Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vegetation structure and fire weather influence variation in burn severity and fuel consumption during peatland wildfires

Abstract. Temperate peatland wildfires are of significant environmental concern but information on their environmental effects is lacking. We assessed variation in burn severity and fuel consumption within and between wildfires that burnt British moorlands in 2011 and 2012. We adapted the composite burn index (pCBI) to provide semi-quantitative estimates of burn severity. Pre- and post-fire surface (shrubs and graminoids) and ground (litter, moss, duff) fuel loads associated with large wildfires were assessed using destructive sampling and analysed using a generalised linear mixed model (GLMM). Consumption during wildfires was compared with published estimates of consumption during prescribed burns. Burn severity and fuel consumption were related to fire weather, assessed using the Canadian Fire Weather Index System (FWI System), and pre-fire vegetation type. pCBI varied 1.6 fold between, and up to 1.7 fold within, wildfires. pCBI was higher where moisture codes of the FWI System indicated drier fuels. Spatial variation in pre- and post-fire fuel load accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in fuel loads. Average surface fuel consumption was a linear function of pre-fire fuel load. Average ground fuel combustion completeness could be predicted by the Buildup Index. Carbon release ranged between 0.36 and 1.00 kg C m−2. The flammability of ground fuel layers may explain the higher C release-rates seen for wildfires in comparison to prescribed burns. Drier moorland community types appear to be at greater risk of severe burns than blanket-bog communities.
Temporal Change in Functional Richness and Evenness in the Eastern African Plio-Pleistocene Carnivoran Guild

We analyze functional richness and functional evenness of the carnivoran guild in eastern Africa from 3.5 Ma to 1.5 Ma, and compare them to the present day. The data consist of characters of the craniodental apparatus of 76 species of fossil and extant carnivorans, divided into four 0.5 Ma time slices from 3.5 to 1.5 Ma, together with the modern fauna. Focus is on large (>21.5 kg) carnivores. Results show that the large carnivore guild has lost nearly 99% of its functional richness since 3.5 Ma, in a process starting prior to 2 Ma. Measurement of functional evenness shows the modern large carnivore guild to be unique in being randomly distributed in morphospace while in all past time slices there is significant clustering of species. The results are analyzed in the light of known changes to climate and environment in eastern Africa. We conclude that climate change is unlikely to explain all of the changes found and suggest that the evolution of early hominins into carnivore niche space, especially the evolution of derived dietary strategies after 2 Ma, played a significant part in the reduction of carnivore functional richness.
A PLANNING MODULAR NEURAL-NETWORK ROBOT FOR ASYNCHRONOUS MULTIGOAL NAVIGATION TASKS

This paper focuses on two planning neural-network controllers, a "forward planner" and a "bidirectional planner". These have been developed within the framework of Sutton's Dyna-PI architectures (planning within reinforcement learning) and have already been presented in previous papers. The novelty of this paper is that the architecture of these planners is made modular in some of its components in order to deal with catastrophic interference. The controllers are tested through a simulated robot engaged in an asynchronous multi-goal path-planning problem that should exacerbate the interference problems. The results show that: (a) the modular planners can cope with multi-goal problems allowing generalisation but avoiding interference; (b) when dealing with multi-goal problems the planners keeps the advantages shown previously for one-goal problems vs. sheer reinforcement learning; (c) the superiority of the bidirectional planner vs. the forward planner is confirmed for the multi-goal task.
The joyless economy : the psychology of human satisfaction

When this classic work was first published in 1976, its central tenet--more is not necessarily better--placed it in direct conflict with mainstream thought in economics. Within a few years, however, this apparently paradoxical claim was gaining wide acceptance. Scitovsky's ground-breaking book was the first to apply theories of behaviorist psychology to questions of consumer behavior and to do so in clear, non-technical language. Setting out to analyze the failures of our consumerist lifestyle, Scitovsky concluded that people's need for stimulation is so vital that it can lead to violence if not satisfied by novelty--whether in challenging work, art, fashion, gadgets, late-model cars, or scandal. Though much of the book stands as a record of American post-war prosperity and its accompanying problems, the revised edition also takes into account recent social and economic changes. A new preface and a foreword by economist Robert Frank introduce some of the issues created by those changes and two revised chapters develop them, discussing among others the assimilation of counter-cultural ideas throughout American society, especially ideas concerning quality of life. Scitovsky draws fascinating connections between the new elite of college-educated consumers and the emergence of a growing underclass plagued by drugs and violence, perceptively tracing the reactions of these disparate groups to the problems of leisure and boredom. In the wake of the so-called "decade of greed" and amidst calls for a "kindler, gentler" society, The Joyless Economy seems more timely than ever.
Characterization of the E-commerce Storage Subsystem Workload

