Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Economic gains of improving soil fertility and water holding capacity with clay application: the impact of soil remediation research in Northeast Thailand

Using survey data collected from 250 farmers, this paper evaluates the impact of the Soil Remediation Research Project (SRRP) undertaken by International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Northeast Thailand during 2002–2005. SRRP has demonstrated and promoted the application of clay as a quick and low-cost means for improving the fertility and water holding capacity of sandy soils. The impact evaluation suggests that the SRRP has a net present value (NPV) of US$0.7 million with a benefit–cost ratio (BCR) of 3.1 for the sample context and an NPV of US$99.5 million with a BCR of 317.7 for the larger context of the region.
‘La doble condición’: landmine victims, forced displacement, and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio

Abstract The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability.
ImageFlow: Streaming Image Search

Traditional grid and list representations of image search results are the dominant interaction paradigms that users face on a daily basis, yet it is unclear that such paradigms are well-suited for experiences where the user‟s task is to browse images for leisure, to discover new information or to seek particular images to represent ideas. We introduce ImageFlow, a novel image search user interface that explores a different alternative to the traditional presentation of image search results. ImageFlow presents image results on a canvas where we map semantic features (e.g., relevance, related queries) to the canvas‟ spatial dimensions (e.g., x, y, z) in a way that allows for several levels of engagement – from passively viewing a stream of images, to seamlessly navigating through the semantic space and actively collecting images for sharing and reuse. We have implemented our system as a fully functioning prototype, and we report on promising, preliminary usage results. ACM Classification: H.5. 2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – graphical user interfaces General Terms: Design, Human Factors.
PMN J0134–0931: A Gravitationally Lensed Quasar with Unusual Radio Morphology

The radio-loud quasar J0134-0931 was discovered to have an unusual morphology during our search for gravitational lenses. In Very Large Array and MERLIN images, there are five compact components with a maximum separation of 0. ″7. All of these components have the same spectral index from 5 to 43 GHz. In a Very Long Baseline Array image at 1.7 GHz, a curved arc of extended emission joins two of the components in a manner suggestive of gravitational lensing. At least two of the radio components have near-infrared counterparts. We argue that this evidence implies that J0134-0931 is a gravitational lens, although we have not been able to devise a plausible model for the foreground gravitational potential. Like several other radio-loud lenses, the background source has an extraordinarily red optical counterpart.
From composites to service systems: The role of emergence in service design

Service Design is an engineering endeavor to enrich some aspect of the real world through a man-made artifact. Systems approach to modeling reality is particularly relevant to Service Design as it seeks to explain reality as a composition of functional observations. Nevertheless, its adoption varies from casual interpretations of interconnectedness to citations of non-deducible causality. To establish Systems approach firmly within the domain of Service Design, it is important to provide an unambiguous characterization of the nature of composition that a Systemic view entails. Further, such characterization should be amenable to the development of a formal framework for specifying Services. In this paper, we take a cognitive approach to composition and highlight the difference between composites as structure-unifying integrated-wholes and composites as emergence-revealing systems. We then translate this characterization into a set of visual semantics for expressing a service-oriented view of observed reality.
An Estimate of the Mediation Effect of Risk Tolerance among Marital Status, Gender, and Investing Behavior

Abstract This paper presents a series of path models that were developed to test whether financial risk tolerance mediates the association between the following four variables and investing behavior: (a) male and married, (b) female and married, (c) male and single, or (d) female and single. Data for this study were obtained from a proprietary consumer survey of risk-tolerance attitudes. Four path models were developed to test relationships among the variables in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. These years were chosen to represent the depth and recovery periods in the Great Recession. The total number of respondents was 29,641. Findings showed that financial risk tolerance was positively associated with risky investing behavior (i.e., equity ownership) in each of the four periods. The associations among the gender-marital status variables and investing behavior were mixed; however, findings did indicate that risk tolerance mediates these relationships by sometimes amplifying and occasionally attenuating risky behavior. Based on the findings, implications and limitation are presented.
Share price anticipation of future earnings in the presence of financial leverage, proprietary cost and institutional ownership: Evidence from MENA emerging markets

