Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
XQTC: A Static Type-Checker for XQuery Using Backward Type Inference

We present a novel technique and a tool for static type-checking of XQuery programs. The tool looks for errors in the program by jointly analyzing the source code of the program, input and output schemas that respectively describe the sets of documents admissible as input and as output of the program. The crux and the novelty of our results reside in the joint use of backward type inference and a two-way logic to represent inferred tree type portions. This allowed us to design and implement a type-checker for XQuery which is more precise and supports a larger XQuery fragment compared to the approaches previously proposed in the literature; in particular compared to the only few actually implemented static type-checkers such as the one in Galax. The whole system uses compilers and a satisfiability solver for deciding containment for two-way regular tree expressions. Our tool takes an XQuery program and two schemas Sin and Sout as input. If the program is found incorrect, then it automatically generates a counter-example valid w.r. t. Sin and such that the program produces an invalid output w.r. t Sout. This counter-example can be used by the programmer to fix the program.
Comments on ''Improving the computing efficiency of HPC systems using a combination of proactive and preventive checkpoint''

In this short note, we provide some comments on the recent paper ''Improving the computing efficiency of HPC systems using a combination of proactive and preventive checkpointing'' by Bouguerra et al. We start by identifying some errors in their equations. Then we explain that they do not actually use the distribution of lead times, contrary to statements by the authors. Finally, we show that their algorithm does not change policy at the best possible moment, and we point to our own work~\cite{rr-journal-prediction} for the (correct version of the) optimal algorithm.
Public Benefits of Private Technology Adoption: Spatial Externalities of Water Conservation in India

from a selective randomized control trial (RCT). We use the selective RCT from the 2011 – 2012 rollout of LLL in eastern Uttar Pradesh (EUP), conducted by Lybbert et al. (2018). This experiment involved an elicitation of farmer willingness to pay for the new technology; collection of data on household, farm, soil, and water extraction habits; a representative sample of farmers in EUP; and an estimation of water and diesel impacts from technology use in a RCT employed with these same
Feeling Good or Feeling Better?

Can people remember correctly their past well-being? We study three national surveys of the British, German and French population, where more than 50,000 European citizens were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncover systematic biases in recalled subjective well-being: on average, people tend to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: while happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate its worsening. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. These results offer an explanation of why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower and are more open to new experiences.
Field‐Scale Migration of Colloidal Tracers in a Fractured Shale Saprolite

A field‐scale tracer experiment carried out under natural gradient ground water flow conditions showed that colloids can be highly mobile in a fractured and highly weathered shale saprolite. Four colloidal tracers (0.100 μm fluorescent latex microspheres, bacteriophage strains PRD‐1 and MS‐2, and INA, a dead strain of Pseudemonas syringae), were introduced to a 6.4 m deep well, and concentrations of the tracers were monitored in the source well and in downgradient monitoring wells at distances of 2 to 35 m. All of the colloidal tracers were detected to distances of at least 13.5 m and two of the tracers (microspheres and INA) were detected in all of the downgradient wells. In most wells the colloidal tracers appeared as a “pulse”, with rapid first arrival (corresponding to 5 to 200 m/d transport velocity), one to six days of high concentrations, and then a rapid decline to below the detection limit. The colloids were transported at velocities of up to 500 times faster than solute tracers (He, Ne, and rhodamine‐WT) from previous tests at the site. This is believed to be largely due to greater diffusion of the solutes into the relatively immobile pore water of the fine‐grained matrix between fractures. Peak colloid tracer concentrations in the monitoring wells varied substantially, with the microspheres exhibiting the highest relative concentrations and hence the least retention. Rates of concentration decline with distance also varied, indicating that retention is not a uniform process in this heterogeneous material. Two of the tracers, INA and PRD‐1, reappeared in several monitoring wells one to five months after the initial pulse had passed, and the reappearance generally corresponds with increased seasonal precipitation. This is consistent with subsequent laboratory experiments that showed that colloid retention in these materials is sensitive to factors such as flow rate and ionic strength, both of which are expected to vary with the amount of precipitation.
High numbers of Trichodesmium and diazotrophic diatoms in the southwest Indian Ocean

