Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A study of typhoon intensity change using satellite remote sensing data

* Corresponding author. ** This work is supported by National Science Council of Taiwan through NSC98-2611-019-017-MY3. Abstract – Mechanisms of influence on typhoon intensity change in the northwestern Pacific are studied by using satellite remote sensing data. A decision tree of data mining technique is applied to analyze the possible influence of geophysical parameters on typhoon intensity change. The related geophysical parameters include sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapor, rain rate, sea surface height anomaly, and sea-air temperature difference. The total number of 14 Category-5 typhoons occurred between 2003 and 2007 in the northwestern Pacific is employed for this study. The results indicate that the major mechanism of influence on typhoon intensity change is seaair temperature difference and the second one is sea surface temperature. About 88% typhoon intensity is enhanced when a typhoon passes over the ocean where its sea surface temperature is larger than air temperature. The model is further validated by typhoon JANGMI. The accuracy and precision of this model are 82.3% and 85.7%, respectively.
DCT${^2}$Gen: A Versatile TCP Traffic Generator for Data Centers

Only little is publicly known about traffic in non-educational data centers. Recent studies made some knowledge available, which gives us the opportunity to create more realistic traffic models for data center research. We used this knowledge to create the first publicly available traffic generator that produces realistic traffic between hosts in data centers of arbitrary size. We characterize traffic by using six probability distribution functions and concentrate on the generation of traffic on flow-level. The distribution functions are described as step functions, which makes our generator highly configurable to generate traffic for different kinds of data centers. Moreover, in data centers, traffic between hosts in the same rack and hosts in different racks have different properties. We model this phenomenon, making our generated traffic very realistic. We carefully evaluated our approach and conclude that it reproduces these characteristics with high accuracy.
Identification of dietary patterns and relationship with weight and health outcomes in older adults

The proportion of older adults (≥ 65 years old) is dramatically increasing. The first of the Baby Boomer generation (adults born between 1946 and 1964) turned 65 years old in 2011. The prevalence of obesity among this age group is higher than ever. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2008, 34% of women and 37% of men aged ≥ 60 years old are obese. Obesity is clearly related to a number of adverse health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome (MetSyn). However, the role that diet plays related to these outcomes in an aging population is less clear. The prevalence of nutrition-related chronic disease outcomes is higher among low socioeconomic and rural populations. These at-risk populations are not readily sampled in national nutritional surveys. Studies characterizing populations of rural, older adults are needed to better understand the role of dietary patterns and health disparities. In particular, limited data are available for the old-older person aged 80 years and above. Data that are available suggests that many obese older adults consume poor quality diets and that dietary practices may influence health outcomes even in populations of old-older individuals. Advances in dietary pattern research have focused on investigation of the association between specific dietary patterns and disease outcomes. Commonly used methodologies for deriving dietary patterns include both a priori (e.g., diet indices, such as the Healthy Eating Index-2005) and a posteriori methods (e.g., factor or cluster analysis). More recently, other techniques such as reduced rank regression and finite mixture modeling have also been employed.
A framework for testing database applications

Database systems play an important role in nearly every modern organization, yet relatively little research effort has focused on how to test them. This paper discusses issues arising in testing database systems and presents an approach to testing database applications. In testing such applications, the state of the database before and after the user's operation plays an important role, along with the user's input and the system output. A tool for populating the database with meaningful data that satisfy database constraints has been prototyped. Its design and its role in a larger database application testing tool set are discussed.
Automatic extraction of Irregular Network digital terrain models

