Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Logics and Politics of Environmental Flows - A Review

: Environmental flows (or Eflows) refer to water that is allocated to the environment through the deliberate release of stored water or planned allocations. Since the late 20th century, Eflows have become increasingly influential in water policy. Over several decades, the research, policy and practice of Eflows has broadened from addressing flow requirements of specific river reaches or the needs of significant species such as salmon, to a broader focus on integrated strategies that aim to sustain rivers’ diverse values. Eflow research has generated an extensive literature that is focused on the scientific and sociopolitical dimensions of managing river flows. We examine this literature critically, tracing the development, application and expansion of Eflows and exploring the shifting norms, framings and assumptions that underpin their theory and practice, including contestations about policy decisions. Our analysis indicates that the politics of environmental flows refracts socially constructed and contested views about nature and river systems and raises fundamental questions about how decisions are made and who decides. While there is a tendency to try to depoliticise Eflows by rendering decisions technical, we argue that, like all water allocation decisions and all water science, Eflows involve sociopolitical contestations about the control of rivers. These contestations are fundamentally about who has the power to make decisions on allocating water and what beliefs, worldviews and frameworks guide these decisions. We conclude that recognising the value-laden character of Eflows research and practice is an essential step towards recognising the value-laden character of river science and management. To achieve more equitable negotiations on deciding how rivers are managed, we argue for an explicit recognition of the political dimensions of Eflows, including a greater awareness of the cultural and ontological politics involved.
Climate change, renewable energy and population impact on future energy demand for Burkina Faso built environment

This research addresses the dual challenge faced by Burkina Faso engineers to design sustainable low-energy cost public buildings and domestic dwellings while still providing the required thermal comfort under warmer temperature conditions caused by climate change. Past and potential climate induced future energy demand for air conditioning has been investigated. It was found based on climate change SRES scenario A2 that predicted mean temperature in Burkina Faso will increase by 2�C between 2010 and 2050. Therefore, in order to maintain a thermally comfortable 25�C inside public buildings, the projected annual energy consumption for cooling load will increase by 15%, 36% and 100% respectively for the period between 2020 to 2039, 2040 to 2059 and 2070 to 2089 when compared to the control case. It has also been found that a 1% increase in population growth will result in a 1.38% and 2.03% increase in carbon emission from primary energy consumption and future electricity consumption respectively.Furthermore, this research has investigated possible solutions for adaptation to the severe climate change and population growth impact on energy demand in Burkina Faso. It has been found that shading devices could potentially reduce the cooling load by up to 40%. Computer simulation programming of building energy consumption and a field study has shown that adobe houses have the potential of significantly reducing energy demand for cooling and offer a formidable method for climate change adaptation. Finally this research has shown, based on the Net Present Cost that hybrid photovoltaic (PV) and Diesel generator energy production configuration is the most cost effective local electricity supply system, for areas without electricity at present, with a payback time of 8 years when compared to the business as usual diesel generator stand-alone configuration. It is therefore a viable solution to increase electricity access to the majority of the population.
Doppler-Only Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract : SAR has traditionally been performed using high-range resolution data. This thesis is a proof-of-concept that the imaging process can be performed using high-doppler resolution data. The system requires a simple continuous wave transmitter, and the signal returns are confined to a narrow band. High-doppler resolution data is collected along an isodoppler line for different perspectives of the target. This data, a sinogram, is equivalent to taking the Radon transform of the target. The Fourier transform of the sinogram from each perspective (at an angle ) gives a slice of the two-dimensional transform subtending an angle with the axis, with equally distributed points along the line. This results in a higher density of points near the centre. Some form of weighting is necessary. This weighting is part of the Filtered Backprojection algorithm to determine the Inverse Radon transform of the sinogram. The backprojection portion is a simple redistribution of data back along the original projection line. Images were modeled by delta functions to test the above algorithm. The main points noted were that the reconstructed image was a scaled version of the original image, and that the quality of the image improved when more perspectives of the target were taken.
A small‐gain approach for adaptive output‐feedback NN control of switched pure‐feedback nonlinear systems

