Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UvA-DARE Seasonal detours by soaring migrants shaped by wind regimes along the East Atlantic Flyway

05) to test for signiﬁcant differences between the cumulative frequency distribution of zonal wind speeds encountered by the birds and the cumulative frequency distribution of zonal wind speeds within the ﬂyway, across each band of 5 ° latitude. To determine cumulative frequency distributions of zonal wind speeds across the ﬂyway, we only took into account the NCEP nodes within the longitudinal range used by honey buzzards in each band of 5 ° latitude. The decision to use bands of 5 ° and 10 ° latitude was made partly because higher resolution resulted in unnecessarily complex ﬁgures and tables. All of the analyses were conducted using the R Language for Statistical Programming (R.3.0.2, R Core Development Team 2013), and all of the ﬁgures were prepared using the ggplot2-package (Wickham 2009).
Korean Journal for Food Science of Animal Resources

We investigated the quality properties and bacteria diversity of pork salami containing homemade kimchi powder (KP). Pork salamis were manufactured with commercial starter culture (control), and 1% KP (KP1), 3% KP (KP3), and 5% KP (KP5). The salami was fermented and aged for 2 days and 56 days, respectively. The pH and AW values of salamis with KP were significantly lower than that of the control (p<0.05). The 2-thiobarbituric acid reactive substance values of all salamis with KP increased but were below 0.2 mg MDA/kg. Salamis with KP, decreased the L* value, but increased the a* and b* values (p<0.05). The Lactobacillus count was significantly higher in the salamis with KP than in the control by day 14 (p<0.05). The number of Leuconostoc was higher in salamis with KP than in the control and was the highest in salamis in KP1. The KP1 protected lipid oxidation and showed low TBARS value of pork salami compared to the control. This study demonstrates that KP can improve pork salami properties and can serve as a potential natural compounds for fermented meat prodcuts like Metzgerei.
User Experience Awareness Network Optimization for Video Streaming Based Applications

– The growing popularity of video-based applications has put an enormous strain on the network and causes the network to be more prone to congestion. The study of congestion control and bandwidth allocation problems is often formulated into Network Utility Maximization (NUM) framework, and the existing solutions for NUM generally focus on single-layered applications. However, today’s quality of video is often divided into several layers, where each layer provides a different level of quality enhancement. In this paper, we study how multi-layered video-based applications impact network performance and pricing through NUM formulation, particularly traffic from video streaming. In our investigation, we design and implement a new multi-layered user utility model that leverages on studies of human visual perception. Then, using this new utility model to examine network activities, we demonstrate that solving NUM with multi-layered utility is intractable, and that rate allocation and network pricing may oscillate due to user behavior specific to multi-layered applications. To address this, we propose a new approach for admission control to ensure quality of service and experience. Our simulation results show that the proposed admission control mechanism can effectively eliminate the oscillation behavior and mitigate link bottleneck. 1
A microbial causal mediation analytic tool for health disparity and applications in body mass index

