Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic delineation of local provenance defines seed collection zones along a climate gradient

Ecological restoration is often conducted with limited consideration of genetic diversity and the environmental factors that drive variation within species. We studied genetic diversity and environmental variation among 16 populations of Stylidium hispidum, an endemic southwestern Australian triggerplant. As a result we were able to estimate the seed transfer distance within which genetic divergence is low and population fitness less likely to be impacted by maladaptation, and identify environmental variables that may be relevant for future restoration of this species.
Religiosity and Spirituality: Is It an Appropriate Issue in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy? —Comparative Studies of Germany and South Korea

In patient-centred care, religious and spiritual needs and values of patients are increasingly underlined. The field of psychiatry and psychotherapy is no exception in this regard, so more attention and research are required. In addition to existing research, taking a further step, we would like to know whether there are any cultural differences in regard to staffs’ religious and spiritual values, and their attitudes to deal with religious or spiritual issues in clinical settings. For that reason, comparative studies were conducted in Germany and Korea. As a result, we found that German psychiatric staffs have more positive perspectives on religion and related aspects than Korean, not only in their personal lives but also in therapeutic settings. Furthermore, some contradictions regarding religiosity and spirituality were shown in staffs’ professional attitudes of both countries. Above all, in consideration of professional neutrality respondents are reluctant to handle such issues in therapeutic settings. For Korean psychiatric staffs, another important reason was that they are predominantly atheists or agonistics. German psychiatric staffs referred to have insufficient time. The kind of professionality which they are proclaiming to keep during the therapeutic processes is shown to be inadequate for several reasons. For genuinely wholistic care, more cross-cutural and in-depth studies are needed. Furthermore, professional self-contradictions deserve further attention and reflection, for the patients’ sake.
The Third Sector and Development

The essay examines the essentiality of the third sector in context of the assumption that it can play a great deal of role in driving development and alleviating poverty in developing countries. It argues that the third sector useful as it may seem in the development process lacks the statist capacity to drive development. It further argues that it is only the state that has the capacity to dispense social welfare provisioning to the people. The historical fact of the absence of indigenous capital in Africa and the state as the primary source of capital accumulation lend credence to the pre-eminence role of the state in driving social welfare delivery. While calling for support for the third sector it welcomes efforts at re-inventing the developmental state in Africa.
Convergence Properties of Newton ' s Method in the Proximity ofa

We analyse the elementwise convergence in the Jacobian of the classical Newton method as the solution of a non-linear system f(x) = 0 is approached. It is shown that each Jacobian element approaches a constant value at a rate determined by the nonlinearity of the relevant function with respect to the appropriate scalar variable. For many practical problems, this means that in the last steps of the Newton iteration, only a low-rank update has to be applied to the Jacobian. The consequences of these results are examined for both direct and iterative solution methods, and appropriate algorithmic modiications stated. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theory.
The Luna-Vust Theory of Spherical Embeddings

The work of Kramer, Luna, Vust, Brion and others [Kra,LV,BLV,BP] established the importance of a very distinguished class of homogeneous varieties G/H, those which are now called spherical. Such varieties are homogeneous for a connected reductive group G and are characterized by many equivalent properties, the most important being (see [BLV]): — Any Borel subgroup B of G has an open orbit in G/H. — Every equivariant completion of G/H contains only finitely many orbits. — For every irreducible G-module V and any character χ of H
Dark matter gravitational interactions

We argue that the conjectured dark matter in the Universe may be endowed with a new kind of gravitational charge that couples via a short-range gravitational interaction mediated by a massive vector field. A model is constructed that assimilates this concept into ideas of current inflationary cosmology. The model is also consistent with the observed behaviour of galactic rotation curves according to Newtonian dynamics. The essential idea is that stars composed of ordinary (as opposed to dark) matter experience Newtonian forces due to the presence of an all-pervading background of massive gravitationally charged cold dark matter. The novel gravitational interactions are predicted to have a significant influence on pre-inflationary cosmology. The precise details depend on the nature of a gravitational Proca interaction and the description of matter. A gravitational Proca field configuration that gives rise to attractive forces between dark matter charges of like polarity exhibits homogeneous isotropic eternal cosmologies that are free of cosmological curvature singularities thus eliminating the horizon problem associated with the standard big-bang scenario. Such solutions do, however, admit dense hot pre-inflationary epochs each with a characteristic scale factor that may be correlated with the dark matter density in the current era of expansion. The model is based on a theory in which a modification of Einsteinian gravity at very short distances can be expressed in terms of the gradient of the Einstein metric and the torsion of a non-Riemannian connection on the bundle of linear frames over spacetime. Indeed, we demonstrate that the genesis of the model resides in a remarkable simplification that occurs when one analyses the variational equations associated with a broad class of non-Riemannian actions.
Support Methods in Diabetic Patient Management by Insulin Administration. Neural Networks vs Induction Methods

