Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Countryside to Sip: Venice Inland and the Prosecco’s Uneasy Relationship with Wine Tourism and Rural Exploitation

In 2016, Italian production of wine exceeded 51 million hectolitres and among the twenty regions, the region with the most production by volume (millions of hectolitres) was the Veneto region, north-east of Italy, with almost 11 million. In particular, the success of Prosecco at the global level is the most important driving factor at both the economic and productivity levels. The worldwide success of Prosecco wine entails a remarkable change in both the local and regional configuration of agrarian landscapes. Traditional winegrowing swiftly changed into an intensive monoculture with remarkable investments and the spread of new viticulture entrepreneurships. The discussion proposed here intends to investigate the process of heritage construction or ‘heritagisation’, UNESCO candidacy, as an important issue for rural tourism promotion in the context of a productive winescape. We concentrated our analysis on the DOCG area, a complex space where several forces need to coexist; the productive drive of growing requests (global and local) of Prosecco, as well as rural representation based on local habits and a concrete hilly landscape. Rural tourism is clearly an important sector in terms of revenue and employment, especially for local communities, and it can help to ensure economic stability; however, doing so in a way that benefits the area and the landscape is not so straightforward. There are potential problems in facilitating increased urbanization, such as the standardization of landscape and damage to the area if plans are mismanaged. In the case of best practices, a desirable model of tourism can be tapped into while helping rural regions take advantage of more sustainable tourism development and landscape management.
Synthesis of nonlinear controller for wind turbines stability when providing grid support

This paper presents a new nonlinear polynomial controller for wind turbines that assures stability and maximizes the energy produced while imposing a bound in the generated power derivative in normal operation (guarantees a smooth operation against wind turbulence). The proposed controller structure also allows eventually producing a transient power increase to provide grid support, in response to a demand from a frequency controller. The controller design uses new optimization over polynomials techniques, leading to a tractable semidefinite programming problem.
A Gravitational Origin of the Arrows of Time

The only widely accepted explanation for the various arrows of time that everywhere and at all epochs point in the same direction is the ‘past hypothesis’: the Universe had a very special low-entropy initial state. We present the rst evidence for an alternative conjecture: the arrows exist in all solutions of the gravitational law that governs the Universe and arise because the space of its true degrees of freedom (shape space) is asymmetric. We prove our conjecture for arrows of complexity and information in the Newtonian N-body problem. Except for a set of measure zero, all of its solutions for non-negative energy divide at a uniquely dened point into two halves. In each a well-dened measure of complexity uctuates but grows irreversibly between rising bounds from that point. Structures that store dynamical information are created as the complexity grows. Recognition of the division is a key novelty of our approach. Each solution can be viewed as having a single past and two distinct futures emerging from it. Any internal observer must be in one half of the solution and will only be aware of one past and one future. The ‘paradox’ of a time-symmetric law that leads to observationally irreversible behaviour is fully resolved. General Relativity shares enough architectonic structure with the N-body problem for us to prove the existence of analogous complexity arrows in the vacuum Bianchi IX model. In the absence of non-trivial solutions with matter we cannot prove that arrows of dynamical information will arise in GR, though they have in our Universe. Finally, we indicate how the other arrows of time could arise.
Multicriterial Inventory Analysis with MATLAB Application: A Case Study from Health Care

Establishing an effective inventory control strategy requires appropriate information about the composition and characteristics of inventories. It is extremely important in the case of organizations with tight budget such as hospitals.In general, obtaining information for inventory-related decisions mainly has two obstacles. Firstly, the number of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) being on hand at companies often exceeds the amount that can be manageable in singles. Observing the similarity among the SKUs based on one or more criteria can release the complex decision-making processes. One of the most frequently used approach of sorting SKUs into homogenous groups in inventory management is the ABC analysis. Secondly, the non-appropriate interpretation of the classification results of ABC analysis can lead to confusion. Comprehension of the results, especially in inventory management, can be facilitated by data visualization. The purpose of this study is to present an IT-based decision aid framework built on the traditional ABC analysis which supports the application of inventory-related case-based distance model and its visualization. A linear programing method is applied on MATLAB basis to determine the model parameters which is followed by a plotting method of linear and nonlinear separating surfaces. The results of the study are demonstrated through a case study from health care where the database comes from the inventory records of a general hospital. Keywords: Multicriterial ABC analysis, MATLAB, visualization, case-based distance model;
Activity Recognition Using Probabilistic Timed Automata

