Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asian irrigation, African rain: Remote impacts of irrigation

Irrigation is not only vital for global food security but also constitutes an anthropogenic land use change, known to have strong effects on local hydrological and energy cycles. Using the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology's Earth System Model, we show that related impacts are not confined regionally but that possibly as much as 40% of the present‐day precipitation in some of the arid regions in Eastern Africa are related to irrigation‐based agriculture in Asia. Irrigation in South Asia also substantially influences the climate throughout Southeast Asia and China via the advection of water vapor and by altering the Asian monsoon. The simulated impact of irrigation on remote regions is sensitive to the magnitude of the irrigation‐induced moisture flux. Therefore, it is likely that a future extension or decline of irrigated areas due to increasing food demand or declining fresh water resources will also affect precipitation and temperatures in remote regions.
Integrating Route and Survey Learning in Complex Virtual Environments: Using a 3D Map

This study aimed to explore how a three-dimensional (3D) map affects the acquisition of survey knowledge in complex virtual environments (VEs). Subject navigated in virtual and real subway stations, where the virtual station was augmented with either a 3D floor map, a 3D building map, or neither. After subject's navigation in the station, they made the judgment of spatial relative directions between objects. The analyses of response time showed that participants responded faster when they were assisted by the 3D floor or building map than without a map aid in virtual stations. There was no significant difference between survey knowledge acquired in the virtual station augmented with the 3D floor or building map and in the real station. Participants with the 3D floor map performed best in spatial judgments. Implications of these findings to a 3D map design were discussed.
A framework for continuous, transparent authentication on mobile devices

Mobile devices have consistently advanced in terms of processing power, amount of memory and functionality. With these advances, the ability to store potentially private or sensitive information on them has increased. Traditional methods for securing mobile devices, passwords and PINs, are inadequate given their weaknesses and the bursty use patterns that characterize mobile devices. Passwords and PINs are often shared or weak secrets to ameliorate the memory load on device owners. Furthermore, they represent point-of-entry security, which provides access control but not authentication. Alternatives to these traditional meth- ods have been suggested. Examples include graphical passwords, biometrics and sketched passwords, among others. These alternatives all have their place in an authentication toolbox, as do passwords and PINs, but do not respect the unique needs of the mobile device environment. This dissertation presents a continuous, transparent authentication method for mobile devices called the Transparent Authentication Framework. The Framework uses behavioral biometrics, which are patterns in how people perform actions, to verify the identity of the mobile device owner. It is transparent in that the biometrics are gathered in the background while the device is used normally, and is continuous in that verification takes place regularly. The Framework requires little effort from the device owner, goes beyond access control to provide authentication, and is acceptable and trustworthy to device owners, all while respecting the memory and processor limitations of the mobile device environment.
The P wave velocity structure of upper mantle beneath the North China and surrounding regions from FMTT

In this study we used 52414 P wave first motion traveltimes to get the P wave velocity structure of upper mantle beneath the Central Block(CB)and Eastern Block(EB)of North China Craton(NCC)by Fast Marching Teleseismic Tomography(FMTT). There were 190 broadband stations from North China Seismic Array,and all of the teleseismic events occurred during Oct.2006 and Mar.2009. The relative traveltime residuals were got by waveform cross correlation.The checkerboard resolution was～0.5°×0.5°. The results reveal that:an obvious low-velocity anomaly is located at the region beneath the CB and EB of NCC,which extends from 40 km to 240 km;but beneath the Yanshan Uplift region,there is a high-velocity zone.These show that the CB and EB of the NCC have been obviously destructed,but the destruction region does not include the Yanshan Uplift;or the destruction of CB and EB is more apparent than that of Yanshan Uplift.The low-velocity anomaly extends to～250 km depth beneath the CB of NCC,which may have something to do with the formation of Cenozoic pyrogenic rock and Fenwei valley graben.
Sexual dimorphism 24 / 02 / 09 1 Sexual Dimorphism in Environmental Epigenetic Programming

The phenotype of an individual is the result of complex interactions between genotype and current, past and ancestral environment leading to a lifelong remodelling of our epigenomes. The vast majority of common diseases, including atherosclerosis, diabetes, osteoporosis, asthma, neuropsychological and autoimmune diseases, which often take root in early development, display some degree of sex bias, very marked in some cases. This bias could be explained by the role of sex chromosomes, the different regulatory pathways underlying sexual development of most organs and finally, lifelong fluctuating impact of sex hormones. A substantial proportion of dimorphic genes expression might be under the control of sex-specific epigenetic marks. Environmental factors such as social behaviour, nutrition or chemical compounds can influence, in a gender-related manner, these flexible epigenetic marks during particular spatiotemporal windows of life. Thus, finely tuned developmental program aspects, for each sex, may be more sensitive to specific environmental challenges, particularly during developmental programming and gametogenesis, but also throughout the individual's life under the influence of sex steroid hormones and/or sex chromosomes. An unfavourable programming could thus lead to various defects and different susceptibility to diseases between males and females. Recent studies suggest that this epigenetic programming could be sometimes transmitted to subsequent generations in a sex specific manner and lead to transgenerational effects (TGEs). This review summarizes the current understanding in the field of epigenetic programming and highlights the importance of studying both sexes in epidemiological protocols or dietary interventions both in humans and in experimental animal models.
A Comparative Study of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Canola Production

