Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting Using Information from Radar and Numerical Weather Prediction Models

The benefits of short-term (1–6 h), distributed quantitative precipitation forecasts (DQPFs) are well known. However, this area is acknowledged to be one of the most challenging in hydrometeorology. Previous studies suggest that the ‘‘state of the art’’ methods can be enhanced by exploiting relevant information from radar and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, using process physics and data-dictated tools where each fits best. Tests indicate that improved results are obtained by decomposing the overall problem into component processes, and that each process may require alternative tools ranging from simple interpolation to statistical time series models and artificial neural networks (ANNs). A new hybrid modeling strategy is proposed for DQPF that utilizes measurements from radar [Weather Surveillance Radar-1998 Doppler (WSR-88D) network: 4 km, 1 h] and outputs from NWP models (48-km Eta Model: 48 km, 6 h). The proposed strategy improves distributed QPF over existing methods like radar extrapolation or NWP-based QPF by themselves, as well as combinations of radar extrapolation and NWP-based QPF.
Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into Pre-Study Abroad Courses : A Self-study

Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into Pre-Study Abroad Courses : A Self-study This paper will explore how critical thinking skills could be integrated into Pre-study Abroad course curriculum at the School of Languages and Communication (SOLAC) at Kobe University in Japan. SOLAC’s role in designing Pre- and Post-Study Abroad (PSA) courses that fall within SOLAC’s Global Programs will be contextualized to demonstrate how developing learners’ critical thinking skills could help SOLAC teachers achieve some of the overarching curricular aims of preparing students for studying abroad. Challenges revolving around concepts of critical thinking in an Asian educational context will be explained using existing literature. Moreover, literature regarding studying abroad and the role educators play in facilitating students to reflect on their experiences abroad will be analyzed. Following the literature review, the theoretical framework, methodology and data collection, research results, and implications of the research for SOLAC teachers of a self-study action research project will be specified. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate how action research in the form of a self-study project has allowed me to prepare for obstacles that lay ahead in expanding this self-study action research project to Post-Study Abroad courses next semester.
Evolution and Enhancement of BitTorrent Network Topologies

This paper describes an experimental study that closely examines the underlying topologies of multiple complex networks formed in BitTorrent swarms. Our results demonstrate that the networks exhibit fundamental differences during different stages of a swarm, suggesting that the initial stage is not predictive of the overall performance. We also find a power-law degree distribution in the network of peers that are unchoked by others, which indicates the presence of a robust scale-free network. However, unlike previous studies, we find no clear evidence of persistent clustering in any of the networks, precluding the presence of a small-world that is potentially efficient for peer-to-peer downloading. These results suggest an interesting venue for improving BitTorrent's performance. We present a first attempt to introduce clustering into BitTorrent. Our approach is theoretically proven and makes minimal changes to the tracker only. Its effectiveness is verified through a series of simulations and experiments.
KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes

KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) is a knowledge base for systematic analysis of gene functions, linking genomic information with higher order functional information. The genomic information is stored in the GENES database, which is a collection of gene catalogs for all the completely sequenced genomes and some partial genomes with up-to-date annotation of gene functions. The higher order functional information is stored in the PATHWAY database, which contains graphical representations of cellular processes, such as metabolism, membrane transport, signal transduction and cell cycle. The PATHWAY database is supplemented by a set of ortholog group tables for the information about conserved subpathways (pathway motifs), which are often encoded by positionally coupled genes on the chromosome and which are especially useful in predicting gene functions. A third database in KEGG is LIGAND for the information about chemical compounds, enzyme molecules and enzymatic reactions. KEGG provides Java graphics tools for browsing genome maps, comparing two genome maps and manipulating expression maps, as well as computational tools for sequence comparison, graph comparison and path computation. The KEGG databases are daily updated and made freely available (http://www. genome.ad.jp/kegg/).
Efficient Replication of over 180 Genetic Associations with Self-Reported Medical Data

