Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the Potential of Sentinel-2 and Pléiades Data for the Detection of Prosopis and Vachellia spp. in Kenya

Prosopis was introduced to Baringo, Kenya in the early 1980s for provision of fuelwood and for controlling desertification through the Fuelwood Afforestation Extension Project (FAEP). Since then, Prosopis has hybridized and spread throughout the region. Prosopis has negative ecological impacts on biodiversity and socio-economic effects on livelihoods. Vachellia tortilis, on the other hand, is the dominant indigenous tree species in Baringo and is an important natural resource, mostly preferred for wood, fodder and charcoal production. High utilization due to anthropogenic pressure is affecting the Vachellia populations, whereas the well adapted Prosopis—competing for nutrients and water—has the potential to replace the native Vachellia vegetation. It is vital that both species are mapped in detail to inform stakeholders and for designing management strategies for controlling the Prosopis invasion. For the Baringo area, few remote sensing studies have been carried out. We propose a detailed and robust object-based Random Forest (RF) classification on high spatial resolution Sentinel-2 (ten meter) and Pleiades (two meter) data to detect Prosopis and Vachellia spp. for Marigat sub-county, Baringo, Kenya. In situ reference data were collected to train a RF classifier. Classification results were validated by comparing the outputs to independent reference data of test sites from the “Woody Weeds” project and the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) confusion matrix generated in RF. Our results indicate that both datasets are suitable for object-based Prosopis and Vachellia classification. Higher accuracies were obtained by using the higher spatial resolution Pleiades data (OOB accuracy 0.83 and independent reference accuracy 0.87–0.91) compared to the Sentinel-2 data (OOB accuracy 0.79 and independent reference accuracy 0.80–0.96). We conclude that it is possible to separate Prosopis and Vachellia with good accuracy using the Random Forest classifier. Given the cost of Pleiades, the free of charge Sentinel-2 data provide a viable alternative as the increased spectral resolution compensates for the lack of spatial resolution. With global revisit times of five days from next year onwards, Sentinel-2 based classifications can probably be further improved by using temporal information in addition to the spectral signatures.
Social Media as an Advertising Tool : Evidence from a Natural Experiment ∗

We investigate the causal effect of tweets on product demand using variation in microblogging caused by a partial block of the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo due to political events. We analyze the effect of the activity decrease due to the block on viewership of a large set of TV shows that rely on Sina Weibo as an advertising platform. Using a set of difference-in-difference regressions, we show that viewership decreased more strongly in geographical areas with a higher Sina Weibo penetration and only for shows with a high (pre-block) activity level on Sina Weibo. We quantify the effect on viewership in units of comments on tweets (comments were disabled during the block) by instrumenting the number of relevant comments with a dummy for the time-period of the block, and find an elasticity of TV show viewership with respect to comments of 0.02. A one standard deviation shift in the number of comments implies an increase in revenue from TV advertising of 250,000 dollars per episode. We find no evidence of heterogeneity in the effect across show genre nor for new versus old shows. Microblogging activity returned to the pre-block level immediately, whereas ratings remained at a lower level for a brief period of time shortly after the block.
Breaking literacy boundaries through critical service‐learning: education for the silenced and marginalized

Originating as counter normative pedagogies, both service‐learning and critical pedagogies hold a common commitment to subvert and transform facets of school life that may alienate and oppress students. This article explores how critical pedagogies and service‐learning might provide complementary benefits and become a more compelling emancipatory pedagogy of ‘critical service‐learning’ for K‐12 educational contexts. This work proposes that these pedagogies of civic literacy and critical literacy can break their boundaries to intersect and provide a form of education for those students most marginalized and alienated by oppressive features of traditional instruction.
Statistical Machine Translation: Little Changes Big Impacts

In this paper we describe some experiments carried out to test the impact of automatic casing and punctuation changes when training and testing statistical translation models. The experiments described here concern the translation from/to English and Brazilian Portuguese texts but since the superficial changes investigated are language independent, we believe that the conclusions can be applied to many other pairs of languages. These experiments weredesigned aiming at setting a baseline scenario for future training and testing of more complex statistical translation models such as the factored ones. From the experiments presented here it is possible to see that case and punctuation changes have a significant impact on automatic translation results.
Xenopsylla brasiliensis Fleas in Plague Focus Areas, Madagascar

