Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of hydrological time series using copulas for detecting 1 catchment characteristics and anthropogenic impacts 2

Global climate change can have impacts on characteristics of rainfall-runoff 8 events and subsequently on the hydrological regime. Meanwhile, the catchment itself 9 changes due to anthropogenic influences. However, it is not easy to prove the link 10 between the hydrology and the forcings. In this context, it might be meaningful to detect 11 the temporal changes of catchments independent from climate change by investigating 12 existing long term discharge records. For this purpose, a new stochastic system based on 13 copulas for time series analysis is introduced in this study. 14 A statistical tool like copula has the advantage to scrutinize the dependence structure of 15 the data and, thus, can be used to attribute the catchment behavior by focusing on the 16 following aspects of the statistics defined in the copula domain: (1) Copula asymmetry, 17 which can capture the non symmetric property of discharge data, differs from one 18 catchment to another due to the intrinsic nature of both runoff and catchment. (2) Copula 19 distances can assist in identifying catchment change by revealing the variability and 20 interdependency of dependence structures. 21 These measures were calculated for 100 years of daily discharges for the Rhine rivers 22 and these analyses detected epochs of change in the flow sequences. In a follow-up study, 23 we compared the results of copula asymmetry and copula distance applied to two flow 24 models: (i) Antecedent Precipitation Index (API) and (ii) simulated discharge time series 25
CONSTRUCTION AND INTEGRATION OF GIS DATABASES FOR RISK ASSESSMENT OF NATIONALLY DESIGNATED CULTURAL PROPERTIES DUE TO EARTHQUAKES AND TYPHOONS IN JAPAN

For protecting cultural properties from natural disasters, constant effort for comprehensive strategy including risk assessment and rescue simulation is necessary. Whether a cultural property is damaged or not by a certain natural disaster is controlled by the (1) magnitude of disaster, (2) distance between the cultural property site and the disaster source, (3) surrounding environment, and (4) vulnerability of the cultural property itself or the storage building for the case of movable property. For these reasons, the use of geographic information system (GIS) is considered to be effective in estimating damage as precaution to cultural properties, immediate and rescue of them at the time of disasters by integrating their spatial and attribute information. In Japan, earthquakes and typhoons are two of major natural disasters, so we assessed the risk by integrating the GIS databases of cultural properties and these natural disasters. We calculated the probabilities of occurrence of intraplate earthquakes ≥ JMA seismic intensity 5+ in 50 years, and overlaid with the GIS database of nationally designated cultural properties. 11 National Treasure buildings and 32 storage buildings of the applied arts designated as National Treasure are situated within the area of 20 % or more probabilities. We also overlapped the track and area of several typhoons on the GIS database and showed that most of the damaged cultural properties distributed at eastern side of the track of the typhoons. These examples indicate the validation of GIS for both longand shortperiod of risk assessment for cultural properties. * FUTAGAMI Yoko futa@tobunken.go. jp Telephone: +81-3-3823-4869 Fax: +81-3-3823-4867.
URBANIZATION , LAND DEVELOPMENT , AND LAND FINANCING : EVIDENCE FROM CHINESE CITIES

China’s urbanization is significant worldwide. This process is characterized by underurbanization of population and fast urban land expansion. The driving forces behind this expansion and their rationale are not fully understood and empirically tested. This study fills this gap by analyzing panel data from 1999–2009 for all 286 prefecture-level cities in China. The findings reveal that land financing, using different measures, significantly contributed to land urbanization in China. Economically stronger cities with higher real estate investment more aggressively pushed for land urbanization. The true purpose of urbanization should be improving the living standard, not to generate revenue. It is suggested that urbanization can serve its justified goals only if fiscal and political relations between central and local governments can be adjusted. As more data become available, future studies are encouraged to further explore the subject by investigating additional factors and the latest trend of urbanization in
Reflectarray Antennas Illumination and Spillover Efficiency Calculations for Rectangular Reflectarray Antennas

