Hasil untuk "Unlocalized maps (Asian studies only)"

Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raymond Ng et al.

Multilingual text embeddings are often assumed to encode meaning in a perspective-independent semantic space, yielding stable similarity judgments across tasks and languages. Our results show that this assumption does not hold in practice. We introduce SEA-BED, a large-scale benchmark covering 10 Southeast Asian (SEA) languages and diverse embedding tasks, designed to systematically examine how embedding performance varies across tasks, languages, and language-task combinations. Across extensive evaluations, we observe that no single model performs uniformly well across SEA languages; task difficulty differs markedly within languages, and success on one task does not reliably generalize to others. Language-task analyses further reveal highly non-uniform performance landscapes, where performance varies across different language-task combinations. These findings call for closer attention to performance measurements that provide an expansive view across languages and tasks to uncover inconsistencies in semantic representation. Based on these observations, we provide insights for future model development, including data, algorithmic, and architectural considerations.

Matteo Marcantoni, Bayu Jayawardhana, Kerstin Bunte

Navigation and exploration within unknown environments are typical examples in which simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms are applied. When mobile agents deploy only range sensors without bearing information, the agents must estimate the bearing using the online distance measurement for the localization and mapping purposes. In this paper, we propose a scalable dynamic bearing estimator to obtain the relative bearing of the static landmarks in the local coordinate frame of a moving agent in real-time. Using contraction theory, we provide convergence analysis of the proposed range-only bearing estimator and present upper and lower-bound for the estimator gain. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Sara Berger, Carla Agurto, Guillermo Cecchi et al.

The emergence of COVID-19 offered a unique opportunity to study chronic pain patients as they responded to sudden changes in social environments, increased community stress, and reduced access to care. We report findings from n=70 Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) patients before and during initial pandemic stages resulting from advances in home monitoring and artificial intelligence that produced novel insights despite pandemic-related disruptions. From a multi-dimensional array of frequently monitored signals-including mobility, sleep, voice, and psychological assessments-we found that while the overall patient cohort appeared unaffected by the pandemic onset, patients had significantly different individual experiences. Three distinct patient responses (sub-cohorts) were revealed, those with: worsened pain, reduced activities, or improved quality of life. Remarkably, none of the specific measures by themselves were significantly affected; instead, it was their synergy that exposed the effects elicited by the pandemic onset. Partial correlations illustrating linked dimensions by sub-cohort during the pandemic and those associations were different for each sub-cohort before COVID-19, suggesting that daily at-home tele-monitoring of chronic conditions may reveal novel patient types. This work highlights the opportunities afforded by applying modern analytic techniques to more holistic and longitudinal patient outcomes, which might aid clinicians in making more informed treatment decisions in the future.

Xiaopeng Cheng, Ilje Cho, Tomohisa Kawashima et al.

In this work, we studied the Galactic Center supermassive black hole (SMBH), Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), with the KVN and VERA Array (KaVA)/East Asian VLBI Network (EAVN) monitoring observations. Especially on 13 May 2019, Sgr A* experienced an unprecedented bright near infra-red (NIR) flare; so, we find a possible counterpart at 43 GHz (7 mm). As a result, a large temporal variation of the flux density at the level 15.4%, with the highest flux density of 2.04 Jy, is found on 11 May 2019. Interestingly, the intrinsic sizes are also variable, and the area and major-axis size show a marginal correlation with flux density with >2σ. Thus, we interpret that the emission region at 43 GHz follows the larger-when-brighter relation in 2019. The possible origins are discussed with an emergence of a weak jet/outflow component and the position angle change of the rotation axis of the accretion disk in time.

Kazuki Nakajima, Ruodan Liu, Kazuyuki Shudo et al.

Gender imbalance in academia has been confirmed in terms of a variety of indicators, and its magnitude often varies from country to country. Europe and North America, which cover a large fraction of research workforce in the world, have been the main geographical regions for research on gender imbalance in academia. However, the academia in East Asia, which accounts for a substantial fraction of research, may be exposed to strong gender imbalance because Asia has been facing persistent and stronger gender imbalance in society at large than Europe and North America. Here we use publication data between 1950 and 2020 to analyze gender imbalance in academia in China, Japan, and South Korea in terms of the number of researchers, their career, and citation practice. We found that, compared to the average of the other countries, gender imbalance is larger in these three East Asian countries in terms of the number of researchers and their citation practice and additionally in Japan in terms of research career. Moreover, we found that Japan has been exposed to the larger gender imbalance than China and South Korea in terms of research career and citation practice.

