Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mass deposition fluxes of Saharan mineral dust to the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean: an intercomparison of methods

Abstract. Mass deposition fluxes of mineral dust to the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean were determined within this study. In the framework of SOPRAN (Surface Ocean Processes in the Anthropocene), the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean in terms of material exchange were investigated at the Cape Verde atmospheric observatory (CVAO) on the island Sao Vicente for January 2009. Five different methods were applied to estimate the deposition flux, using different meteorological and physical measurements, remote sensing, and regional dust transport simulations. The set of observations comprises micrometeorological measurements with an ultra-sonic anemometer and profile measurements using 2-D anemometers at two different heights, and microphysical measurements of the size-resolved mass concentrations of mineral dust. In addition, the total mass concentration of mineral dust was derived from absorption photometer observations and passive sampling. The regional dust model COSMO-MUSCAT was used for simulations of dust emission and transport, including dry and wet deposition processes. This model was used as it describes the AOD's and mass concentrations realistic compared to the measurements and because it was run for the time period of the measurements. The four observation-based methods yield a monthly average deposition flux of mineral dust of 12–29 ng m−2 s−1. The simulation results come close to the upper range of the measurements with an average value of 47 ng m−2 s−1. It is shown that the mass deposition flux of mineral dust obtained by the combination of micrometeorological (ultra-sonic anemometer) and microphysical measurements (particle mass size distribution of mineral dust) is difficult to compare to modeled mass deposition fluxes when the mineral dust is inhomogeneously distributed over the investigated area.
A Combinatorial K-View Based Algorithm for Image Texture Classification

Textural features is very important properties in many types of images. Partitioning an image into homogeneous regions based on textural features is useful in computer vision. Many texture classification algorithms have been proposed including Local Binary Patterns, Gray Level Co-Occurrence and K-View based algorithms, to name a few. Among of them, The K-View using Rotation-invariant feature algorithm (K-View-R) and the fast weighted K-View-Voting algorithm (K-View-V) produce higher classification accuracy by compare with those original K-View based algorithms. However, there still have some rooms for improvement. In this paper, by analyzing those K-View based algorithms, an attempt to utilize the advantages of the K-View-R and K-View-V was investigated. The new approach which we called combinatorial K-View based method was presented. To test and evaluate the proposed method, some experiments were carried out on a lot of textural images which taken from a standard database. Preliminary experimental results demonstrated the new method achieved more accurate classification by compare with other K-View based methods.
The climatic consequences of relaxing the uniform greenhouse gas ( GHG ) assumption in the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis atmospheric general circulation

[1] The climatic consequences of relaxing the uniform greenhouse gas (GHG) assumption in the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis atmospheric general circulation model are examined. A simple chemical loss parameterization for nitrous oxide, methane, CFC-11, and CFC-12 is employed that includes stratospheric water vapor production from methane oxidation. Multidecadal mean distributions of these species are obtained that compare reasonably well with UARS satellite observations of the stratosphere. The radiative impact of these changes is a widespread cooling of the stratosphere (with a spatially averaged, annual mean value of 0.6 K), compared to the model with specified uniform GHG distributions. This cooling results from an approximate doubling of the amount of middle to upper stratospheric moisture (as a result of methane oxidation) and exceeds the radiatively induced warming due to decreases in the other GHGs. Annual mean temperature changes of up to +8 K in the upper winter polar stratosphere, by contrast, are dynamically induced because of increases in the residual mean circulation and associated heating.
CCD: Connected Component Descriptor for Robust Mosaicing of Camera-Captured Document Images

We propose a robust method for mosaicing of document images using features derived from connected components. Each connected component is described using the angular radial transform (ART). To ensure geometric consistency during feature matching, the ART coefficients of a connected component are augmented with those of its two nearest neighbors. The proposed method addresses two critical issues often encountered in correspondence matching: (i) the stability of features and (ii) robustness against false matches due to the multiple instances of characters in a document image. The use of connected components guarantees a stable localization across images. The augmented features ensure a successful correspondence matching even in the presence of multiple similar regions within the page. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on camera captured document images exhibiting large variations in viewpoint, illumination and scale.
Syntax-driven implementation of software programming language control constructs and expressions on FPGAs

