Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using the choice experiment method for valuing improvements in water quality : a simultaneous application to four recreation sites of a river basin

Using the choice experiment method, this paper examined local residents' preferences for water quality management at a speci c river basin in France, in the context of the Water Framework Directive. The study design accounted for improvements in water quality resulting from the measures described in the river basin management plan. Site-speci c attributes were de ned, which included the four sites that compose our water body. Each attribute was assigned two levels: one corresponding to the current situation and the other to the improvement situation. These attributes levels were combined to result in di erent management options, each associated with a `monetary price'. Respondents were asked to choose their preferred alternative in the choice sets, each consisting of three water management options for the four sites (more precisely, two improvement options and the `status quo' option). Then we estimated the value of water quality improvement at each site. Our estimation strategy consisted in estimating rst, a conditional logit model and then, a random parameters logit model in order to take into account heterogeneity of preferences. Results show that people are willing to pay for improvements in water quality. However, we nd that total bene ts accruing from such improvements are not su cient to cover costs of measures. We nally show that protest bids do a ect the results.
Association of bio fi lm production with multidrug resistance among clinical isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa from intensive care unit

A b st ra ct Background and Aims: Given choice, bacteria prefer a community-based, surface-bound colony to an individual existence. The inclination for bacteria to become surface bound is so ubiquitous in diverse ecosystems that it suggests a strong survival strategy and selective advantage for surface dwellers over their free-ranging counterparts. Virtually any surface, biotic or abiotic (animal, mineral, or vegetable) is suitable for bacterial colonization and biofilm formation. Thus, a biofi lm is “a functional consortium of microorganisms organized within an extensive exopolymeric matrix. ” Materials and Methods: The present study was undertaken to detect biofi lm production from the repertoire stocks of Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) obtained from clinical specimens. The tube method was performed to qualitatively detect biofi lm production. Results: A total of 109 isolates of both organisms were included in the study, out of which 42% (46/109) isolates showed biofi lm detection. Among the biofi lm producers, 57% of P. aeruginosa and 73% of A. baumannii showed multidrug resistance (MDR) pattern which was statistically signifi cant in comparison to nonbiofi lm producers (P < 0.001). Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the only study to have tested the biofi lm production in both P. aeruginosa and A. baumannii in a single study. Biofi lm production and MDR pattern were found to be signifi cantly higher in A. baumannii than P. aeruginosa. Antibiotic resistance was signifi cantly higher among biofi lm producing P. aeruginosa than non producers. Similarly, antibiotic resistance was signifi cantly higher among biofi lm producing A. baumannii than non producers.
A fragmentising interface to a large corpus of digitized text: (Post)humanism and non-consumptive reading via features

: While the idea of distant reading does not rule out the possibility of close reading of the individual components of the corpus of digitized text that is being distant-read, this ceases to be the case when parts of the corpus are, for reasons relating to intellectual property, not accessible for consumption through downloading followed by close reading. Copyright restrictions on material in collections of digitized text such as the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) necessitates providing facilities for non-consumptive reading, one of the approaches to which consists of providing users with features from the text in the form of small fragments of text, instead of the text itself. We argue that, contrary to expectation, the fragmentary quality of the features generated by the reading interface does not necessarily imply that the mode of reading enabled and mediated by these features points in an anti-humanist direction. We pose the fragmentariness of the features as paradigmatic of the fragmentation with which digital techniques tend, more generally, to trouble the humanities. We then generalize our argument to put our work on feature-based non-consumptive reading in dialogue with contemporary debates that are currently taking place in philosophy and in cultural theory and criticism about posthumanism and agency. While the locus of agency in such a non-consumptive practice of reading does not coincide with the customary figure of the singular human subject as reader, it is possible to accommodate this fragmentising practice within the terms of an ampler notion of agency imagined as dispersed across an entire technosocial ensemble. When grasped in this way, such a practice of reading may be considered posthumanist but not necessarily antihumanist.
Design and Control of an Electrical Machine for Flywheel Energy-Storage System

Flywheel energy storage systems are now considered as enabling technology for many applications including space satellite low earth orbits, pulse power transfer, hybrid electric vehicles, and many stationary applications. The purpose of this study is the development of a flywheel system for possible application in road vehicles. The present paper reports on the design of the flywheel’s rotor, the electrical machine and its control. The flywheel’s rotor was designed by calculating its dimensions, weight and material’s cost for different energy capacities. The most appropriate machine was chosen as being the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine. The main factors that influence the design of this machine are costs, material limitations, standard specifications and special application factors. For the machine’s control, the sensorless control is desirable instead of using mechanical sensors, in order to reduce total hardware complexity, size, cost and maintenance requirements. The Direct Flux and Torque Control was chosen to control the system for this application.
New studies on human skeletal remains from the ancient Her-donia ( southeast Italy ) . Evidences of tuberculosis and brucellosis : two diseases connected with farm animals

