Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Road-Aware Spatial Mapping for Moving Objects

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) attracts great attention in the past few years. With millions of devices connected to the network, data are generated at an unprecedented speed and the data must be stored efficiently in the database to serve spatial queries. In existing spatial databases that use space-filling curves to organize the data, they store spatial data without considering on-road data distribution. This will introduce unnecessary computation and I/O cost in the service of users' queries about data on the roads. In this paper, we present a Road-Aware Spatial Mapping of data to the storage, or RASM for short, which can be applied in spatial databases for highly efficient storage and query services for moving objects. Usually, a space-filling curve, such as the Hilbert curve, is used to map data in a cell of a geographical area to a segment of linear storage space. However, in a road-network system where data are most distributed and queried along the roads, using a generic square cell as a mapping unit to aggregate data is in conflict with the data use pattern. In RASM, road segment, instead of the cell, is used as the unit of space mapping and data storage so that data requested in a road query can be stored together to enable efficient I/O. Furthermore, a substantial computation may be required to identify mapping units covered in a query in a geometric space. As RASM has grouped data in the road-segment units, one can efficiently found the units covered in a road query, which is usually concerned only about data on a few segments of roads. We implemented a prototype query-serving system using RASM to map data on road segments to a linear space enabled by LevelDB, a widely-used key-value store. Experiment results with real-world traffic data show that with RASM, the road query time can be reduced by up to 43%, and the I/O traffic can be reduced by up to 70%. In the meantime, other queries about geographical regions are well supported in RASM with minimal performance impacts.
Artificial Neural Network Architectures for solving Double Dummy Bridge Problem in Imperfect Information Game

Contract Bridge is an intelligent game, which enhances the creativity with various skills and quest to acquire the intricacies of the game, because no player knows exactly what moves other players are capable of during their turn. The Bridge being a game of imperfect information is to be equally well defined, since the outcome at any intermediate phase is purely based on the decision made on the immediate prior stage. One along with the architectures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is applied by training on sample deals and used to estimate the number of tricks to be taken by one pair of bridge players is the key idea behind Double Dummy Bridge Problem (DDBP) implemented with the neural network paradigm. This study mainly focuses on Cascade-Correlation Neural Network (CCNN) and Elman Neural Network (ENN) which are used to solve the Bridge problem by using Resilient Back-Propagation (R-prop) algorithm. The Work Point Count System (WPCS) is an exclusive, most important and popular system which is used to bid a final contract in Bridge game. Keywords-ANN, CCNN,ENN,R-prop algorithm,Sigmoid activation function,Contract Bridge, DDBP, Bidding, Playing, WPCS.
Limitations to Signaling Trust with All or Nothing Investments

Many economic interactions are characterized by “all or nothing” action spaces that may limit a demonstrable index of trust and, therefore, the propensity to reciprocate. In two experimental trust games, the action space governing investments was manipulated to examine the effects on investments and reciprocity. In the continuous game the investor could invest any amount between $0 and $10, while in the binary game the investor could invest either $0 or $10. In both games, the trustee received the tripled investment and then could return any amount back to the investor. Investors invested significantly more in the binary game than in the continuous game. However, higher investments in the binary game did not lead to more reciprocity. To the contrary, conditional on investment of $10, on average trustees returned significantly less in the binary game than in the continuous game.
Morphology, biodegradability, mechanical, and thermal properties of nanocomposite films based on PLA and plasticized PLA