This study investigates share price anticipation of future earnings in the context of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) emerging countries. We also examine whether the relationship between stock return and future earnings vary with companies' financial leverage level, in the presence of proprietary costs and institutional ownership.In this paper, we use the modified future earnings response coefficient model (FERC) of Collins et al (1994) to measure the ability of stock prices to predict future earnings in the presence of institutional owners, political and proprietary cost for a sample of 69 firms in MENA emerging capital markets and during the period of 2005-2008. Our research model builds on multiple regression analysis and assumes interaction between current and future earnings and the above mentioned variables. We show that the informativeness of current earnings is negatively associated with financial leverage level, institutional ownership and proprietary cost. Our results indicate moreover that the presence of institutional owners do not help stock prices predict future earnings. Furthermore, neither firms’ leverage nor lower market entries barrier seems to have an impact on current returns anticipation of future earnings.Providing evidence on the information content of earnings and its interaction with some proprietary, political and governance factors in the context of MENA emerging markets helps to a better understanding for capital market participants of the value relevance of such financial information.This study adds to the literature on share price anticipation of earnings in two crucial respects. First, on a theoretical basis we consider the effect of Proprietary Cost, political cost and institutional ownership on the future return earnings relationship. Second, we give some insight into the future return-earnings relation in MENA emerging countries.
Depth image based rendering with inverse mapping

Three-dimensional video has gained much attention during the last decade due its vast applications in cinema, television, animation and virtual reality. The design of intermediate view synthesis algorithms that are efficient both in terms of computational complexity and visual quality is a paramount goal in the fields of 3D free view point television and displays. This papers focuses on the design of a low complexity view synthesis algorithm that produces better quality of the virtual image. A novel view synthesis technique to create a virtual view from two video sequences with corresponding depths is proposed. The technique employs low complexity integer pixel precision warping and a novel approach for hole filling based on inverse mapping. The proposed technique is tested over a number of video sequences and compared with existing state of the art methods, yielding excellent results both in terms of signal to noise ratio and visual quality.
Sonographically determined anomalies and outcome in 170 chromosomally abnormal fetuses

Structural pathology and outcome were studied in 170 chromosomally abnormal fetuses. Numerical chromosomal abnormalities were established in 158 (93 per cent) cases, of which 110 (71 per cent) represented trisomies, 30 (18 per cent) Turner syndrome, and 18 (11 per cent) triploidy. Structural chromosomal abnormalities were diagnosed in 12 (7 per cent) cases. Gestational age at referral was significantly shorter for pregnancies with Turner syndrome than for the other chromosomal abnormalities. Referral before 20 weeks of gestation was mainly based on fetal structural pathology alone (92 per cent); after 20 weeks, patients were referred because of structural pathology combined with small for gestational age, oligohydramnios, or polyhydramnios. Referral as a result of suspected multiple organ pathology occurred in 73.5 per cent of pregnancies. An abnormal amniotic fluid volume was present in 59/170 (34.5 per cent) chromosomally affected pregnancies, i.e., oligohydramnios in 31 and polyhydramnios in 28 cases. Birth weight was below the tenth percentile in over half of the chromosomally abnormal fetuses, except for Turnersyndrome. Fetal outcome was poor, with a survival rate at 1 month of 30 per cent for trisomies which was mainly determined by trisomy 21 (14/18=77.5 per cent).
Myelin-specific proteins and glycolipids in rat Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes in culture

We have used antibodies to identify Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes and to study the expression of myelin-specific glycolipids and proteins in these cells isolated from perinatal rats. Our findings suggest that only Schwann cells which have been induced to myelinate make detectable amounts of galactocerebroside (GC), sulfatide, myelin basic protein (BP), or the major peripheral myelin glycoprotein (P0). When rat Schwann cells were cultured, they stopped making detectable amounts of these myelin molecules, even when the cells were associated with neurites in short-term explant cultures of dorsal root ganglion. In contrast, oligodendrocytes in dissociated cell cultures of neonatal optic nerve, corpus callosum, or cerebellum continued to make GC, sulfatide and BP for many weeks, even in the absence of neurons. These findings suggest that while rat Schwann cells require a continuing signal from appropriate axons to make detectable amounts of myelin- specific glycolipids and proteins, oligodendrocytes do not. Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes also displayed very different morphologies in vitro which appeared to reflect their known differences in myelinating properties in vivo. Since these characteristic morphologies are maintained when Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes were grown together in mixed cultures and in the absence of neurons, we concluded that they are intrinsic properties of these two different myelin- forming cells.
Two different approaches for iris recognition using Gabor filters and multiscale zero-crossing representation

