Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Jack pine becomes more vulnerable to cavitation with increasing latitudes under doubled CO 2 concentration

Trees may migrate northward in response to climate change and become exposed to new photoperiod and soil moisture regimes. This study assessed the impacts of photoperiod and its interaction with soil moisture and carbon dioxide concentration ([CO2]) on the hydraulic conductivity in jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.) and its vulnerability to xylem embolism. Seedlings were exposed to 400 vs. 950 mol·mol−1 [CO2], 60%–70% vs. 30%–40% (of field capacity) soil moisture, and photoperiods of seed origin and 5° and 10° north of seed origin in greenhouses. Cavitation vulnerability curves were measured for determining the xylem pressure at which 50% hydraulic conductivity was lost ( PLC50). It was found that elevated [CO2] significantly increased hydraulic conductivity, whereas low soil moisture decreased it. Under elevated [CO2], the xylem became progressively more vulnerable to embolism with changes in photoperiod regime from the seed origin to 10° north of the seed origin, as indicated by the progressively less negative PLC50. However, no such a trend was detected under the ambient [CO2]. The results suggest that the species may become less resistant to drought as the atmospheric [CO2] increases, hindering the northward migration or seed transfers. Even within its current natural distribution range, trees near its northern boundary of the range may be more vulnerable to embolism as the atmospheric [CO2] increases even without any change in moisture conditions.
INFLUENCE OF CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICERS (CEO’S) COMPENSATION ON PERFORMANCE OF COMPANIES QUOTED AT THE NAIROBI SECURITIES EXCHANGE

Globally, for instance in America, The Enron scandal was revealed in October 2001, and eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company and the dissolution of Arthur Anderson, which was one of the largest audit and accountancy firm in the world. Locally, data available from NSE revealed that Uchumi supermarkets Limited, was put under statutory receivership in the year 2006. The evidence cited that Uchumi Supermarket was a case of misappropriation of funds by the top management. Would C.E. O compensation be the cause of the problem? The general objective of this research is to analyze the influence of (CEOs) compensation on performance of companies quoted at Nairobi Securities Exchange. The study adopted descriptive research. The population of interest in this study consisted of all the CEOs of companies quoted in the NSE. Using simple random sampling, a sample of 183 was selected at random from a target population of 840 employees in the 10 sectors of NSE. The data was analysed using SPSS and the Microsoft excel to generate quantitative reports. The research International Journal of Economics and Finance Vol.1, Issue 2, 2013 http://www.ijsse. org ISSN 2307-6305 Page | 2 concludes that, most of the total incentives of CEO are stock based incentives, which is greater than pay based incentives. Positive relationship exists between the cash-flow ownership of the largest shareholder and firm value. Cash compensation is negatively related to the percentage of stockholdings of insider directors and executives. Research concludes that directors need less fixed cash compensation since they already benefit directly from the value of their shares
GNSS-assisted accurate corridor mapping with small UAV

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS), the accurate camera positions at exposure can be known and the GNSS-assisted bundle block adjustment (BBA) approach is possible for image orientation. Several flights are conducted on a dike with a small UAV embedded with a metric camera and GNSS receiver. The multi-lever-arm estimation within the BBA procedure makes it possible to merge image blocks of different configurations such as nadir and oblique images and thus achieve a better accuracy. Due to the substantial cost of ground control point (GCP) network establishment, a minimum number of GCPs is expected while maintaining the 3D point accuracy. By adding oblique image block to nadir image block or merging nadir image blocks of different flight heights, a 3D point accuracy of ∼ 5 cm is reached with no GCPs on a corridor acquisition scene of ∼ 600 m. This 3D point accuracy is as well achieved with solely a nadir image block by providing a good a priori camera calibration. With one GCP in the middle of the image block, the vertical accuracy is significantly improved and a 3D point accuracy of ∼ 1.0 cm is attained.
Transient Classification Using Markov Methods

