It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, November 27, 2023
Wave Devouring Propulsion: a revolutionary green technology for maritime sustainability
A new form of wave devouring propulsion (WDP) could power ships and help to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the maritime industry.
Academics from Cranfield University have worked on the concept of using wave energy for propulsion, and designed an inventive method of achieving greater thrust from the power of the waves by harnessing a vessel’s submerged flapping foils in an innovative way.
Inspiration from whale fins
Taking inspiration from the power of a whale's fins, the team studied the structure and movement of the tail fin to unravel how it effectively uses wave energy for propulsion. Through simulations and experiments, they developed and integrated a simplified version of the whale's tail fin action into a ship's power system.
WDP technology offers a range of benefits, making it a compelling solution for the marine industry. Not only does it reduce fuel costs, it also significantly enhances marine craft propulsion. This green technology can find applications in small, unmanned vessels and can be seamlessly integrated into hybrid propulsion systems, including those powered by electricity, hydrogen, or fossil fuels. It also has the potential to achieve carbon reduction targets and contribute to the sustainable development goals of the shipping industry.
Dr Liang Yang, Lecturer in Marine Renewable Energy Systems at Cranfield University, led the research and said: “Wave Devouring Propulsion (WDP) could act as a transformative force in maritime sustainability. Our research pioneers a novel approach to propel ships using the boundless energy of waves.
“We’re not just reducing emissions; we're navigating towards a future where carbon reduction targets are met, and the shipping industry aligns with sustainable development goals.”
The funding for the project was delivered as part of the Transport Research and Innovation Grants (TRIG) from the Department for Transport.
Recommender systems are machine learning applications in online platforms that automate tasks historically done by people. In the news industry, recommender algorithms can assume the tasks of editors who select which news stories people see online, with the goal of increasing the number of clicks by users, but few studies have examined how the two compare.
A new study examined how users of an online news outlet in Germany reacted to automated recommendations versus choices made by human editors. On average, the algorithm outperformed the person, but the person did better under certain conditions. The study’s authors suggest a combination of human curation and automated recommender technology may be best.
The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Lausanne, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München. It is published in Management Science.
“Our work highlights a critical tension between detailed yet potentially narrow information available to algorithms and broad but often unscalable information available to humans,” explains Ananya Sen, assistant professor of information systems and economics at CMU’s Heinz College, who coauthored the study. “Algorithmic recommendations personalize at scale using information that tends to be detailed but is often temporally narrow and context-specific, while human experts base recommendations on broad knowledge accumulated over a professional career but cannot make individual recommendations at scale.”
To quantify how companies should use algorithmic recommendation technology relative to human curation, researchers studied users’ reactions to automated recommendations compared to how they reacted to human recommendations at a major online news outlet in Germany from December 2017 to May 2018. The outlet is an ad-supported publisher with more than 20 million monthly visitors and nearly 120 million monthly page impressions.
On average, the algorithmic recommendations outperformed those curated by human editors with respect to users’ clicks. But this result depended on the experience of the human editors (more experienced editors did better than less experienced editors), the amount of personal data available to the algorithm (the algorithm required sufficient volume to perform well), and variation in the external environment that caused variation in demand for articles (humans did better on days with more attention-grabbing news).
The findings suggest that reverting to human curation can mitigate the drawbacks of personalized algorithmic recommendations, the authors say. They also suggest that platforms should defer to human expertise in the absence of user-specific personal data. The optimal combination of human curation and automated recommendation technology can lead to an increase of up to 13% in clicks.
“Based on our experiment, we suggest that managers leverage humans and automatic recommendations together rather than looking at curation as an issue that pits human experts against algorithms,” says Christian Peukert, professor of strategy, globalization, and society at the University of Lausanne’s business school, who coauthored the study.
Among the study’s limitations, the authors say their experiment tested only how one algorithm performed relative to human editors, so their findings may apply only to news media that is supported by ads.
