Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Growth, hatch size and maturation in a southern population of the loliginid squid Loliolus noctiluca

Age, growth and cost of reproduction were examined for the small near-shore loliginid squid Loliolus noctiluca in Tasmanian waters, near the southern limit of its distribution. The effects of several factors on hatch size were also evaluated by comparing the statolith natal ring size (NR) from individuals collected in different locations, seasons and years. The life cycle of L. noctiluca was less than six months. July-hatched females grew faster than their May-hatched counterparts, indicating a faster growth in winter-hatched compared with autumn-hatched individuals. There was considerable variation in NRs as function of location, season, year and sex, with females displaying NRs considerably larger than males in any location and year. Immature and maturing females displayed poorer body condition than mature counterparts, suggesting that gonad growth does not affect the mantle or fin growth. A good condition was maintained also in spent individuals indicating that L. noctiluca continued to invest in somatic organs throughout the spawning period. A reproductive strategy closer to ‘multiple spawning’, than to ‘single spawning’ was proposed for this species. Loliolus noctiluca was used as a model to explore the possible effects of climate change on near-shore loliginid populations.
Management of the palm Astrocaryum chambira Burret (Arecaceae) in northwest Amazon

We studied the management of the fiber-producing chambira palm Astrocaryum chambira by indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon. Between 2009 and 2012, we visited four communities and two marketing centers, where we interviewed 12 people. In addition, we specifically observed A. chambira harvesting, processing, and commercialization; studied palm populations at five localities; measured leaf production rate; and integrated secondary data. At least 21 aboriginal groups in the Colombian Amazon use chambira fiber. The palm grows in association with human communities, and it has been widely used and managed in past agroforestry systems. The fiber is obtained from the unexpanded leaves of juvenile or adult palms, and harvesting is often unsustainable because of overharvesting acaulescent palms or of cutting down adult palms. This is leading to a depletion of palm population. Annual leaf production rate was 1.59-2.89 leaves/palm year−1, which is lower than that reported in other studies. Based in our results, we recommended a harvest of 1 leaf/palm year−1 in acaulescent palms, and 1-2 leaves/palm year−1 in stemmed palms. Chambira-derived products are mostly handicrafts for marketing, and their trade represents 40%-100% of artisan household cash income. Improving the management of chambira palms requires the introduction of non-destructive harvest techniques and a wider use of the palm in agroforestry systems. An analysis of traditional management practices and of the role of chambira among Amerindian people indicates that A. chambira was an incipient domesticate at the time of the European conquest.
Effects & Symptoms of the Harmonics of the Diode Rectifier in the Power Quality Issues

The paper presents that significant effects and symptoms of the voltage and current harmonics of the single phase diode bridge rectifier have negative impacts in the power quality issues comprising on the uncertainties, pure sine wave deformations, critical symptoms and individual contributions of the various order of the harmonics. In this paper, a supportive performance parameters of the full bridge diode rectifier has been assessed by a Fourier series in a common platform and open source for the practical applications
Fast Identification of Ancillary Service Locations for Improving Hopf Bifurcation Margin Under Uncertainties

Increasing penetration of renewable energy is posing challenges to stable operation of the power system. An important stability consideration is the small signal stability, which is characterized by Hopf bifurcation. The system operator can use ancillary services to maintain sufficient Hopf bifurcation margin to ensure stability. This work proposes a method to identify the optimum locations for ancillary services to improve Hopf bifurcation margin. The forecast uncertainties related to load and renewable based generation has been handled using boundary power flow based eigenvalue analysis. Simulation studies were performed on WSCC 9 bus system and New England 39 bus system. The accuracy of proposed method is proved by comparing the result with Monte-Carlo method.
Growth rates and productivity of Cladonia arbuscula and Cladonia impexa on the Sands of Forvie, Scotland

Cladonia arbuscula (Walk.) Rabenh. and C. impexa Harm, were found to have annual growth rates of 4.6 mm and 5.1 mm respectively. These species together contribute about 470 kg/ha per annum of dry matter in a Calluna–Empetrum dry heath community.
Discovering Collaboration: Unveiling Slow, Distributed Scanners based on Common Header Field Patterns

