Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Support for wilderness recreation fees: The influence of fee purpose and day versus overnight use

This paper examines public support for new user fees established at the Desolation Wilderness in California as part of the Fee Demonstration Program. Traditional approaches to fee policy evaluations have typically focused on economic or revenue issues and equity impacts of various pricing strategies. Support for fees has been shown to vary by users in terms of attitudes toward fees, nature of usage or behaviors, and demographics. Fee support may also vary by the type of recreation or resource area, especially in the case of dispersed recreation areas such as wilderness or other sites, which have historically been provided by tax dollars. To evaluate the role of new fees on public support for spending revenues, this paper compares ratings of support for the use of fees for 19 different management activities, assuming two different rationales across two user group samples. One rationale asks about support for fees to improve upon the current level of service, while the other asks about support For fees to provide the current level of service. A split sample was used to test for effects associated with the two rationales. The list of management activities was developed jointly by managers and researchers to gather input on spending priorities. Data came from a 1997-98 study which surveyed campers and day users. The results suggest general support for wilderness use fees, with strongest support for restoration of human damaged sites, litter removal, and related information provision. Unlike most customers, the wilderness users surveyed in this study, particularly campers, gave more support for using fees to maintain or provide the current level ofservice rather than to improve service. Differences between campers and day users for both rationales on particular management activities are presented, as well as a rank order of management activities. Managers can use these results to determine the platform or positioning of spending new revenues. The results show wilderness users prefer a main- tenance spending program to restore wilderness conditions over a devel- opment and new services spending program. Managers can also begin to match the agencies' project priorities with customers' needs and desires. Overall, this paper provides a case study of customer involvement in fiscal policy.
Comparison of unsupervised segmentation methods for surficial materials mapping in Nunavut, Canada using RADARSAT-2 polarimetric, Landsat-7, and DEM data

In this paper, unsupervised segmentation methods are investigated for surficial materials mapping in Nunavut, Canada. Different satellite data sources including RADARSAT-2 polarimetric image, LANDSAT-7 image, and DEM data are combined and three unsupervised segmentation methods are compared. Results show that IRGS has better performance than the other two methods.
A novel method to model ECG beats using Gaussian functions

ECG signal modeling is an essential prerequisite for detection, classification and compression of ECG signal. In this paper, a novel method is developed to model ECG beats using Gaussian fitting of order eight. First, the baseline is detected from the probability histogram of the ECG signal and each beat is divided into two components according to the one above the baseline and the one below it. Both of them are then modeled separately and incorporated together to construct the entire fit. The MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database has been used for authenticity. The difference between the modeled signal and the original signal is calculated and very low residual error has been found. The RMS error of this method has been determined to be 0.02569, 0.02846, 0.05916, 0.02002 and 0.03169 mV for NSR, APC, PVC, LBBB and RBBB beats respectively.
CHAPTER 4 Effect Sizes Based on Means

When the outcome is reported on a meaningful scale and all studies in the analysis use the same scale, the meta-analysis can be performed directly on the raw difference in means (henceforth, we will use the more common term, raw mean difference). The primary advantage of the raw mean difference is that it is intuitively meaningful, either inherently (for example, blood pressure, which is measured on a known scale) or because of widespread use (for example, a national achievement test for students, where all relevant parties are familiar with the scale). Consider a study that reports means for two groups (Treated and Control) and suppose we wish to compare the means of these two groups. Let 1 and 2 be the true (population) means of the two groups. The population mean difference is defined as
IC 3418: STAR FORMATION IN A TURBULENT WAKE

