nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Woody species composition in an African savanna: determined by centuries of termite activity but modulated by 50 years of ungulate herbivory

Ungulate herbivory and formation of large termite mounds occur over different time scales, but both can affect plant community composition in savannas. Human managed savanna systems are increasingly dominated by domesticated grazing herbivores. These have replaced a mix of indigenous browsers and grazers, leading to changes in plant communities such as increased bush encroachment. We compared the relative impacts of five decades of different types of ungulate herbivory (cattle grazing, browsing and grazing by wild herbivores, and exclusion of all larger herbivores) on woody plant assemblages in two habitats, namely, large termite mounds, which may be thousands of years old, and the surrounding matrix. Location Miombo woodland savanna, Zimbabwe.  To determine the influence of termite mounds and herbivory on spatial distribution and composition of woody assemblages, we compared 40 paired mound matrix plots from the three herbivory treatments using PERMANOVA. We assessed whether mound plots were more similar to each other than matrix plots were to each other, and whether herbivory influenced similarity. We used SIMPER analysis to identify changes in abundance of indicator species for each habitat (i.e. mound or matrix) Results Species composition differed significantly between mound and matrix and also between herbivory treatments. Woody plant assemblages on mounds were more similar to each other than woody plant assemblages in matrix plots were to each other, regardless of type of herbivory, but herbivory reduced the mound/matrix contrast. Sample location (i.e. on mound or in matrix) explained 23% of the variation in woody species composition, compared to 12% explained by herbivory. Woody plant abundance was lowest where there were both grazers and browsers.  The influence of large termite mounds on plant assemblages was roughly double that of herbivory, which has occurred over five decades. Type of herbivory emerged as relatively influential on woody plant species composition, given that the time periods involved were short by comparison to the slow formation of termite mounds. Type of herbivory also influenced species composition and vegetation structure, with a diversity of herbivores necessary to reduce encroachment by woody species.
Experimental studies on hydro mechanical properties of metamorphic rock under hydraulic pressures

The research on the hydro mechanical coupling of metamorphic rock is of great importance in rock engineering. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the hydro mechanical properties of metamorphic rock based on the experimental data from triaxial compression tests. Metamorphic rock samples taken from an underground oil storage facility were tested under different hydraulic pressures using a rock servo controlled triaxial rheology test system. The results indicated that hydraulic pressure had impact on the strength, deformation and permeability of the metamorphic rock. Based on the test results, the stress strain behaviour and permeability evolution of the rock samples show three stages. The mechanical properties of the metamorphic rock are presented in detail for the three stages in the whole stress strain process. The derived mechanical parameters are correlated to the division of the phases. The relationship between hydraulic pressure and axial strain, lateral strain, volumetric strain and permeability are analysed and discussed, especially the influence of hydraulic pressure on various parameters in the hydro mechanical process. The influence of the hydraulic pressure on the failure mode of the rock under coupled conditions is described.
A low cost modification to a Flail Vac Harvester for collecting lightweight, wind dispersed seed

Indeterminate wildflowers with pappus bearing seed are difficult to effectively harvest at yields approaching maximum potential using traditional equipment. We modified a Flail Vac Seed Stripper by mounting heavy loops of chain to the front of the Flail Vac to provide agitation of the floral canopy to disarticulate seed from the flowers of hoary tansyaster (Machaeranthera canescens (Pursh) A. Gray [Asteraceae] The modification allowed for multiple, non damaging harvests that collected only shatter ready, fully ripe seed. Labor and time associated with post harvest drying and seed cleaning were reduced because of the decrease in vegetative matter accumulated.
A Novel Image Quality Assessment With Globally and Locally Consilient Visual Quality Perception
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Computational models for image quality assessment (IQA) have been developed by exploring effective features that are consistent with the characteristics of a human visual system (HVS) for visual quality perception. In this paper, we first reveal that many existing features used in computational IQA methods can hardly characterize visual quality perception for local image characteristics and various distortion types. To solve this problem, we propose a new IQA method, called the structural contrast quality index (SC QI) by adopting a structural contrast index (SCI) which can well characterize local and global visual quality perceptions for various image characteristics with structural distortion types. In addition to SCI, we devise some other perceptually important features for our SC QI that can effectively reflect the characteristics of HVS for contrast sensitivity and chrominance component variation. Furthermore, we develop a modified SC QI, called structural contrast distortion metric (SC DM) which inherits desirable mathematical properties of valid distance metricability and quasi convexity. So, it can effectively be used as a distance metric for image quality optimization problems. Extensive experimental results show that both SC QI and SC DM can very well characterize the HVS's properties of visual quality perception for local image characteristics and various distortion types, which is a distinctive merit of our methods compared with other IQA methods. As a result, both SC QI and SC DM have better performances with a strong consilience of global and local visual quality perception as well as with much lower computation complexity, compared with the state of the art IQA methods. The MATLAB source codes of the proposed SC QI and SC DM are publicly available online at https:/sites.google.com/site/sunghobaecv/iqa.
A Novel Image Quality Assessment With Globally and Locally Consilient Visual Quality Perception.
Venue: IEEE transactions on image processing a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society

