Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physical and Biological Processes Underlying the Sudden Appearance of a Red-Tide Surface Patch in the Nearshore

Abstract : The factors contributing to the timing and intensity of phytoplankton blooms ("red tides") in very shallow water are poorly understood. Here, the sudden and brief (3h) appearance at the surface of an alongshore-parallel band of red tide is described. The bloom, near Huntington Beach CA, was dominated by the locally common red-tide forming dinoflagellate Lingulodinium polyedrum (F. Stein). Surface chlorophyll-a (Chl a) and temperature (T) were mapped with a novel GPS-tracked jetski. The surface red-tide band, with maximum Chl a~7 microgram L-1, was visible for more than 3h, was located 500 m from shore (~8m water depth), was ~200m wide and extended ~1km alongshore. The subsurface bloom, with maximum Chl a > 30 microgram L-1, developed farther offshore, near the 17-deg C isotherm over 4-7 days prior to the surface appearance. A few hours before the surface band appeared, an intense Chl a> patch was observed in 13m total depth in the mid-water column trough of a shoreward-propagating supertidal internal wave. The Chl a> patch intensification was consistent with dinoflagellate vertical swimming interacting with the wave-driven circulation. In shallow water (<12 m depth), vertical mixing, attributed to internal wave breaking, brought the Chl a patch to the surface. Warm water in very shallow water (depth < 5 m) apparently blocked the Chl a patch from entering the surfzone. These observations highlight the role of small-scale physical and biological processes in determining the spatial and temporal characteristics of nearshore red tide blooms.
Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression analysis is rapidly becoming an area of intense interest in computer science and human-computer interaction design communities. The most expressive way humans display emotions is through facial expressions. In this paper a method is implemented using 2D appearance-based local approach for the extraction of intransient facial features and recognition of four facial expressions. The algorithm implements Radial Symmetry Transform and further uses edge projection analysis for feature extraction and creates a dynamic spatio- temporal representation of the face, followed by classification into one of the expression classes. The algorithm achieves an accuracy of 81.0% for facial expression recognition from grayscale image.
Optimized Parking Control for Electric Vehicle Driven by Switched Reluctance Motor

Sufficient and stable positioning torque is necessary for the parking of an electric vehicle driven by switched reluctance motor (SRM). Considering the highly nonlinear torque characteristic of SRM, the parking control with high stability and power consumption economy is an important issue. This paper presents an optimized parking control method for an electric vehicle driven by SRM to achieve optimal parking stability and power consumption economy simultaneously. The static torque-angle characteristic curve of a four-phase 16/12 SRM is analyzed, based on which the optimized region of parking position (presented by rotor angle) is obtained considering the uncertainty of parking conditions. To ensure the vehicle is properly parked in the optimized position region, active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is utilized to achieve the smooth switch from zero-speed control to parking position control. Simulation and experimental results verify that the proposed method can better stabilize the parking on the ramp and reduce power consumption in all conditions.
Introduction and dispersal of exotic food plants into Europe during the Roman and medieval periods

This thesis examines the introduction and importation of numerous exotic food plants into north-western and western Europe during the Roman and medieval periods. It constitutes the first part of a wider, ongoing research project directed by Prof. Van der Veen on “Long-Distance Trade and Agricultural Development”. The aim is to establish the dispersal histories of these exotics and highlight the active role of food in processes of socio-economic change in past societies. Relevant data were collected from all available archaeobotanical records in the area and period under study, and brought together in a uniform database format. Information was gathered on the species presence, mode of preservation and accuracy of identification. Sites are classified by period (Roman/early medieval/medieval), type (urban/rural/military), status (elite/non-elite) and context (secular/ceremonial/religious). Two types of analyses are employed to identify the chronological, social and geographical dispersal of the most common (forty-two) species: a species-specific, and a multivariate technique (Correspondence Analysis). Results indicate the emergence of very distinct dispersal patterns for each period and for the various species. In the Roman period numerous new food plants become available in different contexts. Many species that could be locally cultivated become incorporated into local diet, particularly near the Rhine frontier, while rarer species are limited to military, major urban and elite sites. In the following period most exotics disappear, indicating a turn towards more local dietary and agricultural regimes and highlighting the disjointed socio-economic context of the early medieval world. A shift in activities northwards is observed during the medieval period when the diversity of species increases again. Different food plants become prominent but most are associated with towns and the urban elite, marking socio-economic divisions. This study advances understanding of the changing nature of the exotic status of many species, and reveals these as crucial guides to charting human and economic impacts and movements. For my parents, Sofia and Tasos Livardas
THE IMPACT OF THE OKEHAMPTON BYPASS