Diabetes mellitus is now recognised as a major world-wide public health problem. At present, about 100 million people are registered as diabetic patients. Many clinical, social and economic problems occur as a consequence of insulin-dependent diabetes. Treatment attempts to prevent or delay complications by applying ‘optimal’ glycaemic control. Therefore, there is a continuous need for effective monitoring of the patient. Given the popularity of decision tree learning algorithms as well as neural networks for knowledge classification which is further used for decision support, this paper examines their relative merits by applying one algorithm from each family on a medical problem; that of recommending a particular diabetes regime. For the purposes of this study, OC1 a descendant of Quinlan’s ID3 algorithm was chosen as decision tree learning algorithm and a generating shrinking algorithm for learning arbitrary classifications as a neural network algorithm. These systems were trained on 646 cases derived from two countries in Europe and were tested on 100 cases which were different from the original 646 cases.
Evaluating a dancer's performance using kinect-based skeleton tracking

In this work, we describe a novel system that automatically evaluates dance performances against a gold-standard performance and provides visual feedback to the performer in a 3D virtual environment. The system acquires the motion of a performer via Kinect-based human skeleton tracking, making the approach viable for a large range of users, including home enthusiasts. Unlike traditional gaming scenarios, when the motion of a user must by kept in synch with a pre-recorded avatar that is displayed on screen, the technique described in this paper targets online interactive scenarios where dance choreographies can be set, altered, practiced and refined by users. In this work, we have addressed some areas of this application scenario. In particular, a set of appropriate signal processing and soft computing methodologies is proposed for temporally aligning dance movements from two different users and quantitatively evaluating one performance against another.
AUTOMATIC CAMERA ORIENTATION AND STRUCTURE RECOVERY WITH

SAMANTHA is a software capable of computing camera orientation and structure recovery from a sparse block of casual images without human intervention. It can process both calibrated images or uncalibrated, in which case an autocalibration routine is run. Pictures are organized into a hierarchical tree which has single images as leaves and partial reconstructions as internal nodes. The method proceeds bottom up until it reaches the root node, corresponding to the final result. This framework is one order of magnitude faster than sequential approaches, inherently parallel, less sensitive to the error accumulation causing drift. We have verified the quality of our reconstructions both qualitatively producing compelling point clouds and quantitatively, comparing them with laser scans serving as ground truth.
Multi-level Data Mining - One way to sophisticated Web-based applications

With the possibility of world wide access current Web applications have an almost unlimited amount of potential users. Methods of data mining can be used to classify the user groups and to learn from their behavior. With the collected information changes and optimizations can be applied to the Web application to hit the users requirements. One already established method for data mining is Web usage mining. Web usage mining is based on the logging information that is generated by the Web server when the user clicks through the site. A new approach that offers more flexibility as presented in this paper is multi-level data mining. It takes advantage of the several layers in a Web application. Guidelines that may be regarded as good practice in the field of data tracking will be introduced in this paper.
Do Technical Analysts Outperform Novice Traders: Experimental Evidence

Previous studies on technical analysis mostly report the profitability of specific trading rules for a given set of historical data. In this paper, we use the human trader experiment approach to compare the performance of experienced and novice traders. It is found that traders who are more knowledgeable on technical analysis significantly outperform those who are less knowledgeable.
Rapid parapatric speciation on holey adaptive landscapes

A classical view of speciation is that reproductive isolation arises as a by–product of genetic divergence. Here, individual–based simulations are used to evaluate whether the mechanisms implied by this view may result in rapid speciation if the only source of genetic divergence are mutation and random genetic drift. Distinctive features of the simulations are the consideration of the complete process of speciation (from initiation until completion), and of a large number of loci, which was only one order of magnitude smaller than that of bacteria. It is demonstrated that rapid speciation on the time–scale of hundreds of generations is plausible without the need for extreme founder events, complete geographic isolation, the existence of distinct adaptive peaks or selection for local adaptation. The plausibility of speciation is enhanced by population subdivision. Simultaneous emergence of more than two new species from a subdivided population is highly probable. Numerical examples relevant to the theory of centrifugal speciation and to the conjectures about the fate of ‘ring species’ and ‘sexual continuums’ are presented.
Effector biology during biotrophic invasion of plant cells

