Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Potato‐Cropped Soil

Intensive agricultural land use is considered to be the major source of the anthropogenic contribution to the increase in atmospheric N2O concentration during the last decades. A reduction of anthropogenic N2O emissions therefore requires a change in agricultural management practices. Mathematical models help to understand interacting processes in the N cycle and state variables affecting N2O emissions. The aim of this study was to test two modeling approaches for their ability to describe and quantify the seasonal variations of N2O fluxes in a potato (Solanum tuberosum L.)‐cropped soil. Model 1 assumes a fixed N2O/N2 ratio for N2O production and neglects the transport of N2O in the soil profile; Model 2 explicitly considers N2O transport and assumes a dynamic reduction of N2O to N2 Data for model evaluation came from an experiment where N2O fluxes were monitored during the vegetation period using a closed chamber technique. Generally, both modeling approaches were able to describe the observed seasonal dynamics of N2O emissions and events of high N2O emissions due to increased denitrification activity after heavy precipitation. The inclusion of a gas transport module in the modeling approach resulted in simulated N2O emission dynamics showing a smoother transient behavior. Extremely high emission rates from the interrow soil of the potato field were underestimated by both models. The lower N2O release from the ridge soil was mainly due to better aeration because of a lower soil bulk density and lower water contents caused by lateral runoff and root water uptake.
Demographic Information Prediction: A Portrait of Smartphone Application Users

Demographic information is usually treated as private data (e.g., gender and age), but has been shown great values in personalized services, advertisement, behavior study and other aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to make efficient demographic prediction based on smartphone application usage. Specifically, we firstly consider to characterize the data set by building a matrix to correlate users with types of categories from the log file of smartphone applications. Then, by considering the category-unbalance problem, we make use of the correlation between users’ demographic information and their requested Internet resources to make the prediction, and propose an optimal method to further smooth the obtained results with category neighbors and user neighbors. The evaluation is supplemented by the dataset from real world workload. The results show advantages of the proposed prediction approach compared with baseline prediction. In particular, the proposed approach can achieve 81.21 percent of Accuracy in gender prediction. While in dealing with a more challenging multi-class problem, the proposed approach can still achieve good performance (e.g., 73.84 percent of Accuracy in the prediction of age group and 66.42 percent of Accuracy in the prediction of phone level).
Evaluation of Climate Input Biases and Water Balance Issues Using a Coupled Surface–Subsurface Model

A physically based, coupled and distributed hydrologic model has been set up for the Ringkøbing Fjord catchment, Denmark. This transient model, built with the MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 code, comprises all major components of the terrestrial water cycle, including a three‐dimensional finite‐difference groundwater model. The dynamic coupling of the hydrologic processes secures physically sound feedback and makes the model an ideal tool for evaluating the overall water balance and quantifying potential water balance issues. Historically, failure to obtain water balance closure has been a persistent and much debated problem in Denmark, presumably arising mainly from uncertainties in precipitation, actual evapotranspiration, and groundwater flow to the sea. In this study, the water balance issues were addressed within the modeling framework through analysis of different rain gauge catch corrections and potential evapotranspiration input. The analysis focused on the effect of different rain gauge catch corrections on the model performance, the optimized parameter sets, and state variables not included in the model calibration. The results suggest that water balance problems can be reduced by using a dynamic rain gauge catch correction based on daily wind speed and temperature fields. The model optimization and performance evaluation revealed, however, that several parameter sets gave similar performance compared with the observed groundwater head and river discharge data but still resulted in significant differences with respect to internal water fluxes such as evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and stream flow components. New observational data are needed to constrain the model further and thus reduce the water balance uncertainties convincingly.
Barriers to Social Ventures’ attraction of funding: A legitimation perspective on business plan competitions