Health care organizations are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve patient care, but their translation into clinical settings has been inconsistent, in part because evaluating AI in health care remains challenging. In a new article, researchers propose a framework for using AI that includes practical guidance for applying values and that incorporates not just the tool’s properties but the systems surrounding its use.
The article was written by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, The Hospital for Sick Children, the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Columbia University, and the University of Toronto. It is published in Patterns.
“Regulatory guidelines and institutional approaches have focused narrowly on the performance of AI tools, neglecting knowledge, practices, and procedures necessary to integrate the model within the larger social systems of medical practice,” explains Alex John London, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon, who coauthored the article. “Tools are not neutral—they reflect our values—so how they work reflects the people, processes, and environments in which they are put to work.”
London and his coauthors advocate for a conceptual shift in which AI tools are viewed as parts of a larger “intervention ensemble,” a set of knowledge, practices, and procedures that are necessary to deliver care to patients. In previous work with other colleagues, London has applied this concept to pharmaceuticals and to autonomous vehicles. The approach treats AI tools as “sociotechnical systems,” and the authors’ proposed framework seeks to advance the responsible integration of AI systems into health care.
Previous work in this area has been largely descriptive, explaining how AI systems interact with human systems. The framework proposed by London and his colleagues is proactive, providing guidance to designers, funders, and users about how to ensure that AI systems can be integrated into workflows with the greatest potential to help patients. Their approach can also be used for regulation and institutional insights, as well as for appraising, evaluating, and using AI tools responsibly and ethically. To illustrate their framework, the authors apply it to the development of AI systems developed for diagnosing more than mild diabetic retinopathy.
“Only a small majority of models evaluated through clinical trials have shown a net benefit,” says Melissa McCradden, a Bioethicist at the Hospital for Sick Children and Assistant Professor of Clinical and Public Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, who coauthored the article. “We hope our proposed framework lends precision to evaluation and interests regulatory bodies exploring the kinds of evidence needed to support the oversight of AI systems.”
New research from North Carolina State University and Michigan State University opens a new avenue for modeling low-energy nuclear reactions, which are key to the formation of elements within stars. The research lays the groundwork for calculating how nucleons interact when the particles are electrically charged.
Predicting the ways that atomic nuclei – clusters of protons and neutrons, together referred to as nucleons – combine to form larger compound nuclei is an important step toward understanding how elements are formed within stars.
Since the relevant nuclear interactions are very difficult to measure experimentally, physicists use numerical lattices to simulate these systems. The finite lattice used in such numerical simulations essentially acts as an imaginary box around a group of nucleons that enables physicists to calculate the properties of a nucleus formed out of these particles.
But such simulations have so far lacked a way to predict properties that govern low-energy reactions involving charged clusters arising from multiple protons. This is important because these low-energy reactions are vital to element formation in stars, among other things.
“While the ‘strong nuclear force’ binds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei, the electromagnetic repulsion between protons plays an important role in the nucleus’ overall structure and dynamics,” says Sebastian König, assistant professor of physics at NC State and corresponding author of the research.
“This force is particularly strong at the lowest energies, where many important processes take place that synthesize the elements that make up the world we know,” König says. But it is challenging for theory to predict these interactions.”
So König and colleagues decided to work backward. Their approach looks at the end result of the reactions within a lattice – the compound nuclei – and then backtracks to discover the properties and energies involved in the reaction.
“We aren’t calculating the reactions themselves; rather, we’re looking at the structure of the end product,” König says. “As we change the size of the ‘box,’ the simulations and results will also change. From this information we can actually extract parameters that determine what happens when these charged particles interact.”
“The derivation of the formula was unexpectedly challenging,” adds Hang Yu, graduate student at NC State and first author of the work, “but the final result is quite beautiful and has important applications.”
From this information the team developed a formula and tested it against benchmark calculations, which are evaluations done via traditional methods, to ensure the results were accurate and ready to be used in future applications.
