Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of CMIP5 Decadal Experiments for Interannual Rainfall Prediction Over Australia

Phase five of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project enabled a range of decadal modeling experiments where climate models were initialized with observations and allowed to evolve freely for 10–30 years. However, climate models struggle to realistically simulate rainfall and the skill of rainfall prediction in decadal experiments is poor. Here, we examine how predictions of sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) indices from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 decadal experiments can provide skillful rainfall forecasts at interannual timescales for Australia. Forecasts of commonly used SSTA indices relevant to Australian seasonal rainfall are derived from decadal hindcasts of six different climate models and corrected for model drift. The corrected indices are then combined to form a multimodel ensemble. The resultant forecasts are used as predictors in a statistical rainfall model developed in this study. As SSTA forecasts lose skill with increasing lead time, a new methodology for predicting interannual rainfall is proposed. We allow our statistical prediction model to evolve with lead time while accounting for the loss of skill in SSTA forecasts instead of using one statistical model for all lead times. Results in this pilot study across two of the largest climate zones in Australia show that SSTA outputs from the decadal experiments provide enhanced skill in rainfall prediction over using the conventional model (based purely on lagged observed indices) up to a maximum of three years ahead. This methodology could be used more broadly for other regions around the world where rainfall variability is known to have strong links to ocean temperatures.
A probabilistic optimization approach for motion planning of autonomous vehicles

This paper presents a novel probabilistic approach for improving the motion planning performance of autonomous driving. The proposed approach is based on the sampling-based planning algorithm, which generates an optimal trajectory from a set of trajectory candidates. In order to treat the uncertainty in the perception data and the vehicle system, the particle filter framework is applied to the motion planning algorithm with four main steps: the time update of the trajectory candidates, the perception measurement update, the trajectory selection and the motion goal resampling. Since the proposed planning algorithm recursively generates an optimal trajectory, the time update of the trajectory candidate updates the motion goals of the trajectory candidates in the previous step using the vehicle model, and it also generates a new set of candidates. In order to evaluate the optimality of each candidate with regard to the safety and the reliability, a perception measurement update is performed. In this step, the importance weight of each candidate is computed using perception data and its adaptive likelihood function. Based on the candidates with updated importance weights, an optimal trajectory is determined in the trajectory selection. Then, the motion goal resampling modifies the set of motion goals based on the importance weights for efficient management of the motion goals in the iterative planning algorithm. The developed algorithm is validated using various types of test. The results show that the proposed method not only provides an integrated probabilistic interface between the perception and the planning but also results in an excellent performance in terms of the computation efficiency.
Landers 1992 “Reloaded”: Integrative Dynamic Earthquake Rupture Modeling

The 1992 Mw 7.3 Landers earthquake is perhaps one of the best studied seismic events. However, many aspects of the dynamics of the rupture process are still puzzling, for example, the rupture transfer between fault segments. We present 3‐D spontaneous dynamic rupture simulations, incorporating the interplay of fault geometry, topography, 3‐D rheology, off‐fault plasticity, and viscoelastic attenuation. Our preferred scenario reproduces a broad range of observations, including final slip distribution, shallow slip deficits, and mapped off‐fault deformation patterns. We demonstrate good agreement between synthetic and observed waveform characteristics and associated peak ground velocities. Despite very complex rupture evolution, ground motion variability is close to what is commonly assumed in Ground Motion Prediction Equations. We examine the effects of variations in modeling parameterization within a suite of scenarios including purely elastic setups and models neglecting viscoelastic attenuation. Source dynamics of all models include dynamic triggering over large distances and direct branching; rupture terminates spontaneously on most of the principal fault segments. Sustained dynamic rupture of all fault segments in general, and rupture transfers in particular, constrain amplitude and orientation of initial fault stresses and friction. We conclude that physically consistent in‐scale earthquake rupture simulations can augment earthquake source observations toward improving the understanding of earthquake source physics of complex, segmented fault systems.
Uncloaking Campbell and Shiller’s CAPE: A Comprehensive Guide to Its Construction and Use

