Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seasonal changes in avian communities living in an extensively used farmland of Western Poland

Abstract To study the seasonal changes in avian communities, we collected data in an extensively used farmland in Western Poland during 2006-2013. Generalized additive mixed models were used in order to study the effects of seasonality and protected areas on the overall bird species richness. A similarity percentage analysis was also conducted in order to identify the species that contribute most strongly to dissimilarity among each bird according to the phenological season. Furthermore, the differences in bird communities were investigated applying the decomposition of the species richness in season, trend, and remainder components. Each season showed significant differences in bird species richness (seasonality effect). The effect of the protected areas was slightly positive on the overall species richness for all seasons. However, an overall negative trend was detected for the entire period of eight years. The bird community composition was different among seasons, showing differences in terms of dominant species. Greater differences were found between breeding and wintering seasons, in particular, the spatial pattern of sites with higher bird richness (hotspots) were different between breeding and wintering seasons. Our findings showed a negative trend in bird species richness verified in the Polish farmlands from 2006. This result mirrors the same negative trend already highlighted for Western Europe. The role of protected areas, even if slightly positive, was not enough to mitigate this decline process. Therefore, to effectively protect farmland birds, it is necessary to also consider inter-seasons variation, and for this, we suggest the use of medium-term temporal studies on bird communities’ trends.
InverseFaceNet : Deep Monocular Inverse Face Rendering — Supplemental Material —

Figure 1. Our single-shot deep inverse face renderer InverseFaceNet obtains a high-quality geometry, reflectance and illumination estimate from just a single input image. We jointly recover the facial pose, shape, expression, reflectance and incident scene illumination. From left to right: the input photo, our estimated face model, its geometry, and the pointwise Euclidean geometry error compared to Garrido et al. [3].
Human Performance Improvement Key to Sustainable Safety Excellence

www.asse. org JUNE 2009 PROFESSIONAL SAFETY 63 SOME IN THE SAFETY INDUSTRY assert that a goal of zero defects, although admirable, is unrealistic because some risks are simply too costly to identify, prevent or eliminate (Behm, Veltri & Kleinsorge, 2004). Constrained by budgets, managers pragmatically target low-hanging fruit—hazards that are most harmful or frequent, may result in costly injuries or are easily controlled. Behm, et al. (2004) maintain “that some risk must be considered acceptable for an organization’s financial stability” (p. 24). In most workplaces, a small measure of human error constitutes “acceptable risk. ”Although partially mitigated through design, human error is an inherent risk that is considered wholly unavoidable and ultimately inevitable. Unreliability is a fact of life. Oversights occur, information is misdirected, and even the most talented and conscientious employees are occasionally prone to errors in judgment. The risk of human error is amplified in today’s highly dynamic work environments. Change is fundamental, rapid and unrelenting. Unexpected circumstances, revised goals, change orders and turnover are just a few of the factors that surreptitiously disrupt safety system equilibrium, resulting in worker inattention, carelessness or negligence.
Dimensionality Reduction of Quality Objectives for Web Services Design Modularization

viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND AND CHALLENGES . 5 2.1 Background . 5 2.1. 1 Web Service Interface Defects . 5 2.1. 2 Used Metrics . 6 2.1. 3 Refactoring Types . 7 2.1. 4 Dimensionality Reduction . 7 2.2 Motivating Example . 8 CHAPTER 3: DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION APPROACH FOR WEB SERVICES MODULARIZATION . 9 3.1 Approach Overview . 9 3.2 NSGA-II . 10 3.3 NSGA-II Adaptation . 12 3.3.1 Solution Representation . 12 3.3.2 Change Operators . 12
HMM Based Distributed Speech Processing Distributed Speech Recognition

: Distributed speech recognition (DSR) is a concept which performs speech recognition over a network. It mainly focuses to assist physically challenged and visually impaired individuals to use internet services with as ease as that of others. DSR adopts the client/server methodology for implementing recognition process over internet. In combination with the HMM based recognition systems; distributed speech recognition (DSR) can deliver a highly flexible and scalable system of speech recognition. An example based on DSR can be thought of as in a meeting or discussion room, the meeting notes can be directly taken down in our handset and can be shared with all the stakeholders immediately after the meeting. The performance of speech recognition systems receiving speech that has been transmitted over mobile channels can be significantly degraded when compared to using an unmodified signal. The degradations are as a result of both the low bit rate speech coding and channel transmission errors. A Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) system overcomes these problems by eliminating the speech channel and instead using an error protected data channel to send a parameterized representation of the speech, which is suitable for recognition. The processing is distributed between the terminal and the network. The terminal performs the feature parameter extraction, or the front-end of the speech recognition system. These features are transmitted over a data channel to a remote "back-end" recognizer. The backend server recognizes speech from the received stream of parameter vectors, uses phoneme based HMM models and recognizes the speech.
Frequency dependent 2H N.M.R. relaxation rates of small unilamellar phospholipid vesicles

