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The aim of the study was to develop a self-management manual for tinnitus. The study was carried out in three phases. In phase-1, an evidence-based approach was considered by reviewing the literature to select intervention strategies that had proven to reduce tinnitus percept. Further, health literacy recommendations were used to convey the information in the manual to the patient. Phase-2 included expert committee scrutiny and assessing the understandability and actionability of the prepared self-management manual using the Patient Education Material Assessment Tool (PEMAT). In Phase-3, the self-management manual was validated from tinnitus patients. The expert committee mainly gave suggestions regarding the content, word choice and grammatical errors. PEMAT scores from patients and the expert committee revealed that activities provided in the manual are understandable and actionable. The THI and TFI scores were reduced after one month of short-term intervention. The self-management manual effectively reduced tinnitus percept and associated problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the quasinormal modes of the Schwarzschild black hole under the extended generalized uncertainty principle (EGUP) with the minimal length and momentum are investigated. We derive the EGUP-corrected black hole metric function which indicates quantum effects do not alter the event horizon. Based on this, we consider the perturbation of the quantum-corrected black hole with scalar and electromagnetic fields, derive the Schrödinger-like equation, and analyze the effect of quantum correction on the time evolution with the help of the time-domain integration method. The results show that quantum effects change the damping and decay of the black hole and predict that the imaginary part of the quasinormal frequency will decline as the EGUP parameters (α , β) increase. To verify this prediction, we then calculate the quasinormal frequency using the 6-order WKB method and discuss how quantum correction and multiple number affect the quasinormal frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of unique markers in ornithology has a long history and is predicated on the assumption that markers have negligible effects on behavior and survival. The assumption that marks are harmless is particularly important with imperiled species. We studied the effects of two different marking schemes on Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus), a small shorebird protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act that is intensively monitored and managed. We used two marking schemes, (1) color bands and (2) uniquely engraved flags during breeding seasons from 2013 to 2023 to determine whether the injuries were causing additive mortality and thus actually limiting populations. We estimated the effect of perceived limping and injury (e.g., swelling, laceration, etc.) on chick and hatch-year survival. We detected injuries in some years and associated with both marking schemes (range 0.0–6.0%, average = 2.7% of marked chicks each year). Interval survival for banded chicks was like that of flagged chicks (β\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\beta $$\end{document} = − 0.55, 95% BCI: − 1.30–0.33, f = 0.92). Mean survival to fledging, however, was higher in years where flags were used (ϕ¯=\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\overline{\phi }=$$\end{document} 0.55 ± 0.14) than when bands were used (ϕ¯=\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\overline{\phi }=$$\end{document} 0.34 ± 0.14), but we surmise that this difference was partly conflated with negative density-dependent factors (β\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\beta $$\end{document} = − 0.49, 95% BCI: − 0.73 to − 0.25, f = 1.00) and predation. Our results show that pre-fledge survival of birds with uniquely coded flags was similar to that of birds receiving color bands. There was also no evidence that injured birds had a significantly lower hatch-year survival than those that were not injured. However, the relatively high (up to 6%) injury rate in some years remains a concern. Injury and survival rates need to be considered and evaluated when deciding on whether to mark individuals. Ultimately, wildlife practitioners should strive to use the best methods for information gathering and management, without negatively impacting the species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a joint restoration convolutional neural network (JRCNN) is proposed to produce a visually pleasing super resolution (SR) image from a single low-quality (LQ) image. The LQ image is a low resolution (LR) image with ringing, blocking and blurring artifacts arising due to compression. JRCNN consists of three deep dense residual blocks (DRB). Each DRB comprises of parallel convolutional layers with cross residual connections. The representational power of JRCNN is improved by depth-wise concatenation of feature representations from each of the DRBs. Moreover, these connections mitigate the problem of vanishing of gradients. Different from the previous networks, JRCNN exploits the contextual information directly in the LR image space without using any interpolation. This strategy improves the training efficiency of the network. The exhaustive experimentation on different datasets show that the proposed JRCNN produces state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, ablation experiments are performed to assess the effectiveness of JRCNN. In addition, individual experiments are conducted for SR and compression artifact removal on benchmark datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transients can have a severe impact on demographic parameter estimates. For instance, the use of visual counts or number of captures at a ringing station to assess indices of abundance may result in biased over-estimates due to the presence of transients. With