Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flood pulse effects on multispecies fishery yields in the Lower Amazon

Seasonally fluctuating water levels, known as ‘flood pulses’, control the productivity of large river fisheries, but the extent and mechanisms through which flood pulses affect fishery yields are poorly understood. To quantify and better understand flood pulse effects on fishery yields, this study applied regression techniques to a hydrological and fishery record (years 1993–2004) for 42 species of the Amazon River floodplains. Models based on indices of fishing effort, high waters and low waters explained most of the interannual variability in yields (R2=0.8). The results indicated that high and low waters in any given year affected fishery yields two and three years later through changes in fish biomass available for harvesting, contributing 18% of the explained variability in yields. Fishing effort appeared to amplify high and low water effects by changing in direct proportion to changes in fish biomass available for harvesting, contributing 62% of the explained variability in yields. Although high waters are generally expected to have greater relative influence on fishery yields than low waters, high and low waters exerted equal forcing on these Amazonian river-floodplain fishery yields. These findings highlight the complex dynamics of river-floodplain fisheries in relation to interannual variability in flood pulses.
The Nature of Luminous X-Ray Sources with Mid-Infrared Counterparts

We investigate the luminous X-ray sources in the Lockman Hole (LH) and the extended Groth strip (EGS) detected at 24 μm using the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) and also with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. We assemble optical/infrared spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for 45 X-ray/24 μm sources in the EGS and LH. Only about one-quarter of the hard X-ray/24 μm sources show pure type 1 active galactic nucleus (AGN) SEDs. More than half of the X-ray/24 μm sources have stellar emission-dominated or obscured SEDs, similar to those of local type 2 AGN and spiral/starburst galaxies. One-third of the sources detected in hard X-rays do not have a 24 μm counterpart. Two such sources in the LH have SEDs resembling those of S0/elliptical galaxies. The broad variety of SEDs in the optical-to-Spitzer bands of X-ray-selected AGNs means that AGNs selected according to the behavior in the optical/infrared will have to be supplemented by other kinds of data (e.g., X-ray) to produce unbiased samples of AGNs.
Diffusion of Federated Identity Management

In this work, we discuss the diffusion of federated identity management. We base our research on Roger’s diffusion of innovation theory, and derive generic factors influencing the diffusion of federated identity management solutions. To validate our model and investigate specific contributions of parameters in specific usage scenarios, we investigate market success of federated identity management systems. We examine several application scenarios in the fields of e-business, Web, and e-government.
Comparing the expressive power of the synchronous and asynchronous $pi$-calculi

The Asynchronous $\pi$-calculus, proposed in Honda and Tokoro (1991) and, independently, in Boudol (1992), is a subset of the $\pi$-calculus (Milner et al. 1992), which contains no explicit operators for choice and output prefixing. The communication mechanism of this calculus, however, is powerful enough to simulate output prefixing, as shown in Honda and Tokoro (1991) and Boudol (1992), and input-guarded choice, as shown in Nestmann and Pierce (2000). A natural question arises, then, as to whether or not it is as expressive as the full $\pi$-calculus. We show that this is not the case. More precisely, we show that there does not exist any uniform, fully distributed translation from the $\pi$-calculus into the asynchronous $\pi$-calculus, up to any ‘reasonable’ notion of equivalence. This result is based on the incapability of the asynchronous $\pi$-calculus to break certain symmetries that may be present in the initial communication graph. By similar arguments, we prove a separation result between the $\pi$-calculus and CCS, and between the $\pi$-calculus and the $\pi$-calculus with internal mobility, a subset of the $\pi$-calculus proposed by Sangiorgi where the output actions can only transmit private names.
Oral Delivery of a Novel Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine Expressing Influenza A Virus Proteins Protects Mice against H5N1 and H1N1 Viral Infection

Attenuated strains of invasive enteric bacteria, such as Salmonella, represent promising gene delivery agents for nucleic acid-based vaccines as they can be administrated orally. In this study, we constructed a novel attenuated strain of Salmonella for the delivery and expression of the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) of a highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus. We showed that the constructed Salmonella strain exhibited efficient gene transfer activity for HA and NA expression and little cytotoxicity and pathogenicity in mice. Using BALB/c mice as the model, we evaluated the immune responses and protection induced by the constructed Salmonella-based vaccine. Our study showed that the Salmonella-based vaccine induced significant production of anti-HA serum IgG and mucosal IgA, and of anti-HA interferon-γ producing T cells in orally vaccinated mice. Furthermore, mice orally vaccinated with the Salmonella vaccine expressing viral HA and NA proteins were completely protected from lethal challenge of highly pathogenic H5N1 as well as H1N1 influenza viruses while none of the animals treated with the Salmonella vaccine carrying the empty expression vector with no viral antigen expression was protected. These results suggest that the Salmonella-based vaccine elicits strong antigen-specific humoral and cellular immune responses and provides effective immune protection against multiple strains of influenza viruses. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the feasibility of developing novel attenuated Salmonella strains as new oral vaccine vectors against influenza viruses.
Commercial Television and Voter Information