Deuterium (2H) N.M. R. spectroscopy has been used to investigate experimentally the molecular dynamics of phospholipid vesicles. 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC) was deuterated specifically in both acyl chains, and aqueous suspensions of vesicles were studied above the main orderdisorder transition temperature. 2H spin-lattice relaxation rates (R 1) were measured at nine different magnetic field strengths, corresponding to Larmor frequencies (v o = ωo/2π) spanning 2·5 MHz to 61·4 MHz. Of three models considered, a model in which R 1 ∝ ω-1/2 0 best described the 2H N.M. R. results, whereas fits to R 1 ∝ ω-1 0 or to a lorentzian plus a constant dispersion were less satisfactory. Thus a broad distribution of motions exists, which must be explained by any model for the N.M. R. relaxation of liquid-crystalline phospholipids.
Analysis of well-being of pigs by means of video sequences

[ANGLES] The Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU) collaborates with the Danish Meat Research Institute in order to implement an automated method which takes care of the well-being of pigs on the slaughterhouse. The method will try to survey the welfare of pigs during the process from when they arrive at the slaughterhouse, they are unloaded and finally they go to the $CO^{2}$ chamber. By means of video sequences, the task has consisted in implementing an algorithm that obtains the maximum amount of information from the pigs on the slaughterhouse. Afterwards, the information about them is stored and used as a tool for extracting features about the abnormal behaviour of the pigs.
Supplemental : Multiview Consistency as Supervisory Signal for Learning Shape and Pose Prediction

We briefly described, in the main text, the formulation of a view consistency loss L(x̄, C;V ) that measures the inconsistency between a shape x̄ viewed according to camera C and a depth/mask image V . Crucially, this loss was differentiable w.r. t both, pose and shape. As indicated in the main text, our formulation builds upon previously proposed differentiable ray consistency formulation [3] with some innovations to make it differentiable w.r. t pose. For presentation clarity, we first present our full formulation, and later discuss its relation to the previous techniques (a similar discussion can also be found in the main text).
Technical Barriers To Trade: A Case Study Of Phytosanitary Barriers And U.S. - Japanese Apple Trade

Concern about the use if technical barriers as restrictions to trade has increased since the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture. In this analysis, we quantify the phytosanitary barriers to U.S. apple exports to Japan by calculating tariff-rate equivalents. We examine the trade and welfare impacts of removing phytosanitary barriers and tariffs under two assumptions regarding transmission of the bacterial disease fire blight: first, that transmission via commercial fruit is not possible, and second, that it can occur. The disease losses required to eliminate the grains to trade are estimated to be much larger than those experienced in other countries.
Matching Spectroscopy with the Ultrasonic Polar Scan for Advanced NDT of Composites

The Pulsed Ultrasonic Polar Scan (P-UPS) is a powerful technique for characterizing anisotropic materials like fiber reinforced plastics. A time-domain analysis of the ultrasonic signals yields amplitude and time-of-flight polar diagrams that provide a fingerprint of the local stiffness properties. Though, this simple analysis ignores a lot of information contained in the ultrasonic signals. In this study, we propose to use the P-UPS technique in combination with the spectroscopic analysis of broadband pulses, to obtain plane wave transmission spectra for all in-plane polar angles. This allows us to combine on one hand the strengths of the P-UPS technique, that does not require a priori knowledge about the sample anisotropy, and on the other hand the frequency-domain analysis that utilizes information contained in the broadband pulses.
Gonadotropin releasing hormone in agnathans

25 Introduction 27 Materials and Methods 32 Peptide Isolation Methods 32 Peptide Isolation and Methods 32 First Extraction and Radioimmunoassay 32 Matrix-Assisted Laser-Desorption Ionization Post Source Decay (PSD) and Collision Induced Dissociation (CID) 33 Second Extraction and Radioimmunoassay 33 Texas Peptide Sequencing 34 Molecular Methods 35 Total RNA Isolation 35 First Strand Synthesis 36 Polymerase Chain Reaction 36
Priority Neuron: A Resource-Aware Neural Network for Cyber-Physical Systems

