1,270 research outputs found
Pleasing the 'Bubble:' Abe Shinzo's Strategic Self-Exhibition on Facebook
Not only is Abe Shinzo on the way to becoming Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister in the country's history. With more than 1 million followers on Twitter and slightly less than 600 hundred thousand fans on Facebook, he is by far the most successful Japanese political leader on social media. Commentators have described Abe's turn to social networking services (SNS) as a "revenge" against "traditional" media against the background of a growing use of SNSs by other major Japanese political actors. At any rate, particularly through Facebook, combining text and pictures of himself on and off duty, Abe has successfully established his own mode to communicate with and "exhibit" himself to voters, citizens and the global community of netizens. This paper aims to address the following research question: on which themes and key concepts is this "presentation of the self" based? In other words, how is the Prime Minister communication staff constructing Abe's "social" image and to which audience is this aimed? Based on Goffman's theorization and later application of his work on the study of online social interactions, this paper illustrates the strive to ensure the consistency of Abe's use of the SNS with previously expressed concepts and ideas (e.g., in the 2006 book "A Beautiful Country"), with the aim of pleasing the "bubble" of like-minded individuals constituting Abe's (online) support base, and avoid issues that might possibly harm the Prime Minister's reputation. Abe's Facebook activity (a combination of text and pictures) during a critical time in his second tenure (2017), in which he faced cronyism allegations while coping with gaffes and scandals involving cabinet members, provided a case in point for multimedia content analysis
Technical Note: Real-time updating procedure for flood forecasting with conceptual HBV-type models
International audienceFlood forecasting is of increasing importance as it comes to an increasing variability in global and local climates. But rainfall-runoff models are far from being perfect. In order to achieve a better prediction for emerging flood events, the model outputs have to be continuously updated. This contribution introduces a rather simple, yet effective updating procedure for the conceptual distributed rainfall-runoff model PREVAH, whose runoff generation module relies on similar algorithms as the HBV-Model. The current conditions of the system, i.e. the contents of the upper soil reservoirs, are updated by the proposed method. The testing of the updating procedure on data from two mountainous catchments in Switzerland reveals a significant increase in prediction accuracy with regards to peak flow
Sections of Coxeter Orbihedra
We study sections of high dimensional polytopes whose vertices form the orbit of a Coxeter group, and create “scans”of such polytopes in order to graphically visualise them for educational and public engagement purposes
Technical Note: Updating procedure for flood forecasting with conceptual HBV-type models
International audienceFlood forecasting is of increasing importance as it comes to an increasing variability in global and local climates. But rainfall-runoff models are far from being perfect. In order to achieve a better prediction for emerging flood events, the model outputs have to be continuously updated. This contribution introduces a rather simple, yet effective updating procedure for the conceptual semi-distributed rainfall-runoff model PREVAH, whose runoff generation module relies on similar algorithms as the HBV-Model. The current conditions of the system, i.e. the contents of the upper soil reservoirs, are updated by the proposed method. The testing of the updating procedure on data from two mountainous catchments in Switzerland reveals a significant increase in prediction accuracy with regards to peak flow
Monthly hydrometeorological ensemble prediction of streamflow droughts and corresponding drought indices
Streamflow droughts, characterized by low runoff as consequence of a drought event, affect numerous aspects of life. Economic sectors that are impacted by low streamflow are, e.g., power production, agriculture, tourism, water quality management and shipping. Those sectors could potentially benefit from forecasts of streamflow drought events, even of short events on the monthly time scales or below. Numerical hydrometeorological models have increasingly been used to forecast low streamflow and have become the focus of recent research. Here, we consider daily ensemble runoff forecasts for the river Thur, which has its source in the Swiss Alps. We focus on the evaluation of low streamflow and of the derived indices as duration, severity and magnitude, characterizing streamflow droughts up to a lead time of one month. <br><br> The ECMWF VarEPS 5-member ensemble reforecast, which covers 18 yr, is used as forcing for the hydrological model PREVAH. A thorough verification reveals that, compared to probabilistic peak-flow forecasts, which show skill up to a lead time of two weeks, forecasts of streamflow droughts are skilful over the entire forecast range of one month. For forecasts at the lower end of the runoff regime, the quality of the initial state seems to be crucial to achieve a good forecast quality in the longer range. It is shown that the states used in this study to initialize forecasts satisfy this requirement. The produced forecasts of streamflow drought indices, derived from the ensemble forecasts, could be beneficially included in a decision-making process. This is valid for probabilistic forecasts of streamflow drought events falling below a daily varying threshold, based on a quantile derived from a runoff climatology. Although the forecasts have a tendency to overpredict streamflow droughts, it is shown that the relative economic value of the ensemble forecasts reaches up to 60%, in case a forecast user is able to take preventive action based on the forecast
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Storyline description of Southern Hemisphere midlatitude circulation and precipitation response to greenhouse gas forcing
