Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human‐influenced streamflow during extreme drought: identifying driving forces, modifiers, and impacts in an urbanized catchment in central Poland

This study investigates the response of the streamflow to an extremely hot and dry summer 2015 in the urbanized catchment of the Utrata River in central Poland. The objectives were to: reveal changes in the flow regime, assess anomalies in summer river flows, estimate the natural and wastewater effluent contribution and provide an ecological context for the in‐stream conditions. The mean annual flow rate in the period 1996–2015 increased by 0.61 m3/s as compared to 1951–1970. The mean annual wastewater inflow rate to the river in 2015 was approximately 0.770 m3/s, constituting 39% of the observed flow. Almost the entire period of August this contribution approached 100%. The optimum river water temperature threshold for warm‐water fish species was exceeded. Streamflow modifications are attributed to an increase of wastewater discharge, urban impact through an increase in imperviousness, and the variability of climatic driving forces.
Identification of Mechanisms by Which Genetic Susceptibility Loci Influence Systemic Sclerosis Risk Using Functional Genomics in Primary T Cells and Monocytes

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a complex autoimmune disease with a strong genetic component. However, most of the genes associated with the disease are still unknown because associated variants affect mostly noncoding intergenic elements of the genome. We used functional genomics to translate the genetic findings into a better understanding of the disease.
Factors influencing the sustainability of homestead vegetable production intervention in Rufiji, Tanzania: A cross-sectional mixed methods study

There is growing evidence that home vegetable gardening interventions improve food security and nutrition outcomes at the family level. Sustainability of many of these community interventions remain a challenge. This study assessed factors influencing the sustainability of homestead vegetable production intervention in Rufiji district, Tanzania, one year after the cessation of external support. This was a community based cross-sectional study using both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods. A total of 247 randomly selected women from households who participated in the homestead vegetable intervention were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. The study held four focus group discussions with women from households that participated in the intervention, and four In-Depth interviews with two extension workers, one community health worker, and one agriculture district officer. Multiple logistic regression for quantitative data and thematic analysis for qualitative data was conducted. About 20.24% (50/247) of households sustained homestead vegetable production for one year after the intervention phased out. Shortage of seeds (adjusted odds ratio = 0.65: CI = 0.46–0.93, p-value 0.018) and either manure or fertilizers (adjusted odds ratio = 1.62: CI = 1.04–2.46, p-value 0.031) were significant factors influencing the sustainability of homesteads vegetable production. In the Focus Group discussions (FGDs) and In-Depth Interview (IDIs), all participating women and extension workers reported high cost of water, destruction from free-grazing animals, agriculture pests and diseases, poor soil fertility, shortage of seeds, and lack of capital affected homestead vegetable production sustainability. Existing individual, community, and system challenges influence the sustainability of external-funded agriculture and nutrition interventions. The study findings underscore the importance of community authorities, scientists, and policymakers in having a well-thought sustainability plan in all promising external-funded interventions.
Meta-analysis methods for risk difference: A comparison of different models

Risk difference is a frequently-used effect measure for binary outcomes. In a meta-analysis, commonly-used methods to synthesize risk differences include: (1) the two-step methods that estimate study-specific risk differences first, then followed by the univariate common-effect model, fixed-effects model, or random-effects models; and (2) the one-step methods using bivariate random-effects models to estimate the summary risk difference from study-specific risks. These methods are expected to have similar performance when the number of studies is large and the event rate is not rare. However, studies with zero events are common in meta-analyses, and bias may occur with the conventional two-step methods from excluding zero-event studies or using an artificial continuity correction to zero events. In contrast, zero-event studies can be included and modeled by bivariate random-effects models in a single step. This article compares various methods to estimate risk differences in meta-analyses. Specifically, we present two case studies and three simulation studies to compare the performance of conventional two-step methods and bivariate random-effects models in the presence or absence of zero-event studies. In conclusion, we recommend researchers using bivariate random-effects models to estimate risk differences in meta-analyses, particularly in the presence of zero events.
Capacitive/inductive compensation factor in coupled lines wilkinson power divider design

In this article, two coupled line sections are taken place transmission lines for miniaturization in Wilkinson power divider. A general compensation factor is shunted in the middle of two coupled line sections to compensate the different input impedances between even‐ and odd‐mode, where, the factor could be capacitive or inductive reactance, and its value is determined by effective dielectric constants of substrate, coupling strength and its physical lengths of two coupled line sections. Compared with the function of compensated capacitor, the similar results are newly summarized in this article: compensated inductor could also be used to compensate different characteristic impedances in stripline structure (homogeneous medium), and compensate the difference of phase velocities microstrip line structure (inhomogeneous medium). Design charts and calculated bandwidths are discussed for both different structures. One experimental circuit was fabricated in microstrip line structure, and the measurement results showed good agreement with theoretical results © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:2940–2944, 2016
Response strategies to changes in the environment adopted by three star hotels in Nairobi

