A new monotypic genus and species from China, \u3cem\u3eLangxie feti\u3c/em\u3e gen. et sp. n. (Scorpiones: Buthidae)

A new monotypic genus, Langxie gen. n., is described from Xizang (Tibet), China. The new genus shares an important morphological character with Afrolychas Kovařík, 2019: absence of external accessory denticles (EADs) along the sixth row of median denticles (MDs) on the pedipalp movable finger. Langxie gen. n. is different from Afrolychas in the following aspects: loss of EAD near the proximally enlarged MD within each row (i. e., loss of all EAD on the movable finger; this also distinguishes the new genus from other related genera in the “(Ananteris + Isometrus)” clade (Štundlová et al., 2022)), subaculear tubercle armed with or without a secondary tubercle dorsally, immaculate color pattern, more slender appendages and metasoma, and less sexually dimorphic pectines. Langxie gen. n. further differs from another geographically close genus, Himalayotityobuthus Lourenço, 1997, by the presence of highly developed pectinal fulcra (vs. absent in Himalayotityobuthus), six rows of MDs on the pedipalp movable finger (vs. 7–8 in Himalayotityobuthus) and five pairs of lateral ocelli (vs. 3 in Himalayotityobuthus). The new species, Langxie feti sp. n., is small and slender, exhibiting no obvious sexual dimorphism in pedipalp and metasoma, but the sexes are visibly different in the relative size of median ocelli and coarseness of carapacial granulation. Lattice microstructures are prominently developed on its cuticle

Three more species of \u3cem\u3eEuscorpius\u3c/em\u3e confirmed for Greece (Scorpiones: Euscorpiidae)

In Greece, scorpion genus Euscorpius has been insufficiently studied. Taxonomy of several species and subspecies has been inconsistent and confusing. We provide new morphological data and redescriptions of type specimens of three “old” taxa, described from Greece and formerly listed under a “catch-all” taxon Euscorpius carpathicus. We elevate to, or confirm at species status: Euscorpius scaber Birula, 1900 (type locality: Mt. Athos), E. candiota Birula, 1903 (type locality: Heraklion, Crete), and E. ossae Di Caporiacco, 1950, stat.n. (type locality: Mt. Ossa, Thessaly). Species-level separation of these taxa is also confirmed by multiple species delimitation methods implemented on the phylogenetic data generated using four different DNA markers

Water bear with barbels of a catfish : a new Asian Cornechiniscus (Heterotardigrada: Echiniscidae) illuminates evolution of the genus

Cornechiniscus Maucci & Ramazzotti, 1981 is a species-poor heterotardigrade genus with peculiar, horn-shaped appendages A. It can be found in mosses and lichens growing on dusty soils on all continents except for Australasia and Antarctica, with presumably Central Asia as the main place of species radiation. A recent, COI and ITS-1-based phylogeny elucidated phylogenetic relationships between 5 out of 10 Cornechiniscus species, and aided the integrative description of C. imperfectus Gąsiorek & Michalczyk, 2020 from mountains of Northern Kyrgyzstan. However, the other 5 species remained unplaced on the generic evolutionary tree. Using new samples from Northern Kyrgyzstan, Italy and Argentina, I extracted new representatives of the genus and updated the genus phylogeny in the frame of integrated taxonomic approach (light and scanning microscopy, DNA sequencing of four markers: 18S rRNA, 28S rRNA, ITS-1, and COI). A new Kyrgyz species is dioecious and necessitates modifying the genus diagnosis to accommodate its cirri prolongation that contrasts with bulbous peribuccal cirri typical for Cornechiniscus. Furthermore, it enhances the hypothesis on the Central Asian origin of the genus. Morphologically, C. mystacinus sp. nov. most closely resembles C. tibetanus (Maucci, 1979) by its large body size (adult females ~500 μm on average), strongly heteronych and smooth claws, and by the development of spines in the lateral positions C–E and at the posterior margin of the pseudosegmental plate IV’. I demonstrated the sister relationship between C. holmeni (Petersen, 1951) and C. imperfectus, previously hypothesised based on their morphological similarity. Cornechiniscus lobatus (Ramazzotti, 1943) can be considered a subcosmopolitan taxon since it certainly occurs in the Holarctic and Neotropics

Evolving Clustering Algorithms And Their Application For Condition Monitoring, Diagnostics, & Prognostics

