Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE IMPACT OF NITROGEN AND SILICON NUTRITION ON THE RESISTANCE OF SUGARCANE VARIETIES TO ELDANA SACCHARINA ( LEPIDOPTERA : PYRALIDAE )

Crop and sucrose loss from damage by Eldana saccharina Walker (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) still ranks as being the most important factor limiting productivity in the South African sugar industry. There is ample evidence from the literature that nutrients such as nitrogen and silicon play important roles in the susceptibility and resistance of a range of crops to stalk borer damage. In our own industry, studies conducted in 1989 showed that high N usage under conditions of moisture stress greatly increased survival of larvae and infestation of sugarcane by E. saccharina. Recent studies have emphasized the important role of applied silicon in improving the resistance of sugarcane to E. saccharina infestation even in the more resistant varieties such as N21 and N33. Because the effects of nitrogen and silicon on E. saccharina behavior have previously been studied independently, a preliminary glasshouse trial was conducted to study the combined influence of these nutrients on E. saccharina infestation in five cane varieties (NCo376, N31, N35, N36 and N37) to determine whether applied silicon can offset the negative effects of applied N on E. saccharina build-up. The results showed that the equivalent of 200 kg/ha applied silicon reduced the percent stalk length damaged by an average of 47% across all five varieties that were included in the trial. Maximum reductions in percent damaged stalk length using silicon treatment ranged from a 70% average at the lowest N level (60 kg/ha N), to 39% at the intermediate N level (120 kg/ha N) and 35% at the highest N treatment (180 kg/ha N). The use of silicon will enable many growers who have severely cut back on their nitrogen applications to reduce the risk of E. saccharina damage, and to resume applying the normal recommended rates of nitrogen, thereby ensuring that nitrogen will not limit crop yield.
Dahl Model-Based Hysteresis Compensation and Precise Positioning Control of an XY Parallel Micromanipulator With Piezoelectric Actuation

This paper presents a new control scheme for the hysteresis compensation and precise positioning of a piezoelectrically actuated micromanipulator. The scheme employs an inverse Dahl model-based feedforward in combination with a repetitive proportional-integral-derivative feedback control algorithm along with an antiwindup strategy. The dynamic model of the system with Dahl hysteresis is established and identified through particle swarm optimization approach. The necessity of using global optimization and how to choose the model parameters to be optimized are addressed as well. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated by several experimental studies on an XY parallel micromanipulator. Experimental results reveal that both antiwindup and repetitive control strategies can improve the positioning accuracy of the system, and a well performance of the proposed scheme for both one-dimensional tracking and two-dimensional contouring tasks of the micromanipulator is achieved. Moreover, due to a simple structure, the proposed methodology can be easily generalized to other micro- or nanomanipulators with piezoelectric actuation as well.
Merging semantic and participative approaches for organising teachers' documents

Communities of teachers need tools to gather and organise educational resources scattered over the Web. As current generic search engines are insufficient to deal with contexts, these tools must rely on human annotations. First, we compare the Semantic Web and the Participative Web (2.0) approaches to annotate resources and we argue for the need to merge them. Secondly, we propose a social bookmarking tool merging the flexibility of tags with basic inference processes attached to ontologies. Thus we define the concept of structurable tags which are tags that can be linked through relations while keeping their spontaneous, on-the-fly and aggregative properties.
A multi-measurement approach to the identification of the audiovisual facial correlates of contrastive focus in French

The aims of this study are twofold. We first seek to validate a previous study conducted on one speaker. It identified lower face visible articulatory correlates of contrastive focus in French for real (non-reiterant) speech. We thus conducted the same study for another speaker. Our second goal was to enlarge the set of cues measured to other facial movements. To do so we used a complementary measurement technique (Optotrak) on the same corpus. The articulatory measurements showed that there was a set of consistent visible articulatory correlates of contrastive focus in French across speakers: a) an increase in lip area and jaw opening on the focused item b) a lengthening of the focal syllables c) a post-focal hypo-articulation. However, there are also some speaker specific strategies. The first speaker showed an anticipation strategy but the second speaker did not. The Optotrak measurements confirmed that: a) focus corresponded to an increase in lip height and/or in lip width b) the post-focal sequence was hypo-articulated. We also found that: a) the focused item was often correlated with a slight head movement (nod) b) facial movements such as cheek movements were amplified when there was focus and c) eyebrow movements were not correlated with focus.
Tunneling Performance Increases at Lower Temperatures for Solenopsis invicta (Buren) but not for Nylanderia fulva (Mayr)

