Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An approach to the calculation of habitat preference data: Impala on Loskop Dam Nature Reserve

A new approach to the calculation of habitat preference indices for ungulates is outlined using the distribution of impala in the Loskop Dam Nature Reserve as an example. Impala showed a high preference for open Acacia woodlands and foothill ecotones. Home-ranges were small with seasonal migrations occurring possibly as a result of availability of surface water. A frequency curve was found to fit the empirical distribution of habitat preference indices and utilized to obtain a probability density function. From this density function weights were obtained as indicators of relative habitat importance.
Inhibition-Induced Forgetting

The ability to inhibit prepotent responses is a core executive function, but the relation of response inhibition to other cognitive operations is poorly understood. In the study reported here, we examined inhibitory control through the lens of incidental memory. Participants categorized face stimuli by gender in a go/no-go task (Experiments 1 and 2) or a stop-signal task (Experiment 3) and, after a short delay, performed a surprise recognition memory task for those faces. Memory was impaired for stimuli presented during no-go and stop trials compared with those presented during go trials. Experiment 4 showed that this inhibition-induced forgetting was not attributable to event congruency. In Experiment 5, we combined a go/no-go task with a dot-probe test and found that probe detection during no-go trials was inferior to that on go trials. This result supports the hypothesis that inhibition-induced forgetting occurs when response inhibition shunts attentional resources from perceptual stimulus encoding to action control.
Class-Specific Simplex-Latent Dirichlet Allocation for Image Classification

An extension of the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), denoted class-specific-simplex LDA (css-LDA), is proposed for image classification. An analysis of the supervised LDA models currently used for this task shows that the impact of class information on the topics discovered by these models is very weak in general. This implies that the discovered topics are driven by general image regularities, rather than the semantic regularities of interest for classification. To address this, we introduce a model that induces supervision in topic discovery, while retaining the original flexibility of LDA to account for unanticipated structures of interest. The proposed css-LDA is an LDA model with class supervision at the level of image features. In css-LDA topics are discovered per class, i.e. a single set of topics shared across classes is replaced by multiple class-specific topic sets. This model can be used for generative classification using the Bayes decision rule or even extended to discriminative classification with support vector machines (SVMs). A css-LDA model can endow an image with a vector of class and topic specific count statistics that are similar to the Bag-of-words (BoW) histogram. SVM-based discriminants can be learned for classes in the space of these histograms. The effectiveness of css-LDA model in both generative and discriminative classification frameworks is demonstrated through an extensive experimental evaluation, involving multiple benchmark datasets, where it is shown to outperform all existing LDA based image classification approaches.
Voronoi diagrams – inventor, method, applications

Abstract The article presents the person and works of Georgy Voronoi (1868-1908), the inventor of an original method of diagrams, a student of the famous mathematician Andrey Markov. Georgy Voronoi graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg, and subsequently worked as a professor of mathematics at the Imperial University of Warsaw. One of his students was the future outstanding Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński. In his brief lifetime G. Voronoi published several important scientific articles on number theory. In an almost 100 page paper in French published in 1908 he described a method of diagrams, or polygons, which became known as the method of Voronoi diagrams. In the digital age this method and its modifications found new applications. The entry “Voronoi” is getting more popular on the Internet, and the method of Voronoi diagrams and its modifications are widely described in handbooks and scientific articles. The article presents application of the method in the most popular computer programs from the Geographic Information System (GIS) group and presents examples of its usage in research on geographic space in various scientific disciplines.
An Empirical Study of the Coolstreaming+ System