Galaxy Evolution Explorer observations of IC 3418, a low surface brightness galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, revealed a striking 17 kpc UV tail of bright knots and diffuse emission. Hα imaging confirms that star formation is ongoing in the tail. IC 3418 was likely recently ram pressure stripped on its first pass through Virgo. We suggest that star formation is occurring in molecular clouds that formed in IC 3418's turbulent stripped wake. Tides and ram pressure stripping (RPS) of molecular clouds are both disfavored as tail formation mechanisms. The tail is similar to the few other observed star-forming tails, all of which likely formed during RPS. The tails’ morphologies reflect the forces present during their formation and can be used to test for dynamical coupling between molecular and diffuse gas, thereby probing the origin of the star-forming molecular gas.
Twelve microsatellite loci for lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush)

We describe 12 microsatellite loci isolated from lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush). The number of alleles at these loci ranged from two to 11 with an average of 5.3 alleles per locus. The expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.29 to 0.76, with an average of 0.68. Accidental (or illegal) introductions of lake trout into watersheds are decimating native trout populations in the northern Rocky Mountains, and these loci will be useful for identifying the source of these introductions and for estimating the number of founding individuals.
Atomic-Scale Friction of Monolayer Graphenes with Armchair- and Zigzag-Type Edges During Peeling Process

We numerically studied the atomic-scale friction of the monolayer graphene sheet during the nanoscale peeling process by molecular mechanics simulation. The zigzag behavior appears twice in the force curve during the surface and line contacts between the graphene sheet and the graphite surface. During the surface contact, the graphene sheet takes the atomic-scale sliding motion, which exhibits the transition from the continuous to the stick-slip sliding particularly for the graphene with the armchair-type free edge. The period of the zigzag structures for the stick-slip motion in the peeling force curve nearly corresponds to the lattice period of the graphite depending on the lattice orientation and the edge structure of graphene. During the line contact, the graphene sheet also takes the stick-slip sliding motion. Comparison between armchair- and zigzag-type free edges reveals the difference of the characteristic atomic-scale sliding of the graphene sheet. These findings indicate the possibility of not only the direct observation of the atomic-scale friction of the graphene sheet at the tip/surface interface but also the identification of the lattice orientation and the edge structure of the graphene sheet. [DOI: 10.1380/ejssnt.2010. 105]
Push recovery with stepping strategy based on time-projection control

In this paper, we present a simple control framework for on-line push recovery with dynamic stepping properties. Due to relatively heavy legs in our robot, we need to take swing dynamics into account and thus use a linear model called 3LP which is composed of three pendulums to simulate swing and torso dynamics. Based on 3LP equations, we formulate discrete LQR controllers and use a particular time-projection method to adjust the next footstep location on-line during the motion continuously. This adjustment, which is found based on both pelvis and swing foot tracking errors, naturally takes the swing dynamics into account. Suggested adjustments are added to the Cartesian 3LP gaits and converted to joint-space trajectories through inverse kinematics. Fixed and adaptive foot lift strategies also ensure enough ground clearance in perturbed walking conditions. The proposed structure is robust, yet uses very simple state estimation and basic position tracking. We rely on the physical series elastic actuators to absorb impacts while introducing simple laws to compensate their tracking bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate the functionality of different control blocks and prove the effectiveness of time-projection in extreme push recovery scenarios. We also show self-produced and emergent walking gaits when the robot is subject to continuous dragging forces. These gaits feature dynamic walking robustness due to relatively soft springs in the ankles and avoiding any Zero Moment Point (ZMP) control in our proposed architecture.
Nearing extremal intersecting giants and new decoupled sectors in = 4 SYM

We study near-horizon limits of near-extremal charged black hole solutions to five-dimensional U(1)3 gauged supergravity carrying two charges, extending the recent work of Balasubramanian et al. [1]. We show that there are two near-horizon decoupling limits for the near-extremal black holes, one corresponding to the near-BPS case and the other for the far from BPS case. Both of these limits are only defined on the 10d IIB uplift of the 5d black holes, resulting in a decoupled geometry with a six-dimensional part (conformal to) a rotating BTZ × S3. We study various aspects of these decoupling limits both from the gravity side and the dual field theory side. For the latter we argue that there should be two different, but equivalent, dual gauge theory descriptions, one in terms of the 2d CFT's dual to the rotating BTZ and the other as certain large R-charge sectors of d = 4, = 4 U(N) SYM theory. We discuss new BMN-type sectors of the = 4 SYM in the N → ∞ limit in which the engineering dimensions scale as N3/2 (for the near-BPS case) and as N2 (for the far from BPS case).
Invadopodia biogenesis is regulated by caveolin‐mediated modulation of membrane cholesterol levels

