU Programming Environment: Experiences with TAU and HMPP
Authors: Malony Allen D.  , Mayanglambam Shangkar  , Morin Laurent  , Sottile Matthew J.  , Bihan Stephane  , Shende Sameer S.  , Bodin Francois
Published: February 2025

Application development environments offering high-level programming support for accelerators will need to integrate instrumentation and measurement capabilities to enable full, consistent performance views for analysis and tuning. We describe early experiences with the integration of a parallel performance system (TAU) and accelerator performance tool (TAUcuda) with the HMPP Workbench for programming GPU accelerators using CUDA. A description of the design approach is given, and two case studies are reported to demonstrate our development prototype. A new version of the technology is now being created based on the lessons learned from the research work.
Enhanced Performance Analysis of Multi-core Applications with an Integrated Tool-chain
Authors: William Thomas  , Mix Hartmut  , Mohr Bernd  , Menzel René  , Voigtländer Felix
Published: February 2025

Programming and optimising large parallel applications for multi-core systems is an ambitious and time consuming challenge. Therefore, a number of software tools have been developed in the past to assist the programmer in optimising their codes. Scalasca and Vampir are two of these performance-analysis tools that are already well established and recognised in the community. While Scalasca locates, quantifies, and presents performance flaws (defined as event patterns) in a compact and simple to use tree representation, the Vampir framework visualises all details of the function call sequences and communication patterns in a great variety of timeline or statistic displays. Scalasca locates and presents the problems found and their severity but gives limited practical hints on the case history to find a solution. Looking at the huge amount of detailed data in Vampir can make it hard to find the interesting spots in spatial and temporal resolution for identification of problems and selection for further investigation. This observation led to the combination of these tools resulting in a more productive tool-chain. In this paper we present our approach to connect Scalasca and Vampir through a common bus system. A practical real-world example is provided and the beneficial impact of the integration on the work-flow is shown by optimising the adaptive mesh refinement and load balancing phases of the metal forming simulation FE software INDEED.
Prototyping and Programming Tightly Coupled Accelerators
Authors: Stotzer Eric  , Leiss Ernst L.  , Granston Elana  , Hoyle David
Published: February 2025

A tightly coupled accelerator is specialized hardware attached to and controlled by a host processor. In this paper, we will discuss the features of tightly coupled accelerators and describe our programming model. We will show that our approach allows for the rapid prototyping and development of tightly coupled accelerators, using a worked out example on a Texas Instruments processor.
Learning Terror Trigger Textual Devices on Religious Internet sites
Authors: Shorer-Zeltser Marina  , Ben-Israel Galit M.
Published: February 2025

The presented paper is a part of a broader research on patterns of political involvement of religious Internet communities. The research proposes that special textual devices, like: keywords, semiotic phrases, icons, etc, are activating the first trigger that draws the attention of the potential volunteers to take an activate act in terror groups.
Fractal Nature of Barkhausen Noise – A Key to Characterise the Damage State of Magnetic Materials
Authors: Schreiber Jürgen
Published: February 2025

To characterize materials damage the scaling behavior of the deformation structure was analyzed. As a result of that the fractal dimension of surface topography appears to be a suitable parameter assessing different stages of fatigue and residual service time. Since magnetic domain pattern correlates well with the deformation structure, the fractal features of the subsurface materials region was tested by the magnetic Barkhausen noise signals for ferromagnetic steel samples. Different materials were investigated and a characteristic step-like dependence of the fractal dimension as a function of cyclic load number was found. Applications of the fractal concept to industrial components will be reported.
Model-based Image Processing in Eddy Current Nondestructive Evaluation
Authors: Aldrin John C.  , Knopp Jeremy S.  , Blodgett Mark P.
Published: February 2025

To improve the ability of eddy current nondestructive evaluation to characterize fatigue cracks in multilayer structures, a model-based image processing approach is presented that fits models based on first-principles to image data. Model refinements are presented that address edge responses, error associated with adjacent holes and poor hole centering due to cracks. Using this approach, improvements are demonstrated in the visual presentation of image data for crack detection and the potential for characterization.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Aggression
Authors: Kozarić-Kovaˇić Dragica  , Grubišić-Ilić Mirjana  , Marinić Igor  , Alegić Karin Anita
Published: February 2025

Aggression and/or impulsivity are frequent characteristics of the patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even the DSM-IV criteria include “irritability and outbursts of anger” as one of persistent symptoms of increased arousal. In this paper we will review recent theories regarding aggression in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder. Results of our study, with the aim to find the difference in aggression between PTSD patients and patients with other psychiatric diagnoses, will be shown.
Substance Use and Mental Health Wounds of War: Findings From U.S. Department of Defense Health Related Behavior Surveys
Authors: Bray Robert M.  , Mclean Amy Noll  , Hourani Laurel L.
Published: February 2025

