Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiative Transfer in the Earth System

Facts about FACTs: This document is part of the Freely Available Community Text (FACT) project. FACTs are created, reviewed, and continuously maintained and updated by members of the international academic community communicating with eachother through a well-organized project website. FACTs are intended to standardize and disseminate our fundamental knowledge of Earth System Sciences in a flexible, adaptive, distributed framework which can evolve to fit the changing needs and technology of the geosciences community. Currently available FACTs and their URLs are listed in Table 1. Because of its international scope and availability to students of all
Mortality after death of spouse in relation to duration of bereavement in Finland.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: (1) To assess the extent to which death of a spouse causes excess mortality by controlling for the effects of confounding and other sources of bias. Three possible sources of bias are considered: accidents common to spouses, common socioeconomic environment, and common lifestyles. (2) To assess the duration specific effects of death of a spouse on mortality. DESIGN AND SETTING: Prospective study of mortality in Finland among all 35-84 year old married Finnish men and women (1,580,000 people). Baseline sociodemographic measurement from the 1985 census records. Follow up by computerised record linkage to death certificate registers for the period 1986-91 (about 116,000 deaths, of which almost 10,000 among the bereaved) using personal identification codes. RESULTS: (1) After controlling for confounding effects, excess mortality was 17% in men and 6% in women. (2) Excess mortality was higher for short durations than long durations of bereavement. (3) Excess mortality after bereavement was higher in men than women. CONCLUSIONS: Controlling for confounding does not seem to have a crucial modifying effect on the relationship between spousal bereavement and mortality. It seems that death of a spouse has a causal effect on mortality. However, although spousal bereavement is a major stressful life event, this causal effect seems to be relatively small and short lived.
Barriers to physician adherence to a subfertility guideline.

BACKGROUND Guidelines aim to improve clinical practice but are not self-implementing. Insight into barriers to physician guideline adherence is crucial for development of effective implementation strategies. The study aim was to identify barriers to physician adherence to an intrauterine insemination (IUI) guideline of the Dutch Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional survey among all Dutch gynaecologists, residents and fertility physicians (n = 860), using written questionnaires that were based on information obtained in focus group discussions. We investigated barriers related to physicians' knowledge and attitudes, and external barriers. RESULTS The response rate was 65%. We used 344 questionnaires for analysis. Physicians' knowledge was adequate, with a median unfamiliarity rate with each of the 31 key guideline recommendations of 12%. Physicians' attitudes were generally positive, especially regarding guideline development and quality. Important attitude-related barriers included physicians' lack of self-efficacy regarding physician-patient communication and poor outcome expectancy. External barriers were mostly related to specific patient characteristics and associated with higher age of physicians and fewer consultations for fertility problems per week. CONCLUSIONS Multiple barriers impede physician adherence to subfertility guidelines, mainly physicians' lack of self-efficacy and low outcome expectancy. Both physicians and patients play an important role in future implementation interventions to optimize subfertility care.
FIW – Working Paper Restructuring the International Textile Production and Trade Network . The Role of Italy and Portugal

Production and trade processes in the textile industry have been undergoing tremendous changes in structure due to both changes in technology (i.e. increased mechanization and automation processes) and in the institutional environment (i.e. the assignment of the WTO treaty in 1994). This paper studies the restructuring process in the textile industry from the perspective of two major textile producing countries in the EU15, i.e. Italy and Portugal between the two years 1995 and 2009. As a starting point, a detailed descriptive analysis of the global distribution of the textile industry and changes therein is provided. By means of two international textile trade networks (ITTNs), showing (1) trade in value added and (2) trade in labour, we next discuss spatial trade patterns and changes therein. Focusing on the ITTNs, we then figure out how these countries’ textile industries were affected in terms of specialisation patterns, movements along the global value chain and vertical specialisation. Combining the merits of a multiregional I/O-framework with network analysis both qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experienced restructuring process are figured out. This paper contributes to a better understanding of changes in national economic structures resulting from changes in the institutional and technological change without masking the international context. 1 Marlies Schütz, Graz Schumpeter Centre, Universitätsstraße 15/FE, 8010 Graz, Austria. Tel: +43-(0)316-380 3597, e-mail: marlies.schuetz@uni-graz.at Nicole Palan, Graz Schumpeter Centre, Universitätsstraße 15/FE, 8010 Graz, Austria. Tel: +43-(0)316-380 3596, e-mail: nicole.palan@uni-graz.at. 2 This article was funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) under grant P24915-G11:“Diffusion Processes in economic systems” and supported by funds of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Anniversary Fund, project number 15482. The authors like to thank the FWF for financial support. Furthermore, we are grateful to Jacques Thisse and Heinz D. Kurz for fruitful discussions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Nadia Simoes and Nuno Crespo for helpful comments. Finally, our thanks go also to Benjamin Marussig and Stefan Palan for supporting us in this work.
A Neural Network for Egomotion Estimation from Optical Flow

