Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On asymptotics of estimating functions

The asymptotic theory of estimators obtained from estimating functions is reviewed and some new results on the multivariate parameter case are presented. Specifically, results about existence of consistent estimators and about asymptotic normality of these are given. First a very general stochastic process setting is considered. Then it is demonstrated how more specific conditions for existence of √ n-consistent and asymptotically normal estimators can be given for martingale estimating functions in the case of observations of a Markov process.
The Introduction of the Bow and Arrow and Lithic Resource Use at Rose Spring

One objective of the most recent re-excavation of the Rose Spring site in eastern California was to evaluate the impact of the introduction of the bow and arrow on local obsidian exploitation. Part of the strategy of the study involved the collection and analysis of a large sample of lithic reduction/ production waste produced over the 5,500-year occupation of the site. A change was anticipated in the use of bifacial cores with the adaptation of a new hunting technology requiring less lithic material. A model of change was posited and then tested by using the data generated from the study. The re sults of the analysis indicate the possibility that certain changes in the reduction strategies practiced by the inhabitants of Rose Spring did not become manifest until nearly 1,000 years after the appear ance of the bow, suggesting persistence of the use of the dart and atlatl until about A.D. 1500. An alternative interpretation based on obsidian hydration data is also discussed. Depositional mixing late in time coupled with change in site tool production activities late in time could account for the appar ent appearance of continuity of earlier dart point reduction strategies during the long-term use of the site. The introduction of the bow and arrow to the North American continent surely had a profound impact on hunting and gathering populations who adopted its use late in the occupation of the New World. With this new hunting technology, the hunter could remain visually undetected while releasing deadly projectiles from a consid erable distance, with greater accuracy (in most cases) than could be afforded by the atlatl. In herent to this change in technology was a second advantage? the projectile tips, if made of stone, required less material than that necessary to con struct dart points. In the absence of large quan tities of readily available raw lithic material, this new technology could have been a particular boon. It also could have made scavenging of lithic materials from earlier encampments more profitable than at any time before the bow.
The Natural Rate of Unemployment and its Implications for Economic Policy

The analysis of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff has undergone several stages during the post-war era. The first was marked by the acceptance of A.W. Phillips’ 1957 hypothesis and the subsequent Phillips curve. The next stage – marked by Friedman’s contributions – revealed a vertical long-run Phillips curve and introduced the natural rate of unemployment, designating that level of unemployment consistent with stable inflation. This paper explores the theoretical and empirical implications that have emerged since the introduction of the natural rate concept. At the theoretical level, we find that, far from questioning its existence, the theoretical debates revolve around two main questions: Can we actually determine the precise level of the natural rate and what are the appropriate techniques? and How does the natural rate change over time and what are the factors that influence it? Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, lags behind. Despite numerous empirical studies, economists are a long way from an appropriate quantitative understanding of the determinants and variability of the natural rate, either across time or across countries.
TARGET-FREE EXTRINSIC CALIBRATION OF A MOBILE MULTI-BEAM LIDAR SYSTEM

Abstract. LIDAR sensors are widely used in mobile mapping systems. With the recent developments, the sensors provide high amounts of data, which are necessary for some applications that require a high level of detail. Multi-beam LIDAR sensors can provide this level of detail, but need a specific calibration routine to provide the best precision possible. Because they have many beams, the calibration of such sensors is difficult and is not well represented in the literature. We present an automatic method for the optimization of the calibration parameters of a multi-beam LIDAR sensor: the proposed approach does not need any calibration target, and only uses information from the acquired point clouds, which makes it simple to use. For our optimization method, we define an energy function which penalizes points far from local planar surfaces. At the end of the automatic process, we are able to give the precision of the calibration parameters found.
Influence of surface stressing on stellar coronae and winds

The large-scale field of the Sun is well represented by its lowest energy (or potential) state. Recent observations, by comparison, reveal that many solar-type stars show large-scale surface magnetic fields that are highly non-potential - that is, they have been stressed above their lowest-energy state. This non-potential component of the surface field is neglected by current stellar wind models. The aim of this paper is to determine its effect on the coronal structure and wind. We use Zeeman-Doppler surface magnetograms of two stars - one with an almost potential, one with a non-potential surface field - to extrapolate a static model of the coronal structure for each star. We find that the stresses are carried almost exclusively in a band of uni-directional azimuthal field that is confined to mid-latitudes. Using this static solution as an initial state for an MHD wind model, we then find that the final state is determined primarily by the potential component of the surface magnetic field. The band of azimuthal field must be confined close to the stellar surface as it is not compatible with a steady-state wind. By artificially increasing the stellar rotation rate we demonstrate that the observed azimuthal fields can not be produced by the action of the wind but must be due to processes at or below the stellar surface. We conclude that the background winds of solar-like stars are largely unaffected by these highly-stressed surface fields. Nonetheless, the increased flare activity and associated coronal mass ejections that may be expected to accompany such highly-stressed fields may have a significant impact on any surrounding planets.
DATA COLLECTING AND PROCESSING FOR SUBSTATION INTEGRATION ENHANCEMENT

