This article examines the political history of forest fires in Portugal during the 20th century. Taking as its starting point an analysis of parliamentary debates during the Estado Novo regime, this study analyses how, between the 1930s and 1970s, forest fires ceased to be a local problem and became a national emergency, successively debated in sessions of the National Assembly and the Corporate Chamber. Situated at the intersection of politics, science and economics, the article examines how the consolidation of afforestation as a state project, the transformations of the rural economy, and the affirmation of new technical and scientific perspectives on fire prevention and control contributed to shaping political discourse around forest fires.
Quantum illumination represents one of the most interesting examples of quantum technologies. On the one hand, it can find significant applications; on the other hand, it is one of the few quantum protocols robust against noise and losses. Here we present a short summary of the history of this quantum protocol.
Measurements of jet substructure in Pb+Pb collisions provide key insights into the mechanism of jet quenching in the hot and dense QCD medium created in these collisions.This Letter presents a measurement of the suppression of large-radius jets with a radius parameter of R=1.0 and its dependence on the jet substructure. The measurement uses 1.72 nb−1 of Pb+Pb data and 255 pb−1 of pp data, both at sNN=5.02 TeV, recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Large-radius jets are reconstructed by reclustering R=0.2 calorimetric jets and are measured for transverse momentum above 200 GeV. Jet substructure is evaluated using charged-particle tracks, and the overall level of jet suppression is quantified using the jet nuclear modification factor (RAA). The jet RAA is measured as a function of jet pT, the charged kt splitting scale (d12), and the angular separation (ΔR12) of two leading sub-jets. The jet RAA gradually decreases with increasing d12, implying significantly stronger suppression of large-radius jets with larger kt splitting scale. The jet RAA gradually decreases for ΔR12 in the range 0.01−0.2 and then remains consistent with a constant for ΔR12 ≳ 0.2. The observed significant dependence of jet suppression on the jet substructure will provide new insights into its role in the quenching process.
Myong Chol Jung, Julien Monteil, Philip Schulz
et al.
We present the history-aware transformer (HAT), a transformer-based model that uses shoppers' purchase history to personalise outfit predictions. The aim of this work is to recommend outfits that are internally coherent while matching an individual shopper's style and taste. To achieve this, we stack two transformer models, one that produces outfit representations and another one that processes the history of purchased outfits for a given shopper. We use these models to score an outfit's compatibility in the context of a shopper's preferences as inferred from their previous purchases. During training, the model learns to discriminate between purchased and random outfits using 3 losses: the focal loss for outfit compatibility typically used in the literature, a contrastive loss to bring closer learned outfit embeddings from a shopper's history, and an adaptive margin loss to facilitate learning from weak negatives. Together, these losses enable the model to make personalised recommendations based on a shopper's purchase history. Our experiments on the IQON3000 and Polyvore datasets show that HAT outperforms strong baselines on the outfit Compatibility Prediction (CP) and the Fill In The Blank (FITB) tasks. The model improves AUC for the CP hard task by 15.7% (IQON3000) and 19.4% (Polyvore) compared to previous SOTA results. It further improves accuracy on the FITB hard task by 6.5% and 9.7%, respectively. We provide ablation studies on the personalisation, constrastive loss, and adaptive margin loss that highlight the importance of these modelling choices.
Can nonhuman animals be used for the benefit of humans in a scientifically and morally justified manner and, if yes, how? Based on our own experiences as scholars from various academic backgrounds, we argue that this question can only be answered as an interdisciplinary and international endeavor, considering insights from research ethics and animal ethics as well as scientific and legal aspects. The aim of this article is to contribute to the foundation of the emerging field of animal research ethics. In doing so, we describe the following seven phases of animal research experiments: ethical, legal and social presumptions (phase 0), planning (phase I), review (phase II), conduct of experiments (phase III), publication/dissemination (phase IV), further exploitation of results (phase V), and evaluation (phase VI). In total, 20 key ethical, legal, and practical challenges that an ethical framework for the use of animals in research needs to address are identified and analyzed. Finally, we characterize the following four meta-challenges and opportunities associated with animal research ethics as a field: (1) moral pluralism, (2) the integration of views and positions outside the laboratory, (3) international plurality of conduct, standards, and legal norms, and (4) interdisciplinary education.
