Media, and particularly TV media, have a great impact on the general public. In recent years, spatial patterns of information and the relevance of intangible geographies have become increasingly ...important. Gatekeeping plays a critical role in the selection of information that is transformed into media. Therefore, gatekeeping, through national media, also co-forms the generation of mental maps. In this paper, correspondence analysis (a statistical method) combined with cloud lines (a new visual analytics technique) is used to analyze how individual major regional events in one of the post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, penetrate into the media on a national scale. Although national news should minimize distortions about regions, this assumption has not been verified by our research. Impressions presented by the media of selected regions that were markedly influenced by one or several events in those regions demonstrate that gatekeepers, especially news reporters, functioned as a filter by selecting only a few specific, and in many cases, unusual events for dissemination.
Agriculture represents one of the most important economic activities that co-creates the qualities of landscapes. While topics such as food production, land utilization, or the development of rural ...regions are typically taken into account when analysing agriculture, regionally differentiated media portrayals of agriculture constitute a largely innovative approach. The main objective of this paper is to analyse and interpret agriculture-oriented news about individual self-governing regions in Czechia that were broadcasted in the framework of the national TV reporting. The paper is conceived as a historical study of the creation of the image of agriculture in the period from 2004 to 2011, which we define as the period of adaptation of Czech agriculture to the EU. The article includes both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. In summary, the media portrayals of agriculture largely differ from real conditions in Czech self-governing regions. Important themes, such as common agricultural policy or organic farming, have been mostly ignored within regionally focused national TV coverage. On the contrary, TV news is typically focused on one or a few phenomena of unusual or negative character, which is consistent with the gatekeeping conception.
Biomedical image registration, or geometric alignment of two-dimensional and/or three-dimensional (3D) image data, is becoming increasingly important in diagnosis, treatment planning, functional ...studies, computer-guided therapies, and in biomedical research. Registration based on intensity values usually requires optimization of some similarity metric between the images. Local optimization techniques frequently fail because functions of these metrics with respect to transformation parameters are generally nonconvex and irregular and, therefore, global methods are often required. In this paper, a new evolutionary approach, particle swarm optimization, is adapted for single-slice 3D-to-3D biomedical image registration. A new hybrid particle swarm technique is proposed that incorporates initial user guidance. Multimodal registrations with initial orientations far from the ground truth were performed on three volumes from different modalities. Results of optimizing the normalized mutual information similarity metric were compared with various evolutionary strategies. The hybrid particle swarm technique produced more accurate registrations than the evolutionary strategies in many cases, with comparable convergence. These results demonstrate that particle swarm approaches, along with evolutionary techniques and local methods, are useful in image registration, and emphasize the need for hybrid approaches for difficult registration problems.
Theoretical and practical advances in time-frequency analysis, in general, and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), in particular, have increased over the last two decades. Although the Morlet ...wavelet has been the default choice for wavelet analysis, a new family of analytic wavelets, known as generalized Morse wavelets, which subsume several other analytic wavelet families, have been increasingly employed due to their time and frequency localization benefits and their utility in isolating and extracting quantifiable features in the time-frequency domain. The current paper describes two practical applications of analysing the features obtained from the generalized Morse CWT: (i) electromyography, for isolating important features in muscle bursts during skating, and (ii) electrocardiography, for assessing heart rate variability, which is represented as the ridge of the main transform frequency band. These features are subsequently quantified to facilitate exploration of the underlying physiological processes from which the signals were generated.
This article is part of the theme issue 'Redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age'.
•Addresses the need for intuitive websites to facilitate precision agriculture in emerging areas.•Contributes to research into interactive visual analytics.•Proposes innovative multiresolution and ...correlation graphics for agricultural data.•Presents a case study in agricultural community-based participatory research.•Contributes to research in using drone and other imagery for precision agriculture.
Agriculture in northern Ontario, Canada, has not yet reached the level of development of the southern regions of the province. In spite of the increasing desirability of the former region for agricultural expansion, northern agricultural producers – as well as other producers in “emerging” areas – have less access to information and decision support services relative to more established agricultural regions. At the same time, geographic information systems (GIS) are now being integrated into precision agriculture to assess field variability, to ensure optimal use of information, to maximize output, and to increase efficiency. To address this trend, a community-based research initiative based on an interactive web-based information visualization and GIS decision support system has been deployed with the aim of providing northern Ontario producers with access to the data they need to make the best possible decisions concerning their crops. This system employs citizen science and community-based participatory research to build a mutually beneficial partnership between agricultural producers, researchers, and other community stakeholders.
Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1 alpha (PGC-1α) is a transcription factor co-activator that helps coordinate mitochondrial biogenesis within skeletal muscle following ...exercise. While evidence gleaned from submaximal exercise suggests that intracellular pathways associated with the activation of PGC-1α, as well as the expression of PGC-1α itself are activated to a greater extent following higher intensities of exercise, we have recently shown that this effect does not extend to supramaximal exercise, despite corresponding increases in muscle activation amplitude measured with electromyography (EMG). Spectral analyses of EMG data may provide a more in-depth assessment of changes in muscle electrophysiology occurring across different exercise intensities, and therefore the goal of the present study was to apply continuous wavelet transforms (CWTs) to our previous data to comprehensively evaluate: 1) differences in muscle electrophysiological properties at different exercise intensities (i.e. 73%, 100%, and 133% of peak aerobic power), and 2) muscular effort and fatigue across a single interval of exercise at each intensity, in an attempt to shed mechanistic insight into our previous observations that the increase in PGC-1α is dissociated from exercise intensity following supramaximal exercise. In general, the CWTs revealed that localized muscle fatigue was only greater than the 73% condition in the 133% exercise intensity condition, which directly matched the work rate results. Specifically, there were greater drop-offs in frequency, larger changes in burst power, as well as greater changes in burst area under this intensity, which were already observable during the first interval. As a whole, the results from the present study suggest that supramaximal exercise causes extreme localized muscular fatigue, and it is possible that the blunted PGC-1α effects observed in our previous study are the result of fatigue-associated increases in muscle acidosis. This should be explored in future research using further combinations of EMG and muscle biochemistry and histology.
