Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The geography of Canadian interlocking directorates: how do they relate to brain circulation?

This study examines the spatiality of interlocking directorates of Canadian companies, with particular emphasis given to international interlocks. From a geographical standpoint, do these connections to foreign firms reinforce the importance of Canada’s top corporate cities as ‘gateways’ to international business? Is there a geography associated with the interlocking to these gateway cities? Findings build on James O. Wheeler’s body of research focused on corporate headquarters. This study is placed within the context of the current economic geography dialogue. Particular focus is placed on Saxenian’s theory of brain circulation, wherein she argues that individuals with international experience serve as brokers linking domestic businesses with those in distant regions. A further purpose of this study then is to examine Saxenian’s argument in the context of Canadian corporations. First, is there a geographical association between directors’ foreign educations and where Canadian firms are interlocked to internationally? Second, the corporate performance of Canadian firms interlocked internationally will be measured against those firms that are not. It seems logical to assume that increased connections would yield more diverse and rich knowledge, which could lead to better decisions, and thus corporate performance, in today’s global world. But does it? This study finds that being linked to an international company through a common director did translate into more profitability for Canadian firms. Findings also revealed a geographical link between international interlocks and a director’s foreign education. However, when Canadian firms were interlocked with an international company with a director who had international education, greater profits did not necessarily result.
Irrigation Water Conservation Using Wide‐spaced Furrows

Furrow irrigation studies comparing water applications to narrow and wide-spaced furrows were conducted on three crops at thee locations in Oklahoma over eight growing seasons. Wide-spaced-furrow irrigation usually required about half the water of narrow spacing. In 9 of 11 studies, no yield reductions were noted. In the seasons where yield reductions were noted, the atmospheric evaporative demand was high. A simple test was devised to indicate if a season in progress shows high atmospheric demand. The evaporative demand test involves measurement of rainfall and daily wind movement. Using standard National Weather Service instruments, daily average of rain > 1.6 mm between 15 July and 31 Aug. combined with daily wind movement < 155 km in August caused no yield reduction in wide-spaced-furrow irrigation. Wind was measured at the standard height of a “Class A” evaporation pan (51 cm). Conservation of water from wide-spaced-furrow irrigation should be possible on medium to fine textured soils in many semiarid regions of the world
Voices of the Volunteers: An Exploration of the Influences that Volunteer Experiences Have on the Resilience and Sustainability of Catchment Groups in Coastal Queensland

Volunteers in stewardship groups are a major element of the social mobilisation strategy used in Australia to manage natural resources. The ability of such groups to overcome problems, deal with new issues as they arise, and keep going under pressure may be thought of as managing for "resilience. " This approach uses the idea of adaptive change where resilient communities are simultaneously changeable and stable, adapting to new situations as they arise. Interviews were conducted along the east coast of Queensland, Australia, to better understand resilience in community-based stewardship groups. Participants were drawn from groups such as Landcare; Coastcare; Bushcare; Greening Australia; Waterwatch; and Integrated Catchment Management Committees. Analysis of 26 personal and group interviews involving 85 participants revealed six different conceptions, where catchment volunteering was experienced as seeking and maintaining balance; developing/maintaining an identity; empowerment; learning; networking; and contributing to sustainability. Analysis of these conceptions enhanced an understanding of how resilience may be developed in community-based stewardship groups.
The dynamics of wind‐driven intraseasonal variability in the equatorial Indian Ocean

[1] Variability in the equatorial Indian Ocean on intraseasonal time scales (defined as periods of 30–110 days) is investigated using satellite and in situ observations and a simple analytical linear long-wave equatorial β-plane model. Despite the extreme simplicity of the model, which includes just the two gravest baroclinic mode Kelvin waves and first meridional mode Rossby waves, simulated surface zonal velocity and sea surface height compare very well with observations. Both observations and model are characterized by a red shift in the velocity spectrum relative to the wind forcing spectrum, which is attributable to a combination of factors, including (1) the near resonant excitation of Kelvin waves by eastward propagating winds, (2) constructive interference between wind-forced waves and Rossby waves reflected from the eastern boundary, and (3) the favored excitation of low-frequency waves whose zonal wavelengths are long compared to the zonal fetch of the wind. We decomposed variability in two broad period bands, namely, 30–70 days and 70–110 days, for detailed analysis. At periods of 30–70 days, zonal velocity tends to be stationary in the directly forced region along the equator owing to the competing contributions of Kelvin and Rossby waves. In contrast, at 70–110 day periods, zonal velocity propagates westward despite eastward propagation of zonal wind stress because of the combined influence of eastern boundary generated and wind-forced Rossby waves. Kelvin waves reflected from the western boundary are negligibly small, indicating that basin mode resonances are not prominent as has been previously suggested.
PRODUCTION VALUE-ADDED PRODUCTS FROM BIODIESEL DERIVED CRUDE GLYCEROL