Neste artigo divulgam-se os resultados alcançados e as problemáticas teóricas e metodológicas decorrentes do tratamento do Arquivo da Família Calisto Pinto da Silva, inserindo-se as atividades de reorganização, descrição e estudo da História Familiar na prática supervisionada em Arquivística Histórica desenvolvida na Direção Regional do Arquivo e Biblioteca da Madeira. Após uma primeira parte em que se reflete criticamente acerca dos estudos e contributos de pesquisa e em que se analisa, de forma pormenorizada, a fundamentação teórica promovida em torno dos Arquivos de Família, procede-se à elaboração de uma breve História da instituição de acolhimento e ao relacionamento do objeto de estágio com as práticas empregues no Arquivo Regional. Por fim, descrevem-se as tarefas realizadas e as dificuldades adjacentes ao tratamento do Arquivo da Família Calisto Pinto da Silva, visando-se em primeira instância compreender o referido acervo na sua completude, enquadrá-lo face à questão central e explorar potencialidades de pesquisa e novas investigações no quadro da História Local e Regional, neste caso, do Arquipélago da Madeira.
Lucy Davis, Tatiana Larionova, Dhairya Patel
et al.
Abstract Around 45% of natural hazards reported worldwide are related to floods, and current indications show that exposure to floods and inherent losses will keep escalating. Historic centres are particularly vulnerable in this context due to the structural and material characteristics of the buildings and because they embrace social and cultural values that must be safeguarded. This article aims to contribute to this research area by presenting and discussing the application of an index‐based methodology specifically tailored to assess flood risk in historic urban centres. The historic city centre of Tomar, Portugal, an area that encompasses over 500 buildings and has a rich history of floods, is used here as a case study. Vulnerability data resulting from the application of the vulnerability assessment approach are then combined with flood hazard—that is, water velocity and depth obtained from flood peaks estimated for 20‐ and 100‐year periods of return—and used to identify the buildings at risk. Finally, a set of depth‐damage curves is derived and used here to carry out a cost–benefit analysis for different flood adaptation measures.
River protective works. Regulation. Flood control, Disasters and engineering
The article discusses the main milestones of the formation of higher veterinary education in Portugal since the XIX century, when the first collective education in the field of agriculture of this country appeared. The prerequisites for the development of veterinary medicine in the west of the Iberian Peninsula and the factors constraining it are indicated. The importance of special veterinary education for ensuring not only the food security of the country, but also for the development of science as a whole is shown. Archival data on the disciplines studied by students in higher veterinary educational institutions in the last few centuries are noted.
Online action detection is the task of predicting the action as soon as it happens in a streaming video. A major challenge is that the model does not have access to the future and has to solely rely on the history, i.e., the frames observed so far, to make predictions. It is therefore important to accentuate parts of the history that are more informative to the prediction of the current frame. We present GateHUB, Gated History Unit with Background Suppression, that comprises a novel position-guided gated cross-attention mechanism to enhance or suppress parts of the history as per how informative they are for current frame prediction. GateHUB further proposes Future-augmented History (FaH) to make history features more informative by using subsequently observed frames when available. In a single unified framework, GateHUB integrates the transformer's ability of long-range temporal modeling and the recurrent model's capacity to selectively encode relevant information. GateHUB also introduces a background suppression objective to further mitigate false positive background frames that closely resemble the action frames. Extensive validation on three benchmark datasets, THUMOS, TVSeries, and HDD, demonstrates that GateHUB significantly outperforms all existing methods and is also more efficient than the existing best work. Furthermore, a flow-free version of GateHUB is able to achieve higher or close accuracy at 2.8x higher frame rate compared to all existing methods that require both RGB and optical flow information for prediction.
Publicado en junio de 2020, el Livro de vozes e sombras de João de Melo se inserta en una fértil corriente literaria que en los últimos años ha proporcionado nuevas posibles lecturas del periodo revolucionario de 1974. Las tres historias que componen el eje argumental de la novela, intrínsecamente relacionadas entre sí, suponen un hito en la narrativa contemporánea, por la capacidad del autor de dar una voz tanto a las víctimas como a los verdugos de los sucesos del Verano Caliente de 1975. Ambientado en las Azores, en Lisboa y en Angola, el Livro de João de Melo desvela e interpreta los orígenes del independentismo del Frente de Libertação dos Açores, las acciones violentas perpetradas contra la población contraria a sus posiciones ideológicas, así como las consecuencias de la descolonización portuguesa en África a través del testimonio de una niña ciega que se convierte de forma repentina en una retornada. La ficción literaria se postula así como una sólida base para la configuración de una memoria colectiva que incluya todas las sensibilidades, cada una con sus fisuras y sus contradicciones.
