Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
T E C H N I C a L a D V a N C E Open Access

A feasibility study of short message service text messaging as a surveillance tool for alcohol consumption and vehicle for interventions in university students Abstract Background: Practitioners who come into contact with the intoxicated, such as those in unscheduled care, often have limited resources to provide structured interventions. There is therefore a need for cost-effective alcohol interventions requiring minimal input. This study assesses the barriers, acceptability and validity of text messaging to collect daily alcohol consumption data and explores the feasibility of a text-delivered intervention in an exploratory randomised controlled trial.
SNR gap between MIMO linear receivers: Characterization and applications

This paper presents a statistical characterization of the SNR gap between MIMO Zero-Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) equalizers, beyond the Rayleigh assumption for the interfering streams amplitude fading. Results are valid for arbitrary transmit SNR values and number of transmit/receive antennas. Specifically, we provide the exact closed-form distribution of the random variable representing the difference between the output SNR on a generic receive filter branch, under MMSE and ZF equalization. Analytical results turn particularly useful for the study of heterogeneous cellular networks.
3 A flexible simulated annealing hyper-heuristic ( SAHH ) 3 . 1 Framework of the proposed hyper-heuristic

Most of the current search techniques represent approaches that are largely adapted for specific search problems. There are many real-world scenarios where the development of such bespoke systems is entirely appropriate. However, there are other situations where it would be beneficial to have methodologies which are generally applicable to more problems. One of our motivating goals for investigating hyper-heuristic methodologies is to provide a more general search framework that can be easily and automatically employed on a broader range of problems than is currently possible. In this paper, we investigate a simulated annealing hyper-heuristic methodology which operates on a search space of heuristics and which employs a stochastic heuristic selection strategy and a short-term memory. The generality and performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated over a large number of benchmark datasets drawn from two very different and difficult problems, namely; course timetabling and bin packing. The contribution of this paper is to present a method which can be readily (and automatically) applied to different problems whilst still being able to produce results on benchmark problems which are competitive with bespoke human designed tailor made algorithms for those problems.
A simple method for sampling invertebrate drift in large rivers and boulder‐bed streams

Sampling invertebrate drift in high‐gradient boulder‐bed channels or large turbulent rivers is challenging, because the traditional approach of driving stakes into the stream bed to secure drift nets may not work. We describe a simple method using a split wading rod to collect drift samples from the wadeable river margin or bank as an alternative method for rapid assessment of invertebrate drift when boat access is not possible. Pilot sampling in a large river shows that near‐shore drift samples collected with this approach are broadly similar to samples collected from the centre of the channel using more conventional methods, although our results suggest that depth and velocity effects may cause drift concentrations to be elevated closer to the bank.
Strathprints Institutional Repository

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers’ working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored.
Emergence of Grassy Habitats during the Greenhouse–Icehouse Systems Transition in the Middle Eocene of Southern South America

Abstract. Phytolith assemblages recovered from the middle Eocene Koluel-Kaike Formation in Central Patagonia, southern South America, confirm the presence of herbaceous components, mainly related to mixed ecosystems or savannahs, and subordinate dry forest communities. This new palaeobotanical information reveals a clear transition between previously described subtropical/tropical woodland-dominated communities from the early Eocene Las Flores Formation, and grass-rich ecosystems from the mid-Eocene Sarmiento Formation. Saddle phytoliths recorded in the Koluel-Kaike Formation would attest the presence of C4 grasses (Chloridoideae) by the middle Eocene of Central Patagonia. These saddle phytoliths is the oldest grassy habits recorded in Central Patagonia, and preceding in at least ∼8 Ma the timing proposed by previous contributions. The early appearance of grass-dominated ecosystems in southern South America, would be related to the worldwide greenhouse to icehouse systems transition initiated during the mid-Paleogene.
Changes in various branches of the Brewer–Dobson circulation from an ensemble of chemistry climate models

We analyzed the changes of simulated Brewer–Dobson circulation (BDC) for 1960–2099 from 12 chemistry climate models participating the Chemistry‐Climate Model Validation activity phase 2 (CCMVal‐2). We decomposed the BDC into transition, shallow, and deep branches with vertical extent of 100–70, 70–30, and above 30 hPa, respectively. Models consistently simulate the acceleration in all three BDC branches over 140 years, but the acceleration rate of the deep branches is much smaller. The acceleration rate of the transition and shallow branches in general shows weak seasonal or hemispheric dependence and increases with time, consistent with the continuous and homogeneous increase of greenhouse gas concentrations. The trend magnitudes of shallow and transition branches differ from model to model, which are found to be associated with the simulated changes in subtropical jets and tropical upper tropospheric temperature. The acceleration of the deep branch is also a response to the increase of greenhouse gas concentrations but is modulated by the changes in ozone concentrations. The effect of ozone changes is particularly prominent in the southern deep branch during austral summer: almost all models simulated strong significant acceleration during the ozone depletion era, weak deceleration during the ozone recovery era, and near‐zero trends during the stable ozone era. However, the ozone effect is less evident in other seasons and in other branches.
Online Consumer Behavior on Using Social Media on E-Commerce, based on the AISAS Model Approach. Case Study; Bukalapak, Tokopedia and Blili.com

