1,324 research outputs found
ICSS: The International Community ‘Space’ Station: Publicness and formation of a resilient and sustainable community in a space habitat
No full textThe goal of this thesis is to propose a design for an orbital space station that incubates the future space civilization and is the base for space regulations and governance. A place that is democratizing access to space and resources, and allows for any interested individual to join and contribute to the world at large and their personal wellbeing. The goal is to design a place where a closely knitted community of makers, scientists, and artists is cultivated. They will be the decision-makers and the actors in space exploration.To learn how to do that, initially, the thesis embarks on the research of some community aspects on Earth and the way public space contributes to their cultivation in our cities. Specifically, the focus of the study is to observe and analyze the function that Het Park in Rotterdam serves to people. It is a look into the congenital and human side of living in an industrialized world and the values this brings to the community. In space, that natural side will inevitably be different or non-existing and to maintain the values that nature and the park bring to our lives we need to develop a translated alternative. The goal is to add a playful and authentic element to a potentially very machine and virtual future in space.After an introduction to the direction in which we have been heading since the industrial revolution, the research examines 4 major values taken from the park- social value, health, freedom, and engagement, to understand the importance of addressing the natural and human qualities. Those values are analyzed through park visits and sketches of people utilizing their environment and adapting it with simple means. Conclusively, the research highlights the importance of the presence of the public park in people’s lives even if we forget it or do not notice it on a daily basis and it shows how such a place can strengthen the community and make people more caring and more respectful (Cohen, et. all 2006). It identifies which are the key elements that play a role in the value that the park brings to the citizens. Thus they can be taken and appropriated to the space environment and the space station design. This research is a continuation of a previous essay by the author - “Cohousing in ‘Space’ and Time”.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Explorela
LCT-GAN - Improving the efficiency of tabular data synthesis via latent embeddings
No full textIn the past decade data-driven approaches have been at the core of many business and research models. In critical domains such as healthcare and banking, data privacy issues are very stringent. Synthetic tabular data is an emerging solution to privacy guarantee concerns. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the emerging solutions for synthesizing data. However in order to capture all relevant relationships between columns, tabular data needs to be numerically encoded. As columns might be of different types, this is a challenging task as proven by recent approaches. Throughout this paper, we focus on the dimensionality explosion problem, which leads to high-dimensional datasets alongside computational overhead and increase in training time. We introduce a novel synthesis pipeline - LCT-GAN - an improvement to the current state-of-the-art in tabular data synthesis CTAB-GAN. Our approach addresses the dimensionality explosion problem by introducing a low-dimensional embedding step via an autoencoder prior to training. It is then combined with a novel conditional GAN architecture, operating in latent space. After thorough evaluation, we observe that our solution achieves more than 30\% improvement in certain statistical metrics in comparsion to CTAB-GAN, accompanied by 5 fold decrease in size and 150 times speedup in training time for a single epoch. We successfully show that it is possible to embed data using autoencoders, and that GANs are able to learn complex relationships in latent space in the context of tabular data.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin
Search for narrow resonances below the Upsilon mesons
No full textWe have investigated the invariant mass spectrum of dimuons collected by the CDF experiment during the 1992-1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron collider to improve the limit on the existence of narrow resonances set by the experiments at the SPEAR e(+)e(-) collider. In the mass range 6.3-9.0 GeV/c(2), we derive 90% upper credible limits to the ratio of the production cross section times muonic branching fraction of possible narrow resonances to that of the Upsilon(1S) meson. In this mass range, the average limit varies from 1.7 to 0.5%. This limit is much worse at the mass of 7.2 GeV/c(2) due to an excess of 250 +/- 61 events with a width consistent with the detector resolution
Adsorption of n-pentanol from KPF6 aqueous solution on the (100) and (110) faces of Ag single crystal electrodes
No full textThe potential dependence of the adsorption of n-pentanol (NP) on the (100) and (110) faces of Ag single crystal electrodes from
aqueous KPF6 solutions has been studied at 10 mV/s potential scan rate by measuring the impedance both at constant
frequency ( f ) and by sweeping f from 11 kHz to 0.1 Hz. The adsorption of NP has been found to be strongly dependent on
crystal orientation. The results have been compared with those obtained on Ag(111) with the same kind of single crystal
preparation, as well as with Ag(100) electrolytically grown in a Teflon capillary [A. Popov, O. Velev, T. Vitanov, J. Electroanal.