This paper considers the efficient parallel implementation of control constructs and expressions written in a common software programming language and synthesised to FPGA platforms. The context of this work are Syntax-Driven Language Specific Processors (SDLSP). An SDLSP for a given software programming language has its architecture defined by the grammar rules of the language itself. Each statement and expression rule in the grammar is implemented on the FPGA, together with sufficient control logic to load program statements sequentially onto the processor, and interface with program store. The instructions executed are a high-level (effectively one-to-one) encoding of the application software program. The advantages of this approach lie in its parallelism and space-efficiency. Syntax-driven language processors take less space than a full CPU on FPGA, and execute statements with a comparable speed; take significantly less space in general than directly compiled approaches (such as Handel-C), although have longer execution times for the same code.
Health in Europe 6 Ageing in the European Union

The ageing of European populations presents health, long-term care, and welfare systems with new challenges. Although reports of ageing as a fundamental threat to the welfare state seem exaggerated, societies have to embrace various policy options to improve the robustness of health, long-term care, and welfare systems in Europe and to help people to stay healthy and active in old age. These policy options include prevention and health promotion, better self-care, increased coordination of care, improved management of hospital admissions and discharges, improved systems of long-term care, and new work and pension arrangements. Ageing of the health workforce is another challenge, and policies will need to be pursued that meet the particular needs of older workers (ie, those aged 50 years or older) while recruiting young practitioners.
Network Threat Frequency Forecasting Based on Fuzzy Time Series and D-S Evidence Theory

Network threat frequency forecasting is the important factor for dynamic quantitative risk assessment, which can timely offer network security administrators the corresponding effective security strategy to actively counteract the network threat. This paper first reviews current time series forecasting methods, and then presents a network threat frequency forecasting algorithm based on fuzzy time series and D-S evidence theory. The proposed method first discusses the selection problem of interrelated forecasting factors, and then uses the selected factor-pair to construct factors order fuzzy logic relationships based on historical data to increase the forecasting accuracy. By experiments, the correctness and validity of the proposed method get validated.
Teaching Information Assurance to Policymakers

—While preparing non-technical students for a conference on Information Assurance, we discovered a void in their understanding. These students knew the buzzwords, but did not understand the basics of information infrastructures or how things actually work in cyberspace. Because of their superficial knowledge in this area, they often made arguments that were either unfounded or that would have led to policies that contradicted their stated goals. We designed a course to address this shortfall and taught it for the first time in the fall of 2000. I. INTRODUCTION he United States Military Academy has sponsored a student conference on the nation's foreign policy for over 50 years. In 1999 the program committee decided to add a conference panel focused on the implications of an increasingly networked world. They invited faculty from USMA's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to assist because they did not feel completely comfortable in this new arena. During our preparation for and conduct of this conference, we identified a glaring hole in the education of the students that will one day be making the domestic, foreign and military policy for our nation. We discovered that these students, who were all brilliant in their chosen disciplines such as political science or history, were still ignorant about cyber-space and the information technology infrastructure through which the world is increasingly interacting. This is perhaps surprising, since these students all grew up in the computer age. They played computer games, e-mailed their friends, word-processed their assignments and used PowerPoint slides to give talks in high school. The students knew the buzzwords, and at first were not shy about using them. The problem was that their understanding was only superficial. They would make statements that really made no sense because they did not understand the concepts behind the terms. The frightening
An Improved Transformation Technique for H.264 / Advanced Video Coding

A video encoder/decoder (CODEC) performs video data compression by having combination of three main modules such as motion estimation and compensation, transformation, and entropy encoding. Among these three modules, transformation is the module of removing the spatial redundancy that exists in the spatial domain of video sequence. Discrete cosine transformation (DCT) is the defacto transformation method in existing image and video coding standards. DCT is a popular transformation technique for intra and inter frame video coding. Even though it has high energy preserving and correlation properties, it suffers from blocking artifacts. This problem affects the performance of other subsequent modules involved in the video CODEC. To overcome this problem, a hybridization method has been incorporated in transformation module of video CODEC. This paper presents an improvement in the transformation module by incorporating DCT as transformation technique for inter frames and discrete wavelet transform for intra frames of video sequence. This proposal is also applied in the existing H.264/AVC standard. Extensive experiments have been conducted with various low-bit rate video sequences. The results show that the proposed technique outperforms the existing transformation technique used in the H.264/AVC considerably.
Metamorphic Testing of Stochastic Optimisation