Desmond Caulley, Yufeng Yang, David Anderson

Large datasets are very useful for training speaker recognition systems, and various research groups have constructed several over the years. Voxceleb is a large dataset for speaker recognition that is extracted from Youtube videos. This paper presents an audio-visual method for acquiring audio data from Youtube given the speaker's name as input. The system follows a pipeline similar to that of the Voxceleb data acquisition method. However, our work focuses on fast data acquisition by using face-tracking in subsequent frames once a face has been detected -- this is preferable over face detection for every frame considering its computational cost. We show that applying audio diarization to our data after acquiring it can yield equal error rates comparable to Voxceleb. A secondary set of experiments showed that we could further decrease the error rate by fine-tuning a pre-trained x-vector system with the acquired data. Like Voxceleb, the work here focuses primarily on developing audio for celebrities. However, unlike Voxceleb, our target audio data is from celebrities in East Asian countries. Finally, we set up a speaker verification task to evaluate the accuracy of our acquired data. After diarization and fine-tuning, we achieved an equal error rate of approximately 4\% across our entire dataset.

Hongzhang Xu, Rowena Ball

The old lie of mathematical inadequacy of Indigenous communities has been curiously persistent despite increasing evidence shows that many Indigenous communities practiced mathematics. Attempts to study and teach Indigenous mathematical knowledge have always been questioned and even denied validity. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority in the F-10 Australian schools curriculum, from 2022 onwards, includes content elaborations related to Indigenous mathematics, which have been developed and refined by expert Indigenous advisers. We celebrate this initiative, but experience also tells us to expect some resistance from sectors of the education communities who hold to an exclusively Anglo-European provenance of mathematics. Through this review article we seek to constructively forestall potential pushback and address concerns regarding the legitimacy and pedagogical value of Indigenous mathematics, by countering with evidence some published claims of mathematical inadequacies of Australian First Nations cultures.

Thushari Atapattu, Mahen Herath, Charitha Elvitigala et al.

People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.

Yuki Saito, Yuto Nishimura, Shinnosuke Takamichi et al.

We present STUDIES, a new speech corpus for developing a voice agent that can speak in a friendly manner. Humans naturally control their speech prosody to empathize with each other. By incorporating this "empathetic dialogue" behavior into a spoken dialogue system, we can develop a voice agent that can respond to a user more naturally. We designed the STUDIES corpus to include a speaker who speaks with empathy for the interlocutor's emotion explicitly. We describe our methodology to construct an empathetic dialogue speech corpus and report the analysis results of the STUDIES corpus. We conducted a text-to-speech experiment to initially investigate how we can develop more natural voice agent that can tune its speaking style corresponding to the interlocutor's emotion. The results show that the use of interlocutor's emotion label and conversational context embedding can produce speech with the same degree of naturalness as that synthesized by using the agent's emotion label. Our project page of the STUDIES corpus is http://sython.org/Corpus/STUDIES.

C. V. von Bartheld, Dennis Mathew, R. Butowt

We have read with great interest the paper by Soh et al. [1]. In addition to the data presented and the issues discussed in their contribution, the results of this work elucidate important features of the pathogenicity of anosmia—an aspect that the authors appear to have missed. The authors show that, early in the pandemic, South Asians (Indians and Bangladeshis) with COVID-19 who resided in Singapore had a very low prevalence of anosmia (2.3–3.6%), confirming the results of other early studies on South Asians (reviewed in [2]). However, subsequent studies have shown that later in the pandemic, South Asians (Indians and Bangladeshis) with COVID-19 had a significantly higher prevalence of anosmia, of between about 20% and as much as 71% (e.g., [3]). The substantial differences in prevalence of COVID-19 induced olfactory dysfunction between populations have prompted a major discussion about possible reasons [1, 2, 4]. Such differences may be explained by two main factors: either a difference at the level of the human host, or a difference at the level of the coronavirus, or a combination of the two factors. At the host level, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the entry protein to which the viral spike protein binds, has different variants, resulting in differing virus binding affinities and the frequency of such ACE2 variants is known to differ between ethnicities [4]. At the level of the virus, there are differences between virus strains. The D614G mutation, especially, is responsible for the enhanced cell entry or binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to the ACE2 protein [5]. Early in the pandemic, the D614 variant was predominant before it was rapidly replaced by the G614 variant [4, 5]. Geographically, the major holdouts of the D614 virus into the second half of 2020 were primarily in China and in Singapore (https:// cov. lanl. gov/ apps/ covid19/ map/ [5]). The most parsimonious explanation of why South Asians in Singapore had a very low prevalence of anosmia, early in the pandemic, but why the same ethnicity (Indians and Bangladeshis) has a much larger prevalence at a later time point in the pandemic, is that the virus type differed. The virus with the G614 mutation likely has enhanced binding to sustentacular cells and Bowman gland cells in the olfactory epithelium. This appears to be at least partially responsible for the increased prevalence of anosmia in COVID-19 patients, even within the same ethnic populations. This trend has been suspected [4], but was difficult to prove in populations, because both SARS-CoV-2 variants coexisted in most regions [2, 5]. The study of Soh et al. [1], with a relatively large cohort and at a location, where only one virus type (D614) was present at the time of data collection, provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate the relative contributions of virus and host factors for chemosensory dysfunction. To our knowledge, their study provides the most convincing argument for the D614G mutation leading to higher rates of anosmia. Whether populations of East Asian descent also have increased anosmia when they become infected with the G614 virus remains to be determined. Likewise, the new virus variants that have recently emerged may also cause altered anosmia prevalence. This comment refers to the article available online at https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s0040502106647-2.

