Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thermal nature and resolution of the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary under the Pacific from surface waves

It is strongly debated whether the interface between the lithosphere and underlying as- thenosphere is a temperature-dependent rheological transition, as expected in a thermal convection system, or additionally affected by the presence of melts and/or fluids. Pre- vious surface wave studies of Pacific oceanic lithosphere have found that shear velocity and azimuthal anisotropy vary with seafloor crustal age as expected for a thermal control; however radial anisotropy does not. Various thermo-mechanical models have been pro- posed to explain this disparate behaviour. Nonetheless, it is unclear how robust the surface wave constraints are, and this is what we test in this study. We apply a Bayesian model space search approach to three published Pacific surface-wave dispersion datasets, two phase-velocity and one combined phase- and group-velocity set, and determine various proxies for the depth of the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB) and their uncer- tainties based on the velocity and radial anisotropy model distributions obtained. In their overall character and pattern with age, the velocity models from different datasets are consistent with each other, although they differ in their values of LAB depths. Uncertainties are substantial (as much as 20 km on LAB depths) and the addition of group-velocity data does not reduce them. Radial anisotropy structures differ even in pattern and display no obvious age dependence. However, given the uncertainties, we cannot exclude that radial anisotropy, azimuthal anisotropy, and velocity models actually reflect compatible, age-dependent, LAB depth estimates. The velocity LAB trends are most like those ex- pected for half-space cooling, because velocity differences persist at old ages, below the depth of common plate cooling models. Any direct signature of sub-ridge melt would be too small-scale to be resolved by these data. However, the velocity-increasing effects of dehydration and depletion due to melting below the ridge could explain why LAB proxy depths tend to a minimum of ∼60 km below young ocean floor.
An Efficient Tree Cache Coherence Protocol for Distributed Shared Memory Multiprocessors

Directory schemes have long been used to solve the cache coherence problem for large scale shared memory multiprocessors. In addition, tree-based protocols have been employed to reduce the directory size and the invalidation latency for a large degree of data sharing in the system. However, the existing tree-based protocols involve a very high communication overhead for maintaining a balanced tree, especially when the degree of data sharing is low. This paper presents a new tree-based cache coherence protocol which is a hybrid of the limited directory and the linked list schemes. By utilizing a limited number of pointers in the directory, the proposed protocol connects the nodes caching a shared block in a tree fashion without incurring any communication overhead. In addition to the low communication overhead, the proposed scheme also possesses the advantages of the existing bit-map and tree-based linked list protocols, namely, scalable memory requirement and logarithmic invalidation latency. We evaluate the performance of our protocol by running four applications on the Proteus execution-driven simulator. Our simulation results show that the performance of the proposed protocol is very close to that of the full-map protocol.
SIGMOD Officers , Committees , and Awardees Chair Vice-Chair Secretary /

The popularity of similarity search expanded with the increased interest in multimedia databases, bioinformatics, or social networks, and with the growing number of users trying to find information in huge collections of unstructured data. During the exploration, the users handle database objects in different ways based on the utilized similarity models, ranging from simple to complex models. Efficient indexing techniques for similarity search are required especially for growing databases. In this paper, we study implementation possibilities of the recently announced theoretical framework SIMDEX, the task of which is to algorithmically explore a given similarity space and find possibilities for efficient indexing. Instead of a fixed set of indexing properties, such as metric space axioms, SIMDEX aims to seek for alternative properties that are valid in a particular similarity model (database) and, at the same time, provide efficient indexing. In particular, we propose to implement the fundamental parts of SIMDEX by means of the genetic programming (GP) which we expect will provide highquality resulting set of expressions (axioms) useful for indexing.
Accounting Conservatism and Creditor Recovery Rate

This is a PDF file of a manuscript that has been accepted for publication in an American Accounting Association journal. It is the final version that was uploaded and approved by the author(s). While the paper has been through the usual rigorous peer review process for AAA journals, it has not been copyedited, nor have the graphics and tables been modified for final publication. Also note that the paper may refer to online Appendices and/or Supplements that are not yet available. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting and review of page proofs before it is published in its final form, therefore the published version will look different from this version and may also have some differences in content.
CenterTrack: An IP Overlay Network for Tracking DoS Floods

