New Measurements of Venus Winds with Ground-Based Doppler Velocimetry at CFHT

operations with observations from the ground using various techniques and spectral domains (Lellouch and Witasse, 2008). We present an analysis of Venus Doppler winds at cloud tops based on observations made at the Canada France Hawaii 3.6-m telescope (CFHT) with the ESPaDOnS visible spectrograph. These observations consisted of high-resolution spectra of Fraunhofer lines in the visible range (0.37-1.05 μm) to measure the winds at cloud tops using the Doppler shift of solar radiation scattered by cloud top particles in the observer's direction (Widemann et al., 2007, 2008). The observations were made during 19-20 February 2011 and were coordinated with Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) observations by Venus Express. The complete optical spectrum was collected over 40 spectral orders at each point with 2-5 seconds exposures, at a resolution of about 80000. The observations included various points of the dayside hemisphere at a phase angle of 67°, between +10° and -60° latitude, in steps of 10° , and from +70° to -12° longitude relative to sub-Earth meridian in steps of 12°. The Doppler shift measured in scattered solar light on Venus dayside results from two instantaneous motions: (1) a motion between the Sun and Venus upper cloud particles; (2) a motion between the observer and Venus clouds. The measured Doppler shift, which results from these two terms combined, varies with the planetocentric longitude and latitude and is minimum at meridian ΦN = ΦSun - ΦEarth where the two components subtract to each other for a pure zonal regime. Due to the need for maintaining a stable velocity reference during the course of acquisition using high resolution spectroscopy, we measure relative Doppler shifts to ΦN. The main purpose of our work is to provide variable wind measurements with respect to the background atmosphere, complementary to simultaneous measurements made with the VMC camera onboard the Venus Express. We will present first results from this work, comparing with previous results by the CFHT/ESPaDOnS and VLT-UVES spectrographs (Machado et al., 2012), with Galileo fly-by measurements and with VEx nominal mission observations (Peralta et al., 2007, Luz et al., 2011). Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge support from FCT through projects PTDC/CTE-AST/110702/2009 and PEst-OE/FIS/UI2751/2011. PM and TW also acknowledge support from the Observatoire de Paris. Lellouch, E., and Witasse, O., A coordinated campaign of Venus ground-based observations and Venus Express measurements, Planetary and Space Science 56 (2008) 1317-1319. Luz, D., et al., Venus's polar vortex reveals precessing circulation, Science 332 (2011) 577-580. Machado, P., Luz, D. Widemann, T., Lellouch, E., Witasse, O, Characterizing the atmospheric dynamics of Venus from ground-based Doppler velocimetry, Icarus, submitted. Peralta J., R. Hueso, A. Sánchez-Lavega, A reanalysis of Venus winds at two cloud levels from Galileo SSI images, Icarus 190 (2007) 469-477. Widemann, T., Lellouch, E., Donati, J.-F., 2008, Venus Doppler winds at Cloud Tops Observed with ESPaDOnS at CFHT, Planetary and Space Science, 56, 1320-1334

Propuesta para superar sesgos y heurísticas en la interpretación de situaciones de probabilidad

Se presenta una propuesta de creación didáctica mediada por las TIC, para superar algunos sesgos y heurísticas tales como: la heurística de la representatividad, el sesgo de equiprobabilidad y la falacia del eje temporal, los cuales se presentan al momento de resolver problemas de probabilidad. Las actividades diseñadas se plantean mediante la estructura que propone Batanero (2001) para el desarrollo de proyectos estadísticos en el aula, los cuales se caracterizan por su carácter contextualizado, lo cual permite hacer uso de datos que se interpretan desde el contexto y son motivadores. Estos proyectos se presentan mediante Ambientes Virtuales de Aprendizaje (AVA) a través de la plataforma Moodle, con el objetivo de que pueda ser utilizada por docentes que deseen aplicarla en sus aulas de clase. Asimismo se destaca el uso de las simulaciones de problemas de probabilidad, puesto que éstos permiten al estudiante visualizar experimentos que difícilmente pueden observarse en la vida real. Se espera que las actividades puedan ser aprovechadas por los docentes en una fase previa al desarrollo de conceptos de probabilidad en el aula, con estudiantes de educación media vocacional, y que las experiencias obtenidas en el trabajo con los proyectos pueda ser compartido por los profesores con el objetivo de recoger resultados respecto de la efectividad de las mismas en la superación de las heurísticas y sesgos inicialmente mencionados

