Simple catchments and where to find them: The storage discharge relationship as a proxy for catchment complexity

Author(s):  
Florian Ulrich Jehn ◽  
Lutz Breuer ◽  
Philipp Kraft ◽  
Konrad Bestian ◽  
Tobias Houska

<p>Hydrology and especially hydrological models often treat catchments as if they were leaky buckets. But, do we find such catchments in the real world or is this just a convenient simplification? Moreover, if we find them, what attributes allow these catchments to show such a simple behavior? To study this, we look at time series of 27 years for 90 catchments in Hesse, Germany, which includes droughts and years of abundant precipitation. In addition, the state Hesse provides a wide range of catchment attributes like geology, soils and land use, while still having a relatively similar climate. Using discharge, evapotranspiration and precipitation, we calculate the cumulative storage change for all years separately and use it as a proxy for the storage. We group the 90 catchments by the complexity of their storage-discharge relationship, which we define as how good the relationship can be modelled by an exponential function. We find that climate and physical attributes of the catchments seem to have similar influence on the overall complexity of the storage-discharge relationship. However, we could also identify catchments that depict consistent behavior, mostly independent of climate. Those catchments either behave always complex or always simple in all the years considered. They differ in their permeability, conductivity, geology, soil and to a lesser extent their shape. We show that bucket like catchments exist in the real world and that they can be found by looking for oval catchments with good permeability in regions of igneous geology and clay silt soil texture.</p>

Author(s):  
Irene Zempi ◽  
Imran Awan

This chapter examines the implications of online/offline Islamophobia for victims including increased feelings of vulnerability, fear and insecurity. Participants also suffered a range of psychological and emotional responses such as low confidence, depression and anxiety. Additionally, participants highlighted the relationship between online and offline Islamophobia, and described living in fear because of the possibility of online threats materialising in the ‘real world’. Many participants reported taking steps to become less ‘visible’ for example by taking the headscarf or face veil off for women and shaving their beards for men.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-264
Author(s):  
Nicholas Ross Smith ◽  
Ruairidh J. Brown

There is much pessimism as to the current state of Sino-American relations, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020. Such pessimism has led to some scholars and commentators asserting that the Sino-American relationship is on the cusp of either a new Cold War or, even more alarmingly, something akin to the Peloponnesian War (via a Thucydides Trap) whereby the United States might take pre-emptive measures against China. This article rejects such analogizing and argues that, due to important technological advancements found at the intersection of the digital and fourth industrial revolutions, most of the real competition in the relationship is now occurring in cyberspace, especially with regards to the aim of asserting narratives of truth. Two key narrative battlegrounds that have raged since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic are examined: where was the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic? and who has had the most successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic?. This article shows that Sino-American competition in cyberspace over asserting their narratives of truth (related to the COVID-19 pandemic) is fierce and unhinged. Part of what is driving this competition is the challenging domestic settings politicians and officials find themselves in both China and the United States, thus, the competing narratives being asserted by both sides are predominately for domestic audiences. However, given that cyberspace connects states with foreign publics more intimately, the international aspect of this competition is also important and could result in further damage to the already fragile Sino-American relationship. Yet, whether this competition will bleed into the real world is far from certain and, because of this, doomsaying via historical analogies should be avoided.


Resonance ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-195
Author(s):  
Deepak Dhar

BMJ Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. e038530
Author(s):  
Francesca L Cavallaro ◽  
Ruth Gilbert ◽  
Linda Wijlaars ◽  
Eilis Kennedy ◽  
Ailsa Swarbrick ◽  
...  

IntroductionAlmost 20 000 babies are born to teenage mothers each year in England, with poorer outcomes for mothers and babies than among older mothers. A nurse home visitation programme in the USA was found to improve a wide range of outcomes for young mothers and their children. However, a randomised controlled trial in England found no effect on short-term primary outcomes, although cognitive development up to age 2 showed improvement. Our study will use linked routinely collected health, education and social care data to evaluate the real-world effects of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) on child outcomes up to age 7, with a focus on identifying whether the FNP works better for particular groups of families, thereby informing programme targeting and resource allocation.Methods and analysisWe will construct a retrospective cohort of all women aged 13–24 years giving birth in English NHS hospitals between 2010 and 2017, linking information on mothers and children from FNP programme data, Hospital Episodes Statistics and the National Pupil Database. To assess the effectiveness of FNP, we will compare outcomes for eligible mothers ever and never enrolled in FNP, and their children, using two analysis strategies to adjust for measured confounding: propensity score matching and analyses adjusting for maternal characteristics up to enrolment/28 weeks gestation. Outcomes of interest include early childhood development, childhood unplanned hospital admissions for injury or maltreatment-related diagnoses and children in care. Subgroup analyses will determine whether the effect of FNP varied according to maternal characteristics (eg, age and education).Ethics and disseminationThe Nottingham Research Ethics Committee approved this study. Mothers participating in FNP were supportive of our planned research. Results will inform policy-makers for targeting home visiting programmes. Methodological findings on the accuracy and reliability of cross-sectoral data linkage will be of interest to researchers.


1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-176
Author(s):  
Susan Strand Monchamp

One of my major goals in mathematics is to have my student understand the relationship of mathematics to the real world. To this end, we begin the year in my first-gradeclass by doing a series of logic activities that lead to the production of our class constitution. The activities reflect three of the NCTM' curriculum and evaluation standards—Mathematics a Communication, Mathematics as Reasoning, and Mathematical Connections (NCTM 1989).


