Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Woody encroachment affects multiple dimensions of ant diversity in a neotropical savanna

Although savanna woody encroachment has become a global phenomenon, relatively little is known about its effects on multiple dimensions and levels of savanna biodiversity. Using a combination of field surveys, a species‐level phylogeny, and functional metrics drawn from a morphological dataset, we evaluated how the progressive increase in tree cover in a fire‐suppressed savanna landscape affects the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of neotropical ant communities, at both the alpha and beta levels. Ants were sampled along an extensive tree cover gradient, ranging from open savannas to forests established in former savanna areas. Variation in tree cover had a significant influence on all facets of diversity at the beta level, whereas at the alpha level tree cover variation affected the taxonomic and functional but not the phylogenetic diversity of the ant communities. In general, ant community responses to variation in tree cover were largely non‐linear as differences in taxonomic alpha diversity and in the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic composition of the sampled communities were often much stronger at the savanna/forest transition than at any other part of the gradient. This indicates that savanna ant communities switch rapidly to an alternative state once the savanna turns into forest. Ant communities in the newly formed forest areas lacked many of the species typical of the savanna habitats, suggesting that the maintenance of a fire suppression policy is likely to result in a decrease in ant diversity and in the homogenisation of the ant fauna at the landscape scale.
Optimized spinning design for low PMD fibers: an analytical approach

It is known that the differential group delay (DGD) due to polarization mode dispersion (PMD) can be effectively reduced by spinning the fiber during drawing. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach that allows optimization of the spinning design. The fundamental idea is that, in the absence of polarization coupling, an optimized spinning profile can balance the effects of the intrinsic linear birefringence so that the differential group delay can be forced to be periodic and, consequently, have a limited amplitude as a function of distance. Our approach Is independent of the spin profile. In other words, with a fixed set of parameters that characterize a particular spin function, we are able to find analytically the values corresponding to a periodic DGD in a deterministic regime. Numerical results based on waveplate model confirm the analytical prediction and show that PMD can be reduced by about two orders of magnitude with respect to the same fiber without spinning, even after the introduction of random polarization coupling.
Fitness for Service of Degraded Grade 91 Pipe

The use of creep strength enhanced ferritic alloys such as Grade 91 in fossil power plants has become popular for high temperature piping applications. Since Grade 91 has higher stress allowables than Grade 22, a designer can specify thinner component wall thicknesses, resulting in lower through-wall thermal stresses during transient events and lower material and piping support costs.During the past two decades, Grade 91 has been used successfully in fossil power plants. However, this alloy has had some incidents of non-optimal weldment microstructure. In this case study, Brinell hardness tests of an ASME A182 Grade F91 (F91) wye block, including upstream and downstream F91 spools, revealed several readings of soft material, as low as 168HB. A study of creep rupture tests of degraded Grade 91 specimens revealed that the lower bound creep rupture curve of the degraded Grade 91 material is above the average creep rupture curve of Grade 22 material for the range of the specific piping operating stresses.Based on the empirical evidence that the average Grade 22 material creep rupture curve is conservative for the creep rupture of degraded Grade 91 material, a life consumption evaluation was performed for the degraded Grade 91 weldments using Grade 22 creep rupture properties. A life fraction analysis was performed considering the redistributed maximum principal stresses, based on simulation of piping displacements obtained from the hot and cold walkdowns. This study also considered the recent history of the specific piping system operating pressures and temperatures.This study also considered dissimilar metal welds, from ASME A182 Grade F91 (F91) to ASME A335 Grade P22 (P22) materials. It was determined that the Grades F91-to-F91 weldments had about 30% life consumption and the remaining lives were at least 7 years. The Grades F91-to-P22 weldments had less than 40% life consumption and the remaining lives were at least 15 years.Copyright © 2012 by ASME
Extracting Rectified Building Footprints from Traditional Orthophotos: A New Workflow

Deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks have largely improved the performance of building segmentation from remote sensing images. However, the images for building segmentation are often in the form of traditional orthophotos, where the relief displacement would cause non-negligible misalignment between the roof outline and the footprint of a building; such misalignment poses considerable challenges for extracting accurate building footprints, especially for high-rise buildings. Aiming at alleviating this problem, a new workflow is proposed for generating rectified building footprints from traditional orthophotos. We first use the facade labels, which are prepared efficiently at low cost, along with the roof labels to train a semantic segmentation network. Then, the well-trained network, which employs the state-of-the-art version of EfficientNet as backbone, extracts the roof segments and the facade segments of buildings from the input image. Finally, after clustering the classified pixels into instance-level building objects and tracing out the roof outlines, an energy function is proposed to drive the roof outline to maximally align with the building footprint; thus, the rectified footprints can be generated. The experiments on the aerial orthophotos covering a high-density residential area in Shanghai demonstrate that the proposed workflow can generate obviously more accurate building footprints than the baseline methods, especially for high-rise buildings.
Stereo visual-inertial odometry using structural lines for localizing indoor wheeled robots