Cinkovich SS, Lambin EF. Disease risk and landscape attributes of tick-borne Borrelia pathogens in the San Francisco Bay area, California. PLoS ONE. 2015;10:e0134812. http://dx.doi. org/10.1371/ journal.pone. 0134812 7. Barbour AG. Phylogeny of a relapsing fever Borrelia species transmitted by the hard tick Ixodes scapularis. Infect Genet Evol. 2014;27:551–8. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.meegid. 2014.04. 022 8. Barbour AG, Maupin GO, Teltow GJ, Carter CJ, Piesman J. Identification of an uncultivable Borrelia species in the hard tick Amblyomma americanum: possible agent of a Lyme disease–like illness. J Infect Dis. 1996;173:403–9. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093/ infdis/173.2. 403 9. Bunikis J, Tsao J, Garpmo U, Berglund J, Fish D, Barbour AG. Typing of Borrelia relapsing fever group strains. Emerg Infect Dis. 2004;10:1661–4. http://dx.doi. org/10.3201/eid1009.040236 10. Margos G, Gatewood AG, Aanensen DM, Hanincova K, Terekhova D, Vollmer SA, et al. MLST of housekeeping genes captures geographic population structure and suggests a European origin of Borrelia burgdorferi. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008;105:8730–5. http://dx.doi. org/10.1073/pnas.0800323105
FINITE ELEMENT STRESS EXTRACTION BY THE COMPLEMENTARY ENERGY PRINCIPLE

This paper presents a new method for accurate pointwise stress extraction from finite element solutions, applied to two-dimensional linear elastostatic problem shaving bounded value stresses. The method, denoted by SEC(Stress Extraction by Complementary principle), is based on the complementary energy principle applied overalocal domain in thepost-processing phase. Detailed formulation of the SEC method is provided, and numerical experiments with the h- and p-versions of the finite element method are presented for a family of exact solutions characterized by varying degree of smoothness. It is shown that on the boundaries of the domain, as well as in the interior, accurate pointwise stresses are obtained, and the relative error in the pointwise stresses converges with a rate which is as fast as the relative error measured in energy norm or faster. Importantly, the SEC method in conjunction with the p-version of the finite element method is virtually independent of the Poisson's ratio, and is equally applicable to nearly in compressible materials. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sociomedical Variations Among Ethnic Groups

A comparison of different ethnic groups in New York City reveals significant variations in knowledge about disease, attitudes toward medical care, and behavior during illness. These differences are found to be related to the form of social organization within the ethnic groups. The more ethnocentric and socially cohesive the group on a community, friendship, or family level, the more likely are its members to display low knowledge about disease, skepticism toward professional medical care, and dependency during illness. In general, form of social organization is found to be more important than ethnicity or social class in relation to sociomedical responses.
The Nature of Unnaturalness in Religious Representations: Negation and Concept Combination

The cognitive anthropological approach has provided a powerful means of beginning to understand religious representations. I suggest that two extant approaches, despite their general plausibility, may not accurately characterise the detailed nature of those representations. A major source of this inaccuracy lies in the characterisation of negation of ontological properties, which gives rise to broader questions about their ontological determinacy and counter-intuitiveness. I suggest that a more plausible account may be forthcoming by allowing a more complex approach to the representations, deriving from understanding their nature as concept combinations. Such an account also suggests an alternative approach to the role of deference in religious representations. In sum, the empirical and theoretical implications of a more fine-grained analysis of religious representations suggest a vindication of the cognitive anthropology approach to integrating culture and cognition.
C-Reactive Protein Modulates Risk Prediction Based on the Framingham Score: Implications for Future Risk Assessment: Results From a Large Cohort Study in Southern Germany

Background—The Framingham Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) prediction score is recommended for global risk assessment in subjects prone to CHD. Recently, C-reactive protein (CRP) has emerged as an independent predictor of CHD. We sought to assess the potential of CRP measurements to enhance risk prediction based on the Framingham Risk Score (FRS) in a large cohort of middle-aged men from the general population. Methods and Results—We measured CRP and traditional cardiovascular risk factors at baseline in 3435 white men of German nationality, 45 to 74 years of age. All men were drawn from 3 random samples of the general population in the Augsburg area located in Southern Germany in 1984 to 1985, 1989 to 1990, and 1994 to 1995 (response rate, 80%), and the FRS was calculated in all of them. Outcome was defined as nonfatal and fatal coronary events, including sudden cardiac death. During an average follow-up of 6.6 years, a total of 191 coronary events occurred. Cox regression showed a significant contribution of CRP to coronary event risk prediction independent of the FRS (P =0.0002). In stratified analysis for 5 categories of FRS, CRP significantly added prognostic information to the FRS in subjects in 2 intermediate risk categories (P =0.03 and P =0.02). Conclusions—Our results suggest that CRP enhances global coronary risk as assessed by the FRS, especially in intermediate risk groups. This might have implications for future risk assessment.
Informing the Design of Pipeline-Based Software Visualisations

