Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Communication between Participants and Non-participants in Analytical Capacity Building Projects: Management Advice to Family Farms in Benin

Abstract Purpose: Approaches to build farmers' analytical capacities are said to trigger wide-ranging changes. This article reports on the communication process between participants and non-participants in one such approach, related to the technical and management skills learned by participants and the changes these participants subsequently made, and the outcomes in terms of non-participants' learning. Design/Methodology/Approach: In this study, we analysed the following: (1) participants' learning and changes in social practices; (2) communication between participants and non-participants regarding technical and management skills and changes in social practices; (3) non-participants' learning and changes in social practices. The case study was a management advice to family farm project in three villages in Benin. Findings: Most participants learned management skills, which led them to reassess their objectives and to reduce traditional social practices they now considered unproductive. Even in the case of frequent communication, non-participants found it difficult to learn management skills, which hindered their experiential learning. Non-participants consequently had difficulty understanding why participants changed their social practices such as reduction of their traditional gift giving, leading to limited well-argued discussion about these changes in practices between participants and non-participants. Practical Implications: This study shows that, due to the limited learning process of non-participants communicating with participants, there is a need to design and test approaches to achieve capacity-building while including more participants at a similar cost, and to stimulate explicit discussion at village level about the changes in values and social practices that these approaches may trigger. Originality/Value: The article analyses both participants and non-participants' experiential learning, and looks at the two sides of the interaction between the communication processes and non-participants' learning.
Chlorine isotope composition in chlorofluorocarbons CFC-11, CFC-12 and CFC-113 in firn, stratospheric and tropospheric air

Abstract. The stratospheric degradation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) releases chlorine, which is a major contributor to the destruction of stratospheric ozone (O3). A recent study reported strong chlorine isotope fractionation during the breakdown of the most abundant CFC (CFC-12, CCl2F2, Laube et al., 2010a), similar to effects seen in nitrous oxide (N2O). Using air archives to obtain a long-term record of chlorine isotope ratios in CFCs could help to identify and quantify their sources and sinks. We analyse the three most abundant CFCs and show that CFC-11 (CCl3F) and CFC-113 (CClF2CCl2F) exhibit significant stratospheric chlorine isotope fractionation, in common with CFC-12. The apparent isotope fractionation (vapp) for mid- and high-latitude stratospheric samples are respectively −2.4 (0.5) and −2.3 (0.4) ‰ for CFC-11, −12.2 (1.6) and −6.8 (0.8) ‰ for CFC-12 and −3.5 (1.5) and −3.3 (1.2) ‰ for CFC-113, where the number in parentheses is the numerical value of the standard uncertainty expressed in per mil. Assuming a constant isotope composition of emissions, we calculate the expected trends in the tropospheric isotope signature of these gases based on their stratospheric 37Cl enrichment and stratosphere–troposphere exchange. We compare these projections to the long-term δ (37Cl) trends of all three CFCs, measured on background tropospheric samples from the Cape Grim air archive (Tasmania, 1978–2010) and tropospheric firn air samples from Greenland (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) site) and Antarctica (Fletcher Promontory site). From 1970 to the present day, projected trends agree with tropospheric measurements, suggesting that within analytical uncertainties, a constant average emission isotope delta (δ) is a compatible scenario. The measurement uncertainty is too high to determine whether the average emission isotope δ has been affected by changes in CFC manufacturing processes or not. Our study increases the suite of trace gases amenable to direct isotope ratio measurements in small air volumes (approximately 200 mL), using a single-detector gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) system.
A new variable fractional sample delay filter with nonlinear interpolation

A finite impulse response (FIR) filter is presented which can synthesize any fractional sample delay by nonlinear interpolation. This circuit can be used as a digital interpolator capable of compensating for the delay time between the echo canceller output and the receiver input for the V.32 full-duplex modem or the U-transceiver in digital subscriber loop (DSL). Analytic closed-forms for the tap weights of such an FIR filter and numerical verifications are presented. <<ETX>>
An agroclimatological overview of wheat production regions of Bolivia