In this study, melt intercalation method is applied to prepare poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-plasticized PLA nanocomposite films including 0, 3, and 5% organoclay (Cloisite 30B) using a laboratory scale compounder, which is connected to a microcast film device. To evaluate the nanomorphology and the dispersion state of the clays, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) are conducted. Tensile tests are performed to characterize the mechanical behavior of the films. Biodegradation rate is determined by degradation tests in composting medium. Differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) is applied to observe the thermal behavior of the films. XRD and TEM show that the exfoliation predominantly occurrs in plasticized PLA nanocomposites, whereas unexfoliated agglomerates together with exfoliated clays are observed in the nonplasticized PLA. Tensile tests indicate that the addition of 3% clay to the neat-PLA does not affect the strength; however, it enhances the modulus of the nanocomposites in comparison to neat-PLA. Incorporation of 3% clay to the plasticized PLA improves the modulus with respect to PLA/PEG; on the other hand, the strain at break value is lowered ∼ 40%. The increase in the rate of biodegradation in composting medium is found as in the order of PLA > PLA/PEG > 3% Clay/PLA/PEG > 5% Clay/PLA/PEG > 3% Clay/PLA. DSC analysis shows that the addition of 3% clay to the neat PLA results in an increase in Tg. The addition of 20% PEG as a plasticizer to the neat-PLA decreases Tg about 30°C, however incorporation of clays increases Tg by 4°C for the plasticized PLA. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009
Biofouling patterns in spacer filled channels: High resolution imaging for characterization of heterogeneous biofilms

Biofilms develop in heterogeneous patterns at a μm scale up to a cm scale, and patterns become more pronounced when biofilms develop under complex hydrodynamic flow regimes. Spatially heterogeneous biofilms are especially known in spiral wound reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF) membrane filtration systems used for desalination and wastewater reuse to produce high quality (drinking) water. These spiral wound membrane modules contain mesh-like spacer structures used to create an intermembrane space and improve water mixing. Spacers create inhomogeneous water flow patterns resulting in zones favouring biofilm growth, possibly leading to biofouling thus hampering water production. Oxygen sensing planar optodes were used to visualize variations in oxygen decrease rates (ODR). ODR is an indication of biofilm activity. In this study, ODR images of multiple repetitive spacer areas in a membrane fouling simulator were averaged to produce high resolution, low noise ODR images. Averaging 40 individual spacer areas improved the ODR distribution image significantly and allowed comparison of biofilm patterning over a spacer structure at different positions in an RO filter. This method clearly showed that most active biofilm accumulated on and in direct vicinity of the spacer. The averaging method was also used to calculate the deviation of ODR patterning from individual spacer areas to the average ODR pattern, proposing a new approach to determine biofilm spatial heterogeneity. This study showed that the averaging method can be applied and that the improved, averaged ODR images can be used as an analytical, in-situ, non-destructive method to assess and quantify the effect of membrane installation operational parameters or different spacer geometries on biofilm development in spiral wound membrane systems characterized by complex hydrodynamic conditions.
A Review: Techniques for Clustering of Web Usage Mining

In the area of software, data mining technology has been considered as important mean for discovering patterns and trends of large amount of data. So, this approach is basically used to extract the unknown pattern from the large set of data for business as well as real time applications. Data mining is a computational intelligence discipline which has emerged as a effective tool for data analysis, new KDD and good decision making. The raw and unlabeled data from the large volume of dataset can be classified initially in an unsupervised fashion by using cluster analysis i.e. clustering the work of a set of observations into clusters so that observations in the same cluster may be in some sense be treated as similar. The result of the clustering method and efficiency of its domain application are generally determined through various algorithms. This paper includes various clustering algorithms which can use efficiently according to the particular application, available software hardware facilities and size of dataset.
Global Climate Simulation with the University of Wisconsin Global Hybrid Isentropic Coordinate Model

Abstract The purpose of this study is to briefly describe the global atmospheric University of Wisconsin (UW) hybrid isentropic–eta coordinate (UW θ–η) model and document results from a 14-yr climate simulation. The model, developed through modification of the UW hybrid isentropic–sigma (θ–σ) coordinate model, employs a vertical coordinate that smoothly varies from terrain following at the earth's surface to isentropic coordinates in the middle to upper troposphere. The UW θ–η model eliminates the discrete interface in the UW θ–σ model between the PBL expressed in sigma coordinates and the free atmosphere expressed in isentropic coordinates. The smooth transition of the modified model retains the excellent transport characteristics of the UW θ–σ model while providing for straightforward application of data assimilation techniques, use of higher-order finite-difference schemes, and implementation on massively parallel computing platforms. This study sets forth the governing equations and describes the vert.
BIOCHEMICAL STANDARDIZATION OF TORTEZIN, A NOVEL IMMUNOSTIMULATOR FROM THE TORTOISE BLOOD CELLS

