Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Forced Sales and Farmland Prices

We analyze farmland prices in the German federal state of Brandenburg from 2000 to 2011 with the aim to understand the price formation process in farmland foreclosures. Pressured sales usually result in a price discount due to time constraints; however, the land is sold using public auctions. This may lead to a price premium. Since the effect of a foreclosure on farmland prices is ambiguous, we empirically quantify the overall effect. We use matching techniques and a regression-based approach. We find that on average, price premiums are realized, though the effect depends on prevailing land market conditions. (JEL C21, Q11)
The View Finder: International Perspectives on Special Education Technology. Volume 3.

The four articles in this monograph present issues in the application of technology to special education from an international perspective. In the first chapter, "Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems--Computer Applications for Individuals with Disabilities: An International Perspective," Richard Cardinali and George McMurdo provide a comparative review of the developments in technology-based communication systems in the United States and Scotland (United Kingdom). They argue that use of augmentative and alternative commlinication is currently limited due to a lack of role models, a lack of vision, and insufficient training. The second article is titled "Computer Applications for Special Needs Students: What Canadian Teachers Use and Need," by C. Laine and others. This paper reports the results of a national survey of Canadian special education teachers on special education technology including such issues as access, use, and unmet needs. The third paper is "Technology and Social Skills Training Program for Students with Special Needs in Israel: 'I Found a Solution,'" by Malka Margalit. This paper reports on five studies of students with mild disabilities who used a computer-assisted social skills program called "I Found a Solution. " It suggests such programs may have tremendous value in enabling students to experiment and rehearse solutions for social conflicts. The final paper is "The Indonesian System of Caring: Beyond Technology Solutions to Human Problems" by Judy W. Kugleman. It raises questions concerning unanticipated outcomes that may arise from over-reliance on technology and the dangers of assumptions about shared beliefs and values in multicultural societies. (Papers contain references.) (DB) Volume Three DISES 1995 U 8 DEPARTMENT OF EDuCATION OiliCe of Educahonai Research and imtxovement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Ceecidocument has been rePrOduCed sived from the person or organiztion his
LSSVM Combined with SPA Applied to Near-Infrared Quantitative Determination of the Octane in Fuel Petrol Samples

Least square support vector machine (LSSVM) combined with successive projection algorithm (SPA) method was applied for near-infrared (NIR) quantitative determination of the octane number in fuel petrol. The NIR spectra of 87 fuel petrol samples were scanned for model establishment and optimization. First order derivative Savitzky-Golay smoother (1st-d’SG) was utilized to improve the NIR predictive ability. Its pretreatment effect was compared with the raw data. SPA was applied for the extraction of informative wavelengths. Considering the linear and non-linear training mechanism, LSSVM regression was employed to establish calibration models. The correlation coefficient (R) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used as the model evaluation indices; accordingly the octane number in fuel petrol was quantitatively determined with the prospective predictive indices. Results showed that after pretreated by 1st-d’SG, 8 SPA-selected wavelengths was generated as the inputs of LSSVM, so that the calibration models were optimized in the way of combining the SPA-LSSVM regression with the SG smoother. The prediction results were quite satisfactory, with the calibrating correlation coefficient of 0.951 and the RMSE of 3.282. An independent testing sample set was used to evaluate the optimal model, the testing correlation coefficient was 0.903 and the RMSE was 4.128. We conclude that NIR spectrometry is feasible to determine the octane in fuel petrol by establishing SPA-LSSVM models. The 1st-d’SG pretreatment has the advantage of selecting wavelengths containing the implicit information. The combination of 1st-d’SG pretreatment and SPA-LSSVM show its applicable potential to predict the octane number in fuel petrol.
Design and optimization of coupled microring resonators(MRRs) in silicon-on-insulator

The design of microring resonators (MRRs) for serial configuration, integrated in the lateral scheme was presented and simulated using 3D electromagnetic simulator based on finite integration technique. The device model is embedded on the high index contrast (HIC) structure of silicon-on-insulator with monomodal cavity for TE-mode polarizations. From the proposed model, we varied the MRRs order, waveguides separation distance and ring radius, in order to evaluate the influence of those parameters on the device performance in terms of loss, free spectral range (FSR) and quality factor (Q-factor). Upon varying the gap distances, it was found that the highest Q-factor value of the proposed design was 1275 obtained at gap separation of 150 nm for ring radius of 6 μm, while the largest FSR was 24 nm. The trade-offs between device compactness, optical bandwidth and Q-factor are also presented.
Channels for objects and environments in macaque inferotemporal cortex

