Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Les pteridophytes des forets de basse altitude du centre de sumatra, indonesie : diversite et ecologie

La diversite et l'ecologie des pteridophytes des forets tropicales primaires de basse altitude du centre de sumatra sont envisagees a l'echelle locale dans des parcelles de grandes surfaces, et a l'echelle regionale en comparant les differents sites. Les repartitions spatiales naturelles de ces especes sont decrites, puis correlees avec la topographie. Leurs relations avec l'architecture de l'ecosysteme forestier sont envisagees. La recherche d'indicateurs phyto-ecologiques est abordee pour le substrat geologique. Les compositions specifiques de pteridophytes sont caracterisees par des parametres classiques et analysees au moyen d'indices de distorsion. Les pteridophytes terrestres montrent une grande variete de repartitions spatiales et l'habitat de ces especes est stratifie selon la topographie ou certains modeles du milieu d'origine physique ou biologique (chablis). Les pteridophytes epiphytes montrent une forte stratification selon un gradient de sites de colonisation des hotes-supports. Elles semblent fortement liees a la presence de communautes d'epiphytes deja installees et montrent une bonne correlation avec certaines classes de la dynamique forestiere. La comparaison de sites a l'echelle regionale montre que les pteridophytes repondent de facons differentes suivant leurs categories fonctionnelles (terrestres, lianes, epiphytes). Les especes terrestres sont plus volontiers sensibles a la variable latitude-altitude des sites independamment de la nature de leur substrat. Les epiphytes se repartissent en fonction des caracteristiques physico-chimiques du substratum bien que n'etant pas en connexion directe avec celui-ci. Ce resultat confirme les observations de gentry et dodson de l'utilisation de ce groupe comme indicateur phytoecologique.
An exploration of the contributions of the advanced certificate in education in mathematical literacy programme towards the professional development of teachers in KwaZulu-Natal.

This study explores some of the contributions made by the Advanced Certificate of Education in Mathematical Literacy (ACEML) program towards the participating teachers’ professional development. The teachers’ professional development was explored by looking at the development of content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, the changes in their beliefs and identity and the attainment of selfconfidence. The study uses a mixed method approach where data was collected by means of a questionnaire using a survey of thirty one teachers. Six of the teachers from this sample were then interviewed. An analysis of the questionnaires and the interviews was done together with some of the tasks done by the participants. This entailed using at first a quantitative analysis and then a qualitative analysis. The findings revealed that the teachers had learnt new content knowledge since mathematical literacy was a new subject. Many of the teachers also felt that they had improved on their existing knowledge by using context to make them real life problems. The teachers reported that they gained pedagogic content knowledge and confidence both in and out of the classroom and saw themselves participating as a professionals. The beliefs of the teachers in Mathematical Literacy (ML) changed as they identified with the content and the pedagogic content knowledge of ML. They experienced learning through their tutors, peers and resource materials. Since mathematical literacy was a new subject with a discipline requiring different pedagogical content knowledge from the subjects that they previously taught. The teachers explained that the program also assisted them in becoming reflective teachers. Completion of the qualification opened up access to membership of professional bodies such as AMESA which is a mathematics educator organisation, as well as opportunities for promotion as leaders and senior officials in the department of education. The results also has implications for the teacher, department of education and the universities. An ongoing teacher development is necessary to maintain a high standard of professionalism.
ANALYSIS OF CONE PRESSUREMETER TESTS IN SANDS. DISCUSSION AND CLOSURE

A discussion of a paper with the aforementioned title by H.S. Yu, F. Schnaid, and I.F. Collins, published in this journal (Volume 122, Number 8, August 1996), is presented. The discusser agrees that the cone pressuremeter has the potential to be a useful tool for determination of design parameters in sands. However, it is asserted that considerable attention must be paid to obtaining consistent expansion curves affected to a known extent by constraints of equipment and test procedure. It is argued that the ability to observe the soil's response to several loading paths at the same location in the same sounding offers significant advantages over cone penetration testing and may make it possible to detect unusual soil conditions early in a field investigation. Discussion is followed by closure from the authors.
Divide&Content: A Fair OS-Level Resource Manager for Contention Balancing on NUMA Multicores