To compromise a computer, it is first necessary to discover which hosts are active and which services they run. This reconnaissance is typically accomplished through port scanning. Defense systems monitor for these unsolicited packets and raise an alarm if a predefined threshold is exceeded. To remain undetected, adversaries can either slow down the scan, and/or distribute it over multiple hosts. With each source below the threshold, the combination of all may still complete the scan efficiently. It is especially this group that is of concern: with enough resources and knowledge to execute such a coordinated activity, they will pose a more potent threat than the noisy "script kiddie". Correlating which out of 4 billion IPs potentially collaborate is however a challenging task, hence today’s systems do not consider coordination beyond basic subnet aggregation.In this paper, we propose a method to identify and fingerprint distributed scanners based on commonalities in header fields, which are an artifact of the way fast port scanning software is built. We demonstrate that this method can effectively locate groups, and based on the monitoring logs we report on a number of new groups and tools, which have previously not been reported in the academic literature.Fingerprints generated can ultimately be used as Indicators of Compromise to detect and mitigate scanning behavior in order to deny adversaries the possibility to learn about weaknesses of a system.
Further morphological and molecular studies of driftwood hoppers (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Talitridae) from Mediterranean/north-east Atlantic coastlines

An unknown talitrid was discovered in 2011 in the Swale, UK, living in driftwood. Sequencing of multiple mitochondrial and nuclear genes (cytochrome oxidase I, 18S rDNA and 28S rDNA) confirms that the unknown taxon was close to Orchestia mediterranea A. Costa 1857. The driftwood in which it was found was of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), probably imported from North America. Relative growth methods allow us to reject the null hypothesis that the unknown taxon was a juvenile Orchestia mediterranea. This is because the unknown taxon initiates sexual maturation at an earlier moult number (neoteny) and is predicted to reach terminal moult stages at a much smaller size (dwarfism) than its closest relative O. mediterranea. Both molecular and morphological data confirm that the unknown taxon from the Swale, UK, is a new driftwood specialist taxon, distantly related to the driftwood specialist genus Macarorchestia. Additional data for body length and sex ratios are presented for Macarorchestia. In addition, relative growth methods have shown that the driftwood species Orchestia microphtalma Amanieu and Salvat 1964 is closer to the genus Macarorchestia rather than to the wrack generalist one, Orchestia. This evidence is in line with the molecular results that do not cluster morphologically defined species of Orchestia monophyletically.
Measurement and Impact Assessment of Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields in Dayalbagh Educational Institute

The use of mobile communication services has increased so much that it has benefited our lifestyle by offering comfort in communications and being connected to nearby and distant locations. As a result of the ubiquitous nature of electromagnetic radiation (emitting from mobile phone Base Trans-receiver Stations), no one can escape from electromagnetic radiation whether he/she is a user of these services or not. However, it has raised many questions about possible health effects for the population exposed to electromagnetic radiation. In this study, the electric field, magnetic field, and power density are measured using SRM-3006 in Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra. After the measurement, these readings are compared with the general public exposure guidelines and limits established by the International Commission on Non-Ionized Radiation Protection and the government of India. Measured values are analyzed and discussed to know their correlation with human health.
A regeneração de uma floresta tropical montana após corte e queima (São Paulo - Brasil)

Slash-and-burn has been the main kind of disturbance in the Atlantic montane forest. We analyzed the change in vegetation structure, woody species composition, species richness and diversity and plant guild composition after the cutting and burning of a mature forest. According to our results the rate of vegetation change is related to the forest attribute analyzed. In the first moment, the disturbed forest had the species richness and diversity restored, followed by plant guild composition, species composition and finally its physical structure. A forty year old forest site showed between 38.8% and 117.1% of the values recorded in the mature site, suggesting that this forest regenerates following patterans observed in other tropical forests. In addition to disturbance intensity, this montane forest has particular features as the average size of diaspores and tree species richness, which are thought to provide this forest higher resilience. Changes in woody species composition can be described by successional models formed by three or four stages, depending on the disturbance intensity. Models are characterized by pioneer species of Imperata, Pteridium, Baccharis, Tibouchina and Alchornea genera.
Ensemble methods for strongly imbalanced data: bankruptcy prediction

Application of the machine learning methods on strongly imbalanced datasets is a challenging task in the field of data processing. Imbalanced learning is part of many real-world applications and it is a very vivid research area. Moreover, bankruptcy prediction, even though it is one of the most popular prediction applications, is still not successfully solved. In this paper, we present a comparison of several ensemble machine learning methods applied on a recently acquired dataset of small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the Slovak Republic. The highest achieved prediction accuracy of the proposed classification models, measured by geometric mean, is in some cases almost 100%. Results are validated on three datasets from different business areas, namely agriculture, construction and retails.
Interference-Aware Memory Allocation for Real-Time Multi-Core Systems

