Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reconstruction of panoramic image through fusion of sequential lateral multi-lens logging images

The original well wall images are a set of sequential isometric images taken by a lateral multi-lens video logging tool. How to make one panoramic mosaic logging image from these images is a challenge. In this paper, wavelet transform image fusion method is proposed though computation of the overlap region of sequential images. The proposed method is consisted of three steps, i.e. multiresolution decomposition of the original logging images, determination of wavelet fusion coefficients by the overlap regions and making a panoramic mosaic image through inverse reconstruction of decomposed images. The following experiment shows the proposed method solves the issue of discontinuity of mosaic image edge gray and the fusion panoramic image demonstrates a better visual effect.
Initial Study into the Plastic Self Organising Map

A novel network architecture and algorithm called the Plastic Self Organising Map (PSOM) is presented. The PSOM is based upon Kohonen’s Self Organising Map and is a learning architecture for clustering of multidimensional data. The architecture and algorithm is explained before the results shown. The PSOM grew to meet the demand of new patterns and removed links and unused nodes over time. The final structure was efficient and able to generalise for patterns corrupted by noise. Further work and recommendations are also given.
Faith-Based Sustainability in Practice: Cases Studies from Kenya

The enduring problems of poverty and environmental degradation demand new resources for advancing sustainability. Faith-based approaches and learning present two potential avenues. Archival research, interviews, and participant observation conducted with two faith-based organizations in Kenya engaged in sustainability work provide empirical evidence of how faith and sustainability can intersect in practice. A Rocha Kenya, a Christian conservation organization, focuses on bird and forest habitats and community conservation, and the Rural Service Programme delivers rural development programs for the Quaker church. Proﬁles illustrate the interaction between the faith convictions of the organizations and their members, their organizational culture and structure, their work, and learning for sustainability that emerges. Findings reveal that their sustainability work is undergirded by integrated and holistic approaches and their faith-based motivations and values. Characteristics that contribute to learning include commitment to building and sharing knowledge, a strong management structure, and diversity within the organizational culture.
The Impact of Office Dimension , Layout , Path Loss Exponent , and Multipath Fading on the k-Neighbors Connectivity Problem

Topology Control (TC) in ad-hoc networks, particularly Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), aims to lower node energy consumption by limiting interference and collisions. A key issue regarding TC is to solve the kneighbors connectivity problem, i.e., the minimal amount of neighbors needed to build a fully connected network. Usually, this problem has been studied based on flat, unrealistic scenarios or in an analytic way. In this work, we simulate some indoor scenarios taking into account the dimension, office layout, path loss exponent (PLE), and multipath fading to estimate the minimum k-neighbors that allows for the overall connectivity of a given WSN. Overall, our results showed that the obstacles interfered on the k values by increasing them. The path loss exponent is related to such k increases, especially when the offices have the same layout. However, for different layouts, we showed that k is not only driven by the PLE, but also by the layout. Moreover, multipath fading could help TC protocols to set k to smaller values. As a counterpart, multipath fading increased the energy consumption.
Near-duplicate detection using GPU-based simhash scheme

With the rapid growth of data, near-duplicate documents bearing high similarity are abundant. Elimination of near-duplicates can reduce storage cost and improve the quality of search indexes in data mining. A challenging problem is to find near-duplicate records in large-scale collections efficiently. There have already been several efforts on implementing near-duplicate detection on different architectures. In this paper, a new implementation, using a special hash function namely simhash, is proposed to identify near-duplicate documents on CUDA enabled devices. Two mechanisms are designed to achieve higher performance, including swapping and dynamic allocating. Experimental results show that our parallel implementation outperforms the serial CPU version, achieving up to 18 times.
Hydrogen peroxide in inducible plant stress responses

