Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantifying the Interaction of Wildlife and Roads: a Habitat and Movement Approach

There is a growing need to address the effects of roadway presence on wildlife. Not only do roads directly impact gene dispersal from a movement perspective, but they limit movement of the individual animal from a habitat perspective by presenting an artificial barrier between one area of viable habitat and another. For this reason it is becoming increasingly important to quantify contact between humans and wildlife and to develop better methods for mitigating these types of conflicts. Studying habitat connectivity and animal mobility in the context of roads can provide actionable information on how, where, and when these encounters might occur in order to minimize the effects transportation networks have on wildlife. This study uses two different approaches for studying wildlife-road interactions: (1) quantifying habitat fragmentation caused by roads and (2) directly quantifying wildlife interaction with roadways. This was achieved through the development and extension of methods found in the fields of landscape ecology and time geography. First, this study demonstrates the utility of one newly created road-based landscape metric through a detailed case study via the creation of an original ArcGIS toolbox. Second, this study develops a new time-geographic methodology to probabilistically measure and predict where wildlife interactions are most likely to occur on road networks. Additionally, it is important to ensure these methods not only quantify effects of roads from habitat and movement perspectives but can be used to mitigate these conflicts in real world conservation settings. Each of these approaches individually leverages techniques found in the field of spatial optimization to strategically locate wildlife crossing structures. This study developed two new methodologies to quantify where, when, and how wildlife interactions with roads are most likely to occur: the first using road-based landscape metrics and the second using a probabilistic voxel-based time-geographic approach. To address habitat connectivity issues, one road-based landscape metric was validated on a real world data set and further advanced by developing a GIS-based tool for real world applications. Utilizing landuse and roadway layers in combination with user specified parameters, the script tools developed here readily calculate this road-based landscape metric for a given study area. To address wildlife mobility issues, probabilistic space-time prisms were used to quantify interaction probabilities between wildlife and roads. These prisms were generated for a given set of tracking points and overlaid with an intersecting roads layer in GIS. Summing the probabilities at prism-roadway intersections revealed a pattern in the likelihood of animal-roadway interactions. Finally, each method was expanded to capture habitat fragmentation and animal movement in the presence of roads over large spatial scales using location analysis techniques. This research also develops and implements new methods that explicitly address wildlife-road interactions…
Recent rapid warming trend revealed from the isotopic record in Muztagata ice core, eastern Pamirs

[1] Many have made efforts to clarify the climatic significance of stable isotopic variations in ice cores around central Asia through the study of stable isotopes in present-day precipitation. A new shallow ice core from Muztagata, in the eastern Pamirs, allows for a detailed comparison of annual δ18O variation with local meteorological data as well as with global air temperature variations. On the basis of a comparison of seasonal fluctuations of δ18O in the local precipitation, the 41.6-m ice core drilled at 7010 m provides a record of about one-half century. The annual fluctuations of δ18O in this ice core are in good agreement (correlation coefficient of 0.67) with the annual air temperature changes at the nearby meteorological station Taxkorgen, indicating that the isotopic record from this ice core is a reliable temperature trend indicator. The most important discovery from the δ18O variation of this ice core is a rapid warming trend in the 1990s, which is consistent with a general global warming trend over this time period. This recent rapid warming at higher elevations in this area has led to the quick retreat of alpine glaciers.
Approximation Algorithms for Some Vehicle Routing Problems

We study vehicle routing problems with constraints on the distance traveled by each vehicle or on the number of vehicles. The objective is either to minimize the total distance traveled by vehicles or to minimize the number of vehicles used. We design constant differential approximation algorithms for kVRP. Note that, using the differential bound for METRIC 3VRP, we obtain the randomized standard ratio 197 99 + , ∀ > 0. This is an improvement of the best-known bound of 2 given by Haimovich et al. For natural generalizations of this problem, called EDGE COST VRP, VERTEX COST VRP, MIN VEHICLE and kTSP we obtain constant differential approximation algorithms and we show that these problems have no differential approximation scheme, unless P = NP.
Effects of natural and anthropogenic drivers on land-cover change and treeline dynamics in the Apennines (Italy)

Effects of natural and anthropogenic drivers on land-cover change and treeline dynamics in the ABSTRACT Questions How do climate, topography and human impact affect land cover changes, elevation of treelines and dominant tree species composition at multiple spatial scales? each municipality between 1991 and 2011. For the land cover change analysis, we produced matrices of Land Cover Change (LCC) obtained by comparing CORINE Land Cover (CLC Level 3) maps from 1990 (CLC1990) and 2012 (CLC2012) with 100 m of resolution. We obtained land cover changes at the regional scale by merging the 44 classes of the original CORINE maps to generate a reduced set of land cover classes, excluding water and non-vegetated classes for the following analysis. We developed a transition matrix for the whole region by calculating changes in areal extent for selected land cover classes: broadleaf forests, conifer forests, mixed forests, and transitional woodlands, pastures, agriculture lands, orchards and artificial areas. We focused mainly on the transitions between forested and non-forested cover classes. We calculated each cover class individual class dynamics. We computed the
BIOMEDICAL WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION WITH NEURAL WORD AND CONCEPT EMBEDDINGS

