Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seismic hazard assessment - a holistic microzonation approach

The probable mitigation and management issues of seismic hazard necessitate seismic microzonation for haz- ard and risk assessment at the local level. Such studies are preceded with those at a regional level. A comprehensive framework, therefore, encompasses several phases from in- formation compilations and data recording to analyses and interpretations. The state-of-the-art methodologies involve multi-disciplinary approaches namely geological, seismo- logical, and geotechnical methods delivering multiple per- spectives on the prevailing hazard in terms of geology and geomorphology, strong ground motion, site amplification, site classifications, soil liquefaction potential, landslide sus- ceptibility, and predominant frequency. The composite haz- ard is assessed accounting for all the potential hazard attribut- ing features with relative rankings in a logic tree, fuzzy set or hierarchical concept.
Burn-scar patterns and their effect on regional burnt-area mapping in insular South-East Asia

This study aimed to deepen understanding on the limits imposed by burn-scar patterns and size distribution on regional burnt-area mapping with medium to coarse resolution (250–1000 m) satellite imagery in insular South-East Asia. Burnt-area maps based on 16 high-resolution SPOT 4 HRVIR and 5 HRG images were analysed in combination with land-cover and soil maps. Although the number of small burn scars (<25ha) was high throughout the region, the proportion of total burnt-area found in small scars varied remarkably (from 3 to 97%) between study sites. Unlike land cover, soil type was found to be a good indicator for usability of medium to coarse-resolution burnt-area mapping owing to the high occurrence of large burn scars on peatland and other wetland areas. A medium-resolution burnt-area mapping simulation (where 500 × 500-m grid cells containing ≥50% burnt area were considered detectable) resulted in 86% detected burnt area in wetlands (peat and alluvial soils) as opposed to only 33% in non-wetland areas. We thereby conclude that burn scar patterns and size distribution permit reliable regional burnt-area mapping with medium to coarse-resolution satellite imagery in the wetlands of insular South-East Asia, whereas alternative methods may need to be used in non-wetland areas.
Permutation tests for analyzing cospeciation in multiple phylogenies: applications in tri-trophic ecology

Abstract There is a need for a reliable statistical test which is appropriate for assessing cospeciation of more than two phylogenies. We have developed an algorithm using a permutation method that can be used to test for and infer tri-trophic evolutionary relationships of organisms given both their phylogenies and pairwise interactions. An overall statistic has been developed based on the dominant eigenvalue of a covariance matrix, and compared to values of the statistic computed when tree labels are permuted. The resulting overall p-value is used to test for the presence or absence of cospeciation in a tri-trophic system. If cospeciation is detected, we propose new test statistics based on partial correlations to uncover more details about the relationships between multiple phylogenies. One of the strengths of our method is that it allows more parasites than hosts or more hosts than parasites, with multiple associations and more than one parasite attached to a host (or one parasite attached to multiple hosts). The new method does not require any parametric assumptions of the distribution of the data, and unlike the old methods, which utilize several pairwise steps, the overall statistic used is obtained in one step. We have applied our method to two published datasets where we obtained detailed information about the strength of associations among species with calculated partial p-values and one overall p-value from the dominant eigenvalue test statistic. Our permutation method produces reliable results with a clear procedure and statistics applied in an intuitive manner. Our algorithm is useful in testing evidence for three-way cospeciation in multiple phylogenies with tri-trophic associations and determining which phylogenies are involved in cospeciation.
Research on Language Learning: How Can It Respond to Classroom Concerns?.

Recent research on language learning and its implications for language teachers and others interested in language pedagogy and practice is summarized. The review takes the form of the forlowing pedagogical questions: In what ways does knowing one language help and hinder the learning of a second? ; What is "comprehens3b1e input," and is it really all that is necessary for successful second language acquisition? ; What can be done to encourage participation among students who seldom ask questions or initiate interaction? : Which is more helpful to acquisition: teacher-led instruction or group work? ; How much attention should be given to explicit grammar instruction? ; Should students drill and practice new structures? ; Does correction assist language learning? ; How necessary to learning a language is cultural integration with its users? ; Why do some students have less accurate pmnunciation than others and what can be done about this? ; and How can fossilized learners or "terminal twos" be helped to move neyond their current proficiency level? Responses to all these questions are suppl'%ed in terms of what research has to say to teachers, what research is still in the process of investigating, and what research has yet to do. A 48-item bibliography is included. (MSE) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * *********************************************************************** "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MAT AL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC). " U.S. DIPARTM(NTO IDUCATON Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Vhis document Nis been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points ol view or opinions stated in this docu . nient do not necetunly represent official OERI position or Colley Research on language learning: How can it respond to classroom concerns? '
Disturbance and riverine benthic communities: What has it contributed to general ecological theory?

