Measuring urban rainfall with a dense Commercial Microwave Link network in Lagos, Nigeria

<p>Measuring urban precipitation adds extra difficulty to the already challenging task of quantitative precipitation estimation. Buildings form obstructions that can block ground-based precipitation radar signals, and the complex urban microclimate makes gauge measurements representative for only a very small area. Performing precipitation measurements in an urban setting thus benefits from using many different data sources, to capture the largest possible range of scales. As such, opportunistic sensing techniques are especially valuable for urban hydrometeorological research: the use of unconventional data sources to extract valuable data that can allow us to estimate urban precipitation. One of the more prominent data sources is the use of Commercial Microwave Links –CMLs – to measure rainfall, by making use of the signal attenuation between cell phone towers. This method of estimating rainfall has been mostly tested and applied in developed countries that already have reasonable coverage of conventional precipitation measurements. However, the most benefits are to be made in developing regions lacking such measurement networks. Only few studies address this, generally using relatively small datasets.</p><p>This research focuses on tropical CML rainfall estimation in Lagos, Nigeria. This African megacity has a dense network of CMLs and few official measurement stations, making it an interesting area to study the effectiveness of urban CML precipitation measurements in such a region. We employ the open-source R package RAINLINK to obtain 15-min rainfall maps based on data from a few thousand CMLs during the rainy season. We optimise the most important RAINLINK parameters by comparing to rain gauge data, considering local network and environmental conditions. In addition, disdrometer data from Nigeria or similar climates are used to compute the values of the physically-based coefficients relating specific attenuation to rainfall rate.</p>

Intron and Its Splicing Mechanism and Their Connection with Human Disease

In the maturation mechanism of a messenger RNA, splicing play an important role with removing the noncoding introns and ligating the coding exons. Alternative splicing (AS) gives an extra difficulty to this mechanism and to the regulation of gene expression. The possible disturbing in the alternative RNA splicing mechanism can be a reason to several diseases like cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. Intronless genes (IGs) are seen in almost 3% of the human genome. Functionality of IGs has an important role in signal transduction genes and related regulatory proteins. This diversity can be reason to IG-associated diseases, especially neuropathies, developmental disorders, and cancer. The retroelements can be seen in almost half of the human genome. The known informations indicate that insertion of retroelement into exons and introns of genes promote different types of genetic disease, including cancer. The retroelement connected mutagenesis cause to fifty different types of human disease. The molecular informations and bioinformatic analyses can be used to explain the connection with splicing mutations and genetic mechanisms of several different human disease and understanding of this mechanism play an important role in the formation of treatment programme against to these diseases.Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.15(3) 2016 p.307-312

National Identity as a Factor of Inter-Cultural Communication

The article deals with the definition and origin of the notions «mentality (identity)» and «national mentality (identity)» focusing on their complex essence. The article names factors that affect the formation of national identity, at the same time pointing out the aspect of human life that the identity itself affects. The notion «national identity» is revealed via its vocabulary definitions. National identity is analyzed as a factor of inter-cultural communication, its role and importance in this communication are also analyzed. One of the objectives of the research is signing out the limits of the concepts «national identity» and «inter-cultural communication» and revealing the conditions of their interaction and mutual dependence. National identity is a complex notion, which complexity lies within the combination of mental and emotional, spiritual elements. This factor adds extra difficulty into understanding, as well as investigating the notion of national identity. Thus it is not rarely ignored in linguistics, international communication, even in teaching languages. However, nowadays, when globalization makes international contacts and communication widely accessible, many people meet unexpected difficulties that derive from ignoring national identity factor. That is why recently it is getting more and more obvious that taking national identity into consideration can be one of the main keys to successful communication at all levels.

The Effect of L1-L2 Lexicalization Mismatch on Incidental Acquisition of Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge

The researcher was interested to explore the possible effects of L1-L2 lexicalization mismatch on the acquisition and retention of receptive vocabulary knowledge by 90 Persian-speaking EFL learners. Lexicalization mismatch was defined in the context of this study as the lack of a lexically equivalent translation in learners’ L1 (i.e. Persian) for an L2 word (i.e. English). Thus, non-lexicalized words referred to those L2 words that required a longer string of L1 words to cover their essential semantic features. The findings indicated that there were significant differences between lexicalized and non-lexicalized target words in the receptive knowledge of meaning and form and receptive knowledge of associations. Thus, it seems non-lexicalized words are most likely to cause extra difficulty for EFL learners in the semantic aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Using enhanced input within a systematic vocabulary recycling program is recommended to deal with such words.

