7,995 research outputs found
Slitless spectrophotometry with forward modelling: principles and application to atmospheric transmission measurement
In the next decade, many optical surveys will aim to tackle the question of
dark energy nature, measuring its equation of state parameter at the permil
level. This requires trusting the photometric calibration of the survey with a
precision never reached so far, controlling many sources of systematic
uncertainties. The measurement of the on-site atmospheric transmission for each
exposure, or on average for each season or for the full survey, can help reach
the permil precision for magnitudes. This work aims at proving the ability to
use slitless spectroscopy for standard star spectrophotometry and its use to
monitor on-site atmospheric transmission as needed, for example, by the Vera C.
Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time supernova cosmology program.
We fully deal with the case of a disperser in the filter wheel, which is the
configuration chosen in the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope. The theoretical basis of
slitless spectrophotometry is at the heart of our forward model approach to
extract spectroscopic information from slitless data. We developed a publicly
available software called Spectractor (https://github.com/LSSTDESC/Spectractor)
that implements each ingredient of the model and finally performs a fit of a
spectrogram model directly on image data to get the spectrum. We show on
simulations that our model allows us to understand the structure of
spectrophotometric exposures. We also demonstrate its use on real data, solving
specific issues and illustrating how our procedure allows the improvement of
the model describing the data. Finally, we discuss how this approach can be
used to directly extract atmospheric transmission parameters from data and thus
provide the base for on-site atmosphere monitoring. We show the efficiency of
the procedure on simulations and test it on the limited data set available.Comment: 30 pages, 36 figures, submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysic
Religion, Education, and the ‘East’. Addressing Orientalism and Interculturality in Religious Education Through Japanese and East Asian Religions
This work addresses the theme of Japanese religions in order to rethink theories and practices pertaining to the field of Religious Education. Through an interdisciplinary framework that combines the study of religions, didactics and intercultural education, this book puts the case study of Religious Education in England in front of two ‘challenges’ in order to reveal hidden spots, tackle unquestioned assumptions and highlight problematic areas. These ‘challenges’, while focusing primarily on Japanese religions, are addressed within the wider contexts of other East Asian traditions and of the modern historical exchanges with the Euro-American societies. As result, a model for teaching Japanese and other East Asian religions is discussed and proposed in order to fruitfully engage issues such as orientalism, occidentalism, interculturality and critical thinking
Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes
This reprint includes 22 research papers and an editorial, collected from the Special Issue "Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes", highlighting recent research advances and emerging research directions in complex industrial processes. This reprint aims to promote the research field and benefit the readers from both academic communities and industrial sectors
Enhancing primary care psychological therapy for clients with comorbid physical health conditions: A Critical Discourse Analysis investigation into interprofessional identity
Background / Aim: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services are the largest provider in England of primary care psychological therapy for depression and anxiety disorders. Over recent years there has been increased recognition of the importance of therapists and their physical health colleagues (e.g. nurses, physiotherapists or other allied health professionals) integrating care for patients with comorbid long-term health conditions and common psychological disorders. Specialist teams have been creating differentiating Psychological Therapists as Core and Integrated. The aim is to investigate the implications of this shift for Therapists’ professional identity.
Method: A Critical Discourse Analysis was conducted based on five focus groups with eighteen professionals from Core IAPT, Integrated IAPT and physical healthcare backgrounds.
Key Findings: Discourses related to expertise, responsibility and innovation / creativity emerged from the corpora. The research highlights the niche set of behaviours, skills, values and attitudes under construction by Integrated Therapists and the way in which their role shapes and is shaped by their interactions with their counterparts.
Implications: The research makes recommendations for Integrated Therapists’ professional identity including to showcase niche skills and effective collaborative therapy. Future research recommendations are made regarding unheard voices and silenced discourses in professional identity reconstruction.
Key Terms: Professional Identity; Integrated Therapy; Cognitive Behaviour Therapy; Long-Term Conditions and Medically Unexplained Symptoms (LTC/MUS
From lobby to party : organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule Movement, 1880-1930
In this thesis I trace the processes of organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule movement between 1880 and 1930. Employing an ecological framework, I detail the field of organisations that developed in two distinct periods, 1886-1914 and 1918-1930, and the way their interactions facilitated the emergence of new organisational forms, principally lobbies and parties. To bring discipline to this jumble of events, I employ three formal models to colligate the qualitative data presented: 1) co-evolutionary dynamics; 2) ecological control; and 3) the garbage model of organisational choice. My argument follows three broad moves. The first is movement away from nationalism to contentious politics as a frame of reference for these events. The second move is away from substances to a focus on intercalated processes. This entails a focus on networks of interaction, sequences of attention and social matching dynamics. The third is a move away from teleology and to a realisation of the contingent nature of these events. There was no necessity for either lobbies or parties to form. Rather organisational emergence was a contingent process of refunctionality—the use of existing organisational forms for new purposes. Operationalizing these processes I focus on the way that changes in the operating environment shaped three mechanisms: careers; organisational embedding; and ecological control. What I discover is that organisational change in the Scottish Home Rule movement was product of the matching of availability, attention and authorisation to act
Acoustic modelling, data augmentation and feature extraction for in-pipe machine learning applications
Gathering measurements from infrastructure, private premises, and harsh environments can be difficult and expensive. From this perspective, the development of
new machine learning algorithms is strongly affected by the availability of training
and test data. We focus on audio archives for in-pipe events. Although several
examples of pipe-related applications can be found in the literature, datasets of
audio/vibration recordings are much scarcer, and the only references found relate
to leakage detection and characterisation. Therefore, this work proposes a methodology to relieve the burden of data collection for acoustic events in deployed pipes.
