Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WIDER Working Paper 2023/97 IMF conditionality and structural reforms Evidence from developing countries

: The global economy, dominated by the consequences of a disastrous health crisis and international tensions, needs policy support to regain its growth dynamic. To regain an inclusive and sustainable growth dynamic, structural policies of governments are needed to allow a reallocation of resources and to stimulate productivity. International cooperation seems to be necessary, and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) contribution could play an important role in promoting reforms. Indeed, in IMF-supported programmes, the conditions for developing countries’ transition to liberalization and open markets are often common. In this paper, we address the question of whether periods of IMF conditionality contribute to the promotion of structural reforms in developing countries. We combine a rich dataset on IMF conditionality and structural reforms covering 64 developing countries over the period 1980–2014. Through the entropy balancing method and alternative identification strategies, we show that IMF conditionality programmes promote structural reforms in developing countries. We show that the effect of IMF conditionality can vary depending on the type of conditionality, the type of reform, the time frame, the initial level of structural reforms, and can depend on some structural factors including the business cycle, the quality of fiscal and monetary policy, the level of development, and the quality of institutions. Furthermore, we show that IMF conditionality can have spillover effects on trading partners and that IMF conditionality programmes that are met tend to have a greater impact on structural reforms.
Influence of hydrological drought on surface water and groundwater quantitative and qualitative parameters in the Torysa river catchment, eastern Slovakia

Surfacewaterandgroundwaterquantitativeandqualitativeparametersdependonmanyfactors,amongwhichtheclimaticcon-ditions and human influence play an important role. Hydrological drought affects first the surface water and with a certain time-lag also thegroundwater.Humaninfluenceaffectsboththequantitativeandqualitativeproperties. Hydrologicaldroughtinsurfacewaterandground-waterintheareaoftheupperTorysaRivercatchmentwasderivedusingthethresholdlevelmethodforstreamflowandbaseflowvalues.Baseflowvalueswerecalculatedusingthelocalminimummethod. Intheend,numberofsurfacewaterandgroundwaterdroughtperiodswascomparedstressingthelengthofthedroughtperiodandtimeshiftbetweenthestartingdates.Changesinchemicalcompositionofsurfaceandgroundwaterduringdroughtperiodswerestudiedandanalysed.
Differential effects of self-esteem and interpersonal competence on humor styles

Background: In contrast with an early implicit “facilitative hypothesis” of humor, a revised specificity hypothesis predicts that the benefits of humor depend on the specific style of humor used. Information on predictors of these humor styles in turn enhances the ability to predict the effect on well-being. Methods: We examined the relationships between interpersonal competence, self-esteem, and different styles of humor, while also examining the contributions of age and gender. Participants (n = 201) aged 18–63 years completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Inventory, the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire, and the Humor Styles Questionnaire, and gave demographic information. Results: High self-esteem was associated with higher use of affiliative, aggressive, and self-enhancing humor styles, but lower use of self-defeating humor. High interpersonal competence predicted greater use of affiliative humor, whereas low interpersonal competence predicted greater use of aggressive humor. Further analyses showed that initiation competence predicted affiliative humor (positively) but both initiation competence (positively) and conflict management competence (negatively) predicted aggressive humor. Conclusion: The findings that both self-esteem and initiation competence contribute to use of aggressive humor add to knowledge of who is likely to use this potentially harmful humor style. We conclude that a readiness to initiate humorous interactions is not on its own a general and positive attribute contributing to “good” humor.
Generative Graph Dictionary Learning

Dictionary learning, which approximates data samples by a set of shared atoms, is a fundamental task in representation learning. However, dictionary learning over graphs, namely graph dictionary learning (GDL), is much more challenging than vectorial data as graphs lie in disparate metric spaces. The sparse literature on GDL formulates the problem from the reconstructive view and often learns linear graph embeddings with a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) Mixture Model named F RA M E to address the GDL problem from the generative view. Equipped with the graph generation function based on the radial basis function kernel and FGW distance, F RA M E generates nonlinear embedding spaces, which, as we theoretically proved, provide a good approximation of the original graph spaces. A fast solu-tion is further proposed on top of the expectation-maximization algorithm with guaranteed convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained node and graph embeddings, and our algorithm achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Fast, collaborative acquisition of multi-view face images using a camera network and its impact on real-time human identification

