Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A GIS Approach to Evaluate Infrastructure Variables Influencing the Occurrence of Traffic Accidents in Urban Roads

Several studies worldwide have been developed that seek to explain the occurrence of traffic accidents from different perspectives. The analyses have addressed legal perspectives, technical attributes of vehicles and infrastructure as well as the psychological, behavioral and socio-economic components of the road system users. Recently, some analysis techniques based on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been used, which allow the generation of spatial distribution maps, models and risk estimates from a spatial perspective. Sometimes analyses of traffic accidents are performed using quantitative statistical techniques, which place significant importance on the evolution of accidents. Studies such as those in references have shown that conventional statistical models are sometimes inadequate to model the frequency of traffic accidents, as they may provide erroneous inferences. GIS approach has been used to explore different spatial and temporal visualization technologies to reveal accident patterns and significant factors relating to vehicle crashes, or as a management system for accident analysis and the determination of hot spots. This paper examines the relationship between urban road accidents and variables related to road infrastructure, environment and traffic volumes. Some accident-prone sections in the city of Kocaeli are specifically identified by GIS tools. Urban road accidents in Kocaeli are a serious problem and it is believed that accidents can be related to infrastructure characteristics. The study aimed to establish the relationship between urban road accidents and the road infrastructure variables and revealed some possible accident prone locations for the period of 2013 and 2015 in Kocaeli city.
Temperature Trends and Anomalies in Modern Satellite Data: Infrared Sounding and GPS Radio Occultation

Trends in monthly average, zonal average temperature in the stratosphere as retrieved from highly accurate modern satellite data are intercompared and compared with climate reanalyses from 2003 through 2014. The data sets used are those of Atmospheric Infrared Sounder and Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation, and the reanalyses are those of MERRA and ERA‐Interim. Trends produced by all data sets agree to within 0.02 K/year in the lower stratosphere and 0.05 K/year in the middle stratosphere. A number of retrieval errors are found that introduce incorrect trends and seasonal anomalies. Adding microwave data to the infrared retrieval changes trends by approximately 0.01 K/year, thus improving agreement with the other data sets. The signature of the quasi‐biennial oscillation in temperature and the annual cycle of temperature over Antarctica as retrieved from infrared data contain null‐space errors of more than 3 K due to erroneous priors used in retrieval. Nonuniformity in GPS radio occultation gives rise to errors because changes in received GPS signal strength alter the upper boundary initialization in radio occultation retrieval. Finally, an incorrect specification of atmospheric water vapor introduces an erroneous seasonal cycle of temperature as retrieved from GPS radio occultation data in the upper troposphere. All of these time‐dependent retrieval errors can be corrected with future research and improvements to spectral infrared and GPS radio occultation retrieval systems.
Toward Eecient Agnostic Learning

In this paper we initiate an investigation of generalizations of the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning model that attempt to signiicantly weaken the target function assumptions. The ultimate goal in this direction is informally termed agnostic learning, in which we make virtually no assumptions on the target function. The name derives from the fact that as designers of learning algorithms, we give up the belief that Nature (as represented by the target function) has a simple or succinct explanation. We give a number of positive and negative results that provide an initial outline of the possibilities for agnostic learning. Our results include hardness results for the most obvious generalization of the PAC model to an agnostic setting, an eecient and general agnostic learning method based on dynamic programming, relationships between loss functions for agnostic learning, and an algorithm for a learning problem that involves hidden variables.
Transactions on Systems , Man , and Cybernetics – Part B : Cybernetics 2 when

—When performing visualization and classification, people often confront the problem of dimensionality reduction. Isomap is one of the most promising nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques. However, when Isomap is applied to real-world data, it shows some limitations, such as being sensitive to the noise. In this paper, an improved version of Isomap, namely S-Isomap, is proposed. S-Isomap utilizes class information to guide the procedure of nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Such a kind of procedure is called supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction. In S-Isomap, the neighborhood graph of the input data is constructed according to a certain kind of dissimilarity between data points, which is specially designed to integrate the class information. The dissimilarity has several good properties which help to discover the true neighborhood of the data, and thus makes S-Isomap a robust technique for both visualization and classification, especially for real-world problems. In the visualization experiments, S-Isomap is compared with Isomap, LLE and WeightedIso. The results show that S-Isomap performs the best. In the classification experiments, S-Isomap is used as a preprocess of classification and compared with Isomap, WeightedIso, as well as some other well-established classification methods including K nearest neighbor classifier, BP neural network, J4.8 decision tree and SVM. The results reveal that S-Isomap excels Isomap and WeightedIso in classification and is highly competitive with those well-known classification methods.
Formal specification and verification of a group membership protocol for an intrusion-tolerant group communication system