Activity recognition focuses on what is happening in the scene. It endeavors to recognize the actions and goals of one or more actors from a sequence of observations both on the actor actions and the environmental conditions. Automated recognition of human activity is essential ability that may be used in the surveillance to provide security in indoor as well as outdoor environments. Understanding human activity is also important for human-computer-interaction systems including tele-conferencing and for content-based retrieval of video from digital repositories. The main technique utilized in activity recognition is computer vision. In vision-based activity recognition, a great deal of work has already been done. This is partially due to increasing computational power that allows huge amount of video to be processed and stored, but also due to the large number of potential applications. In vision-based activity recognition, we can distinguish four steps, namely human detection, human tracking, human activity recognition and then a high-level activity evaluation. A method of (Viola et al., 2003) detects a moving pedestrian in a temporal sequence of images. A linear combination of filters is applied to compute motion and appearance features that are then summed to determine a cumulative score, employed afterwards in a classification of the detection window as including the moving object. For vision based activity recognition, tracking is the fundamental component. The entity must be first tracked before the recognition can take place. Briefly, the goal of visual tracking is to find and describe the relative position change of the moving object from one frame to another in the whole sequence, while the task of action recognition is to classify the person’s action given the person’s location, recent appearance, etc. Kalman filters (Crowley & Berard, 1997; Kwolek, 2003) and particle filtering–based algorithms (Nait-Charif & McKenna, 2003) are utilized extensively for object tracking in this domain. These algorithms generally involve an object state transition model and an observation model, which reflect both motion and appearance of the object (Haykin & de Freitas, 2004). After tracking of the moving objects the action recognition stage occurs, where Dynamic Time Warping (Myers et al., 1980; Myers & Rabiner, 1981) and Hidden Markov Models (Brand & Kettnaker, 2000) are employed very often at this stage. Sophisticated stochastic models such as Dynamic Bayesian Networks (Albrecht et al., 1997; Ghahramani, 1997), Stochastic Context Free
A novel method for nanoprecision alignment in wafer bonding applications

Wafer bonding has been identified as a promising technique to enable fabrication of many advanced semiconductor devices such as three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC) and micro/nano systems. However, with the device dimensions already in the nanometre range, the lack of approaches to achieve high precision bonding alignment has restricted many applications. With this increasing demand for wafer bonding applications, a novel mechanical passive alignment technique is described in this work aiming at nanoprecision alignment based on kinematic and elastic averaging effects. A number of cantilever-supported pyramid and V-pit microstructures have been incorporated into the outer circumference area of the to-be-bonded Si chips, respectively. The engagement between the convex pyramids and concave V-pits and the compliance of the support cantilever flexures result in micromechanical passive alignment which is followed by direct bonding between the Si chips. The subsequent infrared (IR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) inspections repeatedly confirmed the achievement of alignment accuracy of better than 200 nm at the bonding interface with good bonding quality. The impact and potential applications of the developed alignment technique are also discussed.
Speech replay spoofing attack detection system based on fusion of classification algorithms

Fast development of modern technologies of digital processing and speech recording leads to the fact that it is necessary to take into account the potential threats from the speech replay attacks. We propose our ensemble fusion replay attack detection system. It uses constant Q cepstral coefficients as speech features and short-time mean normalization for their preprocessing. The set of binary classifiers includes multiple Gaussian mixture models based Bayesian classifier, i-vector based Gaussian Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis and XGBoost tree boosting algorithm. Fusion of scores was made by modified logistic regression algorithm from BOSARIS toolbox. ASV Spoof 2017 corpus is utilized in the experiments as the main database for anti-spoofing systems evaluation. Obtained results demonstrate that the proposed system can provide substantially better performance than the baseline Gaussian mixture model classifier. The pre-processing of cepstral features is crucial for the better performance of the system. High evaluation performance can be obtained using only few algorithms in a set. The attained value of equal error rate EER=12.44% for our fusion classifier is competitive with the best results obtained during last two years.
Torrefaction of Healthy and Beetle Kill Pine and Co-Combustion With Sub-Bituminous Coal

Combustion of biomass and co-combustion with fossil fuels are viable means of reducing emissions in electricity generation, and local biomass resources are appealing to minimize life cycle emissions. In the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S., a bark beetle epidemic is causing widespread forest death and associated safety hazards. This biomass has potential to be a feedstock resource, thereby achieving dual goals of improving forest health while supplying biomass for uses such as co-firing with coal in power plants. In this study, combustion and co-combustion of healthy pine (HP) and beetle kill pine (BK) with coal were conducted to assess the interchangeability of these feedstocks in raw and torrefied forms. HP and BK pine were torrefied at 200, 250, and 300 C to increase energy density and improve grindability, both of which aid in seamless integration into power plants. Grindability was assessed for both feedstocks at each torrefaction condition. The raw feedstocks were pyrolyzed to assess their relative compositions. Raw and torrefied feedstocks were then combusted alone and co-combusted with sub-bituminous Powder River Basin coal using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Modulated TGA was used to derive kinetic parameters of coal, raw and torrefied biomass, and coal-biomass blends. Results show increased grindability and pyrolysis mass loss of BK as compared to HP, which are attributed to the degraded state of the wood. Combustion and cocombustion show favorable interchangeability of the HP and BK, and additive behavior when co-combusted with coal. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4038406]
CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY & RISK MANAGEMENT: AN INVESTIGATION OF REINSURANCE & CHARITABLE GIVING IN INSURANCE FIRMS

