Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in Environmental Awareness and Its Connection to Local Environmental Management in Water Conservation Zones: The Case of Beijing, China

This paper aims at investigating the change over time in the environmental awareness in rural Chinese communities and its correlation with environmental management measures implemented at the local level. We identify three main components of awareness, namely: perception, behavior, and attitude toward environmental management measures. Data were collected from two surveys in three villages in northern China in 2006 and 2015 that interviewed 125 and 129 respondents, respectively, and were analyzed employing an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. The results discussed in the paper show that environmental awareness increased between 2006–2015, and was mainly manifested in better environmental behavior and understanding of environmental status due an improvement in rural infrastructure and a greater amount of information provided to rural residents about the environment. Place of residence had a considerable influence on respondents’ environmental awareness: residents in eco-villages had a higher environmental awareness than those living in common agricultural villages. This appears to indicate a positive nexus between the comprehensiveness of environmental management measures implemented locally, and environmental awareness. Also, the universality of environment issues reduced the importance of socioeconomic and demographic factors in determining the degree of environmental awareness. However, more attention should be paid to villagers’ external behavior and inner feelings, such as their attitude to governmental management policies. These findings yield important policy implications that are relevant to the promotion of environmental awareness in China’s rural communities, and the adoption of more effective environmental management measures.
Demography, breeding success and effects of nest type in artificial colonies of Red-footed Falcons and allies

Abstract Shortage of breeding sites is an important limiting factor of bird populations. Artificial breeding platforms, nest-boxes or man-made twig nests often present solutions with remarkable results, however long-term sustainability of these populations remains to be resolved. Furthermore, the question whether the inference of results of studies conducted on birds breeding in artificial breeding sites can be generalized to other populations, still remains open. Here we present the history, and the results of a 20 year old (1995-2015) nest-box programme initiated to increase potential breeding possibilities of Red-footed Falcons in an area, where nest-site shortage was a severe limiting factor. We show how various other species (Jackdaws, Kestrels and Long-eared Owls) have utilized these resources, and present descriptive statistics on their reproductive performance. Analysing the data of a total of 1432 breeding attempts, we show that Red-footed Falcons have similar clutch sizes, and nesting success (i.e. ratio of nests with at least on fledgling), however fledging success (ratio of the number of eggs/fledged nestlings) was different in artificial nest-boxes. When we excluded closed box types from artificial nests, this difference was not apparent. In case of Kestrels (n=1626 breeding attempts) clutch size was significantly higher in artificial nests, while we found no difference in fledging or nesting success. When only comparing open boxes to natural nests, the difference in clutch size was no longer significant. We also analysed the effect of nest box design on reproductive parameters of the two species using regression trees. Inter annual effects were the most important in shaping clutch size and fledging rate of both falcon species, however we also found nest-box design effects, but only in Red-footed Falcons. In years when mean clutch size was high, these birds had lower clutch size in an older, darker nest-box type compared to an alternative design, and to open boxes. However, fledging rate in the same years was lower for both open boxes and older nest-boxes. We conclude that artificial colonies are an important and successful tool in Red-footed Falcon conservation, and that the breeding parameters measured in artificial colonies depend on nest-box design. We present correlative evidence that closed boxes have a significant positive species specific effect on reproduction, probably due to their protection against weather. We also show that birds may have a preference for a certain nest-box design, and that the breeding success in the less favoured box type may be similar to that in open nests. We recommend that future studies incorporate nest-type and nest-box design effects in all comparisons made on reproductive performance in case of Red-footed Falcons and Kestrels.
GWAgeER - A GroupWise Age Ranking Framework for Human Age Estimation

The task of estimating the age of humans from facial image is a challenging one due to the non-linear and personalized pattern of aging differing from one individual to another. In this work, we investigated the problem of estimating the age of humans from their facial image using a GroupWise age ranking approach complemented by ageing pattern correlation learning. In our proposed GroupWise age-ranking approach, we constructed a reference image set grouped according to ages for each individual in the reference set and used this to obtain age-ranks for each age group in the reference set. The constructed reference set was used to obtain transformed LBP features called age-rank-biased LBP (arLBP) features which were used with attached age- ranks to train an age estimating function for predicting the ages of test images. Our experiments on the publicly available FG-NET dataset and a locally collected dataset (FAGE) shows the best known age estimation accuracy with MAE of 2.34 years on FG-NET using the leave-one- person-out strategy.
Molecular Characterization of Cellulolytic Bacteria Derived From Termite Gut and Optimization of Cellulase Production