Computing tight upper bounds for the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) at design-time is a crucial step when developing hard real-time software. For multi-core processors, however, timing interference between processor cores is a major problem, which may lead to overestimated WCET bounds. This work investigates possible solutions to reduce interference costs using synchronization-based interference models and appropriate memory allocation schemes. An interference-aware Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation of the memory allocation problem is presented to optimally map the variables of parallel programs to a set of distributed memory segments. The approach uses a generic model of the hardware platform, such that it applies to a wide range of multi-core targets, including complex Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnects. A case study with six different platform configurations shows that interference costs can be bounded more tightly using the proposed interference model. An evaluation of the allocation scheme furthermore shows that the optimization approach can reduce interference costs by up to 49%.
Human Emotion Recognition using Acoustic Features with Optimized Feature Selection and Fusion Techniques

Human Emotion Recognition (HER) system is used for automatic recognition of human emotional states and take necessary actions based on negative emotions. This process finds its applications in Driver assistant systems, Air - pilot cockpit systems, Call centers, etc. The HER system proposed in this paper recognizes, classifies and validates different human emotions from the acoustic signal using several classifiers over standard speech corpus. Though many of the Acoustic features carry emotional information, training the machine with all the features may overfit the model or reduce the accuracy. To overcome this problem optimized selection of fused features is to be performed. This paper discusses optimized methods for fusion and feature selection to identify human emotional states through speech signals. The feature fusion results in the computation convolution of the HER system due to high dimensional correlated speech feature set. To overcome this and enhance the recognition rate feature selection technique is used. To pre dict emotional categories, different classifiers are considered viz. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and the results are validate d on standard corpus viz. Emo-DB, SES, IEMOCAP, IITKGP-SESC, and IITKGP-SEHSC. SVM has outperformed over other classifiers and is best trained on the IITKGP-SEHSC corpus.
Genetic investigation of salt reception in Drosophila melanogaster

We have used mutants defective in gustatory behavior to investigate the neural basis of salt perception in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Salts elicit responses from two sensory neurons, L1 and L2, in each taste sensillum. Results from competition tests, selective proteoloysis, and mutant studies lead us to speculate that L1 possesses two sites (A and B) for the detection of monovalent ions. The A site accepts Na+ ions alone, while the B site is less selective responding to Na+, K+, and Li+. The loss of the A-mediated response in the mutant gustE leads to a concomitant reduction in its behavioral attraction to NaCl. This suggests that the L1 neuron signals attraction to low concentrations of NaCl. This inference is supported by examining the kinetics of behavioral and electrophysiological responses in the wild type and in mutants that show enhanced attraction to salts.Key words: gustatory mutants, Drosophila, salt sites, preference test.
Morphology versus molecules: the phylogenetic relationships of Sepsidae (Diptera: Cyclorrhapha) based on morphology and DNA sequence data from ten genes

The Sepsidae is, with approximately 300 described species, a relatively small family of cyclorrhaphan flies whose behaviour, morphology, and development have been extensively studied. However, currently the only available tree for Sepsidae is more than 10 years old and was based entirely on morphological characters. Here, we present the results of parsimony and Bayesian analyses based on 75 species, ten genes, and morphology. Parsimony and Bayesian analyses produce largely congruent and well‐supported topologies regardless of whether indels are coded as 5th character states, as missing values, or all sites with indels are removed. The tree confirms the monophyly of Sepsidae and identifies the Ropalomeridae as its sister group. With regard to higher‐level relationships, we identify widespread conflict between the morphological and the DNA sequence data. The proposed hypothesis based on both partitions largely reflects the signal in the molecular data. Particularly surprising is the rejection of two relationship hypotheses with strong morphological support, namely the sister group relationship between Orygma and the remaining Sepsidae and the monophyly of the Sepsis species group. Our partitioned Bremer support (PBS) analyses imply that indel coding has a stronger effect on the relative performance of individual gene partitions than the exclusion of alignment‐ambiguous sequences or the location of a gene on the mitochondrial or nuclear genome. However, these analyses also reveal unexpectedly strong fluctuations in PBS values given that indel treatment has only a minor effect on tree topology and jacknife support. These unexpected fluctuations highlight the need for a comparative study across multiple data sets that investigates the influence of conflict and indel treatment on PBS values.
Use of a box to prevent agonistic behavior after regrouping in isolated and non‐isolated pigs

The effects of a box in the pen on the agonistic behavior of pigs after regrouping was determined in 24 pigs from five litters that were kept in three pens after weaning. For the experiment, the pigs were allocated to six pens with four animals each and kept with their peers for 2 weeks. The lightest pig from each pen was removed and isolated for 2 weeks, and then regrouped with its original peers. At the time of regrouping, half of the pens were equipped with the box. The number and duration of agonistic behavior events were particularly large and long in the pen without a box on the first day after regrouping, and for the isolated pig on the first day (all P < 0.05). The number of times the box was accessed was large for the isolated pig on the first day after regrouping (P < 0.01). The number of agonistic behavior events and the times the box was accessed was correlated on the first day after regrouping (rs = 0.79, P < 0.01). The number of agonistic behavior events on the first day after regrouping was greater in the pens without a box than in the pens with a box (P < 0.01). It was suggested that the box had the effect of reducing agonistic behavior after regrouping.
TagAlong: Efficient Integration of Battery-free Sensor Tags in Standard Wireless Networks