Disturbance from floods and/or low flows is a pervading force in almost all benthic riverine communities around the world. As such the study of disturbance effects on benthic communities has been a dominant theme of research in benthic river ecology. Many of these studies have been phenomenological or have evaluated hypotheses developed in other areas of ecology. These studies have provided considerable weight to move the common view of ecological communities in general as deterministically structured, to one where stochastic disturbances can be the dominant structuring force in many communities. Benthic river studies investigating the link between disturbance and diversity have generally failed to find support for single variable hypotheses, such as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, from other areas of ecology, however, river ecologists have been among the first to embrace multivariate models of diversity. The highly mobile, larval life history stage of many riverine invertebrates makes many of the hypotheses generated in general ecology inappropriate for benthic river communities; however, the recently popularized neutral models may prove to be good descriptors of these communities. Food web structure studies indicate riverine webs respond differently to disturbance from the way predicted by ecological theory. The contribution of studies of disturbance in benthic ecology to general ecology has to date been rather limited with some notable exceptions. However, the ubiquity of floods in rivers worldwide offers fertile ground for future contributions that could substantially advance this area of ecology. Benthic river ecologists need to resist the temptation to simply show general ecological models often do not work in streams, and need to develop their own models, which in turn may feed back to wider ecology. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Un protocole de routage à basse consomation d'énergie selon l'approche de clustering pour les réseaux de capteurs sans fils

In this paper we propose a new routing protocol with low energy consumption for wireless sensor networks based on the clustering approach. Our protocol is based on a strategy which aims at providing a more equitable exploitation of the selected nodes (cluster-heads) energy by distributing their load of the managed sensors during the clustering process. In order to save the energy dissipated while transmitting sensed data to the base station, the multi-hops routing strategy is used to arrange the communication of the data between cluster-heads nodes. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol decreases the energy consumption and prolongs the network lifetime.
Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been used in Information Retrieval. The results are not encouraging. Simple methods (stopwording, porter-style stemming, etc.) usually yield signiﬁcant improvements, while higher-level processing (chunking, parsing, word sense disambiguation, etc.) only yield very small improvements or even a decrease in accuracy. At the same time, higher-level methods increase the processing and storage cost dramatically. This makes them hard to use on large collections. We review NLP techniques and come to the conclusion that (a) NLP needs to be optimized for IR in order to be effective and (b) document retrieval is not an ideal application for NLP, at least given the current state-of-the-art in NLP. Other IR-related tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, seem to be better suited.
Modelling and analysis of tagging networks in Stack Exchange communities

Large Question-and-Answer (Q&A) platforms support diverse knowledge curation on the Web. While researchers have studied user behaviour on such platforms in a variety of contexts, there is relatively little insight into important by-products of user behaviour that also encode knowledge. Here, we analyse and model the macroscopic structure of tags applied by users to annotate and catalogue questions, using a collection of 168 Stack Exchange websites that span a diversity of sizes and topics. We study the distribution of tag frequencies and also the structure of ‘co-tagging’ networks where nodes are tags and links connect tags that have been applied to the same question. We find striking similarity in tagging structure across Stack Exchange communities, even though each community evolves independently (albeit under similar guidelines). Our findings thus provide evidence that social tagging behaviour is largely driven by the Stack Exchange platform itself and not by the individual Stack Exchange communities. We also develop a simple generative model that creates random bipartite graphs of tags and questions. Our model accounts for the tag frequency distribution but does not explicitly account for co-tagging correlations. Even under these constraints, we demonstrate empirically and theoretically that our model can reproduce a number of the statistical properties that characterize co-tagging networks.
Studying atmospheric transport through Lagrangian models

[1] Lagrangian models (LMs) track the movement of fluid parcels in their moving frame of reference. As such, scientists using LMs are forced, in a way, to imagine themselves moving with the parcel and experiencing the effects of advection, turbulence, and changes in the parcel's environment. LMs have advanced in sophistication over recent decades, allowing them to be used increasingly for both scientific and societal purposes. For example, it is common practice now for researchers around the world to apply LMs to examine a wide spectrum of geophysical phenomena. Atmospheric chemists can track intercontinental transport of pollution plumes [Stohl et al., 2002] or airborne radioactivity [Wotawa et al., 2006]. By running LMs backward in time [Flesch et al., 1995; Lin et al., 2003], instrumentalists can establish the source regions of observed atmospheric species with high computational efficiency [Ryall et al., 2001]. Therefore, LMs are being used increasingly to quantify sources and sinks of greenhouse gases by combining simulations with observations in an inverse modeling framework [Trusilova et al., 2010]. Such “top-down” emissions estimation is receiving growing acceptance as an independent tool to test the veracity of emissions inventories and to verify adherence to treaties.
Polarization, Immigration, Education: What’s Behind the Dramatic Decline in Youth Employment?

