Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance of the Standardized Precipitation Index Based on the TMPA and CMORPH Precipitation Products for Drought Monitoring in China

This paper evaluated the accuracy of multiple satellite-based precipitation products including the tropical rainfall measuring mission multisatellite precipitation analysis (TMPA) (TMPA 3B42RT and TMPA 3B42 version 7) and the Climate Prediction Center MORPHing technique (CMORPH) (CMORPH RAW and CMORPH BLD version 1.0) datasets and investigated the impact of the accuracy and temporal coverage of these data products on the reliability of the standardized precipitation index (SPI) estimates. The satellite-based SPI was compared with the SPI estimate using in situ precipitation observations from 2221 meteorological observation sites across China from 1998 to 2014. The SPI values calculated from the products calibrated with rain gauge measurements (TMPA 3B42 and CMORPH BLD) are generally more consistent with the SPI obtained with in situ measurements than those obtained using noncalibrated products (TMPA 3B42RT and CMORPH RAW products). The short data record of satellite precipitation data products is not the primary source of large errors in the SPI estimates, suggesting that the SPI estimate using satellite precipitation data products can be applied to drought assessment and monitoring. Satellite-based SPI estimates are more accurate in eastern China than in western China because of larger uncertainties in precipitation retrievals in western China, characterized by arid and semiarid climate conditions and complex landscapes. The satellite-based SPI can capture typical drought events throughout China, with the limitation that it is based on precipitation only and that different durations of antecedent precipitation are only suitable for specific drought conditions.
Forging an Indigenous Counterpublic Sphere: The Taller de Historia Oral Andina in Bolivia

This essay analyzes the impact of an indigenous counterpublic sphere in contemporary Bolivia, arguing that it functions as an arena of differential consciousness for Aymara intellectuals and activists. In examining the work carried out by the Aymara nongovernmental organization known as the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), the essay highlights this sphere's importance as both a discursive and territorial arena where agency is expressed in the collaborative spirit of community. THOA's work is significant in strategically formulating a methodology of decolonization based on revisionist Andean historiography, territorial demands, and collective political action.
Self-powered bipolar gate-driver power supply circuit for neutral-point-clamped converters

The design of gate-driver power supply (GDPS) circuits for multilevel neutral-point-clamped converters is a challenge due to the large number of power switches required and the fact that each device presents a different GDPS reference node. This paper presents a compact self-powered bipolar GDPS circuit, consisting of two subcircuits connected across the power switches, which altogether produce all the positive and negative supply voltages required by the GDs. As these subcircuits essentially contain semiconductor components, they can be integrated with the power switch and gate driver, to produce a compact cell from which obtain a compact converter leg implementation. Overall, this BGDPS design is suitable for all types of NPC multilevel topologies with any type of power transistor, although it is most suitable for moderate device voltage ratings. The good performance of the proposed BGDPS circuit has been confirmed through experiments on a conventional two-level leg, and on three-level and four-level active-clamped converter legs.
Understanding Student Attitudes about Distance Education: The Importance of Excitement and Fear.

T he purpose of the present study is to further understand faculty attitudes about distance education by exploring the psychological processes through which these attitudes are influenced. We explored the following research question: Do feelings of excitement versus fear mediate and/or moderate the relationship between online teaching experience and various faculty attitudes about online education? Survey data from 152 part- and full-time faculty from a midsize public university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States was utilized. Multiple regression analyses revealed that excitement versus fear mediates the relationship between online teaching experience and all of our outcome variables, and that excitement versus fear moderates the relationship between online teaching experience and the extent to which faculty feel that their institution is pushing too much instruction online. Our results demonstrate the importance of excitement versus fear in explaining why some faculty have negative rather than positive attitudes about distance education. Our results suggest that university administrators may find it helpful to implement policies and practices that instill a sense of excitement about distance education in all faculty.
Immunization levels among premature and low-birth-weight infants and risk factors for delayed up-to-date immunization status. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccine Safety Datalink Group.

