Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Importance of clay size minerals for Fe(III) respiration in a petroleum‐contaminated aquifer

The availability of Fe(III)‐bearing minerals for dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction was evaluated in sediments from a petroleum‐contaminated sandy aquifer near Bemidji, Minnesota (USA). First, the sediments from a contaminated area of the aquifer, in which Fe(III) reduction was the predominant terminal electron accepting process, were compared with sediments from a nearby, uncontaminated site. Data from 0.5 m HCl extraction of different size fractions of the sediments revealed that the clay size fraction contributed a significant portion of the ‘bio‐available’ Fe(III) in the background sediment and was the most depleted in ‘bio‐available’ Fe(III) in the iron‐reducing sediment. Analytical transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed the disappearance of thermodynamically unstable Fe(III) and Mn(IV) hydroxides (ferrihydrite and Fe vernadite), as well as a decrease in the abundance of goethite and lepidocrocite in the clay size fraction from the contaminated sediment. TEM observations and X‐ray diffraction examination did not provide strong evidence of Fe(III)‐reduction‐related changes within another potential source of ‘bio‐available’ Fe(III) in the clay size fraction – ferruginous phyllosilicates. However, further testing in the laboratory with sediments from the methanogenic portion of the aquifer that were depleted in microbially reducible Fe(III) revealed the potential for microbial reduction of Fe(III) associated with phyllosilicates. Addition of a clay size fraction from the uncontaminated sediment, as well as Fe(III)‐coated kaolin and ferruginous nontronite SWa‐1, as sources of poorly crystalline Fe(III) hydroxides and structural iron of phyllosilicates respectively, lowered steady‐state hydrogen concentrations consistent with a stimulation of Fe(III) reduction in laboratory incubations of methanogenic sediments. There was no change in hydrogen concentration when non‐ferruginous clays or no minerals were added. This demonstrated that Fe(III)‐bearing clay size minerals were essential for microbial Fe(III) reduction and suggested that both potential sources of ‘bio‐available’ Fe(III) in the clay size fraction, poorly crystalline Fe(III) hydroxides and structural Fe(III) of phyllosilicates, were important sources of electron acceptor for indigenous iron‐reducing microorganisms in this aquifer.
Withdrawing is believing? Detecting Inconsistencies between Withdrawal Choices and Third-party Data Collections in Mobile Apps

—Popular privacy regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) often allow consumers to with-draw from providing data, e.g., the famous right to opt-out. Modern computer software, e.g., mobile applications (apps), often provide withdrawal interfaces, which stop data collection— e.g., from third-party ads and analytics libraries—to respect users’ withdrawal decisions. While such interfaces are marked as “withdrawal”, their correlated withdrawal decisions are often inconsistent with the apps’ actual data collection behavior, especially from third parties, which is defined as withdrawal inconsistency in the paper. Prior works have either studied website withdrawal inconsistency or privacy leaks of mobile apps. However, the mobile withdrawal inconsistency problem is different yet more complex than those in websites due to the diversity in mobile withdrawal interface and the variety of private information. At the same time, none of the existing works detecting privacy leaks of mobile apps understand users’ withdrawal decisions let alone correlate them with withdrawal behaviors. In this paper, we design and implement a novel approach, called M OW C HECKER , to detect mobile apps’ inconsistencies in third-party data collection. The key insight is that withdrawal choices should have either a control-flow dependency on personal information flow or a data-flow dependency on withdrawal APIs provided by third-party data collection libraries. Our evaluation of M OW C HECKER on real-world Android apps reveals 157 manually-confirmed, zero-day withdrawal inconsistencies. We have responsibly reported them to app developers and received 23 responses with two being fixed.
CO2FIX at the landscape level - an application for the Veluwe area, the Netherlands

The carbon fixation model CO2FIX was adapted to run on landscape scale, and was applied to the Veluwe area, a forested region in the Netherlands. After a simulation of 500 years, the average carbon stock per hectare in the forest products compartment is about 10 Mg C per ha, the carbon stock in the soil about 125 and the carbon stock in the biomass about 100, in total 235 Mg C per ha. The proceeding average sink for the whole of the Veluwe area (73 180 ha) amounts to 0.037 Mt C in 2020, 0.034 Mt in 2032, and 0.009 Mt C in 2482. The actual annual sink saturates much earlier, around 2050, but continues to fluctuate. The spatial variability in the results is large and is a reflection of the temporal variability occurring in a rotation. The report discusses the accuracy of CO2FIX simulations, and compares results with other studies.
Cognitive load detection using Ci-SSA for EEG signal decomposition and nature-inspired feature selection

