Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agent-Based Model of Navigable Inland Waterway Tow Operation Procedures

Transportation modeling within the context of extreme weather events induced by climate change is critical to understand and improve the resilience of transport systems as the world moves further into the 21st century. Among transportation modes, navigable inland waterways in particular face severe challenges to their future reliability as a result of extreme weather events. The economic implications of inland waterway operational efficiencies on commercial shipping have been studied in detail for several decades. Less well understood, however, are the effects of tow operation procedures enacted during adverse river conditions that have resulted from extreme weather events. This paper describes a model of a waterway segment that simulates stakeholder decision making and tow operator behavior to provide stakeholders with insights into the possible benefits of waterway action plans as operational guidance documents. Simulations run for a test area of the navigable inland waterway system indicated that operational procedures recommended in waterway action plans might have a significant impact on waterway operational efficiencies, which suggests that the model may be a useful decision-support tool for waterway stakeholders.
Simulation of Pesticide Leaching in the Field and in ZeroTension Lysimeters<link href="#vzj2vzj20070067-note-0001"/>

793 The risk assessment of pesticide leaching aims to assess whether normal agricultural use of the pesticide (i.e., application to hundred thousands of hectares over periods of decades with a certain frequency) will lead to unacceptable contamination of groundwater. Zero-tension lysimeters (lysimeters with free outfl ow of water) are considered to be a useful tool in this risk assessment because they almost exactly reproduce the environmental conditions that occur in the corresponding fi eld soil (Bergström, 1990; Führ et al., 1998a). Since about 1990, such lysimeter studies have played an important role in the regulatory risk assessments for pesticide leaching to groundwater within the European Union (EU). The fi rst guideline for performing lysimeter studies was established in Germany (BBA, 1990), followed a decade later by a guideline for lysimeter studies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2000). These guidelines do not include recommendations for how to use the results of a lysimeter study in the risk assessment procedure. In the German risk assessment procedure, annual average fl ux concentrations are derived from the lysimeter measurements, and the maximum of the annual averages is used directly for decision making (Nolting and Schinkel, 1998). In the EU risk assessment, the same approach has been followed (EFSA, 2005). Using measured lysimeter leachate concentrations directly for decision making is only justifi able if the lysimeter study represents the realistic worst-case conditions that need to be protected. Because lysimeters are experimental model systems, however, the direct use of measured lysimeter leachate concentrations for decision making can be questioned. A fi rst point of debate is the effect of the bottom boundary condition of the lysimeter on pesticide leaching concentrations (Jene et al., 1998; Flury et al., 1999; Abdou and Flury, 2004; Kasteel et al., 2007). Water will fl ow out of a zero-tension lysimeter only when the bottom layer is water saturated and capillary rise of water into such a lysimeter is impossible. This differs from the situation at the same depth in the fi eld, where water can fl ow downward under unsaturated conditions and where water may also fl ow upward due to capillary rise from the groundwater table. This problem has been assessed in both modeling and experimental studies. Flury et al. (1999) calculated the effect of the bottom boundary condition for a conservative solute under steady-state unsaturated fl ow. For the lysimeter, they found a slower mean solute transport velocity and a larger spreading than for the fi eld. Abdou and Flury (2004) included two-dimensional heterogeneous water fl ow in their analysis and also found a slower mean transport velocity for the lysimeter than for the fi eld. They showed that the difference was larger Simulation of Pesticide Leaching in the Field and in Zero-Tension Lysimeters
Exploiting heterogeneity in peer-to-peer systems using gradient topologies

A peer-to-peer system can be de ned as an overlay network built by a set of nodes on top of a physical network infrastructure and its operating protocols, such as the Internet. In a peer-to-peer network, each node maintains a limited number of connections with other nodes, called peers, and the graph of peer connections constitutes the overlay's topology. One of the most fundamental properties of existing large-scale peer-to-peer systems is a very high heterogeneity and dynamism of peers participating in the system. Studies show that the distributions of peer characteristics, such as peer session duration, available bandwidth, and storage space, are highly skewed and often heavy-tailed, with small fractions of peers possessing disproportionally large fractions of the total system resources. Such heterogeneity introduces both challenges and opportunities when designing peer-to-peer systems. The use of lowperformance or low-stability nodes for maintaining system data or services can easily lead to a poor performance of the entire system, while the placement of critical data and services on the most reliable, high-capacity nodes may improve the overall system stability and performance. Current state-of-the-art peer-to-peer systems exploit their heterogeneity by introducing two-level hierarchies of peers. High capability peers, so called super-peers, form an independent sub-topology within the existing peer-to-peer network and handle the core system functionality, such as indexing peer data and handling search queries, or relaying tra c on behalf of rewalled peers. Ordinary peers connect directly to super-peers and act as their clients. However, many existing systems lack an e cient, decentralised super-peer election algorithm. In many systems, super-peers are selected manually, through an out-of-band mechanism, or are elected using simple local heuristics, which are likely to generate suboptimal super-peer sets. Sophisticated super-peer election algorithms exist, but they are usually highly speci c to particular systems and are not easily portable to other application areas. This thesis presents a novel class of peer-to-peer topologies, called gradient topologies, which generalise the concept of super-peer networks. In gradient topologies, the position of each peer is determined by a continuous utility function, and the highest utility peers are clustered in a logical centre of the topology, while peers with lower utility are located at gradually increasing distance from the centre. The utility metric captures application-speci c peer requirements and re ects peers'
Story Shell : the participatory design of a bespoke digital memorial

