Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) pulsed calls in the Eastern Canadian Arctic

Killer whales produce pulsed calls, which are used for communication. Calls are highly stereotyped and repertoires are unique to individual pods. Discrimination amongst these calls and comparison of call repertoires between pods can help determine population structure in killer whales and can be used to track pod movements. Calls were detected in underwater acoustic recordings in August and September 2017 in the Arctic waters of Eclipse Sound, in Nunavut, Canada. We present a repertoire of killer whale calls recorded. Eleven stereotypic call types, three biphonic and eight monophonic, were identified using manual call organization and manual whistle contour extraction. A higher diversity of calls was detected in the hydrophone located in the known narwhal aggregation site in Milne Inlet, than at the second hydrophone deployed at the mouth of Eclipse Sound which is the proposed entrance and exit point for the killer whales. The potential for increased killer whale presence and magnitude of predation on narwhals is a source of concern for management of the population and by Inuit subsistence hunters who rely on narwhals for food and economic benefit. Describing the acoustic repertoire of killer whales seasonally present in the Canadian Arctic may help understand their behavior and seasonal movements. The results presented may provide a basis for future acoustic comparisons across the North Atlantic and aid in characterizing killer whale ecotypes making seasonal incursions into Arctic waters

Using reasoning to support ORM conceptual modelling and its application in information systems