Visual information processing in the primate brain is thought to occur along two major pathways, known as the ventral and dorsal pathways. The ventral (’what’) pathway has been considered a system specialized for processing visual information about object structure/shape and identity. Evidence for this view comes from wideranging studies based on fMRI, behavioral effects of lesions and neural recording. In particular, recording studies in the macaque have revealed strong sensitivity to object shape information, ranging in complexity from 2D local contour orientation in early visual areas to 3D local surface curvature in the inferotemporal (IT) cortex, a region comprising the final stages of the ventral pathway. While object vision has been the primary focus of research in the ventral pathway, fMRI studies relating to visual representation of places or environments (e.g. landscapes and interiors) have implicated dorsal pathway areas and the parahippocampal cortex. The goal of the research presented here was to test for the first time using neural recording whether neurons in anterior IT cortex of the macaque ventral pathway are in addition to objects also sensitive to environmental shape. Neural responses were sampled using large-scale abstract visual stimuli that resembled landscapes and interiors. Specifically, visual stimuli spanned the entire scale
Modeling auditory signal processing in hearing-impaired listeners

Recently, an auditory signal processing model was developed which can sim- ulate psychoacoustic data from a large variety of conditions related to spectral and temporal masking in normal-hearing listeners (Jepsen et al., 2008). The model includes the dual-resonance non-linear (DRNL) filterbank suggested by Lopez-Poveda and Meddis (2001) to simulate the non-linear cochlear signal processing, and is otherwise similar to the modulation lterbank model by Dau et al. (1997). In the present study, the model parameters were modi ed to sim- ulate cochlear hearing impairment. The modi cations of the model were based on individual data from notched-noise masking and forward masking and were associated with changes of the parameters of the DRNL stage of the model. Data from a pure-tone audiogram were used to further reduce listener sensitivity in connection with an assumed loss of inner hair cells. In addition, intensity discrimination experiments and a modulation depth discrimination experiment were performed to estimate potential retro-cochlear (central) limitations of the processing of supra-threshold stimuli. The model helps understanding the perceptual consequences of hearing impairment in individual listeners and might be useful for the evaluation of hearing-aid signal processing.
Showcasing Self: An Intersectional Analysis Of Body Type Presentation In Online Daters

Using data collected from the online dating site Match.com, this paper performs a content analysis examining the relationships between race, gender, and sexuality as both independent variables and as intersections on impression management strategies in online dating. Impression management strategies form a foundational core of how people interact with others in social situations. This analysis focuses on impression management strategies by examining how people advertise their body type in a public arena. Analysis also draws upon the types of bodies these people desire in an ideal date, as a second method of looking at the norms surrounding the ideal body type for a given group. Drawing upon intersectionality theories, this paper looks at potential biases in previous online dating literature towards white heterosexuals. Taking this idea into account, this analysis utilizes 892 profiles from major urban centers within the United States, approximately equal in the numbers of whites and blacks, gay/lesbians and heterosexuals, and men and women, in order to examine underrepresented populations in previous online dating literature. Findings show that body type norms based on intersectional race and gender literature appear to be more accurate predictors of proclaimed body type than only those using gender literatures. In addition, sexuality, race, and gender interactions appear to have an effect in the terminology an online dater uses in describing both themselves and the types of bodies desired in ideal dates. Contrary to prior online dating and gender literature, findings also indicate a greater willingness of women compared to men to use terms that indicate their body might be overweight. Theoretical explanations look at how positions relative to hegemonic power may be an overriding influence in the importance of body type impression management strategies.
Atmospheric boundary layer characteristics and land−atmosphere energy transfer in the Third Pole area

The Tibetan Plateau and nearby surrounding area (the Third Pole area) dramatically impacts the world’s environment and especially controls climatic and environmental changes in China, Asia and even in the Northern Hemisphere. Supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and some international organizations, the Third Pole Environment (TPE) Programme is now under way. First, the background of the establishment of the TPE, the establishment and monitoring plans on long-term for the TPE and six comprehensive observation and study stations are introduced. Then the preliminary observational analysis results on atmosphere−land interaction are presented. The study on the regional distribution of land surface heat fluxes is of paramount importance over the heterogeneous landscape of the Third Pole area. A parameterization methodology based on satellite and in situ data is described and tested for deriving the regional surface heat fluxes (net radiation flux, soil heat flux, sensible heat flux and latent heat flux) over the heterogeneous landscape. As a case study, the methodology was applied to the whole Tibetan Plateau area. Eight images of MODIS data and four images of AVHRR data were used for the comparison among winter, spring, summer and autumn, and the annual variation analyses. The derived results were also validated by using the ‘‘ground truth’’ measured in the stations of the TPE. The results show that the derived surface heat fluxes in the four different seasons over the Tibetan Plateau area are in good agreement with the ground measurements. The results from AVHRR were also in agreement with MODIS. It is therefore concluded that the proposed methodology is successful for the retrieval of surface heat fluxes using the MODIS data, AVHRR data and in situ data over the Tibetan Plateau area.
Applying citizen science to gene, drug and disease relationship extraction from biomedical abstracts

