scholarly journals Whispering of the city: Characteristics and origin of environmental shaking in the Taipei metropolitan area

Author(s):  
Kate Huihusan Chen ◽  
Ting-Chen Yeh ◽  
Christopher W. Johnson ◽  
Yaochieh Chen ◽  
Cheng-Horng Lin ◽  
...  

Abstract Examining continuous seismic data recorded by a dense broadband seismic network throughout Taipei shows for the first time, the nature of seismic noise in this highly populated metropolitan. Using 140 broadband stations in a 50 km x 69 km area, three different recurring, strong noise signals characterized by dominant frequencies of 2–20 Hz, 0.25-1 Hz, and < 0.2 Hz are explored. At frequencies of 2–20 Hz, the seismic noise exhibits daily and weekly variations, and a quiescence during the Chinese New Year holidays. The largest amplitude occurred at a station located only 400 m from a traffic-roundabout, one of the busiest intersections in Taipei, suggesting a possible correlation between large amplitude with traffic flow. The median daily amplitude for the < 0.2 Hz and 0.2-1.0 Hz frequency bands are mostly synchronized with high similarity between stations, indicating that the sources are persistent oceanic or atmospheric perturbations across a large area. The daily amplitude for the > 2 Hz band, however, is low, indicating a local source that changes on shorter length scales. Human activities responsible for the 2–40 Hz energy in the city, we discovered, are able to produce amplitudes approximately 2 to 1500 times larger than natural sources.

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Huihsuan Chen ◽  
Ting-Chen Yeh ◽  
Yaochieh Chen ◽  
Christopher W. Johnson ◽  
Cheng-Horng Lin ◽  
...  

AbstractExamining continuous seismic data recorded by a dense broadband seismic network throughout Taipei shows for the first time, the nature of seismic noise in this highly populated metropolitan area. Using 140 broadband stations in a 50 km × 69 km area, three different recurring, strong noise signals characterized by dominant frequencies of 2–20 Hz, 0.25–1 Hz, and < 0.2 Hz are explored. At frequencies of 2–20 Hz, the seismic noise exhibits daily and weekly variations, and a quiescence during the Chinese New Year holidays. The largest amplitude occurred at a station located only 400 m from a traffic-roundabout, one of the busiest intersections in Taipei, suggesting a possible correlation between large amplitude and traffic flow. The median daily amplitude for the < 0.2 Hz and 0.2–1.0 Hz frequency bands is mostly synchronized with high similarity between stations, indicating that the sources are persistent oceanic or atmospheric perturbations across a large area. The daily amplitude for the > 2 Hz band, however, is low, indicating a local source that changes on shorter length scales. Human activities responsible for the 2–40 Hz energy in the city, we discovered, are able to produce amplitudes approximately 2 to 1500 times larger than natural sources. Using the building array deployed in TAIPEI 101, the tallest building in Taiwan, we found the small but repetitive ground vibration induced by traffic has considerable effect on the vibration behavior of the high-rise building. This finding urges further investigation not only on the dynamic and continuous interaction between vehicles, roads, and buildings, but also the role of soft sediment on such interaction.


Author(s):  
O.M. Anoshko

This publication continues a series of articles which introduce into scientific discourse the results of archaeo-logical research into the cultural layer of Tobolsk — the main city of Siberia during the Russian colonization pe-riod. The First and Second Regency excavations were laid on the spit of the Troitsky Cape, on the territory of the Tobolsk Kremlin, in the utility building construction zone of the Tobolsk-Tyumen diocese. Based on the historical and archival data, the identified stratigraphic columns should demonstrate the peculiarities of the formation of cultural strata in different periods of development of the city since its foundation, but unfortunately, as shown by the excavations, the early layers were severely damaged across a large area as a result of constant active recon-structions of the Kremlin. The earliest of the studied objects are the remains of a defensive line that ran along the edge of the cape in the 17th c., protecting the city from attacks. As a result, the structure of the wooden fortifica-tions of the city have been identified, which represented a high log fence, with an adjacent platform — fighting gallery — on the inner side. The presence of such structure suggests that the defensive wall carried loopholes for cannons and culverins, significantly expanding the firing potential. The nature, location and construction of this defensive line is similar to the one we found in the Chukman excavation site, on the nearby cape of Chukman. The ancient objects of the First and the Second Regency excavations include eight structures that have not been fully explored. One of them contained a rare archaeological find — the remains of a tiled stove, faced with terra-cotta, glazed, polychrome relief and painted tiles. Another building preserved in a form of a brick foundation, during the clearing of which, for the first time in Tobolsk, fragments of porcelain ware from Gardner factory were found, which was considered to be the best in Russia in the 19th century. In general, the obtained materials open new opportunities for studying the early stages of the history and culture of the first Russian capital of Siberia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
M.A. KOMOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  

The purpose of the article is to present the history and the analysis of the Russian wooden sculpture “Nikola Мtsenskiy” results of the examination from Peter and Paul Cathedral in Mtsensk. For the first time, the author conducted a historical and cultural examination of this object for religious purposes. The article defines the historical and cultural context of this object existence, its veneration as a relic, the problem of comparing the “The Legend of the appearance of the miraculous icon of St. Nicholas Wonderworker in the city of Mtsensk” and the preserved sculpture. The author also examines the historical and artistic sources of origin of similar items in the culture of the medieval Moscow state. The author dates the preserved fragment of the sculpture from Mtsensk Peter and Paul Cathedral to the late 1600s.


Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1736
Author(s):  
Zengchong Yang ◽  
Xiucheng Liu ◽  
Bin Wu ◽  
Ren Liu

Previous studies on Lamb wave touchscreen (LWT) were carried out based on the assumption that the unknown touch had the consistent parameters with acoustic fingerprints in the reference database. The adaptability of LWT to the variations in touch force and touch area was investigated in this study for the first time. The automatic collection of the databases of acoustic fingerprints was realized with an experimental prototype of LWT employing three pairs of transmitter–receivers. The self-adaptive updated weight coefficient of the used transmitter–receiver pairs was employed to successfully improve the accuracy of the localization model established based on a learning method. The performance of the improved method in locating single- and two-touch actions with the reference database of different parameters was carefully evaluated. The robustness of the LWT to the variation of the touch force varied with the touch area. Moreover, it was feasible to locate touch actions of large area with reference databases of small touch areas as long as the unknown touch and the reference databases met the condition of equivalent averaged stress.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 321
Author(s):  
Miltiadis Polidorou ◽  
Niki Evelpidou ◽  
Theodora Tsourou ◽  
Hara Drinia ◽  
Ferréol Salomon ◽  
...  

Akrotiri Salt Lake is located 5 km west of the city of Lemesos in the southernmost part of the island of Cyprus. The evolution of the Akrotiri Salt Lake is of great scientific interest, occurring during the Holocene when eustatic and isostatic movements combined with local active tectonics and climate change developed a unique geomorphological environment. The Salt Lake today is a closed lagoon, which is depicted in Venetian maps as being connected to the sea, provides evidence of the geological setting and landscape evolution of the area. In this study, for the first time, we investigated the development of the Akrotiri Salt Lake through a series of three cores which penetrated the Holocene sediment sequence. Sedimentological and micropaleontological analyses, as well as geochronological studies were performed on the deposited sediments, identifying the complexity of the evolution of the Salt Lake and the progressive change of the area from a maritime space to an open bay and finally to a closed salt lake.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 414
Author(s):  
Neda Aničić ◽  
Uroš Gašić ◽  
Feng Lu ◽  
Ana Ćirić ◽  
Marija Ivanov ◽  
...  

Two Balkan Peninsula endemics, Nepeta rtanjensis and N. argolica subsp. argolica, both characterized by specialized metabolite profiles predominated by iridoids and phenolics, are differentiated according to the stereochemistry of major iridoid aglycone nepetalactone (NL). For the first time, the present study provides a comparative analysis of antimicrobial and immunomodulating activities of the two Nepeta species and their major iridoids isolated from natural sources—cis,trans-NL, trans,cis-NL, and 1,5,9-epideoxyloganic acid (1,5,9-eDLA), as well as of phenolic acid rosmarinic acid (RA). Methanol extracts and pure iridoids displayed excellent antimicrobial activity against eight strains of bacteria and seven strains of fungi. They were especially potent against food-borne pathogens such as L. monocytogenes, E. coli, S. aureus, Penicillium sp., and Aspergillus sp. Targeted iridoids were efficient agents in preventing biofilm formation of resistant P. aeruginosa strain, and they displayed additive antimicrobial interaction. Iridoids are, to a great extent, responsible for the prominent antimicrobial activities of the two Nepeta species, although are probably minor contributors to the moderate immunomodulatory effects. The analyzed iridoids and RA, individually or in mixtures, have the potential to be used in the pharmaceutical industry as potent antimicrobials, and in the food industry to increase the shelf life and safety of food products.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-68

AbstractIn 2014 through 2018, Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and History Museum of Quxian County conducted a systematic archaeological survey, detection, and excavation to the Chengba site in Quxian County. The excavation uncovered 4,000sq m in total, from which 444 various features were recovered and over 1,000 artifacts were unearthed. The functional zoning of this site has been roughly made clear; the excavations of the western gate and important building foundations of the Guojiatai city site are important archaeological discoveries of the city sites of the Han through Western Jin dynasties, and at the checkpoint site on the waterway of this period was uncovered for the first time in China. The large amounts of bamboo slips and wooden tablets unearthed in the excavation provided important materials for the explorations on the management of the central government of the Han and Jin empires to the administrative areas of commandery and district levels and the social lives of the local people at that time.


Millennium ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Christoph Schwameis

AbstractBoth in the fourth book of Cicero’s De signis (Verr. 2,4) and in the fourteenth book of Silius Italicus’ Punica, there are descriptions of the city of Syracuse at important points of the texts. In this paper, both descriptions are combined and for the first time thoroughly related. I discuss form and content of the accounts, show their functions in their oratorical and epic contexts and consider their similarities. The most important facets, where the descriptions coincide in, seem to be their link to Marcellus’ conquest in the Second Punic War, the resulting precarious beauty of the city and the specifically Roman perspective on which these ekphraseis are based.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donglin Zhu ◽  
Lei Li ◽  
Rui Guo ◽  
Shifan Zhan

Abstract Fault detection is an important, but time-consuming task in seismic data interpretation. Traditionally, seismic attributes, such as coherency (Marfurt et al., 1998) and curvature (Al-Dossary et al., 2006) are used to detect faults. Recently, machine learning methods, such as convolution neural networks (CNNs) are used to detect faults, by applying various semantic segmentation algorithms to the seismic data (Wu et al., 2019). The most used algorithm is U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015), which can accurately and efficiently provide probability maps of faults. However, probabilities of faults generated by semantic segmentation algorithms are not sufficient for direct recognition of fault types and reconstruction of fault surfaces. To address this problem, we propose, for the first time, a workflow to use instance segmentation algorithm to detect different fault lines. Specifically, a modified CNN (LaneNet; Neven et al., 2018) is trained using automatically generated synthetic seismic images and corresponding labels. We then test the trained CNN using both synthetic and field collected seismic data. Results indicate that the proposed workflow is accurate and effective at detecting faults.


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