Academic dissertation To be presented for public criticism, with permission of the Abbreviations ABA abscisic acid HRGP hydroxyproline-rich glycopro-tein AOX alternative oxidase JA jasmonic acid APX ascorbate peroxidase MJ methyl jasmonate ARE antioxidant responsive element MPT1 mitochondrial phosphate translocator1 CAT catalase MRE metal responsive element Cat1AS CAT1 antisense mRNA messenger RNA cDNA complementary DNA MTF-1 metal response element binding transcription factor 1 CHS chalcone synthase NahG bacterial gene encoding salicy-late hydroxylase CHX cycloheximide PAL phenylalanine ammonia-lyase DAB 3'3-diaminobezidine PAO polyamine oxidase DAO diamine oxidase PCD programmed cell death DDRT-PCR differential display reverse transcriptase-PCR PCR polymerase chain reaction DPI diphenylene iodonium PiC phosphate carrier ECM extracellular matrix POX peroxidase EC-SOD extracellular superoxide dis-mutase PR10 pathogenesis related protein 10 ERELEE4 ethylene responsive element, Lycopersicon esculentum E4 PR-protein pathogenesis related protein ERF ethylene responsive element binding factor Q quinacrine EST expressed sequence tag RbcS Rubisco small subunit G glucose rbohA respiratory burst oxidase ho-molog A GO glucose oxidase rcd1 radical induced cell death 1 GPX glutathione peroxidase ROS reactive oxygen species GR glutathione reductase SA salicylic acid GSH glutathione SAR systemic acquired resistance GSSG glutathione disulphide SOD superoxide dismutase GST glutathione-S-transferase TEM transmission electron micros-copy HL high light TMV tobacco mosaic virus HPLC high performance liquid chromatography UV ultraviolet HR hypersensitive response VOC volatile organic compound WRKY protein DNA-binding protein containing WRKYGQC-amino acid sequence in the N-terminus Original publications This thesis is based on the following publications, which will be referred to in the text with their Roman numerals. Additional unpublished data will also be presented in the text. Kangasjärvi J. 1996. Ozone affects birch (Betula pendula Roth) phenylpropanoid, polyamine and active oxygen detoxifying pathways at biochemical and gene-expression level. activates cell death and defense gene-expression in birch (Betula pendula) (Manuscript). H2O2 primes an active cell death process in tobacco (Manuscript). Summary Plant inducible defence responses during stress were studied in the commercially important forest tree species Silver birch (Betula pendula Roth). A model system, catalase1 antisense tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum)(Cat1AS, deficient in catalase activity), was used to reveal further mechanisms underlying oxidative stress-induced cell death process. Numerous environmental factors affect the productivity of plants during their life span. Some of these are stress inducing and they may be biotic (such as pathogens) or abiotic (such as air pollutants or irradiation). Many biotic and abiotic stresses have in common the ability to induce the accumulation of apoplastic and intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) in plant …
Fish Classification Using Support Vector Machine

Fish recognition is presently a very complex and difficult task despite its commercial and agricultural usefulness. Some of the challenges facing accurate and reliable fish recognition include distortion, noise, segmentation error, overlap and occlusion. Several techniques, which include K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), K-mean Clustering and Neural Network, have been widely used to resolve these challenges. Each of these approaches has inherent limitations, which limit classification accuracy. In this paper, a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based technique for the elimination of the limitations of some existing techniques and improved classification of fish species is proposed. The technique is based on the shape features of fish that was divided into two subsets with the first comprising 76 fish as training set while the second comprises of 74 fish as testing set. The body and the five fin lengths; namely anal, caudal, dorsal, pelvic and pectoral were extracted in centimeter (cm). Results based on the new technique show a classification accuracy of 78.59%, which is significantly higher than what obtained for ANN, KNN and K-mean clustering-based algorithms.
The Perception‐Action Model: Counting Computational Mechanisms

Milner and Goodale's Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH) is regarded as common ground in recent discussions of visual consciousness. A central part of TVSH is a functional model of vision and action (a functional perception-action model, PAM for short). In this paper, I provide a brief overview of these current discussions and argue that PAM is ambiguous between a strong and a weak version. I argue that, given a standard way of individuating computational mechanisms, the available evidence cannot be used to distinguish between these versions. This not only has consequences for philosophical theories of the role of visual consciousness but also has implications for the role of experimental evidence in model testing in cognitive neuroscience.
Research on the Evolutionary Mechanism of Social Network Based on Competitive Selection

Public selection, competitive employment and other competitive selection of cadres are currently the important ways in the reform of our country's cadre and personnel system. The way, level and range of competitive selection is taking continuous explorations and innovations, and covering more and more fields. From the perspective of information communication, the paper considers the social network as social capital flow channel based on information communication, constructs an analysis framework of the evolution of social network based on competitive selection, analyzes the evolutionary mechanism of the social network, and shows the formal description of the social network type, five-stage model and the dynamical evolutionary process model.
Multicast Routing Simulation in the Ring Network : A Prototyping Study 環狀網路中多點傳輸的路由模擬:一雛型研究

