Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolution of the solar magnetic flux on time scales of years to millenia

Aims. We improve the description of the evolution of the Sun’s open and total magnetic flux on time scales of years to millenia. Methods. In the model employed here the evolution of the solar total and open magnetic flux is computed from the flux emerging at the solar surface in the form of bipolar magnetic features, which is related to the sunspot number cycle parameters and can be estimated from historical records. Compared to earlier versions of the model in addition to the long-lived open flux, now also a more rapidly decaying component of the open flux is considered. The model parameters are constrained by comparing its output with observations of the total surface magnetic flux and with a reconstruction of the open magnetic flux based on the geomagnetic indexes. A method to compute the Sun’s total magnetic flux and the sunspot number during the Holocene, starting from the open flux obtained from cosmogenic isotopes records, is also presented. Results. By considering separately a rapidly evolving and a slowly evolving component of the open flux the model reproduces the Sun’s open flux, as reconstructed based on the aa-index, much better and a reasonable description of the radial component of interplanetary magnetic field data is obtained. The greatest improvement is in the reproduction of the cyclic variation of the open flux, including the amplitudes of individual cycles. Furthermore, we found that approximately 25% of the modeled open flux values since the end of the Maunder minimum are lower than the averaged value over 2008, i.e. during the current low minimum. The same proportion is observed in reconstructions of the open flux during the Holocene based on cosmogenic isotopes, which suggests that the present solar minimum conditions are below average, but not exceptional in terms of the heliospheric magnetic flux.
The feature extraction and dimension reduction research based on weighted FCM clustering algorithm

The high dimensional data brings dimensionality disaster problem in information fusion and pattern recognition, the similarity frequency band between feature information is clustered by the improved fuzzy clustering algorithm, the feature extraction and data dimension reduction are realized in feature distributed band respectivly. The threshold and clustering parametre are established by compactness degree and separation degree between samples, the cluster validity criterion function is given to determine the optimal clustering for samples, and finally an illustration verifies this method.
Do States Choose Their Mix of Taxes to Minimize Employment Losses?

We consider the mix of taxes chosen by a state government to minimize reductions in employment growth. The optimal mix of taxes requires that the decrease in employment growth for an additional dollar of revenue is equal for all taxes. We test this prediction using state-level data from 1980-1994. We find the corporate income tax has a significant negative impact on employment while the sales and individual income taxes do not. Our results also suggest that states are not choosing the mix of taxes to minimize losses in employment growth with corporate income taxes set relatively too high.
Optimal Wind Power Plant Bidding under Consideration of Storage

In this master thesis, a model is proposed to enable profitable market participation of wind power plants considering the availability of second-party owned energy storage. A novel concept of storage capacity reservations is presented using which the wind power producer hedges against wind outcomes which are unfavourable with respect to its day-ahead market bids. The idea that wind power producers need not to own storage devices is explored through decoupling of storage operation during actual energy production from the participation in day-ahead markets. Hence, the overall model is divided into two stages: day-ahead scheduling and intra-day operation. In the day-ahead scheduling stage, profit maximizing bids for the day-ahead market are prepared while in the intra-day operation stage, the storage device owner assists the wind power producer in tracking its day-ahead market bids through suitable storage scheduling and through participation in intraday adjustment markets. The day-ahead market bids are decided such that they are energy-neutral with respect to expected use of storage for imbalance mitigation. This allows the storage device owner to efficiently plan its operation schedule without worrying about overuse or under-utilization of storage capacity by the wind power producer. The model is validated by comparing it with the participation of wind power plants in electricity markets on its own. The case study shows that even after considering the costs of storage reservations and storage operation, the proposed model leads to maximization of profits for the wind power plants while eliminating the profit variability. Furthermore, the lost opportunity costs of having a joint wind-storage power plant is avoided through decoupling of the storage device from wind power producer. Mitigation of wind power imbalances can be seen as a secondary function for the storage device while it can still participate in the electricity markets on its own.
How life history affects threat status: Requirements of two Onobrychis-feeding lycaenid butterflies, Polyommatus damon and Polyommatus thersites, in the Czech Republic