Three star hotels mainly owned by private firms in Kenya have a very big stake in development o f hotel industry and requires strategic management for growth and sustainability. The objectives o f this study were to identify strategies adopted by three star hotels in Nairobi in response to numerous changes in the environment and to identify the extent to which changes in the environment affect the strategic direction o f three star hotels. The study was descriptive survey. The population o f the study was the entire three star hotels in Nairobi as gazetted on 23rd July 2004 gazette notice number 5693 o f the republic o f Kenya, which totaled to eight with seven respondents head o f operational departments per each hotel giving a total o f 56 respondents. The study found out that most o f the three star hotels have basic practices o f strategic management and are influenced by environmental forces towards strategic management. They are mainly reactive and not proactive in strategic planning. Due to private ownership, strategic response is highly influenced by entrepreneurial leadership by the owners. Amongst the major recommendations is that there is a great need o f proprietors to allow professionalism so as to achieve much speedier growth o f three star hotels to other levels. There is also a need to involve all staff on issues o f strategic management for understanding and ownership o f business structures. Further, there is also a need to establish intensive research for the hotels with professional forums for business information sharing. The limitation o f the study was that it was conducted in Nairobi city whereas there are other types o f three star hotels at the coast and in the parks whose management may be influential to hospitality business trend.
Genetic predisposition to increased blood cholesterol and Genetic predisposition to increased blood cholesterol and triglyceride lipid levels and risk of Alzheimer disease: A Mendelian triglyceride lipid levels and risk of Alzheimer disease: A Mendelian randomization analysis randomization analysis

Background: Although altered lipid metabolism has been extensively implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer disease (AD) through cell biological, epidemiological, and genetic studies, the molecular mechanisms linking cholesterol and AD pathology are still not well understood and contradictory results have been reported. We have used or could be secondary to LOAD. Limitations of this study include the small proportion of lipid variance explained by the GRS, biases in case-control ascertainment, and the limitations implicit to Mendelian randomization studies. Future studies should focus on larger LOAD datasets with longitudinal sampled peripheral lipid measures and other markers of lipid metabolism, which have been shown to be altered in LOAD.
Reliability of the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument: measuring tongue and handgrip strength and endurance in young and elderly adults

s of Scientific Papers Presented at Conferences * Adams, V. , Mathisen, B. , Baines, S. , Lazarus, C. , & Callister, R. (2013). Reliability of measurements of tongue strength and endurance using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument with healthy adults. The Dysphagia Research Society 21 Annual Scientific Meeting (International: Seattle, USA) * Adams, V. , Mathisen, B. , Baines, S. , Lazarus, C. , & Callister, R. (2013). Reliability of measurements of tongue and hand strength and endurance using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument in the frail elderly in a residential agedcare facility. The Dysphagia Research Society 21 Annual Scientific Meeting (International: Seattle, USA) * Adams, V. , Mathisen, B. , Baines, S. , Lazarus, C. , & Callister, R. (2012). A systematic review and meta-analysis of measurements of tongue and hand strength and endurance using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument (IOPI). Speech Pathology Australia National Conference (National: Hobart, Australia) Abstracts of Scientific Posters Presented at Conferences * Adams, V. , Mathisen, B. , Baines, S. , Lazarus, C. , & Callister, R. (2013). Reliability of measurements of tongue strength and endurance using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument with healthy adults. Speech Pathology Australia National Conference (National: Gold Coast, Australia)s of Scientific Posters Presented at Conferences * Adams, V. , Mathisen, B. , Baines, S. , Lazarus, C. , & Callister, R. (2013). Reliability of measurements of tongue strength and endurance using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument with healthy adults. Speech Pathology Australia National Conference (National: Gold Coast, Australia)
UNDERSTANDING THE FACTORS AFFECTING USERS’ INTENTION TO CONTINUOUSLY PAY FOR THE SERVICE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

Although social networking services have been popular, many users are still reluctant to pay for the services. In this study, we proposed a theoretical model that considered perceived value and service degradation barriers as major determinants of the intention to continuously pay for the services. In addition, possible antecedences of the two determinants were proposed. After surveying 212 subjects, the results indicated that all hypotheses were supported. Finally, the implications of this research were discussed.
Contextual Analysis of Strategies and Interaction Motivations with Smartphones in Vehicles