Nylanderia fulva (Mayr), the tawny crazy ant, is an invasive pest established in Florida and several other Gulf Coast states. In their invasive ranges in the Southeastern USA, large N. fulva populations have reduced species abundance, even displacing another invasive ant, Solenopsis invicta (Buren). In North Florida, N. fulva populations survive winter temperatures that reach below freezing for extended periods. However, the shallow littoral debris used by N. fulva for nest construction offers little insulation to brood and reproductives when exposed to freezing temperatures. Field populations of N. fulva in North Florida were observed tunneling below ground, a previously undescribed behavior. Other invasive ants exhibit similar subterranean tunneling behavior as a means of thermoregulation. To test the hypothesis that N. fulva has the capacity to construct subterranean tunnels across a range of ecologically relevant temperatures, tunneling performance for N. fulva and S. invicta, another invasive ant that tunnels extensively, were compared at four temperatures (15.0, 18.0, 20.0, and 22.0 °C). Overall, N. fulva tunneled significantly less than S. invicta. Nylanderia fulva tunneled furthest at warmer temperatures whereas S. invicta tunneled furthest at cooler temperatures. However, N. fulva constructed subterranean tunnels at all temperatures evaluated. These data support the hypothesis that N. fulva is capable of tunneling in temperatures as low as 15.0 °C, confirming that this ant can also perform a behavior that is used by other ants for cold avoidance.
Audio Music Genre Classification Using Different Classifiers and Feature Selection Methods

We examine performance of different classifiers on different audio feature sets to determine the genre of a given music piece. For each classifier, we also evaluate performances of feature sets obtained by dimensionality reduction methods. Finally, we experiment on increasing classification accuracy by combining different classifiers. Using a set of different classifiers, we first obtain a test genre classification accuracy of around 79.6 plusmn 4.2% on 10 genre set of 1000 music pieces. This performance is better than 71.1 plusmn 7.3% which is the best that has been reported on this data set. We also obtain 80% classification accuracy by using dimensionality reduction or combining different classifiers. We observe that the best feature set depends on the classifier used
A Simple Ocean Data Assimilation Analysis of the Global Upper Ocean 1950-95. Part II: Results

Abstract The authors explore the accuracy of a comprehensive 46-year retrospective analysis of upper-ocean temperature, salinity, and currents. The Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) analysis is global, spanning the latitude range 62°S–62°N. The SODA analysis has been constructed using optimal interpolation data assimilation combining numerical model forecasts with temperature and salinity profiles (MBT, XBT, CTD, and station), sea surface temperature, and altimeter sea level. To determine the accuracy of the analysis, the authors present a series of comparisons to independent observations at interannual and longer timescales and examine the structure of well-known climate features such as the annual cycle, El Nino, and the Pacific–North American (PNA) anomaly pattern. A comparison to tide-gauge time series records shows that 25%–35% of the variance is explained by the analysis. Part of the variance that is not explained is due to unresolved mesoscale phenomena. Another part is due to errors in the rat.
Chronic Intermittent Hypoxia Induces NMDA Receptor-Dependent Plasticity and Suppresses Nitric Oxide Signaling in the Mouse Hypothalamic Paraventricular Nucleus

Chronic intermittent hypoxia (CIH) is a concomitant of sleep apnea that produces a slowly developing chemosensory-dependent blood pressure elevation ascribed in part to NMDA receptor-dependent plasticity and reduced nitric oxide (NO) signaling in the carotid body. The hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) is responsive to hypoxic stress and also contains neurons that express NMDA receptors and neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS). We tested the hypothesis that extended (35 d) CIH results in a decrease in the surface/synaptic availability of the essential NMDA NR1 subunit in nNOS-containing neurons and NMDA-induced NO production in the PVN of mice. As compared with controls, the 35 d CIH-exposed mice showed a significant increase in blood pressure and an increased density of NR1 immunogold particles located in the cytoplasm of nNOS-containing dendrites. Neither of these between-group differences was seen after 14 d, even though there was already a reduction in the NR1 plasmalemmal density at this time point. Patch-clamp recording of PVN neurons in slices showed a significant reduction in NMDA currents after either 14 or 35 d exposure to CIH compared with sham controls. In contrast, NO production, as measured by the NO-sensitive fluorescent dye 4-amino-5-methylamino-2′,7′-difluorofluorescein, was suppressed only in the 35 d CIH group. We conclude that CIH produces a reduction in the surface/synaptic targeting of NR1 in nNOS neurons and decreases NMDA receptor-mediated currents in the PVN before the emergence of hypertension, the development of which may be enabled by suppression of NO signaling in this brain region.
To Pay or Be Paid? The Impact of Taker Fees and Order Flow Inducements on Trading Costs in U.S. Options Markets

