Global ecosystems are currently buckling under the weight of “plastics turbulence:” the condition of ubiquitous plastic entanglement within all human and non-human natural systems. This chapter argues that “global plastics governance” - the fragmented and variable political and institutional response to the plastics crisis - suffers from strategies that are doomed to fail because they miss what is

COVID-19 is a major public health threat associated with increased disease burden, mortality, and economic loss to countries and communities. Safe and efficacious COVID-19 vaccines are key in halting and reversing the pandemic. Low confidence in vaccines has been one of the factors leading to hesitancy. We aimed to assess the COVID-19 vaccine confidence (safety and effectiveness), associated facto

BACKGROUND: Post-term pregnancy is a health problem of clinical importance and; tends to recur in subsequent pregnancies. Maternal age, height, and male fetal sex are risk factors associated with Post-term pregnancy. The study aimed to determine the recurrence risk of post-term pregnancy and associated factors among women delivered at KCMC referral hospital.METHODOLOGY: This retrospective cohort s

This PhD thesis examines how application of 3D visualization and related digital analytical tools is having a transformative impact on archaeological practice via improvement of visual-spatial thinking and the strengthening of conceptual understanding. However, the deployment of these new digital methods is essentially still at an experimental stage. Therefore, the thesis undertakes a critical eva

In 2005, Pachon et al.1 proposed cardiac vagal denervation to treat neurally mediated syncope. Since then, a metanalysis of observational studies2 and a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT)3 have provided some evidence that cardioneuroablation (CNA) is able to prevent syncope recurrence at least during the first 2 years following the procedure in patients affected by reflex syncope. In brief,

This introductory article conceptualizes the notion of third country influence on European Union (EU) law and policy and proposes an analytical framework theorizing the venues and means through which third countries may gain such impact, under what conditions and with which implications for the EU’s legal and political order. The article first introduces the focus on outside-in influence in the co

Marja-Liisa Öberg unpacks the logic behind EU ‘decision-making autonomy’ – where only member states can participate in making EU decisions – suggesting that treating third countries as outsiders is not a flaw in the system but a fundamental policy choice that is unlikely to change any time soon.

The study of European integration has traditionally focused "inside-in" on the internal development of common laws and policies. With the maturing of the single market and the evolution of EU external relations, attention has shifted beyond the EU to the ways in which the EU intentionally and unintentionally projects its norms beyond its borders - the "inside-out" dynamics of European integration.

Deep learning, the study of multi-layered artificial neural networks, has received tremendous attention over the course of the last few years. Neural networks are now able to outperform humans in a growing variety of tasks and increasingly have an impact on our day-to-day lives. There is a wide range of potential directions to advance deep learning, two of which we investigate in this thesis:(1) O

In this paper, we present an adaptive spectral projection based finite element method to numerically approximate the solution of the wave equation with memory. The adaptivity is not restricted to the mesh (hp-adaptivity), but it is also applied to the size of the computed spectrum (k-adaptivity). The meshes are refined using a residual based error estimator, while the size of the computed spectrum

BackgroundAmbulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring has long been used to monitor BP in hypertension and lately emerged as a useful tool to detect hypotensive susceptibility in reflex syncope. However, hemodynamic characteristics in reflex syncope have not been sufficiently explored. The present study investigated the differences between ambulatory BP monitoring profiles associated with reflex syn

In this paper, we consider the numerical inverse Laplace transform for distributed order time-fractional equations, where a discontinuous Galerkin scheme is used to discretize the problem in space. The success of Talbot's approach for the computation of the inverse Laplace transform depends critically on the problem's spectral properties and we present a method to numerically enclose the spectrum

In this paper, we compare two approaches to numerically approximate the solution of second-order Gurtin–Pipkin type of integro-differential equations. Both methods are based on a high-order Discontinous Galerkin approximation in space and the numerical inverse Laplace transform. In the first approach, we use functional calculus and the inverse Laplace transform to represent the solution. The spect

Discontinuous Galerkin composite finite element methods (DGCFEM) are designed to tackle approximation problems on complicated domains. Partial differential equations posed on complicated domain are common when there are mesoscopic or local phenomena which need to be modelled at the same time as macroscopic phenomena. In this paper, an optical lattice will be used to illustrate the performance of t

In this paper, we study spectral properties and spectral enclosures for the Gurtin-Pipkin type of integro-differential equations in several dimensions. The analysis is based on an operator function and we consider the relation between the studied operator function and other formulations of the spectral problem. The theory is applied to wave equations with Boltzmann damping.

In this paper, we consider a sorting scheme for potentially spurious scattering resonant pairs in one- and two-dimensional electromagnetic problems and in three-dimensional acoustic problems. The novel sorting scheme is based on a Lippmann-Schwinger type of volume integral equation and can, therefore, be applied to structures with graded materials as well as to configurations including piece-wise

In this paper we consider scattering resonance computations in optics when the resonators consist of frequency dependent and lossy materials, such as metals at optical frequencies. The proposed computational approach combines a novel hp-FEM strategy, based on dispersion analysis for complex frequencies, with a fast implementation of the nonlinear eigenvalue solver NLEIGS. Numerical computations il

This article reviews both recent progress on the mathematics of dispersive and absorptive photonic crystals and well-established results on conservative photonic crystals. The focus is on properties of the photonic band structures and we also provide results that are of importance for the understanding of lossy metal-dielectric photonic crystals.