Hasil untuk "Europe (General)"

C. Wolff, F. Bade, C. M. Kraan

Abstract Managed retreat, the purposeful relocation of households and assets to reduce flood risk, is gaining recognition as an essential adaptation strategy under intensifying climate change. Although often contested and perceived as socially or politically unacceptable, managed retreat holds potential to enhance the long‐term resilience of at‐risk communities. In Europe, however, it remains comparatively underexplored, with only a handful of European managed retreat cases that have been reported on in the academic literature. Here, we present a data set of European managed retreat cases, based on a multilingual review of academic and gray literature, as well as media articles. We found 44 implemented or planned cases of managed retreat across the continent, spanning 11 countries, ranging from the relocation of individual assets to more than 1,500 households. Through a cross‐case analysis, we identify five key factors that influence the process and outcomes of managed retreat projects: the compensation offered, the timing of the project, the engagement of the affected community, the leadership taken by the government, and the post‐relocation land use. Our analysis demonstrates that, although managed retreat remains less common than engineered protection measures, it is more prevalent in Europe than previously assumed and is already being practiced in varied forms. By uncovering common challenges and enabling conditions, this study offers transferable insights for advancing more anticipatory and strategically designed managed retreat initiatives, both within Europe and beyond.

Michael Edward Stewart

The marriage of Germanus, nephew of Emperor Justin I (r. 518–527), to Matasuintha, former Gothic queen and granddaughter of Theoderic the Great (r. 475–526), in late 549 or early 550, was a significant yet often overlooked moment in the later stages of the Gothic War. Scholars generally interpret the marriage as a pragmatic alliance shaped by immediate strategic concerns – either a political manoeuvre by Justinian or a personal initiative by Germanus following his appointment as commander in Italy. This article revisits that assumption by exploring three related questions. First, did the marriage and military appointment signal a reconciliation between Justinian and Germanus, or a calculated attempt by the emperor to stabilize a deteriorating political situation? Second, how did their relationship evolve in the years leading up to the union, particularly after Theodora’s death in 548? Finally, more speculatively, was Germanus’ earlier decision to marry his daughter to the general John in 545 connected to his own dynastic ambitions?

L. Filipe O. Costa, Francisco Frutos-Alfaro, José Natário et al.

In a recent paper we discussed when it is possible to define reference frames nonrotating with respect to distant inertial reference objects (extension of the IAU reference systems to exact general relativity), and how to construct them. We briefly review the construction, illustrating it with further examples, and caution against the recent misuse of zero angular momentum observers (ZAMOs).

Stanislas Rigal, Maxime Lenormand, Léa Tardieu et al.

In response to increasing threats to biodiversity, conservation objectives have been set at national and international level, with the aim of halting biodiversity decline by reducing direct anthropogenic pressures on species. However, the potential effects of conservation policies derived from these objectives on common species remain rarely studied. Common species are often not the primary species targeted by conservation measures and can be distributed across a wide range of habitats that may be affected differently by these measures. We analyse the effect of a range of pressures related to climate, land use and land use intensity, on 263 common bird and 144 common butterfly species from more than 20,000 sites between 2000 and 2021 across 26 European countries. We use land-use and land-use-intensity change scenarios produced previously using the IPBES Nature Futures Framework to support the achievement of conservation objectives, as well as climate change scenarios in order to project the future of biodiversity pressures in Europe up to 2050. To project the future of common biodiversity in these scenarios, we translate these pressure changes into expected variations of abundances for all common bird and butterfly species, as well as for the multi-species indicators used to monitor common biodiversity status in Europe. The projected trends are improved, while still declining, for birds in particular farmland species under the scenarios that meet the conservation objectives, with few effects on butterflies. No scenario shows a stop or a reversal in the decline in abundance of bird and butterfly species that are currently common, on the time scale considered. Our results therefore call into question the fate of common biodiversity under the current conservation policies and the need for other anticipatory frameworks that do not implicitly require a growing need for natural resources.

