All the King’s Horses, All the King’s Elephants: The Fates of Royal Animals in Nepal’s Post-Monarchy Period

In May of 2008, Nepal’s 240-year-old monarchy was legally dissolved. In the wake of this dissolution, the new interim government sought to replace royal institutions, procedures, and ceremonies with new, parallel processes. One unexpected royal legacy that politicians needed to resolve was that of the former royal animals that had been connected to the position of the King. The king of Nepal and palace institutions had been responsible for the welfare of a range of animals: private royal horses, a palace dairy herd, elephants in Chitwan, and an aviary of pheasants. Many of Nepal’s ex-royal animals have survived for years after the monarchy’s collapse, and many of them were left vulnerable, with no one clearly responsible for or dedicated to them in the new political context. The peculiar and marginalized fates of Nepal’s ex-royal animals highlight the profound institutional complexity the monarchy once entailed, and the far-reaching consequences of its dissolution. They also reveal the grudging and complex ways that parliamentary politicians and bureaucrats have handled some of the more inconvenient legacies of the institution they eliminated

Nepal and Bhutan in 2014

Both Nepal and Bhutan formed new parliamentary governments in 2014. In both cases, a new party took control, but major policies remained unchanged. Many people experienced hardships in buying basic commodities (because of inflation in Nepal and a subsidy dispute in Bhutan). Nepal faced three natural disasters

Soil Surface Runoff Scheme for Improving Land-Hydrology and Surface Fluxes in Simple SiB (SSiB)

Evapotranspiration on land is hard to measure and difficult to simulate. On the scale of a GCM grid, there is large subgrid-scale variability of orography, soil moisture, and vegetation. Our hope is to be able to tune the biophysical constants of vegetation and soil parameters to get the most realistic space-averaged diurnal cycle of evaporation and its climatology. Field experiments such as First ISLSCP Field Experiment (FIFE), Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (BOREAS), and LBA help a great deal in improving our evapotranspiration schemes. However, these improvements have to be matched with, and coupled to, consistent improvement in land-hydrology; otherwise, the runoff problems will intrinsically reflect on the soil moisture and evapotranspiration errors. Indeed, a realistic runoff simulation also ensures a reasonable evapotranspiration simulation provided the precipitation forcing is reliable. We have been working on all of the above problems to improve the simulated hydrologic cycle. Through our participation in the evaluation and intercomparison of land-models under the behest of Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP), we identified a few problems with Simple SiB (SSIB; Xue et al., 1991) hydrology in regions of significant snowmelt. Sud and Mocko (1999) show that inclusion of a separate snowpack model, with its own energy budget and fluxes with the atmosphere aloft and soil beneath, helps to ameliorate some of the deficiencies of delayed snowmelt and excessive spring season runoff. Thus, much more realistic timing of melt water generation was simulated with the new snowpack model in the subsequent GSWP re-evaluations using 2 years of ISLSCP Initiative I forcing data for 1987 and 1988. However, we noted an overcorrection of the low meltwater infiltration of SSiB. While the improvement in snowmelt timing was found everywhere, the snowmelt infiltration has became excessive in some regions, e.g., Lena river basin. This leads to much reduced runoff in many basins as compared to observations. We believe this is a consequence of neglect of the influence of subgrid-scale variations in orography that affects the production of surface runoff

Decision Support System for Assembly Line Planning

TVGs are entities that carry assembly process descriptions, assembly time estimations, product workspaces and other meta-information. These TVGs get assigned to workstations during line balancing. In order to ensure that line workers do not intrude upon each other’s workspace, product workspaces are needed. Generating and maintaining product workspace information for every TVG is automated by use of the Bauraum Identification Tool developed in this research. All assembly work instructions must have time studies. Methods Time Measurement (MTM) are charts that provide assembly time estimations based on the part information. There are 22 MTM tables and several pieces of information are required to arrive at a time study. Using MTM tables to generate assembly time estimates is an error-prone process. The MTM estimate generator developed provides support by presenting a reduced set of MTM tables. Automated line balancing algorithms have not been able to capture all expert knowledge. The output of these algorithms is unintuitive with regards to allowing manual edits. The Line balancing Visualization and Editing Tool takes in the output of one algorithm and visualizes the information. The tool allows users to edit the assignment made by the algorithm and notifies the user of inconvenient assignments

