Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Norway's rule on Svalbard: tightening the grip on the Arctic islands

ABSTRACT Over the last four decades, Norwegian rule on the Svalbard islands has developed gradually, from being virtually non-existent to firm. This study explains these developments in Norwegian jurisdiction both from a perspective of international relations and within a paradigm of domestic politics. It finds that external forces have been the permissive causes of change, while internal forces represent the efficient causes. Norway's incremental strengthening of jurisdiction, notably from the mid-1970s onward, has resulted in an unprecedented Norwegian grip on the Arctic islands in which the other parties to the 1920 Svalbard Treaty seemingly acquiesce.
Prompt thermospheric response to the 6 November 2001 magnetic storm

[1] Thermospheric densities observed by the STAR accelerometer on CHAMP, near 400 km altitude, are used to examine the response to the major geomagnetic storm on 6 November 2001. This is the first large storm studied with CHAMP data at these near dawn-dusk local times. New features of the neutral density response at both global and local temporal/spatial scales have been revealed. Prompt response of the neutral atmosphere observed at the beginning of the storm was enriched by short- and meso-scale perturbations. Simultaneous observations of electromagnetic and ionospheric plasma perturbations and particle precipitations from the DMSP satellites, electron energy fluxes from NOAA-14 and Polar/UVI specified the energy source and the time delay. The suggested mechanism for this prompt thermospheric response appears to be due mainly to enhanced perpendicular electric fields. Large-scale, global changes caused by the geomagnetic storm show generally greater enhancements in the winter (northern) hemisphere at both 0700 and 1900 local time and greater at 0700 LT than 1900 LT.
Variational Bayesian Inference for Nonlinear Hawkes Process with Gaussian Process Self-Effects

Traditionally, Hawkes processes are used to model time-continuous point processes with history dependence. Here, we propose an extended model where the self-effects are of both excitatory and inhibitory types and follow a Gaussian Process. Whereas previous work either relies on a less flexible parameterization of the model, or requires a large amount of data, our formulation allows for both a flexible model and learning when data are scarce. We continue the line of work of Bayesian inference for Hawkes processes, and derive an inference algorithm by performing inference on an aggregated sum of Gaussian Processes. Approximate Bayesian inference is achieved via data augmentation, and we describe a mean-field variational inference approach to learn the model parameters. To demonstrate the flexibility of the model we apply our methodology on data from different domains and compare it to previously reported results.
Trajectory prediction using HF radar surface currents: Monte Carlo simulations of prediction uncertainties

[1] An important aspect of particle trajectory modeling in the ocean is the assessment of the uncertainty in the final particle position. Monte Carlo particle trajectory simulations using surface currents derived from standard-range and long-range CODAR HF radar systems were performed using random-walk and random-flight models of the unresolved velocities. Velocity statistics for these models were derived from the covariance functions of differences between CODAR and drifter estimates of surface currents. Comparison of predicted trajectories and drifter tracks demonstrate that these predictions are superior to assuming the drifters stay at their initial position. Vertical shear between the effective depth of long-range CODAR measurements (∼2.4 m) and that of drifters (0.65 m) causes the drifters to move more rapidly downwind than predicted. This bias is absent when standard-range CODAR currents (effective depth ∼0.5 m) are used, implying that drifter leeway is not the cause of the bias. Particle trajectories were computed using CODAR data and the random-flight model for 24-hour intervals using a Monte Carlo approach to determine the 95% confidence interval of position predictions. Between 80% and 90% of real drifters were located within the predicted confidence interval, in reasonable agreement with the expected 95% success rate. In contrast, predictions using the random-walk approach proved inconsistent with observations unless the diffusion coefficient was increased to approximately the random-flight value. The consistency of the random-flight uncertainty estimates and drifter data supports the use of our methodology for estimating model parameters from drifter-CODAR velocity differences.
Understanding the Usability of AI Programming Assistants

The software engineering community recently has witnessed wide-spread deployment of AI programming assistants, such as GitHub Copilot. However, in practice, developers do not accept AI programming assistants’ initial suggestions at a high frequency. This leaves a number of open questions related to the usability of these tools. To understand developers’ practices while using these tools and the important usability challenges they face, we administered a survey to a large population of developers and received responses from a diverse set of 410 developers. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we found that developers are most motivated to use AI programming assistants because they help developers reduce key-strokes, finish programming tasks quickly, and recall syntax, but resonate less with using them to help brainstorm potential solutions. We also found the most important reasons why developers do not use these tools are because these tools do not output code that addresses certain functional or non-functional requirements and because developers have trouble controlling the tool to generate the desired output. Our findings have implications for both creators and users of AI programming assistants, such as designing minimal cognitive effort interactions with these tools to reduce distractions for users while they are programming.
Effects of Benthic Barriers on Aquatic Habitat Conditions and Macroinvertebrate Communities

