Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Brazilian coastal vulnerability to climate change

The coastal zone of Brazil includes a variety of coastal forms, such as wide occurrence of sedimentary cliffs, large and deeply incised estuaries, crystalline headlands and low-lying coastal plains. These forms will respond in different ways to the expected climate changes and associated sea level rise. The potential vulnerability of the distinct coastal types along the Brazilian coast to climate change is evaluated. Due to the low occupation of large sectors of the coastline, the risks are concentrated in the urbanized areas. The largest impacts are expected to be caused by floods. The absence of long-term observations of oceanographic data or detailed altimetric maps presents a major difficulty for the evaluation of different risk scenarios at the local level and consequently for the application of measures to minimize these impacts over the population. caracteriza por amplos dominios de falesias sedimentares e de rochas do embasamento com alternância de baixadas costeiras e margens ao longo de estuarios inseridos nos relevos elevados. Considerando os distintos compartimentos geomorfologicos e apresentada uma avaliacao da vulnerabilidade potencial em face de uma mudanca climatica e associada elevacao do nivel do mar. Os resultados indicam que a baixa ocupacao de grande parte da zona costeira faz com que as areas de risco se concentram nas cidades costeiras, sendo os riscos de inundacao os de maior impacto sobre a populacao. A ausencia de observacoes continuas de longa duracao, assim como a falta de mapeamentos altimetricos de detalhe, representa a maior dificuldade na construcao de cenarios de risco a nivel local e consequentemente para o desenvolvimento e aplicacao de medidas de minimizacao dos impactos sobre a populacao. Palavras-chave: Vulnerabilidade costeira, mudanca climatica, classificacao costeira, Brasil
A WALK WITH SGD: HOW SGD EXPLORES REGIONS

The non-convex nature of the loss landscape of deep neural networks (DNN) lends them the intuition that over the course of training, stochastic optimization algorithms explore different regions of the loss surface by entering and escaping many local minima due to the noise induced by mini-batches. But is this really the case? This question couples the geometry of the DNN loss landscape with how stochastic optimization algorithms like SGD interact with it during training. Answering this question may help us qualitatively understand the dynamics of deep neural network optimization. We show evidence through qualitative and quantitative experiments that mini-batch SGD rarely crosses barriers during DNN optimization. As we show, the mini-batch induced noise helps SGD explore different regions of the loss surface using a seemingly different mechanism. To complement this finding, we also investigate the qualitative reason behind the slowing down of this exploration when using larger batch-sizes. We show this happens because gradients from larger batch-sizes align more with the top eigenvectors of the Hessian, which makes SGD oscillate in the proximity of the parameter initialization, thus preventing exploration.
Economic Impact of Commercial Hybrid Seed Production in Vegetables on Farm Income, Employment and Farm Welfare – A Case of Tomato and Okra in Karnataka

Commercial Seed Production (CSP) in vegetables like tomato and okra is an important economic activity for farmers in the dry regions like Haveri and Gadag in Karnataka providing assured returns and additional employment. Its economic impact assessed at individual and aggregate levels based on a sample of 70 cultivators has indicated that the activity provides stability, equity in income distribution across the group and helps enhance family welfare. Undertaken mainly during the khraif season on a plot of around 0.43 ha, the farmers incur an expenditure of around Rs 49,780 / ha for tomato and Rs 38,555/ha for okra. With a seed yield of 0.493 and 5.66 quintals of tomato and okra, respectively, the farmers could realize a net return of Rs 88,338/ha from tomato and Rs 39,440/ha from okra. Being highly labour-intensive involving special operations such as emasculation and hybridization, the commercial seed production generates employment opportunities of around 415 women-days in both tomato and okra CSP. With low coefficient of variation in the range of 8 per cent price in okra to around 28 per cent for yield in tomato, the CSP could provide income stability for the dryland farmers. Measured in terms of Giniâ€™s coefficient of income equality, the CSP of tomato and okra with a value of 0.22 and 0.24 has proved to improve income distribution across the group. By adopting a combination of two plots of tomato, one during kharif and one during rabi, with one plot of okra in kharif, CSP could fetch the highest net return of Rs 33,859/ha. The presence of surrogate water market and dwindling groundwater in the region highlight the urgent need for a policy and action points for safeguarding the social and environment issues in the highly beneficial CSP of tomato and okra.
Group-based motivational interviewing for alcohol use among college students: An exploratory study.