This paper examines the prevalence of substance use and mental health issues among active-duty military personnel, and provides a preliminary assessment of several risk and protective factors associated with the development of common mental health conditions in military personnel. Data were drawn from large-scale population-based U.S. Department of Defense Surveys of Health Related Behaviors Among Active Duty Military Personnel. Assessment of trends showed large reductions in cigarette use and illicit drug use, but less change in heavy alcohol use. The most important risk factors predicting negative mental health outcomes were avoidance coping behaviors, lack of adequate sleep and high levels of work stress. The most important protective factor against negative mental health outcomes was implementation of active coping strategies. Military personnel who reported avoidant coping strategies were most likely to suffer from a range of negative mental health consequences, whereas those who implemented active coping strategies, including both problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies, were least likely to report mental health problems. Findings suggest that active coping strategies may buffer military personnel from the development of a range of negative mental health outcomes. Further study is needed to determine the key elements of active coping strategies and the conditions under which they are most effective for active-duty military personnel. Additional research is also needed to develop and implement targeted interventions that promote active coping strategies to help prevent negative mental health outcomes during stressful situations including combat.
Mental Health and Psychosocial Care for Citizens Affected by War in Lebanon: Training Project for Healthcare Professionals
Authors: Farhood Laila
Published: February 2025

This project was initiated in response to the rising needs in the mental health sector due to the attack on Lebanon in July 2006, through which World Health Organization (WHO) and Ministry of Health (MOH) responded to the disorganization and suffering of the civilian population due to the war. Objective: To provide psychosocial and mental health training for Primary Health Care (PHC) physicians, social workers and psychologists in the South of Lebanon in order to implement a standardized form of psychosocial and mental health care. Method: Training of the health care professionals was done through a two-day training workshop in different cities in the south region. A training manual (Arabic and English versions) has been devised. Specialists held the training workshops in mental health. Results: Five training workshops were implemented along three regions identified as centers in the south. Information on psychosocial and mental health services was provided for PHC physicians, psychologists, social workers and paramedics. This is the first activity of its kind in Lebanon. The material provided to the health care professionals was helpful in supporting traumatized individuals. Evaluation of the training workshops was positive as reported by the participants.
Perspectives on the Atmosphere’s Role in Sustaining Ecosystem Services
Authors: BERKOWICZ Simon M.
Published: February 2025

The role of the atmosphere in contributing to ecosystem services and human well-being is discussed with examples at the local and regional scale, but also some implications at the global scale. The way the atmosphere interacts and supports our ecosystems is not always readily apparent, especially in dryland regions. Selected examples are presented using rain and dew in coastal arid to Mediterranean regions. The Negev desert of Israel was chosen to illustrate aspects of rain and dew, with Jerusalem as an example of urban dew collecting. A bibliographic search of journal articles with the term “ecosystem service(s)” in their titles or abstracts revealed that 60 percent of all such publications appeared between 2007-2009 and that, overall, 90 percent of the journal titles were in the sciences. Only a handful of publications focused on the atmosphere.
Influence of Frequency Decision Taking and Torque Hysteresis on Accuracy of Trajectory in Industrial Manipulator with Direct Torque Control of Induction Motor Drives
Authors: Beniak Ryszard
Published: February 2025

The paper analyses an application of 3-phase small induction motors as drives for industrial manipulator joints and undertakes the problems of their control. When applying direct torque control method for driving motors and inverse dynamics method for the control of the whole system, presented solution becomes viable. The presented solution is not only realistic but also yields high quality of trajectory tracking as a result of introducing the robust control of the whole system. The problem is widely illustrated by the results of the simulation of manipulator operation with this kind of drives including several control system options. Particular focus is on the effect of torque hysteresis interval assumed in control algorithm on the frequency of control for which the conformance between the control and the obtained trajectories is satisfactory.
Improved Approach in Lightning Rod Positioning
Authors: Fauveaux Sylvain  , Warsmann Pierre
Published: February 2025

Lightning, natural source of large electromagnetic disturbances, impose damages by direct and indirect phenomenon to electrical installations in particular. This article deals with the direct protection against these aggressions which could be destructive to buildings and hazardous for people. Some methodologies, describing the use of lightning rods and their protection zone, exist. The most known and used method is the Rolling Sphere Method. This pragmatic method, easy to use by the workmanship people, show some limitations. This paper proposes to modify it to make it more universal in the lightning rod choice by introducing the assumption of the Counter-Sphere.
Torque Ripple Reduction in a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine Controlled by a DTC-SVM
Authors: Rafa Souad  , Hocine Lila  , Boudjit Kamel
Published: February 2025

Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM) are extensively used in high-performance industrial applications. The electromagnetic torque in a PMSM is proportional to the angle between the stator and rotor flux linkages. Therefore, high dynamic response can be achieved by means of Direct Torque Control (DTC). The main advantage of DTC is its structure simplicity, since no coordinate transformation and no compensation are needed. However, high torque ripple is produced when making use of full voltage vectors in classical DTC. The paper presents an improved PMSM DTC scheme by using a space vector modulation strategy and two proportional-integral (PI) controllers. The reference voltage vectors are generated by a SVM unit, which replaces the switching table in the conventional DTC scheme. The strategy improves the performances of DTC by combining low torque ripple characteristic and a constant switching frequency in steady state with a high dynamic response.
Power Losses Modeling in Magnetic Parts of Transformer
Authors: Zakrzewski Kazimierz
Published: February 2025

