Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protection of river downstream of hydropower plant

Frequent switching on and off of hydropower plant (HPP) turbines causes sudden water-level fluctuation in a river. If the plant is constructed on a lowland river in alluvial soils, the fluctuation provokes erosion of the riverbed downstream of the HPP and creates unfavourable conditions for water fauna and flora there. Legislative and common technical measures are often not sufficient to protect the riverbed against the harmful impact of the plant. This paper presents a new technique for protecting the riverbed from erosion and harm to water fauna downstream of a HPP. Attention is drawn to water plants (WPs), which have a strong influence on the river flow by slowing it down and increasing its depth. Possibilities to protect the river by means of WPs are analysed. Planting and growing of natural WPs in the river flow control spots have been found in practice difficult to be performed. Natural WPs are taken as prototypes for development of artificial ones. The flow-slowing ability of the latter is much greater than that of natural plants. Design of artificial WPs and their distribution in the river according to the requirements for the flow parameters are presented.
Cliff Retreat Induced by Series of Storms at Międzyzdroje (Poland)

ABSTRACT Terefenko, P.; Giza, A. ; Paprotny, D. ; Kubicki, A. , and Winowski, M. , 2018. Cliff Retreat Induced by Series of Storms at Międzyzdroje (Poland). In: Shim, J.-S. ; Chun, I. , and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 181–185. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. In Międzyzdroje, a coastal town in Poland, significant cliff retreat has been observed in recent times. It used to be considered mainly a response to storm events with particularly high water levels and wave energy. However, morphology of cliff coasts is shaped not only by the most extreme storm surges or by a number of accompanying processes such as precipitation. Much wider effects are now being linked to the occurrence of series of subsequent storms. This research uses a set of five terrestrial LiDAR surveys carried out between November 2016 and April 2017 to determine short-term cliff erosion associated with two major storm surges and several smaller storms. The surveys covered the whole cliff profile as well as the topography of the adjacent beach. Results indicate a considerable reduction in beach levels as a first important effect. Frequency of the storm events prevented the beach from recovering between the surges, allowing the waves to directly attack the cliff base. Consequently, the cliff foot line retreated up to 4.7 m. This resulted in an erosion volume exceeding 25.000 m3 within 5 sections of the coastal cliff analysed, which are 500 m long in total. This work demonstrates that the development of the coastline is not only directly linked with the rate of erosion at given storm parameters. More importantly, the frequency of extreme events has to be considered.
Soil moisture under no-tillage and tillage systems in maize long-term experiment

The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of conventional till (CT) and no-till (NT) cultivation systems in long term experiment with maize on soil water dynamics using continuous soil moisture (SM) measurements in the 2014, 2015, 2016 vegetation seasons. The ability of HERMES model to simulate SM was also evaluated in Polish conditions. The long term experiment with maize is located in the Grabow Experimental Farm of Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation – State Research Institute in Masovian Voivodeship – Central Poland (51˚21´18´´N, 21˚40´09´´E). The HERMES model was calibrated by modification of temperature sums in crop parameters file and capacity parameters (field capacity and wilting point) of the experimental site. The results show that NT system has a positive impact on soil water content. However, this improvement is dependent on a year, phenological phase and soil layer. The results showed also that calibrated (until now) model HERMES is able to simulate SM in a wet year. For simulation of SM in a dry year there is still need for future improvement of calibration parameters.
Radio Link Quality Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey

Radio link quality estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has a fundamental impact on the network performance and affects as well the design of higher layer protocols. Therefore, since about a decade, it has been attracting a vast array of research works. Reported works on link quality estimation are typically based on different assumptions, consider different scenarios
Impact of Mega Sheep Seed Project on Growth Performance of Mecheri Sheep

