Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
3-D electrical resistivity tomography using adaptive wavelet parameter grids

SUMMARY We present a novel adaptive model parametrization strategy for the 3-D electrical resistivity tomography problem and demonstrate its capabilities with a series of numerical examples. In contrast to traditional parametrization schemes, which are based on fixed disjoint blocks, we discretizethesubsurfaceintermsofHaarwaveletsandadaptivelyadjusttheparametrizationas the iterative inversion proceeds. This results in a favourable balance of cell sizes and parameter reliability, that is, in regions where the data constrain the subsurface properties well, our parametrization strategy leads to a fine grid, whereas poorly resolved areas are represented only by a few large blocks. This is documented with eigenvalue analyses and by computing model resolution matrices. During the initial iteration steps, only a few model parameters are involved, which reduces the risk that the regularization dominates the inversion. The algorithm alsoautomaticallyaccountsfornon-lineareffectscausedbypronouncedconductivitycontrasts. Inside conductive features a finer grid is generated than inside more resistive structures. The automated parameter adaptation is computationally efficient, because the coarsening and refinement subroutines have a nearly linear numerical complexity with respect to the number of model parameters. Because our approach is not tightly coupled to electrical resistivity tomography, it should be straightforward to adapt it to other data types.
Mathematical model of pennate muscle ( LIF 043-15 )

The purpose of this study is to create a new mathematical model of pennate striated skeletal muscle. This new model describes behaviour of isolated flat pennate muscle in two dimensions (2D) by taking into account that rheological properties of muscle fibres depend on their planar arrangement. A new mathematical model is implemented in two types: 1) numerical model of unipennate muscle (unipennate model); 2) numerical model of bipennate muscle (bipennate model). Applying similar boundary conditions and similar load, proposed numerical models had been tested. Obtained results were compared with results of numerical researches by applying a Hill-Zajac muscle model (this is a Hill type muscle model, in which the angle of pennation is taken into consideration) and a fusiform muscle model (a muscle is treated as a structure composed of serially linked different mechanical properties parts).
COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses XV. Assessing the achievability and precision of time-delay measurements

COSMOGRAIL is a long-term photometric monitoring of gravitationally lensed QSOs aimed at implementing Refsdal's time-delay method to measure cosmological parameters, in particular H0. Given long and well sampled light curves of strongly lensed QSOs, time-delay measurements require numerical techniques whose quality must be assessed. To this end, and also in view of future monitoring programs or surveys such as the LSST, a blind signal processing competition named Time Delay Challenge 1 (TDC1) was held in 2014. The aim of the present paper, which is based on the simulated light curves from the TDC1, is double. First, we test the performance of the time-delay measurement techniques currently used in COSMOGRAIL. Second, we analyse the quantity and quality of the harvest of time delays obtained from the TDC1 simulations. To achieve these goals, we first discover time delays through a careful inspection of the light curves via a dedicated visual interface. Our measurement algorithms can then be applied to the data in an automated way. We show that our techniques have no significant biases, and yield adequate uncertainty estimates resulting in reduced chi2 values between 0.5 and 1.0. We provide estimates for the number and precision of time-delay measurements that can be expected from future time-delay monitoring campaigns as a function of the photometric signal-to-noise ratio and of the true time delay. We make our blind measurements on the TDC1 data publicly available
Evaluation of parents’ views about etiologic factors of severe early childhood caries: A qualitative study

Background. Severe early childhood caries (S-ECC) is a rapid form of dental caries that firstly affects primary upper incisors of children less <3 years of age and can cause interference in child’s health by pain, nutritional deficiencies and sleep disorders. It seems there are many unknown factors in the etiology as well as progression of S-ECC. The aim of this study was to assess parents' views in this relation. Methods. In this qualitative study parent’s views and their 1‒3-year-old children were studied when they visited pediatric medical clinics in Kerman. After cleaning the children teeth and examination of them to discover caries, they were placed in 2 groups with or without S-ECC. Then each parent was interviewed separately and their comments were collected and studied. Examinations and interviews continued with parents until they did not express anything new. Results. Parents of children without S-ECC had better understanding about S-ECC related factors than parents of children with S-ECC and greater number of them (without significant differences) expressed known reasons for occurrence of S-ECC. There were differences among known reasons and proposed reasons mostly in parents of children with S-ECC, although the differences were not significant. Maternal stress and amount of breast milk’s lactose were factors that were reported by some parents while there were unknown factors related to the etiology of S-ECC. Furthermore, no parents mentioned factors like saliva or mode of delivery. Conclusion. The most important achievement of the study was the attention of some parents to the role of their chronic stress in the occurrence of S-ECC. Another important consideration was that none of the parents mentioned the important role of the quality and quantity of saliva in preventing S-ECC, which should be promoted in the community
Universal formula for baryon spectra in heavy-ion collisions and its implications