Transport Model Simulations of Projectile Fragmentation Reactions at 140 MeV/nucleon

The collisions in four different reaction systems using $^{40,48}$Ca and $^{58,64}$Ni isotope beams and a Be target have been simulated using the Heavy Ion Phase Space Exploration and the Antisymmetrized Molecular Dynamics models. The present study mainly focuses on the model predictions for the excitation energies of the hot fragments and the cross sections of the final fragments produced in these reactions. The effects of various factors influencing the final fragment cross sections, such as the choice of the statistical decay code and its parameters have been explored. The predicted fragment cross sections are compared to the projectile fragmentation cross sections measured with the A1900 mass separator. At $E/A=140$ MeV, reaction dynamics can significantly modify the detection efficiencies for the fragments and make them different from the efficiencies applied to the measured data reported in the previous work. The effects of efficiency corrections on the validation of event generator codes are discussed in the context of the two models.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure

Snowmelt and Infiltration Deficiencies of SSiB and Their Resolution with a New Snow-Physics Scheme

A two-year 1987-1988 integration of SSiB forced with ISLSCP Initiative I surface data (as part of the Global Soil Wetness Project, GSWP, evaluation and intercomparison) produced generally realistic land surface fluxes and hydrology. Nevertheless, the evaluation also helped to identify some of the deficiencies of the current version of the Simplified Simple Biosphere (SSiB) model. The simulated snowmelt was delayed in most regions, along with excessive runoff and lack of an spring soil moisture recharge. The SSIB model had previously been noted to have a problem producing accurate soil moisture as compared to observations in the Russian snowmelt region. Similarly, various GSWP implementations of SSIB found deficiencies in this region of the simulated soil moisture and runoff as compared to other non-SSiB land-surface models (LSMs). The origin of these deficiencies was: 1) excessive cooling of the snow and ground, and 2) deep frozen soil disallowing snowmelt infiltration. The problem was most severe in regions that experience very cold winters. In SSiB, snow was treated as a unified layer with the first soil layer, causing soil and snow to cool together in the winter months, as opposed to snow cover acting as an insulator. In the spring season, a large amount of heat was required to thaw a hard frozen snow plus deep soil layers, delaying snowmelt and causing meltwater to become runoff over the frozen soil rather than infiltrate into it

Using advanced segmentation methods for images from TEM microscopes

Tato magisterská práce se zabývá využitím konvolučních neuronových sítí pro segmentační účely v oblasti transmisní elektronové mikroskopie. Také popisuje zvolenou topologii neuronové sítě - U-NET, použíté augmentační techniky a programové prostředí. Firma Thermo Fisher Scientific (dříve FEI Czech Republic s.r.o) poskytla obrazová data pro účely této práce. Získané segmentační výsledky jsou prezentovány ve formě křivek (ROC, PRC) a ve formě numerických hodnot (ARI, DSC, Chybová matice). Zvolená UNET topologie dosáhla excelentních výsledků v oblasti pixelové segmentace. S největší pravděpodobností, budou tyto výsledky sloužit jako odrazový můstek pro interní firemní výzkum.This master‘s thesis deals with the use of a convolutional neural networks for the segmentation task on images from transmission electron microscope. It also describes chosen neural network topology - U-NET, used augmentation techniques and programming environment. ThermoFisher Scientific (formerly FEI Czech Republic s.r.o.) provided data for this thesis. Obtained segmentation results are presented in the form of curves (ROC, PRC) and numerical values (ARI, DSC, Confusion matrices). Chosen U-NET topology achieved excellent results in the field of pixel-wise segmentation, and hopefully, these results will serve as a starting point for internal company research.