Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Convective cloud downdraft structure: An interpretive survey

Observational and modeling studies dealing with different aspects of convective clouds are reviewed and interpreted to construct a generalized description of the structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics of convective cloud downdrafts. Observational studies reveal that downdraft speeds and sizes range from typical values of several meters per second and several hundred meters in nonprecipitating cumulus congestus clouds to typical values of 5–10 m s−1 and several kilometers in precipitating cumulonimbi. Maximum measured downdraft speeds appear to be limited to ∼20 m s−1. Different types of downdrafts appear to exist within precipitating convective clouds. Penetrative downdrafts common to nonprecipitating convective clouds and upper regions of precipitating convective clouds exhibit maximum horizontal dimensions of ∼1 km. These downdrafts emerge when subsaturated environmental air is entrained or mixed into the cloud. A second type, cloud edge downdrafts, appear in both observations and in cloud model results. Although their driving mechanisms are not fully understood, such downdrafts may be forced by cloud edge evaporational cooling and localized updraft mass flux compensation. Overshooting downdrafts comprise a third type and are typically associated with intense convection in which updraft air surpasses an equilibrium level of neutral buoyancy, cools upon further ascent, and then descends but remains within a few kilometers of cloud top. Finally, the precipitation-associated downdraft is one forced at low levels by precipitation loading, evaporation, and melting. This downdraft may attain relatively large scales, of the order of the horizontal dimension of precipitating regions within the lowest several kilometers. Such large scales provide a clear distinction from (penetrative-type) downdrafts of ∼1 km maximum scale within nonprecipitating convection. There is evidence from both observational and modeling studies that downdraft dynamical and thermodynamical processes are strongly influenced by static stability, wind shear profiles, cloud microphysical processes, and precipitation characteristics. However, the degree to which downdraft structure depends on such interrelated controlling factors has not yet been determined.
An inventory of glacier changes between 1973 and 2011 for the Geladandong Mountain area, China

Abstract. The snow and ice of the Geladangong Mountain area supply the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and long-term changes to glaciers and ice masses in this region due to a warming climate are of great concern. An inventory of glacier boundaries and changes over decades for the Geladandong Mountain area in China has been conducted using remote sensing imagery from Landsat (MSS, TM, ETM+), CERBES CCD, and GIS techniques. Variations in glacier extent has been measured using a~series of digital images since 1973, including Landsat MSS in 1973, Landsat TM in 1992, Landsat ETM+ in 2004, and CBERS CCD in 2011. All Landsat data are snow-free outside the glacier boundaries, allowing an unsupervised classification method to be used to extract glacier area. For the CBERS CCD data, some areas were covered by clouds and snow, requiring an initial unsupervised classification method to divide glacier, clouds and snow from other land types, followed by a supervised visual interpretation to extract glacier area. The results show a decrease in glacier ice cover in the study area during the past 38 yr. From 1973 to 2011, glacier area decreased from 107 105 hectares to 94 220 hectares, or a change of −12%. The speed at which ice cover is being lost has been decreasing during the past 38 yr. The rate of glacier area loss was 0.47% yr−1 from 1973–1992, 0.19% yr−1 from 1992–2004, and 0.14% yr−1 from 2004–2011. While most of the glaciers are shrinking, some are expanding. For the 1973 to 2004 period, retreating glaciers exposed 14 447 hectares of land, and advancing glaciers spread over 2682 hectares that were not covered by ice in 1973. The net glacier area decrease is 11 765 hectares from 1973–2004. For the 1973 to 2011 period, glaciers expanded over 3791 hectares, and retreated from 16 504 hectares.
Sheet Structure in Granites: Its Origin and Use as a Measure of Glacial Erosion in New England

