Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Environmental Fate of Soil Applied Neonicotinoid Insecticides in an Irrigated Potato Agroecosystem

Since 1995, neonicotinoid insecticides have been a critical component of arthropod management in potato, Solanum tuberosum L. Recent detections of neonicotinoids in groundwater have generated questions about the sources of these contaminants and the relative contribution from commodities in U.S. agriculture. Delivery of neonicotinoids to crops typically occurs as a seed or in-furrow treatment to manage early season insect herbivores. Applied in this way, these insecticides become systemically mobile in the plant and provide control of key pest species. An outcome of this project links these soil insecticide application strategies in crop plants with neonicotinoid contamination of water leaching from the application zone. In 2011 and 2012, our objectives were to document the temporal patterns of neonicotinoid leachate below the planting furrow following common insecticide delivery methods in potato. Leaching loss of thiamethoxam from potato was measured using pan lysimeters from three at-plant treatments and one foliar application treatment. Insecticide concentration in leachate was assessed for six consecutive months using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Findings from this study suggest leaching of neonicotinoids from potato may be greater following crop harvest in comparison to other times during the growing season. Furthermore, this study documented recycling of neonicotinoid insecticides from contaminated groundwater back onto the crop via high capacity irrigation wells. These results document interactions between cultivated potato, different neonicotinoid delivery methods, and the potential for subsurface water contamination via leaching.
Fetal head localization and fetal brain segmentation from MRI using the center of gravity

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of fetus is an essential tool to study normal and abnormal brain development of fetus. A meaningful interpretation of fetal brain by a neurologist requires brain segmentation. We propose an automatic method for segmentation of the fetal brain in MRI. We first detect the fetal head location in 2D MRI slices using center of gravity (COG), and draw a circle on the input image that encloses the fetal head and is taken as the ROI. The fetal brain is segmented from the ROI using thresholding, morphological operations and connected component analysis. Our method is evaluated on 25 volumes of fetal data. To assess the performance of the method we compute the Dice similarity coefficient (D) and obtained the value as 0.8842 which is comparable to all the existing methods.
1 2 3 ENCODING OF EYE POSITION IN THE GOLDFISH HORIZONTAL 4 OCULOMOTOR NEURAL INTEGRATOR 5 6

35 36 Monocular organization of the goldfish horizontal neural integrator was studied during 37 spontaneous scanning saccadic and fixation behaviors. Analysis of neuronal firing rates revealed 38 a population of ipsilateral (37%), conjugate (59%) and contralateral (4%) eye position neurons. 39 When monocular optokinetic stimuli were employed to maximize disjunctive horizontal eye 40 movements the sampled population changed to 57%, 39%, 4%. Monocular eye tracking could be 41 elicited at different gain and phase with the integrator time constant independently modified for 42 each eye by either centripetal (leak) or centrifugal (instability) drifting visual stimuli. Acute 43 midline separation between the hindbrain oculomotor integrators did not affect either 44 monocularity or time constant tuning corroborating that left and right eye positions are 45 independently encoded within each integrator. Together these findings suggest that the 46 ‘ipsilateral’ and ‘conjugate/contralateral’ integrator neurons primarily target abducens 47 motoneurons and internuclear neurons, respectively. The commissural pathway is proposed to 48 select the ‘conjugate/contralateral’ eye position neurons and act as a feedfoward inhibition 49 affecting null eye position, oculomotor range and saccade pattern. 50 51
Campaign Rhetoric and Policy Making under Career Concerns

In this paper I develop a model of political platform choice and subsequent policy implementation decisions by political candidates who are primarily motivated by career concerns. Although political platforms are non binding, politicians have some incentive to keep campaign promises in order to uphold their reputation. I analyze the electoral outcome and the determinants which influence the decision to break campaign promises. JEL Classification: D8
Usage of Lidar Data for Leaf Area Index Estimation

Abstract Leaf area index (LAI) can be measured either directly, using destructive methods, or indirectly using optical methods that are based on the tight relationship between LAI and canopy light transmittance. Third, innovative approach for LAI measuring is usage of remote sensing data, especially airborne laser scanning (ALS) data shows itself as a advisable source for purposes of LAI modelling in large areas. Until now there has been very little research to compare LAI estimated by the two different approaches. Indirect measurements of LAI using hemispherical photography are based on the transmission of solar radiation through the vegetation. It can thus be assumed that the same is true for the penetration of LiDAR laser beams through the vegetation canopy. In this study we use ALS based LiDAR penetration index (LPI) and ground based measurement of LAI obtained from hemispherical photographs as a reference in-situ method. Several regression models describing the corellation LAI and LPI were developed with various coefficients of determination ranging up to 0,81. All models were validated and based on the tests performed, no errors were drawn that would affect their credibility.
An Efficient Technique for Iris Recognition using Wavelets and Artificial Neural Networks

