Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How do pedestrians balance safety, walking time, and the utility of crossing the road? A stated preference study

This paper presents the results of a stated preference survey to estimate the value of reductions in community severance (the “barrier effect” of transport infrastructure on the mobility of pedestrians). In a first exercise, participants chose between crossing a road in a place without designated facilities or walking additional minutes to a place where the road is covered over. Half of the participants never chose to cross, regardless of the road design, traffic characteristics, and length of the detour. On average, the other half would only cross the road if the detour was at least 7.9 minutes (or longer, if the road had extra traffic lanes, no central reservation, or high traffic density). In a second exercise, participants were asked whether they would cross the road to access a cheaper shop or a bus stop on the other side of the road, instead of a more expensive one on their side of the road. 38% never chose to cross. The other 62% would only cross a road with high traffic density if the saving was at least £2.8, but would cross roads with other characteristics for smaller savings. Overall, the study suggests that many people are not willing to trade-off pedestrian safety with shorter walking times or cost savings. People who are willing to trade-off tend to attach greater importance to traffic density, comparing with aspects such as road design and traffic speed.
Thickness distribution of Antarctic sea ice

[1] Ship-based observations are used to describe regional and seasonal changes in the thickness distribution and characteristics of sea ice and snow cover thickness around Antarctica. The data set comprises 23,373 observations collected over more than 2 decades of activity and has been compiled as part of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Antarctic Sea Ice Processes and Climate (ASPeCt) program. The results show the seasonal progression of the ice thickness distribution for six regions around the continent together with statistics on the mean thickness, surface ridging, snow cover, and local variability for each region and season. A simple ridge model is used to calculate the total ice thickness from the observations of level ice and surface topography, to provide a best estimate of the total ice mass, including the ridged component. The long-term mean and standard deviation of total sea ice thickness (including ridges) is reported as 0.87 ± 0.91 m, which is 40% greater than the mean level ice thickness of 0.62 m. Analysis of the structure function along north/south and east/west transects revealed lag distances over which sea ice thickness decorrelates to be of the order of 100–300 km, which we use as a basis for presenting near-continuous maps of sea ice and snow cover thickness plotted on a 2.5 � 5.0 grid.
The Interactions Between Portfolio Size and Concentration An Analysis of the U.S. Venture Capital Market

This study examines how a venture capitalist determines the optimal number of companies in her portfolio of investments. We especially focus our analysis on the relationship between a portfolio‟s size and its concentration in a particular sector (industry, geographical, or developmental stage). Our empirical investigation uses a dataset of 2,125 VC funds that made 91,486 investments between 1975 and 2003. We hypothesize, based on a literature review of incentives and agency costs related to portfolio size, that a fund focused on one sector will invest in more companies. This hypothesis draws upon the theory that a concentrated fund benefits from an improved ability to reallocate resources across startups. However, we find the opposite to be the case; portfolio size is significantly negatively related to concentration. We present a model that demonstrates that the constrained deal flow faced by a fund concentrated in a specific sector may negatively impact portfolio size. Finally, we provide evidence in support of this alternate hypothesis by utilizing the concept of a VC firm‟s “network position. ”
DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS, FACIES AND DIAGENESIS OF THE UPPER JURASSIC-LOWER CRETACEOUS CARBONATE DEPOSITS OF THE BUILA-VÂNTURARIÞA MASSIF, SOUTHERN CARPATHIANS (ROMANIA)

The Buila-Vânturariţa Massif consists of massive Upper Jurassic reef limestones (Kimmeridgian–Tithonian) and Lower Cretaceous (Berriasian–Valanginian, and Barremian–? Lower Aptian) deposits. Besides corals and stromatoporoids, a wide range of micro-encrusters and microbialites has contributed to their development. In this study, the authors describe briefly and interpret the main facies associations and present the microfossil assemblages that are important for age determination. The distribution of facies associations, corroborated with the micropalaeontological content and early diagenetic features, indicate different depositional environments. The carbonate successions show the evolution of the Late Jurassic–Early Cretaceous depositional environments from slope and reef-front to internal-platform sedimentary settings, including peritidal environments in the lowermost Cretaceous. Early diagenesis, represented by synsedimentary cementation in the form of micritization (including cement crusts in the reef microframework), followed by dissolution, cementation and dolomitization in a meteoric regime, and void-filling late cementation during the burial stage.
Molecular investigations on grain filling rate under terminal heat stress in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

