Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A study of late Holocene local vegetation dynamics and responses to land use changes in an ancient charcoal making woodland in the central Pyrenees (Ariège, France), using pedoanthracology

Human activities have profoundly transformed mountain woodland landscapes, particularly in the Pyrenees where they have intensified and diversified since the Bronze Age. Quantification of the role played by past practices with regard to woodland cover is critical for accurate assessment of how ongoing global environmental change may affect its dynamics in the future. A local study was made of charcoal remains from an ancient charcoal-making woodland (ca. 30 ha), the forêt de Bernadouze, located on a north-facing slope in the Vicdessos valley in the French central Pyrenees. This valley is well known as having had a long history of human influence related to pastoralism, iron ore mining and smelting. A total of 1,695 charcoal pieces from soils in three sampling pits was extracted, identified, quantified and dated in order to identify tree canopy openings and patterns of change in the woodland driven by past human uses. The results provide new and original insights regarding 1, the past higher biodiversity and the ancient character of the forêt de Bernadouze, 2, the dynamics and history of the main trees and 3, successive phases of human activity. We show that the current woodland has resulted from several millennia of human activities such as pasturing and use of the wood for making charcoal. From the Bronze Age, humans have progressively transformed a natural fir-dominated wood into a managed beech-dominated one, and caused the elimination of Taxus baccata L. (yew).
Neural Operator: Graph Kernel Network for Partial Differential Equations

The classical development of neural networks has been primarily for mappings between a finite-dimensional Euclidean space and a set of classes, or between two finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. The purpose of this work is to generalize neural networks so that they can learn mappings between infinite-dimensional spaces (operators). The key innovation in our work is that a single set of network parameters, within a carefully designed network architecture, may be used to describe mappings between infinite-dimensional spaces and between different finite-dimensional approximations of those spaces. We formulate approximation of the infinite-dimensional mapping by composing nonlinear activation functions and a class of integral operators. The kernel integration is computed by message passing on graph networks. This approach has substantial practical consequences which we will illustrate in the context of mappings between input data to partial differential equations (PDEs) and their solutions. In this context, such learned networks can generalize among different approximation methods for the PDE (such as finite difference or finite element methods) and among approximations corresponding to different underlying levels of resolution and discretization. Experiments confirm that the proposed graph kernel network does have the desired properties and show competitive performance compared to the state of the art solvers.
RCT Study of the Effects of an Online Divorce Platform on Anxiety, Depression, and Somatization

Divorce is associated with a range of negative psychological consequences including increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatization. The current study presents the results of a one-year longitudinal randomized controlled trial study of the Cooperation after Divorce online intervention platform for adults going through a divorce. Participants included 1,856 Danish divorcees who, on average, began the intervention within one week of legal divorce and responded to the SCL-90R anxiety, depression, and somatization subscales at baseline, 3, 6, and 12 months post juridical divorce. Data analyses consisted of linear mixed effect model analyses, mean group comparisons, and one-sample t-tests to compare the 12-month follow-up with national normative data. The study found that the intervention platform significantly reduced anxious, depressive and somatization symptoms among divorcees in the intervention group over a one-year period and that the magnitude of these effects was large in effect size (Cohen’s (d) = >. 78). Further, it was found that at one year post divorce, symptom levels of all three outcomes were close to the population norms for participants in the intervention group but still considerable elevated for participants in the control group. The findings suggest that online intervention platforms may be effective in reducing adverse mental health related effects of divorce and thereby offer long-term human and public health benefits.
First Come, First Served – Tour Scheduling with Priorities

This paper introduces a bicriteria version of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which is motivated by various applications in the context of service delivery. The additional objective allows to take priorities among locations into account while minimizing the costs of traveling. For this, cities in the input are given in a strict ordering, e.g., due to arrivial times of delivery requests. After making the notion of priorities precise, we present a local-search algorithm to approximate the set of non-dominated solutions. While still being conceptionally easy, our algorithm employs diﬀerent means of in-tensiﬁcation and diversiﬁcation in a way we call breadth-ﬁrst local search . We maintain one candidate solution for each possible value of the additional objective in a polynomially-sized archive, and try to improve this set towards the Pareto front. Experimental results with test data from TSPLIB show that this is a reasonable approach to attack the problem.
Muge Mesolithic heterogeneity: comparing Moita do Sebastião and Cabeço da Arruda