Data Collecting and Processing for Substation Integration Enhancement. (May 2003) Sasa Jakovljevic, B.S., University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Mladen Kezunovic The issue of substation integration is recognized as a very important one ever since the process of technological development brought a multitude of new computerbased devices and functions into substation operation. During the relatively short time period after the first microprocessors were invented, a myriad of computer-based devices found their application in power engineering. Those devices had a variety of input and output data formats, which hampered exchange of data among different devices. Recent initiatives for standardization of substation data formats and communication protocols have progressed to facilitate production of devices with standardized data formats and data exchange capabilities. Central substation computers now have an opportunity to collect and process data from such computer-based devices. An advanced data collecting and processing solution is developed and implemented as Integrated Substation Software in an effort to enhance substation integration. This report describes a solution that comprises data generation using a substation model, data collecting from modeled apparatus and instruments and finally application of data processing and consistency checking algorithms for creating outputs. The process of data collecting and processing is automated and repeated in equidistant time intervals. Results of processing and related reports are concisely displayed on the user interface screen and exported through data files. The Substation Integration Software was tested through the set of scenarios where each scenario is used to test one of the processing and consistency checking algorithms. The results show that measurements are improved and applicable for usage by other substation and system-wide applications.
Factors affecting the distribution patterns of aquatic macrophytes

Abstract Aquatic macrophytes constitute important components of many freshwater ecosystems. The manifold role of aquatic macrophytes in freshwater habitats is closely linked to their distribution, which in turn depends on a myriad of factors. Foremost, among these are light, water temperature, water quality changes and nutrient enrichment, sediment composition and fluctuations in water levels. Light and temperature are of paramount importance in determining the distribution (with depth, season and latitude), thereby influencing productivity and species composition as well. Sediment compositions markedly affect the growth rates of macrophytes which in turn have a profound influence on the distribution of aquatic macrophytes. Water quality changes and nutrient enrichment can cause considerable variations in the species richness, composition, and density of aquatic vegetation. The reduction in water levels could bring drastic changes in the species composition and distribution of macrophytes. Factors associated with competition, herbivory, land use and land cover changes etc. also play an important role in shaping macrophyte distribution and community structure. In this review we examine both biotic and abiotic factors that influence the structural attributes like species composition, distribution, abundance and diversity of aquatic macrophytes.
CANCER PREVENTION INITIATIVE: AN INTELLIGENT APPROACH FOR THYROID CANCER TYPE DIAGNOSTICS

In recent, medical Image mining has witnessed to be one of the emerging fields of machine learning. Particularly; the classification problem of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images has become a prominent challenge. Thyroid cancer must be detected as earlier as possible; a little delay would extremely be proved hazards for human health and may be resulted into the most fatal threat to human life. Infect in-depth study of physical components of cells of FNAB (Fine needle aspiration Biopsy) would help to refine the results and provide more precise decisions about the potential occurrences of cancer, this paper proposes a system, so called ‘TCTD’ (Thyroid Cancer Type Diagnostics), which aims to assist the doctors during their diagnostic process conducted for thyroid follicular carcinoma and its sub-types. There are five main steps of our methodology. In first step image pre-processing techniques are used. In the second step; we use ensemble methods, such as Multi-SVM to build decision model and to analyze the frequencies between the variables. In third, fourth and fifth steps, model testing, result visualization and performance evaluation are performed by using precision, recall and f-measure estimations. The measured classification accuracy of proposed system is about 98.50% using 10 K-fold cross validation.
Differential Effects of Perceived and Objective Knowledge Measures on Perceptions of Biotechnology

This paper compares the effects of perceived and objective knowledge measures and their relationship to a series of agricultural biotechnology applications using data gathered in a survey of regional Southwestern adults (N = 432). Findings showed that there were differences between perceived and objective knowledge measures and that these differences varied by application. Differences between the two knowledge measures appeared to be most significant among respondents who indicated that they had no knowledge of biotechnology applications. It is likely that perceived knowledge is more important than actual knowledge for some animal and plant biotechnology applications.
Reducing coherency traffic volume in chip multiprocessors through pointer analysis