In this paper, we consider the process by which an effective software visualisation can be designed and explore the ways in which both special-purpose and general-purpose tools may be used to inform the software visualisation design process. A series of decisions must be made in order to determine which data will contribute, the 'look & feel' of the visualisation, the algorithms, stylesheets and configuration parameters which are involved as implementation progresses. In our previous work we have developed a flexible, extensible and configurable pipeline-based approach to the implementation of software visualisation. Data is represented in XML at each stage and undergoes successive transformations as it moves through the implementation pipeline. Pipeline components capture and analyse data, compute geometry and determine the detailed presentation of visual output. In this paper, we describe a parallel pipeline for software visualisation design. Its steps involve making choices which determine the specific implementation pipeline components, together with their configurations, defining a particular visualisation. We discus issues and techniques involved in the software visualisation design pipeline, describe tools which support them, and give examples from our software visualisation research.
Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree

A distinction can be made between ‘professionalisation’, which is concerned with occupational status and standing, and ‘professionalism,’ which refers to matters of quality and standards of practice (especially specialized knowledge, ethics and altruism). The purpose of this stimulus article is to present key features of contemporary medical professionalism as a basis for critically reflecting on discourse associated with Tiger Woods' current coach, Sean Foley. It is suggested that that provision of a Master of Science degree in golf teaching/coaching would facilitate the development of ‘professionalism’ in golf coaches.
Study of Oxidative Stress in Human Lens Epithelial Cells Exposed to 1.8 GHz Radiofrequency Fields

Objectives The aims of the present study were to determine oxidative stress and to explore possible reasons of reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase in human lens epithelial (HLE) B3 cells exposed to low intensity 1.8 GHz radiofrequency fields (RF). Methods The HLE B3 cells were divided into RF exposure and RF sham-exposure groups. The RF exposure intensity was at specific absorption rate (SAR) of 2, 3, or 4 W/kg. The ROS levels were measured by a fluorescent probe 2′7′-dichlorofluorescin diacetate (DCFH-DA) assay in the HLE B3 cells exposed to 1.8 GHz RF for 0.5, 1, and 1.5 h. Lipid peroxidation and cellular viability were detected by an MDA test and Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assays, respectively, in the HLE B3 cells exposed to 1.8 GHz RF for 6, 12, and 24 h, respectively. The mRNA expression of SOD1, SOD2, CAT, and GPx1 genes and the expression of SOD1, SOD2, CAT, and GPx1 proteins was measured by qRT-PCR and Western blot assays in the HLE B3 cells exposed to 1.8 GHz RF for 1 h. Results The ROS and MDA levels significantly increased (P<0.05) in the RF exposure group and that the cellular viability, mRNA expression of four genes, and expression of four proteins significantly decreased (P<0.05) compared with the RF sham-exposure group. Conclusions Oxidative stress is present in HLE B3 cells exposed to 1.8 GHz low-intensity RF and that the increased production of ROS may be related to down-regulation of four antioxidant enzyme genes induced by RF exposure.
Why Are Subordinates Less Satisfied with Mediation? The Role of Uncertainty

This study explores the influence of hierarchical position on both mediation satisfaction and uncertainty about the mediation. As parties involved in hierarchical conflict typically behave differently and have different perceptions and experiences, we think it is most likely that hierarchical position will affect the mediation process and its outcomes. In this article, we investigate the influence of hierarchical position on both uncertainty about the mediation and satisfaction with the mediation and its potential moderating role on the relationship between uncertainty and satisfaction. To test our hypotheses, we use data from fifty real mediation cases dealing with hierarchical labor conflicts in the Netherlands. As expected, uncertainty has a stronger negative effect on subordinates' satisfaction with the mediation than it does on the supervisors who were involved in mediation. Implications for mediation theory and practice are discussed.
12V battery modeling: Model development, simulation and validation

This paper presents a 12V batteries modeling approach suitable for both lead acid and Li-ion batteries. In this work we have developed a simulation model, based on equivalent circuit models, of the lead acid and 12V Li-ion batteries in order to study their operating behavior. The trade-off between model accuracy and complexity is analyzed in order to obtain a proper model behavior under various operating conditions and simulation objectives (fast transients voltages behavior, fuel consumption or steady state phases). Experimental measurements prove that the obtained battery models are capable of providing accurate simulation results.
Features and dimensions: Motion estimation in fly vision

