Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of flooding on avian top‐predators and their invertebrate prey in a monsoonal Taiwan stream

Summary 1. The effects of flooding on top predators are poorly understood globally, but particularly in monsoonal streams. We therefore attempted to assess how inter-annual and intra-annual variations in flood magnitude affected an obligate riverine predator, the brown dipper (Cinclus pallasii), and its invertebrate prey, in the mountain Tachia River, Taiwan. Major flooding in one of the study years (2005) allowed an insight into the effects of abnormally large flows. 2. The abundance and biomass of insects, and the abundance of dippers, decreased steadily from 2003 to 2005 as flood magnitude grew, but then increased in 2006 when more typical discharge returned. Dipper abundance, insect abundance and insect biomass were all strongly positively inter-related, but negatively related to discharge. Insect biomass, rather than abundance, was more useful in predicting brown dipper abundance. 3. Aquatic insect composition fluctuated among sampling years, revealed by non-metric multidimensional scaling, and these fluctuations were also related to discharge. In turn, dipper abundance and the mean body size of aquatic insects declined with the shift in insect composition as flow increased. 4. These data illustrate how discharge fluctuations can have pronounced effects on top predators in streams, mediated in this case by fluctuating prey abundance. While contributions from bird movement, breeding performance and mortality were not clearly differentiated, our data reveal how dippers have strategies to accommodate varying discharge in river systems. We suggest that the effects of floods on dippers should be taken into account when using this group as indicators of river quality.
Molecular study of a consanguineous family with autosomal recessive mental retardation and speech disorder

A B S T R A C T Mental retardation (MR) is one of the most frequently found major genetic disorders around the world, affecting 1-3% of the people in the general population. The recent advancement in molecular biology and cytogenetic study has made possible the identification of new genes for a variety of genetic disorders including autosomal recessive MR. Recessive genetic disorders are common in Pakistan due to the high rate of consanguinity. A central focus of the present study was to map and identify the disease causing gene in a mentally retarded consanguineous Pakistani family with speech disorder. The study comprises of 20 individuals including 10 patients. Genetic analysis of autosomal recessive MR and speech disorders was carried out for eight known fundamental loci sorted out on the basis of clinical features. These loci including 3p26.2, 3p21.3, 7q22, 8p22, 11p15, 14q11.2-q12, 19p13.12, and 22p13 were screened using polymorphic microsatellite markers. To identify the disease locus, genomic DNA from each individual was genotyped for homozygosity analysis. Microsatellite markers were amplified using PCR. The study provided valuable data to exclude linkage of the above mentioned loci. The absence of any linkage of the Pakistani family with autosomal recessive MR to the eight well known loci, confirms the genetic heterogeneity of MR. These results need to be verified and the candidate gene be found by a complete genome scan, which may help us in establishing the genotype-phenotype correlation of MR, improving genetic counseling, carrier screening, DNA based prenatal diagnosis and the opportunity to develop appropri ate animal models to test new forms of cell or gene therapies.
Building Successful Environmental Information Systems (EIS)

This study aimed to understand how Environmental Information Systems (EIS) had been successfully developed and what fact ors might contribute to its demise. This study is timely given increasing d emands on environmental management best practices and the current calls on how IS can be designed for such 'green' practices. Drawing from a case stu dy, this paper examined an ongoing design and development of a farm management system seeking to enhance understanding of EIS development and success. The findings identified a number of key issues that were importa nt in the EIS development. These included how the development process, collaboration and involvement, technical aspect, support and part icipation and support from all stakeholders including smaller ones. The r esults from this study suggested that EIS development exhibited a lot of c hallenges because it had involved a number of persons, diverse organizations and non-human aspects such as environmental regulation, standardization a nd safety aspect. Given this flux nature, it was therefore important for th e initiators (e.g. Government and developers) to establish alliances with other i nterested parties, orchestrate the view of different stakeholders and technical aspects to success the design process.
Forbidden fruit versus tainted fruit: Effects of warning labels on attraction to television violence

Under growing public and government pressure, the television networks have adopted warning labels for violent programs. Tainted fruit theory posits that warning labels will decrease interest in violent programs, whereas forbidden fruit theory posits that warning labels will increase interest in violent programs. In Experiment 1, it was found that warning labels increased interest in violent programs, especially when the label source was authoritative. In Experiment 2, it was found that high-reactance individuals were especially interested in viewing violent programs with warning labels. In Experiment 3, it was found that warning labels increased interest in violent programs more than did information labels. These results are consistent with forbidden fruit theory. Those who are interested in reducing viewership of violent media might use these results as a caution against assuming that warning labels decrease viewership when warning labels may in fact increase viewership.
Optimization of Sample Preparation for 1-Hydroxypyrene as a Major Biomarker of Exposure to PAHs Prior to HPLC

