Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms of population declines in boreal forest grouse

Ludwig, Gilbert Xavier Mechanisms of Population Declines in Boreal Forest Grouse Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2007, 48 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Biological and Environmental Science ISSN 1456-9701; 176) ISBN 978-951-39-2825-4 (PDF), 978-951-39-2805-6 (nid.) Yhteenveto: Kanalintukantojen laskuun vaikuttavat tekijät Diss. Populations of Finnish forest grouse have been declining during several decades. Using large data sets on both the individual and the population level, I have studied possible mechanisms and processes underlying the long-term declines of forest grouse in Finland. The observed decline in population size of Finnish forest grouse is most likely mediated through long-term changes in breeding success. The likely mechanisms underlying the long-term decrease in breeding success and population size in grouse are interactions between human land-use (modern forestry and agriculture) and predators exacerbated by detrimental effects of asymmetric climate change. The prime factor in human land-use includes modern forestry practices such as clear-cutting and largescale drainage as well as fragmentation due to agriculture. The ensemble of these factors is one reason of increased densities of mesopredators, but the process has strongly been facilitated by the absence of large carnivores over the last century. In addition to increased mesopredator densities itself, a number of human caused landscape features, e.g. fragmentation and large-scale drainage, additionally increase predation risk on grouse, and may act as an ecological trap. This process has further been exacerbated climate change: chicks are increasingly hatching too early, before the onset of optimal brood rearing conditions. In order to stop the long term decline, improving breeding success can be regarded as a key management target, including e.g. control of mesopredators. Results suggest that top-down effects due to recent increases in lynx populations may be more effective in controlling mesopredators than the current state of active control through hunting. Furthermore, breeding success could be locally improved through forest management that favours occurrence of bilberry and protection of pine bogs, restoration of bogs and mires where drainage is not economically profitable, as well as by integrating weather and climate change into the equation of hunting management.
Stored product protection in Africa: Past, present and future

More than 55% of Africans earn their livelihood from agriculture, which is also the key to economic development of the continent. The agriculture is largely traditional and grains constitute the bulk of food production. Sorghum, maize, rice, wheat and millet for cereals and cowpeas, dry beans, groundnut, chickpea and bambara groundnut for pulses, are most common in Africa. Because agricultural production is seasonal while the demands for agricultural commodities are more evenly spread throughout the year, grain storage becomes a particularly important agricultural activity. Grain storage is done on-farm, peasant farmers’ residences (family granaries), community stores and large warehouses. Since most of the grains produced in Africa are destined for human consumption, storage in family granaries predominates. Unfortunately, the technology and management of family granaries and other storage structures are seriously wanting. These predispose the grains to serious attacks from biotic constraints such as insects, rodents, birds and micro-organisms. The rate of insect proliferation in these storage structures could be alarmingly high, especially with the warm climate in tropical Africa. Annual grain losses of up to 50% in cereals and 100% in pulses have been reported, although average losses stand at roughly 20%. Major insects that attack cereals and pulses include grain weevils, grain borers, grain beetles and grain moths. Pest prevention, early detection and pest control would greatly reduce grain losses during storage. Control methods comprise physical, chemical and phytochemical measures with emphasis on the use of traditional botanical pesticides. This paper discusses the major cereals and pulses stored in Africa, the different storage structures, storage losses, constraints, control measures, and the relationship between storage structures and pest infestation. It also attempts to highlight peculiarities to the African storage environment and research trends over the years, and suggests recommendations for improving grain storage in the continent.Keywords: Stored products, Grains, Pests, Protection, Africa
Analysis of Coupled-bunch Instabilities in the NSLS-II Storage Ring

During the commissioning phase 1 of the NSLS-II storage ring an option under consideration is to install a normal conducting 7-cell PETRA-III cavity structure with a stored average current of 25mA. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of coupled-bunch instabilities that may be driven by the Higher Order Modes (HOMs) of the 7-cell PETRA-III cavity.
Purnomo, Pendeteksian Overspecification pada Dokumen Spesifikasi Kebutuhan Perangkat Lunak

Software development begins with important process, understanding and determining what kind of software that will be built and write it into a Software Requirements Specification (SRS). Meyer’s “The Seven Sins of Specifier” explain several things to be avoided in SRS. One is overspecification. Overspecification occurs when there is an element in the document specification that is not related to the problems but to a feature of possible solution. This study proposed a method to detect the presence of overspecification in SRS by developing a text-based decision tree classifier utilizes natural language processing tools. Testing and evaluation of the results obtained Kappa value of 0.8872 at 0.0 threshold. This means that the proposed solution works well and can be used to detect the presence of overspecification on software requirements specification document with 0.8872 Kappa value or proportion of agreement between the proposed solution and the annotators is almost perfect agreement.
A Comparison of JPEG and Wavelet Compression Applied to Computed Tomography Brain, Chest, and Abdomen Images