Crude glycerol, a by-product of biodiesel production which contain impurities such as methanol, triglycerides and catalysts, would represent a huge challenge to the environment if disposed. Thus the best opportunity is to convert crude glycerol into valuable products. While a number of microorganisms are able to utilize glycerol as a sole carbon source to yield a range of organic acids and alcohols, the fermentation process has not been optimized. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the application of ultrasound to enhance the production of value-added acids and alcohols by anaerobic fermentation of crude glycerol. By a method of screening, Clostridium diolis was selected and used in batch fermentation experiments at 37 C, pH of 6.8 7 and 150 rpm on anaerobic environment by N2 sparging. Prior to each experiment, crude glycerol was washed three (3) time with diethyl ether and a series of glycerol concentrations (50-150 g/L) was fermented for 48 hours with samples taken every 3 hours for analyses. The high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and a light microscopy were used to analyze samples before and after the fermentation process. Interestingly, very low amounts of methanol and free fatty acids were observed in the washed glycerol after HPLC analysis compared to crude glycerol. Results also demonstrated the production of 1, 3-Propanediol (1, 3-PD) and acetic acid when the fermentation liquor was analyzed by HPLC after 48 hours. Moreover, other solvents such as butanol and lactic acid were obtained in very low quantities. Subsequently, the effect of ultrasound on the growth of Clostridium diolis was evaluated and lead to enhanced yields by promoting rapid cellular growth rate. The results thereby indicate that better product yields can be achieved when microorganisms are stimulated with low intensity ultrasonic irradiations.
The Role of Abiotic Environmental Conditions and Herbivory in Shaping Bacterial Community Composition in Floral Nectar

Identifying the processes that drive community assembly has long been a central theme in ecology. For microorganisms, a traditional prevailing hypothesis states that “everything is everywhere, but the environment selects”. Although the bacterial community in floral nectar may be affected by both atmosphere (air-borne bacteria) and animals as dispersal vectors, the environmental and geographic factors that shape microbial communities in floral nectar are unknown. We studied culturable bacterial communities in Asphodelus aestivus floral nectar and in its typical herbivorous bug Capsodes infuscatus, along an aridity gradient. Bacteria were sampled from floral nectar and bugs at four sites, spanning a geographical range of 200 km from Mediterranean to semi-arid conditions, under open and bagged flower treatments. In agreement with the niche assembly hypothesis, the differences in bacterial community compositions were explained by differences in abiotic environmental conditions. These results suggest that microbial model systems are useful for addressing macro-ecological questions. In addition, similar bacterial communities were found in the nectar and on the surface of the bugs that were documented visiting the flowers. These similarities imply that floral nectar bacteria dispersal is shaped not only by air borne bacteria and nectar consumers as previously reported, but also by visiting vectors like the mirid bugs.
Estimating Earthworm-Influenced Soil Structure by Morphometric Image Analysis

Earthworms have a profound influence on soil processes. However, there is generally a lack of adequate means by which to assess the influence of earthworms on soil structure. Not until quantitative methods on undisturbed soil samples are developed will there be any adequate measure of the influence of earthworms on soil structure. This paper describes an extension of an image-analysis method developed for the quantitative determination of the influence of earth-worms on soil structural properties. Mammillated vughs are most likely developed by the burrowing of soil macrofauna, in particular earthworms. A learning set of mammillated vughs was compiled with pores taken from a soil developed solely through the channeling and casting of earthworms. This learning set was used to classify soil blocks taken from a no-till and conventionally tilled treated soil. The results indicated that the no-till soils had more than twice the number of mammillated vughs >1000 μm in diameter. This was attributed to the larger earthworm population in the no-till soils, coupled with the change in morphology or destruction of some of the mammillated vugh features caused by disturbance in the conventionally tilled soil. This method should allow for a more effective means to evaluate the influence of earthworms on soil properties within any given soil profile.
Dark tourism: understanding visitor motivation at sites of death and disaster

Dark Tourism: Understanding Visitor Motivation at Sites of Death and Disaster. (December 2003) Stephanie Marie Yuill, B.A., University of Waterloo Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Tazim Jamal People are fascinated with death and disaster. One simply has to watch traffic slow to a crawl when passing a car accident to understand this. However, this fascination goes beyond the side of a highway and enters the realm of tourism. Today, numerous sites of death and disaster attract millions of visitors from all around the world: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne Frank’s House, Graceland, Oklahoma City, Gettysburg, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Arlington National Cemetery. The list grows each year as exhibited by the recent creation of an apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Due to the increasing popularity of this tourism product, a small number of academics have begun studying the phenomenon. Leading the field are Lennon and Foley who labeled it Dark Tourism, Seaton who coined the term Thanatourism, and Rojek who developed the concept of Black Spots. However, despite ongoing study, there has been a paucity in understanding what actually motivates individuals to sites of dark
Contribution to the knowledge of petroleum generative potential of Late Sinemurian – Pliensbachian of the Lusitanian Basin - northern sector (Portugal)