This paper describes the participatory process involved in designing a bespoke, tangible, digital memorial – Story Shell with a bereaved parent. We drew on an emergent framework for digital memorials in considering who should author and experience the memorial, what content should be included, what form the memorial should take, and what message it was intended to convey. A key finding was that the participatory design process itself served as a memorial, by presenting opportunities for the participant to share detailed memories of their loved one. Reflections on the process deliver insights for makers and analysts on how to work in sensitive design spaces, where there is a need to consider not only an object’s form but also its situation within a delicate social
The factors that influence building a Thai global brand: A demonstration of a mixed methods approach

The objective of this study was to study the causal relationship of factors that affect building Thai brand and turning them into a Thai Global brand (TGB) defined by GBS, SBN, INT and HBV. Researcher has found 12 factors which correspond to 3 theories: 1) values-based marketing (VBM) defined by VI, MI and VS, 2) global brand equity (GBE) defined by PQ, BA, BS, BL and BF and 3) corporate social responsibility (CSR) defined by ER, LR, TR and PR. The mixed method – sequential explanatory research strategy has been deployed. The sample consisted of 453 respondents in 19 public companies listed in SET were surveyed, and in-depth interviews from 12 executives. The results indicated that 1) VI, MI and VS have no influence on GBS, SBN, INT and HBV, but have correlation with PQ, BA, BS, BL, BF, ER, LR, TR and PR; 2) PQ, BA, BS, BL and BF have significant influence on GBS, SBN, INT and HBV; and 3) ER, LR, TR and PR have influence on GBS, SBN, INT and HBV.
Spider community responses to grassland restoration: balancing tradeoffs between abundance and diversity: Spider community response to grassland restoration

Spiders (Araneae) play key roles in ecosystems, not only as common and abundant generalist predators, but also as major contributors to biodiversity in many areas. In addition, due to their short generation times and high mobility, spiders respond rapidly to small changes in their environment, potentially making them useful indicators for restoration monitoring. However, few studies have focused on spider responses to grassland restoration in the United States. We compared degraded, native, and restored grassland sites to examine how spider communities and habitat respond to arid grassland restoration. We also examined how responses varied with the age of the restoration project. Spider communities in native sites differed from those in restored and degraded sites in several ways: native sites had fewer spiders and a different community composition than degraded and restored sites. However, native and restored sites had more species than degraded sites. Chronosequence data showed trends for lower abundance, higher species richness, and changing community composition as restoration projects mature. Several habitat variables were closely linked to variation in spider communities including cover of invasive annual grasses, litter, and biological soil crusts. Our data suggest that spider and vegetation responses to grassland restoration efforts can be successful in the long term—with resulting communities becoming more similar to native ones—and that spiders are useful indictors of grassland restoration. Our results also suggest that restoration may involve balancing trade-offs between ecosystem services, with potential losses in predatory control offset by increases in biodiversity with restoration effort.
Northward cooling of the Kuncha nappe and downward heating of the Lesser Himalayan Northward cooling of the Kuncha nappe and downward heating of the Lesser autochthon distributed to the south of Mt. Annapurna, western central Nepal