Advances in sensing, computation, storage, and actuation technologies have entered cyber-physical systems (CPSs) into the smart era where complex control applications requiring high performance are supported. Neural networks (NNs) models are proposed as a predictive model to be used in model predictive control (MPC) applications. However, the ability to efficiently exploit resource hungry NNs in embedded resource-bound settings is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose priority neuron network (PNN), a resource-aware NNs model that can be reconfigured into smaller subnetworks at runtime. This approach enables a tradeoff between the model’s computation time and accuracy based on available resources. The PNN model is memory efficient since it stores only one set of parameters to account for various subnetwork sizes. We propose a training algorithm that applies regularization techniques to constrain the activation value of neurons and assigns a priority to each one. We consider the neuron’s ordinal number as our priority criteria in that the priority of the neuron is inversely proportional to its ordinal number in the layer. This imposes a relatively sorted order on the activation values. We conduct experiments to employ our PNN as the predictive model of a vehicle in MPC for path tracking. To corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology, we compare it with two state-of-the-art methods for resource-aware NN design. Compared to state-of-the-art work, our approach can cut down the training time by 87% and reduce the memory storage by 75% while achieving similar accuracy. Moreover, we decrease the computation overhead for the model reduction process that searches for neurons below a threshold, from <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ {O(n)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ {O}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>(log<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ {n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>).
arkov C hain Model for Semantic Document Retrieval

The task of researching and developing information retrieval systems is becoming important in the big data age. Current search methods try to mention to fast searching based on keyword matching or similar semantic between query and documents but have not got a really effective engine for semantic search . In this paper, we propose a method for information retrieval based on probability inference with the DLMC model to search by semantic equivalents and a topic word with score for fast searching. Results of the experimental with 952 Vietnamese documents show that our method is really effective for Vietnamese document retrieval system.
The links between some European financial factors and the BRICS credit default swap spreads

Emerging economies and especially the BRICS countries have strong economic ties with the euro area. In addition, the financial crisis in the euro area may have effects on other markets or areas, especially those of the main emerging markets. Credit default swap (CDS) spreads are relevant indicators of credit risks. After identifying a set of fundamental determinants for sovereign CDS spreads, including euro area financial factors and computing Markov switching unit root test, we estimate Markov switching models over the period from January 2002 to August 2012, in order to examine the behaviour of sovereign CDS spreads in the BRICS countries. , i) We detect two different regimes for the BRICS, that finding is backed by conventional robustness checks and economic events; ii) most of the explanatory variables are involved in the determining theses regimes. Thus both financial and real factors have an impact on the relations defining each regime, except for Russia which is only impacted by financial ones. Especially, euro area financial indicators are largely involved in the BRICS sovereign CDS spreads’ dynamics. Besides, the robustness check supports the use of euro area variables as determinants of BRICS sovereign CDS spreads.
DROUGHT TOLERANCE TURFGRASS CULTIVARS FOR MICHIGAN

The Michigan Agricultural Statistics Service (MASS) showed that over 1.9 million acres of turfgrass were maintained throughout the state during 2002-2003. Over 84% of this acreage was in the residential sector, while 96,000 acres were intensively managed by golf course superintendents. In addition, 1.8 million acres were used as forage grasses in the state of Michigan. The contribution of the turfgrass industry to Michigan’s state economy exceeded $1.8 billion annually and created jobs for over 30,000 full-time employees. Furthermore, the turfgrass industry depends primarily on Michigan State University for research to determine the best grass cultivars and management practices for the State of Michigan. Our ultimate goal is to develop efficient drought tolerant cultivars by combining modern molecular and conventional breeding technology to transfer valuable traits from fescue in which new and improved drought tolerant cultivars will be released. The newly developed drought tolerant cultivars will ultimately save the turfgrass industry millions of dollars by reducing the irrigation rate, energy input, and more importantly conserving water resources, as it becomes exceedingly limited throughout the USA and the world. With regions experiencing increased drought conditions, along with cities and municipalities declaring water emergencies, the watering of landscapes will be severely restricted.
The regional distribution characteristics of aerosol optical depth over the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract. The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is representative of typical clean atmospheric conditions. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieved by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) is higher over Qaidam Basin than the rest of the TP throughout the year. Different monthly variation patterns of AOD are observed over the southern and northern TP, whereby the aerosol load is usually higher in the northern TP than in the southern part. The aerosol load over the northern part increases from April to June, peaking in May. The maximum concentration of aerosols over the southern TP occurs in July. Aerosols appear to be more easily transported to the main body of the TP across the northern edge rather than the southern edge. This is maybe partly because the altitude is lower at the northern edge than that of the Himalayas located along the southern edge of the TP. Three-dimensional distributions of dust, polluted dust, polluted continental aerosol and smoke are also investigated, based on Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) data. Dust is found to be the most prominent aerosol type on the TP, and other types of aerosols affect the atmospheric environment slightly. A dividing line of higher dust occurrence in the northern TP and lower dust occurrence in the southern TP can be observed clearly at an altitude of 6–8 km above sea level, especially in spring and summer. This demarcation appears around 33–35° N in the middle of the plateau, and it is possibly associated with the high-altitude terrain in the same geographic location. Comparisons of CALIPSO and MISR data show that the vertical dust occurrences are consistent with the spatial patterns of AOD. The different seasonal variation patterns between the northern and southern TP are primarily driven by atmospheric circulation, and are also related to the emission characteristics over the surrounding regions.
Slurry Based Coatings On Silicon Based Ceramics