This report describes use of the Spatial Characterization Tool (SCT) developed by Texas A&M University to analyze the similarity of the climates of research sites in the major wheat production areas in Bolivia- the highland intermountain valleys and the lowland plains- to those of other regions. For highland environments, zones of similarity were only found in scattered regions of Bolivia and Per, and the complex topography of the Andean region and the relatively large SCT grid cells (9km x 9km) hampered climate characterization. For lowland sites, combined results of analyses of the favorable season plus the coolest or driest quarters of the year ( when wheat is actually grown in lowland Bolivia) identifies the environments of adjacent areas of Bolivia, two regions in Brazil, Small regions in Venezuela, plus areas in Mexico, Central America, and Africa as similar to those in the target sites in Bolivia. Site similarity analysis appears to be a valuable method for understanding relations among crop production environments, allowing prediction of crop responses to agronomic practices, assessments of genetic diversity or sustainability, and other types of studies. Current applications, however, are limited by a alack of quality data.
Vertical profiling of aerosol particles and trace gases over the central Arctic Ocean during summer

Unique measurements of vertical size-resolved aerosol particle concentrations, trace gas concentrations and meteorological data were obtained during the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS, www.ascos.se), an International Polar Year project aimed at establishing the processes responsible for formation and evolution of low-level clouds over the high Arctic summer pack ice. The experiment was conducted from on board the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and provided both ship-and helicopter-based measurements. This study focuses on the vertical helicopter profiles and onboard measurements obtained during a three-week period when Oden was anchored to a drifting ice floe, and sheds light on the characteristics of Arctic aerosol particles and their distribution throughout the lower atmosphere. Distinct differences in aerosol particle characteristics within defined atmospheric layers are identified. Within the lowermost couple hundred metres, transport from the marginal ice zone (MIZ), condensational growth and cloud processing develop the aerosol population. During two of the four representative periods defined in this study, such influence is shown. At altitudes above about 1 km, long-range transport occurs frequently. However, only infrequently does large-scale subsidence descend such air masses to become entrained into the mixed layer in the high Arctic, and there-fore long-range transport plumes are unlikely to directly influence low-level stratiform cloud formation. Nonetheless, such plumes can influence the radiative balance of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) by influencing formation and evolution of higher clouds, as well as through precipitation transport of particles downwards. New particle formation was occasionally observed, particularly in the near-surface layer. We hypothesize that the origin of these ultrafine particles could be in biological processes, both primary and secondary, within the open leads between the pack ice and/or along the MIZ. In general, local sources, in combination with upstream boundary-layer transport of precursor gases from the MIZ, are considered to constitute the origin of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) particles and thus be of importance for the formation of interior Arctic low-level clouds during summer, and subsequently, through cloud influences, for the melting and freezing of sea ice.
Monetary and Fiscal Policy Design at the Zero Lower Bound – Evidence from the Lab

The global economic crisis of 2007-8 has pushed many advanced economies into a liquidity trap. We design a laboratory experiment on the effectiveness of policy measures to avoid expectations driven liquidity traps. Monetary policy alone is not sufficient to avoid liquidity traps, even if it preventively cuts the interest rate when inflation falls below a threshold. However, monetary policy augmented with a fiscal switching rule succeeds in escaping liquidity trap episodes. We also measure larger-than-unity fiscal multipliers when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. Experimental results in different treatments are well explained by adaptive learning. JEL codes: C92, D83, D84, E52, E62
A Residual Encoder-Decoder Network for Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios

In this paper, we propose an encoder-decoder based deep convolutional network for semantic segmentation in autonomous driving scenarios. The architecture of the proposed model is based on VGG16 [1]. Residual learning is introduced to preserve the context while decreasing the size of feature maps between the stacks of convolutional layers. Also, the resolution is preserved through shortcuts from the encoder stage to the decoder stage. Experiments are conducted on popular benchmark datasets CamVid and CityScapes to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model. The experiments are corroborated with comparative analysis with popular encoder-decoder networks such as SegNet and Enet architectures demonstrating that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods despite having fewer trainable parameters.
Measuring the Degree of Integration in the Dairy Products Market in Malawi

Using monthly data for the period 2006–2011, this study analyzed the degree of spatial market integration in Malawi focusing on two dairy products (liquid milk and powdered milk) sold in the four major towns of the country. The analysis of spatial market integration is important to assess whether to re-establish a dairy processing facility in the northern part of the country. The empirical analysis comprised of the following steps: (1) Integration between prices from different regions were tested using Johansen’s cointegration procedure, with the results indicating that, in the long run, prices in some areas move in a similar direction. (2)Two spatial equilibrium models were estimated using a three-regime bivariate threshold vector autoregressive model (TVAR) and a three-regime threshold vector error correction model (TVECM). The results showed that transaction costs were not a cause for concern between the areas thus northern Malawi does not need to re-establish a dairy processing facility as surplus areas (mainly Southern Malawi) can supply the region.
Searchable Encryption with Data Integrity Verification