The detection and classification of acoustic transients has remained a difficult problem because of the lack of tractable models to adequately describe the phe­ nomenon. The signals are typically non-Gaussian, nonstationary, and are frequently observed in a low signal-to-noise ratio environment. On a short-time basis however there is information in the evolution of the power spectrum that can be ap­ plied to their detection and classification. This paper describes results of research in transient classification using hidden Markov models to represent the tran­ sient events. The models use features of the short­ time power spectrum as observations that evolve ac­ cording to an underlying Markov chain that is not di­ rectly observed. Comparison of classification results for different types of features on acoustically simu­ lated data is reported.
Evaluación de la jerarquía de cache en procesadores multinúcleo

This project focuses on the evaluation of different real cache hierarchies (based on the latest Intel designs). It uses the Multi2Sim simulator to obtain information about the utilization of each level of the hierarchy when the processor executes several applications. The information obtained covers all levels of the cache hierarchy. Initially the hierarchy of a single core processor will be studied. Then, we add more cores and increase the complexity of the cache hierarchy, in order to add more cores and complexity to the hierarchy. The ultimate goal is to simulate hierarchies close to those of recent commercial processors. Comparing the results of the different studies, we can infer how cache hierarchy contention impacts on the performance of each application.
Selective prefetching: prefetching when only required

Cache memories are commonly used to reduce the number of slower lower-level memory accesses, thereby improving the memory hierarchy performance. However, high cache miss-ratio can severely degrade system performance. It is therefore necessary to anticipate the cache misses to reduce their frequency. Prefetching, is one such technique, which allows memory systems to import data into the cache before the processor needs it. Aggressive prefetching can significantly reduce cache misses but may lead to cache pollution and also increase memory traffic. An innovative hardware-based prefetching technique is proposed which overcomes these problems while providing improved cache hit-rate. Our trace driven simulations show an improvement of around 60% in the miss rates for an instruction cache employing the LRU-FP block replacement algorithm with the proposed pre-fetch scheme as compared to the miss rates obtained due to a sequential prefetch mechanism.
Covert Channel sobre SSL Heartbeat

This work shows a way to establish a covert channel over TLS, specifically using the sub protocol SSL Heartbeat. This sub protocol was wrongly implemented by openssl, and launched a worldwide alert when hundred of thousands of web sites, supposed to be secure, could expose their digital certificate’s private keys. A covert channel is a communication channel that allows a process to transfer information in a manner that violates the system’s security policy. In our work a covert channel was achieved by modifying the communicating agents in both sides: client and server. The modified client sends a special built HeartbeatRequest message containing the activation sequence. For a standard server, the protocol continues in the conventional way. The modified server instead, after receiving the activation sequence, sends the hidden information using a HeartbeatResponse message. When the server receives a standard HeartbeatRequest, it responds normally in order to hide its behavior and to avoid being detected. The design and implementation of this covert channel allow sending data to a client from a server that, from the point of view of the TLS protocol, acts as usual managing its websites. These data are masked, so they become invisible to external agents. Resumen— Se presenta una alternativa para establecer un canal encubierto de comunicación (covert channel) sobre el protocolo TLS, particularmente sobre el sub protocolo SSL Heartbeat. Este sub protocolo fue el que, mal implementado por el programa openssl, permitió que recientemente se provocara una alerta mundial ante la posibilidad de que cientos de miles de sitios web supuestamente seguros pudieran exponer las claves privadas de sus certificados digitales. Un covert channel es un canal de comunicación que permite a un proceso transferir información violando alguna polı́tica de seguridad. En nuestro trabajo, este se logra a través de la modificación de los agentes que actúan tanto del lado servidor como del lado cliente. El cliente modificado envı́a un paquete HeartbeatRequest especialmente construido con la correspondiente secuencia de activación. Para un servidor que sigue el protocolo en forma correcta, el mismo continúa de la manera habitual. El servidor modificado, ante la secuencia de activación, envı́a la información subrepticia a través del paquete HeartbeatResponse. Ante un paquete estándar HeartbeatRequest, la entidad comunicante responderá de manera tradicional para evitar o dificultar su detección. El diseño e implementación del canal encubierto presentados permiten enviar datos hacia un cliente desde un servidor que, desde el punto de vista del protocolo TLS, actúa con normalidad manteniendo su correspondiente sitio web. Estos datos resultan indetectables por agentes externos.
Evaluation of Lightweight TPMs for Automotive Software Updates over the Air

