Hasil untuk "Geography (General)"

Татьяна Александровна Гаврилина

Погребальный обряд является одним из важнейших маркеров, позволяющих наиболее точно и достоверно охарактеризовать особенности мировоззрения представителей древних сообществ. В статье предпринята попытка выявить специфику погребального обряда прибрежных культур южноамериканского континента – пайхан (12800–9600 л.н.) и лас-вегас (10800–6600 л.н.), а также очертить возможные перспективы его изучения. Автор дает характеристику современного подхода к изучению погребений: для работы с костными останками активно привлекаются специалисты в области антропологии, генетики, проводятся исследования для определения характера повреждения костей, идентификации по гендерному признаку, диагностики патологий и т.д.

Paweł Mackiewicz

In this paper, I discuss Nowa Ruda and the Kłodzko region as viewed by Karol Maliszewski and represented in his poetry, from his earliest poems written in the second half of the 1980s to his latest poetry collections. My argument revolves around the key concept of a field humanist on which Maliszewski relied to define himself (and his I-speaker). This notion brings together the various social functions Maliszewski performed and the responsibilities he took as a literature scholar, a teacher, a local community member and, above all, a poet producing local verses. These challenges find a suitable generic correspondence in the leporello, an inspiring form as it resists both the writer and the reader since the whole must be first unfolded and studied before attention is eventually devoted to a small fragment the way Maliszewski does.

Nita Bandyopadhyay, Tuhin Das, Suvra Mondal

Background. Yoga, an ancient practice rooted in Indian culture, has gained global recognition for its physical and mental health benefits. Among its practices, Surya Namaskar (SN) stands out as a holistic yogic Sun Salutation exercise combining postures, breathing, and mindfulness, offering physical vitality, mental calmness, and a practical solution to the challenges posed by modern sedentary lifestyles. Objectives. The objective of the present systematic review was to analyze the effect of SN on overall health and wellness of healthy adults. Materials and methods. A comprehensive search was conducted in five major databases, namely Scopus, PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect, using the terms such as “Surya Namaskar”, “Sun Salutation”,“Surya Namaskar and physical fitness”, “Surya Namaskar for adults”, “Sun Salutation for overall health and wellness”,and “Surya Namaskar and sedentary lifestyle”. The articles published in English between 2011 and 2024 were considered in the current review. The systematic search and reporting adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies was used to analyze the methodological quality of the included articles. Results. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 117 articles were initially retrieved, out of which 11 were finally included, encompassing data from 445 healthy adults from three countries, aged between 18 and 65 years. The duration of the SN intervention varied from four to 24 weeks, with session frequency ranging from three days per week to daily, and a diverse number of cycles. The methodological quality analysis revealed that two articles were of strong, six of moderate, and the remaining three of weak quality. Conclusions. This systematic review concludes that the practice of the yogic Sun Salutation exercise (SN) is beneficial for improving and maintaining physical fitness, physiological health, and psychological well-being, which determine the overall health and wellness of healthy adults.

Hisaaki Shinkai, Masao Takamoto, Hidetoshi Katori

Optical lattice clocks (OLCs) enable us to measure time and frequency with a fractional uncertainty at $10^{-18}$ level, which is 2 orders of magnitude better than Cs clocks. In this article, after briefly reviewing OLCs and the history of testing the fundamental principles of general relativity, we report our experiments of measuring the gravitational redshift between RIKEN and The University of Tokyo, and at Tokyo Skytree using transportable OLCs. We also discuss a couple of future applications of OLCs, such as detecting gravitational waves in space and relativistic geodesy. The possibility of testing second-order parametrized post-Newtonian potential around the Earth is also mentioned.

Jibang Wu, Chenghao Yang, Yi Wu et al.

This paper develops an agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) for grounded persuasive language generation in automated copywriting, with real estate marketing as a focal application. Our method is designed to align the generated content with user preferences while highlighting useful factual attributes. This agent consists of three key modules: (1) Grounding Module, mimicking expert human behavior to predict marketable features; (2) Personalization Module, aligning content with user preferences; (3) Marketing Module, ensuring factual accuracy and the inclusion of localized features. We conduct systematic human-subject experiments in the domain of real estate marketing, with a focus group of potential house buyers. The results demonstrate that marketing descriptions generated by our approach are preferred over those written by human experts by a clear margin while maintaining the same level of factual accuracy. Our findings suggest a promising agentic approach to automate large-scale targeted copywriting while ensuring factuality of content generation.

