Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controlling small mammal predators using sodium monofluoroacetate (1080) in bait stations along forestry roads in a New Zealand beech forest.

A single five night pulse of sodium monofluroacetate (0.15% 1080) applied in bait stations at two different spacing intervals, 100 and 200 m, along forestry roads in New Zealand beech forest, killed all four of the resident radio-tagged stoats (Mustela erminea) and all three of the resident radio-tagged wild house cats (Felis catus) by secondary poisoning. Gut contents of predators indicated that house mice (Mus musculus), ship rats (Rattus rattus) and brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) were important sources of the toxin. High kills of predators, possums and rats at both 100 and 200 m spacing regimes suggest that greater efficacy of controlling these pests would be achieved with the latter method. Evidence suggests that routine management of possums and rats using 1080 and brodifacoum has resulted in widespread control of small mammalian carnivores by secondary poisoning in New Zealand forests. However, aerial application of poison can kill large numbers of tomtits (Petroica macrocephala) and robins (Petroica australis) and few other native bird species have been adequately monitored through such operations. Reducing risks to native wildlife is responsible ecological management. Use of bait stations along forestry roads or tracks may be fundamental in mounting cost-effective large-scale ground-based protection of native wildlife through safer predator controls. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Day-Ahead Hail Prediction Integrating Machine Learning with Storm-Scale Numerical Weather Models

Hail causes billions of dollars in losses by damaging buildings, vehicles, and crops. Improving the spatial and temporal accuracy of hail forecasts would allow people to mitigate hail damage. We have developed an approach to forecasting hail that identifies potential hail storms in storm-scale numerical weather prediction models and matches them with observed hailstorms. Machine learning models, including random forests, gradient boosting trees, and linear regression, are used to predict the expected hail size from each forecast storm. The individual hail size forecasts are merged with a spatial neighborhood ensemble probability technique to produce a consensus probability of hail at least 25.4 mm in diameter. The system was evaluated during the 2014 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hazardous Weather Testbed Experimental Forecast Program and compared with a physics-based hail size model. The machine-learning-based technique shows advantages in producing smaller size errors and more reliable probability forecasts. The machine learning approaches correctly predicted the location and extent of a significant hail event in eastern Nebraska and a marginal severe hail event in Colorado.
Output Properties of Transparent Submount Packaged FlipChip Light-Emitting Diode Modules

Flip chip technology has been widely adopted in modern power light-emitting diode (LED) fabrications and its output efficiency is closely related to the submount material properties. Here, we present the electrical, optical and thermal properties of flip chip light-emitting diodes mounted on transparent sapphire and borosilicate glass which have shown a higher output luminous flux when compared to the traditional non-transparent mounted LEDs. Exhibiting both better thermal conductivity and good optical transparency, flip chip LEDs with a sapphire submount showed superior performance when compared to the non-transparent silicon submount ones, and also showed better optical performance than the flip chip LEDs mounted on transparent but poor-thermal-conducting glass substrates. The correspondent analysis was carried out using ANSYS 14 to compare the experimental thermal imaging with the simulation results. TracePro software was also used to check the output luminous flux dependency on different LED mounting designs.
Segmentation of renal compartments in DCE-MRI of human kidney

Chronic renal failure is an increasing problem world-wide. It is important to monitor renal function precisely to assess disease progression, the prognosis, and therapy-effects. Correct segmentation of kidney compartments from the DCE-MR images is needed to support automated functional analysis of kidney. In this work we compared three unsupervised data driven approaches to automatically segment the renal compartments: k-means clustering, wavelet based clustering, and Gaussian Mixture Models. The algorithms were applied to 4 DCE-MRI data sets in human kidney. Data were acquired with different temporal and spatial resolution as well as at 1.5T and 3T. Obtained results were compared to manually segmented kidney compartments. On average, the renal cortex could be segmented at 88%, the medulla at 91%, and the pelvis at 98% accuracy. Comparison of the methods showed no significant differences in the segmentation accuracies (p >0.5). In conclusion, unsupervised data driven segmentation could be seen as a reliable and automated approach to support the analysis of renal function.
Salvinorin A: A potent naturally occurring nonnitrogenous κ opioid selective agonist