Max Maass, Henning Pridöhl, Dominik Herrmann et al.

Researchers help operators of vulnerable and non-compliant internet services by individually notifying them about security and privacy issues uncovered in their research. To improve efficiency and effectiveness of such efforts, dedicated notification studies are imperative. As of today, there is no comprehensive documentation of pitfalls and best practices for conducting such notification studies, which limits validity of results and impedes reproducibility. Drawing on our experience with such studies and guidance from related work, we present a set of guidelines and practical recommendations, including initial data collection, sending of notifications, interacting with the recipients, and publishing the results. We note that future studies can especially benefit from extensive planning and automation of crucial processes, i.e., activities that take place well before the first notifications are sent.

Flavio Del Santo

Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend have been among the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. Extensive studies have been dedicated to the development of their controversial relationship, which saw Feyerabend turning from a student and supporter of Popper to one of his harshest critics. Yet, it is not as well known that the rift between Popper and Feyerabend generated mainly in the context of their studies on the foundation of quantum mechanics, which has been the main subject of their discussions for about two decades. This paper reconstructs in detail their diatribe over the foundations of quantum mechanics, emphasizing also the major role that their personal relationship played in their distancing.

A. Kondrashin, L. Morozova, E. Stepanova et al.

Dirofilariasis is a helminths vector-borne disease caused by two species of Dirofolaria—D. repens and D. immitis. The former is overwhelmingly associated with human dirofilariasis. The vector of the worm are mosquitoes of the family Culicidae (largely Culex, Aedes and Anopheles). The definitive hosts of Dirofilaria are dogs and to a lesser extent cats. Humans are an accidental host. A total of 1200 human cases caused by Dirofilaria were registered in the territory of the ex-USSR during the period 1915–2016. Zonal differences have been seen in the prevalence of infected dogs and mosquitoes. Studies undertaken in the southern part of the Russian Federation (RF) revealed the prevalence of Dirofilaria in dogs to be 20.8% with wild variations of larva density. Studies carried out in the central part of the RF found that the prevalence of parasites in dogs was 4.1%. Aedes mosquitoes were infected less than Culex and Anopheles mosquitoes. The latter were infected by D. repens more often than Culex and Aedes. Zonal differences were also traced in regard to Dirofilaria prevalence in humans, thus allowing identification of three zones of risk of infection (low, moderate, and stable), reflected in a series of constructed maps. Although Dirofilariasis was known on the territory of Russia from 1915, only sporadic cases of the disease were reported occasionally. Its number was showed an increasing trend only during the 1980s–1990s, reaching the level of hundreds of cases. The majority of cases were confined to the southern parts of Russia with geographic coordinates of 43°–45° on the northern latitude. Comparison of the timing of the global trend of climate warming during the 1990s with the temporal pattern of Dirofilaria on the territory of Russia during the same period demonstrated a close association between two phenomena. With the continuous process of global climate warming, the incidence of dirofilariasis both in man and dogs goes unabated exemplified by the territorial expansion of the disease northwards and eastwards attaining the latitude of 56°–57° on the northern latitude in the European and Asian parts of Russia. It appears that within the period of the last 20–25 years, the population at risk has doubled. Under these circumstances, dirofilariases in Russia should be considered as an emerging public health problem necessitating the establishment of a comprehensive epidemiological monitoring system with strong entomological and veterinary components. Based on the results obtained, an appropriate control intervention could be developed.