This paper proposes optimization-based stereo visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to locate indoor wheeled robots. The multiple Manhattan worlds (MWs) assumption is adopted to model the interior environment. Instead of treating these worlds as isolated ones, we fuse the latest MW with the previous ones if they are in the same direction, reducing the calculated errors on the orientation of the latest MW. Then, the structural lines that encode the orientation information of these worlds are taken as additional landmarks to improve the positioning accuracy and reduce the accumulated drift of the system, especially when the system is in a challenging environment (i.e. scenes with continuous turning and low textures). In addition, the structural lines are parameterized by only two variables, which improves the computational efficiency and simplifies the initialization of lines. Experiments on public benchmark datasets and in real-world environments demonstrate that the proposed VIO system can accurately position the wheeled robot in a complex indoor environment.
Flying Qualities for a Twin-Jet Transport in Severe Atmospheric Turbulence

Atmospheric turbulence is the leading cause of serious personal injuries in nonfatal accidents of commercial aircraft. One main type of motion that causes flight injuries in atmospheric turbulence is the sudden plunging motion with an abrupt change in altitude. To assess the possibility of designing a control system to mitigate such plunging motion, the dynamic stability characteristics must be known. The main objective of the present paper is to evaluate the dynamic stability characteristics and, more generally, the flying qualities of a twin-jet transport aircraft encountering severe atmospheric turbulence through digital six-degree-of-freedom flight simulations in transonic flight. The fuzzy-logic thrust model and unsteady aerodynamic models are used to estimate the nonlinear unsteady aerodynamics while performing numerical integration of flight dynamic equations. The flying qualities are based on the instantaneous eigenvalues of all flight modes obtained during time integration. It is shown that the real part of eigenvalues for the plunging mode (i.e., damping characteristics) is largely positive and can be used as a key parameter in describing the flying qualities in plunging.
Utilizing Mobile Learning in Writing Skills in ESL Classroom

This paper portrayed a systematic review of relevant published studies on how mobile learning tools can help ESL primary school learners to enhance the interaction among their peers or teachers. It discussed the impact of utilising the mobile learning in writing skills of ESL school learners. The use of mobile learning tools brings so much impact on the good and bad sides for all people who are involved. Apart from that, since pandemic of COVID-19 been aroused around the world, it is definitely need to change the method of conversational method to advanced method on teaching and learning of English in writing skill which indeed to involved mobile learning as one of the modern platform which is easy and free to utilise it. This systematic review of literature (SLR) is focusing on the effectiveness of utilising mobile learning in writing skill among English second language learners and perspective of the learners on the mobile learning utilisation in English writing language learning. There were 21 articles pertaining to the utilising mobile learning in writing skill among ESL learners which were screened from the ERIC and ScienceDirect databases by using the review methodology of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). The results derived from the articles throughout the year 2021 demonstrated that the most used research design to accumulate the effectiveness of mobile learning and learners’ perspective on its utilisation in writing skill among ESL learners. In general, the findings illustrated factors influencing the effectiveness of mobile learning, presented its benefits and showed positive impact on the English language learners’ academic performance with the support of appropriate teaching approaches, meaningful learning and effective learning environments and due to that reason, ESL learners showed positive perspectives towards mobile learning. The result of the findings suggests future study to investigate the perspectives of parents on the effectiveness of mobile learning in English language writing among ESL learners and address relevant issues on the challenges in implementing mobile learning such as network connectivity and availability of mobile devices and its usability.
The economic impact of cybercrime and cyber espionage

Introduction Is cybercrime, cyber espionage, and other malicious cyber activities what some call “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history,” or is it what others say is a “rounding error in a fourteen trillion dollar economy? ” The wide range of existing estimates of the annual loss—from a few billion dollars to hundreds of billions—reflects several difficulties. Companies conceal their losses and some are not aware of what has been taken. Intellectual property is hard to value. Some estimates relied on surveys, which provide very imprecise results unless carefully constructed. One common problem with cybersecurity surveys is that those who answer the questions “self-select,” introducing a possible source of distortion into the results. Given the data collection problems, loss estimates are based on assumptions about scale and effect— change the assumption and you get very different results. These problems leave many estimates open to question. The Components of Malicious Cyber Activity In this initial report we start by asking what we should count in estimating losses from cybercrime and cyber espionage. We can break malicious cyber activity into six parts: The loss of intellectual property and business confidential information Cybercrime, which costs the world hundreds of millions of dollars every year The loss of sensitive business information, including possible stock market manipulation Opportunity costs, including service and employment disruptions, and reduced trust for online activities The additional cost of securing networks, insurance, and recovery from cyber attacks Reputational damage to the hacked company Put these together and the cost of cybercrime and cyber espionage to the global economy is probably measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. To put this in perspective, the World Bank says that global GDP was about $70 trillion in 2011. A $400 billion loss—the high end of the range of probable costs—would be a fraction of a percent of global income. But this begs several important questions about the full benefit to the acquirers and the damage to the victims from the cumulative effect of cybercrime and cyber espionage.
Resource Reconfiguration During Technological Change