Salvia divinorum, whose main active ingredient is the neoclerodane diterpene Salvinorin A, is a hallucinogenic plant in the mint family that has been used in traditional spiritual practices for its psychoactive properties by the Mazatecs of Oaxaca, Mexico. More recently, S. divinorum extracts and Salvinorin A have become more widely used in the U.S. as legal hallucinogens. We discovered that Salvinorin A potently and selectively inhibited 3H-bremazocine binding to cloned κ opioid receptors. Salvinorin A had no significant activity against a battery of 50 receptors, transporters, and ion channels and showed a distinctive profile compared with the prototypic hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide. Functional studies demonstrated that Salvinorin A is a potent κ opioid agonist at cloned κ opioid receptors expressed in human embryonic kidney-293 cells and at native κ opioid receptors expressed in guinea pig brain. Importantly, Salvinorin A had no actions at the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, the principal molecular target responsible for the actions of classical hallucinogens. Salvinorin A thus represents, to our knowledge, the first naturally occurring nonnitrogenous opioid-receptor subtype-selective agonist. Because Salvinorin A is a psychotomimetic selective for κ opioid receptors, κ opioid-selective antagonists may represent novel psychotherapeutic compounds for diseases manifested by perceptual distortions (e.g., schizophrenia, dementia, and bipolar disorders). Additionally, these results suggest that κ opioid receptors play a prominent role in the modulation of human perception.
Organizational Self Assessment of Knowledge Management Maturity

Knowledge is a valuable corporate asset and must be properly managed. No generally accepted methodology exists for assessing the maturity of an organization with respect to the management of its knowledge resources. This paper develops and tests an instrument that organizations can use to self-assess their knowledge management maturity (KMM). Five levels of maturity are defined. These levels are conceptually derived from the broad framework of Carnegie Mellon’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software engineering. However, unlike the CMM assessment that is largely factual, our KMM assessment is largely perceptual. The maturity levels and the assessment instrument were developed in concert with Intel Corporation. A two-stage pilot study was completed and the assessment was administered to a sample of knowledge workers in a large business unit within the company. Although the overall assessment methodology is still under development, the results of our survey indicate that self-assessment of knowledge management maturity is possible, and that this assessment provides valuable feedback for more effective use of knowledge assets.
Towards Differential Query Services in Cost-Efficient Clouds

Cloud computing as an emerging technology trend is expected to reshape the advances in information technology. In a cost-efficient cloud environment, a user can tolerate a certain degree of delay while retrieving information from the cloud to reduce costs. In this paper, we address two fundamental issues in such an environment: privacy and efficiency. We first review a private keyword-based file retrieval scheme that was originally proposed by Ostrovsky. Their scheme allows a user to retrieve files of interest from an untrusted server without leaking any information. The main drawback is that it will cause a heavy querying overhead incurred on the cloud and thus goes against the original intention of cost efficiency. In this paper, we present three efficient information retrieval for ranked query (EIRQ) schemes to reduce querying overhead incurred on the cloud. In EIRQ, queries are classified into multiple ranks, where a higher ranked query can retrieve a higher percentage of matched files. A user can retrieve files on demand by choosing queries of different ranks. This feature is useful when there are a large number of matched files, but the user only needs a small subset of them. Under different parameter settings, extensive evaluations have been conducted on both analytical models and on a real cloud environment, in order to examine the effectiveness of our schemes.
Legal and social dimensions of the male-breadwinner model in Germany

German women find it more difficult than men to establish financial independence through the labour market or social (security) benefits and are more often dependent on the income of the husband or partner. The structural inequalities between women and men in welfare state regimes are described by social scienctists as a result of the male-breadwinner model. The German welfare state is the prototypical example of a conservative welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1990) and a strong male-breadwinner model (Lewis/ Ostner 1994). It`s legal basis is the strict division of the public and private sphere, founded by alimony law and the protection of marriage as a constitutional value und right. This paper aims to identify the elements of the male-breadwinner model within the German legal system. Although regulations appear to be sexneutral in terms of their wording, their gendered impact is the financial dependence of women on men, because their personal entitlements to social security benefits are inadequate and alimony is given priority to means-tested benefits. This raises questions concerning equality law and efficient strategies for change. The paper aims to show the interrelation of apparently neutral regulations, and their meaning for men and women (as groups), and their influence on individuals.
TITLE: CLUSTER ANALYSIS OF 4-DAY BACK TRAJECTORIES ARRIVING IN THE BARCELONA AREA (SPAIN) FROM 1997 TO 2002 AUTHORS:

A cluster algorithm was implemented to analyze the backward trajectories arriving in the Barcelona area (BCN), located at the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Five years of 4-day kinematic back trajectories, computed with the HYbrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory model version 4 (HYSPLIT), were clustered and classified in groups of similar length and curvature. To better describe the tropospheric circulations at BCN, backward trajectories arriving at 5500, 3000, and 1500 m above sea level were analyzed. The main transport patterns are identified at 5500 m: westerly flows (49% of the total situations), northwesterly flows (17%), southwesterly flows (20%), and regional recirculations over Europe and the Mediterranean Sea (15%). An annual distribution of the transport patterns is described. During summertime, moderate westerlies (19%) and southwesterlies (13%) in the middle troposphere, slow westerlies (11%) and southwesterlies (10%) at 3000 m, and regional recirculations (29 %) at 1500 m characterize the BCN long-range transport. This general pattern varies during wintertime with more westerlies at 5500 m, and an increase of northern and northwestern situations at 1500 m. Large number of situations with decoupling between lower from middle troposphere are observed when combining 5500 m and 1500 m cluster results. Inter-annual variability is discussed, and the influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation phase is captured by winter average regime patterns.
A counterpart to pain : itch

Pain is not the only defense mechanism that alerts us to a physical hazard — the other is itch, an unpleasant sensation that is distinct from pain because it provokes the desire to scratch. Although pain and itch feel different, these two sensations share many qualities. Both are aversive sensations that evolved to protect us. Moreover, both can become pathological, developing into chronic debilitating conditions that ruin one’s quality of life.
Construction of a Vietnamese Corpora for Named Entity Recognition

In order to build an automatic named entity recognition (NER) system using a machine learning approach, a large tagged corpus is widely seen as one necessary knowledge resource. Nevertheless, manual construction is time consuming, labor intensive and expensive. Building NER corpora for European languages has been extensively studied while some less-studied languages such as Vietnamese have not yet received much attention. This paper describes construction of a Vietnamese corpus, Vietnamese guidelines for annotators and a tagging tool that we make publicly available. We report on a comparison with the English named entity (NE) corpus in our multilingual NER system.
Trainability: Developing a responsive learning system

In this paper, we describe the lessons we learned in developing AgentBuilder, a commercial system for rapidly creating agents that extract information from web sites. AgentBuilder employs a Programming-by-Example (PBE) paradigm, where users train the system by showing the system examples of web pages and the information to be extracted from these pages. The system uses a sophisticated machine learning algorithm for inducing extraction rules from examples and eventually creates web agents that navigate through a site and extract information. Previous work on Programming-by-Example has discussed the importance of felicity conditions, which simplify training so that the learner can more readily understand what is being taught. In this paper, we show that, in addition, developers must design the learning system to insure that the teacher (i.e. the user) can train the system without becoming frustrated. We discuss these characteristics, which we refer to as " trainability " , and show how trainability considerations constrain the type of learning algorithm that can be employed in a practical AI application.
Automation Techniques for Intelligent Environments - Prediction of Building Activity Patterns Using a Cyclic Genetic Algorithm

This work involves learning the use schedule of an academic building in order to intelligently control various aspects of the environment. Motion sensors are used to monitor and record the activity of each of the rooms in the building. After a basic preprocessing of the data, a Cyclic Genetic Algorithm (CGA) is used to pick out the patterns of use of the rooms. The CGA is seen as ideal for such a problem because of its ability to find repetitive cyclic patterns in the data. Our results show that a CGA has the ability to pick out such patterns and construct a schedule of use for a room.
Contribution Tracking Contribution Tracking : Models and Skills for Collaborative Language Use Under Uncertainty

This article explores the representations and reasoning by which dialogue systems can work collaboratively and creatively to communicate successfully with interlocutors in situations of transient uncertainty. In these situations, dialogue is shaped by the hierarchy of activities underway in the interaction, by the dynamics of linguistic context, and by the array of possibilities that interlocutors take as open ambiguities. Only by integrating information of all these types can a dialogue agent interpret incremental contributions from interlocutors during periods of uncertainty, or formulate its own context-dependent utterances to help pinpoint the context and resolve ambiguities. An empirical study with an implemented human-computer dialogue system in a referential communication task shows how these skills of contribution tracking enable new, more flexible, more robust, and more coherent strategies for interactive language use.
Hardware support for fast capability-based addressing

Traditional methods of providing protection in memory systems do so at the cost of increased context switch time and/or increased storage to record access permissions for processes. With the advent of computers that supported cycle-by-cycle multithreading, protection schemes that increase the time to perform a context switch are unacceptable, but protecting unrelated processes from each other is still necessary if such machines are to be used in non-trusting environments. This paper examines guarded pointers, a hardware technique which uses tagged 64-bit pointer objects to implement capability-based addressing. Guarded pointers encode a segment descriptor into the upper bits of every pointer, eliminating the indirection and related performance penalties associated with traditional implementations of capabilities. All processes share a single 54-bit virtual address space, and access is limited to the data that can be referenced through the pointers that a process has been issued. Only one level of address translation is required to perform a memory reference. Sharing data between processes is efficient, and protection states are defined to allow fast protected subsystem calls and create unforgeable data keys.
Development of an Emotion-Competent SLAM Agent