Urinary 1-hydroxypuren (1-OHP) is commonly used as a major metabolite and biological indicator of the overall exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). For evaluation of human exposure to such compounds, biological monitoring is an essential process, in which, preparation of samples is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone aspects prior to chromatographic techniques. In this study, non classic form of liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) was optimized with regard to solvent type, solvent volume, extraction temperature, mixing type, and mixing duration. Through the extraction process, a mild temperature was used to keep the compound of interest as stable as possible. In this study, a high performance liquid chromatography, using reverse-phase column was used. The isocratic run was done at a constant flow rate of 0.8 ml/min, the mobile phase was methanol/water and a fluorescence detector was used, setting at 242 nm and 388 nm. At the developed conditions, the extraction recovery was exceeded 87.3%, achieving detection limit of 0.2 µg/l. The factors were evaluated statically and the procedure was validated with three different pools of spiked urine samples and showed a good reproducibility over six consecutive days as well as experiments. It was concluded that, this optimized method could simplify sample preparation for trace residue analysis of PAHs metabolites.
Cost structure of energy measurements — A case study

Electricity distribution business is shifting from traditional utilities to commercially driven companies operating in competitive service markets. Some business segments in the field of electricity distribution business are under corporatization. This change requires studies and development of new kinds of business models. To understand the possibilities these new companies have, it is important to study the cost structures of their operations more closely. The analysis of current cost structures of different processes and activities make it possible to understand the changes required for municipal organizations to enter the competitive service markets.
TANAMI: Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry - II. Additional Sources

TANAMI is a multiwavelength program monitoring active galactic nuclei (AGN) south of -30deg declination including high-resolution Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) imaging, radio, optical/UV, X-ray and gamma-ray studies. We have previously published first-epoch 8.4GHz VLBI images of the parsec-scale structure of the initial sample. In this paper, we present images of 39 additional sources. The full sample comprises most of the radio- and gamma-ray brightest AGN in the southern quarter of the sky, overlapping with the region from which high-energy (>100TeV) neutrino events have been found. We characterize the parsec-scale radio properties of the jets and compare with the quasi-simultaneous Fermi/LAT gamma-ray data. Furthermore, we study the jet properties of sources which are in positional coincidence with high-energy neutrino events as compared to the full sample. We test the positional agreement of high-energy neutrino events with various AGN samples. Our observations yield the first images of many jets below -30deg declination at milliarcsecond resolution. We find that gamma-ray loud TANAMI sources tend to be more compact on parsec-scales and have higher core brightness temperatures than gamma-ray faint jets, indicating higher Doppler factors. No significant structural difference is found between sources in positional coincidence with high-energy neutrino events and other TANAMI jets. The 22 gamma-ray brightest AGN in the TANAMI sky show only a weak positional agreement with high-energy neutrinos demonstrating that the >100TeV IceCube signal is not simply dominated by a small number of the $\gamma$-ray brightest blazars. Instead, a larger number of sources have to contribute to the signal with each individual source having only a small Poisson probability for producing an event in multi-year integrations of current neutrino detectors.
Hydrogen Recombination Lines near 327 MHz. I. Distribution of Low-Density Ionized Gas in the Galactic Disk

We present the results of a low-resolution (2° × 2°) survey of radio recombination lines (RRLs) near 327 MHz in the Galactic plane made with the Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT). Although the angular resolution is coarse, these observations represent the first contiguous survey of low-frequency RRL emission in the longitude range l = 330°-0°-89° (inner Galaxy). Hydrogen RRLs were detected in almost all directions in the inner Galaxy and carbon lines in several positions. In the outer Galaxy (l = 172°-252°), an unbiased set of 14 positions were observed and lines were detected toward three of them. To study the extent of the ionized gas above the Galactic disk, we have observed RRLs along the Galactic latitude at two specific longitudes (l = 0.°0 and 13.°9). RRLs were detected up to b = ±3°. The l-v diagram and the radial distribution, obtained from RRL emission near 327 MHz, show good similarity with that of RRL emission near 1.4 GHz, "intense" 12CO emission and to some extent with the RRLs observed near 3 cm from normal H II region. These distributions are distinctly different from those of Hα and H I emission from the Galactic disk. Based on a comparison of the radial distribution of different components in the Galactic disk, we conclude that the diffuse RRL emission is associated with star-forming regions and possibly with a low-density component of known H II regions in the inner Galaxy.
A NEW HYBRID RELIABILITY ANALYSIS METHOD: THE DESIGN POINT - RESPONSE SURFACE - SIMULATION METHOD

