Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In situ
 characterization of linear-optical networks in randomized boson sampling

We introduce a method for efficient, in situ characterization of linear-optical networks (LONs) in randomized boson-sampling (RBS) experiments. We formulate RBS as a distributed task between two parties, Alice and Bob, who share two-mode squeezed-vacuum states. In this protocol, Alice performs local measurements on her modes, either photon counting or heterodyne. Bob implements and applies to his modes the LON requested by Alice; at the output of the LON, Bob performs photon counting, the results of which he sends to Alice via classical channels. In the ideal situation, when Alice does photon counting, she obtains from Bob samples from the probability distribution of the RBS problem, a task that is believed to be classically hard to simulate. When Alice performs heterodyne measurements, she converts the experiment to a problem that is classically efficiently simulable, but more importantly, enables her to characterize a lossy LON on the fly, without Bob's knowing and without changing anything at Bob's end (this is what we mean by in situ). We introduce and calculate the fidelity between the joint states shared by Alice and Bob after the ideal and lossy LONs as a measure of distance between the two LONs. Using this measure, we obtain an upper bound on the total variation distance between the ideal probability distribution for the RBS problem and the probability distribution achieved by a lossy LON. Our method displays the power of the entanglement of the two-mode squeezed-vacuum states: the entanglement allows Alice to choose for each run of the experiment between RBS and a simple characterization protocol based on first-order coherence between complex amplitudes.
Strain rate and temperature dependence of Omori law scaling constants of AE data: Implications for earthquake foreshock‐aftershock sequences

Little is known about the temperature and strain rate dependence of acoustic emission AE activity (AE). Hence, we carried out a preliminary series of flow‐through triaxial compression tests on porous sandstones at different temperatures and strain rates. The AE data exhibits clear foreshock and aftershock sequences with respect to the dynamic failure of the test specimen. Significant AE activity starts less than 5 min before sample failure irrespective of the strain rate. The increase in the AE event rate is steeper and the foreshock exponent p′ is smaller in the slow strain rate tests. It could be the reason why there are no easily recognisable foreshock sequences for most individual earthquakes. The aftershock decay parameter p is a linear function of test temperature as it has also been inferred for natural seismicity. The seismic b‐value decreases systematically with increasing deformation rate suggesting a greater proportion of small cracks in the slow strain rate tests. Hence, the AE activity is a function of both strain rate and temperature.
Immigrants across the U.S. Federal Laboratory

The passage of a restrictive immigration law in Arizona in 2010 rekindled an old debate in the United States on immigration policy and the role of federalism. Despite periodic constitutional controversies, scholars of federalism and U.S. state politics have not adequately explained variation in state-level policy making on immigration. The authors explore pressures leading to state immigration policy innovation and adoption in the United States. The article evaluates factors leading to the introduction and adoption of two types of policies: those dictating the cultural and economic incorporation of immigrants and those attempting to control their flow and settlement. Factors such as fiscal federalism, ethnic contact, and ethnic threat generate incentives for states to pass such laws. The authors compiled a comprehensive data set of state immigration laws from the past decade to explain how factors commonly associated with national immigration policy development—economic conditions, rates of immigration, demographics, party control, and political institutions—influence state-level immigration policy activity.
Influence of Internationalization on Management Accounting Tools: evidences from Italian Firms

This paper aims at analyzing the diffusion of management accounting tools in Italian manufacturing firms. More specifically, this paper investigates, with an exploratory purpose, the role of internationalization. The elimination of trade barriers, the markets globalization and the environmental turbulences affected company strategies. The search for new partners, new clients and new suppliers from foreign countries are only some of recently Italian firms’ trends due to the up-above phenomena. The research is based on the qualitative data analysis collected through a survey by questionnaire. In particular, 264 questionnaires of Italian manufacturing companies were analyzed. The results of this paper provide empirical evidence on a high positive correlation between the increasing foreign client percentage and the management control tools, activity-based costing and target costing in particular. In the range of internationalization contingency variables, this exploratory study considered only the impact of foreign customers. Further researches can involve other factors as foreign suppliers, joint-ventures, and technological exchanges. This paper contributes to analyse the impact of internationalization, a contingency variable today not fully investigated in management accounting system researches. In fact, managerial control systems and management accounting systems can be considered as key variables in each kind of organization (Anthony, 1956), both publicly-owned and private, both in manufacturing industries and services.
Basics of Fluid Construction Grammar Paper under review for Constructions and Frames

