Ebtehal M. Jaffer, Adil Fadhil Abbas , Suhad A. Al-Knaan
The study aimed to evaluate the water quality of East Al-Hammar Marsh in Basrah, Iraq, by utilizing phytoplankton as a biological indicator and applying Palmer's Algal PollutionIndex Phytoplankton samples were collected using a 20 μm mesh size net from three stations (S1 in Harir,S2 in Al Salal, and S3 in Al Barka) in East Al-Hammar Marsh between 2019 and 2020 during the winter months (December, January, and February) and summer months (June, July, and August). Palmer’s Index was used to evaluate the water quality of Al-Hammar Marsh based on both algae genus and species composition.The overall scores for the S1, S2, and S3 algae genera pollution index in the winter months were 35, 28, and 30 respectively. In summer, the scores for the same stations were 21, 15, and 22, respectively. For the algae species pollution index, winter scores were 16, 20, and 22, and summer scores were 21, 18, and 16, respectively. According to the index, a total score of 15 to 20 indicates an organicpollution, and more than 20 indicates a high organic pollution.The genera with tolerance to pollution were Cyanophyta, like OscillatoriaVaucher ex Gomont,1892 and PhormidiumKützing ex Gomont,1892; Bacillariophyta, like CyclotellaKützing, 1846Gomphonema C.G. Ehrenberg,1832, NaviculaBory de Saint-Vincent,1822, Nitzschia Hassall, 1845,SynedraEhrenberg,1830, and Chlorophyta, like PandorinaBory de Saint-Vincent, 1824, ScenedesmusMeyen, 1829, Ankistrodesmus Corda, 1838, ChlamydomonasEhrenberg, 1833, and Euglenophyta, like EuglenaEhrenberg, 1830and PhacusDujardin, 1841. The Palmer index was an important instrument for displaying the probability of pollution in surface water. Compared to the species index, the Palmer index of genera was more useful for the same sampling station, the pollution in the form of the Palmer index varies slightly over time from winter to summer or geographically along the water courses. Generally speaking, organic contamination affects the Al-Hammar Marsh’ssurface water in most of the sampled stations.
Museums. Collectors and collecting, Natural history (General)
Imitation learning method has shown immense promise for robotic manipulation, yet its practical deployment is fundamentally constrained by the data scarcity. Despite prior work on collecting large-scale datasets, there still remains a significant gap to robust spatial generalization. We identify a key limitation: individual trajectories, regardless of their length, are typically collected from a \emph{single, static spatial configuration} of the environment. This includes fixed object and target spatial positions as well as unchanging camera viewpoints, which significantly restricts the diversity of spatial information available for learning. To address this critical bottleneck in data efficiency, we propose \textbf{MOtion-Based Variability Enhancement} (\emph{MOVE}), a simple yet effective data collection paradigm that enables the acquisition of richer spatial information from dynamic demonstrations. Our core contribution is an augmentation strategy that injects motion into any movable objects within the environment for each demonstration. This process implicitly generates a dense and diverse set of spatial configurations within a single trajectory. We conduct extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments to validate our approach. For example, in simulation tasks requiring strong spatial generalization, \emph{MOVE} achieves an average success rate of 39.1\%, a 76.1\% relative improvement over the static data collection paradigm (22.2\%), and yields up to 2--5$\times$ gains in data efficiency on certain tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucywang720/MOVE.
The article will take into consideration the MuCa – Museo della Cantieristica di Monfalcone. It reflects the fragmented reality of the shipbuilding industry and the effects that it had on the local community. The museum engages with a storytelling aimed at acknowledging the impact that the Cosulich family, founder of the shipyard in 1908 and of its company town, had on the economy of the Venezia-Giulia and of the city of Monfalcone. The aim of the article will be that of exploring how the museum manages to shift from historical content to economic content by interweaving the presence of trained guides and a multimedia display that, on the other hand, barely scratches the surface of the different topics covered. The analysis will focus on how the institution communicates delicate topics with the public, such as the passage from the Habsburg monarchy to the Italian autarky as well as the tragedy of asbestos, and whether the museographic approach balances a constant need for detailed studies.
