Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty in msPAF-Based Ecotoxicological Effect Factors for Freshwater Ecosystems in Life Cycle Impact Assessment

Abstract Ecotoxicological effect factors are part of the analysis of relative impacts by chemical contaminants on ecosystems. Uncertainty distributions, represented by the 90% confidence interval, belonging to ecotoxicological effect factors for freshwater ecosystems were determined. This study includes 869 high production volume chemicals, related to 7 nonspecific toxic modes of action (TMoAs). The ecotoxicological effect factors are divided into a TMoA-specific part and a chemical-specific part. The 90% confidence interval of the TMoA-specific part of the effect factor ranges from 23 orders of magnitude for acrylate toxicity to 2 orders of magnitude for nonpolar narcosis. The range in the TMoA-specific part of the effect factor is mainly caused by uncertainty in the spread in toxic sensitivity between species (σj). Average uncertainty in the chemical-specific part of the effect factors depends on the number of species tested and ranges on average from a factor of 5 for more than 3 species tested to a factor of about 1,000 for 2 species tested. Average uncertainty in the ecotoxicological effect factors ranges from a factor of 100 for more than 3 species tested to a factor of nearly 10,000 for 2 species tested. It is recommended that the ecotoxicological effect factor of a chemical is based on toxicity data of at least 4 species.
Enhancement of Steady-State Performance in Direct-Torque-Controlled Dual Three-Phase Permanent-Magnet Synchronous Machine Drives With Modified Switching Table

This paper investigates the improved switching-table-based direct torque control strategies (ST-DTC) for dual three-phase permanent magnet synchronous machine drives. The classical ST-DTC scheme for dual three-phase drives is usually seriously penalized by significant current harmonics, which cause large losses and reduce the efficiency of the drive system. Hence, a modified switching table consisting of 12 new synthetic voltage vectors is proposed. With this new switching table, not only the variables relating to the torque production are well controlled, but also the variables contributing to the current harmonics are eliminated successfully within one sampling period. Furthermore, a simple modified torque regulator is proposed to reduce the torque ripple and the steady-state error of torque which is usually observed in the real-time system. The switching sequence which is most suitable for the implementation of the real-time system has been proposed to minimize the computation burden. The proposed strategy only changes the switching table and torque regulator without any major modifications, and hence, the merits of the classical direct torque control, i.e., simple structure and good robustness, are still preserved. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
A 10:4 MUX and 4:10 DEMUX Gearbox LSI for 100-Gigabit Ethernet Link

The first CMOS "gearbox LSI" based on 65-nm CMOS technology-namely, a 2-W 100-Gigabit-Ethernet gearbox LSI combining a 10:4 multiplexer and a 4:10 demultiplexer - was developed. Its power dissipation is 75% lower than that of a conventional SiGe-based gearbox LSI. To develop this low-power gearbox LSI, the power dissipation of its 25-Gb/s interface is decreased to 14 mW/Gb/s by three circuit schemes: maximizing the use of CMOS circuits, adopting a low-power circuit architecture for a current-mode-logic (CML) circuit, and minimizing clock distribution by using a flip-flop with a single-clock operation and a PLL with phase rotation for each channel. The 25-Gb/s interface in the LSI provides a transmitter output with sufficient eye opening and achieved minimum input sensitivity of 34.4-mV (peak-to-peak).
Motivation and learning strategies: a correlational study of employee training