Charles Darko-Takyi, V. Moodley, S. Boadi-Kusi

Background: There was a need to document population-expected normative data for parameters of non-strabismic binocular vision (NSBV) as the analysis and diagnosis of binocular vision disorders required comparison of patient’s clinical signs with expected data in their specific population. Aim: This article sought to review and map population-expected continental normative data for visual function parameters for evaluating the functional non-strabismic accommodative and vergence system, as these systems are very relevant to evaluate the comfort of visual system. Method: Search engines – namely, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Web of Science database and Ovid MEDLINE database – were used to search studies published in English across different continents using keywords such as ‘normative or expected data’ and ‘specific NSBV parameter’. Results were summarised in tables for easy comparison; data were presented based on the geographical location, year of publication, demographics of the population studied and the techniques used for measuring the parameters. A summary of observed challenges with reviewed works and recommendations for the future studies are indicated. The article is delimited to studies published between 1910 and September 2019 only. Results: Most of the studies investigated specific parameters of either accommodation only or vergence only; few recent studies have comprehensively investigated both parameters. Most studies were conducted in North America followed by Asia and Europe, with a few in Africa. No studies were found with Oceania populations. There were discrepancies and differences in methodologies and techniques used by the studies reviewed and normative data varied among different continents and different populations within each continent. Conclusion: As the observed differences in reviewed studies could be attributed to differences in test techniques, the future studies should consider using identical, reliable, repeatable, objective and subjective techniques with good methodological designs to clarify these results. More studies should be conducted in African and Oceania populations.

Dandan Wu, Jin Sun

Paper folding is a common activity in East Asian kindergartens, but its potential value to early spatial skills have not been empirically explored. This study aims to investigate whether and how paper folding skills can predict spatial ability (SA) in the early years. Altogether 101 preschoolers (Ngirl = 45, Mage = 4.54, SD = 0.75) were randomly sampled from two Hong Kong kindergartens and invited to complete the map-use and the paper folding tasks. The paper folding task taps two levels of children’s paper folding skills: Basic Folding Skill (BFS) and Advanced Folding Skill (AFS). The parents reported the demographic information and their involvement in spatial activities at home. The results indicated the following: (1) there was a significant age-related increase in the paper folding performance; (2) child age could significantly predict both BFS (β = 0.551, p < 0.001) and AFS (β = 0.627, p < 0.001), while parental involvement could only predict BFS (β = 0.246, p < 0.001); (3) after controlling for confounders, paper folding skills could significantly predict SA as measured by the map-use task; (4) BFS was found to mediate the relationship between parental involvement and SA. The educational implications of these findings are also discussed.

Shiyi Chen, Yunfeng Cao, Fengming Hui et al.

Recently, the Arctic Northeast Route (ANR), an important shipping route connecting Asia and Europe, has become more and more navigable because of the accelerating melt of sea ice in the Arctic. The exploitation of the ANR could shorten the navigational distances from North Asia to Northwestern Europe by 40% (about 2500 nautical miles) and reduce one-third (about 10 days) of the time required for maritime transport by the Royal Road, which can help to save lots of transport costs and bring large environmental benefits. It’s very important and urgent to accurately understand the changes in the navigability of the ANR for the development of the route. However, due to the lack of high-quality observed dataset, there are very few observation-based studies. Some model-based studies cannot effectively reflect the real changes in the navigability of the ANR, due to the varying degrees of the data quality issues. In this study, we applied the daily sea ice concentration product provided by the NSIDC and the reconstructed daily SMOS sea ice thickness product into the Arctic Transportation Accessibility Model (ATAM) from the Arctic Ice Regime Shipping System (AIRSS) to assess and map the daily navigation risks for open water vessels in the ANR from 2010–2017 and further analyze the spatial and temporal changes of the Autumn navigability of the route during the eight years. Assuming the navigability of a specific ice regime is affected by the sea ice conditions and the ice-breaking ability of the vessels, the ATAM model can quantify the navigability of a specific ice regime for seven different vessel types. Since the SMOS ice thickness product is more reliable in thin ice area (lower than 0.5 m), we only focus on the navigability changes of the ANR for open water vessels in this study. We found that, although the end of shipping season for open water vessels across the ANR has extended to the day of 297±4 (October 24th) since 2010 (excluding 2013), there is no significant trend in the navigability of the ANR for open water vessels in the last 8 years. Further analysis of the spatial distribution map of the navigation risk for open water vessels at the end of shipping season in different years shows that the navigability of the ANR mainly affected by the ice regime around the Eastern Siberian Sea, the Novosibirsk Islands and the Severnaya Zemlya Islands. In most years, it’s the earlier frozen ice over the three regions leading to the end of the entire ANR, in the case that most other areas are still safely navigable. We also performed detailed analysis and found that there are significant differences in the navigability changes in the three key straits for open water vessels over the ANR. The Long strait shows great inter-annual variations in the navigability, but has limit impact on the navigability of the entire route because of its late ending of the shipping season. The Sannikov Strait shows the fastest decline, but small inter-annual variations in the navigability. It is also the earliest one that ending the shipping season, and therefore has a great impact on the long-term trend of the navigability of the ANR. The intra- and inter-annual changes in the navigability of the Vlikitsky Strait are very complex. It always fluctuates dramatically, and thus has great impact on the short-term navigability of the entire ANR. In view of the complexity of the change in the ANR navigability, observed high-quality, near real-time sea ice datasets are very important for the quantification of navigation risk in the ASR.