In Spring of 2015 the collections of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Padua, have been transferred in a single location – Palazzo Cavalli – after many decades of alternate events. Here it is intended to reach a rapid conclusion of the cataloguing, studying and valorisation of the entire osteoarchaeological collection. The copious collection (currently it is esteemed that its numerical consistency is around thirty thousand finds) has an undeniable scientific value and it is largely unknown.The finds come from archaeological excavations, different in chronology and geographic sites. The project started with the systematic cataloguing, in order to evaluate the antiquity, the origin of the human osteological finds and re-examine them with the current anthropological methodologies.This paper reports the study of the human skeletal remains found during the archaeological campaigns carried out in 1978 and 1981 at Herdonia (southeast Italy) and reveals new unexpected palaeopathological evidences. Herdonia, osteoarchaeological collection, physical anthropology, tuberculosis, brucellosis, farm animals
Japan Federation of Management Related Academies

The purpose of this study is to identify factors that affect consumers’ decision making regarding purchase of fair trade products in Japan. Fair trade is an approach that guarantees that producers of goods from developing countries are not economically exploited. However, few models have been tested in Japan. Therefore, in this paper, referring to Shaw et al. (2000), which analyzes factors to purchase fair trade products in the UK based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), we examine the effect of knowledge about fair trade and others on purchase intention in Japan. The data used here is from a survey in Ibaraki Prefecture (males and females aged between 20 and 79; n = 213). The results showed that knowledge alone did not directly affect purchase intention. Rather, the more important factor influencing purchase of fair trade products was whether it was favorable or easy for consumers to do. Knowledge was related to the outcome evaluation that purchasing fair trade products would be important for society. Such persons did not only obtain the knowledge, but also conduct altruistic behavior frequently. They believed that altruism is socially important in daily life. Therefore, besides simply raising awareness about fair trade, education is important to understand the social significance of altruistic behavior. We tested only models based on TRA and TPB in this study. On the other hand, there are many possible models to include factors that may explain consumers’ decision making for fair trade products. In addition, in order to generalize the results as a model of fair trade products in Japan, it is necessary to carry out another survey targeting the whole of Japanese population.
Fluid NMR-Performing Power/Reliability Tradeoffs for Applications with Error Tolerance

N-modular redundancy (NMR) [1] has long been the most prevalent fault-tolerance technique. However, traditional NMR is agnostic of application characteristics (especially, an application’s error tolerance) causing it be overly expensive in terms of performance and power. In this paper, we investigate fluid NMR, a framework for NMR-based fault tolerance that takes into account an application’s error tolerance to perform dynamic power/reliability tradeoffs. Our case study using face detection as an example application with error tolerance demonstrates that a fluid NMR framework can produce significant power and performance benefits over traditional NMR
Psychological and Physiological Acoustics Session 4 pPP : Computational Modeling of Sensorineural Hearing Loss : Models and Applications 4 pPP 6 . A perceptual model of auditory deafferentation

Overexposure to intense sound produces temporary threshold shifts but permanent loss of afferent nerve terminals. Here, we present a vocoder designed to explore the perceptual consequences of this type of damage. The basic idea is that the spike train produced by an individual auditory afferent resembles a stochastically digitized binary version of the stimulus waveform and that the quality of the waveform representation in the whole nerve depends on the number of aggregated spike trains. Sounds were processed by filtering them into 10 adjacent frequency bands. For the signal in each band, multiple spike trains were then obtained in an attempt to mimic the different representations of that signal conveyed by different auditory afferents innervating a given cochlear region. The aggregated spike train was multiplied by the original signal to obtain an acoustic version of the simulated nerve waveform. Tone-in-noise and speech-in-noise perception tests were performed by young, normal-hearing listeners using different numbers of afferents per frequency band. Results support that deafferentation impairs perception in noise more than in quiet. The proposed vocoder may be extended to model other types of hearing damage and to guide the design of hearing aids and cochlear implants.
Modeling and forecasting of GRP based on R . Solow model

