Arne Nothdurft, Valentin Sarkleti, Tobias Ofner-Graff
et al.
Regression models were evaluated to estimate stand-level growing stock volume (GSV), quadratic mean diameter (QMD), basal area (BA), and stem density (N) in the Brixen im Thale forest district of Austria. Field measurements for GSV, QMD, and BA were collected on 146 inventory plots using a handheld mobile personal laser scanning system. Predictor variables were derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS)-derived normalized digital surface and terrain models. The objective was to generate stand-level estimates and associated uncertainty for GSV, QMD, BA, and N across 824 stands. A unit-level small area estimation framework was used to generate stand-level posterior predictive distributions by aggregating predictions from finer spatial scales. Both univariate and multivariate models, with and without spatially varying intercepts, were considered. Predictive performance was assessed via spatially blocked cross-validation, focusing on bias, accuracy, and precision. Despite exploratory analysis suggesting advantages of complex multivariate spatial models, simpler univariate spatial -- and in some cases, non-spatial -- models exhibited comparable predictive performance.
Thomas Robiglio, Martina Contisciani, Márton Karsai
et al.
Migration is central in various societal problems related to socioeconomic development. While much of the existing research has focused on international migration, migration patterns within a single country remain relatively unexplored. In this work we study internal migration patterns in Austria for a period of over 20 years, obtained from open and high-granularity administrative records. We employ inferential network methods to characterize the flows between municipalities and extract their clustering according to similar target and destination rates. Our methodology reveals significant deviations from commonly assumed relocation patterns modeled by the gravity law. At the same time, we observe unexpected biases of internal migrations that leads to less frequent movements across boundaries at both district and state levels than predictions suggest. This leads to significant regionalization of migration at multiple geographical scales and augmented division between urban and rural areas. These patterns appear to be remarkably persistent across decades of migration data, demonstrating systematic limitations of conventionally used gravity models in migration studies. Our approach presents a robust methodology that can be used to improve such evaluations, and can reveal new phenomena in migration networks.
Gregor Ehrensperger, Vera Katharina Meyer, Marc-André Falkensteiner
et al.
This study makes significant contributions to the understanding of hail climatology in Austria. First, it introduces a comprehensive database of hailstone sizes, constructed from three-dimensional radar data spanning 2009 to 2022 and calibrated by approximately 5000 verified hail reports. The database serves as foundation for describing the short-term climatology of hail and provides the data necessary for estimating hail risk maps with enhanced spatial resolution and quality. Second, the study enables the spatio-temporal metastitical extreme value distribution (TMEVD) to feature return levels of up to 30 years on a high-resolution grid of 1km x 1km. Key advancements include the adaptation of the TMEVD, which now incorporates atmospheric input variables for robust estimations in data-sparse regions. Additionally, this paper presents a novel methodological approach that utilizes a distributional neural network, tailored with innovative sample weighting to efficiently handle the increased computational demands and complexities associated with modeling the distribution parameters. Together, these contributions provide a valuable resource for future research and risk assessment.
Science is about facts and truth. Yet sometimes the truth and facts are not obvious. For example, in the field of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), there has been a long-lasting debate about who were the major contributors in its development. Particularly, there was a strong dispute between the followers of two scientists, R. Damadian and P. Lauterbur. In this review, we carefully trace the major developments in applying NMR for cancer detection starting almost 50 years ago. The research records show that the truth was beyond the claims of either research camps. The development of NMR for cancer detection involved multiple research groups, who made critical contributions at different junctures.
The history of the Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is traced from the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Antonio Garbasso as Director (1913), to the 1960s. Thanks to Garbasso's expertise, not only did the Institute gain new premises on Arcetri hill, where the Astronomical Observatory was already located, but it also formed a brilliant group of young physicists made up of Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti, Enrico Persico, Bruno Rossi, Gilberto Bernardini, Daria Bocciarelli, Lorenzo Emo Capodilista, Giuseppe Occhialini and Giulio Racah, who were engaged in the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and Cosmic Rays. This Arcetri School disintegrated in the late 1930s for the transfer of its protagonists to chairs in other universities, for the environment created by the fascist regime and, to some extent, for the racial laws. After the war, the legacy was taken up by some students of this school who formed research groups in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics. As far as theoretical physics was concerned, after the Fermi and Persico periods these studies enjoyed a new expansion towards the end of the 1950s, with the arrival of Giacomo Morpurgo and above all, that of Raoul Gatto, who created the first real Italian school of Theoretical Physics at Arcetri.
Niels C. M. Martens, Miguel Ángel Carretero Sahuquillo, Erhard Scholz
et al.
