Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alternative Particle Formation Pathways in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific's Biological Carbon Pump

A fraction of organic carbon produced in the oceans by phytoplankton sinks storing 5–15 gigatonnes of carbon annually in the ocean interior. The accepted paradigm is that rapid aggregation of phytoplankton cells occurs, forming large, fresh particles which sink quickly; this concept is incorporated into ecosystem models used to predict the future climate. Here we demonstrate a slower, less efficient export pathway in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific. Lipid biomarkers suggest that the large, fast‐sinking particles found beneath the mixed layer are compositionally distinct from those found in the mixed layer and thus not directly and efficiently formed from phytoplankton cells. We postulate that they are formed from the in situ aggregation of smaller, slow‐sinking particles over time in the mixed layer itself. This export pathway is likely widespread where smaller phytoplankton species dominate. Its lack of representation in biogeochemical models suggests that they may be currently overestimating the ability of the oceans to store carbon if large, fast‐sinking, labile particles dominate simulated particle export.
A novel seeding method based on spatial sliding volume filter for neuron reconstruction

Automatic neuron reconstruction is one of the foremost challenging and important problem in the field of neuroscience. However, none of the prevalent algorithms can automatically reconstruct full anatomy structure. All of these make it is essential of developing new method for the tracing task. This paper introduced a novel seeding method for reconstructing neuron structures from 3-D microscopy images stacks. The protocol was initialized with a set of seeds which were detected by our proposed Sliding Volume Filter. And then the open curve snake was applied to the detected seeds to reconstruct the full structural of neuron cells. Results showed the proposed method exhibited excellent performance with its accuracy compared with traditional method. It is worth noting that the seeding method can clearly benefit for 3-D neuron fiber detection and reconstruction.
Convergent series observer design for a class of nonlinear systems

This paper deals with convergence analysis for power series solutions to a partial differential equation for nonlinear observer design with linear observer error dynamics. This power series solution is used to design the gain matrix for a Luenberger-like observer for nonlinear systems. The conditions are identified to guarantee the convergence of the series in l2. The linearized model of the original system is assumed to be anti-stable at the origin for the convenience of presentation. The convergent conditions can provide a guideline for nonlinear observer design with a truncated series for the observer gain.
Predictors of Language Service Availability in U.S. Hospitals

BACKGROUND Hispanics comprise 17% of the total U.S. population, surpassing African-Americans as the largest minority group. Linguistically, almost 60 million people speak a language other than English. This language diversity can create barriers and additional burden and risk when seeking health services. Patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) for example, have been shown to experience a disproportionate risk of poor health outcomes, making the provision of Language Services (LS) in healthcare facilities critical. Research on the determinants of LS adoption has focused more on overall cultural competence and internal managerial decision-making than on measuring LS adoption as a process outcome influenced by contextual or external factors. The current investigation examines the relationship between state policy, service area factors, and hospital characteristics on hospital LS adoption. METHODS We employ a cross-sectional analysis of survey data from a national sample of hospitals in the American Hospital Association (AHA) database for 2011 (N= 4876) to analyze hospital characteristics and outcomes, augmented with additional population data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate language diversity in the hospital service area. Additional data from the National Health Law Program (NHeLP) facilitated the state level Medicaid reimbursement factor. RESULTS Only 64% of hospitals offered LS. Hospitals that adopted LS were more likely to be not-for-profit, in areas with higher than average language diversity, larger, and urban. Hospitals in above average language diverse counties had more than 2-fold greater odds of adopting LS than less language diverse areas [Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR): 2.26, P< 0.01]. Further, hospitals with a strategic orientation toward diversity had nearly 2-fold greater odds of adopting LS (AOR: 1.90, P< 0.001). CONCLUSION Our findings support the importance of structural and contextual factors as they relate to healthcare delivery. Healthcare organizations must address the needs of the population they serve and align their efforts internally. Current financial incentives do not appear to influence adoption of LS, nor do Medicaid reimbursement funds, thus suggesting that further alignment of incentives. Organizational and system level factors have a place in disparities research and warrant further analysis; additional spatial methods could enhance our understanding of population factors critical to system-level health services research.
Catalytically-active complex of HIV-1 integrase with a viral DNA substrate binds anti-integrase drugs

