Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial epidemiological techniques in cholera mapping and analysis towards a local scale predictive modelling

Cholera spatial epidemiology is the study of the spread and control of the disease spatial pattern and epidemics. Previous studies have shown that multi-factorial causation such as human behaviour, ecology and other infectious risk factors influence the disease outbreaks. Thus, understanding spatial pattern and possible interrelationship factors of the outbreaks are crucial to be explored an in-depth study. This study focuses on the integration of geographical information system (GIS) and epidemiological techniques in exploratory analyzing the cholera spatial pattern and distribution in the selected district of Sabah. Spatial Statistic and Pattern tools in ArcGIS and Microsoft Excel software were utilized to map and analyze the reported cholera cases and other data used. Meanwhile, cohort study in epidemiological technique was applied to investigate multiple outcomes of the disease exposure. The general spatial pattern of cholera was highly clustered showed the disease spread easily at a place or person to others especially 1500 meters from the infected person and locations. Although the cholera outbreaks in the districts are not critical, it could be endemic at the crowded areas, unhygienic environment, and close to contaminated water. It was also strongly believed that the coastal water of the study areas has possible relationship with the cholera transmission and phytoplankton bloom since the areas recorded higher cases. GIS demonstrates a vital spatial epidemiological technique in determining the distribution pattern and elucidating the hypotheses generating of the disease. The next research would be applying some advanced geo-analysis methods and other disease risk factors for producing a significant a local scale predictive risk model of the disease in Malaysia.
Late Jurassic fossils from Cuba and their economic significance

The Vinales limestone fauna is correlated with the upper Portlandian on the basis of the ranges of its normally coiled ammonites and their similarity with species in the upper Portlandian of Mexico and Argentina. Genera not known below the upper Portlandian include Corongoceras, Micracanthoceras, Durangites, Lytohoplites, and Parodontoceras. Genera not known above the Portlandian include Metahaploceras, Physodoceras, and Durangites. Genera not known above the lower Tithonian include Corongoceras and Lytohoplites. Previous correlation with the Lower Cretaceous was based mainly on identity of aptychi and similarity of uncoiled ammonites to species in the Lower Cretaceous of southern Europe. Association of these forms with normal ammonites permits no doubt as to their Portlandian age and suggests that aptychi must be used with caution in detailed stratigraphic work. Nothing in the fauna suggests the Kimmeridgian or Tithonian stages. The much younger age of the fauna than that of the Argovian-lower Kimmeridgian ammonites, described by Sanchez Roig and Marjorie O9Connell, shows that the older fossils are from the San Cayetano formation beneath the Vinales limestone, and that these formations are separated by an unconformity involving parts of the Kimmeridgian and Portlandian. Furthermore, the study shows that undoubted Lower Cretaceous rocks have not yet been found in the West Indies, that metamorphic rocks elsewhere in the West Indies may be Jurassic, and that the regions bordering the Gulf of Mexico have a similar Jurassic history. It suggests that the Palisade disturbance is late Jurassic. Application of these conclusions toward forming a clearer picture of events in Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous times should aid in showing the time of origin and possible distribution of mineral deposits and should be particularly useful in explorations for petroleum in the deeply buried rocks of the Gulf region.
A Case Study on Audio Feedback with Geography Undergraduates

Several small-scale studies have suggested that audio feedback can help students to reflect on their learning and to develop deep learning approaches that are associated with higher attainment in assessments. For this case study, Geography undergraduates were given audio feedback on a written essay assignment, alongside traditional written feedback. The pros and cons of such a technique are explored via student questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews, combined with a stimulated recall session with the tutor to analyze the feedback process. Results highlighted the need for careful consideration of various factors (optimum time length, style, tone of voice, the register of language and timing) when giving audio feedback.
Assessment of second‐generation MODIS aerosol retrieval (Collection 005) at Kanpur, India

The second‐generation MODIS aerosol retrieval (Collection 005) from EOS‐ Aqua (2002–2005) was evaluated using ground‐based AERONET measurements at Kanpur (26.45°N, 80.35°E) northern India. We found that the aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals are more accurate compared to that of previous retrieval (Collection 004). About 70% of the total retrievals at 0.47 μm and 0.55 μm and 60% of the retrievals at 0.66 μm wavelength in the new version fall within the pre‐launch uncertainty (Δτ = ±0.05 ± 0.15τ, where τ is AOD) with better correlation (R2 ∼ 0.83) at all three wavelengths. However, MODIS still tends to over‐estimate AOD for a few retrievals in the presence of dust aerosols. The error in the fine‐dominated AOD was large for most retrievals in the C005. However, the fine‐dominated AOD of Collection 004 was better correlated with the equivalent AERONET data. This suggests that the fine‐dominated AOD retrievals need to be re‐examined further.
Resource optimization in realistic mobile backhaul networks

