Ambient temperature-related sex ratio at birth in historical urban populations: the example of the city of Poznan, 1848-1900.

This study examines whether exposure to ambient temperature in nineteenth-century urban space affected the ratio of boys to girls at birth. Furthermore, we investigate the details of temperature effects timing upon sex ratio at birth. The research included 66,009 individual births, aggregated in subsequent months of births for the years 1847-1900, i.e. 33,922 boys and 32,087 girls. The statistical modelling of the probability of a girl being born is based on logistic GAM with penalized splines and automatically selected complexity. Our research emphasizes the significant effect of temperature in the year of conception: the higher the temperature was, the smaller probability of a girl being born was observed. There were also several significant temperature lags before conception and during pregnancy. Our findings indicate that in the past, ambient temperature, similar to psychological stress, hunger, malnutrition, and social and economic factors, influenced the viability of a foetus. Research on the effects of climate on the sex ratio in historical populations may allow for a better understanding of the relationship between environmental factors and reproduction, especially concerning historical populations since due to some cultural limitations, they were more prone to stronger environmental stressors than currently.

Biometeorological conditions during cold spells in south-east Poland and west Ukraine.

The aim of this research is to analyze the biometeorological conditions, based on the Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET) thermal index, during cold spells (CSs) in south-east Poland and west Ukraine during the years 1966-2021. The research shows a high variability of the occurrence of CSs in the study period and a clear increase in the frequency and total duration of CSs in the east of the study area. The number of CSs in the analyzed years varies from 6 cases in the west (in Katowice) to 34 in the east of the study area (in Shepetivka). The total duration of CSs varied from 26 days (in Raciborz and Katowice) to 166 days (in Rivne). At the majority of stations, CSs occurred most frequently in the first two decades (1966/1967-1975/1976, 1976/1977-1985/986) and in the last full decade (2006/2007-2015/2016). The average PET values at 12:00 UTC during CSs decreased eastwards throughout the study domain and were generally lower than -20.0 °C in the west of Ukraine, while in south-east Poland varied between -18.1 and -20.0 °C. At 40% of stations across the study domain, the lowest average PET values were recorded during a cold spell in January 1987, with PET values varying from -28.0 °C in Chernivtsi to -12.7 °C in Yaremche. The longest or one of the longest spells in most stations (in 77% of stations across the study domain) was the cold spell of 2012 and characterized by mean PET values ranging from -25.4 °C in Rivne to -19.5 °C in Zakopane.

Characteristic of bioclimatic conditions in Poland based on Physiologically Equivalent Temperature.

The aim of the study was to characterise bioclimatic conditions in Poland in the times of progressing warming. This type of research permits the verification whether the progressing climate warming also translates into a change in bioclimatic conditions. This study was based on data obtained for the period 1966-2021 from 37 synoptic stations located in Poland. All the data series were uniform and obtained from the data base of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management-National Research Institute (IMGW-PIB). The study revealed high variability of bioclimatic conditions in Poland both in spatial and in temporal terms. The lowest mean annual PET values were recorded in the north and north-east of the country and the highest in the south-west of Poland. The study revealed changes in the frequency of occurrence of days with cold and heat stress, as well as days with no thermal stress. The most intensive changes were determined for days with cold stress. A decrease in the number of days in this category translated into an increase in the number of days with no thermal stress and days with heat stress.

Occurrence and synoptic background of strong and very strong frost in spring and autumn in Central Europe.

The objective of the paper was the determination of the circulation conditions of occurrence of strong and very strong frost in Central Europe. A frost day was defined as a day with the minimum temperature lower than 0 °C and maximum temperature higher than 0 °C. Moreover, a division of frost was performed in terms of value of minimum temperature, resulting in the designation of mild frost (up to - 2.0 °C), moderate frost (from - 2.1 to - 4 °C), strong frost (from - 4.1 to - 6 °C) and very strong frost (< - 6 °C). The study was based on data from the years 1966-2015 from the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management-National Research Institute, Deutscher Wetterdienst and National Center for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR). The analysis of baric conditions employed values of pressure at sea level, height of isobaric surface of 500 hPa and air temperature at a level of 850 hPa, as well as their anomalies. The spatial analysis showed that the number of frost days in spring and autumn increased from the west to the east of Central Europe. A decrease in the number of frost days, however, is observed over the prevailing area. Average conditions favouring the occurrence of strong and very strong frost both in spring and autumn were related to higher than average pressure at sea level over the prevailing area of the Euro-Atlantic sector. Such baric conditions caused advections of cool air masses from the northern sector.

Ear Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network on Graphs with Filter Rotation.

Geometric deep learning (GDL) generalizes convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to non-Euclidean domains. In this work, a GDL technique, allowing the application of CNN on graphs, is examined. It defines convolutional filters with the use of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). As those filters are defined in continuous space, they can be easily rotated without the need for some additional interpolation. This, in turn, allows constructing systems having rotation equivariance property. The characteristic of the proposed approach is illustrated with the problem of ear detection, which is of great importance in biometric systems enabling image based, discrete human identification. The analyzed graphs were constructed taking into account superpixels representing image content. This kind of representation has several advantages. On the one hand, it significantly reduces the amount of processed data, allowing building simpler and more effective models. On the other hand, it seems to be closer to the conscious process of human image understanding as it does not operate on millions of pixels. The contributions of the paper lie both in GDL application area extension (semantic segmentation of the images) and in the novel concept of trained filter transformations. We show that even significantly reduced information about image content and a relatively simple, in comparison with classic CNN, model (smaller number of parameters and significantly faster processing) allows obtaining detection results on the quality level similar to those reported in the literature on the UBEAR dataset. Moreover, we show experimentally that the proposed approach possesses in fact the rotation equivariance property allowing detecting rotated structures without the need for labor consuming training on all rotated and non-rotated images.