Die konzeptionelle Modellierung ist ein kritischer Schritt bei der Software- Entwicklung. Ihr Zweck ist es, relevante Aspekte der Anwendungsdomäne in einer Sprache zu beschreiben, die für alle am Projekt beteiligten Akteure verständlich ist. Eine Möglichkeit, die konzeptuelle Modellierung zu implementieren, ist die faktenbasierte Modellierung, eine Methodik, die in der Lage ist, die konzeptuellen Modellierungs Constraints darzustellen und dabei auch die Semantik zu erfassen, um Zwischen- und Endergebnisse zu validieren. Object-Role Modelling (ORM) ist eine faktenbasierte Sprache für die Modellierung und Abfrage von Informationen auf der konzeptionellen Ebene durch eine grafische und textuelle Sprache zur Spezifizierung von Modellen, Abfragen und Prozeduren, um die Zuordnung zu anderen Arten von Modellen wie UML und ER durchzuführen. Konzeptionelle Modelle allein sind nicht in der Lage, die Semantik der Modelle zu überprüfen, und diese Einschränkung kann zu impliziten Konsequenzen führen, die vom Modellierer insbesondere in komplexen Diagrammen unentdeckt bleiben können; dies kann auch zu verschiedenen Formen von Inkonsistenzen oder Redundanzen im Diagramm selbst führen, die eine Verschlechterung der Qualität des Designs und/oder erhöhte Entwicklungszeiten und -kosten zur Folge haben. Dieses Problem führt zu der Notwendigkeit automatisierten Schließens, um die genannten Inkonsistenzen und Redundanzen zu überprüfen. Das automatisierte Schließen ist ein bekanntes Verfahren, das einen logischen Prozess verwendet, bei dem eine Schlussfolgerung auf mehreren Prämissen beruht, die im Allgemeinen als wahr angenommen werden. Unter logischem Schließen verstehen wir die Ableitung von Fakten, die in unserem ORMDiagramm nicht explizit ausgedrückt sind. Die Anwendung des automatisierten Schließens auf die konzeptuelle Modellierungsmethodik hat einige Vorteile, da sie den Modellierer während der Modellierungsphase unterstützt, um Fehler zu vermeiden. Redundanzen oder Inkonsistenzen des Diagramms, die Ableitung neuer Constraints, die Bestätigung der Gültigkeit des Modells oder der Vorschlag einer ¨Uberarbeitung sind weitere Vorteile. Diese Schritte sind vor allem für Kontexte, in denen riesige konzeptuelle Diagramme verwendet werden, in denen es sehr schwierig und zeitaufwändig ist, die Semantik der Diagramme manuell zu überprüfen, zeitsparend. Die Hauptidee dieser Arbeit besteht darin, eine Methodik zur Anwendung des automatisierten Schließens auf konzeptuelle Modelldiagramme zu entwickeln, um die Semantik der Diagramme zu überprüfen, damit die Vorteile des automatisierten Schließens genutzt werden können. In dieser Arbeit wird die Methodik auf ORM angewandt, eine mächtige Sprache die eine Vielzahl von Constraints bereitstellt. Unter all diesen Constraints gibt es ORM-Ableitungsregeln, die in der Lage sind, Wissen auszudrücken, das über die Standard-ORM-Fähigkeiten hinausgeht, was zu einer weiteren Komplexität das Schließens führt, da sie der ORM-Sprache Ausdruckskraft verleihen. Diese Regeln ähneln in gewisser Weise den OCL-Constraints für UML oder SQL-Triggers. Ein weiterer Beitrag dieser Arbeit besteht in der Formalisierung der ORMAbleitungsregeln. Auf diese Weise wird es möglich sein, das automatisierte Schließen auch auf die ORM-Diagramme auszudehnen, die mit ORMAbleitungsregeln ausgestattet sind. Ein Beitrag mit einem eher praktischen Charakter wird durch die Implementierung eines Frameworks namens UModel gegeben, das das automatisierte Schließen über konzeptuellen Diagrammen anwendet. Obwohl der Schwerpunkt der Verwendung des Frameworks in dieser Arbeit auf ORM liegt, wurde das Framework so konzipiert, dass es mit den gängigsten konzeptuellen Modellierungssprachen wie UML und ER kompatibel ist. ORM ist in einer offiziellen Microsoft Visual Studio-Erweiterung namens NORMA implementiert, die es dem Benutzer ermöglicht, ORM-Diagramme zu erstellen, zu modifizieren und zu exportieren, und die eine Vielzahl von Funktionen bereitstellt, die dem Modellierer bei der Verwaltung seines ORMDiagramms helfen. Obwohl NORMA ein leistungsstarkes Werkzeug ist, ist es nicht in der Lage, die Konsistenz der Modelle zu überprüfen, und aus diesem Grund könnte die Ausstattung mit Schlussfolgerungfunktionen ein Schritt nach vorn sein, um die Qualität der ORM-Diagramme zu erhalten. Ein weiterer Teil dieser Arbeit ist die Erweiterung der NORMA-Funktionalitäten durch ein Plugin unter Verwendung des UModel-Frameworks, das automatische Schließen über die in NORMA geladenen ORM-Diagramme aktiviert und dann den Endbenutzern die Schlussfolgerungen anzeigt. ORM wird auch in industriellen Unternehmen eingesetzt. Diese Unternehmen verwenden normalerweise CASE-Tools, mit denen sie die konzeptuellen Diagramme erstellen können. Diese Tools berücksichtigen nicht die ¨Uberprüfung der