Funding information Japan Society of Promotion of Science, Grant/ Award Number: 16H0462 Abstract We investigated the tectonothermal history of the Lesser Himalayan sediments (LHS), which are tectonically overlain by the Higher Himalayan Crystalline. Fissiontrack dating and the track length measurement of detrital zircons obtained from the Kuncha nappe and the Lesser Himalayan autochthonous sediments in western central Nepal revealed northward cooling of the nappe and possible downward heating of the autochthon by the overlying hot nappe. Nine zircon fission-track (ZFT) ages of the nappe showed northward-younging linear distribution from 11.6 Ma in the front at Tamghas, 6 Ma in the central at Naudanda, and 1.6 Ma in the northernmost point at Tatopani. Thermochronological invert calculation of the ZFT length elucidated that the Kuncha nappe gradually cooled down (30 C/Myr) at the front and rapidly cooled down (120 C/Myr) at the root zone. In contrast, the ZFT age of the Chappani Formation, located just beneath the Kuncha nappe in the central part, demonstrated a totally reset age of 6.8 Ma, whereas the Virkot Formation, structurally far from the nappe, yielded a partially reset age of 457.3 Ma. This suggests that the LHS underwent downward heating, resulting in a thermal print on the upper part of the LHS; however, the thermal effect was not sufficient to anneal ZFT totally in the deeper part. Presently, the nappe cover is eroded and denuded from this area. Detrital zircons from the Chappani Formation in Tansen area to the south of the Bari Gad Fault did not show any evidence of annealing, suggesting that nappe never covered the LHS distributed to the south of the fault.
Evaluating the impact of a wood-chip bioreactor on phosphorus concentrations

Brock, Amanda M. M.S.A.B. E. , Purdue University, August 2016. Evaluating the Impact of a Wood-chip Bioreactor on Phosphorus Loads. Major Professor: Indrajeet Chaubey. Loss of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) into rivers through subsurface tile drains causes eutrophication, which is a concern for aquatic ecosystems. Denitrifying bioreactors are shown to effectively reduce the losses of nitrate (NO3), however, little is known of their effects on P losses. A bioreactor at Throckmorton Purdue Agricultural Center (TPAC), located south of Lafayette, Indiana, has been shown to reduce NO3 concentrations of the effluent to approximately 0 mg N/L. However, an increase in the concentration of soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) was observed in the bioreactor effluent during the monitoring period. To evaluate the effects of a bioreactor on P losses, three lab-scale anaerobic water columns were constructed using the same wood-chips as those in the TPAC bioreactor. Results from the water column tests showed an increase in the SRP concentrations for all columns with varying rates of increase. The highest concentration was over 7 mg P/L. Fungal growth discovered on the wood-chips led to two subsequent tests to determine the effect of the growth on SRP losses. An aerobic degradation test was done using woodchips from the water columns and a nitrate solution on a shaker table. Under aerobic conditions, SRP concentrations increased to a maximum of 1.2 mg P/L, after which they
3D Tooth Instance Segmentation Learning Objectness and Affinity in Point Cloud

Digital dentistry has received more attention in the past decade. However, current deep learning-based methods still encounter difficult challenges. The proposal-based methods are sensitive to the localization results due to the lack of local cues, while the proposal-free methods have poor clustering outputs because of the affinity measured by the low-level characteristics, especially in situations of tightly arranged teeth. In this article, we present a novel proposal-based approach to combine objectness and pointwise knowledge in an attention mechanism for point cloud-based tooth instance segmentation, using local information to improve 3D proposal generation and measuring the importance of local points by calculating the center distance. We evaluate the performance of our approach by constructing a Shining3D tooth instance segmentation dataset. The experimental results verify that our approach gives competitive results when compared with the other available approaches.
In Vitro and in Vivo Activity of Lactobacillus Sakei L14 Strain Against Campylobacter Jejuni DC3 Strain

Abstract Introduction Domestic poultry is a natural reservoir of Campylobacter, the host–pathogen interaction being predominantly asymptomatic. This study investigated whether chickens remain asymptomatic partly because of lactic acid bacteria (LAB). Material and Methods Campylobacter spp. and LAB were isolated from the gut of poultry chickens using enrichment and screening assays and were identified via rDNA sequencing. The C. jejuni DC3 isolate was grown in different cell-free supernatants (CFS) generated from a priority LAB isolate. An in vivo challenge involving the C. jejuni and LAB isolates using a chicken model was performed to confirm the in vitro findings. Results Twelve presumptive LAB isolates had anti-C. jejuni activity based on cross-streak and agar plug assays, with Lactobacillus sakei L14 isolate exhibiting the highest activity. Inhibition by L. sakei L14 CFS of the growth of C. jejuni occurred in a dose-dependent manner. Campylobacter jejuni DC3 inhibition was most evident in CFS harvested at 72 h and produced by co-culture with the pathogen. Neutralisation of the CFS abrogated the observed inhibition. Co-infection with C. jejuni DC3 and L. sakei L14 in vivo, however, failed to inhibit C. jejuni colonisation in chickens. Conclusion The results suggest that the anti-C. jejuni effect of L. sakei L14 in chickens may be due to mechanisms other than direct inhibition of growth.
Guiding in a nature destination