Fast, collaborative acquisition of multi-view face images using a camera network and its impact on real-time human identification by Rohith Bakkannagari Master of Science in Electrical Engineering West Virginia University Dr. Vinod Kulathumani, Ph.D., Chair Biometric systems have been typically designed to operate under controlled environments based on previously acquired photographs and videos. But recent terror attacks, security threats and intrusion attempts have necessitated a transition to modern biometric systems that can identify humans in real-time under unconstrained environments. Distributed camera networks are appropriate for unconstrained scenarios because they can provide multiple views of a scene, thus offering tolerance against variable pose of a human subject and possible occlusions. In dynamic environments, the face images are continually arriving at the base station with different quality, pose and resolution. Designing a fusion strategy poses significant challenges. Such a scenario demands that only the relevant information is processed and the verdict (match / no match) regarding a particular subject is quickly (yet accurately) released so that more number of subjects in the scene can be evaluated. To address these, we designed a wireless data acquisition system that is capable of acquiring multi-view faces accurately and at a rapid rate. The idea of epipolar geometry is exploited to get high multi-view face detection rates. Face images are labeled to their corresponding poses and are transmitted to the base station. To evaluate the impact of face images acquired using our real-time face image acquisition system on the overall recognition accuracy, we interface it with a face matching subsystem and thus create a prototype realtime multi-view face recognition system. For front face matching, we use the commercial PittPatt software. For non-frontal matching, we use a Local binary Pattern based classifier. Matching scores obtained from both frontal and non-frontal face images are fused for final classification. Our results show significant improvement in recognition accuracy, especially when the front face images are of low resolution.
Mass, heat and nutrient fluxes in the Atlantic Ocean determined by inverse methods. Ph.D. Thesis

Inverse methods are applied to historical hydrographic data to address two aspects of the general circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. The method allows conservation statements for mass and other properties, along with a variety of other constraints, to be combined in a dynamically consistent way to estimate the absolute velocity field and associated property transports. The method was first used to examine the exchange of mass and heat between the South Atlantic and the neighboring ocean basins. The second problem addressed concerns the circulation and property fluxes across the 24 and 36 deg N in the subtropical North Atlantic. Conservation statements are considered for the nutrients as well as mass, and the nutrients are found to contribute significant information independent of temperature and salinity.
Protection of bacteriophage-sensitive Escherichia coli by lysogens

Bacteriophage λ is a temperate virus infecting the bacterium Escherichia coli . Temperate phages have the ability to form lysogens where the prophage is maintained in the infected bacterium in a largely quiescent state. The lysogen becomes immune to superinfection by λ by blocking the development of the superinfecting phage. Here we report the λ lysogen not only protected itself from killing by λ phages but also protected λ -sensitive bacteria in mixed culture. This protection required that the lysogen was able to adsorb the superinfecting λ phages. The protection was also sensitive to the growth state of the mixed culture, and the λ lysogen lost efficiency in protecting λ -sensitive bacteria as it stopped growing. A mutant of the λ tail protein, λ J, was not subject to this loss of protection. Adsorption of λ having the wild-type J protein but not the mutant λ J protein to E. coli was inhibited by interference with bacterial energy metabolism. The last observation suggests wild-type λ preferentially infects bacteria with competent energy metabolism.
Best Arm Identification in Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits

We investigate the problem of best arm identification in Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits (MAM-ABs) where the rewards are defined through a factor graph. The objective is to find an optimal global action with a prescribed level of confidence and minimal sample complexity. We derive a tight instance-specific lower bound of the sample complexity and characterize the corresponding optimal sampling strategy. Unfortunately, this bound is obtained by solving a combinatorial optimization problem with a number of variables and constraints exponentially growing with the number of agents. We leverage Mean Field (MF) techniques to obtain, in a computationally efficient manner, an approximation of the lower bound. The approximation scales at most as ρK d (where ρ , K , and d denote the number of factors in the graph, the number of possible actions per agent, and the maximal degree of the factor graph). We devise MF-TaS (Mean-Field-Track-and-Stop), an algo-rithm whose sample complexity provably matches our approximated lower bound. We illustrate the performance of MF-TaS numerically using both synthetic and real-world experiments (e.g., to solve the antenna tilt optimization problem in radio communication networks).
Augmented, free and tensor generalized digroups

Abstract The concept of generalized digroup was proposed by Salazar-Díaz, Velásquez and Wills-Toro in their paper “Generalized digroups” as a non trivial extension of groups. In this way, many concepts and results given in the category of groups can be extended in a natural form to the category of generalized digroups. The aim of this paper is to present the construction of the free generalized digroup and study its properties. Although this construction is vastly different from the one given for the case of groups, we will use this concept, the classical construction for groups and the semidirect product to construct the tensor generalized digroup as well as the semidirect product of generalized digroups. Additionally, we give a new structural result for generalized digroups using compatible actions of groups and an equivariant map from a group set to the group corresponding to notions of associative dialgebras and augmented racks.
Impact of stratospheric air and surface emissions on 
tropospheric nitrous oxide during ATom