The development of the technology industry also enhances online marketing strategies. It shapes consumer behavior. To measure consumer behavior online, the AISAS model can be used. This model was developed to measure online consumers in the marketplace Bukalapak, Tokopedia and Blibli.com. This study used 100 online consumer respondents as a sample, from the amount that cannot be identified. Data collected by online questionnaires. This research tested by quantitative methods with SEM-PLS analysis. The results of hypothesis testing indicate that 3 of 8 hypotheses were rejected. Relationship of attention to interests, interest in search, search for actions, actions towards shares and the search for positive and significant sharing. Whereas the relationship of attention to actions, interest in actions, and attention to shares don’t affect positively and significantly. Further research also needs to consider other variables that can influence online consumer behavior, such as gender control, education level, age, income level, etc. These research model enriches the concept of consumer behavior in marketing, especially in online media. These results indicate that consumers in their behavior on social media, especially online media, have special characteristics. This paper contributes scholars by examining the AISAS model and how it relates to online consumer
Confirmation of a slow symplasmic loading and unloading pathway in barley (Hordeum Vulgare L.) source and sink leaves

Visualization of the transport pathway in barley (Hordeum vulgare) leaves was carried out using a combination of aniline blue and a symplasmically transported fluorochrome, 5,6 carboxyfluorescein (5,6-CF). When applied to a source leaf, basipetal movement of 5,6-CF was observed after 3 h and the fluorochrome front was observed about 3-4cm away from the point of application. The fluorochrome was taken up into the symplasm of the mesophyll and was loaded into the bundle sheath cells and then subsequently the vascular parenchyma and finally into the sieve tubes. In sink leaves, acropetal movement was observed after 3 h and the fluorochrome had moved approximately 3 cm away from the point of application. Unloading of 5,6-CF occurred from all classes of longitudinal veins. Studies on solute retrieval showed that 5,6 CF-diacetate was transferred to xylem parenchyma where it was metabolized. 5,6-CF was then transferred from the xylem parenchyma to the vascular parenchyma cells, and it would appear that thick-walled sieve tubes were the first to show 5,6-CF labeling. Counterstaining with aniline blue demonstrates the presence of plasmodesmata and this suggests a potential symplasmic pathway from the mesophyll to the sieve tubes. Application of 5,6 CF-diacetate revealed a slow symplasmic pathway, which involved transfer of 5,6-CF, which was effected via plasmodesma.
Comparison of Experimentally and Theoretically Determined Infiltration in Coarse Textured Soil

Though it is vital to estimate infiltration as one of the key factors in effective management of water resources, only few studies have been carried out either to determine the infiltration or to compare the performance of infiltration models for coarse textured soils. Thus, the present study was conducted to accomplish two objectives. First to estimate the Horton’s infiltration model parameters for coarse textured soils (particle size distribution greater than 0.075 mm, according to the Unified Soil Classification System) and to compare the infiltration capacities estimated by the model with those measured in the field. Second to measure the infiltration in the coarse textured soil using both single and double ring infiltrometers and to compare them. Study location was Hapugala area in Galle District, Sri Lanka. In this study, the least squares fitting technique was employed to estimate the Horton’s model parameters from the field measured data. A good agreement was found between the model estimated infiltration values and those measured at field. Horton’s infiltration model estimations fitted very well with much coarse textured soil. The highest difference between the single and double ring infiltrometer measurements were also observed for the much coarse textured soil. Overall, the infiltration measurements by the double ring infiltrometer were 20-35% lower, on average, than that of the single ring infiltration measurements suggesting considerably high infiltration along the lateral direction in the single ring compared to the double ring infiltrometer.
Delivery of a Matrix Metalloproteinase Responsive Hydrogel Releasing TIMP-3 1 Following Myocardial Infarction : Effects on Left Ventricular Remodeling