CONTEXT Studies have noted that health care professionals may not conform to proper immunization schedules for premature and low-birth-weight infants in the United States. Little is known about the success of current efforts to immunize these high-risk infants. OBJECTIVE To describe current immunization practices for premature and low-birth-weight infants and ascertain risk factors for poor immunization status, using large population-based data sources. DESIGN AND SETTING Cohort and case-control analyses of immunization data tracked from March 1991 through March 1997 for 3 large health maintenance organizations (HMOs) participating in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vaccine Safety Datalink project. PARTICIPANTS A total of 11580 low-birth-weight and premature infants were enrolled from birth to age 2 months; 6832 of these were continuously enrolled from birth to age 24 months. At age 2 months, there were 173373 full-term, normal-birth-weight infants enrolled as controls; at age 24 months, there were 103 324. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Age-specific immunization status by prematurity and birth weight (<1500 g, 1500-2500 g, born at <38 weeks' gestation with birth weight of >2500 g, or full-term with normal birth weight) and patient characteristics associated with up-to-date status. RESULTS At each age, infants weighing less than 1500 g at birth had lower up-to-date immunization levels than other infants. At age 6 months, 52% to 65% of infants weighing less than 1500 g were up-to-date at each of the 3 HMOs compared with 69% to 73% of those weighing 1500 to 2500 g, 66% to 80% of premature infants weighing more than 2500 g, and 65% to 76% of full-term, normal-birth-weight infants. By age 24 months, 78% to 86% of infants weighing less than 1500 g were up-to-date, significantly less than heavier infants, who had levels of 84% to 89%. Well-child preventive care strongly predicted immunization status, while concomitant pulmonary disease did not. CONCLUSIONS Our data suggest that infants born prematurely are vaccinated at levels approaching that of the general population, but levels of vaccination for very low-birth-weight infants lag slightly behind.
A Hybrid Service Recommendation Prototype Adapted for the UCWW: A Smart-City Orientation

With the development of ubiquitous computing, recommendation systems have become essential tools in assisting users in discovering services they would find interesting. This process is highly dynamic with an increasing number of services, distributed over networks, bringing the problems of cold start and sparsity for service recommendation to a new level. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a hybrid service recommendation prototype utilizing user and item side information, which naturally constitute a heterogeneous information network (HIN) for use in the emerging ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW) wireless communication environment that offers a consumer-centric and network-independent service operation model and allows the accomplishment of a broad range of smart-city scenarios, aiming at providing consumers with the “best” service instances that match their dynamic, contextualized, and personalized requirements and expectations. A layered architecture for the proposed prototype is described. Two recommendation models defined at both global and personalized level are proposed, with model learning based on the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR). A subset of the Yelp dataset is utilized to simulate UCWW data and evaluate the proposed models. Empirical studies show that the proposed recommendation models outperform several widely deployed recommendation approaches.
Object Tracking in Satellite Videos Based on a Multi-Frame Optical Flow Tracker

Object tracking is a hot topic in computer vision. Thanks to the booming of the very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing techniques, it is now possible to track targets of interests in satellite videos. However, since the targets in the satellite videos are usually too small compared with the entire image, and too similar with the background, most state-of-the-art algorithms failed to track the target in satellite videos with a satisfactory accuracy. Due to the fact that optical flow shows the great potential to detect even the slight movement of the targets, we proposed a multi-frame optical flow tracker (MOFT) for object tracking in satellite videos. The Lucas-Kanade optical flow method was fused with the HSV color system and integral image to track the targets in the satellite videos, while multi-frame difference method was utilized in the optical flow tracker for a better interpretation. The experiments with three VHR remote sensing satellite video datasets indicate that compared with state-of-the-art object tracking algorithms, the proposed method can track the target more accurately.
Empirical investigation of visualization quality for three-dimensional (3D) objects of 3D map on mobile device for navigation aid

Previous studies have shown some key factors that influence the success of visualization quality for 3D objects of 3D map on Personal computers (PCs) and Laptops’, crucial to that is the 3D computational processing capabilities of PCs and Laptops. Unfortunately 3D applications on mobile devices are hindered by the lack of efficient mobile rendering interfaces, low computational resources and direct 3D rendering at interactive rates. Although recently there are several attempts of building complicated 3D map visualization tasks on mobile devices, yet there is still problem of visualization quality of 3D objects of 3D map on a mobile device, this could be attributed to salient features which this paper try to uncover. An experiment that is aimed at investigating how people visualized 3D objects and orient themselves with the 3D map view on a mobile device for navigation assistance was carried out. The result indicates that the size and shape of 3D objects of 3D map significantly aided orientation, but there are no significant differences between the size and color. The 3D map view can increase the user’s sense of presence; however, 3D map projections tend to represent familiar scenes by collections of their 2D views. This paper shows visual variations of complex 3D map scenes on small-screen mobile devices, with a single object-centered 3D map projection.
Facial Feature Expression Based Approach for Human Face Recognition: A Review

