Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Restoration of blanket bog vegetation as a habitat for red grouse following clearance of immature Sitka spruce forest on the west coast of Scotland

Blanket bog habitat is a globally scarce resource and as a result is amongst the most important of British vegetation types in an international context. The habitat supports four Annex 1 bird species including golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) as well as red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) which is only found on heather moorland habitats and provides an important food source for golden eagle. The habitat is a Biodiversity Action Plan habitat with a target to restore 845,000 hectares of degraded blanket bog by 2015. At least 190,000 hectares of blanket bog habitat have been planted with conifer plantation, mainly Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), which is unlikely to mature until 2020-2030. This thesis explores the potential for restoring blanket bog, to provide habitat for red grouse, through the removal of immature Sitka spruce plantation. Three different tree clearance techniques are considered in terms of impact on the developing vegetation plant community. The most cost effective method of clearance, in situ chipping using an excavator mounted flail, is investigated in detail; in particular the effect of wood-chip depth on changes in wood chip decomposition, plant colonisation, plant community development and vegetation structure. Monitoring and experimental data were analysed using multivariate methods including Principal Response Curves, Detrended Correspondence Analysis and Redundancy Analysis, and univariate methods including linear mixed effects and spatio-temporal models. Restoration of blanket bog vegetation is clearly achievable within a relatively short timescale that is dependent on the size of the trees and hence depth of wood chip. Plant community recovery following in situ chipping of trees (yield class 10) that are 20, 25 and 30 years old is predicted to take 7,9 and 10.5 years respectively. Vegetation structure is linked to plant community, with the cover and age of Calluna vulgaris being particularly important. As a result it seems likely that suitable red grouse habitat will be achieved as the target blanket bog plant community is reached.
Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis

The meta-frontier framework has been used extensively for evaluating the technical efficiency of heterogeneous production units that can be classified into different groups. This paper shows how the framework can also be used to make total factor productivity (TFP) comparisons within and across groups. The paper develops a new measure of the distance between a group frontier and the meta-frontier (the so-called ‘technology gap’). It then shows how a spatiallyand temporally-transitive TFP index can be decomposed into measures of global technical change (measuring movements in the metafrontier), local technical change (measuring movements in the group frontiers) and efficiency change (measuring movements towards or around the group frontiers). To illustrate the methodology, the paper examines the productive performance of road authorities responsible for maintaining interstate highways in the US state of Virginia.
Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis

Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are necessary for the conversion of nominal incomes into real incomes for purposes of comparison across countries. The International comparison Program (ICP) is the main source of PPPs but PPPs are compiled only for a few benchmark years with coverage limited to participating countries. Consequently, the Penn World Tables (PWT) has become the main source of PPPs and real income data for growth studies. Despite the popularity of the PWT over the last two decades, the methodology underlying PWT construction has received little attention. The main objective of the paper is to propose a method for the compilation of a consistent panel of PPPs, and real incomes, using an econometric framework that integrates various steps involved in the compilation of the PWT and also uses all the PPP benchmark data from various phases of the ICP. The new approach proposed allows us to compute PPP predictors with standard errors for both ICPparticipating and non-participating countries and non-benchmark years that are consistent with observed trends in national prices. The econometric approach suggested utilises a state-space formulation of a model with errors spatially correlated across countries. The new method is illustrated using an OECD data set for the period 1970 to 2000. JEL Classification: C53, C33
Occupant ’ s thermal preference diversity in residential air-conditioning use : A study in Osaka , Japan

The diverse occupant’s behaviour (OB) has been identified as a significant impact on household air-conditioner (AC) energy use. However, the stochastic feature of occupant’s individual preference in AC use is seldom studied due to the limitation of appliance-level energy data. This study aims to analyze the inter-occupant OB diversity based on the monitoring bigdata of AC load in a residential community of 586 households in Osaka, Japan. First, household’s thermal preference was quantitatively identified from AC load profiles. Clustering analysis is then employed for labeling and classification of the target households with different thermal preference types. Results show 4 typical behavioral patterns, namely sensitive & active users, sensitive but inactive users, insensitive but active users, insensitive & inactive users, with a share of dwellings in the community of 36%, 31%, 19%, and 14%, respectively. Such household-level benchmarking could provide an informative reference for the modeling and simulation of residential AC usage.
Social Media Monitoring of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Influenza Epidemic With Adaptation for Informal Language in Arabic Twitter Data: Qualitative Study