HIV-1 integration into the host cell genome is a multistep process catalyzed by the virally-encoded integrase (IN) protein. In view of the difficulty of obtaining a stable DNA-bound IN at high concentration as required for structure determination, we selected IN–DNA complexes that form disulfide linkages between 5′-thiolated DNA and several single mutations to cysteine around the catalytic site of IN. Mild reducing conditions allowed for selection of the most thermodynamically-stable disulfide-linked species. The most stable complexes induce tetramer formation of IN, as happens during the physiological integration reaction, and are able to catalyze the strand transfer step of retroviral integration. One of these complexes also binds strand-transfer inhibitors of HIV antiviral drugs, making it uniquely valuable among the mutants of this set for understanding portions of the integration reaction. This novel complex may help define substrate interactions and delineate the mechanism of action of known integration inhibitors.
A Point of View on New Education for Smart Citizenship

Smart cities and intelligent communities have an ever-growing demand for specialized smart services, applications, and research-driven innovation. Knowledge of users’ proﬁles, behavior, and preferences are a potentially dangerous side effect of smart services. Citizens are usually not aware of the knowledge bases generated by the IT services they use: this dimension of the contemporary and digital era sheds new light on the elements concerning the concept of citizenship itself, as it affects dimensions like freedom and privacy. This paper addresses this issue from an education system perspective, and advances a non-technical methodology for being aware and recognizing knowledge bases generated by user-service interaction. Starting from narratives, developed in natural language by unskilled smart service users about their experience, the proposed method advances an original methodology, which is identiﬁed in the conceptual models derived from these narratives, a bridge towards a deeper understanding of the informative implications of their behavior. The proposal; which is iterative and scalable; has been tested on the ﬁeld and some examples of lesson contents are presented and discussed.
Please Scroll down for Article Journal of New Music Research a Web-based Game for Collecting Music Metadata a Web-based Game for Collecting Music Metadata

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Abstract We have designed a web-based game, MajorMiner, that makes collecting descriptions of musical excerpts fun, easy, useful, and objective. Participants describe 10 second clips of songs and score points when their descriptions match those of other participants. The rules were designed to encourage players to be thorough and the clip length was chosen to make judgments objective and specific. To analyse the data, we measured the degree to which binary classifiers could be trained to spot popular tags. We also compared the performance of clip classifiers trained with MajorMiner's tag data to those trained with social tag data from a popular website. On the top 25 tags from each source, MajorMiner's tags were classified correctly 67.2% of the time, while the social tags were classified correctly 62.6% of the time.
Oxalate content of different drinkable dilutions of tea infusions after different brewing times.

BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to determine the effect of different brewing times and diluting on oxalate content of loose-packed black teas consumed in Tabriz, Iran. METHODS The oxalate content of black teas after brewing for 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 minutes was measured in triplicate by enzymatic assay. In order to attain the most acceptable dilution of tea infusions, tea samples which were brewed for 15, 30 and 60 minutes were diluted two (120 ml), three (80 ml) and four (60 ml) times respectively. RESULTS There was a stepwise increase in oxalate concentrations associated with increased brewing times (P< 0.001) with oxalate contents ranging from 4.4 mg/240 ml for the 5 min to 6.3 mg/240 ml for 60 min brewing times, respectively. There were significant differences between the mean oxalate content of different dilutions after brewing for 15, 30 and 60 minutes (P< 0.001). CONCLUSION The oxalate content of Iranian consumed black tea after different brewing times and different dilution was below the recommended levels. Therefore, it seems that consumption of black tea several times per day would not pose significant health risk in kidney stone patients and susceptible individuals.
Cyclostationarity-based doppler spread estimation in mobile fading channels

The Doppler spread, or equivalently, the mobile speed, is a measure of the spectral dispersion of mobile fading channel. Accurate estimation of the mobile speed is of importance in wireless mobile applications which require the knowledge of the rate of channel variations. This paper exploits the inherent cyclostationarity of linearly modulated signals, transmitted through fading channels, to design robust blind and data-aided mobile speed estimators. Two categories of cyclic-correlation and cyclic-spectrum-based methods are developed. Extension to space-time speed estimation at the base station in macrocells is also provided. In comparison with the existing methods, the new estimators can be used without any need for pilot tones, and are robust to additive stationary noise or interference of any color or distribution. Unlike the conventional multi-antenna based method, the proposed space-time speed estimator does not assume the receiver noise to be spatially white. We also devised a suboptimal training sequence for pilot-symbol assisted methods, to reduce the estimation error. The performances of the proposed estimators are illustrated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations.
Linear Coding of Voice Onset Time