In the cloud computing environment, the integrity and searchability are two* important attributes of data. Integrity verification ensures the security of data. Searchable encryption ensures the availability of secret data. The research of a single property of the data in the cloud environment has has been widely studied currently, but there are few research of the both properties of the data at the same time. In this paper, through studying the cloud storage scheme which support integrity verification and searchable encryption, we propose a bilinear-based integrity verification scheme with searchable encryption.
Deeper leisure involvement as a coping resource in a stigmatized leisure context

Although leisure involvement can be a resource for coping with stigmatization, some forms of leisure are themselves stigmatized. One such stigmatized leisure context is the furry fandom, a diverse group of people that create anthropomorphic animal identities. Drawing on the minority stress model and symbolic self-completion theory, we examined survey responses of 3473 members of online furry communities. Greater involvement in the furry community was associated with higher levels of well-being. This association was statistically explained by greater disclosure of furry identity and an indirect path through feelings of self-acceptance and affiliation with the furry fandom linked to greater disclosure of furry identity. Results suggest how deeper leisure involvement helps to counteract minority stress and cope with a stigmatized leisure identity.
Unsupervised Singing Voice Separation Based on Robust Principal Component Analysis Exploiting Rank-1 Constraint

In this paper, we address the singing voice separation problem and propose a novel unsupervised approach based on robust principal component analysis (RPCA) exploiting rank-1 constraint (CRPCA). RPCA is a recently proposed singing voice separation algorithm that can separate singing voice from the monaural recordings. Although RPCA has been successfully applied to singing voice separation task, it ignores the different characteristic values of singular value decomposition and computational complexity to minimize the nuclear norm for separating singing voice. Since rank-l constraint in the background music, as the background music has a large variation in richness than singing voice among different songs. Furthermore, rank-1 constraint can utilize a prior target rank to separate singing voice and background music from the mixture music signal. Accordingly, the proposed CRPCA method utilizes rank-1 constraint minimization of singular values in RPCA instead of minimizing the whole nuclear norm, which can not only describe the different values of singular value decomposition, but also the computation complexity is reduced. The experiment evaluation results reveal that CRPCA can achieve better separation performance than the previous methods, especially with regard to use time frequency masking on ccMixter and DSD100 datasets. In addition, the running time on CRPCA is shorter than others under the same conditions.
Central-engine-powered Bright X-Ray Flares in Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: A Hint of a Black Hole–Neutron Star Merger?

Short gamma-ray bursts may originate from the merger of a double neutron star (NS) or the merger of a black hole (BH) and an NS. We propose that the bright X-ray flare related to the central engine reactivity may indicate a BH–NS merger, since such a merger can provide more fallback materials and therefore a more massive accretion disk than the NS–NS merger. Based on the 49 observed short bursts with the Swift/X-ray Telescope follow-up observations, we find that three bursts have bright X-ray flares, among which three flares from two bursts are probably related to the central engine reactivity. We argue that these two bursts may originate from the BH–NS merger rather than the NS–NS merger. Our suggested link between the central-engine-powered bright X-ray flare and the BH–NS merger event can be checked by future gravitational wave detections from advanced LIGO and Virgo.
Author ' s personal copy Large-volume ultrafiltration for the study of radiocarbon signatures and size vs . age relationships in marine dissolved organic matter

