Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are the small-sized plankton communities of oligotrophic ecosystems resilient to UVR and P pulses?

Evaluating how environmental stressor interactions influence ecosystem structure and functioning is critical to understanding the response of ecosystems to global change. We exposed a species-poor planktonic community to P pulses in the absence and presence of solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR). We used a field-mesocosm study in an oligotrophic mid-altitude lake to test the hypothesis that interaction between these factors affects the community’s diversity and composition, but not its biomass-size spectrum, making this community resilient in terms of its C-transfer function. Our findings show that P pulses and UVR affected the relative abundance of different planktonic populations. The abundance of phytoplankton was enhanced strongly by P pulses and secondarily by UVR. The UVR × P interaction affected only the smallest autotrophic species. Chlorococcal abundance increased, whereas chroococcal cyanobacteria decreased. However, UVR had a much more pronounced effect than P on the composition of microcrustaceans, and both factors interactively affected their biomass. Hence, the biomass-size spectrum was not resilient to the UVR × P pulse interaction. The steepness of the slope increased under P-pulse conditions because zooplankton were not able to grow concomitantly with phytoplankton, as confirmed by the low zooplankton to phytoplankton biomass ratio (Z∶P). The observed planktonic changes under new foreseeable conditions that include an increase in UVR fluxes and P inputs might decouple the C cycle in inland oligotrophic lakes in the Mediterranean region.
Being Together in Time: Musical Experience and the Mirror Neuron System

THE DISCOVERY OF INDIVIDUAL "MIRROR NEURONS" in the macaque brain that fire both when an action is executed and when that same action is observed or heard, and of a homologous system in humans, is leading to an extraordinary conceptual shift in our understanding of perception-action mechanisms, human communication, and empathy. In a recent model of emotional responses to music (Molnar-Szakacs & Overy, 2006), we proposed that music is perceived not only as an auditory signal, but also as intentional, hierarchically organized sequences of expressive motor acts behind the signal; and that the human mirror neuron system allows for corepresentation and sharing of a musical experience between agent and listener. Here, we expand upon this model of Shared Affective Motion Experience (SAME) and discuss its implications for music therapy and special education.We hypothesize that imitation, synchronization, and shared experience may be key elements of successful work in these areas.
Statistics of turbulence in the energy-containing range of Taylor–Couette compared to canonical wall-bounded flows

Considering structure functions of the streamwise velocity component in a framework akin to the extended self-similarity hypothesis (ESS), de Silva et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 823, 2017, pp. 498–510) observed that remarkably the large-scale (energy-containing range) statistics in canonical wall-bounded flows exhibit universal behaviour. In the present study, we extend this universality, which was seen to encompass also flows at moderate Reynolds number, to Taylor–Couette flow. In doing so, we find that also the transversal structure function of the spanwise velocity component exhibits the same universal behaviour across all flow types considered. We further demonstrate that these observations are consistent with predictions developed based on an attached-eddy hypothesis. These considerations also yield a possible explanation for the efficacy of the ESS framework by showing that it relaxes the self-similarity assumption for the attached-eddy contributions. By taking the effect of streamwise alignment into account, the attached-eddy model predicts different behaviour for structure functions in the streamwise and in the spanwise directions and that this effect cancels in the ESS framework – both consistent with the data. Moreover, it is demonstrated here that also the additive constants, which were previously believed to be flow dependent, are indeed universal at least in turbulent boundary layers and pipe flow where high Reynolds number data are currently available.
Organizational Capital, Corporate Leadership, and Firm Dynamics

We argue that economists have studied the role of management from three perspectives: contingency theory (CT), an organization-centric empirical approach (OC), and a leader-centric empirical approach (LC). To reconcile these three perspectives, we augment a standard dynamic firm model with organizational capital, an intangible, slow-moving, productive asset that can be produced only with the direct input of the firm’s leadership and that is subject to an agency problem. We characterize the steady state of an economy with imperfect governance and show that it rationalizes key findings of CT, OC, and LC as well as generates a number of new predictions on performance, management practices, chief executive officer behavior and compensation, and governance.
Co-Tuning Virtual-Acoustic Performance Ecosystems: observations on the development of skill and style in the study of musician-instrument relationships

