Search

The Kos Plateau Tuff (KPT), was an enormous caldera forming eruption originating from a vent within the Kos/Nisyros/Yali volcanic complex, occurring at 161 ka. It is the largest recognised Late Quaternary eruption in the Eastern Mediterranean. With its distinctive, highly silicic chemical composition, the resulting ash deposits have been used both as a synchronous marker for palaeoenvironmental records in the region, and to provide information on eruption processes and magnitude. Here, we describe ash layers detected at multiple sites (deep-sea sequences and a terrestrial archaeological site) with ages generated by radiometric dating and sapropel correlation, to demonstrate the existence of a later, but geochemically similar eruption from the Kos volcano which has not previously been identified in proximal volcanic units. This eruption is dated to MIS 5e (∼124–129 ka), i.e. ∼40 kyr younger than the KPT. This tephra marks the start of MIS5e, and presents a rare opportunity to independently and precisely align paleoenvironmental records and archaeological sites during a time of rapid warming and sea level rise analogous to the present day. The presence of multiple tephras also implies the possibility of multiple eruptions during this period. This adds to our knowledge of the active and hazardous nature of Kos/Nisyros/Yali volcanic complex.

Data-science-driven development projects are increasingly gaining the attention of small and medium sized enterprises. Since SME are often lacking the necessary competencies in data science, cooperation with other companies or universities is required. The efficient handling of data is one of the main challenges in joint cross-enterprise development projects. Actual cost driver is the development of data by labeling and classifying the data by domain experts, which is very time-consuming and labor-intensive with large amounts of data. Furthermore, clearance processes also have a high potential to cause delays before data can be shared with project partners. Moreover, before the actual work can begin, it is often necessary to clean up and repair incomplete or noisy data. The concept of Data Administration Shell presented in this paper addresses the challenge of structured information sharing and information management in joint cross-enterprise engineering. The Data Administration Shell links data sets to information regarding data origin and already performed analyses including their results and program scripts. Adding relations and documentation facilitates the reuse of data sets for subsequent projects. For this purpose, the Data Administration Shell adapts the concepts serving the information sharing in the research field of manufacturing and Digital Twin. The evaluation of the Data Administration Shell was based on time-series measurement data from a production process optimization scenario. Here, the Data Administration Shell manages the data sets of time series data and facilitates the joint cross-enterprise engineering of data-driven solutions.

The system development process is becoming increasingly complex as the systems themselves become more and more complex. At the same time, the various disciplines such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering are becoming increasingly intermixed, so that companies in one discipline are experiencing leaps and bounds in the complexity of their systems and their development. For this reason, this publication presents a concept of a virtual assistant that leads through a development phase. It shows that the software supporting the development needs an information model to store the data of the developed system and to connect it with the existing knowledge. This knowledge can either be available internally or on the web. The development process should therefore support cooperation so that the assistance software and engineers interact with each other.

Despite the vast array of different geochronological tools available, dating the Paleolithic remains one of the discipline’s greatest challenges. This review focuses on two different dating approaches: trapped charge and amino acid geochronology. While differing in their fundamental principles, both exploit time-dependent changes in signals found within crystals to generate a chronology for the material dated and hence, the associated deposits. Within each method, there is a diverse range of signals that can be analyzed, each covering different time ranges, applicable to different materials and suitable for different paleoenvironmental and archaeological contexts. This multiplicity of signals can at first sight appear confusing, but it is a fundamental strength of the techniques, allowing internal checks for consistency and providing more information than simply a chronology. For each technique, we present an overview of the basis for the time-dependent signals and the types of material that can be analyzed, with examples of their archaeological application, as well as their future potential.

