bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Report of the Central Bureau For Astronomical Telegrams
Authors: Thernöe K. A. 
Published: November 2021

The Central Bureau suffered a sad loss through the death, on 27 July 1960, of its director Miss Julie Vinter Hansen who since 1947 had conducted its work very efficiently and with never failing interest. In order to maintain the activities of the Bureau until a permanent arrangement could be made, the supervision was temporarily entrusted to the writer who for several years has participated in its work. In this capacity I have prepared the following report, covering the period from 20 October 1957 to 31 December i960.The work of the Bureau since 1957 has proceeded along the usual lines. The number of subscribers to telegrams and circulars, and to circulars only, has continued to rise, namely from 68 to 73 and from 117 to 158 respectively. Pleasing as is this rise, it calls, however, for a correspondingly greater amount of clerical work at the Bureau, and it would not have been possible to keep the subscription fees fairly low if we were not the recipients of subsidies from the International Astronomical Union and the Danish Rask-Orsted Foundation.
Proceedings of the Joint Discussion: Arguments in Favor of the Revision of the Conventional System of Astronomical Constants
Authors: Fricke W. 
Published: November 2021

The Chairman, W. Fricke, President of Commission 4, opened the Joint Discussion by drawing attention to the purpose and proposed procedure for the meeting. The Joint Discussion had been arranged by the Executive Committee of the Union in order to avoid the necessity for separate discussions by each Commission that was affected by the Report of the Working Group on the IAU System of Astronomical Constants. The Organizing Committee therefore proposed the following resolution:‘The members of the IAU at this Joint Discussion recommend to the Executive Committee that the following resolution be put before the General Assembly: “The International Astronomical Union endorses the final list of constants prepared by the Working Group on the System of Astronomical Constants and recommends that it be used in the national and international astronomical ephemerides at the earliest practicable date.’”
Proceedings of the Joint Discussion: Parameters of the Earth's Gravitational Field
Authors: Cook A. H. 
Published: November 2021

The Chairman, W. Fricke, President of Commission 4, opened the Joint Discussion by drawing attention to the purpose and proposed procedure for the meeting. The Joint Discussion had been arranged by the Executive Committee of the Union in order to avoid the necessity for separate discussions by each Commission that was affected by the Report of the Working Group on the IAU System of Astronomical Constants. The Organizing Committee therefore proposed the following resolution:‘The members of the IAU at this Joint Discussion recommend to the Executive Committee that the following resolution be put before the General Assembly: “The International Astronomical Union endorses the final list of constants prepared by the Working Group on the System of Astronomical Constants and recommends that it be used in the national and international astronomical ephemerides at the earliest practicable date.’”
Proceedings of the Joint Discussion: Masses of the Principal Planets
Authors: Clemence G. M. 
Published: November 2021

The Chairman, W. Fricke, President of Commission 4, opened the Joint Discussion by drawing attention to the purpose and proposed procedure for the meeting. The Joint Discussion had been arranged by the Executive Committee of the Union in order to avoid the necessity for separate discussions by each Commission that was affected by the Report of the Working Group on the IAU System of Astronomical Constants. The Organizing Committee therefore proposed the following resolution:‘The members of the IAU at this Joint Discussion recommend to the Executive Committee that the following resolution be put before the General Assembly: “The International Astronomical Union endorses the final list of constants prepared by the Working Group on the System of Astronomical Constants and recommends that it be used in the national and international astronomical ephemerides at the earliest practicable date.’”
Improving RGB-D SLAM in dynamic environments using semantic aided segmentation
Authors: Kenye Lhilo , Kala Rahul 
Published: November 2021

SummaryMost conventional simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approaches assume the working environment to be static. In a highly dynamic environment, this assumption divulges the impediments of a SLAM algorithm that lack modules that distinctively attend to dynamic objects despite the inclusion of optimization techniques. This work exploits such environments and reduces the effects of dynamic objects in a SLAM algorithm by separating features belonging to dynamic objects and static background using a generated binary mask image. While the features belonging to the static region are used for performing SLAM, the features belonging to non-static segments are reused instead of being eliminated. The approach employs deep neural network or DNN-based object detection module to obtain bounding boxes and then generates a lower resolution binary mask image using depth-first search algorithm over the detected semantics, characterizing the segmentation of the foreground from the static background. In addition, the features belonging to dynamic objects are tracked into consecutive frames to obtain better masking consistency. The proposed approach is tested on both publicly available dataset as well as self-collected dataset, which includes both indoor and outdoor environments. The experimental results show that the removal of features belonging to dynamic objects for a SLAM algorithm can significantly improve the overall output in a dynamic scene.
Outer limits of the continental shelf beyond CLCS recommendations and Article 76(8) of UNCLOS: With reference to Japan’s Cabinet Order No. 302
Authors: Gau Michael Sheng-ti , Zhao Si-han 
Published: November 2021