This paper investigates the problem of adaptive output‐feedback neural network (NN) control for a class of switched pure‐feedback uncertain nonlinear systems. A switched observer is first constructed to estimate the unmeasurable states. Next, with the help of an NN to approximate the unknown nonlinear terms, a switched small‐gain technique‐based adaptive output‐feedback NN control scheme is developed by exploiting the backstepping recursive design scheme, input‐to‐state stability analysis, the common Lyapunov function method, and the average dwell time (ADT) method. In the recursive design, the difficulty of constructing an overall Lyapunov function for the switched closed‐loop system is dealt with by decomposing the switched closed‐loop system into two interconnected switched systems and constructing two Lyapunov functions for two interconnected switched systems, respectively. The proposed controllers for individual subsystems guarantee that all signals in the closed‐loop system are semiglobally, uniformly, and ultimately bounded under a class of switching signals with ADT, and finally, two examples illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical results, which include a switched RLC circuit system.
Caméras 3D pour la localisation d'un système mobile en environnement urbain

L’objectif de la these est de developper un nouveau systeme de localisation mobile compose de trois cameras 3D de type Kinect et d’une camera additionnelle de type Fish Eye. La solution algorithmique est basee sur l’odometrie visuelle et permet de calculer la trajectoire du mobile en temps reel a partir des donnees fournies par les cameras 3D. L’originalite de la methodologie reside dans l’exploitation d’orthoimages creees a partir des nuages de points acquis en temps reel par les trois cameras. L’etude des differences entre les orthoimages successives acquises par le systeme mobile permet d’en deduire ses positions successives et d’en calculer sa trajectoire.
Molecular characterisation of the Herpes Simplex Virus-1 LATP2 enhancer region.

HSV1 vectors have previously been produced with the ability to direct long-term expression of a transgene within the nervous system. These viruses have an arrangement of the latency promoter and enhancer regions LAP1 and LATP2 such that LATP2 exerts long-term expression onto LAP1 and an exogenous promoter at the same time, in a back-to-back fashion. To characterise the LATP2 region, two series of vectors were produced containing deletion mutations of the region placed in different orientations to LAP1 within the context of the original vectors. The vectors were tested in vitro and in vivo in the PNS and a potentially repressive region within LATP2 was identified. The enhancer activity of the region was also localised to a defined area. As the HSV1 genome is associated with histones and modification of these is a method of transcriptional control, histone modification could be one mechanism that the virus uses to keep the LAT region active during latency. This was investigated by examining the acetylation of histones associated with the LAT region, including LATP2, at lytic and latent timepoints in an in vitro system by ChIP assay. These studies found that although no significant differences in acetylation at different loci of LATP2 was found, the LAT regulatory region generally appears to be more associated with hyperacetylated histones during latency than non-LAT promoters and that this increased acetylation is conferred onto an exogenous promoter when placed within the LAT region. The findings in this thesis should provide insight into the functioning of the LAT region and may allow the development of improved HSV1 vectors for gene therapy in the nervous system.
PUBLISHED VERSION

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work noncommercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005305
Location-allocation models for relief distribution and victim evacuation after a sudden-onset natural disaster

Quick response to natural disasters is vital to reduce loss of and negative impact to human life. The response is more crucial in the presence of sudden-onset, difficult-to-predict natural disasters, especially in the early period of those events. On-site actions are part of such response, some of which are determination of temporary shelters and/ or temporary medical facility locations, the evacuation process of victims and relief distribution to victims. These activities of last-mile disaster logistics are important as they are directly associated with sufferers, the main focus of any alleviation of losses caused by any disaster. This research deals with the last-mile site positioning of relief supplies and medical facilities in response to a sudden-onset, difficult-to-predict disaster event, both dynamically and in a more coordinative way during a particular planning time horizon. Four mathematical models which reflect the situation in Padang Pariaman District after the West Sumatera earthquake were built and tested. The models are all concerned with making decisions in a rolling time horizon manner, but differ in coordinating the operations and in utilization of information about future resource availability. Model I is a basic model representing the current practice with relief distribution and victim evacuation performed separately and decisions made only considering the resources available at the time. Model II considers coordination between the two operations and conducts them with the same means of transport. Model III takes into account future information keeping the two operations separate. Model IV combines the features of Models II and III. The four models are approached both directly and by using various heuristics. The research shows that conducting relief distribution and victim evacuation activities by using shared vehicles and/or by taking into account future information on resource availability improves the current practice . This is clearly demonstrated by the experimental results on small problems. For large problems, experiments show that it is not practical to directly solve the models, especially the last three, and that the solution quality is poor when the solution process is limited to a reasonable time. Experiments also show that the heuristics help improve the solution quality and that the performances of the heuristics are different for different models. When each model is solved using its own best heuristic, the conclusions from results of large problems get very close to those from small problems. Finally, deviation of future information on resource availability is considered in the study, but is shown not to affect the performance of model III and model IV in carrying out relief distribution and victim evacuation. This indicates that it is always worthwhile to take into account the future information, even if the information is not perfect, as long as it is reasonably reliable.
Systemic scleroderma. Multicenter trial of 1 year of treatment with recombinant interferon gamma.