What is the effect of liberalizing a country’s broadcasting system on the level of information of its citizens? To analyse this question, we first construct a model of state monopoly broadcasting where the government selects the amount of television news coverage of different public policy outcomes, and then sets public policy and political rents. Voters vote retrospectively given the news provided. In equilibrium, the incumbent provides some news coverage, and more so to groups for which reducing policy uncertainty is more important. We then introduce a profit-maximizing commercial channel. It provides more news coverage to groups of voters valuable to advertisers or underprovided by the state monopoly. We test our predictions on a panel of individuals interviewed in the elections before and after the entry of commercial TV in Sweden. We find that people who start watching commercial TV news increase their level of political knowledge more than those who do not. They also increase their political participation more. The positive informational effects are particularly valuable since commercial TV news attracts ex ante uniformed voters.
The October 2005 Earthquake in Northern Pakistan: Pattern of Injuries in Victims Brought to the Emergency Relief Hospital, Doraha, Mansehra

Abstract Objective: Knowledge of injuries of earthquake victims is important to plan relief efforts. This cross-sectional study was conducted following the 08 October 2005 earthquake in Northern Pakistan to determine the pattern of injuries sustained and their relationship with age and gender in order to identify the medical needs in an earthquake-affected zone. Methods: The study was conducted between 13 October and 23 October 2005 at the Emergency Relief Hospital, Doraha, Mansehra. From the 1,700 patients registered in the hospital, 310 were sampled randomly for the study. Demography and details of the patients' injuries were noted by history and physical examination. Twelve cases were omitted due to incomplete data. Results: Of the cases, 54% were female. Children ≤10 years old formed the largest age group. Isolated bone injuries were present in 41%, soft tissue injuries in 36%, and mixed injuries in 23% of the patients.The most common bone injury was lower limb fracture (52%), while the most common non-bone injury was non-infected, soft tissue wounds on the limbs (33%). Among patients with soft tissue injuries, gangrenous wounds were present in 9%, and grossly infected wounds in 30% (20% on limbs and 10% on rest of the body). Conclusions: The population injured during the earthquake showed a higher proportion of females and children ≤10 years old, and lower limb bone injuries. The data highlight the need to address orthopedic, pediatric, and women's health issues, and for logistic arrangement of relevant diagnostic and therapeutic facilities at the initial stages of relief activities after earthquakes.
IMPLEMENTATION OF PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN HOTEL INDUSTRY

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) influences the development tourism on globally, and its development has changed the practice of business. Any reference ICT in the hotel industry necessarily begins the concept of Property Management System (PMS). PMS as an essential component for hotel management provides tools as are necessary hotel staff in performing daily operations of the reservation, the accommodation capacities management, accounting, etc. This software supports all basic activities involved with process operation accommodation facilities and interconnects systems within it. Hospitality enterprises that are constantly working on innovations in the implementation of hardware, software, and networks can be competitive in the market, which maintain the long term prosperity of the business. This paper is conceptually defined PMS and its application in the context of the impact on the hotel management. The methodology is based on secondary research examing the key dimensions of the PMS systems and their functionality. The aim of this paper is to explore the intensity of the impact on the prosperity implementation of PMS hotel management. The findings show that, despite the availability of a range of PMS software and funcionalities, the European touristic market continues to be led by a handful of providers. The unique contribution of this paper is in secondary research, the issues associated with the critical, core technology for the hotel industry, i.e. PMS.
A Learned Representation For Artistic Style

The diversity of painting styles represents a rich visual vocabulary for the construction of an image. The degree to which one may learn and parsimoniously capture this visual vocabulary measures our understanding of the higher level features of paintings, if not images in general. In this work we investigate the construction of a single, scalable deep network that can parsimoniously capture the artistic style of a diversity of paintings. We demonstrate that such a network generalizes across a diversity of artistic styles by reducing a painting to a point in an embedding space. Importantly, this model permits a user to explore new painting styles by arbitrarily combining the styles learned from individual paintings. We hope that this work provides a useful step towards building rich models of paintings and offers a window on to the structure of the learned representation of artistic style.
An evaluation of the FDA's analysis of the costs and benefits of the graphic warning label regulation

