Topic
Naturalness
About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.
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01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the various meanings of naturalness and why it is increasingly problematic (as commonly defined) as a central goal for protected area management, and explore how naturalness might be redefined or reinterpreted, and how concepts such as ecological integrity can complement naturalness.
Abstract: have begun to question the feasibility of maintaining natural conditions in protected areas. Growing awareness of Native American influence and recognition of the dynamics of natural systems raise questions about what naturalness even is. And with increasing recognition of the potential effects of climate change, there is a dawning awareness that it may not even be desirable to maintain naturalness. Is the concept of naturalness still sufficient to guide protected area stewardship? Should it be reinterpreted or more precisely defined? Are there other concepts that should complement it or take its place (Box 1)? In April 2007 we convened a small workshop to explore this question. In this paper, we share some of what was discussed in that workshop. We examine the various meanings of naturalness and why it is increasingly problematic (as commonly defined) as a central goal for protected area management. We detail the case for and against human intervention in ecosystem processes. We explore how naturalness might be redefined or reinterpreted, and how concepts such as ecological integrity
40 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the naturalness hypothesis does not imply religious determinism, and they fail to weigh adequately the more conservative prediction, that of religious probabilism, that is, the belief that a significant proportion of people in contemporary societies reject supernatural beliefs.
40 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the problems and prospects of the standard lore of dark energy and show that scalar fields, in principle, cannot address the cosmological constant problem.
Abstract: We briefly review the problems and prospects of the standard lore of dark energy. We have shown that scalar fields, in principle, cannot address the cosmological constant problem. Indeed, a fundamental scalar field is faced with a similar problem dubbed naturalness. In order to keep the discussion pedagogical, aimed at a wider audience, we have avoided technical complications in several places and resorted to heuristic arguments based on physical perceptions. We presented underlying ideas of modified theories based upon chameleon mechanism and Vainshtein screening. We have given a lucid illustration of recently investigated ghost-free nonlinear massive gravity. Again, we have sacrificed rigor and confined to the basic ideas that led to the formulation of the theory. The review ends with a brief discussion on the difficulties of the theory applied to cosmology.
39 citations
TL;DR: This model is the first no-reference quality assessment method for 360-degree images that combines multifrequency information and image naturalness and outperforms state-of-the-art full-reference (FR) and NR approaches.
Abstract: 360-degree/omnidirectional images (OIs) have received remarkable attention due to the increasing applications of virtual reality (VR). Compared to conventional 2D images, OIs can provide more immersive experiences to consumers, benefiting from the higher resolution and plentiful field of views (FoVs). Moreover, observing OIs is usually in a head-mounted display (HMD) without references. Therefore, an efficient blind quality assessment method, which is specifically designed for 360-degree images, is urgently desired. In this paper, motivated by the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) and the viewing process of VR visual content, we propose a novel and effective no-reference omnidirectional image quality assessment (NR OIQA) algorithm by MultiFrequency Information and Local-Global Naturalness (MFILGN). Specifically, inspired by the frequency-dependent property of the visual cortex, we first decompose the projected equirectangular projection (ERP) maps into wavelet subbands by using discrete Haar wavelet transform (DHWT). Then, the entropy intensities of low-frequency and high-frequency subbands are exploited to measure the multifrequency information of OIs. In addition to considering the global naturalness of ERP maps, owing to the browsed FoVs, we extract the natural scene statistics (NSS) features from each viewport image as the measure of local naturalness. With the proposed multifrequency information measurement and local-global naturalness measurement, we utilize support vector regression (SVR) as the final image quality regressor to train the quality evaluation model from visual quality-related features to human ratings. To our knowledge, the proposed model is the first no-reference quality assessment method for 360-degree images that combines multifrequency information and image naturalness. Experimental results on two publicly available OIQA databases demonstrate that our proposed MFILGN outperforms state-of-the-art full-reference (FR) and NR approaches.
39 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that two singlets with a Dirac mass can increase the Higgs mass while maintaining naturalness in the presence of large SUSY breaking in the singlet sector.
Abstract: A novel extension of the standard model allows for large supersymmetry breaking without a fine-tuning of parameters, therefore maintaining naturalness.
39 citations