Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BIVARIATE FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF FLOOD VARIABLES USING COPULA IN KELANTAN RIVER BASIN

A copula-based methodology is presented in this study for bivariate flood frequency analysis of Kelantan river basin located in Northeast Malaysia. The joint dependence structures of three flood characteristics, namely, peak flow (Q), flood volume (V) and flood duration (D) were modelled using t-Copula. Various univariate distribution functions of flood variables were fitted with observed flood variables to find the best distributions. Cumulative joint distribution functions (CDF) of peak flow and volume (Q-F), peak flow and duration (Q-D) and volume and duration (V-D) revealed that return period of joint return periods are much higher compared to univariate return period. The joint probabilities of occurrence of 0.8, 0.6, 0.4, 0.2 and 0 can be expected when flood duration greater than 65 h, 54 h, 46 h, and 32 h, and the flood volume higher than 0.62 km3, 0.33 km3, 0.25 km3, and 0.22 km3 respectively.
Local variation in hedonic house pricing in Hanoi, Vietnam: a spatial analysis of status quality trade-off (SQTO) theory

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Local variation in hedonic house price, Hanoi: a spatial analysis of SQTO theory A. J. Comber 1 , P. Harris 2 , T. Q. Nguyen 3 , P. K. Chi 4 , H. Tran 4 and H. H. Phe 5 School of Geography, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Email: a.comber@leeds.ac. uk Rothamsted Research, North Wyke, Okehampton, EX20 2SB, UK Email: paul.harris@rothamsted.ac. uk National University of Civil Engineering, Hanoi, Vietnam Email: quannt@nuce.edu. vn GeoViet Consulting Co. Ltd, Hanoi, Vietnam Email: chi.geoviet@gmail.com Vinaconex RD Fujita, 1989). In these, access to place of work to minimise commuting costs, for example, is one of the main factors explaining residential location choices for lower- income households and higher-income households choose larger properties in the suburbs
Minimizing Side-Channel Attack Vulnerability via Schedule Randomization

Predictable and repeatable execution is the key to ensuring functional correctness for real-time systems. Scheduling algorithms are designed to generate schedules that repeat after a certain amount of time has passed. However, this repeatability is also a vulnerability when side-channel attacks are considered. Side-channel attacks are attacks based on information gained from the implementation of a system, rather than on weaknesses in the algorithm. Side-channel attacks have exploited the predictability of real-time systems to disrupt their correct behavior. Schedule Randomization has been proposed as a way to mitigate this problem. Online, the scheduler selects a schedule among a set of available ones, trying to achieve an execution trace that is as different as possible from previous ones, therefore minimizing the amount of information that the attacker can gather. This thesis investigates fundamental limitations of schedule randomization for a generic taskset. We then propose an algorithm to construct a set of schedules that achieves a differentation level as high as possible, using the fewest number of schedules, for tasksets with implicit deadlines. The approach is validated with synthetically generated tasksets and the taskset of an industrial case study, showing promising results.
Personalised context-aware ubiquitous learning system for supporting effective English vocabulary learning

Because learning English is extremely popular in non-native English speaking countries, developing modern assisted-learning schemes that facilitate effective English learning is a critical issue in English-language education. Vocabulary learning is vital within English learning because vocabulary comprises the basic building blocks of English sentences. Therefore, numerous studies have attempted to increase the efficiency and performance of learning English vocabulary. ‘The situational learning approach’ proposed that ‘context’ is an important consideration in the language learning process and can enhance learner learning interest and efficiency. Restated, meaningful vocabulary learning occurs only when the learning process is integrated with social, cultural and life contexts. With the rapid development of context-awareness techniques, the development of context-aware mobile learning systems, which can support learners in learning without constraints of time or place via mobile devices and associate learning activities with real learning environment, enables the conduct of a novel context-aware ubiquitous learning mode to enhance English vocabulary learning. Accordingly, this study proposes a personalised context-aware ubiquitous learning system (PCULS) for learning English vocabulary based on learner location as detected by wireless positioning techniques, learning time, individual English vocabulary abilities and leisure time, enabling learners to adapt their learning content to effectively support English vocabulary learning in a school environment. Experimental results indicated that the accuracy of the employed wireless positioning scheme is over 92%, which is sufficient to help learners detect their locations. Additionally, the PCULS has been successfully implemented on PDA devices in a school environment to support effective situational English vocabulary learning. Experimental result indicates that the learning performance of learners who used personalised English vocabulary learning systems with context awareness (i.e. PCULS) was superior to learners who used personalised English vocabulary learning systems without context awareness.
Reining in the Outliers in MapReduce Clusters using Mantri

