Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insect assemblages and their preference for Lupinus albus and

While lupin has undergone extensive research to ascertain its suitability for growth as forage or grain legume crop, the present trend is for research to be centered on its applicability in the seed protein and oil industry. Study of the literature showed that no intensive study of the lupin insect fauna had been carried out in Bulgaria. The purpose of this study was to identify the insect assemblages associated with Lupinus albus and L. luteus, as well as the insect preference for them. Thrips sampling was made by the tapping-method, aphids were directly counted on the plants and the composition and population density of other species were recorded by sweepings. Insect fauna was studied for the first time in Bulgaria. The fauna was represented on L. albus by 64 species, belonging to eight orders, 28 families and 57 genera, including 23 beetles, 25 hemipteras, five thrips, three butterflies, three bees, one leaf aphid, two grasshoppers, one leafminer and one green lacewing. L. luteus had similar species composition but was less preferred by insects. The use of lupin cultivars with shorter and intense reproductive periods, with a lower content of crude protein and phosphorus, would give an environmentally friendly protection against insect pests, which would be suitable for an organic production system.
TIME-DEPENDENT SEISMIC HAZARD ABOVE THE SOUTH AMERICA SUBDUCTION ZONE IN CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN CHILE

The Peru-Chile portion of the South America subduction zone is one of the most seismically active regions in the world and the source of some of the largest known earthquakes, including the 1960 moment magnitude (M) 9.5 Great Chile earthquake and more recently, the 2010 M 8.8 Maule earthquake. Since the beginning of the historical record in the mid1500s, there have been at least 10 earthquakes of M 8 and larger principally due to rupture of the megathrust based on reported tsunamis. We have performed probabilistic seismic hazard analyses (PSHA) for four cities above the subduction zone in central and southern Chile. We have included a time-dependent model for the region's most significant seismic source, the two southernmost segments of the South America subduction zone megathrust: the Concepcion-Valparaiso and Southern Chile segments. Our time-dependent model is based principally on the historical record and the challenge was to characterize the significant uncertainties in the segmentation, recurrence, and maximum magnitudes of the megathrust earthquakes that have occurred and will occur along the subduction zone. The PSHA seismic source model also includes crustal faults, crustal background seismicity, and the Wadati-Benioff zone. A number of crustal faults are located above the South America megathrust although it is unclear whether these are independent seismic sources or rupture coseismically with the megathrust. An additional critical issue that needs to be addressed in the PSHA is the selection of ground motion prediction models. We used the Next Generation of Attenuation (NGA)-West2 models for the crustal seismic sources and recent global models for both the megathrust and the Wadati-Benioff zone. We also compared these latter models with the strong motion data from the 2010 Maule earthquake. Assuming generic soil site conditions, we computed the hazard for the cities of Valparaiso, Concepcion, Temuco, and Puerto Montt. We compare our probabilistic hazard results with a time-independent model of the two southern segments of the South America megathrust to evaluate the impact of the time-dependent model on the hazard in central and southern Chile.
Minimax strategy for Stratified Sampling for Monte Carlo

We consider the problem of stratified sampling for Monte-Carlo integration. We model this problem in a multi-armed bandit setting, where the arms represent the strata, and the goal is to estimate a weighted average of the mean values of the arms. We propose a strategy that samples the arms according to an upper bound on their standard deviations and compare its estimation quality to an ideal allocation that would know the standard deviations of the strata. We provide two pseudo-regret analyses: a distribution-dependent bound of order Õ(n−3/2) that depends on a measure of the disparity of the strata, and a distribution-free bound Õ(n−4/3) that does not. We also provide the first problem independent (minimax) lower bound for this problem and demonstrate that MC-UCB matches this lower bound both in terms of number of samples n and in terms of number of strata K. Finally, we link the pseudo-regret with the difference between the mean squared error on the estimated weighted average of the mean values of the arms, and the optimal “oracle” strategy: this provides us also a problem dependent and a problem independent rate for this measure of performance and, as a corollary, asymptotic optimality.
Economic Inequality in Preventive Maternal and Child Health Care A Study of Rural India