The reflectarray antenna was first introduced by Barry and Malech in their paper [1] from 1963. A reflectarray antenna consists of an illuminating antenna (feed) and a flat or curved reflector built of reflectarray elements (see Fig. 1). Reflectarray elements retransmit signals from the feed and introduce such phase delay that a plane wave is formed in a given direction. Reflectarrays may be an interesting alternative to classic array antennas [2], because they do not contain a beamforming network in its classic form. Instead, the free space between the feed and reflector aperture acts as a beamforming network. Lack of a traditional beamformer leads to increased reliability of the entire antenna, because the reflectarray elements are isolated from each other and decrease the total weight of antenna. In addition, when the reflector contains several thousand elements [3] there is no need to build an extensive signal divider, which would be very complicated in case of classic array antennas. However, it needs to be stressed that in reflectarray antennas, using free space as the beamforming network leads to a fundamental design problem: how to choose the proper mutual position between the feed and the reflector. Another problem, connected with the former, is the choice of a correct radiation pattern of the feed. All these parameters affect the reflectarray efficiency, which should obviously be possibly high. In this paper formulas are derived which describe the relationship between parameters of a rectangular reflectarray and its antenna efficiency (characterized by two components: illumination efficiency and spillover efficiency). By plotting antenna efficiency versus certain antenna parameters, the designer can choose parameter values which maximize the reflectarray efficiency.
Dynamics and Adaptiveness of Meta-communicative Interaction in a Foraging Environment

In this paper we will describe an artificial life model that is used to provide an evolutionary grounding for metacommunicative interaction (MCI)— utterance acts in which conversationalists acknowledge understanding or request clarification. Specifically, we ran artificial life experiments on populations of foraging agents who are able to communicate about entities in a simulated environment, where the main difference between the populations is in their MCI capability. Populations which possess MCI capabilities were quantitatively compared with those that lack them with respect to their lexicon dynamics and adaptability in diverse environments. These experiments reveal some clear differences between MCI-realised populations— that learn words using MCI—and MCI-non-realised population—that learn words solely by introspection, where the main finding using this model is that in an increasingly complex language, MCI has overwhelming adaptive power and importance. These results demonstrate in a very clear way how adaptive MCI can be in primordial settings of language use.
Studying the Effect of Corporation’s Disclosure Quality Rank on Income-Smoothing and Informativeness of Tehran Stock Exchange’s Listed Companies

The study is to review the disclosure quality rank on income-smoothing and informativeness by means of four hypotheses. The timescale is between 2010 and 2016, and 149 TSE’s listed companies are studied. The first hypothesis examines the effect of higher disclosure quality rank on income informativeness. The result confirms that higher rank of disclosure quality improves income informativeness. The second hypothesis reviews the relationship between disclosure quality rank and income smoothing. The findings of this hypothesis indicate lower disclosure quality will increase income smoothing behavior. In the third hypothesis, the effect of income smoothing on informativeness is examined, which results in a statistical view that income smoothing has a sensible positive effect on informativeness. Finally, the effect of higher rank of disclosure quality on the informativeness of the smoothing listed companies in the fourth hypothesis. The findings indicate that income smoothing has a meaningful effect in strong disclosure quality companies.
Convergence Analysis of Zeroth-Order Online Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

In this paper, we design and analyze a new zeroth-order online algorithm, the zeroth-order online alternating direction method of multipliers (ZOO-ADMM). We prove that ZOOADMM has a convergence rate of O( √ m/ √ T ), where m is the number of optimization variables, and T is the number of iterations. Compared to the first-order gradient-based online algorithm, ZOO-ADMM requires √ m times more iterations, however, it enjoys dual advantages of being gradient-free operation and employing the ADMM to accommodate complex structured regularizers.
BIOTECHNOLOGICAL CONTROL METHODS AGAINST PHYTOPATHOGENIC BACTERIA IN TOMATOES