The Teaching Economics with Moneyball website (https://www.moneyballsimulator.info/) includes material we have identified, created, and collated over the years and includes updates to a simulator that can be used to teach marginal revenue product. All material posted on the site is freely available to educators and submissions are encouraged. Published version

Funder: NOMIS Stiftung; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008483, The article presents evidence about the Middle Palaeolithic and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition interval in the karst area of the Danube Gorges in the Lower Danube Basin. We review the extant data and present new evidence from two recently investigated sites found on the Serbian side of the Danube River – Tabula Traiana and Dubočka‐Kozja caves. The two sites have yielded layers dating to both the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and have been investigated by the application of modern standards of excavation and recovery along with a suite of state‐of‐the‐art analytical procedures. The presentation focuses on micromorphological analyses of the caves’ sediments, characterisation of cryptotephra, a suite of new radiometric dates (accelerator mass spectrometry and optically stimulated luminescence) as well as proteomics (zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) and stable isotope data in discerning patterns of human occupation of these locales over the long term.

Marine Isotopic Stage 5 is associated with wetter climatic conditions in the Saharo-Arabian deserts. This stage also corresponds to the establishment of Middle Paleolithic hominins and their associated material culture in two geographical provinces in southwest Asia—the Eastern Mediterranean woodland and the Arabian Peninsula desert. The lithic industry of the Eastern Mediterranean is characterized by the centripetal Levallois method, whereas the Nubian Levallois method characterizes the populations of the Arabian desert. The Negev Desert, situated between these regions is a key area to comprehend population movement in correlation to climatic zones. This investigation addresses the nature of the Middle Paleolithic settlement in the Negev Desert during MIS 5 by studying the site of Nahal Aqev. High resolution chronological results based on luminescence dating and cryptotephra show the site was occupied from MIS 5e to MIS 5d. The lithic industries at Nahal Aqev are dominated by centripetal Levallois core method. These data demonstrate that Nahal Aqev is much closer in its cultural attributes to the Eastern Mediterranean Middle Paleolithic than to the Arabian Desert entity. We conclude that Nahal Aqev represents an expansion of Middle Paleolithic groups from the Mediterranean woodland into the desert, triggered by better climatic conditions. These groups possibly interacted with hominin groups bearing the Nubian core tradition from the vast region of Arabia.

Nowadays, formal methods are used in various areas for the verification of programs or for code generation from models in order to increase the quality of software and to reduce costs. However, there are still fields in which formal methods have not been widely adopted, despite the large set of possible benefits offered. This is the case for the area of programmable logic controllers (PLC). This article aims to evaluate the potential of formal methods in the context of PLC development. For this purpose, the general concepts of formal methods are first introduced and then transferred to the PLC area, resulting in an engineering-oriented description of the technology that is based on common concepts from PLC development. Based on this description, PLC professionals with varying degrees of experience were interviewed for their perspective on the topic and to identify possible use cases within the PLC domain. The survey results indicate the technology's high potential in the PLC area, either as a tool to directly support the developer or as a key element within a model-based systems engineering toolchain. The evaluation of the survey results is performed with the aid of a demo application that communicates with the Totally Integrated Automation Portal from Siemens and generates programs via Fastsynth, a model-based open source code generator. Benchmarks based on an industry-related PLC project show satisfactory synthesis times and a successful integration into the workflow of a PLC developer., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication at IEEE INDIN 2021

Der Systementwicklungsprozess nimmt immer mehr an Komplexität zu, da die Systeme selbst immer komplexer werden. Gleichzeitig Vermischen sich die verschiedenen Disziplinen wie Maschinenbau, Elektrotechnik und Softwaretechnik zunehmend, so dass Unternehmen einer Disziplin sprunghafte Komplexitätszuwächse bei ihren Systemen und in ihrer Entwicklung haben. Deshalb wird in dieser Veröffentlichung ein Konzept eines Sprachassistenten erarbeitet, der durch eine Entwicklungsphase führt. Daraus geht hervor, dass die Software zur Unterstützung der Entwicklung ein Informationsmodell benötigt, um die Daten des entwickelten Systems zu speichern und diese mit dem vorhandenen Wissen zu verbinden. Dieses Wissen kann entweder intern oder im Web vorhanden sein. Der Entwicklungsprozess soll daher Kooperation unterstützen, so dass die Assistenzsoftware und Ingenieure miteinander interagieren.

