Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gerrymandering and Political Gridlock in the US

In the recent decades gerrymandering became one of the effective tactics to guarantee the outcomes of general elections. Since elected officials know that they are safe in the next election cycle, they only are to appeal to one partisan interest group. This discourages congressmen from working across party lines and leads to congressional gridlock. In this paper we discuss our approach to measuring gerrymandering of a congressional district. Starting with the ratio of the shape’s area to its perimeter as compactness we analyzed which congressional districts are gerrymandered. Furthermore, we deployed Partisan Voting Index data to identify Swing districts and districts with one-party leaning. Comparing mean compactness of all three groups we concluded that the Swing districts are less gerrymandered compared to party-aligned ones. We discuss the challenges, results and future work in analyzing congressional data to understand the impact of gerrymandering.
LMVP: Video Predictor with Leaked Motion Information

We propose a Leaked Motion Video Predictor (LMVP) to predict future frames by capturing the spatial and temporal dependencies from given inputs. The motion is modeled by a newly proposed component, motion guider, which plays the role of both learner and teacher. Specifically, it {\em learns} the temporal features from real data and {\em guides} the generator to predict future frames. The spatial consistency in video is modeled by an adaptive filtering network. To further ensure the spatio-temporal consistency of the prediction, a discriminator is also adopted to distinguish the real and generated frames. Further, the discriminator leaks information to the motion guider and the generator to help the learning of motion. The proposed LMVP can effectively learn the static and temporal features in videos without the need for human labeling. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that LMVP can yield state-of-the-art results.
Pliocene Indonesian Throughflow and Leeuwin Current dynamics: Implications for Indian Ocean polar heat flux

To understand the gradual global cooling during the mid-Pliocene (3.5–2.5 Myr ago) one needs to consider the tectonical constriction of tropical seaways, which affected ocean circulation and the evolution of climate. Here we use paired measurements of δ18O and Mg/Ca ratios of planktonic foraminifera to reconstruct the Pliocene hydrography of the western tropical Indian Ocean (Site 709C) and changes in the Leeuwin Current in the eastern subtropical Indian Ocean (Site 763A) in response to Indonesian Gateway dynamics. Today, the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) and, subsequently, the warm southward flowing Leeuwin Current off Western Australia are essential for the polar heat transport in the Indian Ocean. During 3.5–3 Ma, sea surface temperatures significantly dropped in the Leeuwin Current area, becoming since ~3.3 Ma 2°C–3°C cooler than the rather unchanged sea surface temperatures from the eastern and western tropical Indian Ocean. We refer this drop in sea surface temperatures to a weakened Leeuwin Current with severe climatic effects on Western Australia induced by a tectonically reduced surface ITF. We suggest that this reduced surface ITF led to a diminished poleward heat transport in the Indian Ocean resulting in a weakened Leeuwin Current and possibly to cooling of the Benguela upwelling system.
Random processes and phylogenetic loss caused by plant invasions

Aim Although biological invasions represent a major cause of biodiversity loss, the actual mechanisms driving species extinctions remain insufficiently understood. Here we investigate the role of three processes as drivers of phylogenetic loss in invaded local plant communities, namely the ‘biotic resistance’, ‘environmental filtering’ and ‘functional equivalence’ hypotheses. Location Balearic Islands (western Mediterranean). Methods We quantified the phylogenetic diversity and structure of 109 pairs of invaded and non-invaded local plant communities from two Mediterranean islands. Each pair contained one control plot and one plot invaded either by the deciduous tree Ailanthus altissima, the succulent subshrubs Carpobrotus spp. or the pseudoannual geophyte Oxalis pes-caprae. We combined generalized linear models, analyses of phylogenetic community structure and generalized linear mixed models using a Markov chain Monte Carlo technique (MCMCglmm) to contrast the ‘biotic resistance’, ‘environmental filtering’ and ‘functional equivalence’ hypotheses. Results While the phylogenetic structure of the non-invaded communities was not more clustered or overdispersed than expected by chance, minimum phylogenetic distance to the invasive species increased in invaded assemblages, in which the magnitude of phylogenetic diversity loss ranged from 6 to 37% depending on the invader’s identity. Invader or island identity did not explain the probabilities of native species becoming locally extinct. Rather, the likelihood of extinction was mainly explained by species abundance, with scarcer species exhibiting a higher chance of becoming locally extinct. Species identity explained a small fraction of the variation in extinction risk (12%), independently of each species’ evolutionary history. Main conclusions The most relevant driver of local extinction is a stochastic process where less abundant species tend to disappear more frequently irrespective of their evolutionary history. This has strong implications for conservation because it suggests that in the study region the invaders are unlikely to drive regional and global extinctions except in cases where the native species is already rare.
Social Capital and Social Trust in Britain