In this work we consider the problem to determine qualitative information about the motion of a viewer moving in a stationary environment. First the optical flow (OF) is computed using a token based approach estimating the 2D velocity vectors only for some interesting points. Then our method estimates the motion of the viewer using only the available sparse OF. A neural network extracts information about stable points useful for the computation of vehicle's heading and Time-to-Collision (TTC). A number of experiments showing the efficacy and robustness of the method have been performed both on synthetic image sequences and on real images acquired by a CCD camera mounted on a mobile platform.
Naming Tools and Using Rules : Evidence That a Frontal / Basal-Ganglia System Underlies both Motor Skill Knowledge and Grammatical Rule Use

We investigated the hypothesis that two well-studied brain systems (see Feinberg & Farah, 1997) underlie the lexicon/grammar dichotomy (Ullman et al., 1997). In this view, frontal/basal-ganglia circuitry implicated in the learning and expression of motor and cognitive skills also underlie the acquisition and use of grammatical rules, and temporal-lobe circuits implicated in the learning and use of factual (conceptual) knowledge also underlie the learning and use of memorized words. The hypothesis predicts co-occurring word/rule and fact/skill double dissociations in patients with damage to one or the other system and similar degrees of impairment to words and facts and to skills and rules. Lexicon and grammar, and conceptual and motor skill knowledge, were probed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) or Alzheimer's disease (AD). PD is associated with frontal/basal-ganglia damage, which may explain PD impairments at learning new and expressing established motor skills and at syntactic processing. In contrast, in (low-demented) PD patients there is typically little damage to temporal-lobe structures, and word and fact use remain relatively spared. AD is associated with temporal-lobe damage , which may explain AD impairments at learning new words and facts and at using established ones. In contrast, there is a relative sparing of frontal/basal-ganglia structures, learning new and using established motor and cognitive skills, and syntactic processing (see Feinberg & Farah, 1997). Testing for grammar/lexicon dissociations has been problematic, because tasks probing lexicon and grammar usually differ in ways other than their use of the two capacities. Therefore grammar and lexicon were probed with English regular and irregular past tense. Regular forms (e.g., play–played) require an-ed-suffixation rule, whereas irregulars (dig–dug) undergo largely arbitrary transformations and are memorized in the lexicon. Crucially, regulars and irregulars are matched in complexity (one word), meaning (past), and syntax (tensed) (Pinker, 1991).
Does civic participation stimulate political activity

Activists are the engines of social movements. What spurs their activism? This article scrutinizes the role of civic participation in stimulating political action. We examine how the type of voluntary organization, scope of involvement and intensity of activity relate to political activity. Contrary to existing studies that collapse noninstitutional political activities into a single measure, we differentiate collective activities from individualized activities, enabling us to investigate how the type, intensity and scope of civic participation differentially stimulate political activities. Our sample included 14,787 participants in 71 street demonstrations. We show that membership and interest in activist organizations stimulates political activity, especially for those actively involved and especially for collective noninstitutionalized activities, while membership in leisure organizations only stimulates individualized political activities, but not collective activities. We therefore conclude that civic participation is a multifaceted phenomenon associated with various political activities in different ways.
From overexcitabilities to openness: Informing gifted education with psychological science

ABSTRACT In the theory of positive disintegration (TPD), Dabrowski described overexcitabilities (OEs), manifestations of inner energy with a developmental purpose that appear more common in gifted individuals. Unfortunately, most studies present OEs outside of the context of the original theory as if they were standalone traits applicable to gifted students. In this atheoretical conceptualization, OEs seem to define the personality trait of openness to experience described in the five-factor model of personality (FFM) as each OE can be matched with a specific facet of openness. Descriptions of facets of openness and corresponding OEs are strongly similar. In this article we argue that they are conceptually equivalent and that current research on openness and OE supports this assertion. The FFM has robust empirical support, and TPD lacks empirical support; additionally, OEs as currently presented in gifted education deviate from TPD’s original tenets. Therefore, gifted education should shift its way of explaining these tendencies by framing them as the personality trait of openness to experience rather than OEs.
Noise-induced oscillatory shuttling of NF-kappaB in a two compartment IKK-NF-kappaB-IkappaB-A20 signaling model.