A central strategic imperative for surviving technological change requires firms to attenuate the inertia and rigidity imposed by its legacy technology orientation (defined as the relative emphasis placed on technological knowledge and products aligned to an incumbent technology) and successfully transition to a new technology. We theorize that resource reconfiguration through corporate scope decisions—alliances, acquisitions, divestitures, and different postacquisition integration approaches—enables firms to achieve the twin requirements of attenuation and transition. Initially, a legacy technology orientation exerts inertia due to legacy reinforcement—decreasing the likelihood of firms making new technology acquisitions and legacy technology divestitures. New technology alliances mitigate this inertia via legacy attenuation—increasing the likelihood of acquisitions and legacy divestitures. Finally, when firms make new technology acquisitions, we theorize that acquirers choosing partial acquisition integration approaches (partial integration and partial autonomy) are more likely to achieve a successful transition to the new technology-legacy transition and, thus, more likely to survive technological change relative to firms choosing full integration or full autonomy. Using a sample of firms from the digital camera product market over 1991–2006, we found strong empirical support for our predictions. We contribute to research on technological change by demonstrating that firms may overcome the inertia of a legacy technology orientation and adapt to an emerging new technology by employing corporate scope decisions and postacquisition integration as resource reconfiguration mechanisms. Specifically, we advance the novel finding that postacquisition integration is an important survival-enhancing mechanism that facilitates adaptation to technological change.
Ferroresonance on Rural Distribution Systems

The conditions under which ferroresonant overvoltages can occur on rural distribution systems are reviewed. A brief description of the phenomenon of ferroresonance is given, and the reasons for the increasingly frequent occurrence of ferroresonance on modern systems are enumerated. Preventive or corrective measures that have been proposed are reviewed and evaluated. A guide for the selection of corrective or preventive measures on rural systems is presented.
Developmental toxicity of endocrine-disrupting chemicals: Challenges and future directions

Maternal exposure to a mixture of various endocrine disruptors (EDCs) may have a substantial impact on postnatal health of her offspring(s) and increase the risk for health disorders and diseases in adulthood. Research efforts to better understand the health risk associated with endocrine disruptor exposures in early life have increased in recent decades. This paper provides a short overview of the current challenges that researchers continue to face in selecting appropriate epidemiologic methods and study designs to identify endocrine disruptors and evaluate their adverse health effects during this critical developmental window. Major challenges involve the selection of a representative biomarker that reflects the foetal internal dose of the biologically active chemical or its metabolite(s) that may be associated with adverse health effects with regard to variable level and duration of exposure and the latency between exposure and disorder/disease manifestation. Future studies should pay more attention to identifying factors that contribute to interindividual variability in susceptibility to various EDCs and other toxicants.
Network Attacks and Defenses: A Hands-on Approach

The attacks on computers and business networks are growing daily, and the need for security professionals who understand how malfeasants perform attacks and compromise networks is a growing requirement to counter the threat. Network security education generally lacks appropriate textbooks with detailed, hands-on exercises that include both offensive and defensive techniques. Using step-by-step processes to build and generate attacks using offensive techniques, Network Attacks and Defenses: A Hands-on Approach enables students to implement appropriate network security solutions within a laboratory environment.Topics covered in the labs include: Content Addressable Memory (CAM) table poisoning attacks on network switches Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) cache poisoning attacks The detection and prevention of abnormal ARP traffic Network traffic sniffing and the detection of Network Interface Cards (NICs) running in promiscuous mode Internet Protocol-Based Denial-of-Service (IP-based DoS) attacks Reconnaissance traffic Network traffic filtering and inspection Common mechanisms used for router security and device hardening Internet Protocol Security Virtual Private Network (IPsec VPN) security solution protocols, standards, types, and deployments Remote Access IPsec VPN security solution architecture and its design, components, architecture, and implementations These practical exercises go beyond theory to allow students to better anatomize and elaborate offensive and defensive techniques. Educators can use the model scenarios described in this book to design and implement innovative hands-on security exercises. Students who master the techniques in this book will be well armed to counter a broad range of network security threats.
Supply chain network considerations for e-retail of luxury goods in Canada

