Late Quaternary ecosystem and climate interactions in SW Balkans inferred from Lake Prespa sediments

The transboundary Lake Prespa and its watershed enclose a remarkable biodiversity that is protected by several national and international treaties. Situated at 849 m a.s.l., the area is characterized by a transitional climate and the closed nature of the basin controls Lake Prespa’s modern hydrology. An 18 m-long sediment sequence was retrieved from a distal location, away from stream inflow, where preliminary hydroacoustic investigations suggested undisturbed sedimentation. Consequently, the sediments were dated and analyzed using palynological, sedimentological and geochemical techniques. The age model is based on AMS and ESR dating, tephrochronology and cross correlation with the Greenland ice record (NGRIP) and suggests an age of c. 92 ka cal BP for the base of the sequence. The pollen spectra allow for the zoning of the record in three major phases of vegetation development corresponding to Marine Isotope Stages 5 to 1. The forested phases of MIS 5 and MIS 1 are dominated by thermophilous and drought-sensitive trees (e.g. Quercus, Carpinus, Fagus) suggesting higher temperatures and moisture availability during their growing season. Increased lake productivity, hypolimnion anoxia and calcite precipitation are recorded in these intervals. Continuous presence of Mediterranean frost-sensitive species (e.g. Pistacia, Phillyrea) during the Holocene implies rising temperatures in late winter and spring. Sporadic occurrence of maquis pollen in MIS 5 suggest that temperature was probably limiting their expansion. Increasing fuel availability and summer aridity most likely account for a higher microscopic charred particle concentration during the Holocene (in particular after c. 5.5 ka). However, intensifying anthropogenic activity has probably overridden climate forcing over the last c. 2 ka. Within MIS 5 and MIS 1, brief periods (centennial to millennial) of open landscape are also documented and are ascribed to colder and drier climate conditions persisting at Prespa. During MIS 3, the relatively open landscape is characterized by several deciduous trees besides Pinus. An open steppe landscape with scattered tree stands comprising mostly Pinus prevailed in MIS 4 and MIS 2. High Artemisia and Chenopodiaceae abundances point to rather cold and arid conditions at Prespa. This appears to be in agreement with low lake productivity, enhanced mixing and increased ice-cover documented for this time. However, occurrences of deciduous tree pollen throughout the Last Glacial provide evidence for the survival of several tree species in sheltered locations at Prespa or its vicinity. This study underscores the sensitivity of the Lake Prespa region to climate forcing over the Last Glacial and the Holocene. The vegetation history of the region was examined focusing on ecological processes such as immigration, competition, succession, population growth and stability. Ongoing investigations may offer further insights into the paleoenvironment and paleoclimate at Prespa. The Prespa pollen underline the potential of the region to serve as refugium over longer time scales. In spite of systematic conservation efforts over the last decades, the question of whether Prespa’s ecosystems will withstand increasing anthropogenic pressures remains open

Πιστότητα στη μάρκα και ικανοποίηση πελατών

Σκοπός της παρούσας έρευνας είναι να διερευνηθεί το περιεχόμενο και η σχέση που υπάρχει μεταξύ των εννοιών της ικανοποίησης των πελατών και της πίστης σε μια μάρκα εταιρίας. Η έρευνα είναι κατά βάση βιβλιογραφική και περιλαμβάνει την ανάλυση πολλών θεωριών πάνω στις προαναφερθέντες έννοιες. Η έρευνα ξεκινάει κάνοντας την ανάλυση της σημασίας του εμπορικού σήματος και τις αντιλήψεις των καταναλωτών για αυτό. Η προτίμηση ενός καταναλωτή ως προς το να αγοράσει μια συγκεκριμένη μάρκα σε μια κατηγορία προϊόντων αναφέρεται συνήθως ως πίστη στο εμπορικό σήμα. Στην συνέχεια, η έρευνα περνάει στο θέμα της ικανοποίησης των πελατών και των καταναλωτών, αναλύοντας τις επιμέρους θεωρίες των ερευνητών του παρελθόντος. Οι καταναλωτές που δείχνουν συνολική προτίμηση σε κάποιο προϊόν επώνυμης μάρκας προφανώς και είναι αρκετά ευχαριστημένοι από το προϊόν ή από άλλες υπηρεσίες που παρέχει η μάρκα, ωστόσο ενδέχεται να περιλαμβάνονται και βαθύτερα αίτια σχετικά με τις πηγές ικανοποίησής τους. Χρήσιμα συμπεράσματα παρουσιάζονται στο τέλος της έρευνας.The purpose of the current dissertation is to investigate the content and the relationship between the concepts of customer satisfaction and loyalty to a brand of a company. Research is basically bibliographic and includes the analysis of many theories on the above-mentioned concepts. Research begins by analyzing the importance of the brand and the perceptions of consumers about it. A consumer's preference for purchasing a particular brand in a product category is usually referred to as brand loyalty. The research then goes on the subject of customer and consumer satisfaction, analyzing and providing the individual theories of the researchers of the past. Consumers who show a general preference for a branded brand product are obviously quite happy with the product or other services provided by the brand but may also include deeper reasons for their sources of satisfaction. Useful conclusions are presented at the end of the survey

