1,121 research outputs found
Preliminary comparison of 3.5-cm and 12.6-cm wavelength continuous wave observations of Mars
Radar observations of Mars at Goldstone in 1990 were conducted by transmitting pure sinusoidal signals at 3.5-cm wavelengths and receiving the Doppler-spread echoes from Mars at Earth. Radar transmissions were circularly polarized and the echoes recorded in two senses: depolarized and polarized. Latitudes of the subradar points are between 3.5 deg and 11.1 deg S; longitude coverage is discontinuous. The observed depolarized and polarized echo total cross-sections and their ratios for two wavelengths were compared and discussed
Why We Read Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users
relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although
it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to
meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal
of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers
with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user
surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions,
capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they
are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting
Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a
large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000
responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to
Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal
curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey
responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs,
enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use
cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across
topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using
Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on
topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader
motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers
aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to
their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing
access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as
recommendation engines.Comment: Published in WWW'17; v2 fixes caption of Table
Comparison of Inedible Egg Product and Spray-Dried Plasma as Sources of Protein for Weanling Pigs
Pigs were weaned at approximately 18 days of age and fed diets containing inedible egg product, spray-dried plasma (SDP), or the combination of both for 2 weeks postweaning. They then received a common diet for an additional 2 weeks after the treatment period. The impact of these dietary ingredients on growth performance was evaluated.
Inedible egg product did not improve growth or feed efficiency of pigs compared with those fed the control diet during the 2-week treatment period. However, SDP increased body weight gain and feed efficiency during the treatment period. The improved performance over the control group that resulted from feeding a combination of SDP and egg product was primarily dependent upon the SDP. In the third week, a trend occurred for improved performance of pigs fed the egg product compared with those fed 4% SDP; however, the difference was not significant. During this same period, pigs previously fed SDP gained weight slower and consumed less feed than those that had not been fed SDP. Therefore, the response to SDP was partially lost when it was removed from the diet. In summary, the outcome of this study demonstrated that inedible egg product was an adequate source of protein for the weanling pig but did not provide measurable improvements over the control diet. Inedible egg product did not have an additive effect when combined with SDP. The improved feed efficiency associated with SDP resulted in increased weanling pig growth
North-South cooperation through BIOTA: An interdisciplinary monitoring programme in arid and semi-arid southern Africa
Connecting disciplines in a north– South collaboration has many advantages: mutualisms evolve, synergies are created and spin-offs emerge. The BIOTA South (Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis in southern Africa) programme, with its long-term vision to generate knowledge of biodiversity along a north–south transect in southern Africa, is providing opportunities for research, technology transfer and capacity building while focusing on potential solutions for critical challenges that face this environmentally vulnerable part of the subcontinen
Asynchronous Training of Word Embeddings for Large Text Corpora
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language and have been
widely popular in numerous tasks in information retrieval and text mining.
Training embeddings over huge corpora is computationally expensive because the
input is typically sequentially processed and parameters are synchronously
updated. Distributed architectures for asynchronous training that have been
proposed either focus on scaling vocabulary sizes and dimensionality or suffer
from expensive synchronization latencies.
In this paper, we propose a scalable approach to train word embeddings by
partitioning the input space instead in order to scale to massive text corpora
while not sacrificing the performance of the embeddings. Our training procedure
does not involve any parameter synchronization except a final sub-model merge
phase that typically executes in a few minutes. Our distributed training scales
seamlessly to large corpus sizes and we get comparable and sometimes even up to
45% performance improvement in a variety of NLP benchmarks using models trained
by our distributed procedure which requires of the time taken by the
baseline approach. Finally we also show that we are robust to missing words in
sub-models and are able to effectively reconstruct word representations.Comment: This paper contains 9 pages and has been accepted in the WSDM201
Wavelet Based Fractal Analysis of Airborne Pollen
The most abundant biological particles in the atmosphere are pollen grains
and spores. Self protection of pollen allergy is possible through the
information of future pollen contents in the air. In spite of the importance of
airborne pol len concentration forecasting, it has not been possible to predict
the pollen concentrations with great accuracy, and about 25% of the daily
pollen forecasts have resulted in failures. Previous analysis of the dynamic
characteristics of atmospheric pollen time series indicate that the system can
be described by a low dimensional chaotic map. We apply the wavelet transform
to study the multifractal characteristics of an a irborne pollen time series.