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products and authorised it to assert jurisdiction over other tobacco products. As with other Federal agencies, FDA is required to assess the costs and benefits of its significant regulatory actions. To date, FDA has issued economic impact analyses of one proposed and one final rule requiring graphic warning labels (GWLs) on cigarette packaging and, most recently, of a proposed rule that would assert FDA’s authority over tobacco products other than cigarettes and smokeless tobacco. Given the controversy over the FDA's approach to assessing net economic benefits in its proposed and final rules on GWLs and the importance of having economic impact analyses prepared in accordance with sound economic analysis, a group of prominent economists met in early 2014 to review that approach and, where indicated, to offer suggestions for an improved analysis. We concluded that the analysis of the impact of GWLs on smoking substantially underestimated the benefits and overestimated the costs, leading the FDA to substantially underestimate the net benefits of the GWLs. We hope that the FDA will find our evaluation useful in subsequent analyses, not only of GWLs but also of other regulations regarding tobacco products. Most of what we discuss applies to all instances of evaluating the costs and benefits of tobacco product regulation and, we believe, should be considered in FDA's future analyses of proposed rules.
Smart Devices are Different: Assessing and MitigatingMobile Sensing Heterogeneities for Activity Recognition

The widespread presence of motion sensors on users' personal mobile devices has spawned a growing research interest in human activity recognition (HAR). However, when deployed at a large-scale, e.g., on multiple devices, the performance of a HAR system is often significantly lower than in reported research results. This is due to variations in training and test device hardware and their operating system characteristics among others. In this paper, we systematically investigate sensor-, device- and workload-specific heterogeneities using 36 smartphones and smartwatches, consisting of 13 different device models from four manufacturers. Furthermore, we conduct experiments with nine users and investigate popular feature representation and classification techniques in HAR research. Our results indicate that on-device sensor and sensor handling heterogeneities impair HAR performances significantly. Moreover, the impairments vary significantly across devices and depends on the type of recognition technique used. We systematically evaluate the effect of mobile sensing heterogeneities on HAR and propose a novel clustering-based mitigation technique suitable for large-scale deployment of HAR, where heterogeneity of devices and their usage scenarios are intrinsic.
Children's and adolescents' snacking: interplay between the individual and the school class

Objective: In schools, perceived norms of classmates facilitate but can also inhibit unhealthy food intake in children and adolescents. However, the role of actual class behaviors and attitudes is less established. Thus, the present study examined classmates' actual eating behavior and food preferences in relation to actual food intake. In addition, it tested whether these normative effects are facilitated by corresponding individual and class food preferences or a positive social self-concept. Methods: The food preferences, social self-concept, and unhealthy snacking frequency of 734 Finnish, 829 German, and 555 Romanian children and adolescents (aged 8–19) from 127 school-classes were assessed. Results: Multilevel analysis at individual and class level showed that classmates shared similar snacking habits (14.7% variance). Moreover, the unhealthy food preference of a school-class was associated with its collective snacking [χ(1)2=54.67, p < 0.001, PRV = 0.32). This effect was facilitated by individual, unhealthy food preferences [χ(1)2=16.72, p < 0.001, PRV = 0.57] and a positive social self-concept [χ(1)2=5.91, p = 0.015, PRV = 0.12]. Conclusions: Actual class norms are related to children's and adolescents' eating, but their impact depends on individual differences in preferences and social self-concept.
Use of a Mobile Application for Self-Monitoring Dietary Intake: Feasibility Test and an Intervention Study

Given the increasing social and economic burden of chronic disease and the need for efficient approaches to prevent and treat chronic disease, emphasis on the use of information and communication technology (ICT)-based health care has emerged. We aimed to test the feasibility of a mobile application, Diet-A, and examine whether Diet-A could be used to monitor dietary intake among adolescents. In a three-month pre–post intervention study, 9 male and 24 female high school students aged 16–18 years consented and participated in this study. Participants were instructed to record all foods and beverages consumed using voice or text mode input. Nutrient intake was measured using 24-h recalls pre- and post-intervention. We compared nutrient intake data assessed by Diet-A application with those assessed by 24-h recalls. Participants tended to underreport intakes of nutrients compared to those assessed by two 24-h recalls. There were significant decreases in sodium (p = 0.04) and calcium (p = 0.03) intake between pre- and post-intervention. Of participants who completed questionnaires of feasibility (n = 24), 61.9% reported that they were satisfied using the application to monitor their food intake, and 47.7% liked getting personal information about their dietary intake from the application. However, more than 70% of participants answered that it was burdensome to use the application or that they had trouble remembering to record their food intake. The mobile application Diet-A offers the opportunity to monitor dietary intake through real-time feedback. However, use of Diet-A may not provide accurate information on the food intake of adolescents, partly because of the recording burden.
Continuous assessment of the cerebral vasomotor reactivity in head injury.

