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Light Pollution and Prevention: An Introduction
Published in Tuan Anh Nguyen, Ram K. Gupta, Nanotechnology for Light Pollution Reduction, 2023
Abhinay Thakur, Richika Ganjoo, Ashish Kumar
All life on Earth has been reliant on the Earth’s constant day-night cycle for billions of years. All plants and animals have it encoded in their deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). By illuminating the night, we have drastically disturbed this cycle. The daily cycle of light and darkness on Earth regulates life-sustaining processes including sleep, nourishment, reproduction, predator defense for plants and animals. Artificial light at night seems to have a detrimental and even lethal impact on a variety of species, including birds, mammals, amphibians, plants, and insects. Artificial light has a negative impact on the world’s ecosystems [15,16]. Nocturnal animals sleep throughout the day and are active at night. Light pollution profoundly alters their nocturnal environment by turning night into day. Glare from artificial lights may also have an effect on wetland environments that are home to amphibians such as frogs and toads, whose breeding ritual includes nocturnal croaking. Artificial lights disrupt this nocturnal activity, interfering with reproduction, and reducing populations.
The Evolving and Aging Eye
Published in Lisa Heschong, Visual Delight in Architecture, 2021
Current evolutionary theory holds that while dinosaurs reigned supreme during the daytime, the first mammals were small and primarily nocturnal. To help find food in the darkness of night, their sense of smell became primary over vision, such as it still is for dogs and rats. Many mammals also developed whiskers to help them feel around in the dark. Early mammalian eyes reflected this shift to nocturnal behaviors, with a higher density of rods most sensitive in the dark of night, and a loss of color vision capabilities compared to birds. Some nocturnal mammals, especially carnivores, developed a special reflective surface at the back of their retina, called the tapetum lucidum, which greatly enhances night vision. This is why cats’ eyes can sometimes seem to glow in the dark, and why flash photography of wildlife often shows critters with strangely bright eyes.
Air Pollution
Published in William J. Rea, Kalpana D. Patel, Air Pollution and the Electromagnetic Phenomena as Incitants, 2018
William J. Rea, Kalpana D. Patel
The sleep/wake cycle is one of the most obvious circadian rhythms and defines a species’ photic niche; diurnal species are awake during the day and asleep at night, whereas nocturnal species are asleep during the day and awake at night. Most species, including humans, are under the influence of two systems: the sleep drive (homeostatic) and the alerting force (circadian).25 The sleep drive and alerting force are distinct and independent from each other, although they normally work in concert to ensure that individuals fall asleep at night and are awake during the day. The sleep drive is normally low when people get up in the morning and increases steadily throughout the waking day.
A Novel Approach for the Assessment of the Nocturnal Image of the Cultural Landscape
Published in LEUKOS, 2023
Lodovica Valetti, Franco Pellerey, Anna Pellegrino
The method proposed to assess the visual values and the visual perception of the nocturnal image of landscape contexts included different phases: (i) a preliminary territorial analysis devoted to collect information about the main characteristics of the area (case study); (ii) a subjective survey aimed at analyzing ordinary people’s perception and preferences of the nightscape; (iii) an in-field analysis to achieve objective data relative to the perceived nighttime image due to urban and architectural lighting; (iv) a statistical analysis to identify significant correlations between subjective and objective data. A general flowchart that describes the methodological approach is reported in Fig. 1 and more details about the different phases are reported in the following subsections.
Fully Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Context-Aware Word Translation and Denoising Autoencoder
Published in Applied Artificial Intelligence, 2022
Shweta Chauhan, Philemon Daniel, Shefali Saxena, Ayush Sharma
Figure 4 shows word-by-word translation using CLSWE with the language model for source sentence “He is going to school with bat.” Firstly, the sense embedding of the source sentence is calculated and only bat has two senses, first sense the bat#1 (an implement with a handle and a solid surface, usually of wood, used for hitting the ball in games) is used and in other sense bat #2 (rearmouse, a mainly nocturnal mammal capable of sustained flight) is used. Although the above examples demonstrate words with only two senses, there is no restriction on the number of senses a word may have, and some words can have 3 or 4 senses. It will depend upon our vocabulary and word embedding of corpus. We are predicting the nearest top thirty words with their similarity score for target language, but only top three scores are shown in Figure 4. We are considering six-gram LM as it is used to capture the diversity of context for the word. The language model will give the probability score for a word depending upon the immediately preceding words of the source sentence and combining it with the CLSWE score and the target word with the best score will be selected.