Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of National Retail Chains: How We Got Here

The growth and dominance of large, national chains is a ubiquitous feature of the US retail sector. The recent literature has documented the rise of these chains and the contribution of this structural change to productivity growth in the retail trade sector. Recent studies have also shown that the establishments of large, national chains are both more productive and more stable than the establishments of single-unit firms they are displacing. We build on this literature by following the paths of retail firms and establishments from 1977 to 2007 using establishment- and firm-level data from the Census of Retail Trade and the Longitudinal Business Database. We dissect the shift towards large, national chains on several margins. We explore the differences in entry and exit as well as job creation and destruction patterns at the establishment and firm level. We find that over this period there are consistently high rates of entry and job creation by the establishments of single-unit firms and large, national firms, but net growth is much higher for the large, national firms. Underlying this difference is far lower exit and job destruction rates of establishments from national chains. Thus, the story of the increased dominance of national chains is not so much due to a declining entry rate of new single-unit firms but rather the much greater stability of the new establishments belonging to national chains relative to their single-unit counterparts. Given the increasing dominant role of these chains, we dissect the paths to success of national chains, including an analysis of four key industries in retail trade. We find dramatically different patterns across industries. In General Merchandise, the rise in national chains is dominated by slow but gradual growth of firms into national chain status. In contrast, in Apparel, which has become much more dominated by national chains in recent years, firms that quickly became national chains play a much greater role.
Fault tolerant control for a class of hybrid impulsive systems

This paper investigates the fault tolerant control (FTC) problem for a class of hybrid nonlinear impulsive systems. Two kinds of faults are considered: continuous faults that affect each mode, and discrete faults that affect the impulsive switching. The FTC strategy is based on the tradeoff between the frequency of switching and the decreasing rate of Lyapunov functions along the solution of the system, which maintains the stability of overall hybrid impulsive systems in spite of these two kinds of faults. A numerical example is given to illustrate the design procedure.
Computational Photography: Mastering New Techniques for Lenses, Lighting, and Sensors

Computational photography combines plentiful computing, digital sensors, modern optics, actuators, probes, and smart lights to escape the limitations of traditional film cameras and enables novel imaging applications. This book provides a practical guide to topics in image capture and manipulation methods for generating compelling pictures for graphics, special effects, scene comprehension, and art. The computational techniques discussed cover topics in exploiting new ideas in manipulating optics, illumination, and sensors at time of capture. In addition, the authors describe sophisticated reconstruction procedures from direct and indirect pixel measurements that go well beyond the traditional digital darkroom experience.
Probabilistic Reliability Management Approach and Criteria for power system real-time operation

This paper develops a probabilistic approach for power system reliability management in real-time operation where risk is a product of i) the potential occurrence of contingencies, ii) the possible failure of corrective (i.e., post-contingency) control and, iii) the socio-economic impact of service interruptions to end-users. Stressing the spatiotemporal variability of these factors, we argue for reliability criteria assuring a high enough probability of avoiding service interruptions of severe socio-economic impact by dynamically identifying events of non-negligible implied risk. We formalise the corresponding decision making problem as a chance-constrained two-stage stochastic programming problem, and study its main features on the single area IEEE RTS-96 system. We also discuss how to leverage this proposal for the construction of a globally coherent reliability management framework for long-term system development, midterm asset management, and short-term operation planning.
Distributed Out-of-Memory NMF of Dense and Sparse Data on CPU/GPU Architectures with Automatic Model Selection for Exascale Data

—The need for efﬁcient and scalable big-data analytics methods is more essential than ever due to the exploding size and complexity of globally emerging datasets. Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a well-known explainable unsupervised learning method for dimensionality reduction, latent feature extraction, blind source separation, data mining, and machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a new distributed out-of-memory NMF method, named pyDNMF-GPU , designed for modern heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures that is capable of factoring exascale-sized dense and sparse matrices. Our method reduces the latency associated with local data transfer between the GPU and host using CUDA streams , and reduces the latency associated with collective communications (both intra-node and inter-node) via NCCL primitives . In addition, sparse and dense matrix multiplications are signiﬁcantly accelerated with GPU cores, resulting in good scalability. We set new benchmarks for the size of the data being analyzed: in experiments, we measure up to 76x improvement on a single GPU over running on a single 18 core CPU and we show good weak scaling on up to 4096 multi-GPU cluster nodes with approximately 25,000 GPUs, when decomposing a dense 340 Terabyte-size matrix and a 11 Exabyte-size sparse matrix of density 10 − 6 . Finally, we integrate our method with an automatic model selection method. With this integration, we introduce a new tool that is capable of analyzing, compressing, and discovering explainable latent structures in extremely large sparse and dense data.
Nitrate pollution from horticultural production systems : tools for policy and advice from field to catchment scales

