Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dam invaders: impoundments facilitate biological invasions into freshwaters

Freshwater ecosystems are at the forefront of the global biodiversity crisis, with more declining and extinct species than in terrestrial or marine environments. Hydrologic alterations and biological invasions represent two of the greatest threats to freshwater biota, yet the importance of linkages between these drivers of environmental change remains uncertain. Here, we quantitatively test the hypothesis that impoundments facilitate the introduction and establishment of aquatic invasive species in lake ecosystems. By combining data on boating activity, water body physicochemistry, and geographical distribution of five nuisance invaders in the Laurentian Great Lakes region, we show that non-indigenous species are 2.4 to 300 times more likely to occur in impoundments than in natural lakes, and that impoundments frequently support multiple invaders. Furthermore, comparisons of the contemporary and historical landscapes revealed that impoundments enhance the invasion risk of natural lakes by increasing their.
Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy

For decades, the five-forces model of competition has dominated the thinking about strategy. But it describes competition among traditional “pipeline” businesses, which succeed by optimizing the activities in their value chains—most of which they own or control. “Platform” businesses that bring together consumers and producers, as Uber, Alibaba, and Airbnb do, require a different approach to strategy. The critical asset of a platform is external—the community of members. The focus shifts from controlling resources to orchestrating them, and firms win by facilitating more external interactions and creating “network effects” that increase the value provided to all participants. In this new world, competition can emerge from seemingly unrelated industries and even from within the platform itself. The authors, three platform strategists, walk executives through the choices they must make when building platforms, outlining the different metrics needed to manage them. Businesses that fail to learn the new rules will struggle, they argue. When a platform enters the marketplace of a pure pipeline business, the platform nearly always wins. That’s exactly what happened when the iPhone came on the scene in 2007. By 2015, it accounted for 92% of global profits in mobile phones, while most of the giants that once ruled the industry made no profit at all. INSETS: Networks Invert the Firm. ;HARNESSING SPILLOVERS
A Genetic Algorithm for Path Generation and its Applications

Path generation is an optimization problem mainly performed on grid maps that combines generation of paths with minimization of their cost. Several methods that belong to the class of exhaustive searches are available; however, these methods are only able to obtain a single path as a solution for each iteration of the search. Conversely, while genetic algorithms involving a type of multipoint search methods have been proposed as suitable candidates for this problem with the goal of simultaneously searching for multiple candidate paths, these methods are limited to particular applications, and there are limitations on the types of paths that can be represented. This paper therefore proposes a path generation method that is applicable to more general-purpose applications compared to previous methods based on a new design of the genotype used in the genetic algorithm.
Influence of BCH and LDPC Code Parameters on the BER Characteristic of Satellite DVB Channels

This article presents the results of a study on the noise immunity of DVB channels when higher-order M-ary APSK modulation schemes and concatenated BCH-LDPC codes are used. Dependencies to determine the probability at the decoder output are given taking into consideration the BCH and LDPC code parameters and the error probability in the communication channel. The influence of the BCH packets length, the BCH code rate, the number of maximum iteration and the parameters of LDPC parity-check matrix on the code efficiency is analyzed. Research of the influence of the concatenated LDPC-BCH code parameters on the radio channel noise immunity is conducted and dependencies to determine the required CNR at the input of the satellite receiver are given.
Physical quality of an Oxisol cultivated with maize submited to cover crops in the pre-cropping period

SUMMARY The intensive use of land alters the distribution of the pore size which impartsconsequences on the soil physical quality. The Least Limiting Water Range (LLWR)allows for the visualization of the effects of management systems upon either theimprovement or the degradation of the soil physical quality. The objective of thisstudy was to evaluate the physical quality of a Red Latosol (Oxisol) submited tocover crops in the period prior to the maize crop in a no-tillage and conventionaltillage system, using porosity, soil bulk density and the LLWR as attributes. Thetreatments were: conventional tillage (CT) and a no-tillage system with the followingcover crops: sunn hemp ( Crotalaria juncea L.) (NS), pearl millet ( Pennisetumamericanum (L.) Leeke) (NP) and lablab ( Dolichos lablab L.) (NL). Theexperimental design was randomized blocks in subdivided plots with sixreplications, with the plots being constituted by the treatments and the subplotsby the layers analyzed. The no-tillage systems showed higher total porosity andsoil organic matter at the 0–0.5 m layer for the CT. The CT did not differ from theNL or NS in relation to macroporosity. The NP showed the greater porosity, whileCT and NS presented lower soil bulk density. No
Strange bedfellows : Shifting paradigms in the corpus-based analyses of literary translations

