Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification and modelling of linear dynamic systems

System identification and modelling are very important parts of system control theory. System control is only as good as good is created model of system. So this article deals with identification and modelling problems. There are simple classification and evolution of identification methods, and then the modelling problem is described. Rest of paper is devoted to two most known and used models of linear dynamic systems.
Using Multi Techniques Analysis in Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification and Mapping of Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State Nigeria

This work used multi techniques analysis comprises GIS models, geostatistics, clustering analysis as against the traditional single layer thematic approach to characterize Mambilla Plateau, a cold highland in Taraba state of Nigeriainto biogeoclimatic ecosystem zones needed for natural resources management. The principal criteria used in classifying and mapping the ecosystems are: climate and bioclimate data, physiography (slope, relief and aspect), vegetation/landcover data. In classifying and mapping the physiography of Mambilla Plateau, the topographic layer was produced from 90 m NASA/SRTM digital elevation model. Principal component analysis, agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis (AHC) and geostatistical techniques (Kriging) were applied to develop bioclimatic layer. A combination of vegetation field survey conducted on selected sites, un/supervised classification and the application of NDVI values was used to produce landcover map and delineation of the Plateau into vegetation units. These layers of physiographic, bioclimatic and vegetation were spatially combined using fuzzy (sum) overlay in Arc GIS 10.2 to produce 5 major and 1 subunit biogeoclimatic ecosystem zones on the Mambilla Plateau and the adjoining landscape namely: humid lowland forest/humid shrubby forest, montane forest, escarpment stream valley forest, grass cypress cool mountain and, grass eucalyptus cold high mountain. It is expected that this approach to biogeoclimatic ecosystem mapping shall form the bedrock for vegetal/forest resources management not only in the region but find application especially in most of the highland of the world.
A Survey on Novel Method for Prediction of Difficult Keyword Queries

Keyword queries are used to access data from databases. To improve the performance of querying system it would be useful to identify queries with low ranking quality. In this paper we analyze the characteristics o hard queries and propose a novel framework to measure the difficulty for a keyword query over a database. We evaluate our query difficulty prediction model against two effectiveness benchmarks for popular keyword search ranking methods. The ranking qualities of the results provide a good user satisfaction. Our intensive experiments show that the algorithms predict the issue of a question with comparatively low errors and negligible time overhead.
Induction and Spread of a spruce bark beetle outbreak in the Wilderness Area Dürrenstein, Austria

Mass outbreaks of the spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) currently represent the largest threat to spruce dominated forests in Central Europe. Besides the high reproductive capacity and the aggressiveness of the beetle itself, climatic conditions affect the number of possible generations per year, and thus the occurrence of high population densities of the insect. The aim of this study was to investigate the uninterrupted influence of microclimatic site and stand conditions on the dynamics of population densities of the spruce bark beetle in a valley end of the Wilderness Area Durrenstein (IUCN Cat.1). A retro perspective analysis of the areas infested by the beetle during the years 2003-2011 was done regarding climatic conditions (temperature, irradiation, and precipitation) as well as stand and site related predisposition factors. The results show that high amounts of trees killed by bark beetles only occurred after extreme events (e.g. avalanche or wind throw) and that there was no direct or delayed relationship between temperature conditions and new infestations. South facing slopes showed higher predisposition and were infested earlier than east, west or north facing slopes. The site variables geomorphology and snowbreakage, as well as the stand variables proportion of spruce, stand age and storm hazard were crucial for the study sites predisposition towards bark beetle infestations. In 2012, spruce bark beetles marked with fluorescent powder were caught in pheromone traps to examine the beetles’ dispersal (flight direction and distance). Most beetles were found in south-western direction and within 100 m (>50%), 93% within 500 m. Very few individuals (<0.2%) managed to fly over a 1500 m high mountain ridge and were found in pheromone traps up to 5 km away from their hatching site. The areas predicted temperature increase of +1.1° to +2°C (2021-2050) and +3° to +3.9°C (2050-2071) will severely influence the development of Ips typographus from currently a univoltine development at higher elevations to a mulivoltine development in future. This may have a significant effect on beetle’s population growth and trigger longer, more intense, and larger epidemics.
Removal of Cd(II) onto Raphanus sativus peels biomass: equilibrium, kinetics, and thermodynamics