In an unconventional presentation of the data on the transverse momentum spectra of baryons produced in heavy-ion collisions, regularities are found that make possible the discovery of a universal formula valid for p,Λ,Ξ, and Ω. The formula describes the baryon distributions over wide ranges of pT(0.5≲pT≲5 GeV/c) for 0.06≲sNN≲3 TeV, except for very peripheral collisions. Some aspects of their empirical properties are derived in the recombination model, resulting in a revelation of some features of the light and strange quark distributions before hadronization. Interpretation of the inverse slopes of their exponential behavior leads to an implication that cannot accommodate the conventional description of fluid flow. This is mainly a study of phenomenology without detailed model input.
A New Principle for Tuning-Free Huber Regression

: The robustiﬁcation parameter, which balances bias and robustness, plays a critical role in the construction of subGaussian estimators for heavy-tailed and/or skewed data. Although the parameter can be tuned using cross-validation, in large-scale statistical problems such as high-dimensional covariance matrix estimation and large-scale multiple testing, the number of robustiﬁcation parameters increases with the dimensionality causing cross-validation to become computationally pro-hibitive. We propose a new data-driven principle for choosing the robustiﬁcation parameter for Huber-type subGaussian estimators in three fundamental problems: mean estimation, linear regression, and sparse regression in high dimensions. Our proposal is guided by a nonasymptotic deviation analysis, and is conceptually different from cross-validation, which relies on the mean squared error to assess the ﬁt. Extensive numerical experiments and a real-data analysis further illustrate the eﬃcacy of the proposed methods.
Reinforcement Learning for a Simple Racing Game

OpenAI Gym is a popular open-source repository of reinforcement learning (RL) environments and development tools. Its curated set of problems and ease of use have made it a standard benchmarking tool for RL algorithms. Furthermore, its challenges are designed to be computationally tractable on modern consumer-grade hardware. We saw OpenAI Gym as an ideal tool for venturing deeper into RL. Our objective was to conquer an RL problem far closer to real-world use cases than the relatively clean examples found in DMU or homework assignments, and in particular one with a continuous action space and very high-dimensional state space. The CarRacing-v0 environment provided exactly this, with a dash of video game excitement to boot. As an online learning task involving the learning of in-game actions from pixels, CarRacing is a prime target for deep reinforcement learning. Much of our methodology is due to Mnih et al.’s landmark exploration of deep reinforcement learning for Atari gameplay [2], and the course notes which clarified and expanded upon it [3]. More recently double and dueling deep Q-networks have seen success in solving similar tasks [5].
The Effect of Oil Price Shocks on the Saudi Manufacturing Sector

This paper aims to examine the effects of oil price shocks on the manufacturing sector in Saudi Arabia during the period 2002 – 2014, using quarterly data. A unit root test was conducted, in which the data were shown to be non-stationary in the level, and they became stationary in the first difference for all variables. The co-integration model was applied, and the results indicated that no co-integrating equation exists, which means that there is no long run effect of oil price shocks on the manufacturing sector. So, we estimate a Vector Auto Regressive model, the results of which implied that oil price shocks do not affect in the manufacturing sector in the short run, and it may have an effect on the manufacturing sector after 10 quarter according to the impulse response function.
Explaining the durable goods co-movement puzzle with non-separable preferences: a bayesian approach.

A standard two-sector sticky price model with flexibly priced durables depicts negative co-movement between durables and non-durables after a monetary policy shock, which is at odds with the empirical evidence. This paper proposes a new channel, non-separable preferences with a small wealth effect on labor hours, as a solution to the co-movement puzzle. In contrast to the standard model where the aggregate hours remain relatively unchanged after the contractionary policy shock, aggregate labor hours fall along with the fall in the labor wage, thereby discouraging production in both the durable and non-durable goods sectors. We further compare our model's explanatory power with two other alternatives that can resolve the puzzle by using a Bayesian approach. Based on the log marginal likelihood and cross-correlation function comparison exercises, we find evidence that the data strongly favor both the alternative specifications over our baseline model. More specifically, the model with a working capital channel and habit formation gives the best fit to the data, especially for cross-correlations between durable and non-durable consumption.
Data and text mining A novel representation of genomic sequences for taxonomic clustering and visualization by means of self-organizing maps

