Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
pplication of L-systems to geometrical construction of chamise nd juniper shrubs

Improved models of fire spread and fire characteristics are desired for live shrub fuels, since the majority of existing research efforts focus on either dead fuel beds or crown fires in trees. Efforts have been made to improve live fuel modeling, including detailed studies of individual leaf combustion, with results incorporated into a shrub combustion model for broadleaf species. However, this approach was not well-suited to non-broadleaf shrubs since their fuel consists of long needle-covered branches rather than easily discretized leaves. Methods were therefore developed to simulate the branching structure of chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) and Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma). The plant structure was hrub geometry ildland fire based on a form of fractal theory called Lindenmayer systems (i.e., L-systems). Correlations to predict branch number from crown diameter were made based on data from the literature, to ensure that the modeled shrubs would have the same bulk density as live shrubs. The structure model was designed to match the specific characteristics of each species, such as branching angles, the number of stems exiting at ground level, and the fuel element length. This method can be used to generate shrub geometries for detailed shrub combustion models or for realistic artistic renditions.
Hipertensão, obesidade abdominal e baixa estatura: aspectos da transição nutricional em uma população favelada

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the frequency of occurrence of short stature, overweight, abdominal obesity and arterial hypertension, and the possible correlations among such factors, in women of very low income. The findings were considered in terms of nutrition transition and the Barker's programming hypothesis. METHODS: A group of 223 women, 18 to 65 years of age, were studied with respect to the following parameters: for body mass index (kg/m2), values >25 indicated overweight and obesity, whilst values 0.8 indicated abdominal adiposity; for systolic/diastolic blood pressure, values >140/90 mm Hg indicated hypertension; and for height, values within the 25th percentile (1st quartile) indicated short stature. RESULTS: The frequency of occurrence of overweight and obesity (present in 35.9% of the group) was greater than that of underweight (9.4% of the group). The diastolic blood pressure was positively associated with body mass index (r= 0.37; CI 95,0%: 0.01 <r2 <0.26) and with waist/hip ratio (r= 0.35; CI 95.0%: 0.01 <r2 <0.25). Subjects rated within the 1st and the 4th height quartiles, respectively, showed the following results: frequency of hypertension, 23.3% and 8.9% (odds ratio= 3.08; p= 0.03); frequency of overweight, 41.7% and 35.7% (p= 0.51); mean body mass index, 24.6 and 23.7 (p= 0.27); and mean waist/hip ratio, 0.87 and 0.85 (p= 0.04). CONCLUSION: Overweight and obesity were more prevalent within the group, than was underweight. Short stature, which is an indicator of malnutrition in early life, presents an important risk factor for both hypertension and abdominal adiposity in later life. The studied group appeared to be undergoing a process of nutritional transition, despite their low-income status. The mechanisms of metabolic adaptation to the malnutrition experienced in early life, might be important factors involved in any explanation of the results obtained in this research.
What's Real about the Business Cycle?

This paper argues that a linear statistical model with homoskedastic errors cannot capture the nineteenth-century notion of a recurring cyclical pattern in key economic aggregates. A simple nonlinear alternative is proposed and used to illustrate that the dynamic behavior of unemployment seems to change over the business cycle, with the unemployment rate rising more quickly than it falls. Furthermore, many but not all economic downturns are also accompanied by a dramatic change in the dynamic behavior of short-term interest rates. It is suggested that these nonlinearities are most naturally interpreted as resulting from short-run failures in the employment and credit markets and that understanding these short-run failures is the key to understanding the nature of the business cycle.
From Parents to Siblings and Peers

The objective of the current research was to test the hypotheses arising from the epigenetic view of social development and from the wider perspective offered by the social network model with three interactional systems, that is, child–parent, child–sibling, and child–peer. They were tested in two prospective longitudinal studies using a multi-informant and multi-method strategy. Study 1 was conducted among 83 children and their parents and Study 2 among 190 children. Attachment security with parents was assessed when the children were 4 years of age, relationships with siblings at 5 years of age, and relationships with peers at 6 years of age. Attachment to parent was found to explain a limited part of variations in later social relationships with siblings and peers. The sibling interactional system had a consistent and enduring effect on later peer relationships. With regard to the two theoretical backgrounds under consideration, neither was able to account for equivocal findings displayed in the two studies as well as in previous research. The wonderful story of social development seems to be a very complex process for which new models are needed.
Impact of blood glucose fluctuation on endothelial dysfunction and severity of stenosis in aged acute coronary syndrome patients

