Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Interactions between Federal and State Climate Policies

In the absence of a federal policy to cap carbon emissions many states are moving forward with their own initiatives, which currently range from announcements of commitments to reduce greenhouse gases to a regional multi-state cap-and-trade program slated to begin in 2009. While federal legislation is expected in the next few years, it is unclear how such legislation will define the relationship between a federal cap and trade program and other state regulations. Assuming the introduction of a cap-and-trade program at the federal level, this paper analyzes the economic and environmental impacts of the range of possible interactions between the federal program and state programs. We find that the impacts of interaction depend on relative stringency of the federal and state program and overlap in source coverage. Where state programs are both duplicative of and more demanding than the federal cap, the effect is entirely redistributive of costs and emissions, with in-state sources facing higher marginal abatement costs. Also, differing marginal abatement costs among states create economic inefficiencies that make achievement of the climate goal more costly than it need be. These redistributive effects and the associated economic inefficiency are avoided under either federal preemption of duplicative state programs or a ‘carve out’ of state programs from the federal cap with linkage to the federal allowance market.
Diesel Exhaust Inhalation Elicits Acute Vasoconstriction in Vivo

Background Traffic-related air pollution is consistently associated with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Recent human and animal studies suggest that exposure to air pollutants affects vascular function. Diesel exhaust (DE) is a major source of traffic-related air pollution. Objectives Our goal was to study the effects of short-term exposure to DE on vascular reactivity and on mediators of vascular tone. Methods In a double-blind, crossover, controlled exposure study, 27 adult volunteers (10 healthy and 17 with metabolic syndrome) were exposed in randomized order to filtered air (FA) and each of two levels of diluted DE (100 or 200 μg/m3 of fine particulate matter) in 2-hr sessions. Before and after each exposure, we assessed the brachial artery diameter (BAd) by B-mode ultrasound and collected blood samples for endothelin-1 (ET-1) and catecholamines. Postexposure we also assessed endothelium-dependent flow-mediated dilation (FMD). Results Compared with FA, DE at 200 μg/m3 elicited a decrease in BAd (0.11 mm; 95% confidence interval, 0.02–0.18), and the effect appeared linearly dose related with a smaller effect at 100 μg/m3. Plasma levels of ET-1 increased after 200 μg/m3 DE but not after FA (p = 0.01). There was no consistent impact of DE on plasma catecholamines or FMD. Conclusions These results demonstrate that short-term exposure to DE is associated with acute endothelial response and vasoconstriction of a conductance artery. Elucidation of the signaling pathways controlling vascular tone that underlie this observation requires further study.
Equilibrated residual error estimator for edge elements

Reliable a posteriori error estimates without generic constants can be obtained by a comparison of the finite element solution with a feasible function for the dual problem. A cheap computation of such functions via equilibration is well known for scalar equations of second order. We simplify and modify the equilibration such that it can be applied to the curl-curl equation and edge elements. The construction is more involved for edge elements since the equilibration has to be performed on subsets with different dimensions. For this reason, Raviart-Thomas elements are extended in the spirit of distributions.
Psb29, a Conserved 22-kD Protein, Functions in the Biogenesis of Photosystem II Complexes in Synechocystis and Arabidopsisw⃞

Photosystem II (PSII), the enzyme responsible for photosynthetic oxygen evolution, is a rapidly turned over membrane protein complex. However, the factors that regulate biogenesis of PSII are poorly defined. Previous proteomic analysis of the PSII preparations from the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp PCC 6803 detected a novel protein, Psb29 (Sll1414), homologs of which are found in all cyanobacteria and vascular plants with sequenced genomes. Deletion of psb29 in Synechocystis 6803 results in slower growth rates under high light intensities, increased light sensitivity, and lower PSII efficiency, without affecting the PSII core electron transfer activities. A T-DNA insertion line in the PSB29 gene in Arabidopsis thaliana displays a phenotype similar to that of the Synechocystis mutant. This plant mutant grows slowly and exhibits variegated leaves, and its PSII activity is light sensitive. Low temperature fluorescence emission spectroscopy of both cyanobacterial and plant mutants shows an increase in the proportion of uncoupled proximal antennae in PSII as a function of increasing growth light intensities. The similar phenotypes observed in both plant and cyanobacterial mutants demonstrate that the function of Psb29 has been conserved throughout the evolution of oxygenic photosynthetic organisms and suggest a role for the Psb29 protein in the biogenesis of PSII.
Bearing fault diagnosis using time encoded signal processing and recognition