In this research, the energy flow and production energy indices of canola cultivation in Trakya province of Turkey, Golestan and Mazandaran provinces of Iran were compared. Diesel fuel and chemical fertilizer inputs were the highest consumer of energy in the production of canola in these three regions. The results indicated that despite the higher energy use of machinery in Trakya province of Turkey, the energy use of diesel fuel in this province is less than the energy consumed in the two northern provinces of Iran, which could be due to available old machines for the production of canola in Mazandaran and Golestan provinces. Total greenhouse gas emissions of canola production for these regions were computed 562.85, 652.86 and 887.30 kgCO 2 eq ha -1 , respectively. The inputs of chemical fertilizer and diesel fuel in canola production produced the highest percentage of gas emissions in these three areas. Energy consumption for potential feedstock production for one kg production of biodiesel fuel in these provinces was calculated as 14.76, 20.66 and 37.77 MJ, respectively. The amounts of greenhouse gas emissions for potential feedstock production for one kg production of biodiesel were obtained 0.45, 0.76 and 1.17 kgCO 2 eq for Trakya, Golestan and Mazandaran provinces, respectively.
Predicting Central Asian river flows from regional precipitation and wind patterns during the preceding cold season

Snowmelt is an important driver of regional river flow, and warm season (April-August) river flows are linked to the previous cold season's (November-March) precipitation. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is applied between the cold season regional climate (November-March zonal winds and precipitation) and the subsequent warm season river discharge (April-August station river flows) for 1950-1985. The NCEP/NCAR re-analysis is used for precipitation and winds, and 24 stations in the mountains of eastern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are used for river flow data. The extracted cold season precipitation and wind patterns have regional scales and are adequately captured by the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis. Average cross-validated skill correlation is 0.43 for the river flows, with 10 stations correlated greater than 0.5. As the re-analysis data are updated in real time, this scheme can make operational forecasts. The regional variability is also related to tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures, which may enable forecasts at longer leads.
Political Economy of Agricultural Trade Interventions in Africa

This paper uses new data on agricultural policy interventions to examine the political economy of agricultural trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Historically, African governments have discriminated against agricultural producers in general (relative to producers in non-agricultural sectors), and against producers of export agriculture in particular. While more moderate in recent years, these patterns of discrimination persist. They do so even though farmers comprise a political majority. Rather than claiming the existence of a single best approach to the analysis of policy choice, the authors explore the impact of three factors: institutions, regional inequality, and tax revenue-generation. The authors find that agricultural taxation increases with the rural population share in the absence of electoral party competition; yet, the existence of party competition turns the lobbying disadvantage of the rural majority into political advantage. The authors also find that privileged cash crop regions are particular targets for redistributive taxation, unless the country's president comes from that region. In addition, governments of resource-rich countries, while continuing to tax export producers, reduce their taxation of food consumers.
WAVE MODELLING IN THE WISE GROUP

The WISE group is a group of investigators who have agreed to jointly (i) study the physical processes affecting waves in shallow water, (ii) develop numerical codes to explicitly represent these processes in operational models and (iii) verify these wave models in real coastal conditions. The group meets once per year in Europe or North America to discuss progress and coordinate future plans. Since the first meeting in 1993, interesting results have been obtained in all of the three aspects, including operational third-generation spectral wave models for shallow water (one of which has been released in public domain). INTRODUCTION When in 1992 the highly successful third-generation wave model WAM for ocean applications (WAMDI group, 1988; Komen et al., 1994) was completed, several members of the WAM group turned their attention to coastal regions where of course they encountered coastal engineers with their large diversity of wave models notably the second-generation HISWA model (Holthuijsen et al., 1988). In the following year, these WAM members and members of the HISWA group and others met and decided to jointly approach the study of ffiaves In Shallow water Environments (WISE). In this first meeting the WISE group agreed to develop (operational) wave models for coastal regions in which all relevant physical processes would be represented explicitly. Three tasks were correspondingly defined: (i) to study the physical processes affecting waves in shallow water, (ii) to develop numerical codes to represent these processes in operational models and (iii) to verify these wave models in real coastal conditions. We wish to emphasize that the WISE group does not necessarily exhaust all the activities in the field. However, it includes a fairly large and comprehensive part of it. 1 Istituto Studio Dinamica Grandi Masse, 1364 San Polo, 30125 Venice, Italy 2 Delft University of Technology, Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Stevinweg 1, 2628 CN Delft, the Netherlands
Forecasting Accuracy of a Multi-Country Macroeconometric Model for the Former Yugoslavia

