Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tracing Ground Water Recharge in an Agricultural Watershed with Isotopes

Nitrate and pesticide use in the 800 km2 Raisin River agricultural watershed in eastern Ontario, Canada, threatens the quality of ground water in the highly exploited regional carbonate aquifer overlain by sandy till. To assess local recharge contributions through the cultivated fields, monthly monitoring of ground water levels, geochemistry, and environmental isotopes (δ2H H2O, (δ13CDIC) was carried out for 12 wells over a 14‐month period.
Assessing Watershed-Wildfire Risks on National Forest System Lands in the Rocky Mountain Region of the United States

Wildfires can cause significant negative impacts to water quality with resultant consequences for the environment and human health and safety, as well as incurring substantial rehabilitation and water treatment costs. In this paper we will illustrate how state-of-the-art wildfire simulation modeling and geospatial risk assessment methods can be brought to bear to identify and prioritize at-risk watersheds for risk mitigation treatments, in both pre-fire and post-fire planning contexts. Risk assessment results can be particularly useful for prioritizing management of hazardous fuels to lessen the severity and likely impacts of future wildfires, where budgetary and other constraints limit the amount of area that can be treated. Specifically we generate spatially resolved estimates of wildfire likelihood and intensity, and couple that information with spatial data on watershed location and watershed erosion potential to quantify watershed exposure and risk. For a case study location we focus on National Forest System lands in the Rocky Mountain Region of the United States. The Region houses numerous watersheds that are critically important to drinking water supplies and that have been impacted or threatened by large wildfires in recent years. Assessment results are the culmination of a broader multi-year science-management partnership intended to have direct bearing on wildfire management decision processes in the Region. Our results suggest substantial variation in the exposure of and likely effects to highly valued watersheds throughout the Region, which carry significant implications for prioritization. In particular we identified the San Juan National Forest as having the highest concentration of at-risk highly valued watersheds, as well as the greatest amount of risk that can be mitigated via hazardous fuel reduction treatments. To conclude we describe future opportunities and challenges for management of wildfire-watershed interactions.
Survey on Blockchain P2P Network

Blockchain P2P solutions are becoming more specialized in architecture, peer type, and data propagation techniques. Interoperability on the Blockchain is becoming increasingly important, which has prompted the creation of protocols and frameworks for communication across various chains. In this study, we investigate the development and application of P2P technology in Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and Cosmos are four blockchain platforms. Our findings demonstrate that the various blockchain P2P networks concentrate on finding practical solutions to the scalability issue.
The Value of clean water: The public's willingness to pay for boatable, fishable, and swimmable quality water

This paper presents the findings of a study designed to determine the national benefits of freshwater pollution control. By using data from a national contingent valuation survey, we estimate the aggregate benefits of meeting the goals of the Clean Water Act. A valuation function is estimated which depicts willingness to pay as a function of water quality, income, and other variables. Several validation checks and tests for specific biases are performed, and the benefit estimates are corrected for missing and invalid responses. The two major policy implications from our work are that the benefits and costs of water pollution control efforts are roughly equal and that many of the new policy actions necessary to ensure that all water bodies reach at least a swimmable quality level will not have positive net benefits.
Exploding Johannesburg: Driving in a Worldly City

This article argues for the importance of the «system of automobility» to critical cultural studies of Johannesburg, sub-Saharan Africa’s most globalized city. Using Ivan Vladislavic’s 2004 experimental novella The Exploded View as a primary example, it takes issue with the tendency for cultural studies of the city to focus on pedestrian mobility, or «walking in the city», as being an inherently liberatory practice. Without downplaying the «everyday evasiveness» of walking in the city, this article nonetheless points to the different ways in which pedestrian mobility is invariably circumscribed in a city built around the car. In Vladislavic’s novella, for example, characters drive through rather than walk in the city, and this corresponds to an overlooked form of poetics and power relations that are fundamental to what might be described as Johannesburg’s ‘worldly’ personality.
The Late Devensian Lateglacial palaeoenvironmental record from Whitrig Bog, SE Scotland. 2. Chironomidae (Insecta: Diptera)