Physical and chemical conditions of sediments and benthic community composition were evaluated under synthetic fabric barriers, used to control aquatic macrophytes in confined areas. Macroinvertebrate density declined by 69% within 4 weeks at Eau Galle Reservoir, WI. Within a few weeks of placement at ponds near Dallas, TX, invertebrate densities declined by more than 90%. At Eau Galle Reservoir, benthic barriers apparently blocked sedimentation and caused an increase in NH 4 and a decline in dissolved oxygen to near zero beneath the fabric. Barriers reduced macroinvertebrate taxa richness at both locations. Community effects were most severe in warm water; Chironomidae was eliminated by barriers at the Texas ponds. Barriers substantially reduced macroinvertebrate density and altered community composition; however, biotic conditions in affected areas recovered rapidly after barrier removal.
Price elasticity of residential demand for water: A meta‐analysis

Meta‐analysis is used to determine if there are factors that systematically affect price elasticity estimates in studies of residential water demand in the United States. An econometric model is estimated, using price elasticity estimates from previous studies as the dependent variable. Explanatory variables include functional form, cross‐sectional versus time series, water price specification, rate structure, location, season, and estimation technique. Inclusion of income, rainfall, and evapotranspiration are all found to influence the estimate of the price elasticity. Population density, household size, and temperature do not significantly influence the estimate of the price elasticity. Pricing structure and season are also found to significantly influence the estimate of the price elasticity.
Ytterholmen revisited – implications for the Late Wenlock stratigraphy of Gotland and coeval extinctions

Abstract The latest Cyrtograptus lundgreni graptolite Chron (Late Wenlock, middle Silurian) is characterized globally by the Mulde Event faunal extinctions and glacio-eustatic sea-level change. Only in the last decade has it been recognized as one of the most severe extinction events of the Silurian Period. A section spanning the Slite Group-Halla Formation boundary on the islet Ytterholmen off main Gotland (Sweden) is unique in that strata through the extinction interval are preserved within a reef complex. The importance of Ytterholmen is twofold: First, based on conodonts, lithology and stratigraphic boundaries, the stratigraphy of the Slite Group-Halla Formation boundary interval on eastern Gotland is now fully understood, in ascending order: Slite ‘g’ (c. 12–20 m), Atrypa “reticularis” Beds (c. 0.5 m), Fröjel Formation (c. 0.5 m), and the Halla Formation. The boundary between the Fröjel and Halla formations is an unconformity as previously reported across most of the main island. Second, correlation of the Ytterholmen section with the Mulde Event reference profile on western Gotland for the first time enables study of this event in very shallow interior areas of the carbonate platform. Here, the c. 1 m thick extinction interval (including the Atrypa “reticularis” Beds and the Fröjel Formation) is characterized by mass-occurrences of an atrypid brachiopod, deposition of fine siliciclastic material and termination of the reef complex. Correlation with the East Baltic and Podolia, Ukraine, suggests that similar reef termination occurred contemporaneously throughout the basin. Small patch-reefs occurring immediately above the unconformity on Ytterholmen are among the earliest Mulde Event post-extinction reefs reported from the Baltic basin.
Transforming CLIP to an Open-vocabulary Video Model via Interpolated Weight Optimization

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot learning abilities for image understanding, yet limited effort has been made to investigate CLIP for zero-shot video recognition. We introduce Open-VCLIP, a simple yet effective approach that transforms CLIP into strong zero-shot video classiﬁers that can recognize unseen actions and events at test time. Our framework extends CLIP with minimal modiﬁcations to model spatial-temporal relationships in videos, making it a specialized video classiﬁer, while striving for generalization. We formally show that training an Open-VCLIP is equivalent to continual learning with zero historical data. To address this problem, we propose Interpolated Weight Optimization , which utilizes the beneﬁt of weight interpolation in both training and test time. We evaluate our method on three popular and challenging action recognition datasets following various zero-shot evaluation protocols and we demonstrate our approach out-performs state-of-the-art methods by clear margins. In particular, we achieve 87.9%, 58.3%, 81.1% zero-shot accuracy on UCF, HMDB and Kinetics-600 respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 8.3%, 7.8% and 12.2%.
Analysis of a Historical (1981–2010) Temperature Record of the Punjab Province of Pakistan

