Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating Hypoxic Volume in the Chesapeake Bay Using Two Continuously Sampled Oxygen Profiles

Low levels of dissolved oxygen (DO) occur in many embayments throughout the world and have numerous detrimental effects on biota. Although measurement of in situ DO is straightforward with modern instrumentation, quantifying the volume of water in a given embayment that is hypoxic (hypoxic volume (HV)) is a more difficult task; however, this information is critical for determining whether management efforts to increase DO are having an overall impact. This paper uses output from a three-dimensional numerical model to demonstrate that HV in Chesapeake Bay can be estimated well with as few as two vertical profiles. In addition, the cumulative hypoxic volume (HVC; the total amount of hypoxia in a given year) can be calculated with relatively low uncertainty (<10%) if continuous DO data are available from two strategically positioned vertical profiles. This is because HV in the Chesapeake Bay is strongly constrained by the geometry of the embayment. A simple Geometric HV calculation method is presented and numerical model results are used to illustrate that for calculating HVC, the results using two daily-averaged profiles are typically more accurate than those of the standard method that interpolates bimonthly cruise data. Bimonthly data produce less accurate estimates of HVC because high-frequency changes in oxygen concentration, for example, due to regional-weatheror storm-induced changes in wind direction and magnitude, are not resolved. The advantages of supplementing cruise-based sampling with continuous vertical profiles to estimate HVC should be applicable to other systems where hypoxic water is constrained to a specific area by bathymetry. Plain Language Summary The Chesapeake Bay supports a diverse range of recreational and commercial fisheries. However, every summer the amount of oxygen dissolved in the bay’s bottom water decreases to levels lethal for fish and shellfish, termed a “dead zone. ” To make informed management decisions and understand the health of the ecosystem, it is important to understand the variability in the dissolved oxygen and the amount of water with low dissolved oxygen. In this study, we used both observations collected from boats and three-dimensional computer models to demonstrate that the region of low dissolved oxygen is strongly constrained by the geometry of the Chesapeake Bay. Because of this geometric constraint, the amount of low dissolved oxygen water can be accurately calculated if continually monitored with only two vertical profiles. In contrast, the current method uses numerous locations sampled only twice per month. This study demonstrated that continuous vertical profiles at as few as two locations provide a better estimate of the volume of hypoxia in any given year. This means that the amount of hypoxic water can be estimated in real time using an ocean observing system that efficiently supplements the current monitoring program, because only a few continuous monitoring locations are needed.
Smoothness and Geometry of Boundaries Associated to Skeletal Structures

In an electronic fuel injection system, a transducer for converting a variable pressure signal to a variable inductance comprises an inductive coil surrounding an axially reciprocable, magnetically permeable plunger. Two opposing sides of one end of the plunger are asymmetrically tapered; and a magnetically permeable flux member attached to the coil has portions adjacent the untapered end of the plunger and both sides of the tapered end of the plunger to create parallel flux paths through the plunger, each of which has a gap defined by one of the tapered sides and has a reluctance which varies with axial movement of the plunger. The portion of the flux member adjacent one side of the tapered end is transversely movable with respect to the plunger by a torque arm and adjusting screw so as to vary the slope of the inductance-plunger position curve.
The Australian Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications

We study the behavior of solutions of a three dimensional discrete time nonlinear matrix population model. We prove results concerning the existence of equilibrium points, boundedness, permanence of solutions, and global stability in special cases of interest. Moreover, numerical simulations are used to compare the dynamics of two main forms of the density dependence function (rational and exponential).
FOVEA: a new program to standardize the measurement of foveal pit morphology

The fovea is one of the most studied retinal specializations in vertebrates, which consists of an invagination of the retinal tissue with high packing of cone photoreceptors, leading to high visual resolution. Between species, foveae differ morphologically in the depth and width of the foveal pit and the steepness of the foveal walls, which could influence visual perception. However, there is no standardized methodology to measure the contour of the foveal pit across species. We present here FOVEA, a program for the quantification of foveal parameters (width, depth, slope of foveal pit) using images from histological cross-sections or optical coherence tomography (OCT). FOVEA is based on a new algorithm to detect the inner retina contour based on the color variation of the image. We evaluated FOVEA by comparing the fovea morphology of two Passerine birds based on histological cross-sections and its performance with data from previously published OCT images. FOVEA detected differences between species and its output was not significantly different from previous estimates using OCT software. FOVEA can be used for comparative studies to better understand the evolution of the fovea morphology in vertebrates as well as for diagnostic purposes in veterinary pathology. FOVEA is freely available for academic use and can be downloaded at: http://estebanfj.bio. purdue.edu/fovea.
Automated Essay Writing: An AIED Opinion