Consistent with prior literature, we find that average relative effective spreads are higher for venues that pay for order flow (PFOF) than for venues utilizing the maker-taker (MT) model. This relation becomes more nuanced when liquidity fees are incorporated into liquidity cost measures. For the majority of options, PFOF venues offer lower average liquidity costs net of taker fees. Net liquidity costs for the high-priced options, however, are lower for MT venues. Overall, our results suggest that the inclusion of fees and rebates can rationalize the routing of most, but not all, marketable orders to PFOF venues.
Processes leading to a severe wind-shear incident at Hobart Airport

At 0149 UTC on 21 January 1997 an abrupt southerly wind change moved through Hobart Airport (see Fig. 1 for all place names used in this paper), with the surface wind shifting from 310/22 kn (gust 34 kn) at 0130 UTC to 160/15 kn (gust 31 kn) at 0156 UTC. With this change the temperature dropped from 37.2°C to 24.6°C over the same interval. At 0230 UTC 21 January 1997, Qantas flight QF617 was approaching Hobart Airport from the northwest and encountered extreme turbulence at approximately 500 ft altitude (the imperial units used here are those transcribed from the flight recorder records). Wind (temperature) changed from 315/31 kn (37.5°C) at 472 ft to 178/11 kn (32.8°C) at 396 ft. After descending through the wind-shear layer into cooler southerlies, the plane climbed rapidly and passed through a zone of southwesterly winds, with the temperature increasing rapidly again to the mid-30s (°C) at around 1200 ft altitude. A tabulated extract from the flight recorder data is shown in Table 1. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. In the first part, the frequency with which such wind shear events occur at Hobart Airport is reviewed, and the subsynoptic evolution of the low-level wind, temperature, and pressure fields around southern Tasmania on that day is documented. In the second part of the paper a high resolution mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) model simulation of the event is used to both demonstrate the predictability of the event with Aust. Met. Mag. 52 (2003) 171-188
Pharmacological Inhibition of TPL2/MAP3K8 Blocks Human Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Effector Functions

CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) play a major role in defense against intracellular pathogens. During development, antigen-presenting cells secrete innate cytokines such as IL-12 and IFN-α, which drive CTL differentiation into diverse populations of effector and long-lived memory cells. Using whole transcriptome analyses, the serine/threonine protein kinase Tpl2/MAP3K8 was found to be induced by IL-12 and selectively expressed by effector memory (TEM) CTLs. Tpl2 regulates various inflammatory pathways by activating the ERK mediated MAP kinase pathway in innate immune cells such as macrophages and dendritic cells. In this study, we found that a specific small molecule Tpl2 inhibitor blocked IFN-γ and TNF-α secretion as well as cytolytic activity of human CTLs. This pathway was specific for human effector CTLs, as the Tpl2 inhibitor did not block IFN-γ and TNF-α secretion from murine effector CTLs. Further, IL-12 failed to induce expression of Tpl2 in murine CTLs, and Tpl2 deficient murine CTLs did not exhibit any functional deficiency either in vitro or in vivo in response to L. monocytogenes infection. In summary, we identified a species-specific role for Tpl2 in effector function of human CTLs, which plays a major role in adaptive immune responses to intracellular pathogens and tumors.
Beyond Recommendations: Local Review Web Sites and Their Impact

Online review Web sites have enabled new interactions between companies and their customers. In this article we draw on interviews with users, reviewers, and establishments to explore how local review Web sites can change interactions around local places. Review Web sites such as Yelp and Tripadvisor allow customers to “previsit” establishments and areas of a city before an actual visit. The collection of a large numbers of user-generated reviews has also created a new genre of writing, with reviewers gaining considerable pleasure from passing on word of mouth and influencing others’ choices. Reviews also offer a new channel of communication between establishments, customers, and competitors. We discuss how review Web sites can be designed to cater for a broader range of interactions around reviews beyond a focus on recommendations.
The role of owner/manager in adoption of electronic commerce in small businesses