In this paper, the forecasting performance of a structural multi-country model for Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is compared to the forecasting ability of ARMA and VAR models. It turns out that in many cases the time series approaches deliver more accurate predictions of economic growth, inflation and the unemployment rate than the structural model which is based both on economic theory and on time series for the included countries. This shows that it is not so easy to beat time series models in forecasting. However, the usefulness of structural models should not be evaluated on the basis of their forecasting performance alone, since these models can in addition be used to investigate the macroeconomic effects of policy measures or of exogenous shocks.
Relevance Theory : More than

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book developed out of the 5 th international conference Interpreting for Relevance: Discourse and Translation held in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, in 2010. The conference has for a number of years provided a venue for discussing meaning, communication and translation within relevance theory and other approaches. We express our gratitude to the participants for sharing their research and inspiring comments in a very stimulating and friendly atmosphere. Our thanks also go to the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, which sponsored the organization of the conference. We also wish to thank each of the contributors for submitting their papers. Finally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to Daniel Sax for careful proofreading and to Dorota Traczewska for excellent manuscript preparation. The contributions represent various views commenting on, applying, or developing Relevance Theory (henceforth RT), an approach to communication and cognition created by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and first fully described in their now seminal book Relevance: Communication and Cognition ([1986] 1995). The central notion around which the theory was constructed is that of relevance, understood as a property of inputs to cognitive processes, depending on the balance of cognitive effects and the processing effort needed to gain these effects. Initially, the main interest of RT lay in explaining how communication works and how it is grounded in the cognitive processes of storing and activating assumptions, and combining newly communicated information with contextual information to obtain effects that would justify the effort of engaging in communication at all. Sperber and Wilson adopted Grice's (1957) view that understanding a message consists in discovering the speaker's intentions by making inferences about the deliberately used stimulus, verbal or otherwise. Sperber and Wilson argued that, in the case of verbal communication, apart from the process of linguistic decoding, all the other phases of utterance comprehension are inferential in nature, both at the level of the explicit content of an utterance and at the level of its implicatures. The theoretical basis of RT was first applied to selected aspects of verbal Introduction 2 communication, such as speech acts, metaphor, irony, and others (Sperber and Wilson [1986] 1995, ch. IV). Since its presentation in Relevance: Communication and Cognition, the theory has developed in a number of directions and hence generated an extensive literature (see e.g. Yus 1998; Wałaszewska et al. 2008). Over the years, it has been expanded to accommodate a host …
Life Science Technologies: Microfluidics—Bringing New Things to Life Science

Most everything we know about fluids is based on macroscale observation. But things are different at the microscale, where “channels” can be built with two walls instead of four, turbulence doesn't exist, and fluids can flow side by side without mixing. For years, microfluidics has been the subject of hyperbole, with some speculating that laboratory process would one day be miniaturized onto a chip. Current commercial offerings leverage microfluidics' most obvious advantages: small sample volumes, rapid results, and lower costs. But as researchers have discovered, microfluidics also has a second benefit: enabling experiments that cannot otherwise be accomplished.
Molecular mechanisms linking wound infl ammation and fi brosis: knockdown of osteopontin leads to rapid repair and reduced scarring

intracellular Previous studies of tissue repair have revealed osteopontin (OPN) to be up-regulated in association with the wound infl ammatory response. We hypothesize that OPN may contribute to infl ammation-associated fi brosis. In a series of in vitro and in vivo studies, we ana-lyze the effects of blocking OPN expression at the wound, and determine which infl ammatory cells, and which paracrine factors from these cells, may be responsible for triggering OPN expression in wound fi broblasts. Delivery of OPN antisense oligodeoxynucle-otides into mouse skin wounds by release from Pluronic gel decreases OPN protein levels at the wound and results in accelerated healing and reduced granulation tissue formation and scarring. To identify which leukocytic lineages may be responsible for OPN expression, we cultured fi broblasts in macrophage-, neutrophil-, or mast cell – conditioned media (CM), and found that macrophage- and mast cell – secreted factors, specifi cally platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), induced fi broblast OPN expression. Correspondingly, Gleevec, which blocks PDGF receptor signaling, and PDGF-R (cid:2) – neutralizing antibodies, inhibited OPN induction by macrophage-CM. These studies indicate that infl ammation-triggered expression of OPN both hinders the rate of repair and contributes to wound fi brosis. Thus, OPN and PDGF are potential targets for therapeutic modulation of skin repair to improve healing rate and quality.
AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

