Quality control, validation and user feedback of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS)

The quality control, validation and verification of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) are described. EFAS is designed as a flood early warning system at pan-European scale, to complement national systems and provide flood warnings more than 2 days before a flood. On average 20–30 alerts per year are sent out to the EFAS partner network which consists of 24 National hydrological authorities responsible for transnational river basins. Quality control of the system includes the evaluation of the hits, misses and false alarms, showing that EFAS has more than 50% of the time hits. Furthermore, the skills of both the meteorological as well as the hydrological forecasts are evaluated, and are included here for a 10-year period. Next, end-user needs and feedback are systematically analysed. Suggested improvements, such as real-time river discharge updating, are currently implemented.

Acoustic scattering : high frequency boundary element methods and unified transform methods

We describe some recent advances in the numerical solution of acoustic scattering problems. A major focus of the paper is the efficient solution of high frequency scattering problems via hybrid numerical-asymptotic boundary element methods. We also make connections to the unified transform method due to A. S. Fokas and co-authors, analysing particular instances of this method, proposed by J. A. De-Santo and co-authors, for problems of acoustic scattering by diffraction gratings.

Imbalanced functional link between executive control network and reward network explain the online-game seeking behaviors in Internet gaming disorder

Literatures have shown that Internet gaming disorder (IGD) subjects show impaired executive control and enhanced reward sensitivities than healthy controls. However, how these two networks jointly affect the valuation process and drive IGD subjects' online-game-seeking behaviors remains unknown. Thirty-five IGD and 36 healthy controls underwent a resting-states scan in the MRI scanner. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined within control and reward network seeds regions, respectively. Nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was selected as the node to find the interactions between these two networks. IGD subjects show decreased FC in the executive control network and increased FC in the reward network when comparing with the healthy controls. When examining the correlations between the NAcc and the executive control/reward networks, the link between the NAcc - executive control network is negatively related with the link between NAcc - reward network. The changes (decrease/increase) in IGD subjects' brain synchrony in control/reward networks suggest the inefficient/overly processing within neural circuitry underlying these processes. The inverse proportion between control network and reward network in IGD suggest that impairments in executive control lead to inefficient inhibition of enhanced cravings to excessive online game playing. This might shed light on the mechanistic understanding of IGD.

Comparison of roving-window and search-window techniques for characterising landscape morphometry

Brazil`s State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation

Computational aspects of harmonic wavelet Galerkin methods and an application to a precipitation front propagation model

This article is dedicated to harmonic wavelet Galerkin methods for the solution of partial differential equations. Several variants of the method are proposed and analyzed, using the Burgers equation as a test model. The computational complexity can be reduced when the localization properties of the wavelets and restricted interactions between different scales are exploited. The resulting variants of the method have computational complexities ranging from O(N(3)) to O(N) (N being the space dimension) per time step. A pseudo-spectral wavelet scheme is also described and compared to the methods based on connection coefficients. The harmonic wavelet Galerkin scheme is applied to a nonlinear model for the propagation of precipitation fronts, with the front locations being exposed in the sizes of the localized wavelet coefficients. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Scholarly E-book Across Disciplines: Content Analysis of Usage Reports and Search Terms

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014.

Children’s Literature and English Teaching – Swedish Teachers’ Methods and Attitudes

This study investigates how primary school teachers of grades F-3 pupils in a number of sample schools in Sweden use children’s literature and other methods to enhance their teaching of English. The study explores the attitudes of these teachers’ to using English children’s literature as a teaching tool to promote language development in their pupils, focusing on vocabulary. An empirical questionnaire study was carried out including a total of twenty-three respondents from seven schools in a Stockholm suburb. The respondents are all working teachers with experience of teaching English to young learners, particularly in grades F-3. This study contributes with new knowledge about the often-recommended use of children’s literature as a method for teaching English to young learners, connecting international research with empirical data from the Swedish context. While the results suggest that the majority of the respondents are positive to using children’s literature in their teaching and regularly do so, many of them feel that it is somewhat difficult to find relevant materials to plan, implement and evaluate lessons within the allocated time-frame. Based on these results, further research about how to create more effective ways of using children’s literature as a method for English vocabulary teaching in Swedish schools is recommended.