Chip multicore processors (CMPs) constitute the cherry-picked architecture for high-performance servers employed in supercomputers and cloud datacenters. In the last few years, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) multicore systems have become the dominant choice in these domains. Regardless of the technology advances enabling to pack an increasing number of cores and bigger caches on the same chip, contention for shared resources still represents an important challenge for the system software. Cores in CMPs typically share multiple resources, such as the last-level cache (LLC) or a DRAM controller. The competition for the usage of these resources leads to uneven performance degradation across co-running applications. Previous research has demonstrated that contention effects on CMPs can be mitigated via smart partitioning of the LLC or by distributing threads across groups of cores so as to even out the degree of competition on multiple LLCs or memory nodes. However, most existing resource-management strategies fail to effectively combine both contention-mitigating techniques, thus providing suboptimal results on NUMA multicores. In this paper, we analyze how to best combine these techniques to improve system-wide fairness, and, based on the conclusions of our analysis, propose a fair OS-level NUMA-aware resource manager that leverages dynamic contention-aware thread-to-socket mappings and cache-partitioning. We implemented our resource manager in the Linux kernel and assessed its effectiveness on a real dual-socket system featuring Intel Skylake processors. Our results show that it reduces unfairness by more than 17% on average compared to Linux and a state-of-the-art NUMA-aware resource manager.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Binge Eating Disorder: A Systematic Review

The aim of this systematic review was to synthesise the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on binge eating disorder (BED) the new onset and course. Inclusion criteria: original articles and BED diagnosis; and the main outcomes: relationships between the COVID-19 pandemic and the new onset/clinical changes in BED, and specific results for BED. Exclusion criteria: mixed/inaccurate diagnoses and articles not written in English. We searched four databases and one registry until 5 May 2023. The quality appraisal was conducted using the Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP) tool. Twelve studies with 4326 participants were included. All studies were observational with nine cross-sectional and three longitudinal. Four of the included studies investigated new-onset BED, while eight examined the BED clinical course of patients with a previous diagnosis. With the exception of one study, the available literature indicates both an increase in BED diagnoses and a clinical worsening during COVID-19. Major limitations include study quality (weak-to-moderate) and high heterogeneity in terms of pandemic phase, population, geographical areas, and psychometric tools. Our findings indicate that BED patients are particularly vulnerable to events characterised by social distancing and over-worry, and should be, therefore, carefully monitored. Further studies are needed to corroborate our findings, implement preventive strategies, and promote personalised treatments. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42023434106
High-Performance Convolutional Neural Network Model to Identify COVID-19 in Medical Images

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a deep learning (DL) model that has significantly contributed to medical systems because it is very useful in digital image processing. However, CNN has several limitations, such as being prone to overfitting, not being properly trained if there is data duplication, and can cause unwanted results if there is an imbalance in the amount of data in each class. Data augmentation techniques are used to overcome overfitting, eliminate data duplication, and random under sampling methods to balance the amount of data in each class, to overcome these problems. In addition, if the CNN model is not designed properly, the computation is less efficient. Research has proved that data augmentation can prevent or overcome overfitting, eliminating duplicate data can make the model more stable, and balancing the amount of data makes the model unbiased and easy to learn new data as evidenced through model evaluation and testing. The results also show that the custom convolutional neural network model is the best model compared to ResNet50 and VGG19 in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, loss performance, and computation time efficiency
Traitement d'antenne et corrélation du bruit sismique ambiant : applications multi-échelles

L'utilisation d'un grand nombre de capteurs sismiques est de plus en plus courant pour imager l'interieur de notre planete depuis sa surface pour la prospection sismique, jusqu'a sa structure profonde avec la sismologie continentale et globale. L'application d'un traitement d'antenne aux enregistrements issus de reseaux de capteurs permet l'extraction de nouvelles observables et une meilleure comprehension de la propagation des ondes dans les milieux complexes. Parmi ces methodes, on s'interesse particulierement aux traitements simultanes en emission-reception de type double formation de voies (DFV). A l'echelle de la prospection sismique, la DFV est utilisee pour extraire des ondes de volume pouvant etre masquees par des ondes de surface plus energetiques. A l'echelle continentale, les reseaux de sources etant plus rares, on propose d'appliquer la methode DFV a des signaux reconstruits par correlation du bruit sismique ambiant. De la meme maniere que pour un couple de stations, la correlation d'enregistrements continus permet d'evaluer la fonction de Green entre deux antennes receptrices. Cette methode est appliquee a des donnees du reseau Transportable Array (USArray) afin de mesurer et cartographier la vitesse de phase des ondes de surface au centre des USA. Enfin a l'echelle globale, une combinaison de plusieurs grands reseaux sismologiques est utilisee pour demontrer que la correlation d'enregistrements continus, dans la gamme de periodes, 5-100s permet la reconstruction des ondes de volume a des distances telesismiques. Une analyse de la contribution respective du bruit ambiant, d'origine oceanique, et des seismes est realisee. On montre que les arrivees tardives des forts seismes, reverberees a l'interieur du globe, contribuent de maniere importante a la reconstruction des phases profondes. Les ondes de volume reconstruites a partir du bruit ambiant constituent une nouvelle source d'information, complementaire aux donnees issues des seismes, et pouvant etre utilisee pour imager notre planete.
Tangential Human Motion Recognition With Micro-Doppler Signatures and One-Shot Learning