Rita Vieira, Maria João Furtado Ophthalmology Department of Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto (CHUPorto), Oporto, PortugalCorrespondence: Rita Vieira, Ophthalmology Department of Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto (CHUPorto)- Largo do Prof. Abel Salazar, Oporto, 4099-001, Portugal, Tel +351 913748812, Email anarita.vieira1693@gmail.comPurpose: To describe a case of long-term poorly treated bilateral acute syphilitic posterior placoid chorioretinitis (ASPPC) complicated with choroidal neovascularization, with a multimodal imaging approach.Patients and Methods: Retrospective case report. Analysis of patient’s clinical data.Case Report: A healthy 66-year-old man complained of decreased visual acuity in the right eye (RE). He had a past history of bilateral exudative maculopathy of unknown etiology, lasting for more than 10 years and leading to severe and irreversible vision loss on the left eye. The corrected distance visual acuity (CDVA) was 20/63 on the RE and < 20/400 on the left eye (LE). On slit-lamp, no anterior chamber reaction was observed, a vitreous haze was present on the RE as well as large, bilateral yellowish lesions in the macula, with exuberant macular atrophy, particularly on the LE. These well-defined lesions were confined to the posterior pole. The spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) showed a flat retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) detachment with hyperreflective material beneath the RPE and cystoid macular edema on the RE and an exuberant macular atrophy on the LE, with both eyes showing anomalous enlargement of choroidal vessels. The fluorescein angiography showed general hypofluorescence and indocyanine green angiography revealed a heterogeneous pattern. The OCT angiography (OCTA) of the RE demonstrated an anomalous vascular network related to the presence of choroidal neovascularization (CNV). An etiological study was performed and a positive treponemal test (TPHA) was found. The patient experienced visual acuity improvement to 20/25 after systemic treatment with Penicillin and anti-VEGF injections.Conclusion: Clinical data and multimodal imaging information suggest that this case represents a complication of long-term untreated bilateral acute syphilitic posterior placoid chorioretinitis (ASPPC) with associated choroidal neovascularization. Once the RE presented signs of active disease, besides intravitreal anti-VEGF, treatment of the underlying disease was essential for visual recovery.Keywords: ASPPC, syphilis, neovascularization, ocular syphilis
We reconstruct the history of reionization using Gaussian process regression. Using the UV luminosity data compilation from Hubble Frontiers Fields we reconstruct the redshift evolution of UV luminosity density and thereby the evolution of the source term in the ionization equation. This model-independent reconstruction rules out single power-law evolution of the luminosity density but supports the logarithmic double power-law parametrization. We obtain reionization history by integrating ionization equations with the reconstructed source term. Using optical depth constraint from Planck Cosmic Microwave Background observation, measurement of UV luminosity function integrated till truncation magnitude of -17 and -15, and derived ionization fraction from high redshift quasar, galaxies and gamma-ray burst observations, we constrain the history of reionization. In the conservative case we find the constraint on the optical depth as $τ=0.052\pm0.001\pm0.002$ at 68% and 95% confidence intervals. We find the redshift duration between 10% and 90% ionization to be $2.05_{-0.21-0.30}^{+0.11+0.37}$. Longer duration of reionization is supported if UV luminosity density data with truncation magnitude of -15 is used in the joint analysis. Our results point out that even in a conservative reconstruction, a combination of cosmological and astrophysical observations can provide stringent constraints on the epoch of reionization.
We present a new method that incorporates the horizontal branch morphology into synthetic colour-magnitude diagram based star formation history determinations. This method, we call MORGOTH, self-consistently takes into account all the stellar evolution phases up to the early asymptothic giant branch, flexibly modelling red giant branch mass loss. We test MORGOTH on a range of synthetic populations, and find that the inclusion of the horizontal branch significantly increases the precision of the resulting star formation histories. When the main sequence turn-off is detected, MORGOTH can fit the star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss at the same time, efficiently breaking this degeneracy. As part of testing MORGOTH, we also model the observed colour-magnitude diagram of the well studied Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We recover a new more detailed star formation history for this galaxy. Both the new star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss we determined for Sculptor with MORGOTH are in good agreement with previous analyses, thus demonstrating the power of this new approach.
