In the field of sociophysics, concepts and techniques taken from statistical physics are used to model and investigate some social and political behavior of a large group of humans: their social network is given by a simple graph and neighboring individuals meet and interact in pairs or small groups. Although most of the established models feature rather simple microscopic interaction rules, the m

This work presents an assessment of the precipitation deficit in the São Francisco River Basin (SFRB) based on temporal, seasonal and regional analyses of two decades of precipitation data products derived from satellite missions launched since 1997. The temporal analyses were performed by means of three 3-month SPI time series, consisting of 250 values each derived from TRMM, CHIRPS and PERSIANN-

Flooding of railway infrastructure can lead to significant adverse complications, including infrastructural damage and large-scale disruptions. These can lead to increased economic costs and decreased reliability. Due to climate change, flooding is expected to increase in severity and frequency globally. This paperpresents the findings of a systematic literature review surrounding the effects of f

A competition process on Zd is considered, where two species compete to color the sites. The entities are driven by branching random walks. Specifically red (blue) particles reproduce in discrete time and place offspring according to a given reproduction law, which may be different for the two types. When a red (blue) particle is placed at a site that has not been occupied by any particle before,

A version of the Schelling model on Z is defined, where two types of agents are allocated on the sites. An agent prefers to be surrounded by other agents of its own type, and may choose to move if this is not the case. It then sends a request to an agent of opposite type chosen according to some given moving distribution and, if the move is beneficial for both agents, they swap location. We show t

Background and ObjectivesRecently, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the tau-binding radiotracer [18F]flortaucipir and an accompanying visual read method to support the diagnostic process in cognitively impaired patients assessed for Alzheimer disease (AD). Studies evaluating this visual read method are limited. In this study, we evaluated the performance of the visual read method in pa

We investigate a model for opinion dynamics, where individuals (modeled by vertices of a graph) hold certain abstract opinions. As time progresses, neighboring individuals interact with each other, and this interaction results in a realignment of opinions closer towards each other. This mechanism triggers formation of consensus among the individuals. Our main focus is on strong consensus (i.e., gl

We have for the first time identified the early stellar disk in the Milky Way by using a combination of elemental abundances and kinematics. Using data from APOGEE DR17 and Gaia we select stars in the Mg–Mn–Al–Fe plane with elemental abundances indicative of an accreted origin and find stars with both halo-like and disk-like kinematics. The stars with halo-like kinematics lie along a lower sequenc

The so-called Deffuant model describes a pattern for social interaction, in which two neighboring individuals randomly meet and share their opinions on a certain topic, if their discrepancy is not beyond a given threshold θ. The major focus of the analyses, both theoretical and based on simulations, lies on whether these single interactions lead to a global consensus in the long run or not. First,

When it comes to the mathematical modelling of social interaction patterns, a number of different models have emerged and been studied over the last decade, in which individuals randomly interact on the basis of an underlying graph structure and share their opinions. A prominent example of the so-called bounded confidence models is the one introduced by Deffuant et al.: Two neighboring individuals

During the last decades, quite a number of interacting particle systems have been introduced and studied in the crossover area of mathematics and statistical physics. Some of these can be seen as simplistic models for opinion formation processes in groups of interacting people. In the model introduced by Deffuant et al. (2000), agents that are neighbors on a given network graph, randomly meet in p

Dealing with finite Markov chains in discrete time, the focus often lies on convergence behavior and one tries to make different copies of the chain meet as fast as possible and then stick together. There are, however, discrete finite (reducible) Markov chains, for which two copies started in different states can be coupled to meet almost surely in finite time, yet their distributions keep a total

If the nodes of a graph are considered to be identical barrels – featuring different water levels – and the edges to be (locked) water-filled pipes in between the barrels, consider the optimization problem of how much the water level in a fixed barrel can be raised with no pumps available, that is, by opening and closing the locks in an elaborate succession. This model is related to an opinion for

A two-type version of the frog model on Zd is formulated, where active type i particles move according to lazy random walks with probability pi of jumping in each time step (i = 1, 2). Each site is independently assigned a random number of particles. At time 0, the particles at the origin are activated and assigned type 1 and the particles at one other site are activated and assigned type 2, while

The reintegration of former armed group affiliates into formal politics is a fundamental challenge for post-conflict societies. Arguably, this challenge is even more difficult in settings where ethnic discrimination is pervasive, since discrimination implies comparatively higher barriers to political reintegration for racialized ex-combatants. In this paper, we explore how ethnicity and armed grou

Deflationism about truth is often said to be incompatible with truth-theoretic semantics. However, both of these labels are ambiguous, making the truth of the incompatibility claim dependent on interpretation. I provide one pair of natural interpretations, on which both views relate essentially to grounding and on which they are indeed incompatible. This result has some intrinsic interest as well