Due to the lack of control over the spread of pathogens and effective pesticides with antibacterial activity bacterial diseases cause significant economic losses in vegetable production including tomatoes. Therefore, the search for ways of biocontrol of bacterial diseases pathogens in vegetable crops is an extremely urgent problem. The literature review presents a systematic analysis of modern measures of agrotechnical, chemical and biotechnological control of bacterial diseases in tomatoes, and increasing the resistance degree of these crops against phytopathogenic bacteria using traditional methods, cell selection and the involvement of genetic engineering approaches. It is shown that agrotechnical measures are preventive in nature, while using chemicals and antibiotics has side effects, in particular phytotoxicity and the appearance of resistant strains of pathogens. Effective and economically viable is the use of biotechnological preparations and the cultivation of the varieties resistant to pathogens of bacterial diseases in vegetable crops. Selection of varieties resistant to phytopathogenic bacteria is based on the use of wild species as resistance sources. The creation of genetically modified plants containing avr-genes, resistance genes against bacterial phytotoxins, PR-proteins and AMP is promising.
Enhanced cancer therapy through synergetic photodynamic/immune checkpoint blockade mediated by a liposomal conjugate comprised of porphyrin and IDO inhibitor

Cancer metastases is still a hurdle for good prognosis and live quality of breast cancer patients. Treatment strategies that can inhibit metastatic cancer while treating primary cancer are needed to improve the therapeutic effect of breast cancer. Methods: In this study, a dual functional drug conjugate comprised of protoporphyrin IX and NLG919, a potent indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) inhibitor, is designed to combine photodynamic therapy and immune checkpoint blockade to achieve both primary tumor and distant metastases inhibition. Liposomal delivery is applied to improve the biocompatibility and tumor accumulation of the drug conjugate (PpIX-NLG@Lipo). A series of in vitro and in vivo experiments were carried out to examine the PDT effect and IDO inhibition activity of PpIX-NLG@Lipo, and subsequently evaluate its anti-tumor capability in the bilateral 4T1 tumor-bearing mice. Results: The in vitro and in vivo experiments demonstrated that PpIX-NLG@Lipo possess strong ability of ROS generation to damage cancer cells directly through PDT. Meanwhile, PpIX-NLG@ Lipo can induce immunogenic cell death to elicit the host immune system. Furthermore, PpIX-NLG@Lipo interferes the activity of IDO, which can amplify PDT-induced immune responses, leading to an increasing amount of CD8+ T lymphocytes infiltrated into tumor site, finally achieve both primary and distant tumor inhibition. Conclusion: This work presents a novel conjugate approach to synergize photodynamic therapy and IDO blockade for enhanced cancer therapy through simultaneously inhibiting both primary and distant metastatic tumor.
6-29-2012 Associations between Toenail Arsenic Concentration and Dietary Factors in a New Hampshire Ppopulation

Background: Dietary factors such as folate, vitamin B12, protein, and methionine are important for the excretion of arsenic via one-carbon metabolism in undernourished populations exposed to high levels of arsenic via drinking water. However, the effects of dietary factors on toenail arsenic concentrations in well-nourished populations exposed to relatively low levels of water arsenic are unknown. Methods: As part of a population-based case–control study of skin and bladder cancer from the USA, we evaluated relationships between consumption of dietary factors and arsenic concentrations in toenail clippings. Consumption of each dietary factor was determined from a validated food frequency questionnaire. We used general linear models to examine the associations between toenail arsenic and each dietary factor, taking into account potentially confounding effects. Results: As expected, we found an inverse association between ln-transformed toenail arsenic and consumption of vitamin B12 (excluding supplements) and animal protein. Unexpectedly, there were also inverse associations with numerous dietary lipids (e.g., total fat, total animal fat, total vegetable fat, total monounsaturated fat, total polyunsaturated fat, and total saturated fat). Finally, increased toenail arsenic concentrations were associated with increased consumption of long chain n-3 fatty acids. Conclusion: In a relatively well-nourished population exposed to relatively low levels of arsenic via water, consumption of certain dietary lipids may decrease toenail arsenic concentration, while long chain n-3 fatty acids may increase toenail arsenic concentration, possibly due to their association with arsenolipids in fish tissue.
Indexing and Compressing Text