The attraction of funding is one of the prevailing challenges in the field of social entrepreneurship. The emphasis on social return over financial return and lacking collateral aggravate the persuasion of investors. Business plan competitions form one alternative approach to funding. But which criteria contribute to a successful application is undetermined yet. This thesis analyzes the information content of 126 business plan applications. Content analysis is applied in order to evaluate how the criteria solution, partnership, growth and social impact affect the cognitive legitimacy of the judges and the final decision-making. Exercising ordinal logistic regression further processes the collected data. The results clearly indicate that information content related to the solution offered by the social venture has most significant influence on the cognitive legitimacy perception of the judges and therewith the funding outcome. But also content on growth and partnership is essential to complement the information. The three components should be balanced well in any application that aims to win the funding. The criterion social impact is found to be a keynote that is a requirement for every application, but that statistically does not differentiate a participant from a finalist or a winner. The tested multi-criterion model can explain up to 32.7% of the variance in the funding outcome and can therefore help social entrepreneurs to focus their funding application writing and sensitize them to how funding judgments are finally made.
Turbulence characteristics of flow in an open channel with temporally varying mobile bedforms

Abstract Turbulence of flow over mobile bedforms in natural open channels is not yet clearly understood. An attempt is made in this paper to determine the effect of naturally formed mobile bedforms on velocities, turbulent intensities and turbulent stresses. Instantaneous velocities are measured using a two-dimensional particle image velocimetry (PIV) to evaluate the turbulence structure of free surface flow over a fixed (immobile) bed, a weakly mobile bed and a temporally varying mobile bed with different stages of bedform development. This paper documents the vertical distribution of velocity, turbulence intensities, Reynolds shear stress and higher-order moments including skewness and turbulent diffusion factors. Analysis of the velocity distributions shows a substantial decrease of velocity near the bed with increasing bedform mobility due to increased friction. A modified logarithmic law with a reduced von Kármán constant and increased velocity shift is proposed for the case of the mobile bedforms. A significant increase in the Reynolds shear stress is observed in the mobile bedforms experiments accompanied by changes over the entire flow depth compared to an immobile bed. The skewness factor distribution was found to be different in the case of the flow over the mobile bedforms. All higher-order turbulence descriptors are found to be significantly affected by the formation of temporally varying and non-equilibrium mobile bedforms. Quadrant analysis indicates that sweep and outward events are found to be dominant in strongly mobile bedforms and govern the bedform mobility.
The Effects of a Pulsed Electromagnetic Field on the Proliferation and Osteogenic Differentiation of Human Adipose-Derived Stem Cells

Background A low frequency pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) has been confirmed to play an important role in promoting the osteogenic differentiation of human bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs). Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) possess some attractive characteristics for clinical application compared to BMSCs, such as abundant stem cells from lipoaspirates, faster growth, less discomfort and morbidity during surgery. ASCs can become adipocytes, osteoblasts, chondrocytes, myocytes, neurocytes, and other cell types. Thus, ASCs might be a good alternative in clinical work involving treatment with PEMF. Material/Methods Human ASCs (hASCs)were divided into a control group (without PEMF exposure) and an experimental group (PEMF for two hours per day). We examined the effect of PEMF on promoting cell proliferation and osteogenic differentiation from several aspects: CCK-8 proliferation assay, RNA extraction, qRT-PCR detection, western blotting, and immunofluorescence staining experiments. Results PEMF could promote cell proliferation of human ASCs (hASCs) at an early stage as determined by CCK-8 assay. A specific intensity (1 mT) and frequency (50 Hz) of PEMF promoted osteogenic differentiation in hASCs in alkaline phosphatase (ALP) staining experiments. In addition, bone-related gene expression increased after two weeks of PEMF exposure, the protein expression of OPN, OCN, and RUNX-2 also increased after a longer period (three weeks) of PEMF treatment as determined by western blotting and immunofluorescence staining. Conclusions We found for the first time that PMEF has a role in stimulating cell proliferation of hASCs at an early period, subsequently promoting bone-related gene expression and inducing the expression of related proteins to stimulate osteogenic differentiation.
Physical inactivity, but not sedentary behavior or energy intake, is associated with higher fat mass in Latina and African American girls.