Background: Twitter is a real-time messaging platform widely used by people and organizations to share information on many topics. Systematic monitoring of social media posts (infodemiology or infoveillance) could be useful to detect misinformation outbreaks as well as to reduce reporting lag time and to provide an independent complementary source of data compared with traditional surveillance approaches. However, such an analysis is currently not possible in the Arabic-speaking world owing to a lack of basic building blocks for research and dialectal variation. Objective: We collected around 4000 Arabic tweets related to COVID-19 and influenza. We cleaned and labeled the tweets relative to the Arabic Infectious Diseases Ontology, which includes nonstandard terminology, as well as 11 core concepts and 21 relations. The aim of this study was to analyze Arabic tweets to estimate their usefulness for health surveillance, understand the impact of the informal terms in the analysis, show the effect of deep learning methods in the classification process, and identify the locations where the infection is spreading. Methods: We applied the following multilabel classification techniques: binary relevance, classifier chains, label power set, adapted algorithm (multilabel adapted k-nearest neighbors [MLKNN]), support vector machine with naive Bayes features (NBSVM), bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)
Consistently Faster: A Survey and Fair Comparison of Consistent Hashing Algorithms

Consistent hashing is a well-known hashing technique that allows for a minimal number of resources to be remapped when a cluster is scaled. It plays a fundamental role as a data router and a load balancer in various fields, such as distributed databases, cloud infrastructures, and peer-to-peer networks. Although studies of consistent hashing algorithms relating to different usage scenarios have been carried out, the literature does not provide a thorough evaluation and comparative assessment. Therefore, this paper surveys and empirically compares the most prominent consistent hashing algorithms for distributed databases and cloud infrastructures, published from 1997 to 2021, in a fair agnostic context. Comparison has been performed by implementing all algorithms in Java and benchmarking them on commodity hardware. The metrics involved in the comparison are memory usage, initialization, resize and lookup time, balance, and monotonicity. We found Jump , Anchor , and Dx to outmatch the other algorithms on all the considered metrics. The measured values match the asymptotic curves. Although, some asymptotically faster algorithms have been shown to be slower in practice due to memory accesses.
Evaluation des capacités bioremédiatrices d'une mangrove impactée par des eaux usées domestiques. Application au site pilote de Malamani, Mayotte.

Realises a Mayotte, ces travaux ont permis d'evaluer les capacites de bioremediation d'une mangrove vis-a-vis d'eaux usees domestiques pretraitees. A partir d'un reseau de parcelles (temoins et impactees par des effluents domestiques), un suivi a ete realise sur quatre compartiments de la mangrove : vegetation, eau, sediment, crabes. Les resultats montrent que cet ecosysteme joue un role analogue a celui des filtres plantes et semble etre adapte pour un traitement secondaire pour les eaux usees domestiques. Cependant, si les conclusions a court terme paraissent encourageantes, l'impact a long terme des eaux usees sur la biodiversite de cet ecosysteme et sur son fonctionnement reste a approfondir avant d'utiliser un tel systeme de traitement in situ.
Parapneumonic effusions related to Streptococcus pneumoniae: serotype and disease severity trends

Introduction Streptococcus pneumoniae epidemiology is changing in response to vaccination and some data suggest empyema incidence is increasing. However, differences exist between UK and USA studies. We describe trends in the clinical phenotype of adult pneumococcal pleural infection, including simple parapneumonic effusions (SPE) in the pneumococcal conjugate vaccination (PCV) era. Methods Retrospective cohort study, all adults [≥]16 years admitted to three large UK hospitals, 2006-2018 with pneumococcal disease. Medical records were reviewed for each clinical episode. Serotype data were obtained from the UKHSA national reference laboratory. Results 2477 invasive pneumococcal cases were identified: 459 SPE and 100 pleural infection cases. Incidence increased over time, including non-PCV-serotype disease. PCV7-serotype disease declined following paediatric PCV7 introduction, but the effect of PCV13 was less apparent as disease caused by the additional six serotypes plateaued with serotypes 1 and 3 causing such parapneumonic effusions from 2011 onwards. Mortality was lower in pleural infection patients than SPE patients. Patients with frank pus had lower mortality then those without. 90-day mortality could be predicted by baseline increased RAPID score. Conclusion Pneumococcal infection continues to cause severe disease despite the introduction of PCVs. The predominance of serotype 1 and 3 in this adult UK cohort is in keeping with previous studies in paediatric and non-UK studies. Rising non-PCV serotype disease and limited impact of PCV13 on cases caused by serotypes 1 and 3 offset the reductions in adult pneumococcal parapneumonic effusion disease burden observed following introduction of the childhood PCV7 programme.
EURASIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND FINANCE

We use panel data for 1998 – 2012 and system General Methods of Moments (GMM) specification to test for differences in behavior of resource-rich regions and other Russian provinces due to re-centralization of resource royalties from the region to the center. We ask whether joint taxation of the same tax base by both federal and provincial governments led to vertical externalities and possible over-taxation between federal and regional authorities. We explore whether a shift in the collection of resource taxes from the provinces to the center impacted the size and share of regional tax collection. We find that own tax collections of resource-rich regions declined after re-centralization, while strong vertical externalities persisted between federal and provincial taxes due to joint collection of profit taxes and the overlap between regional income taxes and federal value added taxes
Research Division Federal Reserve Bank of St . Louis Working Paper Series Are Credit Unions Too Small ?