Finding the source of forged Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams in a large, high-speed network is difficult due to the design of the IP protocol and the lack of sufficient capability in most high-speed, high-capacity router implementations. Typically, not enough of the routers in such a network are capable of performing the packet forwarding diagnostics required for this. As a result, tracking-down the source of a flood-type denial-of-service (DoS) attack is usually difficult or impossible in these networks. CenterTrack is an overlay network, consisting of IP tunnels or other connections, that is used to selectively reroute interesting datagrams directly from edge routers to special tracking routers. The tracking routers, or associated sniffers, can easily determine the ingress edge router by observing from which tunnel the datagrams arrive. The datagrams can be examined, then dropped or forwarded to the appropriate egress point. This system simplifies the work required to determine the ingress adjacency of a flood attack while bypassing any equipment which may be incapable of performing the necessary diagnostic functions.
Security and Usability : The Gap in Real-World Online Banking ∗

Online banking is one of the most sensitive tasks performed by general Internet users. Most traditional banks now offer online banking services, and strongly encourage customers to do online banking with ‘peace of mind. ’ Although banks heavily advertise an apparent ‘100% online security guarantee,’ typically the fine print makes this conditional on users fulfilling certain security requirements. We examine some of these requirements as set by major Canadian banks, in terms of security and usability. We opened personal checking accounts at the five largest Canadian banks, and one online-only bank. We found that many security requirements are too difficult for regular users to follow, and believe that some marketing-related messages about safety and security actually mislead users. We are also interested in what kind of computer systems people really use for online banking, and whether users satisfy common online banking requirements. Our survey of 123 technically advanced users from a university environment strongly supports our view of an emerging gap between banks’ expectations (or at least what their written customer policy agreements imply) and users’ actions related to security requirements of online banking. Our participants, being more security-aware than the general population, arguably makes our results best-case regarding what can be expected from regular users. Yet most participants failed to satisfy common security requirements, implying most online banking customers do not (or cannot) follow banks’ stated end-user security requirements and guidelines. The survey also sheds light on the security settings of systems used for sensitive online transactions. This work is intended to spur a discussion on real-world system security and user responsibilities, in a scenario where everyday users are heavily encouraged to perform critical tasks over the Internet, despite the continuing absence of appropriate tools to do so. Version: October 19, 2007. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) 2007 New Hampshire, USA Copyright 200X ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX . $5.00.
E(cid:14)cient Learning and Planning Within the Dyna Framework

Sutton's Dyna framework provides a novel and computationally appealing way to integrate learning, planning, and reacting in autonomous agents. Examined here is a class of strategies designed to enhance the learning and planning power of Dyna systems by increasing their computational e(cid:14)ciency. The bene(cid:12)t of using these strategies is demonstrated on some simple abstract learning tasks.
Virtual collaborative learning using Wiki for ODL learners: the case of Wawasan Open University

Virtual collaborative learning is gaining in popularity in Open & Distance Learning (ODL) environment over the last decade. Findings from preliminary study conducted showed that collaborative learning activities enhance student satisfaction and achieve course learning outcomes. Wiki is widely promoted as virtual collaborative tool and has been integrated into several learning management systems. However, there are limited studies on the effectiveness of moodle-wikis for virtual collaborative learning. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of moodle-wiki in terms of students‟ perception and students‟ performance. The collected data was further analyzed and evaluated. The statistical results demonstrated that students have positive perception towards moodle-wiki and the collaborative tool does enhance student‟s learning performance. This study is useful for instructors and course designers as a guideline to investigate students‟ perception and evaluate the effectiveness of collaborative tool.
Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

: The Tibetan Plateau, the world’s largest orogenic plateau, hosts thousands of lakes that play prominent roles as water resources, environmental archives, and sources of natural hazards such as glacier lake outburst ﬂoods. Previous studies have reported that the size of lakes on the Tibetan Plateau has changed rapidly in recent years, possibly because of atmospheric warming. Tracking these changes systematically with remote sensing data is challenging given the different spectral signatures of water, the potential for confusing lakes with glaciers, and difﬁculties in classifying frozen or partly frozen lakes. Object-based image analysis (OBIA) offers new opportunities for automated classiﬁcation in this context, and we have explored this method for mapping lakes from LANDSAT images and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data. We tested our algorithm for most of the Tibetan Plateau, where lakes in tectonic depressions or blocked by glaciers and sediments have different surface colours and seasonal ice cover in images obtained in 1995 and 2015. We combined a modiﬁed normalised difference water index (MNDWI) with OBIA and local topographic slope data in order to classify lakes with an area >10 km 2 . Our method derived 323 water bodies, with a total area of 31,258 km 2 , or 2.6% of the study area (in 2015). The same number of lakes had covered only 24,892 km 2 in 1995; lake area has increased by ~26% in the past two decades. The classiﬁcation had estimated producer’s and user’s accuracies of 0.98, with a Cohen’s kappa and F-score of 0.98, and may thus be a useful approximation for quantifying regional hydrological budgets. We have shown that our method is ﬂexible and transferable to detecting lakes in diverse physical settings on several continents with similar success rates.
On the decadal predictability of the frequency of flood events across the U.S. Midwest