ABSTRACT As nature attracts most travellers to Iceland, nature conservation is central in sustainable tourism development in the destination. A competent guide can turn a tour into an enjoyable, engaging and educational nature experience, whereas a less competent guide may simply execute the logistics of taking tourists from one point of interest to another. This is a mixed-method study where data were collected through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and desk research. Our findings were that nature conservation was not a theme the guiding, informing and managing of tour groups observed. Nature conservation was not a topic present in the information tour companies supply the guides with, and it was not a prominent theme in the curricula of guide education. Guiding on nature phenomena consisted mainly of information about geology and geoformations. Guiding was mostly verbal, without much attention to experience design. Our conclusions are that more emphasis should be placed on facilitating experience and that an important opportunity for promoting tourism sustainability is missed as nature conservation is neglected. The implication is that these topics should be emphasized more in professional guide education, in the professional community of guides and by tour operators.
Performance Modeling of Computer Vision-based CNN on Edge GPUs

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are currently widely used in various fields, particularly for computer vision applications. Edge platforms have drawn tremendous attention from academia and industry due to their ability to improve execution time and preserve privacy. However, edge platforms struggle to satisfy CNNs’ needs due to their computation and energy constraints. Thus, it is challenging to find the most efficient CNN that respects accuracy, time, energy, and memory footprint constraints for a target edge platform. Furthermore, given the size of the design space of CNNs and hardware platforms, performance evaluation of CNNs entails several efforts. Consequently, designers need tools to quickly explore large design space and select the CNN that offers the best performance trade-off for a set of hardware platforms. This article proposes a Machine Learning (ML)–based modeling approach for CNN performances on edge GPU-based platforms for vision applications. We implement and compare five of the most successful ML algorithms for accurate and rapid CNN performance predictions on three different edge GPUs in image classification. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness and usefulness of our proposed methodology. For three of the five ML algorithms — XGBoost, Random Forest, and Ridge Polynomial regression — average errors of 11%, 6%, and 8% have been obtained for CNN inference execution time, power consumption, and memory usage, respectively.
Oversubscribing GPU Unified Virtual Memory: Implications and Suggestions

Recent GPU architectures support unified virtual memory (UVM), which offers great opportunities to solve larger problems by memory oversubscription. Although some studies are concerned over the performance degradation under UVM oversubscription, the reasons behind workloads' diverse sensitivities to oversubscription is still unclear. In this work, we take the first step to select various benchmark applications and conduct rigorous experiments on their performance under different oversubscription ratios. Specifically,we take into account the variety of memory access patterns and explain applications' diverse sensitivities to oversubscription. We also consider prefetching and UVM hints, and discover their complex impact under different oversubscription ratios. Moreover, the strengths and pitfalls of UVM's multi-GPU support are discussed. We expect that this paper will provide useful experiences and insights for UVM system design.
Construction of a Chinese Corpus for Multi-Type Economic Event Relation

We construct a Chinese Economic Event Treebank (CEETB), focusing on revealing economic and finance events and their relations. Investigating economic event relations will benefit academic research and practice in not just economics but many other scientific areas. The characteristics of economic-related texts (e.g., abundant longer enterprises names and terms) and the Chinese language speciality (e.g., component ellipsis in long sentences) have resulted in challenges in the event relation extraction task. Existing Chinese corpora containing economic event relations mainly focused on finance areas (e.g., the equity market) and only covered a few event types. To support research that may involve economic text analysis in Chinese, our CEETB is constructed following a carefully designed process. First, based on practical and research requirements, we summarize nine different types of event relations and four types of component ellipses in economic texts. Then, an excellent annotation scheme is presented to hyalinize the model, strategy, and process in annotation, followed by statistical analysis and quality evaluation for the CEETB corpus. Finally, to demonstrate the strengths of the constructed corpus in practical applications, we conduct experiments on five SOTA models for event relation extraction.
Image-Based Personality Questionnaire Design

This article explores the problem of image-based personality questionnaire design. Compared with the traditional text-based personality questionnaire, the image-based personality questionnaire is more natural, truthful, and language insensitive. Instead of responding to textual questions, the subjects are provided a set of “choose-your-favorite-image” visual questions. With each question, consisting of image options describing the same semantic concept, the subjects are requested to choose their favorite image. Based on responses to typically 15 to 25 questions, we can accurately estimate the subjects’ personality traits in five dimensions. The solution to design such an image-based personality questionnaire consists of concept-question identification and image-option selection. We have presented a preliminary framework to regularize these two steps in this exploratory study. A demo automatically adapting between desktop and mobile devices is available at http://120.27. 209.14/vbfi. Subjective and objective evaluations have demonstrated the feasibility of accurately estimating a subject’s personality in a limited round of questions.