Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of vegetation patterns and grazers on tidal marshes

Increasing grazing pressures threaten grasslands on a global scale. Therefore, it is important to understand the impact of grazers on the functioning of an ecosystem. In this study, we focused on the effects of small and large grazers on the marsh vegetation and important marsh dynamics, such as sediment accretion and soil carbon stocks. Small grazers (Hare, Barnacle and Brent geese) reduced the vegetation height, but they had very limited effect on important marsh dynamics. Other small grazers (Greylag geese) grub for below-ground storage organs and this creates bare patches. Young successional plant species established in these patches and this increased plant diversity locally. On a landscape scale, we found a reduction in Greylag goose numbers due to natural succession. An increase of the marsh surface reduced their main food source. Cattle had a very large effect; they reduced the vegetation height and increased soil compaction through trampling. This reduced the marsh surface elevation change, while it increased carbon stocks in the soil. Both processes are very important when we consider global climate change: 1) the marsh surface needs to increase in elevation sufficiently, to keep up with an accelerated sea-level rise, and 2) carbon storage in the soil will reduce the CO¬2 concentration in the atmosphere. Livestock grazing is a well-used management tool to maintain biodiversity in European marshes. Therefore, it is important that the indirect effects, through trampling and soil compaction, are taken into account when we want to use cattle as a management tool in coastal marshes.
Gray platelet syndrome: Management of perioperative bleeding in redo cardiac surgery

Gray platelet syndrome (GPS) is a rare (<1/1 000 000) and inherited platelet function disorder characterized by macrothrombocytopenia, α‐granule deficiency, and hemorrhages. Bleeding intensity does not correlate with platelet count nor with functional test results. We hereby describe the perioperative bleeding prevention and management of a patient with GPS requiring multiple redo cardiac surgeries.
CCI CANCELLATION USING KF IN FADED MIMO CHANNELS

Multi input multi output system (MIMO) has become a viable option to meet the demand of high data rate wireless communication. But MIMO system performance is severely affected by the presence of co-channel interference (CCI). CCI cancellation in MIMO channel therefore is a challenging area of research. This paper provides a Kalman Filter based CCI cancellation approach. In the severely faded Rayleigh channel in coded MIMO set-up, experimental results show that Kalman filter based approach for CCI cancellation provides satisfactory results and can thus prove to be a reliable CCI cancellation technique in future.
Macropores and water flow in soils

This paper reviews the importance of large continuous openings (macropores) on water flow in soils. The presence of macropores may lead to spatial concentrations of water flow through unsaturated soil that will not be described well by a Darcy approach to flow through porous media. This has important implications for the rapid movement of solutes and pollutants through soils. Difficulties in defining what constitutes a macropore and the limitations of current nomenclature are reviewed. The influence of macropores on infiltration and subsurface storm flow is discussed on the basis of both experimental evidence and theoretical studies. The limitations of models that treat macropores and matrix porosity as separate flow domains is stressed. Little-understood areas are discussed as promising lines for future research. In particular, there is a need for a coherent theory of flow through structured soils that would make the macropore domain concept redundant.
İkili İlişkiler Güven Ölçeği’nin Geçerlik ve Güvenirlik Çalısmaları

This study aimed to translate Dyadic Trust Scale into Turkish and to examine the evidence related to its validity and reliability. The Scale was administered to 411 married individuals (211 female, 200 male) from Ankara, Aydin, Kayseri, Istanbul, and Sakarya. Findings regarding the construct validity of the scale were found to be consistent with the original scale’s one factor structure. The results of other validity studies indicated that Dyadic Trust Scale was positively and significantly associated with Marital Satisfaction Scale and Emotional Dependency Scale. Furthermore, results revealed that males’ dyadic trust score were significantly higher than females’. The Cronbach alpha coefficient for the total scale was found to be . 89 whereas split-half reliability coefficient was . 86. Results of the study indicated that Dyadic Trust Scale is a valid and reliable instrument to use in Turkey. The findings were discussed within the literature and some suggestions were presented.
Deep Learning-Based Throughput Estimation for UAV-Assisted Network

Due to the rapid growth of mobile technology, unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV) is emerging as a promising solution to distribute wireless data for ground users as a base station (BS). Our study focuses on the analysis of UAV-based BS that assist aerial wireless network. We practically used the real data measurement from the UAVs connected with ground mobile users as air-to- ground(A2G) communication service. The main aim of our work is to analyze and estimate the UAV-BS user throughput with different parameters such as height and distance. In order to achieve our objective, we have estimated the locations of UAVsâ€™ and mobile-usersâ€™, heights of UAV, elevation angle and nature of LoS/NLoS. The system performances are evaluated through long short term memory(LSTM) and comparison was made with multi- layer perceptron(MLP) algorithm. Finally, the evaluation result shows the system has accurate and motivated prediction performances of the user throughput.
Analysing inter-provincial urban migration flows in China: A new multilevel gravity model approach