Ελευθερία Έκφρασης και Μέσα Κοινωνικής Δικτύωσης

Με την παρούσα μελέτη θα επιχειρηθεί η σκιαγράφηση του τοπίου που διαμορφώνουν οι νέες συνθήκες ηλεκτρονικής «άνθισης» για την ελευθερία έκφρασης και η σχέση της με τα υπόλοιπα ατομικά δικαιώματα ενόψει της διάπλασης της οικουμενικής κοινωνίας της πληροφορίας και της μαζικής ψηφιακής συμμετοχικής λειτουργίας. Η προστασία του δικαιώματος στην ελεύθερη έκφραση αποτελεί σημαντική κατάκτηση των δημοκρατικών κοινωνικών μορφωμάτων και αναπόσπαστο κομμάτι της δημοκρατικής λειτουργίας. Αφού μας απασχολήσει το θέμα της νομικής κατοχύρωσης του δικαιώματος θα ασχοληθούμε με το δικαίωμα συμμετοχής του ατόμου στην κοινωνία της πληροφορίας, υπό το πρίσμα της «αλλαγής του επικοινωνιακού παραδείγματος», με την ερμηνεία των «παραδοσιακών» του δικαιωμάτων στη νέα εποχή και με την βολιδοσκόπηση της καινής ψηφιακής συμμετοχικότητας. Έπειτα, θα επιχειρηθεί η καταγραφή, η κατανόηση και η ερμηνεία των κατευθύνσεων που υιοθετήθηκαν από την Κεντρική Εξουσία, στον δυτικό κόσμο, για τη ρύθμιση της ηλεκτρονικής πραγματικότητας. Τέλος, θα προσπαθήσουμε να εστιάσουμε στον ανταγωνισμό ανάμεσα στην ελευθερία της έκφρασης και στα υπόλοιπα ατομικά δικαιώματα και θα επιχειρήσουμε να εμπεδώσουμε τον πραγματικό χώρο που καταλαμβάνει το δικαίωμα με την «παραδοσιακή» του μορφή στο πεδίο εκτύλιξης της ψηφιακής συμμετοχικής διαδικασίας.The present study is an attempt to outline the situation that is formed with the new condi-tions of the electronic “blossoming” for the freedom of speech and its relation with the rest individual rights in view of the spread of the information society and the involvement of the media industry. The right to free expression and its protection is an important achievement for society and an integral part of democracy and its operation. After dealing with the legal vesting of this specific right, we will be dealing with the right of every individual to participate in the information society, under the scope of the change that takes place in the communicative example by interpreting its “ traditional” rights in the new era. At the same time we need to keep in mind the participation in the new digital society. Moreover, attempts will be carried out to capture, comprehend and interpret the guidelines that were adopted by the Main Authority, in the western society, for the regulation of the digital reality. Finally, we will try to focus on the competitiveness between the right to freedom of speech and the rest of the individual rights. Furthermore, we will try to comprehend and under-stand the real space that the right conquers in its 'traditional' form, in the field of digital pro-cess and the participation in it.

VISION DIFFMASK: Faithful Interpretation of Vision Transformers with Differentiable Patch Masking

The lack of interpretability of the Vision Transformer may hinder its use in critical real-world applications despite its effectiveness. To overcome this issue, we propose a post-hoc interpretability method called VISION DIFFMASK, which uses the activations of the model's hidden layers to predict the relevant parts of the input that contribute to its final predictions. Our approach uses a gating mechanism to identify the minimal subset of the original input that preserves the predicted distribution over classes. We demonstrate the faithfulness of our method, by introducing a faithfulness task, and comparing it to other state-of-the-art attribution methods on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K, achieving compelling results. To aid reproducibility and further extension of our work, we open source our implementation: https://github.com/AngelosNal/Vision-DiffMaskComment: Accepted in the XAI4CV Workshop at CVPR 202

