Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors for the Simulation of Convectively Coupled Kelvin Waves

This study investigates the major factors for the realistic simulation of convectively coupled Kelvin waves (CCKWs) using the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System (CFS) models. CFS simulations employing relaxed Arakawa‐Schubert (RAS; hereafter CTRL) and simplified Arakawa‐Schubert (SAS) cumulus parameterization schemes show that the former generates the observed Kelvin wave signature more realistically than the latter does. For example, the space‐time spectral signal, eastwardpropagation,and tilted(and secondbaroclinicmode)vertical structuresin convection, temperature, moisture, and circulation anomalies associated with CCKWs in CTRL are more comparable to observations than in the SAS simulation. CTRL and observations demonstrate the characteristic evolution and vertical heating profile associated with CCKWs similar to those seen in mesoscale convective systems in the tropics: shallow convection, followed by deep convection and then stratiform cloudiness, and resulting in a top-heavy diabatic heating profile. Five additional experiments demonstrate that the effects of convective downdrafts, subgrid-scale convective rain evaporation, and large-scale rain evaporation on CCKWs are assessed to be insignificant in CTRL, possibly due to a more humid environment than observation. However, the Kelvin wave signals are reduced by ;40% when shallow convection is disabled. More importantly, the removal of convectivedetrainment at thecloudtopresultsin thegreatestreductionin Kelvinwaveactivity(by morethan 70%). Therefore, the preconditioning of the atmosphere by shallow convection and detrainment of water vapor and condensate from convective updrafts to the environment and subsequent stratiform heating (gridscale condensational heating)/precipitation processes are the two most crucial factors for the successful simulation of CCKWs.
Provoking Conversation about Unequal Pay in a Work Environment Through Design Women’s Empowerment in HCI

Women have for centuries been subject to systematic disadvantages, especially in regard to unequal pay [1] [8]. With the move to the third wave HCI, empowerment has become a central focus area and an interesting research aim for the HCI community [20]. Through studies with women, we learned that women experience gender inequality and feel non-empowered at their workplace [3]. We have engaged ourselves with this topic as an interest to investigate how we through a critical design can stay with the trouble [22] of unequal pay to provoke conversation and empower women in a work environment. Towards the end of the paper, we report on a field study and conclude by reflecting on staying with the trouble through conversations, how provocation helped the participants stay with the trouble of unequal pay, and the reliability of our guidelines for empowerment. With this paper, we contribute to research within women’s empowerment in the work environment.
Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction

Methods of dimensionality reduction provide a way to understand and visualize the structure of complex data sets. Traditional methods like principal component analysis and classical metric multidimensional scaling suffer from being based on linear models. Until recently, very few methods were able to reduce the data dimensionality in a nonlinear way. However, since the late nineties, many new methods have been developed and nonlinear dimensionality reduction, also called manifold learning, has become a hot topic. New advances that account for this rapid growth are, e.g. the use of graphs to represent the manifold topology, and the use of new metrics like the geodesic distance. In addition, new optimization schemes, based on kernel techniques and spectral decomposition, have lead to spectral embedding, which encompasses many of the recently developed methods. This book describes existing and advanced methods to reduce the dimensionality of numerical databases. For each method, the description starts from intuitive ideas, develops the necessary mathematical details, and ends by outlining the algorithmic implementation. Methods are compared with each other with the help of different illustrative examples. The purpose of the book is to summarize clear facts and ideas about well-known methods as well as recent developments in the topic of nonlinear dimensionality reduction. With this goal in mind, methods are all described from a unifying point of view, in order to highlight their respective strengths and shortcomings. The book is primarily intended for statisticians, computer scientists and data analysts. It is also accessible to other practitioners having a basic background in statistics and/or computational learning, like psychologists (in psychometry) and economists.
Ionization due to electron and proton precipitation during the August 2011 storm

The parameterizations of monoenergetic particle impact ionization in Fang et al. (2010) (Fang2010) and Fang et al. (2013) (Fang2013) are applied to the complex energy spectra measured by DMSP F16 satellite to calculate the ionization rates from electron and ion precipitations for a Northern Hemisphere pass from 0030 UT to 0106 UT on 6 August 2011. Clear enhancement of electron flux is found in the polar cap. The mean electron energy in the polar cap is mostly above 100 eV, while the mean energy in the auroral zone is typically above 1 keV. At the same time, F16 captures a strong Poynting flux enhancement in the polar cap, which is comparable to those in the auroral zone. The particle impact ionization rates using Fang2010 and Fang2013 parameterizations show clear enhancement at F region altitudes mainly due to the low‐energy precipitating electrons, peaking probably in the cusp but also showing enhanced levels throughout most of the polar cap region. The general circulation models (GCMs), National Center for Atmospheric Research Thermosphere‐Ionosphere‐Electrodynamics General Circulation Model, and Global Ionosphere‐Thermosphere Model, using their default empirical formulations of particle impact ionization, do not capture the observed features shown in the total particle ionization rate applying the Fang2010 and Fang2013 parameterizations to DMSP measurements. The difference between GCM simulations and Fang2010 and Fang2013 applied to DMSP data is due to the difference of both the inputs to the models and the parameterization of the ionization rates.
Clicking and trading: Strategies of on-line banking in Spain