This opinion piece emerged from research for the book, Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, by Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez, published by Routledge. While thinking of ways to promote the book, I realised that students could employ AI story generators to write essays. That led me to research automated essay writing, write a Twitter thread that has garnered 43,000 engagements, and author a blog article (Sharples, 2022). The current piece is a revised and expanded version of that article.
Research of criteria for detachment of protective stands - forest administration Gospić case study

U radu se autori kriticki osvrcu na nedorecenost i netransparentnost kriterija pri izdvajanju suma u uređajni razred (UR) zastitnih suma. Pri tome istražuju je li nagib terena iznad 50o , kako to propisuje Pravilnik o uređivanju suma iz 1994, odnosno 1997, bio jedini kriterij po kojem su zastitne sume izdvojene u navedeni UR. Koristeni su podaci o nabigu terena iz sastojinskih obrazaca (O-2 i O-3) te negib izveden iz digitalnog elevacijskoga modela (DEM-a) prostorne razlucivosti 30*30 m. Za istaživanje je odabrana Uprava suma podružnica Gospic unutar koje je izdvojena gotovo trecina svih zastitnih suma u Republici Hrvatskoj. Ustanovljeno je da su se sastojine izdvajale u UR zastitnih suma kombinacijom razlicitih kriterija: nagiba, otvorenosti i blizine objekta koji treba stititi. Na temelju prostorne razdiobe nagiba terena u sastojinama koje su zastitnima proglasene zbog nagiba, dijelovi s manjim nagibom mogli bi se izdvojiti u odsjeke kojim bi se potom moglo redovito gospodariti, a isto tako bi se u pojedinim sastojinama koje nisu izdvojene kao zastitne mogli izdvojiti dijelovi vecega nagiba u UR zastitnih suma. Pri tome bi zbog uprosjecivanja, a time i snižavanja nagiba na DEM-u, bilo potrebno utvrditi iznos odstupanja nagiba ili koristiti DEM vece razlucivosti.
Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information about Code

Modern software engineering is in a state of flux. With more development utilizing AI code generation tools and the continued reliance on online programming resources, understanding code and the original intent behind it is becoming more important than it ever has been. To this end, we have developed the “Meta-Manager”, a Visual Studio Code extension, with a supplementary browser extension, that automatically collects and organizes changes made to code while keeping track of the provenance of each part of the code, including code that has been copy-pasted from popular programming resources online. These sources and subsequent changes are represented in the editor and may be explored using searching and filtering mechanisms to help developers answer historically hard-to-answer questions about code, its provenance, and its design rationale. In our evaluation of Meta-Manager, we found developers were successfully able to use it to answer otherwise unanswerable questions about an unfamiliar code base.
Major Trends in Distance Education Research: A Combination of Bibliometric and Thematic Analyze

This study intends to explore the current trends in the field of distance education research catalogued in Web of Science (WoS) database during 1980-2016. Mainly bibliographic description and social network analysis was employed to investigate the structure and patterns of information exchanged within the field of distance education research and also to interpret the interrelationship between keywords indicated in these articles. A total of 500 most cited articles (out of 6,141 relevant to the topic) were reviewed to examine the impact of factors such as journal DOI and keywords on the number of citations that they received. We also identified major trends in distance education literature including variation across publication and citation year, top ranking of institutions and top ranking of published papers based on authors, subject area and co-authorship collaboration between countries. Our results show that the most cited articles are from two institutions of United States and United Kingdom and the most prolific years in terms of number of published articles and citations are 2013.We also found non-significant and very small correlation between the number of citation and DOI number of the journals. Our study serves as a resource for future studies by indicating how trends in distance education research have gradually developed over time and demonstrating the characteristics of the most cited articles in this literature.
Quantifying uncertainty for climate change and long range forecasting scenarios with model errors . Part 1 : Gaussian models

Information theory provides a concise systematic framework for measuring climate consistency and sensitivity for imperfect models. A suite of increasingly complex physically relevant linear Gaussian models with time periodic features mimicking seasonal cycle are utilized to elucidate central issues that arise in contemporary climate science. These include the role of model error, the memory of initial conditions, and effects of coarse-graining in producing short, medium, and long range forecasts. In particular, we demonstrate how relative entropy can be used to improve climate consistency of an over-damped imperfect model by inflating stochastic forcing. Moreover, we show that in the considered models, by improving climate consistency, we simultaneously increase the predictive skill of an imperfect model in response to external perturbation, a property of crucial importance in the context of climate change. The three models range in complexity from a scalar time periodic model mimicking seasonal fluctuations in a mean jet to a spatially extended system of turbulent Rossby waves to, finally, the behavior of a turbulent tracer with a mean gradient with the background turbulent field velocity generated by the first two models. This last model mimics the global and regional behavior of turbulent passive tracers under various climate change scenarios. This detailed study provides important guidelines for extending these strategies to more complicated and non-Gaussian physical systems.
RASwDA: Re-Aligned Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus for Dialog Act Prediction in Conversations