For representation of terrain, an efficient alternative to dense grids is the Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN), which represents a surface as a set of non-overlapping contiguous triangular facets, of irregular size and shape. The source of digital terrain data is increasingly dense raster models produced by automated orthophoto machines or by direct sensors such as synthetic aperture radar. A method is described for automatically extracting a TIN model from dense raster data. An initial approximation is constructed by automatically triangulating a set of feature points derived from the raster model. The method works by local incremental refinement of this model by the addition of new points until a uniform approximation of specified tolerance is obtained. Empirical results show that substantial savings in storage can be obtained.
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Editor's note: The BMJ and Australian 6 Minutes news items on plain packaging are subscriber-only but may be requested in the same fashion as journal study PDFs. As noted before, 'In the News' studies highlighted in square brackets have been previously featured in this bulletin or in MJU and remain available upon request. In the News: Australia: ALEC: Big Pharma's credibility goes up in smoke as NRT makers fight plain packaging Australia: Attorney-General Roxon: When trade marks & health collide over plain cigarette packaging Australia/US: Proctor: A perfect addicting engine: the case for ending cigarette sales: Audio BMJ: UK/Australia: Health activists note massive rise in campaigns against plain packets for cigarettes Canada: BC: Langley: Another win for non-smokers as strata complex adopts new ban bylaw Canada: BC: Maple Ridge: Family urges city hall to ban smoking outside homes; Negative reaction Canada: Smoking affects liver transplant health, increases risk of viral hepatitis reinfection [Liver Transpl-Bhat] China: Male smokers warned of impotency threat, previously under-appreciated [AJE: He (2007)] China: WHO gives health minister award for battling smoking; Tobacco consumption still rises Dominican Republic/Australia: Third WTO complaint filed over plain packaging, backed by tobacco firms India: Tobacco Act: Nine years on, legislation's implementation lost in smoke India: Gutka: Clamping down on killer chewing tobacco; Shankapura: Tobacco-Free Village Indonesia: Djarum: UEFA hypocrisy as football broadcast on cigarette brand-sponsored channel Indonesia: Bali: Government strictly enforces smoke-free zones, issues fines, arrests civil servants Iran: Morality police target cafe culture for 'un-Islamic' behaviour, arrest women for hookah smoking NZ: PM: Tobacco giant steps up campaign against anti-smoking measures; New website launched NZ: UNDP/ITC: Former Prime Minister Clark admits 'serious oversight' in business award to tobacco company Philippines/UK: BAT still buying 2 million kilograms of local tobacco annually, years after leaving the country Noteworthy: "One of the most powerful times to convince a smoker to quit is before a surgical procedure or after diagnosis of a smoking-related illness. The time has arrived for surgeons to assume the leadership role and catalyze constructive change to minimize the impact of tobacco in the perioperative setting in America. A partnership between surgeons and policy makers could dramatically improve health outcomes. " [Khullar D, Maa J. The Impact of Smoking on Surgical Outcomes: A Collective Review, J Am Coll Surg] "E-cigarettes are increasing in popularity and are marketed as safer cigarettes for both the user and the public because they deliver nicotine without …
The storm you cannot see: Exploring the biological and clinical effect of depressive symptoms on executive function in adolescents after concussion

Background: Following concussion, adolescents may experience both poor inhibitory control and increased depressive symptoms. Studies have shown that brain activity in adolescents with concussion deviates from that of uninjured controls. Despite the gravity of depressive symptoms on quality of life in youth after concussion, very little research has been done to show how concussed adolescents with depressive symptoms might present in brain pathology during cognitive tasks. Purpose: to determine how adolescents with depressive symptoms might present differently in brain activity patterns than those without depressive symptoms after concussion, particularly in the presence of distracting emotional images while engaging inhibitory control processes. Methods: Adolescents diagnosed with concussion between 10-17 years were recruited. Levels of depressive symptoms were collected using the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) self-report questionnaire. Participants were divided into two groups based on T-scores from the CDI: Elevated and Average. They completed an Emotional Go/No-Go task involving neutral and angry faces as emotional distractors in an fMRI scanner. Group comparisons were conducted to analyze differential areas of brain activity during emotion-mediated cognitive processing (Go>No-Go; No-Go>Go) and emotional processing (Neutral>Angry; Angry>Neutral). Results: Adolescents with concussion: Fewer areas of activity were seen during the inhibitory condition (No-Go blocks) compared to the habituation condition (Go blocks). Emotion-mediated inhibitory control activates areas including the right caudate, left occipital fusiform gyrus, bilateral hippocampus, and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex The emotional stimuli yielded activity in the thalamus, pallidum, insula, and putamen were seen in the right hemisphere, while the fusiform gyrus, lateral prefrontal cortex, middle frontal cortex, and precentral gyrus. Adolescents with post-concussive depressive symptoms: Lowering the threshold to Z=2.0, threshold cluster= 0.05 revealed activity in the lateral frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, and left inferior parietal lobe in the Elevated group. Regions associated with Angry>Neutral contrast were minimal, both groups exhibiting little activity at Z=2.0. Conclusions: The findings show that engaging in inhibitory control processes results in fewer areas of brain activity in comparison to simple, automated tasks in adolescents with concussive injury. Frontal regions that are usually associated with inhibitory control were not activated, which suggests that an impairment in the frontal networks. Location of injury may have been a contributing factor to this finding. Faces activated regions associated with both facial and cognitive processing. Adolescents with elevated levels of depressive symptoms were more likely to engage frontal regions that subserve evaluative processes. MSc Thesis – Rachelle Ho McMaster University –Rehabilitation Science
Reactive power and voltage control of the Nigerian grid system using micro-genetic algorithm

