Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Remediation in Situ of Hydrocarbons by Combined Treatment in a Contaminated Alluvial Soil due to an Accidental Spill of LNAPL

Soil contamination represents an environmental issue which has become extremely important in the last decades due to the diffusion of industrial activities. Accidents during transport of dangerous materials and fuels may cause severe pollution. The present paper describes the criteria of the actions which were operated to remediate the potential risk and observed negative effects on groundwater and soil originating from an accidental spill of diesel fuel from a tank truck. With the aim to evaluate the quality of the involved environmental matrices in the “emergency” phase, in the following “safety” operation and during the remediation action, a specific survey on hydrocarbons, light and heavy, was carried out in the sand deposits soil. Elaboration of collected data allows us to observe the movement of pollutants in the unsaturated soil. The remediation action was finalized to improve the groundwater and soil quality. The former was treated by a so called “pump and treat” system coupled with air sparging. A train of three different technologies was applied to the unsaturated soil in a sequential process: soil vapour extraction, bioventing and enhanced bioremediation. Results showed that the application of sequential remediation treatments allowed us to obtain a state of quality in unsaturated soil and groundwater as required by Italian law.
Mahak Samim: A Corpus of Persian Academic Texts for Evaluating Plagiarism Detection Systems

In this paper we introduce Mahak Samim, a plagiarism detection corpus that consists of Persian academic texts in which plagiarism cases are embedded. This corpus, which can be used for evaluating plagiarism detection systems, consists of more than five thousand artificial plagiarism cases with various lengths and diverse degrees of obfuscation. The development process and the features of the corpus are described here. CCS Concepts • Information systems ➝ Information retrieval ➝ Retrieval tasks and goals ➝ Near-duplicate and plagiarism detection.
Population and Individual Elephant Response to a Catastrophic Fire in Pilanesberg National Park

In predator-free large herbivore populations, where density-dependent feedbacks occur at the limit where forage resources can no longer support the population, environmental catastrophes may play a significant role in population regulation. The potential role of fire as a stochastic mass-mortality event limiting these populations is poorly understood, so too the behavioural and physiological responses of the affected animals to this type of large disturbance event. During September 2005, a wildfire resulted in mortality of 29 (18% population mortality) and injury to 18, African elephants in Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. We examined movement and herd association patterns of six GPS-collared breeding herds, and evaluated population physiological response through faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (stress) levels. We investigated population size, structure and projected growth rates using a simulation model. After an initial flight response post-fire, severely injured breeding herds reduced daily displacement with increased daily variability, reduced home range size, spent more time in non-tourist areas and associated less with other herds. Uninjured, or less severely injured, breeding herds also shifted into non-tourist areas post-fire, but in contrast, increased displacement rate (both mean and variability), did not adjust home range size and formed larger herds post-fire. Adult cow stress hormone levels increased significantly post-fire, whereas juvenile and adult bull stress levels did not change significantly. Most mortality occurred to the juvenile age class causing a change in post-fire population age structure. Projected population growth rate remained unchanged at 6.5% p.a. , and at current fecundity levels, the population would reach its previous level three to four years post-fire. The natural mortality patterns seen in elephant populations during stochastic events, such as droughts, follows that of the classic mortality pattern seen in predator-free large ungulate populations, i.e. mainly involving juveniles. Fire therefore functions in a similar manner to other environmental catastrophes and may be a natural mechanism contributing to population limitation. Welfare concerns of arson fires, burning during “hot-fire” conditions and the conservation implications of fire suppression (i.e. removal of a potential contributing factor to natural population regulation) should be integrated into fire management strategies for conservation areas.
Online clustering, fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition

ABSTRACT Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a Twitter dataset including 62 million tweets by 7 million unique users. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, we demonstrate how clusters of users form and evolve over time, the density of interactions between them, and the flow of particular types of information through the clustered network structure. We show that the Egyptian Twitter public developed into increasingly isolated clusters of the like-minded which shared information unevenly. We argue that the growing distance between these clusters encouraged political conflict and facilitated the spread of fear and hatred, which ultimately undermined the democratic transition and won popular support for the military coup.
An effective similarity measure for collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is one of the most successful and widely used methods for automated item recommendation. The most critical component of recommender algorithm is the mechanism of finding similarities among users using item ratings data and so that items can be recommended based on the similarities. The calculation of similarities has relied on traditional vector similarity measures such as Cosine and Pearsonpsilas correlation which, however, have some problems and canpsilat exactly express the similarity between users with the data sparsity. This paper presents a new similarity measure called PNR that utilize amended city-block-distance expressing the similarity between users, which focuses on improving recommendation performance of collaborative filtering recommender system under data sparsity. Empirical studies on MovieLens datasets show that our new proposed approach consistently outperforms traditional similarity measures.
" INTEGRATION MARKETS ON LATIN AMERICAN : LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDEXES "

The beginning of the XXI century has been characterized by economic circumstances and very diverse institutional environments that have given place to a period of uncertainty in the stock markets at world level and, Latin Americans in particular, mainly starting from the events linked at September 2.001 in United States and increased by the crisis of the initiate Argentinean weight at the end of that same year. The objective of this paper is the analysis and identification of the possible relationships of causality among the recurrent fluctuations of the main Latin American bags and regarding bags of markets more developed as that of United States and Spain. To achieve the proposed objective, the sample understands the years 1999 at 2002 with daily observations. In a first approach different methodologies are applied to the indexes to effects of extracting possible simultaneous relationships among the same ones. Subsequently, a model VAR is considered following the procedure of Johansen (1988) and Johansen and Juselius (1990) to detect the existence or not of long term relationships. The results report special importance for all the agents and institutions that operate in the international environment, in those that the manage of the risk one of the main concerns constitutes in the diversification of wallets of values.
A Design of Heterogeneous Cloud Infrastructure for Big Data and Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing and big data are two core services in many organizations. Combining a big data platform, such as Hadoop, into the cloud architecture using virtualization technique will result in losing the performance benefit of MapReduce. Unique for the existing virtualized big data cloud, this work introduces an innovative cloud architecture called the heterogeneous cloud. In the heterogeneous cloud, the big data service is directly deployed onto the bare-metal machines without the help of virtualization. In order to implement such a heterogeneous architecture, we propose a primer architecture design with detailed solutions of potential technical issues and conflicts. With the maximal isolation of computing, network, and storage, the proposed heterogeneous cloud can reach the multifunction of big data and cloud computing with improved performance and energy efficiency.
An Efficient Algorithm for Lip Segmentation in Color Face Images Based on Local Information

Lip detection is used in many applications such as face detection and lips reading. In previous works, researchers have considered whole of face image for lip detection. In this paper we propose a new algorithm. In our algorithm for reducing required calculation and increase accuracy of correct detection, we do not consider whole of the face image. We first remove the upper half part of the face image. Then, for estimate lip area, we divide remained lower half face image to equal parts. For each part we calculate statistical information such as standard deviation, and based on them we detect lip area in face image. For separate lip pixels from skin pixels, we use YCbCr and HSI color spaces at this work. We evaluate our work on CVL face database. Our experiments show that new algorithm gives better results than previous works on this database.
A built-in self-repair method for RAMs in mesh-based NoCs

Network-on-chip is one popular interconnection infrastructure for giga-scale integrated chips. Moreover, the number of memory cores in such chips usually is very large. This paper proposes an efficient built-in self-repair (BISR) method for repairing memories in NoCs. By reusing the communication links in NoCs, the BISR scheme can repair multiple memories using one BISR circuit without incurring the problem of routing. To increase the repair efficiency, a global spare memory is designed for repairing multiple memories. Experimental results show that the proposed BISR scheme can achieve very high repair efficiency. Also, the area overhead of the BISR circuit is very low—only about 1.38% for fifteen 8K×64-bit memories.
The Improved Ensemble Kalman Filter for Multisensor Target Tracking

The ensemble Kalman filter is introduced to the multisensor target tracking system, where the method is widely used in weather forecasting before. The algorithm is modified to obtain members of measurement ensemble from uncorrelated sensors in the system but not a Monte Carlo method, and the performances of the ensemble Kalman filter under different conditions are investigated. Simulation shows that the ensemble Kalman filter can be applied to the multisensor target tracking system and offer much advantage in terms of estimation performance.
Genotyping Allelic and Copy Number Variation in the Immunoglobulin Heavy Chain Locus

The study of genomic regions that contain gene copies and structural variation is a major challenge in modern genomics. Unlike variation involving single nucleotide changes, data on the variation of copy number is difficult to collect and few tools exist for analyzing the variation between individuals. The immunoglobulin heavy variable (IGHV) locus, which plays an integral role in the adaptive immune response, is an example of a genomic region that is known to vary in gene copy number. Lack of standard methods to genotype this region prevents it from being included in association studies and is holding back the growing field of antibody repertoire analysis. Here, we establish a convention of representing the locus in terms of a reference panel of operationally distinguishable segments defined by hierarchical clustering. Using this reference set, we develop a pipeline that identifies copy number and allelic variation in the IGHV locus from whole-genome sequencing reads. Tests on simulated reads demonstrate that our approach is feasible and accurate for detecting the presence and absence of gene segments using reads as short as 70 bp. With reads 100 bp and longer, coverage depth can also be used to determine copy number. When applied to a family of European ancestry, our method finds new copy number variants and confirms existing variants. This study paves the way for analyzing population-level patterns of variation in the IGHV locus in larger diverse datasets and for quantitatively handling regions of copy number variation in other structurally varying and complex loci.
Fixing Configuration Inconsistencies across File Type Boundaries