the aim of contributing to understand transient dynamics within the Eurasian breeding passerines, we used data collected at a ringing station (2010–2018) in a reed bed area of northern Spain designed to sample breeding reed warblers Acrocephalus scirpaceus. Specifically, we tested for the effect of season on the proportion of transients and explored for correlations of rainfall regimens at both the winter and breeding quarters on annual fluctuations of the proportion of transients. The proportion of transients was not constant across the season; it showed relatively small values until mid-June, coinciding with arrivals from Africa and the peak of the breeding period, and then increased very steeply (means > 60%) already in July, with even ca. 90% of transients captured during the second half of July, coinciding with an influx of birds that would be already passing through the area en route to winter quarters in Africa. Analyses to estimate population trends of breeding reed warblers should take this circumstance into account; otherwise, models may show odd patterns, due to a mixture of local and non-local population that might show dissimilar demographic trends. Limiting data analyses to the breeding sub-period having a lesser amount of transients is recommended. Annual fluctuations in the proportion of transients did not correlate with any of the rainfall values in Africa (winter quarters) or meteorological conditions in Europe (NAO index; rainfall values at a local level), though it might be that we did not choose the appropriate variable/period/location combination. Our data set was relatively small; hence, this may hamper us to detect weak linear trends. Future research should contribute to answer this question and deep into the factors driving transience dynamics in bird populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ringing of a floating barge's roll motion under focused wave groups is studied using a fully nonlinear method in a numerical wave tank based on the potential flow theory. The higher order boundary element method (HOBEM) is used to solve the boundary value problem. The mixed Eulerian–Lagrangian (MEL) technique and the fourth-order Runge–Kutta time stepping scheme is used to simulate the interaction between the floating barge and focused wave groups. As the peak spectra frequency is set as one-third of the natural frequency of the barge's roll motion, the influence of the peak wave amplitude of the incident focused wave groups on the roll response of the barge and wave loads is studied. The third-order components are found to be significant in both roll motion and moment as the incident peak wave amplitude increases. Relationship between the roll response of the barge and the peak spectrum frequency of the incident focused wave groups is also studied. The peak of the third-order roll response of the barge is found to decrease greatly as the triple peak spectral frequency deviates from the roll natural frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of game species relies on robust estimates of hunting-related mortality. A relative measure of this mortality can be obtained by comparing survival estimates of animals across similar areas with different hunting pressures. We conducted live recapture-dead recovery analyses on wintering Eurasian Woodcocks Scolopax rusticola (hereinafter "Woodcock") in provinces of Gipuzkoa (GIP) and Álava (ALA), two neighboring regions of northern Spain. The two regions have a similar number of hunting licences issued on a per day basis, but while hunting is limited to 3 days per week in ALA, in GIP it is allowed on a daily basis, resulting in a ca. 50% longer period of exposure of game species to hunting-related mortality here. We used a model based on monthly survival estimates to test whether the mortality of Woodcock varied between the two regions. Mean (± SE from a time-constant model) annual survival of Woodcocks was estimated to be 0.37 (± 0.04) and 0.56 (± 0.04) in GIP and ALA, respectively. If we assumed that this difference was only due to the longer period of exposure to hunting, mortality was increased by ca. 10% per additional day of hunting per week. Moreover, we also found that survival was positively associated with temperature in one of the study zones (ALA), suggesting that a high hunting pressure can override the effect of climate-dependent fluctuations. However, further research into fecundity and dispersal is necessary to assess the viability and sustainability of the wintering Woodcock populations under the current hunting regimes in these two zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A function that is well suited to describe a square wave as well as a sequence of delta functions is presented. The squdel function has a closed rational form instead of a series approximation. Bandwidth limitations are readily incorporated in this function without producing undesirable ringing artifacts. The squdel function is infinitely differentiable and analytic for a squareness parameter as close as required to the square function provided that the limit is not taken. Even its Fourier series decomposition does not exhibit overshooting when truncated. Two-dimensional soft pixel structures are shown to be economically modeled with this function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Condition monitoring has been recognized as an effective and low-cost method to enhance the reliability and improve the maintainability of power electronic converters. In power electronic converters, high-frequency oscillation occurs during the switching transients of power transistors, which is known as ringing. The ringing frequency mainly depends on the values of the parasitic capacitance and stray inductance in the oscillation loop. Although circuit stray inductance is an important factor that leads to the ringing, it does not change with transistor aging. A shift in either the inside inductance or junction capacitance is an important