Purpose – Based on theories from the innovation diffusion literature, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated model of electronic commerce (EC) adoption in small businesses (SBs) of developing countries. The research model specifies variables at managerial level as the primary determinants to EC adoption in SBs. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire-based field survey was conducted to collect data from 268 owner/managers of SBs in Iran. The data were analysed using factorial analysis. Subsequently, six hypotheses were derived and tested by hierarchical multiple regression and logistic regression analysis. Findings – Perceived benefits, perceived compatibility, perceived risks, perceived costs, and innovativeness were found to be the significant determinants of decision to adopt EC. Likewise, discussion on discriminators between adopters and non-adopters of different EC applications has been provided. Research limitations/implications – Cross-sectional data of this research tends to h.
SENTENCE COMPREHENSION AS THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SITUATIONAL REPRESENTATION : A CONNECTIONIST MODEL

When a sentence is understood, the reader or listener must have constructed a mental representation of the situation described by the sentence. The model presented here views sentence comprehension as the construction of such a ‘situational representation’. The model consists of a simple recurrent neural network that transforms word sequences (i.e., sentences) into representations of the correspondi ng situations. These representations were developed for the DSS model of story comprehension (Frank et al., 2003). The results indicate that the network did not just perform simple word-to-situation or sentence-to-situation mappi ngs, but also learned how new combinations of words refer to new combinations of situations.
Systems for state science assessment

In response to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), Systems for State Science Assessment explores the ideas and tools that are needed to assess science learning at the state level. This book provides a detailed examination of K-12 science assessment: looking specifically at what should be measured and how to measure it. Along with reading and mathematics, the testing of science is a key component of NCLBa "it is part of the national effort to establish challenging academic content standards and develop the tools to measure student progress toward higher achievement. The book will be a critical resource for states that are designing and implementing science assessments to meet the 2007-2008 requirements of NCLB. In addition to offering important information for states, Systems for State Science Assessment provides policy makers, local schools, teachers, scientists, and parents with a broad view of the role of testing and assessment in science education.
Saving, Investment and the Current Account

In this review of recent work on the relationship between saving, investment and the current account, it is shown that focusing on national saving and investment behavior and modeling these in a modern intertemporal optimization framework will modify some conventional results regarding the relationship between the current account and the terms of trade, the exchange rate and fiscal policy. It is also shown that such a framework can explain the close empirical correlation between national saving and investment rates without relying on limited international capital mobility. It is conjectured that a better empirical understanding of current account developments could be gained if modern theories of investment and saving behavior were used more systematically in applied studies. Copyright 1992 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
Power indices for revealed preference tests

Revealed preference tests are elegant nonparametric tools that ask whether individual or aggregate data conform to economic models of optimizing behavior. In designing a test using revealed preference, however, one faces a vexing tension between goodness-of-…t and power. If the test …nds violations, then one must ask if the test was too demanding— is there an acceptable tolerance for goodness-of-…t? On the other hand, if no violations are found, one must demonstrate that the test was demanding enough— is the test su¢ ciently powerful? This paper provides a counter-weight to the many papers on goodness-of-…t by discussing indices of the power of revealed preference tests. Where possible, we attempt to unify the two approaches. We present four new indices and discuss their relative merits.
Profit-Maximizing Resource Allocation for Multi-tier Cloud Computing Systems under Service Level Agreements

Pervasive use of cloud computing and resulting rise in the number of hosting datacenters (which provide platform or software services to clients who do not have the means to set up and operate their own facilities) have brought forth many challenges including energy cost, peak power dissipation, cooling, carbon emission, etc. With power consumption becoming an increasingly important issue for the operation and maintenance of the hosting datacenters, corporate and business owners are becoming increasingly concerned. Furthermore provisioning resources in a cost-optimal manner so as to meet different criteria such as response time, throughput, network bandwidth, etc. has become a critical challenge. The goal of this chapter is to provide a review of resource provisioning and power management strategies that optimize serverrelated energy costs in a datacenter while meeting the stipulated service level agreements in terms of throughput and response time. To appear in Large Scale Network-Centric Computing Systems, Editors: H. Sarbazi-Azad and A. Zomaya, Wiley Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Jul. 2013
As Light as your Footsteps: Altering Walking Sounds to Change Perceived Body Weight, Emotional State and Gait

An ever more sedentary lifestyle is a serious problem in our society. Enhancing people's exercise adherence through technology remains an important research challenge. We propose a novel approach for a system supporting walking that draws from basic findings in neuroscience research. Our shoe-based prototype senses a person's footsteps and alters in real-time the frequency spectra of the sound they produce while walking. The resulting sounds are consistent with those produced by either a lighter or heavier body. Our user study showed that modified walking sounds change one's own perceived body weight and lead to a related gait pattern. In particular, augmenting the high frequencies of the sound leads to the perception of having a thinner body and enhances the motivation for physical activity inducing a more dynamic swing and a shorter heel strike. We here discuss the opportunities and the questions our findings open.