Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of pellet-group plots to measure trends in deer and elk populations

Distribution and abundance of mule deer and elk were studied from 1976 to 1981 near Los Alamos, New Mexico, using pellet-group counts. Pellet-group data were shown to fit the negative binomial distribution. Counts for mule deer varied among years in all vegetation types; the population trend was generally downward. Pellet-group counts for elk (winter only) increased in ponderosa pine, but remained unchanged in other areas. Deer pellet groups were distributed similarly from year to year and were nonrandom (i.e., clumped). Elk pellet groups also were clumped, but were clumped less in mixed conifer during the latter part of the study. In ponderosa pine, where deer were most abundant, pellet groups were clumped less than in other habitats. Similarly, in mixed conifer, where elk numbers were highest, pellet groups were clumped least. Neither weather nor fire appeared to affect greatly counts of deer or elk pellet groups, although fire may have influenced distribution of elk. 37 references, 5 tables.
Cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies constitute a correlate of protection against herpes simplex virus type 1 reactivations: A retrospective study

Background Herpes simplex viruses (HSV) cause ubiquitous human infections. For vaccine development, knowledge concerning correlates of protection is essential. Therefore, we investigated (I) if humans are in principle capable producing cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies against HSV and (II) whether this capacity is associated with a reduced HSV-1 reactivation risk. Methods We established a high-throughput HSV-1-ΔgE-GFP reporter virus-based assay and evaluated 2,496 human plasma samples for HSV-1 glycoprotein E (gE) independent cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies. Subsequently, we conducted a retrospective survey among the blood donors to analyze the correlation between the presence of cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies in plasma and the frequency of HSV reactivations. Results In total, 128 of the 2,496 blood donors (5.1%) exhibited high levels of HSV-1 gE independent cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies in the plasma. None of the 147 HSV-1 seronegative plasmas exhibited partial or complete cell-to-cell spread inhibition, demonstrating the specificity of our assay. Individuals with cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies showed a significantly lower frequency of HSV reactivations compared to subjects without sufficient levels of such antibodies. Conclusion This study contains two important findings: (I) upon natural HSV infection, some humans produce cell-to-cell spread inhibiting antibodies and (II) such antibodies correlate with protection against recurrent HSV-1. Moreover, these elite neutralizers may provide promising material for immunoglobulin therapy and information for the design of a protective vaccine against HSV-1.
Enterprise E-Learning Success Factors : An Analysis of Practitioners ’ Perspective ( with a Downturn Addendum )

This study proposes nine success factors for enterprise-wide e-learning. These factors were derived from the literature, interviews with e-learning project leaders, and analysis. Twelve semistructured interviews were conducted and analyzed in order to find out the best success factors to implement e-learning. These factors are divided into two categories: “must-have” factors and “nice-to-have” factors. The must-have factors include: useful and easy to use e-learning tools, marketing, management support, the right organizational culture, and the existence of a real need for the organization. The “nice to have” factors include: time to learn, support, mandatory learning, and incentives. Based on the research conclusions, a checklist of e-learning success factors is provided. A special addendum includes looking at the factors in downturn times, their relative importance and nature.
Appendix on “CafeBoost: Causal Feature Boost to Eliminate Task-Induced Bias for Class Incremental Learning”

Tab. 1 shows additional results on ImageNet-Full for 25 incremental tasks. We observe that our approach boosts the accuracy of LUCIR by 5.39% and reduces the corresponding forgetting by 1.11%. The curves of average incremental accuracy and forgetting rate are also given in Fig. 1. Our approach when combined with LUCIR, achieves a smoothly and slowly decreasing curve of accuracy and the corresponding increasing curve of forgetting. In addition, we plot curves of the forgetting rate on CIFAR-100 and ImageNetSub for 5, 10, and 25 incremental tasks, as shown in Fig. 3. It can be observed that our approach suffers from less forgetting in most tasks.
Designing for Serendipity, a Means or an End?