NF-{\kappa}B is a pleiotropic protein whose nucleo-cytoplasmic trafficking is tightly regulated by multiple negative feedback loops embedded in the NF-{\kappa}B signaling network and contributes to diverse gene expression profiles important in immune cell differentiation, cell apoptosis, and innate immunity. The intracellular signaling processes and their control mechanisms, however, are susceptible to both extrinsic and intrinsic noise. In this article, we present numerical evidence for a universal dynamic behavior of NF-{\kappa}B, namely oscillatory nucleo-cytoplasmic shuttling, due to the fundamentally stochastic nature of the NF-{\kappa}B signaling network. We simulated the effect of extrinsic noise with a deterministic ODE model, using a statistical ensemble approach, generating many copies of the signaling network with different kinetic rates sampled from a biologically feasible parameter space. We modeled the effect of intrinsic noise by simulating the same networks stochastically using the Gillespie algorithm. The results demonstrate that extrinsic noise diversifies the shuttling patterns of NF-{\kappa}B response, whereas intrinsic noise induces oscillatory behavior in many of the otherwise non-oscillatory patterns. We identify two key model parameters which significantly affect the NF-{\kappa}B dynamic response and deduce a two-dimensional phase-diagram of the NF-{\kappa}B response as a function of these parameters. We conclude that if single-cell experiments are performed, a rich variety of NF-{\kappa}B response will be observed, even if population-level experiments, which average response over large numbers of cells, do not evidence oscillatory behavior.
Directed Gossip Algorithms, Consensus Problems, and Stability Effects of Noise Trading

This paper provides a new algorithm that can be used to address cooperative control problems, and namely consensus problems, in networked multi-agent systems and elaborates on connections to the behavior and stability properties of social and economic systems. The paper thereby contributes both to systems theory and to computational financial economics. Motivated by the human communicational and computational limitations, as well as prior work in economics (Kirman, 1993), and engineering (Boyd et al., 2006), we introduce "Directed Gossip Algorithms" and interpret them in the context of financial markets. We propose that it is not the presence of a large number of agents who "follow the bandwagon" that causes excess volatility and bubbles, but rather the absence of fundamentalists is. Our theory may help explain why "thin" markets with a small number of participants are more volatile than developed markets.
Dictionary learning: performance through consistency

We present first results from our efforts in automatically increasing and adapting phonetic dictionaries for spontaneous speech recognition. Spontaneous speech adds a variety of phenomena to a speech recognition task: false starts, human and nonhuman noises, new words and alternative pronunciations. All of these phenomena have to be tackled when adapting a speech recognition system for spontaneous speech. For phonetic dictionaries (especially for spontaneous speech) it is important to choose the pronunciations of a word according to the frequency in which they appear in the database rather than the "correct" pronunciation as it might be found in a lexicon. Additionally modifications of the dictionary should not lead to a higher phoneme confusability. Therefore we propose a data-driven approach to add new pronunciations to a given phonetic dictionary, in a way that they model the given occurrences of words in the database. We show how even a simple approach can lead to significant improvements in recognition performance. First experiments have been performed on the German Spontaneous Scheduling Task (GSST), using the speech recognition engine of JANUS-2, the spontaneous speech-to-speech translation system of the Interactive Systems Laboratories at Carnegie Mellon and Karlsruhe University.
Cognitive residues of similarity

What are the “cognitive after-effects” of making a similarity judgement? What, cognitively, is left behind and what effect might these residues have on subsequent processing? In this paper, we probe for such after-effects using a visual search task, performed after a task in which pictures of real-world objects were compared. So, target objects were first presented in a comparison task (e.g., rate the similarity of this object to another) thus, presumably, modifying some of their features before asking people to visually search for the same object in complex scenes (with distractors and camouflaged backgrounds). As visual search is known to be influenced by the features of target objects, then any aftereffects of the comparison task should be revealed in subsequent visual searches. Results showed that when people previously rated an object as being high on a scale (e.g., colour similarity or general similarity) then visual search is inhibited (slower RTs and more saccades in eyetracking) relative to an object being rated as low in the same scale. There was also some evidence that different comparison tasks (e.g., compare on colour or compare on general similarity) have differential effects on visual search.
Control of Threshold Voltage of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs by Fluoride-Based Plasma Treatment: From Depletion Mode to Enhancement Mode