This paper examines inequalities in terms of economic well being in the preventive care of maternal and child health (MCH) in rural India based on a wealth index constructed from available information. The study makes use of the data of District Level Household Survey (DLHS-Round II, 2002-2004) under the Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) project. Frequency distribution and bi-variate analysis depicts the scenario of MCH services of women and children belonging to different economic strata and according to their background characteristics. Multilevel analysis has been carried out to find out the individual as well as community level effect on utilizing preventive health care services. A summary measure of Gini concentration index has been used to capture the variation in the wealth index. The findings reveal that economic well-being status of the household to which women or children belong, plays a crucial role in explaining the variation in service utilization. There is concentration of women deprived to take adequate maternal care amongst the poorest wealth quintile. Inequality in utilization is found to be more pronounced for between groups compared to within the wealth quintiles. The paper notes that factors that can be easily influenced like improved access to facilities, through both supply side initiatives as well as generating social awareness regarding the importance of preventive care, and affordability of the households towards usage of these services needs to be stressed upon in national policies.
Chemical Signal Guided Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Shuo

Olfaction is a long distance sense, which is widely used by animals for foraging or reproductive activities (Dusenbery, 1992; Vickers, 2000; Zimmer & Butman, 2000): homing by Pacific salmon (Hassler & Scholz, 1983), homing by green sea turtles (Lohmann, 1992), foraging by Antarctic procellariiform seabirds (Nevitt, 2000), foraging by lobsters (Basil, 1994), foraging by blue crabs (Wiesburg & Zimmer-Faust, 1994), mating and foraging by insects (Cardé & Mafra-Neto, 1997). Olfaction plays a significant role in natural life of most animals. For some animals, olfactory cues are far more effective than visual or auditory cues in search for objects such as foods and nests (Bell & Tobin, 1982). Although odor sensing is far simpler than vision or hearing, navigation in a chemical diffusion field is still not well understood (Lytridis et al., 2006). Therefore, this powerful primary sense has rarely been used inside the robotics community. For many military and civilian applications in turbulent fluid flow environment, it would be useful to detect and track a chemical plume to its source. Chemical Plume Tracing (CPT) program, which is sponsored by US Office of Naval Research (ONR), seeks to learn how animals successfully accomplish similar tasks, and to develop algorithms for plume tracing using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). AUVs capable of such chemical plume tracing feats would be of great significance for many applications, e.g., the detection of chemical leaks, locating unexploded ordnance, and locating biologically interesting phenomenon such as thermal vents. This chapter describes the development and field test of a chemical signal guided REMUS AUV system to find a chemical plume, trace the chemical plume to its source, declare reliably the source location, and map the plume source area after source declaration. The basic idea of the chemical signal guided AUV system is illustrated in Fig. 1. An AUV is constrained to maneuver within a region referred to as the OpArea. Within the OpArea the AUV should search for a specified chemical, for which a binary sensor is available. The mission starts with the AUV searching the OpArea for the chemical plume. A binary sensor outputs 1.0 if the chemical concentration is above threshold or 0.0 if the chemical concentration is below threshold. If above threshold chemical is detected, the AUV should trace the chemical plume to its source and accurately declare the source location. Following the source declaration, additional AUV maneuvers might be desired to acquire additional data, possibly using auxiliary sensors. The plume depicted in Fig. 1 is greatly simplified. O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w . in te ch w eb . o rg
The role of background in recognition of character pairs

Humans have little difficulty reading handwriting. There are some indications that background has an effect in recognizing familiar objects. Characters can be seen as familiar objects for humans as well. We explore the use of features from the background between character pairs as a means to successfully recognize the characters themselves. What is the role of background in recognition of character pairs? In the cases of machine font stimuli and handwritten stimuli we test if humans are capable of achieving successful recognition using background features. We show them extracted background blobs from character pairs that appear rarely, occasionally or frequently in Dutch text. Results indicate that humans can accomplish recognition with a average success rate of 95% for the machine font condition and 38% for the handwriting condition. This implies background between characters hold features suitable for future character recognition applications.
Shallow Neural Networks, Gradient Descent, and Overparameterization

This paper focuses on regression using fully connected one-hidden-layer ReLU activated neural networks. Weights are updated via gradient descent algo-rithm. We show that when we have the number of hidden nodes exactly as needed, there exist bad local minimums, so the convergence is not guaranteed. However, in the over-parameterized regime, we show that, under certain reasonable conditions, gradient descent will always ﬁnd the global minimum. And due to the implicit regularization of gradient descent, the solution often has small generalization error surprisingly. We show the above with theoretical and some experimental support, thus accounting for the great success of neural networks nowadays.
Examining Current and Future BCI Applications for People with Disabilities

Over the past decade Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) have gone from being a bundle of concepts, to laboratory experiments, to applications that are now being developed by students and researchers. These applications are now being used in the daily lives of many disabled people. The current solutions that have been developed show us the vast potential of BCI applications being capable of effectively supporting, improving and enriching the lives of those diagnosed with neuromuscular disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This article will present several proven BCI applications that aim to solve problems in the areas of communication, computer management, Internet browsing and entertainment. Along with this, current limitations of BCI applications and future work and enhancements to BCIs and electroencephalography (EEG) systems are also presented. Author
FAN3852-Microphone Pre-Amplifier with Digital Output