Purpose – This article aims to gain a better understanding of the reasons why serendipity is designed for in different kinds of environments. Understanding these design intents sheds light on the value such designs bring to designers, in contrast to the users of the environment. In this way, the article seeks to contribute to the literature on cultivating serendipity from a designers ’ point of view. Design/methodology/approach – An extensive review of the literature discussing designing for serendipity was conducted to elicit the different motivations to design for serendipity. Based on these findings and a thorough analysis, a typology of design intents for serendipity is presented. Findings – The article puts forward four intents to design for serendipity: serendipity as an ideal, common good, mediator and feature. It also highlights that the current academic discourse puts a strong emphasis on two of them. It is argued that this academic abstraction could be problematic for how we deal with designs for serendipity, both in theory and practice. Originality/value – The novelty of this article is that it addresses the question of why to design for serendipity from a designer ’ s point of view. By introducing the notion of directionality it opens up the opportunity to discuss serendipity from multiple perspectives, which contributes to gaining a firmer understanding of serendipity. It allows to more explicitly formulate the different functions of a design for serendipity and thereby expands our knowledge on the value of designing for serendipity. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential threats to designing for serendipity.
Analyse vibrationnelle at-line/on-line en milieu industriel

D'un point de vue technologique, les techniques de spectroscopies vibrationnelles ont fortement evolue ces dernieres annees. Elles sont plus rapides, ont de meilleures resolutions spectrale et spatiale et sont plus sensibles. De plus, associees a des methodes d'analyses statistiques, elles permettent des mesures at-line/on-line avec des temps compatibles avec les procedes industriels. Ces evolutions technologiques (sources plus puissantes, detecteurs plus sensibles, utilisation de fibres optiques, etc.) conduisent aussi a la miniaturisation des instruments qui peuvent desormais etre utilises dans des environnements industriels ou hostiles. La miniaturisation des systemes de mesure entraine des performances souvent moindres que sur des appareils de laboratoire. Il est donc necessaire de realiser une etude amont sur des prelevements du procede industriel afin d'identifier le(s) parametre(s) spectroscopique(s) lie(s) aux proprietes physico-chimiques d'interet et ensuite de construire un modele pouvant etre adapte aux performances moindres de l'equipement sur site. C'est ce compromis performance du capteur/efficacite/prix qu'il faut optimiser
Tropical tropospheric ozone and carbon monoxide distributions: characteristics, origins, and control factors, as seen by IAGOS and IASI

Abstract. The characteristics and seasonal variability in the tropical tropospheric distributions of ozone (O3) and carbon monoxide (CO) were analysed based on in situ measurements provided by the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System (IAGOS) programme since 1994 and 2002, respectively, combined with observations from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding (IASI) instrument on board the MetOp-A satellite since 2008. The SOFT-IO (SOft attribution using FlexparT and carbon monoxide emission inventories for In-situ Observation database) model, which couples back trajectories with CO emission inventories, was used to explore the origins and sources of the tropical CO observed by IAGOS. The highest O3 and CO mixing ratios occur over western Africa in the lower troposphere (LT: surface to 750 hPa) during the fire season (75 ppb of O3 at 2.5 km and 850 ppb of CO at 0.3 km over Lagos in January), mainly due to anthropogenic (AN) emissions and a major contribution from fires. The secondary maxima are observed in Asia in the mid-troposphere (MT: 750–300 hPa) and upper troposphere (UT: 300–200 hPa) in April for O3 and in the LT in January for CO, with larger contributions from AN emissions. The lowest O3 and CO mixing ratios occur over Caracas. In the tropical LT, the majority of the location clusters are affected by local and regional AN emissions. The highest AN impact is found over Asia, Arabia and eastern Africa, and South America (>75 % of CO). Biomass burning (BB) emissions also originate from local or regional sources but with stronger seasonal dependence. The highest BB impact is found over southern tropical Africa (57 %–90 %), except in April, mostly due to local fires, but also from Northern Hemisphere Africa in January (45 %–73 %) and Southern Hemisphere South America in October (29 % over Windhoek). In the MT and UT, AN emissions are more important and dominate in the eastern part of the tropics (from the Middle East to Asia). BB contributions are more important than in the LT, especially from the African fires in January and July and from South East and equatorial Asia in April and October. The overall highest amount of CO is exported from Africa, with the main transport pathway from the dry-season African regions towards the wet-season ones. In contrast, the impact of the Asian emissions in the LT and MT is limited on a local or regional scale. The transport of polluted Asian air masses is important in the UT during the Asian summer monsoon and post-monsoon seasons, when convection is active.
Feature-based Mini Unmanned Air Vehicle Video Euclidean Stabilization with Local Mosaics