Comparisons of related species differing in conservation status may offer insights into causes of species declines. We studied egg-laying patterns and landscape occupancy of two sympatric lycaenidae butterflies inhabiting xeric grasslands, vulnerable Polyommatus thersites and critically endangered Polyommatus [Agrodiaetus] damon, both developing on sainfoin, Onobrychis spp. Females of bivoltine P. thersites oviposit on host plant leaves at a relatively low height (≈20 cm), in both spring (May–June) and summer (July–August) generations. Females of univoltine P. damon (July–September) oviposit to senescing inflorescences, in significantly higher heights (>30 cm), and the species is hence vulnerable to summer mowing or grazing. On a landscape scale, both species tended to occur at sites with diverse sward management, including temporarily unmanaged patches. In addition, P. damon occurred only in the proximity of other occupied sites. The study documents that grassland management must respect the needs of the most vulnerable species, and because these needs are seldom known, it must maintain a high diversity of conditions within individual sites.
Vertex and Mixed $k$-Diameter Component Connectivity

n the $k$-diameter component connectivity model a network is consider operational if there is a component with diameter at least $k$. Therefore, a network is in a failure state if every component has diameter less than $k$. In this paper we find the vertex variant of the $k$-diameter component connectivity parameter, which is the minimum number of vertex deletions in order to put a network into a failure state, for particular classes of graphs. We also show the mixed variant by allowing vertex and edge failures within the network. We show results for paths, cycles, complete, and complete bipartite graphs for both variants as well as perfect $r$-ary trees for the vertex variant.
Experiences with a P2P Infrastructure for Massive Simulations

—Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) are rapidly expanding both in the number of users and complexity of interactions. Their needs of computational resources offer new challenges for the computer scientists. In this paper we present an implementation and some early tests of a Massive Simulation Environments, a particular MMVE, distributed over a Peer-to-Peer infrastructure. We provide some analysis of the problems related to the workload distribution in this environment. Simulation tests show a good grade of scalability and the communication overhead, due to the peers interaction, is dominated by the computational power provided by them.
DNA polymerase β decrement triggers death of olfactory bulb cells and impairs olfaction in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) involves the progressive degeneration of neurons critical for learning and memory. In addition, patients with AD typically exhibit impaired olfaction associated with neuronal degeneration in the olfactory bulb (OB). Because DNA base excision repair (BER) is reduced in brain cells during normal aging and AD, we determined whether inefficient BER due to reduced DNA polymerase‐β (Polβ) levels renders OB neurons vulnerable to degeneration in the 3xTgAD mouse model of AD. We interrogated OB histopathology and olfactory function in wild‐type and 3xTgAD mice with normal or reduced Polβ levels. Compared to wild‐type control mice, Polβ heterozygous (Polβ+/−), and 3xTgAD mice, 3xTgAD/Polβ+/− mice exhibited impaired performance in a buried food test of olfaction. Polβ deficiency did not affect the proliferation of OB neural progenitor cells in the subventricular zone. However, numbers of newly generated neurons were reduced by approximately 25% in Polβ+/− and 3xTgAD mice, and by over 60% in the 3xTgAD/Polβ+/− mice compared to wild‐type control mice. Analyses of DNA damage and apoptosis revealed significantly greater degeneration of OB neurons in 3xTgAD/Polβ+/− mice compared to 3xTgAD mice. Levels of amyloid β‐peptide (Aβ) accumulation in the OB were similar in 3xTgAD and 3xTgAD/Polβ+/− mice, and cultured Polβ‐deficient neurons exhibited increased vulnerability to Aβ‐induced death. Olfactory deficit is an early sign in human AD, but the mechanism is not yet understood. Our findings in a new AD mouse model demonstrate that diminution of BER can endanger OB neurons, and suggest a mechanism underlying early olfactory impairment in AD.
Lossless Trace Compression

The tremendous storage space required for a useful data base of program traces has prompted a search for trace reduction techniques. In this paper, we discuss a range of information-lossless address and instruction trace compression schemes that can reduce both storage space and access time by an order of magnitude or more, without discarding either references or interreference timing information from the original trace. The PDATS family of trace compression techniques achieves trace coding densities of about six references per byte. This family of techniques is now in use as the standard in the NMSU TraceBase, an extensive trace archive that has been established for use by the international research and teaching community.
The Logic of Physical Garbage Collection in Deduplicating Storage

Most storage systems that write in a log-structured manner need a mechanism for garbage collection (GC), reclaiming and consolidating space by identifying unused areas on disk. In a deduplicating storage system, GC is complicated by the possibility of numerous references to the same underlying data. We describe two variants of garbage collection in a commercial deduplicating storage system, a logical GC that operates on the files containing deduplicated data and a physical GC that performs sequential I/O on the underlying data. The need for the second approach arises from a shift in the underlying workloads, in which exceptionally high duplication ratios or the existence of millions of individual small files result in unacceptably slow GC using the file-level approach. Under such workloads, determining the liveness of chunks becomes a slow phase of logical GC. We find that physical GC decreases the execution time of this phase by up to two orders of magnitude in the case of extreme workloads and improves it by approximately 10-60% in the common case, but only after additional optimizations to compensate for its higher initialization overheads.
Modelling the SHARON process in view of coupling with Anammox