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a fully operational computational platform for developing grammars from a constructional perspective. It contains mechanisms for representing grammars and for using them in experiments in language understanding, production and learning. FCG can be used by grammar writers investigating some aspect of language and by computational linguists implementing practical language processing systems or exploring how machine learning algorithms can acquire grammars. This paper introduces some of the basic mechanisms of FCG, starting from the more familiar formalism of rewrite grammars. It focuses in particular on the structure of construction schemas and how they are applied in the process of comprehension and production.
The importance of Asia as a source of black carbon to the European Arctic during springtime 2013

Abstract. Black carbon aerosol (BC) deposited to the Arctic sea ice or present in the free troposphere can significantly affect the Earth's radiation budget at high latitudes yet the BC burden in these regions and the regional source contributions are poorly constrained. Aircraft measurements of aerosol composition in the European Arctic were conducted during the Aerosol–Cloud Coupling And Climate Interactions in the Arctic (ACCACIA) campaign in March 2013. Pollutant plumes were encountered throughout the lower to upper Arctic troposphere featuring enhancements in CO and aerosol mass loadings, which were chemically speciated into BC and non-refractory sulphate and organic matter. FLEXPART-WRF simulations have been performed to evaluate the likely contribution to the pollutants from regional ground sources. By combining up-to-date anthropogenic and open fire biomass burning (OBB) inventories, we have been able to compare the contributions made to the observed pollution layers from the sources of eastern/northern Asia (AS), Europe (EU) and North America (NA). Over 90 % of the contribution to the BC was shown to arise from non-OBB anthropogenic sources. AS sources were found to be the major contributor to the BC burden, increasing background BC loadings by a factor of 3–5 to 100.8 ± 48.4 ng sm−3 (in standard air m3 at 273.15 K and 1013.25 mbar) and 55.8 ± 22.4 ng sm−3 in the middle and upper troposphere respectively. AS plumes close to the tropopause (about 7.5–8 km) were also observed, with BC concentrations ranging from 55 to 73 ng sm−3, which will potentially have a significant radiative impact. EU sources influenced the middle troposphere with a BC mean concentration of 70.8 ± 39.1 ng sm−3 but made a minor contribution to the upper troposphere due to the relatively high latitude of the source region. The contribution of NA was shown to be much lower at all altitudes with BC mean concentration of 20 ng sm−3. The BC transported to the Arctic is mixed with a non-BC volume fraction representing between 90–95 % of the mass, and has a relatively uniform core size distribution with mass median diameter 190–210 nm and geometric standard deviation σg = 1.55–1.65 and this varied little across all source regions. It is estimated that 60–95 % of BC is scavenged between emission and receptor based on BC / ΔCO comparisons between source inventories and measurement. We show that during the springtime of 2013, the anthropogenic pollution particularly from sources in Asia, contributed significantly to BC across the European Arctic free troposphere. In contrast to previous studies, the contribution from open wildfires was minimal. Given that Asian pollution is likely to continue to rise over the coming years, it is likely that the radiative forcing in the Arctic will also continue to increase.
A legal framework for sustainable tourism development in areas affected by natural and manmade disasters in South Africa

Experience has shown that sustainable development requires a commitment to sound economic policies and management, an effective integration of environmental concerns into decision-making in the light of country-specific conditions, and requires full participation of all parties concerned. Developing nations will arguably continue to regard sustainable development in terms of qualitative change in economic conditions. The model of sustainable development continues to have strong relevance in international debate the principles of sustainable tourism development may seem good because they require hard political choices and logical decisions based on cumbersome social, economic and environmental tradeoffs. A very prominent role in protecting the environment is for example carved out for local government. There is a significant focus in South Africa on the notion of developmental local government since 1996. There is also the fundamental challenge of climate change due to global warming and the drive for a much more sustainable approach to our development; indeed the regional level may be a particularly appropriate level for the territorial integration of natural and socio-economic systems.
RF Energy Harvesting Using Rectenna

This paper introduces a rectenna utilizing microstrip innovation that can collect the accessible RF vitality display in the air for serving applications like powering the remote sensors which are out of reach to people. The novel rectenna outlined works at a recurrence of 2.4 Ghz with a gain of 4.186dB. The rectifier utilized is a Schottky diode HSMS-2850, which is used for changing over the RF AC to DC control. Estimations demonstrate that a yield of 328mV was acquired over a 5KΩ resistor for a contribution of 707mV, which was figured from a Wi-Fi gadget whose return loss was observed to be 20dBm. The bandwidth achieved is from 2.37GHz to 2.45 Ghz. Keywords— Rectenna, RF energy harvesting.
Dynamic Scale-out Mechanisms for Partitioned Shared-Nothing Databases