Two Portuguese Mesolithic sites, Moita do Sebastião and Cabeço da Arruda, show osteological differences. Stable isotopes and radiocarbon dates suggest that each site may have two levels (as seems clear also for a third neighbouring site, Cabeço da Amoreira), but the individuals analyzed for this paper are in each case from the lower level. While it is possible that the Arruda sample is slightly later in time than the Moita sample, this cannot be proved on present evidence. Evidence for genetic differentiation is slight, but there is clear evidence of fertility, dietary and activity differences, based on age structure of the samples, on adult dentitions, on stable isotopes, on femoral shaft morphology and on bone cortex characteristics.
Morpho-anthropometric profile of Igbabonelimhin acrobatic dancers of Esan community in Edo State, Nigeria

The aim of this study was to identify the Morpho-anthropometric profile of Igbabonelimhin acrobatic dancers in Esan community, Edo State. Morphoanthropometric indicators of age, weight, height, body mass index (BMI), visceral fat and Body Fat Percentage were determined. A Cross-Sectional study involving twenty four (24) acrobatic dancers participated in the study which were drawn purposively. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentage for all the variables and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients (r) to assess the link and the degree of relation between them. The Results showed a BMI categorization of Normalcy indicating 75%, Underweight, Overweight and Obesity indicating 8.3% each while the Visceral Fat level categorization for ages 19 showed 83.3% indicating 0(Normal), ages 10-14 and 1530 indicating 8.3% for both + (High) and ++ (Very High) respectively. Body Fat Percentage for ages 2039 indicated 100% 0(Normal), ages 40-59 indicating 50% 0(Normal) and 16.6% for –(Low), + (High) and ++ (Very High) respectively. Ages 60-79 indicated 66.7% 0(Normal) and 33.4% + (High). It also showed a significant correlation between the weight of acrobatic dancers on the height, BMI, Body Fat Percentage, Visceral Fat and no correlation between the ages of the acrobatic dancers on height, weight, BMI and percentage fat. Age and height also showed a negative correlation. BMI of the acrobatic dancers showed a positive significant correlation with Percentage Body Fat, Visceral Fat and their weight. It was concluded that Igbabonelimhin acrobatic dancing is a good physical exercise to develop and maintain good morpho-anthropometric profile. It is therefore recommended that continuous maintenance of healthy lifestyle and body composition among such acrobatic dancers should be ensured or encouraged.
Can CMWs sustain quality services and high coverage as private providers in Chitral? A three-year prospective qualitative study

Background: The maternal and neonatal mortality rates of Chitral district of Pakistan are among the highest in the country. One of the factors that found to have positive impact on maternal and newborn health indicators is the availability of quality skill birth attendance because the majority of the poor women cannot access facility-based maternity care. Therefore, in 2006, the Government of Pakistan (GOP) has initiated a program to train and deploy Community Midwives (CMWs) to support safe pregnancies and births. The Aga Khan Health Service’ Pakistan, initiated the Chitral Child Survival Program (CCSP) in partnership with the National Maternal Neonatal and Child Health program. The CCSP was an intervention package deploying 28 CMWs in remote villages of the district and supported by several strategies to ensure successful transition of these CMWs in remote settings. Aim: This study aims to assess the effectiveness of CCSP’s package of interventions and to identify the push (facilitating) and pull (hindering) factors that may have an impact on the CMW’s service utilization. Methods: A three-year longitudinal prospective qualitative design, using individual in-depth CMWs and focus group interviews of key informants conducted in Chitral district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan in localities where the CMWs were deployed. Using purposive sampling, 27 CMWs (all part of CCSP), key informants and other stakeholders were recruited. 23 Journal of Asian Midwives (JAM), Vol. 6, Iss. 2 [2019] Published by eCommons@AKU, 2019 Data analysis was done concurrently with data collection by the researcher, using Creswell’s six steps. Findings: The major themes emerging from this study are: Safe and competent care in isolated villages, community’s support and satisfaction from the CMW work, Supportive supervision, dynamics of CMWs with other healthcare professionals, CMW’s referral systems and its challenges, CMW remuneration and fee for service , and Sustainability of the CMW services Recommendations: Continued support, ongoing in-service education of CMWs and constant engagement of the community, certainly plays a crucial role. The GoP could consider incorporating CMWs in the service structure with a salary based on their scope of practice. This may ensure the sustainability of the CMW model and would allow community to access the MNCH services provided by them.
Transaction cost, price risk perspective and marketing channel decision of small-scale chili farmers in Tra Vinh Province, Vietnam

The aim of this study is to determine the marketing channel and the factors affecting farmer? s selection of a distribution channel of chili produced in Tra Vinh province, Vietnam. With primary data of 193 chili farmers, the study based on the theory of transaction cost economics to estimate the determinants of marketing channels using the approach of the Probit model. The results showed that the marketing choice decision of chili farmers was affected by transaction costs, price risk attitude and farmers? characteristics. Cooperatives mainly used seedling supply as an interlocked exchange to encourage farmers to remain in the cooperative channel. The finding also revealed that cooperative channel was not just the preferred channel when farmers were confronted with selling pressure due to the perishable nature of the chili, but also was a safe channel for more risk-averse farmers.
Learning perspective-free counting via dilated convolutions