The study was carried out to analyse the impact of Mega Sheep Seed Project funded by ICAR for Mecheri sheep to quantify the improvement in terms of animal production. The data on body weight and impact analysis were collected from farmer’s  ocks by interview using structured questionnaire. There was signi cant (P<0.05) increase in growth traits i.e., from 330 g at birth to 1 kg at twelve months of age in MSSP bene ciary  ocks compared to non-bene ciary  ocks. Sex and period of birth signi cantly (P<0.05) in uenced the body weight at all the age group in nuclear  ocks.
In Viva, ln V&o, and Computational Analysis of Dendritic Calcium Currents in Thalamic Reticular Neurons

Thalamic reticular (RE) neurons are involved in the genesis of synchronized thalamocottical oscillations, which depend in part on their complex bursting properties. We have investigated the intrinsic properties of RE cells using computational models based on morphological and electrophysiological data. Simulations of a reconstructed RE cell were compared directly with recordings from the same cell to obtain precise values for the passive parameters. In a first series of experiments, the low-threshold calcium current (ITS) was studied via voltage clamp in acutely dissociated RE cells that lack most of their dendrites. Simulations based on a cell with truncated dendrites and Hodgkin-Huxley kinetics reproduced these recordings with a relatively low density of I,. In a second series of experiments, voltage-clamp recordings obtained in intact RE cells in slices showed a higher amplitude and slower kinetics of I,. These properties could be reproduced from the reconstructed cell model assuming higher densities of I, in distal dendrites. In a third series of experiments, current-clamp recordings were obtained in RE cells in viva. The marked differences with in vitro recordings could be reconciled by simulating synaptic bom-bardment in the dendrites of RE cells, but only if they contained high distal densities of I,. In addition, simpler models with as few as three compartments could reproduce the same behavior assuming dendritic I,. These models and experiments show how intrinsic bursting properties of RE cells, as recorded in vivo and in vitro, may be explained by dendritic calcium currents.
Platelet Membrane Biomimetic Manganese Carbonate Nanoparticles Promote Breast Cancer Stem Cell Clearance for Sensitized Radiotherapy

Introduction The presence of cancer stem cells (CSCs) significantly limits the therapeutic efficacy of radiotherapy (RT). Efficient elimination of potential CSCs is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of RT. Methods In this study, we developed a biomimetic hybrid nano-system (PMC) composed of MnCO3 as the inner core and platelet membrane (PM) as the outer shell. By exploiting the specific recognition properties of membrane surface proteins, PMC enables precise targeting of CSCs. Sonodynamic therapy (SDT) was employed using manganese carbonate nanoparticles (MnCO3 NPs), which generate abundant reactive oxygen species (ROS) upon ultrasound (US) irradiation, thereby impairing CSC self-renewal capacity and eradicating CSCs. Subsequent RT effectively eliminates common tumor cells. Results Both in vitro cell experiments and in vivo animal studies demonstrate that SDT mediated by PMC synergistically enhances RT to selectively combat CSCs while inhibiting tumor growth without noticeable side effects. Discussion Our findings offer novel insights for enhancing the efficacy and safety profiles of RT.
Brazilian Mangrove Status: Three Decades of Satellite Data Analysis

Since the 1980s, mangrove cover mapping has become a common scientific task. However, the systematic and continuous identification of vegetation cover, whether on a global or regional scale, demands large storage and processing capacities. This manuscript presents a Google Earth Engine (GEE)-managed pipeline to compute the annual status of Brazilian mangroves from 1985 to 2018, along with a new spectral index, the Modular Mangrove Recognition Index (MMRI), which has been specifically designed to better discriminate mangrove forests from the surrounding vegetation. If compared separately, the periods from 1985 to 1998 and 1999 to 2018 show distinct mangrove area trends. The first period, from 1985 to 1998, shows an upward trend, which seems to be related more to the uneven distribution of Landsat data than to a regeneration of Brazilian mangroves. In the second period, from 1999 to 2018, a trend of mangrove area loss was registered, reaching up to 2% of the mangrove forest. On a regional scale, ~85% of Brazil’s mangrove cover is in the states of Maranhão, Pará, Amapá and Bahia. In terms of persistence, ~75% of the Brazilian mangroves remained unchanged for two decades or more.
Generalized Integrate-and-Fire Models of Neuronal Activity Approximate Spike Trains of a Detailed Model to a High Degree of Accuracy

[PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , August 1, 2006; 96 (2): 872-890. J Neurophysiol Q. J. M. Huys, M. B. Ahrens and L. Paninski Efficient Estimation of Detailed Single-Neuron Models [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , December 1, 2006; 96 (6): 3448-3464. J Neurophysiol G. La Camera, A. Rauch, D. Thurbon, H. -R. Luscher, W. Senn and S. Fusi Neurons Multiple Time Scales of Temporal Response in Pyramidal and Fast Spiking Cortical [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February 21, 2007; 27 (8): 2058-2073. J. Neurosci. J. G. Mancilla, T. J. Lewis, D. J. Pinto, J. Rinzel and B. W. Connors Synchronization of Electrically Coupled Pairs of Inhibitory Interneurons in Neocortex [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , April 1, 2007; 97 (4): 2744-2757. J Neurophysiol B. Doiron, A. -M. M. Oswald and L. Maler Interval Coding. II. Dendrite-Dependent Mechanisms [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February 1, 2008; 99 (2): 656-666. J Neurophysiol L. Badel, S. Lefort, R. Brette, C. C. H. Petersen, W. Gerstner and M. J. E. Richardson Traces Dynamic I-V Curves Are Reliable Predictors of Naturalistic Pyramidal-Neuron Voltage
Model of Energy Savings achievable with Location-aware Node-to-Node Transmission in UbiComp.

Tracking Location in mobile environment has been a subject of research for quite long and significant progress has been reached. (1-16). The next stage has been to make use of this Location-awareness to devise new functionalities and application and also to improve ways of doing existing activities like transmission change from omnidirectional, whole area coverage to directed location-aware and adapted transmission. A big area missing in MAUC is the software engineering approaches into metrics development, metrics gathering and modelling which can be used for prediction and better gearing of future investments of resources. The particular area of concern here is about energy consideration in Ubicomp. How much energy savings can be achieved? Is there any pattern that the trend of energy savings follow under different sets of conditions? Can these conditions be controlled to achieve a particular desirable energy savings trend? How to gather information on probabilities of saving less than a particular percentage of energy?
Does Mass Transit Counter the Educational Effects of Residential Segregation in the Metropolitan Area of La Paz-El Alto, Bolivia?

Does Mass Transit Counter the Educational Effects of Residential Segregation in the Metropolitan Area of La Paz-El Alto, Bolivia? Victor Eduardo Llanque Zonta This dissertation explored the links between residential segregation, transportation policy, and education equity in the metropolitan area of La Paz-El Alto, Bolivia. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, the study assessed whether mass transit projects counter the educational effects of residential segregation. The specific goals of the study were to: (a) measure the level of segregation that students experience in neighborhoods and schools; (b) assess disparities in school accessibility among students of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds; and (c) to measure the effects of mass transit availability on school segregation. The results showed that students in the metropolitan area of La Paz-El Alto are highly segregated by ethnic and socioeconomic background. Moreover, neighborhoods with a higher proportion of either Indigenous or low-income students have lower levels of school accessibility. School accessibility is hindered by the limited supply of schooling and by an inefficient, unsafe, and limited public transportation system. The introduction of high-quality mass transit had a small yet statistically significant effect on school segregation. Students in the lowest third of the wealth distribution are more likely than their wealthier counterparts to change schools when mass transit becomes available. Mass transit projects have thus been a welcome addition to families’ transportation options, which highlights the significance of pairing education and transportation policies to promote greater equality of educational opportunity.
Predictive Normal Forms for Composition in Categorical Grammars