The Late Sinemurian – Pliensbachian interval of the Lusitanian Basin is characterized by marly limestone deposits with sometimes organic-rich layers. The study of these levels in outcrops located in the northern part of the Lusitanian Basin using some geochemical parameters such as total organic carbon (TOC) and Rock-Eval pyrolysis, allowed the definition of its petroleum generative potential with high stratigraphic accuracy. There are two stratigraphic intervals particularly rich in organic matter, which are positioned in the Polvoeira Member of Agua de Madeiros Formation and in the Marly limestones with organic-rich facies member of the Vale das Fontes Formation. These intervals are characterized by a high frequency of TOC values greater than 1% and/or several high values that can reach about 10%. The Rock-Eval pyrolysis parameter S2 is frequently above 10 mg HC/g rock, with highest value of 43.81 mg HC/g. The values of HI obtained for these intervals, very often larger than 150 mg HC/g TOC, show potential for generation of oil and gas-oil.
Graduates on the move : knowledge flows and Italian regional disparities. Migration patterns of 2001 graduates

Italy is characterised by large sub-national disparities between the less developed South and the more developed Centre-North. It comes at no surprise, therefore, that it has a complex history of population flows from the South to the rest of the country. This thesis focuses on a new trend in the dynamics of internal population flows: whilst historically unskilled workers constituted the bulk of Italian migrants, in recent years, the high skilled have become increasingly mobile. As the high skilled are a crucial input to both innovative activity and economic growth, their spatial movements can potentially affect the dynamics of local development and as such, deserve thorough investigation. The work analyses this internal brain drain, focusing on recent university graduates. As a group, they are especially interesting to study: not only because, as they transit between study and work, they are particularly prone to move, but also because they have, so far, largely been neglected by scholars. Whilst the existing literature has mostly compared spatially mobile to spatially immobile individuals, this thesis distinguishes between returners (who leave the region of study to move back to their home region), migrants (who leave the region of study to move elsewhere) and stayers (who remain in the region of study). This tripartite taxonomy enables us to identify new insights on the dynamics of spatial mobility. The study draws upon a wide and interdisciplinary literature and builds an original theoretical framework to analyse the knowledge flows generated by mobile graduates. Through this framework, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of human capital mobility, at the micro, meso and macro level. The main contribution of the thesis is to explain the links between graduate flows and regional innovation. In addition, the study also explores the consequences of migration on job-satisfaction and the social nature of spatial mobility itself. Methodologically, it applies a wide array of econometric techniques to a survey on graduates’ entry in the labour market, developed by the Italian statistical office (ISTAT). At the policy level, the study sheds light on the connection between higher education, innovation and regional development, providing a new perspective on the long-standing debate on Italian sub-national inequalities
Residual Learning with Bi-LSTM and Multi-Head Attention for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition has a wide range of applications in the fields of intelligent recommendation and human-computer interaction. In recent research on emotion recognition, the model using recurrent neural network could observe the context semantic information and infer the emotion label jointly according to the context information, but it lacked the capture of key information and did not solve the problem of network degradation. Therefore, this paper designs a model based on Bi-LSTM, multi-head attention mechanism and residual connection fusion (Att-BiLSTM). The Bi-LSTM structure realizes the context semantic inference function, the multi-head attention mechanism realizes the emphasis on key information, and the residual connection alleviates the network degradation caused by the overfitting problem. Att-BiLSTM achieves 62.1% precision and 61.8% recall on the IEMOCAP dataset, which is better than the existing comparison algorithms.
INNOVATION IN ENERGY SUPPLY

The term innovation means using new ideas in certain activities to obtain certain goals. The notion of innovation is very general. The peoples use the innovative or creative approach everywhere though not always. The innovative actions may have many concrete objectives but a general goal is progress. Innovation is the main engine of the progress [1]. The directions and the speed of progress depend of innovation. About great importance of innovation speaks the fact that year 2009 is deemed to be a year of creativity and innovation in EU. Innovation in energy supply means using new ideas in energy supply. This contains the treating and producing of energy resources, the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of electrical and thermal energy. Power engineering is a very important, complicated and expensive area, where the acceleration of innovation may give a great effect. The paper introduces the specialities of innovation in energy supply and possibilities to accelerate innovation in power engineering.
Potencial de logro educativo, entorno socioeconómico y familiar: una aplicación empírica con variables latentes para Colombia