Juliette Davret

Imad Ali, Maryam Bayati khatibi, Sadra Karimzadeh

This study aimed to delineate groundwater recharge zones using a combination of analytical hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy-AHP, and frequency ratio (FR) models. Additionally, it aimed to compare the effectiveness of these models in groundwater recharge potential zone mapping. To achieve these objectives, nine groundwater influencing factors were considered, including geology, soil types, lineament density, elevation, slope, topographic wetness index, drainage density, land use land cover, and rainfall. Thematic maps for all these factors were generated using satellite and conventional data in the ArcGIS environment. Weight was assigned to each thematic layer based on its significance to recharge. All thematic layers were combined using AHP model-l (WLC), AHP model-ll (Weighted sum), fuzzy-AHP overlay, and FR-based model using ArcGIS. The findings revealed that 15% and 39% of the study area have high recharge potentials according to AHP-based model-l and model-ll, respectively. The FAHP model demarcated 43% of the area as high recharge zones while the FR model demarcated 42% of the area as high recharge zones. The majority of high groundwater recharge areas were found in the central part of the study area, while the southern part was demarcated as a moderate recharge zone. The eastern and western parts were demarcated as low recharge potentials zones. To validate the accuracy of these models, the study used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) validation curves. The ROC curves revealed that AHP model-ll had the highest accuracy (AUC=89%) followed by the FAHP model (AUC=88%), AHP model-l (AUC=84%), and FR (AUC=81%)...

Xing Luo, Jun Ge, Yipeng Cao et al.

Abstract Land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) can influence surface temperature through local and nonlocal biophysical processes, which remain inadequately addressed. In this study, we separate the local and nonlocal effects of historical (1850–2014) LULCCs based on model outputs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6. We also attempt to explore the sources of intermodel differences in the effects of LULCCs. The multimodel mean shows a cooling effect of −0.05°C (with an intermodel range of −0.24–0.06°C) at the global scale due to cropland and pastureland expansion, consisting of dominant nonlocal cooling of −0.06°C (with an intermodel range of −0.26–0.06°C) and slight local warming of 0.01°C (with an intermodel range of −0.01–0.05°C). The modeling results show some clear consistency in the effects of LULCCs despite considerable intermodel uncertainties. The local effects cause warming at low latitudes and cooling in boreal regions via changes in upward shortwave radiation and sensible and latent heat fluxes. The nonlocal effects mainly cause cooling via decreases in downward longwave radiation and increases in upward shortwave radiation. Intermodel differences in the total effects are dominated by those in the nonlocal effects, which are further attributed to divergent changes in downward longwave radiation and sensible heat flux across the models. This study highlights the importance of the nonlocal effects of LULCCs in terms of strength and intermodel uncertainty, with implications for designing land‐based solutions aimed at climate change mitigation.

Chengbo Yuan, Chuan Wen, Tong Zhang et al.

We address the challenge of acquiring real-world manipulation skills with a scalable framework. We hold the belief that identifying an appropriate prediction target capable of leveraging large-scale datasets is crucial for achieving efficient and universal learning. Therefore, we propose to utilize 3D flow, which represents the future trajectories of 3D points on objects of interest, as an ideal prediction target. To exploit scalable data resources, we turn our attention to human videos. We develop, for the first time, a language-conditioned 3D flow prediction model directly from large-scale RGBD human video datasets. Our predicted flow offers actionable guidance, thus facilitating zero-shot skill transfer in real-world scenarios. We deploy our method with a policy based on closed-loop flow prediction. Remarkably, without any in-domain finetuning, our method achieves an impressive 81\% success rate in zero-shot human-to-robot skill transfer, covering 18 tasks in 6 scenes. Our framework features the following benefits: (1) scalability: leveraging cross-embodiment data resources; (2) wide application: multiple object categories, including rigid, articulated, and soft bodies; (3) stable skill transfer: providing actionable guidance with a small inference domain-gap. Code, data, and supplementary materials are available https://general-flow.github.io