While the cost and speed of generating genomic data have come down dramatically in recent years, the slow pace of collecting medical data for large cohorts continues to hamper genetic research. Here we evaluate a novel online framework for obtaining large amounts of medical information from a recontactable cohort by assessing our ability to replicate genetic associations using these data. Using web-based questionnaires, we gathered self-reported data on 50 medical phenotypes from a generally unselected cohort of over 20,000 genotyped individuals. Of a list of genetic associations curated by NHGRI, we successfully replicated about 75% of the associations that we expected to (based on the number of cases in our cohort and reported odds ratios, and excluding a set of associations with contradictory published evidence). Altogether we replicated over 180 previously reported associations, including many for type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, cholesterol levels, and multiple sclerosis. We found significant variation across categories of conditions in the percentage of expected associations that we were able to replicate, which may reflect systematic inflation of the effects in some initial reports, or differences across diseases in the likelihood of misdiagnosis or misreport. We also demonstrated that we could improve replication success by taking advantage of our recontactable cohort, offering more in-depth questions to refine self-reported diagnoses. Our data suggest that online collection of self-reported data from a recontactable cohort may be a viable method for both broad and deep phenotyping in large populations.
Phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2481 is a key target limiting the efficacy of rapalogs for treating hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Although recent studies facilitate the identification of crucial genes and relevant regulatory pathways, therapeutic approaches against advanced HCC are insufficiently effective. Therefore, we aimed here to develop potent therapeutics to provide a reliable biomarker for the therapeutic efficacy in patients with HCC. To this end, we first compared the cytotoxic effects of various anti-cancer drugs between well differentiated (HAK-1A) and poorly differentiated (HAK-1B) cell lines established from a single HCC tumor. Of various drug screened, HAK-1B cells were more sensitive by a factor of 2,000 to the mTORC1 inhibitors (rapalogs), rapamycin and everolimus, than HAK-1A cells. Although rapalogs inhibited phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2448 in HAK-1A and HAK-1B cells, phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2481 was specifically inhibited only in HAK-1B cells. Silencing of Raptor induced apoptosis and inhibited the growth of only HAK-1B cells. Further, three other cell lines established independently from the tumors of three patients with HCC were also approximately 2,000-fold times more sensitive to rapamycin, which correlated closely with the inhibition of mTOR Ser2481 phosphorylation by rapamycin. Treatment with everolimus markedly inhibited the growth of tumors induced by poorly differentiated HAK-1B and KYN-2 cells and phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2481 in vivo. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that the phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2481 is selectively inhibited by rapalogs in mTORC1-addicted HCC cells and may be a potential reliable biomarker for the therapeutic efficacy of rapalogs for treating HCC patients.
Asymptotic analysis for personalized Web search

PageRank with personalization is used in Web search as an importance measure for Web documents. The goal of this paper is to characterize the tail behavior of the PageRank distribution in the Web and other complex networks characterized by power laws. To this end, we model the PageRank as a solution of a stochastic equation where the R i s are distributed as R. This equation is inspired by the original definition of the PageRank. In particular, N models the number of incoming links to a page, and B stays for the user preference. Assuming that N or B are heavy tailed, we employ the theory of regular variation to obtain the asymptotic behavior of R under quite general assumptions on the involved random variables. Our theoretical predictions show good agreement with experimental data.
Passive Microwave Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture Based on Dynamic Vegetation Scattering Properties for AMSR-E

Accurate mapping of long-term global soil moisture is of great importance to earth science studies and a variety of applications. An approach for deriving volumetric soil moisture using satellite passive microwave radiometry from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) was developed in this study. Unlike the major AMSR-E retrieval algorithms that assume fixed scattering albedo values over the globe, the proposed algorithm adopts a weighted averaging strategy for soil moisture estimation based on a dynamic selection of albedo values that are empirically determined. The resulting soil moisture retrievals demonstrate more realistic global patterns and seasonal dynamics relative to the baseline University of Montana soil moisture product. Quantitative analysis of the new approach against in situ soil moisture measurements over four study regions also indicates improvements over the baseline algorithm, with coefficients of determination (R2) between the retrievals and in situ measurements increasing by approximately 16.9% and 41.5% and bias-corrected root-mean-square errors decreasing by about 25.0% and 38.2% for ascending and descending orbital data records, respectively. The resulting algorithm is readily applied to similar microwave sensors, including the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2, and its retrieval strategy is also applicable to other passive microwave sensors, including lower frequency (L-band) observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Soil Moisture Active Passive mission.
Decentralized Coded Caching Without File Splitting

Coded caching is an effective technique to reduce the redundant traffic in wireless networks. The existing coded caching schemes require the splitting of files into a possibly large number of subfiles, i.e., they perform coded subfile caching. Keeping the files intact during the caching process would actually be appealing, broadly speaking because of its simpler implementation. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this coded file caching in reducing the data delivery rate. In this paper, we propose such a file caching scheme that uses a decentralized algorithm for content placement and either a greedy clique cover or an online matching algorithm for the delivery of missing data. We derive approximations to the expected delivery rates of both schemes using the differential equations method, and show them to be tight through concentration analysis and computer simulations. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed coded file caching is significantly more effective than uncoded caching in reducing the delivery rate. We, furthermore, show the additional improvement in the performance of the proposed scheme when its application is extended to subfile caching with a small number of subfiles.
Scalable address spaces using RCU balanced trees