Esta investigación propone una estrategia empírica de estimación del potencial individual de logro educativo para Colombia (PCE) a través de modelos de ecuaciones estructurales (SEM). El potencial de logro educativo es una variable latente que proviene de la combinación multidimensional de los efectos de vecindad y del background familiar. Un aporte de la investigación radica en la utilización de métodos bayesianos de estimación de las relaciones estructurales sugeridas por la teoría y compara los resultados con los obtenidos mediante técnicas de máxima verosimilitud. Estos resultados aportan evidencia de que la calidad de los entornos locales (efectos de vecindad) presentan los efectos más grandes sobre el PCE. Las estimaciones fueron consistentes por los dos métodos utilizados (estimación bayesiana y máxima verosimilitud, M.L.).
Relative paleointensity record during the last 800 ka from the equatorial Indian Ocean: Implication for relationship between inclination and intensity variations

Paleomagnetic and rock magnetic investigations were carried out on three sediment cores taken from the Ninetyeast Ridge, the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean. The cores are 4.1–10.2 m long and cover the last 270–790 ka with average sedimentation rates of 1.3–1.9 cm/ka. Generally stable demagnetization behaviors and relatively uniform rock magnetic characteristics allowed us to reconstruct relative paleointensity records (NRM30mT/IRM30mT) for each core. The relative paleointensity records showed a beneficial agreement with each other except for the uppermost parts of the cores, and patterns similar to the Sint‐800 paleointensity stack and other relative paleointensity records. Spectral analyses of the relative paleointensity records revealed a dominant periodicity at about 100 ka, but not for the normalizer and other rock magnetic proxies. These results suggested that the 100 ka periodicity in the paleointensity records during the Brunhes Chron would not be caused by sedimentological effects. The mean inclination values of the three cores were close to the expected hypothetical geocentric axial dipole (GAD) direction, which implies that ∼5–10° of negative inclination anomaly (ΔI) is centered at the western equatorial Pacific Ocean, and not extended to the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean. A comparison between the relative paleointensity variation and ΔI amplitude between the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean and the western equatorial Pacific Ocean suggests that changes of the GAD intensity control the relative contribution of the persistent nondipole components and produces the inclination variation.
Limnological Monitoring on the Upper Mississippi River System, 1993-1996: Long Term Resource Monitoring Program Bellevue Field Station

Abstract : Since 1988 the Long Term Resource Monitoring Program (LTRMP) staff have performed basic limnological field measurements in the Upper Mississippi River System. The period of this report (1993-96) includes a major revision of the LTRMP sampling design in 1993 that added randomization broader spatial coverage and increased monitoring of tributaries and locations that allow monitoring of material transport. Personnel from the LTRMP Onalaska (Wisconsin) Field Station made about 1300 vi sits to fixed limnological sampling sites and 2100 visits to stratified random sites in the vicinity of Navigation Pool 8 from 1993 through 1996. An extended late-season flood in summer 1993 coincided with some of the highest nutrient and lowest dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations recorded during the report period. Decreases in nutrient concentrations (particularly nitrogen) and increases in water clarity occurred over the 4-year period. Midday DO concentrations were above 5 mg/L throughout most of the year and across most of Pool 8 with localized exceptions during periods of snow cover. Pool 8 and its watershed are a net source of sediment to the Mississippi River main channel suspended solids concentrations were greater downstream than upstream and concentrations in the tributaries were typically higher than in the main channel. Strong seasonal patterns were evident for temperature DO Secchi transparency turbidity total and volatile suspended solids silicate chlorophyll-alpha and total phosphorus. Spatial variability (among strata) of most measurements generally increased during lower discharge. Within the individual strata, the pattern of variability could be generalized as follows: isolated backwater greater than contiguous backwater greater than impounded greater than or equal to side channel greater than or equal to main channel.
Indicators for separating undesirable and well-delineated tree crowns in high spatial resolution images

Much effort has been spent on the automatic detection and delineation of individual trees from high spatial resolution images. However, delineation errors may lead to an inaccurate crown size when compared with ground measurements. Thus, it is problematic to use delineated crowns to derive information on tree variables, e.g. crown diameter, tree height, diameter at breast height (DBH), stand volume, stem volume or stand competition index. In this study, we investigated two indicators – the mean digital number (MDN) within each delineated crown and the difference between MDNs (DMDNs) for 0.6 m buffer zones outside and inside the boundary of each delineated crown – to separate poorly delineated crowns from well-delineated ones. We modelled the relationships between delineated crowns and field-based crown size, between delineated crowns and tree height, and between delineated crowns and DBH observations in a Norway spruce (Picea abies) stand, separately considering models based on all delineated results and crowns identified as being well delineated. Our results showed that the capability of the two indicators in separating poorly and well-delineated crowns varied under different thresholds. The results also indicated that models considering only well-delineated crowns were more robust and effective in estimating and predicting tree crown diameter, DBH and tree height than models that considered all delineated results.