Abstract. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is both a greenhouse gas in the troposphere and an ozone depleting substance in the stratosphere and is rapidly increasing in the atmosphere. The spatial distribution of N2O emissions and the sources leading to rising concentrations in the global atmosphere are highly uncertain. We measured the global distribution of tropospheric N2O mixing ratios during the airborne Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission. ATom measured mixing ratios of ~300 gas species and aerosol properties in 647 vertical profiles spanning the Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and much of the Southern Ocean basins, from nearly Pole to Pole, over four seasons (2016–2018). We measured N2O mixing ratios at 1 Hz using a Quantum Cascade Laser Spectrometer and a new spectral retrieval method to account for the pressure and temperature sensitivity of the instrument when deployed on aircraft. This retrieval strategy improved the precision of our N2O measurements by a factor of 3, enabling us to recover the precision to that of previous missions. Most of the variance of N2O mixing ratios in the troposphere is driven by the influence of N2O-depleted stratospheric air, especially at mid and high latitudes. We observe the downward propagation of lower N2O mixing ratios (compared to surface stations) that tracks the influence of stratosphere-troposphere exchange through the tropospheric column down to the surface, resulting in a seasonal minimum at the surface 2–3 months after the peak stratosphere-to-troposphere exchange in spring. The highest N2O mixing ratios occur close to the equator, extending through the boundary layer and free troposphere. We observed influences from a complex and diverse mixture of N2O sources, with emission source types identified using the rich suite of chemical species measured on ATom and with the geographical origin calculated using an atmospheric transport model. Although ATom flights were mostly over the oceans, the most prominent N2O enhancements were associated with anthropogenic emissions, including industry, oil and gas, urban and biomass burning, especially in the tropical Atlantic outflow from Africa. Enhanced N2O mixing ratios are mostly associated with pollution-related tracers arriving from the coastal area of Nigeria. Peaks of N2O are often well-correlated with indicators of photochemical processing, suggesting possible unexpected source processes. The difficulty of separating the mixture of different sources in the atmosphere contributes to uncertainties in the N2O global budget. The extensive data set from ATom will help improve the understanding of N2O emission processes and their representation in global models.
Does Momentum Help in Stochastic Optimization? A Sample Complexity Analysis

Stochastic Heavy Ball (SHB) and Nesterov’s Ac-celerated Stochastic Gradient (ASG) are popular momentum methods in optimization. While the beneﬁts of these acceleration ideas in deterministic settings are well understood, their advantages in stochastic optimization are unclear. Several works have recently claimed that SHB and ASG always help in stochastic optimization. Our work shows that i. ) these claims are either ﬂawed or one-sided (e.g., consider only the bias term but not the variance), and ii. ) when both these terms are accounted for, SHB and ASG do not always help. Speciﬁcally, for any quadratic optimization, we obtain a lower bound on the sample complexity of SHB and ASG, accounting for both bias and variance, and show that the vanilla SGD can achieve the same bound.
Estimating carrying capacity at the green turtle nesting beach of East Island, French Frigate Shoals

Many sea turtle populations are at a fraction of their historical abundance, and under- standing ecological processes, under current and climate change scenarios, is critical for establishing recovery goals. In the Hawaiian Islands, the nesting population of the green turtle Chelonia mydas on East Island, French Frigate Shoals, has been recovering at a rate of 5.7% per year. Climate change models, however, predict a loss in nesting habitat on East Island of up to 30% due to sea level rise by 2100. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to determine the carrying capacity of East Island for hatchlings and nesting females under current conditions and predictions of sea level rise. In the simulation model, density-dependent nest destruction was the primary factor regulating population size. Carrying capacity was reached between 1.9 and 2.1 million hatchlings at current conditions; carrying capacity was approached when 80 000 to 120 000 nests were laid on the beach, representing 20 000 to 30 000 nesting females. With a rise in sea level, carrying capacity was reached when 60 000 to 100 000 nests were laid on the beach. The current mean estimate of 390 nesting females per year, over the past 10 yr, at East Island represents 1.3 to 2% of the females that would nest at carrying capacity. The beach at East Island is well below carrying capacity and is capable of supporting a larger nesting population. However, the availability of suitable coastal habitats may play a bigger role in regulating the Hawaiian green turtle population than available nesting habitat.
Physiological stress response, reflex impairment, and survival of five sympatric shark species following experimental capture and release

