Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Economic Analysis of the Hand Moved Sprinkler IrrigationSystem: A Case Study of a Vegetable Farm in Quebec

Irrigation has been promoted as one of the best adaptation measure under climate change. In Eastern Canada, average temperatures are expected to increase, coupled with variable precipitation that may not exceed the evaporation rate. Frequency of dry situation during crop growth period is expected to be higher. This study was developed to examine the financial performance of irrigation on a vegetable farm in Quebec to cope with such a situation. The analysis was undertaken from a producer’s accounting stance. Three measures of financial performance Net present value, Benefit-cost ratio, and Payback period, were used. Two types of technologies were included in this evaluation: One, Base technology where there was no irrigation provided to the crops; and Two, Beneficial Management Practice of providing irrigation water to the crops using an overhead sprinkler system of a hand-move type. The farm grew carrots and onions in an intercropping system half the field was for devoted to carrots, and the other half for onions. Results suggest that irrigating vegetables crops (such as carrots and onions) provided higher net present value over the 15 year life. The irrigation technology generated an additional $10,932 per ha over the life of the project, coupled with a benefit-cost ratio of 2.1. The payback period for the initial investment was estimated to be very short only 1.2 years. These results were found to be robust as under most of the changes (change in price of products, discount rate, cost of initial investment) irrigation maintained its higher level of net returns over no irrigation situation. The only exception was that under the prediction that vegetable yields would be reduced under climate change, irrigation loses its financial attractiveness.
Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration

A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices, the most commonly-used instrument interacts national inflows by country of origin with immigrants' past geographic distribution. We present evidence that estimates based on this "shift-share" instrument conflate the short- and long-run responses to immigration shocks. If the spatial distribution of immigrant inflows is stable over time, the instrument is likely to be correlated with ongoing responses to previous supply shocks. Estimates based on the conventional shift-share instrument are therefore unlikely to identify the short-run causal effect. We propose a "multiple instrumentation" procedure that isolates the spatial variation arising from changes in the country-of-origin composition at the national level and permits us to estimate separately the short- and long-run effects. Our results are a cautionary tale for a large body of empirical work, not just on immigration, that rely on shift-share instruments for causal inference.
Diurnal and Seasonal Solar Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence and Photosynthesis in a Boreal Scots Pine Canopy

Solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence has been shown to be increasingly an useful proxy for the estimation of gross primary productivity (GPP), at a range of spatial scales. Here, we explore the seasonality in a continuous time series of canopy solar induced fluorescence (hereafter SiF) and its relation to canopy gross primary production (GPP), canopy light use efficiency (LUE), and direct estimates of leaf level photochemical efficiency in an evergreen canopy. SiF was calculated using infilling in two bands from the incoming and reflected radiance using a pair of Ocean Optics USB2000+ spectrometers operated in a dual field of view mode, sampling at a 30 min time step using custom written automated software, from early spring through until autumn in 2011. The optical system was mounted on a tower of 18 m height adjacent to an eddy covariance system, to observe a boreal forest ecosystem dominated by Scots pine. (Pinus sylvestris) A Walz MONITORING-PAM, multi fluorimeter system, was simultaneously mounted within the canopy adjacent to the footprint sampled by the optical system. Following correction of the SiF data for O2 and structural effects, SiF, SiF yield, LUE, the photochemicsl reflectance index (PRI), and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) exhibited a seasonal pattern that followed GPP sampled by the eddy covariance system. Due to the complexities of solar azimuth and zenith angle (SZA) over the season on the SiF signal, correlations between SiF, SiF yield, GPP, and LUE were assessed on SZA <50° and under strictly clear sky conditions. Correlations found, even under these screened scenarios, resulted around ~r2 = 0.3. The diurnal responses of SiF, SiF yield, PAM estimates of effective quantum yield (ΔF/Fm′), and meteorological parameters demonstrated some agreement over the diurnal cycle. The challenges inherent in SiF retrievals in boreal evergreen ecosystems are discussed.
Learning Multi-Level Hierarchies with Hindsight