The extraction of required facial expression features from the human face image is an important task for face recognition. Facial expressions are natural means of communications between humans and play a major role in pattern recognition and image processing. Research in facial expression recognition has considered seven basic facial expressions namely anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprise and neutral. For the face expression recognition three main phases are used: face detection, facial feature extraction and facial feature classification and recognition. In this paper we studied the different facial feature recognition techniques proposed by various researchers: Gabor, DWT, DCT, RSST Segmentation and Local Binary Patterns(LBP) features with their advantages and disadvantages.
Entity Resolution and Location Disambiguation in the Ancient Hindu Temples Domain using Web Data

We present a system for resolving entities and disambiguating locations based on publicly available web data in the domain of ancient Hindu Temples. Scarce, unstructured information poses a challenge to Entity Resolution(ER) and snippet ranking. Additionally, because the same set of entities may be associated with multiple locations, Location Disambiguation(LD) is a problem. The mentions and descriptions of temples exist in the order of hundreds of thousands, with such data generated by various users in various forms such as text (Wikipedia pages), videos (YouTube videos), blogs, etc. We demonstrate an integrated approach using a combination of grammar rules for parsing and unsupervised (clustering) algorithms to resolve entity and locations with high confidence. A demo of our system is accessible at tinyurl.com/templedemos. Our system is open source and available on GitHub.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Access Management in Wireless Cellular Networks

In smart city applications, huge numbers of devices need to be connected in an autonomous manner. 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifies that Machine Type Communication (MTC) should be used to handle data transmission among a large number of devices. However, the data transmission rates are highly variable, and this brings about a congestion problem. To tackle this problem, the use of Access Class Barring (ACB) is recommended to restrict the number of access attempts allowed in data transmission by utilizing strategic parameters. In this paper, we model the problem of determining the strategic parameters with a reinforcement learning algorithm. In our model, the system evolves to minimize both the collision rate and the access delay. The experimental results show that our scheme improves system performance in terms of the access success rate, the failure rate, the collision rate, and the access delay.
How dogs hear us : perception of the human voice by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)

Domestic dogs have co-habited with humans for at least 15000 years. Close social interaction between the two species has promoted inter-specific communication and dogs now show advanced skills in responding to human signals in comparison to wolves. However, research into dogs’ abilities to interpret human signals has predominantly focussed on visual gestures, while their responses to vocal signals remain under-investigated. Exploring the perception of human speech by dogs, a phylogenetically distant species, could provide new insights into the evolution of mammal communication. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to assess human speech perception by dogs. Speech is composed of two main communicative components: the segmental phonemic cues carrying the linguistic content and the supra-segmental cues transmitting information about the speaker such as their gender, age and emotional state. I first explore how dogs perceive supra-segmental cues, determining that they are capable of the cross-modal discrimination of human gender. I then provide a review detailing the mechanisms underlying cross-modal associations in mammal communication, before testing which of these mechanisms may enable dogs to cross-modally associate cues to human age. The results indicate that dogs learn to match some voices to humans according to their age category, while also perceiving more general cross-modal correspondences in the environment. Finally, I investigate how dogs dissociate the main communicatory components of speech during processing, providing evidence that dogs differentially process segmental and supra-segmental cues according to their communicative content. In doing so, dogs appear to express parallel hemispheric biases to those reported in humans. Additionally, the results provide the first clear demonstration that dogs attend to the combinatory structure of the phonemic content in learnt commands. Overall, this thesis extends our knowledge of dogs’ perception of human signals, indicating that they are capable of perceiving each of the main components of speech in a functionally relevant manner. Together the results suggest that dogs share some of the cognitive and social processes involved in speech perception with human listeners.
Feather mites are positively associated with daily survival in cliff swallows

Feather mites (Acari: Astigmata) have been reported to be parasitic, commensal, and even mutualistic on the birds that serve as their hosts. We investigated whether there was a relationship between number of feather mites (Pteronyssoides obscurus (Berlese, 1885)) on the wing and daily survival of cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota (Vieillot, 1817)) during the breeding season at 12 nesting colonies in Nebraska in 2005. Survival of birds with known mite loads was monitored by mark–recapture, and survival models with and without a linear effect of mites were compared with the program MARK. For adult swallows, mites were positively associated with daily survival at six colonies, negatively associated at two colonies, and there was no relationship at four colonies. For recently fledged juveniles studied at two colonies, survival varied positively with mite load at one, while the other showed no relationship. Feather mites may provide direct benefits to cliff swallows by consuming old oil, pollen, fungi, .
A trade-off between having many sons and shorter maternal post-reproductive survival in pre-industrial Finland