“This is the background work that tells us how to analyze a simulation in order to extract the data we need to improve predictions for nuclear reactions,” König says. “The cosmos is enormous, but to understand it you have to look at its tiniest components. That’s what we’re doing here – focusing on the small details to better inform our analysis of the bigger picture.”
The work appears in Physical Review Letters and was supported by the National Science Foundation and by the U.S. Department of Energy. NC State graduate student Hang Yu is first author. Dean Lee, professor of physics and theoretical nuclear science department head at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University, co-authored the work. Lee was formerly at NC State and remains an adjunct professor of physics at NC State.
Authors: Sebastian König, Hang Yu, North Carolina State University; Dean Lee, Michigan State University Published: Nov. 21, 2023 in Physical Review Letters
Abstract: We consider the binding energy of a two-body system with a repulsive Coulomb interaction in a finite periodic volume. We define the finite-volume Coulomb potential as the usual Coulomb potential, except that the distance is defined the shortest separation between the two bodies in the periodic volume. We investigate this problem in one and three-dimensional periodic boxes and derive the asymptotic behavior of the volume dependence for bound states with zero angular momentum in terms of Whittaker functions. We benchmark our results against numerical calculations and show how the method can be used to extract asymptotic normalization coefficients for charged-particle bound states. The results we derive here have immediate applications for calculations of atomic nuclei in finite periodic volumes for the case where the leading finite-volume correction is associated with two charged clusters.
Lancaster University researchers reveal the ‘Viral Language’ of the pandemic
Remember ‘Covidiots’ and the first protests by ‘anti-vaxxers’? The early stages of the pandemic saw plenty of new words enter the public ‘voice’, but many of these novel terms were actually fairly short-lived.
Remember ‘Covidiots’ and the first protests by ‘anti-vaxxers’?
The early stages of the pandemic saw plenty of new words enter the public ‘voice’, but many of these novel terms were actually fairly short-lived.
However, according to new research by Lancaster University linguists Dr Luke Collins and Professor Veronika Koller, some will be here to stay, such as ‘zoom fatigue’, an effect of the increase in video-conferencing, and ‘lockdown’.
In their new book ‘Viral Language: Analysing the Covid-19 pandemic in public discourse’, Dr Collins and Professor Koller look at how language was used about and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Across eight chapters, they demonstrate how experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging, scientific research, news articles and advertising.
Examples include:
Stay home, save lives: Health ministers in various English-speaking countries used Twitter/X as a broadcast medium to give direct, bite-sized advice to citizens.
Many politicians declared ‘war’ on Covid, but another popular metaphor was that of journeys. For example: ‘we have come through the tunnel’. Politicians of all stripes used it to ensure compliance with lockdown and other measures and to emphasise togetherness.
Scientific writing on Covid-19 featured some hyperbolic language. For example: ‘This is one of the most extensive datasets on individual transmission events’. This, say the researchers, suggests increasing competition among academics in the scientific effort to control the pandemic.
Did politicians follow ‘the science’ or the scientists? British news media participated in a critical discussion of what ‘the science’ is and how it contributes to policymaking.
And how do you advertise for beer when consumers cannot go out? Advertisers balanced the lockdown context with messages of empathy, community and responsibility. Rather than change course completely though, they adapted their brand values to the new context: Budweiser was still about sports and national identity, Heineken continued to show young people enjoying themselves (although socially distanced), and Stella Artois stuck to its focus on history and heritage.
The book was inspired by the researchers wanting to find out how a globally disruptive crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, leaves traces in the very way we speak and write.
After all, they say, language helps us make sense of events and influences how we experience them.
To investigate the language around Covid-19, Dr Collins and Professor Koller looked at a variety of sources, from large collections of scientific writing and news, which they analysed with computer-assisted methods, to crowd-sourced examples, social media and advertising videos.
As Dr Collins explains: “For the computer-assisted studies, we looked at 224 million words worth of scientific articles, 772 million words of news articles and 12,000 tweets.”
Professor Koller adds: “The studies are of interest to anyone who wants to understand how the language of the news, politicians and advertising changed in reaction to the pandemic”.
