Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increasing influence of heat stress on French maize yields from the 1960 s to

Improved crop yield forecasts could enable more effective adaptation to climate variability and change. Here, we explore how to combine historical observations of crop yields and weather with climate model simulations to produce crop yield projections for decision relevant timescales. Firstly, the effects on historical crop yields of improved technology, precipitation and daily maximum temperatures are modelled empirically, accounting for a nonlinear technology trend and interactions between temperature and precipitation, and applied specifically for a case study of maize in France. The relative importance of precipitation variability for maize yields in France has decreased significantly since the 1960s, likely due to increased irrigation. In addition, heat stress is found to be as important for yield as precipitation since around 2000. A significant reduction in maize yield is found for each day with a maximum temperature above 32 °C, in broad agreement with previous estimates. The recent increase in such hot days has likely contributed to the observed yield stagnation. Furthermore, a general method for producing near-term crop yield projections, based on climate model simulations, is developed and utilized. We use projections of future daily maximum temperatures to assess the likely change in yields due to variations in climate. Importantly, we calibrate the climate model projections using observed data to ensure both reliable temperature mean and daily variability characteristics, and demonstrate that these methods work using retrospective predictions. We conclude that, to offset the projected increased daily maximum temperatures over France, improved technology will need to increase base level yields by 12% to be confident about maintaining current levels of yield for the period 2016–2035; the current rate of yield technology increase is not sufficient to meet this target.
The Near-infrared Optimal Distances Method Applied to Galactic Classical Cepheids Tightly Constrains Mid-infrared Period–Luminosity Relations

Classical Cepheids are well-known and widely used distance indicators. As distance and extinction are usually degenerate, it is important to develop suitable methods to robustly anchor the distance scale. Here, we introduce a near-infrared optimal distance method to determine both the extinction values of and distances to a large sample of 288 Galactic classical Cepheids. The overall uncertainty in the derived distances is less than 4.9%. We compare our newly determined distances to the Cepheids in our sample with previously published distances to the same Cepheids with Hubble Space Telescope parallax measurements and distances based on the IR surface brightness method, Wesenheit functions, and the main-sequence fitting method. The systematic deviations in the distances determined here with respect to those of previous publications is less than 1%–2%. Hence, we constructed Galactic mid-IR period–luminosity (PL) relations for classical Cepheids in the four Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) bands (W1, W2, W3, and W4) and the four Spitzer Space Telescope bands ([3.6], [4.5], [5.8], and [8.0]). Based on our sample of hundreds of Cepheids, the WISE PL relations have been determined for the first time; their dispersion is approximately 0.10 mag. Using the currently most complete sample, our Spitzer PL relations represent a significant improvement in accuracy, especially in the [3.6] band which has the smallest dispersion (0.066 mag). In addition, the average mid-IR extinction curve for Cepheids has been obtained: , , , , , , , and .
Common Factors of Commodity Prices

In this paper we extract latent factors from a large cross-section of commodity prices, including fuel and non-fuel commodities. We decompose each commodity price series into a global (or common) component, block-specific components, and a purely idiosyncratic shock. We find that the bulk of the uctuations in commodity prices is well summarized by a single global factor. This global factor is closely related to fluctuations in global economic activity and its importance in explaining variations in commodity prices has increased since the beginning of the 2000s, especially for oil.
Norm-Breaking Responses to Sexist Abuse: A Cross-Cultural Human Robot Interaction Study

This article presents a cross-cultural replication of recent work on productively violating gender norms; specifically demonstrating that breaking norms can boost robot credibility while avoiding harmful stereotypes. In this work we demonstrate via a 3 (country) x 3 (robot behaviour) between-subject experiment that these findings replicate cross-culturally across the US, Sweden, and Japan, finding evidence that breaking gender norms boosts robot credibility regardless of gender or cultural context, and regardless of pretest gender biases. Our findings further motivate a call for feminist robots that subvert the existing gender norms of robot design.
A Self-Assessment Tool of the Level of Digital Competence of Ukrainian Teachers in the Context of Lifelong Learning: The Results of an Online Survey 2021

