Academic literature on the topic 'Iris Message to the planet'

I am humbled and honored to be here to tell you about a topic that is dear to everyone's heart—and vital to the future of our planet. My colleague, Richard Smalley, gave a presentation on this topic several years ago, at a similar MRS plenary session. Over the last few years of Dr. Smalley's life, he and I worked together, traveling across our country to deliver a message about a subject that we—like many others, both scientists and lay people— have come to believe is unequivocally the most important technological problem in the world: our global energy future. That is an incredibly powerful statement, one that during the next hour I hope to ably defend.

Iris recognition has been around for many years due to an extensive research on the uniqueness of human iris. It is well known that the iris is not similar to each other which means every human in the planet has their own iris pattern and cannot be shared. One of the main issues in iris recognition is iris segmentation. One element that can reduce the accuracy of iris segmentation is the presence of specular reflection. Another issue is the speed of specular reflection removal since the iris recognition system needs to process a lot of irises. In this paper, a specular reflection removal method was proposed to achieve a fast and accurate specular reflection removal. Some modifications were implemented on the existing pixels properties method. Based on the results, the proposed method achieved the fastest execution time, the highest segmentation accuracy and the highest SSIM compared to the other methods. This proves that the proposed method is fast and accurate to be implemented in the iris recognition systems.

In 1979, the IRIS infrared spectrometers on the two Voyager spacecraft obtained over 1000 disk-resolved thermal emission spectra of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, Jupiter's three large icy satellites. This dissertation describes the first detailed analysis of this data set. Ganymede and Callisto subsolar temperatures are 10°K and 5°K respectively below equilibrium values. Equatorial nighttime temperatures are between 100°K and 75°K, Callisto and Europa being colder than Ganymede. The diurnal temperature profiles can be matched by 2-layer surfaces that are also consistent with the eclipse cooling observed from earth, though previous eclipse models underestimated thermal inertias by about 50%. Substrate thermal inertias in the 2-layer models are a factor of several lower than for solid ice. These are 'cold spots' on Ganymede and Callisto that are not high-albedo regions, which may indicate large thermal inertia anomalies. All spectra show a slope of increasing brightness temperature with decreasing wavelength, indicating local temperature contrasts of 10-50°K. Callisto spectra steepen dramatically towards the terminator, a trend largely matched with a laterally-homogeneous model surface having lunar-like roughness, though some lateral variation in albedo and/or thermal inertia may also be required. Subsolar Ganymede spectra are steeper than those on Callisto, but there is no steepening towards the terminator, indicating a much smoother surface than Callisto's. The spectrum slopes on Ganymede may indicate large lateral variations in albedo and thermal inertia. A surface with similar areal coverage of dark, very low thermal inertia material, and bright material with thermal inertia a factor of 2-3 below solid ice, fits the diurnal and eclipse curves, and (less accurately) the IRIS spectrum slopes. Europa spectra have very small slopes, indicating a smooth and homogeneous surface. Modelling of surface water ice migration gives a possible explanation for the inferred lateral inhomogeneities on Ganymede. Dirty ice surfaces at Jupiter are subject to segregation into high-albedo ice-rich cold spots and ice-free regions covered in lag deposits, on decade timescales. Ion sputtering and micrometeorite bombardment are generally insufficient to prevent the segregation. The reflectance spectra of Ganymede and Callisto may be consistent with this type of segregated surface.

Abstract This chapter examines and illustrates eighteenth-century Irish Jacobite poetry and song against the British and European historical background of the time. Several of the relevant tunes, encompassing both traditional and borrowed material, are examined. Beginning with the defeat of King James II’s army in Ireland, some texts allude to European wars and battles and other historic events in the context of the hoped-for return of the ‘rightful king’ while others are less specific in detail. Certain tunes which were used to create a series of literary songs by poets in response to one another’s compositions have been looked at. In addition to manuscript titles, various sources of tunes for texts—such as internal textual evidence—are elucidated. Special emphasis is placed on eighteenth-century Munster poets and poetry, including compositions of the aisling genre in which an allegorical woman, who is the embodiment of Ireland, conveys a Jacobite message, usually one of hope or defiance. Special consideration is given to songs in which the otherworldly woman is given a vernacular personal name (and often a surname), such as ‘Caitlín Ní Uallacháin’. Finally, the overall value of the material, both textual and musical, is contextualized and affirmed.

Marleen S. Barr’s piece looks at contemporary urban practices prefigured by Eleanor Campbell’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, a 1954 children’s science fiction novel. Claiming that Campbell’s most important message was not that space flight was possible, but that “organic matter matters,” Barr surveys contemporary art projects, architecture, and even packaging production to highlight Campbell’s impact on the present moment. Barr thus demonstrates how fantastic futures have infiltrated everyday urban realities.