Forensic experts are taking new steps to identify criminals caught on CCTV using the shoes they are wearing.
Staffordshire University and West Yorkshire Police have teamed up to develop a new system which uses 3D scanning technology to help identify the type of footwear worn by criminals.
While the analysis of footwear impressions left at crime scenes is an established practice in policing, this new approach focuses on the upper part of the shoe to link offenders to a crime.
Claire Gwinnett, Professor of Forensic and Environmental Science, said: “The number of cases in which footage from body worn cameras, CCTV and even phones is used to catch perpetrators has increased. However, criminals often conceal their face and wear dark clothing which means there are few identifying features apart from their shoes.
“The big questions is, how can you identify these shoes and how useful is this as evidence?”
Funded by the Police STAR Fund, the team have devised a fast, effective, and affordable method for capturing data from footwear uppers by creating an interactive 3D image of a shoe under both visible light and infrared light.
“Most CCTV cameras use near infrared light during nighttime recordings, which can make the footwear look completely different than in natural light,” Professor Gwinnett commented. “So, it was important to develop a method that will help police to quickly identify the type of shoe, how common it is, and importantly what it looks like under different lighting conditions.”
Postdoctoral researcher Dr Megan Needham has been trialing the method which uses a photography light box, turntable and camera. She explained: “3D scans, rather than still images, enable users to align the 3D model to the angle of the shoe captured on a CCTV camera.
“We record a video of a shoe on the turntable under each lighting condition, extract the frames and put it into software that stitches it all together to make a 3D model. The idea is that you can set it up and leave it to record then come back when it has finished.”
She added: “It is a quick and simple process, taking around 30 minutes in total. The equipment needed for this process costs less than £500. The aim is for this method to be used by footwear units across the nation, and in the future detention officers in a custody suite to scan a suspect’s shoe.”
Megan is currently refining the optimum settings for the process before it is piloted by different police forces in the new year. In future, it is hoped that this method could be adopted to populate a national database of footwear uppers which could be accessed by police professionals across the country.
Selina Reidy, an Identification Expert from West Yorkshire Police, said: “With the increasing quantity and improving quality of surveillance footage, we are receiving a growing number of requests to identify the make and model of footwear caught on camera. Having access to a searchable database of interactive, 3D models of footwear under both white and near infrared light will greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the current process. This work will expand and improve the current evidence base and, with continued development, will provide an additional forensic capability that informs police investigations.”
Staffordshire University will host a workshop for police professionals about the research in March 2023. For further information please contact megan.needham2@staffs.ac.uk.
Making a difference, belonging drives rural festival volunteers and bolsters community development
AMES, Iowa — During Orange City’s three-day tulip festival each May, the northwest Iowa town attracts roughly 40,000 visitors, more than six times its population. People come for the blooms and parades, traditional Dutch food and musical theater. For the community, it’s an opportunity to celebrate its cultural heritage and give a boost to local businesses.
Volunteers are essential to the festival’s success, as they are for many rural celebrations across the Midwest. But not a lot of research has examined their motivations. To help fill this gap, researchers surveyed hundreds of volunteers from 12 festivals — including Orange City’s — across Iowa, Michigan and Kansas. All of the festivals were based in communities with 1,000 to 35,000 residents and centered on the arts, culture or film.
SoJung Lee led the study. The associate professor in Iowa State University’s Department of Apparel, Events and Hospitality Management researches rural and sustainable tourism, pop culture tourism and country clubs. She also directs graduate education for hospitality management and the Club Research Lab at Iowa State. Co-authors include Linda Niehm, professor and interim department chair of AESHM, whose expertise includes rural retailing and small family businesses; associate professor MiRan Kim at Michigan State University; and associate professor Jichul Jang at Kansas State University.
"Festivals have become significant drivers of economic development that benefit rural communities, but they depend on volunteers who give up their time,” says Lee. “In this study, we wanted to better understand their motivations and focused on psychological ownership. How important is it for volunteers, and how does it affect community involvement and support?”