A bias in reproduction towards sons, which are energetically more costly than daughters, has been suggested to shorten parental lifespan, but previous results have been mixed. Reproductive costs should be most evident in low rather than high resource settings, and are not expected to be severe in men, because women pay higher direct costs of reproduction. We, therefore, used demographic data from pre-industrial Finland to investigate whether the number of sons and daughters born affected their parents’ post-reproductive survival and whether this was related to parent's resource availability. Irrespective of access to resources, mothers, but not fathers, with many sons suffered from reduced post-reproductive survival, and this association decreased as mothers aged. Our results provide evidence that Finnish mothers traded long post-reproductive lifespan for giving birth to many sons.
Perotrochus caledonicus (Gastropoda: Pleurotomariidae) revisited: descriptions of new species from the South-West Pacific

Morphological (shell) and molecular examination of a large suite of specimens of pleurotomariids from around New Caledonia and the Coral Sea reveals the existence of four species in the complex of Perotrochus caledonicus : Perotrochus deforgesi Metivier, 1990 and P. pseudogranulosus sp. nov. live allopatrically on the plateaus and guyots of the Coral Sea; Perotrochus caledonicus Bouchet & Metivier, 1982 and Perotrochus wareni sp. nov. live sympatrically - but essentially not syntopically - on the slopes of New Caledonia, Norfolk Ridge and the Loyalty Ridge. All species live in the 300–500 m interval, and together form a significant component of the mollusc fauna living on hard bottoms in the SW Pacific, with individual dredge hauls containing up to 25 specimens of Perotrochus .
Cervical Facet Orientation Varies with Age in Children: An MRI Study

Background: Within the spine, mobility and stability are principles that drive anatomic morphology. Based on radiographic measurements, the orientation of cervical facet joints has been proven to change throughout child growth. However, because of the mainly cartilaginous composition of the vertebrae in the young child, the lack of osseous landmarks makes radiograph-based measurements unreliable. The aims of our study were to evaluate the change in the sagittal orientation of the cervical facet joints with age based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of asymptomatic children and to compare it to the changes in vertebral body dimensions. Methods: Sagittal images passing through the center of the facet joint or through the center of the vertebral body were used to assess facet orientation at every cervical level. Anteroposterior facet orientation was defined as the angle between the superior facet and a line perpendicular to the posterior wall of the vertebral body. Vertical was defined as parallel to the posterior wall; horizontal was defined as perpendicular to the posterior wall. Vertebral body height and anteroposterior diameter were measured as well. Results: MRI data of the normal cervical spine of 90 children who were 2 months to 18 years of age, obtained for neurologic evaluation, were used for this study. For each level from C3 to C7, there was a positive correlation between facet orientation and age (R = 0.498, p < 0.001). The facet joints were the most vertical at C3 (43.9°) and C7 (49.6°), whereas C5 had the most horizontal facets (39.4°). The greatest rate of change in facet orientation was observed between 6 and 9 years of age. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that facets become more vertical as a function of age. However, other parameters than age must be considered to explain the variation of facet orientation. At C3 and C7, the facet orientation was more vertical, which may increase stability. In between, C5 facets were shallower, which may increase mobility and flexion-extension range of motion.
Phrase Detection Corpus-level Extracted Entities & Relation Iterative Update Negative Pool of Corrupt Tuples construct

Extracting entities and their relations from text is an important task for understanding massive text corpora. Open information extraction (IE) systems mine relation tuples (i.e., entity arguments and a predicate string to describe their relation) from sentences. ese relation tuples are not conned to a predened schema for the relations of interests. However, current Open IE systems focus on modeling local context information in a sentence to extract relation tuples, while ignoring the fact that global statistics in a large corpus can be collectively leveraged to identify high-quality sentence-level extractions. In this paper, we propose a novel Open IE system, called ReMine, which integrates local context signals and global structural signals in a unied, distant-supervision framework. Leveraging facts from external knowledge bases as supervision, the new system can be applied to many dierent domains to facilitate sentence-level tuple extractions using corpus-level statistics. Our system operates by solving a joint optimization problem to unify (1) segmenting entity/relation phrases in individual sentences based on local context; and (2) measuring the quality of tuples extracted from individual sentences with a translating-based objective. Learning the two subtasks jointly helps correct errors produced in each subtask so that they can mutually enhance each other. Experiments on two real-world corpora from dierent domains demonstrate the eectiveness, generality, and robustness of ReMine when compared to state-of-the-art open IE systems.