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xia-Xia Zhao ◽  
Jian-Zhong Wang

Information plays an important role in modern society. In this paper, we presented a mathematical model of information spreading with isolation. It was found that such a model has rich dynamics including Hopf bifurcation. The results showed that, for a wide range of parameters, there is a bistable phenomenon in the process of information spreading and thus the information cannot be well controlled. Moreover, the model has a limit cycle which implies that the information exhibits periodic outbreak which is consistent with the observations in the real world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Konstantin Kvatch

<p>The thesis will have two main parts. First, let us start with an example. In finance, the standard version of the Black-Scholes formula is a beautiful closed form solution used to price European options. This famous formula is ingenious, but has a flaw that relegates it to something that should be admired, and perhaps not be used in the real world. It relies on the assumption that prices of shares evolve according to geometric Brownian motion. This means that we are willing to accept that extreme shocks to prices are almost impossible. Is this a realistic assumption? Of course not. The stock market crashes of 1929, 1987 are great examples to show that extreme events do happen. More recently, the 1997 Asian crisis and 2000 crash of the NASDAQ show that in addition, such events are not so rare. These jumps occur even more frequently and are larger in magnitude for share prices of individual companies. This problem is by no means new, and a plethora of models and pricing techniques have been developed. The standard Black-Scholes formula is just one example, but this is simply illustration of the matter at hand. The process that we use to model a financial time series is of paramount importance, whether we do it for forecasting purposes or for pricing financial derivatives. If we choose to use a model that does not capture the key empirical aspects of the data, then any subsequent inference may be very unfavourably biased. It is because of this problem that we should investigate the more standard modeling that assumes continuity and normal or log-normal distribution of financial time series. We will begin from the very basics and we will see that this is a wonderful piece of theory, deserving of the reputation it has in being simple, groundbreaking and extremely useful. This work should bring us to a position where we can evaluate a second goal. Stochastic processes with jumps and "heavy-tails" have existed for some time, but have begun to filter through to the financial industry only recently. This lag is due to the perceived added conceptual difficulty in the introduction of such models, although we will see that this should not be the case. There is plenty of real evidence that nancial time series exhibit discontinuous behaviour and that these series are far from normally or log-normally distributed. Rather than looking at standard models as correct, and jump or stochastic volatility models as complicated, we should look upon standard models as educational but not sufficient for the real world. Stochastic volatility or jump models should instead be viewed as natural. The theme of the thesis is the importance of choosing a correct model for the underlying process. Although we may speak of the implications of some models to hedging, we will not actually look at specific hedging techniques. The particular aspect of pricing is also not considered in full scope although we will see the Black-Scholes pricing formula. We will consider that the main problem is to specify the model correctly where the method of pricing is a subsequent technicality. In examples we may take pricing tools like Monte-Carlo simulation as a given. We will not strive for full generality or formality, but rather take a physical approach and aim for clarity and understanding. Let us now move on to the beginning, with the introduction of our primary source of randomness.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (24) ◽  
pp. 5786
Author(s):  
Adriana Roncella ◽  
Christian Pristipino ◽  
Oretta Di Carlo ◽  
Matteo Ansuini ◽  
Angela Corbosiero ◽  
...  

Psychosocial factors play an important role in non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This observational study is primarily aimed at assessing the relationship of psychological characteristics of patients with the outcomes of different NCDs, and to assess short-term psychotherapy (STP) efficacy in the real world. Methods: One hundred and forty patients with recent acute myocardial infarction, Takotsubo syndrome, or non-metastatic breast cancer and a control group of 140 age and sex-matched healthy subjects, will be enrolled. All subjects will be administered psychometric tests, quality of life tests, a specific body perception questionnaire, a dream questionnaire, and a projective test, the Six Drawing test at baseline and follow-up. All subjects with medical conditions will be asked to freely choose between an ontopsychological STP along with standard medical therapy and, whenever indicated, rehabilitation therapy or medical therapy plus rehabilitation alone. The study endpoints will be to evaluate: the relationship of the psychological characteristics of enrolled subjects with the outcomes of different NCDs, predictors of the choice of psychotherapy, and the efficacy of ontopsychological intervention on psychological and medical outcomes. Conclusion: This study will generate data on distinctive psychological characteristics of patients suffering from different CDs and their relationship with medical outcomes, as well as explore the efficacy of ontopsychological STP in these patients in the real world. (Number of registration: NCT03437642).


2020 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Papageorgiou ◽  
Demetrios Lekkas

In this work, we undertake the task of laying out some basic considerations towards straightening out the foundations of an abstract logical system. We venture to explain what theory is as well as what is not theory, to discriminate between the roles of truth in theory and in reality, as well as to open the road towards clarifying the relationship between theory and the real world. Etymological, cultural and conceptual analyses of truth are brought forth in order to reveal problems in modern approaches and to set the stage for more consistent solutions. One such problem addressed here is related to negation per se, to its asymmetry towards affirmative statements and to the essential ramifications of this duality with respect to the common perceptual and linguistic aspects of words indicating concepts akin to truth in various languages and to attitudes reflected and perpetuated in them and to their consequent use in attempted informal or formal logic and its understanding. Finally, a case study invoking the causes or “causes” of gravity both clarifies and reinforces the points made in this paper.


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