Concurrency measures in the era of temporal network epidemiology: a review

Diseases spread over temporal networks of interaction events between individuals. Structures of these temporal networks hold the keys to understanding epidemic propagation. One early concept of the literature to aid in discussing these structures is concurrency—quantifying individuals’ tendency to form time-overlapping ‘partnerships’. Although conflicting evaluations and an overabundance of operational definitions have marred the history of concurrency, it remains important, especially in the area of sexually transmitted infections. Today, much of theoretical epidemiology uses more direct models of contact patterns, and there is an emerging body of literature trying to connect methods to the concurrency literature. In this review, we will cover the development of the concept of concurrency and these new approaches.

Geophysical signature of the alpine slab: Field analogues and direct models

<div> <div> <div> <p>Recent geophysical data (receiver functions and body wave tomography) in the Alps show the continuity of the alpine dipping slab with the lower continental crust of the European plate. The eclogitization of the continental crust is often mentioned to explain its signature and its disappearing in the mantle beneath 80 km.</p> <p>The aim of the present study is to use potential lithological analogues sampled in the outcropping European crust to directly predict the seismic properties of the buried crust. Here, we focus on mafic intercalations, present in the variscan basement series of the external crystalline massifs. We compare them with acknowledged generic chemical compositions for the continental lower crust or regional granulite facies rock units. Using the bulk rock chemistries of these samples and representative rocks, we calculate pressure-temperature on which we represent the seismic velocities (Vp, Vs ot Vp/Vs) assuming that the rocks have completely rebalanced during burial. In these diagrams, the main seismic contrasts seem to match the onset of jadeite formation (mostly Vp/Vs diagram), as well as the boundaries of the garnet and omphacite stability fields.</p> <p>Considering the selected rocks are relevant analogues, we then compare the evolution of the seismic properties along the top of the alpine dipping slab with the profiles deduced from recent Vp and Vs tomography models (CIFALPS and AlpArray), varying the effective thermal profile of the Alpine slab, its reaction rate and its overall chemistry. Preliminary results suggest the Alpine lower crustal slab inherited most of his properties from its burial stage, with limited impact of subsequent evolution.</p> </div> </div> </div>

Egy elfeledett Szent István király-falképciklus. •

Tradition had it that the rectangular Romanesque hall with a central column in the royal and later archiepiscopal palace on Castle Hill in Esztergom was the birthplace of King Saint Stephen, although it was already clear in the 19th century that this part of the building dated from after the 11th century. Nevertheless, in view of the salient role of the castle in the cult of Saint Stephen, the prince primate and archbishop of Esztergom (1867–1891) János Simor (1813–1891) had the Romanesque room converted into a chapel in 1873–74, a thousand years after the birth of the state and church founder king. The reconstruction was planned by József Lippert, the chief architect of the prince primate who planned in this capacity, among other things, the transformation of the interior of the cathedral and the construction of its vestibule, the primate’s palace, and the purist reconstruction of Pozsony cathedral. The transformation of the hall with the central column included a new aperture, walling up of a niche, erection of an altar, and embellishing of the walls and vault with neo-Romanesque frescoes imitating the Byzantine style painted by the brothers Karl and Franz Xaver Jobst (fig. 3). The completed chapel became a neo-Romanesque Gesamtkunswerk down to the smallest detail, a venue of cult and memory.The decisive part of the painted decoration was the cycle of the salient episodes in St Stephen’s life on the vault arches: 1. Apparition of St Stephen protomartyr to Sarolt, wife of prince Géza (fig. 7). 2. The baptism of Vajk (fig. 11). 3. Bishop Astrick shows the crown brought from Rome to St Stephen (fig. 15). 6. Offering of the country to God (fig. 23). The paper reviews the iconographic antecedents of the scenes and the respective source texts, mentioning so-far unpublished works (figs. 13, 22). In addition to several other findings, it could be concluded that unlike in the period from the 17th to the mid-19th century when the depictions of King St Stephen were imbued with currently topical political implications, the images of the Esztergom cycle are free from such readings. The painters of the frescoes ordered by archbishop Simor mainly used recognized schemes and panels aligning themselves with the iconographic tradition, and therefore the novelty of the decoration which contemporary accounts emphasized must have been their neo-Byzantine style. A few decades later, however, this style must have appeared obsolete, nor did it have followers in its time, either. Apart from the demonstration of iconographic motifs, the direct models of the scenes cannot be determined even for such an extremely rare theme as Sarolt’s dream. That is at the same time proof of the invention of the painters and that is what ranges their work among the important achievements of post-Compromise painting: the ingenious use of motifs of mostly familiar scenes (identified by captions as well) and their arrangement in a new composition in the chosen or required style, with the prudent use of the semi-circular shape of the picture field when need be. It is important to note that no other picture cycle was created of St Stephen’s life in the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, some of the scenes have demonstrable linkage to stations in the life path of archbishop Simor, which must have influenced the finalization of the programme.During the archaeological excavations and reconstruction on Castle Hill in 1934–1938 the historicist elements of the hall with a central column were removed (fig. 4). Until how, research thought the painted decoration by the Jobst brothers had perished and were only known in reproduction. However, it must have been removed by Mauro Pellicioli or an assistant of his who had been invited to Hungary from Milan by Tibor Gerevich. I chanced upon the removed frescoes in a remote storeroom of Esztergom cathedral in 2011 with Veronika Nagy.

Consistent Transcription and Translation of Speech

The conventional paradigm in speech translation starts with a speech recognition step to generate transcripts, followed by a translation step with the automatic transcripts as input. To address various shortcomings of this paradigm, recent work explores end-to-end trainable direct models that translate without transcribing. However, transcripts can be an indispensable output in practical applications, which often display transcripts alongside the translations to users. We make this common requirement explicit and explore the task of jointly transcribing and translating speech. Although high accuracy of transcript and translation are crucial, even highly accurate systems can suffer from inconsistencies between both outputs that degrade the user experience. We introduce a methodology to evaluate consistency and compare several modeling approaches, including the traditional cascaded approach and end-to-end models. We find that direct models are poorly suited to the joint transcription/translation task, but that end-to-end models that feature a coupled inference procedure are able to achieve strong consistency. We further introduce simple techniques for directly optimizing for consistency, and analyze the resulting trade-offs between consistency, transcription accuracy, and translation accuracy. 1

Animals

This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, capacities. Although creatures of all kinds populate love poetry, birds are the most ubiquitous. The mating behaviors of birds, at once instinctive and highly patterned, offer a natural parallel to the combination of impulse and predetermined structure that characterizes both love and poetry. And while the same could be said of other animals, birds employ song as a key component of their courtship and so reflect the work of love poetry. A focus on birds and other animals also offers the poet scope to celebrate the role of sexual desire in love. Yet animals, in their mingled familiarity and alienness, ultimately appeal to love poets less as direct models than as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.