This report describes a study commissioned by the RAC Foundation for Motoring and the Environment to assess the post-construction impact of the A30 Okehampton bypass in Devon. The bypass, which was fully opened in 1989, was constructed to the south of the town of Okehampton and runs through the northern most section of the Dartmoor National Park. The study examined the predicted environmental impacts of the bypass determined, by reference to evidence presented at the Public Inquiry, and compared these to the current environmental indicators along the route. It was found that, in nearly all circumstances, the environmental predictions stood up well to re-examination. A survey of 200 local residents conducted as part of the study sought to gain the views of the town on the success or failure of the bypass. Eighty percent of those interviewed still regarded the bypass as being of real benefit to the town. Many thought, however, that the levels of traffic in the town, particularly heavy goods vehicles, were still too high. It was found that, despite a comprehensive traffic management and environmental improvement scheme having been drawn up for Okehampton, this had not been implemented. It is suggested that many of the town's residual traffic problems could be solved by the implementation of such a scheme. Finally, the study examined the published literature on both the human and environmental impact of bypasses and placed the Okehampton case study within the overall context of the wider debate on roads and the environment. (A)
A Fuzzy Deep Model Based on Fuzzy Restricted Boltzmann Machines for High-Dimensional Data Classification

We establish a fuzzy deep model called the fuzzy deep belief net (FDBN) based on fuzzy restricted Boltzmann machines (FRBMs) due to their excellent generative and discriminative properties. The learning procedure of an FDBN is divided into a pretraining phase and a subsequent fine-tuning phase. In the pretraining phase, a group of FRBMs is trained in a greedy layerwise way: the first FRBM is trained by original samples, and the average values of the left and right probabilities produced by its hidden units are treated as the training data for subsequent FRBMs. The resulting FDBN is either a generative or a discriminative model depending on the choice of training a generative or a discriminative type of FRBM on top. Then, a hybrid learning approach is proposed to fine-tune this novel fuzzy deep model: the well pretrained fuzzy parameters are first defuzzified, and the FDBN with defuzzified parameters is fine-tuned by the wake–sleep or stochastic gradient descent algorithm. This hybrid strategy not only avoids learning an intractable fuzzy neural network, but also greatly improves the classification capability of the FDBN. The experimental results on MNIST, NORB, and 15 Scene databases indicate that the FDBN with the hybrid learning approach can handle high-dimensional raw images directly. It inherits the fine nature of the FRBM and outperforms some state-of-the-art discriminative models in classification accuracy. Moreover, it shows better capability of robustness than a deep belief net when encountering noisy data.
Understanding approaches to social partnerships - investigating target audience reactions and non-profit managers’ business practice: a mixed-methods study