Semantik der konzeptuellen Diagramme, und eine weitere Herausforderung besteht darin, das oben erwähnte automatisierte Schlussverfahren für eine Zielsoftware zu verallgemeinern. Aus diesem Grund wurde eine Fallstudie auf der Grundlage eines realen industriellen Szenarios erstellt, um mögliche Vorteile, die sich aus der verwendeten Methodik ergeben, konkret zu messen und zu beobachten.Conceptual modelling is a critical step during software development. Its purpose is to describe relevant aspects of the application domain in a language that is understandable by all the stakeholders taking part to the project. A way to implement conceptual modelling is by using fact-based modelling, a methodology that is able to represent the conceptual modelling constraints capturing also the semantics in order to validate intermediate and final results. Object-Role Modelling (ORM) is a fact-based language for modelling and querying information at the conceptual level by a graphical and textual language for specifying models, queries and procedures to perform the mapping to other kinds of models like UML and ER. Conceptual models alone are not able to check the semantics of the models and this limitation may lead to implicit consequences that can go undetected by the modeller especially in complex diagrams; this may also lead to various forms of inconsistencies or redundancies in the diagram itself that give rise to the degradation of the quality of the design and/or increased development times and costs. This issue leads to the need of automated reasoning to check the mentioned inconsistencies and redundancies. Automated reasoning is a well-known procedure that uses a logical process in which a conclusion is based on multiple premises that are generally assumed to be true. By reasoning we mean deriving facts that are not expressed in our ORM diagram explicitly. Applying automated reasoning to the conceptual modelling methodology has some benefits, since it supports the modeller during the modelling phase in order to avoid mistakes, as redundancies or inconsistencies of the diagram, deriving new constraints, confirm the validity of the model or suggest revision. These steps are a time saver especially for contexts where huge conceptual diagrams are used, where it is very difficult and time consuming to manually check the semantics of the diagrams. The main idea of this work is to develop a methodology to apply the automated reasoning on conceptual modelling diagrams to check the semantics of the diagrams, in order to take the benefits from the automated reasoning. In this work the methodology is applied to ORM which is a powerful language providing a rich set of constraints. Among all the constraints there are ORM Derivation rules which are able to express knowledge that is beyond the standard ORM capabilities, bringing to a further complexity of the reasoning because they add expressiveness to the ORM language. Those rules are in a way similar to OCL constraints for UML, or SQL triggers. Another contribution of this work is to formalise ORM Derivation rules, in this way it will be possible to extend the automated reasoning even on those ORM diagrams equipped with ORM Derivation Rules. A contribution with a more practical flavour is given by the implementation of a framework named UModel which applies the automated reasoning over conceptual diagrams. Although the usage of the framework in this work has its focus on ORM, the framework has been designed to be compatible with the most popular conceptual modelling languages such as UML and ER. ORM is implemented in an official Microsoft Visual Studio extension named NORMA, which allows the user to create, modify and export ORM diagrams and which provides a rich set of functionalities to help the modeller to manage its ORM diagram. Despite NORMA being a powerful tool, it is not able to check the consistency of the models and for this reason equipping it with reasoning capabilities could be a step forward in order to preserve the quality of the ORM diagrams. A contribution of this work is the extension of NORMA functionalities by a plugin, using the UModel framework, that activates the automated reasoning over those ORM diagrams loaded into NORMA and then showing the inferences to the final users. ORM is also used in the industry world companies. Those organisation usually use CASE tools that allow them to build the conceptual diagrams. These tools does not take into account checking the semantics of the conceptual diagrams and another challenge is to generalize the aforementioned automated reasoning procedure for a target software. For this reason, a case study based on real-world industrial scenario has been provided in order to concretely measure and observe possible benefits coming from the used methodology