Grain yield under post anthesis high temperature stress is largely influenced by grain filling rate (GFR). To investigate molecular basis of this trait, a set of 111 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from Raj 4014, a heat sensitive genotype and WH 730, heat tolerant cultivar was phenotyped during 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 crop seasons, under field conditions. The difference in GFR (dGFR) between the timely and late sown conditions was used as a phenotypic parameter to find association with molecular markers, as parental lines exhibited significant difference for this trait. The mapping population showed clear-cut segregation pattern for differences in GFR between timely and late sown conditions. About 75% of the progenies showed no difference while 25% showed significant difference in GFR under high temperature stress created by late sown condition. To study the association of this trait with the markers, the parental lines were screened with 300 simple sequence repeat (SSR) microsatellite markers out of which 15% (45) were polymorphic between parental lines. These polymorphic markers were utilized for genotyping a subset, comprising of 43 RILs that had clear contrasting variation for dGFR. Regression analysis revealed significant association of dGFR of RILs with two markers viz., Xbarc04 and Xgwm314 with coefficients of determination (R2) values of 0.10 and 0.06, respectively. Keywords : Grain filling rate (GFR), simple sequence repeat (SSR), heat tolerance, wheat African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(28), pp. 4439-4445
Non-Volume Preserving-based Feature Fusion Approach to Group-Level Expression Recognition on Crowd Videos

Group-level emotion recognition (ER) is a growing research area as the demands for assessing crowds of all sizes is becoming an interest in both the security arena and social media. This work investigates group-level expression recognition on crowd videos where information is not only aggregated across a variable length sequence of frames but also over the set of faces within each frame to produce aggregated recognition results. In this paper, we propose an effective deep feature level fusion mechanism to model the spatial-temporal information in the crowd videos. Furthermore, we extend our proposed NVP fusion mechanism to temporal NVP fussion appoarch to learn the temporal information between frames. In order to demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of each component in the proposed approach, three experiments were conducted: (i) evaluation on the AffectNet database to benchmark the proposed emoNet for recognizing facial expression; (ii) evaluation on EmotiW2018 to benchmark the proposed deep feature level fusion mechanism NVPF; and, (iii) examine the proposed TNVPF on an innovative Group-level Emotion on Crowd Videos (GECV) dataset composed of 627 videos collected from social media. GECV dataset is a collection of videos ranging in duration from 10 to 20 seconds of crowds of twenty (20) or more subjects and each video is labeled as positive, negative, or neutral.
An Efficient Video Coding Algorithm Targeting Low Bitrate Stationary Cameras

One of the crucial factors in video monitoring systems or video surveillance systems is the bitrate while the complexity plays the most important part in the embedded system. Recently, people are trying to reduce the bitrate of these types of systems and the complexity of the algorithm for embedded systems. The bitrate can be reduced by using the current state-ofthe-art video codecs such as H.264/AVC or the newest video standard H.265. However, these codecs have very high processing dependencies and complexity. By employing the properties of stationary cameras, we proposed an efficient video coding algorithm for embedded systems with low complexity, and good compression ratio. The algorithm is the combination of an simple but powerful motion detection, called Σ−∆, and JPEG algorithm. After the first frame in a sequence, the computation is reduced by processing only the moving blocks instead of the whole frame. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated and validated using SystemC.
Trends in the Accuracy of USDA Production Forecasts For Beef and Pork

Trends in the accuracy of USDA forecasts of beef and pork production and supply are evaluated for the period 1982-96. Findings of the study show that USDA forecasts underestimated production and supply in the 1980s, but this bias has now disappeared. The variance of forecasts also has declined. Thus the accuracy of the forecasts has improved. The most recent USDA forecasts were found to meet the criteria of optimal forecasts, while those of the 1980s were not optimal.
PSEUDOAFFINITY CHROMATOGRAPHY ENRICHMENT OF GLYCATED PEPTIDES FOR MONITORING ADVANCED GLYCATION END PRODUCTS (AGES) IN METABOLIC DISORDERS

Advanced Glycation End (AGE) products are produced due to diabetic progression and they are responsible for many complications in the diabetic disorder. The diabetic progression is measured, particularly following glycated hemoglobin using specific antibodies. However, the most abundant protein in blood, human serum albumin, is also found to be glycated which has a much shorter half life and gives information on short term glycemic control. In addition, glycated albumins are considered as markers of diabetic complications such as nephropathy, peripheral vascular calcification and also in Alzheimer’s disease. The glycation proceeds from the interaction between aldehyde group of sugar and the free amino group of the protein, resulting in the formation of Schiff’s base, which undergoes a series of modifications leading to generation of imidazoyl derivatives of amino acids known as Amadori rearrangement products. The imidazoyl derivatives from arginine and lysine are the most prominent modifications observed in proteins in the presence of reducing sugar and these imidazoyl derivatives have an affinity towards certain transition metal ions. Based on our earlier exhaustive work on trapping the histidine peptides using transition metal ion, Cu(II) linked to imino-diacetate complex, we explored Cu(II) immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) as a potential tool for specific detection of glycated peptides of human serum albumin. Our results clearly demonstrate that Cu(II) IMAC is able to detect glycated peptides very efficiently while the non-glycated forms were not retained on the Cu (II) column as confirmed by LC-MS/MS analysis. We further discuss the utility of IMAC technology to enrich the detection of AGE products in plasma. We anticipate that these studies may provide valuable information on understanding disease pathologies and the potential of AGE products as biomarkers of various diseases including neurodegenerative, renal and cardiovascular diseases. Keywords : Pseudoaffinity chromatography; Glycated peptides; Glycation end products; AGE; Metabolic disorders
Removing foreground objects by using depth information from multi-view images