It is well known that the spatial and temporal patterns in streamflow can be correlated with many teleconnections, e.g., solar activity and climatic phenomena such as El Niño. However, fewer studies ...have attempted to analyze both the influence of solar activity and large scale climatic phenomena on natural processes, particularly hydrological processes. In this study we examine long term records of solar activity and El Niño for their combined influence on streamflow across southern Canada. Data used in the analysis include sunspot number, sea surface temperature anomaly in Niño region 3.4, and annual mean streamflow from 50 Canadian Reference Hydrometric Basin Network (RHBN) stations with record lengths ≥50 years (14 of them ≥90 years). Analysis is performed using Fourier spectrum analysis (FSA), continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and cross wavelet transform coherence analysis (WTC). Results of FSA show that for almost all the 14 RHBN stations with record lengths of ≥90 years, streamflow exhibits periodicities of approximately 11 and 22 years (which is in accordance with solar activity), as well as shorter term periodicities consistent with El Niño (2–7 years). WTC analysis confirms the correlation between these periodicities (2–7 years, 11 years, 22 years) in streamflow with solar activity and El Niño records. Both solar activity and El Niño's influences on annual mean streamflow in 18–32 year bands are common, while the influence of El Nino is more extensive in the 2–7 and ∼11 year bands. Through examination of correlations between solar activity and streamflow, El Niño and streamflow, and finally El Niño and solar activity, WTC analysis has identified that solar activity affects El Niño first, and this influence is then transferred by El Niño to streamflow. This study expands on earlier efforts examining linkages between El Niño and streamflow across southern Canada to an examination of linkages between solar activity, El Niño, and streamflow.
Key Points
Solar activity influence El Nino and streamflow
Much progress has recently been made in global optimization, with particular attention devoted to robust nature-inspired stochastic methods for difficult, high-dimensional problems. This paper ...presents a computational study of an adaptation of one such method, particle swarm optimization (PSO), which is analyzed for parallelization on readily-available heterogeneous parallel computational hardware: specifically, multicore technologies accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as Intel Xeon Phi co-processors accelerated with vectorization. In this heterogeneous approach, computationally-intensive, task-parallel components are performed with multicore parallelism and data-parallel elements are executed via co-processing (GPUs or vectorization). A computationally intensive adaptive PSO technique is parallelized according to this schema. In experiments with two high-dimensional and complex functions, large speedups can be obtained. Thus, a heterogeneous approach mitigates the time complexity of PSO adaptations, suggesting that other time-intensive stochastic methods can also benefit from the techniques proposed here.
To date, no postural studies have investigated the specific relationship between linear (anteroposterior (AP) and mediolateral (ML)) postural sway and the free moment (FM) over the range of ...biomechanically important frequencies. The goal of the current paper is to study the relationship between FM and the AP/ML movements during quiet standing with respect to individual frequencies. Mean squared coherence, which measures the degree of the relationship between two signals as a function of frequency, is employed to address this question. The results showed that, in two conditions (eyes opened and eyes closed), at very low frequencies (<0.5Hz), AP and FM were strongly correlated (>0.8) while there was a weak correlation between ML and FM (∼0.2). The situation reversed from (0.5 to 1.5Hz), with AP/FM correlation decreasing, and ML/FM correlation peaking slightly below 1.0Hz. Both conditions were only weakly correlated beyond 1.5Hz. It is suggested that these observations arise from differences in ankle activation between the left and right sides, whereas at higher frequencies, high coherence between ML and FM is a hip control strategy.
The use of spectral response curves for estimating nitrogen (N) leaf concentrations generally has been found to be a challenging task for a variety of plant species. In this investigation, leaf N ...concentration and corresponding laboratory hyperspectral data were examined for two species of mangrove (Avicennia germinans, Rhizophora mangle) representing a variety of conditions (healthy, poor condition, dwarf) of a degraded mangrove forest located in the Mexican Pacific. This is the first time leaf nitrogen content has been examined using close range hyperspectral remote sensing of a degraded mangrove forest. Simple comparisons between individual wavebands and N concentrations were examined, as well as two models employed to predict N concentrations based on multiple wavebands. For one model, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was developed based on known N absorption bands. For comparative purposes, a second model, based on the well-known Stepwise Multiple Linear Regression (SMLR) approach, was employed using the entire dataset. For both models, the input data included continuum removed reflectance, band depth at the centre of the absorption feature (BNC), and log (1/BNC). Weak to moderate correlations were found between N concentration and single band spectral responses. The results also indicate that ANNs were more predictive for N concentration than was SMLR, and had consistently higher r2 values. The highest r2 value (0.91) was observed in the prediction of black mangrove (A. germinans) leaf N concentration using the BNC transformation. It is thus suggested that artificial neural networks could be used in a complementary manner with other techniques to assess mangrove health, thereby improving environmental monitoring in coastal wetlands, which is of prime importance to local communities. In addition, it is recommended that the BNC transformation be used on the input for such N concentration prediction models.
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