We characterize the computation of motion in the fly visual system as a mapping from the high dimensional space of signals in the retinal photodetector array to the probability of generating an action potential in a motion sensitive neuron. Our approach to this problem identifies a low dimensional subspace of signals within which the neuron is most sensitive, and then samples this subspace to visualize the nonlinear structure of the mapping. The results illustrate the computational strategies predicted for a system that makes optimal motion estimates given the physical noise sources in the detector array. More generally, the hypothesis that neurons are sensitive to low dimensional subspaces of their inputs formalizes the intuitive notion of feature selectivity and suggests a strategy for characterizing the neural processing of complex, naturalistic sensory inputs.
Towards a systematic Qura’nic theory of personality

Based on hermeneutic interpretation of the Holy Qura’n and the theoretical suggestions of the eminent Muslim thinker Al-Ghazali, a Qura’nic theory of personality is articulated. Eight main interrelated concepts have been identified in the present analysis and serve as the building blocks of a Qura’nic theory of personality: nafs (psyche), nafs ammarah besoa’ (evil-commanding psyche), al-nafs al-lawammah (the reproachful psyche), roh (spirit), a’ql (intellect), qalb (heart), al-nafs al-mutmainnah (the serene psyche) and al-nafs al-marid’a (the sick psyche). The Qura’nic theory of personality is psychospiritual, structural, dynamic, topographic, holistic, and holds a largely negative view of human nature. The implications of this theory for research and practice are discussed.
Sequence-Growth: A Scalable and Effective Frequent Itemset Mining Algorithm for Big Data Based on MapReduce Framework

Frequent item set mining(FIM) is an important research topic because it is widely applied in real world to find the frequent item sets and to mine human behavior patterns. FIM process is both memory and compute-intensive. As data grows exponentially every day, the problems of efficiency and scalability become more severe. In this paper, we propose a new distributed FIM algorithm, called Sequence-Growth, and implement it on MapReduce framework. Our algorithm applies the idea of lexicographical order to construct a tree, called "lexicographical sequence tree", that allows us to find all frequent item sets without exhaustive search over the transaction databases. In addition, the breadth-wide support-based pruning strategy is also an important factor to contribute the efficiency and scalability of our algorithm. To test the performances of our algorithm, we conduct varied aspects of experiments on MapReduce framework with large datasets. The results show the good efficiency and scalability of Sequence-Growth especially to deal with big data and long item sets. Our algorithm also proposes a new mining methodology which can be easily modified for sequential pattern mining, trajectory pattern mining and other associate rule mining algorithms. We believe that it should have a valuable contribution in the future development of association rule mining algorithms for big data.
SPDK: A Development Kit to Build High Performance Storage Applications

There is strong demand on building high performance storage service upon emerging fast storage devices (e.g., NVMe SSDs). Unfortunately, current storage software stack cannot satisfy such requirements and the software overhead becomes a major bottleneck for developing high performance storage applications.According to our performance profiling results, most storage software overhead is caused by kernel I/O stacks due to context switch, data copy, interrupt, resource synchronization and etc. To address these issues, we provide SPDK (storage performance development kit), a set of tools and libraries for writing high performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications. It achieves high performance by moving the necessary drivers into user space and operating them in a polled mode instead of interrupt mode, which eliminates kernel context switch and interrupt handling overhead and also provides lockless resource access. Integrated with SPDK, performance competitive storage applications can be build upon those fast storage devices. In our experiments, the per cpu core IOPS of NVMe device driver in SPDK is about 6X to 10X better than the kernel NVMe driver. Some storage applications are also developed upon SPDK's framework and obtain much better per-core performance compared with the existing solutions. For example, SPDK NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF) target is 10X more efficient than Linux Kernel NVMe-oF target solution.
Web Translation Mining Based on Suffix Arrays

Mining translations from abundant Web data can be applied in many fields such as computer assisted learning, machine translation and cross-language information retrieval. How to mine possible translations from the Web and obtain the boundary of candidates, and how to remove irrelevant noises and rank the candidates are the challenging issues. In this paper, after reviewing and analyzing all possible methods of acquiring translations, a statistics method based on suffix arrays is proposed to mine term translations from the Web. The proposed method can not only mine different forms of Web translation distributions but also effectively obtain the correct boundary of translations, and then sort-based subset deletion and mutual information methods are respectively proposed to deal with subset redundancy information and affix redundancy information formed in the process of estimation. Experiments on two test sets of 401 English-Chinese terms and 100 English-Japanese terms validate that our system has good performance.