: Cognitive load detection is eminent during the mental assignment of neural activity because it indicates how the brain reacts to stimuli. The level of cognitive load experienced during mental arithmetic tasks can be determined using an electroencephalogram (EEG). The EEG data were collected from publicly available datasets, namely, mental arithmetic task (MAT) and simultaneous task workload (STEW). The first phase comprises decomposing the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using circulant singular spectrum analysis (Ci-SSA). In the second phase, entropy-based features were evaluated using IMFs. After that, the extracted features were fed to nature-inspired feature selection algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA), binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), binary bat algorithm (BBA), and binary dragonfly algorithm (BDA) for optimal selection of features by using machine learning (ML) techniques: K-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM) to analyse the classification accuracy (Ac), sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp), precision (Pr), and F-score with 10-fold cross-validation in the third phase. The highest classification Ac, Se, Sp, Pr, and F-score of the MAT dataset were 97.30%, 0.98, 0.97, and 97.40% from multileads, and 96.20%, 0.96, 0.94, and 96.70% from a single lead (F4) of EEG, respectively. However, we achieved 97.98%, 0.98, 0.98, 0.97, and 98.1% values from multi-leads and 96.67%, 0.96, 0.97, 0.95, and 96.90% from a single-lead STEW dataset. When compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method (Ci-SSA+BDA+KNN) has proven to be more successful.
Intra‐decadal variability in the Ekman heat flux from scatterometer winds

We examine evidences of low frequency variability in the Ekman heat flux due to changes in the global temperature and wind patterns. The 10‐year long time series of high resolution surface wind vectors was provided by the European Remote Sensing Satellites 1 and 2. A linear regression of the zonally averaged Ekman heat flux shows a latitudinal trend for the period between 1992 and 1997. This trend indicates a decrease in the poleward Ekman heat flux of warmer waters from the tropics and a slight decrease in the equatorward flux in the high latitudes. This intra‐decadal trend ended after the 1998 El Niño event. These variations are mostly due to changes in the wind stress field. The decrease in the poleward Ekman heat flux may have far reaching consequences involving the global heat balance.
Working in the UK: Polish migrant worker routes into employment in the north east and north west construction and food processing sectors

This report presents the findings of a TUC-funded project that sought to identify the main routes into employment for Polish migrant workers in the North East and North West construction and food processing sectors. Its findings show that the two sectors offer real opportunities and challenges for trade unions to organise those who most need help. Indeed many unions in the sectors have already taken up the challenge and have started to see real successes in organising groups traditionally seen as hard to organise.
Generic Evolving Self-Organizing Neuro-Fuzzy Control of Bio-Inspired Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent times, with the incremental demand for fully autonomous systems, research interests are observed in learning machine-based intelligent, self-organizing, and evolving controllers. In this paper, a new evolving and self-organizing controller, namely generic-controller (G-controller), is proposed. The G-controller works in a fully online mode with minor expert domain knowledge. It is developed by incorporating the sliding mode control (SMC) theory with an advanced incremental learning machine, namely generic evolving neuro-fuzzy inference system. The controller starts operating from scratch with an empty set of fuzzy rule, and therefore, no offline training is required. To cope with the changing dynamic characteristics of the plant, the controller can add or prune the rules on demand. Control law and adaptation laws for the consequent parameters are derived from the SMC algorithm to establish a stable closed-loop system, where the stability of the G-controller is guaranteed by using the Lyapunov function. The uniform asymptotic convergence of tracking error to zero is witnessed through the implication of an auxiliary robustifying control term. In addition, the implementation of the multivariate Gaussian function helps the controller to handle the nonaxis parallel data from the plant and consequently, enhances the robustness against uncertainties and environmental perturbations. Finally, the controller's performance has been evaluated by observing the tracking performance in controlling simulated plants of unmanned aerial vehicle, namely bio-inspired flapping wing micro air vehicle and hexacopter for a variety of trajectories.
Wilderness visitor experiences: Lessons from 50 years of research

This paper reviews 50 years of research on the experiences of wilderness visitors. Research on the nature of experiences began with an emphasis on motivations for taking wilderness trips and a focus on the experiential outcomes of wilderness visits. This perspective has been complemented by recent work that more deeply explores the lived experience in wilderness, its ebb and flow, and the process by which experience is constructed and developed into long-lasting relationships. In attempting to understand how wilderness settings might best be managed to protect high quality experiences, considerable work has been conducted on the effects of setting attributes on experience. In particular, the effect of use density on experience has been a prominent research theme. Among the insights of this body of research, is the realization that experiences are highly diverse and idiosyncratic and that visitors are highly adaptable and adept at negotiating the situations they experience. This suggests that it is impossible to know how to most effectively steward wilderness experiences without first deciding who and what to manage for. Moreover, given the idiosyncratic personal construction of experience, management action or inaction cannot guarantee high quality experiences for everyone.
Horizontal ADCP for remote mapping of currents