Given the growing importance of Information Technology in today’s vehicles with their ever increasing connectivity and its safety relevance, it is obvious that security technologies need to be employed and improved. Besides secure coding efforts, many of the attack classes and scenarios demand the embodiment of Hardware Security Modules such as the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Platform Module. This paper discusses the use cases and benefits of TPM usage in automotive ECUs. We further show and evaluate how the Automotive Thin Profile released by the Trusted Computing Group can be used to secure Software OverThe-Air updates. We show in detail, how this use case can be addressed by a combination of different levels of TPM implementations – namely full TPMs and Automotive Thin TPMs. In order to give an estimation of the necessary implementation cost, the first ever measurements of required code and RAM sizes for different TPMs and an overview of TPM implementations are provided.
Fuel economy improvement based on a many-gear shifting strategy

Considering the engine operating condition in terms of engine load and engine speed, a fuzzy decision making system has been developed. The objective was to controlling the engine operating point in the engine torque-rpm map, in order to enhance fuel economy. The main idea stems from the approach of tracking the defined target curve in the engine map similar to the CVT control criteria. To provide resemblance between a traditional geared transmission and a CVT, a many-gear transmission concept was introduced. A Fuzzy control was utilized by defining proper membership functions for the inputs and output. The efficient fuel consumption curve in the engine map was taken as the target of controller. The effect of engine output power on fuel consumption has also been taken into consideration. Making use of ADVISOR software, vehicle simulations was performed for the many-gear base case and a very good consistency was found with the CVT case. As a result the fuel consumption was found to become considerably less than existing values. The developed strategy was then applied to other cases including conventional manual and automatic transmissions and improvements in the fuel economy was observed. Copyright © 2012 International Energy and Environment Foundation All rights reserved.
Silicon semiconductor memory based on NAND logic is fast, non-volatile and very popular for temporary computer-storage applications such as caching for hard-disks and portable data storage.

This papers reviews the increasing role of NAND flash memory in storage architectures. NAND flash has enjoyed a phenomenal growth rate in storage capacities as well as a steady decline in pricing during the past few years. These developments have enabled NAND to enter and possibly change or displace some traditional storage architectures. However, besides cost, NAND flash memory has some reliability and performance issues that will slow its adoption into all storage architectures. This paper will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this technology and the implications to the current and possible future storage architectures. Moreover, we will analyze NAND flash future density and costs trends and compare them with the traditional hard disk drive.
CMRI study of cardiac structure and function in the patients with pulmonary heart disease in high altitude areas