Information retrieval is the computational discipline that deals with the efficient representation, organization and access to information objects that represent natural language texts (Salton & McGill, 1983; Witten, Moffat, & Bell, 1999; Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto, 1999). A crucial subproblem in the Information Retrieval area is the design and implementation of efficient data structures and algorithms for indexing and searching information objects that are vaguely described. In this article, we are going to present the latest developments in the indexing area by giving special emphasis to: data structures and algorithmic techniques for string manipulation, space efficient implementations and compression techniques for efficient storage of information objects. The aforementioned problems appear in a series of applications as digital libraries, molecular sequence databases (DNA sequences, protein databases (Gusfield, 1997)), implementation of Web Search Engines, Web Mining and Information Filtering.
Amino Acid Permeases and their Infl uence on Flavour Compounds in Beer

Amino acids are the chief source of assimilable nitrogen in wort. Beer fl avour is highly infl uenced by wort nitrogen content and their utilization by yeast. Amino acid permeases that transport amino acids into the yeast are regulated by two mechanisms namely SPS-sensor complex (Ssy1-Ptr3-Ssy5) and nitrogen catabolite repression (NCR). Various by-products and metabolites like alcohols, esters, organic acids, aldehydes and ketones from beer fermentation contribute to beer fl avour. Suffi cient FAN amounts, nitrogen combinations in the wort and a good understanding of the regulation of amino acid permeases help promote adequate growth and a good fl avour profi le during alcoholic fermentations.
Health care costs and life years gained from treatments within the ACTA trial on cryptococcal meningitis : a comparison of antifungal induction strategies in sub Saharan Africa

Background Mortality from cryptoccocal meningitis remains high. The ACTA trial demonstrated that, compared with 2 weeks of amphotericin B (AmB) plus flucystosine (5FC), 1 week of AmB+5FC was associated with lower mortality, and 2 weeks of oral flucanozole (FLU) plus 5FC was non-inferior. Here, we assess the cost-effectiveness. Methods Participants were randomised in a ratio of 2:1:1:1:1 to 2 weeks oral 5FC+FLU, 1 week AmB+FLU, 1 week AmB+5FC, 2 weeks AmB+FLU or 2 weeks AmB+5FC in sites in Malawi, Zambia, Cameroon and Tanzania. Data on individual resource use and health outcomes were collected from all participants. A costing study from the health care perspective was done in Zambia. Treatment costs were estimated using the ingredient-based approach. Cost-effectiveness was measured as incremental costs per life year saved . We used non-parametric bootstrapping of all patients by arm. Cost-effectiveness planes and acceptability curves were done to assess uncertainties, and a tornado sensitivity graph to examine the impact of individual trial parameters. Results Total costs per patient were US$1442 for 2 weeks oral FLU+5FC, $1763 for 1 week AmB+FLU, $1861 for 1 week AmB+5FC, $2125 for 2 weeks AmB+FLU, and $2285 for 2 weeks AmB+5FC. One-week AmB+5FC was less costly and more effective than 2 weeks AmB+5FC. Twoweeks oral FLU+5FC was less costly and as effective as 2 weeks AmB+5FC. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for one week AmB+5FC versus oral FLU+5FC was US $208 (95% CI: 91, 1210) per life year saved. Conclusions Both 1-week AmB+5FC and 2-weeks oral FLU+5FC are cost-effective treatments.
18-04 CGME for general-form regularization with an application to lowfield MRI

We generalize the CGME (Conjugate Gradient Minimal Error) algorithm to the weighted and regularized least squares problem. Analysis of the convergence of generalized CGME and CGLS shows that CGME can be expected to perform better for ill-conditioned regularization matrices. Two different types of regularization are considered: an l1 penalty and an l2 penalty. The l1 problem is solved using Iterative Reweighted Least Squares, which leads to an ill-conditioned regularization matrix. The two methods are applied in a low-field MRI framework. The MRI physics in a low-field scanner are simulated to generate a noisy signal. When an l1 penalty is used and iterative reweighted least squares is employed, GCGLS needs significantly more iterations to converge than GCGME. GCGME has a regularizing effect that leads to fewer artifacts in our simulations. This effect seems to be stronger when a lower number of CG iterations is used. These two observations indicate that GCGME is a very promising alternative to GCGLS.
Automatic Dog Breed Identification