Background: We evaluated the impact of blood glucose fluctuation to endothelial cell damage and the severity of coronary artery lesion in elderly acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients with or without type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Methods: A total of 128 patients with ACS were enrolled, 80 of them with T2DM were recruited in group A; the other 48 without T2DM were recruited to group B, 40 healthy volunteers were selected as control (group C). The level of vWF in each group were measured, CGM (72 hours) were conducted to evaluate LAGE, MAGE, SDBG, MODD, MPPGE and MPMG. Results: Compared with control group, the level of FPG, CRP, HOMA-IR, vWF, LAGE, MAGE, SDBG in group A and group B were significantly higher (P<0.01). The level of MODD, MPPGE, MPMG, PPGE1, PPGE2, PPGE3 in group A were significantly higher (P<0.01); Compared with group B, the level of HbA1c, Fins, HOMA-IR, vWF, LAGE, MAGE, SDBG, MODD, MPPGE, MPMG, PPGE1, PPGE2, PPGE3 were significantly higher in group A (P<0.01). MAGE were positively related with age, HbA1c, HOMA-IR, CRP, vWF (P<0.01); LAGE, MAGE, SDBG and MPPGE were positively related with HOMA-IR (P<0.05); Multiple stepwise regression analysis showed MAGE, MODD, and CRP were independently associated with Gensini score (P<0.001). MAGE and CRP were the impact factors of endothelial dysfunction. Conclusion: Compared with persistent hyperglycemia, acute glucose fluctuations further aggravate the degree of coronary lesions.
Evaluation of Methods for Expansion Properties of Legume Extrudates

The expansion properties of extrudate such as diameter ratio, sectional expansion index, longitudinal expansion index, specific length, and specific density are used to describe the effect of extrusion processing as well as material parameters. In this study four types of extrudates namely lentil, lentil+starch, whole dry pea+starch, and split dry pea+ starch were evaluated for their expansion properties with N = 50. The effect of number of replicates and progressive values of the statistical parameters like mean, coefficient of variability (CV), standard deviation (SD), and standard error (SE) were compared graphically. It was determined that 30 replicates were sufficient for determining the expansion characteristics of the extrudates. The CV of the extrudates was lower than other engineering materials due to the homogeneity of the sample, obtained as effect of the mixing capacity of extrusion processing. A mathematical relationship was developed from the pooled data to predict the number of replicates required for desired CV from the advance estimate with five observations. The determination of specific density by dimensional measurement, as well as bulk density by glass bead displacement, was also compared. For measurement of bulk density, five replicates were found to satisfy low CV condition.
Aalborg Universitet Fusing Recommendations for Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking websites, which allow their users to store and access their bookmarks online through a Web interface, are rapidly growing in popularity. Recommender systems are a successful remedy to the information overload accompanying the popularity-driven explosive growth in content. They are designed to automatically identify which unseen content might be of interest to a particular user, based on his or her past preferences. In this article, we focus on the task of item recommendation: using recommender systems to locate interesting content for users of social bookmarking websites. Item recommendation for social bookmarking has only recently begun to attract more attention from researchers, and much of the previous work suffers from a lack of comparisons between the different available approaches. This means that it is difficult to determine exactly what the best practices are for item recommendation on social bookmarking websites. In this article, we address this issue by comparing and evaluating eight different recommendation approaches on four different data sets from two different domains. We find that approaches that use tag overlap and metadata are competitive with each other and provide better results for social bookmarking data sets than the transaction patterns that are used traditionally in recommender systems research. In addition, we investigate how to fuse together different recommendation approaches to further improve recommendation accuracy. We find that fusing recommendations can indeed produce significant improvements in recommendation accuracy. We also find that it is often better to combine approaches that use different data representations, such as tags and metadata, than it is to combine approaches that only vary in the algorithms they use. The best results are obtained when both of these aspects of the recommendation task are varied in the fusion process. Our findings can be used to improve the quality of recommendations not only on social bookmarking websites, but conceivably also on websites that offer annotated commercial content.
Climatic changes in western North America, 1950–2005

The rate of climatic change over western North America (WNA) is quantified for 485 climate stations for the period 1950–2005. Additionally, six stations with quality long‐term records were selected and analysed for the period 1906–2005. The indicators used were developed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the World Climate Research Program's Expert Team on Climate Change Detection, Monitoring and Indices (ETCCDMI). From the 27 core indices, 4 temperature‐based and 4 precipitation‐based indicators were selected for in‐depth analysis. The 8 million km2 study area is comprised of the 22 contiguous US states and 4 Canadian provinces west of the Mississippi River and Great Lakes. The results were divided into six general regions for interpretation and presentation. GIS interpolation of station‐specific statistical output was completed to further aid in the identification of spatially coherent trends across WNA. Mean slopes were calculated over the whole study area, and by region, for each index, and then tested to determine if they were significantly different from zero.
STABILITY OF A BIDIMENSIONAL RELATIVE VELOCITY LATTICE BOLTZMANN SCHEME