failure precursor for power transistors. Therefore, ringing frequency can be used to monitor the health of power transistors. However, the switching actions of power transistors usually result in a dynamic behavior that can generate oscillation signals mixed with background noise, which makes it hard to directly extract the ringing frequency. A frequency extraction method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Fast Fourier transformation (FFT) is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is simple and has a high precision. Simulation results are given to verify the ringing analysis and experimental results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The type of ring (i.e. its colour combination: the colour of the alphanumeric characters and the base colour of the ring) used in population dynamics studies could have an effect on parameters such as resighting probability ( p); for instance, we might expect a lower p value when using rings with white characters than when using rings with dark characters. We performed an experiment using two types of colour rings (white or black characters on a dark base) in Yellow-legged Gulls in order to test our hypothesis. To do this, we used Cormack-Jolly-Seber (CJS) models incorporating variation in p among the birds. We obtained no evidence supporting an effect of type of ring on either survival or p. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of year-round geographical ranges and the quantification of the degree of migratory connectivity are fundamental to the successful conservation of migratory bird populations. The Stone-curlew Burhinus oedicnemus is a species of conservation concern in Europe, but its ecology and behaviour are relatively poorly investigated. In particular, its migratory behaviour and the locations of the wintering ranges of most European populations are not known in detail because of a lack of specific studies and the scarcity of ringing recoveries. This study aimed to identify the wintering areas of a Stone-curlew population breeding in the Taro River Regional Park (Parma, northern Italy) by integrating the information obtained from ringing recoveries ( n = 2), geolocators ( n = 7), and GPS data loggers ( n = 2). Furthermore, we compared two approaches to inferring the location of an assumed stationary bird using geolocator data. The different sources were quite coherent, indicating that tagged Stone-curlews did not leave the Mediterranean basin throughout the year and passed the winter in Sardinia or in Tunisia. The recorded wintering sites coincided with areas where breeding (and possibly resident) populations are reported, further emphasising the importance of these areas for the conservation of the species throughout the annual cycle. To our knowledge, our study represents the first thorough analysis performed to uncover the movements of a Mediterranean population of Stone-curlews. Furthermore, it proves the great potential of the tracking devices used in this work to provide information on the migration and non-breeding sites of elusive species, for which the application of mark-recapture/re-sighting techniques is hindered by profound limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a new variational image deringing method. This method is based on total variation minimization with an adaptively varying regularization parameter. The proposed approach improves visual quality of resulting images by preserving more structural information comparing to existing methods. Attendant parallel algorithms have been developed and implemented on GPU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the problem of deblurring images degraded by camera shake blur and saturated (over-exposed) pixels. Saturated pixels violate the common assumption that the image-formation process is linear, and often cause ringing in deblurred outputs. We provide an analysis of ringing in general, and show that in order to prevent ringing, it is insufficient to simply discard saturated pixels. We show that even when saturated pixels are removed, ringing is caused by attempting to estimate the values of latent pixels that are brighter than the sensor's maximum output. Estimating these latent pixels is likely to cause large errors, and these errors propagate across the rest of the image in the form of ringing. We propose a new deblurring algorithm that locates these error-prone bright pixels in the latent sharp image, and by decoupling them from the remainder of the latent image, greatly reduces ringing. In addition, we propose an approximate forward model for saturated images, which allows us to estimate these error-prone pixels separately without causing artefacts. Results are shown for non-blind deblurring of real photographs containing saturated regions, demonstrating improved deblurred image quality compared to previous work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ringing and marking are widely used techniques in avian ecology to assist studies of migration, survival and behaviour, and often used to estimate population sizes. Only rarely, however, have the effects of these markings on bird viability been thoroughly tested. Using an abdominal profile index of marked geese and body mass of recaptured birds previously marked, this study investigated the effect of neckbands on body condition of Pink-footed Geese Anser brachyrhynchus at different temporal scales, and evaluated to what extent capture, handling and banding affected these birds on short, medium and longer terms. Our results indicated that body condition of geese were negatively affected in the days immediately succeeding capture, but that only a minor effect persisted on a seasonal scale. We found no support for a long-term effect of neckbands on the body mass of individual birds, indicating that the capture and handling event might be the main contributory cause to the transitory decline in body condition. Pink-footed Geese thus seemed to habituate almost