Lignocellulose, the major component of plant cell walls, is the most abundant and sustainable biomass on the earth, and is recognized for its potential for renewable energy production (Arakawa 2008, Scharf 2009). It is a general term which refers to a structure made up of three dominant compounds cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. For the degradation of lignocellulose, diversity of enzymes is required which can be classified as, endo-β-1, 4-glucanase (CMCase or endoglucanase), exo-β-1, 4-glucanase (exocellulase, avicelase) and β-glucosidase (cellobiase). All of the three enzymes are involved in breaking the complex polymer into fermentable sugars. Endo-β-1, 4glucanases are needed to break glucosidic bonds for creating free chain ends whereas, exoglucanase are required for the degradation of the same molecule by removing cellobiose units remaining at the free chain ends and βglucosidase which hydrolyzes cellobiose into simple sugars. Insects have evolved very effective strategies to use lignocellulosic substrates as a source of energy (Willis et al., 2010). This makes them an optimal source for prospect of novel cellulolytic enzymes. Termites are one of the most lignocellulose digesting insects and can act as one of the best source for cellulolytic systems as microbial International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 10 (2017) pp. 2474-2492 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
A comparative study on interactions of ionic collectors with orthoclase

: Flotation and adsorption characteristics of the most commonly used cationic and anionic collectors with high grade orthoclase were investigated through the electrokinetic potential measurement, microflotation, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies. According to the obtained results, orthoclase had high flotation recovery with amine and oleic acid based (OAB) collector at certain pH ranges no flotation response was observed with petroleum sulfonate at different pHs. In contrast to the flotation recovery differences, the electrokinetic potential measurements, FTIR and AFM analyses presented similar adsorption characteristics for all collectors. The results of electrokinetic potential tests showed that amine had a strong influence on the zeta potential of orthoclase. While amine turned the zeta potentials of orthoclase from negative to positive, sulfonate and OAB collector provided slightly more negative zeta potentials at certain pHs. In the case of FTIR and AFM analyses, each collector-treated orthoclase (CTO) sample displayed similar characteristic FTIR bands of CH 2 group and micro topographical collector coated patches with different intensities. However, the interactions of each collector with orthoclase surfaces were altered by rinsing with acetone indicating that the interactions were mostly through the electrostatic forces and/or hydrogen bonding.
Distillation of News Flow Into Analysis of Stock Reactions

The gargantuan plethora of opinions, facts, and tweets on financial business offers the opportunity to test and analyze the influence of such text sources on future directions of stocks. It also creates though the necessity to distill via statistical technology the informative elements of this prodigious and indeed colossal data source. Using mixed text sources from professional platforms, blog fora, and stock message boards, we distill via different lexica sentiment variables. These are employed for an analysis of stock reactions: volatility, volume, and returns. An increased sentiment, especially for those with negative prospection, will influence volatility as well as volume. This influence is contingent on the lexical projection and different across Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) sectors. Based on review articles on 100 S&P 500 constituents for the period of October 20, 2009, to October 13, 2014, we project into BL, MPQA, LM lexica and use the distilled sentiment variables to forecast individual stock indicators in a panel context. Exploiting different lexical projections to test different stock reaction indicators we aim at answering the following research questions: Are the lexica consistent in their analytic ability? To which degree is there an asymmetric response given the sentiment scales (positive v.s. negative)? Are the news of high attention firms diffusing faster and result in more timely and efficient stock reaction? Is there a sector specific reaction from the distilled sentiment measures? We find that there is significant incremental information in the distilled news flow and the sentiment effect is characterized as an asymmetric, attention-specific, and sector-specific response of stock reactions.
Blind Separation of Abdominal Electrocardiogram Sources through Dynamic Neural Network

Cardiovascular system of the fetus is biological critical infrastructure. Fetal electrocardiogram and its characteristics such as heart ratio, waveform and dynamic behavior overall include vital information about health state, development and possible deviations from normal fetation. Thus fetal heart ratio monitoring is mandatory during pregnancy. Widespread Doppler ultrasound diagnostics can guarantee obtaining accurate results but is not suitable for long-term monitoring. Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography proposes to extract fetal signal from maternal abdominal electrocardiogram. This approach is applicable for long-term monitoring, but because of amplitude of maternal R-peaks is significantly larger than fetal it is a challenge to extract fetal signal. In this paper we propose using dynamic neural networks for extracting fetal components and demonstrate its advantages compared to blind source separation though independent component analysis. The training algorithm is a combination of backpropagation through time and resilient propagation. The proposed approach accuracy of R-peak detection is 97%. Statistical analysis proved that developed algorithm can process even non-stationary signals with loss of accuracy and no additional training is required. Keywords—dynamic neural network; vanishing gradient; blind source separation; fetal electrocardiogram; resilient propagation
ACCELERATOR DESIGN FOR GRAPH ANALYTICS A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE OF BILKENT UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING

ACCELERATOR DESIGN FOR GRAPH ANALYTICS Şerif Yeşil M.S. in Computer Engineering Advisor: Özcan Öztürk June 2016 With the increase in data available online, data analysis became a significant problem in today’s datacenters. Moreover, graph analytics is one of the significant application domains in big data era. However, traditional architectures such as CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) fail to serve the needs of graph applications. Unconventional properties of graph applications such as irregular memory accesses, load balancing, and irregular computation challenge current computing systems which are either throughput oriented or built on top of traditional locality based memory subsystems. On the other hand, an emerging technique hardware customization, can help us to overcome these problems since they are expected to be energy efficient. Considering the power wall, hardware customization becomes more desirable. In this dissertation, we propose a hardware accelerator framework that is capable of handling irregular, vertex centric, and asynchronous graph applications. Developed high level SystemC models gives an abstraction to the programmer allowing to implement the hardware without extensive knowledge about the underlying architecture. With the given template, programmers are not limited to a single application since they can develop any graph application as long as it fits to the given template abstract. Besides the ability to develop different applications, the given template also decreases the time spent on developing and testing different accelerators. Additionally, an extensive experimental study shows that the proposed template can outperform a high-end 24 core CPU system up to 3x with up to 65x power efficiency.
Comparison of Rwandan and American Followership Styles

Leadership research is plentiful and multifaceted yet followership, an essential component in leadership, attracts little research attention. This research paper measures followership styles in two cultural contexts: American and Rwandan. Although cultural aspects of followership have been studied to some extent, the literature in this area is lacking. Data are collected from two organizations of similar size and function, one in Rwanda, and the other in Oregon, USA. It is hypothesized that Americans’ cultural preferences influence followers to favor critical thinking and active engagement while Rwandan cultural preferences predispose followers to less critical thinking and less active engagement. Results of the research show no significant difference between the cultures on critical thinking and active engagement. However, followership type is significantly different by country. Kelley’s (1992) followership survey and the organizational contexts are probed for possible reasons that no significant differences were found between critical thinking and active engagement, while power distance is seen as the main reason for the difference in followership type. Presently little research has been dedicated to the cultural effects on followership and organizations that work internationally would benefit greatly from a deeper understanding of cultural effects on followership.
Imaging the dynamics of dyke propagation prior to the 2000–2003 flank eruptions at Piton de La Fournaise, Reunion Island

The relationship between shallow magma storage and flank injections in volcanic edifices is rarely documented. We analyse the time series of geodetic and seismic data collected at Piton de La Fournaise volcano (La Reunion) during 9 flank eruptions from 2000 to 2003. The data depicts how magma injections supplied flank eruptions at Piton de la Fournaise volcano, and allows to precisely determine the direction and duration of dike intrusions, indicating a two phases pattern, consistent over all the eruptions: 1) Fast vertical migration of the dyke (∼2 m/s) from the magma chamber to the surface in 10 to 50 minutes, and 2) slower, lateral migration (0.2–0.8 m/s) in tens of minutes to hours controlled by the rift zone geometry.
The evolution of high-redshift massive black holes

Abstract Massive black holes (MBHs) are nowadays recognized as integral parts of galaxy evolution. Both the approximate proportionality between MBH and galaxy mass, and the expected importance of feedback from active MBHs in regulating star formation in their host galaxies point to a strong interplay between MBHs and galaxies. MBHs must form in the first galaxies and be fed by gas in these galaxies, with continuous or intermittent inflows that, at times, can be larger than the Eddington rate. Feedback from supernovae and from the MBHs themselves modulates the growth of the first MBHs. While current observational data only probe the most massive and luminous MBHs, the tip of the iceberg, we will soon be able to test theoretical models of MBH evolution on more “normal” MBHs: the MBHs that are indeed relevant in building the population that we observe in local galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Large-scale File System Design and Architecture

This paper deals with design issues of a global file system, aiming to provide transparent data availability, security against loss and disclosure, and support for mobile and disconnected clients.First, the paper surveys general challenges and requirements for large-scale file systems, and then the design of particular elementary parts of the proposed file system is presented. This includes the design of the raw system architecture, the design of dynamic file replication with appropriate data consistency, file location and data security.Our proposed system is called Gaston, and will be referred further in the text under this name or its abbreviation GFS (Gaston File System).
Using RF-DNA Fingerprints to Discriminate ZigBee Devices in an Operational Environment