Classical reliability methods such as First- and Second-Order Reliability Methods (FORM and SORM) have been important breakthroughs toward feasible and reliable integration of probabilistic information and uncertainty analysis into advanced design methods and modern design codes. These methods have been successfully used in solving challenging reliability problems. Nevertheless, caution should be used in the applications of these methods since their limitations and shortcomings in terms of applicability and accuracy are known and documented. Current research trends highlight the importance of structural reliability analysis methodologies that are able to provide improved estimates of the failure probability without excessive increase in computational cost when compared with ordinary FORM/SORM analyses. In this work, a new hybrid reliability analysis method, denoted as Design Point – Response Surface – Simulation (DP-RS-Sim) method is proposed and illustrated. This method innovatively combines the design point (DP) search used in FORM/SORM analyses with the response surface method and appropriate simulation techniques. The need for this combination has emerged from the results obtained through visualization of the limit state surfaces (LSSs) typically used in finite element reliability analysis. In particular, the visualization results show that these LSSs are often highly nonlinear in the neighborhood of their DPs. As application example, the time-invariant reliability analysis of a reinforced concrete frame structure subjected to horizontal pushover loads is considered. DP-RS-Sim-based estimations of the probability of limit state exceedance (expressed in terms of displacement thresholds) by the benchmark structure are compared with FORM, SORM, crude Monte Carlo and Importance Sampling results in terms of accuracy and computational cost. It is shown that the new DP-RS-Sim method can provide accurate failure probability estimates at low computational cost compared to other structural reliability methods.
An Examination of Sixth Graders' Self-Determined Motivation and Learning in Physical Education.

Self-determination theory (SDT), when applied in education, emphasizes helping learners internalize extrinsic motivation so as to regulate their learning behavior from an amotivation state to intrinsic motivation. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between SDT components and learning in middle school physical education. Sixth grade students ( n = 242) from 15 randomly selected schools provided data on SDT and their knowledge and skill learning achievement as assessed using a pre- and post-measurement design. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that extrinsically regulated motivations and intrinsic motivation contributed little to knowledge and skill achievement and amotivation negatively related to knowledge improvement. Given the fact that the data represented learner responses to an activity centered program, the findings imply that when learning objectives are vague, learners may be motivated to participate in classes but their participation may not contribute much to knowledge and skill achievement.
The Effect of Audit Quality on Earning Management within Manufacturing Companies Listed on Indonesian Stock Exchange

Indonesia began to implementeconomic and tax reforms. Accordingly, it is important to explore further howmanagers of manufacturing companies listed on Indonesia Stock Exchange engagein earning management. Audit quality was measured by two different proxies;i.e., audit firm size and industry specialist auditors, while earningsmanagement was measured by discretionary accruals. Meanwhile, leverage, firmsize, and operating cash flow served as control variables. The sample involvedin this study comprises of manufacturing companies listed on the IndonesiaStock Exchange; covering 420 firm-year observations from the fiscal years 2010to 2013. This study applied a Multiple regression analysis in estimating therelationship between the audit quality and earning management. As hypothesizedin this study, the results showed that audit quality and earning management arenegatively related. The findings advance the current knowledge pertaining toaudit quality and earning management relationship in the context of emergingeconomies such Indonesia.Keywords: audit quality, earning management, Indonesianmanufacturing companies
Hand acceleration measurement by Kinect for rehabilitation applications

A ordable motion sensors that are recently developed for video gaming have formed a budding line of research in the eld of physical rehabilitation. These sensors have been used in many task-based applications to analyze the patients' status based on their completion of assigned tasks. However, as the accuracy of such sensors is lower than that of the clinical ones, their measured data has had very limited use in quantitative motion analysis to this date. The aim of this article is to determine Kinect's ability and accuracy in calculating higher-order kinematic parameters, such as velocity and acceleration, in hand movements. Four methods, i.e. moving average, Butterworth lter, B-spline, and Kalman lter, were proposed to calculate velocity and acceleration from Kinect's raw position data. The results were experimentally compared with two established motion capture systems, i.e. Vicon and Xsens, to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each method. The results show that B-spline is the best method for calculating velocity and acceleration from Kinect's position data. Using this method, these parameters can be measured with an acceptable accuracy.
Kalman Filtering Algorithm for Systems with Stochastic Nonlinearity Functions, Finite-Step Correlated Noises, and Missing Measurements

