Humane Protection of Animals Against the Effects of Fireworks Displays

This article is of a scientific and research nature. Its subject is the humane protection of animals, expressly declared by the Polish legislator in the provisions of the Animal Protection Act, as regarded in the context of wide access to individual use of fireworks by private persons. The author seeks an answer to the question whether the legislator’s high-sounding declarations expressed in the Animal Protection Act, providing for humane protection of animals in Poland, are reflected in respective national or local regulations which would make it possible for the owners or guardians of animals to protect them against the effects of fireworks, especially against noise. The aim of the research is to indicate who, if it has not already been done by the national legislator, is authorised to issue regulations limiting the use of fireworks, in a manner modelled for example on Australian solutions, where displays can be organised by licensed, authorised companies, or in a manner whereby the owner or keeper of the animal is informed in advance by an announcement on the Internet or in a local newspaper of the planned place and date of the pyrotechnic show, so that he or she can provide protection for his or her animal by moving away from the venue in advance. The analysis of national solutions aims to indicate how the shortcomings in this area should be addressed by the regional legislator.

Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment

During the French Revolution, resourceful entrepreneurs seized properties on the outskirts of Paris to create jardins-spectacles, urban pleasure grounds that merged the former aristocratic practices of picturesque strolling with popular entertainments. Visitors paid entrance fees to explore the artfully contrived sensorium and watch astonishing performances, including fireworks displays and hot-air balloon launchings, while strolling. Simon Charles Boutin’s development of Tivoli, one of the most popular of the approximately twenty jardins-spectacles built from 1795 until 1820, reveals how these venues became places to perform embodied spectatorship. The ephemerality of the jardins-spectacles has marginalized their contribution to the history of visuality in the long eighteenth century.

Estimation of dissipated lightning energy by infrasound measurement

<p>Rainfall by thunderstorms and typhoons causes a large-scale disaster, especially in Southeast Asia and other tropical regions. Damage caused by disasters could be minimized by monitoring and predicting in real-time. It is known that typhoon shows the maximum wind speed 1-2 days after the peak of lightning frequency. There is a strong correlation between lightning activity and torrential rainfall. If we could monitor the lightning activity quantitatively, it must be useful to monitor and predict strong rainfall. Lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and the magnitude of its significance is usually represented by its peak current and charge moment change before and after the stroke. However, the energy dissipation by lightning, which might be a good indicator of atmospheric convection, cannot be estimated only from the electromagnetic field measurement since it is impossible to measure the conductivity in the discharge path. Here we focus on infrasound below 20 Hz, which may be a good proxy of energy dissipation caused by lightning stroke. In order to estimate the dissipated energy by lightning stroke, we need to know the quantitative relationship between the dissipated energy and the intensity of infrasound in another way.</p><p>In the present research, we try to calibrate the quantitative relationship between infrasound intensity measured at a known distance and dissipated energy in the atmosphere, using two kinds of fireworks displays. At a building of Hokkaido University we measured infrasound pressure of fireworks for some cases which occurred at the range of 5 km. We also carried out similar measurement in lakeside of Lake Toya in Hokkaido in distance range of 0.3 - 4 km. The maximum dissipated energies of the fireworks are in ~10^6 J, which is approximately 1,000-5,000 times smaller than that of typical lightning, namely. Based on these measurements, we determined the constant to calculate the dissipated energy from infrasound pressure measurement. On the other hand, this constant is not very stable for different cases probably due to the variations in sound spectrum, height of explosion, temperature profile of the atmosphere near surface. We need to consider such conditions when we estimate the dissipated energy of lightning, adding to the effect of line source of the sound in lightning path while the fireworks has a point source.</p><p>This research was supported by Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS), funded by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) / Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)."</p>

Modelling a Spatial-Motion Deep Learning Framework to Classify Dynamic Patterns of Videos

Video classification is an essential process for analyzing the pervasive semantic information of video content in computer vision. Traditional hand-crafted features are insufficient when classifying complex video information due to the similarity of visual contents with different illumination conditions. Prior studies of video classifications focused on the relationship between the standalone streams themselves. In this paper, by leveraging the effects of deep learning methodologies, we propose a two-stream neural network concept, named state-exchanging long short-term memory (SE-LSTM). With the model of spatial motion state-exchanging, the SE-LSTM can classify dynamic patterns of videos using appearance and motion features. The SE-LSTM extends the general purpose of LSTM by exchanging the information with previous cell states of both appearance and motion stream. We propose a novel two-stream model Dual-CNNSELSTM utilizing the SE-LSTM concept combined with a Convolutional Neural Network, and use various video datasets to validate the proposed architecture. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed two-stream Dual-CNNSELSTM architecture significantly outperforms other datasets, achieving accuracies of 81.62%, 79.87%, and 69.86% with hand gestures, fireworks displays, and HMDB51 datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the overall results signify that the proposed model is most suited to static background dynamic patterns classifications.

Flow behavior of perchlorate from a source lake to a water supply tap following fireworks displays

Perchlorate is an oxidizer used in fireworks. Though fireworks displays are held over Lake Biwa, which supplies water to Kyoto, the city's water treatment process lacks the ability to remove perchlorate. This study investigated perchlorate contamination in source and tap water resulting from a fireworks display. During 2016, the perchlorate concentration in the source water increased to 22.3 μg/L during the 19 hours following the display and then decreased to <0.5 μg/L during the 43 hours following the display. The perchlorate concentration in the tap water increased to 13.6 μg/L during the 35 hours following the display, and then gradually decreased. To evaluate the state of mixing through the water treatment process, a model for chemical reactors was applied to concentration time-courses in the source and tap water. The model showed that perchlorate was dispersed homogeneously by stirring as the water flowed downstream through the waterway and through the water purification plant.

Commemoration

Societies commemorate past events in different ways, and in many cases, decisions about how to honor those who fought and died, as well as those who survived, are contested ones. There are many manifestations of the rituals of commemoration, including monuments of varying sizes, songs such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” poems and other forms of literature, parades such as those on Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day, festivals, fireworks displays on the Fourth of July and other important days, and moments of silence. The Gettysburg battlefield is littered with monuments—small, unimposing ones and large, attention-grabbing ones. Landscapes can be dominated or shaped by monuments, such as the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium, or the Battle of the Somme Memorial at Thieval. Memorials can be both temporary and permanent. Some are stark, while others overwhelm the viewer with multiple images. Numerous factors shape commemorations. One factor that determines the ritual is the nature of the event that is being memorialized. Because battles and wars have multiple effects on society, it is perhaps not surprising that decisions about commemorating these events are frequently contentious. In some cases, major conflicts ultimately shape the future identity of a nation. Such is the case with World War I and Great Britain. The books and articles included here reflect interest in these commemorations. Authors argue that what is included in commemorations is just as important as what is omitted. While some of the authors present superficial views of war memorials, others delve deeper and seek the meaning of the images and texts used. Many endeavor to discern what the rituals and memorials say about the people who construct them and how these commemorations shape a nation’s or a people’s identity. These books and articles are about the legacy of war, about remembering and honoring the dead, about celebrating those who survived, about the emergence of battlefield tourism and what that says about a society, and about how societies mourn and recover. They make the distinction between individual and collective memory, between private and public rituals of remembrance. In sum, they are about societies: how they think, how they mourn, how they connect the past to the present, and how they incorporate the past into who and what they are.