We describe a group membership protocol that is part of an intrusion-tolerant group communication system, and present an effort to use formal tools to model and validate our protocol. We describe in detail the most difficult part of the validation exercise, which was the determination of the right level of abstraction of the protocol for formally specifying the protocol. The validation exercise not only formally showed that the protocol satisfies its correctness claims, but also provided information that will help us make the protocol more efficient without violating correctness.
Using aerial imagery and digital photography to monitor growth and yield in winter wheat

ABSTRACT Monitoring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) performance throughout the growing season provides information on productivity and yield potential. Remote sensing tools have provided easy and quick measurements without destructive sampling. The objective of this study was to evaluate genetic variability in growth and performance of 20 wheat genotypes under two water regimes (rainfed and irrigated), using spectral vegetation indices (SVI) estimated from aerial imagery and percentage ground cover (%GC) estimated from digital photos. Field experiments were conducted at Bushland, Texas in two growing seasons (2014–2015 and 2015–2016). Digital photographs were taken using a digital camera in each plot, while a manned aircraft collected images of the entire field using a 12-band multiple camera array Tetracam system at three growth stages (tillering, jointing and heading). Results showed that a significant variation exists in SVI, %GC, aboveground biomass and yield among the wheat genotypes mostly at tillering and jointing. Significant relationships for %GC from digital photo at jointing was recorded with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) at tillering (coefficient of determination, R2 = 0.84, p< 0.0001) and with %GC estimated from Perpendicular Vegetation Index (PVI) at tillering (R2 = 0.83, p< 0.0001). Among the indices, Ratio Vegetation Index (RVI), Green-Red VI, Green Leaf Index (GLI), Generalized DVI (squared), DVI, Enhanced VI, Enhanced NDVI, and NDVI explained 37–99% of the variability in aboveground biomass and yield. Results indicate that these indices could be used as an indirect selection tool for screening a large number of early-generation and advanced wheat lines.
SHRIMP and IDTIMS U-Pb zircon ages of the pre-Alpine basement in the Internal Western Alps (Savoy and Piemont)

Conventional and SHRIMP II U-Pb age determinations are reported for orthogneiss zircons from four basement units of the Internal Western Alps, and for detrital zircons from the Bclledonnc External Crystalline Massif (ECM). The results lead to a reappraisal of the geolcctonic evolution of the Penninic basements (Brianconnais and Piemont) and their pre-Alpine origin. Except for the emplacement of the Cogne granodiorite (Valle d'Aosta) dated at 357 ± 24 Ma (conventional IDTIMS analyses) and 356 ± 3 Ma (SHRIMP analyses). little evidence has been found for a Variscan imprinl. However, results from the Pcclet orthogneiss (482 ± 5 Ma SHRIMP) and Modane metagranite (452 ± 5 Ma SHRIMP) in the Sapey gneiss unit, and the Ambin metarhyolite (500 ± 8 Ma SHRIMP) from the Ambin massif. show that a major plutonic and tectonic event occurred at 450-500 Ma. Evidence has also been found foi a major plutonic event of Permian age (269 ± 6 Ma SHRIMP age from the Gran Paradiso orthogneiss) which suggests important Paleotethyan activity at least in the Piemont basemenl. SHRIMP dating of detrital zircons from a metasediment of ihe Belledonne massif (ECM) and zircon cores and xenoerysts found in most of the analysed magmatic rocks show a large Pan-African age component (590-630 Ma) in both the Exlernal and Internal Alps. This suggests that there is little difference in the composition of the basement between (1) the ECM. which show a clear eontinuity with Variscan Europe. (2) the Penninic basements. which may represent allochthonous Alpine terranes, and (3) the Southern Alpine and Auslro-Alpine domains, classically attributed to an "African" indentcr. They all belong to Gondwana but differ strongly in their Variscan and Alpine history.
Recent recovery of surface wind speed in northwest China

Previous studies have reported that much of the surface wind speed (SWS) over the mid‐latitudes of the northern hemisphere has declined. However, very few studies have investigated the relatively recent phenomenon of wind recovery. Based on 68 wind data series, this paper examines changes in wind speed in northwest China between 1969 and 2015. In 1992, following a decade of sharply decreasing at a rate of 0.036 m s−1 a−1 (p < .05), the SWS began to significant increase at a rate of 0.004 m s−1 a−1. The specific reasons for this increase are as follows: (a) The decrease in SWS during the pre‐1992 slowdown period is the result of declining wind speeds in spring and summer, whereas increases in wind speed during the post‐1992 recovery period are caused by increased wind in winter. (b) The number of days featuring strongly varying wind speeds has changed. Specifically, the number of days above 2 m s−1 all show a significant decreasing trend from 1969 to 1992, whereas the number of days of 1–3 m s−1 shows a significant upward trend from 1993 to 2015. (c) Stations located between 1,000 and 1,500 m.a.s.l. (meter above sea level) are more sensitive to climate change than those at other altitudes, which shows the biggest decline (increase) trend during wind speed slowdown (recovery) period. These stations could potentially act as climatic indicators to predict future wind speed changes. SWS in northwest China have been affected by changes both in large‐scale atmospheric circulation and in regional warming. Surface pressure gradient variations between high‐ and low‐latitude regions may be important contributors to wind speed changes under asymmetric warming. However, urbanization is only moderately responsible for trend changes in SWS.
Removing Raindrops and Rain Streaks in One Go Supplementary Materials

