Proposal for a EU quality label for aerospace education

The paper presents a possible roadmap for the definition of a European quality label for aerospace related higher education degrees. The proposal is the result of a two-years long Horizon 2020 project that has involved a great portion of the European stakeholders in aerospace: Universities, research centres, industries (both small and large) networks, associations and accreditation agencies. The core concept established is that it is possible to establish a sector-specific, content based, quality system, that can complement the existing national or European accreditation systems, providing added value to the internal and/or external quality assurance processes that are in place in most EU countries. The tools and processes proposed are sufficiently simple to be manageable by Universities in addition to their national accreditation processes or as stand-alone assessment. The main goal of the proposed process is the evaluation of the quality of the aerospace curricula in the European context, whereas the accreditation of the programme can be seen as an optional extension of the process, subject to further national regulations. The process is proposed in view of the awarding of a sector-specific, content based, quality label, to be issued by an appropriate legally recognized and qualified institution. 8 field tests with volunteering universities throughout Europe have been performed. They experienced the method as very practical and to the point.Unión Europea H2020 64021

Are you as fooled as I am? Visual illusions in human (Homo) and nonhuman (Sapajus, Gorilla, Pan, Pongo) primate species

It has been argued that humans’ susceptibility to visual illusions does not simply reflect cognitive flaws but rather specific functional adaptations of our perceptual system. The data on cross-cultural differences in the perception of geometric illusions seemingly support this explanation. Little is known, however, about the developmental trajectories of such adaptations in humans, let alone a conclusive picture of the illusionary susceptibility in other primate species. So far, most developmental or comparative studies have tested single illusions with varying procedural implementations. The current study aims at overcoming these limitations by testing human subjects of four different age classes (3- to 5 year-old children and adults) and five non-human primate species (capuchin monkeys, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) with an identical setup in five well-known geometric illusions (Horizontal-vertical, Ebbinghaus, Mueller-Lyer, Ponzo, Sander). Two food items of identical size were presented on separate trays with surrounding paintings eliciting the illusion of size differences and subjects were required to choose one of the items. Four of the five illusions elicited a strong effect in adult humans, and older children showed a greater susceptibility to illusions than younger ones. In contrast, only two illusions (Ebbingaus and Horizontal-vertical) elicited a mild effect on nonhuman primates with high variation within species and little variation between species. Our results suggests that humans learn to see illusions as they develop during childhood. They also suggest that future work should address how nonhuman primates’ experience of these illusion changes throughout their development.PostprintPeer reviewe

Seasonal variability in the global relevance of mountains to satisfy lowland water demand

Mountain areas play a vital role in global water resources as they often generate disproportionally high runoff and seasonally delay runoff due to storage as snow and ice. Water originating from mountains is used to satisfy human water demand further downstream in the lowlands of the corresponding river basins. Although the relevance of mountains for water supply is widely acknowledged, our current quantitative knowledge of their relevance for human water use on a global scale remains limited to decadal averages. As both water demand and mountain water supply have a strong seasonality, it is crucial to assess the global relevance of mountain areas beyond the annual time scale. To this end, we examined the share of lowland surface water abstraction (LSWA) stemming from mountain runoff in all river basins larger than 10 000 km$^{2}$ globally from 1990 to 2019, focusing on the intra-annual variability. We distinguished between essential runoff contributions from low and high mountains and potential mountain runoff contributions to LSWA. Essential mountain contributions are defined as the share of water abstractions in the lowlands that can solely be satisfied by mountain runoff, whereas potential mountain contributions are the share that can originate from the mountains but does not necessarily have to. Our results confirm a strong spatial heterogeneity in the contribution of mountain runoff to LSWA. Globally, 15% of annual LSWA can solely be satisfied by mountain runoff, with monthly variations between 9% and 23%, highlighting the strong seasonality in the reliance on mountain runoff for lowland water use. The share of potential mountain contributions is much higher (51% annually). Slightly less than half of the essential mountain contributions to LSWA are sourced from high mountains. This shows the disproportional relevance of these regions, constituting only around one-third of the total mountain area. Furthermore, our results show an increasing dependence of lowlands on mountain runoff contributions

Coupling a large-scale glacier and hydrological model (OGGM v1.5.3 and CWatM V1.08) – towards an improved representation of mountain water resources in global assessments