This paper characterizes the workload seen at the storage subsystem of an e-commerce system. Measurements are conducted on multi-tiered systems running three different benchmarks, i.e., TPC-W, TPC-C, and RUBiS. In this environment, TPC-W and RUBiS are used to represent web-based e-commerce applications (i.e., on-line shopping and auctioning). They generate mostly READ-dominated workloads. The TPC-C benchmark, although not directly an e-commerce benchmark, is used to represent an e-commerce system under heavy on-line transactions processing activity. Different from the TPC-W and RUBiS benchmarks, TPC-C generates WRITE-dominated workloads.For all three benchmarks, in addition to the system load, the workload mix causes the system resources such as memory to saturate,IO traffic to increase, and, consequently, overall system throughput to reduce.Generally, when a workload shifts from web-site browsing (i.e, reading) to transaction processing (i.e writing) the IO load reduces but the footprint of the IO working set increases, which slows down the IO subsystem.File system and device driver scheduling represent elements in the IO path that for a given set of system resources further improve user-level throughput. Their impact is visible for medium to high utilization and diminishes for light load or overload.
Credible User Identification using Social Network Analysis in a Q & A Site

Although recent commercial search engines use the information concerned with Question and Answering (Q&A), it is still difficult to acquire an appropriate content from numerous user-described answers in Q&A sites. In order to identify the credible users to help people find relevant answer, in this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm, InfluenceRank, which is basis of analyzing relationship in terms of users’ activities and their mutual trusts. Our experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline algorithms.
A menagerie of non-finitely based process semantics over BPA* – from ready simulation to completed traces

Fokkink and Zantema (Fokkink and Zantema 1994) have shown that bisimulation equivalence has a finite equational axiomatization over the language of Basic Process Algebra with the binary Kleene star operation (BPA*). In light of this positive result on the mathematical tractability of bisimulation equivalence over BPA*, a natural question to ask is whether any other (pre)congruence relation in van Glabbeek's linear time/branching time spectrum is finitely (in)equationally axiomatizable over it. In this paper, we prove that, unlike bisimulation equivalence, none of the preorders and equivalences in van Glabbeek's linear time/branching time spectrum, whose discriminating power lies in between that of ready simulation and that of completed traces, has a finite equational axiomatization. This we achieve by exhibiting a family of (in)equivalences that holds in ready simulation semantics (which is the finest semantics that we consider) and whose instances cannot all be proved by means of any finite set of (in)equations that is sound in completed trace semantics (which is the coarsest semantics that is appropriate for the language BPA*). To this end, for every finite collection of (in)equations that are sound in completed trace semantics, we build a model in which some of the (in)equivalences of the family under consideration fail. The construction of the model mimics the one used by Conway (Conway 1971, p. 105) in his proof of a result, originally due to Redko, to the effect that infinitely many equations are needed to axiomatize equality of regular expressions. Our non-finite axiomatizability results apply to the language BPA* over an arbitrary non-empty set of actions. In particular, we show that completed trace equivalence is not finitely based over BPA* even when the set of actions is a singleton. Our proof of this result may be adapted to the standard language of regular expressions to yield a solution to an open problem posed by Salomaa (Salomaa 1969, p. 143). Another semantics that is usually considered in process theory is trace semantics. Trace semantics is, in general, not preserved by sequential composition, and is therefore inappropriate for the language BPA*. We show that, if the set of actions is a singleton, trace equivalence and preorder are preserved by all the operators in the signature of BPA*, and coincide with simulation equivalence and preorder, respectively. In that case, unlike all the other semantics considered in this paper, trace semantics have finite, complete equational axiomatizations over closed terms.
The Effects of Online Formative and Summative Assessment on Test Anxiety and Performance

This study analyzed the effects of online formative and summative assessment materials on undergraduates' experiences with attention to learners' testing behaviors (e.g., performance, study habits) and beliefs (e.g., test anxiety, perceived test threat). The results revealed no detriment to students' perceptions of tests or performances on tests when comparing online to paper-pencil summative assessments. In fact, students taking tests online reported lower levels of perceived test threat. Regarding formative assessment, findings indicate a small benefit for using online practice tests prior to graded course exams. This effect appears to be in part due to the reduction of the deleterious effects of negative test perceptions afforded in conditions where practice tests were available. The results support the integration of online practice tests to help students prepare for course exams and also reveal that secure web-based testing can aid undergraduate instruction through improved student confidence and increased instructional time.
Exploring the possibility of using outdoor recreation to promote mental health in veterans with PTSD