insurance company directories. In the case of composite (life and non-life) insurers in our panel sample that only report group-level donations, the non-life insurance subsidiary's annual share of charitable giving is estimated on a pro-rata of its contribution to annual group gross premiums written. The timeframe covered by our study includes the years from when CSR started to be of direct strategic interest to UK insurers following some high profile corporate failures to the time just after the 2007/8 global financial crisis 6 . We conduct our analysis at the UK insurance firm-level as this is the relevant decision-making unit for financial reporting, statutory solvency monitoring, and most discretionary decisions (e.g., on CSR issues) that affect the local market. Our panel sample of 77 firms constitutes roughly 25% of non-life insurers actively operating in the UK over our period of analysis, and comprises a mix of firms of varying size, ownership, and financial structure. The majority of insurers in our data set (n=67/87%) are stock companies of which roughly one-third are small mono-line insurers that specialize in niche segments of the market (e.g., personal lines). Furthermore, most stock insurers in the data set (n=60/90%) are non-listed entities. However, the preponderance of stock over mutual forms of organization, and non-publicly quoted stock insurers in our data set precludes us from controlling for organizational form and public/private listing status in our analysis. and after controlling for the moderating-effects of board composition and the financial characteristics of insurance firms. We find that consistent with H1a and H1b , reinsurance substitutes for charitable giving as it more cost-effectively satisfies the socio-economic and political interests of a broader constituency of major stakeholders. Our finding of a statistically significant negative relation between charitable donations and reinsurance also explains why financial
THE EXPRESSION OF OESTROGEN AND PROGESTERONE RECEPTORS IN THE GILT UTERUS AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE OESTROUS CYCLE

Ovarian steroid hormones are known to be an important modulator in the regulation of reproductive function in the female. The levels of oestrogen and progesterone have been well documented whilst interacting during the entire oestrous cycle but their specific receptors in the target cells are less understood. Therefore, a comparative study of oestrogen (ER) and progesterone receptors (PR) at certain oestrous stages should be of help in the prediction of their interaction in specific uterine compartments. Tissue samples were collected at different stages of the oestrous cycle: oestrus (n=3), early dioestrus (n=3) and late dioestrus (n=3). They were fixed in 10% formaldehyde and embedded in paraffin. Immunohistochemistry was done, using mouse monoclonal antibodies against the oestrogen receptor (ER-6F11) and the progesterone receptor (PGR-312). In general, most of the uterine cells stained positive but with a different intensity. During oestrus, both ER and PR were obviously strong in the epithelia and the myometrium. For the glandular epithelium (GE), all GE cells stained positive for ER whereas a lower proportion of positive cells was observed for PR. During early dioestrus, it was interesting that cytoplamic staining was observed in the epithelia but not for PR staining. When comparing both receptors during early dioestrus, a stronger intensity was observed in all compartments for PR, especially in the myometrium. During late dioestrus ER and PR, expression showed no difference and every compartment of the uterus stained weaker for both receptor proteins. To summarize, the results from this study showed that both ER and PR may be regulated by the same mechanisms in some compartments and at specific stages of the oestrous cycle and that each compartment of the uterus had a different expression of ER and PR which could accord with their different roles in reproductive physiology.
Recommended retail prices, maximum RPM and the role of buyer power

This paper investigates whether Recommended Retail Prices (RRP) should be preferred to Maximum Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) and studies the effect of buyer power on this choice. It is shown that the manufacturer can offer the retailer a higher unit discount (when purchasing goods from him) to induce her to give up the retail price control through a Maximum RPM. Only when a retailer’s buyer power is small can RRP be an equilibrium solution while, if buyer power is higher, Maximum RPM occurs. RRP is dominated, from a welfare point of view, by Maximum RPM, since the latter eliminates double marginalization. Hence we find no reason, unlike the current attitude of the antitrust authorities, to prefer RRP to Maximum RPM. However when buyer power is high, the discount becomes so high that the efficiency gain from double mark—up elimination is almost completely offset. The best situation for society, in this second best world, arises when the parties’ bargaining power is well matched, as claimed by the famous Galbraith conjecture.
A hybrid semiconductor-glass waveguide laser