The article is devoted to the question of using R. Solow dynamic macroeconomic model of economic growth for modeling and forecasting the dynamics of the gross regional product by the example of the Volga Federal District regions. The models were built in current and comparable prices with and without the lag when entering funds. The multiplicative production functions with and without the scientific and technical progress were taken as a production function. For the model implementation, the following macroeconomic indicators were selected: gross regional product, cost of fixed production assets, population, the number of labor resources employed in the economy and the number of economically active population. The article shows the results of numerical experiments on the implementation of R. Solow models, calculation of parameters that characterise scientific and technical progress, including the Solow residual, and the results of forecasting the gross regional product for the Volga Federal District. The corresponding software "EGRMod" was developed to work under Windows OS in the MS Access environment or under the control of the Access Runtime library. To accumulate data, an external Access database is used. Numerical calculations are performed in SQL using VBA. The research is supported by Russian Science Foundation project #16-18-10017 «Complex of programs for forecasting economic development of the region».
Enhanced data mining analysis in higher educational system using rough set theory

One of the biggest challenges that higher education faces today is predicting the behavior of students. Institutions would like to know, something about the performances of the students group wise. Behrouz‐Minaei-Bidgoli (2004) investigated a web based educational system using data mining techniques. He proposed a problem to investigate the performances of the students when the large data base of Students information system (SIS) is given. Generally students’ problems will be classified into different patterns based on the level of students like normal, average and below average. In this paper we attempt to analyze SIS database using rough set theory to predict the future of students.
Histogram-based Threshold Selection of Retinal Feature for Image Registration

Retinal image registration is performed to align two or more retinal images for super-resolution, image mosaicking and longitudinal study applications to assist diagnosis and monitoring retinal diseases. In fundus retina image, local feature such as Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) with illumination invariant Difference of Gaussian (iiDoG) operator is stable and capable of detecting keypoints from nonuniform image. However, iiDoG-SIFT detects keypoints along the vessels and on the background. Estimating geometrical transformation based on background keypoints can lead to inaccurate registration. Therefore, we introduce a histogram-based threshold selection computed from grayscale pixels of 9x9 patch to select keypoints along the vessels. The threshold selection is determined based on standard deviation of the histogram to exclude keypoints on the background while preserving keypoints along the vessels. The proposed method is tested in registering 134 retinal image pairs from Fundus Image Registration Dataset (FIRE) that consists of super-resolution, image mosaicking and longitudinal study applications. There are two main aspects evaluated during the experiment namely, success rate (%) and target registration error (TRE) of the successful registration. The experimental results show that the proposed method successfully registered 100% of retinal images in super-resolution application with mean TRE of 1.796 pixels, 86% in longitudinal study application with mean TRE of 5.161 pixels and 45% in image mosaicking application with mean TRE of 12.565 pixels. Furthermore, the comparative experiment is performed with GDB-ICP, HarrisPIIFD and H-M. The success rate and percentage of accurate registration of the proposed method outperformed others in super-resolution and longitudinal applications.
S-DPOP: Superstabilizing, Fault-containing Multiagent Combinatorial Optimization

Self stabilization in distributed systems is the ability of a system to respond to transient failures by eventually reaching a legal state, and maintaining it afterwards. This makes such systems particularly interesting because they can tolerate faults, and are able to cope with dynamic environments. In this paper we propose the first self stabilizing mechanism for multiagent combinatorial optimization, which stabilizes in a state corresponding to the optimal solution of the optimization problem. Our algorithm is based on dynamic programming, and requires a linear number of messages to find the optimal solution in the absence of faults. We show how our algorithm can be made super-stabilizing, in the sense that while transiting from one stable state to the next, our system preserves the assignments from the previous optimal state (similar to a "last-known-good" state), until the new optimal solution is found (without "random" changes to the variables). We offer equal bounds for the stabilization and the superstabilization time. Furthermore, we describe a general scheme for fault containment and fast response time upon low impact failures. Multiple, isolated failures are handled effectively. To show the merits of our approach we report on experiments with practical sized distributed meeting scheduling problems in a multiagent system.
Preferences, Partners, and Parenthood: Linking Early Fertility Desires, Union Formation Timing, and Achieved Fertility