Testing stochastic optimisation algorithms presents an unique challenge because of two reasons. First, these algorithms are non-testable programs, i.e. if the test oracle was known, there wouldn't have been the need for those algorithms in the first place. Second, their performance can vary depending on the problem instances they are used to solve. This paper applies the statistical metamorphic testing approach to stochastic optimisation algorithms and investigates the impact that different problem instances have on testing optimisation algorithms. The paper presents an empirical evaluation of the approach using instances of Next Release Problem (NRP). The effectiveness of the testing method is evaluated using mutation testing. The result shows that, despite the challenges from the stochastic nature of the optimisation algorithm, metamorphic testing can be effective in testing them.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Central hemodynamics and arterial function

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Social Network Generation and Role Determination Based on Smartphone Data

We deal with the problem of automatically generating social networks by analyzing and assessing smartphone usage and interaction data. We start by assigning weights to the different types of interactions such as messaging, email, phone calls, chat and physical proximity. Next, we propose a ranking algorithm which recognizes the pattern of interaction taking into account the changes in the collected data over time. Both algorithms are based on recent findings from social network research.
Stigma, Learning and Inheritance: An Ecocultural Study of Adaptation and Resource use among Families of Children with Down Syndrome in Thailand

Purpose : This study explored family adjustment and access to rehabilitative services for children with Down syndrome, between 0-5 years of age, in the ecoculture of Petchaburi Province, Thailand. Methods : The study used a family systems genogram in focus group sessions at Pra Chom Klao Hospital, and made home visits to the eight participants from five families in Petchaburi Province, Thailand. Qualitative data collection included field notes, pictures and video recordings of the 7 focus group discussions. The analysis used rigorous procedures for constant comparison, analysis of space, content, domains and critical discourse analysis. Results : Participating families had adjusted to emotional ruptures at home by moving out. They were resilient in the face of health, culture, economic and educational stress. Cultural and religious resources, especially from the mother’s side of the family, contributed most during and after health crises in the first 2 years of childhood. Parents were concerned about seriously delayed development of communication skills when their children were in the 2 ½ - 5 years age group. Parent conviction that the children would be lifelong dependants limited the possibilities for fostering independent living and occupations for these children. Conclusion and Implications: This study contributes to family and community-based rehabilitation strategies, stigma reduction and promotion of early childhood intervention for children with Down syndrome in Thailand. It found moderate public stigma, obstacles in educational transitions and resource use, and limited parental understanding of children’s inheritance and future quality of life. The recommendations made are: better development of family support groups and rehabilitation counselling services, language and communication strategies, abuse training for mothers, and discussion on inheritance rights which offer insight into sibling relations and employability. Service provision can consider reducing hospital stigma, advocacy for inclusive public and work-based play areas, increased support and professional development for community-based counsellors and special education centre extension services.
Behaviour of Particles in a Network; Test Rig Results

of Technology. During my Master's courses, I decided to do my graduation project on drinking water. After doing an internship in Australia about the quality of drinking water and the behaviour of particles in drinking water transport mains, my attention was attracted. Back in the Netherlands I could join the Q21 project, about water quality in the 21st century. With great pleasure I worked on my project about sedimentation and resuspen-sion of particles in drinking water mains. Before continuing with my thesis, I would like to thank some people who have been of great help during my Master's project. I would like to thank my graduation committee. Prof. van Dijk had useful comments and remarks during the meetings of Q21 and the drinking water colloquia. Furthermore, it was always possible to discuss results or measurement methods with him. Jan Vreeburg supported me on a daily base and answered my questions in no time. Jasper Verberk had critical remarks, which made me consider the matter from all sides. With Wim Uijttewaal I had useful discussions about the hydraulics of the new test rig. Building a test rig never ends. After each experiment, it became necessary to build a new pipe, valve or measuring point. Tonny Schuit and Cees Boeter were always there to help me optimising the test rig. Especially Cees Boeter worked days on the test rig. Without him my test rig would be a big mess of tubes, hoses and tie raps. KIWA Water Research supported me financial and provided me with a particle counter and a turbidity meter. My last (but not least) thanks go to my parents, who are always very in-ii Preface and Acknowledgments terested in what I am doing. Renze always has time to help me with the English language, making this report in L A T E X, opening valves that were too tightly for me. Beside that, he was able to motivate me when things were not going as I wanted.
Distorting the Electoral Connection ? Partisan Representation in Confirmation Politics

