FARSEC: A Reproducible Framework for Automatic Real-Time Vehicle Speed Estimation Using Traffic Cameras

Estimating the speed of vehicles using traffic cameras is a crucial task for traffic surveillance and management, enabling more optimal traffic flow, improved road safety, and lower environmental impact. Transportation-dependent systems, such as for navigation and logistics, have great potential to benefit from reliable speed estimation. While there is prior research in this area reporting competitive accuracy levels, their solutions lack reproducibility and robustness across different datasets. To address this, we provide a novel framework for automatic real-time vehicle speed calculation, which copes with more diverse data from publicly available traffic cameras to achieve greater robustness. Our model employs novel techniques to estimate the length of road segments via depth map prediction. Additionally, our framework is capable of handling realistic conditions such as camera movements and different video stream inputs automatically. We compare our model to three well-known models in the field using their benchmark datasets. While our model does not set a new state of the art regarding prediction performance, the results are competitive on realistic CCTV videos. At the same time, our end-to-end pipeline offers more consistent results, an easier implementation, and better compatibility. Its modular structure facilitates reproducibility and future improvements

Bone composition and bone mineral density of long bones of free-living raptors

Bone composition and bone mineral density (BMD) of long bones of two raptor and one owl species were assessed. Right humerus and tibiotarsus of 40 common buzzards, 13 white-tailed sea eagles and 9 barn owls were analyzed. Statistical analysis was performed for influence of species, age, gender and nutritional status. The BMD ranged from 1.8 g/cm3 (common buzzards) to 2.0 g/cm3 (white-tailed sea eagles). Dry matter was 87.0% (buzzards) to 89.5% (sea eagles). Percentage of bone ash was lower in sea eagles than in buzzards and owls. Content of crude fat was lower than 2% of the dry matter in all bones. In humeri lower calcium values (220 g/kg fat free dry matter) were detected in sea eagles than in barn owls (246 g/kg), in tibiotarsi no species differences were observed. Phosphorus levels were lowest in sea eagles (humeri 104 g/kg fat free dry matter, tibiotarsi 102 g/kg) and highest in barn owls. Calcium-phosphorus ratio was about 2:1 in all species. Magnesium content was lower in sea eagles (humeri 2590 mg/kg fat free dry matter, tibiotarsi 2510 mg/kg) than in buzzards and owls. Bones of barn owls contained more copper (humeri 8.7 mg/kg fat free dry matter, tibiotarsi 12.7 mg/kg) than in the Accipitridae. Zinc content was highest in sea eagles (humeri 278 mg/kg fat free dry matter, tibiotarsi 273 mg/kg) and lowest in barn owls (humeri 185 mg/kg, tibiotarsi 199 mg/kg). The present study shows that bone characteristics can be considered as species specific in raptors

Charting the functional relevance of Broca’s area for visual word recognition and picture naming in Dutch using fMRI-guided TMS

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) has shown pseudohomophone priming effects at Broca’s area (specifically pars opercularis of left inferior frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus; LIFGpo/PCG) within ∼100 ms of viewing a word. This is consistent with Broca’s area involvement in fast phonological access during visual word recognition. Here we used online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether LIFGpo/PCG is necessary for (not just correlated with) visual word recognition by ∼100 ms. Pulses were delivered to individually fMRI-defined LIFGpo/PCG in Dutch speakers 75–500 ms after stimulus onset during reading and picture naming. Reading and picture naming reactions times were significantly slower following pulses at 225–300 ms. Contrary to predictions, there was no disruption to reading for pulses before 225 ms. This does not provide evidence in favour of a functional role for LIFGpo/PCG in reading before 225 ms in this case, but does extend previous findings in picture stimuli to written Dutch words

Native Italian drama and its influence on Plautus

No abstract available

16 - The Reception of Republican Comedy in Antiquity

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy provides a comprehensive critical introduction to Roman comedy and its reception through more than twenty accessible and up-to-date chapters by leading international scholars. This book defines the fundamentals of Roman comedy by examining its literary and comic technique as well as its stagecraft and music, and then traces the genre's influence through the centuries. Roman comedy has served as a model for writers as well as artists ranging from Shakespeare to Molière and from Martin Luther to Cole Porter. Just as the Middle Ages spawned Christianised versions of Terence's comedies, in which harlots find God rather than a husband and young men become martyrs rather than never-do-well lovers, the twentieth century has also given us its take on Roman comedy with Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and numerous modern versions of Plautus' Amphitryon