Dhrubajyoti Biswas, Soumyajit Seth, Mita Bor

In this article, we have studied a 1D map, which is formed by combining the two well-known maps i.e. the tent and the logistic maps in the unit interval i.e. [0, 1]. The proposed map can behave as the piecewise smooth or non-smooth maps (depending on the behaviour of the map just before and after the border) and then the dynamics of the map has been studied using analytical tools and numerical simulations. Characterization has been done by primarily studying the Lyapunov spectra and the corresponding bifurcation diagrams. Some peculiar dynamics of this map have been shown numerically. Finally, a Simulink implementation of the proposed map has been demonstrated.

E. Iodice, M. Sarzi, A. Bittner et al.

The 31 brightest galaxies (m_B < 15 mag) inside the virial radius of the Fornax cluster were observed from the centres to the outskirts with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope. These observations provide detailed high-resolution maps of the line-of-sight kinematics and line strengths of the stars and ionised gas reaching 2-3 Re for 21 early-type galaxies and 1-2 Re for 10 late-type galaxies. The majority of the galaxies are regular rotators, with eight hosting a kinematically distinct core. Only two galaxies are slow rotators. The mean age, total metallicity, and [Mg/Fe] abundance ratio in the bright central region inside 0.5 Re and in the galaxy outskirts are presented. Extended emission-line gas is detected in 13 galaxies, most of them are late-type objects with wide-spread star formation. The measured structural properties are analysed in relation to the galaxies' position in the projected phase space of the cluster. This shows that the Fornax cluster appears to consist of three main groups of galaxies inside the virial radius: the old core; a clump of galaxies, which is aligned with the local large-scale structure and was accreted soon after the formation of the core; and a group of galaxies that fell in more recently.

Christopher Hrynkow, Maria Power

J. Bryja, O. Mikula, R. Šumbera et al.

BackgroundRodents of the genus Mus represent one of the most valuable biological models for biomedical and evolutionary research. Out of the four currently recognized subgenera, Nannomys (African pygmy mice, including the smallest rodents in the world) comprises the only original African lineage. Species of this subgenus became important models for the study of sex determination in mammals and they are also hosts of potentially dangerous pathogens. Nannomys ancestors colonized Africa from Asia at the end of Miocene and Eastern Africa should be considered as the place of their first radiation. In sharp contrast with this fact and despite the biological importance of Nannomys, the specimens from Eastern Africa were obviously under-represented in previous studies and the phylogenetic and distributional patterns were thus incomplete.ResultsWe performed comprehensive genetic analysis of 657 individuals of Nannomys collected at approximately 300 localities across the whole sub-Saharan Africa. Phylogenetic reconstructions based on mitochondrial (CYTB) and nuclear (IRBP) genes identified five species groups and three monotypic ancestral lineages. We provide evidence for important cryptic diversity and we defined and mapped the distribution of 27 molecular operational taxonomic units (MOTUs) that may correspond to presumable species. Biogeographical reconstructions based on data spanning all of Africa modified the previous evolutionary scenarios. First divergences occurred in Eastern African mountains soon after the colonization of the continent and the remnants of these old divergences still occur there, represented by long basal branches of M. (previously Muriculus) imberbis and two undescribed species from Ethiopia and Malawi. The radiation in drier lowland habitats associated with the decrease of body size is much younger, occurred mainly in a single lineage (called the minutoides group, and especially within the species M. minutoides), and was probably linked to aridification and climatic fluctuations in middle Pliocene/Pleistocene.ConclusionsWe discovered very high cryptic diversity in African pygmy mice making the genus Mus one of the richest genera of African mammals. Our taxon sampling allowed reliable phylogenetic and biogeographic reconstructions that (together with detailed distributional data of individual MOTUs) provide a solid basis for further evolutionary, ecological and epidemiological studies of this important group of rodents.