This paper presents in detail a parametric shape grammar for the generation of ancient Greek and Roman library plans. Ancient Libraries showcase a significant variability of scale, monumentality, and design with the use of different architectural components, and researchers cannot identify them as easily as other building types. The grammar is in 2D and captures all the variability of libraries from the simpler forms of the Hellenistic period to the more monumental of the Roman period, creating a vast range of designs. The paper presents the grammar-generated plans of the known libraries based on the evidence in the archaeological record. A frequency analysis of the occurrence of the rules in the derivations ranks the different characteristics of libraries and the architectural forms with which they occur in the corpus, to determine the probability of specific rules and to interpret them as mandatory or optional. The contribution of this work is that the shape grammar summarizes the design principles of ancient libraries visually and helps establish the building type of the ancient library. The frequency analysis assists tremendously in the reconstruction of fragmentarily preserved ancient libraries by providing a system in the reconstruction of the missing parts, when ambiguity is involved.

Lacustrine sediments retrieved from Laguna Potrok Aike in the framework of the Potrok Aike Maar Lake Sediment Archive Drilling Project (PASADO) offer the possibility to investigate climate variations of the past ~51 cal ka BP in Southern Hemispheric midlatitudes, Argentinean Patagonia. This study focuses on short-term cyclicities in the Ca and magnetic susceptibility data sets between 51 and 15 cal ka BP. The record yields a climate pattern with a periodicity of 1.5 ka during Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage 2 (MIS 2) detected in the Southern Hemisphere from 31 to 17 cal ka BP for the first time. MIS 2 is known for constantly cold temperatures, whereas prominent climate variations paced by a 1.5 ka periodicity occurred during MIS 3. Our study documents that minor latitudinal oscillations of the Southern Hemispheric westerlies and the polar easterlies with a 1.5 ka periodicity also took place during MIS 2. However, we assume that because of a major northward displacement of the Southern Hemispheric westerlies, these oscillations did not sufficiently affect the zone of Circumpolar Deep Waters and an increased greenhouse effect by upwelling of CO2-rich deep waters did not occur. This mechanism illustrates why prominent climate events fail to appear during MIS 2.

We document frequent, rapid, strong, millennial-scale paleovegetation shifts throughout the late Pleistocene, within a 100,000+ yr interval (~ 115–15 ka) of terrestrial sediments from the mid-Atlantic Region (MAR) of North America. High-resolution analyses of fossil pollen from one core locality revealed a continuously shifting sequence of thermally dependent forest assemblages, ranging between two endmembers: subtropical oak-tupelo-bald cypress-gum forest and high boreal spruce-pine forest. Sedimentary textural evidence indicates fluvial, paludal, and loess deposition, and paleosol formation, representing sequential freshwater to subaerial environments in which this record was deposited. Its total age"depth model, based on radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence ages, ranges from terrestrial oxygen isotope stages (OIS) 6 to 1. The particular core sub-interval presented here is correlative in trend and timing to that portion of the oxygen isotope sequence common among several Greenland ice cores: interstades GI2 to GI24 (≈ OIS2–5 d). This site thus provides the first evidence for an essentially complete series of "Dansgaard"Oeschger" climate events in the MAR. These data reveal that the ~ 100,000 yr preceding the Late Glacial and Holocene in the MAR of North America were characterized by frequently and dynamically changing climate states, and by vegetation shifts that closely tracked the Greenland paleoclimate sequence.

The elucidation of sleep regulation is not an easy task. On one side, there is a multitude of solid yet disparate data, on the other side, the topic is tempting for engaging in wild speculation, particularly with respect to the functions of sleep. Models may exert a moderating influence by mediating between the two extremes. However, also they navigate between the risk of banality in reformulating the obvious, and the peril of fancy in losing touch with empirical reality.

PDM13 is a new graphic interface program dedicated to frequency domain analysis based on the Phase Dispersion Minimization technique (PDM, Stellingwerf 2012). In this paper, we will present the different algorithms running in PDM13, including the Auto-Segmentation, the Gauss-Newton and the PDM algorithms. More details on this triptych are available in our recent paper (Zalian et al., submitted). Their aim is to offer a simple and powerful way to extract frequency. Amongst the numerous improvements offered by the program, we will particularly focus on the reduction of aliases and the ability to look directly for multiple-period phenomena and the Blazhko effect. After that, we will show the first results from PDM13 using the Antarctica photometric survey.

Many of portable devices such as smart phones, portable multimedia players (PMP), and digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras are capable of capturing high-resolution images (e.g. 10 mega-pixel in DSLR) or even video. The limited battery power supply in the portable devices often prevents these systems to use high-power large liquid crystal display (LCD). Instead, the portable devices often have a LCD screen with small physical size (e.g. 3 cm × 2 cm for Smartphone or DSLR) and with much lower pixel resolution (e.g. 0.15 mega-pixel for 480 × 320 display) than actual image/video resolution. Thus, the high-resolution image and video are down-sampled before being displayed. Unfortunately, the anti-aliasing filter often leads to rather severe blurring. Although the blurring may be minor when the viewing distance is large, it can be rather disturbing in portable applications due to the short viewing distance. To cope with the blurring problem, one possible solution is to use an LCD screen with higher resolution. But such hardware solution tends to be expensive and often not welcomed by the consumer electronic companies. Another possible solution is to continue to use the low-resolution LCD screen, but use some software technique to enhance the apparent image/video resolution. In this paper, we discuss a novel way to improve the apparent resolution of down-sampled image/video using a technique called subpixel rendering, which controls subpixel that is smaller than a pixel in a high-precision manner.

We studied the correlation between the spatial frequency of complex stimuli and neuronal activity in the monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex while performing a task that required visual recognition. Single-cell activity was recorded from the right IT cortex. The frequency components of the images used as stimuli were analyzed by using a fast Fourier transform, and a modulus was obtained for 40 spatial frequency ranges from 0.3 to 11.1 cycles/deg. We recorded 82 cells showing statistically significant responses (analysis of variance, P < 0.05) to at least one of the images used as a stimulus. Seventy-eight percent of these cells (n = 64) showed significant responses to at least three images, and in two thirds of them (n = 42), we found a statistically significant correlation (P < 0.05) between cell response and the modulus amplitude of at least one frequency range present in the images. Our results suggest that information about spatial frequency of the visual images is present in the IT cortex.