Addressing ambiguity issues is an important step in natural language processing (NLP) pipelines designed for information extraction and knowledge discovery. This problem is also common in biomedicine where NLP applications have become indispensable to exploit latent information from biomedical literature and clinical narratives from electronic medical records. In this thesis, we propose an ensemble model that employs recent advances in neural word embeddings along with knowledge based approaches to build a biomedical word sense disambiguation (WSD) system. Specifically, our system identiﬁes the correct sense from a given set of candidates for each ambiguous word when presented in its context (surrounding words). We use the MSH WSD dataset, a well known public dataset consisting of 203 ambiguous terms each with nearly 200 diﬀerent instances and an average of two candidate senses represented by concepts in the uniﬁed medical language system (UMLS). We employ a popular biomedical concept, Our linear time (in terms of number of senses and context length) unsupervised and knowledge based approach improves over the state-of-the-art methods by over 3% in accuracy. A more expensive approach based on the k -nearest neighbor framework improves over prior best results by 5% in accuracy. Our results demonstrate that recent advances in neural dense word vector representations oﬀer excellent potential for solving biomedical WSD.
A direct divider method for self-affine fractal profiles and surfaces

Many profiles and surfaces of interest in geology and geophysics can be modelled by self-affine fractals. The divider method was the first method introduced in fractal analysis, is generally suitable for self-similar fractals, and has been adapted by Brown [1987] using a multi-step approach to estimate the fractal dimension of self-affine profiles. Here, we improve the method in order to be a 1-step technique, but showing also that it is in practice another form of the variance method. Then, we generalise the divider method to self-affine fractal surfaces. The method is tested with application to synthetic one- and two-dimensional functions of known fractal dimension.
Climatology and Variability of the Ionosphere: Incoherent Scatter Radar Observations

Ionospheric climatology and variability studies are conducted using long-term incoherent scatter radar (ISR) observations from seven sites around the world. These studies result in an empirical model system, the ISR Ionospheric Model (ISRIM), which represents local and regional ionospheric climatology and variability of the ionosphere. This paper presents some results of the ISR-based climatology and variability. It is indicated that ionospheric variability changes with height significantly, being large in the F region and small in the E region and in the topside. These changes are dependent of locations. At high latitudes, variability in Ne and Ti in the E region is obviously larger than at midlatitudes and the corresponding percentage variability may become comparable with that in the F region. It is also indicated that in the seasonal variation of the F region electron density variability, the percentage variability is smaller in summer (later summer) than in winter and spring; in the diurnal variation, it is smaller during the day than during the night. Variability is also dependent of the solar flux level. A high F10.7 corresponds to the enhanced variability in summer; the sunrise induced variability is also enhanced.
Static inflation and deflation pressure-volume curves in excised lungs of marine mammals

: Excised lungs from 8 marine mammal species (harp [ Pagophilus groenlandicus ], harbor [ Phoca vitulina ], and gray seal [ Halichoerus grypus ], Atlantic white-sided [ Lagenorhynchus acutus ], common [ Delphinus delphis ] and Risso's dolphin [ Grampus griseus ], long finned pilot whale [ Globicephala melas ], and harbor porpoise [ Phocoena phocoena ]) were used to determine minimum air volume of the relaxed lung (MAV, n = 15) and the elastic properties (pressure-volume curves, n = 24) of the respiratory system, and total lung capacity (TLC). Our data indicate that mass-specific TLC (sTLC, l • kg -1 ) does not differ between species or groups (odontocete vs. phocid) and agree with that estimated (TLC est ) from body mass ( M b ) by: TLC est = 0.135 • M b0.92 . Measured MAV was on average 7% of TLC, with a range from 0% to 16%. The pressure-volume curves were similar among species on inflation but diverged during deflation in phocids as compared with odontocetes. These differences provide a structural basis for observed species differences in depth at which lungs collapse and gas exchange ceases.
DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM: THE MISSING LINK BETWEEN STRATEGY AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE FOR DIGITAL BUSINESSES 1