Many novel condition monitoring techniques have been invented in recent years, and the challenge lies in coming up with a highly reliable and cost efficient monitoring system which should be capable of tracking down and give an early indication of machinery’s faults. The focus of this paper is to develop advanced approaches based on advanced intelligent computations to diagnosis and prognosis bearing condition. TESPAR (Time Encoded Signal Processing and Recognition) is an effective and direct way for describing complex waveforms in digital terms. It is the generic terms set to a collection of novel signal analysis, recognition and classification approaches that can be applied to describe and classify various ranges of complicated band limited signals. The results show that vibration signal waveforms of bearing faults can be digitized and analyzed in terms of its epochs’ duration and shape which are the main parameters of the TESPAR technique that provides an accurate separation between different bearing faults with different degree of severity.
The optimization of contoured beam reflector antenna based on DEGL

The application of Differential Evolution algorithm with Global and Local neighborhoods (DEGL) in the shaping of the reflector antenna is presented. A single offset circular reflector antenna with a single feed is shaped in order to produce a contoured beam that covers the China territory in Ku band. Physical optics (PO) and Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD) are employed to accurately analysis the antenna. The optimization results, which prove that DEGL is efficient and powerful, are validated by the commercial software GRASP9.3. 01.
Structural , efficiency and income effects of direct payments : an analysis of different payment schemes for the German region '

The objective of this paper is to work out some fundamental dynamic effects on agricultural structure, farm incomes, and efficiency that result from decoupled income payments, the transfer of payments together with a progressive payment cut. To do so, we apply the agent-based model AgriPoliS (Agricultural Policy Simulator). AgriPoliS is a normative spatial and dynamic model of regional agricultural structures that takes account of actions and interactions between a large number of individually acting farms. The model is calibrated to the region 'Hohenlohe' in Baden-Württemberg which is characterised by intensive livestock farming on the plains and extensive cattle and dairy farming in more remote valleys. The policy simulations show that impacts on structural change, competitiveness, and income distribution vary greatly depending on how the policy scheme is implemented. If direct payments are completely decoupled from land use (no obligation to farm land) this has significant and lasting effects on the competitiveness of agriculture, structural change, farmers’ incomes and landuse. JEL-Classification: C63, R14, Q18
Chemoautotrophy in the redox transition zone of the Cariaco Basin: A significant midwater source of organic carbon production

During the CARIACO time series program, microbial standing stocks, bacterial production, and acetate turnover were consistently elevated in the redox transition zone (RTZ) of the Cariaco Basin, the depth interval (~240–450 m) of steepest gradient in oxidation‐reduction potential. Anomalously high fluxes of particulate carbon were captured in sediment traps below this zone (455 m) in 16 of 71 observations. Here we present new evidence that bacterial chemoautotrophy, fueled by reduced sulfur species, supports an active secondary microbial food web in the RTZ and is potentially a large midwater source of labile, chemically unique, sedimenting biogenic debris to the basin's interior. Dissolved inorganic carbon assimilation (27–159 mmol C m−2 d−1) in this zone was equivalent to 10%–333% of contemporaneous primary production, depending on the season. However, vertical diffusion rates to the RTZ of electron donors and electron acceptors were inadequate to support this production. Therefore, significant lateral intrusions of oxic waters, mixing processes, or intensive cycling of C, S, N, Mn, and Fe across the RTZ are necessary to balance electron equivalents. Chemoautotrophic production appears to be decoupled temporally from short‐term surface processes, such as seasonal upwelling and blooms, and potentially is more responsive to long‐term changes in surface productivity and deep‐water ventilation on interannual to decadal timescales. Findings suggest that midwater production of organic carbon may contribute a unique signature to the basin's sediment record, thereby altering its paleoclimatological interpretation.
Visual Languages and Logic

Diagrams of one sort or another have always been used as aids to abstract reasoning. Although many are informal mnemonics, reminding their authors about structures and relationships they have observed or deduced, considerable research effort has been expended on formalising graphical notations so that they may play a more central role in the application of logic to problems.
Design and Usage of a Process-Centric Collaboration Methodology for Virtual Organizations in Hybrid Environments

This article describes a collaboration methodology for virtual organizations where the processes can be automatically executed using a hybrid web service, grid or cloud resources. Typically, the process of deriving executable workflows from process models is cumbersome and can be automated only in part or specific to a particular distributed system. The approach introduced in this paper, exemplified by the construction industry field, integrates existing technology within a process-centric framework. The solution on the basis of a hybrid system architecture in conjunction with semantic methods for consistency saving and the framework for modeling VO processes and their automated transformation and execution are discussed in detail.
Potential relevance of audio-visual integration in mammals for computational modeling