Delivery of a Matrix Metalloproteinase Responsive Hydrogel Releasing TIMP-3 1 Following Myocardial Infarction: Effects on Left Ventricular Remodeling 2 3 H-00076-Revised 4 5 Brendan P. Purcell,* Shayne C. Barlow, Paige E. Perreault, Lisa Freeburg, Heather 6 Doviak, Julia Jacobs, Abigail Hoenes, Kia N. Zellars, Aarif Y. Khakoo, TaeWeon 7 Lee, Jason A. Burdick,* Francis G. Spinale 8 9 * Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; 10 + Cardiovascular Translational Research Center, University of South Carolina School 11 of Medicine and the WJB Dorn Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Columbia, SC; 12 § Amgen, CardioMetabolic Disorders, South San Francisco, CA. 13 14 Short Title: MMP Sensitive Gel Release of Recombinant TIMP-3 15 16 Document Statistics: 17
Pre-Hispanic settlements in hydrometeorologically susceptible areas during the late Holocene: The Upper Delta of the Paraná River Case

In this paper, we present the results of the geoarchaeological studies carried out in two archaeological localities of the Upper Delta of the Paraná River (Argentina). The main objective of these studies is to depict the pre-Hispanic strategies involved in the colonization and settlement of southern South America wetlands. Paraná Delta is one of the most conspicuous areas of these lowlands and comprises a large wetland macrosystem. Its current geomorphological configuration was established after the last transgressive mid-Holocene event c. 6000 14C yr BP. In this environment, a high ecological heterogeneity, with diverse and abundant tropical and temperate biota, was developed. These features were important factors to the human colonization and utilization of these wetlands. However, this environment has the highest hydrometeorological susceptibility of La Plata basin. This susceptibility had an impact on settlement systems and resource exploitation strategies established in the area since at least 2000 14C yr BP. These strategies involved at least two settlement types: semi-permanent residential camps and transitory camps oriented to exploit particular resources. The semi-permanent settlements were located in anthropogenic elevated mounds, locally known as ‘cerritos’, and were not subjected to seasonal inundations. Conversely, the transitory camps are found in levees exposed to recurrent flooding.
ADVANCES IN AUTOMATIC TRANSCRIPTION OF ITALIAN BROADCAST NEWS

This paper presents some recent improvements in automatic transcription of Italian broadcast news obtained at ITC-irst. A rst preliminary activity was carried out in order to develop a suitable speech corpus for the Italian language. The resulting corpus, formed by recordings covering 30 hours of radio news, was exploited for developing a baseline system for transcription of broadcast news. The system performs in di erent stages: acoustic segmentation and classi cation, speaker clustering, acoustic model adaptation and speech decoding. Major recent advances allowing performance improvement concern with speech segmentation and clustering, acoustic modeling, acoustic model adaptation and the language model. The transcription system features a 14.3% word error rate on planned studio speech and 18.7% on the whole test set formed by recordings of radio broadcast news. When applied to a test set formed by recordings of television broadcast news, the system features 16.5% word error rate on planned studio speech and 23.2% by considering the whole test set.
NeuroImage: Clinical

Intensity-based multi-atlas segmentation strategies have shown to be particularly successful in segmenting brain images of healthy subjects. However, in the same way as most of the methods in the state of the art, their performance tends to be a ﬀ ected by the presence of MRI visible lesions, such as those found in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Here, we present an approach to minimize the e ﬀ ect of the abnormal lesion intensities on multi-atlas segmentation. We propose a new voxel/patch correspondence model for intensity-based multi-atlas label fusion strategies that leads to more accurate similarity measures, having a key role in the ﬁ nal brain segmentation. We present the theory of this model and integrate it into two well-known fusion strategies: Non-local Spatial STAPLE (NLSS) and Joint Label Fusion (JLF). The experiments performed show that our proposal improves the segmentation performance of the lesion areas. The results indicate a mean Dice Similarity Coe ﬃ cient (DSC) improvement of 1.96% for NLSS (3.29% inside and 0.79% around the lesion masks) and, an improvement of 2.06% for JLF (2.31% inside and 1.42% around lesions). Furthermore, we show that, with the proposed strategy, the well-established preprocessing step of lesion ﬁ lling can be disregarded, obtaining similar or even more accurate segmentation results.
A comparison of the effect of beaver and human‐made impoundments on stream zooplankton