A modular data acquisition system for high resolution clinical PET scanners

En las últimas dos décadas, la Tomografía por Emisión de Positrones (PET) ha demostrado ser una modalidad clave para el estudio de la biología del cúncer y trastornos cardíacos, y para la realizaciún imágenes moleculares, una tecnica que permite la terapia individualizada de la enfermedad [Weissleder01]. La mejor característica de la PET es su sensibilidad: es la tecnica que proporciona imúagenes moleculares con la mayor sensibilidad, y las imúagenes de cuerpo entero que produce no pueden ser igualadas por otras modalidades [Hoh97, Chae07]. Por otra parte, la PET no proporciona referencias anatómicas, lo cual es un problema facilmente resoluble a traves de su integraciún o coregistro con la tomografía computarizada de rayos X (CT) [Lu07]. Ademas, en com- paraciún con otras modalidades de imagen, la PET se caracteriza por bajas estadísticas de conteo (es decir, desintegraciones por unidad de tiempo), lo cual generalmente limita la resoluciún de la imagen. Sin embargo, detectores con geometrías dedicadas permiten solventar ester problema, y producir exce¬lentes resultados [Humm03]. Dos ejemplos destacables de especializacion, que tomaremos como aplicaciones de referencia, son la Mamografía por Emision de Positrones (PEM) y la monitorizacion en línea de dosis en hadroterapia (in-beam PET o, brevemente, ibPET). Las amplias posibilidades de especializacion tienen, sin embargo, una con¬trapartida: es necesario el desarrollo de sistemas de adquisicion igualmente especializados, cuyo coste y prestaciones puede impedir de hecho conseguir las ventajas teúricas proporcionadas por una geometría dedicada. El objetivo de esta tesis doctoral es proponer una nueva arquitectura tecnologica flexible, capaz de obtener prestaciones similares al estado del arte en distintas aplicaciones, a traves de una plataforma de adquisiciún compacta y eficiente en coste, adecuada para PEM e ibPET. En primer lugar, se exploraran el estado del arte y los problemas que han evitado la amplia difusion de equipos PET dedicados en entornos clínicos. Es¬pecial atenciún se dedicara a las soluciones tecnologicas y las características de los escaneres PEM anteriores. Se revisara tambien la situation de losequipos ibPET, especialmente las prestaciones requeridas para soportar efi¬cazmente la planificación de tratamiento en hadroterapia. En segundo lugar, se tratara un diseño conceptual propuesto como solucion al problema. Se propondrán y justificaran diferentes alternativas, con el fin de maximizar la eficiencia de detection y minimizar el coste. A traves de una serie de prototipos intermedios, se implementaran y caracterizarán las opciones de disenño elegidas. Por ultimo, se propondráa el disenño e implementacioán de un prototipo final de sistema de adquisicioán. El equipo en cuestiáon integraráa y extenderaá la soluciones validadas con los prototipos anteriores. x La investigation llevada a cabo durante esta tesis ha permitido realizar un sistema de adquisicion, con prestaciones al estado del arte, apto para el uso de PET dedicado en el entorno clínico del paciente, y que apoyara la investigation en PEM e ibPET. Summary In the last two decades, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) showed to be a key modality to interrogate biology for cancer and cardiac disorders, and to perform molecular imaging, a technology that permits individualized therapy of disease [Weissleder01]. PET's best characteristic is sensitivity: it is the most sensitive tech¬nique for medical molecular imaging, and the whole-body images it produces are unequalled by any other modality [Hoh97, Chae07]. Of course, it lacks anatomical reference, but this is a problem that can be easily overcome with X-ray (CT) (Computed Tomography) integration or coregistration [Lu07]. Moreover, even if PET uses relatively low statistics with respect to other modalities, which generally limits image resolution, it can produce excellent results by using dedicated detector geometries [Humm03]. Two remarkable examples for this kind of system specialization, that we will take as refer¬ence applications, are Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) and in-beam PET (ibPET) for dose delivery monitoring in hadrontherapy. However, the wide range of design possibilities has a counter effect: it re¬quires the development of specifically tailored acquisition systems, whose cost and performances could actually prevent the achievement of the theoretical advantages obtainable with a specialized detector assembly. This doctoral thesis aims at proposing an alternative technological archi¬tecture, able to achieve state of the art PET imaging performances by means of a compact, cost efficient acquisition platform, suitable for its adoption in both PEM and ibPET. Firstly, the state of the art and the controversies that prevent the broad use of dedicated PET in clinics will be explored. Special attention will be paid to the technological solutions and characteristics of previous PEM scanners. It will be also reviewed the current status of ibPET, with particular focus on the performances required to effectively support treatment planning in hadrontherapy. Secondly, a conceptual design solution will be discussed. Various alter-natives will be proposed and justified, with the aim of maximizing detection efficiency and minimize system cost. Through a series of intermediate pro¬totypes the various design choices are implemented and characterized. Thirdly, a final prototype of the acquisition system is designed and im¬plemented. This piece of hardware integrates and extends the solutions that have been validated through the previous systems. The research carried out during this thesis has allowed realizing a state of the art acquisition system that is suitable for specialized PET imaging in the clinical environment of the patient, and that will be used for further research in PEM and ibPET imaging