Computational models for image quality assessment (IQA) have been developed by exploring effective features that are consistent with the characteristics of a human visual system (HVS) for visual quality perception. In this paper, we first reveal that many existing features used in computational IQA methods can hardly characterize visual quality perception for local image characteristics and various distortion types. To solve this problem, we propose a new IQA method, called the structural contrast quality index (SC QI) by adopting a structural contrast index (SCI) which can well characterize local and global visual quality perceptions for various image characteristics with structural distortion types. In addition to SCI, we devise some other perceptually important features for our SC QI that can effectively reflect the characteristics of HVS for contrast sensitivity and chrominance component variation. Furthermore, we develop a modified SC QI, called structural contrast distortion metric (SC DM) which inherits desirable mathematical properties of valid distance metricability and quasi convexity. So, it can effectively be used as a distance metric for image quality optimization problems. Extensive experimental results show that both SC QI and SC DM can very well characterize the HVS's properties of visual quality perception for local image characteristics and various distortion types, which is a distinctive merit of our methods compared with other IQA methods. As a result, both SC QI and SC DM have better performances with a strong consilience of global and local visual quality perception as well as with much lower computation complexity, compared with the state of the art IQA methods. The MATLAB source codes of the proposed SC QI and SC DM are publicly available online at https:/sites.google.com/site/sunghobaecv/iqa.
Together We E Export: Horizontal Cooperation Among Austrian Food Companies in Global Supply Chains and the Role of Electronic Business Tools
Venue: Int. J. Inf. Syst. Supply Chain Manag.

This study examined the horizontal collaboration of small and medium companies SMEs in export food supply chains facilitated by the use of electronic business tools. A multi case study of three best practice Austrian food SMEs examined the practices of horizontal collaboration in global supply chain management. Then, a survey of Austrian food SMEs assessed the horizontal collaboration facilitators and inhibitors. Findings demonstrate that e business tools foster the creation of virtual alliances and help SMEs to increase export sales to new and/or niche foreign markets. SMEs have limited resources to overcome obstacles like cost restrictions to use advanced yet expensive e business tools, managing food safety risks in global supply chains, and meet legal requirements of international trade.
Incorporating Cultural Sensitivity into Interactive Entertainment Education for Diabetes Self Management Designed for Hispanic Audiences
Venue: Journal of health communication

Diabetes self management education can improve outcomes in adults with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) However, Hispanics, a group that carries a large burden of disease, may not participate in diabetes education programs. Audience engagement with entertainment education has been associated with improved health education outcomes and may engage and empower Hispanic users to active self care. Successful use of entertainment education relies on the use of characters and situations with whom the viewers can feel some sense of involvement and for Hispanic audiences is encouraged when storylines and characters are culturally sensitive. In this study, we used a mixed methods approach that included descriptive statistics of closed ended and content analysis of open ended questions to measure the cultural sensitivity of the telenovela portion of a novel technology based application called Sugar, Heart, and Life (SHL) Specifically, we analyzed the responses of 123 male and female patients diagnosed with uncontrolled T2DM to determine viewer involvement with characters and situations in the telenovela, viewer perceived self efficacy in following recommendations, as well as viewer satisfaction with the program. Our findings indicate that the SHL application achieved its goal of creating a user friendly program that depicted realistic, culturally sensitive characters and storylines that resonated with Hispanic audiences and ultimately fostered perceived self efficacy related to following recommendations given about healthy lifestyle changes for diabetes self management. These findings suggest that the SHL application is a culturally sensitive health education intervention for use by Hispanic male and female individuals that may empower them in self management of T2DM.
Automated Energy Optimization of HTTP Requests for Mobile Applications
Venue: 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