Creating a valid software configuration often involves multiple configuration file types, such as feature models, domain-specific languages, or C header files with preprocessor defines. Enforcing constraints across file types boundaries already at configuration is necessary to prevent inconsistencies, which otherwise are costly to discover and resolve later on. We present a pragmatic framework to specify and apply inconsistency-resolving fixes on configuration files of arbitrary types. The framework converts each configuration file to a model, checks it for consistency, applies fixes, and serializes it back again. We argue that conventionally programmed fixes and round-trip mechanisms (i.e., converters and serializers) are indispensable for practical applicability and can provide sufficient reliability when following usual development practices. We have developed round-trip mechanisms for seven different configuration file types and two fixing mechanisms. One fixing mechanism extends previous work by combining automatic detection of correct fix locations with a marker mechanism that reduces the number of locations. A tool-supported process for applying the fixes provides user guidance and integrates additional semantic validity checks on serialized configuration files of complex types (e.g., feature models). Evaluations reveal a speed up in inconsistency fixing and that the performance of the currently integrated round-tripping and fixing mechanisms is competitive.
Sequence-based identification of microbial pathogens: a reconsideration of Koch's postulates

Over 100 years ago, Robert Koch introduced his ideas about how to prove a causal relationship between a microorganism and a disease. Koch's postulates created a scientific standard for causal evidence that established the credibility of microbes as pathogens and led to the development of modern microbiology. In more recent times, Koch's postulates have evolved to accommodate a broader understanding of the host-parasite relationship as well as experimental advances. Techniques such as in situ hybridization, PCR, and representational difference analysis reveal previously uncharacterized, fastidious or uncultivated, microbial pathogens that resist the application of Koch's original postulates, but they also provide new approaches for proving disease causation. In particular, the increasing reliance on sequence-based methods for microbial identification requires a reassessment of the original postulates and the rationale that guided Koch and later revisionists. Recent investigations of Whipple's disease, human ehrlichiosis, hepatitis C, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and Kaposi's sarcoma illustrate some of these issues. A set of molecular guidelines for establishing disease causation with sequence-based technology is proposed, and the importance of the scientific concordance of evidence in supporting causal associations is emphasized.
Optimal control of variable speed wind turbines

This paper proposes a MIMO linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller designed for a horizontal variable speed wind turbine with focus on the operating range referring to the above rated wind speeds. The operating conditions of wind turbines make them subject to fluctuating loads that create fatigue and lead to damage. Alleviating these loads would reduce the needed materials, and increase the lifespan and the quality of the produced energy. The optimality of the entire system is defined in relation with the trade-off between the wind energy conversion maximization and the minimization of the fatigue in the mechanical structure. The solution of a control using an LQR regulator is presented. The performances of the optimal control are assessed and discussed by means of a set of simulations.
Design and evaluation of Bacteroides DNA probes for the specific detection of human fecal pollution

Because Bacteroides spp. are obligate anaerobes that dominate the human fecal flora, and because some species may live only in the human intestine, these bacteria might be useful to distinguish human from nonhuman sources of fecal pollution. To test this hypothesis, PCR primers specific for 16S rRNA gene sequences of Bacteroides distasonis, B. thetaiotaomicron, and B. vulgatus were designed. Hybridization with species-specific internal probes was used to detect the intended PCR products. Extracts from 66 known Bacteroides strains, representing 10 related species, were used to confirm the specificity of these PCR-hybridization assays. To test for specificity in feces, procedures were developed to prepare DNA of sufficient purity for PCR. Extracts of feces from 9 humans and 70 nonhumans (cats, dogs, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, goats, and chickens) were each analyzed with and without an internal positive control to verify that PCR amplification was not inhibited by substances in the extract. In addition, serial dilutions from each extract that tested positive were assayed to estimate the relative abundance of target Bacteroides spp. in the sample. Depending on the primer-probe set used, either 78 or 67% of the human fecal extracts tested had high levels of target DNA. On the other hand, only 7 to 11% of the nonhuman extracts tested had similarly high levels of target DNA. An additional 12 to 20% of the nonhuman extracts had levels of target DNA that were 100- to 1,000-fold lower than those found in humans. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Fast texture synthesis via patch-based circular linked lists