Most quantitative research in social capital focuses on civic engagement in formal organisations. Data on social capital in informal social networks are harder to obtain and there has also been insufficient means for investigating this. In this paper, we use the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to conceptualise and measure three types of social capital: neighbourhood attachment, social network and civic participation. The first two refer to informal social networks and the last to formal social networks. We use gllamm (Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Models) to construct the latent variable scores from the categorical component variables. We also analyse the socio-cultural determinants of the three types of social capital and their impacts on social trust. The results show that socio-cultural conditions affect social capital generation. People in disadvantaged positions are more likely to draw social capital from weak ties and those in advantaged positions are more likely to do so from formal civic engagement. We also find that social capital has an effect over and above people’s own socio-cultural positions. Informal social networks, especially having good neighbourly relations, tend to foster greater trust than does formal civic engagement.
International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management Supplier sustainability assessment for the UK defence industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a framework for assessing supplier sustainability (in terms of survivability) within the defence industry based on financial and operational dimensions. Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a case study approach to identify a research gap in the area of supplier performance measurement and proposes five dimensions to assess supplier sustainability from the review of literature and industry practice while employing a systematic approach to generate measures for each dimension with suggested actions to improve sustainability. Findings – The sustainability measures, dimensions and improvement actions developed were validated with industrial experts from three defence companies and implemented as a sustainability system. A case study was applied and the results were generated. Research limitations/implications – Future research could include further case study application and application of dimensions and measures to other industries. Practical implications – The paper offers managerial implications about the need to consider the survivability of suppliers in the long term, especially in the current economic climate and think about mitigation strategies to enable economic sustainability. Originality/value – This paper adds to the existing knowledge in the supply chain area and proposes a novel approach to supplier performance measurement and management which is holistic.
Locally Finding and Testing Dense Bipartite-like Subgraphs

We study local algorithms for finding and testing dense bipartite-like subgraphs which characterize cyber-communities in the web [21]. We use the bipartiteness (ratio) of a set as the quality measure that was introduced by Trevisan [37]. Our first algorithm, denoted as FindDB(v, K, θ), is a local exploration algorithm that takes as input a starting vertex v, a volume target K and a bipartiteness parameter θ and outputs an induced subgraph of G. It is guaranteed to have the following approximation performance: for any subgraph S with bipartiteness θ, there exists a subset Sθ ⊆ S such that vol(Sθ) ≥ vol(S)/9 and that if the starting vertex v ∈ Sθ and vol(S) ≤ K, the algorithm FindDB(v, K, θ) outputs a subgraph with volume O(K 2 Δ/θ 2 ) and bipartiteness O( √ θ). The running time of the algorithm is O( K 2 θ 2 (log K θ + Δ)), where Δi s the maximum degree ofG, independent of the size of G. By using the analysis of the local exploration algorithm, we give a onesided testing algorithm for testing if every small subgraph in the graph is not dense bipartite-like. A graph G is a (K, θ)-non-dense bipartite graph (abbreviated as (K, θ)-NDBGraph) if every subset of volume at most K has bipartiteness at least θ. A graph G is � -far from any (K, θ)-NDBGraph if
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Audit firm rotation , audit firm tenure and earnings conservatism

This study aims to contribute to the debate around the possibility of mandating audit firm rotation. Specifically, it examines conservatism as an attribute of earnings quality, which has not attracted particular attention in the auditor rotation research. Applying regression analyses on a sample, which consists of U.S. firms for the period 1980-2006, our findings indicate that conservatism in reported earnings increases after the rotation of the audit firm. However, our results lack significance. Moreover, our results indicate that conservatism in reported earnings decreases as the tenure of the audit firm lengthens. Consequently, mandating audit firm rotation might have a positive impact on conservatism and thus on the quality of reported earnings. However, additional analysis shows that this impact might not have existed in the later part of the sample period.
Exotic Femininity: Prostitution Reviews and the Sexual Stereotyping of Asian Women

Studies on prostitution have typically focused on the experiences, problems, and histories of prostitutes, rather than examining men who seek to purchase sex. Race has also been overlooked as a central factor in shaping the sex industry and the motivations of men who seek to purchase sex. This study utilizes online reviews of prostitutes to examine the way men who purchase sex discuss Asian prostitutes in comparison to White prostitutes. This paper traces the history of colonialism and ideas of the exotic Orient to modern stereotypes of Asian women. These stereotypes are then used to frame a quantitative and qualitative analysis of online reviews of prostitutes and compare the ways in which Asian prostitutes and white prostitutes are discussed. Further, the reviews are used to examine more broadly what services, traits, and behaviors are considered desirable by men who use prostitutes. The study finds that there are significant quantitative and qualitative differences in how men discuss Asian and White prostitutes within their reviews, and that these differences appear to be shaped by racially fetishizing stereotypes of Asian women. Prostitution also appears to reinforce male dominance and patriarchy in the form of masculine control and the feminine servicing of male sexual and emotional needs.
Translation model adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation with domain classifier

