Relative Positioning Research Articles

О статусе Ногайской Орды в системе постор­дынских государств

Research objectives: To establish the degree of equivalence for the status of the Nogai Horde in comparison with the Tatar khanates that arose after the collapse of the Golden Horde. Research materials: Russian-Nogai embassy books and documents about those living in Russia in the 16th–17th centuries, writings pertaining to noble people from the East. Results and scientific novelty of the study: The Nogai Horde, until the last third of the 16th century, retained the institution of nominal khans chosen from the numerous descen­dants of Chingis Khan. These latter figures were needed to proclaim the next biy as a beklerbek and issue a charter with a golden seal. That was the only way to legitimize power in the Horde in the eyes of the neighbors and, most crucially, the Nogai themselves. Thus, the Nogai Horde could not get rid of the idea of its subordinate position in relation to the states ruled by the Chingisids. However, from the middle of the 16th century. the traditional place of the Tatar tsars and princes begins to be occupied by the Russian tsar.

Soviet Response to the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom)

This article discusses the way the USSR reacted to the creation of the supranational European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). The authors believe that the Soviet criticism of German and French nuclear programs was, at least, partially, objective and non-ideological. The study featured documents on Soviet foreign policy that described the initial reaction of the USSR to the Euratom plans, suggested alternative options for European cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear energy, and showed the evolution of the Soviet approach to European integration. Western Europe and the United States had their own goals in the development of the peaceful nuclear industry in Europe. The fears expressed by the USSR were related to the membership of the Federal Republic of Germany in Euratom and the role the United States intended to assume in this organization. Eventually, Moscow accepted a more neutral position in relation to the Euratom and other integration processes in Western Europe.

GNSS-based baseline vector determination for widely separated cooperative satellites using L1-only receivers

Real time estimation of the relative position and velocity vectors between two satellites in a formation is an integral part of the formation control loop. Relative positioning based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has been a dominating technology for formation missions in LEO, where extremely precise estimates could be obtained for formations with small inter-satellite distances (1-10 km). Larger baselines between the satellites (>10 km) are more challenging as they pose the problem of huge differences in the ionospheric delays experienced by the signals received by each receiver. This problem could be mitigated by using precise ionospheric-free combinations that could only be obtained by dual-frequency receivers, which is not a cost-efficient option for the modern low-cost miniature missions. In this paper, the problem of GNSS-based relative navigation between two spacecraft with large inter-satellite distance which are equipped with single-frequency receivers is treated through adopting the space-proven Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Although using an EKF for relative navigation is a common practice, there are many variants of the filter settings, which vary in terms of the state and measurement vectors to be adopted as well as the techniques to be used to handle the ionospheric delay. In this research, optimal settings of the filter are sought for the problem of relative baseline vector estimation between two spacecraft that have large separation and which are equipped with with single-frequency GNSS receivers.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) based model with relative attention for de novo drug design

De novo drug design refers to the process of designing new drug molecules from scratch using computational methods. In contrast to other computational methods that primarily focus on modifying existing molecules, designing from scratch enables the exploration of new chemical space and the potential discovery of novel molecules with enhanced properties. In this research, we proposed a model that utilizes Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture and relative attention for de novo drug design. GPT is a language model that utilizes transformer architecture to predict the next word or token in a given sequence. Representation of molecules using SMILES notation has enabled the use of next-token prediction techniques in de novo drug design. GPT uses attention mechanisms to capture the dependencies and relationships between different tokens in a sequence and allows the model to focus on the most important information when processing the input.Relative attention is a variant of the attention mechanism, which allows the model to capture the relative distances and relationships between tokens in the input sequence. In the standard attention mechanism, positional information is typically encoded using fixed-position embeddings. In relative attention, positional information is supplied dynamically during attention calculation by incorporating relative positional encodings, enabling the model to quickly learn the syntax of new unseen tokens.Relative attention enables the GPT model to better understand the relative positions of tokens in the sequence, which can be particularly useful when dealing with limited dataset sizes or generating target-specific drugs. The proposed model was trained on benchmark datasets, and performance was compared with other generative models. We show that relative attention and transfer learning could enable the GPT model to generate molecules with improved validity, uniqueness, and novelty in the context of de novo drug design. To illustrate the effectiveness of relative attention, the model was trained using transfer learning on three target-specific datasets, and the performance was compared with standard attention.