Since the beginning of the recent recession, the employment-population ratio for high-school age youth (16-17 years old) has fallen by nearly a third, to its lowest level ever. However, this recession has exacerbated a longer-run downward trend that actually began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2000s. There is little research regarding why teen employment has fallen. Some earlier work emphasized labor supply explanations related to schooling and education, such as an increased emphasis on college preparation (Aaronson, Park, and Sullivan 2006), while others have argued that adult immigrants have crowded out teens, at least in part because adult immigrants and native teens tend to be employed in similar occupations (Sum, Garrington, and Khatiwada 2006, Camarota and Jensenius 2010, Smith 2012). This paper presents updated trends in teen employment and participation across multiple demographic characteristics, and argues that, in addition to immigration, occupational polarization in the U.S. adult labor market has resulted in increased competition for jobs that teens traditionally hold. Testing various supply and demand explanations for the decline since the mid-1980s, I find that demand factors can explain at least half of the decline unexplained by the business cycle, and that supply factors can explain much of the remaining decline.
Quality Evaluation of Solution Sets in Multiobjective Optimisation

Complexity and variety of modern multiobjective optimisation problems result in the emergence of numerous search techniques, from traditional mathematical programming to various randomised heuristics. A key issue raised consequently is how to evaluate and compare solution sets generated by these multiobjective search techniques. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of solution set quality evaluation. Starting with an introduction of basic principles and concepts of set quality evaluation, this article summarises and categorises 100 state-of-the-art quality indicators, with the focus on what quality aspects these indicators reflect. This is accompanied in each category by detailed descriptions of several representative indicators and in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, issues regarding attributes that indicators possess and properties that indicators are desirable to have are discussed, in the hope of motivating researchers to look into these important issues when designing quality indicators and of encouraging practitioners to bear these issues in mind when selecting/using quality indicators. Finally, future trends and potential research directions in the area are suggested, together with some guidelines on these directions.
A Data Parallel Algorithm for Solving the Region Growing Problem on the Connection Machine

Abstract Region growing is a general technique for image segmentation, where image characteristics are used to group adjacent pixels together to form regions. This paper presents a parallel algorithm for solving the region growing problem based on the split-and-merge approach, and uses it to test and compare various parallel architectures and programming models. The implementations were done on the Connection Machine, models CM-2 and CM-5, in the data parallel and message passing programming models. Randomization was introduced in breaking ties during merging to increase the degree of parallelism, and only one- and two-dimensional arrays of data were used in the implementations.
Design of force feedback utilizing air pressure toward untethered human interface

In order to apply VR technologies to tools for everyday life, it is necessary to develop human interface technologies that do not constrain the users' activities. To achieve this goal, we propose a new force feedback method that utilizes air pressure to provide a force sensation to users. This force feedback system does not constrain users by an arm or a wire that connected with devices, and allows users to move their bodies and hands freely. This paper introduces the concept and the initial implementation of the air-pressure-based force feedback system.
Deltaic urbanism for living with flooding in Southern Vietnam

Waterfront communities in the Mekong Delta live with the inundation of their homes and businesses from seasonal flooding every year. This project investigated housing types, social practices and feelings of vulnerability of local people in the Cai Rang waterfront community in Can Tho City. The project made a significant contribution to methods for assessing vulnerability, adaptability and resilience of inhabitants of flood-prone housing in Vietnam. It also developed a new concept of 'Deltaic Urbanism' that offers a better urbanist approach specifically for deltaic regions subject to the potential impacts of climate change.
Origin of titanite in metarodingite from the Zagros Thrust Zone, Iraq

Abstract Three types of metamorphic titanite have been noted in a metarodingite pod within the tectonized and serpentinized peridotite portion of the Penjwin ophiolite sequence within the Iraqi Zagros Thrust Zone (IZTZ), northeastern Iraq. Type I metamorphic titanite occurs as subhedral to anhedral finegrained disseminated crystals within chlorite that was formed during chloritization of biotite as a result of low-temperature (T = 330-340 °C) ocean-floor metamorphism or rodingitization of plagiogranite under a reducing environment. It is characterized by intermediate Al2O3 (Avg: 3.61 wt%), high FeOT (Avg: 0.89 wt%), and intermediate TiO2 (Avg: 34.7 wt%). Type II metamorphic titanite occurs as a thin rim around ilmenite and has high Al2O3 (Avg: 4.8 wt%), intermediate FeOT (Avg: 0.6 wt%), and low TiO2 (Avg: 33.7 wt%); it represents a reaction product between grossular and ilmenite, which resulted from an oxidizing high-pressure-high-temperature (P = 1.4-1.6 GPa and T > 750 °C) metamorphic event involving plagiogranite. Type III metamorphic titanite occurs as very coarse, highly fractured grains up to 0.5 mm, with inclusions of ilmenite, and surrounded by albitic plagioclase, analcime, and chlorite. This titanite is characterized by low Al2O3 (Avg: 1.23 wt%), low FeOT (Avg: 0.30 wt%), and high TiO2 (Avg: 36.98 wt%). It formed during extensive titanitization of ilmenite by a reaction with Ca-plagioclase during moderate pressure and temperature (P < 1.6 GPa and T < 750 °C) conditions, as a result of albitization of Ca-plagioclase in plagiogranite.
Refinery of an internet-based search tool: exploring perceptions from information systems practitioners

