Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beyond the Modernization Theory: So-cio-Demographic Changes, Economic Structure and Forest Transition in a Multi-Dimensional Time-Series Analysis for Italy

In the light of the modernization theory, the present paper proposes an empirical assessment of the population-economy-environment nexus in Italy by investigating the historical trends (1862- 2009) in 58 variables describing five themes (environment, demography, education, trade, agriculture). Socioeconomic variables representing changes in population structure and demographic dynamics compared with indicators of forest expansion allowed verifying the temporal coherence between demographic and forest transitions at the country scale. The study develops an exploratory data analysis framework based on principal component analysis, hierarchical and non-hiera- rchical clustering and identifies four homogeneous time intervals (1862-1899, 1900-1930, 1931- 1970, 1971-2009) in socioeconomic and environmental attributes. Different trends (positive linear, negative linear and non-linear) in the studied variables were identified through hierarchical clustering.
An object-based approach for flood area delineation in a transboundary area using ENVISAT ASAR and LANDSAT TM data

The aim of this study was to develop a straightforward approach for flood area mapping in a transboundary riverbed using Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis. Weak bilateral/multilateral cooperation among neighboring countries hampers effective disaster management and mitigation activities over transboundary areas and strengthens the demand for reliable remote-sensing-derived information. Three object-based classification approaches using ENVISAT/ASAR and multi-temporal LANDSAT TM data were developed and validated for flood area delineation. The accuracy assessment of the classification results was based on oblique air photo interpretation and an area-based comparison with the official flood map. The bi-level object-based model using the Normalized Difference Water Index and the original post-flood TM bands attained 92.67% overall accuracy in inundated-areas detection, while the ENVISAT/ASAR classification was the least accurate (85.33%), probably due to the lower spatial resolution of the Synthetic Aperture Radar image. A strong agreement (92.14%) was found between the LANDSAT flood extent and the official flood map, suggesting that the proposed method has the potential to be employed in the future as a standard part of a flood crisis management process.
Does aftershock duration scale with mainshock size?

It has been claimed that aftershock duration scales with the mainshock recurrence interval [Dieterich, 1994]. This implies a scaling between aftershock duration and mainshock magnitude. To see if such a scaling exist, we compare properties of aftershock sequences associated with mainshocks whose size span several magnitude units. Earthquake properties were examined along two northern California fault segments, one is the Calaveras fault, another is a northern segment of the San Andreas fault. The first study area contains the rupture area of the M6.2, 1984 Morgan Hill, and the latter is adjacent the southern end of the M7.1, 1989 Loma Prieta rupture. Both the Morgan Hill and the Loma Prieta aftershock activities lasted 1–3 × 108 seconds. On the other hand, aftershock activities of small‐to‐moderate mainshocks lasted about 1–2 × 106 seconds. Nevertheless, there is no evidence for scaling between mainshock size and aftershock duration for moderate‐to‐small mainshocks. It thus seems that large earthquakes, because they break the entire seismogenic depth and interact with deeper parts of the crust, trigger a relaxation mechanism that is inactive during aftershock activity due to moderate‐to‐small quakes, and whose characteristic relaxation time is much longer than that of the brittle crust. Current seismicity models do not provide explanation for these observations.
Temperature and bias dependent gate leakage in AlInN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor

Temperature and bias dependence of gate leakage current in AlInN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) is studied over a wide range of temperature and bias. Poole-Frankel (PF) emission, Fowler-Nordheim (FN) Tunneling, impact ionization and hopping conduction are found to be the dominant leakage mechanisms at different regions of reverse bias. The results suggest that the gate leakage current is governed by not one but several mechanisms depending on the bias and temperature.
Cultural implications of late Holocene climate change in the Cuenca Oriental, Mexico