The scales of power losses modeling in magnetic core and structural parts of transformer, taking into account magnetic nonlinearity and skin effect were presented.The original results were deduced from previous Author's works [4–6].
Dynamic Magneto-Elastic Coupling Model Applied to Thin Ferromagnetic Plate
Authors: Hocini Farid  , Mohellebi Hassane  , Ould Ouali Samy Hassani  , Feliachi Mouloud
Published: February 2025

In this paper a dynamic magneto-elastic model applied to a thin ferromagnetic sheet is presented. The solution of the problem is performed using the finite element method in two-dimensional case. A second order polynomial model written in terms of magnetic field is used in order to take into account the magnetostriction effects. The time derivative of mechanical equation is solved using a finite difference scheme. A comparison with the New-Mark method in terms of calculation time is carried out.
Computer Modelling of Breast Cancer Detection Using FDTD Method
Authors: Miaskowski Arkadiusz  , Bochniak Andrzej  , Krawczyk Andrzej  , Yamada Sotoshi
Published: February 2025

The aim of this paper is the application of the confocal microwave imaging algorithm to breast cancer detection and the investigation of the influence of dispersion of breast tissues on high resolution microwave imaging. Due to ultrawide band (UWB) microwave imaging technique and the frequency dispersive characteristics of the fatty breast tissue, skin and tumour the correct location and size of tumour are needed for an early-stage tumour detection. In this study the exact location of tumour was determined by comparing the results from the dispersive and dispersive-free breast models. All computer simulations have been done using finite-difference time-domain method.
Threat Early Warning through Web Mining
Authors: Best Clive
Published: February 2025

Live monitoring of Internet content is now providing new possibilities for early warning of security threats across a range of fields. This paper reviews the techniques available, their methodologies, and their application to three areas. The first is regional conflict early warming. The second is terrorism forecasting and early warning. The third area is disease outbreaks and health threat monitoring. The main challenges in this research are information retrieval in multiple languages, extraction of relevant data and information from unstructured text, the development of methodologies and indicators capable of detecting trends and small trigger signals. For such early warning systems to be effective they must inform operators of potential threats without an undue number of false alarms. This paper reviews the techniques used for information retrieval and extraction, and describes three applications in the areas concerned.
A “Vicious Agent” Modelling Approach for Testing Port Security Systems
Authors: Mednikarov Boyan  , Stoyanov Nikola
Published: February 2025

In all emergency management phases, knowledge of human behaviour is critical to the development of effective emergency policies, plans and training programs. In the aftermath of a catastrophic event, when technical assets are unavailable or have been destroyed, human behaviour – and often, human behaviour alone – determines the speed and efficacy of disaster recovery efforts.
Online Self-Evaluation as a Public Mental Health Tool after Large-Scale Disasters or Conflicts: Prospects and Limits
Authors: Vetter Stefan  , Henley Robert
Published: February 2025

An Internet-based self-screening instrument for assessing psychological stress reactions was created in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami affecting the countries around the Indian Ocean. Named the Online Self Evaluation Tool (ONSET), it permitted any affected subjects to self-evaluate whether further clinical assessment by trained mental health professionals was needed. This chapter outlines all experiences and existing scientific evidence guiding the development of ONSET, reports the results of the use of this instrument for the tsunami victims, and discusses why early screening after disasters is important. From the entire sample of ONSET users, 45% of respondents reported possible posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, 24% reported possible depression, 19% potentially had anxiety disorders, and 27% reported an increased use of psychotropic substances. Additionally, a total of 18% of ONSET users reported experiencing suicide ideations. Findings support the recommendation that future research on mental health issues should put more emphasis on the importance of early monitoring and assessment to detect early PTSD and other reactions in the wake of natural disasters.
Trauma TIPS: A Brief Internet-Based Early Intervention for the Prevention of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Patients with Traumatic Injury
Authors: Mouthaan Joanne  , Sijbrandij Marit  , Olff Miranda
Published: February 2025

The Internet has proven to be an effective medium for delivering curative interventions for a range of psychological disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For the prevention of PTSD, e-health solutions have so far been scarce, even though the interactivity and accessibility of the Internet medium could be extremely beneficial in offering these types of interventions early after trauma. In this article, we present Trauma TIPS, our interactive e-health intervention for an injured trauma population. Trauma TIPS is aimed at the reduction of acute distress and acute arousal resulting from a traumatic injury, and the prevention of long-term symptoms of PTSD. In the six steps of the program, several cognitive behavioural techniques are presented including: psychoeducation, modeling, relaxation and in vivo exposure, and the use of various audiovisual features. The main emphasis is placed on the patient building resilience after traumatic injury and regaining control over his or her life. Since most single-session interventions that were offered to victims of psychological trauma have shown to be ineffective or are even associated with an increased risk for symptoms of PTSD, we considered that careful testing of this treatment’s efficacy is warranted. Currently, a randomised controlled trial is being carried out to test the efficacy of Trauma TIPS.