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Reward Activates Stimulus-Specific and Task-Dependent Representations in Visual Association Cortices

Humans reliably learn which actions lead to rewards. One prominent question is how credit is assigned to environmental stimuli that are acted upon. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have provided evidence that representations of rewarded stimuli are activated upon reward delivery, providing possible eligibility traces for credit assignment. Our study sought evidence of postreward activation in sensory cortices satisfying two conditions of instrumental learning: postreward activity should reflect the stimulus category that preceded reward (stimulus specificity), and should occur only if the stimulus was acted on to obtain reward (task dependency). Our experiment implemented two tasks in the fMRI scanner. The first was a perceptual decision-making task on degraded face and house stimuli. Stimulus specificity was evident as rewards activated the sensory cortices associated with face versus house perception more strongly after face versus house decisions, respectively, particularly in the fusiform face area. Stimulus specificity was further evident in a psychophysiological interaction analysis wherein face-sensitive areas correlated with nucleus accumbens activity after face-decision rewards, whereas house-sensitive areas correlated with nucleus accumbens activity after house-decision rewards. The second task required participants to make an instructed response. The criterion of task dependency was fulfilled as rewards after face versus house responses activated the respective association cortices to a larger degree when faces and houses were relevant to the performed task. Our study is the first to show that postreward sensory cortex activity meets these two key criteria of credit assignment, and does so independently from bottom-up perceptual processing.
Jet-Driven Motions in the Narrow-Line Region of NGC 1068

We have obtained Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Camera (FOC) f/48 long-slit spectroscopy of the inner 4'' of the narrow-line region (NLR) of NGC 1068 between 3500 and 5400 Å with a spectral resolution of 1.78 Å pixel-1. At a spatial scale of 0. ″0287 pixel-1 these data provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in resolution over previous ground-based spectra and allow us to trace the interaction between the radio jet and the gas in the NLR. Our results show that within ±0. ″5 of the radio jet the emission lines are kinematically disturbed and split into two components whose velocity separation is 1500 km s-1. The filaments associated with the radio lobe also show a redshifted kinematic disturbance on the order of 300 km s-1, which is probably a consequence of the expansion of the radio plasma. Furthermore, the material enveloping the radio jet is in a much higher ionization state than that of the surrounding NLR gas. The highest excitation is coincident with the jet axis, where emission in the coronal line of [Fe VII] λ3769 is detected and the He II λ4686 is strong but where [O II] λ3727 is depressed. This large localized increase in ionization on the jet axis is accompanied by the presence of an excess continuum. Because the electron density is substantially larger in the jet compared with the surrounding NLR, these results can be explained only if there is a more intense ionizing continuum associated with the jet. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, which include an intrinsically anisotropic nuclear radiation field, a reduced gas covering factor, or the presence of a local ionization source. The morphology, kinematics, and, possibly, the ionization structure of the NLR in the vicinity of the jet of NGC 1068 are a direct consequence of the interaction with the radio outflow.
Infliximab in Steroid-dependent Ulcerative Colitis: Effectiveness and Predictors of Clinical and Endoscopic Remission

Background:Up to 20% of patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) become steroid-dependent during their course. Thiopurines are recommended in steroid-dependent UC, but their efficacy is debated. Data exploring the use of infliximab in these patients are scarce. Aims of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of infliximab in steroid-dependent UC and identify predictors of steroid-free remission, mucosal healing (MH), and colectomy. Methods:Steroid-dependent UC patients were enrolled and intentionally treated with infliximab. The prospectively designed analyses evaluated (1) steroid-free clinical remission at 6 and 12 months, (2) steroid-free clinical remission and MH at 12 months, and (3) colectomy within 12 months. Results:One hundred and twenty-six active steroid-dependent UC patients were studied. Of the 126 patients, 36 patients were retrospectively included and 90 patients prospectively enrolled. Steroid-free remission was 53% and 47% at 6 and 12 months, respectively. Predictors of steroid-free remission at 6 and 12 months were thiopurine-naive status (hazard ratio [HR], 2.5 and HR, 2.8, respectively) and combination therapy (HR, 2.1 and HR, 2.2, respectively). At 12 months, 32% were in steroid-free remission and MH. Thiopurine-naive status predicted steroid-free remission and MH (odds ratio, 3.6). C-reactive protein drop to normal after infliximab induction was predictive of steroid-free remission at 6 (HR, 5.9) and 12 months (HR, 4.6) and steroid-free remission and MH at 12 months (odds ratio, 6.0). Twelve patients underwent colectomy after a median of 4.7 months. Steroid sparing significantly reduced the risk of colectomy within 12 months (HR, 0.14). Conclusions:Infliximab seems effective in steroid-dependent UC. Thiopurine-naive status and combination therapy significantly increase the rate of steroid-free remission up to 12 months.
Using emulation to understand and improve wireless networks and applications