Significance Researchers have long invoked drought to explain the demise of many pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sites. However, the climatic history of many regions of Mesoamerica remains poorly understood. This includes the region around Cantona, a large fortified city in highland Mexico that was abandoned between 900 CE and 1050 CE. We used stable isotopes and elemental concentrations from lake sediments to reconstruct past climate, and found evidence of regional aridity between 500 CE and 1150 CE. In the initial phase of drought, Cantona’s population grew, possibly as a result of regional political instability. However, by 1050 CE, long-term environmental stress likely contributed to the city’s abandonment. Our work highlights the interplay of environmental and political factors in past human responses to climate change. There is currently no consensus on the importance of climate change in Mesoamerican prehistory. Some invoke drought as a causal factor in major cultural transitions, including the abandonment of many sites at 900 CE, while others conclude that cultural factors were more important. This lack of agreement reflects the fact that the history of climate change in many regions of Mesoamerica is poorly understood. We present paleolimnological evidence suggesting that climate change was important in the abandonment of Cantona between 900 CE and 1050 CE. At its peak, Cantona was one of the largest cities in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, with a population of 90,000 inhabitants. The site is located in the Cuenca Oriental, a semiarid basin east of Mexico City. We developed a subcentennial reconstruction of regional climate from a nearby maar lake, Aljojuca. The modern climatology of the region suggests that sediments record changes in summer monsoonal precipitation. Elemental geochemistry (X-ray fluorescence) and δ18O from authigenic calcite indicate a centennial-scale arid interval between 500 CE and 1150 CE, overlaid on a long-term drying trend. Comparison of this record to Cantona’s chronology suggests that both the city’s peak population and its abandonment occurred during this arid period. The human response to climate change most likely resulted from the interplay of environmental and political factors. During earlier periods of Cantona’s history, increasing aridity and political unrest may have actually increased the city’s importance. However, by 1050 CE, this extended arid period, possibly combined with regional political change, contributed to the city’s abandonment.
The Preemptive Uniprocessor Scheduling of Mixed-Criticality Implicit-Deadline Sporadic Task Systems

Systems in many safety-critical application domains are subject to certification requirements. For any given system, however, it may be the case that only a subset of its functionality is safety-critical and hence subject to certification, the rest of the functionality is non safety critical and does not need to be certified, or is certified to a lower level of assurance. An algorithm called EDF-VD (for Earliest Deadline First with Virtual Deadlines) is described for the scheduling of such mixed-criticality task systems. Analyses of EDF-VD significantly superior to previously-known ones are presented, based on metrics such as processor speedup factor (EDF-VD is proved to be optimal with respect to this metric) and utilization bounds.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Health Care Use, and Costs: A U.S. Managed Care Perspective

OBJECTIVE:We performed an evaluation of patient symptoms, health care use, and costs to define the burden of illness of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and the relation to the severity of abdominal pain/discomfort in a large health maintenance organization.METHODS:All 6500 adult health maintenance organization members who had undergone flexible sigmoidoscopy in the year 2000 were mailed a questionnaire that elicited Rome I symptom criteria and severity ratings for abdominal pain/discomfort. Multiple health care use measures were obtained from various administrative databases. IBS patients were compared with a control group of non-IBS subjects, and analyses were adjusted for age and sex.RESULTS:We received 2613 (40.2%) responses. Compared with non-IBS subjects over 2 yr, IBS patients had more outpatient visits (medical, surgery, and emergency, p < 0.05), were hospitalized more often (p < 0.05), and had more total outpatient prescriptions (p < 0.05) and IBS-related prescriptions (p < 0.05). Over 1 yr, total costs were 51% higher in IBS patients, who also had higher costs for outpatient visits, drugs, and radiology and laboratory tests (p < 0.05). Total costs were increased by 35%, 52%, and 59% in IBS patients with mild, moderate, and severe symptoms of abdominal pain/discomfort compared with non-IBS subjects (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS:Using Rome I symptom criteria, we found that IBS is associated with a broad pattern of increased health care use and costs. The severity of abdominal pain/discomfort is a significant predictor of health care use and costs for patients with IBS compared with non-IBS subjects.
Networked control systems design via fuzzy logic method

This paper addresses the problem of designing robust static output-feedback controllers for nonlinear network based controller design for the given T-S fuzzy model. The effects of both network-induced delays and data packet dropout will be investigated. Based on an integral inequality and a matrix inequality, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the existence of a network-based controller is formulated in terms of a linear matrix inequality by adjusting effective parameter matrices. In the approach, we do not directly employ the Lyapunov approach, as do in most of traditional fuzzy control design approaches. Instead, sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the robust stability for the considered networked systems are derived in terms of the matrix spectral norm of the closed-loop fuzzy system. The sufficient conditions are further formulated into linear matrix inequalities so that the desired controller can be easily obtained by using the Matlab LMI toolbox. An illustrative numerical example is also given to show the effectiveness of the proposed design method.
A DSL for importing models in a requirements management system

Requirements are artefacts often described with text and models. It is important to manage traceability between requirements and other software artefacts, including designs and test cases, also often captured with specialized models. Some Requirements Management Systems (RMS) support traceability relationships, between (textual) requirements artefacts in the RMS and model artefacts created outside the RMS, through complex standards or proprietary solutions. This paper proposes a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for describing the concepts of a modeling language intended to be traced using an RMS, with tool support handling the import and re-import of models and of their traceability links. The Model Import DSL (MI-DSL) is supported by an Xtext-based editor and the automatic generation of an import library targeting a leading RMS, namely IBM Rational DOORS. The language and the tools are demonstrated for model import and evolution scenarios with two different modeling languages. This work contributes a simple yet reliable mechanism to define and support traceability between requirements and models from different tools.
Greenbench: A benchmark for observing power grid vulnerability under data-centric threats