Abstract : This research was performed to expand AFIT's Radio Frequency Distinct Native Attribute (RF-DNA) fingerprinting process to support IEEE 802.15. 4 ZigBee communication network applications. Current ZigBee bit-level security measures include use of network keys and MAC lists which can be subverted through interception and spoofing using open-source hacking tools. This work addresses device discrimination using Physical (PHY) waveform alternatives to augment existing bit-level security mechanisms. ZigBee network vulnerability to outsider threats was assessed using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to characterize both Authorized Device ID Verification performance (granting network access to authorized users presenting true bit-level credentials) and Rogue Device Rejection performance (denying network access to unauthorized rogue devices presenting false bit-level credentials). Radio Frequency Distinct Native Attribute (RF-DNA) features are extracted from time-domain waveform responses of 2.4 GHz CC2420 ZigBee transceivers to enable humanlike device discrimination. The fingerprints were constructed using a hybrid pool of emissions collected under a range of conditions, including anechoic chamber and an indoor office environment where dynamic multi-path and signal degradation factors were present. The RF-DNA fingerprints were input to a Multiple Discriminant Analysis, Maximum Likelihood (MDA/ML) discrimination process and a 1 vs. many Looks most like? classification assessment made. The hybrid MDA model was also used for 1 vs. 1 Looks how much like? verification assessment. ZigBee Device Classification performance was assessed using both full and reduced dimensional fingerprint sets. Reduced dimensional subsets were selected using Dimensional Reduction Analysis (DRA) by rank ordering 1) pre-classification KS-Test p-values and 2) post-classification GRLVQI feature relevance values. Assessment of Zigbee device ID verification capability.
Hand in hand until research tears us apart

Der direkte Zusammenhang zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und internalisierende Verhaltensauffalligkeiten und zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und Victimisierung in der Schule bei Kindern und Jugendlichen ist noch umstritten. Im Rahmen einer Langschnittstudie wurden 226 Kinder vom Kindergarten bis zur vierten Klasse in ihren Lese- und Rechtschreibfahigkeiten, sowie internalisierende Verhalten und Victimisierung untersucht. Lese- und Rechtschreib-Testscores und Lehrerurteil uber das Verhalten der Kinder wurden erfasst. Basierend auf bisherigen Forschungsergebnissen wurden theoretische Modelle aufgestellt, die den Zusammenhang zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und internalisierende Verhaltensauffalligkeiten, zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und Victimisierung und die langerfristige Auswirkung der Interaktion zwischen diesen erklaren sollten. Daten wurden mittels linearer Strukturgleichungsmodelle uberpruft und es wurden zusatzlich intraclass-Korrelationen berechnet, um den Anteil des Einflusses aufgrund der Klassenzugehorigkeit zu erfassen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen keinen direkten Zusammenhang, weder zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und internalisierende Verhaltensauffalligkeiten noch zwischen Lese- und Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten und Victimisierung. Hoch intraclass Korrelationen wurden fur Lesen und Rechtschreiben gefunden. Die darunterliegenden Prozesse scheinen, besonders bei Rechtschreiben, komplexer zu sein als bisher geglaubt, und weitere Analysen sind notwendig, um genauere Aussagen treffen zu konnen.
Misallocation and Productivity in the Great Depression

Aggregate productivity fell by 18% between 1929 and 1933. Existing explanations for this decline have focused on unobserved shifts in factor inputs such as labor hoarding. I develop a new hypothesis that focuses on the role of resource misallocation. Using a novel plant-level dataset covering a wide swath of manufacturing industries, I find that dispersion in revenue productivity increases by approximately 7.5% between 1929 and 1933 indicative of greater misallocation as in Hsieh and Klenow (2009). I then study the cement industry in detail because of its homogeneous product. I decompose the overall change in industry-level productivity into efficient productivity shifts and misallocation. Increases in misallocation between 1929 and 1931 can explain at a minimum 50% of the decline in productivity for the cement industry, around 20% between 1931 and 1933, and 10 to 15% for 1933 to 1935. In order to explain these findings, I develop a model of financial frictions that relates misallocation to dispersion in working capital interest rates. I argue that these empirical and theoretical results provide another role for the non-monetary effects of the banking crisis during the Depression (Bernanke, 1983a): the collapse of aggregate productivity.