Objective: This article aims to answer the following research question: How does the digital connectivity capacity of the digital ecosystem mediate the strategy’s impact on digital business performance? Design / methodology / approach: A survey was applied and for analysis, the modeling of structural equations of partial least squares (PLS-SEM) with the SmartPLS software was used. Results: The main results indicate that the ability to respond to market and consumer demands is essential for the performance of the digital business, and strategies must be established to increase the product portfolio and increase the speed of decision-making. Research limitations / implications: The main limitation of the study is due to the fact that the research companies are from the retail sector. Practical implications: It was found that companies need to consider the ecosystem in their digital transformation strategy, as it allows flexibility in the connection between business actors, positively influencing financial performance. Theoretical implications: The main theoretical implication is that the study presents a research model that seeks to measure the impact of digital strategies on digital business performance, mediated by the connectivity capacity of the ecosystem. Originality / value: The value of the study is due to the fact that the model is applied in the context of digital transformation, exploring digital capabilities.
Evaluating the energy impact of device parameters for DNN inference on edge

—With advancements in edge inference accelerating the shift from cloud to edge computing, there is a need for research on sustainable edge deployments of DNN workloads. However, the energy consumption of DNN workload execution is affected by numerous parameters and knobs. This paper studies the impact of hardware knobs (CPU and GPU frequency) across six different DNN inference workloads on two different Jetson edge devices. We find that default parameter settings need not be energy optimal; for example, tuning the CPU and GPU frequency can save as much as 19% energy over DVFS.
Effect of soil amendment with bauxite Bayer process residue (red mud) on the availability of phosphorus in very sandy soils

The chemical properties of red mud, a by-product of Bayer process refining of bauxite to alumina, make disposal of the material problematic. It is very alkaline (pH >11), contains a large amount of sesquioxides, and thus has a very high P retention capacity. These characteristics have encouraged its use as a soil amendment to enhance P retention of soils so as to reduce leaching of P. To investigate the effect of added red mud on the availability of existing P in sandy soils an incubation experiment was conducted using 3 types of red mud (untreated red mud, red mud amended with 5% gypsum, and red mud leached with dilute acid to remove all soluble salts) mixed with 12 podsol topsoils at rates of 0, 2.5, 5, 10, 20, and 40 t/ha. The mixtures were incubated wet for 28 days in the dark at 20°C, both with and without a microbial inhibitor. The decrease in 0.5 M sodium bicarbonate extractable phosphorus (bic-P) was 40–60% of initial bic-P at 40 t/ha of all 3 red muds after wet incubation without microbial suppressant. This decreased to 20–40% after drying or with addition of the microbial suppressant. The decrease in bic-P was not due to the increase in pH due to red mud application and appears to involve both chemical and microbial actions. The increase in soil pH of up to 3 units would be beneficial for pasture production at most rates of red mud application and the associated increase in electrical conductivity is not sufficient to affect plant growth.
Self-assembly Stability Compromises the Efficacy of Tryptophan-Containing Designed Anti-measles Virus Peptides

The resurgence of several infectious diseases, like measles, has driven the search for new chemotherapeutics to prevent and treat viral infections. Self-assembling antiviral peptides are a promising class of entry inhibitors capable of meeting this need. Fusion inhibitory peptides derived from the heptad repeat of the C-terminal (HRC) of the measles fusion protein, dimerized and conjugated with lipophilic groups, were found to be efficacious against measles virus. The structures of the self-assembled nanoparticles formed by these peptides modulated their activity. Based on the analysis of a L454W mutation in the fusion protein of a naturally occurring measles viral isolate, HRC peptides bearing the tryptophan residue at position 454 (HRC-L454W) were synthesized with the goal of improving membrane anchoring and manipulating self-assembly. Monomeric and dimeric peptides, whether conjugated or not to a single lipophilic group, reduced infection in vivo. Bis-conjugation with lipophilic groups, in contrast, abrogated activity. Based on the physicochemical properties, self-assembly and membrane insertion kinetics of the HRC-L454W peptides we show that bis-conjugation increases the stability and order of the inner core of the spontaneously self-assembled nanoparticles, resulting in their compaction. The presence of the tryptophan residue also increases steric hindrance effects in the nanoparticle of the dimeric peptides, contributing to inter-peptide cluster meshing, but the same level of compaction is not achieved. We propose that the highly ordered packing and stability of molecular clusters forming the inner core of self-assembled nanoparticles prevent efficient dissociation of the peptides in vivo, hindering their release and therefore eliminating their antiviral efficacy.
The influence of hydrologic conditions and peat oxia on the phosphorus and nitrogen dynamics of a conifer swamp