Abstract Raphanus sativus peels (RSP) biomass for the adsorptive removal of Cadmium (II) has been studied. The effect of different experimental parameter like pH, temperature, contact time, and initial concentration has been reported. The equilibrium adsorption data were subjected to different adsorption isotherms (Langmuir, Freundlich, Dubinin-Radushkevich, Temkin, Flory-Huggins isotherm, and Brunauer, Emmet and Teller isotherms), for kinetic studies pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order, Banghams’s model, and intraparticle diffusion kinetic models were applied. The experimental results indicated that the adsorption of Cd(II) followed monolayer adsorption model and pseudo-second-order kinetics. The change in thermodynamic parameters like free energy (ΔG°), enthalpy (ΔH°), and entropy (ΔS°) was also evaluated. It was found that the RSP exhibits good adsorption capacity for Cadmium (II) from aqueous solution.
Financial assets, linear and nonlinear policy rules : an in-sample assessment of the reaction function of the South African Reserve Bank

In this paper we provide an in-sample assessment of how the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) sets policy rate in the context of both linear and nonlinear Taylor type rule models of monetary policy. Given the controversial debate on whether central banks should target asset prices for economic stability, we investigate whether the SARB policy-makers pay close attention to asset and financial markets in its policy decisions. The main findings are that the nonlinear Taylor rule improves its performance with the advent of the financial crisis, providing the best description of in-sample SARB interest rate setting behaviour. The SARB policy-makers pay close attention to the financial conditions index when setting interest rate. The SARB’s response of monetary policy to inflation is greater during business cycle recessions with not much weight on output and seems to place high importance on inflationary pressures of output during boom periods. The 2007-2009 financial crisis witnesses an overall decreased reaction to inflation, output and financial conditions amidst increased economic uncertainty, with a shift from an asymmetric response to financial conditions over recessions to a more symmetric response irrespectively of the state of the economy.
Monitoring Climate Changes on Small Scale Networks Using Ground Based GPS and Meteorological Data

Abstract The total zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) and its components, hydrostatic and wet parts are important parameters of the atmosphere and directly or indirectly reflect climate processes. This possibility can be more adaptive when meteorological data are combined to co-located meteorological sensors with GPS stations. In this paper eighteen months with one hour time interval ZTD estimates of a permanent GPS station are analyzed with the associated atmospheric parameters provided from a co-located meteorological sensor. The mathematical relationship through the multiple stepwise regression analysis reflects the plausible physical link of temperature and relative humidity values with ZTD’s. This regression equation is assessed by a second data set performed by a small GPS baseline few months later for the same study area. It was found that mainly due to the zenith wet delay variations and with the help of fundamental meteorological equations the behavior of water vapor pressure can be monitored and estimated. This is possible when an appropriate setup of GPS stations and a co-located meteorological sensor exist and if the GPS stations sound the same part of atmosphere. Therefore, the GPS tropospheric products are good indicators for a climate monitoring tool and can help address the physics of a climate model.
Evaluation of Science and Technology Parks by using Fuzzy Expert System

The science parks have important role in development of technology and are able to make economic growth of the countries. The purpose of this article is the presentation of a fuzzy expert system to evaluate the science and technology parks. One of the problems for evaluating Science and Technology parks is to have the high number of criteria and science parks and presenting a system which is able to compare this high number of science parks, with many criteria, is one of the findings of this paper. At the end, we have described a numerical example. This article is an useful information resource for managers of Science and Technology parks and interested parties to invest and to recognize the science parks better.
SMILE STAGES CLASSIFICATION BY USING FEATURE EXTRACTION BASED ON 2 DPCA AND 2 DLDA IN ORTHODONTIC REHABILITATION

This paper discusses classification of smile stages based on 2DPCA for feature extraction and then compares the results with the 2DLDA to distinguish the smiling faces at Stage I, Stage III and Stage IV. For the classification process, SVM multiclass was applied with method of one against one and one against all. Thus, 90 smiling faces data which has been validated by dentist specializing in tooth conservation (30 Stage I, 30 Stage III and 30 Stage IV) is being used for learning and testing evaluation in the experimental process. The experimental results show that not only computational efficiency, but also the recognition rates of 2DLDA + SVM one against all are higher than others.
Does non-farm income diversivication in Northern Albania offer an escape from rural poverty? [Stellt außerlandwirtschaftliche Einkommensdiversifizierung einen Ausweg aus der Armut für landwirtschaftliche Haushalte in Nordalbanien dar?]