REDUCING COHERENCY TRAFFIC VOLUME IN CHIP MULTIPROCESSORS THROUGH POINTER ANALYSIS Erdem Derebaşoğlu M.S. in Computer Engineering Advisor: Özcan Öztürk September 2017 With increasing number of cores in chip multiprocessors (CMPs), it gets more challenging to provide cache coherency efficiently. Although snooping based protocols are appropriate solutions to small scale systems, they are inefficient for large systems because of the limited bandwidth. Therefore, large scale CMPs require directory based solutions where a hardware structure called directory holds the information. This directory keeps track of all memory blocks and which core’s cache stores a copy of these blocks. The directory sends messages only to caches that store relevant blocks and also coordinates simultaneous accesses to a cache block. As directory based protocols scaled to many cores, performance, network-on-chip (NoC) traffic, and bandwidth become major problems. In this thesis, we present software mechanisms to improve effectiveness of directory based cache coherency on CMPs with shared memory. In multithreaded applications, some of the data accesses do not disrupt cache coherency, but they still produce coherency messages among cores. For example, read-only (private) data can be considered in this category. On the other hand, if data is accessed by at least two cores and at least one of them is a write operation, it is called shared data. In our proposed system, private data and shared data are determined at compile time, and cache coherency protocol only applies to shared data. We implement our approach in two stages. First, we use Andersen’s pointer analysis to analyze a program and mark its private instructions, i.e instructions that load or store private data, at compile time. Second, we run the program in Sniper Multi-Core Simulator [1] with the proposed hardware configuration. We used SPLASH-2 and PARSEC-2.1 parallel benchmarks to test our approach. Simulation results show that our approach reduces cycle count, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) accesses, and coherency traffic. iii
Model of Deteriorating Items with Revenue Sharing on Preservation Technology Investment under Price Sensitive Stock Dependent Demand

The objective of this research is to tackle the emerging problem of jointly determining the optimal retail price, the replenishment cycle, and the cost of preservation technology investment from an integrated perspective among the supplier and the manufacturer. For this, we develop an integrated single-manufacturer single-retailer inventory model for deteriorating items under revenue sharing on preservation technology investment. The propose model is develop under the contract that the manufacturer offers the retailer for a percentage of revenue sharing on preservation technology investment. The market demand is assume to be dependent on both the on-hand stock and price, and the manufacturer and the retailer are in an agreement of lot-for-lot policy. Numerical and graphical analysis is given to illustrate the model. Received: 8 June 2015, Revised: 17 November 2015, Accepted: 6 January 2016.
Mating behaviour and breeding of the grey bamboo shark, Chiloscyllium griseum Müller & Henle, 1838 in captivity

In the present study, the mating behaviour and breeding of the grey bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium griseum), in captivity was documented. During mating, two male sharks grasped the pectoral fins of one female, with the dominant male succeeding in copulation in a vertical position. Subsequently, 22 eggs cases were laid in pairs of which 7 eggs hatched after a period of 114- 125 days with 85.7% survival. The male to female sex ratio in shark pups was 1:0.75. In India, this is the first report of complete documentation of the mating behaviour and breeding of sharks in captivity.
STUDY CONCERNING CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF FISH MEAT DEPENDING ON THE CONSIDERED FISH SPECIES

In this paper the authors approach a very actual thematic concerning the fish meat quality, depending on different species with different alimentary behavior and life style. For this goal, it was made chemical analysis of 10 species of fresh water and marine fish, starting with the establishment of the different body components percentage related at the total body weight and continuing with the determination of the chemical composition of the analyzed species. Also, we approach aspects related to the qualitative differences of fish meat, depending on the species, and we compared these result with the meat obtained from domesticated animals. The obtained results showed that the fish meat is clearly superior, from qualitative point of view, comparative to the domesticated animal’s meat.
Division by inner functions in a class of composition operators on Lipschitz spaces

We prove that the class 𝒞(HΛα,HΛβp)={ϕ:Cϕ(HΛα)⊂HΛβp} , where HΛα and HΛβp are holomorphic Lipschitz spaces, has the f‐property for p⩾1, 00, 0
CARDIO-RESPIRATORY DISORDERS AMONG SEWAGE WORKERS By Fahmy