In this contribution, we study the theoretical and numerical stability of a bidimensional relative velocity lattice Boltzmann scheme. These relative velocity schemes introduce a velocity field parameter called “relative velocity” function of space and time. They generalize the d’Humieres multiple relaxation times scheme and the cascaded automaton. This contribution studies the stability of a four velocities scheme applied to a single linear advection equation according to the value of this relative velocity. We especially compare when it is equal to 0 (multiple relaxation times scheme) or to the advection velocity (“cascaded like” scheme). The comparison is made in terms of L1 and L2 stability. The L1 stability area is fully described in terms of relaxation parameters and advection velocity for the two choices of relative velocity. These results establish that no hierarchy of these two choices exists for the L1 notion. Instead, choosing the parameter equal to the advection velocity improves the numerical L2 stability of the scheme. This choice cancels some dispersive terms and improve the numerical stability on a representative test case. We theoretically strengthen these results with a weighted L2 notion of stability.
A model for force regulated integrin binding to the RGD-synergy site

The presence of the synergy site on fibronectin’s module FN-III9, which is located about 32 Å away from the RGD-loop on FN-III10, greatly enhances integrin (α5β1)-mediated cell binding. Since fibronectin is exposed to mechanical forces acting on the extracellular matrix in vivo, we use steered molecular dynamics (SMD) to study how mechanical stretching of FN-III9-10 affects the relative distance between the two synergistic sites. Prior to force-induced unfolding of the modules, our simulations find the existence of an intermediate state in which the synergy-RGD distance is increased to approximately 55 Å while both the conformations of the RGD-loop and the synergy site themselves are unperturbed. This synergy-RGD distance is too large for the RGD-loop and the synergy site to co-bind the same receptor molecule; they are thus functionally decoupled. It has also been experimentally found that an increase in the linker chain length between FN-III9 and FN-III10 reduces α5β1 binding. Our simulations thus suggest that increased α5β1-binding contributed by the synergy site, and associated downstream cell-signaling events, can be turned off mechanically by stretching FN-III9-10 into this intermediate state. Under this model, α5β1 binding to the RGD-synergy site can be reduced under tension without deforming the separate binding sites and thus not affecting binding of integrins to the RGD-loop alone. We thus define this structural intermediate state of FN-III9-10 as the “functionally decoupled” state and discuss its potential physiological implications. Krammer A, Craig DW, Thomas W, Schulten K, and V Vogel.
Advanced Sensors and Controls for Building Applications: Market Assessment and Potential R&D Pathways

Significant energy savings can be achieved in commercial building operation, along with increased comfort and control for occupants, through the implementation of advanced technologies. This document provides a market assessment of existing building sensors and controls and presents a range of technology pathways (R&D options) for pursuing advanced sensors and building control strategies. This paper is actually a synthesis of five other white papers: the first describes the market assessment including estimates of market potential and energy savings for sensors and control strategies currently on the market as well as a discussion of market barriers to these technologies. The other four cover technology pathways: (1) current applications and strategies for new applications, (2) sensors and controls, (3) networking, security, and protocols and standards, and (4) automated diagnostics, performance monitoring, commissioning, optimal control and tools. Each technology pathway chapter gives an overview of the technology or application. This is followed by a discussion of needs and the current status of the technology. Finally, a series of research topics is proposed.
Lorentzian wormholes in Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity

We show that it is possible to construct a wide class of Lorentzian wormholes in Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity with a stress energy which does not violate the weak or null energy condition. The wormholes exist in a certain region of the parameter space. In fact, it is shown that there is a critical value of a parameter defined in our work, below which we have wormholes. Above the critical value, we have a regular black hole spacetime. We put a restriction on the equation of state parameter $\alpha$ ($p_{\theta}=\alpha \rho$) to have wormholes. We also put a lower limit on both the theory parameter $|\kappa|$ and the throat radius, to restrict the tidal acceleration (at the throat) below one Earth gravity. As a special case of our general solution, we retrieve the wormhole supported by an electric field for a charge-to-mass ratio greater than the critical value $\left(\frac{Q}{M}\right)_c\approx 1.144$.
Obfuscation and Honesty Experimental Evidence on Insurance Demand with Multiple Distribution Channels

This paper aims to shed light on the dilemma faced by insurance purchasers faced with multiple distribution channels. Should the consumer herself choose from a large set of insurance policies or rather delegate a part her decision to an intermediary who is more or less honest? We consider decisions based on a number of real-world insurance distribution channels with different information frames. Beliefs about intermediary honesty are the main determinants of individual choice. In addition, the obfuscation of information is the main source of inefficiency in decision-making, particularly regarding the characteristics of the insurance contracts chosen by consumers.
Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?