U.S. credit unions serve 93 million members, hold 10 percent of U.S. savings deposits, and make 13.2 percent of all non-revolving consumer loans. Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and derive estimates of ray-scale and expansion-path scale economies. We employ a dimension-reduction technique to reduce estimation error, and bootstrap methods for inference. We find substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale across the range of sizes observed among credit unions, suggesting that further industry consolidation and growth in the average size of credit unions are likely. ∗Wheelock: Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, P.O. Box 442, St. Louis, MO 63166–0442; wheelock@stls.frb. org. Wilson: The John E. Walker Department of Economics, 222 Sirrine Hall, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634–1309, USA; email pww@clemson.edu. This research was conducted while Wilson was a visiting scholar in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The authors thank an anonymous referee for comments on a prior draft of this paper, and Craig Aubuchon and Heidi Beyer for research assistance. The authors also thank the CyberInfrastructure Technology Integration group at Clemson University for providing the Condor Pool for use in computations; they are especially grateful to Sebastien Goasguen for technical assistance. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System. JEL classification nos.: C12, C13, C14, L11, G21.
in Second

This quantitative study aims to shed lights on the specifics of computer mediated communication (CMC) within the context of the second language acquisition (SLA) writing processes by examining the pre-writing interactions and the first drafts of 60 English as a Second Language adult learners. These interactions took place either in a synchronous (SCMC) or asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) environment. The focus was on the lexical intertextual connections evident when the pre-writing discussions of the learners were compared with the subsequent drafts accounting for the mode communication. The lexical items of the pre-wring discussion and the first drafts were statistically analyzed by applying a t -test. This analysis revealed that there was a statistically significant difference ( α = .05) between the ACMC and SCMC groups in terms of pre-writing discussion and first draft lexical intertextual connections. The participants who conducted their pre-writing discussions in an ACMC mode were more likely to use lexical items from the discussion in their first drafts as compared to the SCMC participants. The researcher believes that these findings can inform distance and computer-enhanced education in general as well as language learning and further the research in this area.
Cumulative environmental assessment in Tasmania : a catchment case study

The cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the environment over time and space has been acknowledged as a key process in the ongoing loss of habitat and biodiversity and as a driver of landscape change. Regulatory approaches that address environmental impacts only at the level of the individual project footprint may facilitate significant environmental impacts through the cumulative effects of those projects. Such approaches are unlikely to ensure that current and future development of natural resources is sustainable. The catchment spatial scale and the regulatory processes that govern three key activities within it - farm dams, forest practices and water abstraction - form the basis for an examination of cumulative effects in Tasmania. International and Commonwealth regulatory approaches to cumulative effects, key concepts and methodologies are examined through a literature review. The potential cumulative impact of farm dams, forest practices and water abstraction on the natural flow regime, freshwater ecological processes and biota is established through the relevant literature. A case study of the Great Forester — Brid catchment in north east Tasmania is used to determine the potential for these impacts to occur in Tasmanian catchments. The results of this study show that there are measurable cumulative impacts on the natural flow regime, connectivity and special natural values within the catchment. Relevant legislation, policies and processes are examined to establish an understanding of how cumulative effects are addressed in Tasmania for these activities. Cumulative impacts of these activities are not adequately addressed in the current legislative and policy environment in Tasmania. An explicit legislative requirement for cumulative effects needs to be considered. In addition a pro-active, regional framework to manage and assess cumulative effects, incorporating integrated catchment management, is a fundamental requirement for the sustainable use of natural resources in Tasmania.
Un modèle intégrateur des effets de l'internationalisation sur la performance de l'entreprise