Objective: The biochemical characterization of the substances presented in the new haemoand immuno stimulating preparation Tortezin from the blood cells of the Central Asian tortoise. Materials and Methods: Tortezin substances manufactured in 2006-2010 were examined by electrophoresis, spectroscopy and RP-HPLC. Results: In UV spectra of Tortezin aqueous solution the pronounced maximum was at 218±1.2 nm and mild spike at 280±3.2 nm; in fluorescence emission spectra upon excitation with wavelength at 280 nm peak emission maximum was 460 ± 38 nm and at 295 nm was 455±21 nm. The RP-HPLC profile and SDS 10% PAGE showed the presence of repetitive typical peaks in different samples. Conclusion: The different methods are to be recommended for standardization of Tortezin. NIGORA TAGAYALIEVA1, MICHELE DALGALARRONDO 2, YVAN CHOISET 2, VITALIY ALEKSANDROV 1, ELMIRA NAZIROVA1, MARINA FOMINA1, NARGIZA TUSHAKOVA1, THOMAS HAERTLÉ 2
Construction of the Escherichia coli DL 11 w3 Strain with spo T rel A Double Deletions

Stringent response, a form of cellular reprograming when encountering environmental stress, has been link to several physiological changes in Escherichia coli cells. The effector molecules that activate the stringent response, (p)ppGpp, are made by relA and spoT. These two genes regulate the accumulation of ppGpp through synthesis and hydrolysis. In this study, we utilized the lambda red recombinase system, a site-specific mutagenesis method, to knock out spoT in E. coli strain JW2755, which already had a deletion in relA. The JW2755 strain was first transformed with the plasmid, pCP20, to remove the kanamycin resistance, then again transformed with the plasmid pkD46 to introduce the lambda red recombinase system. The PCR product with sequence homology to the spoT gene and a kanamycin resistance marker was then transformed into the JW2755 strain. Evidence suggests that all transformations were successful. The final strains containing relA and spoT deletions were checked with PCR, and confirmed to have the correct recombination.
The role of firm characteristics on the relationship between gender diversity and firm performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of gender diversity on firm performance and evaluate how that relationship is influenced by some firm-specific factors for firms in an emerging market. Design/methodology/approach – The authors collected firm level financial data and firm level characteristics for the firms listed in BIST100 index of Borsa Istanbul for the period between 2002 and 2006. Due to endogeneity of gender diversity and firm performance, the authors utilize unbalanced panel data with 2SLS specification. To observe the sensitivity of results across measures of performance, three measures of performance, two accounting-based and one market-based, are utilized. Findings – Overall, the authors find some weak evidence that gender diversity impacts firm performance. In particular, the findings imply significant association between gender diversity and firm performance for firms that are targeting local markets, for firms in the financial sector and for firms that are family.
Private Evaluation of Decision Trees using Sublinear Cost