ABSTRACT If social partnerships can lead to favourable outcomes for not-for-profit organisations (NPOs), what steps are managers taking to achieve such outcomes? We address this question by conducting a mixed-methods study in a professional sports social partnership context in Australia. First, a survey with 4,193 sport team fans – a key target audience for NPOs was conducted to understand the impact of contextual factors (i.e. NPO reputation and perceived fit) on the consumer behaviour process, including donation, volunteer, and advocacy intentions for NPOs involved in a social partnership. Following the confirmation of favourable NPO outcomes, interviews with 11 NPO managers were conducted to explore the business practice inputs of their social partnerships. Interviews showed social partnerships were characterised by a power imbalance in favour of the sports organisation leading to a lack of co-creation of value. Further, despite an expressed intention to formalise the partnerships, formality waned as the partnership moved through the different partnership stages. Results across the two studies demonstrate the need for a more deliberate and strategic approach to social partnerships. Theoretically, we build on the limited work addressing the NPO perspective of social partnerships by adopting a dual stakeholder perspective.
Seasonal Variation in Plant Polyphenols and Related Bioactivities across Three Years in Ten Tree Species as Visualized by Mass Spectrometric Fingerprint Mapping

The currently changing climates and environments place plants under many types of stresses that affect both their survival and levels of chemical defenses. The gradual induction of defenses in stressed plant populations could be monitored on a yearly basis unless a seasonal and yearly variation in natural defense levels obscures such monitoring schemes. Here, we studied the stability of the species-specific polyphenol composition and content of 10 tree species over three growing seasons using five replicate trees per species. We specifically measured hydrolyzable tannins (galloyl and hexahydroxydiphenoyl derivatives), proanthocyanidins (procyanidins and prodelphinidins), flavonols (kaempferol, quercetin and kaempferol derivatives) and quinic acid derivatives with the group-specific UHPLC-DAD-MS/MS tool, together with two bioactivities, the protein precipitation capacity and oxidative activity. With the help of a fingerprint mapping tool, we found out that species differed a lot in their seasonal and between-year variation in polyphenols and that the variation was also partially specific to compound groups. Especially ellagitannins tended to have declining seasonal patterns while the opposite was true for proanthocyanidins. Some of the species showed minimal variation in all measured variables, while others showed even induced levels of certain polyphenol groups during the 3-year study. For every species, we found either species-specific baseline levels in qualitative and quantitative polyphenol chemistry or the compound groups with the most plasticity in their production. The used tools could thus form a good combination for future studies attempting to monitor the overall changes in polyphenol chemistry due to various biotic or abiotic stress factors in plant populations or in more controlled environments.
Supplementary Material for Parameter-Efficient Masking Networks

For all the backbones used in our experiments, we follow their default training settings. For ConvMixer [10], we use AdamW [8] optimizer with triangular learning rate scheduler. We set the maximum learning rate as 0.05 with weight decay as 0.005. We set batch size as 512 and the number of total epochs is 100. We use different configurations for hidden dimension (256/512) and depth (6/8) in our experiments section. For ViT [2], we use Adam [5] optimizer with cosine learning rate scheduler. We set the maximum learning rate as 0.0001. We set batch size as 256 and the number of total epochs as 200. We use different configurations for hidden dimension (256/512) and depth (6/8) in our experiments section. For ResNet [4], we follow the implementation configurations in Popup [9]. Specifically, we use SGD optimizer with maximum learning rate 0.1 and cosine scheduler. The weight decay and momentum are set as 0.0005 and 0.9. We train 100 epochs with 256 batch size. For the sparse selection to pick the subnetworks, we follow the optimal choice in Popup and set it as 0.5 for our experiments. And we use kaiming uniform and kaiming normal [3] to initialize the scores and random weights, respectively.
Research on temperature control technology for laser molding of thermoplastic composite materials