Background: Emerging evidence suggests the potential mediating role of microbiome in health disparities. However, no analytic framework is available to analyze microbiome as a mediator between health disparity and clinical outcome, due to the unique structure of microbiome data, including high dimensionality, sparsity, and compositionality. Methods: Considering the modifiable and quantitative features of microbiome, we propose a microbial causal mediation model framework, SparseMCMM_HD, to uncover the mediating role of microbiome in health disparities, by depicting a plausible path from a non-manipulable exposure (e.g. race or region) to a continuous outcome through microbiome. The proposed SparseMCMM_HD rigorously defines and quantifies the manipulable disparity measure that would be eliminated by equalizing microbiome profiles between comparison and reference groups. Moreover, two tests checking the impact of microbiome on health disparity are proposed. Results: Through three body mass index (BMI) studies selected from the curatedMetagenomicData 3.4. 2 package and the American gut project: China vs. USA, China vs. UK, and Asian or Pacific Islander (API) vs. Caucasian, we exhibit the utility of the proposed SparseMCMM_HD framework for investigating microbiome’s contributions in health disparities. Specifically, BMI exhibits disparities and microbial community diversities are significantly distinctive between the reference and comparison groups in all three applications. By employing SparseMCMM_HD, we illustrate that microbiome plays a crucial role in explaining the disparities in BMI between races or regions. 11.99%, 12.90%, and 7.4% of the overall disparity in BMI in China-USA, China-UK, and API-Caucasian comparisons, respectively, would be eliminated if the between-group microbiome profiles were equalized; and 15, 21, and 12 species are identified to play the mediating role respectively. Conclusions: The proposed SparseMCMM_HD is an effective and validated tool to elucidate the mediating role of microbiome in health disparity. Three BMI applications shed light on the utility of microbiome in reducing BMI disparity by manipulating microbial profiles.
Globalization and the Nigeria Service Sector Performance

The study explores the impact of globalization on the Nigeria service sector performance from 1981 to 2020. It used time series data sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin. The study adopted the ARDL model in analyzing the short and long term effect of globalization on the service sector.Globalization is proxy by foreign portfolio investment, global oil price
Weak Consistency: A Generalized Theory and Optimistic Implementations for Distributed Transactions

Current commercial databases allow application programmers to trade off consistency for performance. However, existing definitions of weak consistency levels are either imprecise or they disallow efficient implementation techniques such as optimism. Ruling out these techniques is especially unfortunate because commercial databases support optimistic mechanisms. Furthermore, optimism is likely to be the implementation technique of choice in the geographically distributed and mobile systems of the future. This thesis presents the first implementation-independent specifications of existing ANSI isolation levels and a number of levels that are widely used in commercial systems, e.g., Cursor Stability, Snapshot Isolation. It also specifies a variety of guarantees for predicate-based operations in an implementation-independent manner. Two new levels are defined that provide useful consistency guarantees to application writers; one is the weakest level that ensures consistent reads, while the other captures some useful consistency properties provided by pessimistic implementations. We use a graph-based approach to define different isolation levels in a simple and intuitive manner. The thesis describes new implementation techniques for supporting different weak consistency levels in distributed client-server environments. The mechanisms are based on optimism and make use of multipart timestamps. A new technique is presented that allows multipart timestamps to scale well with the number of clients and servers in our system; the technique takes advantage of loosely synchronized clocks for removing old information in multipart timestamps. This thesis also presents the results of a simulation study to evaluate the performance of our optimistic schemes in data-shipping client-server systems The results show that the cost of providing serializability relative to mechanisms that provide lower consistency guarantees is negligible for low-contention workloads; furthermore, even for workloads with moderate to high-contention workloads, the cost of serializability is low. The simulation study also shows that our mechanisms based on multipart timestamps impose very low CPU, memory, and network costs while providing strong consistency guarantees to read-only and executing transactions. Thesis Supervisor: Barbara H. Liskov Title: Ford Professor of Engineering
On the Occupancy Measure of Non-Markovian Policies in Continuous MDPs

The state-action occupancy measure of a policy is the expected (discounted or undiscounted) number of times a state-action couple is visited in a trajectory. For decades, RL books have been reporting the occupancy equivalence between Markovian and non-Markovian policies in countable state-action spaces under mild conditions. This equivalence states that the occupancy of any non-Markovian policy can be equivalently obtained by a Markovian policy, i.e. a memoryless probability distribution, conditioned only on its current state. While expected, for technical reasons, the translation of this result to continuous state space has resisted until now. Our main contribution is to fill this gap and to provide a general measure-theoretic treatment of the problem, permitting, in particular, its extension to continuous MDPs. Furthermore, we show that when the occupancy is infinite, we may encounter some non-trivial cases where the result does not hold anymore.
Applying User Experience and User-Centered Design Software Processes in Undergraduate Mobile Application Development Teaching