Reforms in education today are due to many factors, including globalization, the transition to a digital economy and citizenship, the formation of a knowledge society. That is why human digital competencies are becoming increasingly important in the development of education and affect the quality of life of every person. Modern teachers must not only possess his professional knowledge and skills but must also be able to learn throughout life. And in this context, their digital competencies play a crucial role. An important role in clarifying the state of possession of strong digital skills of teachers is played by the need for distance learning, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, as well as in Ukraine. In order to clarify the level of digital competence of teachers in Ukraine, the Comparative Studies Department for Information and Education Innovations of the Institute of Information Technologies and Learning Tools of the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine conducted an all-Ukrainian online survey in January 2021 [[1]]. 1463 educators took part in the online survey, they answered five blocks of questions about their competence in the use of digital tools and instruments for distance learning and self-education: information and digital literacy, communication and cooperation, digital content creation, security and problem solving. The purpose of the article is to present the survey results and provide proposals regarding the development of teachers’ digital competence and professional development.
Porting of μ CernVM to AArch 64 Felix Scheffler , 23 / 09 / 2016

1 Background Virtual Machines (VMs) Virtualisation plays a vital role in computing. The aim is to distribute physical resources, e.g. CPU power, RAM, or disk space, among several virtual appliances. A so-called hypervisor is responsible for allocating and managing resources for several guest operating systems (OSs) or VMs. Virtualisation is motivated by the ease of setting up new testing or production environments across different physical platforms or OSs, the isolation of individual resources as well as improved efficiency [1]. In particular, the same physical resources can be used for different applications on demand. This is why virtualisation is an integral part in data centres world-wide. At CERN, hundreds of VMs are created and destroyed every hour [2]. This flexibility is impossible with physical machines.
Modernization and its Effects on Heritage Tourism in Melaka

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between modernization activities (new buildings, night spots, shopping malls) and heritage sites and to examine whether this has any impact on tourists coming to Melaka. In other words, the study examines whether tourists are attracted to the modernized activities in Melaka or whether they visit Melaka for the heritage experience. The study also identifies in-depth the experience of the Melaka city as a world attraction for its historical monuments and world heritage preservation, and also its transformation into a modern city. The results showed that both activities assisted each other in promoting Melaka as a tourism attraction. To an extent, this study also indicated that the effect of modernization does not negatively impact on the tourist experience of Melaka as a historical city. The study concludes that modernization can bring benefits to tourism and works well with the branding of Melaka as a historical tourism attraction.
Market Concentration in Homebuilding

We investigate the impact of increasing concentration in local residential construction markets on housing production. We show that the increase in concentration in the past decade has led to lower production volume, fewer units in the production pipeline, and greater unit price volatility. Our results imply that the greater concentration has decreased the annual value of new housing production by $106 billion. Because housing is a determinant of the business cycle these findings provide further evidence that the secular decline in competitive intensity in the American economy is altering macroeconomic dynamics.
Using Option Pricing Theory to Infer about Equity Premiums

In this paper we make use of option pricing theory to infer about historical equity premiums. This we do by comparing the prices of an American perpetual put option computed using two different models: The first is the standard one with continuous, zero expectation, Gaussian noise, the second is a strikingly similar model, except that the zero expectation noise is of Poissonian type. The interesting fact that makes this comparison worthwhile, is that the probability distribution under the risk adjusted measure turns out to depend on the equity premium in the Poisson model, while this is not so for the standard, Brownian motion version. This difference is utilized to find the intertemporal, equilibrium equity premium. We apply this technique to the US equity data of the last century and find that, if the risk free short rate was around one per cent, this corresponds to a risk premium on equity about two and a half per cent. On the other hand, if the risk free rate was about four per cent, we find that this corresponds to an equity premium of around four and a half per cent. The advantage with our approach is that we only need equity data and option pricing theory, no consumption data was necessary to arrive at these conclusions. We round off the paper by investigating if the procedure also works for incomplete models.
Public Spending and Growth in the Countries of the Economic Community of West African States

Our research focuses on the impact of government spending on economic growth in the countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). It draws on new theories of endogenous growth, and more specifically on Rajhi model. After the tests of specification, an ARDL model was estimated for each of the countries which have cointegration relationships. For those whose cointegration relationship does not exist, a VAR estimate was made. So according to estimates, Total Public Spending in most of the countries of ECOWAS has not positive influence on the economic growth as well in the short term as in the long term. Also in most of the countries, Public Consumption did not positively affect economic growth as well in the long run as in the short run. Regarding Public Investment, we have the same results; it does not positively affects economic growth in most of the ECOWAS countries. Burkina Faso, Guinea and Ivory Coast are the three excepted countries where Total Public Spending has a positive effect on GDP growth in the long term but not in the short run. For further analysis we looked at Public Consumption and Public Investment. It is only in four out of ten countries of the sample that, we found that Public Consumption expenditures positively affect economic growth in the short term while the impact generally is negative in the long term. Regarding Public investment, it is only in three out of ten countries (Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana), that it was found determinant to economic growth in the long term.
Financial Valuation and Risk Management Working Paper No . 498 Strategic Behavior , Financing , and Stock Returns