Voice onset time (VOT) provides an important auditory cue for recognizing spoken consonant-vowel syllables. Although changes in the neuromagnetic response to consonant-vowel syllables with different VOT have been examined, such experiments have only manipulated VOT with respect to voicing. We utilized the characteristics of a previously developed asymmetric VOT continuum [Liederman, J., Frye, R. E. , McGraw Fisher, J., Greenwood, K. , & Alexander, R. A temporally dynamic contextual effect that disrupts voice onset time discrimination of rapidly successive stimuli. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12, 380386, 2005] to determine if changes in the prominent M100 neuromagnetic response were linearly modulated by VOT. Eight right-handed, English-speaking, normally developing participants performed a VOT discrimination task during a whole-head neuromagnetic recording. The M100 was identified in the gradiometers overlying the right and left temporal cortices and single dipoles were fit to each M100 waveform. A repeated measures analysis of variance with post hoc contrast test for linear trend was used to determine whether characteristics of the M100 were linearly modulated by VOT. The morphology of the M100 gradiometer waveform and the peak latency of the dipole waveform were linearly modulated by VOT. This modulation was much greater in the left, as compared to the right, hemisphere. The M100 dipole moved in a linear fashion as VOT increased in both hemispheres, but along different axes in each hemisphere. This study suggests that VOT may linearly modulate characteristics of the M100, predominately in the left hemisphere, and suggests that the VOT of consonant-vowel syllables, instead of, or in addition to, voicing, should be examined in future experiments.
Using the generalised Viterbi algorithm to achieve a highly effective stegosystem for images

The HUGO project, published at 2010, can be considered as one of the most promising direction in the design of highly undetectable steganography. The main idea of that approach is to minimise the embedding impact from the steganalysis point of view. This goal is achieved by using trellis codes in the embedding procedure, the Viterbi algorithm (VA) and the SPAM features. But the optimality of VA was kept still unclear because a generic purpose of VA is to correct errors with trellis codes instead of embedding secret information. The first goal of the current paper is to prove the optimality of VA application in its generalised form proposed about 30 years ago by one of the authors of this paper. The second goal is to optimise the parameters of the trellis code check matrix for better undetectability of stegosystems.
Geometrically batched networks

We develop approximate solutions for the equilibrium queue length probability distribution of queues in open Markovian networks by considering each queue independently, constructing its arrival process as the join of each contributing queue's departing traffic. Without modulation and non-unit batches, we would only need to consider mean internal traffic rates, modelling each queue as M/M/1 to give an exact result by Jackson's theorem. However, bursty traffic significantly affects steady state queue lengths; for given throughput, mean queue length varies linearly with mean batch size. All batch sizes are geometrically distributed, so each queue is Markovian and has known analytical solution. Our analysis is based on properties of the output processes of these queues, their superposition and splitting, to form the arrival processes at all queues. In general, this leads to a fixed-point problem for the network's equilibrium. The numerical results of our approach are compared with simulation and show promising accuracy.
Comparison of Parent‐Completed Behavior Rating Scales: Differentiating Boys with ADD from Psychiatric and Normal Controls

Three parent-completed behavior rating scales, the Conners Abbreviated Rating Scale (ARS), Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), and Self-Control Rating Scale (SCRS), were studied in boys with attention deficit disorder (ADD), psychiatric controls, and a normal comparison group. The ability of the scales to discriminate these groups was determined via univariate analyses of variance (ANOVA) and discriminant function analyses. All three rating scales revealed group differences. In discriminant function analyses, the ARS was the single best predictor of group membership, but it frequently misclassified psychiatric controls. Externalizing behavior indexes from the SCRS and CBCL yielded similar results. The addition of CBCL internalizing and social competence scales improved overall group classification, facilitating the identification of psychiatric controls. Results encourage the use of multidimensional rating scales such as the CBCL in clinical differential diagnosis, but suggest that unidimensional scales such as the ARS are also useful for assessing change or treatment effects in ADD.
Adoption of swahili iconography in hotel interior design to promote competitive advantage: a case of hotels in south coast of Mombasa

