563 research outputs found
Observed relationships between El Niño-Southern Oscillation, rainfall variability and vegetation and fire history on Halmahera, Maluku, Indonesia
No full textA temporally high-resolution palynological study of the uppermost section of core MD98-2180 from Kau Bay, Halmahera, Indonesia, provides a vegetation and fire record covering the last 250 years. The record is compared with the Maluku Rainfall Index, Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and southern hemisphere winter sea surface temperatures (SST) for the central Pacific Ocean based on instrumental data, as well as reconstructions of the SOI and the central Pacific SST and historically recorded El Nino events. The results show that significant El Nino events are generally associated with increased representation of Dipterocarpaceae pollen, probably reflecting the mass-flowering of this taxon during El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) droughts, and elevated charcoal levels, reflecting a greater incidence of fires during these extremely dry periods, while humid phases show increased fern numbers. Our findings demonstrate that pollen records 'ecological' in scale can provide useful additional proxy records of ENSO events
Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation
No full textThe desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters
Hydrogen from Radiolysis of Aqueous Fluid Inclusions during Diagenesis
No full textAcknowledgments We are grateful to J. Bowie and J. Still for skilled technical support and the staff at ICL-UK’s Boulby mine (especially Thomas Edwards), STFC’s Boulby underground Laboratory and the UK Centre for Astrobiology MINAR programme team (especially Sean Paling) for their support and supervised access to the site. The critical comments of two reviewers helped to improve the manuscript. Author Contributions John Parnell undertook the sampling. Nigel Blamey performed all analytical work. John Parnell wrote the manuscript.Peer reviewe
L’assurance-vie face aux nouveaux instruments financiers et à la déréglementation
No full textDeregulation is the outcome of the unification of the industry throughout Europe. Insurance companies have been slow to react to
the sweeping change we are witnessing. This is partly owing to the
legislation in force in each of the member countries. But, with the
emergence of a single European market, the situation is beginning to
change.
According to the author, Nigel J. Sedgewick, insurers, while
remaining competitive, should adopt a more offensive stance by not
only gaining more control over general expenses, but also by
broadening their range of products to include caps, floors, swaps
and others
A standing ovation for Nigel: An informal study
No full textThis article analyses a series of emails thanking Nigel for his stewardship of JASSS and the characteristics of their authors. It identifies a correlation between two measures of author activity in social simulation research, but no pattern between these activity measures and the email timing. Instead, the sequence suggests a classic standing ovation effect.</p
Distributed human computation framework for linked data co-reference resolution
No full textDistributed Human Computation (DHC) is a technique used to solve computational problems by incorporating the collaborative effort of a large number of humans. It is also a solution to AI-complete problems such as natural language processing. The Semantic Web with its root in AI is envisioned to be a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with minimal integration costs. There are many research problems in the Semantic Web that are considered as AI-complete problems. An example is co-reference resolution, which involves determining whether different URIs refer to the same entity. This is considered to be a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large-scale Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for building a DHC system on top of the Linked Data Cloud to solve various computational problems. To demonstrate the concept, we are focusing on handling the co-reference resolution in the Semantic Web when integrating distributed datasets. The traditional way to solve this problem is to design machine-learning algorithms. However, they are often computationally expensive, error-prone and do not scale. We designed a DHC system named iamResearcher, which solves the scientific publication author identity co-reference problem when integrating distributed bibliographic datasets. In our system, we aggregated 6 million bibliographic data from various publication repositories. Users can sign up to the system to audit and align their own publications, thus solving the co-reference problem in a distributed manner. The aggregated results are published to the Linked Data Cloud
Measure Attractors For Stochastic Navier-Stokes Equations
No full text: We show existence of measure attractors for 2-D stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with general multiplicative noise. Keywords: Stochastic Navier--Stokes equations, measure attractors AMS subject classification: Primary: 35Q30, 60H15, 60G60; Secondary: 35R60, 76D05, 60J25 The research of the first author was supported by an EPSRC Visiting Fellowship at the University of Hull and also partially by the KBN grant 2PO3A 064 08. Submitted to EJP on 15 May, 1997. Final version accepted on May 20, 1998. MEASURE ATTRACTORS FOR STOCHASTIC NAVIER--STOKES EQUATIONS MAREK CAPI ' NSKI AND NIGEL J. CUTLAND Abstract. We show existence of measure attractors for 2-D stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with general multiplicative noise. 1. Introduction This paper is concerned with existence of attractors in connection with stochastic Navier-Stokes equations in dimension 2. For deterministic Navier-Stokes equations, the existence of a global attractor in dimension 2 goes back to the work of Ladyzh..
Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use
No full textFire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved
Detection of Cognitive Features from Web Resources in Support of Cultural Modeling and Analysis
No full textThe World Wide Web serves as a valuable source of culture-relevant information, which can be used to support cultural modeling and analysis activities. Part of the challenge in exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information relates to the need to detect and extract information about beliefs, attitudes, and values from a variety of different resources. The Web thus features a rich variety of information resources, and these are seldom categorized with respect to the dimensions in which cultural analysts are interested. Exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information therefore requires techniques and approaches that enable cultural analysts to extract relevant information and organize extracted content in various ways. In this paper, we outline an approach to assist cultural analysts in the extraction and organization of relevant information. We show techniques that can be used to extract information about the attitudes, beliefs, and values of individuals, and how this data can, in turn, be used to support cultural modeling and analysis
The microscale cooling effects of water sensitive urban design and irrigation in a suburban environment
No full text© 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria. Prolonged drought has threatened traditional potable urban water supplies in Australian cities, reducing capability to adapt to climate change and mitigate against extreme. Integrated urban water management (IUWM) approaches, such as water sensitive urban design (WSUD), reduce the reliance on centralised potable water supply systems and provide a means for retaining water in the urban environment through stormwater harvesting and reuse. This study examines the potential for WSUD to provide cooling benefits and reduce human exposure and heat stress and thermal discomfort. A high-resolution observational field campaign, measuring surface level microclimate variables and remotely sensed land surface characteristics, was conducted in a mixed residential suburb containing WSUD in Adelaide, South Australia. Clear evidence was found that WSUD features and irrigation can reduce surface temperature (T s ) and air temperature (T a ) and improve human thermal comfort (HTC) in urban environments. The average 3 pm T a near water bodies was found to be up to 1.8 °C cooler than the domain maximum. Cooling was broadly observed in the area 50 m downwind of lakes and wetlands. Design and placement of water bodies were found to affect their cooling effectiveness. HTC was improved by proximity to WSUD features, but shading and ventilation were also effective at improving thermal comfort. This study demonstrates that WSUD can be used to cool urban microclimates, while simultaneously achieving other environmental benefits, such as improved stream ecology and flood mitigation.sponsorship: Ashley Broadbent was funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities. While at Arizona State University, Ashley Broadbent was supported by NSF Sustainability Research Network (SRN) Cooperative Agreement 1444758, NSF grant EAR-1204774, and NSF SES-1520803. Nigel Tapper and Andrew Coutts are funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities. The contribution of Matthias Demuzere is funded by the Flemish regional government through a contract as a FWO (Fund for Scientific Research) post-doctoral research fellow. We are indebted to all those who assisted during the Mawson Lakes field campaign: Darren Hocking, Emma White, Naim Daliri-Milani, Stephen Livesley, and Margaret Loughnan. Finally, a sincere thank you to the two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions and comments. (Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, NSF Sustainability Research Network (SRN)|1444758, NSF|EAR-1204774, NSF|SES-1520803, Flemish regional government through a contract as a FWO (Fund for Scientific Research) post-doctoral research fellow, Directorate For Geosciences; Division Of Earth Sciences|1204774)status: Publishe
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