Sheet structure in New England granites tends toward parallelism with the exposed rock surface and is completely independent of all primary rock structures, commonly transecting contacts between the granite and xenoliths, roof pendants, the country rock itself, and minor postgranite intrusive bodies. In general the sheets become progressively thicker, flatter, and more regular with increasing depth. Evaluation of the possible causes of the structure indicates that relief, through removal of superincumbent load, of a primary confining pressure is chiefly responsible for the large-scale exfoliation phenomena involved. Insolation, the progressive hydration and formation of chemical alteration products in certain susceptible minerals, and the mechanical action of fire, frost, and vegetation are possible minor contributory causes. With insignificant exceptions, sheeting in northeastern Massachusetts and adjacent parts of New Hampshire, where detailed studies have been made, is preglacial in origin. Its attitude with respect to present topography therefore facilitates certain comparisons with preglacial topography and thus permits minimum estimates of the thickness of material removed by glacial ice from specific localities. Not only do the granite sheets or shells thicken with depth, but statistical data demonstrate a fair degree of quantitative consistency in this relation. The sizes of large granite boulders-and therefore of the respective sheets from which they were torn-thus furnish an additional clue to their original depth beneath the preglacial surface. Results of these studies suggest the removal of a blanket of rock and preglacial regolith at least 10-15 feet thick by glacial abrasion and plucking from the stoss, or north, slopes of most hills, and of a somewhat greater thickness from their east slopes, summits, and west slopes. Severe plucking and quarrying of the rock appears to have been responsible for strongly concentrated erosion on the lee, or south and southeast slopes of many hills to maximum demonstrable depths in excess of 100 feet.
Collective Action, Property Rights, and Decentralization in Resource Use in India and Nepal

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where environmental resources are concerned, have been less attentive to the political coalitions that prompt decentralization and the role of property rights in facilitating the implementation of decentralized decision making. By comparing decentralization in four cases in South Asia—Forest Councils in Kumaon in India, Joint Forest Management in India, the Parks and People Program in Nepal's Terai, and Community Forestry legislation in Nepal—this article provides answers to two questions: When do governments decentralize environmental decision making? and Which types of property rights must be devolved if decentralized decision making is to be effective?
Evidence for sea breezes on the Alaskan Beaufort Sea Coast

Atmospheric environmental data collected in August 1976 and 1977 along the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska exhibited both circumstantial and direct evidence of the existence of sea breezes at 70°N latitude. To estimate the total atmospheric boundary layer turninga two-dimensional least squares technique was used to derive the three hourly gradient wind (above the atmospheric boundary layer) with data from surface pressure stations for simultaneous comparison to surface wind data. Results indicated the average turning of the wind from above the boundary layer to the surface was 120° on sea breeze days. Rotary spectra from time series data of surface winds measured at offshore and onshore sites have shown the horizontal extent of the sea breeze influence to include at least a 37 km zone centered on the coastline. The sea breeze is largely responsible for the increased persistence of surface onshore (northeasterly and easterly) winds documented in August historical data for the Alaskan Beaufort Sea coast.
Deep learning of diffeomorphisms for optimal reparametrizations of shapes

In shape analysis, one of the fundamental problems is to align curves or surfaces before computing a (geodesic) distance between these shapes. To ﬁnd the optimal reparametrization realizing this alignment is a computationally demanding task which leads to an optimization problem on the diﬀeomorphism group. In this paper, we construct approximations of orientation-preserving diﬀeo-morphisms by composition of elementary diﬀeomorphisms to solve the approximation problem. We propose a practical algorithm implemented in PyTorch which is applicable both to unparametrized curves and surfaces. We derive universal approximation results and obtain bounds for the Lipschitz constant of the obtained compositions of diﬀeomorphisms.
Vestiges of a beginning and the prospect of an end