In many fisheries, some component of the catch is usually released. Quantifying the effects of capture and release on fish survival is critical for determining which practices are sus- tainable, particularly for threatened species. Using a standardized fishing technique, we studied sublethal (blood physiology and reflex impairment assessment) and lethal (post-release mortality with satellite tags) outcomes of fishing stress on 5 species of coastal sharks (great hammerhead, bull, blacktip, lemon, and tiger). Species-specific differences were detected in whole blood lactate, partial pressure of carbon dioxide, and pH values, with lactate emerging as the sole parameter to be significantly affected by increasing hooking duration and shark size. Species-spe- cific differences in reflex impairment were also found; however, we did not detect any significant relationships between reflex impairment and hooking duration. Taken together, we ranked each species according to degree of stress response, from most to least disturbed, as follows: hammer- head shark > blacktip shark > bull shark > lemon shark > tiger shark. Satellite tagging data revealed that nearly 100% of all tracked tiger sharks reported for at least 4 wk after release, which was significantly higher than bull (74.1%) and great hammerhead (53.6%) sharks. We discuss which mechanisms may lead to species-specific differences in sensitivity to fishing and suggest that observed variation in responses may be influenced by ecological and evolutionary phenom- ena. Moreover, our results show that certain species (i.e. hammerhead sharks in this study) are inherently vulnerable to capture stress and mortality resulting from fisheries interactions and should receive additional attention in future conservation strategies.
Topography effects on small-scale precipitation variability in the Swiss pre-Alps

Long-term precipitation and snow-cover measurements were carried out to estimate the areal pattern of precipitation in a small, rugged Swiss pre-Alpine basin. The dense networks used consisted of 34 storage gauges and 32 pit gauges with orifice parallel with slope, the latter being corrected for wetting losses. Consequently, the corrected data was very near to the true precipitation at a particular point. In the winter season also snow-cover characteristics were measured at 11 locations. Altitude turned out to be the best overall predictor for corrected data (R 2 = 0.67) and longitude for uncorrected data (R 2 = 0.67 vs only 0.58 for altitude! ). The combination of altitude, longitude and latitude explains almost 75% of the spatial variance of summer season precipitation and snow-cover characteristics. However, the three variables used in the analysis were found to be interrelated, particularly in networks of storage gauges and snow-cover measurements (R 2 = 0.40-0.70).
Shadow and sky color rendering technique in augmented reality environments

Realistic rendering technique of outdoor Augmented Reality (AR) has been an attractive topic since last two decades due to the large number of publications in computer graphics. Realistic virtual objects in outdoor rendering AR systems require sophisticated effects such as shadows, daylight and interaction between skycolor and virtual as well as real objects. A few realistic rendering techniques have been proposed to overcome this issue most of which are related to non real-time rendering. However, this problem still persists especially in outdoor rendering. This research proposed a new technique to achieve realistic real-time outdoor rendering taking into account the interaction between sky color and objects in AR systems with respect to shadows in any specific location, date and time. This approach involved four main phases, which cover different outdoor AR rendering requirements. In the first phase, sky color was generated with respect to the sun position. The second phase involved the shadow generation algorithm which is called Hybrid Shadow Mapping (HSM). During this phase some improvements in shadow volume and projection shadow are employed. The third phase started with the introduction of a coherent formula for the sun position and shadows in any specific location, date and time. The coherent formula aims to find the shadow positioning automatically. This phase also addressed the interaction between sky color and objects in virtual environments. Finally, a technique to integrate sky color and shadows through the effects of sky color on virtual objects in the AR system is proposed. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique has significantly improved the realism of real-time outdoor AR rendering thus solving the problem of realistic AR systems.
‘Cracking’ the Nationalist Narrative? Representing Cham and Champa in Vietnam’s Museums and Heritage Sites

The Cham are commonly defined as an ethnic group associated with the ancient Southeast Asian kingdoms of Champa. Corresponding to present-day central and southern Vietnam, these kingdoms were progressively conquered by the Vietnamese Dai Viet empire from the 15th to 19th centuries. The article sets out to trace the extent to which a connection between Cham and Champa is actually articulated in Vietnam’s relevant museums and heritage sites. The nationalist narrative in the title refers to that of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which tends to underplay the Dai Viet empire’s progressive ‘southward march’ from its centre in the Red River Delta towards the Mekong Delta. The article concludes that on the whole, juxtaposing representations of Cham ethnicity with Champa artefacts does not amount to a real engagement with the legacy of Champa, though we discuss limited exceptions.
Economic Valuation of Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Historic Temples in Thailand

This study looks at how conservation of Thailand's ancient temple heritage might be financed. Using information from contingent valuation and choice modeling exercises involving 500 households in Bangkok, it assesses how much Thais would be willing to pay for a conservation program to safeguard ten at-risk temple sites. It also looks at the main elements of such a temple conservation program to see which are most highly prized. It finds that, on average, individuals would be willing to make a one-time payment of 200 Baht (USD5.30), either as a tax surcharge or as a voluntary donation to finance the conservation program. Extrapolating these results nationally, this would generate more than enough money to finance a temple conservation program. The study also proposes the main elements of a national program to preserve historic temples in Thailand. Local communities and the private sector (in regions where historic temples are located) are highlighted as the key players in any such initiative.