Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oil spill detection with the RADARSAT SAR in the waters of the Yellow and East China Sea : A case study

This application study highlights the potential of wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery for the regional oil pollution monitoring. As a pre-phase of the pilot-project this paper presents the preliminary results of the oil spill observations with SAR in the Yellow and East China Sea. A set of fullresolution Radarsat (ScanSAR Narrow) SAR images collected between November 15 and 22, 2000 over the Yellow and East China Sea was analyzed for presence of oil spills. By using visual and image processing methods oil spill candidates on the Radarsat images have been selected, their locations defined, statistic estimated and possible risk areas outlined. Results show that generally small oil patches (about several km) are uniformly distributed along the main ship routes and have been probably released from ships. Large oil slicks were observed near the coastline close to big seashore cities/ports, oil exploitation areas and river mouths. Additionally collected data on sea/weather conditions indicated that all oil spill candidates have been detected in a comparatively narrow range of wind conditions (3-7 m/s) and in a wide range of sea surface manifestations. It is concluded that the Radarsat SAR, in its ScanSAR mode, is valuable tool for oil spill detection/localization, but the detectability essentially depended on wind conditions. The results also indicate that despite of the international/domestic conventions and legislati on, oil spills in the sea are still remaining a main unsolved and uncontrolled environmental problem.
Towards interactive indexing for large Chinese calligraphic character databases

In this paper, based on a novel shape-similarity-based retrieval method, we propose an interactive partial-distance-map (PDM)- based high-dimensional indexing scheme to speed up the retrieval performance of the large Chinese calligraphic character databases. Specifically, we use the approximate minimal bounding hyper- sphere of query character to search the PDM and utilize the users' relevance feedback to refine the search process. We conduct comprehensive experiments to testify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Experimental study of TCP unfairness in IEEE802.11-based ad hoc network

TCP is a transport layer protocol providing end-to-end reliable data transfer over IP based network. Wired TCP versions have been developed many years and have good performance. When they are deployed in wireless environment, they show poor performance. In this paper we present our evaluation on TCP performance in the term of throughput unfairness in an IEEE802.11-based ad hoc network. We evaluate TCP unfairness using experimental approach by performing measurement in a real life testbed. Two scenarios, representing hidden and exposed terminal situations, are used. In one of scenario we also vary the traffic load to see the effect of the traffic load to TCP-fairness. In each scenario we measure the throughput and calculate TCP fairness using Jain's fairness index formula
Mapping quasi-periodic oscillations from the outbursting intermediate polar GK Persei

We present time-resolved spectrophotometry of GK Per taken on the rise to outburst maximum, in which we detect 5000 s QPOs in the optical emission lines. We use this opportunity to provide a kinematically-resolved analysis of the phenomenon. Observations are consistent with reprocessing off blobs of gas orbiting within the inner accretion disc, and evidence is found for the migration of the QPO source towards the compact star over orbital timescales.
Prevalence and characterization of foodborne pathogens in dairy cattle in the eastern part of Japan.

To investigate the prevalence and characterization of foodborne pathogens [Campylobacter spp. , Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella spp. ] in dairy cows, rectal content grab samples were collected from 250 dairy cows reared on 25 dairy farms in eastern Japan from December 2010 through February 2011. Campylobacter jejuni was isolated from 106 (42%) cows on 23 (92%) farms, STEC O157 from three cows on one farm, L. monocytogenes from three cows on another three farms and Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium from eight cows on another farm. STEC O26 was not isolated from any of the dairy farms investigated. The results suggest that C. jejuni is widespread in dairy farms in eastern Japan.
Queuing Model for Taxi-Out Time Estimation

Flights incur a large percentage of their delays on the ground during the departure process between their scheduled departure from the gate and takeoff. Because of the large uncertainties associated with them, these delays are difficult to predict and account for, hindering the ability to effectively manage the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system. This paper presents an effort to improve the accuracy of estimating the taxi-out time, which is the duration between pushback and takeoff. The method was to identify the main factors that affect the taxi-out time and build an estimation model that takes the most important ones into account. An analysis conducted at Boston Logan International Airport identified the runway configuration, the airline/terminal, the downstream restrictions and the takeoff queue size as the main causal factors that affect the taxi-out time. Of these factors the takeoff queue size was the most important one, where the queue size that an aircraft experienced was measured as the number of t.
Systematic Ranking of Thread Schedules for Testing Multithreaded Programs