AbstractProlonged droughts and uneven monsoons have adversely affected socioeconomic and environmental conditions of Pakistan, especially of the Punjab province. Analysis of historical (1981–2010) daily minimum and maximum temperatures from five cities in semiarid Punjab, Pakistan, was carried out to evaluate spatial and temporal patterns in thermal regimes. A total of 13 climate change indices were calculated using daily minimum and maximum temperatures and analyzed for trend using RClimDex, a program written in the statistical software package R. A nonparametric Mann–Kendall test and Sen's slope estimates were used to determine the statistical significance and magnitude of a trend, respectively. Observed trends in selected indices during 1981–2010 suggest an overall warming in the region. Over the analysis period, the regionally averaged occurrence of extreme cold (10th percentile) nights and days has decreased by −3.94 nights per decade and −0.61 days per decade, respectively. Occurrence of extreme hot.
Geochemistry and petrogenesis of volcanic clasts in the Permian breccias around Exeter

Geochemical comparisons between volcanic clasts from the late Permian red beds and various granite plutons and granite porphyries ('elvans') from SW England show that the clasts have closest affinity with the poorly megacrystic granite of Dartmoor and the 'elvan-like' Godolphin granite. This affinity with the Dartmoor granite backs up recently published ɛNd data and age determinations. It is concluded that the clasts represent volcanic material derived from an evolving subsurface granitic magma, thereby conforming with conclusions/ideas of earlier workers for the former presence of a Dartmoor volcano.
A Systematic Review of Business and Information Technology Alignment

Business organizations have become heavily dependent on information technology (IT) services. The process of alignment is defined as the mutual synchronization of business goals and IT services. However, achieving mature alignment between business and IT is difficult due to the rapid changes in the business and IT environments. This article provides a systematic review of studies on the alignment of business and IT. The research articles reviewed are based on topics of alignment, the definition of alignment, history, alignment challenges, phases of alignment, alignment measurement approaches, the importance of alignment in business industries, how software engineering helps in better alignment, and the role of the business environment in aligning business with IT. It aims to present a thorough understanding of business-IT alignment and to provide a list of future research directions regarding alignment. To perform the systematic review, we used the guidelines developed by Kitchenham for reviewing the available research papers relevant to our topic.
Ice‐volume forcing of winter monsoon climate in the South China Sea

High-resolution studies of a planktonic foraminifer core record from the South China Sea (SCS) (31KL: 18°45.4′N, 115°52.4′E, water depth 3360 m) reveal changes driven by ice-volume forcings in the climate of the East Asian monsoon in the western Pacific marginal sea during the late Quaternary. The analyses of planktonic foraminifer faunal abundance data from the core indicate significant variations in the relative abundances of the dominant taxa over the past 100,000 years since the isotope stage 5. The transfer function estimates of faunal sea surface temperatures (SST) correlate well with a long-term (104–105 years) trend of global glaciation. About 65,000 years ago, there was an observable change in the mode of SST variability as many low-latitude records have shown. These findings suggest that the SCS surface circulation and the East Asian winter monsoon systems are mainly driven by variations in global glaciation levels. The association of surface ocean cooling in the SCS with global climatic events suggests that fluctuations in the strength of the East Asian winter monsoon may be linked to shifts in the latitudinal position of the westerly winds and the Siberian high-pressure system.
Safe and Nested Endgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games

Unlike perfect-information games, imperfect-information games cannot be decomposed into subgames that are solved independently. Thus more computationally intensive equilibrium-ﬁnding techniques are used, and abstraction — in which a smaller version of the game is generated and solved—is essential. Endgame solving is the process of computing a (presumably) better strategy for just an endgame than what can be computationally afforded for the full game. Endgame solving has many beneﬁts, such as being able to 1) solve the endgame in a ﬁner information abstraction than what is computationally feasible for the full game, and 2) incorporate into the endgame actions that an opponent took that were not included in the action abstraction used to solve the full game. We introduce an endgame solving technique that outperforms prior methods both in theory and practice. We also show how to adapt it, and past endgame-solving techniques, to respond to opponent actions that are outside the original action abstraction; this signiﬁcantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approach, action translation. Finally, we show that endgame solving can be repeated as the game progresses down the tree, leading to signiﬁcantly lower exploitability. All of the techniques are evaluated in terms of exploitabil-ity; to our knowledge, this is the ﬁrst time that exploitability of endgame-solving techniques has been measured in large imperfect-information games.
Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2016

Ontology matching consists of finding correspondences between semantically related entities of two ontologies. OAEI campaigns aim at comparing ontology matching systems on precisely defined test cases. These test cases can use ontologies of different nature (from simple thesauri to expressive OWL ontologies) and use different modalities, e.g., blind evaluation, open evaluation, or consensus. OAEI 2016 offered 9 tracks with 22 test cases, and was attended by 21 participants. This paper is an overall presentation of the OAEI 2016 campaign.
Fault model of the 1771 Yaeyama earthquake along the Ryukyu Trench estimated from the devastating tsunami