This paper proposes a resource management system that allows maximizing the traffic which can be served by a given mobile backhaul network. It does so by means of a novel path optimization algorithm that consists of an offline component (based on predicted traffic demand information) and an online component (for excess traffic). As opposed to previous traffic engineering approaches, which usually assume a fluid traffic model, our algorithm explicitly takes flow classification and thus splitting granularity into account. To improve network utilization, we introduce t time slots and allow m traffic matrices, where the number of m depends on the QoS classes to be differentiated. The algorithm is able to compute a highly efficient resource allocation for each QoS class (also taking availability requirements into account) and avoids re-routing of QoS-sensitive traffic. We present a novel Genetic Algorithm for solving the offline problem. Evaluation is done using synthetic as well as real mobile backhaul data from European operators.
Corruption, Firm Governance, and the Cost of Capital

We develop a model of a firm owned by shareholders and administered by managers who may be either honest or dishonest. When managers have an informational advantage but shareholders retain control, dishonest managers can make false reports that distort investment and thereby reduce firm cash flows. When dishonest managers have privileged access to both information and control, firm value is further reduced and profits are diminished especially in the worst states of the world. Ine®ective corporate governance combined with corruption (dishonesty) thus increases firms’ exposure to systematic risk. In a cross-country empirical test of the model, we find that corruption substantially increases firm betas, particularly in countries with weak shareholder rights. Moving from the level of corruption in Canada to that in South Korea raises industry-adjusted betas by 0.35.
Acute Physiological and Chronic Health Evaluation II Score and its Correlation with Three Surgical Strategies for Management of Ileal Perforations

Introduction: Ileal perforation peritonitis is a common surgical emergency in the Indian subcontinent and in tropical countries. It is reported to constitute the fifth common cause of abdominal emergencies due to high incidence of enteric fever and tuberculosis in these management based on Acute Physiological and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) score. Methods: The following study was conducted in the Department of General Surgery, Government Medical College, Patiala. A total of 57 patients were studied and divided in to Group I, II, and III. APACHE II score accessed and score between 10 and 19 were blindly randomized into three procedures primary closure, resection-anastomosis, and ileostomy. The outcome was compared. Results: Ileal perforations were most commonly observed in the third and fourth decade of life with male dominance. APACHE II score was accessed and out of total 57 patients, 6 patients had APACHE II score of 0-9, 48 patients had APACHE II score of 10-19, and 3 patients had APACHE II score of ≥20. In APACHE II score 10-19, 15 patients underwent primary closure, 16 patients underwent resection-anastomosis, and 17 patients underwent ileostomy. Discussion and Conclusion: Primary closure of perforation is advocated in patients with single, small perforation (<1 cm) with APACHE II score 10-19 irrespective of duration of perforation. Ileostomy is advocated in APACHE II score 10-19, where the terminal ileum is grossly inflamed with multiple perforations, large perforations (>1 cm), fecal peritonitis, matted bowel loops, intraoperative evidence of caseating lymph nodes, strictures, and an unhealthy gut due to edema.
Small Sample Size Performance of the Energy Detector

We examine the small sample size performance of the energy detector for spectrum sensing in AWGN. By making use of the cube-of-Gaussian approximation of chi-squared random variables, we derive a novel, simple, and accurate analytical expression for the minimum number of samples required to achieve a desired probability of detection and false alarm. This way, the number of samples can be calculated by the energy detector with low complexity. We also propose a useful approximation for the performance of cooperative energy detection.
Identifying and analyzing researchers on twitter

For millions of users Twitter is an important communication platform, a social network, and a system for resource sharing. Likewise, scientists use Twitter to connect with other researchers, announce calls for papers, or share their thoughts. Filtering tweets, discovering other researchers, or finding relevant information on a topic of interest, however, is difficult since no directory of researchers on Twitter exists. In this paper we present an approach to identify Twitter accounts of researchers and demonstrate its utility for the discipline of computer science. Based on a seed set of computer science conferences we collect relevant Twitter users which we can partially map to ground-truth data. The mapping is leveraged to learn a model for classifying the remaining. To gain first insights into how researchers use Twitter, we empirically analyze the identified users and compare their age, popularity, influence, and social network.
Analyzing bias in prominent climatic data sets

The majority of documented climatic data set biases can be divided into two categories: physical biases and calendar biases. Factors affecting the consistency and accuracy of the variable measurement (physical bias) throughout the data record include systematic measurement error and changes in instrumentation, time of observation, measurement site location, observation methods, and surrounding land use/land cover. Factors influencing data aggregated from shorter temporal scales to longer temporal scales (i.e. days to years or days to months) are calendar biases and have been studied to a much lesser extent than physical biases. Previous homogenization efforts for prominent temperature and precipitation data sets are detailed in this review. Numerous physical biases are accounted for in these homogenization efforts and a debate exists in the literature regarding the effectiveness of these bias adjustment methods, leading some investigators to question the suitability of these adjusted data sets for the identification of large-scale climate change signals. Calendar biases are not addressed in previous homogenization efforts. After a brief analysis, a calendar bias known to exist in homogenized data sets (the leap year bias) is identified in the CRUTEM3v, an important global monthly near-surface air temperature data set.
Water Impact of Syntactic Foams