The implementation of the Nitrates Directive has imposed a requirement to restrict N fertiliser and manuring practices on farms across the EU in order to reduce nitrate losses to water. These requirements have since been extended by the more demanding Water Framework Directive, which broadens the focus from the control of farm practices to a consideration of the impacts of pollutants from all sources on water quality at a catchment or larger scale. Together, these Directives set limits for water quality, and identify general strategies for how these might be achieved. However, it is the responsibility of policy makers in each Nation State to design the details of the management practices and environmental protection measures required to meet the objectives of the legislation, to ensure they are appropriate for their specific types of land use and climate. This paper describes various modelling tools for comparing different cropping and land use strategies, and illustrates with examples how they can inform policy makers about the environmental benefits of changing management practices and how to prioritise them. The results can help to provide the specific advice on N fertiliser and land use management required by farmers and growers at a field scale, and by environmental managers at a catchment or larger scale. A further example of how results from multiple catchments can be up-scaled and compared using Geographic Information Systems is also outlined.
Predation on bellerophontiform molluscs in the Palaeozoic

Shell repair assumed to result from failed predation is documented in 66 specimens of Ordovician-Carboniferous bellerophontiform tergomyan and gastropod molluscs to examine the relationship between the distribution and appearance of injuries, shell morphology and the internal anatomy of the molluscs, as well as the attack strategies of the presumed predators. Furthermore, the distribution of repaired injuries from failed attacks along the apertural margin as a reflection of the nature of the margin and emarginations is investigated. Bellerophontiform molluscs are ideal for this study because of their distinctive isostrophic morphology and the possibility to directly compare broad and narrow conchs with either deep or shallow medial emarginations. The results show that taxa with a deep medial emargination in the form of a slit have significantly more medial injuries than lateral ones. Near-equal frequencies of lateral and medial injuries in specimens with a shallow emargination (slit or sinus) suggest random distribution. Shell form (narrow or broad) does not exert overall control on the distribution of injuries except, perhaps, in some broad explanate shells with an insignificant medial emargination. While this suggests that it is the type of medial emargination that governs distribution of injuries in these forms, it is not clear if this is a result of passive selection due to structural geometry or preferential targeting by predators (i.e. site-specific mode of attack). Predation strategies on bellerophontiform molluscs thus seem to be dependent on the morphological features of the shells rather than their interpretation as tergomyan or gastropod.
Into the mountains and across the country: emergent forms of equine adventure leisure in Canada

This paper draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘lines of flight’ to analyze the complex inter-relationship between people and their animals as enacted through adventure travel. Two narrative case studies illustrate how the human/horse relationship has been used to transform and/or escape from power relations. The first takes place during the early twentieth century with Mary Shaffer challenging Victorian gender and class relations through her exertions into what is now Jasper National Park in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Similarly, second is the journey of Barbara Kingscote, who after the Second World War rode her horse from Quebec across Canada. Each case study constitutes an emergent form of adventure leisure that involves a companion species. In forging dialogic and material alliances based on a mutual ethics of caring, participants seek out ‘lines of flight’ from territorializing social forces and by doing so discover new territories in which to inhabit.
Sedimentation and tectonic geomorphology adjacent to major active and inactive normal faults, southern Greece

The active Psatha–Skinos normal fault is uplifting a contrasting variety of lithologies in its footwall, including Mesozoic limestones, ophiolitic peridotites and poorly-consolidated Plio-Pleistocene sediments of the inactive Megara basin. In the latter basin, linear marginal uplands border the sedimentary fill and are interpreted as degraded and segmented scarp lines which exhibit features such as facetted spurs. Drainage domains are defined as groups of drainage basins sharing a common tectono-geological substrate. Contrasting domains in the footwall of the active fault have given rise to spectacular differences in drainage basin growth and form. In the uplifting footwall, raised coastal terrace levels are present at about 10 and 40 m. The latter have yielded corals dated at between 90–126 Ka, and have enabled us to calculate uplift and erosional rates. Extrapolation of these rates indicate that some 350 m of footwall relief has been produced over approximately 1 Ma. Most of the sediment eroded from the uplifting footwall is presumed to have been re-sedimented into the Alkyonides Gulf basin plain during this time. The prominent footwall unconformity so-produced forms a fine modern analogue to features seen in ancient syn-rift tilt blocks such as the Viking Graben. Footwall uplift has also backtilted the former depositional surface of the Megara Basin and caused reversal of flow in its axial drainage domain. A variety of depositional environments are documented in the subsiding hangingwall to the coastal fault, including syn-quake talus cones, alluvial fans, intra-fan marshes and swamps, truncated fans, transgressive barriers and spits.
A probe for measuring wetting front migration in rocks

