Pansharpening techniques to detect mass monument damaging in Iraq

The recent mass destructions of monuments in Iraq cannot be monitored with the terrestrial survey methodologies, for obvious reasons of safety. For the same reasons, it’s not advisable the use of classical aerial photogrammetry, so it was obvious to think to the use of multispectral Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. Nowadays VHR satellite images resolutions are very near airborne photogrammetrical images and usually they are acquired in multispectral mode. The combination of the various bands of the images is called pan-sharpening and it can be carried on using different algorithms and strategies. The correct pansharpening methodology, for a specific image, must be chosen considering the specific multispectral characteristics of the satellite used and the particular application. In this paper a first definition of guidelines for the use of VHR multispectral imagery to detect monument destruction in unsafe area, is reported. The proposed methodology, agreed with UNESCO and soon to be used in Libya for the coastal area, has produced a first report delivered to the Iraqi authorities. Some of the most evident examples are reported to show the possible capabilities of identification of damages using VHR images

Complex scattering within D" observed on the very dense Los Angeles Region Seismic Experiment passive array

Several seismic phases that scattered within a few hundred kilometers of the base of the mantle are observed in a very dense seismic section. The Los Angeles Region Seismic Experiment passive phase array was composed of 88 seismometers placed along a 175 km profile. Records from two deep earthquakes in Tonga and one earthquake near Honshu, Japan show a secondary arrival between clear P and PcP arrivals. Modeling with layered structures shows that the Tonga and Honshu seismic sections are consistent with an increase in seismic velocity 140 and 240 km above the core-mantle boundary, respectively, and a ≃10-km thick low-velocity zone at the base of the mantle beneath a region in the mid Pacific. Several of these arrivals are not coherent enough to appear in higher resolution stacks from the much larger Southern California Seismic Network. This experiment illustrates that fine-scale passive array data can reveal small-scale deep Earth structure invisible to larger-scale seismic networks

Ordovician Ductile Deformation Zones in the Hudson Highlands and their Relationship to Meamorphic Zonation in Cover Rocks of Dutchess County, New York

Guidebook for field trips in Connecticut and adjacent areas of New York and Rhode Island: New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference 77th annual meeting, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, October 4-6, 1985: Trip A

The Iceman as a Burial

Since his discovery in 1991 the iceman has been widely seen as meeting a dramatic end – mortally wounded by an arrow shot while attempting to flee through an Alpine pass. A careful study of all the located grave goods, here planned comprehensively for the first time, points strongly towards the scene as one of a ceremonial burial, subsequently dispersed by thawing and gravity. The whole assemblage thus takes on another aspect – not a casual tragedy but a mortuary statement of its day

Criteri di valutazione delle banche dati bibliografiche elettroniche

Introduction: the need for valid and relevant information in clinical healthcare settings raises the problem of how to choose the best biomedical databases to subscribe to. Replicable standard criteria should be defined and should be easy to use and inexpensive. Health technology: electronic databases are useful tools to provide health professionals with good information regarding patients’ care, especially those resources that help support clinical decisions, and that are able to quickly identify documents pertinent to specific health problems. Material and method: the University Hospital “Santa Maria della Misericordia” di Udine has developed an evaluation tool to address the proliferation of proposals available on the market and evaluate potential costs and benefits of individual resources. This instrument is the result of the biomedical documentation service’s experience in the last several years. It consists of 23 questions about the quality of the information and technical-economic aspects of the database in question. The questionnaire’s answers are open or require a "yes" or "no". Results: the application of the instrument to a database results in an overview of the characteristics of each resource and the capacity to compare it with similar databases. Conclusion: the proposed evaluation method offers a quick, objective analysis of possible new purchases and also an indication to what tools are available to clinicians to find the desired information. This approach is part of the methodology of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and draws attention to the strengths and weaknesses in bibliographic databases, especially in those that are used as clinical decision support system

Inspiral, merger and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries: a multipolar analysis

We study the inspiral, merger and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries by analyzing a catalogue of numerical simulations for seven different values of the mass ratio (from q=M2/M1=1 to q=4). We compare numerical and Post-Newtonian results by projecting the waveforms onto spin-weighted spherical harmonics, characterized by angular indices (l,m). We find that the Post-Newtonian equations predict remarkably well the relation between the wave amplitude and the orbital frequency for each (l,m), and that the convergence of the Post-Newtonian series to the numerical results is non-monotonic. To leading order the total energy emitted in the merger phase scales like eta^2 and the spin of the final black hole scales like eta, where eta=q/(1+q)^2 is the symmetric mass ratio. We study the multipolar distribution of the radiation, finding that odd-l multipoles are suppressed in the equal mass limit. Higher multipoles carry a larger fraction of the total energy as q increases. We introduce and compare three different definitions for the ringdown starting time. Applying linear estimation methods (the so-called Prony methods) to the ringdown phase, we find resolution-dependent time variations in the fitted parameters of the final black hole. By cross-correlating information from different multipoles we show that ringdown fits can be used to obtain precise estimates of the mass and spin of the final black hole, which are in remarkable agreement with energy and angular momentum balance calculations.Comment: 51 pages, 28 figures, 16 tables. Many improvements throughout the text in response to the referee report. The calculation of multipolar components in Appendix A now uses slightly different conventions. Matches version in press in PR

Multiple dimensions and roles of Non-Wood Forest Products within bioeconomy: examples from Northern and Southern perspectives

Non-wood forest products (NWFPs) make an important contribution to livelihoods, diets, and recreation for people across the world. Particularly in developing countries, NWFPs are essential for subsistence as nutritionally relevant foods, source of medicines, energy, and construction materials. Moreover, their commercialization also provides earnings for cash-constrained households. NWFPs are important items also in western societies, where they can be found as key ingredients in a surprising number of food and medicinal products. Moreover, many still directly collect NWFPs for self-consumption, for leisure, and for trade. This paper presents results on the roles played by NWFPs in developing and developed countries. On the one hand it provides insights from research conducted in select forest and non-forest communities in two African countries (Uganda and Zambia), demonstrating their role in providing important nutrients year-round, as well as their potential to form the basis of sustainable, economically viable and nutrition-sensitive value chains. On the other, it presents the results of a survey conducted on a large panel of European households (17,000 respondents), revealing that about 90% of these consume NWFPs at least once per year and a surprisingly high share, almost 25%, harvest NWFPs. Moreover, data from two European case-studies illustrate how NWFPs harvesting can originate recreational opportunities and earnings in rural areas. While research results in the different contexts are not directly comparable due to different methods and scale of application, they provide useful insights on the versatile role of NWFPs under different conditions, development stages and aspects of the bioeconomy

The sensitivity of Euro-Atlantic regimes to model horizontal resolution

There is growing evidence that the atmospheric dynamics of the Euro-Atlantic sector during winter is driven in part by the presence of quasi-persistent regimes. However, general circulation models typically struggle to simulate these with, for example, an overly weakly persistent blocking regime. Previous studies have showed that increased horizontal resolution can improve the regime structure of a model but have so far only considered a single model with only one ensemble member at each resolution, leaving open the possibility that this may be either coincidental or model dependent. We show that the improvement in regime structure due to increased resolution is robust across multiple models with multiple ensemble members. However, while the high-resolution models have notably more tightly clustered data, other aspects of the regimes may not necessarily improve and are also subject to a large amount of sampling variability that typically requires at least three ensemble members to surmount