How can practicing psychologists help reduce excessive alcohol consumption among college students? Over 80% of college students consume alcohol, and a significant percentage drinks excessively with myriad problems. Brief interventions based on motivational interviewing (MI) have been identified for use with college populations. The authors randomly assigned 91 freshman students to a brief, classroom-based MI intervention or an assessment control condition. At the end of the semester, MI group participants reported fewer drinks per occasion and fewer episodes of intoxication compared to controls. A classroom-based, MI-style intervention might be an efficient, sustainable, and effective means of reducing heavy drinking among college students.
Gender Differences in Written Expression Curriculum-Based Measurement in Third Through Eighth Grade Students

Many studies have found gender differences in certain areas of academic achievement, such as reading and math. Fewer studies have examined gender disparities in writing skills. The current study explored gender differences in written expression performance. Participants were 1,240 male and female students in third through eighth grade, representing five schools in a rural southeastern school district. Each student was administered an AIMSweb curriculum-based measurement writing probe during the district's regularly scheduled fall, winter, and spring benchmarks. All measures were scored for total words written and correct writing sequences. Two-way repeated measures analyses of variance were used to determine whether differences existed in the sample. A significant female advantage was found on both scoring indices at each grade level. These findings have strong instructional and theoretical implications for practicing school psychologists and other educators.
Distribution and chemotaxonomic significance of phenolic compounds in Spermacoce verticillata (L.) G. Mey.

Context: Spermacoce verticillata, known as “poaia and vassourinha de botão”, is a species widely used in Brazilian traditional medicine as anti-inflammatory, antipyretic and analgesic. It is a native species, small, upright perennial, and broadly distributed throughout Brazil. Until now, few chemical studies have focused on the phenolic composition of this species. Aims: Evaluate the phytochemical profile of phenolic compounds from Spermacoce verticillata and search new compounds that have chemotaxonomic significance. Methods: Leaves of S. verticillata were extracted using distilled water. The extract (SVL) was purified by several chromatography processes. Extract and compounds were analyzed by HPLC-DAD and NMR. Results: Phytochemical analysis led to identification, for the first time, of three compounds (1-3) for the specie. Chlorogenic acid (1) was identified by HPLC-DAD compared with reported in the literature. Quercetin-3-O-rutinoside (rutin) (2) and kaempferol-3-O-rutinoside (3) were isolated from butanolic fraction and identified by spectroscopic analysis comparison with data reported in the literature. The flavonoid rutin is the major compound in SVL followed by kaempferol-3-O-rutinoside and chlorogenic acid. Conclusions: This is the first report for these compounds (1-3) in S. verticillata. The presence of these three new compounds indicates chemical markers of the species for this genus and family. This information is extremely important because increases the resources for chemotaxonomic classification of these species.
Nightside Ionospheric Convection Asymmetries During the Early Substorm Expansion Phase: Relationship to Onset Local Time

We present Super Dual Auroral Radar Network observations of ionospheric convection during substorms. Substorms were grouped according to their onset latitude, onset magnetic local time, and the prevailing sense of interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) BY. The radar observations were then sorted according to substorm group and average convection patterns produced. Here we discuss the patterns corresponding to substorms with onsets occurring in the 65∘–67∘ onset latitude range, at either early (20–22 h) or late (01–03 h) magnetic local times, during intervals of either dominant positive or negative IMF BY. We show that the morphology of the convection patterns differs from that predicted by existing empirical models, with the location of the nightside convection throat being largely consistent with the location of substorm onset. The expected IMF BY‐induced dawn‐dusk convection asymmetry can be enhanced on the nightside when the substorm onset occurs at a fortuitous location but can equally be removed or even reversed from this expected state. Thus, the nightside convection asymmetries are seemingly unrelated to the instantaneous sense of IMF BY.
Feature Extraction for Sentiment Classification on Twitter Data

In the last couple of years, there has been a rapid growth in the use of social networking websites. It is a medium having a huge amount of information where users can view the other users opinion, that are classified into different sentiment classes, which are increasingly growing as a key component in decision making. In this paper, we take one such popular microblog called Twitter. These tweets sometimes express opinions about different topics. People post real time messages about their opinions on different topics, discuss current issues, complain, and express positive sentiment for products they use in daily life. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for automatically classifying the sentiment of “tweets” into positive, negative and neutral sentiment. Experimental evaluations show that our proposed techniques are efficient and perform better than previously proposed methods. In our research, we worked with English language however; the proposed technique can be used with any other language.
The Relationship between Iranian EFL Learners’ Attitudes towards English Language Learning and Their Inferencing Ability in Reading Comprehension