Do senators respond to the preferences of their states median voter or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We study responsiveness using roll call votes on ten recent Supreme Court nominations. We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship. We find that senators respond more powerfully to their partisan base when casting such roll call votes. Indeed, when their state median voter and party median voter disagree, senators strongly favor the latter. This has significant implications for the study of legislative responsiveness, the role of public opinion in shaping the personnel of the nations highest court, and the degree to which we should expect the Supreme Court to be counter-majoritarian. The methodological approach we present can be applied elsewhere to estimate opinion by state and partisan group, or by many other typologies, so as to study other important questions of democratic responsiveness and performance.
Rub-impact fault diagnosis of rotating machinery based on Hilbert-Huang transform

The rub-impact fault is one of the important faults of the rotating machinery. The rub-impact fault signal may be nonlinear and non-stationary. The Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is based on time-frequency signal processing technology, which is suitable for nonlinear and non-stationary signals. In this paper, the HHT transform is used to analyze the time-frequency characteristic of the rub-impact fault signal of a rotor test rig. The velocity sensor is used to measure the vibration signal of the rub-impact fault rotor. The experimental result shows that the HHT transform can effectively detect the rub-impact fault of the rotor, which implies great potential of the HHT transform in the fault diagnosis of rotor system.
Learning Through Dialogue Interactions

A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a simulator and a set of synthetic tasks in the movie domain that allow such interactions between a learner and a teacher. We investigate how a learner can benefit from asking questions in both offline and online reinforcement learning settings, and demonstrate that the learner improves when asking questions. Finally, real experiments with Mechanical Turk validate the approach. Our work represents a first step in developing such end-to-end learned interactive dialogue agents.
Thread-cooperative, bit-parallel computation of levenshtein distance on GPU

Approximate string matching is a very important problem in computational biology; it requires the fast computation of string distance as one of its essential components. Myers' bit-parallel algorithm improves the classical dynamic programming approach to Levenshtein distance computation, and offers competitive performance on CPUs. The main challenge when designing an efficient GPU implementation is to expose enough SIMD parallelism while at the same time keeping a relatively small working set for each thread. In this work we implement and optimise a CUDA version of Myers' algorithm suitable to be used as a building block for DNA sequence alignment. We achieve high efficiency by means of a cooperative parallelisation strategy for (1) very-long integer addition and shift operations, and (2) several simultaneous pattern matching tasks. In addition, we explore the performance impact obtained when using features specific to the Kepler architecture. Our results show an overall performance of the order of tera cells updates per second using a single high-end Nvidia GPU, and factor speedups in excess of 20x with respect to a sixteen-core, non-vectorised CPU implementation.
An examination of intrusion-related shame in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating mental disorder characterised by obsessions and compulsions. Research has consistently shown that everyone experiences unwanted intrusive thoughts which are similar, if not identical, to clinical obsessions, but only 2% to 3.5% of individuals develop OCD. These findings have prompted enquiry as to why not everyone responds to their intrusive thoughts by performing clinically significant compulsions. Cognitive theorists propose that intrusions become obsessions only if they are interpreted as evidence that a valued aspect of the self is defective. This proposal implies a role for shame in the disorder, as shame arises in response to such appraisals. The present thesis is that individuals may attempt to avoid, conceal, suppress, or neutralise intrusions not only to regulate aversive emotions such as anxiety and disgust, but to regulate shame. This dissertation addressed three primary questions. First, do individuals with OCD feel more shame than nonclinical populations when intrusions arise? Second, are individuals more likely to respond to frequent intrusions by performing compulsions if they feel shame? Third, is relief from shame associated with reduction in compulsions across the course of treatment? To facilitate examination of these questions, a measure of intrusion-related shame was developed and validated. Responses from nonclinical participants were analysed in an exploratory factor analysis (n = 279) and confirmatory factor analysis (n = 283). Following item reduction in the initial confirmatory factor analysis, the factor structure was confirmed in a subsequent confirmatory factor analysis with data from 385 nonclinical participants. The final 17-item IRS assessed three forms of shame associated with experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts and urges: internal current shame; internal forecasted shame; and external forecasted shame. Results demonstrated excellent internal consistency, and good convergent