Chem. 256 (1988) 405]
Epidemiological factors associated with human cystic echinococcosis: A semi-structured questionnaire from a large population-based ultrasound cross-sectional study in eastern Europe and Turkey
No full textBackground: Cystic echinococcosis (CE) is a neglected parasitic zoonosis prioritized by the WHO for control. Several studies have investigated potential risk factors for CE through questionnaires, mostly carried out on small samples, providing contrasting results. We present the analysis of risk factor questionnaires administered to participants to a large CE prevalence study conducted in Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Methods: A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 24,687 people from rural Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. CE cases were defined as individuals with abdominal CE cysts detected by ultrasound. Variables associated with CE at P < 0.20 in bivariate analysis were included into a multivariable logistic model, with a random effect to account for clustering at village level. Adjusted odds ratios (AOR) with 95% CI were used to describe the strength of associations. Data were weighted to reflect the relative distribution of the rural population in the study area by country, age group and sex. Results: Valid records from 22,027 people were analyzed. According to the main occupation in the past 20 years, "housewife" (AOR: 3.11; 95% CI: 1.51-6.41) and "retired" (AOR: 2.88; 95% CI: 1.09-7.65) showed significantly higher odds of being infected compared to non-agricultural workers. "Having relatives with CE" (AOR: 4.18; 95% CI: 1.77-9.88) was also associated with higher odds of infection. Interestingly, dog-related and food/water-related factors were not associated with infection. Conclusions: Our results point toward infection being acquired in a "domestic" rural environment and support the view that CE should be considered more a "soil-transmitted" than a "food-borne" infection. This result helps delineating the dynamics of infection transmission and has practical implications in the design of specific studies to shed light on actual sources of infection and inform control campaigns
Boolean Satisfiability with Transitivity Constraints
No full text
We consider a variant of the Boolean satisfiability problem where a subset E
of the propositional variables appearing in formula F sat encode a symmetric, transitive, binary relation over N elements. Each of these relational variables, e, i, j, for 1, expresses whether or not the relation holds between elements i and j. The task is to either find a satisfying assignment to F sat that also satisfies all transitivity constraints over the relational variables (e.g., e 1,2 ^ e 2,3 --> e 1,3), or to prove that no such assignment exists. Solving this satisfiability problem is the final and most difficult step in our decision procedure for a logic of equality with uninterpreted functions. This procedure forms the core of our tool for verifying pipelined microprocessors.
To use a conventional Boolean satisfiability checker,we augment the set of clauses expressing F
sat with clauses expressing the transitivity constraints. We consider methods to reduce the number of such clauses based on the sparse structure of the relational variables.
To use Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs), we show that for some sets E
, the OBDD representation of the transitivity constraints has exponential size for all possible variable orderings. By considering only those relational variables that occur in the OBDD representation of F
sat, our experiments show that we can readily construct an OBDD representation of the relevant transitivity constraints and thus solve the constrained satisfiability problem.
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A semiclassical surface-hopping procedure for vibrational relaxation in polyatomic molecules: model calculations
No full textThe Muddy Practice of Social Media Crowdsourcing in Bandung City
No full textThis interpretative case study investigates social media use during three urban floods in Bandung City, Indonesia. The results suggest that social media is widely used by citizens as an alternative means of emergency communication. As for the government, although the implementation of social media in Bandung City Government can be said to be a pioneer in comparison to other city governments, and Bandung governments units were required to implement social media, social media played a very limited role in crisis communication between citizens and government. Reasons for this include fragility in adoption of technology, lack of institutionalization of technology, and a mutual distrust between government and citizens, where citizens prefer to use traditional media to issue complaints and report status updates rather than government agencies. This empirical finding was found based on a multimethod study, using interview data, social media scraping, document analysis and field study as sources of data.</p
Direct Observation of the Dynamics of Latex Particles Confined inside Thinning Water-Air Films
No full textThe dynamics of micrometer-size polystyrene latex particles confined in thinning foam films was
investigated by microscopic interferometric observation. The behavior of the entrapped particles depends
on the mobility of the film surfaces, the particle concentration, hydrophobicity, and rate of film formation.
When the films were stabilized by sodium dodecyl sulfate, no entrapment of particles between the surfaces
was possible. When protein was used as a stabilizer, a limited number of particles were caught inside
the film area due to the decreased mobility of the interfaces. In this case, extraordinary long-ranged (>100
Ìm) capillary attraction leads to two-dimensional (2D) particle aggregation. A major change occurs when
the microspheres are partially hydrophobized by the presence of cationic surfactant. After the foam films
are opened and closed a few times, a layer of particles simultaneously adsorbed to the two interfaces is
formed, which sterically inhibits any further film opening and thinning. The particles within this layer
show an excellent 2D hexagonal ordering. The experimental data are relevant to the dynamics of defects
in coating films, Pickering emulsions, and particle assembly into 2D arrays
Quench Performance and Field Quality of FNAL Twin-Aperture 11 T NbSn Dipole Model for LHC Upgrades
No full textA 2 m long single-aperture dipole demonstrator and two 1 m long single-aperture models based on NbSn superconductor have been built and tested at FNAL. The two 1 m long collared coils were then assembled in a twin-aperture NbSn dipole demonstrator compatible with the LHC main dipole and tested in two thermal cycles. This paper summarizes the quench performance of the FNAL twin-aperture NbSn 11 T dipole in the temperature range of 1.9-4.5 K. The results of magnetic measurements for one of the two apertures are also presented. Test results are compared to the performance of coils in a single-aperture configuration. A summary of quench propagation studies in both apertures is given
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