Background: A study of image compression is becoming more important since an uncompressed image requires a large amount of storage space and high transmission bandwidth. This paper focuses on the quantitative comparison of lossy compression methods applied to a variety of 8-bit Computed Tomography (CT) images. Method: Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and Wavelet compression algorithms were used on a set of CT images, namely brain, chest, and abdomen. These algorithms were applied to each image to achieve maximum compression ratio (CR). Each compressed image was then decompressed and quantitative analysis was performed to compare each compressed-thendecompressed image with its corresponding original image. The Wavelet Compression Engine (standard edition 2.5), and JPEG Wizard (Version 1.1.7) were used in this study. The statistical indices computed were mean square error (MSE), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Results: Our results mostly agreed with other published studies, which show that Wavelet compression yields better compression quality at constant compressed file sizes compared with JPEG. Conclusion: The degree of compression is dependent on anatomic structures and complexity of diagnostic information in the image so careful consideration must be given to the level of compression ratio before archiving clinical images otherwise essential information will be lost.
EFFECTIVE FACTORS IN SOCIAL MEDIA ON YOUNG CONSUMERS' PURCHASE INTENTION AND PURCHASING FROM THESE MEDIA (CASE STUDY: YOUNG CONSUMERS IN ISFAHAN)

The objective of the research is to study the effective factors in social media on Iranian young consumers' purchase intention and purchasing from these media. The research is an applied research in terms of the objective and a survey research in terms of the method of data collection. A standard questionnaire has been used to measure variables. The sample included 400 Iranian youths using social media whom have been selected using non-probability available sampling method. Data have been analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. It has been used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equations modeling to test hypotheses. Results showed that awareness cognitive, knowledge cognitive, trust, and brand equity significantly affect Iranian young consumers' purchasing intention and purchasing in the social media. The effect of purchasing intention on the purchasing was also confirmed.
Exploring the link between corporate governance and innovative capacity in the Australian superannuation industry

In a large-scale single industry case study, insights are provided into corporate governance factors affecting innovative capacity in the superannuation industry in Australia. Analysis of the data indicated that the major corporate governance factors driving innovation in the industry included: ‘possessing a progressive organisational culture’, ‘emphasis on marketing-orientation’, and ‘engaging in co-opetition’. Similarly, the data indicated that the major corporate governance factors inhibiting innovation included: ‘possessing a conservative/risk-averse organisational culture’, ‘unwillingness to deviate from a strict interpretation of regulation’, ‘emphasis on a profit-orientation’, and ‘the absence of any formalised innovation processes within the firm’. These findings are used to develop a ‘theory of innovation’ link between corporate governance approaches and innovative capacity in the Australian superannuation industry. Although this study is limited in its scope, it does represent an initial exploration of the critical relationship that exists between Board-level functions and the ability of a superannuation firm to innovate in the Australian context.
Incorporating Confucius and Ancient China into a Rhetorical Theory Course

In our globalized world, students of communication benefit from experiencing diverse cultures and perspectives throughout the curriculum. One way to encourage twenty-first century global learning is to infuse the study of Chinese discourse into rhetorical theory courses. This essay first provides a rationale for the importance of comparative rhetoric and a review of relevant literature on ancient Chinese rhetoric. Then, the essay details a three-week module on ancient Chinese rhetoric with readings and activities, and an appraisal of the activity, with the goal of demonstrating the necessity and feasibility of introducing undergraduate students to globalized rhetorical studies.
Smoothing the lagrangean dual function when the s ubproblem is solved through dynamic programming

When lagrangean relaxation is applied to combinatorial optimization problems, the resulting dual function becomes non-differentiable, which may generate serious convergence difficulties. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for smoothing the lagrangean dual function associated to relaxed combinatorial optimization problems when the subproblem is solved via dynamic programming. Our technique allows for using gradient ascent methods to approach the optimal values of the lagrangean multipliers for the original problem. We also prove that when the obtained gradient is zero, a feasible fractional solution for the original problem is given. We use this technique to calculate lower bounds for the classical Generalized Assignment Problem. For this problem, our experiments show that lower bounds very close to the optimal ones can be found in a modest computational time, when compared to the best stabilized column generation algorithm found in the literature.
Thyroid hormones and tetrac: new regulators of tumour stroma formation via integrin avb3