Extensions to Categorial Grammars proposed to account for nonconstitutent conjunction and long-distance dependencies introduce the problem of equivalent derivations, an issue we have characterized as spurious ambiguity from the parsing perspective. In Wittenburg (1987) a proposal was made for compiling Categorial Grammars into predictive forms in order to solve the spurious ambiguity problem. This paper investigates formal properties o f grammars that use predictive versions of function composition. Among our results are (1) that grammars with predictive composition are in general equivalent to the originals if and only if a restriction on predictive rules is applied, (2) that modulo this restriction, the predictive grammars have indeed eliminated the problem of spurious ambiguity, and (3) that the issue o f equivalence is decidable, i.e., for any particular grammar, whether one needs to apply the restriction or not to ensure equivalence is a decidable question.
Conference proceedings

The spatial and temporal characteristics of Citrus tristeza virus (CTV) epidemics have been described previously for both the CTV/ Toxoptera citricida and CTV/ Aphis gossypii pathosystems. For the CTV/ T. citricida pathosystem, aggregation of infected trees develops due to transmission of CTV by viruliferous aphids within local areas of influence. Long distance spread of CTV has been documented for both pathosystems. However, the threat of infection from CTV-infected trees to neighboring trees is unknown. Survival analysis was used to examine the probability of survival (remaining in a non-infected state) through time of CTV-free trees when located at various distances of proximity to CTV-infected trees. A risk index was calculated via a modified Cox proportional hazards model to estimate the probability of survival through time of CTV-free trees when located at various distances from trees that became CTV-infected in prior years. The risk of becoming infected was related to previous reported ‘local areas of influence’. Within a planting, infection by CTV of a substantial proportion of newly infected trees could be attributed to trees determined to be infected 6 mo previously within a ‘local area of influence’ of approximately 24 m radius, and that ‘survival’ decreased significantly through time.
Rebuilding local seed system of native crops in earthquake affected areas of Nepal, Proceedings of a National Sharingshop 18 Dec 2017, Kathmandu

The April 25 earthquake (with 7.6 Richter scale) and its subsequent aftershocks have had both direct and indirect impact on people’s livelihoods, agriculture and agrobiodiversity. The major effect of disaster was in remote hills and mountains where production system was rainfed, risk-prone, subsistence and people’s livelihoods depended on agriculture and biodiversity of traditional crops. According to the estimates of the Post Disaster Need Assessment (PDNA) of the Government of Nepal, the total value of direct and indirect impact of the earthquake to Nepalese economy was close to USD 7 billion, equivalent to one-third of country’s GDP. The agriculture sector suffered total damage and loss of USD 255 million, with maximum losses (86%) in mountainous and hilly areas of affected areas. The earthquake had also secondary effects triggering human and nature induced landslides, land degradation, flooding, drying up of water sources, avalanches and disease epidemics. It also have had long-term negative impact on agricultural and national development through the loss of productive labor force, infrastructure, forced outmigration and disruption in supply chains and earning potentials of people. The disaster had significant effect on the agriculture and agrobiodiversity due to destruction of storage structures, burial of stored seeds and damage of agricultural lands. An assessment of rescue collection mission carried out jointly by Bioversity International and National Genebank in 7 earthquake affected districts (Gorkha, Dhanding, Lamjung, Kavre, Nuwakot, Makawanpur, Rasuwa), revealed the loss of 104 landraces of different crops and 68 crop landraces becoming endangered from earthquake effect. Similarly a declining community and farm level richness and evenness of crop biodiversity was found in the affected areas. Increased investment in scientific agriculture and post-disaster revival of local seed system suited to affected areas of mountain agriculture and ecology is needed for rebuilding agriculture and revival of economy based on local biodiversity based livelihoods.
Ensemble Learning : An Empirical Study