MOTIVATION Biomedical literature is growing at a rate that outpaces our ability to harness the knowledge contained therein. To mine valuable inferences from the large volume of literature, many researchers use information extraction algorithms to harvest information in biomedical texts. Information extraction is usually accomplished via a combination of manual expert curation and computational methods. Advances in computational methods usually depends on the time-consuming generation of gold standards by a limited number of expert curators. Citizen science is public participation in scientific research. We previously found that citizen scientists are willing and capable of performing named entity recognition of disease mentions in biomedical abstracts, but did not know if this was true with relationship extraction. RESULTS In this paper, we introduce the Relationship Extraction Module of the web-based application Mark2Cure and demonstrate that citizen scientists can perform relationship extraction. We confirm the importance of accurate named entity recognition on user performance of relationship extraction and identify design issues that impacted data quality. We find that the data generated by citizen scientists can be used to identify relationship types not currently available in the Mark2Cure Relationship Extraction Module. We compare the citizen science-generated data with algorithm-mined data and identify ways in which the two approaches may complement one another. We also discuss opportunities for future improvement of this system, as well as the potential synergies between citizen science, manual biocuration, and natural language processing. AVAILABILITY Mark2Cure platform: https://mark2cure.org. Mark2Cure source code: https://github.com/sulab/mark2cureData and analysis code for this paper: https://github.com/gtsueng/M2C_rel_nb. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Uncertainty Propagation in Gaussian Process Pipelines

Gaussian processes (GPs) constitute ideal candidates for building learning pipelines [1, 2, 3]. Their Bayesian, non-parametric nature reduces the need to cross-validate for specifying kernel parameters and they offer the promise of automatic structure determination through appropriate “pruning” priors, such as ARD or spike and slab. We consider learning pipelines which rely on Gaussian process models to accomplish inference tasks in each stage. Our aim is to allow for the uncertainty obtained in each stage to be propagated across the pipeline. Propagating uncertainty through GPs is challenging due to their non-linearity. To achieve our goal, we generalise a variational inference method [4, 5] that allows for approximately propagating densities throughout the nodes of GP-based directed graphical models. To illustrate the framework we focus on two different instances of learning paradigms that can be reduced to a pipeline of Gaussian processes. The first is semi-supervised learning through data imputation and the second is auto-regressive simulation of states from a dynamical model for domains such as reinforcement learning. Our approach increases automation in a principled way by eliminating the need to sample, cross-validate thresholds or manually detect outliers in between the learning stages. Experiments on simulated and real-world data show the importance of correctly propagating the uncertainty between stages of the pipeline and demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.
Star formation in grand-design, spiral galaxies - Young, massive clusters in the near-infrared

Deep, near-infrared JHK-maps were observed for 10 nearby, grand-design, spiral galaxies using HAWK-I/VLT to study the distribution of young stellar clusters in them and thereby determine whether strong spiral perturbations can influence star formation. Complete, magnitude-limited candidate lists of star-forming complexes were obtained by searching within the K-band maps. The properties of the complexes were derived from (H-K)-(J-H) diagrams including the identification of the youngest complexes (i.e. <7 Myr) and the estimation of their extinction. Young stellar clusters with ages <7 Myr have significant internal extinction in the range of Av=3-7m, while older ones typically have Av<1m. The cluster luminosity function (CLF) is well-fitted by a power law with an exponent of around -2 and displays no evidence of a high luminosity cut-off. The brightest cluster complexes in the disk reach luminosities of Mk = -15.5m or estimated masses of 10^6 Mo. At radii with a strong, two-armed spiral pattern, the star formation rate in the arms is higher by a factor of 2-5 than in the inter-arm regions. The CLF in the arms is also shifted towards brighter Mk by at least 0.4m. We also detect clusters with colors compatible with Large Magellanic Cloud intermediate age clusters and Milky Way globular clusters. The (J-K)-Mk diagram of several galaxies shows, for the brightest clusters, a clear separation between young clusters that are highly attenuated by dust and older ones with low extinction. The gap in the (J-K)-Mk diagrams implies that there has been a rapid expulsion of dust at an age around 7 Myr, possibly triggered by supernovae. Strong spiral perturbations concentrate the formation of clusters in the arm regions and shifts their CLF towards brighter magnitudes.
3 Regulation of information and advertising *