To improve our understanding of non-genomic, integrin avb3-mediated thyroid hormone action in tumour stroma formation, we examined the effects of triiodo-L-thyronine (T3), L-thyroxine (T4) and integrin-specific inhibitor tetrac on differentiation, migration and invasion of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) that are an integral part of the tumour’s fibrovascular network. Primary human bone marrow-derived MSCs were treated with T3 or T4 in the presence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell-conditioned medium (CM), which resulted in stimulation of the expression of genes associated with cancer-associated fibroblast-like differentiation as determined by qPCR and ELISA. In addition, T3 and T4 increased migration of MSCs towards HCC cell-CM and invasion into the centre of three-dimensional HCC cell spheroids. All these effects were tetrac-dependent and therefore integrin avb3-mediated. In a subcutaneous HCC xenograft model, MSCs showed significantly increased recruitment and invasion into tumours of hyperthyroid mice compared to euthyroid and, in particular, hypothyroid mice, while treatment with tetrac almost completely eliminated MSC recruitment. These studies significantly improve our understanding of the anti-tumour activity of tetrac, as well as the mechanisms that regulate MSC differentiation and recruitment in the context of tumour stroma formation, as an important prerequisite for the utilisation of MSCs as gene delivery vehicles.
A Qualitative Study on Increasing and Decreasing Factors of the School Principals’ Motivation

This study aims to figure out the situational factors that increase and decrease the motivation of school principals while they are carrying out their duties. Qualitative research method is used and it is designed in phenomenology model according to the nature of the study. Ten participants who work as school principals in primary and secondary schools in Ankara were selected by criterion sampling among the purposive sampling method. Results were obtained by using semi-structured interview technique including open-ended questions. At the end of the study, It is found that "private life" decrease the motivation of school principals and high "burnout" level affects their intrinsic motivation negatively. In addition, information and complaint-line "Alo 147" and "financial difficulties" are internal factors that decrease the motivation of school principals. On the top of the internal factors that increase the motivation of school principals comes "loving kids" and on the top of the external factors comes "student achievement", " to be appreciated" and "dedicated teacher" .
Text Case-Based Reasoning Framework for Fault Diagnosis and Predication by Cloud Computing

In Discrete Event System, such as railway onboard system, overwhelming volume of textual data is recorded in the form of repair verbatim collected during the fault diagnosis process. Efficient text mining of such maintenance data plays an important role in discovering the best-practice repair knowledge from millions of repair verbatims, which help to conduct accurate fault diagnosis and predication. This paper presents a text case-based reasoning framework by cloud computing, which uses the diagnosis ontology for annotating fault features recorded in the repair verbatim. The extracted fault features are further reduced by rough set theory. Finally, the case retrieval is employed to search the best-practice repair actions for fixing faulty parts. By cloud computing, rough set-based attribute reduction and case retrieval are able to scale up the Big Data records and improve the efficiency of fault diagnosis and predication. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through a fault diagnosis of train onboard equipment.
Distributed load control of autonomous renewable energy systems

Autonomous renewable energy systems such as wind, solar, and micro-hydro require control methods to maintain stability, due to the real time variation of input energy and load, while maximizing the use of renewable energy. This paper describes the application of load control using a novel frequency and voltage-sensing device. The device uses a low cost microcontroller to monitor the system frequency and voltage. Load switching is carried out based on this information. Software was developed for frequency and voltage measurements and tested on a 18 kW, single phase, 50 Hz, micro-hydro system. A fuzzy control system was then developed which makes intelligent load switching decisions using inputs from the measurement algorithms coupled with expert knowledge expressed in the form of control rules. This load control system was then tested on the same micro-hydro system and on a site powered by a 60 kW, 3 phase, 50 Hz wind turbine only.
Income Shocks Reduce Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Five East European Countries

This paper empirically investigates whether households affected by income shocks cope by reducing human capital investments. The analysis uses Crisis Response Surveys conducted in Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Turkey during 2009 and 2010. A propensity score matching technique is adopted to compare health and education investment decisions among households that were affected by income shocks to the matched comparison group. The authors find that households affected by income shocks reduced some human capital investments. Interestingly, households in these five countries were more likely to adopt health-related coping strategies as opposed to education-related coping strategies. The results from Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Turkey show that households affected by income shocks reduced their visits to doctors and reduced their spending on medicine and medical care significantly more than the matched comparison group. Households affected by income shocks reduced their education investments, but did not adopt harmful education-related coping strategies, such as withdrawing children from schools or moving children from costly private to cheaper public schools. These findings reveal that long-term and possibly intergenerational household welfare could be affected by short-run income shocks and hence underscore the need for governments to employ mitigation measures.
VCS-IV: A Real-Time Vision System Using a Digital Vision Chip