Abstract ‘No vestige of a beginning, …’ In one sense the first half of James Hutton’s famous statement of 1788 holds true today — the oldest parts of Earth’s crust identified in two centuries of ‘modern’ study look not unlike those being formed at present. Yet the age of the planet can now be determined as close to 4.5 billion years, and radiometric ages of vestigial rocks and minerals approach 90 per cent of that value. The history of the planet is becoming clearer. We can now accurately reconstruct the geography of Pangea in early Mesozoic times. Remnants of older rifted continental margins suggest the existence of previous supercontinents for which hypothetical reconstructions have been proposed — a global-scale Huttonian process of tectonic renewal. Their mode of fragmentation and comparison with the other terrestrial planets suggest a functional connection between surficial plates and deep-seated mantle plumes, which may extend back to the Archaean. The fossil record, geochemistry, and molecular biology provide a timeline for life on Earth which does extend to the Archaean, almost as far as the oldest rocks and minerals. The history of endogenic tectonism, environmental change and biological evolution was punctuated, and to some extent at least influenced, by bolide impacts. Like Hutton, in the rocks we can still read ‘no prospect of an end’, though astrophysical evidence indicates the demise of the Earth, or at least of its biosphere, will inevitably come 5000 million years into the future when our Sun will become a red giant, enveloping all its planets in a gaseous holocaust. Detection of complex organic molecules in the comas of comets that recently traversed the inner Solar System has shown, however, that the basic chemical building blocks of life are present in interstellar space. Evidence is steadily building up for the existence of planets around other stars of the Milky Way. Hence life need not be limited in either space or time by the existence of the Earth itself. Indeed, contemporary cosmology entertains possibilities that the entire universe that we recognize may be boundless, permanently expanding, or perhaps even part of a continuum of evolving universes. In this ultimate sense, therefore, the concluding sentence of the Theory of the Earth by the ‘founder of modern geology’ can be considered as valid today as it was 200 years ago.
Navigating Occluded Intersections with Autonomous Vehicles Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Providing an efficient strategy to navigate safely through unsignaled intersections is a difficult task that requires determining the intent of other drivers. We explore the effectiveness of Deep Reinforcement Learning to handle intersection problems. Using recent advances in Deep RL, we are able to learn policies that surpass the performance of a commonly-used heuristic approach in several metrics including task completion time and goal success rate and have limited ability to generalize. We then explore a system's ability to learn active sensing behaviors to enable navigating safely in the case of occlusions. Our analysis, provides insight into the intersection handling problem, the solutions learned by the network point out several shortcomings of current rule-based methods, and the failures of our current deep reinforcement learning system point to future research directions.
CLEFeHealth2012 - The CLEF 2012 Workshop on Cross-Language Evaluation of Methods, Applications, and Resources for eHealth Document Analysis

CLEFeHealth2012 is the CLEF2012 workshop on cross-language evaluation of methods, applications, and resources for eHealth document analysis. Its focus is on written and spoken natural-language processing with the use scenario of people using ICT tools to analyse and integrate eHealth documents across languages, genres, and jargons. The significance of workshop lies in taking steps toward systematic evaluation and continuous improvement of eHealth ICT. The target audience of CLEFeHealth2012 is interested in syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of electronic health documents, their intelligent re-use, their automated analysis, and evaluation of the analysis methods. The potential participants represent academia, industry, healthcare, and government. The programme of the workshop consists of three invited talks on collaborative datasets, resources, tools, and infrastructure by Australian and US researchers; a panel of Austrian, Finnish, Irish, Swedish, and Swiss experts in eHealth; eleven paper presentations; and three workshops for roadmap development, student mentoring, and partnership building, respectively. CLEFeHealth2012 invites you to develop with us a roadmap towards this vision of using systematically evaluated ICT tools to analyse and integrate eHealth documents across languages, genres, and jargons. The workshop takes place in Rome, Italy on Tuesday 18 September, 2012.
Control of unknown linear systems with Thompson sampling