The Switchboard Dialog Act (SwDA) corpus has been widely used for dialog act prediction and generation tasks. However, due to misalignment between the text and speech data in this corpus, models incorporating prosodic information have shown poor performance. In this paper, we report the misalignment issues present in the SwDA corpus caused by previous automatic alignment methods and introduce a re-aligned, improved version called RASwDA (Re-Aligned Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus). Our goal is to create the largest publicly available two-speaker dialogue act corpus which has correctly aligned transcripts and speech. Through manual realignment and validation of 537.5 conversations completed so far, we have exceeded the state-of-the-art dialog act recognition results trained on SwDA. As we continue to expand RASwDA by re-aligning the remaining conversations from SwDA, we anticipate further improvements in model performance, facilitated by a larger and more accurate dataset.
Enhancing Neural Language Models: A Comprehensive Approach with Tensorized Transformer and Over-Parameterization

—This research paper introduces novel strategies to enhance the performance and efficiency of neural language models, addressing challenges in resource-limited settings and scalability. This research presents multi-linear attention with Block-Term Tensor Decomposition (BTD), a self-attention model leveraging tensor decomposition and parameters sharing. This approach achieves significant parameter compression while demonstrating improved performance on language modeling tasks. Comparative evaluations against traditional Transformer models underscore the effectiveness of multi-linear attention. TensorCoder employs a dimension-wise attention mechanism to address the quadratic complexity of the scaled dot-product attention in Transformers, making it suitable for long sequence tasks. The proposed approach is validated on masked language modeling and neural machine translation tasks, showcasing a substantial reduction in computational complexity while maintaining or surpassing performance compared to the original Transformer. This research also optimizes pre-trained language models (PLMs) through fine-tuning. To overcome computational challenges associated with large PLMs, the paper introduces a matrix product operator for over-parameterization during fine-tuning. Efficient decomposition methods factorize parameter matrices into higher-dimensional tensors, enabling the selection of important parameter matrices through static and dynamic strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach significantly enhances the fine-tuning performance of small PLMs, enabling them to outperform larger counterparts with three times the parameters. This research opens avenues for efficiently scaling language models without compromising inference latency, showcasing the potential of over-parameterization in enhancing the applicability of large PLMs in real-world systems.
Statistical Analysis of Solar Radio Burst Type III and Type IV with Relation to Solar Activities

Solar activities are natural phenomena that occur at the solar surface by ejecting energy into interplanetary space and consequently hitting Earth’s atmosphere where the commencement of geomagnetic storms. Generally, solar radio bursts originated at the same level as the solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and shock at solar atmosphere which the Sun project the radio energy into the interstellar medium. This is a novel study to investigate the correlation between solar burst type IV and type III based on their properties. The analysis is based on the statistical data of type IV and type III solar bursts from 2006 – 2011. The statistics of solar burst type IV associated with type III were obtained through e-Callisto (Compact Astronomical Low-frequency Low-cost Instrument for Spectroscopy Transportable Observatory) Spectrometer in the years 2006 until 2011. The aim of this study is to find out whether type III bursts preserved energy to solar bursts type IV thus led to the formation of geomagnetic storm. Statistical data from this study showed that most of the burst type IV were preceded and followed by type III burst. The total number of type IV events studied was 37, with 20 preceded by type III and the remainder with other types. Predominantly, solar bursts events are accompanied with great solar flares (class X and M) producing major storms. Although the study did not show much correlation between bursts type IV and type III in producing these storms, there are several possible explanations for this result. It may be the case that solar events such as solar flare, CMEs and active region ejected from the solar disc is not heading towards Earth and the energy has eventually dispersed into the interplanetary medium.
Using scent to enhance captive welfare and breeding in a zoo-housed endangered lemur species.

The Alaotran gentle lemur is one of the most endangered primates in the world and shows a low success rate in captive breeding programmes. We tested a novel scent enrichment, made up of a synthesized mixture potentially conveying information about female fertility, on four unsuccessful breeding pairs (n = 8) hosted at Jersey, Birmingham, London (UK) and Mulhouse (France) zoos. We evaluated the effects of the scent enrichment combining behavioural observations (n = 515 hours) with faecal endocrinology (cortisol and testosterone measurements) (n = 180 samples). We did not �nd any signi�cant change in a�liative behaviours, while aggressive and abnormal behaviours were rarely observed. However, we found a signi�cant increase of both male and female olfactory behaviours during the enrichment condition, with females performing these behaviours signi�cantly less than males. We also found that sexual behaviours signi�cantly increased over the enrichment period. Conversely, we did not �nd any signi�cant change related to enrichment in cortisol and testosterone levels. Our �ndings show little effectiveness by our scent enrichment, which is likely due to shortfalls with regards to fertile odour sampling. However, our results also highlight that biologically relevant odour signals may trigger natural species-specic behaviours, with potential implications for management and conservation breeding of zoo-based endangered species.
Crustal motion along the Eurasia-Nubia plate boundary in the Calabrian Arc and Sicily and active extension in the Messina Straits from GPS measurements