AbstractIn 2014 Japan’s Cabinet Order No. 302 declared the outer limits of its continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles (OL) to the west and north of Oki-no-Tori Shima (Area 302). Oki-no-Tori Shima consists of two small, barren, and uninhabitable rocks in the West Pacific. The northern part of Area 302 is broader than what the 2012 recommendations of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) specify. A question arises whether Order No. 302 violates Article 76(8) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides that the OL established by a coastal state ‘on the basis of’ the CLCS recommendations shall be final and binding. Another question is the role played by the CLCS in ‘assisting’ the coastal states to delimit their national jurisdiction so as to know where the Area (i.e., the Common Heritage of Mankind under UNCLOS Articles 1(1)(1) and 136) begins. The essential questions arising from Area 302 concern how well the UNCLOS mechanism can perform to safeguard the Common Heritage of Mankind through preventing encroachment thereupon by individual coastal states. This article looks at the context and explores the obligations implied by Article 76(8) for coastal states to ‘follow’ the recommendations in establishing the OL, with special reference to the northern part of Area 302. The article also examines legal consequences arising from a breach of these obligations.
Competing repair strategies for word-final obstruent-liquid clusters in northern metropolitan French
Authors: Griffiths Joshua M. 
Published: November 2021

ABSTRACTFrench licenses word-final obstruent-liquid clusters (table /tabl/; souffre /sufʁ/). These clusters may be realised faithfully resulting in an apparent violation of the sonority sequencing principle (Clements, 1990). Yet, the clusters can also be repaired in one of two ways: (1) through the reduction of the cluster (i.e. [tab]) or (2) through the epenthesis of a schwa vowel, resyllabifying the cluster into the onset position (i.e. [ta.blə].) In this article, I investigate which factors condition the realisation of word-final obstruent-liquid clusters. The results are formalised in Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003), but evidence for effects of style and speaker age require the scaling of several constraints (Coetzee and Kawahara, 2013). This study sheds light on these curious clusters, while raising new questions about the interaction of grammatical and non-grammatical factors.
Causal inference via string diagram surgery
Authors: Jacobs Bart , Kissinger Aleks , Zanasi Fabio 
Published: November 2021

Abstract
Extracting causal relationships from observed correlations is a growing area in probabilistic reasoning, originating with the seminal work of Pearl and others from the early 1990s. This paper develops a new, categorically oriented view based on a clear distinction between syntax (string diagrams) and semantics (stochastic matrices), connected via interpretations as structure-preserving functors. A key notion in the identification of causal effects is that of an intervention, whereby a variable is forcefully set to a particular value independent of any prior propensities. We represent the effect of such an intervention as an endo-functor which performs ‘string diagram surgery’ within the syntactic category of string diagrams. This diagram surgery in turn yields a new, interventional distribution via the interpretation functor. While in general there is no way to compute interventional distributions purely from observed data, we show that this is possible in certain special cases using a calculational tool called comb disintegration. We demonstrate the use of this technique on two well-known toy examples: one where we predict the causal effect of smoking on cancer in the presence of a confounding common cause and where we show that this technique provides simple sufficient conditions for computing interventions which apply to a wide variety of situations considered in the causal inference literature; the other one is an illustration of counterfactual reasoning where the same interventional techniques are used, but now in a ‘twinned’ set-up, with two version of the world – one factual and one counterfactual – joined together via exogenous variables that capture the uncertainties at hand.
Comparing the Meaningfulness of Finite and Infinite Lives: Can We Reap What We Sow if We Are Immortal?
Authors: Metz Thaddeus 
Published: November 2021

AbstractOn the rise over the past 20 years has been ‘moderate supernaturalism’, the view that while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with them. William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for a version of this view, according to which only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance since we would then be held accountable for our decisions affecting others’ lives. I present two major objections to this position. On the one hand, I contend that if God existed and we had souls that lived forever, then, in fact, all our lives would turn out the same. On the other hand, I maintain that, if this objection is wrong, so that our moral choices would indeed make an ultimate difference and thereby confer an eternal significance on our lives (only) in a supernatural realm, then Craig could not capture the view, aptly held by moderate supernaturalists, that a meaningful life is possible in a purely natural world.
God, The Meaning of Life, and Meaningful Lives
Authors: Hill Daniel J 
Published: November 2021