BACKGROUND Minority girls are disproportionately affected by overweight and obesity. The independent effects of physical activity (PA), sedentary behavior (SB), and diet are not well understood. OBJECTIVE This study examined the individual influences of PA, SB and diet on fat mass in Latina and African American (AA) girls, aged 8-11. METHODS Baseline data from a longitudinal cohort study in minority girls is presented. Multiple linear regression analysis assessed the effects of PA, SB, and energy intake on fat mass, adjusting for lean mass, age, Tanner stage and ethnicity. RESULTS Participants were 53 Latina and AA girls (77% Latina; M age=9.8 +/- .9; M(BMI%)=80.8 +/- 23.1). Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) by accelerometry (beta= -.13, P<.01) and lean mass (beta=.69, P<.001) were associated with fat mass (Model R2=.63; P<.0001). MVPA by 3-day-physical-activity-recall (beta=-.04, P=.01) and lean mass (beta=.75, P<.001) were associated with fat mass (Model R2=.61; P<.0001). SB and energy intake were not associated with fat mass in any model. CONCLUSION Using both objective and subjective measures of PA, MVPA, but not SB or diet, was associated with higher fat mass in Latina and AA girls, independent of lean mass, age, Tanner stage, and ethnicity. Prospective studies are needed to clarify the differential impact of diet and activity levels on adiposity in this population.
Video Inpainting Through Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition

This paper aims at applying the hand gestures which are recognized by the camera for the removing of the object and filling that object with other object for the frames of video . The video inpainting is an important technique in video processing , applying hand gesture to this technique is important. As the world is moving towards the touchless technology, Human computer Interaction with gesture recognition for mouse control is applied to the video inpainting. A Finite state machine is used for the hand gesture recognition. For the extraction and replacement of the object the PIX-MIX algorithm is used. To improve the outline image quality of the frame this algorithm compares pixel to pixel rather than the patch to patch or region to region. The extraction and replacement of the object is carried out through dynamic hand gesture.
Focused and Adaptive Crawling for Topic Specific and Hidden Web Entries

: In this paper we describe new adaptive crawling strategies to efficiently locate the entry points to hidden-Web sources and we describe a new hypertext resource discovery system called a Focused Crawler. The fact that hidden-Web sources are very sparsely distributed makes the problem of locating them especially challenging. We deal with this problem by using the contents of pages to focus the crawl on a topic; by prioritizing promising links within the topic; and by also following links that may not lead to immediate benefit. We propose a new framework whereby crawlers automatically learn patterns of promising links and adapt their focus as the crawl progresses, thus greatly reducing the amount of required manual setup and tuning. The goal of a focused crawler is to selectively seek out pages that are relevant to a pre-defined set of topics. The topics are specified not using keywords, but using exemplary documents. Rather than collecting and indexing all accessible Web documents to be able to answer all possible ad-hoc queries, a focused crawler analyzes its crawl boundary to find the links that are likely to be most relevant for the crawl, and avoid and network resources, and helps keep the crawl more up-to-dates we designed two hypertext mining programs that guide our crawler: a classifier that evaluates the relevance of a hypertext document with respect to the focus topics, and a distiller that identifies hypertext nodes that are great access points to many relevant pages within a few links, Irrelevant regions of the Web. This leads to significant savings in hardware. Our experiments over real Web pages in a representative set of domains indicate that online learning leads to significant gains in harvest rates—the adaptive crawlers retrieve up to three ti mes as many forms as crawlers that use a fixed focus strategy.
Improving Open Access through Prior Learning Assessment

This paper explores and presents new data on how to improve open access in distance education through using prior learning assessments. Broadly there are three types of prior learning assessment (PLAR): Type-1 for prospective students to be allowed to register for a course; Type-2 for current students to avoid duplicating work-load to gain certification; and Type-3 mapping occupational skills as portfolio-needs analysis. In each of these some e-assessment can play a role, notably in Type-3 in distance education. Our previous research has been in Type-2 and we report the empirical results and challenges involved in practice. Moving beyond Type-2 we further report how e-Type-3 can improve our practice in the Open University of China—a very large ODL provider. We discuss the barriers and challenges being faced, and ways being explored to resolve these issues, to reduce the costs involved and to improve open access to learning.
Modeling, Simulation and Control of Flow Tank System

Process control refers the methods that are used to control and manipulating of processes variable in manufacturing a product. It has manyimportances in industrial processes. In this paper, a brief introduction about several aspects of process control has been provided on flow tank. Basic types of controller and their tuning methodshave been discussed here. This paper mainly concern with modelling and designing of controller on real time single tank system and simulation. Here theoretical and practical processes model for single tank system are identified and compare on real time work. From those best model used for calculating parameters of PID Controller based on servo and regulatory system. Here three controller tuning methods such as RelayAuto-Tunning, Ziegler-Nichols, and Tyreus-Luyben are used to design controller for flow tank and compare their output response in real tome flow tank system and on simulation.
Changes in runoff in two neighbouring catchments in the Bohemian Forest related to climate and land cover changes