Motivation: Self-organizing maps (SOMs) are readily available bioinformatics methods for clustering and visualizing high-dimensional data, provided that such biological information is previously transformed to fixed-size, metric-based vectors. To increase the usefulness of SOM-based approaches for the analysis of genomic sequence data, novel representation methods are required that automatically and bijectively transform aligned nucleotide sequences into numeric vectors, dealing with both nucleotide ambiguity and gaps derived from sequence alignment. Results: Six different codification variants based on Euclidean space, just like SOM processing, have been tested using two SOM models: the classical Kohonen’s SOM and growing cell structures. They have been applied to two different sets of sequences: 32 sequences of small sub-unit ribosomal RNA from organisms belonging to the three domains of life, and 44 sequences of the reverse transcriptase region of the pol gene of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 belonging to different groups and sub-types. Our results show that the most important factor affecting the accuracy of sequence clustering is the assignment of an extra weight to the presence of alignmentderived gaps. Although each of the codification variants shows a different level of taxonomic consistency, the results are in agreement with sequence-based phylogenetic reconstructions and anticipate a broad applicability of this codification method. Contact: sole@eui.upm. es Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. VC The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 736 Bioinformatics, 31(5), 2015, 736–744 doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu708 Advance Access Publication Date: 24 October 2014
An exploratory investigation on new product development in family luxury businesses

In the actual scenario characterised by new and ever-changing dynamics of the global market, firms need to quickly and timely anticipate competitors' next moves, monitor market tastes, adapt their products and properly communicate their positioning. The history of many luxury brands is linked to a family, though they may have changed ownership over time. The products often remain faithful to the style impressed by the family and when it does not happen, the risk is to lose enamel. Since this phenomenon has not been thoroughly investigated, this research aims at investigating the relationship between family and products in the luxury sector, in order to understand if and how, the family affects the success of the company. We have interviewed 19 family businesses operating in the luxury sector discovering that the involvement of the family and its essence are deeply anchored in the core business of the company.
QUALITY AND PRICES OF INTRA-EUROPEAN TRADE OF FOOD-INDUSTRY PRODUCTS

The completion of the European Single Market should bring out an exploitation of comparative advantages in production and trade. It is usually assumed that, given the predominance of intraeuropean trade flows in the global import figures of the European Union, efficiency gains from trade creation could be potentially important. However, the analysis of the effects of the Single Market on trade specialisation with a greater degree of accuracy requires trade quality indicators to be available. This paper uses the theory of index numbers to establish the relative quality levels of the food industry shipments to the European Internal Market from European Union member countries. It is found a positive relationship between the evolution of country shares on the European food in-dustry and the ability to achieve growing quality levels in the composition of export flows. Finally, intraeuropean food industry trade is analysed accordingly to the pattern of specialisation adopted.
Post-ischemic inflammatory response in the brain: Targeting immune cell in ischemic stroke therapy

An ischemic stroke occurs when the blood supply is obstructed to the vascular basin, causing the death of nerve cells and forming the ischemic core. Subsequently, the brain enters the stage of reconstruction and repair. The whole process includes cellular brain damage, inflammatory reaction, blood–brain barrier destruction, and nerve repair. During this process, the proportion and function of neurons, immune cells, glial cells, endothelial cells, and other cells change. Identifying potential differences in gene expression between cell types or heterogeneity between cells of the same type helps to understand the cellular changes that occur in the brain and the context of disease. The recent emergence of single-cell sequencing technology has promoted the exploration of single-cell diversity and the elucidation of the molecular mechanism of ischemic stroke, thus providing new ideas and directions for the diagnosis and clinical treatment of ischemic stroke.
The Welfare State and Competitiveness

In all modern industrial countries, redistributive expenditures are a larger component of the government budget than consumption of goods and services. In this paper, we use a general equilibrium, two- country model with exportables, importables and nontradables to study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the presence of labor unions and distortionary taxation. We show that an increase in transfers to, say, retirees, financed by distortionary taxation, can generate a loss of competitiveness (defined as an increase in relative unit labor costs for tradable goods), an appreciation of the relative price of nontradables, and a decrease in employment in all sectors of the domestic economy. The same qualitative effects would also obtain in the case of an increase in transfers towards the unemployed even if financed by non-distortionary taxation. Moreover, all these effects of labor taxation depend in a nonlinear way on the degree of centralization of the wage setting process in the labor market. We then estimate the effects of labor taxation on unit labor costs and the relative price of nontradables in a sample of 14 OECD countries. We find considerable empirical support for the model.
Risk, Uncertainty, and Expected Returns