Changes in chironomid midge larval assemblages in Lateglacial (c. 13.5–10 ka yr BP) lake sediments from Whitrig Bog are used to infer climatic (temperature) change. The earliest sediments contain few, predominantly cold stenothermic taxa. This fauna is replaced by an assemblage dominated by thermophilic taxa, indicating rising temperatures. The relatively warm Interstadial is punctuated by at least two brief cold oscillations which are characterized by the return of certain cold‐water taxa and the demise of some elements of the thermophilic fauna. The earlier of the two oscillations was apparently shorter and colder than the second. The highest Lateglacial Interstadial temperatures were attained either shortly before or after the first cold oscillation. This timing of the Lateglacial thermal maximum is apparently later than has been previously inferred from fossil beetle data. The Lateglacial Interstadial is terminated by the Loch Lomond (Young Dryas) Stadial, which is indicated in this monolith by an abrupt return of cold stenothermic Chironomidae and the virtual elimination of thermophilic taxa. Temperatures during the Younger Dryas appear to have been colder than during either of the previous minor cold oscillations. Climatic inferences from chironomid analysis broadly support and augment conclusions drawn from sediment chemistry and palynological evidence derived from the same monolith, although there is evidence that the vegetation and chironomid responses to early postglacial warming were out of phase.
Chemical pretreatments for improving the radiocarbon dates of peats and organic silts in a gley podzol environment : Grahams Terrace, North Westland

Abstract Radiocarbon dates obtained for peats and organic silts from the high rainfall/leaching environment of North Westland have been shown to conflict with known stratigraphic evidence by yielding anomalously young dates. This study examines the effectiveness of 14 chemical pretreatment methods, including classical humus fractionation of soil organic matter, hydrolysis with mineral acids (6 M HC1 and 70% HNO3), and extraction of lipids and cellulose, in removing young carbon contaminants from peat and organic silt samples prior to radiocarbon assay. The criterion chosen for judging the effectiveness of a treatment in removing young contaminants is an increase in 14C age, with the assumption that contamination is largely due to young carbon. Chemical pretreatments were undertaken on peat and organic silt samples taken immediately above (5–0 cm) and below (0–5 cm) a layer of Kawakawa Tephra found at Grahams Terrace in North Westland. Radiocarbon dates, obtained by accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS), sho.
Partial Area Contributions to Storm Runoff in a Small New England Watershed

During an experimental study of runoff producing mechanisms in a small drainage basin, the major portion of storm runoff was produced as overland flow on a small proportion of the watershed. Where the water table intersected the ground surface before and during a storm, water escaped from the soil surface and ran quickly to the stream at velocities 100 to 500 times those of the subsurface system. Direct precipitation onto the saturated area was another major contributor of storm flow. Storage of water within these source areas was small and travel times out of them were short. Runoff from them was largely controlled by rainfall intensity. These partial areas contributing quick runoff could expand or contract seasonally or during a storm. Their position and expansion can be related to geology, topography, soils, and rainfall characteristics. In the study basin, water that remained below the ground surface on its way to the main stream channel was a relatively minor contributor to the storm hydrograph. The response of subsurface flow to rainfall was heavily damped by storage and transmission within the soil. Measurements of water table elevation and runoff from experimental plots in another small watershed with different geologic conditions confirmed the results outlined above. Runoff records from a large number of small basins of the Sleepers River experimental watershed indicate the more general applicability of these findings.
CKN: An Edge AI Distributed Framework

The edge-cloud-HPC continuum is transformative for AI processing at the edge. With greater availability of both edge and cloud resources, AI inference, training, and optimization can be distributed across the continuum. We target edge-cloud in particular where the workload at the Edge server can exhibit discrete changes, for instance, when motion is detected. We optimize for Quality of Experience (QoE) and utilize historical data from the Edge, graphs, and Deep Learning to infer the next action to take. Using a large synthetic workload and publicly profiled inference models, our results show that predictive guidance outperforms random choice or best guess in optimal QoE of the edge-cloud continuum.
University of Birmingham R-Metric:

—Measuring the performance of an algorithm for solving multiobjective optimization problem has always been challenging simply due to two conﬂicting goals, i.e., convergence and diversity of obtained tradeoff solutions. There are a number of metrics for evaluating the performance of a multiobjective optimizer that approximates the whole Pareto-optimal front. However, for evaluating the quality of a preferred subset of the whole front, the existing metrics are inadequate. In this paper, we suggest a systematic way to adapt the existing metrics to quantitatively evaluate the performance of a preference-based evolutionary multiobjective optimization algo-rithm using reference points. The basic idea is to preprocess the preferred solution set according to a multicriterion decision making approach before using a regular metric for performance assessment. Extensive experiments on several artiﬁcial scenarios, and benchmark problems fully demonstrate its effectiveness in evaluating the quality of different preferred solution sets with regard to various reference points supplied by a decision maker.
Microphysical modeling of a midlatitude ''polar stratospheric cloud'' event: Comparisons against multiwavelength ground-based and spaceborne lidar data