This paper proposes a novel multilevel gravity model of migration to study the underresearched topic of urban to urban migration in China. Many previous studies have looked at rural to urban migration in the context of urbanisation and economic development, and at return migration. Very few have looked at what is becoming more important in increasingly urbanised countries, which is the movement from one urban location to another. In the study, we develop a new method that allows for the interconnections between migration flows: between those that share an origin, those that share a destination, and where there is a reciprocal flow between places. A conventional gravity model of migration ignores those connections, risking erroneous estimation of the regression parameters and of their statistical significance. It also ignores that those connections are of substantive interest—they reveal the interconnections between places regarding the numbers of migrants that they send and receive. We motivate and illustrate the advantages of our approach using 2010 interprovincial migration census data for China. The results obtained from the model confirm the effect of distance, of population size and of regional income levels. They show that there is greater variation in the numbers of migrants received by provinces than there is in the numbers sent, and that reciprocal migration between pairs of provinces is an important feature of what is happening in China, especially between the neighbouring provinces of Sichuan and Tibet.
Asset-Oriented Access Control: Towards a New IoT Framework

Controlling asset-access has traditionally been considered a matter for systems in which assets reside. Centralized approaches to access control are, however, problematic for the IoT. One reason for this is that devices may not be confined to a single system of control. In this abstract, we argue for a new paradigm in which assets are empowered to make their own access decisions. To facilitate this shift in perspective, we propose a policy-neutral framework based on principles adapted from object-oriented programming. This approach establishes assets as active, message-passing entities that store and determine their own access control. We describe initial work modelling the interaction of such assets and point to future formal work for reasoning about protocols and policy composition.
The German Public and Its Trust in the ECB: The Role of Knowledge and Information Search

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that subjective and factual knowledge, as well as the desire to be informed, about the ECB foster citizens' trust. Specific knowledge about the ECB is more influential than general monetary policy knowledge. Objective knowledge is more important than subjective knowledge. However, an increasing intensity of media usage, especially newspaper reading, has a significantly negative influence on trust. We conclude that the only viable way for the ECB to generate more trust in itself is to spread monetary policy knowledge.
Learning to See Beyond the Self: Accelerating Pre-Service Teacher Development through Collaboration

Abstract A culture of isolation pervades the practice and preparation of teachers. Consequently, the development of teachers can be delayed and result in a focus on self-concerns rather than promoting student learning. Teacher educators have a unique opportunity to address this problem by creating opportunities for meaningful collaboration amongst pre-service teachers, supervisors, and faculty. The purpose of this article is to describe our experiences with an on-going collaborative teacher development project aimed at helping pre-service teachers to see beyond their personal concerns and work collaboratively toward promoting their own, their colleagues, and their students' learning. The body of the article is devoted to a description of the genesis of the project and an overview of the project's activities. We close the article with a description of our own and our students' experiences with the first attempt at integrating this project into our graduate elementary teacher education program.
Evaluation Crop Water Requirement on the Dryland at the West Bangkala Sub District of Jeneponto Regency

Aims of the present work were to analyze crop water requirement and yield reduction due to rice planting time delay in the first season and maize p lanting time in the second season. Data analysis were perfo rmed using the program CropWat 8, soil moisture 103 mm m-1, climate data of 1995-2010 period fro m Bontosungguh station, Latitude: 050 16 '48'' Longitude: 1190 25' 24'' of Gowa regency, rainfall data of 1997-2010 period, were obtained fro m the Benteng/Alio station, latitude: 050 35' 46.1" and the longitude 1190 33' 49.5" of Jeneponto of South Sulawesi. Calculation of potential evapotranspiration (ETo) used Pen man-Monteith equation. Reduction of rice y ield in the wet season less than 5% and yield reduction of maize reach 30% if the delay until 4 decade. Delay of p lanting time of first and second planting time is maximu m of 37 days with a maximu m of 40% yield reduction.
Stormy: Statistics in Tor by Measuring Securely