Increasing the effectiveness of learning within the workplace continues to be a focus for organizations. Given that people will work for many more years than the traditional 30 years of generations past, combined with the ever changing economic environment, individuals and companies must continually improve skills. Previous research has focused on the areas of motivation, self-regulated learning, and instructional design. Within the financial services industry, many analytical skills are required. Because analysis is vital to financial success, organizations spend significant sums of money providing in-depth training. The institution involved with this study uses a vendor that provides online financial analysis training programs. The foundational program takes 50 hours to complete and is generally considered difficult. This study sought to assess whether a correlation exists between individual motivation and the learning strategies used. Utilizing abbreviated versions of two existing instruments (the Work Preference Inventory and the Strategic Learning Questionnaire) participants were asked to report on their levels of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) and the types of learning strategies used. The survey began with questions that addressed (a) intrinsic challenge, (b) intrinsic enjoyment, (c) extrinsic outward (perceptions of others), and (d) extrinsic compensation motivations. The questions in the second part of the survey addressed learning strategies of (a) task understanding, (b) goal setting, (c) activating prior knowledge, (d) searching/selecting, (e) assembling, (f) translating, (g) structuring, (h) rehearsing, (i) help-seeking, (j) monitoring, (k) evaluating, and (l) regulating.
Adaptive plasticity and niche expansion in an invasive thistle

Phenotypic differentiation in size and fecundity between native and invasive populations of a species has been suggested as a causal driver of invasion in plants. Local adaptation to novel environmental conditions through a micro-evolutionary response to natural selection may lead to phenotypic differentiation and fitness advantages in the invaded range. Local adaptation may occur along a stress tolerance trade-off, favoring individuals that, in benign conditions, shift resource allocation from stress tolerance to increased vigor and fecundity and, therefore, invasiveness. Alternately, the typically disturbed invaded range may select for a plastic, generalist strategy, making phenotypic plasticity the main driver of invasion success. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we performed a field common garden and tested for genetically based phenotypic differentiation, resource allocation shifts in response to water limitation, and local adaptation to the environmental gradient which describes the source locations for native and invasive populations of diffuse knapweed (Centaurea diffusa). Plants were grown in an experimental field in France (naturalized range) under water addition and limitation conditions. After accounting for phenotypic variation arising from environmental differences among collection locations, we found evidence of genetic variation between the invasive and native populations for most morphological and life-history traits under study. Invasive C. diffusa populations produced larger, later maturing, and therefore potentially fitter individuals than native populations. Evidence for local adaptation along a resource allocation trade-off for water limitation tolerance is equivocal. However, native populations do show evidence of local adaptation to an environmental gradient, a relationship which is typically not observed in the invaded range. Broader analysis of the climatic niche inhabited by the species in both ranges suggests that the physiological tolerances of C. diffusa may have expanded in the invaded range. This observation could be due to selection for plastic, “general-purpose” genotypes with broad environmental tolerances.
Émotions et interactions sociales : l'affiliation et l'isolement comme modes de régulation personnelle et sociale

Cette these a pour objet d'examiner l'incidence de situations provoquant des emotions sur les comportements d'affiliation et d'isolement et les consequences de ceux-ci sur le ressenti des individus et leurs relations a autrui. Onze etudes regroupees en sept recherches permettent ainsi de discuter (a) du role de la similarite dans les comportements gregaires, (b) de l'impact de la tonalite des emotions ressenties sur les comportements affiliatifs, (c) du caractere strictement personnel ou plus social des emotions subjectives et de l'effet du comportement emis sur le ressenti emotionnel et (d) de l'aspect relationnel et affectif des "situations emotionnelles" et de leurs consequences pour les individus. Les comportements d'affiliation et d'isolement issus de "situations emotionnelles", negatives comme positives, permettent de resserrer les liens en signant un respect des normes et en offrant une possibilite de valorisation sociale, de reception d'un support social adequat au moment propice et d'un partage social des emotions. Nous presentons les emotions comme etant federatrices a plus ou moins long terme et comme etant impliquees dans la reconnaissance sociale et l'interdependance des individus membres d'un reseau social
Computer animation with scripts and actors