In recent years, there has been significant interest in adopting the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for Internet live video streaming. There are primarily two reasons behind this development: the elimination of infrastructure support and the self-scaling property of P2P systems. The success of our system Coolstreaming represented one of the earliest large-scale P2P video streaming experiments. Since then, there have been several large-scale commercial deployments. With desirable content, these systems have the potential to scale orders of magnitude beyond the existing academic P2P prototypes. However, to transform this potential into reality, we need to understand the key design trade-offs and principles, as well as the design limitations of these systems. There are two main design decisions in a P2P streaming system: (i) How to form an overlay, and (ii) How to deliver the content. Coolstreaming adopts a gossiping protocol for overlay construction, and a swarm-based protocol for content delivery. While these protocols provide excellent flexibility and effectiveness in dealing with system dynamics and random failure, their impact on the performance and the system scalability remain less known. This paper takes an inside look at a commercial system based on the Coolstreaming, called Coolstreaming+. We explore its design choices and the impact of these choices on streaming performance. Specifically, by using internal traces generated by recent live broadcast events, we study the workload, performance, and dynamics of the system. Based on these traces, we show that (1) the churn is the most critical factor that affects the overall performance of the system, and (2) there is a highly skew resource distribution in P2P streaming systems, which has significant impact on resource allocation. We further discuss the impact of these observations on the system properties, and present solutions to deal with various design challenges. In particular, we suggest solutions to deal with the excessive start-up time and high failure rates during flash crowd, which are two of the main challenges any streaming system needs to address.
HRaid: A Flexible Storage-system Simulator

HRaid:aFlexibleStorage-systemSimulatorToniCortesJes usLabartaUniversitatPolitecnicadeCatalunya-Barcelonaftoni,jesusg@ac.upc.es-http://www.ac.upc.es/hpcAbstractClustersofworkstationsarebcomingaquitepopularplatformtorunhigh-performanceappli-cations.Thisfacthasstressedtheneeofhigh-performancestoragesystemsforthiskindofenvi-ronments.Inordertodesignsuchsystems,weneedadequatetools,whichshouldbeexibleenoughmodelaclusterofworkstations.Currentlyavailablesimulatorsdonotal lowheterogeneity(severalkindofdisks),hierarchiesorresourcesharing(amongothers),whicharequitecommoninclusters.To l lthisgap,wehavedesignedandimplementeHRaid,whichisaveryexibleandeasytousestorage-systemsimulator.Inthispaper,wepresentsimulator,itsmainabstractionsandsomesimpleexamplesofhowitcanbeused.Keywords:Storage-systemmo delingandsimula-tion,HeterogeneousRAIDs,Clustercomputing1Intro ductionOneofthemaincharacteristicsaclusterworkstationsisitsabilitytogrowheneverneeded.Ifmorestoragespaceisrequired,anewdiskcanb eeasilyattached.Thisendsupmakingitverydiculttohaeanhomoge-neoussetofdisks,unlessalldisksarereplacedwhenanewoneisb ought.Allsimulationto olsthatarecurrentlyavailableassumesetofho-mogeneouscomp onents[1 ,2 ,3 ]. Thiskindofto olsisadequatetosimulatestoragesystemforparallelmachines,butitlackstheexibilitytostudythep erformanceofanI/Osystemforaclusterofworkstations.Itisalsoquitecommon,inacluster,tohaveThisworkhasb eensupp ortedbytheSpanishMin-istryofEducation(CICYT)undertheTIC-98-0511contract.plentyofresourcesharingwithinastoragesys-tem.Mostto olsdonottakeintoaccountthee ectofnetworkorCPUcontention.Theseissuescannotb eleftasideasthep erformancemaydep endonthemheavily.Web elievthatitisveryimp ortanttohato olsthatallowresearcherstoseethee ectofagivenp olicyusingmorerealmo delsthantheonescurrentlyavailable.HRaidisnewto olthatgivesthep ossibilitytoresearcherstomo delheterogeneousstoragesystemsuchaRAIDswherethedisksarenothomoge-neous.Itcanalsob eusedtomo delhierar-chiesofRAIDsoranyotherkindnetwork-distributedsystemduetoitsgreatcon gura-tionexibility.Ofcourse,italsoallowstomo deltraditionalenvironmentswithhomoge-neouscomp onents,orevensingledisksystems.Furthermore,itisalsoexibleenoughtoallowanyresearchertoaddnewcomp onentsormo delsforalreadyexistingcomp onents(suchasdisksornetworks). Inthispap er,wewillpresentthemainfunc-tionalitiesofthisnewto olandthecomp onentsthathavealreadyb eenimplemented,whichshouldb eenoughformostresearchworks.1. 1KindofProblemstob eAddressedUsingHRaidTogetab etterideaofhowthisnewto olcouldb eused,wepresentafewexamplequestionsthatcanb eansweredusingit. Whatisthee ectofheterogeneityinanetworkRAID? Hoisthep erformancea ectedifanewandfasterdiskisaddedtotheRAIDsystem? Isitworthbuy
Wardrop Equilibrium for CDMA Systems

