Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monitoring Martes Populations in California: Survey Design and Power Analysis

Fishers (Martes pennanti) and American martens (M. americana) have been protected from trapping in California since the mid-1900s, yet in portions of each of their historic ranges their numbers are extremely low, perhaps due to the effects of timber harvest. We propose a method capable of detecting declines in the occurrence and distribution of fishers or martens using baited track-plate stations. The proposed sampling unit is a small grid of stations that has a high probability of detecting animals when they are present. These multistation units are sufficiently spaced to meet the assumption of independence for a binomial model. We propose a stratified random sampling design with strata sampled for proportions of occurrence at discrete points in time. Stratification is based on variation in occurrence by region and is estimated from preliminary survey data. A previously pub- lished bias adjustment is applied to the proportion of units with detections to adjust for possible failure to detect resident individuals at a sampling unit. A Monte Carlo simulation model was developed to determine the sample size necessary to detect 20 and 50% declines, with 80% power, in the proportion of sampling units with occurrence. We assume a 10-yr sampling interval. Sensitivity analysis, using a range of values for means and standard deviations of strata proportions, determined that power was much more sensitive to changes in mean than the standard deviation. When the best current estimates of the fisher strata proportions were input for 10 strata (five regional and two habitat) in California, 115 and 17 sampling units per stratum were necessary to detect 20 and 50% declines, respectively. For some circumstances this sampling effort was also sufficient to achieve strata estimates with 5% error and to detect statistical differences between individual stratum proportions. The steps in the process of implementing a monitoring program for Pacific fishers in California are outlined as an example of the planning and preparation necessary to monitor changes in the distribution of a rare forest carnivore.
Image transmission quality analysis over adaptive BCH coding

Image communication over telephone wireline and wireless networks is becoming a standard way of communication due to very efficient compression algorithms for reducing the required channel capacity. However, all standard compression techniques are strongly sensitive to channel noise. For noisy channels it is necessary to investigate in order to select the appropriate channel coding method as a tradeoff between the image quality and the ability to control errors caused by noise. BCH (Bose, Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem) codes are becoming more frequently used due to the availability of VLSI components. BCH codes have a powerful random and burst correcting ability. BCH codes also leave the data in its original form which allows image and video decoders to be specified with "optional" error correction. In order to overcome the outlined drawbacks of fixed channel protection, Adaptive Protection is needed. AP adds redundancy as a function of the current channel characteristics. The BCH code can be adapted towards the burst error correcting capabilities and this will be shown in the contribution. This paper investigates the effects of noise-induced transmission errors on the performance of BCH coding methods for different errors correction capability. First, the relations among the bit error rate, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and code lengths are analyzed. Further, the transmission performance of BCH codes association with different modem schemes are analyzed. QCIF image transmission quality over BCH codes for different errors capability are simulated, discussed and compared. The results listed in this article denote the effects of the using BCH codes in a selected method. Based on this analysis an adaptive BCH scheme is proposed to pick the correcting capabilities that offers the best reconstructed image quality for each average SNR.
This Essay Constitutes a (near) Transcript of a Talk That I Gave at the Icml 2013 Workshop on Peer Review and Publishing Models. * Double-blind Review

So, I'm sure everyone here knows what double-blind review is, but nonetheless, I'm going to define it anyway -just to make sure we're all on the same page. Double-blind peer review is where the identities of a paper's authors and reviewers are concealed from each other. This is in contrast to single-blind review, in which reviewer identities are concealed from authors but not vice versa, and open peer review, where neither the identities of authors or reviewers are concealed. The primary motivation behind double-blind review is to eliminate bias in the reviewing process by preventing factors other than scientific quality from influencing the perceived merit of the work under review. At this point in time, double-blind review is the de facto standard for machine learning conferences.
Enhancing Performance of TCP in Multihop Networks

It has been observed that TCP suffers from poor bandwidth utilization and extreme unfairness in wireless environment, and the utility of TCP in the multi-hop IEEE 802.11 network has been seriously questioned. The high transmission errors and varying latency in wireless channel would have a seriously adverse effect on the performance of TCP. Thus, a novel cross-layer approach with joint congestion and contention window control scheme and a probabilistic approach for RTT measurement is proposed to improve the performance of TCP in multi-hop networks. The simulation results show that proposed design provides a more efficient solution for frequent transmission loss and enables TCP to distinguish between congestion loss and transmission errors, thus to take proper remedial actions to improve TCP performance in multi-hop network by setting optimal congestion window and updating the window only during congestion.
Dietary patterns and cardiovascular risk factors in adolescents and young adults: the Northern Ireland Young Hearts Project – CORRIGENDUM