The combined SHARON-Anammox process for treating wastewater streams with high ammonia load, is discussed. Partial nitrification at high temperatures in a continuously aerated SHARON reactor, should yield an optimal ammonium/nitrite ratio, that is subsequently sent to the Anammox process to form nitrogen gas. A mathematical model of the SHARON process is presented. The stoichiometric matrix is formulated in terms of yield coefficients and biomass composition. Special attention is given to the calculation of pH. Preliminary simulations of the behaviour of the SHARON reactor are discussed. Copyright c 2002 TiASWiK
Global Patterns in the Implementation of Payments for Environmental Services

Assessing global tendencies and impacts of conditional payments for environmental services (PES) programs is challenging because of their heterogeneity, and scarcity of comparative studies. This meta-study systematizes 55 PES schemes worldwide in a quantitative database. Using categorical principal component analysis to highlight clustering patterns, we reconfirm frequently hypothesized differences between public and private PES schemes, but also identify diverging patterns between commercial and non-commercial private PES vis-à-vis their service focus, area size, and market orientation. When do these PES schemes likely achieve significant environmental additionality? Using binary logistical regression, we find additionality to be positively influenced by three theoretically recommended PES ‘best design’ features: spatial targeting, payment differentiation, and strong conditionality, alongside some contextual controls (activity paid for and implementation time elapsed). Our results thus stress the preeminence of customized design over operational characteristics when assessing what determines the outcomes of PES implementation.
Sentence-Level Opinion-Topic Association for Opinion Detection in Blogs

The Opinion Detection from blogs has always been a challenge for researchers. One of the challenges faced is to find such documents that specifically contain opinion on users' information need. This requires text processing on sentence level rather than on document level. In this paper, we have proposed an opinion detection approach. The proposed approach tries to tackle opinion detection problem by using some document level heuristics and processing documents on sentence level using different semantic similarity relations of WordNet between sentence words and list of weighted query terms expanded through encyclopedia Wikipedia. According to initial results, our approach performs well with MAP of 0.2177 with improvement of 28.89% over baseline results obtained through BM25 matching formula. TREC Blog 2006 data is used as test data collection.
Nitric Oxide Transport in Normal Human Thoracic Aorta: Effects of Hemodynamics and Nitric Oxide Scavengers

Despite the crucial role of nitric oxide (NO) in the homeostasis of the vasculature, little quantitative information exists concerning NO transport and distribution in medium and large-sized arteries where atherosclerosis and aneurysm occur and hemodynamics is complex. We hypothesized that local hemodynamics in arteries may govern NO transport and affect the distribution of NO in the arteries, hence playing an important role in the localization of vascular diseases. To substantiate this hypothesis, we presented a lumen/wall model of the human aorta based on its MRI images to simulate the production, transport and consumption of NO in the arterial lumen and within the aortic wall. The results demonstrated that the distribution of NO in the aorta was quite uneven with remarkably reduced NO bioavailability in regions of disturbed flow, and local hemodynamics could affect NO distribution mainly via flow dependent NO production rate of endothelium. In addition, erythrocytes in the blood could moderately modulate NO concentration in the aorta, especially at the endothelial surface. However, the reaction of NO within the wall could only slightly affect NO concentration on the luminal surface, but strongly reduce NO concentration within the aortic wall. A strong positive correlation was revealed between wall shear stress and NO concentration, which was affected by local hemodynamics and NO reaction rate. In conclusion, the distribution of NO in the aorta may be determined by local hemodynamics and modulated differently by NO scavengers in the lumen and within the wall.
Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Russia: Vocational youth in transition

1. Introduction 2. Youth transitions in theoretical perspective 3. Transitions in transition 4. Managing transitions: the IVET system in Ul'ianovsk Oblast' 5. Virtual transitions: from 'inheritance' to individualization 6. 'Learning to learn': making and breaking educational transitions 7. Re-embedding transitions: social networks and role playing.
Learning phase-rich features from streaming auditory images

Sparse codes for auditory stimuli are typically based on time-dependent power spectra. These spectrographic images result in the loss of phase information at fine temporal scales that could be useful for subsequent downstream processing tasks, such as monaural source separation. Using a resonance model of the human cochlea, we were able to learn spectrotemporal features on a sliding window of auditory images that allowed for phase rich reconstructions that remained accurate to millisecond scales. Moreover, we showed that such features exhibit tonotopy when trained on musical input and are useful in denoising. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of how sparsely activated auditory features that preserve phase information on time scales relevant to monaural source segmentation can be learned on streaming spectrotemporal auditory images.
The N-Terminal Domain of Chlorophyllide a Oxygenase Confers Protein Instability in Response to Chlorophyll b Accumulation