Invadopodia are proteolytically active protrusions formed by invasive tumoural cells when grown on an extracellular matrix (ECM) substratum. Clearly, invadopodia are specialized membrane domains acting as sites of signal transduction and polarized delivery of components required for focalized ECM degradation. For these reasons, invadopodia are a model to study focal ECM degradation by tumour cells. We investigated the features of invadopodia membrane domains and how altering their composition would affect invadopodia biogenesis and function. This was achieved through multiple approaches including manipulation of the levels of cholesterol and other lipids at the plasma membrane, alteration of cholesterol trafficking by acting on caveolin 1 expression and phosphorylation. We show that cholesterol depletion impairs invadopodia formation and persistence, and that invadopodia themselves are cholesterol‐rich membranes. Furthermore, the inhibition of invadopodia formation and ECM degradation after caveolin 1 knock‐down was efficiently reverted by simple provision of cholesterol. In addition, the inhibitory effect of caveolin 3DGV expression, a mutant known to block cholesterol transport to the plasma membrane, was similarly reverted by provision of cholesterol. We suggest that invadopodia biogenesis, function and structural integrity rely on appropriate levels of plasma membrane cholesterol, and that invadopodia display the properties of cholesterol‐rich membranes. Also, caveolin 1 exerts its function in invadopodia formation by regulating cholesterol balance at the plasma membrane. These findings support the connection between cholesterol, cancer and caveolin 1, provide further understanding of the role of cholesterol in cancer progression and suggest a mechanistic framework for the proposed anti‐cancer activity of statins, tightly related to their blood cholesterol‐lowering properties.
Generating Realistic Datasets for Deduplication Analysis

Deduplication is a popular component of modern storage systems, with a wide variety of approaches. Unlike traditional storage systems, deduplication performance depends on data content as well as access patterns and meta-data characteristics. Most datasets that have been used to evaluate deduplication systems are either unrepresentative, or unavailable due to privacy issues, preventing easy comparison of competing algorithms. Understanding how both content and meta-data evolve is critical to the realistic evaluation of deduplication systems. We developed a generic model of file system changes based on properties measured on terabytes of real, diverse storage systems. Our model plugs into a generic framework for emulating file system changes. Building on observations from specific environments, the model can generate an initial file system followed by ongoing modifications that emulate the distribution of duplicates and file sizes, realistic changes to existing files, and file system growth. In our experiments we were able to generate a 4TB dataset within 13 hours on a machine with a single disk drive. The relative error of emulated parameters depends on the model size but remains within 15% of real-world observations.
Topic-Level Expert Modeling in Community Question Answering

Community Question Answering (CQA) services provide an open platform for people to share their knowledge and have attracted great attention for its rapidly increasing popularity. As more knowledge is shared in CQA, how to use the repository for solving new questions has become a crucial problem. In this paper, we tackle the problem by finding experts from the question answering history first and then recommending the appropriate experts to answer the new questions. We develop the Topic-level Expert Learning (TEL) model to find experts on topic level in CQA. Our proposed model incorporates link analysis into content analysis. The main difference between TEL and other generative models is that TEL can automatically adjust and update the sampling parameters during iterations in order to better model the experts on topic level. The experiments are conducted on datasets crawled from Yahoo! Answers and the results show that our method can effectively find experts to answer new questions and can better predict best responders for new questions. Our model achieves significant improvement over the baseline methods on multiple metrics. Beyond these metric performances, TEL converges fast within a few iterations.
A Qualitative Study of Nutritional Behaviors in Adults With Multiple Sclerosis