Dietary pattern (DP) analysis allows examination of the combined effects of nutrients and foods on the markers of CVD. Very few studies have examined these relationships during adolescence or young adulthood. Traditional CVD risk biomarkers were analysed in 12-15-year-olds (n 487; Young Hearts (YH)1) and again in the same individuals at 20-25 years of age (n 487; YH3). Based on 7 d diet histories, in the present study, DP analysis was performed using a posteriori principal component analysis for the YH3 cohort and the a priori Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS) was calculated for both YH1 and YH3 cohorts. In the a posteriori DP analysis, YH3 participants adhering most closely to the 'healthy' DP were found to have lower pulse wave velocity (PWV) and homocysteine concentrations, the 'sweet tooth' DP were found to have increased LDL concentrations, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure and decreased HDL concentrations, the 'drinker/social' DP were found to have lower LDL and homocysteine concentrations, but exhibited a trend towards a higher TAG concentration, and finally the 'Western' DP were found to have elevated homocysteine and HDL concentrations. In the a priori dietary score analysis, YH3 participants adhering most closely to the Mediterranean diet were found to exhibit a trend towards a lower PWV. MDS did not track between YH1 and YH3, and nor was there a longitudinal relationship between the change in the MDS and the change in CVD risk biomarkers. In conclusion, cross-sectional analysis revealed that some associations between DP and CVD risk biomarkers were already evident in the young adult population, namely the association between the healthy DP (and the MDS) and PWV; however, no longitudinal associations were observed between these relatively short time periods.
Updates on the Environmental Risks and Control of Cryptosporidiosis

Cryptosporidiosis is an emerging infectious disease that remains to be fully understood. The role of environmental issues such as water quality, livestock management, animal waste disposal and insect control are beginning to be recognized in the transmission of cryptosporidiosis. Prevention is highly emphasized as there is no consistently effective pharmacologic treatment for human cryptosporidiosis until now. Based on literature review, there are four environmental strategies in controlling cryptosporidiosis: (1) promotion of hygienic practices in the livestock industry (2) sanitary disposal of animal manure and human waste (3) constant surveillance of water supply and (4) protection of the immunocompromised population. More studies are needed to further understand the ecological factors that may contribute to the effective measures in controlling cryptosporidial transmission and infection.
Time Delay Estimation by Bispectrum Interpolation 1

Time delay is an important parameter for the characterization of signal propagation of sensors. In order to improve the precision of time delay estimation, this article proposes an algorithm based on bispectrum interpolation. The algorithm first calculates the characteristic spectrum function on the basis of the bispectrum of the two signals. The frequency domain interpolation is done on the characteristic spectrum function. By conducting the inverse Fourier transform and the maxima seeking method, the calculation formula for the time delay of the two signals is deduced. The simulation test results show that compared with the bispectrum-based time delay estimation method, the bispectrum interpolation-based time delay estimation method has improved greatly in terms of the estimation precision and temporal resolution. The algorithm has the advantages of high precision, small error and strong ability to suppress the correlative Gaussian noise. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.
Sobreeducación en el mercado laboral urbano de Colombia para el año 2006

En este trabajo se analiza la sobreeducacion en el mercado laboral de las Trece Areas Metropolitanas usando la informacion de la Encuesta Continua de Hogares del segundo trimestre de 2006 y el metodo estadistico para identificar a los sobreeducados. Los resultados senalan que aproximadamente el 13% de los trabajadores de las siete categorias ocupacionales analizadas se encontraban sobreeducados.
Vehicle routing problem: models and solutions

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well known problem in operational research where customers of known demands are supplied by one or several depots. The objective is to find a set of delivery routes satisfying some requirements or constraints and giving minimal total cost. The VRP has drawn enormous interests from many researchers during the last decades because of its vital role in planning of distribution systems and logistics in many sectors such as garbage collection, mail delivery, snow ploughing and task sequencing. The VRP is divided into many types. The important problems are VRP with Time Windows, VRP with Pick-Up and Delivery and Capacitated VRP. Recently many exact methods have been used to solve the VRP such as exact algorithms based on linear programming techniques and guided local search. Besides that, heuristic techniques have received wide interests in researchers’ effort to solve large scale VRPs. Among the recently applied heuristic techniques are genetic algorithm, evolution strategies and neural networks
ON THE MATTER OF ESSENTIAL RICHNESS