“This surgery is designed to help you preserve the vision you have. If we are completely successful, you will not see worse once we are done.” Hardly an encouraging message we give to patients needing glaucoma surgery. An experienced glaucoma surgeon knows that aqueous diversion procedures are fraught with complications, including the ever terrifying loss of vision. Early complications of trabeculectomy that can lead to vision loss can be categorized as refractive, inflammatory/infectious, hemorrhagic, and other. It is important to recognize these complications promptly and understand the appropriate time to intervene. Thoughtful preoperative planning, meticulous technique, and a dose of good luck can help prevent these complications. It is the ability to anticipate, avoid, and manage complications that distinguishes the successful and satisfied glaucoma surgeon from a frustrated one. Trabeculectomy may induce new spherical and cylindrical aberrations. When intraocular pressure (IOP) is reduced, and particularly if there is overfiltration, the lens-iris diaphragm moves forward, and the anterior chamber shallows. These combined actions usually induce a spherical refractive error (myopic shift). The clinical signs of a myopic shift will be a shallow anterior chamber and visual acuity that will improve with a pinhole occluder or refraction. Interestingly, should the overfiltration be accompanied by macular edema, the myopic effect may be counteracted by a hyperopic shift due to macular elevation and shortening of axial length, and the patient may not have any change in refraction or may even have a hyperopic shift. For more information about axial length and changes in refraction, including after trabeculectomy, see Chapter 41. Astigmatic shift can have several origins. If a trabeculectomy flap is dissected too far anteriorly into the peripheral cornea and not sutured securely back to its origin, “against the rule” astigmatism can be induced. If a superiorly located flap is sutured with too much tension, astigmatism can be induced along the axis of the tightest suture(s), usually “with the rule.” (See Chapter 26.) Additionally, uneven suture tension in the conjunctival closure (whether limbus- or fornix-based) can affect the degree of postoperative astigmatism.

Whoever made the dollar bill green had a right instinct. There is a connection, profound and yet so easy to ignore, between the money in our pocket and the green earth, though the connection is more than color. The dollar bill needs paper, which is to say it needs trees, just as our wealth in general derives from nature, from the forest, the earth and waters, the soil. That these are all limited and finite is easy to see, and so also must be wealth; it can never be unlimited, though it can be expanded and multiplied by human ingenuity. Somewhere on the dollar bill that message might be printed, a warning that you hold in your hand a piece of the limited earth that should be handled with respect: “In God we trust; on nature we must depend.” The public is beginning to understand that connection in at least a rudimentary way and to realize that taking better care of the earth will cost money, will lower the standard of living as it is conventionally defined, and will interfere with freedom of enterprise. By the evidence of opinion polls, something like three out of four Americans say they are ready to accept those costs, a remarkable development in our history. The same can be said for almost every other nation on earth, even the poorest, who are learning that, in their own long-term self-interest, the preservation of nature is a cost they ought to pay, though they may demand that the rich nations assume some of the cost. Having money in one’s pocket, no matter how green its color, is no longer the unexamined good it once was. Many have come to realize that wealth might be a kind of poverty. The human species, according to a team of Stanford biologists, is now consuming or destroying 40 percent of the net primary terrestrial production of the planet: that is nearly one half of all the energy fixed by photosynthesis on the land. We are harvesting it, drastically reorganizing it, or losing it through urbanization and desertification in order to support our growing numbers and even faster growing demands.

As the twenty-first century winds onward, it is becoming increasingly clear that understanding how climate affects human cultural systems is critically important. Indeed, it has been argued by many researchers that how we respond to changing global climate is one of the greatest scientific and political challenges facing our planetary technological civilization, comparable and closely intertwined with concerns about biological or nuclear warfare, famine, disease, overpopulation, or environmental degradation. By any reasonable evaluation of the evidence, this century, and likely the several centuries that follow it, will be characterized by dramatic climate change, perhaps as significant in terms of its impact on our species as any climatic episodes that have occurred in the past. What we don’t know with much certainty is how these environmental changes will play out across the planet, and how individuals as well as nation states will respond to them. Archaeology has a major role to play in helping us move through this period of crisis, however, by showing us how human cultures in the past responded to dramatic changes in climate. As the work of many archaeological scholars has shown, climate change has not invariably proven to be a bad thing: it is how people respond to it that is critical (e.g. Anderson et al. 2007b; Cooper and Sheets 2012; Crumley 2000, 2006, 2007; Hardesty 2007; McAnany and Yoffee 2010; McIntosh et al. 2000; Redman 2004a; Sandweiss and Quilter 2008; Sassaman and Anderson 1996; Tainter 2000). Archaeology working in tandem with a host of palaeoenvironmental and historical disciplines has lessons for our modern world and, as this volume demonstrates, we as a profession are making great strides in getting our message out. Perhaps the most important lesson from the past is that people, through their actions, are the drivers of cultural change, including response to climate change. Societies are not, however, monolithic entities that ‘chose’ to succeed or fail; people as individuals, groups, or factions through their actions generate outcomes, and often some demonstrate remarkable flexibility and resilience (Cooper and Sheets 2012; Diamond 2005; McAnany and Yoffee 2010).