In this paper, a system for automatically identifying dog breeds via images is explained, implemented, and evaluated. The system consists of three major stages: facial keypoint localization, facial normalization, and breed classification. The facial keypoint localization algorithm is intended to be my project for CS231A, while the breed identification algorithm is intended to be my project for CS231N. The intermediate phase is insufficient as a project for either class yet complements both. Further, all three stages are crucial to the performance and understanding of the system as a whole, so all three will be at least briefly characterized here with more detail given to the implementation and evaluation of the breed identification network. Both predictive models have ultimately taken the form of convolutional neural networks yet retain several important differences. Results on the breed identification task are compared to those
Chapter 2 Instructional Scaffolding : Foundations and Evolving Definition

This chapter covers the definition of instructional scaffolding, as well as its theoretical bases, and how those bases are reflected in computer-based scaffolding. Computer-based scaffolding is defined as a computer-based tool that extends and enhances student capabilities as students engage with authentic and ill-structured tasks. Despite its original atheoretical nature, scaffolding was linked to many theoretical frameworks, including activity theory, Adaptive Character of ThoughtRational (ACT-R), and knowledge integration. This variation in theoretical frameworks has led to differing scaffolding strategies (e.g., fading, adding, and fading/ adding strategies) and overall scaffolding approaches. These are described in depth in this chapter.
A NEW ETHNOBIOLOGICAL SIMILARITY INDEX FOR THE EVALUATION OF NOVEL USE REPORTS

Similarity Indices are widely applied in the field of ecology to measure species diversity as well as to map patterns of conservation and monitor threats to biodiversity. Among the known, Jaccard’s and Sorensen’s indices are the most frequently employed similarity Indices. Here, we propose a new and efficient statistical approach in the field of ethnobiology and validate its efficacy by comparing the results with predefined similarity Indices used in previous studies. The core objective was to propose a new index for quantitative ethnobiological analyses and to find out solutions for sorting the plants having similar ethnobiological uses in allied, aligned, national and global regions; as the pre-existing indices like Jaccard’s and Sorensen’s indices provides best estimates in the field of ecology but not in ethnobiological studies. In comparative ethnobiological studies, ethnobiologists use conventional ecological tools for evaluation of similarities and dissimilarities. Our proposed similarity index is based on the quantification of similar uses of common medicinal plants via comparing present study with previously published reports from various areas where, the author(s) have used the Sorensen’s index and/or Jaccard’s index. To assess the significance and validity of this newly developed index, similarities and differences in ethnomedicinal studies on medicinal plants in different regions were evaluated. Data regarding medicinal plants usage here was compared with 20 previously published studies and then analyzed through preexisting indices as well as Rahman’s index to examine the novelty in the study. Our preliminary results revealed noteworthy coherence with the existing similarity indices, albeit, the new index was more efficient than the previous. Our comparison revealed, that as far as common vegetation and floral levels are concerned, the existing ecological coefficients of similarity are efficient and precise; but for similarities in the field of medicinal plant studies certain constraints are overcome by the proposed similarity index. Inferences derived from Rahman’s similarity index (RSI) are as reliable as the previously known and well-established similarity indices. Further, RSI specifically targets the ethnobiological similarities, a limitation in Jaccard’s and Sorensen’s indices. Thus, RSI would be a useful tool/index in the assessment of rigorous quantitative ethnobiological data.
Tree-Ring Width Chronologies and Their Response to Climate in the Qinling Mountains , China

Six localities of tree-ring samples in the Qinling Mountains have been listed in this paper. T hey are scattered in the mountain area from Huashan in the east to Taibai in the west. T he tree-ring width chronologies have been developed and their statistics have been discussed by author. T he results of response functions indicate that the tree-ring growth in most sites mainly responds to precipitation's variation except one high elevation site located in the Taibai Mountain. (