In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation method for SMT systems. Specifically, our method only using monolingual data in a target language to adapting translation model, our system brings improvements over the SMT baseline system. We use two methods to improve the quality of SMT system: (i) classify phrases on the phrase-table of the SMT baseline system, and (ii) adapt to translation model through updating the direct translation probability of phrases. Our experiments are applied to the EnglishVietnamese language pair and use of law domain (in-domain) and general domain (outdomain) data sets. The English-Vietnamese parallel corpus is provided by the IWSLT 2015 organizers and the experimental results showed that our method significantly outperformed the baseline system. Our system improved on the quality of machine translation in the law domain up to 0.9 BLEU score over baseline trained on the English-Vietnamese data set.
Multiscale seismic tomography

Summary Seismic traveltime tomography is commonly discretized by a truncated expansion of the pursued model in terms of chosen basis functions. Whether parametrization affects the actual resolving power of a given data set as well as the robustness of the resulting earth model has long been seriously debated. From the perspective of the model resolution, however, there is one important aspect of the parametrization issue of seismic tomography that has yet to be systematically explored, that is, the space–frequency localization of a chosen parametrization. In fact, the two most common parametrizations tend to enforce resolution in each of their own particular domains. Namely, parametrization in terms of spherical harmonics with global support tends to emphasize spectral resolution while sacrificing the spatial resolution, whereas the compactly supported pixels tend to behave in the opposite manner. Some of the significant discrepancies among tomographic models are very likely to be manifestations of this effect, when dealing with data sets with non-uniform sampling. With an example of the tomographic inversion for the lateral shear wave heterogeneity of the D″ layer using S–SKS traveltimes, we demonstrate an alternative parametrization in terms of the multiresolution representation of the pursued model function. Unlike previous attempts of multiscale inversion that invoke pixels with variable sizes, or overlay several layers of tessellation with different grid intervals, our formulation invokes biorthogonal generalized Harr wavelets on a sphere. We show that multiresolution representation can be constructed very easily from an existing block-based discretization. A natural scale hierarchy of the pursued model structure constrained by the resolving power of the given sampling is embedded within the solution obtained. It provides a natural regularization scheme based on the actual ray-path sampling and is thus free from a priori prejudices intrinsic to most regularization schemes. Unlike solutions obtained through spherical harmonics or spherical blocks that tend to collapse structures onto ray paths, our parametrization imposes regionally varying Nyquist limits, that is, robustly resolvable local wavelength bands within the obtained solution.
Molecular Identification and Phylogenetic Analysis of Pseudoperonospora cubensis Isolates in Peninsula Malaysia

Thirteen isolates of Pseudoperonospora cubensis, the causal agent of downy mildew, were collected from cucurbit fields in five states of the western part of Peninsular Malaysia during its growing season between November 2008 and March 2009. The host range of these isolates was determined previously using leaf disc assay and the results indicated that there were 12 pathotypes among these isolates. The objective of this study was to analyze the 13 isolates for phylogenetic relationship using internal transcribed spacers (ITS) of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) and mitochondrial COX-II regions. A high sequence similarity among the 13 isolates and similar sequences from GenBank were detected in ITS (>99%) and COX-II (>98%) regions. Phylogenetic analysis of the 13 isolates based on Minimum Evolution method performed on ITS and COX-II regions revealed five and three groupings, respectively. However, no relationship was found between the phylogenetic groupings using both genes and pathotypes in this study.
Latitudinal patterns of diversity in the world collection of pearl millet landraces at the ICRISAT genebank