Experience from an operational map-reduce cluster reveals th t outliers significantly prolong job completion. The causes for outliers include (i) machine charac teristics both hardware reliability (e.g., disk failures) as well as run-time contention for processor, mem ory and other resources, (ii) network characteristics with varying bandwidths and congestion along p aths, and (iii) imbalance in workload among tasks. We present Mantri, a system that monitors tasks and culls outliers using cause-andresource-aware techniques.Mantri’s strategies include smart restart of outliers, network-a ware placement of tasks and protecting outputs of valuable tasks. Mantri’s principled strategy of dealing with outliers is a signific ant advancement over prior work that concentrate only on duplic ating tasks. Using real-time progress reports, Mantri detects outliers early in their lifetime, and takes appropr iate action based on their causes. Early action frees up resources that can be used by subsequent tasks a nd expedites the job overall. Deployment in Bing’s production cluster and extensive trace-driven simu lation indicate that Mantri is 3.1x more effective than the existing state-of-the-art in improving job comple tion times.
Most Influential Qualities in Creating Satisfaction Among the Users of Health Information Systems: A Study in Seven EU Countries

Background Several models suggest how the qualities of a product or service influence user satisfaction. Models, such as the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Delone and McLean Information Systems Success (D&M IS), demonstrate those relations and have been used in the context of health information systems. Objectives We want to investigate which qualities foster greater satisfaction among patient and professional users. In addition, we are interested in knowing to what extent improvement in those qualities can explain user satisfaction and if this makes user satisfaction a proxy indicator of those qualities.
Measurement and Analysis on the Packet Delivery Performance in a Large-Scale Sensor Network

Understanding the packet delivery performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is critical for improving system performance and exploring future developments and applications of WSN techniques. In spite of many empirical measurements in the literature, we still lack in-depth understanding on how and to what extent different factors contribute to the overall packet losses for a complete stack of protocols at large scale. Specifically, very little is known about: 1) when, where, and under what kind of circumstances packet losses occur; 2) why packets are lost. As a step toward addressing those issues, we deploy a large-scale WSN and design a measurement system for retrieving important system metrics. We propose MAP, a step-by-step methodology to identify the losses, extract system events, and perform spatial-temporal correlation analysis by employing a carefully examined causal graph. MAP enables us to get a closer look at the root causes of packet losses in a low-power ad hoc network. This study validates some earlier conjectures on WSNs and reveals some new findings. The quantitative results also shed lights for future large-scale WSN deployments .
The Total Drainable Water Storage of the Amazon River Basin: A First Estimate Using GRACE

In the Amazon River basin, water stored for months to years in the soils and subsurface provide a persistent resource that regulates local and global climate via teleconnections and provides water to plants in times of little rain. While Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have provided the hydrological community with large advances in the understanding of large river basin dynamics and for water resources monitoring applications, the relative storage measurements from GRACE satellites have not yet been utilized for the quantification of total available freshwater on landmasses. In this study, we quantify the total drainable water storage (TDWS) in the Amazon basin by characterizing the relationship between the water storage anomaly of a large catchment and its base flow. Previous studies have shown that these two hydrological parameters behave like a linear time‐independent system over a catchment like the Amazon dominated by fully humid tropical climate. This linear relationship allows us to determine a zero water storage level, at which the storage‐driven discharge becomes zero. We quantify the TDWS of the Amazon basin as 1,766 km3 and estimate an average 2 month residence time for stored waters. An independent analysis over nine major subbasins confirms our estimate for the entire basin. We show that our estimated TDWS values for individual subbasins, varying between 15 and 654 km3, follow two different linear relationships with their mean annual input. Through these relationships we also quantify the storage‐driven portion of the streamflow and the total streamflow for Amazon and its subbasins. Furthermore, we estimate surface water storage variation of the Amazon River system by combining the water level time series from satellite altimetry and surface water extent time series from satellite imagery. Our results show that 61% of total basin water storage variation occurs in the surface water compartment. In addition, we find that 65% of the TDWS is available in its surface water system.
Optical Frequency Combs in External Cavity SiN Hybrid Lasers

We analyze the emergence of optical frequency combs in a III-V SiN hybrid laser. Our model accounts for the narrow band effective mirror reflectivity and allows to simulate laser dynamics as a function of the bias current and the detuning of the lasing frequency with respect to the effective reflectivity peak. The physical mechanisms triggering multimode dynamics are analyzed in detail, with a focus on the generation of frequency combs, which are characterized in terms of bandwidth, line separation, phase and amplitude noise.
Propriétés mécaniques, thermiques et acoustiques d'un matériau à base de particules végétales : approche expérimentale et modélisation théorique

