Dealing with natural language interfaces in a geolocation context

In the geolocation field where high-level programs and low-level devices coexist, it is often difficult to find a friendly user inter- face to configure all the parameters. The challenge addressed in this paper is to propose intuitive and simple, thus natural lan- guage interfaces to interact with low-level devices. Such inter- faces contain natural language processing and fuzzy represen- tations of words that facilitate the elicitation of business-level objectives in our context

X-ray observations of the Ultraluminous infrared galaxy IRAS19254-7245 (The Superantennae)

We present ROSAT HRI and ASCA observations of the well known ULIRG IRAS19254-7245 (the Superantennae). The object is not detected by ROSAT yielding a 3\sigma upper limit of L_x ~8x10^{41} erg/s in the 0.1-2 keV band. However, we obtain a clear detection by ASCA yielding a luminosity in the 2-10 keV band of 2 \times 10^{42}erg/s. Its X-ray spectrum is very hard, equivalent to a photon index of Gamma=1.0+-0.35. We therefore, attempt to model the X-ray data with a "scatterer" model in which the intrinsic X-ray emission along our line of sight is obscured by an absorbing screen while some fraction, f, is scattered into our line of sight by an ionized medium; this is the standard model for the X-ray emission in obscured (but non Compton-thick) Seyfert galaxies. We obtain an absorbing column of 2x10^{23}cm^{-2} for a power-law photon index of Gamma=1.9, an order of magnitude above the column estimated on the basis of optical observations; the percentage of the scattered emission is high (~20%). Alternatively, a model where most of the X-ray emission comes from reflection on a Compton thick torus (N_H>10^{24} cm^{-2}) cannot be ruled out. We do not detect an Fe line at 6.4 keV; however, the upper limit (90%) to the equivalent width of the 6.4 keV line is high (~3 keV). All the above suggest that most of the X-ray emission originates in an highly obscured Seyfert-2 nucleus.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, To appear in MNRA

Nitrogen transfer between clover and wheat in an intercropping experiment

A novel approach to the problem of improving nitrogen supply in organic farming is to use intercropping of cereals with a legume to provide nitrogen transfer within a season and/or to following crops. The affects of intercropping were studied in a column experiment using mixtures of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum cv. Claire), with white clover (w.c.) (Trifolium repens cv. Barblanca) and with red clover (r.c.) (Trifolium pratense cv. Britta). The effects of cutting and removal above ground clover material with and without additional soil disturbance were compared to leaving clover plants in situ and intercropped with wheat in a split root design. Wheat and clover plants, as monocultures, were used for the controls. 15N ammonium nitrate solution was applied. The wheat seeds were sown into the column without nitrogen. We found that the cutting treatment produced the highest yield of wheat. Available ammonium-N in the soil was greatest in the clover control treatment for the column with only red clover roots and in the cutting+soil disturbance treatment for the column with only white clover roots. Available nitrate-N was greatest in the soil disturbance treatment in the column with clover and wheat roots for both red and white clover. The cutting treatment produced the highest yield of wheat

Short time-scale optical variability of the dwarf Seyfert nucleus in NGC 4395

We present optical spectroscopic observations of the least-luminous known Seyfert 1 galaxy, NGC 4395, which was monitored every half-hour over the course of 3 nights. The continuum emission varied by ~35 per cent over the course of 3 nights, and we find marginal evidence for greater variability in the blue continuum than the red. A number of diagnostic checks were performed on the data in order to constrain any systematic or aperture effects. No correlations were found that adequately explained the observed variability, hence we conclude that we have observed real intrinsic variability of the nuclear source. No simultaneous variability was measured in the broad H-beta line, although given the difficulty in deblending the broad and narrow components it is difficult to comment on the significance of this result. The observed short time-scale continuum variability is consistent with NGC 4395 having an intermediate-mass (~10^5 solar masses) central supermassive black hole, rather than a very low accretion rate. Comparison with the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 5548 shows that the observed variability seems to scale with black hole mass in roughly the manner expected in accretion models. However the absolute time-scale of variability differs by several orders of magnitude from that expected in simple accretion disc models in both cases.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, 5 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA

Commoning (in) the neighbourhood, righting the city

The advent of the urban commons as a response to the commodification of urban life (Foster & Iaione, 2016) and its excluding impact on the urban populations has consolidated a network of social actions, namely acts of commoning (Linebaugh, 2008) that produce and transform the city (Stavrides, 2015). While most of the commons-oriented initiatives largely depend upon horizontal relationships and values shared among active citizens, municipalities and public authorities also play a catalytic role in the level of citizen engagement with the commons through offering the appropriate institutional frameworks. One such instrument of public policy is the BIP/ZIP Program in Lisbon. Initiated in 2011 by the Department of Housing and Local Development of the Municipality of Lisbon, the program aims to promote quality of life and territorial cohesion in priority neighbourhoods by funding projects and interventions guided by partnerships among different stakeholders. Being the first participatory budget implemented at municipal level in a European capital (Falanga, 2019), BIP/ZIP has funded as of its 2021 edition 426 projects in 67 priority areas, addressing multiple urban issues and including diverse actors and activities. In the example of BIP/ZIP, the study seeks to unravel the network of institutionally supported commoning activities that are performed in the neighbourhood scale and can in extrapolation portray the Right-to-the-City in the urban scale. Towards this goal, the research initially conceives a framework to classify commoning practices based on their socio-spatial focus. The underlying themes that have emerged, organise commoning activities that 1. prioritise the most disadvantaged, 2. promote social development, 3. have a strong spatial character, 4. practice togetherness and solidarity, 5. enhance the value of the neighbourhood and 6. expand the boundaries. In parallel, the case study of BIP/ZIP is examined through the successful applications that correspond to the funded projects. These are seen as the dialogue between the grassroot commoning and institutional decision-making and hence define the negotiated Right-to-the-City in the local context. A data-driven approach is employed to firstly map the projects and compose an index that includes information on their attributes such as themes, objectives and activities and secondly organise them using qualitative coding (Saldana, 2021) into the six commoning categories. The produced taxonomy contributes to the conceptualisation of the BIP/ZIP projects as urban commons, identifying patterns and drawing meaningful conclusions on the definition of the Right-to-the-city for the city of Lisbon.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Local partnerships and urban governance: The case of Lisbon

Collaborative forms of governance in urban regeneration are increasingly gaining ground in cities around the world, contributing to the active engagement of citizens in decision-making processes that affect their neighbourhoods and lives. In some cases, municipalities embrace local grassroot initiatives, as for example with the implementation of participatory budgets, enabling active citizens to creatively invent ways to regain and co-manage the urban commons. In a similar vision, the Department of Housing and Local Development of the Municipality of Lisbon launched in 2011 a participatory budget program, namely BIP/ZIP, to annually fund bottom-up initiatives led by local partnerships in priority neighbourhoods that enable responses to social and territorial emergencies. The aim of this research is to investigate the matrix of local partnerships that have been formulated throughout the eleven years of BIP/ZIP and understand their dynamic role in the transformation of the urban governance in the city of Lisbon.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Quantum network routing and local complementation

Quantum communication between distant parties is based on suitable instances of shared entanglement. For efficiency reasons, in an anticipated quantum network beyond point-to-point communication, it is preferable that many parties can communicate simultaneously over the underlying infrastructure; however, bottlenecks in the network may cause delays. Sharing of multi-partite entangled states between parties offers a solution, allowing for parallel quantum communication. Specifically for the two-pair problem, the butterfly network provides the first instance of such an advantage in a bottleneck scenario. In this paper, we propose a more general method for establishing EPR pairs in arbitrary networks. The main difference from standard repeater network approaches is that we use a graph state instead of maximally entangled pairs to achieve long-distance simultaneous communication. We demonstrate how graph-theoretic tools, and specifically local complementation, help decrease the number of required measurements compared to usual methods applied in repeater schemes. We examine other examples of network architectures, where deploying local complementation techniques provides an advantage. We finally consider the problem of extracting graph states for quantum communication via local Clifford operations and Pauli measurements, and discuss that while the general problem is known to be NP-complete, interestingly, for specific classes of structured resources, polynomial time algorithms can be identified

Understanding participation through a data-driven approach

Participatory models of urban regeneration have been increasingly integrated in local agendas. Yet there is still a need for evaluation methodologies of those models and their impact. This paper presents a data-driven and computational methodology to measure the impact of the BIP/ZIP Program in Lisbon. Using qualitative coding, data integration, unsupervised machine learning models for data clustering and interactive visualization dashboards the study aims to explore the large and complex dataset of the projects of the BIP/ZIP program and identify correlation patterns between their areas of implementation, the networks of project partners and the identified activities of the projects. The proposed methodology is a first step towards the development of a generalizable evaluation framework for participatory models and aims to inform the further development of similar participatory models of urban regeneration.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cosmological Evolution in a Type-0 String Theory

We study the cosmological evolution of a type-0 string theory by employing non-criticality, which may be induced by fluctuations of the D3 brane worlds. We check the consistency of the approach to O(alpha ') in the corresponding sigma-model. The ten-dimensional theory is reduced to an effective four-dimensional model, with only time dependent fields. We show that the four-dimensional universe has an inflationary phase and graceful exit from it, while the other extra dimensions are stabilized to a constant value, with the fifth dimension much larger than the others. We pay particular attention to demonstrating the role of tachyonic matter in inducing these features. The Universe asymptotes, for large times, to a non-accelerating linearly-expanding Universe with a time-dependent dilaton and a relaxing to zero vacuum energy a la quintessence.Comment: 33 pages LATEX, seven eps figures incorporate