Where the Weather Comes From

When Andreas Malm observed that “not even the weather belongs fully to the moment,” he was looking forward from 2016, considering the cumulative impact of present emissions on “generations not yet born.” The reverse is also true: present storms have their origins in past consumption. Up to this point, though, analysis of how human activity will intensify future weather has focused on change in a limited set of quantifiable conditions, like precipitation and temperature – and in this respect, too, the weather of the present is the weather of the past. Both this set of variables and its status as the central object of meteorological study have their origins in the eighteenth century – and so, as this essay will demonstrate, many current complaints about the narrowness of this sense of the weather have also been anticipated by the widespread debate about the objectives of empirical inquiry in which it took shape. By looking back at the concerns that this empirical model of the weather inspired when it was new, however, and taking seriously the eighteenth-century fears about what might be lost to the rise of this new science, we also catch a glimpse of the alternative (and often more expansive) models of perceiving the causes and consequences of encounters with extreme weather that were circulating at the same time. For contemporary scholars interested, after Christina Sharpe, in how to reconceive the weather as “the totality of the environments in which we struggle,” these eighteenth-century responses to the weather thus offer a timely reminder: to aim, in this effort, to acknowledge more of the social and political injustice to which we are so unevenly exposed, but also to cast light on the power we can claim to change the weather–if only we acknowledge all the ways we already make the weather for one another

Evaluation of data box introduction process in the Czech Republic

One of base building stones of eGovernment development in the Czech Republic is so called Data boxes which were introduced to unify communication and to increase efficiency in public administration. The aim of a study carried out by the Department of Information Technologies was to analyze the implementation procedure and to use data boxes. The questioning took place in December 2009, i.e. c.6 weeks after introduction of duty to use a data box. Obtained results are important above all because the development process of eGovernment still does not end. The suggestion from data box implementation can significantly facilitate introduction of basic registers and other applications.eGovernment, Data box, 300/2008 Col., 111/2009 Col., Basic registeres, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, GA, IN,

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,

Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS)

The DSN (Deep Space Network) mission support requirements for the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) are summarized. The TDRSS consists of four identical satellites in geosynchronous orbits (35,800 km) and a dedicated ground station. The payload of each satellite is a telecommunications service system that relays communication signals between low earth-orbiting user spacecraft and the TDRSS ground terminal. Mission objectives are outlined and the DSN support requirements are defined through the presentation of tables and narratives describing the spacecraft flight profile; DSN support coverage; frequency assignments; support parameters for telemetry, command and support systems; and tracking support responsibility

Navigation, localization and stabilization of formations of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

A leader-follower formation driving algorithm developed for control of heterogeneous groups of unmanned micro aerial and ground vehicles stabilized under a top-view relative localization is presented in this paper. The core of the proposed method lies in a novel avoidance function, in which the entire 3D formation is represented by a convex hull projected along a desired path to be followed by the group. Such a representation of the formation provides non-collision trajectories of the robots and respects requirements of the direct visibility between the team members in environment with static as well as dynamic obstacles, which is crucial for the top-view localization. The algorithm is suited for utilization of a simple yet stable visual based navigation of the group (referred to as GeNav), which together with the on-board relative localization enables deployment of large teams of micro-scale robots in environments without any available global localization system. We formulate a novel Model Predictive Control (MPC) based concept that enables to respond to the changing environment and that provides a robust solution with team members' failure tolerance included. The performance of the proposed method is verified by numerical and hardware experiments inspired by reconnaissance and surveillance missions

Recurrent DNNs and its Ensembles on the TIMIT Phone Recognition Task

In this paper, we have investigated recurrent deep neural networks (DNNs) in combination with regularization techniques as dropout, zoneout, and regularization post-layer. As a benchmark, we chose the TIMIT phone recognition task due to its popularity and broad availability in the community. It also simulates a low-resource scenario that is helpful in minor languages. Also, we prefer the phone recognition task because it is much more sensitive to an acoustic model quality than a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition task. In recent years, recurrent DNNs pushed the error rates in automatic speech recognition down. But, there was no clear winner in proposed architectures. The dropout was used as the regularization technique in most cases, but combination with other regularization techniques together with model ensembles was omitted. However, just an ensemble of recurrent DNNs performed best and achieved an average phone error rate from 10 experiments 14.84 % (minimum 14.69 %) on core test set that is slightly lower then the best-published PER to date, according to our knowledge. Finally, in contrast of the most papers, we published the open-source scripts to easily replicate the results and to help continue the development.Comment: Submitted to SPECOM 2018, 20th International Conference on Speech and Compute

Map Resources – ECO Farms in the Czech Republic

The present paper deals with the creation of maps for the sake of a special map portal using the database of eco farms in the Czech Republic. The map output is being developed and implemented within the framework of the Research Program in mutual cooperation of the Department of Information Technologies, Information and Consulting Centre, other departments of the Faculty of Economics and Management CULS Prague with external partners, especially with the Ministry of Agriculture (Environment and Ecological Agriculture Section, Department of Ecological Agriculture) and the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Information (UZEI) - Division of Agro-environmental Policy in Brno. The maps are visualized by means of MPPR 1.0 system and have been processed – in the pilot stage - for the South Bohemian Region eco farms. The results represent initial data from 2009 (as at 31st December 2009) that have been processed, verified and complemented in the course of 2010

Organic farms in the Czech Republic – Map Portal presentation opportunities

The paper is aimed at presenting the map portal of organic farms in the Czech Republic. The pilot project is concerned with the South Bohemia Region. Extensive map data and resources are displayed by means of a purpose-developed universal software solution called Regional Development Map Portal (RDMP) version 1.0. The database was generated and updated on the basis of detailed content validation and strives for maximum accuracy of map object location. The software solution – apart from supporting all standard functions – represents qualitatively a brand new perspective of map data creation and entails many original elements and functionalities