In this contribution, the performance of an uplink CDMA system is analyzed in the context of frequency selective fading channels. Using game theoretic tools, a useful framework is provided in order to determine the optimal power allocation when users know only their own channel (while perfect channel state information is assumed at the base station). We consider the realistic case of frequency selective channels. This scenario illustrates the case of decentralized schemes and aims at reducing the downlink signaling overhead. Various receivers are considered, namely the Matched filter, the MMSE filter and the optimum filter. The goal of this paper is to derive simple expressions for the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium as the number of mobiles becomes large. To that end we combine two asymptotic methodologies. The first is asymptotic random matrix theory which allows us to obtain explicit expressions for the impact of all other mobiles on any given tagged mobile. The second is the theory of non-atomic games along with the Wardrop equilibrium concept which allows us to compute good approximations of the Nash equilibrium as the number of mobiles grow.
Exploring Time Series Spectral Features in Viral Hashtags Prediction

Viral hashtags spread across a large population of Internet users very quickly. Previous studies use features mostly in an aggregate sense to predict the popularity of hashtags, for example, the total number of hyperlinks in early tweets adopting a tag. Since each tweet is time stamped, many aggregate features can be decomposed into fine-grained time series such as a series of numbers of hyperlinks in early adopting tweets. This research utilizes frequency domain tools to analyze these time series. In particular, we apply scalogram analysis to study the series of adoption time lapses and the series of mentions and hyperlinks in early adopting tweets. Besides continuous wavelet transforms (CWTs), we also use fast wavelet transforms (FWTs) to analyze the time series. Through experiments with two sets of tweets collected in different seasons, out-of-sample cross validations show that wavelet spectral features can generally improve the prediction performance, and discrete FWT yields results as good as the more complicated CWT-based methods with scalogram analysis.
Production inconsistencies delay adaptation to foreign accents

The effects of production inconsistencies and speaker’s accented production preferences on speech comprehension were investigated in an eyetracking experiment. Using the visual world paradigm, native speakers of German with L2 English listened to single English words produced by a German speaker that had their th either pronounced canonically or substituted with an /s/ or a /t/. Looks to the target word were most likely for the canonical pronunciation and did not differ between the substitutes. However, target looks increased for items with th substitutions in the course of the experiment, indicating slow adaptation to inconsistently foreign accented speech.
Semantic Social Networks Constructed by Topical Aspects of Conversations: An Explorative Study

As the number of social networking services (SNS) and their users grow, so does the complexity of individual networks as well as the amount of information to be consumed by the users. Users of SNS exchange short and instantaneous messages interactively, which can be seen as conversations. We explore this conversational aspect of SNS and show how refined topic-based semantic social networks can be formed in order to reduce the complexity and information overload. Among other possibilities, we use the notion of topic diversity and topic purity of SNS conversations between two users and show different types of social relationships can be identified in that they break down a huge “syntactic” social network into topic-based ones based on different interaction types. Resulting semantic social networks can be useful in designing various targeted services on online social networks.
A Support Vector Machine Forecasting Model for Typhoon Flood Inundation Mapping and Early Flood Warning Systems