Although the application of computational and statistical approaches in the analyses of literary translations has gained considerable traction of late, there is still a good deal of progress to be made on bridging the divide between the cross-disciplinary nature of such analyses and the traditions of translation studies and the computing sciences. This article attempts to document issues and methodological divergences which arise in such work, collaborative or otherwise, drawing upon studies across the digital humanities, computational stylometry, corpus linguistics and translation studies literature and identifying areas in which further progress could be achieved based on a mutual collaborative spirit between disciplines.
Physics Teachers’ Perception of Effective Teaching/Learning of Physics in Senior Secondary School for Global Competitiveness.

For Nigerian education to aim at enhancing global competitiveness, physics education must ensure that it is translated into marketable product and processes. This study was designed to investigate physics teachers’ perception of effective teaching/learning of physics in senior secondary schools for global competitiveness. The study therefore employed a descriptive survey design. The sample size for the study was seventy nine (79) Senior Secondary School physics teachers from Umuahia Education zone of Abia State of Nigeria. Two (2) research questions and one (1) null hypothesis tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The instrument for data collection is a researchers’ developed structured questionnaire of the Likert type. The instrument was validated and the reliability coefficient obtained as 0.79. Data collected was analyzed using mean for the research questions and chi-square (X 2 ) statistics for the hypothesis. The study revealed that six main principles of effective teaching/learning for global competitiveness were identified by physics teachers. They include first dealing with students’ existing ideas and conceptions, students been able to apply new concepts or skills into different contexts, and learning activities such as inquiring-based teaching and cooperative learning groups. It was recommended that physics teachers should utilize these principles for effective physics teaching/learning.
Weight Learning in a Probabilistic Extension of Answer Set Programs

LPMLN is a probabilistic extension of answer set programs with the weight scheme derived from that of Markov Logic. Previous work has shown how inference in LPMLN can be achieved. In this paper, we present the concept of weight learning in LPMLN and learning algorithms for LPMLN derived from those for Markov Logic. We also present a prototype implementation that uses answer set solvers for learning as well as some example domains that illustrate distinct features of LPMLN learning. Learning in LPMLN is in accordance with the stable model semantics, thereby it learns parameters for probabilistic extensions of knowledge-rich domains where answer set programming has shown to be useful but limited to the deterministic case, such as reachability analysis and reasoning about actions in dynamic domains. We also apply the method to learn the parameters for probabilistic abductive reasoning about actions.
Designing Slot Antennas in Finite Platforms Using Characteristic Modes

In this paper, the application of the Theory of Characteristic Modes for the design of narrow-in-width open slot antennas embedded in finite platforms is investigated. Purely magnetic and electric characteristic modes (CM) of a slot etched in both an infinite and a finite ground plane are analyzed, with the aim to provide a physical understanding of the slot behavior and its interaction with the metallic ground plane. Instead of traditional CM analysis, an alternative approach is proposed, which consists in dividing the design procedure into the separate and complementary analysis of purely magnetic and electric CM. Based on this analysis, some guidelines for the design of open slot antennas are provided, and a simple and compact narrow-in-width wideband open slot antenna is designed. Simulations and measurements are presented for the optimized slot antenna, showing an impedance bandwidth of 47.48% with a very stable radiation pattern.
Modeling of V2V Communications for C-ITS Safety Applications: A CPS Perspective

Tight coupling between the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and the performance of cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) safety applications is addressed. A cyber-physical system analytical framework is developed which links the characteristics of V2V communications (such as packet loss probability and packet transmission delay) with the physical mobility characteristics of the vehicular system (such as safe intervehicular distance). The study is applied to the Day 1 C-ITS application, emergency electronic brake lights, enabled by the European Telecommunication Standard Institute ITS-G5 and IEEE 802.11p standards.
Does Personality Affect Students' Perceived Preferences for Game Elements in Gamified Learning Environments?