Description The FAN3852 integrates a pre−amplifier, LDO, and ADC that converts Electret Condenser Microphone (ECM) outputs to digital Pulse Density Modulation (PDM) data streams. The pre−amplifier accepts analog signals from the ECM and drives an over−sampled sigma delta Analog−to−Digital Converter (ADC) and outputs PDM data. The PDM digital audio has the advantage of noise rejection and easy interface to mobile handset processors. The FAN3852 features an integrated LDO and is powered from the system supply rails up to 3.63 V, with low power consumption of only 0.85 mW and less than 20 W in Power−Down Mode.
BEACHES AND PEACHES : COMMON PRONUNCIATION ERRORS AMONG L 1 SPANISH SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

The following descriptive study aims to illustrate several types of common errors for L1 Spanish speakers of English. It describes four common phonetic distinctions that cause such speakers difficulties in English, including /p/ versus /b/ in a word-initial position, /i/ and / /, / / versus /ow/, and the final voicing distinction between /t/ and /d/. Targeted errors were chosen based upon their relative functional load as well as the tendency to be problematic for Spanish-speakers of English. Data in the form of short read texts and a free speech activity is examined from two different international teaching assistants at a large, North American university in order to ascertain whether they exhibited such problems as well as to diagnose other pronunciation difficulties. Results showed that while the initial /p/ versus /b/ and / / versus /ow/ errors were less problematic, the /i/ versus / / and final voicing distinction between /t/ and /d/ were most difficult for the speakers in this sample. The latter type of error in addition to those involving other finalposition consonant clusters, is argued to be of the highest priority for pronunciation teaching at the advanced level, as it tended to be the factor that most influenced the intelligibility and comprehensibility among the high-proficiency speakers examined here.
Corporate Governance and Financial Reporting Quality : Evidence from the Split Share Structure Reform in China

We examine the changes in financial reporting quality after the split share structure reform in China. The non-tradable shares of controlling shareholders were prohibited from trading before the reform, resulting in severe incentive misalignment and controlling shareholders’ strong motivations to manipulate earnings. The reform removes this market friction by converting non-tradable shares into tradable shares, therefore aligns the interests of controlling and minority shareholders. We measure financial reporting quality based on five proxies including discretionary accrual, earnings smoothness, earnings persistence, value relevance, and conservatism. The empirical results show that firms’ financial reporting quality increases significantly after the reform, especially for firms with weaker pre-reform corporate governance and non-SOEs. The findings imply that corporate governance causally affects firms’ information environment, and shed light on the consequences of privatization in emerging markets.
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Food-related photos have become increasingly popular, due to social networks, food recommendation and dietary assessment systems. Reliable annotation is essential in those systems, but unconstrained automatic food recognition is still not accurate enough. Most works focus on exploiting only the visual content while ignoring the context. To address this limitation, in this paper we explore leveraging geolocation and external information about restaurants to simplify the classification problem. We propose a framework incorporating discriminative classification in geolocalized settings and introduce the concept of geolocalized models, which in our scenario are trained locally at each restaurant location. In particular, we propose two strategies to implement this framework: geolocalized voting and combinations of bundled classifiers. Both models show promising performance, and the later is particularly efficient and scalable. We collected a restaurant-oriented food dataset with food images, dish tags and restaurant-level information, such as the menu and geolocation. Experiments on this dataset show that exploiting geolocation improves around 30% the recognition performance, and geolocalized models contribute with an additional 3 ̃8% absolute gain, while can be trained up to five times faster.
GROUPS OF FREE INVOLUTIONS OF HOMOTOPY s ' " / 21 x 5 [ ( " + 1 ) / 2 l ' S

Let M be an oriented n-dimensional manifold which is homotopy equivalent to S xj" , where I is the greatest integer in n/2. Let Q be the quotient manifold of M by a fixed point free involution. Associated to each such Q are a unique integer k mod 2 ^ , called the type of Q, and a cohomology class u> in H (Q; Z2) which is the image of the generator of the first cohomology group of the classifying space for the double cover of Q by M. Let In(k) be the set of equivalence classes of such manifolds Q of type k for which w =0, where two such manifolds are equivalent if there is a diffeomorphism, orientation preserving if k is even, between them. It is shown in this paper that if n > 6, then In(k) can be given the structure of an abelian groupThe groups /g(fc) are partially calculated for k even.
Graph Similarity and its Applications to Hardware Security

