Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constraints on the composition of the Aleutian arc lower crust from

[1] Determining the bulk composition of island arc lower crust is essential for distinguishing between competing models for arc magmatism and assessing the stability of arc lower crust. We present new constraints on the composition of high P-wave velocity (VP = 7.3–7.6 km/s) lower crust of the Aleutian arc from best-fitting average lower crustal VP/VS ratio using sparse converted S-waves from an along-arc refraction profile. We find a low VP/VS of ~1.7–1.75. Using petrologic modeling, we show that no single composition is likely to explain the combination of high VP and low VP/VS. Our preferred explanation is a combination of clinopyroxenite (~50–70%) and alpha-quartz bearing gabbros (~30–50%). This is consistent with Aleutian xenoliths and lower crustal rocks in obducted arcs, and implies that ~30–40% of the full Aleutian crust comprises ultramafic cumulates. These results also suggest that small amounts of quartz can exert a strong influence on VP/VS in arc crust.
Reconsidering geography and power: policy ensembles, spatial knowledge, and the quest for consistent imagination

7 INTRODUCTION . 9 RESEARCH QUESTIONS . 16 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. 17 Putting geography into objectivist, dialectic, and idealist realities . 17 Towards the ontological spaces of solidarity . 20 Experiencing the geographies of power: the shared archives of knowledge . 23 Critical geopolitics: tracking the origins of geographical ʻtruth regimesʼ . 24 Postcolonial theory: evidencing the contingency of imaginative dominance . 25 New regional geography: staging the integral spaces of governance . 26 The basic operational concepts . 28 Power: positive interdependence and practical efficiency . 29 Scale: power hierarchies and/ or effective relations of performance . 30 Policy: assembling spatial imaginations, power, and scale . 32 DATA AND METHODS . 35 OVERVIEW OF STUDY RESULTS . 40 DISCUSSION . 50 CONCLUSIONS . 55 REFERENCES . 60 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . 69 SUMMARY IN ESTONIAN . 70 CURRICULUM VITAE . 159 ELULOOKIRJELDUS . 160 PUBLICATIONS . 75
Energy-aware image aggregation in wireless visual sensor networks

VSN is different from traditional WSN that collect and transmit images/video instead of scalar data to the sink. Images provide richer information than scalar data that enable VSN to be a promising technology on security monitoring and surveillance. Image transmission in VSN is expansive due to its large image size and significant energy consumption. One possible way to reduce the image size is to aggregate the received images on the sensor nodes before transmission. By eliminating the redundant image, image aggregation in VSN could transmit the overlapped region of the images only once to reduce the total energy consumption. However, image aggregation requires image processing at the aggregator node that incurs additional node processing energy. In this paper, we study the energy consumption tradeoff between node image processing and image aggregation. We derive the image aggregation energy consumption model that considers the image processing and image transmission. From the simulation results, image aggregation scheme does help lowering the energy consumption. As compared to the non-aggregation scheme, image aggregation scheme consumes only 46% of the energy consumption. In addition, we also find that the threshold for the number of aggregated nodes. Above this threshold, increasing the number aggregated nodes does not help on reducing the energy consumption. This could help determining the number of aggregated nodes under different degree of aggregation to achieve minimum energy consumption.
Measurements of earplug attenuation under supra-aural and circumaural headphones