Abstract A conditional asset pricing model with risk and uncertainty implies that the time-varying exposures of equity portfolios to the market and uncertainty factors carry positive risk premia. The empirical results from the size, book-to-market, momentum, and industry portfolios indicate that the conditional covariances of equity portfolios with market and uncertainty predict the time-series and cross-sectional variation in stock returns. We find that equity portfolios that are highly correlated with economic uncertainty proxied by the variance risk premium (VRP) carry a significant annualized 8% premium relative to portfolios that are minimally correlated with VRP.
Interactive comment on “ Assimilating SAR-derived water level data into a hydraulic model : a case study ” by L . Giustarini et al

the performance of the model was assessed comparing the observed and the simulated hydrographs at all the gauged cross sections, thereby checking the capability of the calibrated model to reproduce the spatio-temporal variations of water levels. The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency was computed at all gauged cross sections with recorded water stages and available rating curves, obtaining an average value of 0.84. This will be added and better explained in the resubmitted version of the manuscript.
Design of Supersonic Transport

DESIGN OF SUPERSONIC TRANSPORT By Seruvizhi Maharajan An efficient long range Supersonic Transport (SST) has not been feasible until now because of the difficulties dealing with the sonic boom. However, recent developments in technology make it a real possibility that a technically, environmentally, and economically acceptable SST will be feasible in the near future. This thesis outlines the conceptual and preliminary design of a long range SST, incorporating the latest technologies. The SST is designed to meet low sonic boom and low drag by appropriately designed fuselage shape. The airplane is expected to carry 337 passengers, over 8,700 miles within 4 hours. The stability analysis is included to show that the design is aerodynamically stable. Advanced aerodynamic concepts are incorporated to reduce shock waves and supersonic drag. The proposed SST concept satisfies FAR-25 requirements.
Exploring Swedish preschool teachers' perspectives on applying a self-reflection tool for improving inclusion in early childhood education and care

Introduction In order to provide opportunities for high-quality early childhood education and care for each child, inclusive settings need to develop and sustain their potential to enable participation in terms of attendance and involvement for diverse groups of children. In 2015–2017, the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education completed a project on inclusive early childhood education, focusing on structures, processes, and outcomes that ensure a systemic approach to high-quality inclusive early childhood education. Within the project, a self-reflection tool for improving inclusion, the Inclusive Early Childhood Education Environment Self-Reflection Tool (ISRT), was developed. For purposes of future implementation of the ISRT, the present study focused on the teachers' perspective regarding the ISRT's potential to contribute to enabling all children's participation, defined as attending and being actively engaged in the activities in early childhood education and care. The specific aim was to explore Swedish preschool teachers' perceptions of the ISRT based on their experiences of applying the tool. Methods Twelve preschool teachers participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of applying the tool. The interviews were analyzed with a thematic analysis. Results The thematic analysis resulted in three main themes concerning the teachers' perception of (1) the construction of the ISRT, (2) the time required for using the tool, and (3) the tool's immediate relevance for practice. Each of these themes contained both negative and positive perceptions of the tool. Discussion Based on the negative and positive perceptions identified in the three main themes, future research and development of the ISRT in Swedish preschools are discussed. On a general level, the results are discussed in relation to the implementation of the ISRT in terms of acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility.
False Load Attack to Smart Meters by Synchronously Switching Power Circuits

In the electric energy metering process, current and voltage are sampled periodically and simultaneously, and then used to calculate the energy consumption. This paper presents a simple yet powerful attack to the above metering mechanism such that the calculated energy consumption is made far away from the actual one. Specifically, an adversary switches on/off the power circuit at the meter’s sampling rate. If the meter samples the circuit at the circuit-off (or circuit-on) time, the measured energy consumption is much lower (or higher respectively) than the actual one. Unlike the state-of-the-art false load injection attacks, the present attack is immune to the well-known cryptographical countermeasure that builds a secure and time-stamped channel between the meter and the central system. We implemented a low-cost device to attack a simulated electric energy meter. According to the experiment results, the attack method is effective. Moreover, we propose a countermeasure on the present attack and demonstrate its effectiveness.
Scale Invariant Contrasts 1 Scale Invariant Contrasts of Response Latency Distributions

Individual differences in general speed lead to a positive correlation between the mean and standard deviation of mean latency. This “coarse” scaling effect causes the mean latency difference (MLD) to be spuriously correlated with general speed. Within individuals, the correlation between the mean and standard deviation of trial latencies leads contrasted distributions to increase their overlap as an MLD of fixed width is translated to the right. To address this “fine” scaling effect, contrasts based on within subject latency transformations including the logarithm, standardization, and ranking were evaluated and turned out to be distinctly superior to the MLD. Notably, the mean gaussian rank latency difference was internally consistent, eliminated fine scaling, meliorated coarse scaling, reduced correlations with general speed, increased statistical power to detect within subject and between group effects, and has the potential to increase the validity of inferences drawn from response latency data. Abstract = 145 words= 145 words