Accurate real-time forecasts of inundation depth and extent during typhoon flooding are crucial to disaster emergency response. To manage disaster risk, the development of a flood inundation forecasting model has been recognized as essential. In this paper, a forecasting model by integrating a hydrodynamic model, k-means clustering algorithm and support vector machines (SVM) is proposed. The task of this study is divided into four parts. First, the SOBEK model is used in simulating inundation hydrodynamics. Second, the k-means clustering algorithm classifies flood inundation data and identifies the dominant clusters of flood gauging stations. Third, SVM yields water level forecasts with 1–3 h lead time. Finally, a spatial expansion module produces flood inundation maps, based on forecasted information from flood gauging stations and consideration of flood causative factors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed forecasting model, we present an application to the Yilan River basin, Taiwan. The forecasting results indicate that the simulated water level forecasts from the point forecasting module are in good agreement with the observed data, and the proposed model yields the accurate flood inundation maps for 1–3 h lead time. These results indicate that the proposed model accurately forecasts not only flood inundation depth but also inundation extent. This flood inundation forecasting model is expected to be useful in providing early flood warning information for disaster emergency response.
Equatorial magnetic field of the near‐Earth magnetotail

The equatorial magnetic field of the nightside magnetosphere is critical for understanding not only the configuration of the magnetotail but also its state and dynamics. The present study observationally addresses various aspects of the equatorial magnetic field, such as its spatial distribution, possible antisunward gradients, and extremely weak magnetic fields, with emphasis on the transition region between dipolar and stretched magnetic configurations. The results are summarized as follows: (1) the transition of the tail magnetic field from a near‐Earth dipolar configuration to a stretched one farther out takes place around −12 ≤ Xagsm ≤ −9 RE, although instantaneous configurations can vary significantly; (2) the average equatorial magnetic field in this transition region is noticeably weaker at solar minimum presumably reflecting weaker nightside magnetospheric currents closer to Earth; (3) the statistical comparison of equatorial magnetic fields measured simultaneously at two locations indicates that the gradient of the equatorial magnetic field is directed predominantly earthward, and it is suggested that apparent tailward gradients observed can be very often attributed to other factors such as structures in the Y direction and local fluctuations; (4) however, the gradient can be transiently directed tailward in association with the dipolarization of local magnetic field; (5) extremely weak (≤ 2 nT) magnetic fields are occasionally observed in the transition region during the substorm growth phase and during prolonged quiet intervals, but the association with steady magnetospheric convection, which was suggested before, cannot be confirmed possibly because of its rare occurrence.
It’s Alive! Smart Things for Gaming Chairs: Exploring Animism as a Resource for Building Relations

In this project, the intersection between animism and smart things is being explored, with a special focus on gaming chairs. Integrated sensors and actuators become an opportunity to create interactivity and autonomous behaviour which creates illusions of life. Gaming chairs are interesting to explore because it’s a piece of furniture that is often and well used, for longer periods at a time, allowing a space to create a personal relationship between the human user and the chair. With the goal to develop design beyond the current norms of interactions and relationships between the user and belongings in their home this project uses Research Through Design, Speculative Design, Animism and Posthumanism. By transferring insights of visual expressions, capabilities of beloved belongings, familiar interactions and behaviours to a non-living entity combined with technology and smart things as a contributor for animistic expression - this project proposes that it is possible to create an illusion of life and for humans to develop a relationship to a non-human entity. The actuators applied on the conceptual gaming chair affected the participants testing it - the participants seemed to care for the chair and perceived it to be an extension of themselves
Occurrences and Ecotoxicological Risk Assessment of Heavy Metals in Surface Sediments from Awash River Basin, Ethiopia