This thesis deals with the measurement of physical properties (mechanical, thermal, acoustical) of various formulations of concrete containing vegetable particles. Such material is made up with hemp shives mixed with lime binders. Shives are very porous considering the ratio of capillaries. That fact explains that particles are lightweight, sensible to water and they can be highly strained. The ductile binder is a mixed between hydraulic and aerated lime with sometimes a volume of sand. Depending on the binder proportion, three microstructures of concrete are determined. Moreover, this material presents a microscopic porosity (shives) and a macroscopic porosity. These networks are connected. Vegetable concrete presents a ductile behavior. The maximum stress and the Young modulus are limited as compare to other building materials but the bearable level of strain is rhigh. A theoretical model made with self-consistent method allows to calculate the Young modulus as a function of the mixture proportion and the compactness level. A comparison with experimental measurements shows a good accuracy of the results. Then, the dry thermal conductivity of vegetable concrete is studied. Considering its high sensibility to water, the level of sorption and the impact on thermal conductivity are evaluated. A self-consistent method leads to a model of dry and wet conductivity taking into account the physical properties (proportions, compactness) and the hygrometry. Lastly, the sound absorption of vegetable concrete is measured. The values are high. This first step in the study of the acoustical properties shows a behavior, which can be compared to materials with a double porosity.
Improved low-density parity-check codes using irregular graphs

We construct new families of error-correcting codes based on Gallager's (1973) low-density parity-check codes. We improve on Gallager's results by introducing irregular parity-check matrices and a new rigorous analysis of hard-decision decoding of these codes. We also provide efficient methods for finding good irregular structures for such decoding algorithms. Our rigorous analysis based on martingales, our methodology for constructing good irregular codes, and the demonstration that irregular structure improves performance constitute key points of our contribution. We also consider irregular codes under belief propagation. We report the results of experiments testing the efficacy of irregular codes on both binary-symmetric and Gaussian channels. For example, using belief propagation, for rate 1/4 codes on 16000 bits over a binary-symmetric channel, previous low-density parity-check codes can correct up to approximately 16% errors, while our codes correct over 17%. In some cases our results come very close to reported results for turbo codes, suggesting that variations of irregular low density parity-check codes may be able to match or beat turbo code performance.
Explaining the Stars: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis of Online Customer Reviews

The importance of online customer reviews for the success of products and services has been recognized in both research and practice. Therefore, the ability to explain and interpret customer assessments expressed by the assigned overall star ratings is an important and interesting research field. Existing approaches for explaining the overall star ratings, however, often do not address methodical issues associated with these ratings (e.g., ordinal scale). Moreover, they often ignore the review texts which contain valuable information on the customers’ assessments of different aspects of the rated items (e.g., price or quality). To contribute to both research gaps, we propose a generalized ordered probit model using aspect-based sentiments as independent variables to explain the overall star ratings of online customer reviews. For measuring the explanatory power of our model, we suggest a likelihood-based pseudo R-squared measure. By evaluating our approach using a large real-world dataset of restaurant reviews we show, that, in contrast to other regression models, the generalized ordered probit model can address the methodical issues associated with the star ratings. Moreover, the evaluation shows that the results of the proposed model are easy to interpret and valuable for analysing customer assessments.
Formal Institutions and Subjective Well-Being: Revisiting the Cross-Country Evidence

A long tradition in economics explores the association between the quality of formal institutions and economic performance. The literature on the relationship between such institutions and happiness is, however, rather limited, and inconclusive. In this paper, we revisit the findings from recent cross-country studies on the institutions-happiness association. Our findings suggest that the conclusions reached by previous studies are qualitatively rather insensitive to the specific measure of ‘happiness’ used, while the associations between institutions and subjective well-being differ among poor and rich countries. Separating different types of institutional quality, we find that the effect of economic-judicial institutions on happiness seems to dominate those of political institutions when a sufficient number of developing countries are included in the sample, while analyses restricted to middle- and high-income countries show an additional strong support for a beneficial effect of political institutions. Our results bear important implications which we discuss in the concluding section of the paper. This paper is an update of Bjornskov, Dreher, Fischer (2008), Formal Institutions and Subjective Well-Being: Revisiting the Cross-Country Evidence, Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 699, Stockholm School of Economics.
2 Models and Problem Statement 2 . 1 Random walk on the discrete circle