The enhanced search procedure in a coordinate domain for precise satellite positioning

Recently, there has been an increase in the availability of GNSS satellites for observation, which poses new challenges in the computational process of precise satellite positioning. Ambiguity resolution is a crucial step in achieving accurate relative positioning. In this regard, an improved version of a searching procedure in a three-dimensional coordinate domain has been proposed and tested. The method starts with a float solution, similar to classic methods like the LAMBDA. However, the subsequent step, the search procedure, is conducted in the coordinate space instead of the ambiguity space. This shift to a three-dimensional coordinate space leads to reduced computation time. A computational experiment was performed to validate the proposed method, which demonstrated a significant reduction in processing time. The advantages of this method are particularly prominent when dealing with a large number of satellites.

Fractional coefficient for estimating physiologically meaningful and diurnal transpiration cycle weighted VPD from daily ambient environmental data

Appropriate representation of environmental conditions via meaningful metrics is critical for their effectiveness in modeling crop physiological and resource use processes. Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a primary determinant of crop water use efficiency, commonly reported as daily average. However, VPD can vary substantially during the day in relation to diurnal cycle of transpiration, in which case daily average VPD may not suffice. In such scenarios, integrating VPD over the course of diurnal transpiration cycle into a weighted VPD (VPDw) can be physiologically meaningful as a metric. The goal of this research is to characterize the fractional coefficient (Frac) that can be used to effectively calculate VPDw from daily temperature and relative humidity data without the need for sub-daily environmental data. Site-specific and seasonal estimates of Frac, which represent the relative positioning of VPDw to diurnal extremes of saturation vapor pressure are currently lacking for semi-arid regions. To address this, we quantified Frac at 101 sites in the U.S. Central Plains using long-term (1982–2019) hourly and daily radiation and VPD datasets. Frac varied substantially across the region, with growing season mean values ranging from 0.59 to 0.92. Summer months had the highest Frac values with relatively lower uncertainty as compared to lower Frac during winter. Local observations of Frac deviated significantly from previously assumed stationary estimates implying that site-specific and month-specific Frac may be necessary for robust water use estimations. VPDw measured at an experimental site in Central U.S. Plains explained greater variance in daytime crop transpiration than daily mean VPD in maize, soybean, and sorghum canopies. Site-specific Frac was also assessed to perform better than commonly used Frac estimate of 0.75 to explain day-to-day variation in transpiration, demonstrating effective use of long-term mean Frac values presented here to estimate VPDw using daily datasets.

Estimation of tropospheric parameters with GNSS smartphones in a differential approach

With the introduction of the operating system Android 7 Nougat in the year 2016, it became possible to access Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) code and carrier phase observations. These observations can be processed with the state-of-the-art GNSS processing software packages, which allows an in-depth evaluation of the smartphone’s GNSS performance. The availability of carrier phase observations enables sub-decimeter-level positioning. A few years ago, smartphones wearing dual-frequency GNSS chipsets hit the mass market. In this study, we investigate the capability of such a device for the estimation of tropospheric delays. Static measurements carried out over the period of two weeks are performed using a Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone. The measurements are processed using relative positioning methods with a baseline length of about 33 kilometers, where a continuously operating reference station (CORS) acts as a base. The estimated differential zenith tropospheric wet delay (dZWD), obtained for the smartphone are then combined with absolute values computed at the reference station, in order to obtain time series of Zenith Total Delay (ZTD). Using this method, we demonstrate that high-precision ZTDs can be successfully determined from smartphone GNSS observations. When comparing the estimated tropospheric delays with those determined at a nearby geodetic receiver to assess the accuracy of the acquired time series of ZTD, differences in the range of few millimeters to a centimeter are visible. We examine the impact of various error sources, such as antenna phase center variations and residual effects of the ionosphere. Given that the obtained accuracies are at the level of a centimeter and below, the suggested method shows the potential to resolve small-scale tropospheric structures in near real-time, and thus, could be an interesting data source for numerical weather prediction models or related GNSS crowdsourcing projects.

Menarche age and its association with BMI and socioeconomic status among some school girls in Tikrit City

Body mass index (BMI) is useful for categorizing under- and over-nutrition. It is the weight in kilogram divided by the height in meters and squared. Socioeconomic status (SES) is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family's economic access to resources and social position in relation to others.Menarche is defined as the first menstrual period in a female adolescent. The purpose of this study to find out the effect of BMI and socioeconomic state on menarche among school girls in Tikrit. Methodology : In this study 100 female, aging 11-13 years old were selected in Al-Marjan secondary school of Tikrit region. Height and weight were measured. The body mass index (BMI; kg/m2) was used as an index of relative weight. The socioeconomic status were assessed according to the educational and occupational levels of parents of the girls. The age at menarche were evaluated . This study was done from December 2021 to March 2022. Results : The mean and standard deviation (SD) of menarche age was 12.87 ± 1.17 years. About 60.3% of girls had normal BMI and 31%, 6.8%, and 2% of them were underweight, overweight, and obese, respectively. There was no significant relationship between higher BMI and menarche age. There was no significant relationship between socioeconomic status, physical activity, and birth season, attitude towards menarche, nutritional status, and number of brothers with age of menarche .While there was a significant association of number of sisters and the menarche age. Conclusions: The results showed a no significant relationship between menarche age and BMI. The age of menarche in this region was also different compared to other regions of the globe.