Sites in North Africa hold key information for dating the presence of Homo sapiens and the distribution of Middle Stone Age (MSA), Middle Palaeolithic (MP) and Later Stone Age (LSA) cultural activity in the Late Pleistocene. Here we present new and review recently published tephrochronological evidence for five cave sites in North Africa with long MSA/MP and LSA cultural sequences. Four tephra horizons have been identified at the Haua Fteah (Cyrenaica, Libya). They include cryptotephra evidence for the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption dating to ∼39 ka that allows correlation with other Palaeolithic sequences in the eastern Mediterranean and as far north as Russia. Cryptotephra have also been recorded from the Moroccan sites of Taforalt, Rhafas and Dar es-Soltane 1. At Taforalt the geochemical composition suggests a provenance in the Azores, while examples from Sodmein (Egypt) appear to derive from central Anatolia and another unknown source. In these latter examples chemical compositional data from relevant proximal volcanic centres is currently lacking so the identification of tephra in layers of known age and cultural association provides the first reliable age determinations for distal volcanic events and their geographical extent. The future potential for tephrochronological research in North Africa is also discussed.

A palaeolimnological study of Lake Khall was undertaken to reconstruct impacts from five thousand years of climate change and human activity in the Ol'khon region of Lake Baikal. Taiga biome dominated regional landscapes, although significant compositional turnover occurred due to the expansion of eurythermic and drought resistant Scots pine. Climate during the mid-Holocene was wetter than the present, and Lake Khall was fresh, with abundant molluscs. By 4.4 cal ka BP, sedimentary geochemistry indicated a gradual change in lake water chemistry with an increase in lake salinity up to the present day, most likely controlled by groundwater influences. Vegetation turnover rate was highest between 2.75 and 2.48 cal ka BP, with the onset of drier, more continental climate, which resulted in an influx of aeolian particles to the lake. This abrupt shift was coincident with ice rafted debris event (IRD-2) in North Atlantic sediments and an attenuation of the East Asian summer monsoon. A second arid period occurred shortly afterwards (2.12–1.87 cal ka BP) which resulted in the decline in ostracod numbers, especially Candona sp. A rather more quiescent, warmer period followed, between 1.9 and 0.7 cal ka BP, with very little change in vegetation composition, and low amounts of detrital transfer from catchment to the lake. Peak reconstructed temperatures (and low amounts of annual precipitation) were concurrent with the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Between 0.77 and 0.45 cal ka BP, climate in the Ol'khon region became colder and wetter, although Lake Khall did not become fresher. Cold, wet conditions are seen at other sites around Lake Baikal, and therefore represent a regional response to the period concurrent with the Little Ice Age and IRD-0. After AD 1845 the region warms, and Pediastrum appears in the lake in high abundances for the first time. This increase is ascribed to nutrient enrichment in the lake, linked to the rapid increase in regional pastoral farming.