We observed high cell numbers of large (>50μm) nitrogen‐fixing phytoplankton to the south and east of Madagascar in February 2005. The distribution of the nitrogen‐fixing (diazotrophic) taxa found was markedly different: Trichodesmium was most abundant (500–1000 trichomes L−1) in the waters at the southern tip of Madagascar; while high numbers of diazotrophic diatoms (125–500 cells L−1) were limited to the southeast of Madagascar. Using literature values of nitrogen‐fixation per cell, we estimate potential rates of nitrogen‐fixation for Trichodesmium (south of Madagascar) of 1–5 mmol N m−2 d−1 and for diazotrophic diatoms (east of Madagascar) of 0.4–2.4 mmol N m−2 d−1. These cell‐based estimates highlight the potential for significant nitrogen‐fixation in the southwest Indian Ocean. High numbers of diazotrophic diatoms in subtropical waters to the east of Madagascar may have important implications for the biogeochemistry of the austral phytoplankton bloom in this region.
E�cacy and Safety of Capecitabine Metronomic Chemotherapy versus Conventional Chemotherapy as Maintenance Strategy in Responders After Induction Therapy in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

Background: The aim of this study is to demonstrate that capecitabine metronomic chemotherapy is non-inferior to capecitabine conventional chemotherapy as maintenance treatment, who have responded to 16-18 weeks rst-line chemotherapy in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Methods: The study design is a prospective, randomized, open label, phase II clinical trial. Those mCRC patients who respond well after 16-18 weeks of standard doublet chemotherapy as induction may enrolled into this study, randomly divided into capecitabine metronomic group or standard dosage group. The duration of disease control after randomization and progression free survival from enrollment are primary endpoints. Meanwhile, the overall survival, safety and quality of life are secondary endpoints. The sample size required to achieve the research objectives of this project is 79 cases in each group. The study recently started on 29-01-2018, and will last for 36 months. Discussion: This project intends to study the e�cacy and safety of capecitabine metronomic chemotherapy in the maintenance treatment of advanced colorectal cancer, and to explore the strategy of "low toxicity, high e�ciency, economy and individualization" which is suitable for China's national conditions and pharmacoeconomics. It has great clinical application prospects and clear socio-economic value.
Representations of Positive Polynomials on Non-compact Semialgebraic Sets via Kkt Ideals Representations of Positive Polynomials on Non-compact Semialgebraic Sets via Kkt Ideals

This paper studies the representation of a positive polynomial f (x) on a noncompact semialgebraic set S = {x ∈ R n : g1(x) ≥ 0, · · · , gs(x) ≥ 0} modulo its KKT (Karush-Kuhn-Tucker) ideal. Under the assumption that the minimum value of f (x) on S is attained at some KKT point, we show that f (x) can be represented as sum of squares (SOS) of polynomials modulo the KKT ideal if f (x) > 0 on S; furthermore, when the KKT ideal is radical, we have that f (x) can be represented as sum of squares (SOS) of polynomials modulo the KKT ideal if f (x) ≥ 0 on S. This is a generalization of results in [19], which discuss the SOS representations of nonnegative polynomials over gradient ideals.
Emerging trends in disaster management and the Ethiopian experience: genesis, reform and transformation

This paper aims to serve as a springboard for research in areas of disaster management in Ethiopia. While there have been critical issues that merit intellectual attention and resources, very little has so far been done in the area. This paper delved into the trajectories that Ethiopian disaster management has gone through. It reviews the checkered history of Ethiopian Disaster Management system (EDM) from circa mid-1970s. Having thrown some light on the lessons of experiences from other countries, it indicates the pitfalls EDM has recently faced, and suggests policy and institutional scenarios to overcome them. Key words: disaster management, drought, pre-disaster action, post-disaster action, hazards, disaster, Ethiopian disaster management system, Ethiopia.
Sea ice. Second edition

As a ‘mature’ glaciologist who has worked on sea ice for more than 15 years, I have slept for a long time with the excellent Geophysics of sea ice (Untersteiner, 1986) by my bedside. Pioneering work by colleagues such as S. Ackley, D. Garrison, C. Sullivan and R. Horner had suggested for quite a while that sea ice is not ‘just another form of ice with inorganic impurities in it’ but a true, extremely complex, ecosystem. Since the early 2000s, however, multidisciplinary research on sea-ice ecosystems has started to move at a much faster pace. The first edition of this book, Sea ice: an introduction to its physics, chemistry, biology and geology (Thomas and Dieckmann, 2003), crystallized this progress and quickly became indispensable for the new generation of students involved in sea-ice research. This second edition, as underlined by the author of its foreword, Dr S. Ackley,
Analysis of leaf area index in the ECMWF land surface model and impact on latent heat and carbon fluxes: Application to West Africa

