5,133 research outputs found
Roe deer used as indicator species for a country wide survey for the occurrence of Tick Borne Encephalitis in Austria
Hierarchic Superposition Revisited
Many applications of automated deduction require reasoning in first-order
logic modulo background theories, in particular some form of integer
arithmetic. A major unsolved research challenge is to design theorem provers
that are "reasonably complete" even in the presence of free function symbols
ranging into a background theory sort. The hierarchic superposition calculus of
Bachmair, Ganzinger, and Waldmann already supports such symbols, but, as we
demonstrate, not optimally. This paper aims to rectify the situation by
introducing a novel form of clause abstraction, a core component in the
hierarchic superposition calculus for transforming clauses into a form needed
for internal operation. We argue for the benefits of the resulting calculus and
provide two new completeness results: one for the fragment where all
background-sorted terms are ground and another one for a special case of linear
(integer or rational) arithmetic as a background theory
Accept/Reject Criteria for Structural Ceramics: Probablistic Models for Inclusion Initiated Fracture in Ceramics
Fracture tests on hot-pressed silicon nitride containing several types of inclusions have been conducted. Fracture models pertinent to each inclusion type have been proposed and correlated with the data. The resultant fracture probability relations are one of the key inputs to accept/reject decisions for nondestructive failure prediction
Long-term variability of AGN at hard X-rays
Variability at all observed wavelengths is a distinctive property of AGN.
Hard X-rays provide us with a view of the innermost regions of AGN, mostly
unbiased by absorption along the line of sight. Swift/BAT offers the unique
opportunity to follow, on time scales of days to years and with a regular
sampling, the 14-195 keV emission of the largest AGN sample available up to
date for this kind of investigation. We study the amplitude of the variations,
and their dependence on sub-class and on energy, for a sample of 110 radio
quiet and radio loud AGN selected from the BAT 58-month survey. About 80% of
the AGN in the sample are found to exhibit significant variability on months to
years time scales, radio loud sources being the most variable. The amplitude of
the variations and their energy dependence are incompatible with variability
being driven at hard X-rays by changes of the absorption column density. In
general, the variations in the 14-24 and 35-100 keV bands are well correlated,
suggesting a common origin of the variability across the BAT energy band.
However, radio quiet AGN display on average 10% larger variations at 14-24 keV
than at 35-100 keV and a softer-when-brighter behavior for most of the Seyfert
galaxies with detectable spectral variability on month time scale. In addition,
sources with harder spectra are found to be more variable than softer ones.
These properties are generally consistent with a variable power law continuum,
in flux and shape, pivoting at energies >~ 50 keV, to which a constant
reflection component is superposed. When the same time scales are considered,
the timing properties of AGN at hard X-rays are comparable to those at lower
energies, with at least some of the differences possibly ascribable to
components contributing differently in the two energy domains (e.g.,
reflection, absorption).Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in A&
In search of virus carriers of the 1988 and 2002 phocine distemper virus outbreaks in European harbour seals
European harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) populations decreased substantially during the phocine distemper virus (PDV) outbreaks of 1988 and 2002. Different hypotheses have stated that various seals and terrestrial carnivore species might be the source of infection. To further analyse these hypotheses, grey (Halichoerus grypus) and ringed (Phoca hispida) seals, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and minks (Mustela lutreola) were sampled from the North Sea and East Greenland coasts between 1988 and 2004 and investigated by RT-PCR using a panmorbillivirus primer pair. However, all samples were negative for morbillivirus nucleic acid
Scaling of polymers in aligned rods
We study the behavior of self avoiding polymers in a background of vertically
aligned rods that are either frozen into random positions or free to move
horizontally. We find that in both cases the polymer chains are highly
elongated, with vertical and horizontal size exponents that differ by a factor
of 3. Though these results are different than previous predictions, our results
are confirmed by detailed computer simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Deep Learning using K-space Based Data Augmentation for Automated Cardiac MR Motion Artefact Detection
Quality assessment of medical images is essential for complete automation of
image processing pipelines. For large population studies such as the UK
Biobank, artefacts such as those caused by heart motion are problematic and
manual identification is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, there is an
urgent need for automatic image quality assessment techniques. In this paper,
we propose a method to automatically detect the presence of motion-related
artefacts in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. As this is a highly
imbalanced classification problem (due to the high number of good quality
images compared to the low number of images with motion artefacts), we propose
a novel k-space based training data augmentation approach in order to address
this problem. Our method is based on 3D spatio-temporal Convolutional Neural
Networks, and is able to detect 2D+time short axis images with motion artefacts
in less than 1ms. We test our algorithm on a subset of the UK Biobank dataset
consisting of 3465 CMR images and achieve not only high accuracy in detection
of motion artefacts, but also high precision and recall. We compare our
approach to a range of state-of-the-art quality assessment methods.Comment: Accepted for MICCAI2018 Conferenc
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