The 24 April 1771 Yaeyama earthquake generated a large tsunami with a maximum runup of 30 m, causing significant damage in south Ryukyu, Japan, despite the weak ground shaking. Previously proposed mechanisms of the tsunami include intraplate faulting or submarine landslide in the forearc slope. In this study, I estimate the fault parameters of the 1771 earthquake by numerically computing the tsunami heights and comparing them with the recorded heights. The result indicates that the source fault of the tsunami is very close to the Ryukyu Trench. The results are consistent with a thrust‐faulting earthquake that had a fault‐width of less than 50 km. The 1771 Yaeyama tsunami was caused by a tsunami earthquake (Mw = 8.0) that occurred in the subducted sediments beneath the accretionary wedge.
Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2009 ?

Ontology matching consists of finding correspondences between ontology entities. OAEI campaigns aim at comparing ontology matching systems on precisely defined test cases. Test cases can use ontologies of different nature (from expressive OWL ontologies to simple directories) and use different modalities, e.g., blind evaluation, open evaluation, consensus. OAEI-2009 builds over previous campaigns by having 5 tracks with 11 test cases followed by 16 participants. This paper is an overall presentation of the OAEI 2009 campaign.
First results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2007 ?

We present the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2007 campaign as well as its results. The OAEI campaign aims at comparing ontology matching systems on precisely defined test sets. OAEI-2007 builds over previous campaigns by having 4 tracks with 7 test sets followed by 17 participants. This is a major increase in the number of participants compared to the previous years. Also, the evaluation results demonstrate that more participants are at the forefront. The final and official results of the campaign are those published on the OAEI web site.
Optimal Power Allocation for Multiuser Secure Communication in Cooperative Relaying Networks

We consider a cooperative relaying network in which a source communicates with a group of users in the presence of one eavesdropper. We assume that there are no source-user links and the group of users receive only retransmitted signal from the relay. Whereas, the eavesdropper receives both the original and retransmitted signals. Under these assumptions, we exploit the user selection technique to enhance the secure performance. We first find the optimal power allocation strategy when the source has the full channel state information (CSI) of all links. We then evaluate the security level through: 1) ergodic secrecy rate and 2) secrecy outage probability when having only the statistical knowledge of CSIs.
Ant colony system based on receding horizon control for aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling

The aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) problem is one of the most significant problems in the air traffic control (ATC). This paper makes the first attempt to design an ant colony system (ACS) based approach to solve this NP-hard problem. In order to reduce the computational effort of the optimization process, the receding horizon control (RHC) strategy is integrated into the ACS to divide the optimization process into several sub-processes and solve them one by one. This strategy can reduce the problem scale in each sub-optimization process, resulting in lighter computational effort and higher quality solution for the whole problem. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed RHC based ACS algorithm for the ASS problem (RHC-ACS-ASS). Simulation results show that the RHC-ACS-ASS not only outperforms the GA based approaches, but also the ACS based approach without using the RHC strategy.
Neoarchaean (c. 2.58 Ga) halite casts: implications for palaeoceanic chemistry

Possibly the most extensive and best-preserved Archaean halite casts yet discovered occur in the c. 2.58 Ga upper Black Reef and basal Oaktree formations, Transvaal Supergroup, in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Halite casts are isolated on bedding planes, range in size from c. 1 mm to 20 mm, and have cubic, dumbbell and triangular shapes, as well as hopper-like pyramidal hollows on cube faces. Some of the casts display distinct hopper shapes characteristic of halite crystals. The halite cast-bearing pavements are developed within silicified mudstone interbedded with siltstone or stromatolitic dolomite. Associated sedimentary structures pointing to subaerial exposure include adhesion ripples and warts, desiccation and prism cracks, rill marks and tepee structures. Halite cast-bearing beds are interpreted as supratidal flat or sabkha deposits. The presence of isolated casts and hopper-shaped crystals suggests that halite resulted from displacive growth within the sediment from supersaturated residual brines after mudstone deposition. Absence of any indication of the former presence of gypsum or anhydrite supports previous contentions that the Neoarchaean ocean was deficient in sulphate or contained a high bicarbonate to calcium ratio such that with progressive evaporation, most calcium was consumed before the gypsum stability field was reached. The association of halite and carbonate in the upper Black Reef and basal Oaktree formations constrains the palaeolatitude of the Transvaal Basin at 2.58 Ga to subequatorial (10–30°).