Alfred Tarski (1944) wrote that “the condition of the ‘essential richness’ of the metalanguage proves to be, not only necessary, but also sufficient for the construction of a satisfactory definition of truth. ” But it has remained unclear what Tarski meant by an ‘essentially richer’ metalanguage. Moreover, DeVidi and Solomon (1999) have argued in this Journal that there is nothing that Tarski could have meant by that phrase which would make his pronouncement true. We develop an answer to the historical question of what Tarski meant by ‘essentially richer’ and pinpoint the general result that stands behind his essential richness claim. In defense of Tarski, we then show that each of the several arguments of DeVidi and Solomon are either moot or mistaken. One of the fruits of our investigation is the reclamation of what Tarski took to be his central result on truth. This is a reclamation since: (i) if one does not understand ‘essential richness’, one does not know what that result is, and (ii) we must unearth a heretofore unrecognized change that occurs in Tarski’s view – an alteration of his main thesis in light of a failing he discovered in it.
,a Schm E for Ltro Unication

We discuss a multiple-access protocol that discriminates different users on the basis of their energy. Users are assumed to share the same bandwidth, the same pulse and are decoded according to their received magnitudes. This proposal promises to achieve larger efficiency when jointly applied with classical protocols especially in scenarios where the same low-cost terminals are deployed in large numbers as in sensor networks and inI personal-area nietworks. Analytical results, confirmed by numerical simulations, are derived for performance evaluation on additive white Gaussian noise channels.
Does Cultural Orientation Influence Consumers’ Propensity to Trust?

Four studies are reported to investigate the impact of cultural orientation on consumers’ propensity to trust. A cross-country comparison of trust tendency across 59 countries from World Value Surveys (study 1) indicated that an individualism orientation is associated with greater trust tendency than a collectivism orientation. An individual level of survey confirmed this country-level relationship. One additional experiment that manipulated self-construal provided causal evidence for this relationship. A fourth study used the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, and Cable 1995) to test the role of stranger vs. friend in moderating this relationship. Divergent operationalization of cultural orientation and measurement of trust indicates the relationship is robust.
PLANNING AND DEVELOPING POPULATION-BASED CANCER REGISTRATION IN LOW-AND MIDDLE-INCOME SETTINGS

The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the World Health Organization concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city, or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The mention of specific companies or of certain manufacturers' products does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by the World Health Organization in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. Errors and omissions excepted, the names of proprietary products are distinguished by initial capital letters. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this publication. The International Agency for Research on Cancer welcomes requests for permission to reproduce or translate its publications, in part or in full. Requests for permission to reproduce or translate IARC publications – whether for sale or for non-commercial distribution – should be addressed to the IARC Communications Group, at: publications@iarc.fr.
Social Choice with Partial Knowledge of Treatment Response

textabstractEconomists have long sought to learn the effect of a "treatment" on some outcome of interest, just as doctors do with their patients. A central practical objective of research on treatment response is to provide decision makers with information useful in choosing treatments. Often the decision maker is a social planner who must choose treatments for a heterogeneous population--for example, a physician choosing medical treatments for diverse patients or a judge choosing sentences for convicted offenders. But research on treatment response rarely provides all the information that planners would like to have. How then should planners use the available evidence to choose treatments? This book addresses key aspects of this broad question, exploring and partially resolving pervasive problems of identification and statistical inference that arise when studying treatment response and making treatment choices. Charles Manski addresses the treatment-choice problem directly using Abraham Wald's statistical decision theory, taking into account the ambiguity that arises from identification problems under weak but justifiable assumptions. The book unifies and further develops the influential line of research the author began in the late 1990s. It will be a valuable resource to researchers and upper-level graduate students in economics as well as other social sciences, statistics, epidemiology and related areas of public health, and operations research. Charles F. Manski is Board of Trustees Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. He is the author of four books, including Partial Identification of Probability Distributions and Identification Problems in the Social Sciences.
Stokesian Dynamics simulation of Brownian suspensions