The strategy of Spanish banks regarding online banking has moved cautiously between the sector modernization and the fear of third parties' entry. In this paper we show how from the bubbling beginnings, institutions have moved towards a sound business part of a multichannel strategy. Still, Spanish institutions haven't been able to rip all the advantages that Internet may have in the distribution of financial products.
Winter climate and plant productivity predict abundances of small herbivores in central Europe

We studied winter climate influences on central European small herbivores by testing the prediction that direct physical effects of winter climate should be more pronounced in herbivores living above ground/snow than in subnivean/fossorial ones. Using correlation analysis and autoregressive modeling, we found that population growth rates of European hares, representing the former class of herbivores, are more efficiently predicted by the winter NAO index than those of common voles, representing the latter class of herbivores. We demonstrate that, whereas in hares the NAO index outperformed crop yield indices, used here as a proxy for plant production variability, it was crop yield indices that more effectively predicted population change in voles. These results suggest that the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of winter climate on herbivores may be related to their body size, the major determinant of above ground/snow or subnivean/fossorial mode of life.
African Journal of Biochemistry Research

Vitamin D deficiency (VDD) is a public health problem which affects all human beings including dark-skinned subjects. In children, it can cause disabilities associated with skeletal abnormalities such as rickets or stunted growth. VDD is also associated with a significant risk of extra-skeletal, infectious, auto-immune, neoplastic
Distributed Probabilistic Polling and Applications to Proportionate Agreement

This paper considers a probabilistic local polling process, examines its properties and proposes its use in the context of distributed network protocols for achieving consensus. The resulting consensus algorithm is very simple and light-weight, yet it enjoys some desirable properties, such as proportionate agreement (namely, reaching a consensus value of one with probability proportional to the number of ones in the inputs), resilience against dynamic link failures and recoveries, and (weak) self-stabilization.
Earthquakes and relative sealevel changes

Using a spherical model of postseismic deformation, for the first time we have computed the global contribution of large earthquakes to the relative sealevel variations in the twentieth century. We have found that great earthquakes have the overall tendency to produce a sealevel rise, and that they affect the measurements taken at those tide‐gauge sites that are commonly employed to obtain global estimates of sealevel rise. Though on a global scale most of the signal is associated with thrust events, on a regional scale the effects of great transcurrent earthquakes cannot be neglected. Depending on the viscosity of the asthenosphere, the contribution of earthquakes to the long‐term sealevel changes amounts to at least 0.1 mm/yr. Thus, the climate‐driven long‐term sealevel changes deduced by tide‐gauge observations may be slightly, but not negligibly, overestimated.
Transaction Costs in Water Markets in China's Heihe River Basin

This study assesses the transaction cost related to the Water Use Rights (WUR) system that is in operation in Zhangye City, Gansu Province, Northwest China. The study was carried out to see whether these costs were a significant barrier to a properly functioning system, and, if this was the case, to see what could be done to reduce them. Zhangye City is severely short of water. It is located in one of the driest areas in the world and is mainly watered by the Heihe River. Almost all the water from this river is currently extracted for irrigation and this has caused widespread desertification. The WUR system, the first of its kind in China, was introduced in 2002 to try and distribute water fairly and efficiently between agriculture and industry. Under the system, every water user gets a water quota fixed by the government. These quotas can be traded. Farmers and officials in the area were interviewed to get information and opinions on the effectiveness of the scheme. Transaction costs for both the implementation of the system itself and the WUR trading scheme was assessed. It was found that transaction costs were a significant barrier to the proper functioning of the system. It was also found that these costs were linked to the key social and administrative barriers that stand in the way of the system working properly. In light of this, the study advises that to bring transaction costs down - and improve the implementation of the scheme - these social and administrative problems must be tackled head on.
MusicBox : navigating the space of your music

