MISR stereoscopic image matchers: techniques and results

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument, launched in December 1999 on the NASA EOS Terra satellite, produces images in the red band at 275-m resolution, over a swath width of 360 km, for the nine camera angles 70.5/spl deg/, 60/spl deg/, 45.6/spl deg/, and 26.1/spl deg/ forward, nadir, and 26.1/spl deg/, 45.6/spl deg/, 60/spl deg/, and 70.5/spl deg/ aft. A set of accurate and fast algorithms was developed for automated stereo matching of cloud features to obtain cloud-top height and motion over the nominal six-year lifetime of the mission. Accuracy and speed requirements necessitated the use of a combination of area-based and feature-based stereo-matchers with only pixel-level acuity. Feature-based techniques are used for cloud motion retrieval with the off-nadir MISR camera views, and the motion is then used to provide a correction to the disparities used to measure cloud-top heights which are derived from the innermost three cameras. Intercomparison with a previously developed "superstereo" matcher shows that the results are very comparable in accuracy with much greater coverage and at ten times the speed. Intercomparison of feature-based and area-based techniques shows that the feature-based techniques are comparable in accuracy at a factor of eight times the speed. An assessment of the accuracy of the area-based matcher for cloud-free scenes demonstrates the accuracy and completeness of the stereo-matcher. This trade-off has resulted in the loss of a reliable quality metric to predict accuracy and a slightly high blunder rate. Examples are shown of the application of the MISR stereo-matchers on several difficult scenes which demonstrate the efficacy of the matching approach

Home as a site of ontological security for people who have experienced homelessness: an exploration of community housing as a source of stability, control and safety

Housing is a key solution in addressing homelessness. Homelessness is a growing concern within Australia, and, for individuals who are experiencing homelessness, the unaffordability of rent in the private market can present significant challenges. The provision of affordable housing, in the form of community or public housing therefore becomes imperative - but community housing can take many potential forms, not all of which necessarily have the same impact on tenants. The current study investigates the different potential impacts of rooming houses and self-contained units to tease out some of these impacts. It draws on interview and participant observation data from an ethnographic case study that observed the SouthPort Community Housing Group Inc (SouthPort), a local housing provider in Victoria, Australia which provides housing to single people receiving government benefits. SouthPort manage 271 units for single people in the South Melbourne and Port Melbourne areas. However, at the time of research, SouthPort were still operating a rooming house, which does provide shelter and an alternative to rough sleeping, but which would still leave residents classified as homeless according to current understandings of homelessness. At the same time, even tenants who had never lived in SouthPort's own rooming house often had experience of earlier stays in rooming houses offered by other providers. The observational ad interview data therefore allowed for a comparison of tenants' lived experiences and evaluations of different forms of community housing. A key theoretical concept for this thesis is ontological security and, specifically, how a home acts as a site of ontological security. Traditionally, the literature on ontological security has been heavily focused on the role of home ownership. More recently, however, researchers have begun to examine the different and varying ways that people can experience home as a site of ontological security - including in contexts where the home is not, and can never be, a personal possession. This research has cast new light on the contributing factors of ontological security, and opens up the possible application of this concept to the study of homelessness. This study situates itself within this emerging scholarly subfield, and uses its case study to explore how community housing organisations can enable or hinder tenants' capacity to be ontologically secure - particularly through actions that best support tenants to remain in housing long term. The ethnographic observations and interviews that form the data for this case study were conducted over the course of a seven-month period at a single community housing organisation, located in inner Melbourne. Alongside observations, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with tenants, an ex-tenant, staff and a community housing worker. The results focus on three key areas - stability, control and safety - to understand whether and how tenants' homes serve as a site of ontological security, and to analyse whether there was a difference between rooming houses and self-contained units in supporting the development of ontological security. In brief, observational and interview data suggest that both rooming houses and self-contained unit could offer some measure of security of tenure to tenants, and thus provide some key elements of the stability needed for ontological security. Control, by contrast, varied substantially between rooming houses and self-contained units. Rooming house tenants were unable to exert control in their primary space, compared to tenants in a rooming house. The only space that rooming houses tenants had control was their bedroom, but bathroom and kitchen facilities required negotiation with their neighbours. This absence of control over personal and even intimate dimensions of tenants' lives, greatly hindered the ability of rooming houses to function as a site of ontological security. Self-contained units, however, generally provided the control needed for tenants¿ homes to function as a site of ontological security. Even in self-contained units, however, tenants' interviews suggested that control could still depend on neighbours and their actions in secondary spaces, qualifying the degree to which even self-contained units could satisfy this contributor to tenants' experience of ontological security. Safety was a concern for tenants in both rooming houses and self-contained units. Rooming houses were seen as unsafe by tenants - due particularly to the presence of drugs, violence and the need to share facilities. Tenants' perceptions of safety within self-contained units varied, with unsafe practices of neighbours again posing a perceived risk to the safety of others who had to live in the same complexes. These safety concerns qualify the extent to which tenants could rely on self-contained units to function as a site of ontological security. Given the diverse nature of tenants' experiences of home as a site of ontological security, this thesis concludes by suggesting that self-contained units have the capacity to function as a site of ontological security - with significant qualifications that underscore the importance of supporting tenants' control over, and safety within and around, their accommodation. Rooming houses on the other hand, were not seen to be able to function as a site of ontological security due to the lack of control and safety concerns raised during the research