Residential Sector Energy Consumption at the Spotlight: From Data to Knowledge

Energy consumption is at the core of economic development, but its severe impacts on resources depletion and climate change have justified a call for its general reduction across all economic activities. Lowering households’ energy demand is a key factor to achieve carbon dioxide emission reductions as it has an important energy-saving potential. Households in the European Union (EU28) countries have a significant weight (25%) in the total final energy consumption. However, a wide range of variation is observed within the residential sector from 7.6 to 37.4 GJ per capita/annum, with the lowest consumption indicator observed in Southern EU countries. Energy consumption in the residential sector is a complex issue, explained by a combination of different factors. To pinpoint how to reduce energy consumption effectively while deliver energy services, we need to look not just at technology, but also to the factors that drive how and in what extent people consume energy, including the way they interact with technology (i.e., energy efficiency). The main objective of this research is to understand the differences in energy consumption arising from different socio-demographic, technologic, behavioral and economic characteristics of residential households. This research brings to the spotlight the needs and benefits of looking deeper into residential sector energy consumption in a southern European country. Portugal and the municipality of Évora, in particular, were selected as case studies. Residential sector consumption is a moving target, which increase the complexity of adequate policies and instruments that have to address the bottleneck between increase demand for e.g. climatization due to current lack of thermal comfort and to comply with objectives of increased energy efficiency which ultimately intend to reduce energy consumption. This calls for different levels of knowledge to feed multiscale policies. This dissertation expands the understanding of energy consumption patterns at households, consumers’ role in energy consumption profiles, indoor thermal comfort, and the levels of satisfaction from energy services demand. In a country potentially highly impacted by climate change, with low levels of income and significant lower energy consumption per capita compared to the EU28 average, looking into these issues gains even more importance. The work combines detailed analysis at different spatial (national, city and consumers level) and time scales (hour to annual) taking advantage of diverse methods and datasets including smart meters’ data, door to door surveys and energy simulation and optimization modelling. The results identify (i) ten distinct residential sector consumer groups (e.g., under fuel poverty); (ii) daily and annual consumption patterns (W, U and flat); (iii) major energy consumption determinants such as the physical characteristics of dwellings, particularly the year of construction and floor area; climatization equipment ownership and use, and occupants’ profiles (mainly number and monthly income). It is (iv) recognized that inhabitants try to actively control space heating, but without achieving indoor thermal comfort levels. The results also show (v) that technology can overweight the impact of practices and lifestyle changes for some end-uses as space heating and lighting. Nevertheless, important focus should be given to the evolution in the future of uncertain parameters related with consumer behavior, especially those on climatization, related to thermal comfort and equipment’s use. Furthermore, the research work presents a (vi) bottom-up methodology to project detailed energy end-uses demand, and (vii) an integrated framework for city energy planning. This work sets the ground for the definition of tailor-made policy recommendations for targeted consumer groups (e.g., vulnerable consumers) and climatization behavior/practices to reduce peak demand, social support policies, energy efficiency instruments and measures, renewable energy sources integration, and energy systems planning

Weed management in vineyards, olive groves and orchards

A implementação de culturas perenes, em Portugal, sofreu nas últimas décadas grandes alterações quer na instalação da cultura quer nas técnicas de gestão. Este artigo revê a gestão das infestantes nas principais culturas perenes em Portugal, o que se julga pertinente dado que se tem verificado a implementação de sistemas de modo de produção biológica (MPB) e de produção integrada (MProdi). Por infestante, os autores, consideram as populações de uma dada espécie vegetal que acima de determinados níveis e sob condicionalismos ecológicos particulares sejam responsáveis por prejuízos “líquidos” (balanço benefícios-prejuízos negativo) inaceitáveis em termos económicos e/ou ecológicos ou sociais. Primeiramente, apresentam-se os dados de 2015 relativamente às áreas e produções das culturas perenes mais importantes em Portugal – vinha, olival, pomares de macieira, pereira e citrinos. De seguida, referem-se os principais prejuízos e benefícios das infestantes, salientando-se os estudos relativos aos prejuízos na vinha e os meios de controlo disponíveis mais adotados–mobilização do solo, controlo químico e enrelvamento, as vantagens e inconvenientes de cada método. Por último, refere-se a conveniência da integração das técnicas de gestão, de modo a potenciar os benefícios de cada uma e evitar as suas limitaçõesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cross-functional Analysis of Generalisation in Behavioural Learning