[1] A new version of the land surface model of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Carbon-TESSEL, or CTESSEL) includes a vegetation growth model. This study describes a leaf area index (LAI) data assimilation system (LDAS) based on CTESSEL and satellite LAI for operational Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) predictions. The LDAS is evaluated over West Africa. A preliminary experiment shows a significant impact of the LAI on the CTESSEL NEE. The LAI is compared to two satellite products: the predicted annual cycle is delayed over the Sahel and savannah, and the LAI values differ from the satellite products. Preliminary to their use in the LDAS, the LAI products are rescaled to the CTESSEL predictions. The LDAS simulations are confronted to measurements of biomass and LAI for a site in Mali. The LAI analysis is shown to improve the predicted biomass and the annual cycles of the water (latent heat flux, or LE) and carbon (NEE) fluxes. Afterward, the LDAS is run over West Africa with the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer products (2001–2005). The analysis of LAI shows a limited impact on LE, but it impacts strongly on NEE. Finally, the CTESSEL NEE are compared to two other models' outputs (simple biosphere (SIB) and Carnegie-Ames-Stanford (CASA)). The order of magnitude of the three data sets agrees well, and the shift in annual cycle of CTESSEL is reduced by the LDAS. It is concluded that a LAI data assimilation system is essential for NEE prediction at seasonal and interannual timescales, while a LAI satellite-based climatology may be sufficient for accurate LE predictions.
SPEC Research

SPEC Research Group (SPEC RG) Chair: Samuel Kounev (rgchair@spec.org) Web: https://research.spec.org SPEC KAIVALYA DIXIT DISTINGUISHED DISSERTATION AWARD 2022 The award selection committee for 2022 selected the dissertation of Lishan Yang from the College of William & Mary, USA. The selection committee was impressed by the high quality of scientific work conducted by Dr. Yang and particularly by her ability to bridge multiple academic disciplines spanning software engineering, performance, and computer systems.
The experience of a tertiary level hospital in the 2023 Turkey double earthquake zone; management of 1,092 musculoskeletal injuries in the first week.

OBJECTIVE The double earthquakes that occurred on February 6, 2023, are currently called the disaster of the century, in Turkey. This study is the first to report the experiences in the treatment of orthopedic emergency patients hospitalized in Adana City Training and Research Hospital (ACH), the largest tertiary hospital in the region. PATIENTS AND METHODS The study included the retrospective analysis of the files of the victims of the earthquakes admitted to the ACH between February 6, 2023, and February 13, 2023. The age, gender, time of admission, types and localization of injuries, treatment modalities of earthquake victims, and orthopedic surgical treatment data were recorded. RESULTS In the first week of the quakes, 3,699 patients were admitted to the ER with earthquake-related injuries. A total of 1,092 patients with musculoskeletal injuries were hospitalized, and 827 (75.7%) received orthopedic surgery. Surgical procedures included wound debridement under anesthesia (n=392, 47.4%), large bone fractures and/or pelvic ring fractures (n=224, 27.1%), fasciotomies (n=327, 69.1%), and amputations (n=121, 14.6%). CONCLUSIONS Although Orthopedics and Traumatology Clinic staff have the highest workload, all hospital personnel should be equipped with basic orthopedic approaches related to the disaster. We believe that taking a more active role in the follow-up of orthopedic patients will help improve the management of the chaotic processes and increase overall treatment success.
Learning deficits accompanied by microglial proliferation after the long-term post-1 injection of Alzheimer’s brain extract in mouse brains

1 Background : Human tauopathy brain injections into the mouse brain induce the 2 development of tau aggregates, which spread to functionally connected brain 3 regions; however, the features of this neurotoxicity remain unclear. One reason 4 may be short observational periods because previous studies mostly used 5 mutated-tau transgenic mice and needed to complete the study before these mice 6 developed neurofibrillary tangles. 7 Objective : To examine whether long-term incubation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) 8 brain in the mouse brain cause functional decline
Parameterized Projected Bellman Operator

Approximate value iteration (AVI) is a family of algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to obtain an approximation of the optimal value function. Generally, AVI algorithms implement an iterated procedure where each step consists of (i) an application of the Bellman operator and (ii) a projection step into a considered function space. Notoriously, the Bellman operator leverages transition samples, which strongly determine its behavior, as uninformative samples can result in negligible updates or long detours, whose detrimental effects are further exacerbated by the computationally intensive projection step. To address these issues, we propose a novel alternative approach based on learning an approximate version of the Bellman operator rather than estimating it through samples as in AVI approaches. This way, we are able to (i) generalize across transition samples and (ii) avoid the computationally intensive projection step. For this reason, we call our novel operator projected Bellman operator (PBO). We formulate an optimization problem to learn PBO for generic sequential decision-making problems, and we theoretically analyze its properties in two representative classes of RL problems. Furthermore, we theoretically study our approach under the lens of AVI and devise algorithmic implementations to learn PBO in offline and online settings by leveraging neural network parameterizations. Finally, we empirically showcase the benefits of PBO w.r. t. the regular Bellman operator on several RL problems.
Reanalysis of LIGO black-hole coalescences with alternative prior assumptions