English as a Second Language and Children’s literature : An empirical study on Swedish elementary school teachers’ methods and attitudes towards the use of children’s literature in the English classroom

Previous research has shown multiple benefits and challenges with the incorporation of children’s literature in the English as a Second language (ESL) classroom. In addition, the use of children’s literature in the lower elementary English classroom is recommended by the Swedish National Agency for Education. Consequently, the current study explores how teachers in Swedish elementary school teach ESL through children’s literature. This empirical study involves English teachers from seven schools in a small municipality in Sweden. The data has been collected through an Internet survey. The study also connects the results to previous international research, comparing Swedish and international research. The results suggest that even though there are many benefits of using children’s literature in the ESL classroom, the respondents seldom use these authentic texts, due to limited time and a narrow supply of literature, among other factors. However, despite these challenges, all of the teachers claim to use children’s literature by reading aloud in the classroom. Based on the results, further research exploring pupils’ thoughts in contrast to teachers would be beneficial. In addition, the majority of the participants expressed that they wanted more information on how to use children’s literature. Therefore, additional research relating to beneficial methods of teaching English through children’s literature, especially in Sweden, is recommended.

Methods and background characteristics of the TOHNN study : a population-based study of oral health conditions in northern Norway

OBJECTIVES: The aim of the Tromstannen - Oral Health in Northern Norway (TOHNN) study was to investigate oral health and dental-related diseases in an adult population. This article provides an overview of the background of the study and a description of the sample characteristics and methods employed in data collection. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional population-based study including a questionnaire and clinical dental examination. METHODS: A randomly selected sample of 2,909 individuals (20-79 years old) drawn from the population register was invited to participate in the study. The data were collected between October 2013 and November 2014 in Troms County in northern Norway. The questionnaire focused on oral health-related behaviours and attitudes, oral health-related quality of life, sense of coherence, dental anxiety and symptoms from the temporomandibular joint. The dental examinations, including radiographs, were conducted by 11 dental teams in 5 dental offices. The examination comprised of registration of dental caries, full mouth periodontal status, temporomandibular disorders, mucosal lesions and height and weight. The participants were grouped by age (20-34, 35-49, 50-64 and 65-79) and ethnicity (Norwegian, Sámi, other European and other world). RESULTS: From the original sample of 2,909 individuals, 1,986 (68.3%) people participated, of whom 1,019 (51.3%) were women. The highest attendance rate was among women 20-34 years old (80.3%) and the lowest in the oldest age group of women (55.4%). There was no difference in response rate between rural and urban areas. There was a positive correlation between population size and household gross income (p < 0.001) and education level (p < 0.001). The majority of Sámi resided in smaller municipalities. In larger cities, most participants used private dental health care services, whereas, in rural areas, most participants used the public dental health care service. CONCLUSION: The TOHNN study has the potential to generate new knowledge on a wide range of oral health conditions beneficial to the population in Troms County. Due to the high participation rate, generalization both nationally and to the circumpolar area ought to be possible.

A dynamic model of price competition with switching and search costs

Em modelos de competição de preços, somente um custo de procura positivo por parte do consumidor não gera equilíbrio com dispersão de preços. Já modelos dinâmicos de switching cost consistentemente geram este fenômeno bastante documentado para preços no varejo. Embora ambas as literaturas sejam vastas, poucos modelos tentaram combinar as duas fricções em um só modelo. Este trabalho apresenta um modelo dinâmico de competição de preços em que consumidores idênticos enfrentam custos de procura e de switching. O equilíbrio gera dispersão nos preços. Ainda, como os consumidores são obrigados a se comprometer com uma amostra fixa de firmas antes dos preços serem definidos, somente dois preços serão considerados antes de cada compra. Este resultado independe do tamanho do custo de procura individual do consumidor.