Individual responsobility for health: patterns of behavior

The article discusses the ambiguity of the phenomenon of “responsibility for health” and its relevance in modern life as an important potential for improving the health of the population. Its significance is due to the approved “Strategy for the formation of a healthy lifestyle of the population, prevention and control of non-infectious diseases for the period until 2025.” The structure of the multicomponent phenomenon of “responsibility for health” is being considered based on the materials of the study “Care for health” by Public Opinion Fund (2019) using the locus of control as a psychological tool that made it possible to detect fundamental differences between the positions of individuals who maintain a responsible attitude to health and those who have the opposite point of view. Behavioural practices related to health care, types of motivation, basic environmental and informational factors are considered. It is concluded that a person’s life position in relation to health correlates not only with self-assessment of health, life satisfaction, but also with the level of education, financial and official position, and even place of residence. This psychological orientation affects not only health, but all aspects of human life. Taking into account the important role of the individual in the formation of his attitude to health, it is necessary to create conditions for the implementation of patterns of behaviour of a positive orientation on the basis of the required motivation. A number of social measures are proposed for the active inclusion of the individual in the process of strengthening, maintaining health and taking responsibility for it.

Light-driven self-assembly of spiropyran-functionalized covalent organic framework

Controlling the number of molecular switches and their relative positioning within porous materials is critical to their functionality and properties. The proximity of many molecular switches to one another can hinder or completely suppress their response. Herein, a synthetic strategy involving mixed linkers is used to control the distribution of spiropyran-functionalized linkers in a covalent organic framework (COF). The COF contains a spiropyran in each pore which exhibits excellent reversible photoswitching behavior to its merocyanine form in the solid state in response to UV/Vis light. The spiro-COF possesses an urchin-shaped morphology and exhibits a morphological transition to 2D nanosheets and vesicles in solution upon UV light irradiation. The merocyanine-equipped COFs are extremely stable and possess a more ordered structure with enhanced photoluminescence. This approach to modulating structural isomerization in the solid state is used to develop inkless printing media, while the photomediated polarity change is used for water harvesting applications.

Social capital theory perspective on the role of academic social networking sites

This study explores the impact of academic social networks (ASNs) on the quantity and character of social capital in the academic community of South East Europe (SEE). ASNs are interactive platforms that have emerged as influential tools that impact numerous facets of the academic experience and offer new avenues for acquiring social rights and responsibilities. Applying social capital theory, we examine the relationship between the characteristics of academic users and the ASNs metric. We undertake a network analysis of all SEE research output. Using logistic regression, ANOVA, and mean comparisons, we further investigate the relationship between academic user characteristics and ASNs' metrics on 888 academics from the SEE region. We assess academics' positions in relation to three prominent ASNs: ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Google Scholar. According to the findings, academic rank, research field, and institution rank matter in the metrics of ASNs, which correspond to the manifestation of social capital.

Human Life Course as Constructive Migration.

In this paper, I discuss the systemic features of the life-span development approach which was initially elaborated by Baltes (1989) and more recently considered by Greve (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 1-21, 2023). I argue that the life-span development approach should recognize the agentivity of people as they not only passively react to changes inside and around themselves but rather imaginatively co-construct their selves (and, their environment) through aging. The irreversibility of human development is highlighted in this paper simultaneously with the recognition of the significance of past phenomenological experiences for self-construction. People are considered as historical agents who evolve through gradual qualitative transformations instead of jumping from one discrete (age) category to another. I consider "migration" as a metaphor for "development" (aging) as both imply movement from one temporal position to another as well as moving from one social position to another. The changes related to aging put an adult in a position similar to immigrants who occur abroad and need to make sense of their new positions in relation to their personal and cultural background and the immediate reality/context they live in. Migration and aging both lead to the innovative mixture of the meaning of old and new experiences/knowledge and the creation of new forms of selfhood and personal understanding at different temporal positions.