Hierarchical agents have the potential to solve sequential decision making tasks with greater sample efficiency than their non-hierarchical counterparts because hierarchical agents can break down tasks into sets of subtasks that only require short sequences of decisions. In order to realize this potential of faster learning, hierarchical agents need to be able to learn their multiple levels of policies in parallel so these simpler subproblems can be solved simultaneously. Yet, learning multiple levels of policies in parallel is hard because it is inherently unstable: changes in a policy at one level of the hierarchy may cause changes in the transition and reward functions at higher levels in the hierarchy, making it difficult to jointly learn multiple levels of policies. In this paper, we introduce a new Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework, Hierarchical Actor-Critic (HAC), that can overcome the instability issues that arise when agents try to jointly learn multiple levels of policies. The main idea behind HAC is to train each level of the hierarchy independently of the lower levels by training each level as if the lower level policies are already optimal. We demonstrate experimentally in both grid world and simulated robotics domains that our approach can significantly accelerate learning relative to other non-hierarchical and hierarchical methods. Indeed, our framework is the first to successfully learn 3-level hierarchies in parallel in tasks with continuous state and action spaces.
Parvovirus B 19 in HIV + adult patients with different CD 4 + lymphocyte counts

Purpose. Human parvovirus B19 (B19V) can cause anemia in immunocompromised patients. We aimed to investigate the presence of B19V in HIV+ adults with different CD4+ T cell counts, to recognise the frequency of B19V in these different conditions and its possible association with anemia. Methodology. We studied B19V specific IgM, IgG and DNA in 98 HIV+ patients and in 52 healthy individuals. HIV load, CD4+ counts and haemoglobin level were also determined in the patients. Results. No individual in the control group had detectable IgM, 41/52 (78.8%) had IgG and 5/52 (9.6%) had B19V DNA. Among HIV+ patients, we found 5/98 (5.1%) IgM+, 66/98 (67.3%) IgG+ and 15/98 (15.3%) had B19V DNA (no significant differences between the two groups compared). Considering the CD4+ cell range in HIV patients, 37 had <200 CD4+ cells ml , 31 had 200–500, and 30 had >500. Anti-B19V IgG prevalence in patients with >500 CD4+ cells ml 1 was significantly higher than in the rest (P=0.004) and compared to the control (P=0.046). B19V DNA concentration was always <10 IUml , including 5 healthy individuals and 15 HIV+ patients. There was no significant association between B19V IgM or DNA and anemia nor between B19V DNA and HIV load. Conclusions. The results indicate that B19V is not a high-risk factor for anemia in adult HIV+ patients under HAART treatment. Further studies will contribute to elucidate the mechanisms and significance of B19V DNA prevalence/persistence in adults, independently of the CD4+ cell status.
Using Prompts to Scaffold Metacognition in Case-Based Problem Solving within the Domain of Attribution Theory

www.ejpbl. org Copyright 2020 International Society for Problem-Based Learning This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Using Prompts to Scaffold Metacognition in Case-Based Problem Solving within the Domain of Attribution Theory Joerg Zumbach, Corinna Ortler, Ines Deibl, Stephanie Moser University of Salzburg, School of Education, Hellbrunner, Austria Technical University of Munich, School of Education, Munich, Germany
Ready to Be Open? Explaining the Firm-Level Barriers to Benefiting from Openness to External Knowledge

This paper provides new theory and evidence about the benefits of openness on a firm’s innovation performance and, more importantly, the specific firm-level contingencies under which those benefits are more (or less) likely to be observed. Building on Dyer and Singh’s (1998) relational view, we suggest that a firm’s lack of resources and absorptive capacity, as well as its use of secrecy, are significant barriers to benefiting from openness to external knowledge. Using responses from 12,152 firms to the fourth and fifth UK versions of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) we generate findings consistent with our hypotheses.
Electroweak interactions and dark baryons in the sextet BSM model with a composite Higgs particle

The Electroweak interactions of a strongly coupled gauge theory are discussed with outlook beyond the Standard Model (BSM) under global and gauge anomaly constraints. The theory is built on a minimal massless fermion doublet of the SU(2) BSM flavor group (bsm-flavor) with a confining gauge force at the TeV scale in the two-index symmetric (sextet) representation of the BSM SU(3) color gauge group (bsm-color). The intriguing possibility of near-conformal sextet gauge dynamics could lead to the minimal realization of the composite Higgs mechanism with a light $0^{++}$ scalar, far separated from strongly coupled resonances of the confining gauge force in the 2-3 TeV range, distinct from Higgsless Technicolor. In previous publications we have presented results for the meson spectrum of the theory, including the light composite scalar, perhaps the emergent Higgs impostor. Here we discuss the critically important role of the baryon spectrum in the sextet model investigating its compatibility with what we know about thermal evolution of the early Universe including its galactic and terrestrial relics. For an important application, we report the first numerical results on the baryon spectrum of this theory from non-perturbative lattice simulations with baryon correlators in the staggered fermion implementation of the strongly coupled gauge sector. The quantum numbers of composite baryons and their spectroscopy from lattice simulations are required inputs for exploring dark matter contributions of the sextet BSM model, as outlined for future work.
Knowledge and Attitudes of Primary Health Care Dentists Regarding Oral Cancer in Brazil

Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of dentists working in Primary Health Care Units from a Brazilian city, regarding oral cancer. Materials and methods A prospective, cross-sectional, epidemiologic survey was performed. Seventy-one dentists from Primary Health Care Units were contacted at their workplace, and participated of the study. Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire of 31 multiple-choice questions addressing the main clinical features and risk factors for oral cancer. The questionnaire was divided into two sections: questions related to general data and self-perception of the participants regarding personal knowledge of oral cancer, and objective questions related to general information on oral cancer (clinical features, characteristics, traits, and risk factors). The data were tabulated and analyzed by descriptive statistics. Results Participants were mostly females (81.5%), less than 40 years of age (57.7%), who underwent training 10–20 years ago (47.9%). Most respondents (66.2%) considered their level of knowledge about oral cancer to be satisfactory. However, only 26.8% of tem felt that they were able to carry out diagnostic procedures for oral cancer. Most of them (95.8%) were interested in participating in training courses on Oral Diagnostics; 56.3% of them reported not having received any training or guidance on how to conduct an examination to detect oral cancer during undergraduate training. Conclusions These findings are consistent with previous reports and point to the need for new public policies to enable early diagnosis of oral cancer and a review of training in Oral Diagnostics in dental schools.
Steady computations of ingress through gas turbine rim seals

In gas turbines, rim seals are fitted at the periphery of the wheel-space between the turbine disc and its adjacent casing; their purpose is to reduce the ingress of hot mainstream gases. This paper describes the use of a three-dimensional, steady-state model to investigate ingress through engine-representative single and double radial-clearance seals. The three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes computations of a simplified turbine stage are carried out using the commercial computational fluid dynamics code ANSYS CFX v13, and the model is based on the geometry of an experimental test rig at the University of Bath. The measured variation of the peak-to-trough pressure difference in the annulus, which is the main driving mechanism for ingress, is reproduced well qualitatively by the computations; quantitatively, the maximum local differences between computation and experiment are less than 20% of the measured peak-to-trough circumferential variation. The radial variation of swirl ratio in the rotor–stator wheel-space is well predicted over the range of flow rates and rim seal geometries studied. The radial distribution of sealing effectiveness determined from experiments is reproduced inward of the mixing region near the seal clearance over a range of sealing flow rates; some over-prediction of the effectiveness was found for both seals at high radius, probably due to limitations in the turbulent mixing modelling. The three-dimensional steady-state approach may be a practical tool for the engine designer where there is a lack of experimental data, providing quantitative predictions of the flow structure within the rotor–stator wheel-space and qualitative predictions of the sealing effectiveness for a given rim seal geometry.
Student representation and power relations at Lund University

This study aims to illuminate the power relations that are developed between student and nonstudent representatives while performing governance at the context of Lund University. Furthermore, the influence of these incidents on student’s contribution is investigated, highlighting the strengths and the weaknesses of this representation structure. For this purpose, the study utilizes semi-structured interviews with current student representatives, coming from different levels of governance. As a qualitative approach on the issue, a holistic grasp of the students’ perspective is sought. Student representation has been an expression of a more inclusive agenda that has characterized higher education institutions since the commencement of the Bologna process back in 1999. Generally, many universities have included students in their decision-making processes, as they are great sources of information and feedback, enhancing their overall experience in higher education and developing skills and values that will serve them in their political, social, and labor life later. The findings show that students captivate a central role in steering decisions at Lund University, being meaningfully involved in the majority of governing boards and are provided considerable space for communicating their views. However, power relations between the students and non-student members of these boards still exist, affecting both the interaction among the two groups, but also the ways that students pursue their demands and organize themselves. Knowledge and experience have been signaled as key elements in this process, while the essentiality of student unions is prevalent, as a place of inter-level communication and preservation of opinions’ continuity. This study can function as a guide for which aspects of student representation require more careful consideration at this specific context. Last, this research can be the base for similar inquiries in other institutions, enabling comparisons among them and identifying good practices for enhancing students’ input. (Less)
Gender and other determinants of trust and reciprocity in an experimental labour market amongst Chinese students

Due to economic and demographic changes highly educated women play an important role on the Chinese labour market. Gender has been shown to be an important characteristic that influences behaviour in economic experiments, as have, to a lesser degree, academic major, age and income. We provide a study looking at trust and reciprocity and their determinants in a labour market laboratory experiment. Our experimental data is based on two games, the Gift Exchange Game (GEG) and a variant of this game (the Wage Promising Game, WPG) where the employer's wage off er is non-binding and the employer can choose the wage freely after observing the workers e ffort. We find that women are less trusting and reciprocal than men in the GEG while this cannot be found in the WPG. Letting participants play the GEG and the WPG, allows us to disentangle reciprocal and risk attitudes. While in the employer role, it seems to be that risk attitude is the main factor, this is not con firmed analysing decisions in the worker role.
Heart and diamond Fermi arcs in Pd and Pt oxide topological Dirac semimetals