A mass balance approach was used to determine the factors influencing phosphorus and nitrogen dynamics in wetlands common to headwater catchments of the Precambrian Shield. The relationships of runoff, water level, water temperature, and anoxia to the annual and seasonal total phosphorus (TP) and total nitrogen (TN) retentions of a headwater Sphagnum-conifer swamp during 1987–1988 were examined. Annual retentions of TP (4%) and TN (10%) were low in the swamp. On an annual basis, inputs exceeded outputs of total reactive P, NO3-N, and NH4-N and outputs exceeded inputs of total unreactive P and total organic N. Seasonal trends in P and N retention were inversely correlated with runoff. Positive monthly retention coincided with low runoff and increased biotic assimilation during the growing season. Water table drawdown during the summer was associated with peat aeration and increased levels of P and N in surface and pore water. High levels of P and N in the swamp surface water during the fall and winter were coupled with increased runoff, saturated overland flow, and potentially low biotic assimilation resulting in a net release of TP and TN. Large flow through of waterborne inputs and flushing of regenerated P and N occurred during peak snowmelt runoff resulting in low annual retention.
Large-scale crustal deformation of the Tibetan Plateau

The topography, velocity, and strain fields calculated from a three-dimensional Newtonian viscous model for large-scale crustal deformation are generally in good agreement with results from geological, geodetic and earthquake studies in and around the Tibetan Plateau, provided that the model rheology incorporates a weak zone within the deep crust beneath the plateau (equivalent to a viscosity of 1012 Pa s within a 250-m-thick channel or 1018 Pa s within a 15-km-thick channel). Model studies and observations show a plateau at ∼5 km elevation with steep topographic gradients across the southern and northern plateau margins and more gentle gradients across the southeastern and northeastern margins. Rapid shortening strain is concentrated along the lower portions of the northern and southern plateau margins (at rates ∼20 mm/yr). Model results show north-south shortening (∼10 mm/yr) in reasonable agreement with GPS data (5–8 mm/yr of north-south shortening across the northern two thirds of the plateau) and east-west stretching (10–15 mm/yr) across the eastern half of the high plateau, in reasonable agreement with seismic, geologic, and GPS data. Upper crustal material moves eastward from the plateau proper into a lobe of elevated topography that extends to the south and east. Clockwise rotation of material around the east Himalayan syntaxis (at rates up to ∼10 mm/yr) occurs partly as a result of dextral shear between Indian and Asian mantle at depth and partly as a result of gravitational spreading from the high plateau to the south and east. There is little difference in model surface deformation for assumptions of moderately weak or extremely weak lower crust, except in southern and northern Tibet where margin-perpendicular extension occurs only for the case of an extremely weak lower crust. Our results suggest that the Tibetan Plateau is likely to have gone through a two-stage development. The first stage produced a long, narrow, high orogen whose height may have been comparable to the modern plateau. The second stage produced a plateau that grew progressively to the north and east. East-west stretching, eastward plateau growth and dextral rotation around the east Himalayan syntaxis probably did not begin until well into the second stage of plateau growth, perhaps becoming significant after ∼20 m.y. of convergence.
Novelty Search for Soft Robotic Space Exploration

The use of soft robots in future space exploration is still a far-fetched idea, but an attractive one. Soft robots are inherently compliant mechanisms that are well suited for locomotion on rough terrain as often faced in extra-planetary environments. Depending on the particular application and requirements, the best shape (or body morphology) and locomotion strategy for such robots will vary substantially. Recent developments in soft robotics and evolutionary optimization showed the possibility to simultaneously evolve the morphology and locomotion strategy in simulated trials. The use of techniques such as generative encoding and neural evolution were key to these findings. In this paper, we improve further on this methodology by introducing the use of a novelty measure during the evolution process. We compare fitness search and novelty search in different gravity levels and we consistently find novelty-based search to perform as good as or better than a fitness--based search, while also delivering a greater variety of designs. We propose a combination of the two techniques using fitness-elitism in novelty search to obtain a further improvement. We then use our methodology to evolve the gait and morphology of soft robots at different gravity levels, finding a taxonomy of possible locomotion strategies that are analyzed in the context of space-exploration.
ENSO seasonal synchronization theory

AbstractOne of the key characteristics of El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is its synchronization to the annual cycle, which manifests in the tendency of ENSO events to peak during boreal winter. Current theory offers two possible mechanisms to account the for ENSO synchronization: frequency locking of ENSO to periodic forcing by the annual cycle, or the effect of the seasonally varying background state of the equatorial Pacific on ENSO’s coupled stability. Using a parametric recharge oscillator (PRO) model of ENSO, the authors test which of these scenarios provides a better explanation of the observed ENSO synchronization.Analytical solutions of the PRO model show that the annual modulation of the growth rate parameter results directly in ENSO’s seasonal variance, amplitude modulation, and 2:1 phase synchronization to the annual cycle. The solutions are shown to be applicable to the long-term behavior of the damped model excited by stochastic noise, which produces synchronization characteristics that .