Harbors throughout the world realize the importance of water flow information of the main waterways for ship guidance. The most ideal measurement would be real time depth averaged flow information through the water ways. Reliable estimates of discharge may also useful for a variety of organizations interested in monitoring rivers and channels. Both of these applications may be provided by a Horizontally mounted ADCP (HADCP). However, because each sound beam has a finite opening angle, this generally results in the reflection of sound against the bottom and the surface. These reflections may contaminate the measurements of the water column. A specially designed and modified 300 kHz RDI workhorse unit was used to take data at two different river locations: Jersey Point on the San Joaquin and Walnut Grove on the Sacramento river. The unit is unique in that two pairs of vertically stacked transducers are used to obtain narrower beamwidths than a standard unit. Additionally, special firmware was installed to allow the raw pressure time series from each transducer to be recorded. Algorithms to successfully detect contamination from the surface and the bottom were used to assess data quality. Provided care is used in site selection and installation, the unit works well and is capable of producing profiles to about 100 m as well as estimates of discharge. The effective range of the system varies, even in locations which are not thought to be highly stratified. This indicates the need for real-time algorithms to assess data quality to be included in the firmware of such an instrument.
Passing of the Last of the Three Who Established 14C Dating: A Historical Footnote

Ernest Anderson, the last of the three scientists responsible for the initial research establishing the validity of the radiocarbon dating method at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, has died. From early 1947 to the end of 1949, Anderson and James Arnold joined with Willard Libby to undertake three critical experiments, employing what one of them called a “procedure developed in hell” (solid carbon decay counting). They laid the foundation of what has developed over more than 6 decades into the “gold standard” for the chronometric dating of the most recent phases of the technological and cultural evolution of anatomically modern human societies, the geology of the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene, critical events in the history of the Earth's climate over the last 50,000 yr, and a range of other scientific and historical applications.
The Application of the Theory of Variable Speed of Light on the Universe

By applying the theory of variable speed of light, the galactic red-shift can be described as a phenomenon, which only SEEMS to be a movement and it can be explained by the variation of the cosmic gravitational potential. An alternative concept of the universe is developed, whereas only very general assumptions about the properties of the universe are made. The worldview arising from that is simpler than the Standard Model. The theory of variable speed of light is able to describe the Hubble diagram consistently in a new way, nevertheless, without having to introduce any parameters.
Bed topography and lubrication inferred from surface measurements on fast-flowing ice streams

Abstract Observations of surface elevation (s) and horizontal velocity components (u and v) are inverted to infer the topography (b) and lubrication (c) at the bed of an ice stream, based on a linearized perturbation theory of the transmission of flow disturbances through the ice thickness. Synthetic data are used to illustrate non-uniqueness in the inversion, but also demonstrate that effects of b and c can be separated when s, u and v are specified, even with added noise to simulate measurement errors. We have analyzed prominent short-horizontal-scale (∼2 km) features in topography and velocity pattern in a local 64 km by 32 km area of the surface of Ice Stream E,West Antarctica. Our preferred interpretation of bed conditions beneath the most prominent features on the surface identifies a deep trough in the basal topography with low lubrication in the base of the trough.
Reversals of the Basic-Level Advantage 1 RUNNING HEAD : Reversals of the Basic-Level Advantage “ Object Categorization : Reversals and Explanations of the Basic-Level Advantage ” ( Rogers & Patterson , 2007 ) : A Simplicity Account

T. T. Rogers and K. Patterson [Rogers, T. T. , & Patterson, K. (2007). Object Categorization: Reversals and Explanations of the Basic-Level Advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 451-469] reported an impressive set of results demonstrating a reversal of the highly robust basic level advantage in both patients with semantic dementia and in healthy individuals engaged in a speeded categorisation task. To explain their results, as well as the usual basic level advantage seen in healthy individuals, the authors employed a parallel distributed processing theory of conceptual knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an alternative way of explaining the results of Rogers and Patterson, which is premised on a more restricted set of assumptions born from standard categorisation theory. Specifically, we provide evidence that their results can be accounted for based on the predictions of the simplicity model of unsupervised categorisation.
Exploring the Association Between SNP rs7903146 and Type 2 Diabetes in a Bangladeshi Population