[1] A high-resolution transport model containing a fully explicit size-resolving microphysical scheme is used to study a large-scale polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) case detected by lidar at midlatitudes between 17 and 23 February 2008. The model simulations, initialized using European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) fields and Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) Aura data, are validated locally against ground-based (Institute for Tropospheric Research Multiwavelength Atmospheric Raman lidar for Temperature, Humidity, and Aerosol profiling (IfT MARTHA)) lidar measurements at Leipzig and globally against spaceborne (Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization/Cloud-Aerosol-Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIOP/CALIPSO)) lidar backscatter measurements. By assuming a 1 K cold bias on the ECMWF temperatures and under the assumption of equilibrated spherical PSC particles, our model produces fields of optical and microphysical parameters like the total surface area density (A) and volume (V). A, and V, as well as the median radius of the PSC size distribution, compare favorably to the corresponding values derived from multiwavelength lidar backscatter measurements. Around 21 km, A and V are found to be around 10 μm2 cm−3 and 1 μm3 cm−3, respectively. The median radius of the Supercooled Ternary Solution particle size distribution is estimated to be around 0.3 μm using both the model calculations and the lidar-derived size distribution parameters. Overall, despite the simplifications on the microphysical scheme, the model is able to reproduce the salient features of the local and global lidar observations. The results clearly demonstrate the value of CALIOP products for large-scale studies, exploiting chemistry-transport models.
Study on optimization‐based layered classification for separation of wetlands

The classification and dynamics monitoring of wetlands using remotely sensed data is a complicated, time‐consuming process involving high costs, and the accuracy varies depending on the techniques used for image processing and analysis, and the time and costs required for training, etc. This paper presents an optimization‐based layered classification method for the classification and dynamics monitoring of wetlands based on a decision procedure of multiple objectives. Four driven factors including techniques to be used, classification accuracy, and the time and cost needed for the classification, were selected as the indicators of criteria in optimization of the layered classification. This method was applied to Thematic Mapper (TM) image classification of the wetlands in Minjiang River estuary and led to the overall correct percentage of 85.13% for seven categories of the wetlands.
Slow El Niño‐Southern Oscillation boundary waves

Anomalies of sea surface temperature (SST) and heat storage in the upper 400 m of ocean (HS400) for 13 years from 1979 to 1991 are mapped onto a 2° latitude by 5° longitude grid each month over most of the global ocean from 30°S to 60°N. Time sequences at every grid location are band pass filtered to reveal El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signals on period scales ranging from 2 to 7 years. Time-distance diagrams are constructed along the equator and eastern boundary of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and South Indian Oceans. These time-distance diagrams display slow poleward propagation of equatorial ENSO signals, consistently in HS400 and intermittently in SST. In the North Pacific Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 9–18 months to propagate from the equator northward along the west coast of North America to the Gulf of Alaska. In the North Atlantic Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 6–12 months to propagate from the equator along the west coast of Africa to the Strait of Gibraltar. In the South Indian Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 9–18 months to propagate poleward from the equator along the west coasts of Indonesia and Australia to Perth. Speeds of poleward propagation of ENSO waves in both HS400 and SST along these eastern boundaries range from 5 to 30 cm s−1. These ENSO boundary waves propagate in the same direction as Kelvin waves, but with speeds an order of magnitude smaller. They provide a remote and delayed influence upon ENSO activity in the middle-latitude eastern boundary in each ocean. Time-distance diagrams are also constructed along the western boundary and equator of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and South Pacific Oceans. These time-distance diagrams display slow propagation of ENSO signals in SST and HS400 in both directions depending on the ocean. In the North Pacific Ocean, ENSO signals in both SST and HS400 propagate equatorward from Taiwan to New Guinea, taking 6–18 months to make this transit. Moreover, they arrive on the equator in phase with zonally propagating equatorial ENSO waves. This indicates that ENSO activity in the western subtropical North Pacific Ocean influences ENSO activity in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean through slow equatorward propagation. Speeds of equatorward propagation of ENSO waves in both HS400 and SST along this western boundary range from 5 to 20 cm s−1. In the North Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans this off-equatorial influence is not possible, since slow ENSO waves in HS400 propagate poleward along these western boundaries.
A Study on Caffeine Expectancy and Stress among College Coffee Consumers

With Starbucks and Tim Horton in trend globally, so is the increasing caffeine usage among college students. Students have started consuming caffeine as their energy catalyst, believing that it would help them study for an exam overnight or help them win a sports event. Expectancies for caffeine reveal the various expectations people have, concerning its consumption, based on which they may alter its daily dosage. Caffeine consumption also has an association with the perceived stress. The aim of the current research was to study the effects of outcome expectancies of caffeine consumption including energy/work enhancement, social/mood enhancement/physical performance enhancement, anxiety/negative physical effects, etc. and to determine the relationship of caffeine with perceived stress among college students. Standardized scales were used to measure the caffeine expectancies and perceived stress. A total sample of 62 undergraduate and postgraduate students within the age limit of 18-25 years participated in the study. The result found out that the various outcome expectancies for caffeine consumption are positively correlated to each other. It also revealed that there is a significant positive correlation between perceived stress and caffeine expectancies including withdrawal/dependence and sleep disturbance. It is suggested that the students must keep a check on their daily caffeine consumption so that they do not consume too much that might gradually lead to caffeinism.
Positioning, Navigation, and Timing on the Air