In this paper we report preliminary observations from an ongoing study into how musicians explore and adapt to the parameter space of a virtual-acoustic string bridge plate instrument. These observations inform (and are informed by) a wider approach to understanding the development of skill and style in interactions between musicians and musical instruments. We discuss a performance-driven ecosystemic approach to studying musical relationships, drawing on arguments from the literature which emphasise the need to go beyond simplistic notions of control and usability when assessing exploratory and performatory musical interactions. Lastly, we focus on processes of perceptual learning and co-tuning between musician and instrument, and how these activities may contribute to the emergence of personal style as a hallmark of skilful music-making. ABSTRACT This paper provides a sample of a L A TEX document for the NIME conference series. It conforms, somewhat loosely, to the formatting guidelines for ACM SIG Proceedings. It is an alternate style which produces a tighter-looking paper and was designed in response to concerns expressed, by authors, over page-budgets. It complements the document Author’s (Alternate) Guide to Preparing ACM SIG Proceedings Us- ing L A TEX 2 ✏ and BibTEX . This source ﬁle has been written with the intention of being compiled under L A TEX2 ✏ and BibTeX.Tomake best use of this sample document, run it through L A TEX and BibTeX, and compare this source code with your compiled PDF ﬁle. A compiled PDF version is available to help you with the ‘look and feel. ’ The paper submit- ted to the NIME conference must be stored in an A4-sized PDF ﬁle, so North Americans should take care not to inadvertently generate letter paper-sized PDF ﬁles. This paper template should prevent that from happening if the pdflatex program is used to generate the PDF ﬁle. The abstract should preferably be between 100 and 200 words.
Mass Transfer Kinetics of Osmotic Dehydration of Pineapple

Current study deals with the kinetics and mathematical modelling of osmotic dehydration of pineapple. Pineapple (Ananas comosus), 10 mm thick slices weighing 50 g each, was studied for the osmotic dehydration using hypertonic solutions of sucrose and fructose. The osmotic dehydration process was performed using three levels of temperature 40°C, 50°C and 60°C, three levels of osmotic solution concentration (40%, 50% and 60%) with sample to solution ratio maintained at 1:4, 1:5 and 1:6 respectively. After each interval of time, moisture loss and solid gain was recorded. It was found that moisture loss and solid gain increased with increase in osmotic temperature and osmotic solution concentration. The highest mass transfer was observed at concentration of 60% and temperature of 60°C. Three models (Handerson and Pabis model, Logarithmic model and Lewis model) were used to analyze osmotic dehydration data. Among the three models, Logarithmic model showed a best fit to the osmotic dehydration data with higher value of coefficient of determination (R2).
Contrasting effect of Saharan dust and UVR on autotrophic picoplankton in nearshore versus offshore waters of Mediterranean Sea

Autotrophic picoplankton (APP) is responsible for the vast majority of primary production in oligotrophic marine areas, such as the Alboran Sea. The increase in atmospheric dust deposition (e.g., from Sahara Desert) associated with global warming, together with the high UV radiation (UVR) on these ecosystems, may generate effects on APP hitherto unknown. We performed an observational study across the Alboran Sea to establish which factors control the abundance and distribution of APP, and we made a microcosm experiment in two distinct areas, nearshore and offshore, to predict the joint UVR × dust impact on APP at midterm scales. Our observational study showed that temperature (T) was the main factor explaining the APP distribution whereas total dissolved nitrogen positively correlated with APP abundance. Our experimental study revealed that Saharan dust inputs reduced or inverted the UVR damage on the photosynthetic quantum yield (ΦPSII) and picoplanktonic primary production (PPP) in the nearshore area but accentuated it in the offshore. This contrasting effect is partially explained by the nonphotochemical quenching, acting as a photorepair mechanism. Picoeukaryotes reflected the observed effects on the physiological and metabolic variables, and Synechococcus was the only picoprokaryotic group that showed a positive response under UVR × dust conditions. Our study highlights a dual sensitivity of nearshore versus offshore picoplankton to dust inputs and UVR fluxes, just at the time in which these two global‐change factors show their highest intensities and may recreate a potential future response of the microbial food web under global‐change conditions.
Perceived Stress in Cognitive Performance of Easy and Difficult Task in High and Low Neurotics

The current study aims at investigating stress related differences during processing of easy and difficult tasks in high and low neurotics. To examine this, 22 high and 22 low neurotic participants were selected among 400 screened people based on 21 item Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). They performed single and dual tasks and subsequently filled self-designed perceived stress survey. An analyses of variance (ANOVA) tests with repeated measures were conducted to analyse the results. The results showed that while high and low neurotics did not differ on easy tasks regarding performance and perceived stress level, high neurotics were considerably slower with greater perceived stress level than low neurotics on difficult tasks.
Adaptive Geometric Tessellation for 3 D Reconstruction of Anisotropically Developing Cells in Multilayer Tissues

