Fernando Rodriguez Avellaneda, Erick A. Chacón-Montalván, Paula Moraga
Air pollution remains a critical environmental and public health challenge, demanding high-resolution spatial data to better understand its spatial distribution and impacts. This study addresses the challenges of conducting multivariate spatial analysis of air pollutants observed at aggregated levels, particularly when the goal is to model the underlying continuous processes and perform spatial predictions at varying resolutions. To address these issues, we propose a continuous multivariate spatial model based on Gaussian processes (GPs), naturally accommodating the support of aggregated sampling units. Computationally efficient inference is achieved using R-INLA, leveraging the connection between GPs and Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs). A custom projection matrix maps the GMRFs defined on the triangulation of the study region and the aggregated GPs at sampling units, ensuring accurate handling of changes in spatial support. This approach integrates shared information among pollutants and incorporates covariates, enhancing interpretability and explanatory power. This approach is used to downscale PM2.5, PM10 and ozone levels in Portugal and Italy, improving spatial resolution from 0.1° (~10 km) to 0.02° (~2 km), and revealing dependencies among pollutants. Our framework provides a robust foundation for analyzing complex pollutant interactions, offering valuable insights for decision-makers seeking to address air pollution and its impacts.
En las últimas décadas, artistas de diferentes procedencias y utilizando distintos medios han invocado con sus obras el concepto de territorio, y de las territorialidades que son moldeadas por este, como estrategia de reconocimiento de otras identidades –sobre todo las originarias e indígenas–. El artículo propone una reflexión sobre el concepto de territorio como yuxtaposición de entorno natural, comunidad y cosmovisión que resulta indispensable para la comprensión global de las construcciones culturales e identitarias de las comunidades originarias. Posteriormente, analiza una selección de propuestas artísticas contemporáneas que utilizan estas conceptualizaciones como estrategias discursivas, estructuradas en dos grandes bloques: formas de habitar y territorialidades sagradas y rituales.
Este artigo analisa as influências políticas no funcionamento da Interpol, a principal instituição de policiamento internacional, no período inicial da Guerra Fria, entre 1946 e meados da década de 1960. No primeiro momento, tentamos entender as origens das relações entre polícias nacionais e suas consequentes influências na criação da organização da Comissão Internacional de Polícia Criminal, em 1923, e sua recomposição após 1945, já como Interpol. Analisamos depois o papel da Interpol como organização internacional a partir do final da Segunda Guerra Mundial, agora no contexto da Guerra Fria. Este trabalho explora como a instituição se desenvolve como centro de cooperação policial voltado para interesses do Ocidente. A noção de compromisso político de seus membros principais refletiu-se no funcionamento cotidiano da Interpol, permitindo compreender como esta organização era utilizada com propósitos de ganho de influência política por potências do bloco capitalista.
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.
Abstract Background Rheumatic diseases are associated with an increase in overall risks of tuberculosis (TB). The aim of this study was to evaluate the frequency of TB and the frequency of latent TB infection (LTBI), in clinical practice, for juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) patients from high and low risk of TB incidence endemic countries. Methods This is an international, multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study of data collection from Brazil and Registry of Portugal at REUMA.PT. The inclusion criteria were patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) with age ≤ 18 years who underwent screening for Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection [tuberculin skin test (TST) and/or interferon gamma release assay (IGRA)]. Chest X-rays and history of exposure to TB were also assessed. Results 292 JIA patients were included; mean age 14.3 years, mean disease duration 7.5 years, 194 patients (66.4%) performed only TST, 14 (4.8%) only IGRA and 84 (28.8%) both. The frequency of LTBI (10.6%) and TB was similar between the two countries. The reasons for TB screening were different; in Brazil it was performed more often at JIA onset while in Portugal it was performed when starting Disease Modified Anti-Rheumatic Drugs (DMARD) treatment (p < 0.001). Isoniazid therapy was prescribed in 40 (13.7%) patients (31 with LTBI and 9 with epidemiologic risks and/or due to contact with sick people). Only three patients (1%) developed active TB. Conclusion We found nearly 10% of patients with LTBI, a small percentage of patients with treatment due to epidemiologic risks and only 1% with active TB. Distinct reasons and screening methods for LTBI were observed between the two countries.
Diseases of the musculoskeletal system, Immunologic diseases. Allergy
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.