The widespread adoption of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services in many applications across modern society, has given rise to the development of various alternative PNT systems, aiming at addressing the Global Positioning System (GPS) vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative-based PNT solution by jointly exploiting the use of UAV-assisted wireless networks and the collaboration among the targets and the collaborator nodes in the network, who have unknown and a rough estimate of their position and timing, respectively. The minimization problem of the overall system's and each collaborator node's and target's position and timing estimation error is formulated and solved based on the principles of potential games. The existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the corresponding game is proven, while two different approaches to obtain the game's NE are studied and their tradeoffs are evaluated. The first one follows a game-theoretic approach and the second one is based on the principles of reinforcement learning. A detailed numerical evaluation is performed, via modeling and simulation, in order to demonstrate the benefits and tradeoffs of the proposed PNT solution.
Modeling Spinning Reserve Contribution Using Physical Ramp Rates

As part of administering the day-ahead and real-time wholesale electricity markets, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) is responsible for scheduling adequate operating reserve is available for generator outage contingencies. This paper proposes a Ramp Rate Dependent (RRD) reformulation of spinning reserve scheduling that can utilize Multiple Response Rates (MRR) across the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) generator’s range of output. Tests are conducted on NYISO’s market simulator. Results have shown that operating reserve scheduled by the proposed approach better reflects the operating characteristics of CCGTs. The increase in model complexity has minimal economic impact, negligible performance degradation and is scalable to face the increasing flexibility in NYISO’s electricity and ancillary service market.
Wind Satellite (WINDSAT) Experiment

WINDSAT is a proposed future space-based global wind measuring system. A Shuttleborne experiment is proposed as a proof-of-principle demonstration before development of a full operational system. WINDSAT goals are to measure wind speed and direction to ± 1 m/s and ± 10 deg accuracy, respectively, over the entire earth from 0- to 20-km altitude with 1-km altitude resolution. The wind measuring instrument is a coherent lidar incorporating a pulsed CO2 TEA laser transmitter and a continuously scanning 1.25-m-diameter optical system. The laser fires at an 8-Hz prf and the optics performs a conical scan at 60° to nadir every 7 seconds. Each laser pulse is backscattered by aerosols in the earth's atmosphere. The original transmitted laser frequency is Doppler shifted since the aerosols are moving with the wind. The wind speed is measured by heterodyne detecting the backscattered return laser radiation and measuring the frequency shift. Each wind speed measurement must be repeated at a different look angle in order to determine wind direction. A special feature of combining a continuously rotating optical system with heterodyne detection is the requirement for active alignment or image motion compensation of the return radiation. Short-term pointing stability of 2 μrad and long-term pointing accuracy of 100 μrad is required for efficient detection and accurate wind mapping. A separate WINDSAT attitude determination and control system is required to meet these accuracies.
Examination of a Pollen Tetrad of Integricorpus reticulatus (Mtchedlishvili) Stanley from the Maastrichtian of North Dakota, U.S.A.

Abstract Morphological study of Aquilapolles fossil pollen, long conducted at the light microscopic level, is significantly enhanced by the greater depth of field and magnification obtainable with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The use of SEM‐generated stereo pairs provides a three‐dimensional image revealing spatial relationships of body form, sculpture and aperture arrangement. A tetrad consisting of individual grains referrable to Integricorpus reticulatus (Mtchedlishvili) Stanley, from the Hell Creek Formation (Maastrichtian) of North Dakota, is examined using stereo pairs and standard SEM imaging. This marks, as far as we know, the first SEM examination of an isopolar triprojectate tetrad. Comparison with previously published heteropolar spinulose Aquilapollenites tetrads of possible proteacean affinity provides additional clues to the polyphyletic nature of the Aquilapolles group.
Dynamic-State-Estimation-Based Cyber Attack Detection for Inverter-Based Resources

The cyber security of Inverter Based Resources (IBRs) has received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, a cyber attack detection method is proposed based on dynamic state estimation for IBRs. The state-space models of the physical inverter system and the digital controller are separately derived and then coupled by the data flows in between, i.e., measurement signals and control signals. Based on Kalman Filtering (KF), two dual dynamic state estimators are developed for tracking the cyber and physical state variables, respectively. By checking the model-data consistency of both the physical and cyber layers via hypothesis testing, the proposed method features the capability of distinguishing between false data in measurement signals and in control signals. Simulation results in an IEEE 13 node test feeder demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.