Natural history museums often emphasize technical expertise, which can lead to the isolation of their collections from broader political, cultural, and social contexts. This trend is similarly observed in the presentation of mineral collections, where cultural, historical, and ethical dimensions are frequently overlooked. However, museums with mineral displays have the potential to adopt engagement strategies that foreground the anthropological aspects of these collections. A noteworthy example of this integrative approach is found at the Museum of Civilizations in Rome. This museum hosts ISPRA’s (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale – Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) geological and historical collections, former collections from the Museum of Italian Africa, and contemporary artworks. The institution merges these aesthetic, scientific, and anthropological collections to advance a decolonized narrative. It also incorporates art installations that enhance the understanding of cultural and political issues facing anthropology and science museums today. This article uses the museum’s innovative approach as a case study to explore the intersection of scientific and historical discourses.
With the help of experimental reproduction of archaeological artefacts, it is possible to study how and from which materials that objects might have been made in the Iron Age. Reproductions are carried out with items such as weapons, accessories, jewellery, buildings, food, ceramics, tools, working methods, and many others. This reproduction aimed to determine the smithing methods of one iron fibula from the 12-piece collection in the Salme II Ship Burial on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia. Fibula no SM10602:325 from the distal end of the right femur of skeleton IV (F) was selected for the work (See Figures 1 and 2). Various fibulas were made in the Iron Age using various techniques, mainly from bronze alloys and precious metals. At the beginning of the Viking Age, iron fibulas were forged mainly from bloomery iron. These type 7th and 8th century fibulas have been found in archaeological excavations in Nordic countries, south-western Finland in Ostrobothnia, and Häme provinces (See Figure 4). One fibula was found in Latvia, but none in Estonia, before the archaeological excavations of the Salme ship burials.
Jonathan Erskine, Matt Clifford, Alexander Hepburn
et al.
Human-Computer Interaction has been shown to lead to improvements in machine learning systems by boosting model performance, accelerating learning and building user confidence. In this work, we aim to alleviate the expectation that human annotators adapt to the constraints imposed by traditional labels by allowing for extra flexibility in the form that supervision information is collected. For this, we propose a human-machine learning interface for binary classification tasks which enables human annotators to utilise counterfactual examples to complement standard binary labels as annotations for a dataset. Finally we discuss the challenges in future extensions of this work.
We explore a paradox of collective action and certainty in science wherein the more scientists research together, the less that work contributes to the value of their collective certainty. When scientists address similar problems and share data, methods, and collaborators, their understanding of and trust in their colleagues' research rises, a quality required for scientific advance. This increases the positive reinforcement scientists receive for shared beliefs as they become more dependent on their colleagues' knowledge, interests, and findings. This collective action increases the potential for scientists to reside in epistemic ''bubbles'' that limit their capacity to make new discoveries or have their discoveries generalize. In short, as scientists grow closer, their experience of scientific validity rises as the likelihood of genuine replication falls, creating a trade-off between certainty and truth.
Large archival collections, such as email or government documents, must be manually reviewed to identify any sensitive information before the collection can be released publicly. Sensitivity classification has received a lot of attention in the literature. However, more recently, there has been increasing interest in developing sensitivity-aware search engines that can provide users with relevant search results, while ensuring that no sensitive documents are returned to the user. Sensitivity-aware search would mitigate the need for a manual sensitivity review prior to collections being made available publicly. To develop such systems, there is a need for test collections that contain relevance assessments for a set of information needs as well as ground-truth labels for a variety of sensitivity categories. The well-known Enron email collection contains a classification ground-truth that can be used to represent sensitive information, e.g., the Purely Personal and Personal but in Professional Context categories can be used to represent sensitive personal information. However, the existing Enron collection does not contain a set of information needs and relevance assessments. In this work, we present a collection of fifty information needs (topics) with crowdsourced query formulations (3 per topic) and relevance assessments (11,471 in total) for the Enron collection (mean number of relevant documents per topic = 11, variance = 34.7). The developed information needs, queries and relevance judgements are available on GitHub and will be available along with the existing Enron collection through the popular ir_datasets library. Our proposed collection results in the first freely available test collection for developing sensitivity-aware search systems.
Orion Smedley, Vighnesh Natarajan, Oscar Jaramillo
et al.
