Francisco J. Beron-Vera, Maria J. Olascoaga, Phillipe Miron
et al.
We simulate the dynamics of pelagic \emph{Sargassum} rafts as systems of finite-size floating particles, governed by a Maxey--Riley law with nonlinear elastic interactions. Using surface ocean currents and wind data from reanalysis systems for clump transport, we computed trajectories within a domain covering the tropical and subtropical north Atlantic. The subsequent motion is reduced using Ulam's discretization method into a time-inhomogeneous Markov chain that simulates a background \emph{Sargassum} concentration. Bayesian inversion, combined with nonautonomous transition path theory, was used to infer the origin of the first significant recorded bloom in the tropical North Atlantic, which unfolded in April 2011. Both methodologies independently identified the bloom's origin as near the West African coast, up to two years before it was detectable via satellite imagery on the basin's western side. This finding supports anecdotal evidence of \emph{Sargassum} strandings on the Ghanaian coast in 2009. Moreover, it correlates with unusual environmental conditions -- such as increased nutrient loads from significant upwelling linked to a pronounced Dakar Niña and Saharan dust deposition -- that promote bloom proliferation. Additionally, it aligns with the observation that the species of \emph{Sargassum} in the 2011 bloom differ from those in the Sargasso Sea, which might otherwise be considered a natural origin.
Anupama K Xavier, Oisín Hamilton, Davide Faranda
et al.
Atmospheric blocking exerts a profound influence on mid-latitude circulation, yet its predictability remains elusive due to intrinsic non-linearities and sensitivity to initial-conditions. While blocking dynamics have been extensively studied, the impact of geographical positioning on predictability remains largely unexplored. This study provides a comparative assessment of the predictability of Western and Eastern North Pacific blocking events, leveraging analogue-based diagnostics applied to CMIP6 MIROC6 simulations. Blocking structures are identified using geopotential height gradient reversal, with their temporal evolution analysed through trajectory tracking and error growth metrics. Results reveal that Eastern blocks exhibit lower predictability, characterized by rapid error divergence and heightened mean logarithmic growth rates, whereas Western blocks display dynamical stability. Persistence analysis gives no significant difference between eastern and western North Pacific blocking events. Sensitivity analyses across varying detection thresholds validate the robustness of these findings.
This paper presents a 610 MHz radio survey covering 1.94 square degrees around the North Ecliptic Pole (NEP), which includes parts of the AKARI (ADF-N) and Euclid, Deep Fields North. The median 5-sigma sensitivity is 28 microJy beam per beam, reaching as low as 19 microJy per beam, with a synthesised beam of 3.6 x 4.1 arcsec. The catalogue contains 1675 radio components, with 339 grouped into multi-component sources and 284 isolated components likely part of double radio sources. Imaging, cataloguing, and source identification are presented, along with preliminary scientific results. From a non-statistical sub-set of 169 objects with multi-wavelength AKARI and other detections, luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) represent 66 percent of the sample, ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) 4 percent, and sources with L_IR < 1011 L_sun 30 percent. In total, 56 percent of sources show some AGN presence, though only seven are AGN-dominated. ULIRGs require three times higher AGN contribution to produce high-quality SED fits compared to lower luminosity galaxies, and AGN presence increases with AGN fraction. The PAH mass fraction is insignificant, although ULIRGs have about half the PAH strength of lower IR-luminosity galaxies. Higher luminosity galaxies show gas and stellar masses an order of magnitude larger, suggesting higher star formation rates. For LIRGs, AGN presence increases with redshift, indicating that part of the total luminosity could be contributed by AGN activity rather than star formation. Simple cross-matching revealed 13 ROSAT QSOs, 45 X-ray sources, and 61 sub-mm galaxies coincident with GMRT radio sources.