In-situ TEM study of the crystallization sequence in a gold-based metallic glass

The composition Au49Ag5.5Pd2.3Cu26.9Si16.3 (at.%) is of interest as the basis for the development of gold-based bulk metallic glasses for application in jewellery. In-situ heating in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC, both conventional and fast) are used to obtain a comprehensive characterization of the decomposition on heating a melt-spun glass of this composition. Linking TEM with DSC over a range of heating rates 0.083‒2000 K s‒1, allows the sample temperature in the TEM heating stage to be calibrated. On heating up to melting, the glass decomposes in up to four stages: (1) complete transformation to single-phase nanocrystalline (Au,Cu)7Si; (2) grain growth of this phase; (3) precipitation of (Pd,Ag)Si, reducing the supersaturation of silicon in the (Au,Cu)7Si matrix; (4) with the precipitate phase remaining stable, decomposition of the matrix to a mixture of (Au,Ag)8Cu2, AuCu and Cu3Au phases. At all stages, grain diameters remain sub-micrometre; some of the stable nanocrystalline microstructures may themselves be of interest for applications. The characterization of the decomposition can assist in the optimization of the glass composition to improve tarnish-resistance, while retaining adequate glass-forming ability, formability in thermoplastic processing, and resistance to crystallization. For materials in general, the close correlation of in-situ TEM and DSC results should find wide use in characterizing complex transformation sequences

Probing LLMs for Joint Encoding of Linguistic Categories

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, due to the general-purpose linguistic knowledge acquired during pretraining. Existing model interpretability research (Tenney et al., 2019) suggests that a linguistic hierarchy emerges in the LLM layers, with lower layers better suited to solving syntactic tasks and higher layers employed for semantic processing. Yet, little is known about how encodings of different linguistic phenomena interact within the models and to what extent processing of linguistically-related categories relies on the same, shared model representations. In this paper, we propose a framework for testing the joint encoding of linguistic categories in LLMs. Focusing on syntax, we find evidence of joint encoding both at the same (related part-of-speech (POS) classes) and different (POS classes and related syntactic dependency relations) levels of linguistic hierarchy. Our cross-lingual experiments show that the same patterns hold across languages in multilingual LLMs.Comment: Accepted in EMNLP Findings 202

Novel micro-flat springs using the superior elastic properties of metallic glass foils

A thin metallic glass foil of 100 mg mass forming a sinusoidal arc behaves as non-conventional flat micro-spring withstanding loads 105 times higher than its load. Upon a normal load applied on the top of the arc, the foil deforms elastically leading to sinusoidal wavy patterns of higher order. The lifespan of the novel spring is higher than conventional low cycle springs and can potentially be further improved by eliminating surface and edge preparation induced defects. This unique behavior of metallic glass foils has the potential to revolutionize the field of springs and can be exploited for numerous applications

On the undulatory behaviour of metallic glass foils: a novel spring-type behaviour

The undulatory behaviour is a unique type of mechanical response that was recently observed for metallic glass foils in geometric confinement. It is manifested when normal load is applied on the top of an arc-shaped thin foil of metallic glass; the foil then deforms elastically and its shape changes by progressively increasing the number of formed sinusoidal arcs. This behaviour results from a combination of successive elastic bending and buckling events and can be utilized for developing novel types of non-linear springs. In this work, the undulatory behaviour of a Ni-Fe-Si-B-Mo metallic glass foil has been systematically studied and compared with that of the previously reported Fe-Cr-Si-B foil. The results indicate that the alloy composition and the foil thickness can significantly affect the load required for the formation of the harmonic undulations. The initial geometry of the formed sinusoidal arc including its amplitude and boundary length, can also be used to tune the load and displacement response of the foils. Upon unloading, the foil returns to its initial shape, as long as the loading remains in the elastic deformation range of the metallic glass. The findings suggest that the undulatory behaviour of thin metallic glass foils can be potentially exploited for a wide range of engineering applications including micro-springs, sensors, actuators, and shock absorbers.DMG Mor

Segmentectomy versus lobectomy. Which factors are decisive for an optimal oncological outcome?

Low-dose computed tomography is being used for lung cancer screening in high-risk groups. Detecting lung cancer at an early stage improves the chance of optimal treatment and increases overall survival. This article compares segmentectomy vs. lobectomy as surgical options, in the case of stage I non-small cell lung carcinoma, ideally IA. To compare the 2 previously referred strategies, data were collected from articles (40 studies were reviewed), reviews, and systematic analyses in PubMed Central, as well as reviewing recent literature. Segmentectomy could be an equal alternative to lobectomy in early-stage NSCLC (tumour < 2 cm). It could be preferred for patients with a low cardiopulmonary reserve, who struggle to survive a lobectomy. As far as early-stage NSCLC is concerned, anatomic segmentectomy is an acceptable procedure in a selective group of patients. For better tumour and stage classification, a systematic lymph node dissection should be performed