Researchers have long faced a fundamental tension between the experimental realism of wireless testbeds on one hand, and the control and repeatability of simulation on the other hand. To overcome the stark tradeoff of these traditional alternatives, we are developing a wireless emulator that enables both realistic and repeatable experimentation by leveraging physical layer emulation. We discuss the design and implementation of a prototype wireless emulator, and show how this emulator can be leveraged to provide insight into wireless network and application behaviour. Our experience shows that, compared to simulation, our emulator-based approach provides us with a better understanding of real-world wireless network performance, and enables us to quickly deploy our research into an operational wireless network, while still allowing us to enjoy the benefits of a controlled experimental environment.
Human and Animal Vigilance

Experiments with both men and monkeys, summarized in this report, indicate that vigilance decrements are associated with the ease or difficulty of observing. A given set of signals may be detected often or rarely by human observers, depending on how easy it is to watch the background of stimulus events within which signals can occur.
Akan shit: getting rid of dirt in Ghana

Il existe un curieux paradoxe parmi les Akan du Ghana concernant leurs conceptions sur les excrements et la souillure corporelle : d'un cote, ils sont tres exigeants sur la proprete du corps et de l'autre, les infrastructures (toilettes) sont deficientes. L'A. s'est interesse aux pratiques corporelles, aux conceptions sur la constipation, aux usages sanitaires dans la sphere privee et dans les services hospitaliers et publics, ainsi qu'au langage scatologique.
Australian Economic Growth in Historical Perspective

This article reviews recent contributions to the evidence on, and interpretations of, the long-run growth of the Australian economy. It is noted that several themes currently prominent in growth theory and empirical growth analysis are reflected in the recent literature on the Australian historical experience. Copyright © 2004 Economic Society of Australia. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
InGaAs/InAlAs single photon avalanche diode for 1550 nm photons

A single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) with an InGaAs absorption region, and an InAlAs avalanche region was designed and demonstrated to detect 1550 nm wavelength photons. The characterization included leakage current, dark count rate and single photon detection efficiency as functions of temperature from 210 to 294 K. The SPAD exhibited good temperature stability, with breakdown voltage dependence of approximately 45 mV K−1. Operating at 210 K and in a gated mode, the SPAD achieved a photon detection probability of 26% at 1550 nm with a dark count rate of 1 × 108 Hz. The time response of the SPAD showed decreasing timing jitter (full width at half maximum) with increasing overbias voltage, with 70 ps being the smallest timing jitter measured.
The relationship between serum levels of fibroblast growth factor 21 and diabetic retinopathy

Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) is a major metabolic regulator that has been shown to be elevated in a number of metabolic disturbances including type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and the metabolic syndrome, but few studies about the relationship between serum FGF21 and the complications of diabetes have been done. Since the association between FGF21 and diabetic retinopathy is not clear, this study was conducted to investigate this relationship. In this cross-sectional study, 61 subjects (14 healthy controls, 22 diabetic patients without retinopathy, and 25 patients with diabetic retinopathy) were evaluated. All patients in the study were examined for the presence of diabetic retinopathy. Various clinical and biochemical parameters including FGF21 were evaluated and analyzed and compared between the study groups. Serum levels of FGF21 showed a significant difference between the three groups (P=0.003) but the difference between diabetic patients with and without retinopathy was not significant (P=0.122). Regression model was used to evaluate the role of FGF21 in predicting diabetic retinopathy. In the multivariate logistic regression model after adjustment of systolic blood pressure and fasting blood glucose, the level of FGF21 was not associated with diabetic retinopathy. In the multivariate model, only fasting blood glucose was associated with diabetic retinopathy (P=0.009). According to the results of this study, serum levels of FGF21 in diabetic patients was higher than the control group but these raised levels could not predict the presence of diabetic retinopathy.