Campbell and Shiller’s cyclically adjusted P/E (CAPE) has proven to be a powerful descriptor, and useful predictor, of long-term equity returns in the United States and some global markets. In recent years, though, it has been criticized for being overly pessimistic about the prospects for equity returns, lacking robustness to distortions in corporate earnings and overstating the predictability of returns at long horizons because of overlapping observations and endogeneity, particularly when estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS). This article explores various definitions of CAPE and presents new construction techniques that make it robust to a wide range of accounting and index construction biases, as well as to changing equity market fundamentals. The authors evaluate CAPE’s forecasts over various time periods using econometric methods that account for endogeneity, overlapping observations, and the presence of outliers. Many of these enhancements have minimal impact on CAPE and its U.S. equity market forecasts, but they prove to be useful in smaller markets and in markets that experienced significant dislocations. The authors also show that using accounting-flow variables such as cash flow and revenues in place of earnings and cyclically adjusted earnings can effectively supplement, and even enhance, CAPE’s market return forecasts. Finally, they show that CAPE and its variants forecast nominal returns more effectively than real returns and that the current 10-year forecast for the S&P 500 Index return is about 5.8% per annum.
Study of scrum framework usage in non-software systems

The Agile Software development methodologies have changed the way software products and services are delivered in a continuous manner. Some of these Agile Software Development methodologies have been very successful in increasing the pace of innovation and raising the productivity at workplace. But there has been a constant pushback in the non-software industries against adopting some of these Agile development methodologies citing various reasons. The scope of this thesis is to identify few scenarios from non-software industries to evaluate how the Scrum framework, which is one of the various Agile methodologies, has been successful to raise the productivity and the value delivery to clients. Few of the case studies were studied and their gist is presented in this thesis. More specifically, it is reported in this thesis how the Scrum framework is adopted and adapted to a specific type of industry or product. Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Steven Eppinger Title: General Motors Professor of Management Science and Innovation
Network Coding Enabled Named Data Networking Architectures

The volume of data traffic in the Internet has increased drastically in the last years, mostly due to data intensive applications like video streaming, file sharing, etc. This motivates the development of new communication methods that can deal with the growing volume of data traffic. To this aim, Named Data Networking (NDN) has been proposed as a future Internet architecture that changes how the Internet works, from the exchange of content between particular nodes of the network, to retrieval of particular content in the network. The NDN architecture enables ubiquitous in-network caching and naturally supports dynamic selection of content sources, characteristics that fit well with the communication needs of data intensive applications. However, the performance of data intensive applications is degraded by the limited throughput seen by applications, which can be caused by (i) limited bandwidth, (ii) network bottlenecks and (iii) packet losses. In this thesis, we argue that introducing network coding into the NDN architecture improves the performance of NDN-based data intensive applications by alleviating the three issues presented above. In particular, network coding (i) enables efficient multipath data retrieval in NDN, which allows nodes to aggregate all the bandwidth available through their multiple interfaces; (ii) allows information from multiple sources to be combined at the intermediate routers, which alleviates the impact of network bottlenecks; and (iii) enables clients to efficiently handle packet losses. This thesis first provides an architecture that enables network coding in NDN for data intensive applications. Then, a study demonstrates and quantifies the benefits that network coding brings to video streaming over NDN, a particular data intensive application. To study the benefits that network coding brings in a more realistic NDN scenario, this thesis finally provides a caching strategy that is used when the in-network caches have limited capacity. Overall, the evaluation results show that the use of network coding permits to exploit more efficiently available network resources, which leads to reduced data traffic load on the sources, increased cache-hit rate at the in-network caches and faster content retrieval at the clients. In particular, for video streaming applications, network coding enables clients to watch higher quality videos compared to using traditional NDN, while it also reduces the video servers' load. Moreover, the proposed caching strategy for network coding enabled NDN maintains the benefits that network coding brings to NDN even when the caches have limited storage space.
Son Preference and Child Under nutrition in the Arab Countries: Is There a Gender Bias against Girls?

ABSTRACT Although son preference has been demonstrated in the MENA region with different manifestations and at several phases of human development, the literature remains sparse as far as studies examining the early childhood phase are concerned. The current study aims to explore the presence of a gender bias in child nutrition status and its association with maternal son preference in three Arab countries; namely, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen. Child nutritional status is measured using the Height-for-Age z-score (HAZ). To examine the presence of gender bias across the entire nutritional distribution, we utilized a quantile regression framework. We use data from the most recent rounds of the Demographic and Health Survey on a nationally representative sample of children aged 0–4 years. Descriptive statistics show that 21.5% of the mothers demonstrate son preference in Yemen compared to 19.10% in Jordan and 13.26% in Egypt. Results of the baseline OLS model demonstrate a robust pro-girl nutrition bias in the three countries. However, results of the quantile regression model show that this pro-girl nutrition bias is only prevalent at the lower segment of the conditional HAZ distribution for Jordan and Yemen and is prevalent across the whole conditional HAZ distribution for Egypt. We also find no statistically significant association between maternal son preference and gender bias in child nutrition in the three countries. Although son preference is manifested in several phases of human development in the MENA region, the current study finds no nutritional bias against girls in the examined countries at early childhood.
Evaluation models for different routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