Agile methods in undergraduate courses have been explored by various authors looking to close the gap between industry and professional profiles. We have structured an Android application development course based on a tailored agile process for development of educational software tools. This process is based on both Scrum and Extreme Programming in combination with User Experience (UX) and User-Centered Design (UCD) approaches. The course is executed in two phases: the first half of the course’s semester presents theory on agile and mobile applications development, the latter half is managed as a workshop where students develop for an actual client. The introduction of UX and UCD exploiting the close relationship with stakeholders expected from an agile process can enhance Quality in Use features. Since 2019 two of the projects have been extended in agreement between the client and students. Students, clients and users have found value in the generated products.
YES NO Cartesian Update Update Feature Extraction Feature Extraction Phase Correlation Resample Min Eq . 3 ? Fourier spaceLog-Polar Cross Correlation Model Fourier space Model Sample Sample

Most of existing correlation filter-based tracking approaches only estimate simple axis-aligned bounding boxes, and very few of them is capable of recovering the underlying similarity transformation. To tackle this challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a new correlation filter-based tracker with a novel robust estimation of similarity transformation on the large displacements. In order to efficiently search in such a large 4-DoF space in real-time, we formulate the problem into two 2-DoF sub-problems and apply an efficient Block Coordinates Descent solver to optimize the estimation result. Specifically, we employ an efficient phase correlation scheme to deal with both scale and rotation changes simultaneously in log-polar coordinates. Moreover, a variant of correlation filter is used to predict the translational motion individually. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker achieves very promising prediction performance compared with the state-of-the-art visual object tracking methods while still retaining the advantages of high efficiency and simplicity in conventional correlation filter-based tracking methods. Introduction Visual object tracking is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision with a variety of real-world applications, such as video surveillance and robotics. Although having achieved substantial progress during past decade, it is still difficult to deal with the challenging unconstraint environmental variations, such as illumination changes, partial occlusions, motion blur, fast motion and scale variations. Recently, correlation filter-based methods have attracted continuous research attention (Mueller, Smith, and Ghanem 2017; Ma et al. 2015a; Ma et al. 2015b; H. Zhang and Chen 2017; Li, Xu, and Zhu 2017) due to its superior performance and robustness in contrast to traditional tracking approaches. However, with correlation filters, little attention has been paid on how to efficiently and precisely estimate scale and rotation changes, which are typically represented in a 4-Degree of Freedom (DoF) similarity transformation. To deal with scale changes of the conventional correlation filter-based trackers, (Danelljan et al. 2017b) and (Li and Zhu 2014) extended the 2-DoF representation of original correlation filter-based methods to 3-DoF space, which *Corresponding author. Copyright © 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. 176 431
A. Validation for CLIP-guided Editing

In this section, we visualize the attribute edit method we employed from StyleCLIP [2]. Effect of λ. Fig. 7 shows the effect of λ in Equation 2 of the main text. Originally in StyleCLIP, this filter parameter (denoted as β in [2]) helps the style disentanglement for editing. Since we normalized the edit vectors which benefits the disentanglement in our framework, λ’s effect on style disentanglement is lessened and it is mainly effective on intensity control and denoising. Single-attribute editing. We show an extensive set of images of attribute editing based on the extracted global edit directions (mentioned in Section 3.2 of the main text) to demonstrate that the method is exactly editing the corresponding attribute. Fig. 9 and Fig. 10 visualize the results. We can observe that, based on the user’s input attribute string, the edited image changes only in the attribute direction, while preserving the other attributes. Multiple-attribute editing. To verify that our approach of editing multiple attributes by linear combination (Equation 3 of the main text) is valid, we show examples of combined edits in Fig 8.
Climate Change and the Phenology of Sympatric Birds, Insects, and Plants in Japan