Abstract Objective: Supra-aural audiometric headphones are generally not recommended for use in measuring the attenuation of earplugs, because contact between the headphone and pinna and/or earplug could alter the attenuation obtained, and because of concerns of non-comparability between modes of excitation from supra-aural headphones and the sound-field procedure required by the standardized method. In this study, we compared measurements of earplug attenuation obtained under Telephonics TDH-50P supra-aural headphones with measurements obtained under circumaural headphones designed expressly for such testing. Design: The attenuation of three types of earplugs (foam, premolded quadruple-flange, and custom-molded) was measured in a repeated-measures design. Study sample: The study sample comprised 42 normal-hearing adults (21 females, 21 males). Results: With the foam earplugs, nearly all of the attenuation measurements under the supra-aural headphones fell within 10 dB of the measurements under the circumaural headphones. With the flange and custom earplugs, approximately 10% of individuals obtained spuriously high attenuation under the supra-aural headphones. Conclusions: We conclude that standard supra-aural audiometric headphones are suitable for measuring the attenuation provided by foam earplugs. However, supra-aural headphones should not be used to measure the attenuation of flange or custom-molded earplugs. The potential exists for substantial over-estimation of attenuation, especially of custom plugs.
Food Poverty and Policy

This study on food poverty and policy is an initiative of Combat Poverty, Crosscare and the Society of St Vincent de Paul. It arises from a recommendation in an evaluation of the Dublin City Food Bank, a Crosscare project1. The evaluation had identified the need to review the wider context for food banking, including the links between low income, food insecurity and diet, and other policy measures for improving access to and affordability of food for low-income households.2 Crosscare invited Combat Poverty and the Society of St Vincent de Paul to work with it in undertaking the review. Combat Poverty, the government advisory body on poverty, had previously supported research on low-income families, including studies of food and dietary intake. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, as a charitable organisation working with low-income households, had considerable experience of assisting with the food needs of families, the homeless, older people and children. The review was undertaken by the Centre for Health Promotion Studies, NUI Galway and the Women’s Education Research and Resource Centre, UCD for the three sponsoring organisations. The aims of the study are: ■ to apply and quantify the concept of food poverty in an Irish context ■ to assess and strengthen policy measures relating to food poverty. The study draws on a diversity of information sources, including an analysis of secondary data, interviews with key stakeholders and a review of international literature and policy approaches. The preliminary findings and recommendations were discussed at a workshop of key interests involved in food and poverty issues.
Effects of Varying Dosages of Oral Creatine Relative to Fat Free Body Mass on Strength and Body Composition

This study compared the effects of different dosages of creatine relative to fat free mass on strength, % body fat, body mass (BM), fat free mass (FFM), 40-yd dash time, and vertical jump (VJ) height. In a true experimental double-blind design, 39 male college athletes were given either 5 g creatine mono-hydrate or a placebo 4 times a day for 5 days. For the rest of the 8 weeks they were given either a placebo or 100 or 300 mg * kg−1 FFM of creatine. During this period all subjects undertook a conditioning program 4 times a week emphasizing weight training and speed drills. Pre- and posttesting was conducted on all 6 variables. Both experimental groups had significant improvements in the bench press; the group ingesting 300 mg * kg−1 FFM of creatine improved significantly more than the control group (p < 0.05). Forty-yard dash improvement was significantly better as a result of ingesting 100 mg * kg−1 FFM of creatine compared to the control group. Only the 100-mg group significantly improved 40-yd time. No significant differences among groups were noted in BM, % body fat, FFM, or VJ. In conclusion, ingestion of 100 or 300 mg * kg−1 FFM of creatine for 8 weeks in conjunction with weight training and speed training significantly improved 40-yd dash time and bench press strength, respectively.
Discriminative simplification of mixture models

Simplification of mixture models has recently emerged as an important issue in the field of statistical learning. The heavy computational demands of using large order models drove researches to investigate how to efficiently reduce the number of components in mixture models. The simplification, in solutions proposed so far, was performed by maximizing a certain measure of similarity to the original model, regardless of the discriminative qualities among models of different classes. This paper proposes a novel discriminative learning algorithm for reducing the order of a set of mixture models. The suggested algorithm is based on maximizing the correct component association. Experiments, performed on acoustic modeling in a basic phone recognition task, indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the comparable non-discriminative simplification algorithm.
Children’s Engagement with their Learning using E-portfolios