—We propose the use of dilated convolutions as a simpler approach to the perspective-free counting problem. Counting is a common problem in computer vision (e.g. cells in a microscope image or pedestrians in a crowd). Modern approaches to the counting problem involve the production of a density map via regression whose integral is equal to the number of objects in the image. This method of counting can also be used to locate objects in the image if the regressor used has enough accuracy and precision. However, objects in the image can occur at different scales (e.g. due to perspective effects) which can make it difﬁcult for a neural network to learn the proper density map. A recent result for multiscale counting involves the use of a complicated pyramid of image patches. However, dilated convolutions have been shown to allow for the incorporation of multiscale information without such a complicated design in segmentation problems. We see that our dilated convolutional regression network obtains results comparable to and occasionally superior to the current state of the art.
Relationship Quality and Loyalty: A Modeling of the Relationship through the Structural Equations Method

Relationship quality is one of the key elements in helping firms to develop and maintain a lasting relationship with their customers. Although the concept of relationship quality is at the core of a rich and varied body of research, its conceptualization is still subject to discrepancy. The objective of this research work is to shed some light on the components of relationship quality which have an impact on customer loyalty in the parapharmaceutical industry.
Hand Surface Biometrics for Personal Recognition

Biometric personal recognition is an active research topic which has been accompanying the increasing need for improved and higher security systems. This paper describes a full hand recognition system, which does not require any special image acquisition equipment, and works in extremely flexible conditions. Finger surface and palmprint features are extracted using PCA, LDA and PCA-LDA from each sample hand image and then individually processed. The modalities are fused together at score level in a final stage. A deeper analysis is also given into different methodologies (e.g. distance measures, fusion rules, fusion normalization), along with the comparison of experimental results derived from the variation of system operating parameters, like for example the region-of-interest (ROI) size. The achieved results confirm that biometric fusion has a great positive impact in system performance and that this approach can be used for applications requiring high levels of security, even with small ROI sizes.
Interaction of Different Carbon Related Microbial Activities as Influenced by Green Manure and Bio inoculants in Kharif Maize Crop

Now days, degradation of agricultural soils is of great concern for agricultural biologists. Intensive utilization of chemical fertilizers, soil erosion, nutrient leaching, runoff, organic matter mineralization and unsubstituted crop removal (Balota and Chaves 2010) are major causes of soil degradation. Cultivation of different species in same field can be an alternative approach to enhance microbial diversity and soil sustainability. Application of plant legume crops as green manure can serve this purpose. As, Legume crops have higher biomass production per unit area, high nutrient content, enhance nutrient mobilization, can biological fix nitrogen, robust and have deep rooted system. These International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 9 Number 2 (2020) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
The Relationship between Self-Directed Learning and Critical Thinking Ability of Iranian EFL Learners

Introduction Self-directed learning and critical thinking are both worthwhile frameworks. They simply apply to different domains of the adult education enterprise. Separate studies have been conducted on these two issues, but a few ones are devoted to the relationship between them in other countries or even in Iran. The present study intended to investigate the relationship between self-directed learning and critical thinking of learners of foreign languages. Methods This cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted at postgraduate levels at the School of Health Management and Information Sciences of Iran University of Medical Sciences in 2014. The population of the study consisted of all postgraduate students (N=49). Two sets of questionnaires were distributed among the students, 1) Honey's (2004). 2) Williamson’s (2009). The collected data were analyzed by means of one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, Pearson Correlation, Independent T-Test, and One Way ANOVA through SPSS16. Results and Discussion The results revealed a positive (significant) relationship between critical thinking and self-directed learning (r = 0.424, p = 0.039), therefore it can be concluded that they are beneficial to learners of foreign languages and help them achieve higher level skills.
Magnetocaloric Materials used in Magnetic Refrigeration applications

