This paper focuses on three interconnected topics: (1) quantitative relationship between surface shortwave cloud radiative forcing, cloud fraction, and cloud albedo; (2) surface-based approach for measuring cloud albedo; (3) multiscale (diurnal, annual and inter-annual) variations and covariations of surface shortwave cloud radiative forcing, cloud fraction, and cloud albedo. An analytical expr...

The use of serious games in education and their pedagogical benefit is being widely recognized. However, effective integration of serious games in education depends on addressing two big challenges: the successful incorporation of motivation and engagement that can lead to learning; and the highly specialised skills associated with customised development to meet the required pedagogical objecti...

Background Primary care-based data are an important source of information on the population's health and care delivery. By its long history of observational studies, peer reviewed and national publications, the Belgian network of Sentinel General Practices (SGP) provides knowledge about epidemiological trends and quality of care. The SGP is a voluntary, paper-based, continuous and representativ...

Within the discussion on how to implement fiscal discipline in the European Monetary Union, the adequacy of using the same fiscal rules for different MemberCountries has been challenged by some authors, calling for a temporary higher degree of fiscal flexibility in the case of small and less developed countries. We develop a model of a monetary union between two countries that may differ in (i)...

The similarity relation of a number of texts is important not only for congress organizers (who need to group the proposed contributions to meaningful sessions) but to everybody who wants to find certain information within a larger number of texts. Existing information retrieval methods compare texts according to their similarity. Because these methods mostly remain on the surface of the words,...

We study a problem in decentralized supervisory control coined the Global Problem (GP) by Rudie and Wonham (1992). The objective is to nd local supervisors that generate languages that lie in a speci ed range of closed languages. We present results for a version of this problem called the Special Global Problem, (SGP) where the lower end of the range is empty and the higher end of the range is ...

In this paper, we propose a successive approximation method based on fuzzy wavelet like operator to approximate the solution of linear fuzzy Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with arbitrary kernels. We give the convergence conditions and an error estimate. Also, we investigate the numerical stability of the computed values with respect to small perturbations in the first iteration....

near-surface variations can be very complex and may distort amplitudes and arrival times of the reflections events from target reflectors. near-surface complexities include topographic variations, near-surface irregularities, variations in soil conditions and the weathered layer. these perturbations generally have a significant impact on seismic recordings. although there is a general agreement...