The purpose of this study was to examine typically developing infants’ integration of audio-visual sensory information as a fundamental process involved in early word learning. One hundred sixty pre-linguistic children were randomly assigned to watch one of four counterbalanced versions of audio-visual video sequences. The infants’ eye-movements were recorded and their looking behavior was analyzed throughout three repetitions of exposure-test-phases. The results indicate that the infants were able to learn covariance between shapes and colors of arbitrary geometrical objects and to them corresponding nonsense words. Implications of audio-visual integration in infants and in non-human animals for modeling within speech recognition systems, neural networks and robotics are discussed. Index Terms: language acquisition, audio-visual, modeling
A study of the harmonics introduced by soft-starters in the induction motor starting current using continuous time-frequency transforms

The present paper presents an study on the harmonics introduced by thyristor-based soft-starters in the induction motor starting current. It is observed how the use of these starting elements leads to the amplification of the amplitudes of some specific harmonics. The application of continuous time-frequency decomposition tools enables to visualize the full transient evolutions of these harmonics and discern those that are amplified when using such drives. The identification of the current harmonics introduced or amplified by soft-starters is very useful when applying induction motor fault diagnosis techniques based on the analysis of the startup current, since it enables to discriminate between the components amplified by the soft-starters and those amplified by the fault. Soft-started laboratory motors are employed in this work to study the harmonics amplified by a thyristor-based soft-starter under non-ideal supply conditions. The results reveal that these signal processing tools may be very useful to analyze the components introduced by the drive and, at the time, discriminate them versus eventual fault-related harmonics.
Memory Hierarchy Issues in Multicore Architectures

Multicore architectures have introduced a new problem to parallel computing, namely, the management of hierarchical parallel caches. As with other architectures, a cache structure is designed to simulate a fast common memory. To address the challenge of management of these caches we a) introduce the Unified Multicore Model (UMM), a hierarchical arrangement of caches, b) present a general strategy to develop lower bounds on the memory traffic between a cache and its child caches, and c) present highly efficient implementations for two compute-intensive financial option pricing problems. The UMM seamlessly handles different types of multiple-core processors with varying degrees of sharing of caches at different levels. Our lower bound method is general and applies to a great variety of problems whose algorithms are described by straight-line programs. It extends results obtained previously for serial hierarchical memories [29]. The experimental work was done on a system with two Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5310 1.6GHz processors having a total of 8 cores. For option pricing problems we demonstrate a performance of 19.5 GFLOP, which is 38% of the theoretical peak for this system. Our code outperforms the compiler optimized and auto-parallelized code by a factor of up to 7.5.
The Causes of Rising Opinion Dissensus on Taiwan's Constitutional Court

Defined as the non-unanimity of judicial opinion as recorded by individual judges’ concurrences and/or dissents, the opinion dissensus on Taiwan’s Constitutional Court (TCC) has risen steadily and markedly in the past decade or so. What drives the Justices of TCC to write separately, and what has turned more Justices into frequent opinionators? This paper looks into the possible causal explanations of this intriguing phenomenon, and subjects them to empirical testing. We utilize two case-based measures — Concurrence Score (CS) and Dissent Score (DS) — as our dependent variables, and we identify and assess 27 independent variables in four categories: demographics, composition diversity, agenda (case-specific), and institutional and collegial. The findings of our multiple regression analysis demonstrate that opinion dissensus on TCC has been shaped by a multitude of factors. It matters who were the Justices as individuals, but so do what types of cases the Court heard, how long the Justices served together, and how diverse they were as a group. In particular, our findings that several dimensions of the Court’s composition diversity may be sources of opinion dissensus present a strong circumstantial evidence that group dynamics may have contributed to the production of opinion dissensus on TCC. Our analysis also found that CS and DS on TCC followed different patterns, though many TCC Justices appeared to have dissented on jurisprudential rather than ideological grounds.
Political and Economic Prospects for Mozambique and Angola

This paper discusses similarities and differences in the political and economic prospects for Angola and Mozambique. Central to the posing of these questions is the meaning and usefulness of putting these two countries in the same category. While both share some elements of a common colonial history, their similarities are in many respects outweighed by their differences. Angola is a country whose economy is dominated by huge oil revenues and whose governing party, the MPLA, recently won a military victory over its long time opposition, UNITA. UNITA, though now much weakened, nevertheless represents the legitimate interests of a large segment of the population, whose home provinces are the most agriculturally favored in the country. Mozambique is a country with many fewer natural resources, but in which the ruling party, FRELIMO, has fully embraced a policy of liberalization and opening of the economy. Its main opposition party, RENAMO, originated as a creature of foreign powers and lost its principal distinguishing feature of anti-Marxism when the governing party itself abandoned Marxism beginning a decade after independence.
Visualization of Nonlinear Classification Models in Neuroimaging - Signed Sensitivity Maps