Navigating increasingly large personal music libraries is commonplace. Yet most music browsers do not enable their users to explore their collections in a guided and manipulable fashion, often requiring them to have a specific target in mind. MusicBox is a new music browser that provides this interactive control by mapping a music collection into a two-dimensional space, applying principal components analysis (PCA) to a combination of contextual and content-based features of each of the musical tracks. The resulting map shows similar songs close together and dissimilar songs farther apart. MusicBox is fully interactive and highly flexible: users can add and remove features from the included feature list, with PCA recomputed on the fly to remap the data. MusicBox is also extensible; we invite other music researchers to contribute features to its PCA engine. A small user study has shown that MusicBox helps users to find music in their libraries, to discover new music, and to challenge their assumptions about relationships between types of music. Thesis Supervisor: Tod Machover Professor of Music and Media Program in Media Arts and Sciences MusicBox: Navigating the space of your music
Anàlisi dels usos del sòl de la plana de l'Alt Empordà i la seva localització a través de la teledetecció : (1977-1993)

La plana de l'Alt Emporda (nord-est de Catalunya) presentava, en la decada de 1970, un paisatge intensament humanitzat i diversificat, fruit de l'accio humana al llarg dels segles. L'us de la teledeteccio per a la localitzacio dels usos del sol de 1977 i de 1993 ens ha permes detectar i analitzar els canvis i processos esdevinguts en aquests setze anys a l'area d'estudi. Entre aquests destaquen la intensificacio de determinats conreus herbacis, l'increment de la urbanitzacio i la tendencia a l'homogeneitzacio paisatgistica. La metodologia emprada per a la classificacio de les imatges digitals disponibles dels dos anys ha tingut en compte la fragmentacio parcel·laria, tipica del paisatge mediterrani, i la forta dinamica temporal dels conreus herbacis, predominants a l'area.
Optimization of welding job-shop scheduling problem under variable workstation constraint: an industrial application with Arena simulation based

Öz Job-shop scheduling is a difficult issue for 'labor-intensive project type manufacturing'. Because in this type of production, the actual processing times are not exactly known until the production is finished and these processing times vary depending on the order’s technical specifications. It is an appropriate method to use probability distributions to forecast the processing times. This paper provides an industrial application for the scheduling of a labor-intensive project type working welding job-shop under variable workstation constraints. This constraint is consequence of a special production type that is depending on the length of the products. The aim is minimizing the makespan of a group of waiting orders. Genetic algorithm (GA) is used for this purpose to establish the entry sequence of the job-shop's waiting orders and dispatching them to the 6 identical welding stations. The dynamic conditions of the job-shop are simulated by the Arena simulation program. Stochastic processing times are used as the input data of the algorithm. Using stochastic processing times under variable workstation constraint for welding job-shop scheduling is not investigated previously. According to the experimental results, GA and Arena simulation
Thermochronological analysis of the dynamics of the Southern Alps, New Zealand

The isotopic ages of material exposed close to the Alpine fault in the Southern Alps, New Zealand, vary in a consistent fashion along the orogen. For the K-Ar system, muscovite and biotite ages display two distinct spatial trends that meet in the area of Fox Glacier, where a strong relationship is observed between K-Ar age and altitude. Excess argon is present in samples between Mount Kinnaird and Haast Pass in the southwest of the Southern Alps, giving unrealistically old, inconsistent K-Ar ages across this region. Incorporation of excess argon appears to be highly variable, however, and minimization of its influence on dynamical interpretations of thermochronology is possible through considering only the youngest age from a given area. Such treatment indicates that excess argon contamination does not play an important role in the systematic K-Ar age variation identified along the Southern Alps. The observed age distribution is consistent with estimates of the modern rapid uplift and exhumation of the Southern Alps beginning ca. 5 Ma. K-Ar mica ages older than this south of the Copland Valley indicate that substantial late Cenozoic exhumation occurred along the Southern Alps prior to the development of the modern tectonic regime, but at rates lower than at present. Total exhumation during the current phase of tectonism in the Southern Alps decreases from the Whataroa River southward. North of Fox Glacier, the Southern Alps have attained a dynamical steady state, such that the observed distribution of exhumation will not change significantly with further deformation and denudation under current conditions.
Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ) Architecture and Planning

Abstract Landfill site is a significant and risky part at the same time in the city. In planning an urban city, the pollution caused by landfill damages the surrounded areas, especially the residential zones, if it does not follow the sanitary landfill rules. The pollution from landfills threat the environment and, consequently, human health and wellbeing, so it is essential to maintain a safe and healthy environment in selecting the landfill site. From this point of view, the research aims to create a method to evaluate the affected residential zones by the nearest landfills to protect people from pollution's negative impacts. The research objective is to determine the most impacted residential areas of pollution caused by landfills by combining multiple criteria for studying the selected landfill locations that help determine the degree of contamination (high risk to no risk) in each residential area. The study is conducted in four different locations in Lebanon; three coastal areas and one inward area, to evaluate the differentiation in the meteorological conditions and how they increase the landfill pollution that affect the close inhabitants' zones. By combining the buffer zone criteria and weather factors (temperature, humidity, and wind), the data collected is analysed using the overlay analysis method to determine the most affected residential area by landfill. The assessment in this study found that the pollution degree differs in the residential zones according to the criteria applied, and the weather factors play a significant role in increasing the pollution. By adopting this study's assessment, the urban design decisions for a new residential zone could benefit from this research's method to provide a healthy area.
Circulating biomarkers in classical Hodgkin lymphoma

In classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) there is an urgent need for biomarkers to determine prognosis or treatment response. In this thesis we summarized current knowledge on circulating biomarkers in cHL and studied a selection of these markers as treatment response or prognostic biomarkers. In the first part of this thesis we studied the application of Thymus and Activation Regulated Chemokine (TARC) as a biomarker for treatment response and compared TARC with sGal-1, sCD163 and sCD30 and interim FDG-PET imaging. We found that TARC at diagnosis correlates with metabolic tumor volume and that serial TARC measurements during and after treatment accurately reflect treatment response. In comparison to sGal-1, sCD163 and sCD30, TARC dynamics most accurately reflected treatment response. In addition, interim TARC had a higher positive predictive value for final treatment response compared to interim FDG-PET imaging. All together, we concluded that TARC is a cheap, non-invasive and highly accurate biomarker to determine treatment response in cHL patients. In the second part of this thesis, we focused on microRNAs (miRNAs) as circulating biomarkers. We summarized the role of miRNAs in cHL and concluded that deregulation of miRNAs is a frequent event and an important factor in the pathobiology of cHL. Next, we summarized pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical challenges in circulating miRNAs studies in general. Finally, we performed miRNA microarray profiling of serum of patients with cHL. Using this approach, we were unable to find circulating miRNAs with prognostic value in classical Hodgkin lymphoma.
PRICING EXOTIC OPTION UNDER STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODEL

This paper studies supershare and chooser options in a stochastic volatility economy. These two options are typical exotic options which suggest a broad range of usage and application in different ﬁ nancial market conditions. Despite the popularity and longevity of the Black-Scholes model, the assumption of constant volatility in the Black-Scholes model contradicts to the existence of the non- ﬂ at implied volatility surface observed in empirical studies. Although many studies are devoted to option pricing under stochastic volatility model in recent years, to the best of our knowledge, research on exotic option such as supershare and chooser option pricing have not been carried out in the stochastic volatility case. Supershare and chooser options are both important ﬁ nancial instruments, research on these two exotic options in stochastic volatility model may give more insights on the pricing of supershare and chooser options. By extending the constant volatility in the Black-Scholes model, this paper studies the pricing problem of the supershare option and chooser options in a fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility scenario. Analytic approximation formulae for these two exotic options in fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility model are derived according to the method of asymptotic expansion which shows the approximation option price can be expressed as the combination of the zero-order and ﬁ rst-order approximations. By incorporating the stochastic volatility effect, the numerical analysis in our model shows that stochastic volatility of underlying asset underprices the supershare options, while in the case of the chooser options its price in stochastic volatility model is higher than the price in the constant volatility model.
PUTOP : Turning Predominant Senses into a Topic Model for Word Sense Disambiguation

We extend on McCarthy et al.’s predominant sense method to create an unsupervised method of word sense disambiguation that uses automatically derived topics using Latent Dirichlet allocation. Using topicspecific synset similarity measures, we create predictions for each word in each document using only word frequency information. It is hoped that this procedure can improve upon the method for larger numbers of topics by providing more relevant training corpora for the individual topics. This method is evaluated on SemEval-2007 Task 1 and Task 17. 1 Generative Model of WSD Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the problem of labeling text with the appropriate semantic labels automatically. Although WSD is claimed to be an essential step in information retrieval and machine translation, it has not seen effective practical application because the dearth of labeled data has prevented the use of established supervised statistical methods that have been successfully applied to other natural language problems. Unsupervised methods have been developed for WSD, but despite modest success have not always been well understood statistically (Abney, 2004). Unsupervised methods are particularly appealing because they do not require expensive senseannotated data and can use the ever-increasing amount of raw text freely available. This paper expands on an effective unsupervised method for WSD and embeds it into a topic model, thus allowing an algorithm trained on a single, monolithic corpora to instead hand-pick relevant documents in choosing a disambiguation. After developing this generative statistical model, we present its performance on a number of tasks. 1.1 The Intersection of Syntactic and Semantic Similarity McCarthy et al. (2004) outlined a method for learning a word’s most-used sense given an untagged corpus that ranks each sense wsi using a distributional syntactic similarity γ and a WORDNET-derived semantic similarity α. This process for a word w uses its distributional neighbors Nw, the possible senses of not only the word in question, Sw, and also those of the distributionally similar words, Snj . Thus, P (wsi) =