• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• Publications at Bielefeld Universit... close
• Fraunhofer-ePrints close
• BMC Bioinformatics close

El Niño–Southern Oscillation dynamics affect global weather patterns, with regionally diverse hydrological responses posing critical societal challenges. The lack of seasonally resolved hydrological proxy reconstructions beyond the observational era limits our understanding of boundary conditions that drive and/or adjust El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability. Detailed reconstructions of past El Niño–Southern Oscillation dynamics can help modelling efforts, highlight impacts on disparate ecosystems and link to extreme events that affect populations from the tropics to high latitudes. Here, mid-Holocene El Niño–Southern Oscillation and hydrological changes are reconstructed in the south-west Pacific using a stalagmite from Niue Island, which represents the period 6.4–5.4 ka BP. Stable oxygen and carbon isotope ratios, trace elements and greyscale data from a U/Th-dated and layer counted stalagmite profile are combined to infer changes in local hydrology at sub-annual to multi-decadal timescales. Principal component analysis reveals seasonal-scale hydrological changes expressed as variations in stalagmite growth patterns and geochemical characteristics. Higher levels of host rock-derived elements (Sr/Ca and U/Ca) and higher δ¹⁸O and δ¹³C values are observed in dark, dense calcite laminae deposited during the dry season, whereas during the wet season, higher concentrations of soil-derived elements (Zn/Ca and Mn/Ca) and lower δ¹⁸O and δ¹³C values are recorded in pale, porous calcite laminae. The multi-proxy record from Niue shows seasonal cycles associated with hydrological changes controlled by the positioning and strength of the South Pacific Convergence Zone. Wavelet analysis of the greyscale record reveals that El Niño–Southern Oscillation was continuously active during the mid-Holocene, with two weaker intervals at 6–5.9 and 5.6–5.5 ka BP. El Niño–Southern Oscillation especially affects dry season rainfall dynamics, with increased cyclone activity that reduces hydrological seasonality during El Niño years. The Depositional Record, 10 (1) ISSN:2055-4877

We have developed a device for digitizing coins using photometric stereo, which serves two purposes. For inventory it allows identifying a coin, which has been digitized before, and avoids mixing up similar coins. This is important because the classic marking directly on the object is not possible without obscuring the design. Secondly, one can view a digitized coin on screen and interactively change the light direction similar to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). This enables researchers to better recognize details, especially in the case of often corroded coin finds, and also enables location independent investigations and exchanges. The digitization result consists of color (albedo) and normal information for each pixel, which allows to analyze topographic properties apart from color. We think that this type of data can enable the development of new algorithmic analysis methods. The classification of coins, especially medieval coins, requires specialist knowledge and a great deal of experience. Digital support can help archaeologists without numismatic knowledge to classify coins correctly by providing initial clues and showing, which coins in a comparative data base show similarities with a newly found coin. For the development of such digital tools, we provide a selection of coin data as an open dataset. For the dataset we have selected samples of medieval coins from three different types, which are described in Mehl 499, 595 and Bahrfeldt 19. The dataset contains 2D and 3D data only for their obverses. A possible research direction could be to measure similarity between these samples, such that samples of the same type are more similar than samples of different type. Many samples show only a part of a complete coin. This increases the challenge e.g. for shape correspondence. Multi-scale integral invariant (MSII) features included with the 3D data may help to focus on minting features.

Abstract Background With more clinical trials are offering optional participation in the collection of bio-specimens for biobanking comes the increasing complexity of requirements of informed consent forms. The aim of this study is to develop an automatic natural language processing (NLP) tool to annotate informed consent documents to promote biorepository data regulation, sharing, and decision support. We collected informed consent documents from several publicly available sources, then manually annotated them, covering sentences containing permission information about the sharing of either bio-specimens or donor data, or conducting genetic research or future research using bio-specimens or donor data. Results We evaluated a variety of machine learning algorithms including random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) for the automatic identification of these sentences. 120 informed consent documents containing 29,204 sentences were annotated, of which 1250 sentences (4.28%) provide answers to a permission question. A support vector machine (SVM) model achieved a F-1 score of 0.95 on classifying the sentences when using a gold standard, which is a prefiltered corpus containing all relevant sentences. Conclusions This study provides the feasibility of using machine learning tools to classify permission-related sentences in informed consent documents.

Correct identification and correction of contradictions and inconsistencies within financial reports constitute a fundamental component of the audit process. To streamline and automate this critical task, we introduce a novel approach leveraging large language models and an embedding-based paragraph clustering methodology. This paper assesses our approach across three distinct datasets, including two annotated datasets and one unannotated dataset, all within a zero-shot framework. Our findings reveal highly promising results that significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the auditing process, ultimately reducing the time required for a thorough and reliable financial report audit.

This paper addresses the classification of Arabic text data in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a particular focus on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Contradiction Detection (CD). Arabic is considered a resource-poor language, meaning that there are few data sets available, which leads to limited availability of NLP methods. To overcome this limitation, we create a dedicated data set from publicly available resources. Subsequently, transformer-based machine learning models are being trained and evaluated. We find that a language-specific model (AraBERT) performs competitively with state-of-the-art multilingual approaches, when we apply linguistically informed pre-training methods such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale evaluation for this task in Arabic, as well as the first application of multi-task pre-training in this context. submitted to IEEE SSCI 2023

Zusammenfassung An den Höfen der Könige, Päpste, Fürsten und Fürstinnen entwickelte sich im 14. Jahrhundert eine zunehmende Konkurrenz zwischen Vertreterinnen und Vertretern verschiedener Bestände von Sonderwissen. Die Entscheidung, welches Wissen in welcher Form nutzbar war, verlagerte sich von den gelehrten Milieus auf Laien, an den Höfen auf Herrscher und Herrscherinnen und ihr Umfeld. Der offen ausgetragene Wettbewerb machte es erforderlich, die mit dem jeweiligen Wissensbestand verbundenen Geltungsansprüche, seine Gehalte und seinen möglichen Nutzen sowie die Positionen seiner Trägerinnen und Träger zu überprüfen. Die wachsenden epistemischen Rivalitäten ließen daher Wissen reflexiv werden. Diese Prozesse veranschaulicht der Beitrag anhand von Fallstudien zu ausgewählten lateineuropäischen Höfen.

Abstract Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—“incomparable” and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by the ascription of “incomparability” to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of “incomparability” against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages.

Abstract Conventional interior insulation systems protect the wall from condensation in winter by the help of vapor barriers or vapor retarding insulation materials. However, these solutions also reduce the drying potential of the walls towards the inside. This can be a disadvantage if wetting from the outside due to rain or other influences takes place and the drying potential to the outside is not sufficient. In such cases, so called capillary active materials can be an alternative, because they provide additional drying potential to the inside in summer thanks to a rather low vapor diffusion resistance. In winter they work without vapor retarders because they can store and wick water away from the condensation plane back towards the interior by capillary action. In practice, there are currently many different materials under the label "capillary active" with a correspondingly wide range in terms of moisture storage, liquid transport and vapor diffusion resistance and it is difficult to decide, whether material is suitable for an application or not. There is still missing a common definition of the performance of such materials. While for most other materials already simplified design and application rules for the application as interior insulation are available, capillary active interior insulation materials still require an individual design, normally by the help of hygrothermal simulation. In order to simplify also their practice application, a classification of the moisture performance of capillary active interior insulation, considering the influencing parameters of relevance on the moisture level at the critical interface between wall and interior insulation was developed. On this basis, also a simplified verification process as well as design rules for the main practical application fields become possible, which allows designers to choose an appropriate system for the specific situation.