Several obligate biotrophic phytopathogens, namely oomycetes and fungi, invade and feed on living plant cells through specialized structures known as haustoria. Deploying an arsenal of secreted proteins called effectors, these pathogens balance their parasitic propagation by subverting plant immunity without sacrificing host cells. Such secreted proteins, which are thought to be delivered by haustoria, conceivably reprogram host cells and instigate structural modifications, in addition to the modulation of various cellular processes. As effectors represent tools to assist disease resistance breeding, this short review provides a bird’s eye view on the relationship between the virulence function of effectors and their subcellular localization in host cells.
Center for Policy Research Working Paper No . 38 EXPLICIT VERSUS IMPLICIT INCOME INSURANCE

By supplementing income explicitly through payments or implicitly through taxes collected, income-based taxes and transfers make disposable income less variable. Because disposable income determines consumption, policies that smooth disposable income also create welfare improving consumption insurance. With data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we find that annual consumption variation is reduced by almost 20 percent due to explicit and implicit income smoothing. Consumption insurance is as important economically as private health or automobile insurance. Although taxes have become an increasingly important source of consumption insurance, the 2001 income-tax reform legislation should have little effect on implicit consumption insurance.
Uncertainty, expectations, and the business cycle

This thesis adds to the recent quantitative literature that considers variations in uncertainty as impulses driving the business cycle. In chapter one a flexible partial equilibrium model that features heterogeneous firms, uncertainty shocks and various forms of capital adjustment costs is built in order to reassess whether temporarily higher uncertainty can cause recessions. It is then shown that while uncertainty shocks to demand can cause the bust, rebound and overshoot dynamics reminiscent of recessions, uncertainty shocks to total factor productivity are likely to lead to considerable and prolonged booms in economic activity. The reason for this result is that while the expectational effect of uncertainty shocks is negative and similar in magnitude for both types of uncertainty shocks, the positive distributional effect is an order of magnitude larger for total factor productivity than for demand. Chapter two then derives and implements an identification strategy for uncertainty shocks within a Structural Vector Autoregression framework that is consistent with the way these shocks are commonly modeled in the literature. For the US it is shown that such model consistent uncertainty shocks lead to considerable booms in investment and employment and only explain a small fraction of the variation in the cross-sectional sales variance. Once uncertainty shocks are identified as the shocks that only affect dispersion upon impact, they cause a moderate drop, rebound and overshoot of investment and a large increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of revenues. The results suggest that the standard timing assumption that the expectational effect of uncertainty shocks leads the distributional effect seems questionable. Finally, chapter three analyses endogenous variations in uncertainty and their effect on aggregate dynamics that result from imperfect information in the presence of occasional regime shifts. In a tentative model parameterization to the German manufacturing industry during the Financial Crisis it is shown that after a temporary regime shift imperfect information leads endogenously to higher forecast standard errors compared to full information, as well as higher cross-sectional dispersion of mean forecasts and forecast standard errors. It is then shown that these endogenous variations in uncertainty can lead to considerable downward amplification and some propagation of aggregate investment and revenues during a temporary downward regime shift.
A study of factors affecting usage intention of 3rd generation mobile network service

In 2009, China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 3G (3rd generation mobile network service) licenses in China, which marked China's telecom industry enter into 3G era. Motivating the diffuse of 3G network services has became an important issue for the telecom operators and China's telecom industry. However, very little is actually known about critical factors for consumers' acceptance of the 3G service in China. This study will be based on the Technology Acceptance Model, the Compass Acceptance Model and perceived enjoyment theory to explore the key factors which will influence consumers' acceptance of 3G services. The results show that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, perceived mobility, and subjective norm have significant positive effect on the usage attitude and usage intention toward 3G services, the perceived cost has negative effect on the usage attitude and usage intention toward 3G services, and the usage attitude has positive effect on usage intention toward 3G services. The results have important marketing implications for the telecom operators, and it also provides significance guidance to the future development of China's telecom industry.
Energy efficient hybrid clustering protocol for multilevel heterogeneous wireless sensor network

In recent years, Because of rapid advancement of semiconductor fabrication technology, electronic devices have been becoming smaller, cheaper, and requiring less power for its operation every year. One of the fields, which have benefited by the technological advancement, is the field of WSNs. Recently, a lot of researched related WSNs have been conducted and people have been realizing its unlimited applicability. Though WSNs has great potential and is employed in variety of environments, it comes with some limitations as the Sensor nodes used in WSN shave limited processing capability, low power battery; low bandwidth for communication and less memory space. We proposed a new hybrid Clustering protocol for Multi-level heterogeneous wireless sensor networks in this paper. In this proposed approach, some nodes send data to sink directly while some use clustering technique to send data to sink. The proposed protocol aims to conserve energy by keeping three key design factors into consideration: (1) Finding the optimal distance up to which a node can directly send the data to base station, (2) electing an appropriate node as cluster head and (3) limiting the number of clusters in the network. The simulation results show that EEHCP enhanced the stability period by approximately 75% and almost tripled the throughput when compared to existing techniques such as LEACH and SEP.
Older female consumers’ clothing quality perception: expectations and performance