“Deception” is the manipulation of information to gain some advantage. While people engage in deception in many dimensions for many types of advantage, here I will confine myself to commercial deception through advertising. To understand the economics of deception, I begin with the economics of information. There have been several major analyses of the implications of the economics of information for the regulation of deceptive advertising (Schwartz and Wilde, 1979; Jordan and Rubin, 1979; Beales et al., 1984; Rubin, 1991; Calfee, 1997). The literature has derived four major policy conclusions. First, truthful information regarding price should not be restricted by regulatory authorities. Second, deception is most likely and most harmful for “credence” goods, and regulation is most useful (if it is useful at all) for these goods. Third, truthful information should never be restricted. Fourth, regulation of advertising is best done by authorities that specialize in advertising, rather than by agencies with another mission. A fifth, more tentative conclusion, is that regulation should limit itself to statements that are actually false, and ignore those that are “misleading” or “deceptive. ” The focus of this chapter will be primarily US law though most concepts translate into an international context. I begin with a discussion of the First Amendment issues in regulating advertising. In the following two sections, I discuss advertising of prices and regulation and types of goods. The next section (5) examines regulation of true information about characteristics of goods other than price, with special reference to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Section 6 addresses measures of deception and policies of mandating disclosure of “negative” information. Section 7 discusses remedies, and the last section summarizes the chapter and the policy conclusions reached. The economic literature on advertising is voluminous, and I
Effect of Vegetable Milks on the Physical and Rheological Properties of Ice Cream

The nutritional properties and health benefits of ice cream can be improved by substituting cow’s milk with vegetable milks. In the present study cow’s milk in ice cream was replaced by soy, coconut and composite milk (combinations of coconut or cow milks with soy milk). The changes in ice cream eating qualities and physical properties (melting rate, apparent viscosity, hysteresis, fat globule size and its zeta potential and freezing behavior) were evaluated. The use of vegetable milk to replace cow milk increased pH and decreased melting rate. Ice creams containing composite milk have reduced the melting rate, freezable water amount, particle size and total acceptability of ice creams whereas increased viscosity and hysteresis area with increasing soy milk content. The vegetable milks as composite milk can use to replace cow milk without markedly affecting the quality of ice cream.
Methodologies for preprocessing of Handwritten and Printed Devnagari text Documnet

Recognition techniques for printed and handwritten text in Scanned documents are significantly different. In this paper, method used to identify the skew of the Scanned document images with the binarization, filtration, segmentation of the devanagri Printed and handwritten document. A horizontal and vertical projection algorithm is used to segment the document into a number of patches, with the nilaback Sauvola’s and wolfs binarization with the linear Otsu thresholding for filter. The scan line method is used for the skew detection and correction with adaptive histogram algorithm for image enhancement. Various Printed and handwritten text document are scan for the different preprocessing methods. In the binarization various different algorithms are explain and used the best nilback algorithm for the further process with the help of filter. For the Line, word, character segmentation used the separate algorithms. Also for the skew detection and correction in skew line method gives the better accuracy comparing with the other algorithms with the enhancement of the skew image. Documents and files that were once stored physically on paper are now being converted into electronic form in order to facilitate quicker additions, searches, and modifications, as well as to prolong the life of such records. Because of this, there is a great demand for software, which automatically extracts, analyze, recognize and store information from physical documents for later retrieval.
Restricted Boltzmann Machine Vectors for Speaker Clustering

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) have been used both in the front-end and backend of speaker verification systems. In this work, we apply RBMs as a front-end in the context of speaker clustering. Speakers' utterances are transformed into a vector representation by means of RBMs. These vectors, referred to as RBM vectors, have shown to preserve speaker-specific information and are used for the task of speaker clustering. In this work, we perform the traditional bottom-up Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC). Using the RBM vector representation of speakers, the performance of speaker clustering is improved. The evaluation has been performed on the audio recordings of Catalan TV Broadcast shows. The experimental results show that our proposed system outperforms the baseline i-vectors system in terms of Equal Impurity (EI). Using cosine scoring, a relative improvement of 11% and 12% are achieved for average and single linkage clustering algorithms respectively. Using PLDA scoring, the RBM vectors achieve a relative improvement of 11% compared to i-vectors for the single linkage algorithm.