Rational investors should account for risk factor exposure when allocating capital to mutual funds. Two recent influential studies use mutual fund flows to test whether investors distinguish between performance driven by managers’ skill and systematic risk factors. Both studies found that investors use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), and one concluded that the CAPM is the “closest to the true asset pricing model. ” We re-examine these results and show that, in fact, fund flow data are most consistent with investors relying blindly on fund rankings (specifically, Morningstar ratings) and chasing recent returns. We find no evidence that investors account for any of the common systematic risk factors when allocating capital among mutual funds.
Velocity and Drag Evolution From the Leading Edge of a Model Mangrove Forest

An experimental study of unidirectional flow through a model mangrove forest measured both velocity and forces on individual trees. The individual trees were 1/12th scale models of mature Rhizophora, including 24 prop roots distributed in a three-dimensional layout. Thirty-two model trees were distributed in a staggered array producing a 2.5-m long forest. The velocity evolved from a boundary layer profile at the forest leading edge to a vertical profile determined by the vertical distribution of frontal area, with significantly higher velocity above the prop roots. Fully-developed conditions were reached at the 5th tree row from the leading edge. Within the root zone the velocity was reduced by up to 50 percent and the TKE was increased by as much as 5-fold, relative to the upstream conditions. TKE in the root zone was mainly produced by root and trunk wakes, and it agreed in magnitude with the estimation obtained using the Tanino and Nepf (2008) formulation. Maximum TKE occurred at the top of the roots, where a strong shear region was associated with the change in frontal area. The drag measured on individual trees decreased from the leading edge and reached a constant value at the 5th row and beyond, i.e. in the fully-developed region. The drag exhibited a quadratic dependence on velocity, which justified the definition of a quadratic drag coefficient. Once the correct drag length-scale was defined, the measured drag coefficients collapsed to a single function of Reynolds number.
Autism , Morality and Empathy Frédérique de Vignemont

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Autism, Morality and Empathy Frédérique de Vignemont
Climate Risk and Beliefs: Evidence from New York Floodplains

Applying a difference-in-differences framework to a census of residential property transactions in New York City 2003-2017, we estimate the price effects of three flood risk signals: 1) the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which increased premiums; 2) Hurricane Sandy; and 3) new floodplain maps reflecting three decades of climate change. Estimates are negative for all three signals and some are large: properties included in the new floodplain after escaping flooding by Sandy experienced 18 percent price reductions. We investigate possible mechanisms, including selection of properties into the market and residential sorting. Finding no evidence for these, we develop a parsimonious theoretical model to study changes in flood beliefs. The model allows decomposition of our reduced-form estimates into the effects of insurance premium changes and belief updating. Results suggest that the new maps induced substantially larger belief changes than insurance reform.
Sound Symbolism Facilitates Long-Term Retention of the Semantic Representation of Novel Verbs in Three-Year-Olds

Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the long term. Forty-nine children were taught either sound-symbolically matching or mismatching pairs made up of a novel verb and an action video. The following day, the children were asked whether a verb can be used for a scene shown in a video. They were tested with four videos for each word they had been taught. The four videos differed as to whether they contained the same or different actions and actors as in the training video: (1) same-action, same-actor; (2) same-action, different-actor; (3) different-action, same-actor; and (4) different-action, different-actor. The results showed that sound symbolism significantly improved the childrens’ ability to encode the semantic representation of the novel verb and correctly generalise it to a new event the following day. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that children were generalising to the “same-action, different-actor” video because they did not recognize the actor change due to the memory decay. Nineteen children were presented with the stimulus videos that had also been shown to children in the sound symbolic match condition in Experiment 1, but this time the videos were not labeled. In the test session the following day, the experimenter tested the children’s recognition memory for the videos. The results indicated that the children could detect the actor change from the original training video a day later. The results of the main experiment and the control experiment support the idea that a motivated (iconic) link between form and meaning facilitates the symbolic development in children. The current study, along with recent related studies, provided further evidence for an iconic advantage in symbol development in the domain of verb learning. A motivated form-meaning relationship can help children learn new words and store them long term in the mental lexicon.