The multicast technology has emerged as a dominant and critical technique for the e-commerce applications to best and effectively utilize the networks bandwidth. By proper allocation of the networks bandwidth, the multicast communication among a group of nodes can be deployed with certain optimal criteria. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of multicast transmission within a bi-directional ring networks. As has been widely known, the ring topology is popularly used in the LAN/MAN (Local/Metropolitan Area Networks.) Hence, this study is important and dedicated to the performance improvement of multicast transmission within the existing LAN/MAN. Given a set of multicast groups, our objective is to design a bandwidth allocation strategy for packet transmission that has the minimum traffic congestion. Since the multicast transmission problem in the ring networks was proven as a NP-complete problem, we have formulated this problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) and proposed a heuristic algorithm to obtain certain approximate solutions. The numerical results indicate that our heuristic algorithm generally provides certain of near optimal-solution comparing to another optimal solution solved by ILP. Keyword:Multicast Group, Multicast Routing Path, Maximum Flow, ILP (Integer Linear Programming), Objective Function.
Faith in Policing: The Co-production of Crime Control in Britain

Involving faith-based organizations (FBOs) in the production of crime control has been seen as a way of increasing efficiency, promoting accountability and improving trust and confidence in policing. In this article, which draws on qualitative research, we consider how police officers understand the role of faith in policing, engage with faith communities and work with FBOs to mobilize crime prevention activities. We demonstrate that any effective co-production of crime control that involves faith communities and FBOs requires police officers to negotiate a number of complex and multifaceted issues. We argue that the co-production of crime control has symbolic, moral and technical qualities which all need to be successfully negotiated to achieve its aims.
Joint effects of creative self-efficacy, positive and negative affect on creative performance

Purpose The purpose of this study is to test a model connecting Chinese employees’ positive and negative affect and creative self-efficacy with supervisor-rated creative performance in Chinese business. Building on the cognitive tuning theory, this paper answers several calls for research to examine the joint effects of positive and negative affects on creative performance in the China business environment. Design/methodology/approach The participants were drawn from one of the largest petrochemical companies in China. We drew 459 leader-subordinate dyads across different jobs situated in multiple divisions to complete our surveys. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling to test the hypotheses. Findings The findings suggest that creative self-efficacy has a positive influence on creative performance during low PA scenarios. The authors also demonstrated that for employees in China, creative self-efficacy has a positive influence on creativity when employees experience both low levels of positive affect and high levels of negative affect. Originality/value As the findings suggest, Chinese employees who experience positive affect may engage in heuristic, top-down cognitive processes. Furthermore, findings from the present study also serve to extend the scope of the cognitive tuning model by testing the informational roles of positive and negative affects in self-regulatory processes rather than focusing directly on the main effects of employee affect. An important finding in this study is the three-way interaction indicating that individuals experiencing low positive affect and high negative affect will see a strong connection between creative self-efficacy and creative performance.
SIMPLIFIED SCHEME FOR PERFORMANCE AUGMENTATION OF WEB DATA EXTRACTION

: Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from Web data . Furthermore, it uses the data mining techniques to make the web more profitable and to enhance the effectiveness of our interaction with the web. Users always expect maximum accurate results from search engines. But, unfortunately most of the web pages contain more unnecessary information than actual contents. The unnecessary information present in web pages is termed as templates. Template leads to poor performance of search engines due to the retrieval of non-contents for users. Therefore the performance of search engines can be improved by making web pages free of templates. Our method focuses on detecting and extracting templates from web pages that are heterogeneous in nature by means of an algorithm. Locality sensitive hashing algorithm finds the similarity between the input web documents and provides good performance compared to Minimum Description Length(MDL) principle and hash cluster process in terms of execution time.
Image Fusion for a Nighttime Driving Display

An investigation into image fusion for a nighttime driving display application was performed. Most of the image fusion techniques being investigated in this application were developed for other purposes. When comparing the images of a typical night driving scene to the images used in medical or satellite image fusion it becomes apparent that most of the techniques developed for other fields would be overkill in a nighttime driving display application. This observation motivated the development of a set of image fusion techniques specifically for the nighttime driving display application using the computationally simple Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform. This thesis presents the techniques that were developed and the details of their implimentation
Single Women's Labor Supply Elasticities: Trends and Policy Implications

This paper uses CPS data to examine changes in single women's labor supply elasticities in recent decades. Specifically, the authors investigate trends in how single women's hours of work and labor force participation rates responded to both wages and income over the years 1979–2003. Results from the base specification suggest that over the observation period, hours wage elasticities decreased by 82%, participation wage elasticities by 36%, and participation income elasticities by 57%. These results imply that changes in tax policy had a much larger effect on the labor supply and labor force participation behavior of women in this subpopulation in the early 1980s than in recent years.
Pulsewidth Modulation of Neutral-Point-Clamped Indirect Matrix Converter