Applications of Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) technology requires effective yet generic data driven methods capable of carrying out diagnostics and prognostics tasks without detailed domain knowledge and human intervention. Improved system availability, operational safety, and enhanced logistics and supply chain performance could be achieved, with the widespread deployment of CBM, at a lower cost level. This dissertation focuses on the development of a Mutual Information based Recursive Gustafson-Kessel-Like (MIRGKL) clustering algorithm which operates recursively to identify underlying model structure and parameters from stream type data. Inspired by the Evolving Gustafson-Kessel-like Clustering (eGKL) algorithm, we applied the notion of mutual information to the well-known Mahalanobis distance as the governing similarity measure throughout. This is also a special case of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence where between-cluster shape information (governed by the determinant and trace of the covariance matrix) is omitted and is only applicable in the case of normally distributed data. In the cluster assignment and consolidation process, we proposed the use of the Chi-square statistic with the provision of having different probability thresholds. Due to the symmetry and boundedness property brought in by the mutual information formulation, we have shown with real-world data that the algorithm’s performance becomes less sensitive to the same range of probability thresholds which makes system tuning a simpler task in practice. As a result, improvement demonstrated by the proposed algorithm has implications in improving generic data driven methods for diagnostics, prognostics, generic function approximations and knowledge extractions for stream type of data. The work in this dissertation demonstrates MIRGKL’s effectiveness in clustering and knowledge representation and shows promising results in diagnostics and prognostics applications

Sistemas granulares evolutivos

Orientador: Fernando Antonio Campos GomideTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Recentemente tem-se observado um crescente interesse em abordagens de modelagem computacional para lidar com fluxos de dados do mundo real. Métodos e algoritmos têm sido propostos para obtenção de conhecimento a partir de conjuntos de dados muito grandes e, a princípio, sem valor aparente. Este trabalho apresenta uma plataforma computacional para modelagem granular evolutiva de fluxos de dados incertos. Sistemas granulares evolutivos abrangem uma variedade de abordagens para modelagem on-line inspiradas na forma com que os humanos lidam com a complexidade. Esses sistemas exploram o fluxo de informação em ambiente dinâmico e extrai disso modelos que podem ser linguisticamente entendidos. Particularmente, a granulação da informação é uma técnica natural para dispensar atenção a detalhes desnecessários e enfatizar transparência, interpretabilidade e escalabilidade de sistemas de informação. Dados incertos (granulares) surgem a partir de percepções ou descrições imprecisas do valor de uma variável. De maneira geral, vários fatores podem afetar a escolha da representação dos dados tal que o objeto representativo reflita o significado do conceito que ele está sendo usado para representar. Neste trabalho são considerados dados numéricos, intervalares e fuzzy; e modelos intervalares, fuzzy e neuro-fuzzy. A aprendizagem de sistemas granulares é baseada em algoritmos incrementais que constroem a estrutura do modelo sem conhecimento anterior sobre o processo e adapta os parâmetros do modelo sempre que necessário. Este paradigma de aprendizagem é particularmente importante uma vez que ele evita a reconstrução e o retreinamento do modelo quando o ambiente muda. Exemplos de aplicação em classificação, aproximação de função, predição de séries temporais e controle usando dados sintéticos e reais ilustram a utilidade das abordagens de modelagem granular propostas. O comportamento de fluxos de dados não-estacionários com mudanças graduais e abruptas de regime é também analisado dentro do paradigma de computação granular evolutiva. Realçamos o papel da computação intervalar, fuzzy e neuro-fuzzy em processar dados incertos e prover soluções aproximadas de alta qualidade e sumário de regras de conjuntos de dados de entrada e saída. As abordagens e o paradigma introduzidos constituem uma extensão natural de sistemas inteligentes evolutivos para processamento de dados numéricos a sistemas granulares evolutivos para processamento de dados granularesAbstract: In recent years there has been increasing interest in computational modeling approaches to deal with real-world data streams. Methods and algorithms have been proposed to uncover meaningful knowledge from very large (often unbounded) data sets in principle with no apparent value. This thesis introduces a framework for evolving granular modeling of uncertain data streams. Evolving granular systems comprise an array of online modeling approaches inspired by the way in which humans deal with complexity. These systems explore the information flow in dynamic environments and derive from it models that can be linguistically understood. Particularly, information granulation is a natural technique to dispense unnecessary details and emphasize transparency, interpretability and scalability of information systems. Uncertain (granular) data arise from imprecise perception or description of the value of a variable. Broadly stated, various factors can affect one's choice of data representation such that the representing object conveys the meaning of the concept it is being used to represent. Of particular concern to this work are numerical, interval, and fuzzy types of granular data; and interval, fuzzy, and neurofuzzy modeling frameworks. Learning in evolving granular systems is based on incremental algorithms that build model structure from scratch on a per-sample basis and adapt model parameters whenever necessary. This learning paradigm is meaningful once it avoids redesigning and retraining models all along if the system changes. Application examples in classification, function approximation, time-series prediction and control using real and synthetic data illustrate the usefulness of the granular approaches and framework proposed. The behavior of nonstationary data streams with gradual and abrupt regime shifts is also analyzed in the realm of evolving granular computing. We shed light upon the role of interval, fuzzy, and neurofuzzy computing in processing uncertain data and providing high-quality approximate solutions and rule summary of input-output data sets. The approaches and framework introduced constitute a natural extension of evolving intelligent systems over numeric data streams to evolving granular systems over granular data streamsDoutoradoAutomaçãoDoutor em Engenharia Elétric