Objective: This present study aims to evaluate the cardiac structure and function of patients with pulmonary heart disease and healthy controls in residing in high-altitude regions. Methods: Cardiac structure and function indexes, as well as right ventricular myocardial mass (RVMM), were determined in patients with pulmonary heart disease (pulmonary heart disease group, n=18) and healthy controls (control group, n=20) by Skyra 3.0T magnetic resonance imaging. Results: Cardiac structure indexes were higher in the pulmonary heart disease group than in the control group, and some indexes were significant different between the pulmonary heart disease group and control group (P<0.05). Furthermore, right ventricular end-diastolic volume (RVEDV), right ventricular end-systolic volume (RVESV) and RVMM were higher in the pulmonary heart disease group than in the control group. In addition, right ventricular stroke volume (RVSV) and right ventricular ejection fraction (RVEF) were lower in pulmonary heart disease group than in the control group. Differences in RVSV, RVEF and RVMM between the pulmonary heart disease group and control group were statistically significant (P<0.05). Left ventricular end-diastolic volume (LVEDV) and left ventricular end-systolic volume (LVESV) were higher in the pulmonary heart disease group than in the control group, and left ventricular stroke volume (LVSV) and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) were lower in the pulmonary heart disease group than in the control group. Differences in LVSV and LVEF between the pulmonary heart disease group and control group were statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusion: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) can accurately evaluate cardiac structure and function in patients with pulmonary heart disease, and provide an image basis for the clinical assessment of cardiac structure and function, especially in the aspect of right ventricular cardiac function.
Tomo PTV using 3 D Scanning Illumination and Telecentric Imaging

The article discusses the tomographic reconstruction of particles for the flow visualisation technique PTV (Particle Tracking Velocimetry) and its application on the real flow of a vortex ring using 3D scanning illumination and telecentric imaging. In standard 3D PTV an increasing number density of particles increases the problem of stereo-matching and overlapping particle images limiting the resolution for a three camera set-up to 0.005 ppp (particles per pixel)[5]. Therefore, in classical 3D PTV the maximum number of observable trajectories is limited to the order of 103 in a typical cubic volume. This number can be increased by developments like Scanning PTV [5,7]. However, the mentioned limitations still exist. Tomo PTV in combination with a scanning illumination overcomes these limitations within at least a doubling of the spatial resolution of every single scanned volume. The model flow to determine the measurement method of Tomo PTV described herein is a vortex ring.
A brief literature review on recent progress in nanopore thin film-based optical sensors

Anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) material is broadly used in biomedical and biosensing applications nowadays. Most of the AAO nanopore thin film sensors are usually fabricated on a glass substrate. By bonding the AAO nanopore thin film sensors to a layer of transparent polymer thin film (pTF) made with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a new type of flexible nanopore sensors has been developed. The AAO thin film based flexible sensing platform has been used for pressure sensing, temperature sensing, angular sensing, and for disease biomarker detection. This short review will summarize some recent progress using the AAO nanopore thin film as the drug storage and release device, the flexible optical nanopore sensors with improved resolution, and several applications based on the optical properties.
Geophysics Dissertation AbstractsJoint and constrained inversion of geophysical data for improved imaging of aquifer structure and processes

vii 1 Introduction . 1 1.1 Introduction to hydrogeophysics . 2 1.2 Geophysical methods for aquifer characterization . 3 1.3 The record project and the Thur River field sites . 5 1.4 Data integration . 8 1.5 Time-lapse inversion . 12 1.6 Objectives and structure of this thesis . 15 2 Aquifer zonation based on joint inversions . 17 Abstract . 18 2.1 Introduction . 18 2.2 Methodology . 21 2.3 Field site, parameters, and procedures common to the synthetic and field examples . 26 2.4 Synthetic example . 30 2.5 Field example . 34 2.6 Hydrogeophysical interpretation . 38 2.7 Discussion . 41 2.8 Conclusions . 42 3 Structural time-lapse joint inversion . 43 Abstract . 44 3.1 Introduction . 44 3.2 Methods . 45 3.3 Results . 47 3.4 Concluding remarks . 53
The effect of component recognition on flexibility and speech recognition performance in a spoken question answering system