Abstract We present a critical reanalysis of the black-hole binary coalescences detected during LIGO’s first observing run under different Bayesian prior assumptions. We summarize the main findings of Vitale et al. (2017) and show additional marginalized posterior distributions for some of the binaries’ intrinsic parameters. These findings were presented at IAU Symposium 338, held on October 16-19, 2017 in Baton Rouge, LA, USA.
A Juxtaposition of Airborne Microplastics and Fiber Contamination in Various Environments

Microplastics can have detrimental effects on various wildlife, as well as pollute aquatic and atmospheric environments. The term microplastics refers to miniscule pieces of plastic that are either deliberately produced at that small size or are broken down from larger pieces of plastic. This study focused on air samples collected from five locations to investigate microplastic concentrations in atmospheric fallout from indoor and outdoor settings, through a process utilizing a hand-held vacuum pump and a rotameter. The samples were collected over a five-month period, and the number, as well as the morphologies, of the microplastics were recorded for each of the five sample locations. The amount of microplastic debris found in the urban setting was larger compared to the amount found in the rural setting. Furthermore, we found that the difference between the average number of microplastic fragments and fibers collected from all locations was not large enough to be statistically significant. Since the amount of published research on airborne microplastics is very minimal, the results collected in this study will help us better understand the prevalence of airborne microplastics.
Lifetimes and emissions of SO2 from point sources estimated from OMI

A new method to estimate sulfur dioxide (SO2) lifetimes and emissions from point sources using satellite measurements is described. The method is based on fitting satellite SO2 vertical column density to a three‐dimensional parameterization as a function of the coordinates and wind speed. An effective lifetime (or, more accurately, decay time) and emission rate are then determined from the parameters of the fit. The method was applied to measurements from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) processed with the new principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm in the vicinity of approximately 50 large U.S. near‐point sources. The obtained results were then compared with available emission inventories. The correlation between estimated and reported emissions was about 0.91 with the estimated lifetimes between 4 and 12 h. It is demonstrated that individual sources with annual SO2 emissions as low as 30 kt yr−1 can produce a statistically significant signal in OMI data.
An overview of chemosynthetic symbioses in bivalves from the North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea

Deep-sea bivalves found at hydrothermal vents, cold seeps and organic falls are sustained by chemosynthetic bacteria that ensure part or all of their carbon nutrition. These symbioses are of prime importance for the functioning of the ecosystems. Similar symbioses occur in other bivalve species living in shallow and coastal reduced habitats worldwide. In recent years, several deep-sea species have been investigated from continental margins around Europe, West Africa, eastern Americas, the Gulf of Mexico, and from hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In parallel, numerous, more easily accessible shallow marine species have been studied. Herein we provide a summary of the current knowledge available on chemosymbiotic bivalves in the area ranging west-to-east from the Gulf of Mexico to the Sea of Marmara, and north-to-south from the Arctic to the Gulf of Guinea. Characteristics of symbioses in 53 species from the area are summarized for each of the five bivalve families documented to harbor chemosynthetic symbionts (Mytilidae, Vesicomyidae, Solemyidae, Thyasiridae and Lucinidae). Comparisons are made between the families, with special emphasis on ecology, life cycle, and connectivity. Chemosynthetic symbioses are a major adaptation to ecosystems and habitats exposed to reducing conditions. However, relatively little is known regarding their diversity and functioning, apart from a few "model species" on which effort has focused over the last 30 yr. In the context of increasing concern about biodiversity and ecosystems, and increasing anthropogenic pressure on oceans, we advocate a better assessment of the diversity of bivalve symbioses in order to evaluate the capacities of these remarkable ecological and evolutionary units to withstand environmental change.
A Generalized Formulation for Group Selection via ADMM

This paper studies a statistical learning model where the model coeﬃcients have a pre-determined non-overlapping group sparsity structure. We consider a combination of a loss function and a regularizer to recover the desired group sparsity patterns, which can embrace many existing works. We analyze the stationary solution of the proposed formulation, obtaining a suﬃcient condition for the stationary solution to achieve optimality and establishing a bound of the distance from the solution to a reference point that is related to the ground-truth from a probabilistic interpretation. We develop an eﬃcient algorithm that adopts an alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM), showing that the iterates converge to a stationary solution under certain conditions. In the numerical experiment, we implement the algorithm for generalized linear models with convex and nonconvex group regularizers to evaluate the model performance on various data types, noise levels, and sparsity settings.