This paper proposes a new parallel computing genetic algorithm framework for designing fuel-optimal trajectories for interplanetary spacecraft missions. The framework can capture the deep search-space of the problem with the use of a fixed chromosome structure and hidden-genes concept, can explore the diverse set of candidate solutions with the use of the Adaptive and Twin-Space Crowding techniques, can execute on any High-Performance Computing (HPC) platform with the adoption of the portable Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. New procedures are developed for determining trajectories in legs of the flight from the launch planet, and deep-space maneuver legs of the flight from the launch and non-launch planets. The chromosome structure maintains the time of flight as a free parameter within certain boundaries. The fitness or the cost function of the algorithm uses only the mission ΔV, and does not include the time of flight. The proposed algorithm is proven superior to the classical genetic algorithm both in terms of convergence characteristics for the cost function and the depth of the search space explored.

The purpose of this report is to compare the risk communication strategies and public health mitigation measures implemented by Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (UK) in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic based on publicly available documents. The report compares the country responses both in relation to one another and to the recommendations and guidance of the World Health Organization where available. The comparative report is an output of Work Package 1 from the research project PAN-FIGHT (Fighting pandemics with enhanced risk communication: Messages, compliance and vulnerability during the COVID-19 outbreak), which is financially supported by the Norwegian Research Council's extraordinary programme for corona research. PAN-FIGHT adopts a comparative approach which follows a “most different systems” variation as a logic of comparison guiding the research (Przeworski & Teune, 1970). The countries in this study include two EU member States (Sweden, Germany), one which was engaged in an exit process from the EU membership (the UK), and two non-European Union states, but both members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA): Norway and Switzerland. Furthermore, Germany and Switzerland govern by the Continental European Federal administrative model, with a relatively weak central bureaucracy and strong subnational, decentralised institutions. Norway and Sweden adhere to the Scandinavian model—a unitary but fairly decentralised system with power bestowed to the local authorities. The United Kingdom applies the Anglo-Saxon model, characterized by New Public Management (NPM) and decentralised managerial practices (Einhorn & Logue, 2003; Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2014; Petridou et al., 2019). In total, PAN-FIGHT is comprised of 5 Work Packages (WPs), which are research-, recommendation-, and practice-oriented. The WPs seek to respond to the following research questions and accomplish the following: WP1: What are the characteristics of governmental and public health authorities’ risk communication strategies in five European countries, both in comparison to each other and in relation to the official strategies proposed by WHO? WP2: To what extent and how does the general public’s understanding, induced by national risk communication, vary across five countries, in relation to factors such as social capital, age, gender, socio-economic status and household composition? WP3: Based on data generated in WP1 and WP2, what is the significance of being male or female in terms of individual susceptibility to risk communication and subsequent vulnerability during the COVID-19 outbreak? WP4: Based on insight and knowledge generated in WPs 1 and 2, what recommendations can we offer national and local governments and health institutions on enhancing their risk communication strategies to curb pandemic outbreaks? WP5: Enhance health risk communication strategies across five European countries based upon the knowledge and recommendations generated by WPs 1-4. Pre-pandemic preparedness characteristics All five countries had pandemic plans developed prior to 2020, which generally were specific to influenza pandemics but not to coronaviruses. All plans had been updated following the H1N1 pandemic (2009-2010). During the SARS (2003) and MERS (2012) outbreaks, both of which are coronaviruses, all five countries experienced few cases, with notably smaller impacts than the H1N1 epidemic (2009-2010). The UK had conducted several exercises (Exercise Cygnet in 2016, Exercise Cygnus in 2016, and Exercise Iris in 2018) to check their preparedness plans; the reports from these exercises concluded that there were gaps in preparedness for epidemic outbreaks. Germany also simulated an influenza pandemic exercise in 2007 called LÜKEX 07, to train cross-state and cross-department crisis management (Bundesanstalt Technisches Hilfswerk, 2007). In 2017 within the context of the G20, Germany ran a health emergency simulation exercise with WHO and World Bank representatives to prepare for potential future pandemics (Federal Ministry of Health et al., 2017). Prior to COVID-19, only the UK had expert groups, notably the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), that was tasked with providing advice during emergencies. It had been used in previous emergency events (not exclusively limited to health). In contrast, none of the other countries had a similar expert advisory group in place prior to the pandemic. COVID-19 waves in 2020 All five countries experienced two waves of infection in 2020. The first wave occurred during the first half of the year and peaked after March 2020. The second wave arrived during the final quarter. Norway consistently had the lowest number of SARS-CoV-2 infections per million. Germany’s counts were neither the lowest nor the highest. Sweden, Switzerland and the UK alternated in having the highest numbers per million throughout 2020. Implementation of measures to control the spread of infection In Germany, Switzerland and the UK, health policy is the responsibility of regional states, (Länders, cantons and nations, respectively). However, there was a strong initial centralized response in all five countries to mitigate the spread of infection. Later on, country responses varied in the degree to which they were centralized or decentralized. Risk communication In all countries, a large variety of communication channels were used (press briefings, websites, social media, interviews). Digital communication channels were used extensively. Artificial intelligence was used, for example chatbots and decision support systems. Dashboards were used to provide access to and communicate data.