AbstractIn my 2002 piece ‘The Meaning of Life’ I argued that Life, meaning the sum of the lives of all living things, had a meaning if and only if it had been purposefully brought about by a designer or creator. Michael Hauskeller has recently criticized this argument, responding that this sense of ‘meaning’ is not the one in view when we are discussing ‘the meaning of life’. In this piece I respond to Hauskeller's argument, and, while I stand by my 2002 argument in terms of one meaning of ‘meaning’, I admit that it does not apply to the different question of what makes a life meaningful. I assert that glorifying God is the activity that contributes the most meaningfulness to a life, though I deny that this is the only activity that can contribute meaningfulness to a life. This makes me, in terms due to Thaddeus Metz, a moderate supernaturalist rather than an extreme supernaturalist. Despite this distinction, Metz has argued in this volume that moderate supernaturalism is vulnerable to the same objection as in his view defeats extreme supernaturalism, and I close by responding to this argument.
When Death Comes Too Late: Radical Life Extension and the Makropulos Case
Authors: Hauskeller Michael 
Published: November 2021

AbstractFamously, Bernard Williams has argued that although death is an evil if it occurs when we still have something to live for, we have no good reason to desire that our lives be radically extended because any such life would at some point reach a stage when we become indifferent to the world and ourselves. This is supposed to be so bad for us that it would be better if we died before that happens. Most critics have rejected Williams’ arguments on the grounds that it is far from certain that we will run out of things to live for, and I don't contest these objections. Instead, I am trying to show that they do not affect the persuasiveness of Williams’ argument, which in my reading does not rely on the claim that we will inevitably run out of things to live for, but on the far less contentious claim that it is not unthinkable we will do so and the largely ignored claim that if that happens, we will have died too late.
Why Do People Want to Die? The Meaning of Life from the Perspective of Euthanasia
Authors: Svenaeus Fredrik 
Published: November 2021

AbstractOne way to examine the enigmatic meaningfulness of human life is to ask under which conditions persons ask in earnest for assistance to die, either through euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. The counterpart of intolerable suffering must consist in some form of, however minimal, flourishing that makes people want to go on with their lives, disregarding other reasons to reject assisted dying that have more to do with religious prohibitions. To learn more about why persons want to hasten death during the last days, weeks or months of their lives, what kinds of suffering they fear and what they hold to be the main reasons to carry on or not carry on living, the paper offers some examples from a book written by the physician Uwe-Christian Arnold. He has helped hundreds of persons in Germany to die with the aid of sedative drugs the last 25 years, despite the professional societies and codes in Germany that prohibit such actions. The paper discusses various examples from Arnold's book and makes use of them to better understand not only why people sometimes want to die but what made their lives meaningful before they reached this final decision.
Advancing Local Distance Discrimination of Explosions and Earthquakes With Joint P/S and ML‐MC Classification
Authors: Wang Ruijia , Schmandt Brandon , Holt Monique , Koper Keith 
Published: November 2021

AbstractClassification of local‐distance, low‐magnitude seismic events is challenging because signals can be numerous and difficult to characterize with approaches developed for larger magnitude events observed at greater distances. Yet, accurate classification is important to studies of earthquake processes and detection of potential underground nuclear tests. Here, we combine two classification metrics: the three‐component ratio of high‐frequency P/S amplitudes and the difference between local and coda duration magnitudes (ML‐MC). The metrics use different parts of the high‐frequency wavefield and exhibit complementary sensitivity for classification of M ∼ 0.5–4 natural earthquakes and borehole explosions, which are the best analog for underground nuclear explosions. Using means from bootstrap resampling across four diverse geologic settings, joint classification achieves >94.4% true positives and <8.4% false positives when using ≥8 seismographs within 200 km of the source. This high performance is obtained without local site corrections, indicating that the method may be transportable for local event classification.
High Supply, High Demand: A Fertilizer Waste Release Impacts Nitrate Uptake and Metabolism in a Large River
Authors: Kelly Michelle C. , Zeglin Lydia H. , Husic Admin , Burgin Amy J. 
Published: November 2021

AbstractCurrent understanding of the relationship between nitrate (NO3−) uptake and energy cycling in lotic environments comes from studies conducted in low‐nutrient (NO3− < 1 mg‐N L−1), small (discharge <1 m3 s−1) systems. Recent advances in sensor technology have allowed for continuous estimates of whole‐river NO3− uptake, allowing us to address how the relationship between nutrient uptake and metabolism changes over time and space in larger rivers. We used a six‐month, controlled nitrogen (N) waste release into the eighth order Kansas River (USA) as an ecosystem level nutrient addition experiment. We deployed four NO3− and dissolved oxygen sensors along a 33 km study reach, from February to May 2018, to assess the spatiotemporal relationship between nutrient uptake and stream metabolism during the waste addition. Contrary to our prediction, we did not find evidence of uptake saturation despite an extreme increase in nutrient supply during winter, a period of generally lower biological activity. Although high uptake rates were observed across the study reach, they were uncorrelated to gross primary production. Overall, despite winter temperatures, NO3− uptake rates were high compared to small streams and rivers. We provide evidence that large rivers can be effective ecosystems for retaining and transforming nutrients, while showing that the fine‐scale mechanisms that regulate nutrient retention in large rivers are still largely unknown.
Genetic risk for schizophrenia is associated with altered visually-induced gamma band activity: evidence from a population sample stratified polygenic risk
Authors: Dimitriadis S. I. , Perry G. , Foley S. F. , Tansey K. E. , Jones D. K. , Holmans P. , Zammit S. , Hall J. , O’Donovan M. C. , Owen M. J. , Singh K. D. , Linden D. E. 
Published: November 2021