New battery-free sensor tags that interoperate with unmodified standard IoT devices can extend a sensor network’s capabilities in a scalable and cost-effective manner. The tags achieve battery-free operation through backscatter-related techniques, while the standard IoT devices can provide the necessary unmodulated carrier, avoiding additional dedicated infrastructure. However, this approach presents multiple challenges: It requires coordination between nodes transmitting, receiving and generating carrier, adds extra latency and energy consumption to already constrained devices, and increases interference and contention in shared spectrum. We present TagAlong, a medium access mechanism for interoperable sensor tags that, besides coordinating, optimizes the use of carrier generators, minimizing the disruption caused to the operation of the regular nodes. We accomplish this by parallelizing communications with battery-free tags when possible, sharing carriers for multiple tags concurrently and synchronizing communications with tags that share carrier generators. We demonstrate the feasibility of TagAlong in a testbed deployment. In our evaluation we find that it can reduce the duration of the tags’ schedule by 60% while improving the energy and spectrum usage by 30% when compared to sequential interrogation with no difference in reliability.
Galhas e deformações em jambu (Spilanthes oleraceae)causadas por Tecaphora spilanthes (Ustilaginales)

The herbaceous Asteraceae known by the name jambu and other common names is native to the Amazon region has been used and cultivated for culinary, medicinal, insecticidal and ornamental purposes. It is also used as spice for local food in Belem city, Para State. The medicinal value of this plant has been known and it has been studied in cultivated plants in Botucatu county, Sao Paulo State. This is the first report of a smut (Tecaphora spilanthes Freire & Vanky) affetcting this plant in the Sao Paulo State. The smut causes losses and also reduced the quality of the plants.
La invalidez del Factor de Impacto como indicador del impacto de las revistas científicas latinoamericanas

The invalidity of the Impact Factor as indicator of the impact of Latin American scientific journals. Use of the Impact Factor is currently being discarded in industrialized countries where, to name one case, up to 40% of the articles published in Nature are never cited, despite the high Impact Factor of that journal. However, it is still used in Latin America to evaluate journals and authors, potentially influencing who are given positions and who receives funding. To find out how valid the Impact Factor is for Latin American research, I used the database BINABITROP to see how much of the relevant literature was used to measure impact. I found that the Science Citation Index (SCI) excluded 96% of the relevant literature when measuring the impact of bio- logical articles about Costa Rica for the studied year (2011). Therefore, the impact of Latin American science is unknown and the Impact Factor should not be used to assess how often a journal, institution or author are cited. Rev. Biol. Trop. 62 (1): 9-13. Epub 2014 March 01.
The effect of perceived trust in technology, trust in the bank and perceived risk on customer adoption of mobile banking

One of the greatest challenges for the success of mobile banking is to attract the user's intention to use it. Based on the literature, this study investigated the effect of three main factors (Perceived risk, perceived trust in the provider and perceived trust in technology) that affect the behavioral intention to use mobile banking. The data collected by 113 participants via an online questionnaire. The collected data analyzed using AMOS 18 to measure the research hypotheses. The finding illustrates that the highest influence on the user's intention to use mobile banking is perceived trust in bank provider which shows the t value of 18.7 and P-value <0.001 for hypothesis H2. Perceived risk takes the second place in influencing intention to use mobile banking with t value 13.3 and P-value <0.001. Perceived trust in technology with a t value of 2.6 and P-value < 0.05 has the lowers influence on behavioral intention to use mobile banking. Thus, the results illustrate that mobile banking users need to trust the service provider first as the initial trust is obvious which will be the first step to use the service or not. Then the user will think about how risky it is using the service. Finally, the user needs to know if the technology he/she is using is trustworthy or not. This study limited to the type of perceived risk, future studies might investigate more types of the perceived risk of using mobile banking.
Overwinter variation in glucosinolate content of green tissue of rape (Brassica napus) in response to grazing by wild rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)

The effects of different rabbit grazing regimes on the concentration and relative amounts of individual glucosinolates were studied overwinter in the green tissue of two oilseed rape cultivars (Bienvenu, a single-low type, and Ariana, a double-low type) and two forage rape cultivars (Hobson and Bonar). Grazing significantly increased total glucosinolate content. Within this general increase, the proportion of aliphiatic glucosinolates was reduced whereas the proportion of both indole and phenylethyl glucosinolates increased. Possible reasons for such changes are discussed.