In behavioural testing, system functionalities underrepresented in the standard evaluation setting (with a held-out test set) are validated through controlled input-output pairs. Optimising performance on the behavioural tests during training (behavioural learning) would improve coverage of phenomena not sufficiently represented in the i.i.d. data and could lead to seemingly more robust models. However, there is the risk that the model narrowly captures spurious correlations from the behavioural test suite, leading to overestimation and misrepresentation of model performance -- one of the original pitfalls of traditional evaluation. In this work, we introduce BeLUGA, an analysis method for evaluating behavioural learning considering generalisation across dimensions of different granularity levels. We optimise behaviour-specific loss functions and evaluate models on several partitions of the behavioural test suite controlled to leave out specific phenomena. An aggregate score measures generalisation to unseen functionalities (or overfitting). We use BeLUGA to examine three representative NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, paraphrase identification and reading comprehension) and compare the impact of a diverse set of regularisation and domain generalisation methods on generalisation performance.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. To be published in the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). This preprint is a pre-MIT Press publication versio

The Evaluation of Public Policies from the Perspective of the Agenda 21 of Culture: a Case Study

This research shows the results of the implementation of a public cultural policy at the municipal level and has as a main objective to evaluate, from the perspective of the agenda 21 of culture, the program "Art for social development" by the Municipal Institute of Art and Culture developed in a secondary-level boarding school located at the Topolobampo community, in the municipality of Ahome, Mexico. A QUAN-QUAL methodology was used with instruments like questionnaires applied to the young participants and interviews with the workshop facilitators and administrative staff. Guitar, painting and theatre workshops were given, through which the development of new artistic expression skills was achieved, as well as contributing to the strengthening of social behaviors such as tolerance, patience and interpersonal communication, among others. It was found the constant need of having permanent programs of integral training, both in the field of artistic training and socio-emotional, giving priority to groups at risk, such as students of the boarding school that mostly come from families of scarce resources, some of the low performance academic and aggressive behavior. The conclusion is that public policies are required to promote greater articulation of education and culture in order to have a stronger impact on the social and cultural inclusion of young people

Using the Language of Wellbeing in the Care of the Elderly in Mexico

The language we use with others derives from hidden assumptions about them and commands expectations and outcomes. That is why the constructs and language used in health services provided to the elderly are a worthwhile object of study.This paper addresses the language used in the services provided to the elderly population in Mexico and many other Latin-American countries. The psychological, linguistic and practical aspects of the wellbeing language paradigm are discussed. The linguistic analysis of the discourse used by health care providers conveys important implications to the kind, quality and purpose of intervention.It is argued that by using the language of wellness, health professionals are in a better position to listen and assess the degree of satisfaction and happiness, to explore for conditions that may promote or hinder quality of life, and also, they are in a better position for planning services to the elderly that reach beyond physical health and economic indicators.It is posited that quality of life in old age is incomplete without a sense of the patient’s wellbeing

Functionality learning through specification instructions

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. They enable fine-grained evaluations of model aspects that would otherwise go unnoticed in standard evaluation datasets, but they do not address the problem of how to fix the failure cases. Previous work has explored functionality learning by fine-tuning models on suite data. While this improves performance on seen functionalities, it often does not generalize to unseen ones and can harm general performance. This paper analyses a fine-tuning-free approach to functionality learning. For each functionality in a suite, we generate a specification instruction that encodes it. We combine the obtained specification instructions to create specification-augmented prompts, which we feed to language models pre-trained on natural instruction data to generate suite predictions. A core aspect of our analysis is to measure the effect that including a set of specifications has on a held-out set of unseen, qualitatively different specifications. Our experiments across four tasks and models ranging from 80M to 175B parameters show that smaller models struggle to follow specification instructions. However, larger models (> 3B params.) can benefit from specifications and even generalize desirable behaviors across functionalities.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figure