Smartphone applications for drivers are rapidly growing in the market and the services available to optimize the driving task are also increasing. Although the benefits, the use of applications while driving may cause driver distraction. So, designers need to know how the drivers are actually using their smartphones applications during the driving task in order to have reasonable inputs to design usable and safe interfaces. Therefore, aiming to better understand users’ strategies of use, attitudes and motivations, a qualitative study was conducted through contextual inquiries. The results showed that some variables influence the drivers’ behaviors when interacting with the Smartphone, such as technology affinity, time spend on traffic and driving pleasure.
Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping Provides New Insights into the Link Between Human Ear Morphology and the Head-Related Transfer Functions

This thesis aims to provide a better understanding on the relationship between the human head and ear morphology to a set of individualized filters known as the head related impulse response functions (HRIRs). The HRIR filters contain all the information required by the auditory system to localize sound in 3D space. The analyses presented in this thesis uses the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) technique and the Fast-Multipole Boundary Element Method, better known as FM-BEM, to study the effect of morphological changes on the ears to the corresponding acoustic changes. This work relies heavily on the morphological and acoustic data that is available in the SYMARE database, which contains acoustic and morphological information for 62 subjects. The research findings presented in this thesis is composed of four sections. In the first section of this thesis, the LDDMM framework and its applications to analysing ear shapes is explained. Further, important functions describing various operations for deforming shapes are introduced and elaborated. In order to examine the quality of the ear deformations, tools are developed to compare and measure the differences between the acoustic responses obtained from BEM simulations for two ear shapes. This part of the work also involved the development of techniques to compare and measure differences in 3D shapes using the framework of currents. Finally this section introduces the multi-scale approach for mapping ear shapes. The second section of the thesis estimates a template ear, head and torso shape from the shapes available in the SYMARE database. This part of the thesis explains a new procedure for developing the template ear shape. The procedure builds upon the multi-scale approach, which is described and used in the first part of this research investigation. The template ear and head shapes were examined and verified by comparing the features in the template shapes to corresponding features in the population. In addition, the acoustic and morphological differences of the multi-scale template ear shape to a template ear that was estimated at a single-scale
From Well-heeled to Tip-toed, Shoe-shine to Shoe-lace: Valuing Product Differentiation in Men’s Formal Footwear

Gone are the days when the only branded footwear Indians knew was Bata. After years of economic liberalization, one finds many firms; local, national, and international jostling for consumer attention by producing various types of footwear in Indian market. In fact, today Indian footwear industry is the second largest in the world. This market can be described as a stylized case of a monopolistically competitive market where there is intense competition among firms manufacturing differentiated products. In this study, we focus our attention on men’s formal shoes which are distinguished by the presence (or absence) of many differentiated attributes such as heel, toes, colour, surface, laces, buckles and brands. Invoking hedonic price analysis and bid and offer curves of the customers and firms respectively, shoe prices are viewed as the sum total of the valuation of each of the shoe attributes. We estimate the relative valuation of the shoe attributes by regressing market prices of shoes on various quality attributes. Analysis shows that shoes made of leather, shiny surface, buckles, laces, and brands carry a premium and differentiation based on colour, pointed toes, high heels, and texture is not important. In a highly competitive market, such data driven studies can provide pointers to firms in altering existing shoe models and successfully launching newer ones.
Rolling bearing fault diagnosis under fluctuant conditions based on compressed sensing

Bearings are widely used in industries and construction for shaft supporting or seismic isolation. In recent years, their fault diagnosis, especially under variable, or fluctuant conditions, has received increasing attention. Sufficient monitoring data are usually required for bearing diagnosis. However, sufficient data cannot be guaranteed in some engineering cases with limitations of the transmission channel bandwidth or onboard/onsite computational capabilities. Fortunately, the emerging compressed sensing technique, which provides an effective solution to data compression and processing, has the ability to transform traditional monitoring data to the compressed information domain for a highly effective diagnosis under fluctuant conditions. This study proposes a bearing fault diagnosis method under fluctuant conditions based on compressed sensing theory. First, a random matrix is constructed as the measurement matrix and is employed to compress the original signal into the compressed information domain. Then, reconstruction‐evaluation based fault diagnosis method is conducted with compressed signals. Moreover, the compressed signals used for fault diagnosis are reconstructed on the remote side. The experimental results provide evidence that the proposed method can effectively reduce the data volume required for bearing diagnosis and maintain an accuracy similar to current approaches, and the reconstructed signals can be used for other fault diagnosis methods. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Lung Nodule Classification Using Deep Features in Ct Images