Virgílio Lourenço Silva Neto, Lucas Barbosa e Souza, Marco Antonio Vieira Morais

A deficiência hídrica é uma questão presente no território brasileiro, sendo que, diante de sua distribuição irregular, a análise por estado é relevante, tal como para o estado do Tocantins. Assim, este trabalho visa determinar e analisar as condições de pobreza hídrica de 139 municípios tocantinense. Devido à diversidade de informações dos componentes que constituem este indicador, os valores obtidos em cada subcomponente foram normalizados, adotando-se valores máximos e mínimos de acordo com a escala espacial, permitindo assim realizar uma análise comparativa. O peso atribuído para os componentes que compõem este índice foi de 1 para recurso, acesso, capacidade, e de 0,5 para o componente uso, aplicados na equação que representa o índice de pobreza hídrica. Conforme a escala, que parte de 0 para a situação mais crítica e atinge 1 para a condição excelente, a maior parte dos municípios tocantinenses, assim como a média deste índice para o estado do Tocantins é classificado como bom. Os municípios com as melhores condições foram Palmas (0,70), Porto Nacional (0,65), Miracema e Pedro Afonso (0,63) e Paraíso do Tocantins (0,61), todos na porção central do estado. Já os municípios que apresentaram este índice classificado como crítico foram Praia Norte (0,29), Juarina (0,28), Aragominas (0,27), Piraquê (0,24) e Riachinho (0,22), localizados na parte norte do Estado. O resultado obtido não pode ser interpretado como abundância de recursos hídricos, mas como uma combinação favorável de fatores que permite boas condições no que se refere aos recursos, acessos, capacidades, usos e meio ambiente.

Dimitrios Psaltis

The Kerr-Newman metric is the unique vacuum solution of the General Relativistic field equations, in which any singularities or spacetime pathologies are hidden behind horizons. They are believed to describe the spacetimes of massive astrophysical objects with no surfaces, which we call black holes. This spacetime, which is defined entirely by the mass, spin, and charge of the black hole, gives rise to a variety of phenomena in the motion of particles and photons outside the horizons that have no Newtonian counterparts. Moreover, the Kerr-Newman spacetime remains remarkably resilient to many attempts in modifying the underlying theory of gravity. The monitoring of stellar orbits around supermassive black holes, the detection of gravitational waves from the coalescence of stellar-mass black holes, and the observation of black-hole shadows in images with horizon-scale resolution, all of which have become possible during the last decade, are offering valuable tools in testing quantitatively the predictions of this remarkable solution to Einstein's equations.

Vittorio De Falco

The general relativistic Poynting-Robertson (PR) effect is a very important dissipative phenomenon occurring in high-energy astrophysics. Recently, it has been proposed a new model, which upgrades the two-dimensional (2D) description in the three-dimensional (3D) case in Kerr spacetime. The radiation field is considered as constituted by photons emitted from a rigidly rotating spherical source around the compact object. Such dynamical system admits the existence of a critical hypersurface, region where the gravitational and radiation forces balance and the matter reaches it at the end of its motion. Selected test particle orbits are displayed. We show how to prove the stability of these critical hypersurfaces within the Lyapunov theory. Then, we present how to study such effect under the Lagrangian formalism, explaining how to analytically derive the Rayleigh potential for the radiation force. In conclusion, further developments and future projects are discussed.

Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang, Yibo Sun et al.

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a fundamental backbone for downstream tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. Despite initial gains that were obtained by applying generic PTMs to geo-related tasks at Baidu Maps, a clear performance plateau over time was observed. One of the main reasons for this plateau is the lack of readily available geographic knowledge in generic PTMs. To address this problem, in this paper, we present ERNIE-GeoL, which is a geography-and-language pre-trained model designed and developed for improving the geo-related tasks at Baidu Maps. ERNIE-GeoL is elaborately designed to learn a universal representation of geography-language by pre-training on large-scale data generated from a heterogeneous graph that contains abundant geographic knowledge. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of ERNIE-GeoL. ERNIE-GeoL has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps since April 2021, which significantly benefits the performance of various downstream tasks. This demonstrates that ERNIE-GeoL can serve as a fundamental backbone for a wide range of geo-related tasks.