For a database system used in pay-per-use cloud environments, el as ic scaling becomes an essential feature, allowing for minimizing costs while ac commodating fluctuations of load. One approach to scalability involves horizontal database partition ing and dynamic migration of partitions between servers. We define a scale-out operation s a combination of provisioning a new server followed by migration of one or more partit ions to the newlyallocated server. In this thesis we study the efficiency of different impleme ntations of the scale-out operation in the context of online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. We designed and implemented three migration mechanisms featuring different stra egies for data transfer. The first one is based on a modification of the Xen hypervisor, Snowf lock, and uses on-demand block transfers for both server provisioning and partition migra tion. The second one is implemented in a database management system (DBMS) and uses bulk transfers for partition migration, optimized for higher bandwidth utilization. The third one is a conventional application, using SQL commands to copy partitions between servers. We perform an experimental comparison of those scale-out mechanism s for disk-bound and CPU-bound configurations. When comparing the mechanisms we analyze their impact on whole-system performance and on the experience of individual clients.
Sacks of Mutilated Breasts: Violence and Body Politics in South Asian Partition Literature

The partition narratives of South Asian authors are testimony to the fact that women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds were the greatest victims of the newly created border between India and Pakistan in 1947. Women’s bodies were abducted, stripped naked, raped, mutilated (their breasts cut off), carved with religious symbols and murdered to be sent in train wagons to the “other” side of the border. Taking Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988) as a narrative example of the importance of women’s point of view and as central figures of the violent conflict, we will examine the symbol of the female breasts, following Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s theories on power and governmentality, framed in the rhetoric of Mother India, as the violence inflicted upon women was equivalent to a sacrilege against one’s religion, family and country. Therefore, we will examine the passage of sacks of mutilated breasts as a terrifying testimonio about Partition history fictionally recalled, but also as a metaphor of the border crossing which threatens the stability of the nation. In the light of Julia Kristen’s theory on the abjection, we will interpret the female corpses with mutilated breasts as abjects which blur the limits of a normative society, displaying its fragility. We will conclude by asserting that the novel discussed in this paper can be read as a harsh indictment of both a violent de/colonial process and local misogynist corruption (lessons from History) as well as a weapon of feminist resistance (doing Herstory). Women’s mutilated bodies are uncovered by authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa in order to expose the tragedy and trauma so that the history/body dialectic (a tale of the violation of women’s rights) can be, as a consequence, also uncovered.
Neighborhood Effects in Wind Farm Performance: An Econometric Approach

The optimization of turbine density in wind farms entails a trade-off between the usage of scarce, expensive land and power losses through turbine wake effects. A quantification and prediction of the wake effect, however, is challenging because of the complex aerodynamic nature of the interdependencies of turbines. In this paper, we propose a parsimonious data driven econometric wake model that can be used to predict production losses of existing and potential wind parks. Motivated by simple engineering wake models, the predicting variables are wind speed, turbine alignment angle, and distance. By utilizing data from two wind parks in Germany, a significantly better prediction of wake effect losses is attained compared to the standard Jensen model. A scenario analysis reveals that a distance between turbines can be reduced up to three times the rotor size without entailing substantial production losses. In contrast, a suboptimal configuration of turbines with respect to the main wind direction can result in production losses that are five times higher.
Deflation anD economic Growth : the Great Depression as the Great outlier

This paper deals with the relationship between deflation and economic growth. Although there are numerous theories on the potential effects of deflation on real output, empirical evidence in this field is still incomplete. In order to explore the relationship between prices and output in a more comprehensive way, I use a large panel data set of 20 countries over roughly 150 years, which contains frequent deflationary episodes. Since mainstream macroeconomists often refer to alleged bad historical experience with deflation, I employ an econometric model to examine both contemporaneous and lagged correlation between prices and output. There are two important results. First, there is no general relationship between price growth and output growth. Coefficient estimates have very small magnitude in both the whole sample and in different monetary regimes. Second, well-known episodes of deflation differ a lot. The Great Depression is the only period where deflation seems to be strongly associated with recession. By contrast, Japan in the 1990s and 2000s bears no resemblance to it. Here, both empirically and theoretically, deflation is highly unlikely to have caused economic stagnation.
Examination of the 1 st trimester maternal plasma proteome by SELDI in pregnancies with Pre-eclampsia

