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The main purpose of this article is to examine how elite athletes perceive their own responsibilities and possibilities to be compliant with the anti-doping regulations, and to draw conclusions about what these perceptions mean in relation to the legitimacy of the anti-doping system. A qualitative research design, with interviews conducted with athletes globally, was employed to capture elite spor
Sensitivity tests were performed on a midlatitude continental case using a state-of-the-art aerosol–cloud model to determine the salient mechanisms of aerosol indirect effects (AIE) from solute aerosols. The simulations showed that increased solute aerosols doubled cloud-droplet number concentrations and hence reduced cloud particle sizes by about 20% and consequently inhibited warm rain processes
The number of ice fragments generated by breakup of large graupel in collisions with small graupel fluctuates randomly owing to fluctuations in relative sizes and densities of colliding graupel particles and the stochastic nature of fracture propagation. This paper investigates the impact of the stochasticity of breakup on ice multiplication. When both the rate of generation of primary ice and the
The proper alignment of requirements engineering and testing (RET) can be key to software's success. Three practices can provide effective RET alignment: using test cases as requirements, harvesting trace links, and reducing distances between requirements engineers and testers. The Web extra https://youtu.be/M65ZKxfxqME is an audio podcast of author Elizabeth Bjarnason reading the the Requirements
For decades, enhancement of ice concentrations above those of active ice nucleus aerosols was observed in deep clouds with tops too warm for homogeneous freezing, indicating fragmentation of ice (multiplication). Several possible mechanisms of fragmentation have been suggested from laboratory studies, and one of these involves fragmentation in ice-ice collisions. In this two-part paper, the role o
High-risk (HR) human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is an established cause of malignant disease. We used a societal perspective to estimate the cost of HR HPV-related cervical, vulvar, vaginal, anal, and penile precancer and cancer, and oropharyngeal cancer in Sweden in 2006, 1 year before HPV vaccination became available in the country. Materials and methods This prevalence-based cost-of-illness
As our society becomes more and more dependent on IT systems, failures of these systems can harm more and more people and organizations. Diligently performing risk and hazard analysis helps to minimize the potential harm of IT system failures on the society and increases the probability of their undisturbed operation. Risk and hazard analysis is an important activity for the development and operat
Traditionally, hypervisors, operating systems, and runtime systems have been providing an abstraction layer over the bare-metal hardware. Traditional abstractions, however, do not consider for non-functional requirements such as system-level constraints or users' objectives. As these requirements are gaining increasing importance, researchers are looking into making user-specified and system-level
This paper studies the problem of determining the absolute pose of a perspective camera observing a scene through a known refractive plane, the flat boundary between transparent media with different refractive indices. Efficient minimal solvers are developed for the 2D, known orientation and known rotation axis cases, and near-minimal solvers for the general calibrated and unknown focal length cas
The influence of environmental policy has been known to move beyond the country or regional contexts in which they have been implemented. Examples in literature include the “California effect” and the “Brussels effect”, showing how the policies adopted in the EU and California influence other jurisdictions. In this paper we study the following: To what extent are companies operating in the United
Based on t he Boltzmann Machine concept, we derive alear ning algorithm in which time-consuming stochastic measurementsof correlations a re replaced by solutions to dete rminist ic mean fieldtheory equ ations. T he method is applied to t he XOR (exclusive-or ),encoder, and line sym metry problems with substantial success. Weobserve speedup facto rs ranging from 10 to 30 for these ap plicat ionsand
The Amazon forest is increasingly vulnerable to dieback and encroachment of grasslands and agricultural fields. Threats to these forested ecosystems include drying, deforestation, and fire, but feedbacks among these make it difficult to determine their relative importance. Here, we reconstruct the central and western Amazon tree cover response to aridity and fire in the mid-Holocene—a time of less
Focused environmental research projects and continuously operating research infrastructures (RIs) designed for monitoring all subdomains of the Earth system contribute to global observing systems and serve as crucial information sources for environmental scientists in their quest for understanding and interpreting the complex Earth System and contribute to global observing systems. The EU funded E
We derive the expression of the loop gain in a circuit containing one or more feedback loops, where the transfer functions building the expression are found by means of a few AC analyses on the circuit. No approximations or assumptions on the nature of the loop or of the impedances therein contained are necessary. While hand calculations are certainly possible in the case of simpler circuits, the
Aims Although highly heritable, the genetic etiology of calcific aortic stenosis (AS) remains incompletely understood. The aim of this study was to discover novel genetic contributors to AS and to integrate functional, expression, and cross-phenotype data to identify mechanisms of AS. Methods and results A genome-wide meta-analysis of 11.6 million variants in 10 cohorts involving 653 867 European
Pollution by chemicals and waste impacts human and ecosystem health on regional, national, and global scales, resulting, together with climate change and biodiversity loss, in a triple planetary crisis. Consequently, in 2022, countries agreed to establish an intergovernmental science-policy panel (SPP) on chemicals, waste, and pollution prevention, complementary to the existing intergovernmental s
By measuring brain activity, through techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), it is possible to decode which sound source a person is listening to, called auditory attention decoding (AAD). This can either be done investigating the relation between speech sources and corresponding brain responses over time, or by discrimi-natively estimating directions to which auditory attention is focuse