To facilitate investigations of flow dynamics in unsaturated fractured rocks, we have designed a probe to qualitatively monitor saturation changes in borehole environments. This flexible probe is able to fit the cylindrical shape of boreholes and requires no backfill. Field results suggest that the design of this electrical resistivity probe (ERP) is suitable for determining changes in relative wetness along boreholes in unsaturated fractured rock environments. The performance of these probes was compared with that of psychrometers under a variety of tests; these probes were found to be significantly cheaper in addition to providing data that had a greater spatial and temporal resolution.
A Bayesian model for identifying hierarchically organised states in neural population activity

Neural population activity in cortical circuits is not solely driven by external inputs, but is also modulated by endogenous states which vary on multiple time-scales. To understand information processing in cortical circuits, we need to understand the statistical structure of internal states and their interaction with sensory inputs. Here, we present a statistical model for extracting hierarchically organised neural population states from multi-channel recordings of neural spiking activity. Population states are modelled using a hidden Markov decision tree with state-dependent tuning parameters and a generalised linear observation model. We present a variational Bayesian inference algorithm for estimating the posterior distribution over parameters from neural population recordings. On simulated data, we show that we can identify the underlying sequence of population states and reconstruct the ground truth parameters. Using population recordings from visual cortex, we find that a model with two levels of population states outperforms both a one-state and a two-state generalised linear model. Finally, we find that modelling of state-dependence also improves the accuracy with which sensory stimuli can be decoded from the population response.
Primary production estimates on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland north-west Atlantic Ocean, derived from remotely-sensed chlorophyll

Abstract Chlorophyll detected by Nimbus-7 CZCS satellite imagery was used to calculate the depth-integrated pigment content of the euphotic zone and this value was used in the global algorithm of Morel and Berthon to predict the annual production on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Physiological parameters were adjusted to take account of site-specific seasonal variation. Mean primary production computed from the algorithm was 194gCm−2 yr−1 which compared well with the mean shipboard measured value of 186gCm−2 −1. Production profiles by month show greater variation on the northern than on the southern Grand Banks.
Storm‐coverage effect on dynamic flood‐frequency analysis: empirical data analysis

In this study, a dynamic flood‐frequency analysis model considering the storm coverage effect is proposed and applied to six sub‐basins in the Pyungchang River basin, Korea. The model proposed is composed of the rectangular pulse Poisson process model for rainfall, the Soil Conservation Service curve number method for infiltration and the geomorphoclimatic instantaneous unit hydrograph for runoff estimation. Also, the model developed by Marco and Valdes is adopted for quantifying the storm‐coverage characteristics. By comparing the results from the same model with and without the storm‐coverage effect consideration, we could quantify the storm‐coverage effect on the flood‐frequency analysis. As a result of that, we found the storm‐coverage effect was so significant that overestimation of the design flood was unavoidable without its consideration. This also becomes more serious for larger basins where the probability of complete storm coverage is quite low. However, for smaller basins, the limited number of rain gauges is found to hamper the proper quantification of the storm‐coverage characteristics. Provided with a relationship curve between the basin size and the storm coverage (as in this study), this problem could be overcome with an acceptable accuracy level. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Data Management in Non-Volatile Memory

Non-volatile memory promises to bridge the gap between main memory and secondary storage by offering a universal storage device. Its performance profile is unique in that its latency is close to main memory and it is byte addressable, but it exhibits asymmetric I/O in that writes are more expensive than reads. These properties imply that it cannot act as a drop-in replacement for either main-memory or disk. Therefore, we must revisit the salient aspects of data management in light of this new technology. In what follows we present the current work in the area with a view towards identifying the open problems and exposing the research opportunities. In particular, we address issues like: (a) incorporating non-volatile memory into the data management stack, (b) supporting transactions and ensuring persistence and recovery, and (c) query processing.
Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making. Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Chistina M. Cromley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker. 2005. Columbia University Press, New York. 368 pp. $79.50 cloth, $29.50 paperback.

Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making . Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Chistina M. Cromley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker. 2005. Columbia University Press, New York. 368 pp. $79.50 cloth, $29.50 paperback. In Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making , Ronald D. Brunner et al. have outlined some illustrations of progress toward improved public policy. This is documented through five case studies of public lands management and administration. The authors define adaptive governance as a process that integrates scientific and other types of knowledge into policies through a context of open decision-making structures; the goal is to advance the common interest. The purpose of the volume is to clarify how to expedite a transition to adaptive governance for people concerned about the problems of gridlock in natural resource policy and who are in a position to make a difference.
Small-Scale Precipitation Elements in Midlatitude Cyclones Crossing the California Sierra Nevada

AbstractRadar data in some frontal systems passing over the Sierra Nevada of California show large variance on scales of ~10 km. The most prominent features are a few kilometers in scale and are similar to small-scale precipitation cells embedded in fronts seen over other mountain ranges. Other frontal systems crossing the Sierras are characterized by more uniform air motions. Updrafts in large-variance storms have characteristics of shear-induced turbulence, although buoyant instability may also contribute. Large-variance storms occur under stronger upstream winds and vertically integrated cross- and along-barrier moisture fluxes. Rain gauges indicate that large-variance storms have precipitation greater than smaller-variance storms. Stronger horizontal moisture fluxes may provide greater mean upslope condensation rates; however, it is hypothesized that accelerated microphysical processes are needed to most efficiently convert the condensate into precipitation that falls out on the lower slopes before be.
On the residence time of the Antarctic ice sheet sulfate aerosol

Optical extinction caused primarily by light scattering from suspended sulfate particles above Antarctica provides a relative measure of the amount of overlying sulfate mass. It has been found that the optical extinction, and hence the column-integrated amount of sulfate, varies systematically with altitude, decreasing with increasing heights on the ice sheet, approximately as exp (−h/H) with 3.2 1 month. Other data, notably the shape of the aerosol size spectrum and the observed rate of surface deposition of SO4=, also suggest a long residence time for the SO4= aerosol. It is shown that nucleation of SO2 over the continent is unlikely to contribute substantially to the sulfate aerosol mass. Though it can be concluded that the SO4= aerosol is directly imported to the continent in the form of particles, whether the transport is tropospheric or stratospheric cannot be deduced. It is suggested that 0.1 μm radius particles from growing industrialization are the ones most likely to show an increase in concentration in the future. Though not optically important, such particles may have relevancy in cloud microphysical process on large scales of distances.
Investigation of an Argyre basin ring structure using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter/Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars

[1] The Argyre basin, a large impact basin in the southern highlands of Mars, excavates early Noachian geologic units and thus is an ideal probe of the compositional layering of ancient highland crust. A ring structure defined by circumferential graben is believed to represent the outermost topographic scarp of the basin. Two distinct layers in the fluvially dissected highland plains unit Npld have been exposed by the ring graben in northwest Argyre: a lower unit enriched in high-calcium pyroxene and an upper unit showing laterally extensive occurrences of phyllosilicates, including chlorite and iron-magnesium smectite. These phyllosilicates closely follow the unit contact between unit Npld and Hpl3 in this region; the Hesperian-aged Hpl3 caprock directly covers unit Npld. Two nearby knobs also show phyllosilicate-bearing materials over a high-Ca pyroxene-enriched unit, although the knobs are located in regions mapped as Npl1 and Nplh. From these observations, we suggest that an extensive layer of phyllosilicates underlying a layer of high-Ca pyroxene-bearing rock existed in the region prior to the Argyre impact. These materials were thrown up by the impact event and deposited as an inverted flap. This inverted flap of ejecta was then cut by the circumferential graben that formed as the transient Argyre crater collapsed, exposing the materials.
Higher-order Co-occurrence Features based on Discriminative Co-clusters for Image Classification

We propose a method to extract image features based on effective higher-order cooccurrences. The proposed method constructs the co-clusters to discriminatively quantize joint primitive quantitative data, such as pair-wise pixel intensities, unlike the standard co-occurrence methods that utilize simple clusters trained in an unsupervised manner for quantizing point-wise data. The discriminative co-clusters effectively exploit the co-occurrence characteristics even by a fewer number of cluster components, resulting in low-dimensional co-occurrence features. By taking advantage of those discriminative co-clusters, the co-occurrence features can be extended to the higher-order co-occurrence features of feasible dimensionality. The higher-order co-occurrence captures richer information in image textures by extracting relationships in multiplets more than only doublets (pairs). In the experiments on image classifications for cancer cells and pedestrians, the proposed method exhibits favorable performances compared to the other methods, even to the standard co-occurrence based methods.