Concurrency is used pervasively in the development of large programs. However, testing concurrent programs is notoriously hard due to the inherent non-determinism. Recently, many different techniques have been proposed to identify concurrency-related bugs early. An effective but expensive approach is model-checking, where all possible schedules of a program are executed to ascertain the absence of a bug. Unfortunately, the space of all schedules is huge, and exhaustively enumerating it is usually infeasible. Therefore, an alternative is to try and maximize the probability of uncovering a bug rather than trying to ascertain it’s absence.
Particle Filtering with Observation Anomaly Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Based on the TOA ranging model, the position of mobile target is localized and considered as observation. When the tracking system is depicted as nonlinear function and Gaussian noises model, an observation anomaly detection method is represented in this paper. We apply the observation anomaly detection method to particle filter (PF) algorithm and consider the anomaly data as uninformative, then the modified PF algorithm is proposed to mitigate the observation anomaly. The simulations demonstrate the validity with the observation anomaly detection method and analyze the impacts of different parameter settings. The performance shows that the modified PF can track target position precisely and effectively with the approach of observation anomaly mitigation.
The relationship between emotional intelligence and personality traits with the thrill- seeking and self- efficacy in students of TAU Tonekabon Branch in the academic year 2010-2011

The goal of this research is to analyze the relationship between emotional intelligence and personality traits with the thrill-seeking and self-efficacy in the Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon Branch. The research is a descriptive correlation study. The statistical community is all male and female students studying MD degree in Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon Branch which are the number of 985 peoples. The stratified random sampling method of this research is based on the Morgan’s table and the number of 278 people was determined. For collecting data and needed information, the library and field methods were used. Data collection tools and information in this study is four questionnaires: Personality traits questionnaire (NEO) (1999), Emotional intelligence questionnaire (1980), Zakerman's thrill-seeking questionnaire (1979), Scherer’s public self-efficacy questionnaire (1982). The results showed that: There is a positive and significant relationship between emotional intelligence and personality traits with the thrill-seeking and self-efficacy in students of Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon Branch. There is a positive and significant relationship between personality traits with the range of thrill-seeking in students of Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon Branch and between personality traits neurosis variable is more suitable in predicting the thrillseeking of students. There is a positive and significant relationship between emotional intelligence and range of thrill-seeking in students of Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon Branch and dealing with pressure is most effective in predicting the range of thrill-seeking. There is a positive and significant relationship between personality traits extrovert and being amiability is more effective in predicating the self-efficacy in students of Islamic Azad University Tonekabon Branch and between personality traits, the variable of extroversion and being pleasant are most effective in predicting the student rage of self-efficacy. There is a positive and significant relationship between emotional intelligence and range of thrill-seeking in students of Islamic Azad University Tonekabon Branch and between the emotional intelligence variables, Interpersonal skills is more suitable predictor for range of thrill-seeking of students.
Ieee Transactions on Image Processing 1 Semantic Pyramids for Gender and Action Recognition

—Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigate two major aspects of person description: gender and action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is sub-optimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pre-trained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large datasets namely: Human attribute, Head-Shoulder and Proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four datasets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: Sports, Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010 and Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.
NDA SNR estimation over MISO with STBC channels for BPSK modulated signals using the EM algorithm

In this paper, the problem of Non Data Aided (NDA) Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) estimation of Binary Phase Shift keying (BPSK) modulated signals using the Expectation Maximization (EM) Algorithm is discussed. Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) channels with Space Time Block Codes (STBC) are used. The EM algorithm is a method that finds the Maximum Likelihood (ML) solution iteratively when there are unobserved (hidden or missing) data. Extension of the proposed approach to other types of modulated signals in estimating SNR is straight forward. The performance of the estimator is assessed using the NDA Cramer Rao Lower Bounds (CRLBs). Alamouti coding technique is used in this paper with two transmit antennas and one receive antenna. Our assumption is that the received signal is corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with unknown variance, and scaled by fixed unknown complex channel gain. Monte Carlo simulations are used to show that the proposed estimator offers a substantial improvement over the conventional Single Input Single Output (SISO) NDA SNR estimator due to the use of the statistical dependences in space and time. Moreover, the proposed NDA SNR estimator works close to the NDA SNR estimator over Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) channels.
A New Method of MHP Analysis for Languages with Dynamic Barriers