The need for quantification of cell growth patterns in a multilayer, multi-cellular tissue necessitates the development of a 3D reconstruction technique that can estimate 3D shapes and sizes of individual cells from Confocal Microscopy (CLSM) image slices. However, the current methods of 3D reconstruction using CLSM imaging require large number of image slices per cell. But, in case of Live Cell Imaging of an actively developing tissue, large depth resolution is not feasible in order to avoid damage to cells from prolonged exposure to laser radiation. In the present work, we have proposed an anisotropic Voronoi tessellation based 3D reconstruction framework for a tightly packed multilayer tissue with extreme z-sparsity (2–4 slices/cell) and wide range of cell shapes and sizes. The proposed method, named as the ‘Adaptive Quadratic Voronoi Tessellation’ (AQVT), is capable of handling both the sparsity problem and the non-uniformity in cell shapes by estimating the tessellation parameters for each cell from the sparse data-points on its boundaries. We have tested the proposed 3D reconstruction method on time-lapse CLSM image stacks of the Arabidopsis Shoot Apical Meristem (SAM) and have shown that the AQVT based reconstruction method can correctly estimate the 3D shapes of a large number of SAM cells. Citation: Chakraborty A, Perales MM, Reddy GV, Roy-Chowdhury AK (2013) Adaptive Geometric Tessellation or 3D Reconstruction of Anisotropically Developing Cells in Multilayer Tissues from Sparse Volumetric Microscopy Images. PLoS ONE 8(8): e67202. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0067202 Editor: Roeland M.H. Merks, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) & Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology, Netherlands Received June 19, 2012; Accepted May 17, 2013; Published August 5, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Chakraborty et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work is funded by National Science Foundation grant IIS-0712253 to Amit Roy-Chowdhury and NSF IOS-1147250 to Venugopala Gonehal Reddy. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: amitrc@ee.ucr. edu
Training Deep Reactive Policies for Probabilistic Planning Problems

State-of-the-art probabilistic planners typically apply look- ahead search and reasoning at each step to make a decision. While this approach can enable high-quality decisions, it can be computationally expensive for problems that require fast decision making. In this paper, we investigate the potential for deep learning to replace search by fast reactive policies. We focus on supervised learning of deep reactive policies for probabilistic planning problems described in RDDL. A key challenge is to explore the large design space of network architectures and training methods, which was critical to prior deep learning successes. We investigate a number of choices in this space and conduct experiments across a set of benchmark problems. Our results show that effective deep reactive policies can be learned for many benchmark problems and that leveraging the planning problem description to define the network structure can be beneficial.
The Early to Middle Triassic continental–marine transition of NW Bulgaria: sedimentology, palynology and sequence stratigraphy

Abstract Sedimentary facies and cycles of the Triassic continental–marine transition of NW Bulgaria are documented in detail from reference sections along the Iskar river gorge between the villages of Tserovo and Opletnya. The depositional environments evolved from anastomosing and meandering river systems in the Petrohan Terrigenous Group to mixed fluvial and tidal settings in the Svidol Formation, and to peritidal and shallow-marine conditions in the Opletnya Member of the Mogila Formation. For the first time, the palynostratigraphic data presented here allow for dating the transitional interval and for the precise identification of a major sequence boundary between the Petrohan Terrigenous Group and the Svidol Formation (Iskar Carbonate Group). This boundary most probably corresponds to the major sequence boundary Ol4 occurring in the upper Olenekian of the Tethyan realm and thus enables interregional correlation. The identification of regionally traceable sequence boundaries based on biostratigraphic age control is a first step towards a more accurate stratigraphic correlation and palaeogeographic interpretation of the Early to early Middle Triassic in NW Bulgaria.
Gender-Specific Associations between Personality Traits, Physical Activity, and Body Size Dissatisfaction.

A recently validated trait personality framework is the HEXACO (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience). Little is yet known about how the HEXACO personality dimensions and its subsets – particularly the dimension of honesty-humility – relates to physical activity and body size dissatisfaction as a function of gender. This study tests these relations across men and women through a proposed path model wherein personality and physical activity relate indirectly through lower body size dissatisfaction and perceived fitness in 315 university students. Results pertaining to honesty-humility revealed that women were higher in honesty-humility, emotionality, and conscientiousness. Women with higher honesty-humility (notably sincerity) were prone to lower body size dissatisfaction whereas lower levels of modesty predicted physical activity levels in men. The proposed path model had an excellent fit in both men and women although significant pathways were more prevalent in women than in men. The role of body size dissatisfaction seems to be more salient in explaining the relationship between the HEXACO personality dimensions and perceived fitness and physical activity in women than men. We recommend that practitioners particularly note the vulnerability of women university students who are high in emotionality and low in honesty-humility (especially sincerity) and agreeableness.
Chapter 2 Theory and Design of Conjoint Studies ( Ratings Based Methods ) 2