In this paper I analyze how debt structure and the strategic interaction between shareholders and creditors in the event of default a¤ect expected stock returns. By endogenizing shareholders decision to default, the model generates new predictions linking rm characteristics to expected stock returns through an intuitive economic mechanism. In particular, the model predicts that expected stock returns are higher for rms that face high debt renegotiation di¢culties, and that have a large fraction of secured or convertible debt. Expected stock returns are lower for rms whose shareholders maintain strong bargaining power, and for rms subject to high liquidation costs. Using a large sample of publicly traded US rms between 1985 and 2005, I present new evidence on the link between debt structure, renegotiation frictions, and stock returns, which is supportive of the models predictions. Keywords: Debt Structure, Strategic Behavior, Stock Returns, Renegotiation, Default JEL Classi cation: G13, G32, G33 Swiss Finance Institute, University of Lausanne, Bâtiment Extranef, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Email: Philip.Valta@unil.ch; Phone: +41 21 692 3399. I thank Erwan Morellec for his constant support and valuable comments. I also thank Jerome Detemple, Darrell Du¢e, Laurent Frésard, Verónica Garcés, Enrique Schroth, Norman Schürho¤, and seminar participants at the University of Lausanne, the Swiss Doctoral Workshop 2007 in Gerzensee, the FMA European Conference 2008 in Prague, and the EFMA Meetings 2008 in Athens for valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine. Financial support by the National Centre of Competence in Research "Financial Valuation and Risk Management" (NCCR FINRISK) is gratefully acknowledged.
Investigation of Trade Credit Patterns in Effect with Bank Loan Availability

This research paper attempts to investigate the behavior of non-financial firms towards the use of trade credit. State owned firms are considered as more credit worthy and the bank loan is easily available to them. We hypothesized that the state owned firms do not face any problem to obtain bank loans. According to trade credit literature the firms with better access to bank loans have a better capacity to grant goods on credit. We have also hypothesized that the bank loan availability makes the non-financial firms able to increase the level of trade credit supply. On the other hand, the bank loan availability makes the non-financial firms able to decrease the level of trade credit demand. We have applied Pooled Ordinary Least Square to estimate the relationship between bank loan availability and the behavior of firms towards the use of trade credit. The results of the study explain that bank loan is easily available to state owned firms and they are also interested to extend more trade credit to their buyers. Most of our results are in line with the theories of trade credit and the previous empirical findings.
Attachment representations and generalized problematic internet use in a sample of high school students in transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood

The present study was conducted to explore the unique associations of different attachment representations to generalized problematic Internet use (GPIU) within a community sample of middle-school students that are in transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood. 180 youths (72 girls, mean age = 18.29 years, DS = .46 years) took part to the study. In line with expectations from extant literature, dimensions of insecure-anxious attachment were uniquely associated to the total score of GPIU, as well as to its subcomponents (with the exception of negative outcomes). Importantly, there also emerged the unique role of insecure-avoidant attachment, that was positively associated to the total score of GPIU, as well as to its specific subscales related to the preference for online social interaction and the deficient self-regulation in using the Internet. These results consolidate the suggestion that GPIU occurs within a context in which youths perceive the Internet as a medium to regulate stress and anxiety that derives from face-to-face social interactions; moreover, they also suggest that GPIU occur within a context in which youths choose a social approach that is more distancing than traditional face-to-face relationships. (β p (β .26, p .01). Negative outcomes did not show significant associations with attachment
A Statistical Machine Learning Approach to Generating Graph Structures from Food Recipes

A Statistical Machine Learning Approach to Generating Graph Structures from Food Recipes A thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Computational Linguistics Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Yuzhe Chen Food recipes, as a type of instructional text, contain series of instructions that guide human users through cooking processes. Their structures can usually be represented as flow graphs: at the start state, a collection of ingredients are introduced. Then, a series of actions are performed on these ingredients (along with cooking tools). Finally, the completed dish is produced at the end. A computer system that can extract such structures from food recipes can have many useful applications. Since food recipes are written by humans, they pose many of the same problems the field of Natural Language Processing is trying to solve. Furthermore, they also have challenges that are not commonly seen in many other types of texts. This thesis explores a Statistical Machine Learning approach to food recipe text processing. I will detail my work in the creation of an annotated food recipe dataset used in supervised learning. I will also describe my work in training Machine Learning algorithms that perform Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction tasks on this dataset.
A Comparison of SecureUML and UMLsec for Role-based Access Control