Like many areas in developing nations, rapid population growth, a high urbanization rate, and poor waste management practices have been observed in the Awash River Basin. Moreover, no comprehensive study has been conducted in this basin to evaluate sediment contamination with heavy metals. About 46 sampling locations were considered to study heavy metal concentrations, distributions, pollution levels, and potential ecological risks associated with these contaminants. The results indicate that average concentrations of all metals have exceeded their respective background values except Pb and Hg. A comparison with similar studies also revealed that sediments from the Awash River Basin had a high average value for Cd. The mean enrichment values of heavy metals increased in the order of Hg < As < Pb < Ni < Cu < Cr < Zn < Cd. Multivariate analysis revealed that Ni and Cu had common sources. The average potential ecological risk index (ERI = 355.54) indicates high potential toxicity response in the study area. In general, surficial sediment contamination with heavy metals is causing high ecological hazards in Awash River Basin. This study sheds lights on the current level of contamination of heavy metals which are widely distributed across the sediments of rivers and streams of Awash River Basin.
Development of a Standardized Method for Motion Testing in Pulse Oximeters

BACKGROUND:Pulse oximeter performance in the presence of motion varies among devices and manufacturers because of variations in hardware, software, testing, and calibration. Compounding these differences is a lack of uniform characterization of motion, and the consequential effects of motion upon the wide range of normal and abnormal human physiology. Traditional motion testing attempts to standardize motion into a reproducible form by using a mechanical jig to produce passive motion of a known amplitude and frequency. This type of motion challenge fails to account for the physiologic changes induced by active movement. METHODS:We postulate that a more appropriate method for testing the performance of pulse oximeters in the presence of motion is to create a feedback control loop between the device and the test subject, providing a reproducible, actively created, and controlled motion test suitable for standardized testing among manufacturers. It is hoped that relying on a signal as seen from the oximeter's perspective will enable the creation of a sensitive and reproducible test method capable of separating those oximeters that can reject motion artifact from those that cannot. RESULTS:Preliminary results have concentrated on building the tools and clinical protocols needed to evaluate this method. Some basic observations are reported, but insufficient numbers of experienced subjects precludes rigorous conclusions. CONCLUSION:We have set the stage for a feasibility demonstration using a novel form of testing. With sufficient subjects and proper statistical evaluation, a robust test method for assessing the performance of pulse oximeters in the presence of motion may be at hand.
Automatically Tuning the GCC Compiler to Optimize the Performance of Applications Running on Embedded Systems

This paper introduces a novel method for automatically tuning the selection of compiler flags to optimize the performance of software intended to run on embedded hardware platforms. We begin by developing our approach on code compiled by the GNU C Compiler (GCC) for the ARM Cortex-M3 (CM3) processor; and we show how our method outperforms the industry standard -O3 optimization level across a diverse embedded benchmark suite. First we quantify the potential gains by using existing iterative compilation approaches that time-intensively search for optimal configurations for each benchmark. Then we adapt iterative compilation to output a single configuration that optimizes performance across the entire benchmark suite. Although this is a time-consuming process, our approach constructs an optimized variation of -O3, which we call -Ocm3, that realizes nearly two thirds of known available gains on the CM3 and significantly outperforms a more complex state-of-the-art predictive method in cross-validation experiments. Finally, we demonstrate our method on additional platforms by constructing two more optimization levels that find even more significant speed-ups on the ARM Cortex-A8 and 8-bit AVR processors.
The Influence of Customer Satisfaction and Consumer Brand Relationship pn Future Intention Based on Optimal Experience Theory

The contribution made by the automotive industry can be an improvement for the automotive sector. The global economy can run smoothly and improve with the role played by many industrial sectors, most importantly the automotive industry. This research aims to test and analyze the influence of experience, consumer brand relationship, and satisfaction on future intention. The population is Generation Y and Z consumers aged 17-55 years, who are users of automotive dealer services. The data collection technique uses nonprobability sampling with the judgment sampling method. Optimal experience theory is used in research as the main theory. The sample consisted of 150 respondents. This research is quantitative using SPSS IBM 27 and AMOS Graphics 24 software. The findings of this research show that satisfaction is proven to have no significant influence on future intention. Other research shows that experience results have a positive and significant effect on satisfaction. The findings from this research also show that consumer brand relationships can influence future intentions toward consumers of automotive dealer services. This research is useful in that automotive dealer services must increase satisfaction and consumer brand relationships towards future intentions for consumers.