The genebank at ICRISAT, Patancheru, India conserves a total of 19,063 pearl millet landraces from latitudes ranging from 33.00° in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) to 34.37° in the Northern Hemisphere (NH). In the present study, the NH was found to be the major region for growing pearl millet landraces (80.5%). More landraces were found at lower latitudes ( < 20°) in both hemispheres than at higher latitudes. The latitude range of 10°–15° in the NH and 15°–20° in the SH were found to be important source regions for the prevalence of pearl millet, with 39.6% and 13.1% in the world collection of landraces, respectively. Landraces from lower-latitude regions on either side of the equator varied widely for all traits. Landraces from the 5°–10°N latitude region flowered late and grew tall in the rainy and post-rainy seasons and produced more tillers. Landraces from the 10°–15°N latitude region produced few tillers and had long and thick panicles with larger seeds. Long-bristled bird-resistant landraces were considerable at latitudes of 10°–15°S and 20°–25°S. The minimum temperature at the collection sites was found to be one of the important factors for determining the patterns of the prevalence of pearl millet across the latitudes. Late-maturing, tall and high-tillering landraces from lower-latitude regions were better sources for fodder production. Early-maturing landraces producing long and thick panicles with large seeds from mid-latitude regions (15°–20°) in both hemispheres were useful for developing high-yielding cultivars. Using the latitudinal patterns of diversity in pearl millet landraces, missions may be launched to explore high-diversity, under-collected and threatened areas for the collection of materials of interest at latitudes of 15°–20°.
Human Capital, Social Capital and Scientific Research in Europe: An Application of Linear Hierarchical Models

The theory of human capital is one way to explain individual decisions to produce scientific research. However, this theory, even if it reckons the importance of time in science, is too short for explaining the existing diversity of scientific output. The present paper introduces the social capital of Bourdieu (1980), Coleman (1988) and Putnam (1995) as a necessary complement to explain the creation of scientific human capital. This paper connects these two concepts by means of a hierarchical econometric model which makes the distinction between the individual level (human capital) and the cluster level of departments (social capital). The paper shows how a collection of variables can be built from a bibliographic data base indicating both individual behaviour including mobility and collective characteristics of the department housing individual researchers. The two level hierarchical model is estimated on fourteen European countries using bibliometric data in the fields of economics.
Risky tests, verisimilitude, and path analysis

P. E. Meehl and N. G. Waller (2002) described a novel approach for appraising the verisimilitude of path analysis models. This approach uses limited information parameter estimates when assessing model fit and a nonparametric badness-of-fit measure that relies on path diagram combinatories. R. C. MacCallum, M. W. Browne, and K. J. Preacher (2002); C. S. Reichardt (2002); and S. Mulaik (2002) have provided comments on this work. In this article the authors respond to the commentators and reemphasize the importance of subjecting causal models to severe (risky) tests.
A Simple Two-Stage PCR Based Method to Construct Gene Disruption Cassette

Use of microorganisms in fabricating products of commercial importance has been practiced for several years. Genes in microorganism codes for selected metabolic pathway through which the end product is obtained. It cannot be assuned that all genes in an organism will be useful in serving the stated cause. In order to achieve the desired product, some genes coding the vital pathways have to be silenced. Several methods have been used for constructing gene disruption cassettes, but some prove ineffective because of the complexity in methodology and instability of the construct. Here we have described a two-stage PCR based method for the construction of gene disruption cassette with following advantages: (1) stability of the construct; (2) simple protocol; (3) cost effective and feasibility. Thus this protocol paves way for stable, easy and quick construction of disruption cassettes.
Stacked U-Nets with Multi-output for Road Extraction

With the recent advances of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in computer vision, there have been rapid progresses in extracting roads and other features from satellite imagery for mapping and other purposes. In this paper, we propose a new method for road extraction using stacked UNets with multiple output. A hybrid loss function is used to address the problem of unbalanced classes of training data. Post-processing methods, including road map vectorization and shortest path search with hierarchical thresholds, help improve recall. The overall improvement of mean IoU compared to the vanilla VGG network is more than 20%.
The Relationship between Risk, Capital and Efficiency: Evidence from Japanese Cooperative Banks

The risk-capital positions of Japanese banks have been under tension throughout the 1990s. However, existing theory on the determinants of bank risk-taking still remains limited and the evidence is conflicting. Most studies concentrate on US and European banks, while empirical evidence has remained scarce for Asian banks. Added to that, to our knowledge, there are almost no papers on this subject for cooperative banks in Japan. Thus, the main contribution of this study is to shed some light on the determinants of bank risk-taking and analyse its relationship with capital and efficiency in Japanese cooperative banking (namely shinkin and credit cooperatives banks). This paper focuses on Japanese cooperative banks as they constitute an important segment of the Japanese banking sector. We employ a simultaneous equation model in which the relationships between, risk, capital and cost inefficiency are modelled. Two stage least squares with fixed effects estimation procedure are applied to a panel data set of 263 Japanese cooperative banks over the period 2003 through 2006. The results confirm the belief that risk, capital and inefficiency are simultaneously determined. The empirical model shows a negative relationship between risk and the level of capital for Japanese cooperative banks. Inefficient Japanese cooperative banks appear to operate with larger capital and take on more risk. These arguments may reflect the moral hazard problem that exists in the banking system through exploitation of the benefits of deposit insurance. We also assess the size effects and find that larger cooperative banks holding less capital take on more risk and are less efficient.