Marek Tiits, Tarmo Kalvet, David McBee

This paper addresses critical questions surrounding the security of government-issued identity documents and their potential misuse, with an emphasis on understanding the perspectives of ordinary citizens across Europe and the United States of America. Drawing upon research on technology acceptance and diffusion, the research focuses on understanding the factors that influence users' adoption of novel identity management solutions. Our methodology includes a comprehensive, census-representative survey spanning citizens from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The paper's findings underscore a robust confidence in government-issued identity documents, contrasted by a lower trust in private sector services, including social media platforms and email accounts. The adoption of artificial intelligence for identity verification remains contested, with a significant percentage of respondents undecided, indicating a need for explicit explanation and transparency about its implementation and related risks. Public sentiment leans towards acceptance of government data collection for identification purposes; however, the sharing of this data with private entities elicits more apprehension.

Hankun He, Benjamin Schäfer, Christian Beck

Outdoor air pollution is estimated to cause a huge number of premature deaths worldwide, it catalyses many diseases on a variety of time scales, and it has a detrimental effect on the environment. In light of these impacts it is necessary to obtain a better understanding of the dynamics and statistics of measured air pollution concentrations, including temporal fluctuations of observed concentrations and spatial heterogeneities. Here we present an extensive analysis for measured data from Europe. The observed probability density functions (PDFs) of air pollution concentrations depend very much on the spatial location and on the pollutant substance. We analyse a large number of time series data from 3544 different European monitoring sites and show that the PDFs of nitric oxide ($NO$), nitrogen dioxide ($NO_{2}$) and particulate matter ($PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$) concentrations generically exhibit heavy tails. These are asymptotically well approximated by $q$-exponential distributions with a given entropic index $q$ and width parameter $λ$. We observe that the power-law parameter $q$ and the width parameter $λ$ vary widely for the different spatial locations. We present the results of our data analysis in the form of a map that shows which parameters $q$ and $λ$ are most relevant in a given region. A variety of interesting spatial patterns is observed that correlate to properties of the geographical region. We also present results on typical time scales associated with the dynamical behaviour.

Susobhan Mandal, S. Shankaranarayanan

General relativity and quantum field theory are the cornerstones of our understanding of physical processes, from subatomic to cosmic scales. While both theories work remarkably well in their tested domains, they show minimal overlap. However, our research challenges this separation by revealing that non-perturbative effects bridge these distinct domains. We introduce a novel mechanism wherein, at linear order, spin-2 fields around an arbitrary background acquire \emph{effective mass} due to the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of either global or local symmetry of complex scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. The action of the spin-2 field is identical to the extended Fierz-Pauli (FP) action, corresponding to the mass deformation parameter $α= 1/2$. We show that this occurs due to the effect of SSB on the variation of the energy-momentum tensor of the matter field, which has a dominant effect during SSB. The extended FP action has a salient feature, compared to the standard FP action: the action has 6 degrees of freedom with no ghosts. For local $U(1)$ SSB, we establish that the effective mass of spin-2 fields is related to the mass of the gauge boson and the electric charge of the complex scalar field. Interestingly, our results indicate that the millicharged dark matter scalar fields, generating dark photons, can produce a mass of spin-2 fields of the same order as the Hubble constant $(H_0)$. Hence, we argue that the dark sector offers a natural explanation for the acceleration of the current Universe.

Ramon Canal, Stefano Di Carlo, Dimitris Gizopoulos et al.

Among the key contributions of Vitamin-V (2023-2025 Horizon Europe project), we develop a complete RISC-V open-source software stack for cloud services with comparable performance to the cloud-dominant x86 counterpart. In this paper, we detail the software suites and applications ported plus the three cloud setups under evaluation.

Moisés Wagner Franciscon

Durante o stalinismo tardio (1945-53), o cinema soviético, como o americano, produziu várias películas veiculando mensagens de interesse governamental. A propaganda soviética transparece em filmes como Zagovor obrechennyh, 1950, apesar (e talvez com maior maestria) do trabalho do diretor Mikhail Kalatozov. Por meio da sócio-história cinematográfica de Marc Ferro pode-se apreciar a construção de um discurso legitimador dos novos regimes socialistas locais, da condução da luta política contra o titoísmo e a passagem do Leste Europeu da influência ocidental (ora inglesa, ora alemã) para a soviética (cumprindo o papel do antigo pêndulo russo), e o fim da experiência democrática liberal, trocada pela da democracia popular, com a derrota do novo rival americano e de seu Plano Marshall na região, substituídos pelo COMECOM.