On the efficient simulation of pass-by noise signals from railway wheels

The article presents an approach for calculating pass-by sound pressure radiated from railway wheels in the time domain using moving Green’s functions. The Green’s functions are obtained by using Finite Element (FE) and Boundary Element (BE) methods in the frequency domain, subsequent inverse Fourier transform, followed by convolution with a time series of rolling contact forces to obtain the pass-by time signals. However, traditional BE methods are computationally expensive due to the low structural damping of the wheel, necessitating a high frequency resolution.To overcome this issue, a modal approach is introduced in which the pass-by sound radiated by each wheel mode is calculated separately. This approach incorporates the dynamic response of the wheel in the time-domain processing and thus reduces the cost of the BE solution. A modal source signal is introduced to describe the excitation of each mode at each time step. The sound field radiated by unit modal amplitudes is calculated in BE and subsequently approximated by spherical harmonic (SH) equivalent sources, which allows for efficiently calculating acoustic transfer functions for varying relative positions of the wheel and a stationary receiver. Convolution of the source signal with the moving acoustic transfer function produces the pass-by pressure signal.The article investigates the directivity of the radiation from each mode and finds that most modes, including those with dominant radial deflection, radiate in mostly axial direction at high frequencies. Modes that dominate the pass-by pressure level are identified, both in frequency bands and with respect to the relative positioning of the wheel to the receiver. Finally, it is found that an SH expansion order of approximately 30 is required to satisfy the employed error measures, although lower orders may suffice for an auralisation of the signal.

RME-based local instructional theory for translation and reflection using of South Sumatra dance context

A learning trajectory as a sequence of mathematical activities that could facilitate the growth of students’ understanding of learning goals. This research aimed to produce an instructional sequence to learn the concepts of translation and reflection and to investigate how students develop their understanding informally using a South Sumatra dance context. The research employed the design research method, which consisted of three stages: preliminary design, design experiment (pilot experiment and teaching experiment), and retrospective analysis. This research involved six students who have the high, medium, low capability at the first cycle and 32 students ninth graders at the second cycle at Junior High School 1 Palembang. Data from observations, tests, interviews, and documentation were analyzed descriptively. The tests used were aimed to determine the improvement made by the students; while the classroom observations, interviews, and documentations were used to develop the local instructional theory. This study produced a learning trajectory with three activities include: the students watched a dance video to describe the dancer’s’ positions in relation to floor tiles; the students were asked to determine the starting points of the dancers in Cartesian coordinates to learn concepts; and the students developed a formal concept based on their own knowledge.

Conceptions of environmental education of teachers of the Municipal Education Network of Aracaju-SE

Environmental Education (EE) enables awareness, critical consciousness and active positioning in relation to socio-environmental issues. Therefore, this article aims to understand conceptions about EE of teachers of the municipal education network of Aracaju, Sergipe State, Brazil. For that purpose, we conducted semi-structured interviews and analyzed the responses based on Discursive Textual Analysis. Conceptions are superficial and individualistic, reinforcing the fragmented and conservative socio-environmental educational practice, enhanced by a technical curriculum.

Investigating antiquities trafficking with generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)-3 enabled knowledge graphs: A case study.

Background: There is a wide variety of potential sources from which insight into the antiquities trade could be culled, from newspaper articles to auction catalogues, to court dockets, to personal archives, if it could all be systematically examined. We explore the use of a large language model, GPT-3, to semi-automate the creation of a knowledge graph of a body of scholarship concerning the antiquities trade. Methods: We give GPT-3 a prompt guiding it to identify knowledge statements around the trade. Given GPT-3's understanding of the statistical properties of language, our prompt teaches GPT-3 to append text to each article we feed it where the appended text summarizes the knowledge in the article. The summary is in the form of a list of subject, predicate, and object relationships, representing a knowledge graph. Previously we created such lists by manually annotating the source articles. We compare the result of this automatic process with a knowledge graph created from the same sources via hand. When such knowledge graphs are projected into a multi-dimensional embedding model using a neural network (via the Ampligraph open-source Python library), the relative positioning of entities implies the probability of a connection; the direction of the positioning implies the kind of connection. Thus, we can interrogate the embedding model to discover new probable relationships. The results can generate new insight about the antiquity trade, suggesting possible avenues of research. Results: We find that our semi-automatic approach to generating the knowledge graph in the first place produces comparable results to our hand-made version, but at an enormous savings of time and a possible expansion of the amount of materials we can consider. Conclusions: These results have implications for working with other kinds of archaeological knowledge in grey literature, reports, articles, and other venues via computational means.

