Assessment of Natural Resources Use for Sustainable Development - DPSIR Framework for Case Studies in Portsmouth and Thames Gateway, U.K.

This chapter reports on the uses of the DPSIR framework to assess the sustainability of the intertidal environments within the two UK case study areas, Portsmouth and Thames Gateway. It focuses on statutory conservation areas dominated by intertidal habitats. Two are located in Portsmouth (Portsmouth and Langstone Harbours) and four in the Thames Gateway (Benfleet Marshes, South Thames Estuary, Medway Estuary and the Swale in the Thames Gateway). Based on the reduction of a number of pressures and impacts observed in recent decades and the improvement of overall environmental quality, all six SSSIs are considered to be sustainable in the short and medium term. In the future, it is possible that the impacts of climate change, especially sea-level rise, might result in further reduction in the area and/or quality of intertidal habitats. Further integration between conservation and planning objectives (both for urban development and management of flood risk) at local level is needed to support the long-term sustainability of intertidal habitats

Human Gait Analysis in Neurodegenerative Diseases: a Review

This paper reviews the recent literature on technologies and methodologies for quantitative human gait analysis in the context of neurodegnerative diseases. The use of technological instruments can be of great support in both clinical diagnosis and severity assessment of these pathologies. In this paper, sensors, features and processing methodologies have been reviewed in order to provide a highly consistent work that explores the issues related to gait analysis. First, the phases of the human gait cycle are briefly explained, along with some non-normal gait patterns (gait abnormalities) typical of some neurodegenerative diseases. The work continues with a survey on the publicly available datasets principally used for comparing results. Then the paper reports the most common processing techniques for both feature selection and extraction and for classification and clustering. Finally, a conclusive discussion on current open problems and future directions is outlined

Synthesizing Political Zero-Shot Relation Classification via Codebook Knowledge, NLI, and ChatGPT

Recent supervised models for event coding vastly outperform pattern-matching methods. However, their reliance solely on new annotations disregards the vast knowledge within expert databases, hindering their applicability to fine-grained classification. To address these limitations, we explore zero-shot approaches for political event ontology relation classification, by leveraging knowledge from established annotation codebooks. Our study encompasses both ChatGPT and a novel natural language inference (NLI) based approach named ZSP. ZSP adopts a tree-query framework that deconstructs the task into context, modality, and class disambiguation levels. This framework improves interpretability, efficiency, and adaptability to schema changes. By conducting extensive experiments on our newly curated datasets, we pinpoint the instability issues within ChatGPT and highlight the superior performance of ZSP. ZSP achieves an impressive 40% improvement in F1 score for fine-grained Rootcode classification. ZSP demonstrates competitive performance compared to supervised BERT models, positioning it as a valuable tool for event record validation and ontology development. Our work underscores the potential of leveraging transfer learning and existing expertise to enhance the efficiency and scalability of research in the field.Comment: Preprin

VLBI studies of DAGN and SMBHB hosting galaxies

Dual active galactic nuclei (DAGN) and supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) at kpc and pc-scale separations, respectively, are expected during stages of galaxy merger and evolution. Their observational identification can address a range of areas of current astrophysics frontiers including the final parsec problem and their contribution towards the emission of low-frequency gravitational waves. This has however been difficult to achieve with current spectroscopy and time domain strategies. Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) as a method of directly imaging radio structures with milli-arcsecond (mas) and sub-mas resolutions is introduced as a possible means of detecting DAGN and SMBHBs. We motivate its usage with expected observational signatures and cite some studies from literature to illustrate its current status, and present an updated list of candidates imaged with high-resolution radio observations. We then recall some shortcomings of the method with possible solutions and discuss future directions, relevant to large surveys with the upcoming Square Kilometer Array and future space VLBI missions.Comment: 13 pages, 2 table; Radio Science (accepted

Espon-Interstrat. Espon in Integrated Territorial Strategies.

The INTERSTRAT project’s overall aim is “to encourage and facilitate the use of ESPON 2013 Programme findings in the creation and monitoring of Integrated Territorial Development Strategies (ITDS) and to support transnational learning about the actual and potential contribution of ESPON to integrated policy-making.” We defined integrated territorial development as ‘the process of shaping economic, social and environmental change through spatially sensitive policies and programmes’

Diamond Detectors for the TOTEM Timing Upgrade

This paper describes the design and the performance of the timing detector developed by the TOTEM Collaboration for the Roman Pots (RPs) to measure the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) of the protons produced in central diffractive interactions at the LHC. The measurement of the TOF of the protons allows the determination of the longitudinal position of the proton interaction vertex and its association with one of the vertices reconstructed by the CMS detectors. The TOF detector is based on single crystal Chemical Vapor Deposition (scCVD) diamond plates and is designed to measure the protons TOF with about 50 ps time precision. This upgrade to the TOTEM apparatus will be used in the LHC run 2 and will tag the central diffractive events up to an interaction pileup of about 1. A dedicated fast and low noise electronics for the signal amplification has been developed. The digitization of the diamond signal is performed by sampling the waveform. After introducing the physics studies that will most profit from the addition of these new detectors, we discuss in detail the optimization and the performance of the first TOF detector installed in the LHC in November 2015.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figures, 2 tables, submitted for publication to JINS

Evidence for non-exponential elastic proton-proton differential cross-section at low |t| and sqrt(s) = 8 TeV by TOTEM

The TOTEM experiment has made a precise measurement of the elastic proton-proton differential cross-section at the centre-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 8 TeV based on a high-statistics data sample obtained with the beta* = 90 optics. Both the statistical and systematic uncertainties remain below 1%, except for the t-independent contribution from the overall normalisation. This unprecedented precision allows to exclude a purely exponential differential cross-section in the range of four-momentum transfer squared 0.027 < |t| < 0.2 GeV^2 with a significance greater than 7 sigma. Two extended parametrisations, with quadratic and cubic polynomials in the exponent, are shown to be well compatible with the data. Using them for the differential cross-section extrapolation to t = 0, and further applying the optical theorem, yields total cross-section estimates of (101.5 +- 2.1) mb and (101.9 +- 2.1) mb, respectively, in agreement with previous TOTEM measurements.Comment: Final version published in Nuclear Physics

Production of π0 and η mesons in Cu+Au collisions at sNN =200 GeV

Production of π0 and η mesons has been measured at midrapidity in Cu+Au collisions at sNN=200GeV. Measurements were performed in π0(η)→γγ decay channel in the 1(2)-20GeV/c transverse momentum range. A strong suppression is observed for π0 and η meson production at high transverse momentum in central Cu+Au collisions relative to the p+p results scaled by the number of nucleon-nucleon collisions. In central collisions the suppression is similar to Au+Au with comparable nuclear overlap. The η/π0 ratio measured as a function of transverse momentum is consistent with mT-scaling parametrization down to pT=2GeV/c, its asymptotic value is constant and consistent with Au+Au and p+p and does not show any significant dependence on collision centrality. Similar results were obtained in hadron-hadron, hadron-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions as well as in e+e- collisions in a range of collision energies sNN=3-1800 GeV. This suggests that the quark-gluon-plasma medium produced in Cu+Cu collisions either does not affect the jet fragmentation into light mesons or it affects the π0 and η the same way