A technique and philosophy for controlling computer animation is discussed. Using the Actor/Scriptor Animation System (ASAS) a sequence is described by the animator as a formal written SCRIPT, which is in fact a program in an animation/graphic language. Getting the desired animation is then equivalent to “debugging” the script. Typical images manipulated with ASAS are synthetic, 3D perspective, color, shaded images. However, the animation control techniques are independent of the underlying software and hardware of the display system, so apply to other types (still, B&W, 2D, line drawing .). Dynamic (and static) graphics are based on a set of geometric object data types and a set of geometric operators on these types. Both sets are extensible. The operators are applied to the objects under the control of modular animated program structures. These structures (called actors) allow parallelism, independence, and optionally, synchronization, so that they can render the full range of the time sequencing of events. Actors are the embodiment of imaginary players in a simulated movie. A type of animated number can be used to drive geometric expressions (nested geometrical operators) with dynamic parameters to produce animated objects. Ideas from programming styles used in current Artificial Intelligence research inspired the design of ASAS, which is in fact an extension to the Lisp programming environment. ASAS was developed in an academic research environment and made the transition to the “real world” of commercial motion graphics production.
Large-scale multilabel propagation based on efficient sparse graph construction

With the popularity of photo-sharing websites, the number of web images has exploded into unseen magnitude. Annotating such large-scale data will cost huge amount of human resources and is thus unaffordable. Motivated by this challenging problem, we propose a novel sparse graph based multilabel propagation (SGMP) scheme for super large scale datasets. Both the efficacy and accuracy of the image annotation are further investigated under different graph construction strategies, where Gaussian noise and non-Gaussian sparse noise are simultaneously considered in the formulations of these strategies. Our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by focusing on: (1) For large-scale graph construction, a simple yet efficient LSH (Locality Sensitive Hashing)-based sparse graph construction scheme is proposed to speed up the construction. We perform the multilabel propagation on this hashing-based graph construction, which is derived with LSH approach followed by sparse graph construction within the individual hashing buckets; (2) To further improve the accuracy, we propose a novel sparsity induced scalable graph construction scheme, which is based on a general sparse optimization framework. Sparsity essentially implies a very strong prior: for large scale optimization, the values of most variables shall be zeros when the solution reaches the optimum. By utilizing this prior, the solutions of large-scale sparse optimization problems can be derived by solving a series of much smaller scale subproblems; (3) For multilabel propagation, different from the traditional algorithms that propagate over individual label independently, our proposed propagation first encodes the label information of an image as a unit label confidence vector and naturally imposes inter-label constraints and manipulates labels interactively. Then, the entire propagation problem is formulated on the concept of Kullback-Leibler divergence defined on probabilistic distributions, which guides the propagation of the supervision information. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset NUS-WIDE with 270k images and its lite version NUS-WIDE-LITE with 56k images well demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed multi-label propagation scheme.
Stem Cell-Like Dog Placenta Cells Afford Neuroprotection against Ischemic Stroke Model via Heat Shock Protein Upregulation

In this study, we investigated the dog placenta as a viable source of stem cells for stroke therapy. Immunocytochemical evaluation of phenotypic markers of dog placenta cells (DPCs) cultured in proliferation and differentiation medium revealed that DPCs expressed both stem cell and neural cell markers, respectively. Co-culture with DPCs afforded neuroprotection of rat primary neural cells in a dose-dependent manner against oxygen-glucose deprivation. Subsequent in vivo experiments showed that transplantation of DPCs, in particular intravenous and intracerebral cell delivery, produced significant behavioral recovery and reduced histological deficits in ischemic stroke animals compared to those that received intra-arterial delivery of DPCs or control stroke animals. Furthermore, both in vitro and in vivo studies implicated elevated expression of heat shock protein 27 (Hsp27) as a potential mechanism of action underlying the observed therapeutic benefits of DPCs in stroke. This study supports the use of stem cells for stroke therapy and implicates a key role of Hsp27 signaling pathway in neuroprotection.
Rapid Naming and Phonemic Awareness in Children With Reading Disabilities and/or Specific Language Impairment: Differentiating Processes?