On existence and multiplicity of solutions for generalized (p, q)-Laplacian equations on unbounded domains

This paper deals with the existence and multiplicity of solutions for the generalized $(p, q)$-Laplacian equation \begin{align*} &-{\text{ div}}(A(x, u)|\nabla u|^{p-2}\nabla u) +\frac1p A_t(x, u)|\nabla u|^p -{\text{ div}}(B(x, u)|\nabla u|^{q-2}\nabla u) \\ &\quad\qquad+\frac1q B_t(x, u)|\nabla u|^q + V(x)|u|^{p-2} u+ W(x)|u|^{q-2} u= g(x, u)\quad\qquad\mbox{ in } \mathbb{R}^N, \end{align*} where $1<q\le p< N$, $A, B:\mathbb{R}^N\times\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ are suitable $C^1$ Carath\'eodory functions with $A_t(x, u)=\frac{\partial A}{\partial t}(x, u), B_t(x, u)=\frac{\partial B}{\partial t}(x, u)$, $V, W:\mathbb{R}^N\to\mathbb{R}$ are proper ``weight functions" and $g:\mathbb{R}^N\times\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ is a Carath\'eodory map. Notwithstanding the occurrence of some coefficients which rely upon the solution itself makes the use of variational techniques more challenging, under suitable assumptions on the involved functions, we are able to exploit the variational nature of our problem. In particular, the existence of a nontrivial solution is derived via a generalized version of the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz Mountain Pass Theorem, based on a weaker version of the classical Cerami-Palais-Smale condition. Finally, the multiplicity result, which is thoroughly new also even in the simpler case $q=p$, is gained under symmetry assumptions and a sharp decomposition of the ambient space.Comment: Final version of March 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.1161

Relativistic equations with singular potentials

Funding for open access publishing: Universidad de Granada/CBUAThe first part of this paper concern with the study of the Lorentz force equation [GRAPHICS] in the relevant physical configuration where the electric field (E) over right arrow has a singularity in zero. By using Szulkin's critical point theory, we prove the existence of T-periodic solutions provided that T and the electric and magnetic fields interact properly. In the last part, we employ both a variational and a topological argument to prove that the scalar relativistic pendulum-type equation [GRAPHICS] admits at least a periodic solution when h is an element of L-1(0, T) and G is singular at zero.Universidad de Granada/CBUASpanish Government PGC2018-096422-B-I00, PID2021-122122NB-I00Junta de Andalucia FQM-116Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) 2017JPCAPN_00

Evocative gene-environment correlation between genetic risk for schizophrenia and bullying victimization

Bullying exposure concerns over 10% of adolescents in Europe. Moreover, bullying victimization is heritable and victims are liable to psychotic symptoms, partly because of shared heritability with psychosis. The genetic component of bullying victimization has been proposed to involve the social reactions elicited by victims – a mechanism called “evocative gene-environment correlation”. We hypothesized that genetic risk for schizophrenia, a heritable disease also associated with social stress during childhood and adolescence, is related with social experiences during adolescence and is involved in the risk of developing psychotic symptoms. We studied 908 individuals of the TRAILS sample and found that 13-14-year-old adolescents with greater genetic risk for schizophrenia are more exposed to bullying assessed via peer nomination scores than their peers with lower genetic risk. Importantly, bullying victimization mediated the path from genetic risk to the frequency of psychotic symptoms about three years later. These findings provide evidence of a previously unreported form of gene-environment interplay that may be a mechanism of risk for psychosis and schizophrenia. To the extent that genetic risk translation into clinical symptoms is mediated by environmental risk factors, this evidence supports mental health prevention aimed at antagonizing bullying victimization in vulnerable individuals