Nowadays security has become an important aspect in information systems engineering. A mainstream method for information system security is Role-based Access Control (RBAC), which restricts system access to authorised users. Recently different authors have proposed a number of modelling languages (e.g., abuse cases, misuse cases, secure i*, secure Tropos, and KAOS extensions to security) that facilitate the documentation and analysis of security aspects. However it is unclear if these languages support the full spectrum of RBAC specification needs. In this paper we selected two security modelling languages, namely SecureUML and UMLsec. Based on the literature study and on the running example we systematically investigate how these languages could be used for RBAC. Our observations indicate that, although both approaches originate from the de-facto industry standard UML, they are not competitors. Rather they complement each other: SecureUML helps defining static RBAC aspects; UMLsec is recommended for dynamic RBAC analysis. Hopefully our study will help practitioners to understand these two approaches better, especially when selecting them for modelling purposes. We also believe that the combination of both approaches would ease secure information system development.
When innovation requirements empower individual innovation: the role of job complexity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the field’s understanding of how to raise individual innovation. Specifically, the authors aim to contribute to an understanding of the interplay of job characteristics and intrinsic motivation for individual innovation. Design/methodology/approach The study uses time-lagged survey data of a public service organization in Belgium. The analyses are based on more than 80 jobs and more than 1,000 employees. Hierarchical linear modeling was adopted to test cross-level hypotheses. Findings Innovation requirements influence individual innovation efforts by psychologically empowering employees, but the extent to which psychological empowerment translates into individual innovation depends on job complexity. Originality/value A more nuanced understanding is developed of when innovation requirements empower individual innovation, by acknowledging the role of job complexity in this relationship. The current findings contribute to a multilevel integrative understanding of the interplay of the job context and intrinsic motivation.
Tumoral CD 105 is a novel independent prognostic marker for prognosis in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Tumoral CD105 is a novel independent prognostic marker for prognosis in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma A Saroufim, Y Messai, M Hasmim, N Rioux, R Iacovelli, G Verhoest, K Bensalah, J-J Patard, L Albiges, B Azzarone, et al.
Electro-dewatering Treatment of Pulp and Paper Mill Biosludge: The Effects of Conditioners

Biosludge has been a problem for pulp and paper mills due to its difficulty to dewater. Electro-dewatering can significantly reduce the water content of biosludge, but the effect of electro-dewatering on pulp and paper mill biosludge is not well understood. This study examined the feasibility of using electro-dewatering on pulp and paper mill biosludge and observed that over 40% dry solids content could be achieved. Chemical and physical additives including synthetic polymers, cationic proteins, fly ash, lime mud and wood fines were added to biosludge, and electro-dewatered at 20V using a batch-scale electro-dewatering device. Overall, the addition of conditioners did not improve the removal of water from biosludge. However, biosludge conditioned with a small dose of weak cationic polymer (2% Organopol5400) reduced the energy consumption of electrodewatering by ~19%. Electro-dewatering of biosludge is also expected to consume less energy compared to thermal drying for removing the same amount of water.
Magnetic Reconnection as a Driver for a Sub-ion-scale Cascade in Plasma Turbulence

A new path for the generation of a sub-ion-scale cascade in collisionless space and astrophysical plasma turbulence, triggered by magnetic reconnection, is uncovered by means of high-resolution two-dimensional hybrid-kinetic simulations employing two complementary approaches, Lagrangian and Eulerian, and different driving mechanisms. The simulation results provide clear numerical evidence that the development of power-law energy spectra below the so-called ion break occurs as soon as the first magnetic reconnection events take place, regardless of the actual state of the turbulent cascade at MHD scales. In both simulations, the reconnection-mediated small-scale energy spectrum of parallel magnetic fluctuations exhibits a very stable spectral slope of , whether or not a large-scale turbulent cascade has already fully developed. Once a quasi-stationary turbulent state is achieved, the spectrum of the total magnetic fluctuations settles toward a spectral index of in the MHD range and of at sub-ion scales.