Magnetic refrigeration investigated as an efficient environmentally friendly and flexible alternative to conventional vapor compression systems. This magnetic technology complete with an important part of the Magnetocaloric material which must be subjected to the magnetic field generates by magnets use. A large effort invested in improving the magnetocaloric material, discoveries of outstanding materials provided new opportunities to use them as alternative working materials in active magnetic refrigeration at various temperatures. It is believed that the manganite materials with the superior magnetocaloric properties in addition to cheap materials processing cost will be the option of future magnetic [1]. This paper present an overview of different published magnetocaloric materials used in magnetic refrigeration applications over the past few years, analyze the different efficiency, the usability for these materials based on magnetic flux density used, the temperature span result and others. Thus allows us to present recommendations for improving existing magnetocaloric materials as well as discussing the features of the best magnetocaloric material for magnetic refrigeration. Lastly it remains the responsibility of decisionmakers to choose the most appropriate ones. Index Terms — Magnetic Refrigeration, Magnetocaloric Materials, Magnetocaloric Effect, (MCE) & Curie temperature,
A Mobile Phone Intervention to Improve Obesity-Related Health Behaviors of Adolescents Across Europe: Iterative Co-Design and Feasibility Study

BACKGROUND Promotion of physical activity, healthy eating, adequate sleep, and reduced sedentary behavior in adolescents is a major priority globally given the current increase in population health challenges of noncommunicable diseases and risk factors such as obesity. Adolescents are highly engaged with mobile technology, but the challenge is to engage them with mobile health (mHealth) technology. Recent innovations in mobile technology provide opportunities to promote a healthy lifestyle in adolescents. An increasingly utilized approach to facilitate increased engagement with mHealth technology is to involve potential users in the creation of the technology. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to describe the process of and findings from co-designing and prototyping components of the PEGASO Fit for Future (F4F) mHealth intervention for adolescents from different cultural backgrounds. METHODS A total of 74 adolescents aged 13 to 16 years from Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom participated in the co-design of the PEGASO F4F technology. In 3 iterative cycles over 12 months, participants were involved in the co-design, refinement, and feasibility testing of a system consisting of diverse mobile apps with a variety of functions and facilities to encourage healthy weight-promoting behaviors. In the first iteration, participants attended a single workshop session and were presented with mock-ups or early-version prototypes of different apps for user requirements assessment and review. During the second iteration, prototypes of all apps were tested by participants for 1 week at home or school. In the third iteration, further developed prototypes were tested for 2 weeks. Participants' user experience feedback and development ideas were collected through focus groups and completion of questionnaires. RESULTS For the PEGASO F4F technology to be motivating and engaging, participants suggested that it should (1) allow personalization of the interface, (2) have age-appropriate and easy-to-understand language (of icons, labels, instructions, and notifications), (3) provide easily accessible tutorials on how to use the app or navigate through a game, (4) present a clear purpose and end goal, (5) have an appealing and self-explanatory reward system, (6) offer variation in gamified activities within apps and the serious game, and (7) allow to seek peer support and connect with peers for competitive activities within the technology. CONCLUSIONS Incorporating adolescents' preferences, the PEGASO F4F technology combines the functions of a self-monitoring, entertainment, advisory, and social support tool. This was the first study demonstrating that it is possible to develop a complex mobile phone-based technological system applying the principles of co-design to mHealth technology with adolescents across 3 countries. The findings from this study informed the development of an mHealth system for healthy weight promotion to be tested in a controlled multinational pilot trial.
Volatility forecasts embedded in the prices of crude‐oil options

This paper evaluates and compares the ability of alternative option-implied volatility measures to forecast the monthly realized volatility of crude-oil returns. We find that a corridor implied volatility measure that aggregates information from a narrow range of option contracts consistently outperforms forecasts obtained by the popular Black-Scholes and model-free volatility expectations, as well as those generated by a high-frequency realized volatility model. In particular, this measure ranks favorably in all regression-based tests, delivers the lowest forecast errors under either symmetric or asymmetric loss functions, and generates economically significant gains in volatility timing exercises. We also find that that the CBOE's ``oil-VIX'' (OVX) index performs poorly, as it routinely produces the least accurate forecasts. Our narrow corridor measure continues to outperform other alternatives when we construct volatility forecasts using options on the United States Oil Fund (USO), i.e. the ETF that underlies the calculation of the OVX.
Toponym Resolution with Deep Neural Networks

Toponym resolution, i.e. inferring the geographic coordinates of a given string that represents a placename, is a fundamental problem in the context of several applications related to geographical information retrieval and to the geographical information sciences. The current state-of-the-art relies on heuristic rules, together with machine learning methods leveraging simple linear methods. This article advances an approach leveraging Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), a type of recurrent neural network architecture that can be used for modeling sequential data, to build representations from the sequences of words and characters that correspond to the strings that are to be associated with the coordinates, together with their usage context (i.e., the surrounding words). These representations are then combined and passed to feed-forward nodes, ﬁnally leading to a prediction decision. The entire model can be trained end-to-end with a set of labeled placename occurrences, e.g., collected from Wikipedia. We present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation of the performance of the proposed method, using previous works datasets. The model achieved some interesting results, sometimes even outperforming state-of-the-art toponym resolution methods.