Two simple Markov processes are examined, one in discrete and one in continuous time, arising from idealized versions of a transmission protocol for mobile, delay-tolerant networks. We consider two independent walkers moving with constant speed on either the discrete or continuous circle, and changing directions at independent geometric (respectively, exponential) times. One of the walkers carries a message that wishes to travel as far and as fast as possible in the clockwise direction. The message stays with its current carrier unless the two walkers meet, the carrier is moving counter-clockwise, and the other walker is moving clockwise. In that case, the message jumps to the other walker. The long-term average clockwise speed of the message is computed. An explicit expression is derived via the solution of an associated boundary value problem in terms of the generator of the underlying Markov process. The average transmission cost is also similarly computed, measured as the long-term number of jumps the message makes per unit time. The tradeoff between speed and cost is examined, as a function of the underlying problem parameters.
Examining the Diffusion of User-Generated Content in Online Social Networks

This paper is motivated by the success of You Tube, which is attractive to content creators and media companies for the potential to rapidly disseminate digital content. The tremendous variation in the success of videos posted online and the networked structure of interactions on You Tube lend itself to an inquiry about the role of social influence on content diffusion. Using a unique data set of video information and user information collected from You Tube, we find that evidence for a number of mechanisms by which social influence is transmitted, such as a preference for conformity, social learning and the role of innovators or opinion-makers. Such mechanisms of social interactions can play a huge role not only in the success of user-generated content, but also on the magnitude of that impact. Our results are in sharp contrast to earlier models of diffusion such as the Bass model that do not distinguish between different social processes that are responsible for the process of diffusion of content. Econometrically, the problem in identifying social influence is that individuals' choices depend in great part on the choices of other individuals, referred to as the 'reflection problem'. Another problem in identification is to distinguish between social contagion and user heterogeneity in the diffusion process. Our results are robust to potential self-selection according to user tastes, temporal heterogeneity and the reflection problem. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed.
Zeitschrift für Soziologie

Ethnic discrimination in the housing market has long been seen as a cause of residential segregation and social inequality. While research has investigated the existence and extent of discrimination with regard to written applications for housing, little is known about personal inquiries via telephone. This study reports on findings from a telephone audit study that has allowed us to estimate the impact of (ethnic) accents and to distinguish between taste-based and statistical discrimination. We find no significant discrimination against callers with Turkish names. However, callers with both a Turkish name and accent were invited to view apartments significantly less often. Information about steady employment compensated for this disadvantage to a large extent. We conclude that statistical discrimination plays a major role in explaining why persons of Turkish origin receive fewer invitations to view apartments.
Geographic and Climatic Range Sizes of Australian Eucalypts and a Test of Rapoport's Rule

We present data on the geographic, latitudinal and climatic ranges of 819 species in the large Australian tree genus Eucalyptus L'Herit. The distribution of geographic range sizes is highly skewed, with 68% of species having ranges that cover less than 1% of the continent and only 3% of species having ranges covering more than 10%. The mean range size is 1.5% of the continent and the median 0.5%. At each latitude there is a wide scatter of geographic and latitudinal range sizes. Rapoport's rule, that range size increases with increasing latitude, was not supported. Mean range size peaks in the 20-25? S latitudinal band; this pattern is affected by the shape of the continent but is not simply a consequence of it. Climatic range size, expressed in terms of mean annual temperature and rainfall, also peaks at about 25? S. The mean, median, and frequency distribution of range sizes of arid zone species is similar to that of mesic species. Eucalypt species diversity is highest in the 30-35? S latitudinal band; once again, this pattern is not simply a consequence of the shape of the continent. The frequency distribution of range sizes in the two main eucalypt suballiances, Symphyomyrtus and Monocalyptus, are not significantly different, although Symphyomyrtus contains all the species with range sizes covering more than 6% of the continent. Symphyomyrtus species tend to occupy drier sites than Monocalyptus.
The 2016 SIM IT Issues and Trends Study

Since 1980, the Society for Information Management (SIM), in collaboration with a team of MIS academics, has surveyed its members, asking questions about themselves and their IT management concerns. These studies have expanded over the years to become one of the most comprehensive investigations of IT and IT leadership in organizations. Continuously improving the relevance and accuracy of the studies, this year we have: (a) added questions about cybersecurity, software development and cloud computing; (b) expanded the questions on IT organization structure and governance, IT performance measures, management practices, work activities and spending; and (c) included 2014’s questions about service catalogs and chargebacks (which were omitted intentionally in 2015). We emailed a personal link to the online questionnaire to each of the 5,332 SIM members and received 1,213 responses, including 490 CIOs, representing 801 unique organizations with average annual revenues of $4.75 billion. Total revenue of these organizations was nearly