Topological Dirac semimetals (DSMs) exhibit nodal points through which energy bands disperse linearly in three-dimensional (3D) momentum space, a 3D analogue of graphene. The first experimentally confirmed DSMs with a pair of Dirac points (DPs), Na3Bi and Cd3As2, show topological surface Fermi arc states and exotic magnetotransport properties, boosting the interest in the search for stable and nontoxic DSM materials. Here, based on the ab-initio band structure calculations we predict a family of palladium and platinum oxides as robust 3D DSMs. The novel topological properties of these compounds are distinct from all other previously reported DSMs, they are rendered by the multiple number of DPs in the compounds. We show that along three unit axes of the cubic lattice there exist three pairs of DPs, which are linked by Fermi arcs on the surface. The Fermi arcs display a Lifshitz transition from a heartto a diamond-shape upon varying the chemical potential. Corresponding oxides are already available as high-quality single crystals, which is an excellent precondition for the verification of our prediction by photoemission and magneto-transport experiments. Our findings not only predict a number of much robust 3D DSM candidates but also extend DSMs to transition metal oxides, a versatile family of materials, which opens the door to investigate the interplay between DSMs and electronic correlations that is not possible in the previously discovered DSM materials. ∗ gangli.phy@gmail.com 1 ar X iv :1 60 2. 05 53 3v 1 [ co nd -m at . m tr lsc i] 1 7 Fe b 20 16
Characteristics of the quasi‐16‐day wave in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere region as revealed by meteor radar, Aura satellite, and MERRA2 reanalysis data from 2008 to 2017

This study presents an analysis of the quasi‐16‐day wave (Q16DW) at three stations in the middle latitudes by using a meteor radar chain in conjunction with Aura Microwave Limb Sounder temperature data and MERRA2 (Modern‐Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2) reanalysis data from 2008 to 2017. The radar chain consists of three meteor radar stations located at Mohe (MH, 53.5°N, 122.3°E), Beijing (BJ, 40.3°N, 116.2°E), and Wuhan (WH, 30.5°N, 114.6°E). The Q16DW wave exhibits similar seasonal variation in the neutral wind and temperature, and the Q16DW amplitude is generally strong during winter and weak around summer. The Q16DW at BJ was found to have secondary enhancement around September in the zonal wind, which is rarely reported at similar latitudes. The latitudinal variations of the Q16DW in the neutral wind and temperature are quite different. The Q16DW at BJ is the most prominent in both neutral wind components among the three stations and the Q16DW amplitudes at MH and WH are comparable, whereas the wave amplitude in temperature decreases with decreasing latitude. The quasi‐geostrophic refractive index squared at the three stations in the period from 2008 to 2017 was revealed. The results indicate that the Q16DW in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) at MH has a limited contribution from the lower atmosphere. Around March and October, the Q16DW in the troposphere at BJ can propagate upward into the MLT region, whereas at WH, the contribution to the Q16DW in the MLT region is largely from the mesosphere.
The Potential for Plants to Trap Emissions from Farms with Laying Hens. 1. Ammonia

SUMMARY The potential of vegetation to trap NH3 discharged from a layer house through the exhaust fans was evaluated at The Pennsylvania State University Poultry Education and Research Center in September 2005. Five tree species were planted in pot-in-pot containers in 5 rows downwind of the house fans and in 2 control rows upwind of the hen house. Each row included 1 plant (upwind) or 2 plants (downwind) per species per row. When measured with a photoacoustic NH3 detector at the same elevation as the fan (1.5 m), NH3 concentration decreased sharply with greater distance, from 51.54 ppm at 0 m (at the fan) to 1.89 ppm at 5.5 m (between row 2 and 3), 0.27 ppm at 10 m (after row 5), and 0 ppm at 50 m (control). This trend was also observed with the dosi-tubes and photoacoustic detector at the 0.3- and 3.0-m elevations. Significantly lower NH3 concentrations were recorded when the trees were present downwind of the fans compared with when the trees were removed (16.45 vs. 19.35 ppm), suggesting a portion of the atmospheric NH3 was being held by the plants. This was further supported by a marked decrease in foliar N status of the plants with greater distance from the source. Plant species also differed, with willow appearing to be the most responsive species and effective as an NH3 trap.