Silicon carbide/silicon carbide (SiC/SiC) composite are the leading candidates for advanced high temperature structural components in gas turbine engine application. When SiC surface reacts with O 2, protective SiO2 scales are formed, which are the basis for the corrosion resistance of SiC. Their main dra w back in terms of usage in a gasturbine engine is the volatilization of the protect ive silica scale because of the water vapor which is a byproduct of fuel combustion. The purpose of this project was to develop environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) based on ceramic powders to provide resistance to such moisture damage. In this thesis slurry-coating development has been pursued in terms of optimizing the preparation of p wder-mixtures, the amount of polyvinyl butyral (PVB) to be added as a binder in the slurry, the degree of powder loading in the slurry, and coat sintering temperatu res with different slurry compositions. The α-SiC ceramics were coated by the slurry dip process and sintered at different temperatures; the coated samples were examined unde r scanning electron microscope. Coated samples were thermally cycled in 96.5% H 2O vapor-balance O 2 flowing gas environment from 1300 C (or 1350C) to room temperature (RT) for 100 to 300 cycles ( 1 cycle = 1 h hot temperature and 15 min. RT) to exam ine the coating stability.
DEVELOPMENT OF COLORECTAL PHANTOM TO EVALUATE NEW ULTRASOUND ELASTOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE

Colorectal cancer is the second most frequent in Europe. Standard screaming methods are uncomfort- able for the patient, invasive, and/or are ionizing. An alternative ultrasound elastography method, has been developed as complementary diagnostic imaging tech- nique. This method intends to use a magnetic stress- strain - provide from ferromagnetic fluid inside of colon - to produce relative elastography maps by ultrasound. However, this alternative technique needs to be evaluat- ed in vitro before clinical applications. In this study we developed paraffin based phantom that mimic colon region to ultrasound B-mode and elastography images. This phantom will allow to evaluate potential technique limitation. Varying granular wax from 0% to 4%, we estimate the Young's modulus to determine the material relative stiffness. The phantom has four inclusions with different elastic modulus (from 3.6kPa to 5.7kPa). We measured the ultrasound propagation velocity and acoustic attenuation. This study developed paraffin- based phantom that mimics soft tissue mechanical pro- prieties and simulate a colon lesion.
FIVE-PORT POWER SPLITTER BASED ON PILLAR PHOTONIC CRYSTAL

Designing a power splitter with five ports has been shown in this article. In order to prevent the direct coupling between waveguides, a T-shaped structure with an appropriate distance has been used. The coupling between the parallel photonic crystal waveguides is based on multimode interference, while selecting the output efficiency is performed by setting the refractive coefficients and radius of cavities in the coupling area. The photonic crystal of the splitter has a square-shaped structure made of silicon rods with lattice constant “a”, radius of 0.2a and linear refractive index of n=3.4. The filling factor of this structure is r/a=0.18. Characteristic curve of the power splitter has been simulated by means of finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The present device can be used in the future photonic integrated circuits and optical network applications.
Preemption and Forecast Accuracy : A Structural Approach

This paper examines how competition affects information provided by experts. I estimate a timing game played by financial analysts who produce earning forecasts. Over time, both the exogenous information available to the market and the information privately observed by each analyst become more precise. In choosing when to release their forecasts, analysts weigh whether to wait for more precise information in order to forecast more accurately, or to preempt their competitors by reducing the informational advantage enjoyed by rivals who have yet to issue their forecasts. I assess the informational value of professional forecasters. I find that financial analysts produce 40% of the information on future earnings made available to investors during the forecasting period. I perform a counterfactual experiment with fixed forecast dates to quantify the extent to which preemption affects forecast delay and forecast accuracy. Preemption reduces forecast delays substantially: without preemption, the average analyst would disclose her forecast eight days after the date observed in the data. Because earlier forecasts use less information, preemption diminishes the average forecast accuracy by 24%.