This thesis aims to introduce the evaluation parameters of Lifetime, Density, Radius, and Reliability for the applications of wireless sensor networks. A series of simulation results have been obtained for the Single-hop, LEACH and Nearest Closer routing protocols which have been implemented in J-Sim simulation platform. Simulation results have been analyzed and several evaluation models have been proposed respectively. Thus, simulations may not be necessary for the users to choose a suitable routing protocol.
Social media actions and interactions: The role of the Facebook and Twitter during the 2014 European Parliament elections in the 28 EU nations.

Most political parties across the democratic sphere have created their own spaces within social media. While ostensibly studies show that social media is being utilized by political parties to further their electoral goals, the uses of their social media profiles by visitors is largely beyond official control without devoting significant resources to moderation. This study will be the first to gather data that allows us to detect patterns of participation within and potentially across nations, but in particular within nations and across parties to determine the extent that visitors use social media to promote parties (through liking and sharing) or for entering comments on party posts or for entering into discussions with other visitors. We specifically seek to understand whether we can detect evidence of a political ecosystem in which visitors visit multiple party profiles, enter debates across differing profiles and so contribute to something that might resemble an informed and engaged public sphere.
A Study on the Digital Divide among District Autonomies in Seoul and Its Policy Implications

As the public policy debate over Korea's digital divide intensifies, central and local governments are considering diverse policy implications to resolve this gap between the technological "haves" and "have-nots. " Several studies have investigated this gap focusing on the group differences, however, few study ever tried to examine the gap between regions. The major purposes of this paper are 1) to explore the major determinants that affect the application of computer and internet usage of households in Seoul, and 2) to investigate the differences of district autonomies for this indicator. We utilized Korea Census 2% Sample Data, which has not * 서울대학교 대학원 지역사회개발전공 조교수(Assistant Professor, Seoul National University) ** 경기개발연구원 교통정책연구부 연구위원(Senior Researcher, GyongGi Research Institute) *** 국토연구원 SOC-건설경제실 책임연구원(Associate Researcher, Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements) 2 서울도시연구 제5권 제1호 2004. 3 been fully utilized before. The present study pays particular attention to the hierarchical structure of the data and spatial units when applying our econometric model to our empirical settings. The present study applies a multi-level logit model that can incorporate diverse spatial heterogeneities as well as individual differences. The present study finds that there are big differences among district autonomies of Seoul in the applications of computer and internet usage and application. Based on the findings of this study, the present study concludes with introducing several policy implications and future studies for the prosperity of households in Seoul.
Historical and current forest landscapes of eastern Oregon and Washington Part I: Vegetation pattern and insect and disease hazards.

We analyzed historical and current vegetation composition and structure in 49 sample watersheds, primarily on National Forests, within six river basins in eastern Oregon and Washington. Vegetation patterns were mapped from aerial photographs taken from 1932 to 1959, and from 1985 to 1992. We described vegetation attributes, landscape patterns, the range of historical variability, scales of change, and disturbance hazards. Forest cover increased eight percent in three river basins, but remained relatively unchanged in the other basins. Forests became more dense in vertical and horizontal canopy structure as understory cover increased with regeneration, of mostly shade-toler-ant species. The distribution of forest age classes and structure has changed, with smaller area in early-seral and old forest stages and greater area in multiple-canopy young and mature stands. The percentage of visible dead trees increased in all river. basins. Landscape pattern has become more diverse and fragmented over time in ﬁve of the six river basins. Insect and disease hazards changed little, usually < 10 percent, at the river basin scale because there was considerable variation at the watershed scale, where large changes in hazards were common. comparisons of watersheds. the conﬁdence no signiﬁcant change was recorded.
Religious Regulation in Iran