Tor is a tool for Internet privacy with millions of daily users. The Tor system benefits in many ways from information gathered about the operation of its network. Measurements guide operators in diagnosing problems, direct the efforts of developers, educate users about the level of privacy they obtain, and inform policymakers about Tor's impact. However, data collection and reporting can degrade user privacy, contradicting Tor's goals. Existing approaches to measuring Tor have limited capabilities and security weaknesses. We present Stormy, a general-purpose, privacy-preserving measurement system that overcomes these limitations. Stormy uses secure multiparty computation (MPC) to compute any function of the observations made by Tor relays, while keeping those observations secret. Stormy makes use of existing efficient MPC protocols that are secure in the malicious model, and in addition it includes a novel input-sharing protocol that is secure, efficient, and fault tolerant. The protocol is non-interactive, which is consistent with how relays currently submit measurements, and it allows the relays to go offline after input submission, even while ensuring that an honest relay will not have its input excluded or modified. The input-sharing protocol is compatible with MPC protocols computing on authenticated values and may be of independent interest. We show how Stormy can be deployed in two realistic models: (1) run primarily by a small set of dedicated authorities, or (2) run decentralized across the relays in the Tor network. Stormy scales efficiently to Tor's thousands of relays, tolerates network churn, and provides security depending only on either Tor's existing trust assumption that at least one authority is honest (in the first model) or the existing assumption that a large fraction of relay bandwidth is honest (in the second model). We demonstrate how to use the system to compute two broadly-applicable statistics: the median of relay inputs and the cardinality of set-union across relays. We implement Stormy and experimentally evaluate system performance. When Stormy is run among authorities we can perform 151 median computations or 533 set-union cardinalities over 7,000 relay inputs in a single day. When run among the relays themselves, Stormy can perform 36 median computations or 134 set union cardinalities per day. Thus, both deployments enable non-trivial analytics to be securely computed in the Tor network.
Poster: Finding JavaScript Name Conflicts on the Web

Including JavaScript code from many different hosts is a popular practice in developing web applications. For example, to include a social plugin like the Facebook Like button, a web developer needs to only include a script from facebook.net in her/his web page. However, in a web browser, all the identifiers (i.e., variable names and function names) in scripts loaded in the same frame share a single global namespace. Therefore, a script can overwrite any of the global variables and/or global functions defined in another script, causing unexpected behavior. In this work, we develop a browser-based dynamic analysis framework, that monitors and records any writes to JavaScript global variables and global functions. Our tool is able to cover all the code executed in the run time. We detected 778 conflicts across the Alexa top 1K websites. Our results show that global name conflicts can indeed expose web applications to security risks.
Computing Education for Intercultural Learning

This paper explores computing education as a potential site for intercultural learning and encounter in post-conflict environments. It reports on ethnographic fieldwork from the Nairobi Play Project, a constructionist educational program serving adolescents aged 14-18 in urban and rural multi-ethnic refugee communities in Kenya. While the program offers programming and game design instruction, an equal goal is to foster interaction, collaboration, dialogue and understanding across cultural backgrounds. Based on fieldwork from two project cycles involving 5 after-school classes of 12-24 students each, we describe key affordances for encounter, important resistances to be managed or overcome, and emergent complications in the execution of such programs. We argue that many important accomplishments of intercultural learning occur through moments of friction, breakdowns, and gaps -- for example, technical challenges that produce sites of shared humour; frictions between intercultural activities and computing activities; acts of disrupting order; and unstructured time that students collaboratively fill in. We also describe significant complications in such programs, including pressures to adopt norms and practices consistent with dominant or majority cultures, and instances of intercultural bonding over artefacts with xenophobic themes. We reflect on the implications of these phenomena for the design of future programs that use computing as a backbone for intercultural learning or diversity and inclusion efforts in CSCW, ICTD, and allied fields of work.
Vaping-Seeking Clarity in a Time of Uncertainty.

As of October 28, 2019, 49 states have reported more than 1600 possible cases of severe pulmonary disease related to vaping—the inhalation of a heated, aerosolized solution—to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 1 To date, 34 deaths have been attributed to e-cigarette, or vaping, product use–associated lung injury (EVALI). This has resulted in a recommendation from the CDC that the public avoid the use of e-cigarette products, a proposed federal prohibition on certain products and flavors, and much uncertainty on the part of patients and clinicians. In the midst of this uncertainty, it is important to try to provide some clarity.
Weighted Multiple Linear Regression Model for Mobile Location Estimation in GSM Network

The numbers of crimes and accidents, among other challenging issues, requiring a mobile application with localization capabilities are on the increase. Yet there is under-utilization of location information provided by mobile phones. The accuracy and cost of implementation of mobile position localization on cellular network have been an issue of research interest. In this paper, the statistical modelling of mobile station (MS) position location was carried out using weighted multiple linear regressions (WMLR) method. The proposed statistical modelling approach was based on received signal strength (RSS) technique. The model improved localization accuracy. The model's simulated results were analysed and compared with the existing MLR using real measured data collected from GSM network in a light urban environment in Enugu, Nigeria.
Automatic Pothole Detection System using Laser