FEATURE-BASED MINI UNMANNED AIR VEHICLE VIDEO EUCLIDEAN STABILIZATION WITH LOCAL MOSAICS Damon Gerhardt Department of Computer Science Master of Science Video acquired using a camera mounted on a mini Unmanned Air Vehicle (mUAV) may be very helpful in Wilderness Search and Rescue and many other applications but is commonly plagued with limited spatial and temporal field of views, distractive jittery motions, disorienting rotations, and noisy and distorted images. These problems collectively make it very difficult for human viewers to identify objects of interest as well as infer correct orientations throughout the video. In order to expand the temporal and spatial field of view, stabilize, and better orient users of noisy and distorted mUAV video, a method is proposed of estimating in software and in real time the relative motions of each frame to the next by tracking a small subset of features within each frame to the next. Using these relative motions, a local Euclidean mosaic of the video can be created and a curve can be fit to the video’s accumulative motion path to stabilize the presentations of both the video and the local Euclidean mosaic. The increase in users’ abilities to perform common search-and-rescue tasks of identifying objects of interest throughout the stabilized and locally mosaiced mUAV video is then evaluated. Finally, a discussion of remaining limitations is presented along with some possibilities for future work.
Improved Masking Strategies for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

Models trained using self-supervised speech representation learning algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art performance on competitive downstream task benchmarks. Inspired by advances in masking strategies for text-based models, we propose a novel linguistically-guided masking strategy called RandomPhoneme Masking for Masked Language Modelling-based speech models like HuBERT. We propose two variations of this strategy and conduct pretraining experiments using our proposed strategy. We demonstrate that our proposed strategy’s obtains better metrics when using high-quality supervision-derived phoneme boundaries on the downstream Automatic Speech Recognition, Phoneme Recognition and Keyword Spotting tasks in the SUPERB benchmark of speech tasks, while observing a small gap in performance when using unsupervised boundaries.
Modeling spatial accessibility for in-vitro fertility (IVF) care services in Iowa