Energy is a critical resource for apps that run on mobile de vices. Among all operations, making HTTP requests is one of the most energy consuming. Previous studies have shown that bundling smaller HTTP requests into a single larger HTTP request can be an effective way to improve energy efficiency of network communication, but have not defined an automated way to detect when apps can be bundled nor to transform the apps to do this bundling. In this paper we propose an approach to reduce the energy consumption of HTTP requests in Android apps by automatically detecting and then bundling multiple HTTP requests. Our approach first detects HTTP requests that can be bundled using static analysis, then uses a proxy based technique to bundle HTTP requests at runtime. We evaluated our approach on a set of real world marketplace Android apps. In this evaluation, our approach achieved an average energy reduction of 15% for the subject apps and did not impose a significant runtime overhead on the optimized apps.
Score level fusion based Multimodal biometric identification using Thepade's Sorted Ternary Block Truncation coding with variod proportion of Iris, Palmprint, Left Fingerprint Right Fingerprint with asorted similarity measures different Colorspaces
Venue: 2016 International Conference on Automatic Control and Dynamic Optimization Techniques (ICACDOT)

Biometric is used to automate the measurement of biological data. The measurement and recording of the physical characteristics of an individual for the use in subsequent personal identification. Multimodal biometric authentication is system which uses two or more biometric trait. It provides more immunity against spoofing. To reduce feature vector size and to improve genuine acceptance rate proposed technique is developed. In this paper fusion of Left Fingerprint, Right Fingerprint, Iris, Palmprint are experimented. Multimodal biometrics having different level fusion such as score level fusion, feature level fusion, decision level fusion. In this paper score level fusion is considered for experimentation. Score level fusion contains more gratified and worthful information. Here different score proportions are experimented and performance efficiency is measured using genuine acceptance ratio (GAR) True acceptance rate of recognition is increased because of multiple biometrics characters. In proposed technique features are extracted using Thepade's sorted ternary block truncation coding. Using TSTBTC and matching score proportion Iris: Palm print:  Right Fingerprint(40:2:1:1) gives better performance as indicated by higher GAR values observed by 71.86%
Face and palmprint multimodal biometric system based on bit plane decomposition approach
Venue: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics Taiwan (ICCE TW)

Bit plane decomposition approach has been introduced \ate\y for single trait biometric system such as face, palmprint, and fingerprint recognition. This approach is able to provide promising high performance rate while reducing the data dimensionality. However, this approach has not been tested on multimodal biometric system which uses more than one biometric trait. Hence, this paper introduces a new multimodal biometric system based on face and palmprint fusion with bit plane decomposition approach. Pixel level fusion is applied by using simple averaging method before bit plane feature extraction. Principal Component Analysis is also used on the hybrid face palm bit planes for further dimension reduction before being classified by Feedforward Backpropagation Neural Network. The experimental results show that the proposed system is able to provide high recognition rate.
OCPAD: One class Naive Bayes classifier for payload based anomaly detection
Venue: Expert Syst. Appl.

Application specific attack detection requires packet payload analysis. Current payload analysis techniques suffer from failed detection as they use only the presence or absence of short sequences of a packet in a knowledge base created out of non malicious packets. In this paper, we describe OCPAD a content anomaly detection method to identify network packets with suspicious payload content. Proposed method combines the benefits of one class classification and frequency information of short sequences. We adapt one class Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier as anomaly detector for detecting HTTP attacks. OCPAD uses likelihood of each short sequence's occurrence in a payload of known non malicious packets as a measure to derive the degree of maliciousness of a packet. In the training phase, OCPAD generates the likelihood range of each sequence's occurrence from every packet. In order to store the likelihood range of these sequences, we propose a novel and efficient data structure called Probability Tree. In the testing phase, it treats a short sequence as anomalous if it is not found in the database or its likelihood of occurrence in a packet is not in the range found in training phase. Using the likelihood of anomalous short sequences, it generates a class label for a test packet. Our experiments with a large dataset of 1 million HTTP packets collected from an academic network revealed OCPAD has a high Detection Rate (up to 100% compared to previous methods and acceptable rate of False Positives (less than 0.6%
Convergence between a mosquito eating predator's natural diet and its prey choice behaviour
Venue: Royal Society Open Science

