Impact of earthworm activity on the chemical fertility of irrigated soil with urban effluents

The reuse of urban effluents to irrigate the soils of peri-urban grasslands in the vicinity of the town of Setif (northeastern Algeria) is an old and widespread practice. In this context, the present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of the irrigation with urban effluents on the biological and chemical behavior of soils. Effluents analysis showed significant organic and particulate pollution, the latter contributed to earthworm abundance and increased the richness of irrigated soils with nutrients. The analysis of turricules revealed the role of earthworms through the activity of bioturbation in the increase of the rate of organic matter as well as in the bioavailability of the nutrients of the irrigated soils. In space, permanent vegetation cover has played an important role as a biofilter. This was confirmed by the inter-site differences recorded through the measured variables particularly organic ones.Keywords: Natural grasslands, urban effluents, earthworm activity, turricles, organic matte

Covariants,joint invariants and the problem of equivalence in the invariant theory of Killing tensors defined in pseudo-Riemannian spaces of constant curvature

The invariant theory of Killing tensors (ITKT) is extended by introducing the new concepts of covariants and joint invariants of (product) vector spaces of Killing tensors defined in pseudo-Riemannian spaces of constant curvature. The covariants are employed to solve the problem of classification of the orthogonal coordinate webs generated by non-trivial Killing tensors of valence two defined in the Euclidean and Minkowski planes. Illustrative examples are provided.Comment: 60 pages. to appear in J. Math. Phy

Experiments with urea on private farms

Many District Advisers have carried out trials on private farms to test the response to a variety of types of supplementary feeds. This report gives brief details of five such experiments carried out with urea supplements over the last five years. Table 1 summarises the details and results of these trials

Speech Audio Synthesis from Tagged MRI and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization via Plastic Transformer

The tongue's intricate 3D structure, comprising localized functional units, plays a crucial role in the production of speech. When measured using tagged MRI, these functional units exhibit cohesive displacements and derived quantities that facilitate the complex process of speech production. Non-negative matrix factorization-based approaches have been shown to estimate the functional units through motion features, yielding a set of building blocks and a corresponding weighting map. Investigating the link between weighting maps and speech acoustics can offer significant insights into the intricate process of speech production. To this end, in this work, we utilize two-dimensional spectrograms as a proxy representation, and develop an end-to-end deep learning framework for translating weighting maps to their corresponding audio waveforms. Our proposed plastic light transformer (PLT) framework is based on directional product relative position bias and single-level spatial pyramid pooling, thus enabling flexible processing of weighting maps with variable size to fixed-size spectrograms, without input information loss or dimension expansion. Additionally, our PLT framework efficiently models the global correlation of wide matrix input. To improve the realism of our generated spectrograms with relatively limited training samples, we apply pair-wise utterance consistency with Maximum Mean Discrepancy constraint and adversarial training. Experimental results on a dataset of 29 subjects speaking two utterances demonstrated that our framework is able to synthesize speech audio waveforms from weighting maps, outperforming conventional convolution and transformer models.Comment: MICCAI 2023 (Oral presentation

Critical review of methods for risk ranking of food related hazards, based on risks for human health.

This study aimed to critically review methods for ranking risks related to food safety and dietary hazards on the basis of their anticipated human health impacts. A literature review was performed to identify and characterize methods for risk ranking from the fields of food, environmental science and socio-economic sciences. The review used a predefined search protocol, and covered the bibliographic databases Scopus, CAB Abstracts, Web of Sciences, and PubMed over the period 1993-2013. All references deemed relevant, on the basis of of predefined evaluation criteria, were included in the review, and the risk ranking method characterized. The methods were then clustered - based on their characteristics - into eleven method categories. These categories included: risk assessment, comparative risk assessment, risk ratio method, scoring method, cost of illness, health adjusted life years, multi-criteria decision analysis, risk matrix, flow charts/decision trees, stated preference techniques and expert synthesis. Method categories were described by their characteristics, weaknesses and strengths, data resources, and fields of applications. It was concluded there is no single best method for risk ranking. The method to be used should be selected on the basis of risk manager/assessor requirements, data availability, and the characteristics of the method. Recommendations for future use and application are provided

Superrotation in a Venus general circulation model

A superrotating atmosphere with equatorial winds of ~ 35 ms-1 is simulated using a simplified Venus general circulation model (GCM). The equatorial superrotation in the model atmosphere is maintained by barotropic instabilities in the midlatitude jets which transport angular momentum toward the equator. The midlatitude jets are maintained by the mean meridional circulation, and the momentum transporting waves are qualitatively similar to observed midlatitude waves; an equatorial Kelvin wave is also present in the atmosphere. The GCM is forced by linearized cooling and friction parameterizations, with hyperdiffusion and a polar Fourier filter to maintain numerical stability. Atmospheric superrotation is a robust feature of the model and is spontaneously produced without specific tuning. A strong meridional circulation develops in the form of a single Hadley cell, extending from the equator to the pole in both hemispheres, and from the surface to 50 km altitude. The zonal jets produced by this circulation reach 45 ms-1 at 60 km, with peak winds of 35 ms-1 at the equator. A warm pole and cold collar are also found in the GCM, caused by adiabatic warming in the mean meridional circulation. Wave frequencies and zonal wind speeds are smaller than in observations by cloud tracking but are consistent with a Doppler shifting by wind speeds in the generating region of each wave. Magnitudes of polar temperature anomalies are smaller than the observed features, suggesting dynamical processes alone may not be sufficient to maintain the large observed temperature contrasts at the magnitudes and periods found in this GCM