Classification models are becoming increasing popular tools in the analysis of neuroimaging data sets. Besides obtaining good prediction accuracy, a competing goal is to interpret how the classifier works. From a neuroscientific perspective, we are interested in the brain pattern reflecting the underlying neural encoding of an experiment defining multiple brain states. In this relation there is a great desire for the researcher to generate brain maps, that highlight brain locations of importance to the classifiers decisions. Based on sensitivity analysis, we develop further procedures for model visualization. Specifically we focus on the generation of summary maps of a nonlinear classifier, that reveal how the classifier works in different parts of the input domain. Each of the maps includes sign information, unlike earlier related methods. The sign information allows the researcher to assess in which direction the individual locations influence the classification. We illustrate the visualization procedure on a real data from a simple functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment.
Interactive Liver Tumor Segmentation Using Graph-cuts and Watershed

We present in this paper an application of minimal surfaces and Markov random fields to the segmentation of liver tumors. The originality of the work consists in applying these models to the region adjacency graph of a watershed transform. We detail the assumptions and the approximations introduced in these models by using a region graph instead of a pixel graph. This strategy leads to an interactive method that we use to delineate tumors in 3D CT images. We detail our strategy to achieve relevant segmentations of these structures and compare our results to hand made segmentations done by experienced radiologists. This paper summarizes our participation to the MICCAI 2008 workshop called: “3D segmentation in the clinic : A Grand Challenge II”.
Feature extraction: on the importance of zoning information in cursive script recognition

Cursive script has many ambiguities. Feature extraction, by locating some specific characteristics of a writing sample in isolation or in combination with other features, can minimise the effect of these ambiguities. There are many features that can be extracted from any given sample. Information about the expected vertical letter position within the word, the zoning information, is envisaged to be a powerful criterion. This paper presents the results of experiments carried out to evaluate the usefulness of zoning information. The influence of the applied zoning criteria was varied and the results were observed. A discussion of the way the zoning information can be used to improve the recognition rate and the way in which an existing recognizer is modified to make use of this information is presented.
Macrophage lineage cells in inflammation: characterization by colony-stimulating factor-1 (CSF-1) receptor (c-Fms), ER-MP58, and ER-MP20 (Ly-6C) expression.

Macrophage populations resident in tissues and at sites of inflammation are heterogeneous and with local proliferation sometimes evident. Using the convenient murine peritoneal cavity as an inflammation model, the appearance of macrophage lineage cells was followed with time in both thioglycollate- and sodium periodate-induced exudates. The cells were characterized by their proliferative response in vitro in response to colony-stimulating factor-1 (CSF-1) (or macrophage colony-stimulating factor [M-CSF]), particularly by their ability to form colonies in agar, in combination with flow cytometry (surface marker expression and forward and side scatter characteristics). We propose that c-Fms (CSF-1 receptor), unlike other markers, is a uniformly expressed and specific marker suitable for the detection of macrophage-lineage cells in tissues, both in the steady state and after the initiation of an inflammatory reaction. It was shown that the bone marrow myeloid precursor markers, ER-MP58 and ER-MP20 (Ly-6C), but not ER-MP12 (PECAM-1), are expressed by a high proportion of macrophage-lineage cells in the inflamed peritoneum. The macrophage colony-forming cells (M-CFCs) in a 16-hour thioglycollate-induced exudate were phenotyped as c-Fms+ERMP12-20+58+, properties consistent with their being more mature than bone marrow M-CFCs. It is proposed that ER-MP58, as well as ER-MP20, may be a useful marker for distinguishing inflammatory macrophage-lineage cells from the majority of those residing normally in tissues.
A Proxy-Based Authentication and Billing Scheme With Incentive-Aware Multihop Forwarding for Vehicular Networks

To support the high mobility of vehicles, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defines proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) to reduce the signaling overhead. However, the design of PMIPv6 does not thoroughly consider security issues, such as man-in-the-middle and impersonation attacks. Moreover, the traditional authentication/authorization/accounting (AAA) server architecture in PMIPv6 could impede the localized advantage because of the long-distance delivery between a mobile access gateway (MAG) and the AAA server. In practice, the billing is a crucial issue that is, unfortunately, rarely discussed in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In this paper, a local-based authentication and billing scheme is proposed to lessen the long-distance communication overhead. An incentive-aware multihop forwarding procedure is also offered to stimulate the help of forwarding others' messages in a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) environment. Therefore, the proposed billing scheme is designed for full VANETs, including the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and V2V environments. Lightweight keyed hash functions and batch verification are employed for efficient computation and concise communication overhead. Only a few signatures are used in the first message to ensure the nonrepudiation payment approval. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient, compared with a conventional public-key based scheme. The advantages of the proposed scheme include: 1) mutual authentication and session key agreement; 2) privacy preservation; 3) confidentiality, integrity, free-riding resistance, double-spending avoidance, and nonrepudiation properties; and 4) efficient billing and payment clearance.