Leaves that Sway: Gold Xianbei Cap Ornaments from Northeast China

Over the last fifty years, rich finds of gold objects have been uncovered in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. These tombs belonged to a tribe of steppe nomads called the Murong Xianbei who settled north of the Great Wall during the Han dynasty and established a succession of short-lived states called Yan that ruled parts of Northeast Asia during the third to fifth centuries CE. Until now, the history of the Murong and the rapidly emerging field of Murong archaeology have been published almost exclusively in Chinese. This dissertation seeks to rectify the lack of Western scholarship about this unique border population and their cultural identity as expressed though gold personal adornments. The gold objects in Murong tombs are typically decorated with some combination of openwork and pendant gold leaves attached by wires, some taking the form of trees or antlers. These were probably affixed to fabric caps and have been associated with ornaments described in the Chinese histories as buyao (“step-sway”) ornaments because their thin sheet gold leaves tremble and sway with each step the wearer takes. However, leaf-covered gold crowns and headdresses excavated from tombs across Central Asia, Western Asia, and the Mediterranean have also been proposed as prototypes. This dissertation considers the existing textual and visual data supporting arguments for local and western origins and arrives at new conclusions concerning the relationships between Murong artisans and their counterparts in China, Central Asia, and the Near East though the careful study of the visible traces of the manufacturing process

Evidence Report: Risk of Inadequate Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction (HCI) encompasses all the methods by which humans and computer-based systems communicate, share information, and accomplish tasks. When HCI is poorly designed, crews have difficulty entering, navigating, accessing, and understanding information. HCI has rarely been studied in an operational spaceflight context, and detailed performance data that would support evaluation of HCI have not been collected; thus, we draw much of our evidence from post-spaceflight crew comments, and from other safety-critical domains like ground-based power plants, and aviation. Additionally, there is a concern that any potential or real issues to date may have been masked by the fact that crews have near constant access to ground controllers, who monitor for errors, correct mistakes, and provide additional information needed to complete tasks. We do not know what types of HCI issues might arise without this "safety net". Exploration missions will test this concern, as crews may be operating autonomously due to communication delays and blackouts. Crew survival will be heavily dependent on available electronic information for just-in-time training, procedure execution, and vehicle or system maintenance; hence, the criticality of the Risk of Inadequate HCI. Future work must focus on identifying the most important contributing risk factors, evaluating their contribution to the overall risk, and developing appropriate mitigations. The Risk of Inadequate HCI includes eight core contributing factors based on the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS): (1) Requirements, policies, and design processes, (2) Information resources and support, (3) Allocation of attention, (4) Cognitive overload, (5) Environmentally induced perceptual changes, (6) Misperception and misinterpretation of displayed information, (7) Spatial disorientation, and (8) Displays and controls

The role of participatory workshops in investigating narrative and sound ecologies in the design of an ambient intelligence audio display

We describe two participatory workshops conducted to support design decisions in the making of the audio display for an ambient intelligent game platform. The workshops discussed here explore specific issues of players’ interactions with sound and auditory display design. The workshops helped move our design process forward by specifying the role of narrative and sound ecologies in our design. They clarified the role of sound in creating narrative coherence, guiding player actions, and supporting group interaction. We describe the workshops, the auditory display issues we addressed, discuss how the workshops helped inform our subsequent design, and extend recommendations on how participatory workshops can be used by other designers of auditory displays

Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Beryllium Technology (BeWS-15) September, 14-15, 2022, Karlsruhe, Germany (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7764)

The 15th International Workshop on Beryllium Technology (BeWS-15) was held as a joint event combining BeWS-15 and industrial forum BeYOND-IX on September 14-15, 2022 in Karlsruhe, Germany with great success as a hybrid event. The workshop was organized by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Participants came from Germany, the US, the UK, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Czech Republic, Japan, Sweden, France and China, totaling 55 persons, which was not expected immediately after the global pandemic

COMPOSITIONAL EXPLORATIONS OF PLASTIC SOUND

Each piece of music in this research is meant to explore a different aspect of music as a plastic art. Conclusions reached in the review of each new work were used to guide the development of the next. The notions of plasticity in sound, and sound as a plastic material were used to give the overall research a focal point. In exploring different types of composition, reciprocal plasticity between the materials and the developing ideas of the music are discussed in the context of ecological and biological psychology. By restricting all these works within the genre of 'plastic arts' it became necessary to introduce a new technique for instrumental composition. An aural model is used to replace the traditional written score. These instrumental works were developed entirely within an auditory situation.Funded by De Montfort Universit