Hardware reverse engineering is a powerful and universal tool for both security engineers and adversaries. From a defensive perspective, it allows for detection of intellectual property infringements and hardware Trojans, while it simultaneously can be used for product piracy and malicious circuit manipulations. From a designer's perspective, it is crucial to have an estimate of the costs associated with reverse engineering, yet little is known about this, especially when dealing with obfuscated hardware. The contribution at hand provides new insights into this problem, based on algorithms with sound mathematical underpinnings. Our contributions are threefold: First, we present the graph similarity problem for automating hardware reverse engineering. To this end, we improve several state-of-the-art graph similarity heuristics with optimizations tailored to the hardware context. Second, we propose a novel algorithm based on multiresolutional spectral analysis of adjacency matrices. Third, in three extensively evaluated case studies, namely (1) gate-level netlist reverse engineering, (2) hardware Trojan detection, and (3) assessment of hardware obfuscation, we demonstrate the practical nature of graph similarity algorithms.
Comparison of PMACMachines for Starter-Generator Application in a Series Hybrid-Electric Bus

This paper presents a comparative study of outer rotor PMAC machine candidates for starter-generator application in hybrid bus with series power train configuration. PMAC machines with interior and surface mount permanent magnets are considered and compared, although a complete analysis is only carried out for the SPM. Different design aspects such as concentrated versus distributed windings as well as interior and exterior rotor structures are evaluated. Different slot numbers per pole per phase configurations for concentrated winding PMAC machines are also examined. Comparison and evaluation of the machines is based on their performance which included evaluation of winding and iron losses, magnet losses, and maximum torque capability as well as the size and weight of the machines.
AgSec :

Security and privacy concerns in the future power grid have recently received tremendous focus from security advocates. Most existing security mechanisms utilize cryptographic techniques that are computationally expensive and bandwidth intensive. However, aggregating the large outputs of these cryptographic algorithms has not been considered thoroughly. Smart Grid Networks (SGN) generally have limitations on bandwidth, network capacity and energy. Hence, utilizing data aggregation algorithms, the limited bandwidth can be efficiently utilized. Most of the aggregation algorithms use statistical functions such as minimum, maximum, and average. before transmitting data over the network. Existing aggregation algorithms, in SGNs, are generally expensive in terms of communication overhead, processing load and delay. However, our proposed CDMA-based data aggregation method provides access to all the data of all the smart meters in the root node, which in this case is the Utility Center, while keeping the smart metering data secure. The efficiency of the proposed method is confirmed by mathematical analysis.1
The thermal degradation effect on Thermoplastic Starch ( TPS ) / Montmorillonite nano-clay ( MMT ) / Alumina Trihydrate ( ATH ) nanocomposites

In the chase of enhance performance and characteristics of polymers in terms of thermal degradation, one of the answer is introducing nanoclay and flame-retardant component to produce nanocomposites. Although cross-linking is a common approach to enhance the properties of starch films, current starch cross-linking methods are either expensive, toxic or did not offer desired properties. In this research, TPS based nanocomposites is prepared using ATH and MMT by solution casting method with citric acid (CA) as cross-linking agent. The mechanical disadvantage of TPS can be improved by introducing MMT and ATH whereas ATH is capable to reduce thermal decomposition and acts as fire retardant in polymer. This study aims at determining the effect of thermal degradation of TPS/MMT/ATH blends. Moreover, the combined interaction between the nano-clay, ATH and CA component in weight loss of thermoplastic starch are analysed using a Design of Experiment approach. The prepared nanocomposites are characterized through Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and method of Weight Loss at Different Temperature is introduced to determine thermal properties and weight loss of blends, respectively. In addition, the formation of crosslinking networks in polymer matrix could enhance the thermal stability when CA is used. Meanwhile, high loading level of ATH will result of better thermal stability effect as the weight loss % reduces. However, MMT offer the optimum thermal stability at medium loading level given that it delays the thermal decomposition temperature and also increases formation of the char residue which is able to slow down the combustion process. Consequently, nanocomposite has result an overall improvement in terms of thermal stability thus presenting new class of biodegradable and environmental acceptable material.
Coastal Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus)

The Coastal Giant Salamander belongs to the Dicamptodontidae family (Good 1989). This group was originally considered to be a subfamily of Ambystomatidae. However, taxonomic analysis by Edwards (1976) and Estes (1981) found Dicamptodon to have several unique morphological and neurological traits that warrant distinct family status. Dicamptodontidae is an ancient lineage (Peabody 1954) that first appears in the fossil record of the lower Pliocene.