In their paper, the researchers break psychological ownership into four parts: self-efficacy, accountability, belongingness and self-identity. Self-efficacy relates to an individual’s confidence that they can make a difference. Accountability is the likelihood that someone would speak up if something wasn’t done correctly or if the event or organization was criticized. Belongingness refers to feeling included while self-identity is the idea that someone’s success or identity is connected to the event.
On-site and online survey results from 373 participants indicate people are more likely to volunteer and support community development if they have a strong sense of psychological ownership. This is bolstered when they perceive an event as personally important and relevant, feel needed and find social connection with other volunteers and attendees.
The researchers say tapping into these values can help attract and retain volunteers in the long run. They recommend reaching out to community members before planning a festival or event to gauge interest. Once in motion, festival planners and organizers should find ways to engage volunteers, perhaps by giving them opportunities to make decisions or take on leadership roles. Organizing social events for volunteers can help them build relationships and feel appreciated, as well.
In addition to analyzing motivations, the researchers looked at demographic data provided by the survey participants and how much they volunteered:
82% of the volunteers were local residents
75% were women
80% were over 40 years old; 58 was the average age
55% were employed; 40% were retired; 5% were unemployed or full-time students
53% volunteered between one to four hours per day at the festival; the rest volunteered five or more hours per day
45% of people volunteered at the festival between one and five years; 22% had volunteered between six and ten years; 33% had volunteered for 11 or more years
More than 90% had some college or higher education degrees
Average household income was $75,000
The researchers say the high percentage of women and average age align with other studies about rural volunteerism and community engagement.
In the paper, they emphasize their findings offer “practical implications [that] will be useful to not only festival organizers but also economic and community developers, Extension program specialists, business consultants, and others who provide support to rural towns and their residents.”
“As we visited these festivals, we could really see that they brought out a lot of community pride and economic support. Often, generations of families came back for these events. These festivals can add a lot to communities, including the optimism and mindset of the people who live there,” says Niehm.
“Volunteers are direct resources to communities. Taking care of them by providing enough breaks and food, being open to their input, showing appreciation and fostering social connections can have larger ripple effects on community development and growth,” adds Lee.
The co-authors say future research could explore trends by surveying volunteers at the same festivals over a long period of time. Different settings, urban vs. rural, and other factors, like the size of the event and cultural background, could be studied as well.
Funding for this study came from the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development.
WVU RESEARCHERS ARE DEVELOPING WAYS TO REMOVE HUMAN-MADE RADIO INTERFERENCE THAT CAN BLOCK THE DETECTION OF RADIO SIGNALS BY ASTRONOMERS AT PLACES LIKE THE GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY IN POCAHONTAS COUNTY.
A West Virginia University research team is working on ways to eliminate the rampant human-made radio interference from cell phones, televisions and radar systems that can block the detection of radio signals by astronomers.
With $510,000 in funding support from the National Science Foundation, team members will develop new algorithms and hardware with potentially broad applications.
“As radio astronomy instruments continue to become more sophisticated, human-made signals need to be removed in real time before the information from the sky is reduced for astronomical interpretation,” said Kevin Bandura, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering.
New methods driven by the project’s results will be made freely available to the astronomical community and could also be used in other fields such as radar imaging, satellite communication, sound navigation ranging and other sensor applications. Although each of the mentioned imaging modalities relies upon different sensory environments, new interference detection methods will be easily generalizable to those fields, said Natalia Schmid, professor at the WVU Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, who is leading the effort.
The study will likely play a hand in helping detect fast radio bursts, which were co-discovered by Duncan Lorimer, professor of physics and astronomy, who is working with Schmid and Bandura on the project.
“Radio telescopes are powerful tools to explore the cosmos,” Lorimer said. “They allow for the detection of extremely weak galactic signals and the study of the radio transient sky, including fast radio bursts — enigmatic objects of unknown origin that can probe the large-scale structure of the universe.”