While gamification has gained considerable scholarly and practitioner attention, less concern is paid regarding individual differences in gamified learning environments. Personality in particular is considered as the source of individual differences even within students. Therefore, this study investigates how personality can affect students' perceived preferences for eight game elements in a gamified Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle). One hundred and five students, from a public Tunisian university, used this gamified Moodle during two years to learn "Object Oriented Design Methodology", "Basic Software" and "Information Monitoring Methodology" courses. The obtained results showed that only extraversion, conscientiousness and openness personality traits may affect students' perceived preferences for particular game elements. These findings can be exploited by researchers and practitioners to design personalized and gamified learning environments based on personality.
Crossing Scientific Workflow Fragments Discovery Through Activity Abstraction in Smart Campus

Considering the knowledge-intensity and error-prone of developing scientific workflows from scratch, reusing and repurposing current workflows are the effective and efficient solution to support scientists for conducting novel experiments, and this strategy is deemed as important to achieve the objective of smart campus. An experiment may be relevant with one or multiple scientific workflows. This observation drives us to propose a technique that can discover and recommend cross-workflow fragments with respect to the requirement of novel experiments. Specifically, the functionally similar activities are clustered through adopting a modularity-based community discovery clustering technique, and they are represented as abstract activities. An abstract activity network model is constructed accordingly to reflect the invocation relations among abstract activities. Structural and semantic similar workflow fragments are discovered from the abstract activity network through the sub-graph matching algorithm. These fragments are instantiated through replacing abstract activities by appropriate activities in certain activity clusters. These instantiated workflow fragments are ranked and recommended for their reuse and repurposing purpose. Experimental evaluation results demonstrate that our technique is accurate and efficient on discovering and recommending appropriate cross-workflow fragments.
A Semi-Explicit Surface Tracking Mechanism for Multi-Phase Immiscible Liquids

We introduce a new method to efficiently track complex interfaces among multi-phase immiscible fluids. Unlike existing techniques, we use a mesh-based representation for global liquid surfaces while selectively modeling some local surficial regions with regional level sets (RLS) to handle complex geometries that are difficult to resolve with explicit topology operations. Such a semi-explicit surface mechanism can preserve volume, fine features and foam-like thin films under a relatively low computational expenditure. Our method processes the surface evolution by sampling the fluid domain onto a spectrally refined grid (SRG) and performs efficient grid scanning, generalized interpolations and topology operations on the basis of this grid structure. For the RLS surface part, we propose an accurate advection scheme targeted at SRG. For the explicit mesh part, we develop a fast grid-scanning technique to voxelize the meshes and introduce novel strategies to detect grid cells that contain inconsistent mesh components. A robust algorithm is proposed to construct consistent local meshes to resolve mesh penetrations, and handle the coupling between explicit mesh and RLS surficial regions. We also provide further improvement on handling complicated topological variations, and strategies for remeshing mesh/RLS interconversions.
Microbiological Quality and Contamination Level of Water Sources in Isiolo County in Kenya

Water security and safety is of vital concern in arid and semiarid regions of Kenya. Potable water accessibility and supply is limited due to fluctuating climatic conditions and environmental pollution that lower the wholesomeness of most water sources. The aim of this study was to establish the suitability of these water sources for drinking and use in industrial food processing by the small and medium enterprises (SME's). The aim of this study was to establish suitability of these water sources for drinking and use in industrial food processing by the small and medium enterprises (SME's). A total of 60 surface and ground water sources samples were purposively collected aseptically from the four administrative units (Ngare Mara, LMD, Leparua, and Wabera) of Isiolo County. ISO 16649-3, 688-2, 7937, 9308-1, and 18744 were used for enumeration of E.coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium pafringens, Coliforms, and cysts. Highest mean Clostridium pafringens counts in ground and surface water were 1452 Cfu/ml and 3421 Cfu/ml, respectively. Mean Staphylococcus aureus counts were 740 Cfu/ml and 1333 Cfu/ml in surface water and ground water, respectively. Escherichia coli and Coliforms contamination accounted for 29.88 % and 88.2 %, respectively. Microbial counts in the water sources differed significantly (p≤0.05). Total coliforms had a significant negative relationship (r = -0.76) with residual chlorine. Ground and surface water sources were highly contaminated with microorganism to levels regarded as unsafe by the Kenyan and WHO standards for potable water. Point-of-use water disinfection is thus necessary.
Fast Setup and Robust WiFi Localization for the Exhibition Industry