Cultural General Intelligence Team, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Bethanie Brownfield et al.

Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative cultural evolution, expanding our skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating zero-shot, high recall cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents. Our agents succeed at real-time cultural transmission from humans in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution as an algorithm for developing artificial general intelligence.

M. Sokol, Leonardo Pataccini

Abstract This paper has two interrelated aims. First, it attempts to sketch a preliminary map of economic winners and losers to highlight the emerging economic geographies of the coronavirus pandemic. Second, it aims to explore the links between these emerging economic geographies and the processes of ‘financialisation’, drawing on the concept of ‘financial chains’. Regarding the first aim, the paper argues that the pandemic‐induced crisis will exacerbate social inequalities and deepen uneven development at multiple geographical scales. Regarding the second aim, the paper argues that the ‘financialisation’ perspective in general, and the concept of ‘financial chains’ in particular, provide useful insights into the crisis and its uneven effects, by shedding light on the complex web of flows of value and power relations established/emerging between the prospective winners and losers. It also highlights the prominent role of debt and debt‐based financial chains in shaping economic geographies in times of major global crisis.

Johan SETIAWAN, MTh Sri BUDIASTUTI, Evi GRAVITIANI et al.

The tourist spot of the Top Selfie Kragilan, Mt. Merbabu National Park, a conservation area in Indonesia has not been managed with a business strategy despite the community initiatives increase to utilize the surrounding tourist spots for their livelihood. The study aimed at formulating the tourism business management strategy using Business Model Canvas (BMC) and Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) approaches. BMC modeling used nine aspects, namely customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and cost structure; then analyzed using SWOT approaches. A total of 377 respondents were interviewed to collect the data. The results showed that every aspect of the old business model has been added or innovated according to the analysis of internal and external factors. Also, there has been a "meeting point" between market expectations, the value offered, and the promotional channels used. The combined strategy of Aggressive (S-O) and Diversification (S-T) should be applied to mitigate damage impact, conserve the natural resources, and arranging visits and selfie vehicles/ photo spot to boost revenue streams.

L. Filipe O. Costa, José Natário, N. O. Santos

In the main article [CQG 38 (2021) 055003], a new "canonical" form for the Lewis metrics of the Weyl class has been obtained, depending only on three parameters -- Komar mass and angular momentum per unit length, plus the angle deficit -- corresponding to a coordinate system fixed to the "distant stars" and an everywhere timelike Killing vector field. Such form evinces the local but non-global static character of the spacetime, and striking parallelisms with the electromagnetic analogue. We discuss here its generality, main physical features and important limits (the Levi-Civita static cylinder, and spinning cosmic strings). We contrast it on geometric and physical grounds with the Kerr spacetime -- as an example of a metric which is locally non-static.

N. Thrift

S. Manabe, R. Wetherald

Lena Norbäck Ivarsson, Thomas Andrén, Matthias Moros et al.

Sediment cores from three sites along the east-coast of Sweden, north-western Baltic Proper, have been studied with respect to lithologies, geochemistry, and diatom assemblages to trace and date early human impact with emphasis on nutrient discharge. The three sites Bråviken, Himmerfjärden, and Ådfjärden, have been impacted to various degree during the last millennia by multiple stressors like excessive nutrient discharge and hazardous substances, leading to coastal hypoxia, eutrophication, and pollution. These stressors are mainly caused by drivers in the drainage area as increased human population, changed land use, and point sources as industries and a sewage treatment plant. Even though their detailed history differs, the results show similar general patterns for all three sites. We find no evidence in our data from the coastal zone supporting the hypothesis that the extensive areal distribution of hypoxia in the open Baltic Sea during the Medieval Climate Anomaly was caused by human impact. Timing of the onset of man-made eutrophication, as identified from δ15N and changes in diatom composition, differs between the three sites, reflecting the site specific geography and local environmental histories of these areas. The onset of eutrophication dates to ~1800 CE in Bråviken and Himmerfjärden areas, and to ~1900 CE in the less urban area of Ådfjärden. We conclude that the recorded environmental changes during the last centuries are unique in a thousand year perspective.