PURPOSE The objective of this study was to assess and compare the predictive values of group membership for rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in Dutch school children with and without reading disabilities (RD) or specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD A composite word reading index and a formal SLI diagnosis were used to classify a total of 1,267 children aged 8 to 13 years old either as RD-only (n = 126), SLI-only (n = 21), comorbid (RD+SLI; n = 30), or typically developing (n = 1,090). RAN and PA were assessed with 4 standardized subtests. The clinical subgroups were compared to each other and contrasted with the control group. RESULTS For each subgroup, results indicate substantial effect sizes of RAN and PA. However, the RD-only group seems to be more affected by poor RAN than the SLI-only group, whereas the 2 groups perform equally poorly on PA. The comorbid group was revealed as most severely impaired on all measurements. CONCLUSIONS In studying RD and SLI, this research indicates that it is important to distinguish between RD-only, SLI-only, and comorbid groups. The comorbid group shows additive effects of both disorders.
PTS1 Peroxisomal Import Pathway Plays Shared and Distinct Roles to PTS2 Pathway in Development and Pathogenicity of Magnaporthe oryzae

Peroxisomes participate in various important metabolisms and are required in pathogenicity of fungal plant pathogens. Peroxisomal matrix proteins are imported from cytoplasm into peroxisomes through peroxisomal targeting signal 1 (PTS1) or peroxisomal targeting signal 2 (PTS2) import pathway. PEX5 and PEX7 genes participate in the two pathways respectively. The involvement of PEX7 mediated PTS2 import pathway in fungal pathogenicity has been documented, while that of PTS1 remains unclear. Through null mutant analysis of MoPEX5, the PEX5 homolog in Magnaporthe oryzae, we report the crucial roles of PTS1 pathway in the development and host infection in the rice blast fungus, and compared with those of PTS2. We found that MoPEX5 disruption specifically blocked the PTS1 pathway. Δmopex5 was unable to use lipids as sole carbon source and lost pathogenicity completely. Similar as Δmopex7, Δmopex5 exhibited significant reduction in lipid utilization and mobilization, appressorial turgor genesis and H2O2 resistance. Additionally, Δmopex5 presented some distinct defects which were undetected in Δmopex7 in vegetative growth, conidial morphogenesis, appressorial morphogenesis and melanization. The results indicated that the PTS1 peroxisomal import pathway, in addition to PTS2, is required for fungal development and pathogenicity of the rice blast fungus, and also, as a main peroxisomal import pathway, played a more predominant role than PTS2.
Epoxy Cross-Linked Collagen and Collagen-Laminin Peptide Hydrogels as Corneal Substitutes

A bi-functional epoxy-based cross-linker, 1,4-Butanediol diglycidyl ether (BDDGE), was investigated in the fabrication of collagen based corneal substitutes. Two synthetic strategies were explored in the preparation of the cross-linked collagen scaffolds. The lysine residues of Type 1 porcine collagen were directly cross-linked using l,4-Butanediol diglycidyl ether (BDDGE) under basic conditions at pH 11. Alternatively, under conventional methodology, using both BDDGE and 1-Ethyl-3-(3-dimethyl aminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC)/N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) as cross-linkers, hydrogels were fabricated under acidic conditions. In this latter strategy, Cu(BF4)2·XH2O was used to catalyze the formation of secondary amine bonds. To date, we have demonstrated that both methods of chemical cross-linking improved the elasticity and tensile strength of the collagen implants. Differential scanning calorimetry and biocompatibility studies indicate comparable, and in some cases, enhanced properties compared to that of the EDC/NHS controls. In vitro studies showed that human corneal epithelial cells and neuronal progenitor cell lines proliferated on these hydrogels. In addition, improvement of cell proliferation on the surfaces of the materials was observed when neurite promoting laminin epitope, IKVAV, and adhesion peptide, YIGSR, were incorporated. However, the elasticity decreased with peptide incorporation and will require further optimization. Nevertheless, we have shown that epoxy cross-linkers should be further explored in the fabrication of collagen-based hydrogels, as alternatives to or in conjunction with carbodiimide cross-linkers.
Natural killer cells in non-hematopoietic malignancies