With the prevalence of WiFi devices (e.g., smartphones), many new business opportunities are being spawned by exploiting the routes or locations of users. Nevertheless, most current approaches based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) usually assume that the targeted (tracked) devices have the transmission characteristics similar to the devices used for system training. This is far from the reality and may lead to considerable errors. We propose a robust localization approach which automatically infers a customized signal-strength-to-distance function for every device on-the-fly, and simultaneously estimates the location of it. This is achieved by first approximating the function with a set of piecewise linear functions, for each targeted device, and the parameters of the linear functions are updated, with an Expectation Maximum (EM) algorithm, when more and more RSSI data of the device are available. Specifically, during the expectation step of the EM algorithm, the location of the targeted device is estimated. Whereas in the maximization step of the algorithm, the parameters of the linear functions customized for that device are updated. As the approach is capable of learning the parameters during localization, training process or system calibration is unnecessary and thus the system setup time can be shortened. This feature is practical for meeting the special needs of the exhibition industry: extremely tight schedules for setting up the site from scratch and extremely large venues. With our testbeds, experimental results show that the mean localization error can be kept about 1.7 meters for different mobile devices with different transmission characteristics. A real-world test at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) was also conducted and various mobile devices can be tracked accurately with little setup time.
Enhancing Money Saving Tips Recommendation System by Pairwise Preferences

The authors aim to develop a system that saves money by providing tips (proposed actions; the tips are called know-how) based on user preferences. In order to select helpful tips, this study develops a method that improves estimation accuracy by optimizing the tip indices that represent the tendency in user preferences. Concretely, the method optimizes the tip indices using both the result generally acquired by five-level evaluations and the result gradually acquired by a paired comparison method in which the users are requested to select one of pair of tips. Evaluation experiments show the general trend that estimation accuracy rises with the amounts of paired comparison data.
Secure ARQ Protocol for Wireless Communications: Performance Analysis and Packet Coding Design

In this paper, we consider secure transmission of a private file, which comprises multiple packets. A network-coding assisted automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) scheme is proposed to improve the security at both file level and packet level. Specially, the ARQ protocol degrades the intercept probability of the whole file at the eavesdropper, while the network coding guarantees the per-packet security. The closed-form intercept probability and outage probability of the whole file and each packet are analytically presented, and we then investigate the tradeoff between the security performance and the outage probability. The proposed scheme is further extended to the cooperative ARQ scenario, and simulation results are provided to corroborate our theoretical findings.
Odor Discrimination by Similarity Measures of Abstract Odor Factor Maps from Electronic Noses

The aim of this study is to improve the discrimination performance of electronic noses by introducing a new method for measuring the similarity of the signals obtained from the electronic nose. We constructed abstract odor factor maps (AOFMs) as the characteristic maps of odor samples by decomposition of three-way signal data array of an electronic nose. A similarity measure for two-way data was introduced to evaluate the similarities and differences of AOFMs from different samples. The method was assessed by three types of pipe and powder tobacco samples. Comparisons were made with other techniques based on PCA, SIMCA, PARAFAC and PARAFAC2. The results showed that our method had significant advantages in discriminating odor samples with similar flavors or with high VOCs release.
Power Optimized Single Relay Selection with an Improved Link-Adaptive-Regenerative Protocol

To improve the reliability and efficiency in cooperative communications, a power optimized single relay selection scheme is proposed by increasing the diversity effort with an improved link-adaptive-regenerative (ILAR) protocol. The protocol determines the forwarding power of a relay node by comparing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at both sides of the node; thus it improves the power efficiency. Moreover, it also proposes a single relay selection strategy to maximize the instantaneous SNR product, which ensures the approximate best channel link quality for good relay forwarding. And the system adjusts the forwarding power in real time and also selects the best relay node participated in the cooperative forwarding. In addition, the cooperation in the protocol is analyzed and the approximate expression of the bit-error-rate (BER) and the outage probability at high SNRs are also derived. Simulation results indicate that the BER and outage probability of the relay selection scheme by the ILAR protocol outperform other contrast schemes of current existing protocols. At BER of 10−2, the proposed scheme with ILAR protocol outperforms those of the decoded-and-forward (DF), the selected DF (SDF), and the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols by 3.5, 3.5 and 7 dB, respectively. Moreover, the outage probability of the relay system decreases with the growth of the relay number. Therefore, the proposed relay selection scheme with ILAR strategies can be properly used in cooperative communications for good reliability and high power efficiency.