We report on a novel type of laser in which a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) receives frequency-selective feedback from a glass-waveguide circuit. The laser we present here is based on InP for operation in the 1.55 μm wavelength range. The Si3N4/SiO2 glass waveguide circuit comprises two sequential high-Q ring resonators. Adiabatic tapering is used for maximizing the feedback. The laser shows single-frequency oscillation with a record-narrow spectral linewidth of 24 kHz at an output power of 5.7 mW. The hybrid laser can be tuned over a broad range of 46.8 nm (1531 nm to 1577.8 nm). Such InP-glass hybrid lasers can be of great interest in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and as phase reference in optical beam-forming networks (OBFN). The type of laser demonstrated here is also of general importance because it may be applied over a huge wavelength range including the visible, limited only by the transparency of glass (400 nm to 2.35 μm).
Reporting Effect Size: The Road Less Traveled.

This paper is intended to raise awareness of the need to understand and include effect size statistics in research reports. The paper summarizes what is meant by effect size and why it is important in educational research. It then presents findings of a review of recent issues of four journals to determine the use of effect size by researchers. The paper also suggests some reasons effect size is not reported more commonly and offers some suggestions for increasing the use of such statistics. The four journals on which the review is based were chosen to provide a representative sample of educational research literature with a focus on quantitative studies. Of the 508 articles classified as quantitative or mixed method, 148 mentioned or calculated effect size, but only 82 articles included a calculation of effect size and at least limited discussion of magnitude or practical significance. Only 30 articles contained a calculated effect size and extensive discussion about effect size or magnitude. Most often, conclusions in these journals are made solely from the results of statistical inference tests. (Contains 4 tables and 36 references.) (SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Effect Size 1 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) his document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. Reporting Effect Size: The Road Less Traveled James H. McMillan Sonya Lawson Kristi Lewis Angela Snyder Virginia Commonwealth University Paper presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 5, New Orleans. 2 IEN COPY AVAILABLE
Marek Dabrowski

The date of the formal EU accession did not mean the end of the integration effort of new member states to fully participate in the Single European Market, when taken in its broader sense, including the EU common currency. Apart from joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), new members are still waiting to join the Schengen zone and have full access to labor markets of certain old member states (OMS). There are also specific transitory provisions in many other chapters of the acquis related to agriculture, environment, infrastructure, free capital movement, taxes, etc.
Colour-magnitude diagrams of transiting Exoplanets - II. A larger sample from photometric distances

Colour-magnitude diagrams form a traditional way of presenting luminous objects in the Universe and compare them to each others. Here, we estimate the photometric distance of 44 transiting exoplanetary systems. Parallaxes for seven systems conrm our methodology. Combining those measurements with uxes obtained while planets were occulted by their host stars, we compose colour-magnitude diagrams in the near and mid-infrared. When possible, planets are plotted alongside very low-mass stars and eld brown dwarfs, who often share similar sizes and equilibrium temperatures. They oer a natural, empirical, comparison sample. We also include directly imaged exoplanets and the expected loci of pure blackbodies. Irradiated planets do not match blackbodies; their emission spectra are not featureless. For a given luminosity, hot Jupiters’ daysides show a larger variety in colour than brown dwarfs do and display an increasing diversity in colour with decreasing intrinsic luminosity. The presence of an extra absorbent within the 4.5 m band would reconcile outlying hot Jupiters with ultra-cool dwarfs’ atmospheres. Measuring the emission of gas giants cooler than 1 000 K would disentangle whether planets’ atmospheres behave more similarly to brown dwarfs’ atmospheres than to blackbodies, whether they are akin to the young directly imaged planets, or if irradiated gas giants form their own sequence.
Probabilistic Forecasts of Snow Water Equivalent and Runoff in Mountainous Areas

AbstractGood initial states can improve the skill of hydrological ensemble predictions. In mountainous regions such as Switzerland, snow is an important component of the hydrological system. Including estimates of snow cover in hydrological models is of great significance for the prediction of both flood and streamflow drought events. In this study, gridded snow water equivalent (SWE) maps, derived from daily snow depth measurements, are used within the gridded version of the conceptual hydrological model Precipitation Runoff Evapotranspiration Hydrotope (PREVAH) to replace the model SWE at initialization. The ECMWF Ensemble Prediction System (ENS) reforecast is used as meteorological input for 32-day forecasts of streamflow and SWE. Experiments were performed in several parts of the Alpine Rhine and the Thur River. Predictions where modeled SWE estimates were replaced with SWE maps could successfully enhance the predictability of SWE up to a lead time of 25 days, especially at the beginning and the end o.