The paper uses up-to-date household data from two Northern-Albanian regions. It summarises socio-economic facts on taking up remunerative non-farm employment and identifies the determinants of non-farm income diversification at the farm household level based on a binary logistic regression. Furthermore, the paper provides insight in the northern-Albanian farming structure, migration patterns, attitudes towards and reasons for income diversification into the non-farm sector. Income diversification indeed has a positive impact on the welfare of the households: A statistically significant increasing trend in incomes with rising diversification level was observed.
The Method of Approximate Particular Solutions for Solving Elliptic Problems with Variable Coefficients

A new version of the method of approximate particular solutions (MAPSs) using radial basis functions (RBFs) has been proposed for solving a general class of elliptic partial differential equations. In the solution process, the Laplacian is kept on the left-hand side as a main differential operator. The other terms are moved to the right-hand side and treated as part of the forcing term. In this way, the close-form particular solution is easy to obtain using various RBFs. The numerical scheme of the new MAPSs is simple to implement and yet very accurate. Three numerical examples are given and the results are compared to Kansa's method and the method of fundamental solutions.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SELF-IN-MOTION: EXPLORING YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONSTRUCTION OF "BECOMING"

This study aims to analyze the process of semiotic regulation in youth transition to adulthood from the perspectives of cultural developmental psychology and dialogical self theory . The focus is on the transformations that occur in youth’s self-system configurations during a critical developmental period when they start to participate in the world of work. In this paper, we will advance the idea that semiotic regulation may lead to the construction of a future-oriented time perspective – and more specifically, to a new sense of becoming “professional” – through a cycle of production of innovation, leading to the construction of intransitive hierarchies of meaning and creating more flexibility in the self-system. We present a longitudinal case study of three young people who participated in a social project in Salvador, Bahia to illustrate the process. Data was collected through two rounds of in-depth interviews at ages18 (1 st round) and 21 (2 nd round) years. Analysis followed a mapping of positions and counter-positions, as well as emerging tensions and their resolution over time and in different spheres of life (i.e. work and family life). The idea is to show how negotiations of self-positions evolve and activate a mechanism of hierarchical integration and differentiation of meanings, in which flexible meanings are created that allow for the emergence of alternative life trajectories, building an architecture of the self-in-motion.
Biosignal –Based Multimodal Biometric System

This study concerns personal identification based on electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals. We manufactured a bio-signal measurement system that can simultaneously measure ECG and PPG signals, using which three channels of ECG signal and one channel of PPG signal were acquired from the right-hand index finger of a total of 33 subsets for 3 minutes. Lead-I signal of the three-channel ECG signal and the one-channel PPG signal were selected for recognition. For each subject, 160 heartbeats were automatically separated from the acquired bio-signals, and a total of 21 features, comprising 15 ECG features, 4 ECG-related PPG features, and 2 features concerning PPG only, were extracted from each heartbeat. Letting the 21 features form a single data point, heartbeat features of each subset were used as the training data for a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, with the number of data points being adjusted from 10 to 80, and the data points (80 - 150) other than the training data were used as the testing data, in order to investigate the recognition performance indices. As a result, the proposed algorithm showed high recognition performance of 99.28% accuracy, 0.88% FRR, 0.85% FAR, 99.28% sensitivity, and 99.31% specificity, when there are 80 training data points. Moreover, even when there are 10 training data points, the proposed algorithm showed the performance of 92.77% accuracy, 7.23% FRR, 6.29% FAR, 92.77% sensitivity, and 93.21% specificity, which can be evaluated as an extremely high recognition performance considering that there was a total of 4,950 testing data points.
The Relationship Between Physical Activity Recommendations and Diabetes Risk Factors in Pregnant Women

BACKGROUND: Changes in maternal insulin sensitivity throughout pregnancy may help supply nutrients to a growing fetus; however, the changes may concomitantly increase the mother and child’s risk for diabetes and chronic diseases. Regular physical activity (PA) positively impacts precursors for diabetes, but the impact of PA throughout gestation is less studied. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between meeting PA recommendations and diabetes risk in pregnant women. METHODS: A total of 23 pregnant women were recruited for participation. Venous blood samples, questionnaires, and anthropometric measurements (height, weight, and hip/waist circumferences) were ascertained during a single session. Participants also completed the MAQ physical activity recall questionnaire and wore a pedometer to record current PA. Daily step counts were recorded using a pedometer for two weeks following the blood draw. Women were classified as meeting American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) recommendations (>450 MET·min/week) and/or ―active‖ (>5000 steps/day) based on their average steps/day. Blood samples were analyzed for levels of glucose (BGlu), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), total cholesterol (TCHOL), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLC), high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDLC) and triglycerides (TGs). Scatter plots were constructed for each biomarker versus gestational week to analyze differences in slopes and intercepts between two physical activity level groups. RESULTS: At the blood draw, 15 (65.2%) women were meeting ACOG physical activity recommendations and 7 (36.8%) met an ―active‖ step count classification. Meeting activity recommendations was not significantly related to any biomarker after controlling for gestational age in univariate analysis, but an ―active‖ daily step count approached significance in predicting HbA1c values (p=0.067). In
Validation of the endothelial markers Cd31 and Cd34in Immunohistochemistry of the long saphenousvein for coronary artery bypass surgery