Due to the transient nature of fast radio bursts, removing radio interference is vital for survey sensitivity as it can prevent astronomers from observing parts of the universe.
Schmid, Lorimer and Bandura outlined a three-pronged approach to the project. The team will:
• research and develop innovative and efficient, real-time radio frequency interference detection, characterization and flagging signal processing techniques through statistics and theoretical measures,
• develop hardware prototyping of new RFI detection and characterization algorithms, and
• develop metrics of performance tailored to different astronomical observation cases pertinent to scientific occurrences.
The project will also involve graduate and undergraduate students at WVU.
“Projects will be developed which focus on the design and implementation of new statistical and information theoretical tests for the detection of RFI in radio astronomy data,” Schmid said.
These will become part of the existing “Stochastic Systems Theory” and “Digital Signal Processing for Radio Astronomy” graduate courses, as well as supplement undergraduate classes in “Signals and Systems.”
“The course material will be designed to make this technology more accessible to a wide audience and help train the next generation of scientists and engineers,” Schmid said.
This project is jointly funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. The estimated end date is fall 2026.
Algorithms, firmware and software developed will be made available for use to the world radio astronomy community through GitHub, a cloud-based platform utilized through summer RFI workshops at the Green Bank Observatory and disseminated through programs run by the NSF’s SpectrumX Center.
“The success of this work will be measured not only by our development of the proposed algorithms, but by their adoption, successful use and expansion by the broader international astronomical community,” Bandura said.
Newborn babies have natural affinity for ‘the beat’
Newborn babies can perceive the beat in music, new research has confirmed. The study, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences (TTK) in Hungary, shows that this ability to recognise a beat is not simply due to the statistical learning ability of newborns, but that beat perception is actually a separate cognitive mechanism that is already active at birth. The study was published on 27 November in the scientific journal Cognition.
‘There is still a lot we don't know about how newborn babies perceive, remember and process music,’ says author Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the UvA. 'But, in 2009, we found clear indications that babies of just a few days old have the ability to hear a regular pulse in music – the beat – a characteristic that is considered essential for making and appreciating music.’
27 babies Because the previous research from Honing and his colleagues had so far remained unreplicated and they still had many questions, the UvA and TTK joined forces once again – this time using a new paradigm. In an experiment with 27 newborn babies, researchers manipulated the timing of drum rhythms to see whether babies make a distinction between learning the order of sounds in a drum rhythm (statistical learning) and being able to recognise a beat (beat-induction).
Manipulated timing The babies were presented with two versions of one drum rhythm through headphones. In the first version, the timing was isochronous: the distance between the sounds was always the same. This allows you to hear a pulse or beat in the rhythm. In the other version, the same drum pattern was presented, but with random timing (jittered). As a result, beat perception was not possible, but the sequence of sounds could be learned. This allowed the researchers to distinguish between beat perception and statistical learning.
Because behavioural responses in newborn babies cannot be observed, the research was done with brain wave measurements (EEG) while the babies were sleeping. This way, the researchers were able to view the brain responses of the babies. These responses showed that the babies heard the beat when the time interval between the beats was always the same. But when the researchers played the same pattern at irregular time intervals, the babies didn't hear a beat.
Not a trivial skill ‘This crucial difference confirms that being able to hear the beat is innate and not simply the result of learned sound sequences,’ said co-author István Winkler, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology at TTK. 'Our findings suggest that it is a specific skill of newborns and make clear how important baby and nursery rhymes are for the auditory development of young children. More insight into early perception is of great importance for learning more about infant cognition and the role that musical skills may play in early development.'
Honing adds: 'Most people can easily pick up the beat in music and judge whether the music is getting faster or slower – it seems like an inconsequential skill. However, since perceiving regularity in music is what allows us to dance and make music together, it is not a trivial phenomenon. In fact, beat perception can be considered a fundamental human trait that must have played a crucial role in the evolution of our capacity for music.’