We find the persistence behaviour associated to low pollen concentration values
and to the most rare events of highest pollen co ncentration values. The
information and the correlation dimensions correspond to a chaotic system
showing loss of information with time evolution.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
Identifying a human rights–based approach to obesity for States and civil society
Summary Obesity and its comorbidities pose daunting challenges to global health and development in the 21st century. This paper reviews some commonalities between obesity and another global health challenge, the pandemic of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). International human rights law was an important catalyst for civil society movements that helped to overcome inertia and generate political will for State action in response to HIV and AIDS. Drawing on the HIV experience, the authors propose a conceptual model for a human rights?based response to obesity founded on the twin pillars of State obligations and civil society engagement. Framing States' obligations to address the global obesity pandemic as a matter of international law, informed by the examples of the United Nations ?International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights? and the General Comments of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies on HIV and AIDS, provides a normative framework to guide State actions and opportunities to engage the extensive accountability mechanisms of the United Nations international human rights system. In addition, it provides civil society organizations with the language and tools to demand State action on obesity. The authors call for similar authoritative guidance for States on the application of international human rights law to obesity
Planvorming met behulp van agrarische evaluatie kriteria van de Werkgroep Help : een toepassing op het reconstructiegebied Midden-Delfland
Mechanical evaluation of implanted calcium phosphate cement incorporated with PLGA microparticles
In this study, the mechanical properties of an implanted calcium phosphate (CaP) cement incorporated with 20wt% poly (DL-lactic-coglycolic
acid) (PLGA) microparticles were investigated in a rat cranial defect. After 2, 4 and 8 weeks of implantation, implants were
evaluated mechanically (push-out test) and morphologically (Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and histology). The results of the
push-out test showed that after 2 weeks the shear strength of the implants was 0.4470.44MPa (average7sd), which increased to
1.3471.05MPa at 4 weeks and finally resulted in 2.6072.78MPa at 8 weeks. SEM examination showed a fracture plane at the
bone–cement interface at 2 weeks, while the 4- and 8-week specimens created a fracture plane into the CaP/PLGA composites, indicating
an increased strength of the bone–cement interface. Histological evaluation revealed that the two weeks implantation period resulted in
minimal bone ingrowth, while at 4 weeks of implantation the peripheral PLGA microparticles were degraded and replaced by deposition
of newly formed bone. Finally, after 8 weeks of implantation the degradation of the PLGA microparticles was almost completed, which
was observed by the bone ingrowth throughout the CaP/PLGA composites.
On basis of our results, we conclude that the shear strength of the bone–cement interface increased over time due to bone ingrowth into
the CaP/PLGA composites. Although the bone–cement contact could be optimized with an injectable CaP cement to enhance bone
ingrowth, still the mechanical properties of the composites after 8 weeks of implantation are insufficient for load-bearing purpose
Domain-independent Extraction of Scientific Concepts from Research Articles
We examine the novel task of domain-independent scientific concept extraction
from abstracts of scholarly articles and present two contributions. First, we
suggest a set of generic scientific concepts that have been identified in a
systematic annotation process. This set of concepts is utilised to annotate a
corpus of scientific abstracts from 10 domains of Science, Technology and
Medicine at the phrasal level in a joint effort with domain experts. The
resulting dataset is used in a set of benchmark experiments to (a) provide
baseline performance for this task, (b) examine the transferability of concepts
between domains. Second, we present two deep learning systems as baselines. In
particular, we propose active learning to deal with different domains in our
task. The experimental results show that (1) a substantial agreement is
achievable by non-experts after consultation with domain experts, (2) the
baseline system achieves a fairly high F1 score, (3) active learning enables us
to nearly halve the amount of required training data.Comment: Accepted for publishing in 42nd European Conference on IR Research,
ECIR 202
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