Fluorescence collection from individual emitters plays a key role in state detection and remote entanglement generation, fundamental functionalities in many quantum platforms. Planar photonics have been demonstrated for robust and scalable addressing of trapped-ion systems, motivating consideration of similar elements for the complementary challenge of photon collection. Here, using an argument from the reciprocity principle, we show that far-field photon collection efficiency can be simply expressed in terms of the fields associated with the collection optic at the emitter position alone. We calculate collection efficiencies into ideal paraxial and fully vectorial focused Gaussian modes parameterized in terms of focal waist, and further quantify the modest enhancements possible with more general beam profiles, establishing design requirements for efficient collection. Towards practical implementation, we design, fabricate, and characterize two diffractive collection elements operating at $λ=397$ nm; a forward emitting design is predicted to offer 0.25% collection efficiency into a single waveguide mode, while a more efficient reverse-emitting design offers $1.14\%$ collection efficiency, albeit with more demanding fabrication requirements. Close agreement between simulated and measured emission for both designs indicates practicality of these collection efficiencies, and we indicate avenues to improved devices approaching the limits predicted for ideal beams. We point out a particularly simple integrated waveguide configuration for polarization-based remote entanglement generation enabled by integrated collection.
As a nationalised industry during the Cold War, Britain’s railways were required to undertake civil defence work to prepare for a future conflict. Civil engineers that engaged with civil defence work were required to understand the destructive capacity of first atomic and later hydrogen weapons as well as the threats of nuclear fallout and radiation so that they could design and build structures capable of withstanding them. At first, these civil engineers objected as the work was beyond their expertise. But from 1952 onwards, each region of Britain’s railways, led by their civil engineering departments, began to build infrastructure and train their staff to prepare for the continued functioning of the railways following a nuclear attack. The central focus of railway civil defence changed as the bomb threat itself evolved, but its central purpose was always more focused on repair work and the assistance of military operations over civilian evacuations. However, shackled to guidance and limited available funding from the UK’s Ministry of Transport and the Home Office, planning was frequently delayed or scaled back. By the mid-1960s, alongside most other British civil defence programmes, the planning was abandoned and government funding withdrawn. But despite the myriad of setbacks and funding disappointments, those that undertook the railways’ civil defence planning and training during the early Cold War saw the value in their work and hoped to contribute to a national effort to survive and rebuild should the worst ever occur.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Museums. Collectors and collecting
El presente artículo revela nuevos datos sobre la biografía artística de Antonio Pérez Rubio. Este prolífico autor, dedicado mayoritariamente a la pintura de género de inspiración histórica, no ha recibido apenas atención de la historiografía artística.
A través del estudio de fuentes en archivos y hemerotecas, además de la localización de relevantes obras, se reconstruye su trayectoria dedicada a participar en las Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes y en muestras particulares, así como en iniciativas de
trascendencia en el contexto del asociacionismo artístico madrileño. También se considera a Pérez Rubio como caso de estudio en
la polémica sobre la españolidad en la pintura, el diálogo con los maestros de la tradición nacional y la problemática situación socioeconómica de los pintores españoles del siglo XIX.
Arthur France-Lanord, Hadrien Vroylandt, Mathieu Salanne
et al.
Identifying optimal collective variables to model transformations, using atomic-scale simulations, is a long-standing challenge. We propose a new method for the generation, optimization, and comparison of collective variables, which can be thought of as a data-driven generalization of the path collective variable concept. It consists in a kernel ridge regression of the committor probability, which encodes a transformation's progress. The resulting collective variable is one-dimensional, interpretable, and differentiable, making it appropriate for enhanced sampling simulations requiring biasing. We demonstrate the validity of the method on two different applications: a precipitation model, and the association of Li$^+$ and F$^-$ in water. For the former, we show that global descriptors such as the permutation invariant vector allow to reach an accuracy far from the one achieved \textit{via} simpler, more intuitive variables. For the latter, we show that information correlated with the transformation mechanism is contained in the first solvation shell only, and that inertial effects prevent the derivation of optimal collective variables from the atomic positions only.
En el presente trabajo analizamos un escarabeo egipcio en piedra dura (pensamos que se trata de granodiorita) que porta en su base dos praenomina regios, la imagen de un rey entronizado sobre una barca y una representación del dios Onuris. Si tipológicamente corresponde a un tipo bien establecido desde Wiese, desde un punto de vista técnico ha sido objeto de una ejecución soberbia que se completó (al menos en ciertas zonas) con pan de oro del que aún quedan restos en algunos lugares del amuleto.
