Recently, in the Auerswald et al. (2015) comment on "Rainfall erosivity in Europe", 5 criticisms were addressed: i) the neglect of seasonal erosion indices, ii) the neglect of published studies and data, iii) the low temporal resolution of the data, especially of the maximum rain intensity, iv) the use of precipitation data instead of rain data and the subsequent deviation of the R-factor in Ge...

Reproductive success usually declines in the course of the season, which may be a direct effect of breeding time, an effect of quality (individuals with high phenotypic or environmental quality breeding early), or a combination of the two. Being able to distinguish between these possibilities is crucial when trying to understand individual variation in annual routines, for instance when to bree...

As we start a new school year I would like to take this opportunity to welcome back the many students, staff, research associates and faculty associated with the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior (CISAB). To those of you who are new to CISAB and the Indiana University community, I would like to extend a special welcome to you and I would also like to express my excitement abou...

We study the attack rate, that is the total fraction of the population infected each year, for a disease with seasonally varying transmission rate. The attack rate is shown to be governed by both the reproductive number, reflecting the transmissibility of the disease, and the birth rate, which provides a source of new susceptibles. For the case of epidemics which have an annual period (like the...

Prior studies on the association between weather and psychological changes have produced mixed results. In part, this inconsistency may be because weather's psychological effects are moderated by two important factors: the season and time spent outside. In two correlational studies and an experiment manipulating participants' time outdoors (total N = 605), pleasant weather (higher temperature o...

Cetaceans are protected worldwide but vulnerable to incidental harm from an expanding array of human activities at sea. Managing potential hazards to these highly-mobile populations increasingly requires a detailed understanding of their seasonal distributions and habitats. Pursuant to the urgent need for this knowledge for the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, we integrated 23 years of aerial ...

We study in detail the threshold energy dependence of the seasonal variation effect in the energy integrated solar neutrino signal of the Super-Kamiokande detector in the case of the νe ↔ νμ,τ vacuum oscillation (VO) solution of the solar neutrino problem. We show, in particular, that for the values of ∆m2 and sin 2θ from the VO solution region, the predicted time and threshold e− energy (Te,Th...

An increased number of intermittent renewables poses a threat to the system balance. As a result, new tools and concepts, like advanced demand-side management and smart grid technologies, are required for the demand to meet supply. There is a need for higher consumer awareness and automatic response to a shortage or surplus of electricity. The distributed water heater can be considered as one o...

We define a new seasonal forecasting method based on fuzzy transforms. We use the best interpolating polynomial for extracting the trend of the time series and generate the inverse fuzzy transform on each seasonal subset of the universe of discourse for predicting the value of an assigned output. In the first example, we use the daily weather dataset of the municipality of Naples (Italy) starti...

The topic of finding an effective strategy to halt virus in a complex network is of current interest. We propose an immunization strategy for seasonal epidemics that occur periodically. Based on the local information of the infection status from the previous epidemic season, the selection of vaccinated nodes is optimized gradually. The evolution of vaccinated nodes during iterations demonstrate...