Recommended Citation Gharani, Pedram. "Modeling spatial accessibility for in-vitro fertility (IVF) care services in Iowa. " MA (Master of Arts) thesis, ii To my wonderful mother for her love and invaluable support iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first and the most, I would like to thank my mother. She raised me to who I am today by great devotion, dedication, and sacrificing her dreams. Without her love, I would not have come so far. I would like to express my sincere and deep gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Kathleen Stewart, for her excellent guidance, caring, patience, and providing me with an excellent atmosphere for doing research. I extremely appreciate her constructive comments. I gratefully acknowledge the funding support and generosity of Dr. Ginny L. Ryan from Carver College of Medicine that made this research possible, without whom the present study could not have been completed. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Dr. Margaret Carrel and James Tamerius who served on my thesis committee. This thesis is much improved due to the guidance of my committee members I would also like to thank my elder sister, and elder brother. They have always supported me and encouraged me with their best wishes. Special thanks go to my friends. iv ABSTRACT The challenge of computing a quantitative index for spatial accessibility that describes the degree of access that exists for IVF healthcare in Iowa requires research and evaluation. Our objective was to apply computational methods including a modified gravity model, techniques from spatial interaction modeling, and clustering to discover underserved areas and derive a spatial accessibility surface at the census tract level for IVF centers in Iowa. describing female patients seeking infertility healthcare services were identified based on a survey of physician and nurses and weighted based on systematically cross-comparing the variables for importance. Self-organizing map techniques (SOM) were used to identify and map clusters capturing the degree of match between sociodemographic data and the expert-identified sociodemographic variables. The computed spatial accessibility surface was then combined with the sociodemographic clusters to identify underserved regions. Accessibility and degree of sociodemographic match were abstracted to three classes each (high, moderate, and low access, and high, moderate, and low sociodemographic match). To determine degree of fit and validation of the model, patient residential data (by zip codes mapped to census tracts) were overlaid on the resulting accessibility map. These results serve as an indicator that enables …
Coral Reef Deterioration and Livelihoods of Coastal Communities: An Economics Perspective

This chapter focuses on how coral reef deterioration impacts the well-being of the affected coastal communities. In a macro-level perspective, the chapter discusses 1) how coral reefs socioeconomically benefit humans and 2) how coral reef deterioration impacts humans. This part of the discussion sheds light on several adverse effects of coral reef degradation ranging from reductions in food availability and income to losses of jobs and built capital. In a micro-level perspective, the socioeconomic impact of coral reef degradation on vulnerable coastal communities is illustrated through a case study of the 1998 coral bleaching in Indonesia. The households affected by this bleaching event experienced a large income shock, which translated into reduced protein consumption and impeded child development. The chapter then concludes with two broad policy recommendations drawn from both the macroand micro-level discussions. First, reef conservation and restoration are economically viable investments due to the immense socioeconomic values of coral reefs. Second, policy interventions are required to mitigate impacts of coral reef degradation on the vulnerable groups and to facilitate the adaptation process.
Optimization Methods in Finance

Optimization methods play a central role in financial modeling. This textbook is devoted to explaining how state-of-the-art optimization theory, algorithms, and software can be used to efficiently solve problems in computational finance. It discusses some classical meanâ€“variance portfolio optimization models as well as more modern developments such as models for optimal trade execution and dynamic portfolio allocation with transaction costs and taxes. Chapters discussing the theory and efficient solution methods for the main classes of optimization problems alternate with chapters discussing their use in the modeling and solution of central problems in mathematical finance. This book will be interesting and useful for students, academics, and practitioners with a background in mathematics, operations research, or financial engineering. The second edition includes new examples and exercises as well as a more detailed discussion of meanâ€“variance optimization, multi-period models, and additional material to highlight the relevance to finance.
The Relationship Between Network Fraud and Network Security Awareness: The Mediation Role of Network Social Self-efﬁcacy

This To explore how college students’ awareness of network security affects the possibility of network fraud, and the mechanism of network social self-efﬁcacy. A survey was conducted among 387 college students using the College Students’ Network Fraud Scale, the Network Security Awareness Scale and the Network Self-efﬁcacy Scale. The results show that there is a signiﬁcant negative correlation between network fraud and network security awareness; network fraud and network social self-efﬁcacy have a signiﬁcant negative correlation; network security awareness and network social self-efﬁcacy have a signiﬁcant positive correlation; It has a direct impact, and it can also act on network fraud through network social self-efﬁcacy. The consciousness of network security can affect college students’ network fraud through their sense of network social self-efﬁcacy, and college educators can reduce the possibility of being cheated by promoting college students’ sense of network social self-efﬁcacy.
Extended Analysis of the Semantic Shift in Diachronic Word Embeddings for Spanish Before and After COVID-19