In line with recent focus on learner characteristics in L2 learning, this study was conducted to explore the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ attitudes towards English language learning and their inferencing ability in reading comprehension. Investigating the performance of these learners on inference test according to their gender and different linguistic contexts were secondary goals of the study. After the homogenizing process, a group of learners of both sexes were put in the final group. The attitude questionnaire and the inference test were administered in order to examine the learners’ attitudes and inferencing ability respectively. In order to investigate the role of linguistic context, the inference test was then divided into two sub-tests of short and long passages. The results of the analyses for the collected data indicated a moderate positive correlation between the attitudes of the learners and their inferencing performance. The effect of linguistic context on inferencing turned out to be significant too. However, no significant difference was found between the mean scores of the males and females on the inference test.
Family Functioning and School Success in At-Risk , Inner-City Adolescents 1

The relation between family functioning and school success was examined in 211 at risk, African American, inner city adolescents attending middle school (grades 6–8). Interviews with adolescents and caregivers yielded data on family cohesion, parental monitoring, and school engagement; school records provided data on grade point average. Results showed that both family cohesion and parental monitoring predicted school engagement, but neither family characteristic predicted GPA. Important gender differences also emerged. For boys only, the relation between family cohesion and school engagement was stronger when parental monitoring was high. For girls only, the effects of cohesion and monitoring on school engagement were additive: girls with both high family cohesion and high parental monitoring were most likely to be engaged in school. These findings extend the research base on family protective factors for antisocial behavior in young adolescents. Implications for future examination of family process characteristics in high-risk adolescents are discussed.
Handwritten Digit Recognition Using Structural , Statistical Features and K-nearest Neighbor Classifier

This paper presents a new approach to offline handwritten numeral recognition based on structural and statistical features. Five different types of skeleton features: (horizontal, vertical crossings, end, branch, and cross points), number of contours in the image, Widthto-Height ratio, and distribution features are used for the recognition of numerals. We create two vectors Sample Feature Vector (SFV) is a vector which contains Structural and Statistical features of MNIST sample data base of handwritten numerals and Test Feature Vector (TFV) is a vector which contains Structural and Statistical features of MNIST test database of handwritten numerals. The performance of digit recognition system depends mainly on what kind of features are being used. The objective of this paper is to provide efficient and reliable techniques for recognition of handwritten numerals. A Euclidian minimum distance criterion is used to find minimum distances and knearest neighbor classifier is used to classify the numerals. MNIST database is used for both training and testing the system. A total 5000 numeral images are tested, and the overall accuracy is found to be 98.42%. Index Terms — Structural features, Statistical features, Skeleton features, Euclidian distance, handwritten numerals, Digit recognition.
Trend of tuberculosis and performance evaluation of new sputum positive tuberculosis from Satara district, India

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) has remained a major public health threat worldwide and considering this, Govt. of India declared TB as notifiable disease in year 2012. Objectives: To assess the trend of TB in Satara district, India and to evaluate outcome of new sputum positive TB cases registered under district Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP). Materials and Methods: A retrospective record based cross-sectional study was conducted in District Tuberculosis Centre (DTC), Satara district, Maharashtra, India during March 2013. All Registered TB cases under DTC from the year 2002 to 2012 were included as study subjects. The district RNTCP records since the year 2002-2012, for all TB cases were viewed and analyzed by investigator according to RNTCP outcome evaluation indicators. The trend of TB was statistically analyzed for the period of eleven years by using chi-square trend test. Results: Annual the total TB case detection rate was 117.94/ lakh for year 2002 which decreased to 98.30 / lakh for year 2012. The proportions of pulmonary TB cases decreased from 92.23% to 81.0% since year 2002 to 2012 whereas proportions of HIV-reactive TB cases increased from 3.11% to 25.3% since year 2009 to 2011.Proportions of male TB cases were almost the double of females; however child TB cases increased continuously with maximum TB cases belonged to pulmonary type. The proportional trend of New Sputum Positive (NSP) cases showed periodic fluctuations ranging from 34% to 50% since year 2002 to 2012. The performance of outcome evaluation indicators of NSP cases during evaluation period as viz., cure rate ranging from 79.91% to 87.02% with periodic fluctuations, sputum conversion rate continuously increased from 78.5% to 93.5%,treatment success rate ranging from 82.7% to 90% with apparent difference, whereas defaulter rate decreased from 7.5% to 3.8% by year 2011, treatment failure rate continuously decreased to 2.1% whereas Death rate ranging from 5.2% to 10.4%. The proportional trends of outcome evaluation indicators of NSP-TB cases showed statistically significant difference over period of year 2002 to 2012. Conclusion: Data indicates that TB is still big problem in rural area of western Maharashtra, India and need to strengthen the awareness programme about TB and involvement of private health sector to control the burden of TB. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3126/ajms.v6i4. 11112 Asian Journal of Medical Sciences Vol.6(4) 2015 30-35
Seasonal variation in body composition, metabolic activity, feeding, and growth of adult krill Euphausia superba in the Lazarev Sea