The locally optimal filter is designed for a class of discrete-time systems subject to stochastic nonlinearity functions, finite-step correlated noises, and missing measurements. The multiplicative noises are employed to describe the random disturbances in the system model. The phenomena of missing measurements occur in a random way and the missing probability is characterized by Bernoulli distributed random variables with known conditional probabilities. Based on the projection theory, a class of Kalman-type locally optimal filter is constructed and the filtering error covariance matrix is minimized in the sense of minimum mean square error principle. Also, by solving the recursive matrix equation, we can obtain the filter gain. Finally, two examples are provided: one is a numerical example to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed filtering scheme; the other is to solve the problem of target estimation for a tracking system considering networked phenomena.
Recurrent Poisson Process Unit for Speech Recognition

Over the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in using recurrent neural network-hidden Markov model (RNN-HMM) for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Some modern recurrent network models, such as long shortterm memory (LSTM) and simple recurrent unit (SRU), have demonstrated promising results on this task. Recently, several scientific perspectives in the fields of neuroethology and speech production suggest that human speech signals may be represented in discrete point patterns involving acoustic events in the speech signal. Based on this hypothesis, it may pose some challenges for RNN-HMM acoustic modeling: firstly, it arbitrarily discretizes the continuous input into the interval features at a fixed frame rate, which may introduce discretization errors; secondly, the occurrences of such acoustic events are unknown. Furthermore, the training targets of RNN-HMM are obtained from other (inferior) models, giving rise to misalignments. In this paper, we propose a recurrent Poisson process (RPP) which can be seen as a collection of Poisson processes at a series of time intervals in which the intensity evolves according to the RNN hidden states that encode the history of the acoustic signal. It aims at allocating the latent acoustic events in continuous time. Such events are efficiently drawn from the RPP using a sampling-free solution in an analytic form. The speech signal containing latent acoustic events is reconstructed/sampled dynamically from the discretized acoustic features using linear interpolation, in which the weight parameters are estimated from the onset of these events. The above processes are further integrated into an SRU, forming our final model, called recurrent Poisson process unit (RPPU). Experimental evaluations on ASR tasks including ChiME-2, WSJ0 and WSJ0&1 demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the RPPU. For example, it achieves a relative WER reduction of 10.7% over state-of-the-art models on WSJ0.
The Use of ICT Technologies Enhances Employees’ Performance in the Greek Hotel Industry

A large number of studies have been produced lately aiming to understand and explain the factors influencing the acceptance of IT by the employees of the hotel industry and create model examples, mainly based on TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) (Davis), TTF (Technology Acceptance Model) (Goodhue and Thomson) and their expansions and variations. The research effectuated mainly used empirical data from the United States, North and West Europe as well as East Asia, while a relative lack in papers is observed with regard to data coming from other touristic zones, like the Mediterranean, which, according to the EU is visited by nearly 30% Sata A. (2004) of the world tourism annually. The present paper intends to make up for that relevant insufficiency, being based on data coming from the touristic zone of Greece. Furthermore the purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of Perceived Information Technology Beliefs, in combination with the employees’ particular personal and individual characteristics, which are included in the Personal Characteristics and Subjective Norms factors, through a TAM, to affect Behavioural Intention (BI) to accept and use the Information Technologies (IT). Our findings, with the exception of the (non-significance) of Self-Efficacy, suggest that, in the Greek Tourism Sector, the harmonization of Personal Characteristics together with the other driving factors positively contributes, through a TAM, to the enhancement of Behavioural Intention; consequently, one of the first policy measures in the Sector should be the expansion of staff training in Information Technologies.
Finite-difference time-domain analysis of time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy experiments

In this paper we report on the numerical analysis of a time-resolved terahertz (THz) spectroscopy experiment using a modified finite-difference time-domain method. Using this method, we show that ultrafast carrier dynamics can be extracted with a time resolution smaller than the duration of the THz probe pulse and can be determined solely by the pump pulse duration. Our method is found to reproduce complicated two-dimensional transient conductivity maps exceedingly well, demonstrating the power of the time-domain numerical method for extracting ultrafast and dynamic transport parameters from time-resolved THz spectroscopy experiments. The numerical implementation is available online.