In this paper, an iris recognition system is presented and developed. The proposed system utilizes an integro-differential operator to segment the input iris image. The isolated irises are normalized to vectors of the same length. Classification features from the normalized vectors are extracted using Wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) combined with a novel amplitude-thresholding approach. The extracted features are then applied to an ANN for classification. The iris images used in this study are obtained from the CASIA database. To show the robustness of the proposed system, its performance is compared to that of vector quantization (VQ), a minimum-distance classifier that uses the Euclidean distance. Simulation results show that the proposed ANN system produces a low recognition error of less than 5% and always outperforms the VQ system.
Programming Sirius Distributing and Coordinating Application Reference Data

a Distinguished Engineer at Comcast. He's worked on their next generation IP video delivery systems as an architect and engineer for the past several years, and is interested in functional programming and distributed systems. He currently resides in Philadelphia. Michael_Bevilacqua-Linn@comcast.com Maulan Byron is passionate about making software scalable, fast, and robust. He has spent the majority of his career building and delivering mid-size to large-scale projects in the telecommunication and financial industries. His interests are in making things scale and perform better and finding solutions that make it easier to operationalize software products. Peter Cline is a senior software engineer at Comcast. In the past two years there, his work has focused on distributed systems, hypermedia API design, and automated testing. Prior to Comcast, he worked in search and digital curation at the S irius is an open-source library that provides developers of applications that require reference data with a simple in-memory object model while transparently managing cluster replication and consistency. We describe the design and implementation of Sirius in the context of TV and movie metadata, but Sirius has since been used in other applications at Comcast, and it is intended to support a broad class of applications and associated reference data. Many applications need to use reference data-information that is accessed frequently but not necessarily updated in-band by the application itself. Such reference data sets now fit comfortably in memory, especially as the exponential progress of Moore's Law has outstripped these data sets' growth rates: For example, the total number of feature films listed in the Internet Movie Database grew 40% from 1998 to 2013, whereas commodity server RAM grew by two orders of magnitude in the same period. Consider the type of reference data that drove the design and implementation of Sirius: meta-data associated with television shows and movies. Examples of this metadata include facts such as the year Casablanca was released, how many episodes were in Season 7 of Seinfeld, or when the next episode of The Voice will be airing (and on which channel). This data set has certain distinguishing characteristics common to reference data: It is small. Our data set is a few tens of gigabytes in size, fitting comfortably in main memory of modern commodity servers. It is relatively static, with a very high read/write ratio. Overwhelmingly, this data is write-once, read-frequently: Casablanca likely won't get a different release date, Seinfeld won't suddenly …
Grammatical Evolution: A Steady State approach

We describe a Genetic Algorithm that can evolve complete programs. Using a variable length linear genome to govern the mapping of a Backus Naur Form grammar definition to a program, expressions and programs of arbitrary complexity may be evolved. Our system, Grammatical Evolution, has been applied to problems such as a Symbolic Regression problem, and finding Trigonometric Identities. In this paper we describe how we applied GE to a Symbolic Integration problem, that being finding a function which is an integral of . We also show how a Steady State selection mechanism was found to improve the performance of Grammatical Evolution.
Capturing distribution grid-integrated solar variability and uncertainty using microgrids

The variable nature of the solar generation and the inherent uncertainty in solar generation forecasts are two challenging issues for utility grids, especially as the distribution grid integrated solar generation proliferates. This paper offers to utilize microgrids as local solutions for mitigating these negative drawbacks and helping the utility grid in hosting a higher penetration of solar generation. A microgrid optimal scheduling model based on robust optimization is developed to capture solar generation variability and uncertainty. Numerical simulations on a test feeder indicate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Vector instruction set support for conditional operations