approved: Sinisa Todorovic The Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tool is a versatile instrument for nano-machining in circuit editing. Circuit editing is one of the most important steps in the design of an electronic circuit on a chip. Circuit editing can be improved by imaging of silicon plates and analyzing the resultant images. However smaller features in FIB produce lower signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio in images, and thus render visual feedback increasingly difficult. For this Master thesis, we focus on analyzing a set of Focused Ion Beam grey valued images. Our goal is to reduce the noise in images, and apply an appropriate filter, for feature extraction. This is expected to allow us to see the significant features of the silicon plates. The main challenge is that the noise and its level are unknown. Also the significant features of the silicon plate are unknown. Therefore the problem that we face here is discovery of an unknown pattern in images, under unknown noise. We make the assumption that noise is a superposition of a Gaussian noise, Salt-and-Pepper noise and affine perturbations. We seek the significant features using a least squares optimization to solve for the latent affine transformation, and recover the most significant pattern in the images. The improved images enable the tool user to recognize critical features more reliably for circuit editing. ©Copyright by Sharath Kumar Dhamodaran April 5, 2013 All Rights Reserved Pattern Discovery in Noisy Images by Sharath Kumar Dhamodaran A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Comorbid psychiatric disorders in youth in juvenile detention.

OBJECTIVE To estimate 6-month prevalence of comorbid psychiatric disorders among juvenile detainees by demographic subgroups (sex, race/ethnicity, and age). DESIGN Epidemiologic study of juvenile detainees. Master's level clinical research interviewers administered the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children Version 2.3 to randomly selected detainees. SETTING A large temporary detention center for juveniles in Cook County, Illinois (which includes Chicago and surrounding suburbs). PARTICIPANTS Randomly selected, stratified sample of 1829 African American, non-Hispanic white, and Hispanic youth (1172 males, 657 females, aged 10-18 years) arrested and newly detained. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children. RESULTS Significantly more females (56.5%) than males (45.9%) met criteria for 2 or more of the following disorders: major depressive, dysthymic, manic, psychotic, panic, separation anxiety, overanxious, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, conduct, oppositional defiant, alcohol, marijuana, and other substance; 17.3% of females and 20.4% of males had only one disorder. We also examined types of disorder: affective, anxiety, substance use, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity or behavioral. The odds of having comorbid disorders were higher than expected by chance for most demographic subgroups, except when base rates of disorders were already high or when cell sizes were small. Nearly 14% of females and 11% of males had both a major mental disorder (psychosis, manic episode, or major depressive episode) and a substance use disorder. Compared with participants with no major mental disorder (the residual category), those with a major mental disorder had significantly greater odds (1.8-4.1) of having substance use disorders. Nearly 30% of females and more than 20% of males with substance use disorders had major mental disorders. Rates of some types of comorbidity were higher among non-Hispanic whites and older adolescents. CONCLUSIONS Comorbid psychiatric disorders are a major health problem among detained youth. We recommend directions for research and discuss how to improve treatment and reduce health disparities in the juvenile justice and mental health systems.
Real-time ultrasonic experiments and mechanical properties of soil and rock mixture during triaxial deformation

Non-linear mechanical behaviours of soil and rock mixture (SRM) are known to be the result of elasticity mismatch between soil matrix and rock blocks. Yet the rock–soil interactions, rock block interlocking phenomenon and their dependence under triaxial deformation are poorly understood. Here the authors investigate on the mechanical and ultrasonic properties of SRM by analysing the variation of ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) during triaxial compression. The results show that rock–soil interaction can be reflected by the variation of UPV during deformation. In this work, the change of UPV mainly depends on the axial stress level, and they present a consistent trend during deformation. With the increasing rock block percentage, both axial stress and UPV take on the fluctuation growth trend; the fluctuation is most obvious at the strain hardening stage. Internal friction angle increases with the increasing of rock block percentage, while the cohesion presents the opposite trend. The ultimate failure modes .
The Economics of Climate Change in the Dong Nai Delta : Adapting Agriculture to Changes in Hydrologic Extremes 1

1 This draft paper is based on chapter 1 and 2 of the author’s PhD dissertation. The author would like to thank Jeffrey Williams, Richard Howitt, Jay Lund, Pierre Merel and Michael Springborn for helpful comments and advice. Special thanks to the members of the Southern Institute of Water Resources Planning in Vietnam for kindly providing data and for numerous discussions about the hydrology in the delta. I would also like to thank Claudia Ringler for providing agricultural production data. All errors are my own. Results of the analysis are preliminary, do not cite without permission.