In this supplementary material, we also provide additional quantitative results on another large synthetic deraining dataset, namely Rain1200 [12]. Rain1200 contains 12,000 pairs of images for training, where the number of images with light, medium and heavy rain is all 4,000. Moreover, 1,200 synthetic image pairs are used for testing as well. As indicated by Table 1, our method still outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on Rain1200. Benefiting from our newly proposed dataset, we are able to apply intermediate supervisions to our RSR and RDR blocks in training. Here, we remove those intermediate supervisions and only employ the final rain-free images as our objective, marked CCN w/o ISV, to dissect the importance of the intermediate supervision. As seen in Table 2, without the intermediate supervision, the performance decreases dramatically. The visual results of this baseline are shown in Figure 6. This ablation study also indicates that our superior deraining performance significantly benefits from our complementary learning fashion and proposed dataset. In our CCN, RSR and RDR blocks only share architectures but not weights. In Table 2, we let different RSR and RDR blocks share weights, named CCN w SHARE. As expected, the performance of CCN w SHARE is inferior to CCN. This is because sharing weights do not facilitate learning complementary deraining information. Furthermore, the visual results of this baseline model are illustrated in Figure. 6.
Evaluation and hydrologic validation of TMPA satellite precipitation product downstream of the Pearl River Basin, China

With high spatio‐temporal resolution and wide coverage, satellite‐based precipitation products can potentially fill the deficiencies of traditional in situ gauge precipitation observations and provide an alternative data source for ungauged areas. However, due to the relatively poor accuracy and high uncertainty of satellite‐based precipitation products, it remains necessary to assess the quality and applicability of the products for each investigated area. This study evaluated the accuracy and error of the latest Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Multi‐satellites Precipitation Analysis 3B42‐V7 satellite‐based precipitation product and validated the applicability of the product for the Beijiang and Dongjiang River Basins, downstream of the Pearl River Basin in China. The study first evaluated the accuracy, error, and bias of the 3B42‐V7 product during 1998–2006 at daily and monthly scale via comparison with in situ observations. The study further validated the applicability of the product via hydrologic simulation using the variable infiltration capacity hydrological model for three hydrological stations in the Beijiang River Basin, considering two scenarios: a streamflow simulation with gauge‐calibrated parameters (Scenario I) and a simulation after recalibration with the 3B42‐V7 product (Scenario II). The results revealed that (a) the 3B42‐V7 product produced acceptable accuracy both at the daily scale and high accuracy at the monthly scale while generally tending to overestimate precipitation; (b) the product clearly overestimated the frequency of no rainfall events at the grid cell scale and light rainfall (<1 mm/day) events at the region scale and also overestimated the amount of heavy rain (25–50 mm/day) and hard rain (≥50 mm/day) events; (c) under Scenario I, the 3B42‐V7 product performed poorly at three stations with gauge‐calibrated parameters; under Scenario II, the recalibrated model provided significantly improved performance of streamflow simulation with the 3B42‐V7 product; (d) the variable infiltration capacity model has the ability to reveal the hydrological characteristics of the karst landform in the Beijiang Basin when using the 3B42‐V7 product.
ERIM R EPORT S ERIES R ESEARCH IN M ANAGEMENT

In this study indicators of agglomeration economies and their effect on entrepreneurship in the ICT industry are analysed in diverse urban contexts. Agglomeration economies have a stronger impact on new firm formation than on the growth of incumbent firms. Concentration and diversity both have a positive effect on new firm formation as well as on the growth of incumbent firms, while competition only has a positive effect on new firm formation. It is especially the effects of industrial diversity that are revealed to be sensitive to urban contexts: positive effects on new firm formation are attached to the connected cities and to the highly urbanized Randstad, and positive effects on firm growth to the intermediate zone, the connected cities and urban municipalities.
Episodic Slow Slip Events and Overlying Plate Seismicity at the Southernmost Ryukyu Trench