completely to the presence of neckbands, and the effects on long-term body condition can be expected to be minor. However, neckbands might still influence important life-history traits such as reproduction and survival by means of, e.g., altering social interactions, increasing predation or interfering with mate acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The island of Helgoland (or Heligoland; in the North Sea) was the very first place on Earth to be the focus of systematic studies on bird migration (since the mid-nineteenth century). The 'Vogelwarte Helgoland' was founded in 1910, and since 1909 more than 800,000 birds have been ringed. Most of these are nocturnally migrating songbirds that cross the German Bight in a broad front on their way to or from their Scandinavian breeding grounds. In good weather conditions (tail winds, clear sky), the majority of the migrants does not land on Helgoland, but deteriorating weather strongly increases their attraction to this island. Wind can cause rare birds such as raptors and continental landbirds to be blown offshore or pelagic seabirds to be blown into the German Bight, where they can drift to Helgoland. Migrants stay for hours to weeks, depending on species, age, sex, body condition, season, weather, food availability, intra- and interspecific competition, and predation pressure. The direction of departure also appears to be influenced by body and weather conditions. The reported circumstances for the almost 7,000 recoveries have changed substantially over the last 100 years, and show definite regional differences. Indices from constant-effort trapping reveal decreased numbers of long-distance migrants, while numbers of short/medium-distance migrants have not changed much. In all 'true migrants,' the mean spring passage time has become earlier since 1960 (by up to 18 days). Whereas changes in autumn are less uniform, the time between both periods has increased in most species. This earliness in spring is best explained by local temperatures in short/medium-distance migrants, and by the winter NAO index in long-distance migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological barriers represent a challenging and potentially risky component of migratory flyways. Complex patterns involve large arrays of species and huge numbers of birds in crossing deserts, mountain chains and large stretches of sea. Despite the recent rapid developments of new marking technologies, standardised ringing applied to networks of stations widely distributed across the barriers still represents a unique tool to unravel different aspects of the progression of the waves of migration. The Italian Ringing Centre at ISPRA co-ordinates two major projects investigating, respectively, songbird migration across the Mediterranean in spring and over the Alps in autumn. Networks of ringing stations provide details on geographical distribution of flyways based on first-capture data and on species-specific seasonality of movements as also explained by ecological factors acting both on the wintering and breeding grounds. Physical conditions of migrants at different stages of barrier crossing provide details on the energetic cost of endurance flights, contributing to the understanding of the ecological needs of migrants. Conditions of staging migrants, stopover duration and habitat use by migrants significantly contribute to the understanding of time- versus risk-minimizing strategies, within the general framework of the energetic balance of migration. Also, networks represented by the national communities of ringers contribute to the understanding of the ecological role a given country plays within larger migratory flyways. Ringing still offers great potential to analyse existing large-scale and long-term datasets to provide a sound scientific basis for the conservation of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Woodcock Scolopax rusticola is an important game species in Northern Spain, where it is mainly a wintering species. Knowledge about the migration and origin of the woodcock wintering in Spain is relatively sparse, existing to date only qualitative analyses dating more than a decade. From the analyses of ringing recoveries of woodcock wintering in Spain, we evaluate the relative importance of various countries or regions as sources of the woodcock wintering in Spain, an estimate of their migratory route. Our analyses show the Circum-Baltic Region to be the most important breeding area of the woodcock wintering in Spain. Within that area, both Sweden and Western Russia appear to be particularly important. Analyses of the ringing locations of woodcock ringed during migration and recovered in Spain in winter suggest that woodcock wintering in Spain migrate primarily through the South of the Baltic Sea, Germany and France. The proportion of woodcock ringed in different French regions during the postnuptial migration months (October and November) that was subsequently recovered in Spain (mainly through hunting) declined with the proportion of those birds that was recovered in France (also mainly through hunting). We discuss the management implications of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1999 to 2005 at Zvenigorod Biological Station (Moscow oblast, Russia, 55°44′N, 36°51′E) field studies were performed. Birds were trapped using mist-nets. The Russian Ringing Center provided data collected from 1948 on robins captured outside the Moscow oblast. A total of 5751 robins were trapped and banded in the Moscow oblast. Only two birds (0.03%) were retrapped the following years. Three birds banded in the Moscow oblast were found in other regions. In addition, two robins banded in other countries were caught at Zvenigorod Biological Station. The rate of long-distance recoveries was 0.09%. The Russian Ringing Center reports on three robins banded in other countries and found in the Moscow oblast, and one robin banded in the Moscow oblast and then found in a