A novel texture synthesis method is proposed to form large textures. The task of texture synthesis is divided into two phases: analysis, and synthesis. During the analysis phase, we generate patch-based circular linked lists (PCL) by recording the process of texture synthesis based on graph cuts. The main task of synthesis phase is to pick up patches and copy them to the output to synthesize textures using the PCL. The PCL algorithm synthesizes high-quality textures ranging from regular to stochastic. Compared with the jump map method, our approach is better capturing of texture characteristics and thus performs well when the jump map algorithm fails to produce good results.
Subexponential Circuits : Derandomizing the XOR Lemma

Yao showed that the $XOR$ of independent random instances of a somewhat hard Boolean problem becomes almost completely unpredictable. In this paper we show that, in non-uniform settings, total independence is not necessary for this result to hold. We give a pseudo-random generator which produces $n$ instances of a problem for which the analog of the $XOR$ lemma holds. Combining this generator with the results of [25, 6] gives substantially improved results for hardness vs. randomness trade-offs. In particular, we show that if any problem in $E = DTIME(2O(n))$ has circuit complexity $2(n)$, then $P = BPP$. Our generator is a combination of two known ones the random walks on expander graphs of [1, 10, 19] and the nearly disjoint subsets generator of [23, 25]. The quality of the generator is proved via a new proof of the $XOR$ lemma which may be useful for other direct product results.
Inference for nonlinear dynamical systems

Nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems are widely used to model systems across the sciences and engineering. Such models are natural to formulate and can be analyzed mathematically and numerically. However, difficulties associated with inference from time-series data about unknown parameters in these models have been a constraint on their application. We present a new method that makes maximum likelihood estimation feasible for partially-observed nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems (also known as state-space models) where this was not previously the case. The method is based on a sequence of filtering operations which are shown to converge to a maximum likelihood parameter estimate. We make use of recent advances in nonlinear filtering in the implementation of the algorithm. We apply the method to the study of cholera in Bangladesh. We construct confidence intervals, perform residual analysis, and apply other diagnostics. Our analysis, based upon a model capturing the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of the system, reveals some effects overlooked by previous studies.
Efficient gene transfection using chitosan–alginate core-shell nanoparticles

Reverse microemulsion was used as a template to fabricate chitosan–alginate core-shell nanoparticles encapsulated with enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-encoded plasmids. The average size of DNA-entrapped nanoparticles measured by dynamic light scattering was increased proportionally, with the N/P ratios ranging from 5 to 20. These alginate-coated chitosan nanoparticles endocytosed by NIH 3T3 cells trigged swelling of transport vesicles which render gene escape before entering digestive endolysosomal compartment and concomitantly promote gene transfection rate. Results showed that DNA-encapsulated chitosan–alginate nanoparticles with average size of 64 nm (N/P ratio of 5) could achieve the level of gene expression comparable with the one obtained by using polyethyleneimine–DNA complexes.
An efficient rearrangement of wavelet packet coefficients for embedded quad-tree image coding

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for rearranging the wavelet packet coefficients of an image to form hierarchical trees, by which the well known SPIHT algorithm can be applied. For images with textures, the high frequency wavelet coefficients are likely to become significant after several code passes of SPIHT, which degrades substantially the coding performance. As a result, the high frequency wavelet coefficients representing most of the high detail content of images need to be decomposed into wavelet packet coefficients for a further exploitation. The proposed rearrangement scheme has been applied to the highest frequency wavelet packet coefficients of images. Experimental results show that the performance of SPIHT can be improved, especially for fingerprint images.
Changes in the Muscle Biochemical Composition of Lagocephalus Spadiceus (Richardson, 1845) and Lagocephalus Lunaris (Bloch and Schneider, 1801) off Visakhapatnam, East Coast of India

Seasonal changes in the biochemical parameters such as protein, carbohydrate, lipid and ash besides moisture content in the muscle of Lagocephalus spadiceus (Richardson, 1845) and Lagocephalus lunaris (Bloch and Schneider, 1801) has been carried out during January to December 2009. The percentage composition of moisture, protein, carbohydrate, lipid and ash contents showed variations in their abundance in different seasons in both the species. The highest content of protein (18.11%) in the muscle was recorded in L. spadiceus in summer, while it was high (14.20%) in L. lunaris in monoon season.