Emotions are a fundamental part of everyday life and an important topic in the development of artificial intelligence. We combine a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping algorithm with a model of emotion. The model of emotion is able to generate a mapping from the quantitative figures of the SLAM process to human-like emotions. This enables the robot to communicate its current state towards a human observer using emotional expressions. The paper reports on the design of the model, the result of the affective evaluation during an autonomous path finding process and its comparison to experimental data of a survey.
Region-Of-Interest Retrieval in Brain MR Images

Title: Region-Of-Interest Retrieval in Brain MR Images Author(s): D. Unay; A. Ekin Reviewer(s): IPS Facilities Technical Note: PR-TN 2008/00905 Additional Numbers: Subcategory: Project: Computer Aided Diagnosis for Dementia (2006-227) Customer: Keywords: neurodegenerative diseases, Brain MR image retrieval, local binary patterns, KLT feature points, spatial descriptors, medical databases, local structure analysis Abstract
Combined Bilateral Filter for Enhanced Real-time Upsampling of Depth Images

Highly accurate depth images at video frame rate are required in many areas of computer vision, such as 3D reconstruction, 3D video capturing or manufacturing. Nowadays low cost depth cameras, which deliver a high frame rate, are widely spread but suffer from a high level of noise and a low resolution. Thus, a sophisticated real time upsampling algorithm is strongly required. In this paper we propose a new sensor fusion approach called Combined Bilateral Filter (CBF) together with the new Depth Discontinuity Preservation (DDP) post processing, which combine the information of a depth and a color sensor. Thereby we especially focus on two drawbacks that are common in related algorithms namely texture copying and upsampling without depth discontinuity preservation. The output of our algorithm is a higher resolution depth image with essentially reduced noise, no aliasing effects, no texture copying and very sharply preserved edges. In a ground truth comparison our algorithm was able to reduce the mean error up to 73% within around 30ms. Furthermore, we compare our method against other state of the art algorithms and obtain superior results.
The Effect of Parents' Employment on Children's Educational Attainment

This paper presents the conditions under which a causal interpretation can be given to the association between childhood parental employment and subsequent education of children. In a model in which parental preferences are separable in own consumption and children's well-being, estimation is complicated by endowment heterogeneity and by the fact that parents may compensate or reinforce children's endowments relevant to education attainment. A sibling difference estimatation strategy is generally not sufficient to provide a consistent estimate of the parameter of interest. Identification rests on two stronger assumptions about the timing of parents' knowledge of their children's endowments and about the technology used to produce children's human capital. We find a negative and signifcant effect on the child's educational attainment of the extent of mother's full-time employment when the child was aged 0-5. The effects of mother's part-time employment and father's employment are smaller and less well determined but again negative. In the context of our conditional demand function framework, these results suggest that a higher full family income increases the educational attainment of children, and given full family income, a higher mother's or father's wages reduces their childen's educational attainment.
Case–control and prospective studies of dietary α-linolenic acid intake and prostate cancer risk: a meta-analysis

Objective α-Linolenic acid (ALA) is considered to be a cardioprotective nutrient; however, some epidemiological studies have suggested that dietary ALA intake increases the risk of prostate cancer. The main objective was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of case–control and prospective studies investigating the association between dietary ALA intake and prostate cancer risk. Design A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted by searching MEDLINE and EMBASE for relevant prospective and case–control studies. Included studies We included all prospective cohort, case–control, nested case-cohort and nested case–control studies that investigated the effect of dietary ALA intake on the incidence (or diagnosis) of prostate cancer and provided relative risk (RR), HR or OR estimates. Primary outcome measure Data were pooled using the generic inverse variance method with a random effects model from studies that compared the highest ALA quantile with the lowest ALA quantile. Risk estimates were expressed as RR with 95% CIs. Heterogeneity was assessed by χ2 and quantified by I2. Results Data from five prospective and seven case–control studies were pooled. The overall RR estimate showed ALA intake to be positively but non-significantly associated with prostate cancer risk (1.08 (0.90 to 1.29), p=0.40; I2=85%), but the interpretation was complicated by evidence of heterogeneity not explained by study design. A weak, non-significant protective effect of ALA intake on prostate cancer risk in the prospective studies became significant (0.91 (0.83 to 0.99), p=0.02) without evidence of heterogeneity (I2=8%, p=0.35) on removal of one study during sensitivity analyses. Conclusions This analysis failed to confirm an association between dietary ALA intake and prostate cancer risk. Larger and longer observational and interventional studies are needed to define the role of ALA and prostate cancer.