Syntactic foams are particulate composite materials that are extensively integrated in naval and aerospace structures as core materials for sandwich panels. While several studies have demonstrated the potential of syntactic foams as energy absorbing materials in impact tests, our understanding of their response to water impact remains elusive. In this work, we attempt a first characterization of the behavior of a vinyl ester/glass syntactic subject to slamming. High-speed imaging is leveraged to elucidate the physics of water impact of syntactic foam wedges in a free-fall drop tower. From the images, we simultaneously measure the deformation of the wedge and the hydrodynamic loading, thereby clarifying the central role of fluid–structure interaction during water impact. We study two different impact heights and microballoon density to assess the role of impact energy and syntactic foam composition on the slamming response. Our results demonstrate that both these factors have a critical role on the slamming response of syntactic foams. Reducing the density of microballoons might help to reduce the severity of the hydrodynamic loading experienced by the wedge, but this comes at the expense of a larger deformation. Such a larger deformation could ultimately lead to failure for large drop heights. These experimental results offer compelling evidence for the role of hydroelastic coupling in the slamming response of syntactic foams.
Dissolution of premarital cohabitation in Canada

The rapid increase in the number of unmarried cohabiting couples, indicated by recent evidence, is crucial to our understanding of changing marriage patterns. The levels and patterns of entry into cohabitation have been well documented over the last two decades. but little is known about the outcomes of nonmarital cohabitation. In this study we examine two competing outcomes of cohabitation relationships: union separation and legalization of the union through marriage. Our results show that the hazard rate of union dissolution is affected particularly by gender, fertility status, partner’s marital status, religion, age at start of cohabitation, year cohabitation commenced, and region.
Neural Emoji Recommendation in Dialogue Systems

Emoji is an essential component in dialogues which has been broadly utilized on almost all social platforms. It could express more delicate feelings beyond plain texts and thus smooth the communications between users, making dialogue systems more anthropomorphic and vivid. In this paper, we focus on automatically recommending appropriate emojis given the contextual information in multi-turn dialogue systems, where the challenges locate in understanding the whole conversations. More specifically, we propose the hierarchical long short-term memory model (H-LSTM) to construct dialogue representations, followed by a softmax classifier for emoji classification. We evaluate our models on the task of emoji classification in a real-world dataset, with some further explorations on parameter sensitivity and case study. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the best performances on all evaluation metrics. It indicates that our method could well capture the contextual information and emotion flow in dialogues, which is significant for emoji recommendation.
Biomonitoring of Human Exposure to Prestige Oil: Effects on DNA and Endocrine Parameters

Since 1960, about 400 tankers spilled more than 377765 tons of oil, with the Prestige accident (Galician coast, NW Spain, November 2002) the most recent. Taking into account the consistent large number of individuals exposed to oil that exists all over the world, it seems surprising the absence in the literature of studies focused on the chronic effects of this exposure on human health. In this work we evaluated the level of DNA damage by means of comet assay, and the potential endocrine alterations (prolactin and cortisol) caused by Prestige oil exposure in a population of 180 individuals, classified in 3 groups according to the tasks performed, and 60 controls. Heavy metals in blood were determined as exposure biomarkers, obtaining significant increases of aluminum, nickel and lead in the exposed groups as compared to controls. Higher levels of genetic damage and endocrine alterations were also observed in the exposed population. DNA damage levels were influenced by age, sex, and the use of protective clothes, and prolactin concentrations by the last two factors. Surprisingly, the use of mask did not seem to protect individuals from genetic or endocrine alterations. Moreover, polymorphisms in genes encoding for the main enzymes involved in the metabolism of oil components were analyzed as susceptibility biomarkers. CYP1A1-3'UTR and EPHX1 codons 113 and 139 variant alleles were related to higher damage levels, while lower DNA damage was observed in GSTM1 and GSTT1 null individuals.
A Grain of Salt for the WMT Manual Evaluation

The Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT) has become one of ACL's flagship workshops, held annually since 2006. In addition to soliciting papers from the research community, WMT also features a shared translation task for evaluating MT systems. This shared task is notable for having manual evaluation as its cornerstone. The Workshop's overview paper, playing a descriptive and administrative role, reports the main results of the evaluation without delving deep into analyzing those results. The aim of this paper is to investigate and explain some interesting idiosyncrasies in the reported results, which only become apparent when performing a more thorough analysis of the collected annotations. Our analysis sheds some light on how the reported results should (and should not) be interpreted, and also gives rise to some helpful recommendation for the organizers of WMT.
Plate velocity exhumation of ultrahigh-pressure eclogites in the Pakistan Himalaya