Narrative approaches to documentation and assessment in early childhood education (ECE) encourages children to be active contributors in their own learning journey. With the growing emphasis of technology in society it is natural that this shift has transformed assessment practices with the introduction of e-portfolios. E-portfolios are seen in tertiary, secondary and primary settings nationwide and most recently have been introduced into ECE as a way to extend traditional documentation methods. As a result, documentation and the role children have in their own learning has shifted. Despite their growing popularity in early childhood settings there is very little research into the effect that e-portfolios have on teachers, parents, and most importantly, children and their learning. Given this limited research this study sought to understand the ways in which children are engaging with their learning through e-portfolios. This mixed methodology study used a national online survey as well as case studies to develop an understanding of this topic. Participants included early childhood centre educators, parents and children from settings across New Zealand. Findings revealed a distinct variation in the ways that centres are using e-portfolios to engage children with their learning. A large number of centres are maintaining both hard-copy and online versions of a child's portfolio to ensure that children are not removed from contributing to and revisiting their learning. Whilst results showed examples of children's in-depth engagement with e-portfolios, they also highlighted that many centres are not yet harnessing their full potential. These findings suggest implications for teacher practice, including the need for greater support and training for teachers. As e-portfolios are still a new phenomenon in ECE this study suggests areas of future research to investigate this topic further to improve learning outcomes for children.
Co-expression of statistically over-represented peptides in proteomes: a key to phylogeny ?

It is proposed that the co-expression of statistically significant motifs among the sequences of a proteome is a phylogenetic trait. From the co-expression matrix of such motifs in a group of prokaryotic proteomes a suitable definition of a phylogenetic distance is introduced and the corresponding distance matrix between proteomes is constructed. From the distance matrix a phylogenetic tree is inferred, following a standard procedure. It compares well with a reference tree deduced from a distance matrix obtained from the alignment of ribosomal RNA sequences. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that biological evolution manifests itself with a modulation of basic correlations between shared peptides of short length, present in protein sequences. Moreover, the simple procedure we propose reconfirms that it is possible, sampling entire proteomes, to average the effects of lateral gene transfer and infer reasonable phylogenies.
Quantifying Transient Psychological Stress Using a Novel Technique: Changes to PMA-Induced Leukocyte Production of ROS In Vitro

Although much work has been conducted to quantify the long-term physiological effects of psychological stress, measures of short-term, low-level stress have been more elusive. This study assessed the effect of exposure of volunteers to a mild, brief, psychologically stressful event, on the functional ability of leukocytes in whole blood to respond to phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) in vitro. Volunteers operated a car electric window and adjusted it to 4 pre-determined positions. Between each operation the mechanism’s polarity was covertly altered (group B) or remained unaltered (group A). For each treatment group 10 different subjects provided capillary blood samples pre- and post-stressor. Using a chemiluminescent technique termed leukocyte coping capacity, the ability of leukocytes to produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) in vitro was assessed. ROS release differed significantly at 10 min post-stressor between treatment groups, suggesting exposure to acute psychological stress leads to a reduced ability to respond to bacterial challenge.
Pursuing Personal Goals: Skills Enable Progress, but Not all Progress is Beneficial

Although goal theorists have speculated about the causes and consequences of making progress at personal goals, little longitudinal research has examined these issues. In the current prospective study, participants with stronger social and self-regulatory skills made more progress in their goals over the course of a semester. In turn, goal progress predicted increases in psychological well-being, both in short-term (5-day) increments and across the whole semester; At both short- and long-term levels of analysis, however, the amount that well-being increased depended on the "organismic congruence" of participants' goals. That is, participants benefited most from goal attainment when the goals that they pursued were consistent with inherent psychological needs. We conclude that a fuller understanding of the relations between goals, performance, and psychological well-being requires recourse to both cybernetic and organismic theories of motivation.
An Experimental Evaluation of Smart Disk Architectures Using DSS Commercial Workloads