Importance of biometric user identification is increasing everyday. One of the most promising techniques is the one based on the human iris. The authors, in this work, describe different approaches to develop this biometric technique. Based on the works carried out by Daugman, the authors have worked using Gabor filters and Hamming distance. But in addition, they have also worked in zero-crossing representation of the dyadic wavelet transform applied to two different iris signatures: one based on a single virtual circle of the iris; the other one based on an annular region. Also other metrics have been applied to be compared with the results obtained with the Hamming distance. In this work Euclidean distance and dZ will be shown. The last proposed approach is translation, rotation and scale invariant. Results will show a classification success up to 99.6% achieving an equal error rate down to 0 . 12% and the possibility of having null false acceptance rates with very low false rejection rates. 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
An Unhealthy Click: An Investigation Of Pro-Eating Disorder Website Visitation In A Community Sample

Objective: This study compared pro-eating disorder website visitors and non-visitors on demographic characteristics, weight and diet related variables, eating disorder psychopathology, overvaluation of thinness and attitudes towards these sites. A new measure, the Thin Commandments Scale (TCS), was developed and preliminarily validated. Methods: The study employed a community sample of 420 adults who completed a battery of questionnaires, which also included the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q), the Sociocultural Attitudes Toward Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ-3)Internalization Subscale, and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Additionally, participants responded questions regarding the harmfulness and acceptability of these sites, as well as regarding visitors’ health. Results: Visitors and non-visitors did not differ on demographic or weight and diet related variables except for age and BMI. Visitors exhibited greater eating disorder psychopathology and overvaluation of thinness than non-visitors. Visitors were less likely to judge these websites as harmful and unacceptable, but both groups reported a negative evaluation of the sites. Factor analysis for the Thin Commandments Scale revealed the presence of a single factor, internal consistency analysis showed excellent reliability and support was found for the concurrent validity of the scale. Conclusions: These findings provide further insight into the characteristics of pro-eating disorder website visitors and confirm previous studies that showed that visitors might not conform to the stereotype of the eating disorder population. The Thin Commandments Scale showed initial promise as a way to identify people at risk for developing eating disorders, but replication with other populations is needed to confirm these findings.
Comparative Political Studies

In parliamentary democracies, the transfer of power from one government to the next is sometimes characterized by long periods of negotiations in which party leaders bargain over the composition and policy objectives of a new cabinet. Although these delays can have substantial political and economic consequences, surprisingly little is known about their determinants. Moreover, the few studies that exist reach contradictory conclusions. In this article, the author examines how factors relating to uncertainty and bargaining complexity influence the duration of the government formation process in 16 West European countries from 1944 to 1998. In line with the article’s theoretical expectations, the author finds that factors increasing uncertainty over the type of cabinet that is acceptable always lead to delays in forming governments but that factors increasing bargaining complexity, such as the number of parties and ideological polarization in the legislature, only do so when there is sufficient uncertainty among political actors. The present analysis helps to resolve the contradictory findings in the literature. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA Corresponding Author: Sona N. Golder, Florida State University, Political Science Department, 553 Bellamy, Tallahassee, FL 32309, USA Email: sgolder@fsu.edu; Homepage: http://www.fsu.edu/~polisci/people/faculty/sgolder.htm Comparative Political Studies 43(1) 3–32 © 2010 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0010414009341714 http://cps.sagepub. com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 6, 2010 cps.sagepub. com Downloaded from 4 Comparative Political Studies 43(1)
A Joint Model for Parsing Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies

This paper describes a system that jointly parses syntactic and semantic dependencies, presented at the CoNLL-2008 shared task (Surdeanu et al., 2008). It combines online Peceptron learning (Collins, 2002) with a parsing model based on the Eisner algorithm (Eisner, 1996), extended so as to jointly assign syntactic and semantic labels. Overall results are 78.11 global F1, 85.84 LAS, 70.35 semantic F1. Official results for the shared task (63.29 global F1; 71.95 LAS; 54.52 semantic F1) were significantly lower due to bugs present at submission time.
SPONGY (SPam ONtoloGY): Email Classification Using Two-Level Dynamic Ontology