This paper presents a method with an accurate control of threshold voltages (Vth) of AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) using a fluoride-based plasma treatment. Using this method, the Vth of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs can be continuously shifted from -4 V in a conventional depletion-mode (D-mode) AlGaN/GaN HEMT to 0.9 V in an enhancement-mode AlGaN/GaN HEMT. It was found that the plasma-induced damages result in a mobility degradation of two-dimensional electron gas. The damages can be repaired and the mobility can be recovered by a post-gate annealing step at 400 degC. At the same time, the shift in Vth shows a good thermal stability and is not affected by the post-gate annealing. The enhancement-mode HEMTs show a performance (transconductance, cutoff frequencies) comparable to the D-mode HEMTs. Experimental results confirm that the threshold-voltage shift originates from the incorporation of F ions in the AlGaN barrier. In addition, the fluoride-based plasma treatment was also found to be effective in lowering the gate-leakage current, in both forward and reverse bias regions. A physical model of the threshold voltage is proposed to explain the effects of the fluoride-based plasma treatment on AlGaN/GaN HEMTs
Parsing-based Chinese word segmentation integrating morphological and syntactic information

The conventional sequence labeling methods for Chinese word segmentation do not fully utilize the linguistic information, which restricts further improvements of the performance. Chinese morphology intensively investigates the constructions and usages of Chinese words, which is helpful to Chinese word segmentation. Furthermore, some word segmentation ambiguities cannot be resolved only by means of the lexical information, and the final disambiguations take place in the parsing process. In this paper, we propose a parsing-based Chinese word segmentation model, which can fully utilize the morphological and syntactic information. Experiments on Penn Chinese Treebank(CTB) 5.0 show that the proposed model obtains competitive performances as the CRFs-based model. To investigate the relationship between our parsing-based model and the CRFs-based model, a maximum entropy model based framework for integrating different knowledge sources is employed. The integrating model obtains an F-measure of 97.9, 25% in segmentation error rate reduction relative to the CRFs-based model, which indicates that the two models are complementary to each other.
Using Memcached to Promote Read Throughput in Massive Small-File Storage System

Because of the bottleneck of disk I/O, the distributed file system based on disk is limited in the performance on data throughput and latency. It is a big challenge for such a system to meet the high performance requirement of the massive small-file storage. Cache has been widely used in storage system to improve the data access performance. In order to support the storage of massive small files, we have integrated memcached into our distributed file system to optimize the storage of massive small files. However eviction problem arose from LRU replacement algorithm in memcached. It means that the non-stale objects might be replaced due to large short-lived objects. Therefore, we proposed Prioritized Cache (PC) and Prioritized Cache Management (PCM) to solve the problem. The cache of memcached is reorganized and classified into permanent cache and temporary cache. Furthermore, in order to alleviate side effects on hit rate in sequential access, temporary cache is partitioned into different parts with different priorities and managed according to the priorities. We have implemented and evaluated the integrated prototype system. The experimental results show that the improved distributed file system with distributed object cache can deliver high performance on small-file storage. Compared with the original system, the read of small files increased by a factor of 2.65? 8.05, without write performance degradation.
The Effect of an Intervention to Break the Gender Bias Habit for Faculty at One Institution: A Cluster Randomized, Controlled Trial

Purpose Despite sincere commitment to egalitarian, meritocratic principles, subtle gender bias persists, constraining women’s opportunities for academic advancement. The authors implemented a pair-matched, single-blind, cluster randomized, controlled study of a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention at a large public university. Method Participants were faculty in 92 departments or divisions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between September 2010 and March 2012, experimental departments were offered a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention as a 2.5-hour workshop. Surveys measured gender bias awareness; motivation, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations to reduce bias; and gender equity action. A timed word categorization task measured implicit gender/leadership bias. Faculty completed a work–life survey before and after all experimental departments received the intervention. Control departments were offered workshops after data were collected. Results Linear mixed-effects models showed significantly greater changes post intervention for faculty in experimental versus control departments on several outcome measures, including self-efficacy to engage in gender-equity-promoting behaviors (P = .013). When ≥ 25% of a department’s faculty attended the workshop (26 of 46 departments), significant increases in self-reported action to promote gender equity occurred at three months (P = .007). Post intervention, faculty in experimental departments expressed greater perceptions of fit (P = .024), valuing of their research (P = .019), and comfort in raising personal and professional conflicts (P = .025). Conclusions An intervention that facilitates intentional behavioral change can help faculty break the gender bias habit and change department climate in ways that should support the career advancement of women in academic medicine, science, and engineering.