Energy platforms and the future of energy citizenship

Energy platforms involve citizens in the energy system by creating and orchestrating virtual energy collectives that can support energy system governance. In such an energy collective, households pool their resources to engage in energy trading, collective self-consumption, or grid balancing. In this paper we draw on the theory of material participation to examine how everyday interactions with energy platform technologies enable people to enact energy citizenship. Our findings from interviews and workshops in a demonstration project of an energy platform show that energy platforms complicate the notion of being an energy citizen. For the householders in our research, engaging in new collective energy practices disturbed the existing link between domestic energy practices and energy citizenship. Where people's energy citizenship used to be centred around their own domestic domain, engagement with platform technologies required them to reflect on their position in relation to new issues such as the ‘greenness’ of various energy markets. Moreover, people were confused about the relation between their own agency and goals as an energy citizen, vis-a-vis the collective agency that results from the bundling of energy practices, and the power and motivations of platform providers and energy system actors. Uncertainties around agency and responsibility need to be reduced if platform-based energy collectives are to play a role in fostering meaningful citizen participation in the energy transition. For platform providers, this implies acknowledging people's existing practices and trajectories of energy citizenship, and providing feedback about the contributions people are making.

Performance Assessment of Structural Monitoring of a Dedicated High-Speed Railway Bridge Using a Moving-Base RTK-GNSS Method

At present, high-precision GNSS positioning technology is an important means to monitor the health of bridges and other structures. However, the GNSS signal of reference stations and monitoring stations used for bridge monitoring can easily be blocked by bridge towers, vehicles, or other objects, resulting in low positioning accuracy and insufficient availability of GNSS, which affects the effectiveness of bridge structural health monitoring. Therefore, according to the characteristics of bridge structure, this paper proposes to take the bridge tower monitoring station as a moving-base station to build the baselines with other monitoring stations and use the moving-base RTK-GNSS method to realize the relative positioning, so as to improve the availability of GNSS in the application of bridge structure health monitoring. In this paper, the moving-base RTK-GNSS model is derived and verified via GNSS monitoring data of the Ganzhou dedicated high-speed railway bridge. The results show that the ambiguity in the fixing rate can be improved using the moving-base RTK-GNSS method with the tower monitoring station as the reference station. The deformation and vibration characteristics of each monitoring point can be reflected, and the displacement and vibration amplitude estimation accuracy can achieve results better than 4 mm. Therefore, the moving-base RTK-GNSS method can be used as an alternative scheme when the observation environment of the base station is poor or the banded engineering monitoring is applied, so as to improve the monitoring capability of GNSS.

Design, testing and characterization of a proton central axis alignment device for the dynamic collimation system

Objective. Proton therapy conformity has improved over the years by evolving from passive scattering to spot scanning delivery technologies with smaller proton beam spot sizes. Ancillary collimation devices, such the Dynamic Collimation System (DCS), further improves high dose conformity by sharpening the lateral penumbra. However, as spot sizes are reduced, collimator positional errors play a significant impact on the dose distributions and hence accurate collimator to radiation field alignment is critical. Approach. The purpose of this work was to develop a system to align and verify coincidence between the center of the DCS and the proton beam central axis. The Central Axis Alignment Device (CAAD) is composed of a camera and scintillating screen-based beam characterization system. Within a light-tight box, a 12.3-megapixel camera monitors a P43/Gadox scintillating screen via a 45° first-surface mirror. When a collimator trimmer of the DCS is placed in the uncalibrated center of the field, the proton radiation beam continuously scans a 7×7 cm2 square field across the scintillator and collimator trimmer while a 7 s exposure is acquired. From the relative positioning of the trimmer to the radiation field, the true center of the radiation field can be calculated. Main results. The CAAD can calculate the offset between the proton beam radiation central axis and the DCS central axis within 0.054 mm accuracy and 0.075 mm reproducibility. Significance. Using the CAAD, the DCS is now able to be aligned accurately to the proton radiation beam central axis and no longer relies on an x-ray source in the gantry head which is only validated to within 1.0 mm of the proton beam.

Successful Communicative Strategies for Managing a Faculty Hiring Interview

This paper investigates the job interview discourse during faculty staff hiring, in the Department of the English Language and Literature, within an EFL context. A discursive approach to the talk is applied to examine successful applicants’ communicative strategies to get positive feedback from their interviewers, according to the communicative purposes of the faculty hiring interview and requirements of an assistant lecturer position. To attain this goal, a micro-level discourse analysis considered extracts of twenty (N=20) job interviews that were recorded during real faculty hiring interviews held in English at two Algerian universities. Successful candidates were selected depending on their performance during four common interview phases: self-introduction, research presentation, negotiation of expertise and related position tasks, and discussing future plans. The qualitative analysis yielded an inventory of successful candidates’ communicative strategies that could be enhanced and introduced to design English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in for training students in interview communication.