Email is one of common communication methods between people on the Internet. However, the increase of email misuse/abuse has resulted in an increasing volume of spam emails over recent years. An experimental system has been designed and implemented with the hypothesis that this method would outperform existing techniques, and the experimental results showed that indeed the proposed ontology-based approach improves spam filtering accuracy significantly. In this paper, two levels of ontology spam filters were implemented: a first level global ontology filter and a second level user-customized ontology filter. The use of the global ontology filter showed about 91% of spam filtered, which is comparable with other methods. The user-customized ontology filter was created based on the specific user's background as well as the filtering mechanism used in the global ontology filter creation. The main contributions of the paper are (1) to introduce an ontology-based multilevel filtering technique that uses both a global ontology and an individual filter for each user to increase spam filtering accuracy and (2) to create a spam filter in the form of ontology, which is user-customized, scalable, and modularized, so that it can be embedded to many other systems for better performance.
2016 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) Multiple Submodels Parallel Support Vector Machine on Spark

—The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a classical classification algorithm that has a wide range of application. With kernel function, SVM can dispose the datasets that are not linearly separable in their original feature space, making it more flexible in practical use compared with linear model. However, its complexity in training is an obstacle to large-scale dataset handling. This paper proposes the Multiple Submodels Parallel SVM (MSM-SVM) on Spark to accelerate the training of nonlinear SVM with computer cluster. Making use of SVM' s model theory, we introduce the data-splitting method based on clustering to enable the parallel training process and approximate global solution with a number of local submodels. We also cover the multi-classification with " one-against-one " strategy. The experiment shows that MSM-SVM do well in not only binary classification but also the multiclass one. It outperforms the SVMWithMiniBatchSGD tool in Spark MLlib in predicting accuracy for binary case. And for almost all our experiment datasets, MSM-SVM gives similar predicting performance with LIBSVM while costing much less time.
Concurrent monitoring environment for obtaining IPFIX flow and signature based IDS alert data

The aim of this paper is to introduce and untangle the operating model of a network monitoring environment that handles flow and signature based techniques side by side on a large-scale campus network. This paper introduces one approach for solving the problematic creation of standard-based flow information and signature alarms in tandem from large-scale network traffic. The operating model takes into account cost efficiency, trustworthy and privacy protection. Due to the Privacy Protection Act and local laws, data analysis is made after traffic anonymization.
Fibonacci scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation

We rigorously analyze Knill's Fibonacci scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation, which is based on the recursive preparation of Bell states protected by a concatenated error-detecting code. We prove lower bounds on the threshold fault rate of 0.67×10^−3 for adversarial local stochastic noise, and 1.25×10^−3 for independent depolarizing noise. In contrast to other schemes with comparable proved accuracy thresholds, the Fibonacci scheme has a significantly reduced overhead cost because it uses postselection far more sparingly.
Identification of Novel Reference Genes Using Multiplatform Expression Data and Their Validation for Quantitative Gene Expression Analysis

Normalization of mRNA levels using endogenous reference genes (ERGs) is critical for an accurate comparison of gene expression between different samples. Despite the popularity of traditional ERGs (tERGs) such as GAPDH and ACTB, their expression variability in different tissues or disease status has been reported. Here, we first selected candidate housekeeping genes (HKGs) using human gene expression data from different platforms including EST, SAGE, and microarray, and 13 novel ERGs (nERGs) (ARL8B, CTBP1, CUL1, DIMT1L, FBXW2, GPBP1, LUC7L2, OAZ1, PAPOLA, SPG21, TRIM27, UBQLN1, ZNF207) were further identified from these HKGs. The mean coefficient variation (CV) values of nERGs were significantly lower than those of tERGs and the expression level of most nERGs was relatively lower than high expressing tERGs in all dataset. The higher expression stability and lower expression levels of most nERGs were validated in 108 human samples including formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues, frozen tissues and cell lines, through quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR). Furthermore, the optimal number of nERGs required for accurate normalization was as few as two, while four genes were required when using tERGs in FFPE tissues. Most nERGs identified in this study should be better reference genes than tERGs, based on their higher expression stability and fewer numbers needed for normalization when multiple ERGs are required.