May-happen-in-parallel analysis is a very important analysis which enables several optimizations in parallel programs. Most of the work on MHP analysis has used forward flow analysis to compute "parallel(n)" | set of nodes which may execute in parallel to a given node "n" | including those approaches that addressed the issue for dynamic barrier languages. We propose a new approach to MHP analysis called "Phase Interval Analysis" (PIA) which computes phase intervals, corresponding to dynamic barriers, in which a statement may execute. PIA enables us to infer an order between two statements whenever it can establish that they can not execute in parallel. Because the ordering relation is transitive, we may also be able to infer indirect synchronization happening between two statements, even when they do not share a barrier. To the best of our knowledge, the issue of indirect synchronization has not been addressed prior to this work. We also compute condition functions under which different instances of the same statement may not execute in parallel, when the statements are nested within loops.
Pro-Inflammatory Adipokines as Predictors of Incident Cancers in a Chinese Cohort of Low Obesity Prevalence in Hong Kong

Background Cytokines released from adipose tissues induce chronic low-grade inflammation, which may enhance cancer development. We investigated whether indices of obesity and circulating adipokine levels could predict incident cancer risk. Materials and Methods This longitudinal community-based study included subjects from the Hong Kong Cardiovascular Risk Factors Prevalence Study (CRISPS) study commenced in 1995-1996 (CRISP-1) with baseline assessments including indices of obesity. Subjects were reassessed in 2000-2004 (CRISPS-2) with measurement of serum levels of adipokines including interleukin-6 (IL-6), soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor 2 (sTNFR2; as a surrogate marker of tumor necrosis factor-α activity), leptin, lipocalin 2, adiponectin and adipocyte-fatty acid binding protein (A-FABP). Incident cancer cases were identified up to 31 December 2011. Results 205 of 2893 subjects recruited at CRISPS-1 had developed incident cancers. More of the subjects who developed cancers were obese (22.1 vs 16.1%) or had central obesity (36.6 vs 24.5%) according to Asian cut-offs. Waist circumference (adjusted HR 1.02 [1.00-1.03] per cm; p=0.013), but not body mass index (adjusted HR 1.04 [1.00-1.08] per kg/m2; p=0.063), was a significant independent predictor for incident cancers after adjustment for age, sex and smoking status. 99 of 1899 subjects reassessed at CRISPS-2 had developed cancers. Subjects who developed cancers had significantly higher level of hsCRP, IL-6, sTNFR2 and lipocalin 2. After adjustment for conventional risk factors, only IL-6 (HR 1.51, 95% CI 1.18-1.95) and sTNFR2 (HR 3.27, 95%CI 1.65-6.47) predicted cancer development. Conclusions Our data supported the increased risk of malignancy by chronic low grade inflammation related to central obesity.
Effect of Coenzyme-Q10 on Doxorubicin-Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats

Nephrotoxicity is one of the limiting factors for using doxorubicin (Dox) as an anticancer chemotherapeutic. Here, we investigated possible protective effect of coenzyme-Q10 (CoQ10) on Dox-induced nephrotoxicity and the mechanisms involved. Two doses (10 and 100 mg/kg) of CoQ10 were administered orally to rats for 8 days, in the presence or absence of nephrotoxicity induced by a single intraperitoneal injection of Dox (15 mg/kg) at day 4 of the experiment. Our results showed that the low dose of CoQ10 succeeded in reversing Dox-induced nephrotoxicity to control levels (e.g., levels of blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine, concentrations of renal reduced glutathione (GSH) and malondialdehyde, catalase activity and caspase 3 expression, and renal histopathology). Alternatively, the high dose of CoQ10 showed no superior nephroprotection over the low dose, as there were no significant improvements in renal histopathology, catalase activity, or caspase 3 expression compared to the Dox-treated group. Interestingly, the high dose of CoQ10 alone significantly decreased renal GSH level as well as catalase activity and caused a mild induction of caspase 3 expression compared to control, probably due to a prooxidant effect at this dose of CoQ10. We conclude that CoQ10 protects from Dox-induced nephrotoxicity with a precaution to dosage adjustment.
A Study of Token Based Algorithms for Distributed Mutual Exclusion

The selection of a ‘good’ mutual exclusion algorithm, for the design of distributed systems, is of great importance. A number of mutual exclusion algorithms, with different techniques and varying performance characteristics, are available in the literature. These algorithms can be broadly classified into token based algorithms and non-token based algorithms. A number of survey papers for non-token based mutual exclusion algorithms exist. Although, some of them include discussion on token based mutual exclusion algorithms too, however, none of them include any discussion on the newer variants of classic mutual exclusion, like k-mutual exclusion and group mutual exclusion. The paper presents an exhaustive survey of the token based mutual exclusion algorithms. The variants of mutual exclusion problem, namely k-mutual exclusion and group mutual exclusion, have also been covered.
Author and institution citation analysis of the lean literature