In this paper, a micro-genetic based approach to the optimization of reactive power and voltage profiles improvement and real power loss minimization is presented. The reactive power control devices such as generators, tap positions of on-load tap changer of transformers, shunt reactors are used to correct voltage limits violations while simultaneously reducing the system real power losses. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are well-known global search techniques anchored on the mechanisms of natural selection and genetics. Because of the time intensive nature of the conventional GA, the micro-GA is proposed as a more time efficient alternative. The feasibility and effectiveness of the developed algorithm is tested and verified on the Nigerian grid power system for three case studies scenarios preset in the power world simulator. The far-reaching simulation results that validate the effectiveness of the developed tool are presented and discussed in depth.
Alignment and Misalignment in Personal and Organizational Spiritual Identities

ABSTRACT This article reports on an Australian empirical study that aimed to explore how managers and professionals experience spirituality in the workplace. The rationale for the study lay in the paucity of empirical studies on workplace spirituality in Australia, as compared with the burgeoning literature published in the United States (Bell, Rajendran, & Theiler, 2012, p. 68). Through an inductive and interpretive approach, the analysis gave rise to a grounded theory concerned with personal and organizational spiritual identity. Organizational spiritual identity was communicated through values, practices, discourse, nonverbal artifacts, written documents, policies, and contributions to charities, for example. When personal and organizational spiritual identities were misaligned, the potential for conflict and dilemmas with damaging consequences for employees and organizations intensified.
Exploring Transactional Service Properties for Mobile Service Composition

A module (2) is connected to a multiplexing system by means of a printed circuit board (18) having thereon first conductors (14) each connected to a second conductor (22) by means of a spring clip (24) on the board (18). An edge connector (38) for mating with the board (18) has thereon projections (62) which can be selectively removed before the connector (38) is mated with the board (18). When the board (18) and the connector (38) are mated, the remaining projections (62) each left a respective clip (24) from its first conductor (14) and protrude between the clip (24) and the first conductor (14), thereby disconnecting them. The projections (62) and clips (24) thus provide a switching system which can be used to ensure that only selected second conductors (22) carry current.
Geometric Optimisation and FastICA Algorithms

Independent component analysis is a challenging problem in the area of unsupervised adaptive filtering. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in using geometric optimisation for adaptive filtering. The performance of ICA algorithms significantly depends on the choice of the contrast function and the optimisation algorithm used in obtaining the demixing matrix. In this paper we focus on the standard linear ICA problem from an optimisation point of view. It is well known that after a pre-whitening process, the problem can be solved via an optimisation approach on a suitable manifold. We propose an approximate Newton’s method on the unit sphere to solve the one-unit ICA problem. The local convergence properties are discussed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated by numerical experiments. It turns out that the well known FastICA algorithm can be considered as a special case of our algorithm. Moreover, some generalisations of the proposed algorithm are also discussed. Keywords— Geometric optimisation, independent component analysis, FastICA, scalar shift strategy, local convergence
Scalable Long-term Network Forensics for Epidemic Attacks

Network forensics supports capabilities such as attacker identification and attack reconstruction, which complement traditional intrusion detection and perimeter defense techniques in building a robust security mechanism. Attacker identification pinpoints attack origin to deter future attackers and attack reconstruction can reveal attack causality and network vulnerabilities. In this paper, we study the problem of investigating the origin of stealthy epidemic attacks which may have long lifespan. We propose a network forensics mechanism which is scalable in time and space while maintaining high accuracy in attack origin identification. We propose a data reduction method to filter out irrelevant data and only retain evidence relevant to potential attacks for postmortem investigation. Using real trace-driven experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism and show that we can achieve low false positive and false negative rates in data reduction and support high scalability and accuracy in long-term network forensics.
Characterizing A Database of Sequential Behaviors with Latent Dirichlet Hidden Markov Models

This paper proposes a generative model, the latent Dirichlet hidden Markov models (LDHMM), for characterizing a database of sequential behaviors (sequences). LDHMMs posit that each sequence is generated by an underlying Markov chain process, which are controlled by the corresponding parameters (i.e., the initial state vector, transition matrix and the emission matrix). These sequence-level latent parameters for each sequence are modeled as latent Dirichlet random variables and parameterized by a set of deterministic database-level hyper-parameters. Through this way, we expect to model the sequence in two levels: the database level by deterministic hyper-parameters and the sequence-level by latent parameters. To learn the deterministic hyper-parameters and approximate posteriors of parameters in LDHMMs, we propose an iterative algorithm under the variational EM framework, which consists of E and M steps. We examine two different schemes, the fully-factorized and partially-factorized forms, for the framework, based on different assumptions. We present empirical results of behavior modeling and sequence classification on three real-world data sets, and compare them to other related models. The experimental results prove that the proposed LDHMMs produce better generalization performance in terms of log-likelihood and deliver competitive results on the sequence classification problem.
The effect of incidental haptic sensations on intrapersonal judgements on a personality questionnaire