Skilful predictions of the frequency of flood events over long lead times (e.g., from 1 to 10 years ahead) are essential for governments and institutions making near‐term flood risk plans. However, little is known about current flood prediction capabilities over annual to decadal timescales. Here we address this knowledge gap at 286 U.S. Geological Survey gaging stations across the U.S. Midwest using precipitation and temperature decadal predictions from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) phase 5 models. We use the 1–10‐year predictions of precipitation and temperature as inputs to statistical models that have significant skill in reproducing inter‐annual and decadal changes in the observed frequency of flood events. Our results indicate that the limited skill of basin‐averaged precipitation predictions suppresses the skill of flood event frequency predictions, even at the shortest lead time, but downscaling and bias correction improves predictions across all lead times and especially in spring.
Shape and Motion from Image Streams: a Factorization Method 2. Point Features in 3D Motion

In principle, three orthographic images of four points are su cient to recover the positions of the points relative to each other (shape), and the viewpoints from which the images were taken (motion). In practice, however, the solution to this structure-from-motion problem is reliable only when the viewing direction changes considerably between images. This con icts with the di culty of establishing correspondence between images over long-range camera motions. Image streams, long sequences of images covering a wide motion in small steps, allow solving this con ict by using tracking for correspondence and redundancy for increased reliability in the structure-from-motion computation. This report is the second of a series on a new factorization method for the computation of shape and camera motion from a stream of images. While the rst report considered a camera moving on a plane, we now extend theory, analysis and experiments to general, three-dimensional motion. In our method, we represent feature points in an image stream by a 2F P measurement matrix, which gathers the horizontal and vertical coordinates of the P points tracked through F frames. If coordinates are measured with respect to their centroid, we show that under orthography the measurement matrix is of rank 3. Using this fact, we cast structure-from-motion as a matrix factorization problem, which we solve with an algorithm based on Singular Value Decomposition. Our algorithm gives accurate results, without relying on any smoothness assumption for either shape or motion.
Comparing Size Measures for Predicting Web Application Development Effort: A Case Study

Size represents one of the most important attribute of software products used to predict software development effort. In the past nine years, several measures have been proposed to estimate the size of Web applications, and it is important to determine which one is most effective to predict Web development effort. To this aim in this paper we report on an empirical analysis where, using data from 15 Web projects developed by a software company, we compare four sets of size measures, using two prediction techniques, namely Forward Stepwise Regression (SWR) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). All the measures provided good predictions in terms of MMRE, MdMRE, and Pred(0.25) statistics, for both SWR and CBR. Moreover, when using SWR, length measures and Web Objects gave significant better results than Functional measures, however presented similar results to the Tukutuku measures. As for CBR, results did not show any significant differences amongst the four sets of size measures.
Cross-Layer Design for QoS Support in Multihop Wireless Networks Using network software designed with more-flexible concepts, streaming audio and video quality may be improved for networks where wireless-equipped computers forward data to each other.

Due to such features as low cost, ease of deployment, increased coverage, and enhanced capacity, multihop wireless networks such as ad hoc networks, mesh networks, and sensor networks that form the network in a self- organized manner without relying on fixed infrastructure is touted as the new frontier of wireless networking. Providing efficient quality of service (QoS) support is essential for such networks, as they need to deliver real-time services like video, audio, and voice over IP besides the traditional data service. Various solutions have been proposed to provide soft QoS over multihop wireless networks from different layers in the network protocol stack. However, the layered concept was primarily created for wired networks, and multihop wireless networks oppose strict layered design because of their dynamic nature, infrastructureless architecture, and time- varying unstable links and topology. The concept of cross- layer design is based on architecture where different layers can exchange information in order to improve the overall network performance. Promising results achieved by cross-layer opti- mizations initiated significant research activity in this area. This paper aims to review the present study on the cross-layer paradigm for QoS support in multihop wireless networks. Several examples of evolutionary and revolutionary cross- layer approaches are presented in detail. Realizing the new trends for wireless networking, such as cooperative communi- cation and networking, opportunistic transmission, real system performance evaluation, etc., several open issues related to cross-layer design for QoS support over multihop wireless networks are also discussed in the paper.
Identification of Heterotic Crosses for yield and Water Use Efficiency Traits in Relation to Moisture Stress Tolerance in Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.)