We propose a Thompson sampling based learning algorithm for the Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problem with unknown system parameters. The algorithm is called Thompson sampling with dynamic episodes (TSDE) where two stopping criteria determine the lengths of the dynamic episodes in Thompson sampling. The first stopping criterion controls the growth rate of episode length. The second stopping criterion is triggered when the determinant of the sample covariance matrix is less than half of the previous value. We show under some conditions on the prior distribution that the expected (Bayesian) regret of TSDE accumulated up to time T is bounded by Õ(√T). Here Õ (.) hides constants and logarithmic factors. This is the first Õ (√T) bound on expected regret of learning in LQ control. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of TSDE.
Antarctic fish and fisheries

Preface Part I. The Ecology of Antarctic Fish: 1. Introduction 2. The evolution of the fish fauna of the Southern Ocean 3. The composition of the fish fauna 4. Classification of the Notothenioidei 5. Geographical and bathymetric distribution of the fish fauna 6. Adaptations to the environment 7. Reproduction and early life history 8. Age, growth, mortality and biomass estimates 9. The significance of fish in the ecosystem 10. Parasites 11. Future research Part II. Antarctic Fisheries: 12. The commercially exploited species 13. The development of the fishery 14. Trends in the fishery 15. Fishing grounds and fishing conditions 16. Fish detection and catching methods 17. Fishery products 18. The development of fish stock assessment and fisheries management in the Southern Ocean 19. The effect of fishing on single stocks 20. Detrimental effect of krill fishing on recruitment 21. Effects of fishing and fishery-related activities on other components of the marine ecosystems of the Southern Ocean 22. Approaches to a more effective fisheries management in the Southern Ocean 23. Perspectives for a future fish harvest from the Southern Ocean.
Non-Linear Petrov-Galerkin Methods for Reduced Order Modelling of the Nav ‐ ier-Stokes Equations using a Mixed Finite Element

A new nonlinear Petrov-Galerkin approach has been develope d for Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) Reduced Order Modelling (ROM) of t he Navier-Stokes equations. The new method is based on the use of the cosine rul e between the advection direction in Cartesian space-time and the direction of the gradient of the solution. A finite element pair,P1DGP2, which has good balance preserving properties is used here, consisting of a mix of discontinuous (for velocity com ponents) and continuous (for pressure) basis functions. The contribution of the pre sent paper lies in applying this new non-linear Petrov-Galerkin method to the reduced o rder Navier-Stokes equations, and thus improving the stability of ROM results witho ut tuning parameters. The results of numerical tests are presented for a wind driven 2D gyre and the flow past a cylinder, which are simulated using the unstructured mesh fi nite element CFD model in order to illustrate the numerical performance of the meth od. The numerical results obtained show that the newly proposed POD Petrov-Galerkin m ethod can provide more accurate and stable results than the POD Bubnov-Galerkin me thod.
Face-to-Face Co-Located Human-Human Social Interaction Analysis using Nonverbal Cues: A Survey

This work presents a systematic review of recent efforts (since 2010) aimed at automatic analysis of nonverbal cues displayed in face-to-face co-located human-human social interactions. The main reason for focusing on nonverbal cues is that these are the physical, machine detectable traces of social and psychological phenomena. Therefore, detecting and understanding nonverbal cues means, at least to a certain extent, to detect and understand social and psychological phenomena. The covered topics are categorized into three as: a) modeling social traits, such as leadership, dominance, personality traits, b) social role recognition and social relations detection and c) interaction dynamics analysis in terms of group cohesion, empathy, rapport and so forth. We target the co-located interactions, in which the interactants are always humans. The survey covers a wide spectrum of settings and scenarios, including free-standing interactions, meetings, indoor and outdoor social exchanges, dyadic conversations, and crowd dynamics. For each of them, the survey considers the three main elements of nonverbal cues analysis, namely data, sensing approaches and computational methodologies. The goal is to highlight the main advances of the last decade, to point out existing limitations, and to outline future directions.
LENGTH-WEIGHT RELATIONSHIP OF DOLPHINFISH BY-CAUGHT IN LARGE PELAGIC LONGLINE FISHERIES OF THE SPANISH MEDITERRANEAN