[1] We investigate crustal deformation along the Eurasia-Nubia plate boundary in Calabria and Sicily revealed by the GPS velocity field obtained by the combination of continuous site velocities with previous results from episodic campaigns. We recognize two distinct crustal domains characterized by different motions and styles of deformation. Convergence in Sicily is taken up by crustal shortening along the former Tyrrhenian back arc passive margin, in agreement with seismological data and geological evidence of recent cessation of deformation along the Plio-Pleistocene subduction front. The analysis of the GPS data and the consistency between earthquake slip vectors and convergence direction suggest that Eu-Nu convergence in Sicily does not require intermediate crustal blocks. Significant Eurasia (∼3 mm/yr to NNE) and Nubia-fixed (∼5 mm/yr to ESE) residual velocities in Calabria suggest instead the presence of an intermediate crustal block which can be interpreted as a forearc sliver or as an independent Ionian block. According to the first hypothesis, subduction is still active in the Ionian wedge, although we find no evidence for active back arc spreading in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The N115°E oriented Sicily-Calabria GPS relative motion is consistent with the extension observed during the 1908 Mw 7.1 Messina earthquake. We suggest that up to 3 mm/yr (∼80%) of this estimated relative motion between Sicily and the Calabrian Arc may be taken up in the Messina Straits.
Revealing the Load-balancing Behavior of YouTube Tra(cid:14)c on Interdomain Links

For the last decade, YouTube has consistently been a dominant source of tra(cid:14)c on the Internet. To improve the quality of experience (QoE) for YouTube users, broadband access providers and Google apply techniques to load balance the extraordinary volume of web requests and tra(cid:14)c. We use traceroute-based measurement methods to infer these techniques for assigning YouTube requests to speci(cid:12)c Google video content caches, including the interconnection links between the access providers and Google. We then use a year of measurements (mid-2016 to mid-2017) collected from SamKnows probes hosted by broadband customers spanning a major ISP in the U.S. and three ISPs in Europe. We investigate two possible causes of di(cid:11)erent interdomain link usage behavior. We also compare the YouTube video cache hostnames and IPs observed by the probes, and (cid:12)nd that the selection of video cache has little impact on BGP selection of interdomain links.
ENIGMA-51: Towards a Fine-Grained Understanding of Human Behavior in Industrial Scenarios

This document is intended for the convenience of the reader and reports additional information about the collection and the annotations of the ENIGMA-51 dataset, as well as implementation details of the adopted baselines. This supplementary material is related to the following paper: ENIGMA-51: Towards a Fine-Grained Understanding of Human Behavior in Industrial Scenarios, IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024. The reader is referred to the aforementioned manuscript for further information, and to our web page https://iplab.dmi. unict.it/ENIGMA-51 to download the dataset.
Exploring feminisms on Instagram Reflections on the challenges and possibilities of incorporating digital methods strategies in feminist social media research

Over the past decade, Instagram has become increasingly popular and embedded in the contemporary experience of everyday feminisms. The platform allows for the co-existence of political, personal, mundane, and aesthetically-oriented content, created by both established feminist actors and “ordinary” people (i.e. not activists, career politicians, or celebrities). While feminist media studies have long studied similar practices of online feminism, historically the discipline has tended to privilege qualitative approaches, rather than more quantitatively-oriented digital methods approaches. However, the study of feminist expressions on Instagram can benefit from a critical engagement and selective embrace of some possibilities enabled by digital methods.This article offers a reflection on the use of digital methods’ tools and strategies informed by a feminist media studies theoretical and epistemological lens. This draws on an exploratory case study conducted by the author, which combined qualitative and digital methods to explore a wide landscape of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram. Grounded on this case, the article examines the methodological possibilities and challenges brought by digital methods, and the tensions that can arise from their combination with qualitative feminist approaches. It explores how digital analysis tools can be adopted in combination with qualitative analysis, allowing for the emergence of new insights, critical engagements with large amounts of data, intuitive explorations of datasets, while still allowing to zoom in on specific content for in-depth qualitative engagements. Finally, it also reflects on the ethical implications of a feminist approach to digital methods at the data collecting stage, positing methodological alternatives grounded on a feminist ethics of care.