U-Pb ages of zircon and allanite from the coesite-bearing ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) units in the Kaghan Valley, northern Pakistan, demonstrate that peak UHP metamorphism along the northern margin of the Indian plate occurred at 46.4 ± 0.1 Ma at peak pressure-temperature conditions of >27.5 kbar (>100 km) and 720–770 °C. Much lower pressure retrogressive growth of titanite took place between 46.4 and ca. 44 Ma, indicating that the eclogites were exhumed to 35 km depth at or before 44 Ma, implying very rapid exhumation rates within the mantle of ∼30–80 mm/yr or more, comparable to rapid plate velocities. Once entrained in the base of the crust, the eclogites followed a slower cooling history from 45 Ma, similar to the amphibolite facies gneisses of the Pakistan Himalaya.
Influence of ion energy and substrate temperature on the optical and electronic properties of tetrah

The properties of amorphous carbon (a-C) deposited using a filtered cathodic vacuum arc as a function of the ion energy and substrate temperature are reported. The sp3 fraction was found to strongly depend on the ion energy, giving a highly sp3 bonded a-C denoted as tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) at ion energies around 100 eV. The optical band gap was found to follow similar trends to other diamondlike carbon films, varying almost linearly with sp2 fraction. The dependence of the electronic properties are discussed in terms of models of the electronic structure of a-C. The structure of ta-C was also strongly dependent on the deposition temperature, changing sharply to sp2 above a transition temperature, T1, of ≈200 °C. Furthermore, T1 was found to decrease with increasing ion energy. Most film properties, such as compressive stress and plasmon energy, were correlated to the sp3 fraction. However, the optical and electrical properties were found to undergo a more gradual transition with the deposition.
The Phytoplankton Species Composition and Abundance of Ogun River, Abeokuta, Southwestern Nigeria

The phytoplankton species composition and abundance in Ogun River, Ogun state, Southwest Nigeria was studied for a period of seven months (December, 2011-June, 2012), A total of forty-one genera belonging to five taxonomic groups were recorded from Ogun River. The phytoplankton species composition was dominated by Chrysophyta with 15 species consisting of 36.6% followed by Chlorophyta with 14 consisting of 34.1%. This was followed by Cyanophyta (7 species) consisting of 17.1%, Euglenophyta with 3 species consisting of 7.3% and Pyrrophyta with 2 species consisting 4.92%. Cyanophyta was the highest in abundance consisting of 41% while the lowest in abundance was Pyrrophyta consisting of 1.5%. The low phytoplankton abundance and diversity observed in this study must have been caused by the polluted nature of the water due to the anthropogenic activities carried out around its shores The dominance of Cyanophyta in this river is similar to findings from Lake Victoria, Lake Bishoftu, Lake Chaohu and the temple pond of Thirupour .
SatBałtyk – A Baltic environmental satellite remote sensing system – an ongoing project in Poland. Part 2: Practical applicability and preliminary results*

Abstract This paper is the second part of the description of the first stage of the SatBaltyk project’s implementation. Part 1 (Woźniak et al. 2011, in this issue) presents the assumptions and objectives of SatBaltyk and describes the most important stages in the history of our research, which is the foundation of this project. It also discusses the operation and general structure of the SatBaltyk system. Part 2 addresses various aspects of the practical applicability of the SatBaltyk Operational System to Baltic ecosystem monitoring. Examples are given of the Baltic’s characteristics estimated using the preliminary versions of the algorithms in this Operational System. At the current stage of research, these algorithms apply mainly to the characteristics of the solar energy influx and the distribution of this energy among the various processes taking place in the atmosphere-sea system, and also to the radiation balance of the sea surface, the irradiance conditions for photosynthesis and the condition of plant communities in the water, sea surface temperature distributions and some other marine phenomena correlated with this temperature. Monitoring results obtained with these preliminary algorithms are exemplified in the form of distribution maps of selected abiotic parameters of the Baltic, as well as structural and functional characteristics of this ecosystem governed by these parameters in the Baltic’s many basins. The maps cover practically the whole area of the Baltic Sea. Also given are results of preliminary inspections of the accuracy of the magnitudes shown on the maps. In actual fact, the errors of these estimates are relatively small. The further practical application of this set of algorithms (to be gradually made more specific) is therefore entirely justified as the basis of the SatBaltyk system for the effective operational monitoring of the state and functioning of Baltic ecosystems. This article also outlines the plans for extending SatBaltyk to include the recording of the effects and hazards caused by current and expected storm events in the Polish coastal zone.