Abstract Decision trees are widespread machine learning models used for data classification and have many applications in areas such as healthcare, remote diagnostics, spam filtering, etc. In this paper, we address the problem of privately evaluating a decision tree on private data. In this scenario, the server holds a private decision tree model and the client wants to classify its private attribute vector using the server’s private model. The goal is to obtain the classification while preserving the privacy of both – the decision tree and the client input. After the computation, only the classification result is revealed to the client, while nothing is revealed to the server. Many existing protocols require a constant number of rounds. However, some of these protocols perform as many comparisons as there are decision nodes in the entire tree and others transform the whole plaintext decision tree into an oblivious program, resulting in higher communication costs. The main idea of our novel solution is to represent the tree as an array. Then we execute only d – the depth of the tree – comparisons. Each comparison is performed using a small garbled circuit, which output secret-shares of the index of the next node. We get the inputs to the comparison by obliviously indexing the tree and the attribute vector. We implement oblivious array indexing using either garbled circuits, Oblivious Transfer or Oblivious RAM (ORAM). Using ORAM, this results in the first protocol with sub-linear cost in the size of the tree. We implemented and evaluated our solution using the different array indexing procedures mentioned above. As a result, we are not only able to provide the first protocol with sublinear cost for large trees, but also reduce the communication cost for the large real-world data set “Spambase” from 18 MB to 1[triangleright]2 MB and the computation time from 17 seconds to less than 1 second in a LAN setting, compared to the best related work.
High-performance small vertical-cavity lasers: a comparison of measured improvements in optical and current confinement in devices using tapered apertures

We analyze the scaling characteristics of the optical and current confinement for three different vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) structures with tapered apertures. The improvements in scaling have allowed devices with apertures <3 /spl mu/m to have wall-plug efficiencies over 20% at output powers as low as 150 /spl mu/W. The combination of low threshold (<200 /spl mu/A), single modedness, and good wall-plug efficiency even at low output powers makes these devices excellent candidates for short distance (<1 m) interconnects within computers.
Emissions of ethene, propene, and 1-butene by a midlatitude forest

Measurements of nonmethane hydrocarbon concentrations and gradients above Harvard Forest (42°32′ N, 72°11′ W) are reported for January through December 1993, along with inferred whole-ecosystem emission rates for ethene, propene, and 1-butene. Emissions were calculated using a micrometeorological technique where the ratio of observed CO2 fluxes and gradients were multiplied by the observed hydrocarbon gradients. Average emissions of ethene, propene, and 1-butene during summer were 2.63, 1.13, and 0.41 × 1010 molecules cm−2 s−1, respectively. Emission of these olefins was correlated with incident solar radiation, implying a source associated with photosynthesis. In the northeastern United States, summertime biogenic emissions of propene and 1-butene exceed anthropogenic emissions, and biogenic emissions of ethene contribute approximately 50% of anthropogenic sources. Our measurements suggest that terrestrial biogenic emissions of C2-C4 olefins may be significant for atmospheric photochemistry.
National parks and environmental justice: Comparing access rights and ideological legacies in three countries

National parks are often places where people have previously lived and worked-they have been formed by a combination of natural and human processes that embody an identifiable history of cultural and political values. Conservation of protected areas is primarily about how we perceive such landscapes, how we place differential values on different landscape components, and who gets to decide on these values. Thus, conservation has been and still is very much about issues of power and environmental justice. This paper analyses the social, political and environmental histories of three national park regimes (South Africa, Sweden and Scotland) through the lens of public access rights. We examine the evolving status of access rights-in a broad sense that includes access to land, resources and institutions of governance-as a critical indicator of the extent to which conservation policies and legislation realise the aims of environmental justice in practice. Our case studies illustrate how access rights are contingent on the historical settings and ideological contexts in which the institutions controlling national park management have evolved. Dominant cultural, political and scientific ideologies have given rise to historical precedents and institutional structures that affect the promotion of environmental justice in and around national parks today. In countries where national parks were initially created to preserve perceived 'wilderness', with decisions taken by powerful elites and central authorities, this historical legacy has prevented profound change in line with new policy directives. The comparative analysis of national park regimes, where historical trajectories both converge and diverge, was useful in improving our understanding of contemporary issues involving conservation, people and politics
Discovering Concepts Using Large Table Corpus