The aim is to maximise the yield of small sets of real recordings and demonstrate
how to extract effective features for machine learning. The methodology developed
requires the preliminary creation of a soundbank of audio samples gathered with
simple weak annotations. For practical reasons, the case study is given by a range
of appliances, fittings, and fixtures connected to pipes in domestic environments.
The source recordings are low-reverberated audio signals enhanced through a
bespoke spectral filter and containing the desired audio fingerprints. The soundbank is then processed to create an arbitrary number of synthetic augmented
observations. The data augmentation improves the quality and the quantity of
the metadata and automatically creates strong and accurate annotations that
are both machine and human-readable. Besides, the implemented processing
chain allows precise control of properties such as signal-to-noise ratio, duration
of the events, and the number of overlapping events. The inter-class variability
is expanded by recombining source audio blocks and adding simulated artificial
reverberation obtained through an acoustic model developed for the purpose.
Finally, the dataset is synthesised to guarantee separability and balance. A few
signal representations are optimised to maximise the classification performance,
and the results are reported as a benchmark for future developments. The contribution to the existing knowledge concerns several aspects of the processing chain
implemented. A novel quasi-analytic acoustic model is introduced to simulate
in-pipe reverberations, adopting a three-layer architecture particularly convenient
for batch processing. The first layer includes two algorithms: one for the numerical
calculation of the axial wavenumbers and one for the separation of the modes. The
latter, in particular, provides a workaround for a problem not explicitly treated in the
literature and related to the modal non-orthogonality given by the solid-liquid interface in the analysed domain. A set of results for different waveguides is reported
to compare the dispersive behaviour against different mechanical configurations.
Two more novel solutions are also included in the second layer of the model and
concern the integration of the acoustic sources. Specifically, the amplitudes of the
non-orthogonal modal potentials are obtained using either a distance minimisation
objective function or by solving an analytical decoupling problem. In both cases,
results show that sources sufficiently smooth can be approximated with a limited
number of modes keeping the error below 1%. The last layer proposes a bespoke
approach for the integration of the acoustic model into the synthesiser as a reverberation simulator. Additional elements of novelty relate to the other blocks of the
audio synthesiser. The statistical spectral filter, for instance, is a batch-processing
solution for the attenuation of the background noise of the source recordings. The
signal-to-noise ratio analysis for both moderate and high noise levels indicates
a clear improvement of several decibels against the closest filter example in the
literature. The recombination of the audio blocks and the system of fully tracked
annotations are also novel extensions of similar approaches recently adopted in
other contexts. Moreover, a bespoke synthesis strategy is proposed to guarantee
separable and balanced datasets. The last contribution concerns the extraction
of convenient sets of audio features. Elements of novelty are introduced for the
optimisation of the filter banks of the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the
scattering wavelet transform. In particular, compared to the respective standard
definitions, the average F-score performance of the optimised features is roughly
6% higher in the first case and 2.5% higher for the latter. Finally, the soundbank,
the synthetic dataset, and the fundamental blocks of the software library developed
are publicly available for further research
The determinants of value addition: a crtitical analysis of global software engineering industry in Sri Lanka
It was evident through the literature that the perceived value delivery of the global software
engineering industry is low due to various facts. Therefore, this research concerns global
software product companies in Sri Lanka to explore the software engineering methods and
practices in increasing the value addition. The overall aim of the study is to identify the key
determinants for value addition in the global software engineering industry and critically
evaluate the impact of them for the software product companies to help maximise the value
addition to ultimately assure the sustainability of the industry.
An exploratory research approach was used initially since findings would emerge while the
study unfolds. Mixed method was employed as the literature itself was inadequate to
investigate the problem effectively to formulate the research framework. Twenty-three face-to-face online interviews were conducted with the subject matter experts covering all the
disciplines from the targeted organisations which was combined with the literature findings as
well as the outcomes of the market research outcomes conducted by both government and nongovernment institutes. Data from the interviews were analysed using NVivo 12. The findings
of the existing literature were verified through the exploratory study and the outcomes were
used to formulate the questionnaire for the public survey. 371 responses were considered after
cleansing the total responses received for the data analysis through SPSS 21 with alpha level
0.05. Internal consistency test was done before the descriptive analysis. After assuring the
reliability of the dataset, the correlation test, multiple regression test and analysis of variance
(ANOVA) test were carried out to fulfil the requirements of meeting the research objectives.
Five determinants for value addition were identified along with the key themes for each area.
They are staffing, delivery process, use of tools, governance, and technology infrastructure.
The cross-functional and self-organised teams built around the value streams, employing a
properly interconnected software delivery process with the right governance in the delivery
pipelines, selection of tools and providing the right infrastructure increases the value delivery.
Moreover, the constraints for value addition are poor interconnection in the internal processes,
rigid functional hierarchies, inaccurate selections and uses of tools, inflexible team
arrangements and inadequate focus for the technology infrastructure. The findings add to the
existing body of knowledge on increasing the value addition by employing effective processes,
practices and tools and the impacts of inaccurate applications the same in the global software
engineering industry
CITIES: Energetic Efficiency, Sustainability; Infrastructures, Energy and the Environment; Mobility and IoT; Governance and Citizenship
This book collects important contributions on smart cities. This book was created in collaboration with the ICSC-CITIES2020, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 2020. This book collects articles on: energetic efficiency and sustainability; infrastructures, energy and the environment; mobility and IoT; governance and citizenship
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