Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of saline stress on growth and crop yield of different maize (Zea mays) genotypes

Effects of saline stress ( NaCl ) on yield and vegetative characteristics of eight maize cultivars were studied. The cultivars K3615/1, S.C704, B73, S.C302, Waxy, K3546/6, K3653/2, and Zaqatala were cultivated in two plots of the Astara region: one was with normal soil and the other – with salty one. Salinization reduced the plant height, ear length, ear diameter, number of plant leaves, stem diameter, number of rows in an ear, number of grains in a row, and dry plant mass in all cultivars. Maximal ear length was observed in Zaqatala, B73, and S.C704, and the least one was detected in K3653/2. Salinization decreased crop yield of all the cultivars. Certain correlations between studied parameters were found.
South Atlantic Stream Fish Assemblages: Multi-Scale Structuring Factors, Trait Associations and Channelization, and Responses to Dam Removal

South Atlantic coastal plain streams are unique and understudied freshwater environments that provide crucial habitats for a wide range of aquatic taxa. We investigated patterns in fish assemblages across South Carolina’s coastal plain, and developed statistical models to identify the dominant multi-scale abiotic environmental factors that influence assemblage structure. We performed hierarchical agglomerative clustering, indicator species analysis, and non-metric multidimensional scaling analyses on fish assemblage data collected at 208 wadeable coastal plain streams to identify and describe the predominant fish assemblages that commonly occur in the region. We used classification random forests to identify the multi-scale abiotic variables that best distinguish the habitats of faunal associations we identified. Our analyses indicated the presence of four predominant fish assemblages that commonly occur in the South Atlantic coastal plain, which we termed the: 1) fluvial, 2) eastern mudminnow, 3) centrarchid, and 4) non-fluvial assemblages. Assemblage names were assigned based on the prevailing taxonomic and/or ecological attributes of the species with the highest indicator values for each group. Natural geographic gradients and instream habitat parameters associated with velocity, channel form, stream size, and depth played a greater role in distinguishing fish assemblages than catchment land cover and stream network parameters, and these instream habitat parameters showed weak relationships
Development of Compact Resonant High Voltage Pulse Generator Driven by SiC-MOSFET and Its Uses for Discharge Generation

A leakage inductance resonance (LIR) high voltage pulse generator driven by SiC-MOSFET with a low onresistance and a high blocking voltage is developed. A transformer is used to generate high voltage pulses. LC resonant circuit is composed by the leakage inductance in the transformer winding and the stray capacitance in the secondary circuit. The maximum output voltage and the full width at half maximum are 13.6 kV and 94 ns, respectively, at an input voltage of 1 kV, a load resistance of 10 M , and a turns ratio of 1:7. The maximum energy transfer efficiency is 91% of the input energy with a load resistance of 2 k . The pulse voltage is applied to a wire to wire electrode to generate streamer discharges, and the ozone production efficiency is evaluated. A thin wire with a diameter of 0.05 mm is used as the wire electrode. The ozone production efficiency increases with increasing gap distance, and its maximum value is 67 g/kWh. The results show the LIR pulse generator has a potential to realize a highly efficient and compact radical generator.
Local and Global Path Generation for Autonomous Vehicles Using Splines Generaci´on Local y Global de trayectorias para Veh´ıculos Aut´onomos Usando Splines

Context: Before autonomous vehicles being a reality in daily situations, outstanding issues regarding the techniques of autonomous mobility must be solved. Hence, relevant aspects of a path planning for terrestrial vehicles are shown. Method: The approached path planning technique uses splines to generate the global route. For this goal, waypoints obtained from online map services are used. With the global route parametrized in the arc-length, candidate local paths are computed and the optimal one is selected by cost functions. Results: Different routes are used to show that the number and distribution of waypoints are highly correlated to a satisfactory arc-length parameterization of the global route, which is essential to the proper behavior of the path planning technique. Conclusions: The cubic splines approach to the path planning problem successfully generates the global and local paths. Nevertheless, the use of raw data from the online map services showed to be unfeasible due the consistency of the data. Hence, a preprocessing stage of the raw data is proposed to guarantee the well behavior and robustness of the technique.
15. Causal inference with observational data *