Software developers commonly exploit multicore processors by building multithreaded software in which all threads of an application share a single address space. This shared address space has a cost: kernel virtual memory operations such as handling soft page faults, growing the address space, mapping files, etc. can limit the scalability of these applications. In widely-used operating systems, all of these operations are synchronized by a single per-process lock. This paper contributes a new design for increasing the concurrency of kernel operations on a shared address space by exploiting read-copy-update (RCU) so that soft page faults can both run in parallel with operations that mutate the same address space and avoid contending with other page faults on shared cache lines. To enable such parallelism, this paper also introduces an RCU-based binary balanced tree for storing memory mappings. An experimental evaluation using three multithreaded applications shows performance improvements on 80 cores ranging from 1.7x to 3.4x for an implementation of this design in the Linux 2.6. 37 kernel. The RCU-based binary tree enables soft page faults to run at a constant cost with an increasing number of cores,suggesting that the design will scale well beyond 80 cores.
Sparse complete sets for NP: Solution of a conjecture of Berman and Hartmanis

A set S ⊂ {0,1}* is sparse if there is a polynomial p such that the number of strings in S of size at most n is at most p(n). All known NP-complete sets, such as SAT, are not sparse. The main result of this paper is that if there is a sparse NP-complete set under many-one reductions, then P = NP. We also show that if there is a sparse NP-complete set under Turing reductions, then the polynomial time hierarchy collapses to Δ2P.
Synchronization of interconnected systems with an input-output approach. Part I: Main results

This paper provides synchronization conditions for networks of nonlinear systems, where each component of the network itself consists of subsystems represented as operators in the extended L2 space. The synchronization conditions are provided by combining the input-output properties of the subsystems with information about the structure of network. The work is motivated by cellular networks where signaling occurs both internally, through interactions of species, and externally, through intercellular signaling. The companion paper [1] explores results for state-space models as well as biochemical applications.
Identification of Essential Residues from Protein Secondary Structure Prediction and Applications

Proteins can perform functions when they fold into proper three-dimensional structures. However, since determining the structure of a protein through wet-lab experiments can be time-consuming and laborintensive, computational approaches are preferable. To characterize the structural topology of proteins, Linderstrøm-Lang proposed the concept of a protein structure hierarchy with four levels: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. In the hierarchy, protein secondary structure (PSS) plays an important role in analyzing and modeling protein structures, since it represents the local conformation of amino acids into regular structures. There are three basic secondary structure elements (SSEs): α-helices (H), β-strands (E), and coils (C). Many researchers employ PSS as a feature to predict the tertiary structure (Fischer et al., 2001, Gong & Rose, 2005, Meiler & Baker, 2003, Rost, 2001), function (Aydin et al., 2006, Eisner et al., 2005, Ferre & King, 2006, Laskowski et al., 2005), or subcellular localization (Nair & Rost, 2003, Nair & Rost, 2005, Su et al., 2007) of proteins. It is noteworthy that, among the various features used to predict protein function, such as amino acid composition, disorder patterns, and signal peptides, PSS makes the largest contribution (Lobley et al., 2007). Moreover it has been suggested that secondary structure alone may be sufficient for accurate prediction of a protein’s tertiary structure (Przytycka et al., 1999).
Creating and using matrix representations of social interaction

This paper explores the use of an outcome matrix as a computational representation of social interaction suitable for implementation on a robot. An outcome matrix expresses the reward afforded to each interacting individual with respect to pairs of potential behaviors. We detail the use of the outcome matrix as a representation of interaction in social psychology and game theory, discuss the need for modeling the robot's interactive partner, and contribute an algorithm for creating outcome matrices from perceptual information. Experimental results explore the use of the algorithm with different types of partners and in different environments.
The effects of ethnicity and religiosity on loyalty of micro-enterprise owenrs' towards banks : an application in Malaysia