The history of religious minority politics and rights in Iran dates back to the early periods of the ancient Persian Empire. With the passage of time, expansion of the empire led to increased religious pluralism that necessitated official religious tolerance and accommodation. With the adoption of Shi’a Islam as the official religion of the country at the outset of the 16th century, which was largely motivated by the monarchs’ search for greater political legitimacy, Shi’ism was gradually linked to Persian monarchism and was effectively integrated into the Persian national identity and values. The growing influence of Shi’ism empowered the Shi’a clerical establishment that effectively sought exclusionary and discriminatory policies toward religious and sectarian minorities. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the revolution in the late 1970s, religious minority politics in Iran gained a more complex and nuanced dimension that facilitated Shi’a dominance and ushered in increasingly exclusionary and discriminatory governmental policies that have undermined religious and sectarian minority rights. This article surveys the history of religious pluralism and regulation in pre-Islamic Persia as well as pre-revolutionary Iran, and examines the legal and practical underpinnings of religious regulation in the Islamic Republic. While Islam does account for certain exclusive rights for Muslims in an Islamic state, it explicitly rejects discrimination against the Peoples of the Book (ahl-al Kitab). To a large extent, the current discriminatory practices against religious and sectarian minorities in Iran are rooted in the regime’s advocacy for sectarian exclusivity and political self-interests, which have very little to do with the Islamic worldview.
Usabilidade em plataforma web: de mero repositório a ambiente colaborativo de aprendizagem

Este artigo descreve um estudo de avaliacao da usa­bilidade no desenvolvimento uma proposta de es­tru­­turacao das seccoes de uma plataforma web cen­tra­da no aluno, com vista a sua utilizacao no suporte a trabalho de projeto e praticas colaborativas com alu­nos do ensino secundario. Os dados foram reco­lhi­dos usando os metodos de avaliacao heuris­tica, obser­vacao e inquerito, e em tres testes diferentes: um teste-piloto, um teste heuristico e uma avaliacao com utilizadores semelhantes ao publico­‑alvo. Os re­sul­ta­dos obtidos nos testes permitiram validar a pro­pos­ta e a identificacao de melhorias que sao descritas.
The development of competency frameworks in healthcare professions: a scoping review

Competency frameworks serve various roles including outlining characteristics of a competent workforce, facilitating mobility, and analysing or assessing expertise. Given these roles and their relevance in the health professions, we sought to understand the methods and strategies used in the development of existing competency frameworks. We applied the Arksey and O’Malley framework to undertake this scoping review. We searched six electronic databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, EMBASE, Scopus, and ERIC) and three grey literature sources (greylit.org, Trove and Google Scholar) using keywords related to competency frameworks. We screened studies for inclusion by title and abstract, and we included studies of any type that described the development of a competency framework in a healthcare profession. Two reviewers independently extracted data including study characteristics. Data synthesis was both quantitative and qualitative. Among 5710 citations, we selected 190 for analysis. The majority of studies were conducted in medicine and nursing professions. Literature reviews and group techniques were conducted in 116 studies each (61%), and 85 (45%) outlined some form of stakeholder deliberation. We observed a significant degree of diversity in methodological strategies, inconsistent adherence to existing guidance on the selection of methods, who was involved, and based on the variation we observed in timeframes, combination, function, application and reporting of methods and strategies, there is no apparent gold standard or standardised approach to competency framework development. We observed significant variation within the conduct and reporting of the competency framework development process. While some variation can be expected given the differences across and within professions, our results suggest there is some difficulty in determining whether methods were fit-for-purpose, and therefore in making determinations regarding the appropriateness of the development process. This uncertainty may unwillingly create and legitimise uncertain or artificial outcomes. There is a need for improved guidance in the process for developing and reporting competency frameworks.
Carbon Stocks in Aboveground and Belowground Biomass of Sub-Humid Tropical Forest in Southwestern Nigeria

This study aimed at estimation of carbon stocks in aboveground and below-ground biomass of sub-humid young forest land in south-western Nigeria. Different species of trees were analysed. Results gathered indicated that the forest studied had an average aboveground carbon stock of live trees as 0.00407 t. Terminalia superba (0.00698 t C) has the highest carbon stocks and diameter at breast height (Dbh) of 5.80 cm while Triplochiton scleroxy-lon contained the least stock of carbon (0.00212 t C) and Dbh of 3.55 cm. From the analysis, it was observed that total belowground biomass (BGB) was 32% of AGB. Positive linear relationship was observed between Dbh and the amount of carbon in the study area. It was also observed that a negative linear relationship exists between the aboveground biomass carbon (AGBC) and wood densities. This study indicates that the species of trees in the forest studied are effective carbon sink and can inhibit the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Three new models were developed using different input parameters and they all showed proximity to the 2005 allometric equation by Chave and his team.