ABSTRACT Few studies have explored how people living with multiple sclerosis (MS) cope with impairments and disability to participate in nutritional behaviors, such as meal preparation and grocery shopping. Thus, we conducted a qualitative study among eight individuals with MS who experienced mobility impairments. The eight individuals participated in semistructured, face-to-face interviews that focused on obtaining narratives about day-to-day dietary habits, preparing food, grocery shopping, and going to restaurants. Interviews were analyzed using an inductive category and theme development approach. Overall themes were (a) “it’s a lot of work,” (b) “it’s not just up to me,” (c) sifting through nutritional information, and (d) “why I eat what I eat. ” Participants frequently reported fatigue and mobility impairments as barriers to engagement in nutritional behaviors and often described family members as the “gatekeepers” for food selection and preparation (i.e., providing tangible support). Future research should explore the effectiveness of nutritional interventions that target family dynamics and create a supportive social environment to promote healthy eating habits and nutritional autonomy.
A direct determination of minimum inertial parameters of robots

A direct method is presented to determine the minimum set of inertial parameters of robots. The set consists of the classical parameters that affect the dynamic model and the regrouped parameters. The method permits to most of the regrouped parameters to be determined by means of a closed-form function of the geometric parameters of the robot. It is proved that the minimum number of inertial parameters is less than 7n-4, where n is the number of joints. The method is general whatever the values of the geometric parameters. The method can be extended to tree structure robots and will be integrated into the software package SYMORO. <<ETX>>
A W-Band Air-Cavity Filter Integrated on a Thin-Film Substrate

In this letter, a W-band air-cavity filter has been developed on a thin-film substrate using a lossy silicon substrate as a base plate, which is suitable for a mm-wave system-on-package. The lossy silicon suppresses a parasitic substrate mode excited in a thin-film substrate, while a coupling loss between a transmission line and a resonator is minimized by etching the backside of the lossy silicon substrate underneath the coupling area. In the backside etching process, 70 mum of silicon was left for mechanical support of the thin-film substrate. The resonator was fabricated using a low-cost silicon micromachining technique and was flip-chip integrated on a thin-film substrate. The fabricated air-cavity resonator showed an unloaded Q of 851 at a resonant frequency of 94.18 GHz. Improvement in the coupling loss by the backside etching process was verified with measurement results. The fabricated filter exhibited an insertion loss of 1.75 dB and a return loss better than 14.5 dB with a 1.3% 3 dB fractional bandwidth at a center frequency of 93.8 GHz.
Value Compression of Pattern Databases

One common pattern database compression technique is to merge adjacent database entries and store the minimum of merged entries to maintain heuristic admissibility. In this paper we propose a compression technique that preserves every entry, but reduces the number of bits used to store each entry, therefore limiting the values that can be represented. Even when this technique throws away low values in the heuristic, it can still have better performance than the traditional approach. We develop a theoretical basis for selecting which values to keep and show improved performance in both unidirectional and bidirectional search.
Rehabilitation section.

Objective. Our aim was to systematically review and meta-analyze the effectiveness of graded activity (GA) or graded exposure (GEXP) for chronic nonspecific low back pain (CNSLBP). Methods. A literature search of multiple databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, PEDro, CINAHL, and PsychINFO) was conducted to identify randomized control trials (RCTs). Standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated for relevant outcome measures (pain intensity, disability, quality of life, and catastrophizing). Results. Thirteen RCTs met the inclusion criteria. Only nine studies were included in the meta-analysis. GA was significantly more effective than the control group (CG) for improvements in disability in the short term (three studies: n 5 254, SMD 5 20.3, 95% CI 20.55 to 20.05, P 5 0.02) and long term (two studies: n 5 238, SMD 5 20.53, 95% CI 20.79 to 20.27, P < 0.0001). GA was significantly less effective than GEXP for the improvement of disability in the short term (two studies: n 5 105, SMD 5 0.39, 95% CI 0.003–0.78, P 5 0.048). GA was also significantly less effective than GEXP at improving catastrophizing in the short term (two studies: n 5 105, SMD 5 0.48, 95% CI 0.09–0.87, P 5 0.02). Conclusion. Limited evidence has been found to show that GA significantly reduces disability in the short and long term when compared with the CG in CNSLBP. There is moderate evidence that GEXP more effectively decreases catastrophizing than GA in the short term. No difference was found between GA and other exercise for any variable.
A Suboptimal Power-Point-Tracking-Based Primary Frequency Response Strategy for DFIGs in Hybrid Remote Area Power Supply Systems