An indirect matrix converter is an alternative ldquoall-semiconductorrdquo energy processor proposed recently for converting an ac source with fixed magnitude and frequency to a variable voltage and frequency supply that can meet the requirements of a particular industry application. In principle, an indirect matrix converter is constructed by connecting a front-end bidirectional rectification stage to a conventional two-level inversion stage with no bulky capacitive or inductive energy storage connected to their intermediate dc link. Through the proper modulation and compensation of the resulting converter, sinusoidal input current and output voltage can be achieved with minimized rectification switching loss, rendering the indirect matrix converter as a competitive choice for interfacing the utility grid to, e.g., defense facilities that require a different frequency supply. As an improvement, an indirect matrix converter assembled using a three-level energy processing stage has briefly been mentioned in the literature, but has neither been tested in simulation nor experimentally because its operational principles, pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) control, and index compensation have not yet been discussed in the existing literature. Addressing the previously described issues, this paper focuses on the operational mode analysis of a three-level indirect matrix converter implemented using a neutral-point-clamped inversion stage and the design of a number of PWM and modulation ratio compensation schemes for controlling the converter with improved waveform quality. The performances and practicalities of the designed schemes are verified in simulation and experimentally using an implemented laboratory prototype with some representative results captured and presented in this paper.
Protocol Modifications for Improved Co-Channel Wireless LAN Goodput in Partitioned Spaces

Partitions can play a significant role in minimising cochannel interference of Wireless LANs by attenuating signals across room boundaries. This could pave the way towards higher density deployments in home and office environments through spatial channel reuse. Yet, due to protocol limitations, the latest incantation of IEEE 802.11 standard is still unable to take advantage of this fact: Despite having clearly adequate Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) over co-channel neighbouring networks in other rooms, its goodput falls significantly lower than its maximum in the absence of cochannel interferers. In this paper, we describe how this situation can be remedied via modest modifications to the standard. Keywords—IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN, spatial channel re-use, physical layer capture.
MULTISCALE UNSUPERVISED CHANGE DETECTION ON OPTICAL IMAGES BASED ON MARKOV RANDOM FIELDS AND WAVELETS

In the context of environmental monitoring and natural or industrial disaster management, change-detection method s represent powerful tools for studying and mapping the evolu tion of the Earth’s surface. In order to optimize the accurac y of the change maps, a multiscale approach can be adopted, that jointly exploits observations at coarser scales (to gl obally identify changed areas and gain robustness to noise) an d finer scales (to improve the detection of details). In this pa per, a multiscale contextual unsupervised change-detecti on method is proposed for optical images. It is based on discret e wavelet transforms and Markov random fields. The imagedifferencing approach to change-detection with optical da ta is adopted, wavelets are applied to the difference image to e xtract multiscale features, and Markovian data fusion is use d to integrate both these features and the spatial contextual information in the change-detection process. Expectation maximization and Besag’s algorithms are used to estimate the model parameters. Experiments on real optical images point out the effectiveness of the method, also as compared with state-of-the-art techniques.
The Distributed Decryption Schemes for Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption

| We propose distributed decryption schemes for somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE). The proposed schemes are constructed based on the encryption scheme by Brakerski and Vai-kuntanathan. In SHE, homomorphic multiplication increases the number of elements in a ciphertext. The proposed scheme can decrypt a ciphertext containing more than two elements with k out of N parties. The distributed decryption scheme introduced by Damgard, Pastro, Smart and Zakarias needs a trusted third party for decrypting a ciphertext that has more than two elements with N out of N parties. We present a distributed decryption scheme in which the parties can decrypt ciphertexts of any size without a trusted third party. In addition, we evaluate the errors of the proposed schemes.
Higher Education Institutions and International Students’ Hindrances: A Case of Students From the African Portuguese-Speaking Countries at Two European Portuguese Universities

We present a study to comprehend if the support given by higher education institution (HEI) to international students coming from the PortugueseSpeaking African Countries meets their academic and social hindrances. Our starting point was a set of semi-structured interviews focused on the perspectives of these students, their Professors and Course Directors as well as on the perspectives of HEI’ staff. Despite findings indicate a positive institutional support, it seems there is still much to do in order to do it properly with these students. These different perspectives will allow us to reflect on the impact that those actions/resources have on the path of students from Portuguese-Speaking African Countries and to systematize suggestions to enhance their experiences in HE.
The COVAMOF Software Variability Assessment Method ( COSVAM )

Variability has to undergo continual and timely change, or a product family will risk using the ability to effectively exploit the similarities of its members. Being able to determine whether, when and how variability should respond to changing markets, business needs, and advances in technology, however, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present COSVAM (The COVAMOF Variability Assessment Method). The contribution of COSVAM is that it provides a technique for variability assessment in the context of evolution, where no techniques were available up to date. It addresses several issues that are associated to the current practice, i.e. ad-hoc and unstructured methodology, implicit variability, addressing only one layer of abstraction, insufficiently exploring alternative solutions, and neglecting implementation dependencies between features.