686 research outputs found
In the Driver's Seat: Rico and Education
The Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean (RICO) field campaign carried out a wide array of educational activities, including a major first in a field project—a complete mission, including research flights, planned and executed entirely by students. This article describes the educational opportunities provided to the 24 graduate and 9 undergraduate students who participated in RICO
Technical alignment
This essay discusses the importance of the areas of
infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services
demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It
encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which
transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks
are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying
agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of
preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining
technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation
context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and
challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes
with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical
alignment going forward
Issues in digital preservation: towards a new research agenda
Digital Preservation has evolved into a specialized, interdisciplinary research discipline of its own, seeing significant increases in terms of research capacity, results, but also challenges. However, with this specialization and subsequent formation of a dedicated subgroup of researchers active in this field, limitations of the challenges addressed can be observed. Digital preservation research may seem to react to problems arising, fixing problems that exist now, rather than proactively researching new solutions that may be applicable only after a few years of maturing. Recognising the benefits of bringing together researchers and practitioners with various professional backgrounds related to digital preservation, a seminar was organized in Schloss Dagstuhl, at the Leibniz Center for Informatics (18-23 July 2010), with the aim of addressing the current digital preservation challenges, with a specific focus on the automation aspects in this field. The main goal of the seminar was to outline some research challenges in digital preservation, providing a number of "research questions" that could be immediately tackled, e.g. in Doctoral Thesis. The seminar intended also to highlight the need for the digital preservation community to reach out to IT research and other research communities outside the immediate digital preservation domain, in order to jointly develop solutions
Whole Genome Sequencing for Identification of Putative Causative Alleles for Hemochromatosis in Horses
Hemochromatosis is liver disorder in which excess iron is stored in the liver, leading to iron overload and extensive liver damage that can prove fatal. Based on human precedence, a genetic cause for idiopathic hemochromatosis in horses is suspected. Two horses with hemochromatosis were whole genome sequenced, with variants in candidate genes prioritized in analyses of potential pathogenicity. No clear putative variants were found to be present in both horses, suggesting an etiology more complex than the initially suspected Mendelian inheritance. A heterozygous nonsense mutation in STEAP3 metalloreductase (STEAP3) was identified as a potential contributor to hemochromatosis in one of the horses
Integrated methods and scenario development for urban groundwater management and protection during tunnel road construction: a case study of urban hydrogeology in the city of Basel, Switzerland
In the northwestern area of Basel, Switzerland, a tunnel highway connects the French highway A35 (Mulhouse-Basel) with the Swiss A2 (Basel-Gotthard-Milano). The subsurface highway construction was associated with significant impacts on the urban groundwater system. Parts of this area were formerly contaminated by industrial wastes, and groundwater resources are extensively used by industry. During some construction phases, considerable groundwater drawdown was necessary, leading to major changes in the groundwater flow regime. Sufficient groundwater supply for industrial users and possible groundwater pollution due to interactions with contaminated areas had to be taken into account. A groundwater management system is presented, comprising extensive groundwater monitoring, high-resolution numerical groundwater modeling, and the development and evaluation of different scenarios. This integrated approach facilitated the evaluation of the sum of impacts, and their interaction in time and space with changing hydrological boundary conditions. For all project phases, changes of the groundwater system had to be evaluated in terms of the various goals and requirements. Although the results of this study are case-specific, the overall conceptual approach and methodologies applied may be directly transferred to other urban area
Microphysical processes in two stably stratified orographic cloud systems
August 1981.Includes bibliographical references (pages [146]-151).Sponsored by National Science Foundation ATM 78-19261
Physical structure of northern Colorado River Basin cloud systems
September, 1985.Includes bibliographical references.Sponsored by National Science Foundation ATM-8109490.Sponsored by National Science Foundation ATM-8407543
Pentacene in 1,3,5-Tri(1-naphtyl)benzene: A Novel Standard for Transient EPR Spectroscopy at Room Temperature
Testing and calibrating an experimental setup with standard samples is an essential aspect of scientific research. Single crystals of pentacene in p-terphenyl are widely used for this purpose in transient electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. However, this sample is not without downsides: the crystals need to be grown and the EPR transitions only appear at particular orientations of the crystal with respect to the external magnetic field. An alternative host for pentacene is the glass-forming 1,3,5-tri(1-naphtyl)benzene (TNB). Due to the high glass transition point of TNB, an amorphous glass containing randomly oriented pentacene molecules is obtained at room temperature. Here we demonstrate that pentacene dissolved in TNB gives a typical “powder-like” transient EPR spectrum of the triplet state following pulsed laser excitation. From the two-dimensional data set, it is straightforward to obtain the zero-field splitting parameters and relative populations by spectral simulation as well as the B1 field in the microwave resonator. Due to the simplicity of preparation, handling and stability, this system is ideal for adjusting the laser beam with respect to the microwave resonator and for introducing students to transient EPR spectroscopy
Recurrent Neural-Linear Posterior Sampling for Nonstationary Contextual Bandits
An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between
exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present
in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is
an attractive alternative to transform a nonstationary problem into a
stationary problem that can be solved efficiently. However, even a carefully
designed historical context may introduce spurious relationships or lack a
convenient representation of crucial information. In order to address these
issues, we propose an approach that learns to represent the relevant context
for a decision based solely on the raw history of interactions between the
agent and the environment. This approach relies on a combination of features
extracted by recurrent neural networks with a contextual linear bandit
algorithm based on posterior sampling. Our experiments on a diverse selection
of contextual and noncontextual nonstationary problems show that our recurrent
approach consistently outperforms its feedforward counterpart, which requires
handcrafted historical contexts, while being more widely applicable than
conventional nonstationary bandit algorithms. Although it is very difficult to
provide theoretical performance guarantees for our new approach, we also prove
a novel regret bound for linear posterior sampling with measurement error that
may serve as a foundation for future theoretical work
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