Smart disk systems with large storage capacities and growing computational power are becoming increasingly attractive. The idea is to perform parallel and filtering-type of data intensive computations on disks, close to data, thereby offloading the host processor and increasing the aggregate system power. In this paper, we evaluate in detail the performance of a host-based architecture and a smart disk system using queries from Decision Support System (DSS) databases. We show how to optimize the execution of the whole query being implemented by bundling frequently occurr ing patterns together and posting the bundle to the smart disks in a single invocation that reduces unnecessary communication between host and smart disks. Using an accurate simulator that can simulate the host-based as well as smart-disk system, we ill ustrate that the smart disk architecture brings substantial benefits in terms of overall query execution times. In particular, in our base configuration, we are able to achieve improvements over the traditional architecture by as much as 83.5% using representative queries from the TPC-D benchmark suite.
Driving under the influence of cannabis: a 10-year study of age and gender differences in the concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol in blood.

BACKGROUND Delta(9)-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the major psychoactive constituent of cannabis and its various preparations. Increasing use of cannabis for recreational purposes has created a problem for road-traffic safety. This paper compares age, gender and the concentrations of THC in blood of individuals apprehended for driving under the influence of drugs (DUID) in Sweden, where a zero-tolerance law operates. MEASUREMENTS Specimens of blood or urine were subjected to a broad screening analysis by enzyme immunoassay methods. THC positives were verified by analysis of blood by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) with a deuterium-labelled internal standard (d(3)-THC). All toxicology results were entered into a database (TOXBASE) along with the age and gender of apprehended drivers. FINDINGS Over a 10-year period (1995-2004), between 18% and 30% of all DUID suspects had measurable amounts of THC in their blood (> 0.3 ng/ml) either alone or together with other drugs. The mean age [+/- standard deviation (SD)] of cannabis users was 33 +/- 9.4 years (range 15-66 years), with a strong predominance of men (94%, P < 0.001). The frequency distribution of THC concentrations (n = 8794) was skewed markedly to the right with mean, median and highest values of 2.1 ng/ml, 1.0 ng/ml and 67 ng/ml, respectively. The THC concentration was less than 1.0 ng/ml in 43% of cases and below 2.0 ng/ml in 61% of cases. The age of offenders was not correlated with the concentration of THC in blood (r = -0.027, P > 0.05). THC concentrations in blood were higher when this was the only psychoactive substance present (n = 1276); mean 3.6 ng/ml, median 2.0 ng/ml compared with multi-drug users; mean 1.8 ng/ml, median 1.0 ng/ml (P < 0.001). In cases with THC as the only drug present the concentration was less than 1.0 ng/ml in 26% and below 2.0 ng/ml in 41% of cases. The high prevalence of men, the average age and the concentrations of THC in blood were similar in users of illicit drugs (non-traffic cases). CONCLUSIONS The concentration of THC in blood at the time of driving is probably a great deal higher than at the time of sampling (30-90 minutes later). The notion of enacting science-based concentration limits of THC in blood (e.g. 3-5 ng/ml), as discussed in some quarters, would result in many individuals evading prosecution. Zero-tolerance or limit of quantitation laws are a much more pragmatic way to enforce DUID legislation.
Do Worldviews Matter? Post‐materialist, Environmental, and Scientific/Technological Worldviews and Support for Agricultural Biotechnology Applications

This paper draws upon the social science literature to evaluate whether materialist/post‐materialist, environmental, and scientific/technological worldviews predict levels of support for biotechnology applications. The novelty of this research is two‐fold: 1) it incorporates the post‐materialist hypothesis in risk perception models, and 2) it evaluates the effects of the these three worldviews simultaneously. Data from a regional southwest telephone survey in the United States conducted in Spring 2004 were used to investigate whether these three worldviews were related to support of various animal and plant biotechnology applications. The results illustrated that post‐materialist values were not significantly related to support for animal or plant biotechnology applications. However, environmental and science and technology measures were related to support. One of the new ecological paradigm items, “humans have the right to modify nature,” was consistently related to support for animal and plant biotechnology applications, and anti‐anthropocentric values were related to support for two plant applications. General attitudes toward science and technology were related to support for both animal and plant biotechnology applications. The results provide evidence that perceptions of these applications are multi‐dimensional and that respondents conceptualize animal and plant biotechnology applications differently.
Atomic dynamics of alumina melt: A molecular dynamics simulation study