As evidence of climate change strengthens, knowledge of its regional implications becomes an urgent need for decision making. Current understanding of regional precipitation changes is substantially limited by our understanding of the atmospheric circulation response to climate change, which to a high degree remains uncertain. This uncertainty is reflected in the wide spread in atmospheric circulation changes projected in multimodel ensembles, which cannot be directly interpreted in a probabilistic sense. The uncertainty can instead be represented by studying a discrete set of physically plausible storylines of atmospheric circulation changes. By mining CMIP5 model output, here we take this broader perspective and develop storylines for Southern Hemisphere (SH) midlatitude circulation changes, conditioned on the degree of global-mean warming, based on the climate responses of two remote drivers: the enhanced warming of the tropical upper troposphere and the strengthening of the stratospheric polar vortex. For the three continental domains in the SH, we analyse the precipitation changes under each storyline. To allow comparison with previous studies, we also link both circulation and precipitation changes with those of the Southern Annular Mode. Our results show that the response to tropical warming leads to a strengthening of the midlatitude westerly winds, whilst the response to a delayed breakdown (for DJF) or strengthening (for JJA) of the stratospheric vortex leads to a poleward shift of the westerly winds and the storm tracks. However, the circulation response is not zonally symmetric and the regional precipitation storylines for South America, South Africa, South Australia and New Zealand exhibit quite specific dependencies on the two remote drivers, which are not well represented by changes in the Southern Annular Mode
Failure analysis of thin metal foils
The mechanical response and the failure mode of thin metal foils
under tensile load has been analyzed supplementing the usual test records
with full-field measurements performed by three-dimensional digital image
correlation (3D DIC) techniques. The experiments have been simulated by
finite element models formulated within a non-linear continuum framework.
The study presented in this contribution concerns symmetrically pre-cracked
aluminum samples. The wrinkling of the specimens during the test and the
possible and alternative failure mechanisms are evidenced and discussed
Nested Polytopes with Non-crystallographic Symmetry Induced by Projection
Inspired by the structures of viruses and fullerenes in biology and chemistry, we have recently developed a method to construct nested polyhedra and, more generally, nested polytopes in multi-dimensional geometry with non-crystallographic symmetry. In this paper we review these results, presenting them from a geometrical point of view. Examples and applications in science and design are discussed
Experiment Investigating the Connection between Weak Values and Contextuality
Weak value measurements have recently given rise to a large interest for both
the possibility of measurement amplification and the chance of further quantum
mechanics foundations investigation. In particular, a question emerged about
weak values being proof of the incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and
Non-Contextual Hidden Variables Theories (NCHVT). A test to provide a
conclusive answer to this question was given in [M. Pusey, Phys. Rev. Lett.
113, 200401 (2014)], where a theorem was derived showing the NCHVT
incompatibility with the observation of anomalous weak values under specific
conditions. In this paper we realize this proposal, clearly pointing out the
strict connection between weak values and the contextual nature of Quantum
Mechanics.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Homogenisation of a gridded snow water equivalent climatology for Alpine terrain: methodology and applications
Gridded snow water equivalent (SWE) data sets are valuable for estimating the
snow water resources and verify different model systems, e.g. hydrological,
land surface or atmospheric models. However, changing data availability
represents a considerable challenge when trying to derive consistent time
series for SWE products. In an attempt to improve the product consistency, we
first evaluated the differences between two climatologies of SWE grids that
were calculated on the basis of data from 110 and 203 stations, respectively.
The "shorter" climatology (2001–2009) was produced using 203 stations
(map203) and the "longer" one (1971–2009) 110 stations
(map110). Relative to map203, map110
underestimated SWE, especially at higher elevations and at the end of the
winter season. We tested the potential of quantile mapping to compensate for
mapping errors in map110 relative to map203. During a
9 yr calibration period from 2001 to 2009, for which both map203
and map110 were available, the method could successfully refine the
spatial and temporal SWE representation in map110 by making
seasonal, regional and altitude-related distinctions. Expanding the
calibration to the full 39 yr showed that the general underestimation of
map110 with respect to map203 could be removed for the
whole winter. The calibrated SWE maps fitted the reference (map203)
well when averaged over regions and time periods, where the mean error is
approximately zero. However, deviations between the calibrated maps and
map203 were observed at single grid cells and years. When we looked
at three different regions in more detail, we found that the calibration had
the largest effect in the region with the highest proportion of catchment
areas above 2000 m a.s.l. and that the general underestimation of
map110 compared to map203 could be removed for the entire
snow season. The added value of the calibrated SWE climatology is illustrated
with practical examples: the verification of a hydrological model, the
estimation of snow resource anomalies and the predictability of runoff
through SWE
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