AbstractGamma oscillations (30–90 Hz) have been proposed as a signature of cortical visual information processing, particularly the balance between excitation and inhibition, and as a biomarker of neuropsychiatric diseases. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides highly reliable visual-induced gamma oscillation estimates, both at sensor and source level. Recent studies have reported a deficit of visual gamma activity in schizophrenia patients, in medication naive subjects, and high-risk clinical participants, but the genetic contribution to such a deficit has remained unresolved. Here, for the first time, we use a genetic risk score approach to assess the relationship between genetic risk for schizophrenia and visual gamma activity in a population-based sample drawn from a birth cohort. We compared visual gamma activity in a group (N = 104) with a high genetic risk profile score for schizophrenia (SCZ-PRS) to a group with low SCZ-PRS (N = 99). Source-reconstructed V1 activity was extracted using beamformer analysis applied to MEG recordings using individual MRI scans. No group differences were found in the induced gamma peak amplitude or peak frequency. However, a non-parametric statistical contrast of the response spectrum revealed more robust group differences in the amplitude of high-beta/gamma power across the frequency range, suggesting that overall spectral shape carries important biological information beyond the individual frequency peak. Our findings show that changes in gamma band activity correlate with liability to schizophrenia and suggest that the index changes to synaptic function and neuronal firing patterns that are of pathophysiological relevance rather than consequences of the disorder.
A laboratory study of hydraulic fracturing at the brittle-ductile transition
Authors: Parisio Francesco , Yoshioka Keita , Sakaguchi Kiyotoshi , Goto Ryota , Miura Takahiro , Pramudyo Eko , Ishibashi Takuya , Watanabe Noriaki 
Published: November 2021

AbstractDeveloping high-enthalpy geothermal systems requires a sufficiently permeable formation to extract energy through fluid circulation. Injection experiments above water’s critical point have shown that fluid flow can generate a network of highly conductive tensile cracks. However, what remains unclear is the role played by fluid and solid rheology on the formation of a dense crack network. The decrease of fluid viscosity with temperature and the thermally activated visco-plasticity in rock are expected to change the deformation mechanisms and could prevent the formation of fractures. To isolate the solid rheological effects from the fluid ones and the associated poromechanics, we devise a hydro-fracture experimental program in a non-porous material, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). In the brittle regime, we observe rotating cracks and complex fracture patterns if a non-uniform stress distribution is introduced in the samples. We observe an increase of ductility with temperature, hampering the propagation of hydraulic fractures close to the glass transition temperature of PMMA, which acts as a limit for brittle fracture propagation. Above the glass transition temperature, acoustic emission energy drops of several orders of magnitude. Our findings provide a helpful guidance for future studies of hydro-fracturing of supercritical geothermal systems.
A spatial analysis of seagrass habitat and community diversity in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area
Authors: Carter Alex B. , Collier Catherine , Lawrence Emma , Rasheed Michael A. , Robson Barbara J. , Coles Rob 
Published: November 2021

AbstractThe Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA) in north eastern Australia spans 2500 km of coastline and covers an area of ~ 350,000 km2. It includes one of the world’s largest seagrass resources. To provide a foundation to monitor, establish trends and manage the protection of seagrass meadows in the GBRWHA we quantified potential seagrass community extent using six random forest models that include environmental data and seagrass sampling history. We identified 88,331 km2 of potential seagrass habitat in intertidal and subtidal areas: 1111 km2 in estuaries, 16,276 km2 in coastal areas, and 70,934 km2 in reef areas. Thirty-six seagrass community types were defined by species assemblages within these habitat types using multivariate regression tree models. We show that the structure, location and distribution of the seagrass communities is the result of complex environmental interactions. These environmental conditions include depth, tidal exposure, latitude, current speed, benthic light, proportion of mud in the sediment, water type, water temperature, salinity, and wind speed. Our analysis will underpin spatial planning, can be used in the design of monitoring programs to represent the diversity of seagrass communities and will facilitate our understanding of environmental risk to these habitats.