A real-time visual processing system based on a vision chip that aggregates per pixel digital processing circuitry is presented. The system supports the authors' latest vision chip and achieves high-speed, high-performance visual processing using an implementation that is small yet highly expandable and versatile. The main feature of the system is that the image capture function is programmable, with the operation of the internal pixel A–D conversion controlled from software at high time resolutions. The performance of the system is evaluated by application to basic visual processing and measurement systems, and examples of applications of the enhanced image capture function are presented. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 89(6): 34–43, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20269
First-Principles Study of Ferromagnetism in Iron Chromite Spinels: FeCr2O4 and CrFe2O4

The structural, electronic and magnetic properties of FeCr2O4 and CrFe2O4 spinels have been investigated by the first-principles approach based on density functional theory (DFT) and the full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave method, within the generalized gradient approximation (GGA-PBE) and GGA-[Formula: see text] scheme. The stability of these spinels in the normal and inverse phases is evaluated. The spin-polarized electronic band structures and density of states of FeCr2O4 calculated by GGA-PBE and GGA-[Formula: see text] show that the minority spin channel has metallic nature and the majority spin channel has a half-metallic (HM) gap of 0.25[Formula: see text]eV and 1.30 eV, respectively. CrFe2O4 shows that both minority and majority spin channels have metallic nature when using GGA-PBE and half-semiconducting behavior with half-semiconductor gap of 0.71[Formula: see text]eV when using GGA-[Formula: see text], with magnetic moment of 2[Formula: see text][Formula: see text] per formula unit. Analysis of density of states of these compounds indicates that the magnetic moment mainly originates from the strong spin-polarization of 3[Formula: see text] states of Fe and Cr atoms. Presence of HMF in FeCr2O4 and CrFe2O4 spinels makes these compounds promising compounds for spintronic applications.
A Game Theoretic Analysis of the Conditions of Knowledge Transfer by New Employees in Companies

The availability of knowledge is an essential factor for an economy in global competition. Companies realise innovations by creating and implementing new knowledge. Sources of innovative ideas are partners in the production network but also new employees coming from another company or academia. Based on a model by HECKATHORN (1996) the conditions of efficient knowledge transfer in a team are analysed. Offering knowledge to a colleague can not be controlled directly by the company due to information asymmetries. Thus the management has to provide incentives which motivate the employees to act in favour of the company by providing their knowledge to the rest of the team and likewise to learn from colleagues. The game theoretic analysis aims at investigating how to arrange these incentives efficiently. Several factors are relevant, especially the individual costs of participating in the transfer. These consist mainly of the existing absorptive capacity and the working atmosphere. The model is a 2x2 game but is at least partly generalised on more players. The relevance of the adequate team size is shown: more developers may increase the total profit of an innovation (before paying the involved people) but when additional wages are paid to each person a greater team decreases the remaining company profit. A further result is that depending on the cost structure perfect knowledge transfer is not always best for the profit of the company. These formal results are consistent with empirical studies to the absorptive capacity and the working atmosphere.
Role of Nitrogen on Hydride Nucleation in Pure Niobium by First Principles Calculations

It is well known that the formation and growth of niobium hydride degrades the superconducting radio frequency (SRF) properties of niobium cavities and the treatments that reduce hydrogen concentration improve the cavity quality factor. Recently it has also been shown that the addition of nitrogen through doping or infusion improves the quality factor of SRF niobium. Thus, in this work, the role of nitrogen solute addition in niobium on hydride precipitation is probed through first-principles calculations. In the presence of nitrogen the energetic preference for hydrogen to occupy interstitial sites in the vicinity is reduced. Furthermore, both interstitial octahedral and tetrahedral sites become equally favorable for hydrogen to occupy due to the presence of nitrogen. To examine the role of nitrogen on the nucleation of hydrides, we utilized valence charge transfer and density of states calculations. These quantum insights reveal a strong tendency for nitrogen to accumulate charge, thereby decreasing the bond strength of neighboring niobium and hydrogen atoms. These atomic scale results explain the lesser tendency of surface hydride formation in SRF niobium cavities in the presence of nitrogen and are applicable to dilute Nb-H solid solutions.