We analyzed the relationships between a long-term trend of rising air temperature and the lives of three species of creatures: red-cheeked starlings, paleotropical migratory birds that breed in Japan, small white butterflies and cherry trees (Somei-Yoshino cherry). We studied the egg-laying dates of the starlings in Niigata City located in the central part of Honshu, the largest of the four main islands of Japan. We obtained the first appearance dates of imagoes of small whites and the blooming dates of Somei-Yoshino cherry trees in Niigata from the Japan Meteorological Agency. Red-cheeked starlings had a significant tendency to start their egg-laying earlier each year; over the course of 28 years the laying date became 15.3 days earlier. Their progressively earlier egg-laying dates were significantly correlated with the rise in early spring temperatures in Niigata City, their breeding ground, and with the temperature of Naha City in Okinawa Prefecture, which is a migration stopover area in southern Japan. Since temperatures of both areas rose significantly during the period, it is likely that the temperature rise was the cause of the advanced egg-laying dates. The cherries’ blooming date also tended to become earlier year-by-year, showing a strong negative correlation with the temperature of early spring. The first appearance date of small whites showed no tendency to become earlier year-by-year, but showed a significant negative correlation with the temperature of early spring. We think that the reason for the cherry trees’ blooming date showing a stronger correlation with the temperature of early spring than the laying date of the starlings is because, unlike migratory birds, cherry trees grow in the same region for the entire year. Thus they are greatly influenced by the temperature of our investigation area (Niigata City). Also, unlike small whites whose chrysalises pass the winter close to the surface of the earth covered with snow, cherry buds are exposed to the air and so might have been more influenced by the long-term warming trend in early spring air temperatures.
Risk and Protective Factors of Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorders in Children and Adolescents: A Mega-Analytic Synthesis

Professionals working with children who have severe emotional/behavioral disorders (E/BD) need to understand the risk and protective factors (RPFs) that are correlated with the development of these behavior patterns, for at least 3 reasons. First, significant numbers of students experience negative outcomes or fail to achieve positive outcomes. Second, current policy imperatives dictate a consideration of RPFs as preventive strategies. Finally, a consideration of RPFs affects children's response to intervention. The question posed in this research has three parts: (a) Can RPFs be identified? (b) Can the contexts in which the factors arise be identified? (c) Can the magnitude of the relationships between RPFs and associated outcomes be quantified? The current synthesis examined the findings of multiple meta-analyses and considered a broad range of RPFs across multiple contexts.
Principles and Practices of Enhanced Anaerobic Bioremediation of Chlorinated Solvents

Abstract : The Tri-Services principles and practices manual provides a "road map" for appropriate and successful implementation of, while identifying "red flags" that may limit success. Using a comprehensive conceptual site model, decision matrices can be used to guide the user in appropriate site selection for applying enhanced bioremediation. Evaluation of suitable hydrogeological, geochemical, and biological site conditions increases the confidence in deploying enhanced bioremediation for remediation of chlorinated solvents in groundwater. Once it has been determined that enhanced bioremediation is suitable for application at a site, the Tri-Services principles and practices manual provides further guidance on the design of appropriate enhanced bioremediation system configurations and selection of the appropriate substrate for application. Several tools are also are described within the Tri-Services principles and practices manual that are useful for optimizing the application of enhanced bioremediation, including small-scale pilot-tests, microcosm studies, molecular screening techniques, and bioaugmentation. These tools are not required in all cases, and rationale is provided for when they should be used. These decision matrices within the Tri-Services principles and practices manual are presented to guide Remedial Project Managers through the site selection process, appropriate bench- or pilot-testing, development of optimal system configurations, and selection of substrate type.
Foxes and food subsidies: Anthropogenic food use by red and Arctic foxes, and effects on Arctic fox survival, on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska

Food subsidies have the potential to impact wildlife on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska. Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes (L., 1758)) expanded their range into Arctic regions during the 20 th century, and the availability of anthropogenic foods may have contributed to their success and persistence in the Arctic. Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus (L., 1758)) are also known to forage on anthropogenic foods in Prudhoe Bay and to forage on marine mammals on the sea ice, but it is unknown whether these strategies benefit survival of arctic foxes. This thesis examined: 1) the importance of anthropogenic foods to the diets of red and arctic foxes in Prudhoe Bay, and 2) the factors with the greatest effect on arctic fox survival, including access to food subsidies in Prudhoe Bay and on the sea ice. For the first study, stable isotopes of red and arctic fox tissues were used to infer late summer, late winter, and lifetime (for red fox only) diets. The contribution of anthropogenic foods to the diets of both species was low in late summer (~10%) but high in late winter (49%, 95% credible interval = 38-57%, of red fox diets and 37%, 95% credible interval = 29-44%, of arctic fox diets). Estimates of lifetime diet in red foxes revealed high levels of anthropogenic food use, similar to the winter diet. To characterize the extent of competition for food resources, dietary niche overlap was examined between both species by comparing isotopic niche space. Both fox species had little isotopic niche overlap but may have greater overlap between their ecological dietary niches. Availability and consumption of anthropogenic foods by red foxes, particularly in winter, may partially explain their yearround presence in Prudhoe Bay. For the second study, nest survival models and satellite collar data were used to evaluate whether multiple factors affected survival of adult and juvenile foxes. Site and sea ice use had two times more support than the other factors. Three groups of foxes were identified based on capture location and sea ice use, which corresponded to different survival rates: Prudhoe Bay foxes, NPR-A foxes that used sea ice during more than eight 2-week periods during the winter (seven 2-week periods for juveniles), and NPR-A foxes that did not use sea ice. Both adult and juvenile foxes at Prudhoe Bay had modestly higher annual survival rates, 0.50 (90% CI 0.31-0.69) and 0.04 (90% CI 0.0-0.08) respectively, than foxes at NPR-A that did not use sea ice, 0.40 (90% CI 0.18-0.62) and 0.01 (90% CI 0.0-0.04) respectively. NPR-A foxes that used sea ice extensively had the highest survival rates. Food subsidies may have far-reaching effects on red and arctic foxes on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska.
ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FIRST TRIMESTER NUCAL TRANSLUCENCE, FREE BETA-HUMAN CHORIONIC GONADOTROPIN, AND PREGNANCY-RELATED PLASMA PROTEIN-A IN PREDICTION OF PREGNANCY COMPLICATIONS

: In this study, we aimed to investigate whether there was an association between fetal nuchal translucency (NT) and the serum markers plasma protein-A (PAPP-A) and free beta-human chorionic gonadotropin (β-hCG) measured by the first-trimester screening test, as well as birth weight and hypertension. 454 pregnant women who had undergone the first-trimester screening test for Down syndrome were included in the study. All measurements and values of NT, PAPP-A and β-hCG levels were performed between gestational weeks 11-14. Values of PAPP-A and β-hCG converted to multiples of the corrected median (MoM) were obtained using the PRISCA software package. Regarding the prediction of SGA infants, when the PAPP-A value < was 0.99MoM as a threshold, and when the free β-hCG value < was 0.69 MoM, SGA cases could be detected with a sensitivity of 83% and a specificity of 71.9%. Regarding the prediction of hypertension, at a threshold PAPP-A value of <of 0.96 MoM, cases of hypertension could be detected with a sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 74%. Maternal PAPP-A level in the first trimester was found to correlate with neonatal birth weight (rho: 0.56 (95% CI 0.49-0.62), P < 0.0001), while β-hCG showed a weak but significant correlation with birth weight (rho: 0.137 (95% CI 0.045.) -0.227), P: 0.0036). Low PAPP-A levels in the first trimester were an effective predictor of SGA babies and hypertension, while low β-hCG levels were an effective predictor of SGA babies. There is a significant correlation between first trimester PAPP-A and β-hCG levels and birth weight.