Existing work on knowledge discovery mostly uses natural language techniques to extract entities and relationships from textual documents. However, today relational tables are abundant in quantities, often with clean and well-structured data values. So far these rich relational tables have been largely overlooked for the purpose of knowledge discovery. In this work, we study the problem of extracting concept hierarchies given a large table corpus. Our method first iteratively groups values in a table corpus based on co-occurrence statistics to produce a candidate hierarchical tree. The tree is then summarized by selecting nodes that can best “describe” the original corpus, in order to produce a small tree with desired concept hierarchies, and is easy for humans to understand and curate. We design our algorithms based on map-reduce to scale to large table corpus. Experiment evaluation on real enterprise table corpus shows that proposed approach can generate concepts with high quality. ACM Reference format: Keqian Li, Yeye He, and Kris Ganjam. 2017. Discovering Concepts Using Large Table Corpus . In Proceedings of ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Nova Scotia, Canada, Aug 2017 (KDD’17),
Assessing Photoinduced Toxicity of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in an Urbanized Estuary

Increases in contaminants associated with urban sprawl are a particular concern in the rapidly developing coastal areas of the southeastern United States. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are contaminants associated with vehicle emissions and runoff from impervious surfaces. Increased vehicular traffic and more impervious surfaces lead to an increased loading of PAHs into coastal estuarine systems. The phototoxic effect of PAH-contaminated sediments on a sediment-dwelling meiobenthic copepod, Amphiascus tenuiremis, was estimated in Murrells Inlet, a small, high-salinity estuary with moderate urbanization located in Georgetown and Horry Counties, South Carolina, USA. Field-determined solar ultraviolet radiation (UV) and UV extinction coefficients were incorporated into laboratory toxicity experiments, and a model was developed to predict areas of specific hazard to A. tenuiremis in the estuary. The model incorporated laboratory toxicity data, UV extinction coefficients, and historical sediment chemistry and bathymetric data within a spatial model of sedimentary areas of the estuary. The model predicted that approximately 816% of the total creek habitat suitable for meiobenthic copepods is at risk to photoinduced PAH toxicity. This area is in the northern, more developed part of Murrells Inlet.
Chapter 4 MOP 1 affects DNA methylation , nucleosome occupancy , histone modifications and chromatin conformation at the b 1 allele involved in paramutation

B’ and B-I are two tissue-specifically regulated epialleles of the maize b1 gene. B-I expresses the b1 gene at a high level, B’ at a low level. When combined in one nucleus the two epialleles communicate in trans whereby B’ heritably changes B-I into B’ in a process called paramutation. A hepta-repeat ~100 kb upstream of the b1 coding region is required for paramutation and for high b1 expression. A mutation in the mediator of paramutation1 (Mop1) gene prevents paramutation and up-regulates the expression level of the B’ epiallele. Our data underscore the importance of DNA methylation in the maintenance of the B’ epigenetic state, and we provide evidence that MOP1 maintains the repeat DNA methylation pattern and is required for tissuespecific chromatin remodeling at the hepta-repeat. Furthermore we show that in the absence of MOP1, the chromatin conformation of the B’ epiallele resembles the B-I multi-loop structure mediating high b1 transcription. Our results uncover an intricate interplay between active and silent epigenetic features present at the b1 locus in a mop1 background, resulting in elevated expression of B’. We conclude that MOP1 is essential to maintain the B’ silent chromatin state.
Magnetospheric signatures of ionospheric density cavities observed by Cluster

We present Cluster measurements of large amplitude electric fields correlated with intense downward field‐aligned currents, observed during a nightside crossing of the auroral zone. The data are reproduced by a simple model of magnetosphere‐ionosphere coupling which, under different conditions, can also produce a divergent electric field signature in the downward current region, or correlation between the electric and perturbed magnetic fields. We conclude that strong electric field associated with intense downward field‐aligned current, such as this observation, is a signature of ionospheric plasma depletion caused by the downward current. It is also shown that the electric field in the downward current region correlates with downward current density if a background field is present, e.g., due to magnetospheric convection.