Vector instruction sets are receiving renewed interest because of their applicability to multimedia. Current multimedia instruction sets use short vectors with SIMD implementations, but long vector, pipelined implementations have a number of advantages and are a logical next step in multimedia ISA development. Support for conditional operations (as occur in loops containing IF statements) is an important aspect of a vector ISA. Seven ISA alternatives for implementing conditional operations are systematically explored. Performance considerations are discussed through evaluation of a typical IF loop over a range of vector lengths and true conditional values. An approach using masked operations is shown to be one of the better methods, especially if its implementation is able to skip over blocks of false mask bits. Additional analyses of complex IF loops and parallel pipeline implementations support the masked operation approach. The paper concludes with a practical implementation of masked operations that skips over power-of-2-length blocks of false values. This implementation is simpler than skipping arbitrary-length blocks and provides similar performance.
Definition of the International Normalized Ratio (INR) and its consequences for the calibration procedure of thromboplastin preparations: a rebuttal

A.M.H . P . VAN D EN BESSELAAR , L . POLLER ,* and A . TR IPODI Haemostasis and Thrombosis Research Center, Department of Haematology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands; *ECAA Central Facility, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; and A Bianchi Bonomi Haemophilia and Thrombosis Center, IRCCS Maggiore Hospital, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING ACHIEVEMENT, WRITING SELF-EFFICACY, WRITING APPREHENSION AND PERCEIVED VALUE OF WRITING BY GENDER FOR THIRD-GRADE STUDENTS IN A SUBURBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT

Writing requires strong motivation to persevere through the unique problem solving and self-monitoring process required for a successful execution of the task. Results of writing achievement research often reveal a gender gap. Typically, girls outperform boys at local, state, national, and international writing assessments. This study examined the relationship between writing achievement ability and writing motivation by gender for third-grade students in a suburban school district. This study is important due to a dearth of information on academic motivation in the domain of writing because what does exist is usually focused on students from middle school to college age, not elementary age students. Academic motivation in literacy needs to be better understood in order to both maximize instructional practices suited toward this goal and to increase the development of self-efficacy among students. This study employed a quantitative approach using the following measures: selfefficacy for writing, writing apprehension, writing valuation, the Connecticut Mastery Test’s Direct Assessment of Writing, and general aptitude from the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test
The Evolution of Dbx

Dbx is the standard source-level debugger on most Unix1 workstations. Over the past six years Dbx has grown from a debugger for interpreted Pascal programs to a debugger for compiled C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal, and Modula-2 programs. Dbx also has been retargetted to a variety of architectures, including VAX2, Motorola 680003, MIPS, IBM RT-PC4, IBM 370, Sun SPARC, and Intel 80386. This paper describes the evolution of Dbx and examines how the organization of Dbx has enhanced its portability and extensibility. The structure of Dbx is based on a set of abstractions that define what a debugger must do, not on a decomposition by language or machine. These abstractions provide greater flexibility in handling the unexpected problems associated with retargetting a program.
Atlas.txt: Linking Geo-referenced Data to Text for NLG

Geo-referenced data which are often communicated via maps are inaccessible to the visually impaired population. We summarise existing approaches to improving accessibility of geo-referenced data and present the Atlas.txt project which aims to produce textual summaries of such data which can be read out via a screenreader. We outline issues involved in generating descriptions of geo-referenced data and present initial work on content determination based on knowledge acquisition from both parallel corpus analysis and input from visually impaired people. In our corpus analysis we build an ontology containing abstract representations of expert-written sentences which we associate with macros containing sequences of data analysis methods. This helps us to identify which data analysis methods need to be applied to generate text from data.
The Dynamics of Delegated Decision Making

This paper investigates the behaviour of bodies or organizations, operating in a stochastic environment, where there is a delegated decision maker. A crucial decision is when to delegate to another decision maker. The problem may be intrapersonal, as occurs when there are endogenously changing tastes, or interpersonal where delegation is intuitionally necessay or where decison making is 'as if' there is delegation. This is possible if decision making is through voting - an existence theorem is given. Decisions lead to shifts in control involving option losses; forward-looking recognition of this leads to the endogenous creation of hysteresis. The fact that the behaviour of other agents leads to hysteresis makes it optimal for any single agent to introduce more hysteresis. Organisations or bodies with many possible decision makers operate, in subsets of the state space, in one of two regimes, one where hysteresis is small and the other where hysteresis is large.
Please Scroll down for Article Journal of Human Development Why the Capability Approach? Why the Capability Approach?