The capability to understand the needs and responses of stakeholders is critical in today's business environments. A backlink search tool called Redips was developed to collect information on a company's business communities. This tool has been tested by student subjects and received satisfactory feedback on its usefulness and functionality. However, in order to gain acceptance from management, the perceptions and expectations for the tool should not be overlooked. This study presents a wide range of perceptions from a group of information systems practitioners on the potential use of Redips.
End-to-End Reinforcement Learning of Dialogue Agents for Information Access

This paper proposes KB-InfoBot —a dialogue agent that provides users with an entity from a knowledge base (KB) by interactively asking for its attributes. All components of the KB-InfoBot are trained in an end-to-end fashion using reinforcement learning. Goal-oriented dialogue systems typically need to interact with an external database to access real-world knowledge (e.g., movies playing in a city). Previous systems achieved this by issuing a symbolic query to the database and adding retrieved results to the dialogue state. However, such symbolic operations break the differen-tiability of the system and prevent end-to-end training of neural dialogue agents. In this paper, we address this limitation by replacing symbolic queries with an induced “soft” posterior distribution over the KB that indicates which entities the user is interested in. We also provide a modiﬁed version of the episodic RE-INFORCE algorithm, which allows the KB-InfoBot to explore and learn both the policy for selecting dialogue acts and the posterior over the KB for retrieving the correct entities. Experimental results show that the end-to-end trained KB-InfoBot outperforms competitive rule-based baselines, as well as agents which are not end-to-end trainable.
The upper mantle under Central Europe: indications for the Eifel plume

SUMMARY The topographies of the upper mantle discontinuities at 410 and 660 km depth under Central Europe have been mapped. Using a modified receiver function approach, we processed data recorded at selected Central European broad-band stations during the years 1981‐1998. Below the Rhenish massif near the Eifel region we identified a significantly deepened 410 discontinuity that may have its origin in an upgoing mantle plume, in agreement with recently derived results from seismic tomography. We have furthermore found evidence for a northward-dipping structure at the lower boundary of the mantle transition zone below the Alps, possibly related to the subduction that occurred during the closing of the Tethys.
Phytoplankton growth and microzooplankton grazing in high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll waters of the equatorial Pacific: Community and taxon-specific rate assessments from pigment and flow cytometric analyses

[1] Phytoplankton growth and microzooplankton grazing rates were investigated using the seawater dilution technique during a French Joint Global Ocean Flux Study cruise focusing on grazing processes in the high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll equatorial Pacific at 180° (Etude du Broutage en Zone Equatoriale, October–November, 1996). Raw rate estimates based on spectrofluorometric and high-performance liquid chromatography pigment analyses were typically in close agreement, but most showed substantial imbalances in growth and grazing. Flow cytometric (FCM) analyses were used both as an alternate approach for distinguishing populations and as a means for adjusting pigment-based growth estimates for changes in cellular chlorophyll content and biovolume. Total chlorophyll a (Tchl a) gave mean community growth rates of 0.76 d−1 at 30 m and 0.27 d−1 at 60 m. Grazing rates averaged 0.56 and 0.15 d−1 at the two depths, respectively, and 69% of phytoplankton growth overall. For the prokaryotic picophytoplankter, Prochlorococcus (PRO), rate estimates from dv-chl a and FCM cell counts generally indicated balanced growth and grazing and therefore close grazing control by microzooplankton. At the equator, rate estimates from dv-chl a averaged 0.6–0.7 d−1 at 30 m and 0.25–0.26 at 60 m and were consistent with inferences based on diel pigment variations in the 30–70 m depth range. Phytoplankton production estimates from experimentally determined rates and microscopical assessments of autotrophic carbon at 30 m (mean = 19 mg C m−3 d−1) agreed well with contemporaneous measurements by 14C uptake. Diatom growth rate estimates (1.0–1.6 d−1), constrained by contemporaneous measurements of silicate uptake, implied a relatively small biomass (10–45 nmol C L−1) with high rates of turnover and recycling.