Bastien Cozian, Corentin Herbert, Freddy Bouchet

The European energy system will undergo major transformations in the coming decades to implement mitigation measures and comply with the Paris Agreement. In particular, the share of weather-dependent wind generation will increase significantly in the European energy mix. The most extreme fluctuations of the production at all time scales need to be taken into account in the design of the power system. In particular, extreme long-lasting low wind energy production events constitute a specific challenge, as most flexibility solutions do not apply at time scales beyond a few days. However, the probability and amplitude of such events has to a large extent eluded quantitative study so far due to lack of sufficiently long data. In this letter, using a 1000-year climate simulation, we study rare events of wind energy production that last from a few weeks to a few months over the January-February period, at the scale of a continent (Europe) and a country (France). The results show that the fluctuations of the capacity factor over Europe exhibit nearly Gaussian statistics at all time scales. A similar result holds over France for events longer than about two weeks and return times up to a few decades. In that case, the return time curves follow a universal curve. Furthermore, a simple Gaussian process with the same covariance structure as the data gives good estimates of the amplitude of the most extreme events. This method allows to estimate return times for rare events from shorter but more accurate data sources. We demonstrate this possibility with reanalysis data.

Angelica Urbanelli, Luca Barco, Edoardo Arnaudo et al.

The increasing frequency of catastrophic natural events, such as wildfires, calls for the development of rapid and automated wildfire detection systems. In this paper, we propose a wildfire identification solution to improve the accuracy of automated satellite-based hotspot detection systems by leveraging multiple information sources. We cross-reference the thermal anomalies detected by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) hotspot services with the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) database to construct a large-scale hotspot dataset for wildfire-related studies in Europe. Then, we propose a novel multimodal supervised machine learning approach to disambiguate hotspot detections, distinguishing between wildfires and other events. Our methodology includes the use of multimodal data sources, such as the ERSI annual Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and the Copernicus Sentinel-3 data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the task of wildfire identification.

Marek Kwiek

This study analyzes the unprecedented growth of international research collaboration (IRC) in Europe during the period 2009-2018 in terms of coauthorship and citation distribution of globally indexed publications. The results reveal the dynamics of this change, as growing IRC moves European systems away from institutional collaboration, with stable and strong national collaboration. Domestic output has remained flat. The growth in publications in major European systems is almost entirely attributable to internationally coauthored papers. A comparison of trends within the four complementary collaboration modes clearly reveals that the growth of European science is driven solely by internationally co-authored papers. With the emergence of global network science, which diminishes the role of national policies in IRC and foregrounds the role of scientists, the individual scientists willingness to collaborate internationally is central to advancing IRC in Europe. Scientists collaborate internationally when it enhances their academic prestige, scientific recognition, and access to research funding, as indicated by the credibility cycle, prestige maximization, and global science models. The study encompassed 5.5 million Scopus-indexed articles, including 2.2 million involving international collaboration.

Zhendong Wang, Jianmin Bao, Wengang Zhou et al.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in visual synthesis, but have also raised concerns about potential abuse for malicious purposes. In this paper, we seek to build a detector for telling apart real images from diffusion-generated images. We find that existing detectors struggle to detect images generated by diffusion models, even if we include generated images from a specific diffusion model in their training data. To address this issue, we propose a novel image representation called DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE), which measures the error between an input image and its reconstruction counterpart by a pre-trained diffusion model. We observe that diffusion-generated images can be approximately reconstructed by a diffusion model while real images cannot. It provides a hint that DIRE can serve as a bridge to distinguish generated and real images. DIRE provides an effective way to detect images generated by most diffusion models, and it is general for detecting generated images from unseen diffusion models and robust to various perturbations. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive diffusion-generated benchmark including images generated by eight diffusion models to evaluate the performance of diffusion-generated image detectors. Extensive experiments on our collected benchmark demonstrate that DIRE exhibits superiority over previous generated-image detectors. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/DIRE.