The basic principles of designing a marketing research study will apply to any study that uses conjoint analysis. Differences arise in the conceptual foundations. The conceptual model of conjoint analysis is quite straightforward; it postulates that the utility of a multi-attributed item can be decomposed into specific contributions of each attribute and possibly their interactions. The approach is easy to implement if the number of attributes is small. But, problems arise in most practical problems because of the large number of possible hypothetical alternatives for a given problem. In general, only a subset of possible alternatives is chosen for the study. Experimental design methods exist for selecting such subsets. Over the years, however, researchers have developed various alternative approaches for implementing a conjoint analysis project. Basically, these approaches differ in the way preferences are elicited from respondents for a set of hypothetical choice alternatives. (These include the use of self-explicated data, adaptive data collection, and componential segmentation.) Each data collection approach leads to a corresponding approach to analyzing the data collected. This chapter first reviews the socalled standard or traditional approach in which a subset of full profiles of choice alternatives are rated by a respondent and the data are analyzed for each individual using regression analysis. Extensions to ranked data will be briefly discussed. This chapter then presents and compares an array of alternative parameter estimation approaches. In particular, these approaches have arisen to handle the problem of large numbers of attributes in an applied situation. Examples are provided to illustrate the different approaches. This chapter also covers the issues of stimulus presentation for data collection, reliability and validity of data. Naturally, the issues of validity are linked to the specific conjoint model used and how it is estimated (the next chapter covers the corresponding analysis methods).
Estimating large-scale structures in wall turbulence using linear models

A dynamical systems approach is used to devise a linear estimation tool for channel flow at a friction Reynolds number of $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}=1000$ . The estimator uses time-resolved velocity measurements at a single wall-normal location to estimate the velocity field at other wall-normal locations (the data coming from direct numerical simulations). The estimation tool builds on the work of McKeon & Sharma (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 658, 2010, pp. 336–382) by using a Navier–Stokes-based linear model and treating any nonlinear terms as unknown forcings to an otherwise linear system. In this way nonlinearities are not ignored, but instead treated as an unknown model input. It is shown that, while the linear estimator qualitatively reproduces large-scale flow features, it tends to overpredict the amplitude of velocity fluctuations – particularly for structures that are long in the streamwise direction and thin in the spanwise direction. An alternative linear model is therefore formed in which a simple eddy viscosity is used to model the influence of the small-scale turbulent fluctuations on the large scales of interest. This modification improves the estimator performance significantly. Importantly, as well as improving the performance of the estimator, the linear model with eddy viscosity is also able to predict with reasonable accuracy the range of wavenumber pairs and the range of wall-normal heights over which the estimator will perform well.
Occult hepatitis B virus infection in Egyptian hemodialysis patients with or without hepatitis C virus infection

correspondence: nahed Ismail Department of Pathology and Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Meharry Medical college, 1005 Dr D. B. Todd Blvd, nashville, Tn, UsA Tel +1 615 327 6364 Fax +1 615 327 6409 email nismail@mmc.edu Abstract: Hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections are frequent in patients with end-stage renal disease who are on maintenance hemodialysis. There are limited data about the prevalence of occult HBV infection in patients on long-term hemodialysis. Occult HBV is defined as positive HBV DNA in the blood in the absence of hepatitis B surface antigen in the serum. In this study, we determined the prevalence of occult HBV in hemodialysis patients with or without HCV infection. The study included 116 patients with end-stage renal disease on chronic hemodialysis, of whom 64 patients were HCV RNA positive (Group 1), and 52 were HCV RNA negative (Group 2). We found that four of 64 (6.3%) hemodialysis patients with HCV infection (Group 1) had occult HBV, while only two of 52 (3.8%) hemodialysis patients without HCV (Group 2) had occult HBV. We then examined whether gender-matched hemodialysis patients with positive HBV DNA in the two hemodialysis groups differed in specific parameters, ie, age, degree of liver dysfunction, and presence of coinfection with schistosomiasis, a common parasitic infection of the liver. We found no significant difference between the groups having positive HBV DNA with regard to serum levels of liver enzymes, aspartate transaminase, albumin, and hepatitis B core antigen (P . 0.05). However, we detected significantly higher levels of alanine transaminase, a prolonged duration of hemodialysis, and higher levels of schistosomal antibodies in Group 1 than in Group 2. Interestingly, we found that the presence of schistosomal antibodies, history of past blood transfusion, and longer hemodialysis duration could distinguish patients with occult HBV infection from those with HBV DNA negative infection in hemodialysis patients. In conclusion, the prevalence of occult HBV in chronic hemodialysis patients is low, and does not significantly differ between hemodialysis patients with or without HCV coinfection.