Composition Designing of Cooked Sausage "Udachnaya" Based on Optimization Principles

This article deals with the process of composition designing of the cooked sausage "Udachnaya" by adding non-meat ingredients to reduce material costs for production, obtain a product with given chemical composition and technological properties, as well as to minimize the occurrence of defects characteristic of cooked sausage products, in particular broth-fat runoffs. As part of the research, complete preparations of the new generation “Biophos 90” and “Bioton gel 651” were used, which did not reduce the nutritional and biological value of meat products and also produced sausage products with high organoleptic and technological properties that are safe for consumer health and the environment. Synthesis of lessons learned in the development of the rational formulation of cooked sausage products shows that the use of mathematical modeling makes it possible to implement a targeted combination of ingredients and deliver the specified chemical composition and variable processing properties with an insignificant change in prime cost. The study was conducted using the technical base and laboratory areas of the Department of Commodity Research, Standardization and Quality Control (Faculty of Animal Science, Commodity Research, and Standardization), as well as the common use center of scientific equipment of FSBEI HE “Omsk State Agrarian University named after P.A. Stolypin”. The analytical data presented in this publication may be of interest to students of industry-specific colleges, as well as specialists in the meat industry, and can be implemented in real enterprises. Keywords: Construction, composition, cooked sausage, nutrient additive

Identification of Functional Toxin/Immunity Genes Linked to Contact-Dependent Growth Inhibition (CDI) and Rearrangement Hotspot (Rhs) Systems

Bacterial contact-dependent growth inhibition (CDI) is mediated by the CdiA/CdiB family of two-partner secretion proteins. Each CdiA protein exhibits a distinct growth inhibition activity, which resides in the polymorphic C-terminal region (CdiA-CT). CDI+ cells also express unique CdiI immunity proteins that specifically block the activity of cognate CdiA-CT, thereby protecting the cell from autoinhibition. Here we show that many CDI systems contain multiple cdiA gene fragments that encode CdiA-CT sequences. These “orphan” cdiA-CT genes are almost always associated with downstream cdiI genes to form cdiA-CT/cdiI modules. Comparative genome analyses suggest that cdiA-CT/cdiI modules are mobile and exchanged between the CDI systems of different bacteria. In many instances, orphan cdiA-CT/cdiI modules are fused to full-length cdiA genes in other bacterial species. Examination of cdiA-CT/cdiI modules from Escherichia coli EC93, E. coli EC869, and Dickeya dadantii 3937 confirmed that these genes encode functional toxin/immunity pairs. Moreover, the orphan module from EC93 was functional in cell-mediated CDI when fused to the N-terminal portion of the EC93 CdiA protein. Bioinformatic analyses revealed that the genetic organization of CDI systems shares features with rhs (rearrangement hotspot) loci. Rhs proteins also contain polymorphic C-terminal regions (Rhs-CTs), some of which share significant sequence identity with CdiA-CTs. All rhs genes are followed by small ORFs representing possible rhsI immunity genes, and several Rhs systems encode orphan rhs-CT/rhsI modules. Analysis of rhs-CT/rhsI modules from D. dadantii 3937 demonstrated that Rhs-CTs have growth inhibitory activity, which is specifically blocked by cognate RhsI immunity proteins. Together, these results suggest that Rhs plays a role in intercellular competition and that orphan gene modules expand the diversity of toxic activities deployed by both CDI and Rhs systems