We investigated physiological parameters (elemental and biochemical composition, metabolic rates, feeding activity and growth) of adult Antarctic krill in the Lazarev Sea in late spring (December), mid autumn (April) and mid winter (July and August) to evaluate proposed hypotheses of overwintering mech- anisms. Our major observations are: (1) respiration rates were reduced by 30 to 50% in autumn and win- ter, compared to values in late spring; (2) feeding activ- ity was reduced by 80 to 86% in autumn and winter, compared to late spring, at similar food concentrations; (3) feeding was omnivorous during winter; (4) with each moult, krill grew by 0.5 to 3.8% in length; (5) body lipids and, to a small extent, body proteins were consumed during winter. Adult Euphausia superba thus adopt metabolic slowdown and omnivorous feed- ing activity at low rates to survive the winter season in the Lazarev Sea. By mid autumn, metabolic activity is reduced, most likely being influenced by the Antarctic light regime, which is accompanied by a reduction in feeding activity and growth. Although at a low level, the feeding activity during winter seems to provide an important energy input.
Nitrate Removal from Aqueous Solution Using Natural Zeolite-Supported Zero-Valent Iron Nanoparticles

A report on the synthesis and characterization of nanoscale zero-valent iron in the presence of natural zeolite as a stabilizer is presented. This novel adsorbent (Ze-nZVI) was synthesized by the sodium borohydride reduction method. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images revealed that the stabilized nZVI particles were uniformly dispersed across the zeolite surface without obvious aggregation. The synthesized Ze-nZVI material was then tested for the removal of nitrate from aqueous solution. The effect of various parameters on the removal process, such as initial concentration of nitrate, contact time, initial pH, and Ze-nZVI dosage, was studied. Batch experiments revealed that the supported nZVI materials generally have great flexibility and high activity for nitrate removal from aqueous solution. The nitrogen mass balance calculation showed that ammonium was the major product of nitrate reduction by Ze-nZVI (more than 84% of the nitrate reduced); subsequently the natural zeolite in Ze-nZVI removed it completely via adsorption. The kinetic experiments indicated that the removal of nitrate followed the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The removal efficiency for nitrate decreased continuously with an increase in the initial solution pH value and Ze-nZVI dosage but increased with the increase in the initial concentration of nitrate. The overall results indicated the potential efficacy of Ze-nZVI for environmental remediation application.
Consumer perceptions of higher and lower-level designed store environments

The role and influence of esthetics in the consumption of store environments remains poorly understood. Little is known about how esthetics propose substantial or adjunctive roles in consumers’ store experiences. The aim of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of store design-architecture in high and low-level design contexts. Building on the esthetics, and environmental psychology literatures, our findings confirm consumers’ determinations of perceptual differences in the esthetic content contained in presented store environmental stimuli. Latent means comparisons confirm consumers’ perceptions of the presence of a high-level design in one fast-fashion store with a low-level design of a second store of the same retailer using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results demonstrate the reliability and validity of the proposed constructs in confirming the presence of higher and low-levels of design. This research, thus, expands on the extant number of store specification and response constructs and prospectively opens up new lines of store environments research.
Effect of Illegal Gold Mining Activities on Social-Economic of Workers and Community Surrounding the Watershed in Kuantan Singingi, Indonesia

Illegal Gold Mining in Kuantan Singingi (Kuansing) initially carried out by migrants and followed by local villagers because of economic needs. The workers using mercury (Hg), resulting in river water pollution and suspected cause social economic problems for the community surrounding the watersheds. This study aims to determine the effect of illegal gold mining activity on social economy of workers and community surrounding the watershed in Kuantan Singingi. This research uses both quantitative and qualitative exploratory research. The results showed that illegal gold mining activity in Kuantan Singingi has increased economic income of workers, investors and local police officers were involved, but it has been detrimental to the public around the watershed and cause environmental pollution. The river water can no longer be used for daily necessities; the public has difficulties to getting clean water and fish. Illegal gold mining activities often lead conflicts between the perpetrators of illegal miners (workers / owners) with security personnel and sometimes conflict with the surrounding community. Illegal gold mining activity in streams and irrigation dams to be terminated through mutual commitment. The local government, stakeholders, and citizens also the private sector need to prepare a social control program after closing the illegal gold miners by providing jobs for local people in agriculture and plantations, community empowerment, improving skills and people's income, needs to be diversified, and provision of subsidies. Local governments can also use village funds budget for rural development and help provide land, seed, fertilizer, livestock, and other efforts to improve rural communities welfare.
Frequency functions on the Heisenberg group, the uncertainty principle and unique continuation

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