Bononcini, Leonardo

Del Carmen Encinas Reguero, M.; Quijada Sagredo, M. (eds) (2021). Tragic Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Greek Tragedy. Roma: Aracne. Le Rane Studi 69, 412 pp.

Fabian Neumann, Elisabeth Zeyen, Marta Victoria et al.

Electricity transmission expansion has suffered many delays in Europe in recent decades, despite its significance for integrating renewable electricity into the energy system. A hydrogen network which reuses the existing fossil gas network could not only help to supply demand for low-emission fuels, but could also to balance variations in wind and solar energy across the continent and thus avoid power grid expansion. We pursue this idea by varying the allowed expansion of electricity and hydrogen grids in net-zero CO2 scenarios for a sector-coupled and self-sufficient European energy system with high shares of renewables. We cover the electricity, buildings, transport, agriculture, and industry sectors across 181 regions and model every third hour of a year. With this high spatio-temporal resolution, the model can capture bottlenecks in transmission networks, the variability of demand and renewable supply, as well as regional opportunities for the retrofitting of legacy gas infrastructure and the development of geological hydrogen storage. Our results show consistent system cost reductions with a pan-continental hydrogen network that connects regions with low-cost and abundant renewable potentials to demand centres, synthetic fuel production and cavern storage sites. Developing a hydrogen network reduces system costs by up to 26 billion Euros per year (3.4%), with the highest benefits when electricity grid reinforcements cannot be realised. Between 64% and 69% of this network could be built from repurposed natural gas pipelines. However, we find that hydrogen networks can only partially substitute for power grid expansion. While the expansion of both networks together can achieve the largest cost savings of 10%, the expansion of neither is truly essential as long as higher costs can be accepted and regulatory changes are made to manage grid bottlenecks.

قاسم حسين السعدي Qasim Hussein Alsadie

Real policy emphasizes that states seek to achieve their interests and objectives by focusing on the concept of political conflict for control. As the Iranian role in the region increases and its strength increases, European countries seek to limit Iran's role in the region, weaken its nuclear file, force it to return to negotiations, prevent an arms race on the level of weapons of mass destruction and advanced missiles. In the European Union to be the only sources to secure nuclear fuel for energy plants, and this is consistent with the interests and objectives of European countries. The desire of countries to remain in the position of competition and to refrain from the use of force because it is counterproductive, as a desire to remain in the system, and this explains the European policy towards Iran, which is the imposition of economic sanctions rather than the use of military force for fear of adverse consequences, The sanctions have had a major impact on the Iranian economy, which has led to a geopolitical challenge, resulting in a stifling economic crisis, as well as negative repercussions on the relationship between Europe and Iran. Europe has long sought to make this relationship good as a form of support for anti-US states. The European Union's desire to play a balanced role in the US role in a multi-polar world as well as securing the flow of Iranian oil to it and widening the circle of Iranian revenues from European goods. These sanctions have had a major impact on the Iranian economy, which has caused it to suffer a geopolitical challenge. This has resulted in a crippling economic crisis characterized by a general budget deficit, rising inflation, low economic growth and the accumulation of foreign debt, mostly due to Europe. The dollar and the euro, the lack of foreign investment inside Iran and the decline of exports of the two most important sectors, oil and gas as the basic structure of the Iranian economy. The US dimension to the path of European economic sanctions on Iran, especially after Trump takes over as president, is that the EU can not ignore US policy toward Iran because of its economic and geosynthetic interests with the United States, which require a transatlantic common ground with Iran.

Pauline Rivoire, Philomène Le Gall, Anne-Catherine Favre et al.