The atomic dynamics of Al2O3 melt are studied by molecular dynamics simulation. The particle interactions are described by an advanced ionic interaction model that includes polarization effects and ionic shape deformations. The model has been shown to reproduce accurately the static structure factors S(Q) from neutron and x-ray diffraction and the dynamic structure factor S(Q,! ) from inelastic x-ray scattering. Analysis of the partial dynamic structure factors shows inelastic features in the spectra up to momentum transfers, Q, close to the principal peaks of partial static structure factors. The broadening of the Brillouin line widths is discussed in terms of a frequency dependent viscosity �(! ).
Discrete Wavelet Transform on Consumer-Level Graphics Hardware

Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been heavily studied and developed in various scientific and engineering fields. Its multiresolution and locality nature facilitates applications requiring progressiveness and capturing high-frequency details. However, when dealing with enormous data volume, its performance may drastically reduce. On the other hand, with the recent advances in consumer-level graphics hardware, personal computers nowadays usually equip with a graphics processing unit (GPU) based graphics accelerator which offers SIMD-based parallel processing power. This paper presents a SIMD algorithm that performs the convolution-based DWT completely on a GPU, which brings us significant performance gain on a normal PC without extra cost. Although the forward and inverse wavelet transforms are mathematically different, the proposed algorithm unifies them to an almost identical process that can be efficiently implemented on GPU. Different wavelet kernels and boundary extension schemes can be easily incorporated by simply modifying input parameters. To demonstrate its applicability and performance, we apply it to wavelet-based geometric design, stylized image processing, texture-illuminance decoupling, and JPEG2000 image encoding
The need for central resources in answering questions in different domains: Folk psychology, biology, and economics

This study examined whether, when lay people reason about everyday domains, they do so in a slow, serial, deliberate process or using an automatic, effortless, associative process, and whether there are differences in this respect between content domains. The cognitive resources used by lay persons in reasoning about everyday domains were investigated using a dual task methodology. Fifty-eight adult participants answered computer-administered questions on folk biology (ToB), folk economics (ToE), and folk psychology, where the latter included questions requiring participants to infer an emotion from a verbally presented situation (ToP) and false-belief tasks (ToM). Each domain was tested with questionnaires at two levels of difficulty. Half the participants concurrently performed the 2-back task. Cognitive load reduced accuracy on the main task for ToM tasks (especially for second-order false-belief items) but not for the other domains. Performing the main tasks reduces accuracy and increases latencies on the secondary task for all domains. These findings suggest that the appropriate generalisation does not relate to content domains (such as folk psychology vs. folk biology), but rather to the nature of the task under consideration. For ToE, ToB, and ToP, the relevant inference questions appear to be processed mainly by the associative systems in LTM, and the process is not affected by a concurrent secondary task. For ToM, the response generation processing occurs in the analytic subsystem, and is therefore affected by cognitive load. Further, the more difficult set of questions impaired the secondary task more than the simpler set, in every domain and in terms of both accuracy and latency. This suggests that the processing involved in the associative system consumes domain-general resources too.
Remarks on Heavy-Light Mesons from AdS/CFT

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to compute the energy spectrum of heavy-light mesons in a N=2 SU(N) super Yang-Mills theory with two massive hypermultiplets. In the heavy quark limit, similar to QCD, we find that the excitation energies are independent of the heavy quark mass. We also make some remarks about related AdS/CFT models of flavor with less supersymmetry.