Le present document a pour but de decrire la relation longueur-poids des prises accessoires de coryphene commune (Coryphaena hippurus) dans les pecheries palangrieres de la Mediterranee occidentale. Une relation de puissance-courbe considerable est apparue entre la longueur et le poids de 155 specimens differents de coryphene commune (df= 153; R2= 0,97; F= 5031,59; P< 0,001). La relation longueur-poids resultante etait : W=0,0036 FL.
On-Road Remote Sensing of Automobile Emissions in the Tulsa Area: Year 1, September 2003

The University of Denver conducted a five-day remote sensing study in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area in September of 2003. The remote sensor used in this study measures the ratios of CO, HC, and NO to CO2 in motor vehicle exhaust. From these ratios, we calculate the percent concentrations of CO, CO2, HC and NO in the exhaust that would be observed by a tailpipe probe, corrected for water and any excess oxygen not involved in combustion. Mass emissions per mass or volume of fuel can also be determined. The system used in this study was configured to determine the speed and acceleration of the vehicle, and was accompanied by a video system to record the license plate of the vehicle. Five days of fieldwork, September 8-12, 2003, were conducted on the uphill interchange ramp from westbound US64 (Broken Arrow Expressway) to southbound US169. A database was compiled containing 20,318 records for which the State of Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation provided registration information. All of these records contained valid measurements for at least CO and CO2, and 20,295 records contained valid measurements for HC and NO as well. The database was compiled by the University of Denver, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Efficient Use of Large Pre-Trained Models for Low Resource ASR

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been established as a well-performing technique for many scenarios where lots of labeled data is available. Additionally, unsupervised representation learning recently helped to tackle tasks with limited data. Following this, hardware limitations and applications give rise to the question how to efﬁciently take advantage of large pre-trained models and reduce their complexity for downstream tasks. In this work, we study a challenging low resource conversational telephony speech corpus from the medical domain in Vietnamese and German. We show the beneﬁts of using unsupervised techniques beyond simple ﬁne-tuning of large pre-trained models, discuss how to adapt them to a practical telephony task including bandwidth transfer and investigate different data conditions for pre-training and ﬁne-tuning. We outperform the project baselines by 22% relative using pre-training techniques. Further gains of 29% can be achieved by reﬁnements of architecture and training and 6% by adding 0 . 8 h of in-domain adaptation data.
Application-specific Network Management for Energy-Aware Streaming of Popular Multimedia Formats

The typical duration of multimedia streams makes wireless network interface (WNIC) energy consumption a particularly acute problem for mobile clients. In this work, we explore ways to transmit data packets in a predictable fashion; allowing the clients to transition the WNIC to a lower power consuming sleepstate. First, we show the limitations of IEEE 802.11 power saving mode for isochronous multimedia streams. Without an understanding of the stream requirements, they do not offer any energy savings for multimedia streams over 56 kbps. The potential energy savings is also affected by multiple clients sharing the same access point. On the other hand, an application-specific server side traffic shaping mechanism can offer good energy saving for all the stream formats without any data loss. We show that the mechanism can save up to 83% of the energy required for receiving data. The technique offers similar savings for multiple clients sharing the same wireless access point. For high fidelity streams, media players react to these added delays by lowering the stream fidelity. We propose that future media players should offer configurable settings for recognizing such energy-aware packet delay mechanisms.
Robust Positioning Algorithms for Distributed Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

A distributed algorithm for determining the positions of nodes in an ad-hoc, wireless sensor network is explained in detail. Details regarding the implementation of such an algorithm are also discussed. Experimentation is performed on networks containing 400 nodes randomly placed within a square area, and resulting error magnitudes are represented as percentages of each node’s radio range. In scenarios with 5% errors in distance measurements, 5% anchor node population (nodes with known locations), and average connectivity levels between neighbors of 7 nodes, the algorithm is shown to have errors less than 33% on average. It is also shown that, given an average connectivity of at least 12 nodes and 10% anchors, the algorithm performs well with up to 40% errors in distance measurements.