The population of older consumers is growing significantly worldwide as well as in South Africa. Although they have been labelled as vulnerable consumers with less financial freedom, due to their rapid growth in numbers, they have become an important, often overlooked market segment with the likelihood of increasingly more buying power. Changes that occur with ageing lead to changes in the needs of older female consumers as well as possible changes in their evaluation of clothing quality. However, clothing manufacturers do not necessarily take these changed needs into account, which may lead to consumer dissatisfaction with what is available. Applying the expectancy disconfirmation paradigm, this study explores older women’s expectations and perceptions of clothing quality, and the attributes that they considered when rating performance. A self-administered, structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample comprised 202 South African female consumers over 60 years old who took part in events hosted by the Service Centre for the Aged in the Tlokwe municipal area. A gap analysis indicated significant differences between the consumers’ expectations of clothing attributes and performance. They were not satisfied with current clothing quality (negative disconfirmation), especially in terms of the attributes of price, correct sizing, and fabric, which attracted the lowest performance ratings. The study results indicate that, in terms of the expectancy disconfirmation paradigm, dissatisfaction with the quality of clothing among the older female consumers reveals a clear need for improvement. This growing market segment seeks clothing that better accommodates the changed body features and preferences that come with age.
Role of the late sodium current in arrhythmias related to low repolarization reserve

The prolongation of action potential duration (APD) is usually related to conditions of low repolarization reserve and leads to long QT syndrome. In these situations, an unbalance between currents can fire early after depolarizations (EADs). This repolarizing disorder has been observed in heart failure situations, where the late sodium current (INaL) has an important role. In this work we evaluate the effects of INaL enhancement in the ventricular wall under normal conditions and we analyze the role of INaL under pathological conditions prone to EADs generation. Human INaL was formulated and introduced in ten Tusscher AP model. Our results show that the increase in the maximum conductance of INaL prolongs APD in a rate-dependent manner especially in M cells. A 10-fold increase of INaL prolongs APD in 35 %, 44 % and 80 % for a stimulation rate of 1 Hz in epicardium, endocardium and M cells, respectively. Finally, the enhancement of INaL under conditions of low repolarization reserve led to EADs formation in M cells.
Intraframe and interframe coding of speech spectral parameters

Most low bit rate speech coders employ linear predictive coding (LPC) which models the short-term spectral information within each speech frame as an all-pole lter. In this thesis, we examine various methods that can e ciently encode spectral parameters for every 20 ms frame interval. Line spectral frequencies (LSF) are found to be the most e ective parametric representation for spectral coding. Product code vector quantization (VQ) techniques such as split VQ (SVQ) and multi-stage VQ (MSVQ) are employed in intraframe spectral coding, where each frame vector is encoded independently from other frames. Depending on the product code structure, \transparent coding" quality is achieved for SVQ at 26{28 bits/frame and for MSVQ at 25{27 bits/frame. Because speech is quasi-stationary, interframe coding methods such as predictive SVQ (PSVQ) can exploit the correlation between adjacent LSF vectors. Nonlinear PSVQ (NPSVQ) is introduced in which a nonparametric and nonlinear predictor replaces the linear predictor used in PSVQ. Regardless of predictor type, PSVQ garners a performance gain of 5{7 bits/frame over SVQ. By interleaving intraframe SVQ with PSVQ, error propagation is limited to at most one adjacent frame. At an overall bit rate of about 21 bits/frame, NPSVQ can provide similar coding quality as intraframe SVQ at 24 bits/frame (an average gain of 3 bits/frame). The particular form of nonlinear prediction we use incurs virtually no additional encoding computational complexity. Voicing classi cation is used in classi ed NPSVQ (CNPSVQ) to obtain an additional average gain of 1 bit/frame for unvoiced frames. Furthermore, switchedadaptive predictive SVQ (SA-PSVQ) provides an improvement of 1 bit/frame over PSVQ, or 6{8 bits/frame over SVQ, but error propagation increases to 3{7 frames. We have veri ed our comparative performance results using subjective listening tests.