Currently no reliable 1 trimester screening method exists to detect for pregnancies, which will develop preeclampsia. This deficit makes it difficult to develop appropriate intervention strategies. As the underlying placental aetiology leading to the development of preeclampsia is thought to occur early during gestation, we hypothesized that such changes may already be evident in the maternal plasma proteome. Hence, such unique proteomic fingerprints could be used to distinguish between pregnancies with healthy deliveries from those, which developed preeclampsia. For this purpose we investigated the use of Surface-Enhanced Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS) SELDI. Unique spectral profiles were generated using SELDI-TOF-MS. A total of 8 peaks corresponding to peptides and proteins in the range between 3.2 kDa and 22.2 kDa were identified from a set of 26,707 representing the whole spectral analysis (0 to 60 kDa), were identified which could discriminate pregnancies with normal deliveries to those which developed preeclampsia. Maternal plasma proteome fingerprinting by SELDI-TOF MS may lead to the development of a set of markers which can be used in discern pregnancies at risk for pre-eclampsia.
Mathematical modeling to simulate the movement of contaminants in groundwater

The objectives of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we formulate a system of partial differential equations that models the contamination of groundwater due to migration of dissolved contaminants through unsaturated to saturated zone. A closed form solution using the singular perturbation techniques for the flow and solute transport equations in the unsaturated zone is obtained. Indeed, the solution can be used as a tool to verify the accuracy of numerical models of water flow and solute transport. The second part of this paper, deals with how the water level in a water reserve drops due to pumping water out of a well that is some distance away.
Learning Binary Code with Deep Learning to Detect Software Weakness

As more software are being developed, the importance of automated vulnerability analysis tools is increasing. In this paper, we propose a method of learning assembly code using deep learning to find software weaknesses. Unlike prior studies based on API function call sequence, our method starts by adding the assembly code to an immutable vector to learn the assembly language through deep learning. When modeling assembly code, we propose Instruction2vec, which is effective in vectorizing the assembly code. After learning the assembly code of the existing functions through the vector created by Instruction2vec, we classify whether the new functions have software weaknesses or not. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of Instruction2vec, we train the vectors with text-convolutional neural network model (Text-CNN) and compare the results with those of Word2vec. We also used the Juliet test suite from National Institute of Standards and Technology as a dataset. As a result, we identify up to 96.1% accuracy in classifying whether the function has software weaknesses.
Influence of Vane Vortex Generators on Transonic Wing Buffet: Further Analysis of the BUCOLIC Experimental Dataset

An increased understanding of shock buffet instability on transonic wings is essential in order to design effective control mechanisms for delaying this phenomenon. This paper presents a detailed analysis of an extensive experimental dataset and aims to characterise the shock unsteadiness both at buffet onset and during the initial rise in buffeting levels. The influence of passive control devices is investigated by analysing the clean wing and two configurations with vane vortex generators. Unsteady data obtained both with pressure transducers and dynamic pressure-sensitive paint is analysed with signal processing tools and using proper orthogonal decomposition. We show that, while the vortex generators move the shock position downstream and delay buffet onset by up to 0.4◦, spanwise-travelling pressure waves propagate along the shock in all configurations. Data from dynamic pressure-sensitive paint provides critical insight into this wave propagation which becomes increasingly complex with increasing incidence.
Gamifying Data Visualizations on Mobile Devices

© 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Abstract Increasingly, we are seeing a surge in a mobile-first approach to data driven journalism where data explorations are designed to work with a smaller form-factor. These interactive visualizations are informative and explanatory, but most use scrolly-telling as the interaction paradigm. In this position paper, we would like to draw attention to other more playful interaction paradigms, specific to mobile devices, and game design elements, that when paired could encourage frequent and joyful engagement with data.
Using microsatellite (SSR) and morphological markers to assess the genetic diversity of 12 falcata ( Medicago sativa spp. falcata ) populations from Eurasia

Falcata (Medicago sativa spp. falcata L.), with its high resistance to cold weather, drought and disease, plays an important role in alfalfa breeding. The aim of this study was to assess the genetic diversity of the 12 falcata populations in Eurasia using SSR markers and morphological traits. Regressions for genetic distance, phenotypic distance and geographic distance were also computed to study whether the origin of these populations influenced their genetic or morphological behavior. A total of 22 SSR alleles were detected in 12 populations, and the average genetic diversity of each population ranged from 0.2517 to 0.4965, indicating substantial variation within populations. Among the 12 populations, three had flowers of colors other than yellow, indicating introgression before seed collection. These three populations grew in a more erect manner and clustered into a sub-group for phenotypic distance. Regression analysis showed no relationship between genetic distance and phenotypic distance. Latitude, longitude and altitude of origin were not correlated with genetic distance among populations, while altitude had a correlation with phenotypic distance among these populations (p