Controlling the temperature of nano-scale quantum systems is becoming increasingly important in the efforts to develop thermal devices such as quantum heat valves, heat engines, and refrigerators, and to explore fundamental concepts in quantum thermodynamics. In practice, however, it is challenging to generate arbitrary time-dependent temperatures, similarly to what has been achieved for electronic voltage pulses. To overcome this problem, we here propose a fully quantum mechanical scheme to control the time-dependent environment temperature of an open quantum system. To this end, we consider a collection of quantum harmonic oscillators that mediate the interactions between the quantum system and a thermal reservoir, and we show how an effective time-dependent temperature can be realized by modulating the oscillator frequencies in time. By doing so, we can apply effective temperature pulses to the quantum system, and it can be cooled below the temperature of the environment. Surprisingly, the scheme can be realized using only a few oscillators, and our proposal thereby paves the way for controlling the temperature of open quantum systems.
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.
Melanie Marx, Gregorio Rocha, Pavel Zehtindjiev
et al.
Abstract European Turtle Doves (Streptopelia turtur) are long‐distance migrants and have experienced a population decline of more than 78% since 1980. Their conservation depends on refined knowledge of breeding origins and population connectivity. Feathers collected at stopover sites, but molted at breeding grounds, provide an opportunity to assign birds to potential regions of origin using tissue stable hydrogen isotope values and relate those to a European feather hydrogen isoscape. Here, 101 feather samples from 13 different breeding countries were analyzed to calibrate the European hydrogen isoscape and 101 feather samples from Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Greek, and Bulgarian stopovers were assigned to potential regions of origin. The assigned range of origin for all 101 individuals grouped together agreed with known distribution patterns. Bulgarian samples were mostly assigned to Russian areas. Possible origins of Greek, Italian, Maltese, and Spanish samples ranged from central to southern Europe. Individual assignments highlighted four broad regions of origin, corresponding to a cool/humid to hot/dry temperature gradient. Proportions of birds assigned to these regions varied among birds sampled at different stopover sites. Therefore, our results provide important information about population connectivity and may be useful to evaluate possible influences of hunting on Turtle Dove populations.
Ecology, General. Including nature conservation, geographical distribution
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.
This paper presents the results of a pilot experiment with an existing tidal energy converter (TEC), Evopod 1 kW floatable prototype, in a real test case scenario (Faro Channel, Ria Formosa, Portugal). A baseline marine geophysical, hydrodynamic and ecological study based on the experience collected on the test site is presented. The collected data was used to validate a hydro-morphodynamic model, allowing the selection of the installation area based on both operational and environmental constraints. Operational results related to the description of power generation capacity, energy capture area and proportion of energy flux are presented and discussed, including the failures occurring during the experimental setup. The data is now available to the scientific community and to TEC industry developers, enhancing the operational knowledge of TEC technology concerning efficiency, environmental effects, and interactions (i.e. device/environment). The results can be used by developers on the licensing process, on overcoming the commercial deployment barriers, on offering extra assurance and confidence to investors, who traditionally have seen environmental concerns as a barrier, and on providing the foundations whereupon similar deployment areas can be considered around the world for marine tidal energy extraction.
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.
O arrabalde extramuros de Santa Maria do Alcamim estruturou-se em torno de um eixo viário que ligava as portas da cidade moura às hortas de Arroios. Na íngreme encosta do castelo, dispuseram-se várias ruas paralelas, com um tecido urbano denso, onde se instalou a comunidade cristã moçárabe com a sua igreja. Após a reconquista, este bairro expandiu-se e formou o grande arrabalde ocidental de Santa Justa e Rufina, motor económico da cidade nos séculos seguintes. Junto ao Chão de Alcamim, havia uma quinta que pertencia ao 2º conde de Barcelos, tendo sido adquirida pelo príncipe D. Afonso (futuro D. Afonso IV) a qual foi urbanizada e as casas aforadas. Acompanhando a estrutura social dos enfiteutas e as condições dos seus aforamentos, concluímos que, por diversas vezes, o tecido social e económico se alterou abruptamente influenciando as tipologias, as funções e o valor do imobiliário.
his article discusses some aspects of the status of women amateur photographers during the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, considering the case of the Portuguese Queen Maria Pia of Savoy (1847-1911). We acknowledge the difficulties of making the historiography of women photographers in Portugal, due to the scarcity of sources and archives, and the lack of questions about these absences and their reasons. These facts have contributed to a history of photography in Portugal that consists of a succession of male names of “great photographers”. Asking questions about “the other half”, as well as broadening conceptions of photography to include the diversity of their practices may contribute to highlight the gender constructions raised by photographic practice. It also will help to understand the factors contributing to the limited access of Portuguese women to this practice and the lack of their public visibility, during this period.