The development of any language has always been the focus of close attention and thorough study in linguistics, especially at different historical stages. The Norwegian language is a good example to trace the development of anatomical terminology based on its historical stages, including Norwegian somatisms as well as those from other languages, mainly Latin and Greek, including the word-forming elements. Starting with Ancient Scandinavian through the period of Christianity, the Hanseatic League and further on, several structural models have been identified and distinguished. Each period is associated with adoption and adaptation (assimilation) of somatisms. The first group includes one-word somatisms of Germanic origin, one-word non-assimilated and assimilated somatisms of Latin or Greek origin. The second and the largest group consists of two-word somatisms formed by compounding according to different models based on different parts of speech (noun, adjective, numeral, and verb) and the word-forming elements. Each element in a collocation is represented by either a norwegianized Latin or a native part. Three-word somatisms are not so numerous in anatomical terminology. Despite its seeming simplicity, compounding is an interesting phenomenon for studying due to many patterns of combining words in the formation of somatisms. Concerning compounding special remarks are made, taking into account combinatory flexibility and plasticity of the Norwegian language, which makes it possible to enrich its anatomical vocabulary at low cost and to use its own language capacity and resources for developing this language segment.
The article examines the problem of the use in combat conditions and classification of single-edged short-bladed weapons of the Germanic and neighboring peoples of Europe in the early Middle Ages — combat knives seaxes. The authors consider the numerous existing archaeological finds in the context of terms used in modern Scandinavian languages, and also turn to the analysis of options for using the terms “seax” and “skalm” in archaic texts. A contextual analysis of the use of these terms in the poetic texts of songs from the Elder Edda and the prose of Icelandic sagas belonging to various subtypes is presented. According to the authors, the term “skalm” had a very specific purpose and fell out of everyday use — as a designation for a real type of weapon — long before the Viking Age. In the texts describing the Viking Age, it is not people who are consistently armed with skalms, but the dark and negative characters opposing them — trolls, jotuns, etc. However, in the heroic epic tradition, skalms, on the contrary, are used by heroes; It was the skalms that became part of the poetic formulas describing the equipment of the heroes of the epic. There is reason to believe that this term comes from ancient times and by the Viking Age it became an anachronism, acquiring new connotations and negative meaning.
Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, K. Moore, S. Ebenesersdóttir
et al.
We investigate a 2,000-year genetic transect through Scandinavia spanning the Iron Age to the present, based on 48 new and 249 published ancient genomes and genotypes from 16,638 modern individuals. We find regional variation in the timing and magnitude of gene flow from three sources: the eastern Baltic, the British-Irish Isles, and southern Europe. British-Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia from the Viking period, whereas eastern Baltic ancestry is more localized to Gotland and central Sweden. In some regions, a drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that ancient immigrants contributed proportionately less to the modern Scandinavian gene pool than indicated by the ancestry of genomes from the Viking and Medieval periods. Finally, we show that a north-south genetic cline that characterizes modern Scandinavians is mainly due to the differential levels of Uralic ancestry and that this cline existed in the Viking Age and possibly earlier.
Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive amounts of text data, and the performance of the LLMs typically correlates with the scale and quality of the datasets. This means that it may be challenging to build LLMs for smaller languages such as Nordic ones, where the availability of text corpora is limited. In order to facilitate the development of the LLMS in the Nordic languages, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 1.2TB of text, in all of the major North Germanic languages (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish), as well as some high-quality English data. This paper details our considerations and processes for collecting, cleaning, and filtering the dataset.
The lottery is a very lucrative industry. Popular fascination often focuses on the largest prizes. However, less attention has been paid to detecting unusual lottery buying behaviors at lower stakes. Our paper introduces a new model to detect illegal discounting in the North Carolina Education Lottery using statistical analysis of net gains and ticket buying habits. Nine outlying players are flagged and are further examined using a proposed stochastic model to calculate the range of their possible losses in the lottery. The unusual buying patterns of the players flagged as outliers are further confirmed using a K-means clustering analysis of lottery store visiting behaviors.
We present a statistical model for German medical natural language processing trained for named entity recognition (NER) as an open, publicly available model. The work serves as a refined successor to our first GERNERMED model which is substantially outperformed by our work. We demonstrate the effectiveness of combining multiple techniques in order to achieve strong results in entity recognition performance by the means of transfer-learning on pretrained deep language models (LM), word-alignment and neural machine translation. Due to the sparse situation on open, public medical entity recognition models for German texts, this work offers benefits to the German research community on medical NLP as a baseline model. Since our model is based on public English data, its weights are provided without legal restrictions on usage and distribution. The sample code and the statistical model is available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GERNERMED-pp
Shi Chen, Wolfgang Karl Härdle, Brenda López Cabrera
In this paper we propose a regularization approach for network modeling of German power derivative market. To deal with the large portfolio, we combine high-dimensional variable selection techniques with dynamic network analysis. The estimated sparse interconnectedness of the full German power derivative market, clearly identify the significant channels of relevant potential risk spillovers. Our empirical findings show the importance of interdependence between different contract types, and identify the main risk contributors. We further observe strong pairwise interconnections between the neighboring contracts especially for the spot contracts trading in the peak hours, its implications for regulators and investors are also discussed. The network analysis of the full German power derivative market helps us to complement a full picture of system risk, and have a better understanding of the German power market functioning and environment.