History of the arts, Museums. Collectors and collecting
Fingerprinting-based approaches are particularly suitable for deploying indoor positioning systems for pedestrians with minimal infrastructure costs. The accuracy of the method, however, strongly depends on the quality of collected labeled fingerprints within the calibration phase, which is a tedious process when done manually in a static fashion. We present VI-SLAM2tag, a system for auto-labeling of dynamically collected fingerprints using the visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI-SLAM) module of ARCore. ARCore occasionally updates its internal coordinate system. Mapping the entire trajectory to a target coordinate system via a single transformation thus results in large drift effects. To solve this, we propose a strategy for determining locally optimal sub-trajectory transformations. Our system is evaluated with respect to the accuracy of the generated position labels using a geodetic tracking system. We achieve an average labeling error of roughly 50 cm for trajectories of up to 15 minutes, which is sufficient for fingerprinting-based localization. We demonstrate this by collecting a multi-floor dataset including WLAN and IMU data and show how it can be used to train neural network based models that achieve a positioning accuracy of roughly 2 m. VI-SLAM2tag and the dataset are made publicly available.
Noufal Jaseem, Sai Vinjanampathy, Victor Mukherjee
We study fluctuations in many-body quantum heat engines operating in the presence of collective system-bath interactions. We show that collective effects in open quantum systems can be harnessed to develop highly consistent many-body quantum engines. We consider quantum Otto engines, modeled by $n$ spins collectively coupled to thermal baths. Our results show that collective effects can significantly reduce the fluctuations in the output work, quantified by high reliability ($r$) and low thermodynamic uncertainty. In contrast to independent engines, we demonstrate a quadratic enhancement of the reliability $r$ for their collective counterparts. We extend our analysis to the case of interacting spin models commonly studied in many-body physics, such as the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model, thereby broadening the regime of applicability of collective effects in quantum thermal machines significantly. This paves the way forward for realistic collective quantum thermal machines in many body systems.
In previous replication studies and experiments, a lunate jade artifact from the Pre-Classic/Formative period (1500 BC-AD 250) of Mesoamerica was analysed, researched, and tested for its similarities to the crescent weight, a specialized type of loom weight found in ancient Central and Southern Europe. These analyses successfully established that even a form of this artifact made of wood, shell, or other common, everyday materials would have served effectively as a loom weight that was comparable in form and function to the European crescent weight for warp-weighted weaving looms; in addition, further experiments showed that this artifact, and the European crescent weights, can effectively and efficiently be used to create different types of sheds for weaving both basic and more complex textile patterns, greatly reducing the need to use a pick or batten to lift individual warp threads or the need for complex groups of heddles. In this current project, further replication studies serve as a pragmatic method for testing the lunate artifacts as specialized weights for twining on warp-weighted looms. The efficacy of the artifacts for warp twining and for weft twining is tested using methodologies that were developed to test the function of the European crescent weights. Also explored are new possibilities for the practical applications of these types of weights as specialized twining tools.
Valdemar Švábenský, Jan Vykopal, Daniel Tovarňák
et al.
When learning cybersecurity, operating systems, or networking, students perform practical tasks using a broad range of command-line tools. Collecting and analyzing data about the command usage can reveal valuable insights into how students progress and where they make mistakes. However, few learning environments support recording and inspecting command-line inputs, and setting up an efficient infrastructure for this purpose is challenging. To aid engineering and computing educators, we share the design and implementation of an open-source toolset for logging commands that students execute on Linux machines. Compared to basic solutions, such as shell history files, the toolset's added value is threefold. 1) Its configuration is automated so that it can be easily used in classes on different topics. 2) It collects metadata about the command execution, such as a timestamp, hostname, and IP address. 3) Data are instantly forwarded to central storage in a unified, semi-structured format. This enables automated processing, both in real-time and post hoc, to enhance the instructors' understanding of student actions. The toolset works independently of the teaching content, the training network's topology, or the number of students working in parallel. We demonstrated the toolset's value in two learning environments at four training sessions. Over two semesters, 50 students played educational cybersecurity games using a Linux command-line interface. Each training session lasted approximately two hours, during which we recorded 4439 shell commands. The semi-automated data analysis revealed solution patterns, used tools, and misconceptions of students. Our insights from creating the toolset and applying it in teaching practice are relevant for instructors, researchers, and developers of learning environments. We provide the software and data resulting from this work so that others can use them.