In recent decades, tangential-flow ultrafiltration (UF) technology has become a primary tool for isolating large amounts of “ultrafiltered” marine dissolved organic carbon (UDOC; 0.1 lm to 1 nm) for the detailed characterization of DOC chemical composition and radiocarbon (DC) signatures. However, while total DOC DC values are generally thought to be quite similar in the world ocean, previous studies have reported widely different DC values for UDOC, even from very similar ocean regions, raising questions about the relative “reactivity” of high molecular weight (HMW) DOC. Specifically, to what degree do variations in DOM molecular weight (MW) vs. composition alter its relative persistence, and therefore HMW DOC DC values? In this study we evaluate the effects of varying proportions of HMW vs. low molecular weight (LMW) DOC on UDOC DC values. Using concentration factor (CF) as a proxy for MW distributions, we modeled the retention of both OC and DC in several very large CF experiments (CF >3000), from three depths (20, 670, and 915 m) in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG). The resulting DOC and DC UF permeation coefficients generally increase with depth, consistent with mass balance trends, indicating very significant permeation of LMW, C-depleted DOC at depth, and higher recoveries of DC-enriched, HMW DOC in the surface. In addition, changes in CF during sample concentration and ionic strength during sample diafiltration had very large and predictable impacts on UDOC DC values. Together these results suggest that previously reported disparities in UDOC DC values are reconciled by linked trends of DC content vs. MW. At low CFs, UDOC samples have similar DC values to total DOC. In contrast, UDOC samples collected at extremely high CFs (and after diafiltration) have more positive DC values. We demonstrate that the observed relationships between UDOC DC and CF derived from our data can directly explain offsets in all previously published UDOC DC values for the NPSG. While CF is not traditionally considered in UF studies, our results indicate it can substantially influence the interpretation of UDOC C “age”, and thus reactivity, in the marine environment. In addition, our results indicate that CF can in fact be used as a proxy for average MW. We suggest that a variable-CF-UF approach, coupled with molecular-level DC analyses, presents a new tool for studying relationships between molecular size, age, and “labile” DOC distributions in the ocean. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Integrating Lightweight Systems Analysis into the United Process by Using Service Responsibility Tables

This paper is a step toward establishing direct, but non-automatic links between lightweight (semi-formal) analysis methods for business professionals and heavyweight analysis methods for IT professionals. After noting the importance of user involvement in obtaining accurate and meaningful user requirements, the paper summarizes the Unified Process, a software development methodology that employs Unified Modeling Language (UML). Another section in the paper summarizes previous extensions of the work system method that produced a lightweight analysis tool called Service Responsibility Tables (SRTs). This paper uses a straightforward example to demonstrate a set of heuristics for translating between service responsibility tables produced by business professionals and UML diagrams that IT professionals can use as a partial basis for programming. This type of guideline-based link between lightweight and heavyweight methods could lead to more effective user involvement in requirements determination and reduce failure rate in IT projects.
DIMENSIONS OF AUTOTELIC PERSONALITY AND THEIR EFFECTS ON PERCEIVED PLAYFULNESS IN THE CONTEXT OF MOBILE INFORMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES

Autotelic Personality represents an important individual construct in flow theory yet little is known about its underlying dimensions. Csikszentmihalyi (1988) suggested that the higher the autotelic nature of an individual, the more likely for him/her to experience flow. This study explores autotelic personality, its underlying dimensions and its relationship with perceived playfulness in the context of Mobile Information and Entertainment Services (MIES). This study found Autotelic Personality to be an important quality in order for users to experience perceived playfulness in the MIES context. Several underlying dimensions of Autotelic Personality were identified, including personal innovativeness, self efficacy and control.
A Load-adaptive CSMA/CA MAC Protocol for Mobile Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Mobile underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs) including autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and/or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have wide ocean applications. For a single-hop mobile UWASN with mobile nodes touring around the area of static sensor nodes and gathering data generated by these nodes, we propose a load-adaptive carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) media access control (MAC) protocol which is abbreviated to LACC-M. In the proposed MAC protocol, two transmission modes are designed to meet different requirements of network load. Moreover, a broadcast packet used in the proposed protocol is specially designed to allow mobile nodes to join the network and change the transmission mode according to the network load. Simulation results show that the proposed LACC-M protocol outperforms other two contention-based protocols, SFAMA and UWALOHA, in specific application scenarios, in terms of high throughput, low end-to-end packet delay, high successful data delivery rate and low energy consumption.
Immigrants' Language Skills and Visa Category 1

This article is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency among immigrants in a longitudinal survey for Australia. It focuses on both visa category and variables derived from an economic model of the determinants of destination-language proficiency among immigrants. Skills-tested and economic immigrants have the greatest proficiency shortly after immigration, followed by family-based visa recipients, with refugees having the lowest proficiency. Other variables the same, these differences disappear by 3.5 years after immigration for speaking skills; and although they diminish, they persist longer for reading and writing skills. The variables generated from the model of destination-language proficiency (such as schooling and age at migration) are, in part, predictions of visa category, but they are more important statistically for explaining proficiency.