The Maxey-Riley equation has been extensively used by the fluid dynamics community to study the dynamics of small inertial particles in fluid flow. However, most often, the Basset history force in this equation is neglected. Including the Basset force in numerical solutions of particulate flows involves storage requirements which rapidly increase in time. Thus the significance of the Basset history force in the dynamics has not been understood. In this paper, we show that the Maxey-Riley equation in its entirety can be exactly mapped as a forced, time-dependent Robin boundary condition of the one-dimensional heat equation, and solved using the Unified Transform Method. We obtain the exact solution for a general homogeneous time-dependent flow field, and apply it to a range of physically relevant situations. In a particle coming to a halt in a quiescent environment, the Basset history force speeds up the decay as stretched-exponential at short time while slowing it down to a power-law relaxation, $\sim t^{-3/2}$, at long time. A particle settling under gravity is shown to relax even more slowly to its terminal velocity ($\sim t^{-1/2}$), whereas this relaxation would be expected to take place exponentially fast if the history term were to be neglected. For a general flow, our approach makes possible a numerical scheme for arbitrary but smooth flows without increasing memory demands and with spectral accuracy. We use our numerical scheme to solve an example spatially varying flow of inertial particles in the vicinity of a point vortex. We show that the critical radius for caustics formation shrinks slightly due to history effects. Our scheme opens up a method for future studies to include the Basset history term in their calculations to spectral accuracy, without astronomical storage costs. Moreover our results indicate that the Basset history can affect dynamics significantly.
Assumindo que os processos arquivísticos podem ser estudados, apresentamos o resultado de uma pesquisa feita no Arquivo da Casa de Belmonte. O nosso trabalho abordou a produção documental da família Figueiredo Cabral da Câmara entre 1460 e 1840. Sob os novos paradigmas da História e da Arquivística, foi feita uma abordagem multidisciplinar, cruzando estes dois saberes. Através da análise das práticas arquivísticas da linhagem – produção, preservação, transmissão e recuperação – explicaremos até que ponto o arquivo assegurou à família a posse das suas terras, morgados, rendimentos e estatuto social. Comparando registos de documentos recolhidos em diferentes locais e data, responderemos a algumas questões, tais como: até que ponto a trajetória da família influenciou a construção do Arquivo da Casa de Belmonte e, no sentido contrário até que ponto o arquivo está relacionado com a gestão do património e com a identidade familiar?
We constrain the history of reionization using the data from Planck 2015 Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy observations. We also use prior constraints on the reionization history at redshifts $\sim7-8$ obtained from Lyman-$α$ emission observations. Using the free electron fractions at different redshifts as free parameters, we construct the complete reionization history using polynomials. Our construction provides an extremely flexible framework to search for the history of reionization as a function of redshifts. We present a conservative and an optimistic constraint on reionization that are categorized by the flexibilities of the models and datasets used to constrain them, and we report that CMB data marginally favors extended reionization histories. In both the cases, we find the mean values of optical depth to be larger ($\approx0.09$ and $0.1$) than what we find in standard steplike reionization histories ($0.079\pm0.017$). At the same time we also find that the maximum free electron fraction allowed by the data for redshifts more than 15 is $\sim0.25$ at 95.4\% confidence limit in the case of optimistic constraint.
Taking Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History as a point of departure, the evaluation of a variety of studies on Los relámpagos de agosto serves to take inventory of how Ibargüengoitia parodies the legacy of myths about the Mexican Revolution as living history. That the historical truth of the story is lost can already be seen by looking at the frame story which allows reading the novel as a false vindication of revolutionary disputes amongst many others. By comparing the frame story of the fictitious memories of the general Arroyo with the memories of Obregón and Amaya, on the one hand, and the epilogues of Los relámpagos de agosto and Las muertas, on the other hand, a subtle and still not sufficiently appreciated construction becomes apparent: one of the narrators has simply given up in the face of history’s changeability.