Natural killer (NK) cells belong to the innate immune system and were initially described functionallywise by their spontaneous cytotoxic potential against transformed or virus-infected cells. A delicate balance between activating and inhibiting receptors regulates NK cell tolerance. A better understanding of tissue resident NK cells, of NK cell maturation stages and migration patterns has evolved allowing a thoughtful evaluation of their modus operandi. While evidence has been brought up for their relevance as gate keepers in some hematopoietic malignancies, the role of NK cells against progression and dissemination of solid tumors remains questionable. Hence, many studies pointed out the functional defects of the rare NK cell infiltrates found in tumor beds and the lack of efficacy of adoptively transferred NK cells in patients. However, several preclinical evidences suggest their anti-metastatic role in a variety of mouse tumor models. In the present review, we discuss NK cell functions according to their maturation stage and environmental milieu, the receptor/ligand interactions dictating tumor cell recognition and recapitulate translational studies aimed at deciphering their prognostic or predictive role against human solid malignancies.
, Centre de Recherches en Economie de Grenoble ( CREG ) et IRSTEA

La série des Etudes et Documents du CERDI est consultable sur le site : Avertissement : Les commentaires et analyses développés n'engagent que leurs auteurs qui restent seuls responsables des erreurs et insuffisances. Abstract This article analyses the impact on the labor market of the transition from a state-­‐controlled economy towards a market economy. We consider a dynamic matching-­‐model with a declining and an emerging competitive sector. We show that there are two opposite strategies BLOCKIN
Physics and compact modeling of SOI substrates with buried ground plane (GPSOI) for substrate noise suppression

The physical mechanisms responsible for superior crosstalk suppression are identified in a new class of silicon-on-insulator substrate (GPSOI) that incorporates a buried metallic ground plane below the active silicon and buried oxide layers. It has been shown that this technology exhibits a factor of ten reduction in crosstalk power between components through the substrate compared to existing state-of-the-art silicon-based substrates using standard s/sub 21/ magnitude measurements in a microwave coplanar transmission test structure. The dominant crosstalk mechanisms are identified and compared to other existing crosstalk suppression technologies using numerical electromagnetic simulations and lumped element compact model development.
Activities of red blood cell anti-oxidative enzymes (SOD, GPx) and total anti-oxidative capacity of serum (TAS) in men with coronary atherosclerosis and in healthy pilots.

BACKGROUND Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been proposed to play important pathogenic roles, especially in harmful oxidative modifications of low-density cholesterol. Redox balance within the organism is largely determined by the activities of anti-oxidative enzymes of red blood cells and by the total anti-oxidative capacity of the serum (TAS). MATERIAL/METHODS SOD and GPx activities and TAS in 13 men aged 42-65 years with coronary atherosclerosis (group I) were compared with those of both 15 clinically healthy pilots matched for age and lipid abnormalities (cholesterol and triglycerides) (group II) and 14 age-matched pilots without lipid abnormalities (group III). RESULTS There were statistically significant differences in SOD and GPx activities and in TAS between the groups. CONCLUSIONS 1. SOD and GPx activities and TAS were lower in men with advanced coronary atherosclerosis that in age-matched clinically healthy men with similar dyslipidemia and were even further decreased compared with clinically healthy men without dyslipidemia. 2. The decrease in SOD and GPx activities and TAS in men with advanced coronary atherosclerosis was more pronounced than the degree of hypercholesterolemia or hypertriglyceridemia. 3. If hyperlipidemia and the activity of antioxidative enzymes and TAS were considered without reference to other risk factors of atherosclerosis, it appeared that the decreases in SOD, GPx, and TAS may play a more important role in the development of the atherosclerotic process than isolated increases in free cholesterol or triglyceride levels.