Le but de cette etude est d'acquerir une comprehension de la structure et des determinants des proprietaires de micro-Entreprises, vis-A-Vis leur fidelite a leur banque preferee. En utilisant a la fois les banque locales et internationales en Malaisie comme objet d'etude, la recherche exploratoire a ete realisee pour evaluer le niveau de fidelite du proprietaire envers leurs banques et l'effet de l'ethnicite et la religiosite. La collecte des donnees comprenait des etudes pilotes, re-Analyse de la litterature publiee, en passant par deux methodes principales. Illuminee par la "theorie des echanges sociaux", cette etude a egalement tente d'integrer les resultats en apparence d'antecedents loyaute au services de marketing et bancaire / la litterature financiere des institutions. Sur les premieres donnees majeures de cette etude, 20 informateurs ont fourni un apercu comparatif de la nature des cinq raisons qui attirent les proprietaires de micro-Entreprises: reputation de la banque, qualite du service percue, qualite de la relation, l'ethnicite et la religiosite. Ces deux derniers semblaient etre des theme emergents et ont ete etablis dans cette etude. La deuxieme partie des donnees majeures de cette etude ont ete recueillies par les enquetes de 356 clienteles de diverses banques conventionnelles et islamiques. Les hypotheses sur les relations ont ete testees par l'analyse des facteurs et la regression. Les resultats attendus pourraient donner une orientation importante pour le developpement du cadre holistique pour expliquer la formation et la structure de la fidelisation cliente envers la banque et des services financiers.
Low-Area Active-Feedback Low-Noise Amplifier Design in Scaled Digital CMOS

The emerging concept of multistandard radios calls for low-noise amplifier (LNA) solutions able to comply with their needs. Meanwhile, the increasing cost of scaled CMOS pushes towards low-area solutions in standard, digital CMOS. Feedback LNAs are able to meet both demands. This paper is devoted to the design of low-area active-feedback LNAs. We discuss the design of wideband, narrowband and multiband implementations. We demonstrate that competitive RF performance is achievable thanks to CMOS downscaling, pleasing many applications because of their low cost (digital CMOS) and low area (bondpad size).
Elementary Derivation of the Multicomponent Diffusion Equation

It is demonstrated that the multicomponent diffusion equation can be derived from elementary kinetic-theory considerations without employing the results of the mathematical theory of nonuniform gases. By using the approach described by Furry, elementary expressions for the binary diffusion coefficients are also obtained. The advantage of the concept of the equivalence of partial pressure gradients and momentum gradients is thereby emphasized.
Firm Size Distribution and Epl in Italy

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in explaining the relative small average size of Italian firms. We construct a simple model that shows that the smooth relation between size and growth probability is disturbed in proximity of the thresholds at which EPL applies di.erentially. We use a comprehensive dataset of all Italian firms between 1986 and 1998 to estimate the e.ects of EPL in terms of discouraging small firms from growing. We then construct a stochastic transition matrix for firm size that, together with the estimates, allows for a quantitative evaluation of the e.ects of EPL in the long run. Our results show that EPL does influence firm size distribution, but that its e.ects are quantitatively modest: average firm size would increase by less than 1% when removing the threshold e.ect. In terms of policy, these findings suggest that changes in EPL are not likely to have a large impact on the propensity of small firms to grow
Constant-time neighbor finding in hierarchical tetrahedral meshes

Techniques are presented for moving between adjacent tetrahedra in a tetrahedral mesh. The tetrahedra result from a recursive decomposition of a cube into six initial congruent tetrahedra. A new technique is presented for labeling the triangular faces. The labeling enables the implementation of a binary-like decomposition of each tetrahedron which is represented using a pointerless representation. Outlines of algorithms are given for traversing adjacent triangular faces of equal size in constant time.
The Craftivist Collective Guide to Craftivism

Our manifesto is “To expose the scandal of global poverty, and human rights injustices though the power of craft and public art. This will be done through provocative, non-violent creative actions. ” We are a group of people, based all over the world, who use craftivism (a term coined by Betsy Greer to describe the combination of craft and activism) to raise awareness of social injustices and human rights issues internationally. 1 From a central Web site we organize projects and events that anyone is welcome to join in with. We encourage craftivists to send us photos and accounts of their projects for the Web site, so that we can show the world the global eff ect of our eff orts.
An Investigation of Finger and Manual Dexterity

In ergonomics, handgrip has been perceived as one of the most important hand functions; however, other types of functions of the hand are also important to the ergonomist, such as finger and manual dexterity, on which few ergonomic studies have been done. This experiment involved 60 male and female college students whose performance (number of pegs placed into a board in 30 sec.) of finger dexterity were statistically significantly different between the right and left hands and between women and men. The interaction of hand and sex was significant.
Individuality analysis of online Kanji handwriting

This paper presents an analysis study of handwritten Kanji characters on a digitizing tablet. To solve a writer identification and verification problem, we have tried to extract significant individual characteristics of a certain set of Kanji characters, which might be defined as feature parameters derived from the knowledge of document examiners. A set of feature parameters in terms of character shape and writing behavior is evaluated by the statistical test. Evaluation results have shown that some feature parameters are good enough to identify and verify a writer himself.