Diurnal variation of overdense meteor echo duration and ozone

The diurnal variation of the median duration of overdense sporadic radar meteor echoes is examined. The meteors recorded in August, December, and January by the Ondrejov meteor radar during the period 1958-1990 were used for the analysis. A maximum median echo duration 1-3 hours after the time of local sunrise in the meteor region confirms the already known sunrise effect. Minimum echo duration occurring at the time of sunset seems to be the most important point of diurnal variation of the echo duration, when ozone is no longer dissociated by solar UV radiation. The effect of diurnal changes of the echo duration should be considered when the mass distribution of meteor showers is analyzed

Information Services and ICT Development in Agriculture of the Czech Republic

The paper presents results of KIT (Department of Information Technologies) research which maps the actual state and expected development trends of information and communication technologies in conditions of CR agriculture. It includes results of investigation realized in 2008 with connection to the actually carried out inquiry in the first half-year 2009.Broadband, ADSL, FTTx, Wi-Fi, CDMA, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, G, A, I, N,

Distributed Recognition of Reference Nodes for Wireless Sensor Network Localization

All known localization techniques for wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks require certain set of reference nodes being used for position estimation. The anchor-free techniques in contrast to anchor-based do not require reference nodes called anchors to be placed in the network area before localization operation itself, but they can establish own reference coordinate system to be used for the relative position estimation. We observed that contemporary anchor-free localization algorithms achieve a low localization error, but dissipate significant energy reserves during the recognition of reference nodes used for the position estimation. Therefore, we have proposed the optimized anchor-free localization algorithm referred to as BRL (Boundary Recognition aided Localization), which achieves a low localization error and mainly reduces the communication cost of the reference nodes recognition phase. The proposed BRL algorithm was investigated throughout the extensive simulations on the database of networks with the different number of nodes and densities and was compared in terms of communication cost and localization error with the known related algorithms such as AFL and CRP. Through the extensive simulations we have observed network conditions where novel BRL algorithm excels in comparison with the state of art

Virtual form of education in lifelong learning - chance for the country

The availability of education, including lifelong learning, is one of the value measures of quality of life in advanced countries. However, there are still significant differences between a township and a rural region. Centres of education are mainly situated in big cities; smaller municipalities are separated from these centres by tens or hundreds of kilometers (according to the conditions of the Czech Republic). While educating young people, it is usually accepted that they commute towards education; there is a whole range of social and cultural aspects; and above all, they have time for that - it is their main “working†load. The opposite situation is the case in lifelong learning, which is conducted in parallel with full-time employment but is necessary for effective and competitive performing of the employment. For participants of lifelong learning it is impossible to commute big distances; their working load does not allow it. Thus, those forms, in which so called „education which goes to the studentsâ€, are chosen. ICT brings an enormous opportunity to bring education closer to the rural regions. A text form of e-learning is practically already standard; but a voice and image broadcast give us inexhaustible possibilities of usage. The aim of this paper is to propose and verify methods of distant (virtual) education with the use of multimedia tools.E-learning, virtual education, lifelong learning, rural development, multimedia, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Embodied Desire: Establishing the Transmasculine Viewer

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Scandinavian Studies held in Sicily 1992 to 1995

Scandinavian Studies held in Sicily 1992 to 199

Moralizing Women: The Expression of Belief in the Victorian Novel

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, English, 2014This dissertation examines the longstanding critical distaste for didactic literature and the marginalization of certain Victorian women novelists' work for its overt moral, religious, and political commitments. Exploring women's particular relationship to novelistic didacticism, I show that authors like Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, and Sarah Grand consciously used didactic forms to address the risks of expressing belief in fiction and challenge stereotypes of the moralizing woman writer. Victorian women novelists faced difficulty avoiding charges of moralizing; while entering the public literary sphere brought charges of vulgar self-display, any counter emphasis on didactic aims brought related charges of moral vanity. Either way, women supposedly failed to embody the figure of the spontaneously inspired, unselfconscious artist celebrated by ethical and aesthetic discourse of the period. These novelists' experience of such constraints, however, prompted remarkable insights into the problematic ironies inherent in such notions of artistic unselfconsciousness as well as alternative strategies for managing the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the novel. This project reveals that the modernist critique of Victorian moralizing had an antecedent in nineteenth-century religious tradition itself. Even more surprisingly, all the novelists I study, religious and secular alike, turn to religious forms--prayer in particular--to rethink authorial self-consciousness and the limited possibilities for expressing moral, religious, or political belief in literature. Conceptualizing prayer as an address to an audience between self and other, they cultivate an authorial voice that is neither overly (vainly) self-conscious nor impossibly unselfconscious. Their didacticism thus involves more than the artistically simplistic, morally presumptuous aim of saving the reader; instead, the engagement of the reader and the author with the novel's complex modes of moral self-consciousness allows them, willingly (after an extensive acknowledgment of the risks involved), to save each other