La question « Est-ce que l'internationalisation est benefique a la performance de l'entreprise ? » reste depuis plus de trois decennies au coeur des debats sans conclusion definitive dans le monde des chercheurs en management strategique, business international et management international. Les six modeles generaux - positif et lineaire, positif mais avec la performance decroissante, U standard, U inverse, S horizontale, S inverse - expliquant la relation entre l'internationalisation et la performance (RIP) ont ete construits dans les etudes anterieures. Dans ce papier, nos travaux consistent a developper sous l'angle de la theorie de l'apprentissage organisationnel un modele integrateur qui permet de preciser la nature de la relation entre l'internationalisation et la performance de l'entreprise. La construction de notre modele integrateur se realise dans deux perspectives de recherche, l'une deterministe et l'autre evolutive. Au niveau conceptuel, le resultat de notre travail permet : (1) d'eclairer les effets distincts des dimensions differentes de l'internationalisation sur la performance dans le temps; (2) de reconcilier les resultats disperses de 6 camps de recherche differents
Wipp air-intake shaft disturbed-rock zone study

The disturbed-rock zone surrounding the air-intake shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site was investigated to determine the extent and the permeability of the disturbed-rock zone as a function of radial distance from the 6.1 m diameter shaft, at different elevations within the Salado. Gas- and brine-permeability tests were performed in the bedded halite of the Salado formation at two levels within the air-intake shaft. The gas- and brine-permeability test results demonstrated that the radial distance to an undisturbed formation permeability of 1 {times} 10{sup {minus}21} m{sup 2} was less than 3.0 m.
Evaluation of Surface Tension Models for SPH-Based Fluid Animations Using a Benchmark Test

We evaluate surface tension models in particle-based fluid simulation systems using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) with a benchmark test. Our benchmark consists of three experiments and a set of analysis methods that are useful for the comparison of surface tension models. Although visual quality is of major interest and is considered as well, we suggest quantification methods for the properties of these models. The goal is to identify if a certain model is suitable for a given scenario and to be able to control the results in the creation of animations. We apply the proposed evaluation methods to three existing surface tension models in combination with different SPH techniques (WCSPH, PCISPH, and IISPH) and perform systematic tests to show the influence of different settings and parameter choices. The surface tension models are chosen from different classes: a pure inter-particle force model, a model based on surface curvature, and a model using a combination of these. Additionally, we present a simple modification to improve the quality of inter-particle force models.
Hierarchical Position Based Dynamics

The Position Based Dynamics approach (PBD) recently introduced allows robust simulations of dynamic systems in real time. The simplicity of the method is due to the fact, that the solver processes the constraints one by one in a Gauss-Seidel type manner. In contrast to global Newton-Raphson solvers, the local solver can easily handle non-linear constraints as well as constraints based on inequalities. Unfortunately, this advantage comes at the price of much slower convergence. In this paper we propose a multi-grid based process to speed up the convergence of PBD signiﬁcantly while keeping the power of the method to process general non-linear constraints. Several examples show that the new approach is signiﬁcantly faster than the original one. This makes real time simulation possible at a higher level of detail in interactive applications such as computer games.
Seafloor characterisation using multibeam sonar echo signal processing and image analysis

The authors propose the approach to multibeam seafloor characterisation which relies on the combined, concurrent use of two different techniques of multibeam sonar data processing. The first one is based on constructing the grey-level sonar images of seabed using the echoes received in the consecutive beams. Then, the parameters describing the local region of sonar image, namely, the local standard deviation of a grey level, and the slope of a local autocorrelation function of a grey level, are calculated. The second technique assumes the use of a set of parameters of the multibeam echo envelope, similarly as in single beam classification. For selected parameters, namely, for echo envelope moment of inertia and for echo envelope fractal dimension, the slope of their angular dependence is calculated. Finally, the quantities obtained by these 2 techniques have been combined together and the multidimensional distributions of sets of them have been analysed in the context of seabed classification procedure. The approach has been tested using multibeam data records acquired from several bottom types in the Gulf of Gda (cid:276) sk region. The preliminary results show that application of the proposed combined approach should improve the classification performance in comparison with that of using only the one scheme of seafloor multibeam data processing.
ESTUDIOS SOBRE LA ECONOMÍA ESPAÑOLA Actual and

The returns to formal schooling in Spain are estimated in this paper. The main difference between this and previous papers on this subject is that, here, a distinction is made between the increase in the worker’s potential maximum wage due to schooling and the actual registered increase. This difference (or underpayment) can be justified on the basis of job search theory. We use the stochastic frontiers technique because it allows the estimation of variables (such as the potential wage) that cannot be directly observed. One of the main results of this paper is that formal schooling clearly increases a worker’s potential maximum wage. This increase is particularly noticeable for those workers who have completed at least a five-year university programme. It has also been estimated that schooling increases the degree of underpayment, which is also quite relevant in the case of long-term university education. In spite of this, the effect of formal schooling on actual wages is clearly positive.