Overlying a palustrine deposit of unknown age (complex FP), and protected from weathering and erosion inside a large cave/rock-shelter cavity, the sedimentary fill of Cueva Antón, a Middle Paleolithic site in SE Spain, corresponds in most part (sub-complexes AS2-to-AS5) to a ca.3 m-thick Upper Pleistocene terrace of the River Mula. Coupled with the constraints derived from the deposit’s paleoclimatic proxies, OSL dating places the accumulation of this terrace in MIS 5a, and radiocarbon dates from the overlying breccia cum alluvium (sub-complex AS1) fall in the middle part of MIS 3; the intervening hiatus relates to valley incision and attendant erosion. The two intervals represented remain largely unknown in Iberia, where the archeology of the early-to-middle Upper Pleistocene is almost entirely derived from karst sites; Cueva Antón shows that this dearth of data, often interpreted in demographic terms, has depositional underpinnings ultimately determined by past climate variation. In early MIS 5a, the paleobotanical evidence indicates climate conditions similar to present, albeit wetter, followed by progressive cooling, reflected in the replacement of Aleppo pine by black pine and, at the very end, juniper-dominated landscapes — the latter characterizing also mid-MIS 3 times. The variation in sedimentary facies and composition of the mollusk assemblages reflects the changing position of the river channel relative to the back wall of the cave. Such changes represented the major constraint for the occupation of the site — most of the time inaccessible to terrestrial mammals, it was used throughout by the eagle-owl, explaining the abundance of rabbit bones. Human occupation occurred during a few, short windows of availability, and is reflected in well-preserved living floors defined by hearths, artefact scatters, and the remains of hunted herbivores. The stone tool assemblages are Middle Paleolithic, which, in Europe, implies a Neandertal identity for their makers and, hence, that Neandertals persisted in the region until GI 8. Cueva Antón’s high-resolution record provides unique, critical information on the paleoenvironments and adaptations of humans in two short windows of time during which wetter conditions existed in SE Iberia, where arid or semi-arid climates prevailed through most of the Upper Pleistocene and the Holocene., Archeological fieldwork and research at Cueva Antón was funded by the Dirección General del Medio Natural de la Región de Murcia, the Municipality of Mula, the University of Murcia, the Fundación Séneca (Murcia), the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (grants HAR2011-24878, HAR2014-52671-P and CGL2012-34717), the Generalitat Valenciana (grant PROMETEOII/2013/016), the Excellence Research Projects Program of the Andalusian Government (grant P11-RNM-7033), and the Leakey Foundation. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Radiocarbon Facility (NRCF) funded some of the radiocarbon dates, and the German Research Foundation’s (DFG) project CRC 806 (“Our Way To Europe. Culture-Environment Interaction and Human Mobility in the Late Quaternary”) funded the Luminescence dating. M. Sanz was funded by a postdoctoral grant (SFRH/BPD/100828/2014) from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia using funding from the FSE/POPH

We present a new palaeoenvironmental record of hydrological variability in Lake Baikal, based on re-modelled delta O-18(diatom) values of diatom silica (delta O-18(modelled)), where the residual contaminants are identified and compensated for using electron optical imaging and whole-sample geochemistry. delta O-18(modelled) interpretations are based on the balance between rivers with high delta O-18 values and rivers with low delta O-18 values. Isotopic variability is related to latitudinal differences in precipitation which feed these rivers. The delta O-18(modelled) record suggests that rather moist conditions prevailed in the Lake Baikal region during the latter stages of the Younger Dryas. Throughout the Holocene, episodes of low delta O-18(modelled) values are, in general, in good agreement with increases in percentage haematite-stained grains in North Atlantic sediments (indicative of ice-rafted debris events). Rivers with southerly catchments dominate fluvial input especially between c. 3.3 and 2 cal ka BP, concurrent with high precipitation in the Lake Baikal region. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A new development in archaeological chronology involves the use of far travelled volcanic ash which may form discrete but invisible layers within a site's stratigraphy. Known as cryptotephra, these horizons can provide isochrons for the precise correlation of archaeological records at single moments in time, removing, or at least significantly reducing, temporal uncertainty within inter-site comparisons. When a tephra can be dated elsewhere, its age can be imported between records, providing an independent check on other dating methods in use and valuable age estimates for difficult to date sequences. The use of cryptotephra layers to date and correlate palaeoenvironmental archives is well established and there exists a wealth of tephra compositional data and regional tephrostratigraphic frameworks from which archaeological cryptotephra studies can benefit greatly. Existing approaches to finding and analysing cryptotephra are easily adapted to archaeological sequences, so long as the often complex nature of archaeological stratigraphies and sediment taphonomy are borne in mind. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Gjipali Ilir, Ruka R., White D., Hasa E., Angjellari F. Shpella e Pëllumbasit (Tiranë). In: Iliria, vol. 37, 2013. pp. 275-280.