Continuous carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites have problems such as long temperature self setting time, high overshoot, and low control accuracy during laser in situ molding, resulting in poor component forming quality. This article designs a temperature closed-loop control system based on an intelligent fuzzy proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller. By introducing a fuzzy self-tuning PID algorithm, the goal of quickly adjusting to the working temperature when turned on is achieved. The temperature overshoot is significantly reduced, and the temperature control accuracy is improved. According to the requirements of laser in situ forming of carbon fiber reinforced polyether ether ketone composite materials, a laser in situ forming experimental device was built. Through simulation testing and comparison of forming temperature, the results showed that compared with traditional PID controllers, when using an intelligent fuzzy PID controller to control temperature, the temperature control accuracy was maintained at ± 10 ℃, the overshoot percentage was about 2.29%, and the adjustment time was about 9.7 seconds. All indicators met the actual engineering requirements, The temperature setting effect is good and the fitting degree is high. Therefore, the overall performance of the intelligent fuzzy PID controller is far superior to traditional PID controllers, meeting the temperature control requirements in the laser in situ molding process of thermoplastic composite materials.
Inverse Problems for Physics-Based Process Models

We describe and compare two formulations of inverse problems for a physics-based process model in the context of uncertainty and random variability: the Bayesian inverse problem and the stochastic inverse problem. We describe the foundations of the two problems in order to create a context for interpreting the applicability and solutions of inverse problems important for scientific and engineering inference. We conclude by comparing them to statistical approaches to related problems, including Bayesian calibration of computer models. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 11 is March 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews. org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The E-Tutor in the New Normal: Analysing the Changing Roles of Tutoring in an ODeL Environment during and post Covid-19

This article reports on a study that explored how an open distance learning (ODL) institution is integrating its online processes in handling e-tutors’ experiences as they transition from face-to-face to blended facilitation. The study examined the following key issues: firstly, conceptions of how the university strategy transitions conventional tutors into its open distance e-learning (ODeL) system; secondly, conceptions of how e-tutors bridge the gap between facilitation and student support; and thirdly, how e-tutors are integrated in the ODeL institution’s system in relation to their personal academic development. The study adopted a qualitative exploratory approach, which relied on documentary sources and the experiences of university e-tutors at the Botswana Open University (BOU) captured through telephonic and online interviews. It is argued that the world is changing due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The changes have been fast, radical, demanding and uncertain. However, ODeL institutions can do more to confront these challenges. The study findings indicated that BOU has positively responded to these changes by relying on its capabilities and strengths. The article provides insights for improved access, success, tutor identities and development. The article ends with recommendations on what could be done to improve learning, teaching and practice as facilitated by e-tutors within ODeL institutions as they recover from the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Esports fan identity toward sponsor–sponsee relationship: an understanding of the role-based identity

PurposeDespite to useful relevance to better understand how group-level identity develops, few studies have explored the identity theory in the esports field and, in particular, considering the impact of a fan's role identity. The current study aims to explore esports fan role-identity vis-à-vis the relationship with the sponsor and the sponsee so as to understand the effects on their behavioral intentions.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sample of 356 esports fans who attended the 2021 FPF eFootball Open Challenge, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) analyzed the psychometric properties of the constructs and a subsequent Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) examined the effects of fan identity on two types of behavioral intentions and sponsor–sponsee relationship.FindingsResults indicate that fans who highly identify with esports have the highest attachment to the event and tend toward having a positive word-of-mouth intention. Esports fans who have a higher brand identification reported a positive attitude toward the event's sponsor brand and tend to purchase its products. Moreover, the study findings also provide evidence of the bidirectional interaction between the way in which fans attach with the esports event and its sponsor brand, leading to greater reciprocity in their identity formation.Originality/valueThis study helps to understand how the fan identity process can enhance its fate and develop mutually, building role overlapping identity in the esports sponsor–sponsee relationship. Complementarily, it supports of how the marketeers and managers must analyze the importance of being a fan to the individual in order to understand how its self-identity can shape the future behavior.
Miliusa majestatis (Annonaceae), a New Species from Southern Thailand as Evidenced by Molecular Phylogeny and Morphology