Due to the presence of a power electronic converter, the doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind generators are isolated from grid frequency variations, which will impose significant burden on conventional generators to regulate frequency in a hybrid remote area power supply (RAPS) system. Thus, participation of wind generators in frequency control is increasingly demanded. In this paper, a primary frequency response strategy is proposed for the DFIG to regulate the RAPS system frequency. A droop control loop without conventionally used high-pass filter is integrated to generate the torque reference for the DFIG to provide primary frequency response, and a supplementary control loop is proposed to enhance the primary frequency response with torque feedback control. Furthermore, the suggested suboptimal power point tracking strategy is capable of reserving wind power to improve the frequency response. The proposed strategy enables DFIG to participate in RAPS system frequency regulation while alleviating high rate of change of power and thus stress on the diesel generators under highly variable load demand. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated through simulations.
OF DEFECT MODES IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL TERNARY METALLO-DIELECTRIC NANOLAYERED PHOTONIC CRYSTAL

We investigate the characterization of defect modes in one-dimensional ternary symmetric metallo-dielectric photonic crystal (1DTSMDPC) band-gap structures. We consider the defect modes for symmetric model with respect to the defect layer. We demonstrate reflectance with respect to the wavelength and its dependence on different thicknesses and indices of refraction of dielectric defect layer, angle of incidence and number of periods for both transverse electric (TE ) and transverse magnetic (TM ) waves. Also, we investigate properties of the defect modes for different metals. Our findings show that the photonic crystal (PC) with defect layer, made of two dielectrics and one metallic material, leads to different band-gap structures with respect to one dielectric and one metallic layer. There is at least one defect mode when we use dielectric or metallic defect layer in symmetric structure. And, the number of defect modes will be increased by the enhancement of refractive index and thickness of dielectric defect layer.
ppENK Gene Methylation Status in the Development of Pancreatic Carcinoma

Objective. To explore the association of hypermethylation of the proenkephalin gene (ppENK) with pancreatic carcinoma and to identify the effects of a demethylating agent on pancreatic cell lines. Method. Human pancreatic cancer tissues and five pancreatic carcinoma cell lines, as well as normal pancreatic tissue, were used. ppENK methylation status was detected by MS-PCR (methylation-specific PCR). Results. Methylation of ppENK was detected in 90.3% (28/31) of the human pancreatic carcinoma tissues but was not seen in normal pancreatic tissue. There was no correlation between the extent of methylation of ppENK and the clinicopathological features of the pancreatic carcinomas. Methylated ppENK was detected in all the pancreatic cancer cell lines and was associated with loss of mRNA expression in the pancreatic carcinoma cell lines and normal pancreatic tissue. After treatment with 5-aza-dC, methylated ppENK was not detected and the inhibition of ppENK mRNA expression was reversed. Conclusions. Inhibition of ppENK expression by a change in its methylation status plays an important role in pancreatic carcinogenesis. ppENK methylation is thus an important molecular event that distinguishes pancreatic carcinoma tissue from normal pancreatic tissue. Effects on cell growth, apoptosis, and the cell cycle may contribute to changes of ppENK methylation status.