Reducing the clique and chromatic number via edge contractions and vertex deletions.

We consider the following problem: can a certain graph parameter of some given graph G be reduced by at least d, for some integer d, via at most k graph operations from some specified set S, for some given integer k? As graph parameters we take the chromatic number and the clique number. We let the set S consist of either an edge contraction or a vertex deletion. As all these problems are NP-complete for general graphs even if d is fixed, we restrict the input graph G to some special graph class. We continue a line of research that considers these problems for subclasses of perfect graphs, but our main results are full classifications, from a computational complexity point of view, for graph classes characterized by forbidding a single induced connected subgraph H

SOXS: a wide band spectrograph to follow up transients

SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) will be a spectrograph for the ESO NTT telescope capable to cover the optical and NIR bands, based on the heritage of the X-Shooter at the ESO-VLT. SOXS will be built and run by an international consortium, carrying out rapid and longer term Target of Opportunity requests on a variety of astronomical objects. SOXS will observe all kind of transient and variable sources from different surveys. These will be a mixture of fast alerts (e.g. gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves, neutrino events), mid-term alerts (e.g. supernovae, X-ray transients), fixed time events (e.g. close-by passage of minor bodies). While the focus is on transients and variables, still there is a wide range of other astrophysical targets and science topics that will benefit from SOXS. The design foresees a spectrograph with a Resolution-Slit product ~ 4500, capable of simultaneously observing over the entire band the complete spectral range from the U- to the H-band. The limiting magnitude of R~20 (1 hr at S/N~10) is suited to study transients identified from on-going imaging surveys. Light imaging capabilities in the optical band (grizy) are also envisaged to allow for multi-band photometry of the faintest transients. This paper outlines the status of the project, now in Final Design Phase.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, to be published in SPIE Proceedings 1070

The spatial distribution of aeolian dust and terrigenous fluxes in the tropical Atlantic Ocean since the Last Glacial Maximum

© 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. The flux of terrestrial material from the continents to the oceans links the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere through physical and biogeochemical processes, with important implications for Earth's climate. Quantitative estimates of terrigenous fluxes from sources such as rivers, aeolian dust, and resuspended shelf sediments are required to understand how the processes delivering terrigenous material respond to and are influenced by climate. We compile thorium-230 normalized 232Th flux records in the tropical Atlantic to provide an improved understanding of aeolian fluxes since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). By identifying and isolating sites dominated by aeolian terrigenous inputs, we show that there was a persistent meridional gradient in dust fluxes in the eastern equatorial Atlantic at the LGM, arguing against a large southward shift of the intertropical convergence zone during LGM boreal winter. The ratio of LGM to late-Holocene 232Th fluxes highlights a meridional difference in the magnitude of variations in dust deposition, with sites 700 km away, characterized by 232Th fluxes approximately twice as large as aeolian-dominated sites in the east

Sensitivity analysis of school parameters to compare schools from different surveys: a review of the standardisation task of the EC-FAIR programme CLUSTER

Echo traces seen on echo grams contain a lot of information about the aggregation of fish in schools. But the acosutic image obtained with a vertical biomass assessment echosounder contains distorsions mainly due to the beam angle, the equipment settings and the school depth. When the acoustic image of aggregation patterns changes over the years or varies between stocks, it is important to know up to what extent biological interpretation is meaningful!. The present paper reviews the work performed by a group of scientist within the EC FAIR programme CLUSTER. Simulations were performed to correct school parameters. Digital data were replayed to assess the importance of these corrections. Charts were derived to limit biological interpretation of changes on the school acoustic images