different country. It was shown that robins born or breed in the Moscow oblast exhibited neither nest-site fidelity nor natal homing, which is the case for other areas. Wintering grounds of robins born or breed in the Moscow oblast are located within a single zone (north-east of Spain, south of France and Italy). This area is also wintering ground for robins from other regions. There exists one route connecting the wintering grounds for robins with the Moscow oblast which birds follow during autumn and spring migrations. It is possible that the Moscow oblast is a nesting area for robins born or breed in the north of Russia (including Finland and the Leningrad oblast). Natal sites and nest sites of robins could be separated by a distance of 1000 km or more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a prototype system, ZoneIT, for selectively controlling the functionality of mobile devices, e.g. the ringing of cellular telephones. ZoneIT exploits the fact that many such devices have short-range radio communication systems (e.g. Bluetooth and ZigBee). It uses such radio systems to allow these devices to communicate with Base Stations to learn what functionality is permissible in a particular zone. ZoneIT is secured by a process that enables mobile devices to authenticate base stations, and so protect against denial of service attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ringing is a common type of coherent noise in ground penetrating radar (GPR) data. When this kind of coherent noise is strong and is not properly removed, deeper structure may be completely masked. Ringing appears as nearly horizontal and periodic events, which are the most important features enabling us to remove the noise by signal processing. In this study, we have reviewed basic principles of various signal processing techniques to remove the ringing noise and compared their performances using field GPR data contaminated by severe ringing noise. The reviewed methods include background removal. f-k filtering, predictive deconvolution with filtering in wavenumber domain, and filtering by radon transform. Furthermore, it is shown that ringing can be successfully removed by the eigenimage filtering method, where GPR image is decomposed into eigenimages by singular value decomposition. This comparative analysis shows that the refined techniques are definitely more effective than the simple methods for the ringing noise removal with less distortion of GPR signals and each method has its own advantage as well as limitations. Moreover, preservation of the horizontally linear events from geological targets can be possible only through a kind of selective or local filtering such as the eigenimage filtering method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of correlation analyses between annual Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values in Africa and the annual survival rate estimated for a breeding population of barn swallows Hirundo rustica from Denmark, we identified potential wintering and migration areas in South Africa during December–February and March–May, when barn swallows commonly occur in South Africa. During December–February we identified potential wintering areas only in the western part of South Africa, in the Karoo. Potential areas in the central and eastern parts of the country were only identified during March–May. NDVI values in the Karoo during March–May explained most of the variance in annual adult survival rate of the population. The high ratio of European ringed barn swallows among controlled individuals in the Karoo was similar to the ratio that would be expected based on the number of ringed barn swallows and the population sizes of barn swallows in north-western European breeding populations. The level of this ratio in the Karoo was higher than in any other locality in the central and eastern parts of South Africa and Botswana, indicating that ringed birds from the eastern flyway are absent to a much smaller extent than ringed birds from the western flyway. This approach shows that the NDVI and survival method can focus ringing efforts to regions and areas that are likely to harbour specific breeding populations, thereby helping to identify potential wintering and migration areas for breeding populations of migratory birds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) investigation tools are increasingly used for real-time detection of underground utilities. Background noise is an annoying problem, because it sometimes masks the reflection from objects of interest. This study introduces an efficient background removal algorithm, which is so simple that it can be incorporated into GPR logging devices. The algorithm is based on the recently published outliers-out algorithm for stacking seismic data. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and field GPR data show that proposed background removal algorithm yields much better results than the commonly used average trace subtraction algorithm in a relatively comparable computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Discrete Fourier Transform of an image is computed, the image is implicitly assumed to be periodic. Since here is no reason for opposite borders to be alike, the "periodic" image generally presents strong discontinuities across the frame border. These edge effects cause several artifacts in the Fourier Transform, in particular a wellknown "cross" structure made of high energy coefficients along the axes, which can have strong consequences on image processing or image analysis techniques based on the image spectrum (including interpolation, texture analysis, image uality assessment, etc.). In this paper, we show that an image can be decomposed into a sum of a "periodic omponent" and a "smooth component", which brings a simple and computationally efficient answer to this problem. We discuss the interest of such a decomposition on several applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]