Type 2 diabetes, often referred to as T2D, is a widespread health condition. This study focuses on the specific ge-netic variation in a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs7903146 in the gene TCF7L2 and its potential association with T2D. We examined DNA samples from Bangladeshi individuals to see whether the genetic variant rs7903146 is associated with T2D in this community. We discovered that the CC variant of rs7903146 was extremely prevalent, appearing in all of the samples from people without T2D and in the majority of the samples from people with T2D out of the 38 sequences they looked at (16 from people without T2D and 22 from people with T2D). In a tiny proportion of T2D patients, there was also a less prevalent variant called CT. Surpris-ingly, the Bangladeshi population in this study did not show a clear association be-tween rs7903146 and T2D. This counters what several earlier investigations have found. This opens the door for more future research to completely comprehend the genetic and environmental causes of T2D to build preventative treatments for this quickly increasing global health problem.
Guiding Design Principle Projects: A Canvas for Young Design Guiding Design Principle Projects: A Canvas for Young Design Science Researchers Science Researchers

Particularly young researchers face challenges in organizing large design science research (DSR) projects and often struggle to capture, communicate, and reflect on important components to produce purposeful outcomes. Making informed decisions at the project start, such as selecting suitable kernel theories and development procedures, is of great relevance because they affect the entire design process and the resulting design products. Although DSR can produce different types of outcomes, from more situational artifacts to more abstract design knowledge, scholars point to the need for generalizing insights collected in such projects to advance the knowledge base. As design principles are among the prevailing forms of such design knowledge, this paper builds a visual inquiry tool—represented as a canvas—that navigates researchers through common components for crafting design principles and leverages collaborative reflections on essential project decisions. To build our canvas, we adapt inquiry-based learning (IBL) guidelines and visual inquiry tools to DSR education. Evaluations with doctoral students revealed promising indications for the canvas’s applicability and usefulness in guiding iterative DSR projects, reflecting on basic components, and communicating work-in-progress to other scholars and practice. Overall, we complement the body of DSR literature by providing an educational visual inquiry tool for producing design principles.
Consideraciones ecológicas y biogeográficas del género Argiope (Arachnida, Araneae) en las Islas Columbretes (Castellón, España). Ecologic and biogeographycal aspects of the genus Argiope (Arachnida, Araneae) from the Columbretes Islands (Castelló,.

En este estudio se describe la presencia y abundancia de dos especies de arañas tejedoras del género Argiope (A. lobata i A. bruennichi) en la isla Columbrete Grande (archipiélago de Columbretes, Castellón, España). El número de arañas observadas en una superficie de 10m' fue variable y dependiente de la presencia de vegetación. La densidad de arañas A. lobata (10m') fue superior (media = 4.4 arañas, mín= 0.5 y máx= 17.5) que la densidad de A. bruennichi (media = 2.3, min=l, máx= 6.6), y ambas especies se solaparon en el mismo hábitat. El examen de la literatura existente (Web of Science-SCI) ha mostrado que no se dispone de información sobre la biología y ecología de estas dos especies de arañas en España. Por ello, aportamos información preliminar sobre algunos aspectos de ecología y comportamiento de ambas especies. También se discute sobre el posible origen de las especies en la isla dentro del marco biogeográfico de las arañas del género Argiope. Palabras clave: biogeografía insular, ecología, islas Columbretes, Argiope, Araneidae.
Leaky McEliece: Secret Key Recovery From Highly Erroneous Side-Channel Information

The McEliece cryptosystem is a strong contender for post-quantum schemes, including key encapsulation for confidentiality of key exchanges in network protocols. A McEliece secret key is a structured parity check matrix that is transformed via Gaussian elimination into an unstructured public key. We show that this transformation is a highly critical operation with respect to side-channel leakage. We assume leakage of the elementary row operations during Gaussian elimination, motivated by actual implementations of McEliece in real world cryptographic libraries (Classic McEliece and Botan). We propose a novel algorithm to reconstruct a secret key from its public key with information from a Gaussian transformation leak. Even if the obtained side-channel leakage is extremely noisy, i.e., each bit can be flipped with probability as high as τ ≈ 0 . 4, our algorithm still succeeds to recover the secret key in a matter of minutes for all proposed (Classic) McEliece instantiations. Remarkably, for high-security McEliece parameters, our attack is more powerful in the sense that it can tolerate even larger τ . Technically, we introduce a novel cryptanalytic decoding technique that exploits the high redundancy exhibited in the McEliece secret key. This allows our decoding routine to succeed in reconstructing each column of the secret key successively. Our result stresses the necessity to well protect highly structured code-based schemes such as McEliece against side-channel leakage.