The non-equilibrium behaviour of concentrated colloidal dispersions is studied by Stokesian Dynamics, a general molecular-dynamics-like technique for simulating particles suspended in a viscous fluid. The simulations are of a suspension of monodisperse Brownian hard spheres in simple shear flow as a function of the Péclet number, Pe, which measures the relative importance of shear and Brownian forces. Three clearly defined regions of behaviour are revealed. There is first a Brownian-motion-dominated regime (Pe ≤ 1) where departures from equilibrium in structure and diffusion are small, but the suspension viscosity shear thins dramatically. When the Brownian and hydrodynamic forces balance (Pe ≈ 10), the dispersion forms a new ‘phase’ with the particles aligned in ‘strings’ along the flow direction and the strings are arranged hexagonally. This flow-induced ordering persists over a range of Pe and, while the structure and diffusivity now vary considerably, the rheology remains unchanged. Finally, there is a hydrodynamically dominated regime (Pe > 200) with a dramatic change in the long-time self-diffusivity and the rheology. Here, as the Péclet number increases the suspension shear thickens owing to the formation of large clusters. The simulation results are shown to agree well with experiment.
MECANISMO DE ENFRETAMENTO À EVASÃO NO ENSINO SUPERIOR PÚBLICO: INSERÇÃO DO CONTEÚDO SOBRE PROFISSÕES NO ENSINO MÉDIO

O fenomeno da evasao no ensino superior promove prejuizos economicos, financeiros e sociais, em especial, para as Instituicoes Publicas de Ensino Superior. Estudar os fatores determinantes e as alternativas para o enfretamento da evasao sob a otica de evadidos, professores e coordenadores dos cursos de Administracao, Ciencias Contabeis e Ciencias Economicas da Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros - Unimontes - e o objetivo deste artigo. Para tanto, realizou-se uma pesquisa descritiva, com abordagem quantitativa e qualitativa. O referencial teorico foi composto de duas tematicas: evasao e identidade. O resultado da pesquisa apontou para o fortalecimento dos mecanismos ja existentes na Unimontes como o projeto politico pedagogico, maior flexibilidade, a modernizacao dos cursos, a retomada da mostra de profissoes e uma maior integracao professorUniversidade. Entretanto, uma das principais causas da evasao no Ensino Superior antecede a entrada do aluno na Instituicao, conforme identificado neste estudo. Como alternativa, propoe-se a aplicacao de teste vocacional e a insercao do conteudo sobre profissoes no ensino medio publico e privado, visando amparar a escolha e a decisao do estudante sobre seu futuro profissional.
Application-specific Patterns Report D2.3

PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) Executive Summary This is the third deliverable of the Work Package 2 Parallel patterns. It provides the description of an initial set of domain specific parallel patterns. These patterns have been identified by analyzing the requirements provided by the different " application " communities contributing to the project. In particular, three different application domains have been considered, namely symbolic computation, numerical computation and soft computing domains. For each domain, an initial set of domain specific patterns has been identified. Within each set of domain specific patterns a " representative " pattern has been identified and its characterizing properties have been described using the methodology of the software engineering parallel pattern community. Last but not least, for the identified representative patterns we have outlined possible implementation strategies using the core, " RISC " patterns introduced in D2.1 (the " Initial generic patterns report " [18]) and whose implementation is discussed in D2.2 (" Homogeneous implementation of initial generic patterns " [17]), which constitute the " basic building blocks " of parallel applications according to the general ParaPhrase project design. These implementation strategies are aimed at establishing a general domain specific pattern implementation methodology suitable for supporting the implementation of any of the domain specific patterns considered within the project. It is worth pointing out that, as the project evolves, we expect to extend this first set of domain specific patterns with new patterns suggested from the project beneficiaries contributing to the use case work package (WP6). As far as this deliverable is concerned, we will use C++/FastFlow code snippets to illustrate the implementation strategies of domain specific patterns. As the code refers to the same skeletons implemented in Erlang, the overall methodology naturally extends to the Erlang ParaPhrase framework. The placement of this deliverable within WP2 and, more generally, within the project, is illustrated in Fig. 1, on the following page.
Ussein Almuallim

In many domains, an appropriate inductive bias is the MIN-FEATURES bias, which prefers consistent hypotheses definable over as few features as possible. This paper defines and studies this bias. First, it is shown that any learning algorithm implementing the MIN-FEATURES bias requires O($ In $+ $[2P + p In n]) training examples to guarantee PAC-learning a concept having p relevant features out of n available features. This bound is only logarithmic in the number of irrelevant features. The paper also presents a quasi-polynomial time algorithm, FOCUS, which implements MIN-FEATURES. Experimental studies are presented that compare FOCUS to the ID3 and FRINGE algorithms. These experiments show that-contrary to expectations-these algorithms do not implement good approximations of MIN-FEATURES. The coverage, sample complexity, and generalization performance of FOCUS is substantially better than either ID3 or FRINGE on learning problems where the MIN-FEATURES bias is appropriate. This suggests that, in practical applications, training data should be preprocessed to remove irrelevant features before being given to ID3 or FRINGE.