This paper suggest a novel arrangement technique for the four varieties of lung nodules, i.e., well- circumscribed, vascularized, juxta-pleural, and pleural-tail, in minute dose computed tomography scans. The proposed technique is built on contextual analysis by merging the lung nodule and adjacent anatomical structures, and has three main stages: an adaptive patch-based division is used to build concentric multilevel partition; then, a new feature set is planned to incorporate intensity, texture, and gradient information for image patch feature description, and then a contextual latent semantic analysis-based classifier is designed to compute the probabilistic estimations for the related images. Our proposed method was estimated on a publicly existing dataset and obviously demonstrated promising classification performance.
Stabilized Doubly Robust Learning for Recommendation on Data Missing Not at Random

In recommender systems, users always choose the favorite items to rate, which leads to data missing not at random and poses a great challenge for unbiased evaluation and learning of prediction models. Currently, the doubly robust (DR) method and its variants have been widely studied and demonstrate superior performance. However, in this paper, we show that DR methods are unstable and have unbounded bias, variance, and generalization bounds to extremely small propensities. Moreover, the fact that DR relies more on extrapolation will lead to suboptimal performance. To address the above limitations while retaining double robustness, we propose a stabilized doubly robust (SDR) estimator with a weaker reliance on extrapolation. Theoretical analysis shows that SDR has bounded bias, variance, and generalization error bound simultaneously under inaccurate imputed errors and arbitrarily small propensities. In addition, we propose a novel learning approach for SDR that updates the imputation, propensity, and prediction models cyclically, achieving more stable and accurate predictions. Extensive experiments show that our approaches signiﬁcantly outperform the existing methods.
Breakdown of the Weak-Coupling Limit in Quantum Annealing

Reverse annealing is a variant of quantum annealing, in which the system is prepared in a classical state, reverse-annealed to an inversion point, and then forward-annealed. We report on reverse annealing experiments using the D-Wave 2000Q device, with a focus on the p = 2 p -spin problem, which undergoes a second order quantum phase transition with a gap that closes polynomially in the number of spins. We concentrate on the total and partial success probabilities, the latter being the probabilities of ﬁnding each of two degenerate ground states of all spins up or all spins down, the former being their sum. The empirical partial success probabilities exhibit a strong asymmetry between the two degenerate ground states, depending on the initial state of the reverse anneal. To explain these results, we perform open-system simulations using master equations in the limits of weak and strong coupling to the bath. The former, known as the adiabatic master equation (AME), with decoherence in the instantaneous energy eigenbasis, predicts perfect symmetry between the two degenerate ground states, thus failing to agree with the experiment. In contrast, the latter, known as the polaron transformed Redﬁeld equation (PTRE), is in close agreement with experiment. Thus our results present a challenge to the suﬃciency of the weak system-bath coupling limit in describing the dynamics of current experimental quantum annealers, at least for reverse annealing on timescales of a µ sec or longer.
Gamified Speaker Comparison by Listening

We address speaker comparison by listening in a game-like environment, hypothesized to make the task more motivating for naive listeners. We present the same 30 trials selected with the help of an x-vector speaker recognition system from VoxCeleb to a total of 150 crowdworkers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They are divided into cohorts of 50, each using one of three alternative interface designs: (i) a traditional (non-gamiﬁed) design; (ii) a gamiﬁed design with feedback on deci-sions, along with points, game level indications, and possibility for interface customization; (iii) another gamiﬁed design with an additional constraint of maximum of 5 ‘lives’ consumed by wrong answers. We analyze the impact of these interface designs to listener error rates (both misses and false alarms), probability calibration, time of quitting, along with survey question-naire. The results indicate improved performance from (i) to (ii) and (iii), particularly in terms of balancing the two types of detection errors.
Selectively Contextual Bandits

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the users. While personalization creates a rich user experience that reflect individual interests, there are benefits of a shared experience across a community that enable participation in the zeitgeist. Such benefits are emergent through network effects and are not captured in regret metrics typically employed in evaluating bandits. To balance these needs, we propose a new online learning algorithm that preserves benefits of personalization while increasing the commonality in treatments across users. Our approach selectively interpolates between a contextual bandit algorithm and a context-free multi-arm bandit and leverages the contextual information for a treatment decision only if it promises significant gains. Apart from helping users of personalization systems balance their experience between the individualized and shared, simplifying the treatment assignment policy by making it selectively reliant on the context can help improve the rate of learning in some cases. We evaluate our approach in a classification setting using public datasets and show the benefits of the hybrid policy.