Abstract There is public concern that large-scale disturbances to forest cover caused by insects and storm winds in the Bohemian Forest could intensify high water flows and enhance the expected flooding risks predicted in current regional climate change scenarios. We analysed stream discharge in Upper Vydra and Große Ohe, neighbouring catchments in the Bohemian Forest, the largest contiguous forested area in Central Europe. Upper Vydra, in the Šumava National Park, and Große Ohe (including the Upper Große Ohe headwater catchment in the Bavarian Forest National Park) are similar in size, but differ in land use cover and the extent of disturbed Norway spruce stands. Publicly available runoff and meteorological data (1978–2011) were examined using non-parametric trend and breakpoint analysis. Together with mapped vegetation cover changes, the results were used to address the following questions: 1) are there significant changes in the hydrological cycle and, if so, do these changes relate to 2) the extent and expansion of disturbance in forests stands and/or 3) altered precipitation dynamics and thermal conditions? We found no marked overall change in annual runoff or in annual or seasonal precipitation, but a significant increase in high flows in March. This overall trend related to the marked warming in late winter and early spring (+~4 K in April, p < 0.01), irrespective of altitude and slope position. It significantly shifted the end of the snow cover period by more than three weeks to the beginning/middle of April depending on altitude, and intensified snow melt. In the Upper Große Ohe catchment, a significant decrease in catchment balance, the difference between the long term precipitation and runoff (–72 mm, 11%) was found when the loss of tree cover reached 30% of catchment area. Diminished evapotranspiration losses from severely disturbed stands increased groundwater recharge during summer and caused a significant rise in low flows in autumn. However, observed increases in late winter high flows were due to warming only. They could be further intensified by the increasing winter precipitation predicted under present climate change scenarios, and would therefore increase the risk of flooding at lower elevations.
Descriptive Children’s Television

This paper identifies a service that is currently available to blind and visually impaired television called description. Description is the use of inserted text into a video program during dialogue pauses in order to provide auxiliary information that may not be evident to blind viewers. While some research has been conducted about the benefits of description and blind adults, no empirical data has been collected as it relates to children. In this paper, literature has been reviewed to discuss first the emerging trend toward educational programming for preschool aged children then the various theories about how children learn and the implications of description for both blind and sighted children. After determining that an argument for description is unnecessary due to the prevalence of the service already in existence, the project began to take a closer look at how description can be beneficial for all children. This paper serves as a foundation for future, needed research on this topic and calls for attention to be paid to both the social impact of description, as well as the methods used for deciding when, what and how much to describe.
The Hong Kong Legal System

This book provides an introduction to the legal system in Hong Kong. Understanding Hong Kong's legal system today requires both an understanding of the British origins of much of the laws and legal institutions as well as the uniquely Hong Kong developments in the application of the Basic Law under 'one country, two systems'. These features of the Hong Kong legal system are explored in this book, which takes into account developments in the two decades or so of the new legal framework in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. In providing both an exposition of the legal institutions in Hong Kong and legal method under Hong Kong's legal system (including practical guidance and examples on case law, statutory interpretation and legal research), this book is ideal for first-year law students, students of other disciplines who study law and readers who have an interest in Hong Kong's unique legal system.
Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints

Abstract Mathematical models are presented and analyzed to facilitate a food bank's equitable and effective distribution of donated food among a population at risk for hunger. Typically exceeding the donated supply, demand is proportional to the poverty population within the food bank's service area. The food bank seeks to ensure a perfectly equitable distribution of food; i.e., each county in the service area should receive a food allocation that is exactly proportional to the county's demand such that no county is at a disadvantage compared to any other county. This objective often conflicts with the goal of maximizing effectiveness by minimizing the amount of undistributed food. Deterministic network-flow models are developed to minimize the amount of undistributed food while maintaining a user-specified upper bound on the absolute deviation of each county from a perfectly equitable distribution. An extension of this model identifies optimal policies for the allocation of additional receiving capacity to counties in the service area. A numerical study using data from a large North Carolina food bank illustrates the uses of the models. A probabilistic sensitivity analysis reveals the effect on the models' optimal solutions arising from uncertainty in the receiving capacities of the counties in the service area.