OBJECTIVE Cerebrovascular vasomotor reactivity reflects changes in smooth muscle tone in the arterial wall in response to changes in transmural pressure or the concentration of carbon dioxide in blood. We investigated whether slow waves in arterial blood pressure (ABP) and intracranial pressure (ICP) may be used to derive an index that reflects the reactivity of vessels to changes in ABP. METHODS A method for the continuous monitoring of the association between slow spontaneous waves in ICP and arterial pressure was adopted in a group of 82 patients with head injuries. ABP, ICP, and transcranial doppler blood flow velocity in the middle cerebral artery was recorded daily (20- to 120-min time periods). A Pressure-Reactivity Index (PRx) was calculated as a moving correlation coefficient between 40 consecutive samples of values for ICP and ABP averaged for a period of 5 seconds. A moving correlation coefficient (Mean Index) between spontaneous fluctuations of mean flow velocity and cerebral perfusion pressure, which was previously reported to describe cerebral blood flow autoregulation, was also calculated. RESULTS A positive PRx correlated with high ICP (r = 0.366; P < 0.001), low admission Glasgow Coma Scale score (r = 0.29; P < 0.01), and poor outcome at 6 months after injury (r = 0.48; P < 0.00001). During the first 2 days after injury, PRx was positive (P < 0.05), although only in patients with unfavorable outcomes. The correlation between PRx and Mean index (r = 0.63) was highly significant (P < 0.000001). CONCLUSION Computer analysis of slow waves in ABP and ICP is able to provide a continuous index of cerebrovascular reactivity to changes in arterial pressure, which is of prognostic significance.
Detecting and characterizing high-frequency oscillations in epilepsy: a case study of big data analysis

We develop a framework to uncover and analyse dynamical anomalies from massive, nonlinear and non-stationary time series data. The framework consists of three steps: preprocessing of massive datasets to eliminate erroneous data segments, application of the empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert transform paradigm to obtain the fundamental components embedded in the time series at distinct time scales, and statistical/scaling analysis of the components. As a case study, we apply our framework to detecting and characterizing high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) from a big database of rat electroencephalogram recordings. We find a striking phenomenon: HFOs exhibit on–off intermittency that can be quantified by algebraic scaling laws. Our framework can be generalized to big data-related problems in other fields such as large-scale sensor data and seismic data analysis.
Lessons in using vibrotactile feedback to guide fast arm motions

We present and evaluate an arm-motion guidance system that uses magnetic tracking sensors and low cost vibrotactile actuators. The system measures the movement of the user's arm and provides vibration feedback at the wrist and elbow when they stray from the desired motion. An initial study was conducted to investigate whether adding tactile feedback to visual feedback reduces motion errors when a user is learning a new arm trajectory. Although subjects preferred it, we found that the addition of tactile feedback did not affect motion tracking performance. We also found no strong preference or performance differences between attractive and repulsive tactile feedback. Some factors that may have influenced these results include the speed and the complexity of the tested motions, the type of tactile actuators and drive signals used, and inconsistencies in joint angle estimation due to Euler angle gimbal lock. We discuss insights from this analysis and provide suggestions for future systems and studies in tactile motion guidance.
Development of Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Based Desorption-Ionisation Sources for Mass Spectrometry

Ambient ionisation mass spectrometry is a rapidly increasing field, largely dominated by ambient ionisation sources that are dependent upon plasma formation. This thesis discusses attempts to create a plasma based ionisation source used at atmospheric pressure to be integrated with mass spectrometry for small molecule analysis such as drugs and explosives detection. The important features of the plasma ionisation source were to provide a rapid analysis technique which required little or no sample preparation, minimal consumables and a large sampling surface area. The plasma sources developed in this study were used to treat various surface types replicating banknotes for drugs on money analysis, ensuring that plasma treatment was not detrimental to their integrity. Furthermore, the plasma sources were all coupled with various mass spectrometers for sample analysis and were successfully able to detect various drugs and explosives in both positive and negative ion modes at low nanogram to picogram detection limits. The evidence that these plasma sources are capable of ionising in both positiveand negative-ion modes suggests the possibility of other applications within small molecule analysis. Most importantly, these plasma sources are able to detect drugs and explosives with very minimal sample preparation even from UK polymer banknotes without destroying them. This technique reduces consumable costs; whilst affording great sensitivity, speed, high-throughput, selectivity and specificity. As these plasma sources have been coupled with various mass spectrometers, it is possible that they will be readily coupled with other detectors such as ion mobility spectrometry.