Small human‐made dams and beaver ponds cause significant changes in the environment of small streams. The decreased current velocity and increased water retention time in these impoundments favour the development of limnetic organisms, for example, zooplankton. However, small human‐made reservoirs are regulated, deep and narrow, whereas beavers create relatively large impoundments with numerous shallow patches and their impact on the stream zooplankton communities can be different. We compared the effect of beaver ponds and small reservoirs on the zooplankton communities in streams. Three sample collection sites were established in each stream. Site 1 was approximately 100 m upstream of the water impoundment formed by the dam. Site 2 was at the dam impoundment of the stream water. Site 3 was approximately 300 m below the dam. Beaver ponds have a larger impact on the zooplankton richness and the abundance changes compared with seminatural reservoirs not maintained by people, and a much greater impact than reservoirs regularly cleaned and regulated. Beaver ponds create heterogeneous environment that favour the occurrence of a greater number of zooplankton species compared with small reservoirs. Moreover, the increase in organic matter in the downstream areas could lead to trophic changes in the stream.
Measuring the Long-Term Perception of Monetary Policy and the Term Structure

This paper has two objectives. The first is to identify the long-term public perception of monetary policy. The second is to identify the relationship between this perception and long-term bond rates. For German data, the use of a two-factor model of the term structure results in the best forecast of long-term interest rates for the period between January 1975 and January 2003. It also allows us to introduce as the second factor the long-term perception of inflation as a characteristic of the behaviour of monetary authorities.
Elastic deep learning in multi-tenant GPU cluster

We study how to support elasticity, i.e., the ability to dynamically adjust the parallelism (number of GPUs), for deep neural network (DNN) training. Elasticity can benefit multi-tenant GPU cluster management in many ways, e.g., achieving various scheduling objectives (e.g., job throughput, job completion time, GPU efficiency) according to cluster load variations, maximizing the use of transient idle resources, performance profiling, job migration, and straggler mitigation. However, existing parallelism adjustment strategies incur high overheads, which hinder many applications from making effective use of elasticity. We propose EDL to enable low-overhead elastic deep learning with a simple API. We present techniques that are necessary to reduce the overhead of parallelism adjustments, such as stop-free scaling and dynamic data pipeline. We also demonstrate that EDL can indeed bring significant benefits to the above-listed applications in GPU cluster management.
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

making under uncertainty based on partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), and (3) algorithms for temporal difference (TD) learning in reinforcement learning theory. The new model postulates that decisions are made not based on a unitary estimate of " state " but rather the entire posterior probability distribution over states (the " belief state ") (see also Dayan and Daw, the model to take actions based on the current degree of uncertainty in its estimates. It allows, for example, " information-gathering " actions that can be used to reduce the current uncertainty in an estimate of a task-relevant quantity before committing to a decision. We show how a network of neurons can learn to map belief states to appropriate actions for maximizing expected reward. We illustrate the proposed model by applying it to the well-known random dots motion discrimination task. We show that after learning, model neurons representing belief state exhibit responses similar to those of LIP neurons in primate cerebral cortex. The appropriate threshold for switching from gathering information to making a decision is learned as part of the reward maximization process through TD learning. After learning , the temporal evolution of reward prediction error (TD error) in the model shares similarities with the responses of midbrain
Quantifying the completeness of the bat fossil record

Bats (Chiroptera) are one of the most successful extant mammalian orders, uniquely capable of powered flight and laryngeal echolocation. The timing and evidence for evolution of their novel adaptations have been difficult to ascertain from the fossil record due to chronological gaps and the fragmentary nature of most fossil bat material. Here, we quantify the quality of the bat fossil record using skeletal and character completeness metrics, which respectively document for each taxon what proportion of a complete skeleton is preserved, and the proportion of phylogenetic characters that can be scored. Completeness scores were collected for 441 valid fossil bat species in 167 genera from the Eocene to the Pleistocene. All metrics record similar temporal patterns: peak completeness in the Lutetian stage reflects the presence of Lagerstätten, while subsequent stages have very low completeness, except an Aquitanian high and a Pleistocene peak in skeletal completeness. Bat completeness is not correlated with intensity of sampling through geological time but has a weak negative correlation with publication date. There is no correlation between taxonomic richness and completeness, as the bat record predominately consists of diagnostic but isolated teeth. Consequently, bat skeletal completeness is the lowest of any previously assessed tetrapod group, but character completeness is similar to parareptiles and birds. Bats have significantly higher character completeness in the northern hemisphere, probably due to heightened historical interest and presence of Lagerstätten. Taxa derived from caves are more complete than those from fluviolacustrine and marine deposits, but do not preserve highly complete specimens.
Some Implementation Results on Random Polling Dynamic Load Balancing

Using two sample applications, we demonstrate the e(cid:11)ectiveness of our portable and reusable library for parallel tree search. On 1024 Transputers we achieve near optimal speedup even for quite small instances of the Golomb ruler problem. The 0/1 knapsack problem is more challenging but it is possible to achieve superlinear speedup compared to the standard sequential depth (cid:12)rst algorithm the implementation is based on.