The Internet has changed the way people purchase goods in the 21st century: many types of goods and services have become available online. Luxury goods followed this trend after an initial delay, primarily due to the nature of these goods. At the time of the preparation of this document, there were no proven guidelines for building the most successful e-retail website for luxury goods from the brand management and profitability perspectives. Ralph Lauren (RL) is an established American brand, well known for quality and consistent style in the following categories: clothing for women, men, and children; home goods, accessories; and fragrances. RL Corporation houses many labels that constitute premium and luxury offerings. RL currently sells through the Internet in many countries, in addition to countless company owned stores, 9 flagship stores, department stores and boutiques distributed around the world. To continue growth, RL wants to launch an e-retail website for Canada. This thesis aims to provide supply chain network considerations for the successful operation of the Canadian e-retail website for RL. These considerations stem from a careful look into potential luxury website characteristics that would meet the company objective of elevating the brand towards the luxury category. It is recommended that RL secure expansion capacity that will likely be necessary for B2C operation at its Toronto distribution center (DC). In addition, material handling equipment that will process a high volume of small orders should be placed in this DC. The Vancouver cross-docking facility could be expanded in the future as prompted by sales volume and coupled with a DC to cater to the West Coast of Canada. Also, it is recommended that advanced customer tracking systems and databases be employed, especially to determine high value customers for tailored offerings in the luxury segment. Thesis Supervisor: Roberto Perez-Franco Title: Research Associate at CTL, MIT 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS A BSTRA CT . 2 A CKN O W LED GEM EN TS. 5 LIST OF FIG URES. 6 LIST OF TA BLES. 7 1 IN TR OD UC TION . 8 1.1 O verview of R alph L auren. 8 1.2 O verview of the C anadian M arket. 9 1.3 Brand Elevation. 10 1.4 C urrent operations in C anada. 11 1.5 R esearch Q uestions and A pproach . 11 1.6 Thesis O utline. 12 2 LITERA TURE RE VIE W . 13 2.1 The Luxury Brand . 14 2.2 E-com m erce . 14 2.3 The C anadian C onsum er. 18 2.4 A pparel Supply C hain O perations . 20 3 M E TH OD OLO O G Y . 26 3.1 Interview s. 27 3.2 Surveys . 30 3.3 Field V isits . 31 3.4 M arket R esearch . 33 3.5 C om pany D ata Sets. 34 4 DATA COLLECTION, ANALYSIS AND KEY FINDINGS . 35 4.1 Field V isits Store and O ffice V isits. 35 4.2 Field V isits D istribution C enter (D C) V isits . 38 4.3 D ata Sets Provided by R alph Lauren. 40 4.4 M arket R esearch . 41 3 4.5 Interview s. -------. -----------. 57 5 D ISC USSION . -------. --------. 66 5.1 C anadian M arket . -------. -. 66 5.2 E-retail of Luxury Goods.67 5.3 Supply Chain O perations. 70 6 CON CL USION . 79 A PPEN D IX A . 82 REFEREN CES. --. 85
Constructing a model for the dynamic evaluation of vulnerability in software based on public sources

One of the key processes in software development and information security management is the evaluation of vulnerability risks. Analysis and evaluation of vulnerabilities are considered a resource-intensive process that requires high qualifications and a lot of technical information. The main opportunities and drawbacks of existing systems for evaluation of vulnerability risks in software, which include the lack of consideration of the impact of trends and the degree of popularity of vulnerability on the final evaluation, were analyzed. During the study, the following information was analyzed in the structured form: the vector of the general system of vulnerability evaluation, the threat type, the attack vector, the existence of the original code with patches, exploitation programs, and trends. The obtained result made it possible to determine the main independent characteristics, the existence of a correlation between the parameters, the order, and schemes of the relationships between the basic magnitudes that affect the final value of evaluation of vulnerability impact on a system. A dataset with formalized characteristics, as well as expert evaluation for further construction of a mathematical model, was generated. Analysis of various approaches and methods for machine learning for construction of a target model of dynamic risk evaluation was carried out: neuro-fuzzy logic, regression analysis algorithms, neuro-network modeling. A mathematical model of dynamic evaluation of vulnerability risk in software, based on the dynamics of spreading information about a vulnerability in open sources and a multidimensional model with an accuracy of 88.9 %, was developed. Using the obtained model makes it possible to reduce the analysis time from several hours to several minutes and to make a more effective decision regarding the establishment of the order of patch prioritization, to unify the actions of experts, to reduce the cost of managing information security risks