Urban acoustic environments consist of various sound sources including traffic noise, human-generated sounds, and natural sounds that affect the soundscape perception of a given location. However, these sound sources are indistinguishable by noise maps that are based on sound pressure levels. Hence, soundscape maps based on the perception of sounds are necessary to describe an acoustic environm...

We describe a sampling method to estimate the polarized CMB signal from observed maps of the sky. We use a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm to estimate the polarized CMB map, containing Q and U Stokes parameters at each pixel, and a marginalized covariance matrix. These can be used as inputs for cosmological analyses. The polarized sky signal is parameterized as the sum of three components: CM...

We consider the effect of noise on the dynamics generated by volume-preserving maps on a d-dimensional torus. The quantity we use to measure the irreversibility of the dynamics is the dissipation time. We focus on the asymptotic behaviour of this time in the limit of small noise. We derive universal lower and upper bounds for the dissipation time in terms of various properties of the map and it...

The Planck satellite will observe the full sky at nine frequencies from 30 to 857 GHz. Temperature and polarization frequency maps made from these observations are prime deliverables of the Planck mission. The goal of this paper is to examine the effects of four realistic instrument systematics in the 30 GHz frequency maps: non-axially-symmetric beams, sample integration, sorption cooler noise,...

Many cortical maps are found in biological organisms. In these maps, related units tend to be collected close to each other, and important inputs typically have a magniied representation on the map. We consider an interpretation of these structures as maps of parallel information-bearing channels, rather than winner-take-all maps such as the Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM). By considering the...