Improve Design and Analysis on Transitional Chute of Scraper Conveyor

To avoid the corrosion of transitional chute of scraper conveyor, optimization is needed on the structural of transitional chutes. After analyzing the force on turning point of transitional chute, multi-body dynamic experiments were made. The results show that, the improve design decrease the force on the turning point obviously and there are no extra difficulty on manufacture and installation. The experiment and analysis can conclude that the forces, which influence the wear of transitional chute, are depended on the transition arc radius but not transitional angle.

CONSTRUCTION OF EISENSTEIN SERIES FOR Γ0(p)

A simple construction of Eisenstein series for the congruence subgroup Γ0(p) is given. The construction makes use of the Jacobi triple product identity and Gauss sums, but does not use the modular transformation for the Dedekind eta-function. All positive integral weights are handled in the same way, and the conditionally convergent cases of weights 1 and 2 present no extra difficulty.

An Approach to Temporal Planning and Scheduling in Domains with Predictable Exogenous Events

The treatment of exogenous events in planning is practically important in many real-world domains where the preconditions of certain plan actions are affected by such events. In this paper we focus on planning in temporal domains with exogenous events that happen at known times, imposing the constraint that certain actions in the plan must be executed during some predefined time windows. When actions have durations, handling such temporal constraints adds an extra difficulty to planning. We propose an approach to planning in these domains which integrates constraint-based temporal reasoning into a graph-based planning framework using local search. Our techniques are implemented in a planner that took part in the 4th International Planning Competition (IPC-4). A statistical analysis of the results of IPC-4 demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in terms of both CPU-time and plan quality. Additional experiments show the good performance of the temporal reasoning techniques integrated into our planner.

The Wars and the Posies

The problems of the second half of the fourteenth century continued to affect the fifteenth. Sudden death remained a constant threat, and population levels probably did not begin to recover much, if at all, until the 1540s. Instability in England was briefly restrained by the century’s first two Henries, but thereafter losses in France soon began to prove expensive, the Wars of the Roses were resumed, and uprisings in Wales added to the uncertainty. Nor did the new Stewart dynasty bring internal peace to Scotland. Commercial profits could still be made, especially in the cloth trade, but exports rose and fell with alarming rapidity. Population reduction led to much restructuring, not least in widespread abandonment or shrinkage of rural sites and of urban back areas and suburbs. For archaeology there are some compensations; stone-lined rubbish-pits were one response to fears of smell-spread disease, and their final fills are less often mixed up with residual material than those left unlined. But in London the establishment of the stone waterfront means that the dump deposits peter out, so that the place of the capital in setting standards for the rest of the country becomes even more difficult to assess. Although there was enough bullion to sustain a silver currency in England and Scotland and to allow at least intermittent minting of gold coins, sometimes in quite large numbers, the site-find record is an indicator of decreased overall usage. Both silver and gold became available from new sources after 1460, some compensation for the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the consequent extra difficulty of trading with the Near East, but the maritime route that opened up for bringing gold from West Africa may not have increased the quantity coming into Europe as a whole, as trans-Sahara caravans were fewer. Use of the sea, however, put first Portugal and later England in the middle of commercial flow-lines, rather than at their ends. After the fifteenth century gems began to come round the Cape to enter Europe by the same western route, and emeralds even crossed the Atlantic, to be followed by new supplies of gold.

A simple procedure for the analysis of experiments on mixtures of varieties or species of agronomic interest

SummaryThis paper re-analyses three experiments for which results have previously been published. A simpler model for aggression, based only on the proportions of the component yields of the mixed plots, is adopted. This greatly simplifies the analysis, which requires only a straightforward application of least squares, and gives much more accurate estimates of competitive power. Omission of some combinations from the mixtures included in an experiment presents little extra difficulty.Various secondary matters, some of which have implications for the design of experiments of this type, are discussed in the paper. Graphical plots which throw light on the effect of sole yield differences on competitive power are exhibited. A logarithmic transformation of the data, often used to equalize the variance, was found to lead to underestimation of enhancement.