Objectives: Endothelial injury during a surgical intervention can significantly affect the functional status of the vein. The endothelial layer plays a vital role in the long saphenous vein for ensuring smooth blood flow and the prevention of vasoconstriction and thrombi formation within the blood vessels. There are few histological studies comparing the different vein harvesting techniques that have studied endothelial layer integrity using CD31 and CD34 on human long saphenous veins. Methods: Non-distended vein samples measuring 1cm were obtained from ten consecutive traditional open vein harvesting patients and were automatically processed and stained using immunohistochemistry for CD31 and CD34. The colour, intensity and distribution of the staining on the tissues was scored blindly by five independent scientists and an expert histopathologist for this study. Results: The CD34 antibody demonstrated greater colour (p<0.007), intensity (p<0.019) and distribution (p<0.007) compared to CD31. Conclusion: Our study indicates that CD34 provides a more reliable endothelial marker in the long saphenous vein than CD31. The results of this study can be translate into other immunohistochemistry studies looking at the quality of the endothelium on the vein in cardiac and vascular surgical studies.
Transition Clues Based Video Summarization By Using Scale Invariant Feature Transform

A large amount of short, single-shot videos are created by personal camcorder every day, such as the small video clips in family albums, and thus a solution for presenting and managing these video clips is highly desired. From the perspective of professionalism and artistry, long- take/shot video, also termed oneshot video, is able to present events, persons or scenic spots in an informative manner. This paper presents a novel video composition system "Video Puzzle" which generates aesthetically enhanced long-shot videos from short video clips. Our task here is to automatically composite several related single shots into a virtual long-take video with spatial and temporal consistenc We propose a novel framework to compose descriptive long-take video with content-consistent shots retrieved from a video pool. For each video, frame-by-frame search is performed over the entire pool to find start-end content correspondences through a coarse-to-fine partial matching process. The content correspondence here is general and can refer to the matched regions or objects, such as human body and face. The content consistency of these correspondences enables us to design several shot transition schemes to seamlessly stitch one shot to another in a spatially andtemporally consistent manner. The entire long-take video thus comprises several single shots with consistent contents and fluent transitions. Meanwhile, with the generated matching graph of videos, the proposed system can also provide an efficient video browsing mode. Experiments are conducted on multiple video albums and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and the usefulness of the proposed scheme. keyword—Image retrieval, one-shot video, video authoring ,video transition.
Detecting changes in auditory events

Change deafness is defined as the failure to detect the source of an above-threshold change in an auditory scene (Gregg & Samuel, 2008; Hall, Peck, Gaston, & Dickerson, 2015). A new paradigm demonstrated the phenomenon under analogous conditions to its visual counterpart (Hall, et al., 2015). This investigation examined the use of the paradigm through two experiments which involved the same four simultaneously presented events. Experiment 1 distributed events across a virtual 120o on the azimuth while the target event oscillated across a 60o space for each trial. Listeners were instructed to identify the target. Target rate of change was manipulated across four different velocities (80o/s, 40o/s, 24o/s, 8o/s). Results confirmed that all conditions differed in error rates from an isolated control task. The 8o/s condition displayed the highest error rates, providing strong evidence of change deafness, whereas error rates in the 80o/s, 40o/s, and 24o/s conditions did not significantly differ, providing inconclusive evidence. Response times did not vary across conditions. Experiment 2 compared findings to a filter manipulation and evaluated change deafness by comparing flickered (1s and 3s initial presentation) and continuously changing target events, which oscillated between wideand narrow-band filters. All conditions resulted in error rates that did not vary from the control task. The continuous condition had increased response times, providing explicit evidence of change deafness. Rapid response times in flicker conditions indicated the elimination of change deafness. The 3s presentation time in one flicker condition further reduced response times, demonstrating the impact of encoding. Experiments support the assessed paradigm as an appropriate method of analyzing change deafness.
Determinants of Loan Quality: Lessons from Greek Cooperative Banks

Abstract The article focuses on the credit risk of cooperative banks in Greece. The main objective is to define which factors are responsible for variations in loan quality during the period 2003-2014. Loan quality is measured by Loan Loss Reserves Ratio (LLR) and dynamic regression techniques are implemented for the econometric estimations. The outlined results suggest that the macroeconomic environment (i.e. public debt, local unemployment, economic activity and inflation) and the accounting ratios (i.e. past loan quality and profitability) seem to be the explanatory variables of problem loans.