Shallow slow slip events accompanied by seismicity has been increasingly reported in subduction zones during the last decade; however, the relationship between shallow slip events and seismicity is unclear. We report episodic slow slip events and seismicity at the southernmost Ryukyu Trench. The inversion results from GPS‐derived cumulative displacements indicate that the slow slip events occur offshore in northeastern Taiwan on the shallow subduction interface, where high seismic VP/VS ratios applies. Seismicity is observed above the subduction interface for locations of significant variations in the VP/VS ratio and does not follow the migration of peak slip along the subduction interface. We calculated the temporal evolution between the seismicity and the propagation of slow slip events and determined that seismicity is not primarily driven by slip propagation. The spatiotemporal relationship, coupled with the VP/VS ratio, suggests that high‐pressure fluid activity may be crucial to episodes of slow slip events and seismicity.
Active and Interactive Learning Online : A Comparison of Web-Based and Conventional Writing Classes —

—BRAD MEHLENBACHER, CAROLYN R. MILLER, DAVID COVINGTON, AND JAMIE S. LARSEN Abstract—This study examines how students enrolled in two Web-based sections of a technical writing class performed compared to students enrolled in a conventional version of the class. Although no significant difference in student performance was found between the two learning conditions, our data reveal intriguing relationships between students’ prior knowledge, attitudes, and learning styles and our Web-based writing environment. One finding that we focus on here is that reflective, global learners performed significantly better online than active, sequential learners, whereas there was no difference between them in the conventional class. Our study highlights the complexity of effective teaching and the difficulty of making comparisons between the online and the classroom environments. In particular, we maintain that the transfer of active learning strategies to the Web is not straightforward and that interactivity as a goal of instructional website design requires significant elaboration.
An improved RIP-based performance guarantee for sparse signal recovery via orthogonal matching pursuit

A sufficient condition reported very recently for perfect recovery of a K-sparse vector via orthogonal matching pursuit in K iterations is that the restricted isometry constant of the sensing matrix satisfies δ<sub>K+1</sub> <; 1/(√K + 1). By exploiting a “near orthogonality” condition specified in terms of the achievable angles between two orthogonal sparse vectors upon compression, this paper shows that the requirement on δ<sub>K+1</sub> can be further relaxed to δ<sub>k+1</sub> <; √4k+1 - 1\2K. This result thus narrows the gap between the so far best known bound and the ultimate performance guarantee δ<sub>K+1</sub> <; 1/√K that is conjectured by Dai and Milenkovic in 2009.
Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics

Received Jun 30, 2022 Revised Aug 2, 2022 Accepted Aug 15, 2022 Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been a disaster for humanity, especially in the health sector. Covid-19 is a serious disease, a large number of people lose their lives every day. This disease not only affects one country, but the whole world suffers from this viral disease. In the fight against COVID-19 immediate and accurate screening of infected patients is essential, one of the most widely used screening approaches is chest X-Ray (CXR) which is rated faster and cheaper. This study aims to detect patients suffering from COVID-19 through chest X-Ray using a transfer learning approach, the method used is with several deep residual network architectures such as ResNet50, RexNet100, SSL ResNet50, semiweakly supervised learning (SWSL) ResNet50, Wide ResNet50, SK ResNet34, ECA ResNet50d, Inception ResNet V2, CSP ResNet50, and ResNest50d. Then the results will be compared with previous studies. The study was conducted ten times using different pre-training and got the best results on the SWSL ResNet50 architecture with an accuracy value of 99.28%, this value increased 6.98% from previous studies, 99.51% F1Score, 99.41% Precision, 99.61% Sensitivity, and 98.33% Specificity, that means this study obtained better results than previous studies.
Menstrual hygiene practices of women in a rural area of Kancheepuram district, India: a cross sectional study

Background: Menstruation is a normal biological function in females and in the society, the practices followed are highly variable across different regions. This study aimed to determine the practices followed during menstruation by rural women in Kancheepuram district, Tamil Nadu, India.Methods: This community based cross sectional study was carried out between August and October 2018. Sample size of 400 was calculated by using formula 4pq/d2 and female respondents were selected from sampled households using systematic random sampling. Data were collected using a pre-tested, structured questionnaire, which were analysed using SPSS version 16.0 and presented using descriptive and analytical statistics.Results: A total of 395 women were included in the study. About 54% of females belonged to the age group of 26-35 years and 82.5% were married. Use of sanitary pads during menstruation was reported by 28.6% of the females. Other absorbents used were disposable cloths (46.3%) and reusable cloths (25.1%). About 79% of females practiced some form of restriction during menstruation. Females aged <35 years (OR: 2.55, 95% CI: 1.48-4.39) were more likely to use sanitary pad compared to older females. Females who used sanitary pad as absorbent were less likely to have symptoms of reproductive tract infections compared to those who didn’t (OR: 0.51, 95% CI: 0.28-0.94). Conclusions: Menstrual hygiene practices were found be unsatisfactory among the rural women and various restrictions during menstruation were also in practice. Women should be educated about the importance of use of sanitary pads and the harms of using cloths. Awareness also needs to be created to abolish the unnecessary restrictions that are imposed on women to be followed during menstruation.