Causality permeates our understanding of reality; it is fundamental to how we operate in, and make sense of, the world, but, as many philosophers have pointed out, ‘this deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise and widely agreed upon’ (Paul & Hall 2013, p. 1). Establishing relationships of cause and effect is also central to scientific inquiry and rigorous sociological analysis must treat seriously the difficulties this entails. Social scientists have approached causality in diverse ways: in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘causal models’ in sociology meant path models and structural equation models, in time-series econometrics Granger (1969) developed a widely used approach to causality, Hill (1965) presented a set of nine criteria for causality that were important in epidemiology, and Ní Brolcháin & Dyson (2007) proposed a set of related criteria for causality in demography. But in recent years two approaches to causality have come to prominence in the social sciences and more widely: the counterfactual or potential outcomes model (as in Angrist & Pischke 2009) and the approach that understands causality in terms of a causal structure displayed as a graph (Pearl 2009), sometimes called a Structural Causal Model. In many sciences, causal relations can be established through experiments, often termed randomized control trials (RCTs). Sometimes this is possible in the social sciences (see the chapter by Gërxhani & Miller on experimental sociology in this Handbook) but often experiments are not feasible or ethical; as a result, social scientists commonly want to estimate causal relationships using observational data – that is, data in which they do not have control over the factor considered to be a cause of the effect they are studying. This makes the drawing of conclusions about causal relationships much more challenging. Lack of control over the causal treatment is a problem in some other sciences too. Sociologists have played fast and loose with the word ‘cause’ and its associated terms – ‘effect’, ‘impact’, ‘tendency’, ‘mechanism’ and so on. Causal language is often used in analyses that are descriptive. Imagine we observe that students whose families have higher incomes tend to have higher scores on a standardized test or examination. This is a descriptive statement and to write of the ‘effect’ of family income on test scores in this case is misleading. A causal, as distinct from a descriptive, statement, concerns what would happen if the cause were changed: ‘increasing students’ family income leads, on average, to better test scores’ is a causal statement. Establishing that a relationship is Causal inference with observational data
Increased environmentally driven recruitment variability decreases resilience to fishing and increases uncertainty of recovery

Independent of the effects of spawning-stock biomass (SSB), environmental variability in juvenile production, driven by factors such as temperature and food supply, have considerable potential to influence population resilience to fishing and depletion. Here, we analyse 18 time-series of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) stocks and empirically estimate this “environmental variability” in recruit-per-spawner (RPS) ratios. We then investigate the role of environmental recruitment variability on population resilience to fishing and ability to recover following depletion. To this end, cod population dynamics are simulated through a period of fishing, followed by a period of recovery, with alternative scenarios of recruitment variability and autocorrelation within it. The major effect of environmental recruitment variability is manifested through uncertainty. Firstly, the higher the recruitment variability, the shorter and less variable the time required for the population to decline below 15% of its carrying capacity, K. Secondly, higher variability leads to higher uncertainty in recovery time. Both these patterns are further strengthened by autocorrelation. Our findings suggest that increased environmental recruitment variability decreases resilience to fishing and increases uncertainty in recovery, thus challenging some traditional views that variability confers high productivity and rapid ability to recover from collapse.
Article (refereed) - postprint

17 18 A combined field and laboratory scale study of 10 European lakes treated between 2006-2013 with 19 a lanthanum (La) modified bentonite (LMB) to control sediment phosphorus (P) release was 20 conducted. The study followed the responses in sediment characteristics including La and P 21 fractions and binding forms, P adsorption capacity of discrete sediment layers, and pore water P 22 concentrations. Lanthanum phosphate mineral phases were confirmed by solid state 31 P MAS 23 NMR and L III EXAFS spectroscopy. Rhabdophane (LaPO 4 · nH 2 O) was the major phase although 24 indications of monazite (LaPO 4 ) formation were also reported, in the earliest treated lake. Molar 25 ratios between La and P in the sediments were generally above 1, demonstrating excess La relative 26 to P. Lanthanum was vertically mixed in
Understanding the Science Behind Riparian Forest Buffers: Effects on Water Quality

The riparian area is that area of land located immediately adjacent to streams, lakes, or other surface waters. Some would describe it as the floodplain. The boundary of the riparian area and the adjoining uplands is gradual and not always well-defined. However, riparian areas differ from the uplands because of high levels of soil moisture, frequent flooding, and the unique assemblage of plant and animal communities found there. Through the interaction of their soils, hydrology, and biotic communities, riparian forests maintain many important physical, biological, and ecological functions, and important social benefits.
The E.T.PACK Project: towards a fully passive and consumable-less deorbit kit based on low work-function tether technology

