No Arabic abstract
The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.
To provide a comprehensive view for dynamics of and on many real-world temporal networks, we investigate the interplay of temporal connectivity patterns and spreading phenomena, in terms of the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model on the modified activity-driven temporal network (ADTN) with memory. In particular, we focus on how the epidemic threshold of the SIR model is affected by the heterogeneity of nodal activities and the memory strength in temporal and static regimes, respectively. While strong ties (memory) between nodes inhibit the spread of epidemic to be localized, the heterogeneity of nodal activities enhances it to be globalized initially. Since the epidemic threshold of the SIR model is very sensitive to the degree distribution of nodes in static networks, we test the SIR model on the modified ADTNs with the possible set of the activity exponents and the memory exponents that generates the same degree distributions in temporal networks. We also discuss the role of spatiotemporal scaling properties of the largest cluster and the maximum degree in the epidemic threshold. It is observed that the presence of highly active nodes enables to trigger the initial spread of epidemic in a short period of time, but it also limits its final spread to the entire network. This implies that there is the trade-off between the spreading time of epidemic and its outbreak size. Finally, we suggest the phase diagram of the SIR model on ADTNs and the optimal condition for the spread of epidemic under the circumstances.
Gamma-ray spectral data were collected from sensors mounted to traffic signals around Northern Virginia. The data were collected over a span of approximately fifteen months. A subset of the data were analyzed manually and subsequently used to train machine-learning models to facilitate the evaluation of the remaining 50k anomalous events identified in the dataset. We describe the analysis approach used here and discuss the results in terms of radioisotope classes and frequency patterns over day-of-week and time-of-day spans. Data from this work has been archived and is available for future and ongoing research applications.
To extract useful information about quantum effects in cold atom experiments, one central task is to identify the intrinsic quantum fluctuation from extrinsic system noises of various kinds. As a data processing method, principal component analysis can decompose fluctuations in experimental data into eigen modes, and give a chance to separate noises originated from different physical sources. In this paper, we demonstrate for Bose-Einstein condensates in one-dimensional optical lattices that the principal component analysis can be applied to time-of-flight images to successfully separate and identify noises from different origins of leading contribution, and can help to reduce or even eliminate noises via corresponding data processing procedures. The attribution of noise modes to their physical origins is also confirmed by numerical analysis within a mean-field theory.
As a huge threat to the public health, Chinas air pollution has attracted extensive attention and continues to grow in tandem with the economy. Although the real-time air quality report can be utilized to update our knowledge on air quality, questions about how pollutants evolve across time and how pollutants are spatially correlated still remain a puzzle. In view of this point, we adopt the PMFG network method to analyze the six pollutants hourly data in 350 Chinese cities in an attempt to find out how these pollutants are correlated temporally and spatially. In terms of time dimension, the results indicate that, except for O$_3$, the pollutants have a common feature of the strong intraday patterns of which the daily variations are composed of two contraction periods and two expansion periods. Besides, all the time series of the six pollutants possess strong long-term correlations, and this temporal memory effect helps to explain why smoggy days are always followed by one after another. In terms of space dimension, the correlation structure shows that O$_3$ is characterized by the highest spatial connections. The PMFGs reveal the relationship between this spatial correlation and provincial administrative divisions by filtering the hierarchical structure in the correlation matrix and refining the cliques as the tinny spatial clusters. Finally, we check the stability of the correlation structure and conclude that, except for PM$_{10}$ and O$_3$, the other pollutants have an overall stable correlation, and all pollutants have a slight trend to become more divergent in space. These results not only enhance our understanding of the air pollutants evolutionary process, but also shed lights on the application of complex network methods into geographic issues.
We show that the recoils of the body caused by cardiac motion and blood circulation provide a noninvasive method capable to display the motions of the heart muscle and the propagation of the pulse wave along aorta and its branches. The results are compared with the data obtained invasively during a heart catheterization. We show that the described noninvasive method is able to determine the moment of a particular heart movement or the time when the pulse wave reaches certain morphological structure.