Editorial of a special issue on dark matter & modified gravity, distributed across the journals Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Published version of the open access editorial (in SHPS) available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.015. The six papers are collected here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-science-part-b-studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-modern-physics/special-issue/10CR71RJLWM.
With Cyrano, Voltaire, and Verne, France provided important milestones in the history of early science fiction. However, even if the genre was not very common a few centuries ago, there were numerous additional contributions by French-speaking writers. In this paper, we review two cases of interplanetary novels written in the second half of the eighteenth century and sharing a rare particularity: their authors were female. Voyages de Milord Ceton was imagined by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert whereas Cornelie Wouters de Wasse conceived Le Char Volant. While their personal lives were very different, and their writing style too, both authors share in these novels a common philosophy in which equality -- between ranks but also between genders -- takes an important place. Their works thus clearly fit into the context of the Enlightenment.
Volatility regarding negotiated subject positions features prominently in Hemingway’s works. Yet, his portrayal of Hungarians in the vignette of Chapter VIII and the short story entitled “The Revolutionist” (both found in the collection of In Our Time, 1925) underlines 1920s America’s unwillingness to modify preconceived stereotypes about the “other.” Both stories have attracted considerable attention among scholars who have analyzed these texts from such perspectives as political ideology and the arts. Aiming to fill a gap in literary criticism, I shall examine the narrative representation of stereotypical approaches to the Hungarian minority with emphasis on societal expectations set by white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class men in the United States during the 1920s. The values they propagated in society illustrate that the Roaring Twenties was an openly discriminatory decade in which ignoring and sometimes literally attacking the “other” for deviating from the prescribed norms of the era was acceptable. Anxiety about the “other” uncovers a great deal of national insecurity; America’s battle with foreigners merges into a battle with itself.
Faced with communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary’s 1977 scheme to construct a diversion canal and hydroelectric dam system on the Danube, a movement gradually arose in Hungary to fight the plan. This national dissident campaign, which started with discussion groups and technical articles, not only brought in an extraordinary cross-section of opinion and background—united around the preservation of natural heritage—but played a key part in the rebirth of a lively civic society within a long repressed political and intellectual culture. The story of this movement’s arguments, strategies, and ultimate success is both a key story in the decay and collapse of communist rule in Hungary, but a case study in how a non-western European/American approach to the politics of preservation can rally support and achieve consensus.
We start by surveying the history of the idea of a fundamental conservation law and briefly examine the role conservation laws play in different classical contexts. In such contexts we find conservation laws to be useful, but often not essential. Next we consider the quantum setting, where the conceptual problems of the standard formalism obstruct a rigorous analysis of the issue. We then analyze the fate of energy conservation within the various viable paths to address such conceptual problems; in all cases we find no satisfactory way to define a (useful) notion of energy that is generically conserved. Finally, we focus on the implications of this for the semiclassical gravity program and conclude that Einstein's equations cannot be said to always hold.
We study the multi-round response generation in visual dialog, where a response is generated according to a visually grounded conversational history. Given a triplet: an image, Q&A history, and current question, all the prevailing methods follow a codec (i.e., encoder-decoder) fashion in a supervised learning paradigm: a multimodal encoder encodes the triplet into a feature vector, which is then fed into the decoder for the current answer generation, supervised by the ground-truth. However, this conventional supervised learning does NOT take into account the impact of imperfect history, violating the conversational nature of visual dialog and thus making the codec more inclined to learn history bias but not contextual reasoning. To this end, inspired by the actor-critic policy gradient in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel training paradigm called History Advantage Sequence Training (HAST). Specifically, we intentionally impose wrong answers in the history, obtaining an adverse critic, and see how the historic error impacts the codec's future behavior by History Advantage-a quantity obtained by subtracting the adverse critic from the gold reward of ground-truth history. Moreover, to make the codec more sensitive to the history, we propose a novel attention network called History-Aware Co-Attention Network (HACAN) which can be effectively trained by using HAST. Experimental results on three benchmarks: VisDial v0.9&v1.0 and GuessWhat?!, show that the proposed HAST strategy consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised counterparts.
Mehmet Şükrü Kuran, Ahmet Erdem Tozoğlu, Cinzia Tavernari
In this paper we explain our experiences and observations on a blended world history course which combines classical lecture and discussion elements as well as video game sessions in which the students play strategy video games with heavy historical focus. The course, named Playing with The Past, is designed to experiment on how to integrate video games on teaching history especially in order to achieve a higher understanding of the contemporary social, political, economical, and technological context of a given era for a given nation. We ran the course four times between 2015 - 2018 with different video game titles having different historical models and observe the experiences and learning of students based on the quality of their written essays and articles. Our experiments and observations could be beneficial not only for the design of a general world history course, but also for a history course on specific periods, cultures, and nations.