A method of forming a planar dielectric layer over an interconnect pattern which requires fewer processing steps and has a lower dielectric constant than is obtained in the prior art. The method comprises providing a substrate having an electrical interconnect pattern thereon, forming a first layer of dielectric over the interconnect pattern, preferably by plasma generated TEOS oxide, forming a porous second layer of silicon-containing dielectric with low dielectric constant different from the first layer over the first dielectric layer from an inorganic silicon-containing composition, preferably hydrogen silsesquioxane and forming a third layer of dielectric different from the second layer over the second dielectric layer, preferably by a plasma generated TEOS oxide. The step of forming the second layer comprises the steps of depositing an inorganic silicon-containing composition capable of being pyrolytically converted to a silicon oxide over the first layer and placing the resulting structure in an essentially pure nitrogen and essentially moisture-free environment at a pressure at or below atmospheric pressure and then heating the silicon-containing composition to a temperature of from about 375 DEG C. to about 425 DEG C. and preferably 400 DEG C. for from about 30 minutes to about 90 minutes to convert the silicon-containing composition to silicon oxide.
Gaussian Processes Classification and its PAC-Bayes Generalization Error Bounds – CSE 291 Project Report

McAllester’s PAC-Bayes theorem (strengthened by [4]) characterizes the convergence of a stochastic classifier’s empirical error to its generalization error. Fixed one ”prior” distribution P (h) over hypothesis space H, the theorem can hold for all ”posterior” distribution Q(h) over H simultaneously, so in practice we can find a data-dependent posterior distribution overH as the distribution of final stochastic classifier,
Nonreplicative RNA Recombination of an Animal Plus-Strand RNA Virus in the Absence of Efficient Translation of Viral Proteins

RNA recombination is a major driving force for the evolution of RNA viruses and is significantly implicated in the adaptation of viruses to new hosts, changes of virulence, as well as in the emergence of new viruses including drug-resistant and escape mutants. However, the molecular details of recombination in animal RNA viruses are only poorly understood. In order to determine whether viral RNA recombination depends on translation of viral proteins, a nonreplicative recombination system was established which is based on cotransfection of cells with synthetic bovine viral diarrhea virus (family Flaviviridae) RNA genome fragments either lacking the internal ribosome entry site required for cap-independent translation or lacking almost the complete polyprotein coding region. The emergence of a number of recombinant viruses demonstrated that IRES-mediated translation of viral proteins is dispensable for efficient recombination and suggests that RNA recombination can occur in the absence of viral proteins. Analyses of 58 independently emerged viruses led to the detection of recombinant genomes with duplications, deletions and insertions in the 5′ terminal region of the open reading frame, leading to enlarged core fusion proteins detectable by Western blot analysis. This demonstrates a remarkable flexibility of the pestivirus core protein. Further experiments with capped and uncapped genome fragments containing a luciferase gene for monitoring the level of protein translation revealed that even a ∼1,000-fold enhancement of translation of viral proteins did not increase the frequency of RNA recombination. Taken together, this study highlights that nonreplicative RNA recombination does not require translation of viral proteins.
Research on dynamic growth model of virtual plant leaf based on parameterization

In order to establish a model to describe the growth process of plant leaf and realize the simulation of plant leaf's growth process on computer, this paper put forward a growth model of plant leaf which based on the growth parameters, it can simulate the growth process of plant leaf easily and actually on computer on the premise that several necessary parameters are provided. The experiment result proved that this model has such advantages as better simulation effect, acquiring parameters easier and higher generality.
Consideration of the Flit Size for Deflection Routing based Network-on-Chips

Bufferless deflection routing enables energy and hardware efficient Network-on-Chips (NoCs). However, due to the lack of buffers, packet switching can not be deployed for such NoCs. Therefore, it is crucial to determine an appropriate flit size and link width, which can be considerably larger compared to packet switched NoCs. In this work, we investigate the effect of the flit size on hardware costs and on performance for NoCs based on a permutation network and additionally on deflection routing. We show that hardware requirements for a permutation network based router increase linearly. The performance decreases exponentially with smaller link widths, however a moderate reduction of the link width can be an option.
Interaction between nodes in MANET

Intrusion detection in MANETs is challenging because these networks change their topologies dynamically; lack concentration points where aggregated traffic can be analyzed; utilize infrastructure protocols that are susceptible to manipulation; and rely on noisy, intermittent wireless communications. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are networks constructed to operate not only in stable environments. Nodes within these networks are intended to move freely, self-organizing, self-discovering and operate where the infrastructure is not 0 present or if it is present but transitorily not available. In the current paper we are discussing about the IDS nodes, its role and the role of crucial nodes in MANET.