Words can shift their meaning across time. This article shows the results obtained by the exploratory analysis of the semantic shifting on Spanish vocabulary using Di-achronic Word Embeddings. Diachronic data consists of a 2018 Spanish corpus, before the COVID-19 outbreak, and a second corpus with documents from 2021. This paper addresses the construction of the diachronic Spanish word embeddings model, as well as the results obtained by the analysis using a non-supervised distance vector technique. In addition to the results shown in [1], this extended article discusses additional topics with the most semantic shift between those periods, like video games, cryptocurrencies, COVID-19 testing, COVID-19 vaccines, sanitizers, sports (soccer, basketball, cycling, tennis), pornography and K-Pop, in addition to COVID-19, masks, and vaccines treated in the first article.
Automatic Number Plate Recognition Using Machine Learning

Automatic number plate recognition makes use of Image processing andMachinelearningtechnologytodetectvehiclenumbersirrespectiveofclimaticconditions.Asthenumberofvehiclesisincreasingdaybyday,it’snecessaryto considersafetymeasures. Itisusedinvariousﬁeldsliketrafﬁccontrol,automatic roadtaxcollectionattollareasandvehicleparkingsystemsincrowdedareas.The goaloftheproposedsystemistodevelopacapableautomaticauthorizedvehicle recognitionsystemthatmakesuseofthevehiclenumberplate.Fordetectingnum-berplate,aninfrared(IR)sensorisused,whichhelpsintakingclearimagesfroma camera. Takingimagesofmovingvehiclesisthemostimportantanddifﬁculttask. Charactersegmentationisusedtoextractthevehiclenumberplateregionfrom animagebyusingR-CNNmethod.TheOpticalCharacterRecognition(OCR) methodisusedforidentifyingtheaccuratecharacter.Thecollecteddataisthen comparedwiththerespectiveauthoritydatabasestoinvestigatespeciﬁcinforma-tionlikevehicleowner,registrationlocation,addressandsoon.Ifthevehicle detailsmatchthoseinthedatabase,thenonlygatebarricadeisopened.Through thissystem,criminalactivitiescanbeminimizedandroadsafetymeasureswill beconsidered. Thesystemtriestopromotetheefﬁciencyandaccuracyofnumber platedetectionoverclimaticconditions.
Magnetic imaging with polarized soft x-rays

Properties, behavior, and functionalities of magnetic materials are largely determined by microscopic spin textures, particularly their formation into domains, their coupling mechanisms and their dynamic behavior. Advanced characterization tools are prerequisite to fundamentally understand magnetic materials and control spins for novel magnetic applications. Magnetic microscopies allow to image directly the static and dynamic features of the relevant microscopic magnetization structures in advanced magnetic materials and thus provide detailed and direct insight into underlying physical phenomena. A large variety of magnetic imaging techniques has become available with particular strengths but also certain limitations. Essential features of magnetic microscopies are a high spatial resolution down into the nanometer regime, as this is the fundamental length scale of magnetic exchange interaction and the ultimate length scale in advanced magnetic technologies; magnetic and elemental sensitivity with quantitative capabilities, as the properties of advanced magnetic materials can be tailored by combining various magnetic elements and their magnetic moments; high temporal resolution from the nsec to the fsec regime to understand the associated spin dynamic processes and the functionality in magnetic devices; tomographic capabilities with nm resolution as new directions in nanoscience and technologies are moving into 3dim arrangements of spin structures; and interfacial sensitivity as novel ways to control spins harness either the coupling across interfaces in multilayered structures or utilize non‐collinear spin arrangements, which often occur from symmetry breaking at surfaces and interfaces. The unique properties of polarized soft x‐rays, their abundancy and specific interaction with magnetic materials in form of dichroism effects have triggered the development of various magnetic x‐ray imaging techniques. This review will provide an overview of the current state‐of‐the‐art in magnetic imaging with polarized soft x‐rays. It describes the various approaches using x‐ray optics, electron optics and diffraction based techniques and it will highlight the capabilities of each technique by selected examples from current research.