OBJECTIVE To confirm significant improvement of the skin score in systemic sclerosis by treatment with interferon gamma in a larger group of patients and to investigate on a molecular level the influence of interferon gamma on collagen type I messenger RNA expression. DESIGN Open, noncontrolled multicenter study. SETTING Five outpatient clinics specializing in the care of systemic scleroderma. PATIENTS Thirty-two patients suffering from the diffuse or limited form of systemic sclerosis and progressive disease were recruited; 20 patients finished the study. INTERVENTION Each patient received interferon gamma, 50 micrograms subcutaneously 3 times a week for 1 year. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Skin score, collagen type I messenger RNA in skin biopsy specimens. RESULTS The patients who completed the study showed an unchanged median skin score after 1 year of therapy. In addition, similar collagen type I messenger RNA levels were detected in skin biopsy specimens taken from involved skin before and after therapy in these patients. CONCLUSIONS Treatment of systemic scleroderma with interferon gamma is associated with stabilization of the skin score and lack of worsening of visceral involvement.
Appendix for OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation

We implement our framework using the Detectron2 [27] library. Multi-Scale Feature Modeling. We adopt the settings from [4] for modeling the image pixel-level features. More specifically, we use 6 MSDeformAttn [31] inside our pixel decoder, applied to feature maps with resolutions 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 of the original image. We use lateral connections and upsampling to aggregate the multi-scale features to a final 1/4 resolution scale. We map all the features to a hidden dimension of 256. Unified Task-Conditioned Query Formulation. We initialize the N − 1 queries as repetitions of task-token, Qtask. Unless stated otherwise, we set N = 250 and Nctx = 16. Our text tokenizer and text encoder are the same as [29]. We use a single linear layer to project the tokenized task input, followed by a layer-norm to obtain Qtask. Task-Dynamic Mask and Class Prediction Formation. Following [4], we set L = 3 inside the transformer decoder. Therefore, we have a total of 3L (9) stages inside our transformer decoder. We also calculate an auxiliary loss on each intermediate class and mask predictions after every transformer decoder stage [4]. Training Settings. We train our model with a batch size of 16. When training on ADE20K [6] and Cityscapes [5], we use the AdamW [20] optimizer with a base learning rate of 0.0001, poly learning rate decay and weight decay 0.1. We use a crop size of 512×512 and 512×1024 on ADE20K and Cityscapes, respectively. We train for 90k and 160k iterations on Cityscapes and ADE20K, respectively. For data augmentation, we use shortest edge resizing, fixed size cropping, and color jittering followed by a random horizontal flip. When training on COCO [15], we use a step learning rate schedule along with the AdamW [20] optimizer, a base learning rate of 0.0001, 10 warmup iterations, and a weight decay of 0.05. We decay the learning rate at 0.9 and 0.95 fractions of the total number of training steps by a factor of 10. We train for a total of 100 epochs with LSJ augmenta#queries PQ AP mIoU #param.
PMU-Based Distributed State Estimation to Enhance the Numerical Stability Using Equality Constraints

With the deployment of PMUs in large-scale power systems, distributed state estimation (DSE) plays a major role in wide-area monitoring systems (WAMS). Specifically, the convergence and time efficiency of state estimators are important properties that must be preserved regardless of operating conditions. In this article, an equality-constrained PMU-based DSE strategy is proposed to enhance the numerical stability and computational efficiency of DSE. First, we identify network conditions in terms of the current flow magnitudes inducing the numerical instability of DSE. Then, we define a new local set of measurements and form equality constraints that enable the DSE problem to have a significantly reduced condition number, meaning that the numerical stability of DSE is enhanced. Moreover, an accelerated ADMM method is adopted to improve time efficiency. Furthermore, even if the measured data were corrupted, the proposed DSE strategy converges and estimate the states successfully. Numerical simulations are performed on IEEE 14-, 118-, and 1,062-bus systems, and the 1,665-bus Korean power system, to validate the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in terms of numerical stability and time efficiency under various measurement conditions.
Impact of Social Networking Sites on Student’s Academic Performance