This article presents three characterizations of the weak factorization systems on finitely complete categories that interpret intensional dependent type theory with Sigma-, Pi-, and Id-types. The first characterization is that the weak factorization system (L,R) has the properties that L is stable under pullback along R and that all maps to a terminal object are in R. We call such weak factorization systems type-theoretic. The second is that the weak factorization system has an Id-presentation: roughly, it is generated by Id-types in the empty context. The third is that the weak factorization system (L, R) is generated by a Moore relation system, a generalization of the notion of Moore paths.
In recent years, numerical weather prediction models have begun to show notable levels of skill at predicting the average winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) when initialised one month ahead. At the same time, these model predictions exhibit unusually low signal-to-noise ratios, in what has been dubbed a `signal-to-noise paradox'. We analyse both the skill and signal-to-noise ratio of the Integrated Forecast System (IFS), the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model, in an ensemble hindcast experiment. Specifically, we examine the contribution to both from the regime dynamics of the North Atlantic eddy-driven jet. This is done by constructing a statistical model which captures the predictability inherent to to the trimodal jet latitude system, and fitting its parameters to reanalysis and IFS data. Predictability in this regime system is driven by interannual variations in the persistence of the jet latitude regimes, which determine the preferred state of the jet. We show that the IFS has skill at predicting such variations in persistence: because the position of the jet strongly influences the NAO, this automatically generates skill at predicting the NAO. We show that all of the skill the IFS has at predicting the winter NAO over the period 1980-2010 can be attributed to its skill at predicting regime persistence in this way. Similarly, the tendency of the IFS to underestimate regime persistence can account for the low signal-to-noise ratio, giving a possible explanation for the signal-to-noise paradox. Finally, we examine how external forcing drives variability in jet persistence, as well as highlight the role played by transient baroclinic eddy feedbacks to modulate regime persistence.
The article examines the largely forgotten British émigré film Dark Journey, its Swedish setting and Scandinavian release. The spy drama, which tells the story of German and French secret agents in Stockholm during World War I by mixing thriller elements with romance, raises a number of questions regarding the representation of spies in a Scandinavian context, Sweden as a contested film market in the later 1930s and the transnational production strategy of films made at the Denham studios in Britain. It is one of the films that helped the profession of secret agents to change its image from a dingy and unchivalrous activity to an adventurous, illustrious and cosmopolitan enterprise. Interestingly, the film offers a very positive portrayal of its German protagonist, played by Conrad Veidt, that is at odds with other Anglo-American spy films but not at all uncommon for Swedish spy fiction.
Alina Maria Ciobanu, Shervin Malmasi, Liviu P. Dinu
In this paper we present the GDI_classification entry to the second German Dialect Identification (GDI) shared task organized within the scope of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2018. We present a system based on SVM classifier ensembles trained on characters and words. The system was trained on a collection of speech transcripts of five Swiss-German dialects provided by the organizers. The transcripts included in the dataset contained speakers from Basel, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. Our entry in the challenge reached 62.03% F1-score and was ranked third out of eight teams.
Abstract When Selma Lagerlöf became a Nobel laureate in 1909, her works were translated into new languages and introduced to countries, including Spain, where she had previously been unknown. This article traces the image of Sweden and Scandinavia reflected in Selma Lagerlöf’s reception in Spanish newspapers and periodicals around 1910. The idea of a distinctive Nordic or Scandinavian identity is discernible in the critics’ characterizations of Lagerlöf’s works; however, there is tension between their presentations of Lagerlöf as a representative of the region of Scandinavia or the North in general versus just one nation (Sweden) or province (Värmland). Building on research in imagology and literary transfer, this article investigates how and which regional, national, and provincial identities, geographies, and stereotypes of North and South were activated in support of a particular idea of the author.