In this paper, we present a novel method for removing foreground objects in multi-view images. Unlike the conventional methods, which locate the foreground objects interactive way, we intend to develop an automated system. The proposed algorithm consists of two modules: 1) object detection and removal, and 2) detected foreground filling stage. The depth information of multi-view images is a critical cue adopted in this algorithm. By multi-view images, it is not meant a multi-camera equipped system. We use only one digital camera and take photos by hand. Although it may cause bad matching result, it is sufficient to detect and remove the foreground object by using coarse depth information. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides an effective tool, which can be used in applications for digital camera, photo-realistic scene generation, digital cinema and so on.
Safety assessment of transgenic plums and grapevines expressing viral coat protein genes: new insights into real environmental impact of perennial plants engineered for virus resistance.

The potential impact of transgenic plums and grapevines expressing viral coat protein (CP) gene constructs on the diversity and dynamics of virus populations was assessed under open and confined conditions in the frame of a research program sponsored by the European Commission. Across all field trials conducted in different locations (France, Romania, and Spain) and environments (continental and Mediterranean), transgenic plums expressing the CP gene of Plum pox virus (PPV) and transgenic grapevines expressing the CP gene of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) had no detectable effect on the emergence of recombinant PPV and GFLV species over eight-ten and three years, respectively. Also, no statistically significant difference was found in the number and type of aphids, including viruliferous individuals, and other arthropods that visited transgenic and nontransgenic plum trees. In addition, Apple chlorotic leaf spot virus, Prune dwarf virus, and Prunus necrotic ringspot virus did not influence the stability of the engineered resistance to PPV in co-infected transgenic plums over three dormancy periods. Further, under confined conditions, no recombinant virus was found to detectable level in transgenic grapevines expressing the CP gene of Grapevine virus A (GVA) or Grapevine virus B (GVB) that were challenged with the homologous or heterologous virus, despite high accumulation of transgene transcripts. Also, translocation of transgene-derived products, i.e. protein, mRNAs and siRNAs, did not occur to detectable level from transgenic grapevine rootstocks expressing the GFLV CP gene to nontransgenic scions. Altogether, our transgenic plums and grapevines expressing viral genes had a neutral impact on virus populations and non-target organisms over extended time. These findings provide new insights into the environmental impact of transgenic perennial crops engineered for virus resistance. It is expected that they will assist national and international regulatory authorities in making scientifically based decisions for the release of virus-resistant transgenic crops.
Research Online Research Online Vulnerability assessment of a large sized power system considering a new Vulnerability assessment of a large sized power system considering a new index based on power system loss index based on power system loss

Abstract The concept of power system vulnerability assessment combines information on the level of system security as well as information on a wide range of situations, events and contingencies with regards to which a system is vulnerable. This paper attempts to investigate and evaluate the effect of line outage, generation outage and amount of load disconnected on the power transmission network losses of a large size power system. These effects will be investigated and evaluated using new proposed method based on vulnerability index of power system loss. The objectives of this work is to evaluate and compare the efficiency of the proposed vulnerability index based on total power system loss in assessing the vulnerability of a large size power system with other known vulnerability indices based on anticipated loss of load as well as generation vulnerability index. Case studies were carried out using the Power System Analysis and Toolbox (PSAT) on the 300-bus test system the vulnerability indices were calculated using the Matlab program. The impact of each contingency on the result of power system loss is discussed Abstract – Vulnerability assessment of power systems is important so as to determine their ability to continue to provide service in case of any unforeseen catastrophic contingency such as power system component failures, communication system failures, human operator error, and natural calamity. An approach towards the development of on-line power system vulnerability assessment is by means of using an artificial neural network (ANN), which is being used successfully in many areas of power systems because of its ability to handle the fusion of multiple sources of data and information. An important consideration when applying ANN in power system vulnerability assessment is the proper selection and dimension reduction of training features. This paper aims to investigate the effect of using various feature extraction methods on the performance of ANN as well as to evaluate and compare the efficiency of the proposed feature extraction method named as neural network weight extraction. For assessing vulnerability of power systems, a vulnerability index based on power system loss is used and considered as the ANN output. To illustrate the effectiveness of ANN considering various feature extraction methods for vulnerability assessment on a large sized power system, it is verified on the IEEE 300-bus test system.
Managing triads in a military avionics service maintenance network in Taiwan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of triad structures, and the management mechanisms adopted by the focal company, affect cooperative performance.Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a social network perspective to examine the triad management phenomenon in the military avionics maintenance context, which is closely associated with the field of operations management.Findings – This paper demonstrates that different triad structures and management mechanisms influence perceived cooperative performance. Four main findings emerged: in a triad, a firm playing a bridging role perceives higher cooperative performance than when playing a peripheral role in the triad or being located in a fully connected triad. When a firm plays the bridging role in a triad, and has a high level of trust, this leads to higher perceived cooperative performance. When a firm plays a peripheral role in a triad, high levels of coordination mechanism combined with high levels of trust re.
Role of vanadium pentoxide hole-extracting nanolayer in rubrene/C 70 -based small molecule organic solar cells

Vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) was inserted between the donor layer and the anode as a hole-extracting nanolayer. Compared with devices without a hole-extracting layer, short-circuit current density (JSC), open-circuit voltage (VOC), fill factor (FF), and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of rubrene/C70-based heterojunction solar cells with 3 nm V2O5 nanolayer are enhanced by 99%, 73%, 20%, and 310%, respectively. We found that V2O5 interlayer can effectively suppress the contact resistance and increase the hole transport capability. The dependence of the device performance on V2O5 layer thickness as well as fill factor on exciton dissociation and charge transport was also investigated in detail.
Prevalence of Depression and Cognitive Distortion among a Cohort of Malaysian Tertiary Students

The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of depression, cognitive distortion and their asso- ciated factors among a cohort of 400 Malaysia tertiary students, recruited from 40 colleges and universities located at East and West Malaysia. Participants were assessed using Becks Depression Inventory (BDI)-IA, Automatic Thoughts Ques- tionnaire (ATQ) and several self-designed questions. The prevalence of depression among tertiary students in Malaysia was 21.3%, with mean BDI and ATQ scores significantly lower (p<0.05) among males (9.6±8.6 and 55.0±19.0, respectively), compared to females (11.6±9.7 and 60.7±23.6, respectively). BDI scores were significantly different among fields of study (p=0.022), but not levels of study (p=0.154). Severity of depression had a strong correlation (r=0.821) with the level of cognitive distortion. Substance use was more prevalent among males during depression while suicidal thoughts were more prevalent among those tested to be depressed. Females and those found to be depressed were more prone to skip meal during depression. Understanding the relation between depression, cognitive distortion and its associated factors would benefit intervention effort among tertiary students, which is known to be a prone age group.
Telecommunication Network Survivability for Improved Reliability in Smart power Grids

iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background 1 1.2 Motivations 3 1.3 Problem Statement 6 1.4 Scope and Objectives 6 1.5 Research Approach 6 1.6 Thesis Outline 7 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND SURVEY 8 2.1 Integrated Smart Grid Failure Modelling 8 2.2 Network Protection Schemes 13 2.2.1 Link Protection Schemes 13 2.2.2 Path Protection Schemes 15 2.2.3 Restoration Schemes 16 2.3 Open Challenges 17 CHAPTER 3: COUPLED TRANSMISSION GRID ANALYSIS 19 3.1 Network Survivability Schemes 21 3.1.1 No Protection (Baseline) 22 3.1.2 Basic Link-Disjoint Protection 24 3.1.3 Risk-Aware Link-Disjoint Protection 24 3.2 Transmission Grid Fault Analysis 26 CHAPTER 4: PERFORMANCE EVALUATION 29 4.1 Power Transmission Grid Topology 29 4.2 Analysis Results and Findings 32 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK 37 5.1 Conclusions 37 5.2 Future Directions 38
An effective prototyping method for delivering interaction design in industrial design education

Increasingly industrial designers are required to engage in the design of computer-embedded products. Due to the interactive nature of these products, efficient prototyping is becoming more critical in the design process. This paper presents a designer-oriented prototype development method that facilitates the construction of fully functional physical prototypes. Unlike the multi-media authoring tools commonly used to date, this method employs a cheap and widely available software application: Microsoft PowerPoint with embedded Visual Basic. The method has been designed for use by programming non-literate designers and allows interactive physical prototypes to be created and tested without extensive specialist knowledge. This was achieved in part by simple modifications to a standard computer keyboard. Our case study on the use of this method in the teaching of information ergonomics demonstrated that students could effectively produce software-hardware hybrid prototypes with minimum effort in a short time scale. This method offers an excellent means of collaboration between designers and professionals from different domains. The prototyping method enables rapid and iterative design cycles in design education, research and practice.