These days, Social Networking Sites (SNS) have become the primary source of communication between individuals. The main focus of this study is to determine the impact of social networking sites on the academic performance of youth. A sample of 309 youth was selected, and the primary data was collected through the questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS. The results were exciting; the results show that SNS is affecting the student’s academic performance. The study further confirmed that most respondents visit the SNS daily for an average of half an hour to more than 3 hours. The study further reveals that the number of active friends increases the youths’ academic performance. Since the study confirmed that the usage had affected children's academic performance, there is an urgent need for counseling and advice to the youths regarding the dangers of addiction to SNS the school authorities and parents. The other factor is that students' time on SNS affects their academic performance, and they cannot finish the portion within the assigned time. Based on these findings, it can be used to propose the appropriate methods for students to manage and balance their time without affecting their academic performance.
LSGP-USFNet: Automated Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Detection Using Locations of Sophie Germain’s Primes on Ulam’s Spiral-Based Features with Electroencephalogram Signals

Anxiety, learning disabilities, and depression are the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), an isogenous pattern of hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention. For the early diagnosis of ADHD, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are widely used. However, the direct analysis of an EEG is highly challenging as it is time-consuming, nonlinear, and nonstationary in nature. Thus, in this paper, a novel approach (LSGP-USFNet) is developed based on the patterns obtained from Ulam’s spiral and Sophia Germain’s prime numbers. The EEG signals are initially filtered to remove the noise and segmented with a non-overlapping sliding window of a length of 512 samples. Then, a time–frequency analysis approach, namely continuous wavelet transform, is applied to each channel of the segmented EEG signal to interpret it in the time and frequency domain. The obtained time–frequency representation is saved as a time–frequency image, and a non-overlapping n × n sliding window is applied to this image for patch extraction. An n × n Ulam’s spiral is localized on each patch, and the gray levels are acquired from this patch as features where Sophie Germain’s primes are located in Ulam’s spiral. All gray tones from all patches are concatenated to construct the features for ADHD and normal classes. A gray tone selection algorithm, namely ReliefF, is employed on the representative features to acquire the final most important gray tones. The support vector machine classifier is used with a 10-fold cross-validation criteria. Our proposed approach, LSGP-USFNet, was developed using a publicly available dataset and obtained an accuracy of 97.46% in detecting ADHD automatically. Our generated model is ready to be validated using a bigger database and it can also be used to detect other children’s neurological disorders.
United Nations Development Programme

The goal of Project is to strengthen the role of the private sector in the economies of Brest and Grodno regions and in the thriving tourism sector of the Republic of Belarus. The goal will be reached through the support of the development and growth of private micro-, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) operating in the ecotourism sector, stimulating local initiative and job creation, and promotion and marketing of the project territories as tourist destinations both within the country, and beyond. The project will assist in educating the population of sustainable ecotourism practices, cooperation opportunities with local authorities and private sector, and broadening the market place of ideas.
Women’s employment trajectories in a low-income setting: Stratification and change in Nepal

BACKGROUND Across the globe, employment for pay outside the home plays a key role in the lives of women, and increasing the proportion of women involved in high-quality jobs is a critical component of reaching several sustainable development goals. While existing research from high-income societies demonstrates that women’s employment is not constant over the life course, relatively less is known about women’s employment trajectories in low-income countries. OBJECTIVE We examine employment trajectories among women in rural Nepal, accounting for job type, employment intensity, and earnings.
The Use of the Institutional Grammar 1.0 for Institutional Analysis: A Literature Review

Since Crawford and Ostrom proposed the Institutional Grammar (IG), a conceptual tool for breaking down and organizing institutional statements, a burgeoning literature has used it to study institutions contained in single documents and to conduct comparative institutional analysis across multiple countries and time periods. Moreover, rapid advances in text analysis and computational methods are creating new analytic opportunities to study rules, norms and strategies by leveraging the IG syntax. At this stage, it is important to assess the existing literature to understand how the IG has supported institutional analysis across a variety of contexts, including commons governance. Based on a corpus of 48 empirical articles published between 2010 and 2021, we explore how analysts have operationalized institutional statements using the IG. We also synthesize the IG-based metrics and theoretical concepts developed in these articles to illustrate the contributions of IG for measurement of challenging concepts such as polycentricity, discretion, and compliance, among others. Our findings indicate that the IG is a flexible and adaptable tool for institutional analysis, especially for making empirical contributions from text-based data, and it holds promise toward building a potentially new emerging subfield we call Computational Institutional Analysis.