On the basis of 1115 records of Evarcha culicivora feeding in the field, we can characterize this East African jumping spider (Salticidae) as being distinctively stenophagic. We can also, on the basis of laboratory prey choice experiments, characterize E. culicivora as having a specialized prey classification system and a hierarchy of innate preferences for various categories of mosquitoes and other arthropods. Prey from the field belonged to 10 arthropod orders, but 94.5% of the prey records were dipterans. Mosquitoes were the dominant prey (80.2% of the records) with the majority (82.9% of the mosquitoes being females, and thereafter midges were the most common prey (9.2% of the records) Preference profiles that were determined from experiments showed strong convergence with natural diet in some, but not all, instances. In experiments, E. culicivora adults appeared to distinguish between six prey categories and juveniles between seven, with blood carrying anopheline female mosquitoes being ranked highest in preference. For adults, this was followed by blood carrying culicine female mosquitoes and then anopheline female mosquitoes not carrying blood, but these two preferences were reversed for juveniles. Moreover, for juveniles, but not for adults, anopheline male mosquitoes seem to be a distinct prey category ranked in preference after blood carrying culicine females and, for both adults and juveniles, preference for midges is evident when the alternatives are not mosquitoes. These findings illustrate the importance of going beyond simply specifying preferred prey categories when characterizing predators as 'specialized' and a need to make clear conceptual distinctions between a predator's natural diet, the prey categories that are relevant to the predator, and the predator's prey choicebehaviour.
The use of purposeful sampling in a qualitative evidence synthesis: A worked example on sexual adjustment to a cancer trajectory
Venue: BMC Medical Research Methodology

BackgroundAn increasing number of qualitative evidence syntheses papers are found in health care literature. Many of these syntheses use a strictly exhaustive search strategy to collect articles, mirroring the standard template developed by major review organizations such as the Cochrane and Campbell Collaboration. The hegemonic idea behind it is that non comprehensive samples in systematic reviews may introduce selection bias. However, exhaustive sampling in a qualitative evidence synthesis has been questioned, and a more purposeful way of sampling papers has been proposed as an alternative, although there is a lack of transparency on how these purposeful sampling strategies might be applied to a qualitative evidence synthesis. We discuss in our paper why and how we used purposeful sampling in a qualitative evidence synthesis about 'sexual adjustment to a cancer trajectory' by giving a worked example.MethodsWe have chosen a mixed purposeful sampling, combining three different strategies that we considered the most consistent with our research purpose: intensity sampling, maximum variation sampling and confirming/disconfirming case sampling.ResultsThe concept of purposeful sampling on the meta level could not readily been borrowed from the logic applied in basic research projects. It also demands a considerable amount of flexibility, and is labour intensive, which goes against the argument of many authors that using purposeful sampling provides a pragmatic solution or a short cut for researchers, compared with exhaustive sampling.Opportunities of purposeful sampling were the possible inclusion of new perspectives to the line of argument and the enhancement of the theoretical diversity of the papers being included, which could make the results more conceptually aligned with the synthesis purpose.ConclusionsThis paper helps researchers to make decisions related to purposeful sampling in a more systematic and transparent way. Future research could confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis of conceptual enhancement by comparing the findings of a purposefully sampled qualitative evidence synthesis with those drawing on an exhaustive sample of the literature.
Chinese Relation Extraction by Multiple Instance Learning
Venue: AAAI Workshop: Knowledge Extraction from Text

Relation extraction, which learns semantic relations of concept pairs from text, is an approach for mining commonsense knowledge. This paper investigates an approach for relation extraction, which helps expand a commonsense knowledge base with little labor work. We proposed a framework that learns new pairs from Chinese corpora by adopting concept pairs in Chinese commonsense knowledge base as seeds. Multiple instance learning is utilized as the learning algorithm for predicting relation for unseen pairs. The performance of our system could be improved by learning multiple iterations. The results in each iteration are manually evaluated and processed to next iteration as seeds. Our experiments extracted new pairs for relations "AtLocation" "CapableOf" and "HasProperty" This study showed that new pairs could be extracted from text without huge humans work.
Structure of astrotactin 2: a conserved vertebrate specific and perforin like membrane protein involved in neuronal development
Venue: Open Biology

The vertebrate specific proteins astrotactin 1 and 2 (ASTN 1 and ASTN 2) are integral membrane perforin like proteins known to play critical roles in neurodevelopment, while ASTN 2 has been linked to the planar cell polarity pathway in hair cells. Genetic variations associated with them are linked to a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders and other neurological pathologies, including an advanced onset of Alzheimer's disease. Here we present the structure of the majority endosomal region of ASTN 2, showing it to consist of a unique combination of polypeptide folds: a perforin like domain, a minimal epidermal growth factor like module, a unique form of fibronectin type III domain and an annexin like domain. The perforin like domain differs from that of other members of the membrane attack complex perforin (MACPF) protein family in ways that suggest ASTN 2 does not form pores. Structural and biophysical data show that ASTN 2 (but not ASTN 1) binds inositol triphosphates, suggesting a mechanism for membrane recognition or secondary messenger regulation of its activity. The annexin like domain is closest in fold to repeat three of human annexin V and similarly binds calcium, and yet shares no sequence homology with it. Overall, our structure provides the first atomic resolution description of a MACPF protein involved in development, while highlighting distinctive features of ASTN 2 responsible for its activity.