E.T. PACK is a project aimed at the development of a deorbit kit based on Low Work-function Tether (LWT) technology, i.e. a fully passive and electrically ﬂoating system made of a long conductive tape coated with a low work-function material. The LWT interacts passively with the environment (ambient plasma, magnetic ﬁeld and solar radiation) to exchange momentum with the planet’s magnetosphere, thus enabling spacecraft to de-orbit and/or re-boost without the need for consumable. The main goal is to develop a deorbit kit and related software with Technology Readiness Level 4 and promote a next project to carry out an in-orbit experiment. The planned kit in the experiment has three modes of operation: as a fully passive LWT and as a conventional electrodynamic tether equipped with an active electron emitter in passive and active modes. Several activities of the project pivot around the C 12 A 7 : e − electride, which will be used in four hardware elements: (i) LWT (ii) hollow cathode, (iii) photo-enhanced thermionic emission device to convert solar photon energy into electrical energy, and (iv) a hollow cathode thruster. These elements, some of which do not belong to the deorbit kit, are synergetic with the main stream of the project and common to some tether applications like in-orbit propulsion and energy generation. This work explains the activities of E.T. PACK and the approach that will be followed for solving its technological challenges. After reviewing last progresses on electrodynamic tethers and thermionic materials, it presents a preliminary concept of the kit for the in-orbit experiment, some simulation results, and the key hardware elements.
gDNA: Towards Generative Detailed Human Avatars

To make 3D human avatars widely available, we must be able to generate a variety of 3D virtual humans with varied identities and shapes in arbitrary poses. This task is challenging due to the diversity of clothed body shapes, their complex articulations, and the resulting rich, yet stochastic geometric detail in clothing. Hence, current methods that represent 3D people do not provide a full generative model of people in clothing. In this paper, we propose a novel method that learns to generate detailed 3D shapes of people in a variety of garments with corresponding skin-ning weights. Speciﬁcally, we devise a multi-subject forward skinning module that is learned from only a few posed, un-rigged scans per subject. To capture the stochastic nature of high-frequency details in garments, we leverage an adversarial loss formulation that encourages the model to capture the underlying statistics. We provide empirical evidence that this leads to realistic generation of local details such as wrinkles. We show that our model is able to generate natural human avatars wearing diverse and detailed clothing. Furthermore, we show that our method can be used on the task of ﬁtting human models to raw scans, out-performing the previous state-of-the-art
20. How digital technologies boost value potential creation and value realization in CE: insights from a multiple case study across industries

Digital technologies and technological innovations have been identified as important catalysts for business model innovations that enable value creation while adhering to circular economy (CE) principles (Nascimento et al. 2019; Rosa et al. 2020; Ranta et al. 2021; Bocken et al. 2016). Although the concept of business models has often been used in the CE literature, its primary function has been to showcase a more holistic perspective on how CE principles can be implemented in business (see e.g. Lüdeke-Freund et al. 2019). Thus, the business models in the CE literature have mainly focused on value proposition (Manninen et al. 2018), value creation (Bocken et al. 2016), and value capture (Ranta et al. 2018) activities of companies that enable adhering to CE principles in business. The literature, however, has not given much attention to the models’ primary role in describing customer value creation (Teece 2010) and the necessary participation of the customer in value creation (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2016). In this chapter, we therefore discuss how digital technologies enable and boost customer value creation in CE. We give special attention to not only the effects of digital technologies in creating value potential for customer but also the effects in the customer’s possibilities to realize this value. As with business model innovations, the CE literature has approached digital technologies from a circularity and material efficiency perspective. Technologies have allowed companies to better utilize their supply chain data to track products and materials, potentially improving their ability to retain value (Lopes de Sousa Jabbour et al. 2019) and thus better fulfil the requirement for circularity (Ranta et al. 2020). However, adhering to CE principles does not determine a company’s ability to succeed or even exist in the market. For this, the value perceived by the customer is considered fundamental (Slater and Narver 1994). For a business model to be applicable, it must create value for the customer and be able to capture a part of that value (Teece 2010). The dominant approach to customer value considers it as something determined by the customer (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2016) and created through interactions between the customer and the supplier (Lindgreen et al. 2009). The supplier is seen as a facilitator (Grönroos and Voima 2013), or proposer (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2016), of value as well as an organizer of the value process (Aarikka-Stenroos and Jaakkola 2012). The customer realizes the value as co-creator and evaluator (Grönroos 2011; Grönroos and Voima 2013; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004; Vargo and Lusch 2016) by interacting with the supplier and using the products and services offered to them (Grönroos and Voima 2013; Vargo and Lusch 2004).
T h

Insomnia is an important public health issue with high prevalence, disease burden, and economic costs. Insomnia is preferably treated with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBTI). Both face-to-face and Internet-delivered CBT for Insomnia (I-CBTI) are evidence-based effective treatments. I-CBTI has yet to reach its full potential in both scope and scale. More developments toward improved effectiveness could further improve I-CBTI. I-CBTI can be successfully offered to a wide and varied range of insomnia sufferers and is suggested to be effective irrespective of demographic variation or baseline severity. Research should focus on working mechanisms and moderators of effects, aimed at implementation of tailored Internet treatments to successfully treat more people.
University of Birmingham My Phone and Me