‘Underachieving’ fertility desires is more common among women with higher levels of education and those who delay the first marriage beyond the mid-twenties. However, the relationship between these patterns, in particular the degree to which marriage postponement explains lower fertility among the highly educated, is not well understood. In this paper, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 cohort to analyze differences in parenthood and achieved parity for men and women, focusing on the role of union formation timing in achieving fertility goals over the life course. We expand on previous research by distinguishing between entry into parenthood and average parity among parents as pathways to underachieving; by considering variation in the impact of marriage timing by education and by stage of the life course; and by comparing results for men and women. We find that the most educated women who desired three or more children are less likely to become mothers both relative to less-educated counterparts who desired large families and relative to their college-educated peers desiring two children. Once they achieve motherhood, however, they do have the highest average parity. No comparable fatherhood differential by desired family size is present. Postponing marriage beyond the age of 30 is associated with decreases in parenthood and average parity. Age patterns are similar for both women and men, pointing at social rather than biological factors for the underachievement of fertility goals.
Efficient phenol removal from aqueous solution using iron-coated pumice and leca as an available adsorbents: evalution of kinetics and isotherm studies

Searching for low cost, accessible, simple implementation, and environmentally friendly adsorbents has been one of the concern of researchers in recent years. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the efficient phenol removal from a synthetic aqueous solution using iron-coated pumice and LECA as an available adsorbents. Bath adsorption experiments were carried out to evaluate the effects of the independent variables such as pH (3-5-7-9-11), initial concentration of phenol (10-50mg/L), contact time (10-60 min) and different concentrations of pumice and LECA (0.2-1 g/100 cc) on the phenol adsorption. The results of the experiments showed that there was a direct relationship between the phenol removal efficiency and increasing the contact time and the adsorbent dosage but it has reverse relationship with the increasing of pH and phenol initial concentration. The optimal condition of parameters for phenol removal were 200 rpm agitation speed, 0.6 g adsorbent dosage, 30 min contact time, and 20 mg/L initial phenol concentration. The study of isotherm and kinetic models showed that the experimental data of the phenol adsorption process were correlated with Freundlich (R2pumice=0.9749, R2LECA=0.9487) and Pseudo-second order (R2pumice=0.9745, R2LECA=0.9486) models. Based on this study’s results, the modified pumice and LECA have a high ability to remove the phenol compounds from aqueous solution.
Progress and challenges in operational earthquake forecasting in New Zealand

Operational earthquake forecasting (OEF) involves the updating of information about the future occurrence of potentially damaging earthquakes, and the officially sanctioned dissemination of this information. GeoNet is the official source of geological hazard information in New Zealand. GeoNet began regularly publishing timevarying probabilities of earthquake occurrence following the September 2010 Darfield earthquake. Over the past six years we have developed a framework for combining different models on different time-scales, ranging from days to years. There are many challenges with the earthquake data when developing forecast models. For example, the local magnitude ML is the standard magnitude in the earthquake catalogue, from which the forecast models are derived, while seismic hazard models use moment magnitude Mw. We derive regression relations of Mw on ML that show that the expected number of earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above is about half for Mw compared to ML. The maximum annual probability of MM7 shaking for the Kaikoura sequence as calculated two months after the earthquake reduces from 60 to 40% when the same regression is applied to the forecasted rates. We continue to work with key stakeholders to obtain feedback on the usefulness of the information provided.
The impact of panitumumab treatment on survival and quality of life in patients with RAS wild-type metastatic colorectal cancer

Abstract Panitumumab is a fully human monoclonal antibody targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). It is currently approved for the treatment of RAS wild-type (WT) metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) in combination with chemotherapy in first- and second-line and as monotherapy in chemorefractory patients. This review will provide an overview of main efficacy data on panitumumab from its early development up to latest evidences, including novel perspectives on predictive biomarkers of anti-EGFRs efficacy and mechanisms of secondary resistance. Quality of life (QoL) related issues and panitumumab safety profile will be addressed as well.
The importance of SME Bank selection criteria-a review through the literature

This study analyzes the important role of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) on the economic growth for both developed and developing countries. Based on the literature review, this study identified very few research work, which were conducted based on SME bank selection. However, bank plays a major role for SME’s sustainability and growth. The future scope of this study can identify the important factors for the SME clients in choosing a bank in Bangladesh as no such research has been done. Moreover, we can also compare the important factors that SME clients consider among developed and developing countries.
Decrease of non-point water pollution : A practical algorithm for the user-friendly presentation of the cost-effectiveness comparison of management measures

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) establishes the framework for the water quality protection in EU. This legislation defines the use of the “Cost-Effectiveness Analysis” (CEA) for the identification of the least cost related management measures (WFD, Article 5, Annex III) and requires involvement and close cooperation with users (WFD, Article 14). Within these principles a practical and simple algorithm is constructed for the user-friendly presentation of the cost-effective measures, applied for the decrease of the water pollution by agricultural run-off. Furthermore, in the disseminated information to users, regarding the CEA procedures, data for the estimation of the cost of a measure should be also included.