We study resource-limited online learning, motivated by the problem of conditional-branch outcome predic tion in computer architecture. In particular, we consider (parallel) time and space-efficient ensemble learne for online settings, empirically demonstrating benefits similar to those shown previously for offline ensem bles. Our learning algorithms are inspired by the previously published “boosting by filtering” framework as well as the offline Arc-x4 boosting-style algorithm. We train ensembles of online decision trees using novel variant of the ID4 online decision-tree algorithm as the base learner, and show empirical results f both boosting and bagging-style online ensemble methods. Our results evaluate these methods on both branch prediction domain and online variants of three familiar machine-learning benchmarks. Our data jus fies three key claims. First, we show empirically that our extensions to ID4 significantly improve performance for single trees and additionally are critical to achieving performance gains in tree ensemble Second, our results indicate significant improvements in predictive accuracy with ensemble size for th boosting-style algorithm. The bagging algorithms we tried showed poor performance relative to the boos ing-style algorithm (but still improve upon individual base learners). Third, we show that ensembles of sma trees are often able to outperform large single trees with the same number of nodes (and similarly outp form smaller ensembles of larger trees that use the same total number of nodes). This makes online boos particularly useful in domains such as branch prediction with tight space restrictions (i.e., the available rea estate on a microprocessor chip).
EFFECT OF GRADING CHARACTERISTICS ON THE UNDRAINED SHEAR STRENGTH OF SAND-SILT MIXTURES

The liquefaction susceptibility of saturated medium sand-silt mixture samples is evaluated by monotonic undrained triaxial laboratory tests that were carried out on reconstituted specimens at various relative densities (Dr = 17 and 91%) and a constant confining pressure (σ3’= 100 kPa). The test results were used to conclude on the effect of grading characteristics and other parameters on the liquefaction resistance of the sand-silt mixtures. The test results indicate that the undrained residual strength can be correlated to the coefficient of uniformity (Cu) and the average diameter (D50). Indeed, it decreases linearly with the increase of the uniformity coefficient and decrease of the average diameter. It is found that a relationship between the static liquefaction resistance and any of the diameters (D10 or D50) and the coefficient of uniformity (Cu) would be more realistic than to build a relation between the coefficient of gradation (Cc) and the static liquefaction resistance.
Experiments with a musical machine : musical style replication in 3 – 5-year-old children

The relationship between new technology and learning is gaining increasing relevance in the field of music education (Webster, 2002; Folkestad et al., 1998). However, only a few studies have considered the nature of the interaction between children and musical machines. This article describes an observation study of children aged 3–5 years confronting a particular interactive musical system, the Continuator, which is able to produce music in the same style as a human playing the keyboard (Pachet, 2003). The analysis of two case studies suggests that the Continuator is able to develop interesting child/machine interactions and creative musical processes in young children. It was possible to observe a ‘life cycle’ of interaction, as well as micro-processes similar to those observed in child/adult interactions (Stern, 1985; Imberty, 2002). The ability of the system to attract and hold the attention of children has been interpreted through the theory of flow introduced by Csikszentmihalyi (1990).
DYNAMIC TRUST AND SECURITY MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL FOR DELAY TOLERANT NETWORKS

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are depicted by high frequent disconnection, end-to-end latency, and opportunistic communication over unreliable wireless links. To avoid these anomalies we propose a dynamic trust & security management protocol for secure routing optimization in DTN environments in the presence of well-behaved, selfish and malicious nodes. Which will be a novel model-based methodology for the analysis of our trust protocol and validate it via simulation, we address dynamic trust and security management using the information centric networks (ICN) architecture, i.e., determining and applying the best operational settings at runtime in response to dynamically changing network conditions to minimize trust bias and to maximize the routing application performance. The results demonstrate that our protocol is able to deal with selfish behaviours and is resilient against trust-related attacks comparison to Bayesian trust-based routing protocols, Dynamic trust and security management without ICN architecture and with using ICN architecture . Furthermore, our trust and security based routing protocol can effectively trade off message overhead and message delay for a significant gain in delivery ratio.