Notiﬁcations are extremely beneﬁcial to users, but they often demand their attention at inappropriate moments. In this paper we present an in-situ study of mobile interruptibility focusing on the effect of cognitive and physical factors on the response time and the disruption perceived from a noti-ﬁcation. Through a mixed method of automated smartphone logging and experience sampling we collected 10372 in-the-wild notiﬁcations and 474 questionnaire responses on notiﬁ-cation perception from 20 users. We found that the response time and the perceived disruption from a notiﬁcation can be inﬂuenced by its presentation, alert type, sender-recipient relationship as well as the type, completion level and complexity of the task in which the user is engaged. We found that even a notiﬁcation that contains important or useful content can cause disruption. Finally, we observe the substantial role of the psychological traits of the individuals on the response time and the disruption perceived from a notiﬁcation.
Caching Contents with Varying Popularity using Restless Bandits

We study content caching in a wireless network in which the users are connected through a base station that is equipped with a finite-capacity cache. We assume a fixed set of contents whose popularity varies with time. Users' requests for the content depend on their instantaneous popularity levels. Proactively caching contents at the base station incurs a cost but not having requested contents at the base station also incurs a cost. We propose to proactively cache contents at the base station so as to minimize content missing and caching costs. We formulate the problem as a discounted cost Markov decision problem that is a restless multi-armed bandit problem. We provide conditions under which the problem is indexable and also propose a novel approach to maneuver a few parameters to render the problem indexable. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Whittle index policy via numerical evaluation.
Paraspinal Muscle Degeneration: A Potential Risk Factor for New Vertebral Compression Fractures After Percutaneous Kyphoplasty

Background: The paraspinal muscle is essential for maintaining normal spine function and structure, which degeneration is closely related to various spinal diseases. The main objective of this study was to identify the potential role of paraspinal muscle degeneration in the occurrence of new vertebral compression fractures (NVCF) and develop a clinically applicable nomogram for prospective NVCF risk prediction. Methods: A total of 202 patients with single-level osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures (OVCF) who underwent percutaneous kyphoplasty treatment between January 2016 and March 2019 were included in this study. Demographic, clinical, radiological, and treatment data were collected and analyzed. The paraspinal muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) and fat signal fraction (FSF) were measured to quantify the extent of muscle degeneration. Multivariate binary logistic regression analysis was performed to select risk factors to build a nomogram that predicted the occurrence of NVCF. The concordance index (C-index) and calibration curve were used to evaluate the discriminative capacity and predictive accuracy of the nomogram. Results: NVCF occurred in 54 of 202 patients (26.7%). The erector spinae FSF (OR = 1.064; P = 0.001), psoas major FSF (OR = 1.326; P < 0.001), and the difference index of the muscle CSA between multifidus and psoas major (OR = 1.048; P < 0.001) were independent risk factors for the occurrence of NVCF. The nomogram performance was good after evaluation using the calibration curves and C-index (95% confidence interval, 0.854–0.943). Conclusion: Paraspinal muscle degeneration is a potential risk factor for NVCF occurrence. A nomogram was designed to precisely predict the risk of NVCF. This predictive nomogram may help clinicians to make better clinical decisions and provide more accurate functional exercise protocol for OVCF patients.
: The Case of the Belgian Retail Sector

Purpose of this paper : The article focuses on how information technology allows firms to deliver services by means of information kiosks. Methodology : 22 exploratory in-depth interviews were conducted with key informants in the retail and other sectors, in primarily Belgium or France. Subsequently, 14 hypotheses were developed that were tested by means of two exploratory surveys, one with 84 customers and one with 9 retailers. Findings : Our findings suggest that information kiosks can be implemented successfully with up to three easy-to-use kiosks at the entrance of the mall or inside the store and, if retailers allow Internet access to a limited number of Web sites. Retailers must keep their information centrally updated and relevant, and customers are not interested in ordering all kinds of products and services. Managerial implications : The managerial implications are discussed in terms of advantages and disadvantages vis-à-vis the customers and the retailers. Research limitations : The study is limited by the number of respondents, both customers and retailers, and the way that the sample was taken across three different locations may not be truly representative.
On the portance of lor e-ocessing for ject tection in bmarine ages

When training a neural network for object detection a great deal of effort is usually devoted to augment the training dataset. The rationale behind this process is that augmentation increases the generalization capability of the network. However, little attention has been paid to the application of image enhancement techniques as a pre-processing step of the training task. In this paper we show, in the context of ﬁsh detection in submarine images, that the application of classical color enhancement methods may improve signiﬁcantly the performance of the well known Mask R-CNN object detector.