Smart grid is a cyber-physical system which integrates communication networks into traditional power grid. This integration, however, makes the power grid susceptible to cyber attacks. One of the most distinguished challenges in studying the aftermath of cyber attacks in smart grid lies in data-centric threats. Even though such attacks are critical to the information network, they will result in much more Domino-like impact than they behave in cyber world. This is because for an information-centric network, distorted or delayed information undermines services and applications. But in power grid, these data-centric attacks may result in instable power systems, and further detrimental impact of power supplies. In this paper, we present Greenbench, a benchmark that is designed to evaluate real-time power grid dynamics in response to data-centric attacks. The simulation results provide several counter-intuitive suggestions to both smart grid security research and deployment.
Are Homegarden Ecosystems Resilient to Climatic Change? An Analysis of Adaptation Strategies of Homegardeners in Sri Lanka

: Homegarden ecosystems are considered to be resilient to climate change partly due to the use of efficient and effective adaptation strategies by the homegardeners. This study documents the strategies adopted by homegardeners in Sri Lanka and investigates the determinants of the choice of such strategies. Data gathered from household surveys conducted in three selected locations were analyzed to achieve the study objectives. About 52% of the homegardeners in all locations were found to be small-scale farmers (<0.5 ha) engaged in semi-subsistence farming over a long period of time. The majority (85%) of them were educated up to the primary (elementary) level. Among the homegardeners, more than 63% in Keeriyagaswewa, 54% in Pethiyagoda and 90% in Siwalakulama have not made any significant changes to the plant, tree and animal composition of homegardens over the past 20 years. A number of adaptation strategies have been used by the homegardeners enabling them to maintain diversity in the homegar-den ecosystem. Changes in planting dates (37%), agronomic practices (39%), use of soil and water conservation measures (41%) and technology (55%) such as the use of new varieties and irrigation equipment, were the most commonly-used adaptation strategies. A considerable variation in the type of adaptation strategies across the households was noted. The results of the probit analysis indicate that the type of employment, age, sex, education level of household head, experience in farming, homegarden size, diversity of homegarden measured by the Shannon Weiner Index (SWI) and perceptions towards climate change, significantly influence the decision to adopt a given strategy. The development programmes to promote adaptation to climate change in homegardens should hence be designed taking the above determinants into consideration.
The Podocyte as a Therapeutic Target in Proteinuric Kidney Disease

Kidney podocytes are highly differentiated cells with a complex cellular morphology. They are located inside the glomerulus, a corpuscle of capillaries through which blood is filtered hydrostatically through a high-volume/highdiscrimination filter. Neighboring podocyte Foot Processes (FP) is connected by a specialized cell-cell junction, the Slit Diaphragm (SD), which represents the main size selective filtration barrier in the kidney. The podocyte is an attractive cell for drug targeting due largely to its presence on the epithelial surface of one of the best vascularized organs in the body. Podocytes are exposed to 180 liters of filtered water and solutes each day, with the glomerular basement membrane and fenestrated glomerular endothelium not likely to be obstacles to small molecule passage. Though no podocyte-specific drugs are presently available, clinical nephrology has taken advantage of the pleitropic effects of a diverse array of therapeutic agents to treat glomerular disease. Glucocorticoids, retinoic acid, cyclosporine, abatacept, ACTH, thiazolidinedione, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors and rituximab have been successfully repurposed from other clinical indications to treat protein uric kidney disease. By different mechanisms these agents all nonspecifically target podocytes to promote their survival under disease conditions. This review summarizes the currently understood mechanistic basis for their use.
A dynamic programming approach to audio segmentation and speech/music discrimination

We consider the problem of segmenting an audio signal into characteristic regions based on feature-set similarities. In the proposed approach, a feature-space representation of the signal is generated; sequences of these feature-space samples are then aggregated into clusters corresponding to distinct signal regions. The algorithm consists of using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to condition the feature space and dynamic programming (DP) to identify data clusters. We consider the design of the dynamic program cost functions; we are able to derive effective cost functions without relying on significant prior information about the structure of the expected data clusters. We demonstrate the application of the LDA-DP segmentation algorithm to speech/music discrimination. Experimental results are given and discussed.
Robust and Secure Time-Synchronization Against Sybil Attacks for Sensor Networks