Miliusa majestatis Damth. , Sinbumr. & Chaowasku (Annonaceae), a new species from southern Thailand, is described and illustrated. Based on molecular phylogenetic analysis using up to seven plastid DNA regions (matK, ndhF, rbcL and ycf1 exons; trnL intron; psbA-trnH and trnL-trnF intergenic spacers) and including, among others, 35 accessions (representing 34 species) of Miliusa, the new species belongs to one of the four unnamed major clades in the genus. Within that clade and in the genus in general, M. majestatis is unique in having constricted inner petals and small basal openings between adjacent inner petals. Its conservation status is provisionally assessed as Data Deficient (DD).
Low glomerular filtration rate values are associated with higher TSH in an elderly population at high cardiovascular disease risk

Background Hypothyroidism is associated with impaired glomerular filtration rate (GFR), a recognized cardiovascular disease (CVD), and mortality risk factor. In older adults, this association remains unexplored. We aimed to determine the relationship of elevated TSH with GFR in an elderly population at high CVD risk. Methods Older adults (age>65ys) with high CVD risk defined by two or more CVD risk factors: smoking (S), high blood pressure (HBP), high total cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, diabetes (DM), metabolic syndrome or previous cardiovascular event, were prospectively included at our ambulatory Endocrine Clinic. Patients under levothyroxine or thyroid disease were excluded. TSH> 6mU/l defined subclinical hypothyroidism (ScH) with normal free T4 levels. Estimated GFR was calculated by the Berlin-Initiative Study (BIS)-1 formula for elderly population. Urinary albumin to creatinine ratio (uACR), IL-6 and TNF-α, and Carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) were also determined. The U Mann-Whitney test, the Spearman test, and multiple linear regression were used as statistical tests, Results Finally 246 patients (68% females) were included and 20 (8%) had ScH. This group, was older (median, Q1-Q3: 77,72-78; 72,68-77 years, p=0.01) and DM was less frequent than in the euthyroid group (35 vs 58%, p=0.039). Lower fasting glucose (-20%,p=0.01), GFR (-14%,p=0.01) and freeT4 (-10%,p<0.001) were found compared to euthyroid patients. A higher prevalence of Kidney failure was found in ScH (80 vs. 46%, p=0.003) vs. euthyroid individuals. Significant correlations with GFR were detected: age (r-0.482,p<0.001), TSH (r-0.172,p=0.004), IL-6 (r-0.150,p=0.047), TNF-α (r-0.274,p<0.001), uACR (r-0.170,p=0.009) and CIMT(r-0.189,p=0.004). By multiple linear regression, in a model adjusted by age, sex, BMI, uACR, S, DM, TNF-α and HBP, TSH (Bst -0.14, p=0.023, R2 = 0.25) was found an independent predictor of GFR. Conclusion In older adults with high CVD risk, ScH is associated with lower renal function, and this relationship is present regardless of other cardiometabolic risk factors. These results suggest that ScH could contribute to low GFR and excess CVD risk, although this hypothesis should be addressed in longitudinal studies.
Northwest Ethiopia : peoples and economy

A study of the peoples and economy of Ethiopia's Northwest, the homeland of the Amhara people and the center of medieval Abyssinia. The author deals with local people and relies heavily on firsthand observations made during the eight months he spent there in 1953-54, supplemented and put into cultural and historical perspective by material gathered during his travels elsewhere in Ethiopia and in the Sudan, Uganda, the Belgian Congo, and Nigeria, and by data from published works.
Collaborating and Communicating Online: A Cross-Bordered Intercultural Project between Taiwan and the U.S.

This study explored the collaborative process of an online cross-cultural communication project between Taiwan and the U.S. The behaviors of the cross-cultural teams were analyzed and compared. The results indicated that the U.S. participants enjoyed interacting with their group members more, had developed a better sense of community, and were more comfortable with online communication. However, more of the U.S. participants lurked online. It was recommended that a modified web-based cultural and language exchange project be coordinated to accommodate the Taiwanese participants’ desire in learning English. Besides, cross-bordered teams should be informed of the proper online collaborative and communication skills.