The lean paradigm is now firmly established within the field of operations and SCM. However, even though a large number of narrative reviews exist on this topical body of material, no citation analysis (CA) has yet been conducted. This paper presents the first CA of the lean literature, and also represents the most extensive known CA study within the wider field. It uses ten search phrases over a source population of over 15,000 Google Scholar publications. These are filtered into a dataset of the 241 most highly cited publications on lean that account for an aggregated total of 98,829 citations. The research reveals a surprising degree of influence of academics within the supposedly a theoretical lean literature. US institutions dominate, with MIT being the most influential. Both practitioners and management consultants almost exclusively co-authoring with their own type. Japan has the second largest number of management consultant authors after the USA.
Dependence between sea surge, river flow and precipitation in south and west Britain

Abstract. Estuaries around Great Britain may be at heightened risk of flooding because of the simultaneous occurrence of extreme sea surge and river flow, both of which may be caused by mid-latitude cyclones. A measure especially suited for extremes was employed to estimate dependence between river flow and sea surge. To assist in the interpretation of why flow-surge dependence occurs in some areas and not in others, the dependence between precipitation and surge and between precipitation and river flow was also studied. Case studies of the meteorological situations leading to high surges and/or river flows were also carried out. The present study concerns catchments draining to the south and west coasts of Great Britain. Statistically significant dependence between river flow and daily maximum sea surge may be found at catchments spread along most of this coastline. However, higher dependence is generally found in catchments in hilly areas with a southerly to westerly aspect. Here, precipitation in south-westerly airflow, which is generally the quadrant of prevailing winds, will be enhanced orographically as the first higher ground is encountered. The sloping catchments may respond quickly to the abundant rainfall and the flow peak may arrive in the estuary on the same day as a large sea surge is produced by the winds and low atmospheric pressure associated with the cyclone. There are three regions where flow-surge dependence is strong: the western part of the English south coast, southern Wales and around the Solway Firth. To reduce the influence of tide-surge interaction on the dependence analysis, the dependence between river flow and daily maximum surge occurring at high tide was estimated. The general pattern of areas with higher dependence is similar to that using the daily maximum surge. The dependence between river flow and daily maximum sea surge is often strongest when surge and flow occur on the same day. The west coast from Wales and northwards has slightly stronger flow-surge dependence in summer than in winter, whereas dependence is stronger in winter than in summer for the southern part of the study area. Keywords: : Britain, dependence, sea surge, river flow, precipitation, mid-latitude cyclone, seasonality, time lag
Survey of Strategic Alignment Impacts on Organizational Performance in International European Companies

The strategic use of technology based information systems (IS/IT) is a fundamental issue for every business. This is particularly true in the case of firms that engage in international business activities. The present paper is part of an empirically oriented project to investigate the impacts of strategic alignment on organizational performance, especially in the case of European International Companies. We use Structural Equation Modeling to apprehend the strategic alignment concept as an emergent variable derived from the co variation of two components: (1) business strategy; and (2) the IS/IT strategy. Then, we explore the role of this emergent concept as a determinant of organizational performance. We use data from a large database constructed due to survey instruments to assess the usage of IS/IT among European firms. 505 questionnaires have been exploited in this study. The results obtained will be presented and discussed in this paper.
Working Paper No . 1 Time-Based Frameworks for Valuing Knowledge : Maintaining Strategic Knowledge

To survive and flourish in a changing and unpredictable world, organizations and people must maintain strategic power over necessary resources often in the face of competition. Knowledge contributes to that strategic power. Without vigilance to maintain its currency and accuracy, the value of knowledge depreciates as circumstances change over time. Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology and Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis provide a paradigmatic framework for considering the roles and importance of time in constructing knowledge and using it to maintain strategic power. Following Popper, knowledge is constructed, used and evaluated via cyclically-iterated processes. We introduce nine timebased frames of reference based in this Popperian autopoietic paradigm to explore the relationships between time and a utility-based valuation of knowledge as it is constructed and applied. We believe this framework and associated paradigmatically consistent vocabulary provide useful tools for analyzing organizational knowledge management needs.