Checking HateCheck: a cross-functional analysis of behaviour-aware learning for hate speech detection

Behavioural testing -- verifying system capabilities by validating human-designed input-output pairs -- is an alternative evaluation method of natural language processing systems proposed to address the shortcomings of the standard approach: computing metrics on held-out data. While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. With this in mind, we explore behaviour-aware learning by examining several fine-tuning schemes using HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection systems. To address potential pitfalls of training on data originally intended for evaluation, we train and evaluate models on different configurations of HateCheck by holding out categories of test cases, which enables us to estimate performance on potentially overlooked system properties. The fine-tuning procedure led to improvements in the classification accuracy of held-out functionalities and identity groups, suggesting that models can potentially generalise to overlooked functionalities. However, performance on held-out functionality classes and i.i.d. hate speech detection data decreased, which indicates that generalisation occurs mostly across functionalities from the same class and that the procedure led to overfitting to the HateCheck data distribution.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at the First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NLP (NLP Power!

Análise dos padrões de encalhes de tartarugas marinhas no litoral norte e médio do Rio Grande do Sul entre 1994 e 2015

Dados provenientes de encalhes vem sendo utilizados para o estudo de diversos grupos de animais marinhos, frequentemente naqueles envolvendo tartarugas, sendo possível a realização de inferências entre os encalhes e a mortalidade desse animais nas águas adjacentes. Este trabalho analisou 1055 registros de tartarugas marinhas encalhadas no litoral norte e médio do Rio Grande do Sul entre 1994 e 2015. Estes dados tem origem principalmente em monitoramentos de praia realizados pelo Centro de Estudos Costeiros, Limnológicos e Marinhos (CECLIMAR) e pelo Grupo de Estudos de Mamíferos Aquáticos do Rio Grande do Sul (GEMARS). Foram registradas todas as cinco espécies conhecidas no litoral brasileiro: Caretta caretta (n=541), Chelonia mydas (n=410), Dermochelys coriacea (n=57), Lepidochelys olivacea (n=10) e Eretmochelys imbricata (n=6), além de 31 registros sem identificação de espécie. Foi encontrado um padrão sazonal nas taxas de encalhe ao longo do ano: notavelmente, encalhes tornam-se mais comuns entre o final da primavera e começo do verão. Comparações com modelos lineares simples demonstraram um aumento dos encalhes de C, caretta e C. mydas com o passar dos anos, o que indica que esta ocorrendo uma maior mortalidade dessas espécies no mar. Mesmo que esse aumento possa ser, pelo menos em 4 parte, explicado pelo crescimento das populações graças à proteção das praias de desova, é possível que este aumento esteja relacionado com um aumento do impacto humano, particularmente da atividade pesqueira, mostrando-se urgente a necessidade de maiores estudos sobre a mesma, bem como de planos de manejo para a redução de impactos desta.Data originating from strandings has been used to study different groups of marine animals, frequently in the ones involving sea turtles, that demonstrate the possibility of making inferences on the mortality of these animals in the nearby waters based on this kind of data. In this work we analyse 1055 entries from sea turtle strandings on the north shore of the brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul between 1994 and 2015. This data was obtained mostly from beach surveys, done by two groups: CECLIMAR and GEMARS. All five species known for the brazilian coast were observed: Caretta caretta(n=541), Chelonia mydas (=410), Dermochelys coriacea(n=57), Lepidochelys olivacea (n=10) and Eretmochelys imbricata (n=6), plus 31 turtles in whithout species identification. A seasonal pattern was noticed in the way the stranding rates vary through the year: markedly, strandings become more common between the end of spring and beginning of summer. Comparisons with simple linear models showed a rise in the strandings rates of C. caretta and C. mydas throughout the years, which suggests a rise in-sea mortality may be occurring. Although this rise may be at least in part explained by the growth of the populations due to protection policies in nesting beaches, it may be due to higher human impacts, most notably from fisheries. The limited data on that regard presses for more studies, as well as management plans on fisheries to control the impact of this activity on marine life