Accurate estimation of daily rainfall return levels associated with large return periods is needed for a number of hydrological planning purposes, including protective infrastructure, dams, and retention basins. This is especially relevant at small spatial scales. The ERA-5 reanalysis product provides seasonal daily precipitation over Europe on a 0.25 x 0.25 grid (about 27 x 27 km). This translates more than 20,000 land grid points and leads to models with a large number of parameters when estimating return levels. To bypass this abundance of parameters, we build on the regional frequency analysis (RFA), a well-known strategy in statistical hydrology. This approach consists in identifying homogeneous regions, by gathering locations with similar distributions of extremes up to a normalizing factor and developing sparse regional models. In particular, we propose a step-by-step blueprint that leverages a recently developed and fast clustering algorithm to infer return level estimates over large spatial domains. This enables us to produce maps of return level estimates of ERA-5 reanalysis daily precipitation over continental Europe for various return periods and seasons. We discuss limitations and practical challenges and also provide a git hub repository. We show that a relatively parsimonious model with only a spatially varying scale parameter can compete well against statistical models of higher complexity.

Juan Ramón Moreno-Vera, José Monteagudo Fernández

En la experiencia que aquí se presenta, estudiantes de la Universidad de Murcia dejaron las aulas por unas horas para llevar a cabo un aprendizaje situado de la historia del arte mediante un itinerario didáctico sobre la Murcia medieval. De este modo, se rompen las barreras físicas del aula y se integran los elementos de aprendizaje con el propio paisaje urbano por donde los estudiantes pasan a diario. El itinerario didáctico partía desde el antiguo Alcázar Seguir de la ciudad, hoy Convento de clausura, pasando por la plaza de Santo Domingo, antigua plaza del zoco; la conjunción urbana de “las cuatro esquinas”, donde convergen las calles de los principales gremios de la ciudad; la catedral de Murcia, donde se conservan los restos de la antigua mezquita Al-Jama y, finalmente, en el conjunto monumental de San Juan de Dios, donde aún es visible el nicho del mihrab del antiguo oratorio del Alcázar mayor medieval. Los resultados de la investigación se basan en el análisis de un pre-test y un post-test que el alumnado contestó sobre sus conocimientos de la Murcia medieval. La progresión de aprendizaje del alumnado participante fue positiva mejorando en el post-test los resultados previos.

Hana Stoklasová

The paper deals with midwives’ practice in the first half of the 20th century. The issue is based on the analysis of serial sources, so-called birth diaries. The research analyses ten series of birth diaries in the pre-printed form in which the midwives recorded information on the course of deliveries. The diaries are kept in Czech and Moravian archives and provide data on obstetric practice in various regions of the Czech lands. That makes it possible for us to compare the circumstances under which the midwives worked as well as their performance in different geographical, demographic, and social conditions, both in industrial and agrarian areas. The obtained data provide answers to several questions, e.g. the beginnings of assistants’ careers, their performance, the social structure of their clientele, as well as medical aspects of obstetric practice and cooperation with physicians. The research attempts to define the links between these indicators and also focuses on the financial gains of the midwives in their obstetric practice.

KAI BRODERSEN

Aineias (Aeneas Tacticus) legt in seinen Poliorketika dar, wie im Altertum eine kleine Stadt einer Belagerung standhalten kann. Die Schrift ist das älteste militärische Fachbuch, das uns aus der Antike erhalten ist, und bietet die ausführlichste Beschreibung darüber, wie ein Stadttor gesichert wird. Zur Deutung dieser historischen Quelle sind verschiedene, oft hochkomplizierte Modelle vorgeschlagen worden. Der Aufsatz entwickelt eine dem Text eher entsprechende einfache Deutung. Diese vermeidet es, aus anderen Zeugnissen übertragene oder aber nur mit argumenta e silentio begründete Deutungen zum Verständnis des Textes einzusetzen, und macht damit nachvollziehbar, weshalb Aineias weniger auf Technik als vielmehr auf das Vertrauen der Bewohnerschaft zueinander setzt, wenn es um die Sicherung einer von Feinden bedrohten Stadt geht, denn, wie Aineias betont, “zuerst muss man zusehen, ob die Bürger einträchtig sind, da dies bei einer Belagerung das höchste Gut ist.”