Objective: The present study was designed to investigate cardio-respiratory disorders among sewage workers in Alexandria in order to suggest the suitable preventive measures for this sector. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 67 male sewage workers and a control group of 60 non-exposed matched persons. All participants of the study were subjected to an interview using a pre-designed questionnaire and clinical general and systemic examinations as well as specific investigations including resting ECG, pulmonary function testing, plain chest X-ray and measurement of the level of sulf-hemoglobin. Results: This study showed high smoking rate among sewage workers in comparison to controls (p=0.010). The resting ECG changes reported among the exposed workers in the present study were mainly left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and ischemic changes (p=0.027). Sulf-hemoglobin level was an independent determinant factor in multiple logistic regression models with LVH and ischemic changes as the dependent variables (p= 0.050 and 0.000 respectively). Significant reductions in percent predicted FVC and FEV1 among the exposed group versus controls (p=0.000 and 0.001 respectively), suggesting a restrictive pattern of impairment, were observed. Respiratory manifestations were the independent determinant for FVC and FEV1 in multiple regression analyses (p= 0.031 & 0.05 respectively). Conclusion: Cardio-respiratory disorders among sewage workers should be considered in health surveillance of this sector with emphasis on antismoking measures. Fahmy F.C. et al., 198
Comparing scenarios of Canadian daily climate extremes derived using a weather generator

Stochastic weather generators are widely used for developing local climate scenarios from large-scale climate change scenarios simulated by GCMs. We used AAFC-WG, a stochastic weather generator developed at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), to develop daily climate scenarios for the time period 2040-2069 for the agricultural regions of Canada, based on 4 climate change simulations conducted by global climate models CGCM3, HadCM3, ECHAM5/MPI-OM and CSIRO-Mk3.5. Annual and growing season (1 May to 30 September) extreme daily values of maxi- mum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation were estimated from these scenarios on fine grids (0.5° latitude × 0.5° longitude) and from direct daily global climate model (GCM) outputs on coarse grids (~2.8° latitude × 2.8° longitude for CGCM3, 2.5° latitude × 3.75° longitude for HadCM3, and ~1.865° latitude × 1.875° longitude for ECHAM5/MPI-OM and CSIRO-Mk3.5). Compared with the corresponding values from direct GCM outputs, the extremes from daily climate scenarios gener- ated by the AAFC-WG provided more detail at the finer spatial scale. Although the spatial patterns of the changes in climate extremes were often similar, actual values of the extremes from localized scenarios may be more reliable than those from direct GCM outputs since climate extremes under the present climate were not often realistically reproduced by the GCMs studied here. It is understood that the actual values are important as they provide the basis for climate change impact studies and the development of adaptation strategies.
First records of 13 mammalian species within the southwestern Cross Timbers region of Texas

Fieldwork from 2004 to 2008 and investigation of the mammal collection of Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas, resulted in the collection and discovery of 13 species of mammals that constitute county records for Brown, Callahan, Comanche, Erath, Hamilton, and Mills counties within the southwestern Texas Cross Timbers ecological region. The Cross Timbers region is a transition zone between the eastern deciduous forests and the western prairie regions. The mammalian fauna of the region has been sporadically studied and these specimens help define mammalian distributions within the southwestern Cross Timbers.
Teaching the YouTube generation: exploring the benefits of an interactive teaching approach in sustainable product design

This paper presents findings from a doctoral study, which investigated effective methods for teaching social sustainability within product design courses in British and Irish universities. Specifically exploring, how to foster a holistic understanding of the social aspects of sustainable product design amongst undergraduate and postgraduate students, through design thinking. Perceived relevance is considered as a fundamental aspect in enabling students to engage deeply with sustainability [1]. Authors [2;3;4] note that 'Net Generation' learners have specific learning preferences that can be targeted in order to improve the students learning experience. Through the careful design of materials which build upon the students tendency towards visual learning and seeking increase relevance and motivation, by offering opportunities for collaborative learning and learning through discovery. Three 'Rethinking Design' workshops were designed and developed as part of a doctoral study to introduce students to the wider social aspects of sustainability and these were conducted in five universities in Britain and Ireland. The workshops featured visually rich audio visual introductions followed by collaborative group based mind mapping activities, which were successful in fostering deep learning by facilitating learning through discovery, critical reflection, peer learning and creativity leading to an exploration of design thinking solutions.
Laser surface melting of 304 stainless steel for pitting corrosion resistance improvement

Laser surface melting has been conducted on a 304 stainless steel (SS) with the aim of enhancing pitting corrosion resistance of the material. This process involves rapid melting of the materiali? ½s surface followed by rapid solidification to refine the microstructure. This includes the dissolution of inclusions such as MnS, FeS, CrxCy, and other minor constituents. The microstructures as a result of laser treatment were observed by means of optical microscope and also confirmed by the XRD. The glow discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GDOES) was utilized for chemical analysis. Changes in hardness were observed by using a Vickers microhardness tester. Pitting corrosion tests on laser treated and untreated samples were conducted according to ASTM G48-92 to evaluate mass loss and pitting morphology. Laser surface melting improved the pitting corrosion resistance of this material in a chloride-containing environment.