Time synchronization is crucial for cyber-physical systems (CPSs), e.g., wireless sensor and actuator networks. Cyber physical security is an important yet challenging problem. In particular, attacks to the time synchronization service may incur data distortion or even malfunction of the whole system. Sybil attack is one of the most common attack types for sensor networks, where a node illegitimately claims multiple identities. Existing secure time-synchronization protocols; however, cannot well address Sybil attacks in the time synchronization process. We propose a robust and secure time-synchronization protocol (RTSP) to defend against Sybil attacks. Different from previous secure timesync protocols, RTSP employs a novel graph theoretical approach, which is able to perform anomaly detection at the message level instead of the node level. This fine-grained detection ability enables RTSP to become robust against Sybil attacks, as well as node compromise and message manipulation attacks. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.
I know who you will meet this evening! Linking wireless devices using Wi-Fi probe requests

Active service discovery in Wi-Fi involves wireless stations broadcasting their Wi-Fi fingerprint, i.e. the SSIDs of their preferred wireless networks. The content of those Wi-Fi fingerprints can reveal different types of information about the owner. We focus on the relation between the fingerprints and the links between the owners. Our hypothesis is that social links between devices owners can be identified by exploiting the information contained in the fingerprint. More specifically we propose to consider the similarity between fingerprints as a metric, with the underlying idea: similar fingerprints are likely to be linked. We first study the performances of several similarity metrics on a controlled dataset and then apply the designed classifier to a dataset collected in the wild. Finally we discuss how Wi-Fi fingerprint can reveal informations on the nature of the links between users. This study is based on a dataset collected in Sydney, Australia, composed of fingerprints corresponding to more than 8000 devices.
Improved Control of Tuberculosis and Activation of Macrophages in Mice Lacking Protein Kinase R

Host factors that microbial pathogens exploit for their propagation are potential targets for therapeuic countermeasures. No host enzyme has been identified whose genetic absence benefits the intact mammalian host in vivo during infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the leading cause of death from bacterial infection. Here, we report that the dsRNA-dependent protein kinase (PKR) is such an enzyme. PKR-deficient mice contained fewer viable Mtb and showed less pulmonary pathology than wild type mice. We identified two potential mechanisms for the protective effect of PKR deficiency: increased apoptosis of macrophages in response to Mtb and enhanced activation of macrophages in response to IFN-gamma. The restraining effect of PKR on macrophage activation was explained by its mediation of a previously unrecognized ability of IFN-gamma to induce low levels of the macrophage deactivating factor interleukin 10 (IL10). These observations suggest that PKR inhibitors may prove useful as an adjunctive treatment for tuberculosis.
Local Search Genetic Algorithm for Optimization of Highly Reliable Communications Networks

This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) with specialized encoding, initialization and local search genetic operators to optimize communication network topologies. This NPhard problem is often highly constrained so that random initialization and standard genetic operators usually generate infeasible network architectures. Compounding this infeasibility issue is that the fitness function involves calculating the all-terminal reliability of the network, a calculation which is computationally expensive. Therefore, it is imperative that the search balances the need to thoroughly explore the boundary between feasible and infeasible networks, along with calculating fitness on only the most promising candidate networks. The algorithm results are compared to optimum results found by branch and bound and also to GA results without local search operators on a suite of 79 test problems. This GA strategy of employing bounds, simple heuristic checks and problem specific repair and local search operators can be used on other highly constrained combinatorial applications where numerous fitness calculations are prohibitive.
Photochemical trajectory modeling studies of the North Atlantic region during August 1993

A Lagrangian photochemical trajectory model has been used to assess the factors affecting O-3 production during transport of polluted air masses across the North Atlantic Ocean. Sensitivity studies have been performed along idealized trajectories, and it is found that the potential impact of North American emission sources is maximized by transport of air at high altitudes, in drier conditions and in conditions where mixing of the air with background air masses is relatively limited. Measurements taken from the NCAR King Air aircraft as part of the North Atlantic Regional Experiment (NARE) August 1993 intensive have been used to initialize forward trajectories, calculated using European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting analyzed wind fields, from eastern North America to assess O-3 production over the Atlantic during this period. The effects of dilution of a polluted air parcel with air from the upper troposphere have also been studied, and the contribution of photochemical O-3 production to the air mass composition is found to be smaller than that of dilution, particularly for long trajectories and for conditions where dilution is relatively rapid or involves air from the stratosphere. Measurements taken from the Meteorological Research Flight Hercules aircraft over the eastern Atlantic as part of the Oxidizing Capacity of the Tropospheric Atmosphere campaign have been examined in the light of these studies. A backward trajectory analysis has been performed from one of the vertical profiles taken off the coast of Portugal on August 31, 1993, to assess the origin of the different air masses intercepted. While the lower levels are characteristic of air from the European boundary layer advected over the ocean, the upper levels show strong evidence for anthropogenic influence from North American sources, with elevated levels of O-3, NOy, CO, and aerosol. Although it cannot be concluded that this air mass definitely originated from over North America, the measured concentrations are shown to be consistent with those for an air mass from this source region experiencing some mixing with air masses in the upper troposphere.