Interior designers in Kenya today have to contend with the fact that the world is a global village whose influence transverses the hotel design industry. They are therefore tasked to come up with innovative designs in order to keep up with the ever fluctuating and highly competitive hotel industry market. The aim of this project research was to establish that the conscious use of Kenyan iconography in hotel design can increase guests “perceptions and level of satisfaction and thus significantly improve the hotels competitive advantage. Relevant literature review is divided into three broad sections namely: iconography as design inspiration, its application in hotel design and consequently its use in promoting competitive advantage in the hotel industry. Case studies were carried out in 5 hotels located in Diani Beach South Coast of Mombasa to establish the adoption of Swahili iconography in their hotel design. A mixed methods approach where both quantitative and qualitative analysis was used to study the specific objectives; questionnaires, interviews and photographic evidence were employed for the study. Findings indeed confirm that there is fierce competition in the global hotel market and adoption of successful local cultural attributes such as iconography is a proven method to draw and maintain target groups. Findings of this study stand to benefit the following groups: The government of Kenya; the investors and policy makers in the tourism and hotel business in Kenya; and the design professionals; by purposefully extracting indigenous iconography from material culture and using it as design inspiration in hotel spaces to enhance competitive advantage, hotels may record increase in numbers of repeat customers, thus up surging their earnings. The study will also help hotels management in improving product quality and fulfilling better customers‟ expectations.
Application of 1D and 2D MFR reactor technology for the isolation of insecticidal and anti-microbial properties from pyrolysis bio-oils

ABSTRACT Valuable chemicals can be separated from agricultural residues by chemical or thermochemical processes. The application of pyrolysis has already been demonstrated as an efficient means to produce a liquid with a high concentration of desired product. The objective of this study was to apply an insect and microorganism bioassay-guided approach to separate and isolate pesticidal compounds from bio-oil produced through biomass pyrolysis. Tobacco leaf (Nicotianata bacum), tomato plant (Solanum lycopersicum), and spent coffee (Coffea arabica) grounds were pyrolyzed at 10°C/min from ambient to 565°C using the mechanically fluidized reactor (MFR). With one-dimensional (1D) MFR pyrolysis, the composition of the product vapors varied as the reactor temperature was raised allowing for the selection of the temperature range that corresponds to vapors with a high concentration of pesticidal properties. Further product separation was performed in a fractional condensation train, or 2D MFR pyrolysis, thus allowing for the separation of vapor components according to their condensation temperature. The 300–400°C tobacco and tomato bio-oil cuts from the 1D MFR showed the highest insecticidal and anti-microbial activity compared to the other bio-oil cuts. The 300–350 and 350–400°C bio-oil cuts produced by 2D MFR had the highest insecticidal activity when the bio-oil was collected from the 210°C condenser. The tobacco and tomato bio-oil had similar insecticidal activity (LC50 of 2.1 and 2.2 mg/mL) when the bio-oil was collected in the 210°C condenser from the 300–350°C reactor temperature gases. The 2D MFR does concentrate the pesticidal products compared to the 1D MFR and thus can reduce the need for further separation steps such as solvent extraction.
Pharmacoinvasive Strategy Versus Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention in Patients With ST-Segment–Elevation Myocardial Infarction: A Propensity Score–Matched Analysis

Background—The Strategic Reperfusion Early After Myocardial Infarction trial and the French Registry of Acute ST-elevation or Non-ST-elevation Myocardial Infarction 2015 suggested that pharmacoinvasive strategy compares favorably with primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We sought to assess the clinical impact of pharmacoinvasive strategy compared with PPCI in real-world patients with ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction. Methods and Results—We used the Korea Acute Myocardial Infarction Registry to identify ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction patients receiving either pharmacoinvasive strategy defined as fibrinolysis followed by percutaneous coronary intervention (rescue/urgent or routine elective; n=708) or PPCI (n=8878). Patients receiving facilitated percutaneous coronary intervention within 3 hours from fibrinolysis were excluded. Propensity-matched 12-month clinical outcome was compared. In the propensity-matched cohort (n=706 in each group), the pharmacoinvasive group had shorter time to reperfusion therapy (165 versus 241 minutes; P<0.001) and higher rate of pre-percutaneous coronary intervention Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction grade 3 (50.4% versus 13.7%; P<0.001). Incidences of major bleeding and stroke during hospitalization were not different. Twelve-month rates of death and major adverse cardiac events (composite of death, recurrent myocardial infarction, target-vessel revascularization, and coronary artery bypass graft surgery) were similar between pharmacoinvasive strategy and PPCI: 4.4% versus 4.1% and 7.5% versus 7.8%, respectively. Equipoise between pharmacoinvasive strategy and PPCI for 12-month major adverse cardiac events occurred when percutaneous coronary intervention–related delay was ≈100 minutes. Conclusions—ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction patients receiving pharmacoinvasive treatment, compared with PPCI, had shorter time to reperfusion, higher culprit-vessel patency, and similar 12-month clinical outcome.