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Abstract In addressing operational challenges such as poverty or economic development, many researchers and practitioners wish to build upon insights raised by Sen's capability approach and related writings. This paper argues that the comprehensive reach and foundation of the human development and capability approach has a value independent from and additional to their practical outworkings, and yet also that operational specifications are both possible and vital to the further development of the approach. The paper begins with a thumbnail sketch of the core concepts of the capability approach, and supplements these with additional informational and principle requirements that Sen argues to be necessary for a more complete assessment of a state of affairs. It traces some important avenues along which the Human Development Reports and other empirical studies have operationalized certain aspects of Sen's capability approach. The paper then articulates further developments that might be expected, arguing that such developments must also build upon cutting edge research in other fields. It also identifies certain 'value judgments' that are inherent to the capability approach and should not be permanently dismissed by some methodological innovation.
Monte Carlo Tree Search for Collaboration Control of Ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

In this paper, we present an application of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) to control ghosts in the game called Ms. Pac-Man. Our proposed ghost team consists of a ghost controlled by rules and three ghosts controlled individually by different MCTS. Given a limited time response, in order to increase the reliability of MCTS results, we introduce a mechanism for predicting Ms. Pac-Man's future movements and use this mechanism for simulating Ms. Pac-Man during Monte Carlo simulations. Our ghost team won the first Ms. Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team Competition at the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). Its performances for a variety of design choices are also shown and discussed.
Find More Bugs with QuickCheck!

Random testing is increasingly popular and successful, but tends to spend most time rediscovering the ``most probable bugs'' again and again, reducing the value of long test runs on buggy software. We present a new automated method to adapt random test case generation so that already-discovered bugs are avoided, and further test effort can be devoted to searching for {\em new} bugs instead. We evaluate our method primarily against RANDOOP-style testing, in three different settings---our method avoids rediscovering bugs more successfully than RANDOOP and in some cases finds bugs that RANDOOP did not find at all.
Collecting Shared Experiences through Lifelogging: Lessons Learned

The emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which one can capture fine-grained activity traces. Such traces have wide applicability in domains such as human memory augmentation, behavior change, and healthcare. However, obtaining these traces for research is nontrivial, especially those containing photographs of everyday activities. To source data for their own work, the authors created an experimental setup in which they collected detailed traces of a group of researchers over 2.75 days. They share their experiences of this process and present a series of lessons learned for other members of the research community conducting similar studies.
Fixed-Slope Universal Lossy Coding for Individual Sequences

In a theory of lossy coding of individual sequences, two kinds of coding schemes, the fixed-rate coding and the fixed-distortion coding, have been studied. This paper investigates another kind of lossy coding scheme of individual sequences, which is called fixed-slope lossy coding. We show that the optimal cost attainable by the blockwise fixed-slope lossy encoder is equal to the optimal average cost with respect to the overlapping empirical distribution of the given sequence. Moreover, we clarify that the fixed-slope universal lossy block encoder based on the complexity function achieves the optimal cost. As an application of the result, we show that for any ergodic source the sample average of the cost achieved by the lossy block encoder based on the complexity function is asymptotically equal to the optimal cost with probability one
Melanin and blood concentration in a human skin model studied by multiple regression analysis: assessment by Monte Carlo simulation

Measurement of melanin and blood concentration in human skin is needed in the medical and the cosmetic fields because human skin colour is mainly determined by the colours of melanin and blood. It is difficult to measure these concentrations in human skin because skin has a multi-layered structure and scatters light strongly throughout the visible spectrum. The Monte Carlo simulation currently used for the analysis of skin colour requires long calculation times and knowledge of the specific optical properties of each skin layer. A regression analysis based on the modified Beer–Lambert law is presented as a method of measuring melanin and blood concentration in human skin in a shorter period of time and with fewer calculations. The accuracy of this method is assessed using Monte Carlo simulations.
Optimal algorithms and inapproximability results for every CSP?

Semidefinite Programming(SDP) is one of the strongest algorithmic techniques used in the design of approximation algorithms. In recent years, Unique Games Conjecture(UGC) has proved to be intimately connected to the limitations of Semidefinite Programming. Making this connection precise, we show the following result : If UGC is true, then for every constraint satisfaction problem(CSP) the best approximation ratio is given by a certain simple SDP. Specifically, we show a generic conversion from SDP integrality gaps to UGC hardness results for every CSP. This result holds both for maximization and minimization problems over arbitrary finite domains. Using this connection between integrality gaps and hardness results we obtain a generic polynomial-time algorithm for all CSPs. Assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, this algorithm achieves the optimal approximation ratio for every CSP. Unconditionally, for all 2-CSPs the algorithm achieves an approximation ratio equal to the integrality gap of a natural SDP used in literature. Further the algorithm achieves at least as good an approximation ratio as the best known algorithms for several problems like MaxCut, Max2Sat, MaxDiCut and Unique Games.