1Dept. of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Institute of Frontier Technology, Regional Agricultural Research Station, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh (517 502) India 2Dept. Genetics and Plant Breeding, 4Dept. of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University, Andhra Pradesh (522 034), India 3Dept. of Crop Physiology, Institute of Frontier Technology, Regional Agricultural Research Station, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh (517 502), India
BlockSwap: Fisher-guided Block Substitution for Network Compression

The desire to run neural networks on low-capacity edge devices has led to the development of a wealth of compression techniques. Moonshine (Crowley et al., 2018a) is a simple and powerful example of this: one takes a large pre-trained network and substitutes each of its convolutional blocks with a selected cheap alternative block, then distills the resultant network with the original. However, not all blocks are created equally; for a required parameter budget there may exist a potent combination of many different cheap blocks. In this work, we find these by developing BlockSwap: an algorithm for choosing networks with interleaved block types by passing a single minibatch of training data through randomly initialised networks and gauging their Fisher potential. We show that block-wise cheapening yields more accurate networks than single block-type networks across a spectrum of parameter budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/ pytorch-blockswap.
Value chain analysis of small-scale fisheries in the High Dam Lake in Egypt

Although, High Dam Lake small-scale fisheries is an important source of fish for residents of Aswan in Upper Egypt, there is limited information available about the performance of small-scale fisheries value chain. Structured questionnaires with fishers, traders, and processors were used to collect input and output data at each node of the chain. Focus group discussions meeting with stakeholder collected qualitative information about and critical factors influencing performance across the chain. Catch distribution composed mainly from tilapias 75%. While pebbly fish (Alestes spp.) and tigerfish (Hydrocynus spp.) accounts for 13% of catch. Fish processing is an important subsector in lake fisheries. Fishers obtained a relatively low percentage (49%) of the final consumer price. The recorded average catch per fisher 20 kg/day and the average total fishing cost in the three landing sites was EGP 5210 / t. Every 100 metric tons of fish catch and sell provides around 30 full-time equivalent jobs. This study revealed that fish stock is under pressure of overfishing. Critical factors facing the small-scale fisheries and influencing profitability are numerous. This value chain study improves our understanding of the performance of small-scale fisheries and identified limiting factors and action needed to support fisheries development in the lake. Key words: Small-scale fisheries, value chain, tilapia, tigerfish, pebbly fish.
Ageostrophic Secondary Circulation at a Submesoscale Front and the Formation of Gravity Currents

Large-eddy simulations are performed to investigate the development of the ageostrophic secondary circulation (ASC) and associated transport in a submesoscale front. Based on the observations in the northern Bay of Bengal and in the Pacific cold tongue, the model front has a large cross-front density difference that is partially compensated with lateral temperature and salinity gradients. Vertical stratification is varied in different cases to explore its effect on the ASC. The evolution of the ASC differs with stratification. When the front is unstratified, shear instabilities, which develop from the geostrophic shear, cause the front to slump. Cold water from the light side propagates across the front on the surface, while warm water from the dense side spreads in the opposite direction at depth. In cases with stratifications, a shear layer driven by the cross-front pressure gradient forms at the surface to initiate the ASC. Shear-driven turbulence associated with the enhanced shear in the layer causes the front to slump, and the development of the ASC onward is similar to the unstratified case. Irrespective of the initial stratification of the strong fronts simulated here, the surface layer evolves into a gravity current. The ASC is composed of the surface gravity current and a countercurrent that are separated by a middle layer with enhanced stratification and a thermal inversion. Turbulent dissipation is enhanced at the nose of the gravity current and in a sheared region somewhat behind the leading edge of the countercurrent. The gravity current propagates at a speed proportional to the buoyancy difference across the front in the case with no stratification.