Extant research has shown that incidental haptic sensations can, nonconsciously, influence judgements of objects or people that are non-diagnostic (unrelated) for the actual qualities of the items being judged – including interpersonal judgements. Evidence suggests that this could also be true for intrapersonal judgements. The application of this conception to the use of personality questionnaires lead to the following hypothesis: incidental exposure to a specific haptic experience (firmness or flimsiness of the paper) could, nonconsciously, trigger physically grounded mental frameworks, which, in turn, may effect the intrapersonal judgements of individuals completing a personality questionnaire. A randomized post-test only, one-way experimental design was conducted using a sample of university students (n = 178). The experiment found evidence to support the hypothesis that a physically grounded mental framework, consistent with embodied cognition, could nonconsciously lead participants to form stronger self-judgements on agreeableness and extraversion, when encountering an incidental haptic experience of firmness in a personality questionnaire. The findings of this research may serve to create awareness of the influence of incidental haptic sensations as a confounding variable in questionnaire design. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.
Adenovirus infection inhibits the phosphorylation of major histocompatibility complex class I proteins

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules act as peptide receptors to direct the recognition of foreign antigens by cytolytic T cells. The cell surface expression and trafficking of these peptide receptors is thought to be controlled by the conformation of the MHC molecule and possibly by the phosphorylation of the cytoplasmic portion of the heavy chain protein. It is of some interest that adenoviruses (Ads) have evolved proteins that interfere with the expression of MHC molecules. One of these proteins, called E3/19k, binds to newly synthesized MHC molecules in the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) and inhibits their trafficking to the cell surface. Here we show that during the infection of a human cell line with Ad2, the phosphorylation of the endogenous MHC molecules is inhibited. We also observe that the phosphorylation of the endogenous HLA molecules is grossly impaired in a human cell line transfected with the Ad2 EcoRI D fragment containing the E3/19k gene. We conclude that the E3/19k protein inhibits the phosphorylation of the MHC heavy chains and that this may be one of the important functions of this protein in infected cells. In addition, we show that a mutant of the E3/19k protein, which lacks an RER retention signal but which retains its ability to bind to HLA molecules, does not inhibit the phosphorylation of HLA molecules and that phosphorylated molecules are not Endo H sensitive. This suggests that HLA molecules are phosphorylated after leaving the medial-Golgi compartment, thus providing the most compelling evidence yet that HLA molecules are phosphorylated at or near the cell surface. Finally, to our knowledge, this is the first study under which the phosphorylation of MHC molecules is shown to be altered and may have some relevance for other pathogenic conditions.
Impacts of tracked vehicles on sediment from a desert soil

Off-road military vehicle traffic is a major consideration in the management of military lands. The objective of this study was to determine the impacts of military tracked M1A1 heavy combat tank vehicles on sediment loss from runoff, surface plant cover, and surface microtopography in a desert military training environment. A randomized block design was used which had 10 blocks with 4 plots (0.5 m2) in each block. Each block had randomly selected treatments that included an untreated control, 1 pass by a M1A1 tank under wet seasonal conditions, 3 passes by a M1A1 tank under wet seasonal conditions, 1 pass by a M1A1 tank under dry seasonal conditions, and 3 passes by a M1A1 tank under dry seasonal conditions. Data were analyzed using mean separation and stepwise regression techniques. Most sample periods showed that sediment losses from M1A1 tank treatments, single or triple passes under wet or dry seasonal conditions, did not differ statistically from natural sediment losses under nominal rainfall events. However, comparatively intense rainfall events often generated significantly (P < 0.05) greater sediment losses from the M1A1 tank triple pass treatments. Triple pass M1A1 tank impacts had detrimental effects that could last many years, particularly when disturbances were imposed under dry seasonal conditions. Seasonal drought for the area, occurring 2 out of 3 years during the study period, may have exacerbated the effects of triple pass M1A1 tank impacts. Analysis showed that grass cover, litter cover, and microtopographic variance were highly and negatively correlated (R = -0.62) with cumulative sediment loss. Depending on precipitation availability, a minimum of 3 years for most triple pass M1A1 tank impacts is suggested for suitable vegetation recovery and soil stability. It is recommended that site repetitious M1A1 tank training maneuvers should be conducted with particular attention to site recovery. Furthermore, the influence of climate, drought in particular, should be among the topics addressed by future military training land use models. DOI:10.2458/azu_jrm_v56i4_fuchs