A spoken question answering system that recognizes questions as full sentences performs well when users ask one of the questions defined. A system that recognizes component words and finds an equivalent defined question might be more flexible, but is likely to have decreased speech recognition performance, leading to a loss in overall system success. The research described in this document compares the advantage in flexibility to the loss in recognition performance when using component recognition. Questions posed by participants were processed by a system of each type. As expected, the component system made frequent recognition errors while detecting words (word error rate of 31%). In comparison, the full system made fewer errors while detecting full sentences (sentence error rate of 10%). Nevertheless, the component system succeeded in providing proper responses to 76% of the queries posed, while the full system responded properly to only 46%. Four variations of the traditional tf-idf weighting method were compared as applied to the matching of short text strings (fewer than 10 words). It was found that the general approach was successful in finding matches, and that all four variations compensated for the loss in speech recognition performance to a similar degree. No significant difference due to the variations in weighting was detected in the results.
Recurrent neural networks and time series prediction

Uses a parametric statistical framework to understand the effect of input representation on performance for nonlinear prediction of time series. In particular, considerations of input representation lead directly to choices between feedforward and recurrent neural networks. It is shown that feedforward networks are nonlinear autoregressive models and that recurrent networks can model a larger class of processes, including nonlinear autoregressive moving average models. For some processes, feedback allows recurrent networks to achieve better predictions than can be made with a feedforward network with a finite number of inputs. The results are confirmed on a problem in power system regional load forecasting. <<ETX>>
A DDL approach to learning noun and verb phrases in the beginner level EFL classroom

In this study, we combine learning grammar through “observation, hypothesis formation, use” in a series of hands-on DDL (data-driven learning) activities with a CALL (computer-assisted language learning) vocabulary learning program for teaching TOEIC-specific grammar and vocabulary to beginner level Japanese university students. First, students follow carefully crafted guidelines to explore the structures of noun or verb phrases using parallel Japanese-English concordancing lines from a specially developed Japanese-English newspaper corpus (Utiyama & Isahara 2003) and a bilingual concordancer (Barlow 2004). Next, the vocabulary is consolidated with a 30minute CALL program activity. Finally, they complete follow-up activities using targeted vocabulary to reinforce the grammar patterns discovered through the DDL activities. The evaluation of learning outcomes showed this course design was useful for learning grammar basics such as recognizing parts of speech and derivations, and understanding the basic structures of noun phrases and verb phrases, in addition to the more complex grammar questions such as those found on TOEIC. In response to questionnaires, students reported that they enjoyed this course and believed it was useful for both grammar and vocabulary learning. As a modification of a previous study in an on-going project, this study included new follow-up exercises which students also found useful.
Guided Person Image Synthesis

This paper presents a novel method to manipulate the visual appearance (pose and attribute) of a person image according to natural language descriptions. Our method can be boiled down to two stages: 1) text guided pose generation and 2) visual appearance transferred image synthesis. In the first stage, our method infers a reasonable target human pose based on the text. In the second stage, our method synthesizes a realistic and appearance transferred person image according to the text in conjunction with the target pose. Our method extracts sufficient information from the text and establishes a mapping between the image space and the language space, making generating and editing images corresponding to the description possible. We conduct extensive experiments to reveal the effectiveness of our method, as well as using the VQA Perceptual Score as a metric for evaluating the method. It shows for the first time that we can automatically edit the person image from the natural language descriptions.
Sparse Nonparametric Dynamic Graphical Models

We propose a Sparse Nonparametric Dynamic Graphical Model for financial application. We base our model on multiple CAViaR quantile regression models, and we address the issue of the quantile crossing for this type of semi-parametric models. We show how to jointly estimate the multiple quantile levels by exploiting the conditions on the parameters and setting the estimation as a linear constrained optimization problem. We employ the defined non-crossing Multiple CAViaR model as non-parametric estimation of the marginal distributions to get a sparse dynamic graphical model . Abstract Proponiamo un modello grafico non parametrico e dinamico per applicazioni finanziarie. Stimiamo modelli di regressione quantilica multipla di tipo CAViaR, ed affrontiamo il tema del non crossing pe modelli semi parametrici. Mostriamo come stimare congiuntamente i diversi livelli garantendo la propriet di non crossing e come usare questi come stime di distribuzioni marginali per ottenere un modello grafico che risulti sparso e dinamico.