: Identification of pavement distress such as potholes and humps not only helps drivers to avoid accidents, but also helps authorities to maintain roads. This project discusses previous pothole detection methods that have been developed and proposes a cost-effective solution to identify the potholes and humps on rods and provide timely alerts to drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages. Lasers are used to identify the potholes and humps. The proposed system captures the geographical location coordinates of the potholes and humps. It can actively learn the knowledge about the suspension system of the host vehicle without any human intervention vibration model to infer the presence of pothole while the vehicle is hitting the pothole. As a proof of concept Raspberry Pi based prototype of proposed system is designed and going to be developed for small application.
Exascale Storage Systems - An Analytical Study of Expenses

The computational power and storage capability of supercomputers are growing at a different pace, with storage lagging behind; the widening gap necessitates new approaches to keep the investment and running costs for storage systems at bay. In this paper, we aim to unify previous models and compare different approaches for solving these problems. By extrapolating the characteristics of the German Climate Computing Center's previous supercomputers to the future, cost factors are identified and quantified in order to foster adequate research and development. Using models to estimate the execution costs of two prototypical use cases, we are discussing the potential of three concepts: re-computation, data deduplication and data compression.
Prevalence of Allergic Bronchopulmonary Aspergillosis in Cystic Fibrosis Patients using Two Different Diagnostic Criteria.

Summary Objective. There are different diagnostic criteria for the diagnosis of Allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) in CF patients. In this present study we evaluated the prevalence of ABPA in Iranian CF patients by two more usual diagnostic criteria as ISHAM working criteria (A) and CF Foundation Consensus Conference criteria (B). Methods. Eighty six CF patients were included in the study. All CF patients underwent for Aspergillus skin prick test (AST), Aspergillus-specific IgE (sIgEAf) and Aspergillus-specific IgG (sIgGAf), total IgE. The ABPA prevalence was estimated by two diagnostic criteria, (A) and (B) and compared. Results. The frequency of positive AST, total IgE, sIgEAf and sIgGAf were 47 (54.6%), 9 (10.5%), 42 (48.8%) and 67 (77.9%), respectively. The obtained rate of ABPA prevalence (10.5%) was identical in two diagnostic criteria A and B (kappa value of 1.000). Conclusions. The applied diagnostic criteria had no significant effect on the reported rate of ABPA prevalence.
"It doesn't win you friends"

Collaborative writing tools have become ubiquitous in today's world and are used widely in many professional organizations and academic settings. Yet, we know little about how ability-diverse teams, such as those involving people with and without vision impairments, make use of collaborative writing tools. We report on interviews with 20 academics and professionals who are blind or visually impaired and perform collaborative writing with sighted colleagues. Our findings reveal that people with vision impairments perform collaborative writing activities through four interconnected processes, which include learning an ecosystem of (in)accessible tools, adapting to complexities of collaborative features, balancing the cost and benefit of accessibility, and navigating power dynamics within organizations. We discuss how our analysis contributes to theories of accessibility in collaboration and offers practical insights for future collaborative system design.
The link between green purchasing decisions and measures of environmental consciousness

A review of the literature suggests that traditional segmentation variables (socio‐demographics) and personality indicators are of limited use for characterizing the green consumer. Explores the extent to which variables, specific to environmental consciousness, are better able to explain consumers’ pro‐environmental purchasing behaviour. Two conceptualizations of the purchasing domain are addressed, namely general green purchasing behaviour and specific purchasing habits relating to five green product categories. Two data sets are used in the analysis, namely marketing students and members of the United Kingdom general public. Suggests that measures of environmental consciousness are closely linked to environmentally‐responsible purchasing behaviour, although the strength of the relationships varies according to sample type, the conceptualization of the purchasing domain and the particular product category at issue.
The Latest Insights into Adipokines in Diabetes

The Special Issue “Pathogenetic and Therapeutic Significance of Adipokines in Diabetes” focused on adipokines as shared diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for both obesity and type 2 diabetes. Experts discussed the pathological role of adipokines in their studies associated with diabetes. It provided new insights into the role of adipokines in diabetes. In this commentary and review, these studies will be summarized and the novel roles of adipokines will be discussed. This will also confirm the role of adipokines as biomarkers for diagnosis and prediction, and as therapeutic targets of diabetes and its related pathogenic phenomena.