Glaciers are present in many large river basins, and due to climate change, they are undergoing considerable changes in terms of area, volume, magnitude and seasonality of runoff. Although the spatial extent of glaciers is very limited in most large river basins, their role in hydrology can be substantial because glaciers store large amounts of water at varying timescales. Large-scale hydrological models are an important tool to assess climate change impacts on water resources in large river basins worldwide. Nevertheless, glaciers remain poorly represented in large-scale hydrological models. Here we present a coupling between the large-scale glacier model Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM) v1.5.3 and the large-scale hydrological model Community Water Model (CWatM) V1.08. We evaluated the improved glacier representation in the coupled model against the baseline hydrological model for four selected river basins at 5 arcmin resolution and globally at 30 arcmin resolution, focusing on future discharge projections under low- and high-emission scenarios. We find that increases in future discharge are attenuated, whereas decreases are exacerbated when glaciers are represented explicitly in the large-scale hydrological model simulations. This is explained by a projected decrease in glacier-sourced runoff in almost all basins. Calibration can compensate for lacking glacier representation in large-scale hydrological models in the past. Nevertheless, only an improved glacier representation can prevent underestimating future discharge changes, even far downstream at the outlets of large glacierized river basins. Therefore, incorporating a glacier representation into large-scale hydrological models is important for climate change impact studies, particularly when focusing on summer months or extreme years. The uncertainties in glacier-sourced runoff associated with inaccurate precipitation inputs require the continued attention and collaboration of glacier and hydrological modelling communities

Effective Radiative Forcing – a New Approach to Assessing the Impact of Aviation on the Atmosphere

This article discusses new possibilities of assessing the impact of aviation on the atmosphere. The second part of this text describes a project realized at the Department of Air Transport at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The project is focused on investigating the effect of air transport on contrails.</span

Does Presentation Format Influence Visual Size Discrimination in Tufted Capuchin Monkeys (Sapajus spp.)?

Most experimental paradigms to study visual cognition in humans and non-human species are based on discrimination tasks involving the choice between two or more visual stimuli. To this end, different types of stimuli and procedures for stimuli presentation are used, which highlights the necessity to compare data obtained with different methods. The present study assessed whether, and to what extent, capuchin monkeys\u27 ability to solve a size discrimination problem is influenced by the type of procedure used to present the problem. Capuchins\u27 ability to generalise knowledge across different tasks was also evaluated. We trained eight adult tufted capuchin monkeys to select the larger of two stimuli of the same shape and different sizes by using pairs of food items (Experiment 1), computer images (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2). Our results indicated that monkeys achieved the learning criterion faster with food stimuli compared to both images and objects. They also required consistently fewer trials with objects than with images. Moreover, female capuchins had higher levels of acquisition accuracy with food stimuli than with images. Finally, capuchins did not immediately transfer the solution of the problem acquired in one task condition to the other conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that - even in relatively simple visual discrimination problems where a single perceptual dimension (i.e., size) has to be judged - learning speed strongly depends on the mode of presentation

Building hierarchical martensite

Martensitic materials show a complex, hierarchical microstructure containing structural domains separated by various types of twin boundaries. Several concepts exist to describe this microstructure on each length scale, however, there is no comprehensive approach bridging the whole range from the nano- up to the macroscopic scale. Here, we describe for a Ni-Mn-based Heusler alloy how this hierarchical microstructure is built from scratch with just one key parameter: the tetragonal distortion of the basic building block at the atomic level. Based on this initial block, we introduce five successive levels of nested building blocks. At each level, a larger building block is formed by twinning the preceding one to minimise the relevant energy contributions locally. This naturally explains the occurrence of different types of twin boundaries. We compare this scale-bridging approach of nested building blocks with experiments in real and reciprocal space. Our approach of nested building blocks is versatile as it can be applied to the broad class of functional materials exhibiting diffusionless transformations.Comment: 25 pages, including supplementar

Chimpanzees use observed temporal directionality to learn novel causal relations

We investigated whether chimpanzees use the temporal sequence of external events to determine causation. Seventeen chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) witnessed a human experimenter press a button in two different conditions. When she pressed the “causal button” the delivery of juice and a sound immediately followed (cause-then-effect). In contrast, she pressed the “non-causal button” only after the delivery of juice and sound (effect-then-cause). When given the opportunity to produce the desired juice delivery themselves, the chimpanzees preferentially pressed the causal button, i.e., the one that preceded the effect. Importantly, they did so in their first test trial and even though both buttons were equally associated with juice delivery. This outcome suggests that chimpanzees, like human children, do not rely solely on their own actions to make use of novel causal relations, but they can learn causal sequences based on observation alone. We discuss these findings in relation to the literature on causal inferences as well as associative learning.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Evolution of Primate Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-response task. Our results confirm previous findings that longer delays decrease memory performance across species and taxa. Our analyses demonstrate a considerable contribution of phylogeny over ecological and social factors on the distribution of short-term memory performance in primates; closely related species had more similar short-term memory abilities. Overall, individuals in the branch of Hominoidea performed better compared to Cercopithecoidea, who in turn performed above Platyrrhini and Strepsirrhini. Interdependencies between phylogeny and socioecology of a given species presented an obstacle to disentangling the effects of each of these factors on the evolution of short-term memory capacity. However, this study offers an important step forward in understanding the interspecies and individual variation in short-term memory ability by providing the first phylogenetic reconstruction of this trait’s evolutionary history. The dataset constitutes a unique resource for studying the evolution of primate cognition and the role of short-term memory in other cognitive abilities