The moving direction affects the radar micro-Doppler signatures induced by human movement, with the least being attained when the human moves tangentially with regard to the line of sight. Tangential spectrograms contain minimal data on human movements and exhibit an extensive level of visual similarity, providing a significant obstacle in the classification of human motion. At the same time, the high costs associated with obtaining measured radar spectrograms result in a restricted quantity of data, making it more challenging to identify human motion spectrograms in one-shot situations. Considering the aforementioned difficulties, we propose a one-shot human motion recognition (HMR) method with tangential spectrograms based on metric learning which creatively uses simulation data as the support set and measured data as the query set. In our model, the local region enhancement (LRE) component is introduced to concentrate solely on echo signal regions near the central frequency by employing global information to improve the efficacy of valuable feature channels and diminish the impact of extraneous ones. A spatial group-wise refinement (SGR) component has been proposed to extract discriminative features from central regions by assigning weights to distinct spatial positions within each semantic group in local feature maps. Compared to other methods, the experimental results indicate that the proposed methodology enhances the classifier’s efficacy, resulting in a rise in the classification accuracy of 3.4% at least.
CD5 Expression Dynamically Changes During the Differentiation of Human CD8+ T Cells Predicting Clinical Response to Immunotherapy

Defining the molecular dynamics associated with T cell differentiation enhances our understanding of T cell biology and opens up new possibilities for clinical implications. In this study, we investigated the dynamics of CD5 expression in CD8+ T cell differentiation and explored its potential clinical uses. Using PBMCs from 29 healthy donors, we observed a stepwise decrease in CD5 expression as CD8+ T cells progressed through the differentiation stages. Interestingly, we found that CD5 expression was initially upregulated in response to T cell receptor stimulation, but diminished as the cells underwent proliferation, potentially explaining the differentiation-associated CD5 downregulation. Based on the proliferation-dependent downregulation of CD5, we hypothesized that relative CD5 expression could serve as a marker to distinguish the heterogeneous CD8+ T cell population based on their proliferation history. In support of this, we demonstrated that effector memory CD8+ T cells with higher CD5 expression exhibited phenotypic and functional characteristics resembling less differentiated cells compared to those with lower CD5 expression. Furthermore, in the retrospective analysis of PBMCs from 30 non-small cell lung cancer patients, we found that patients with higher CD5 expression in effector memory T cells displayed CD8+ T cells with a phenotype closer to the less differentiated cells, leading to favorable clinical outcomes in response to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy. These findings highlight the dynamics of CD5 expression as an indicator of CD8+ T cell differentiation status, and have implications for the development of predictive biomarker for ICI therapy.
Selection of Appropriate Thermal Indices for Applications in Human Biometeorological Studies

Application of thermal indices has become very popular over the last three decades. It is mostly aimed at urban areas and is also used in weather forecasting, especially for heat health warning systems. Recent studies also show the relevance of thermal indices and their justification for thermal perception. Only twelve out of 165 indices of human thermal perception are classified to be principally suitable for the human biometeorological evaluation of climate for urban and regional planning: this requests that the thermal indices provide an equivalent air temperature of an isothermal reference with minor wind velocity. Furthermore, thermal indices must be traceable to complete human energy budget models consisting of both a controlled passive system (heat transfer between body and environment) and a controlling active system, which provides a positive feedback on temperature deviations from neutral conditions of the body core and skin as it is the case in nature. Seven out of the twelve indices are fully suitable, of which three overlap with the others. Accordingly, the following four indices were selected as appropriate: Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Perceived Temperature (PTJ), Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), and rational Standard Effective Temperature (SET*).
Optimized Low-Powered Wide Area Network within Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an integral part of everyday life. LPWANs have been introduced to support the billions of internet-connected devices and the data they produce. LPWANs are capable of providing reliable connectivity even in low-density areas and devices consuming a low amount of energy. The exponential increase in the use of IoT applications across the globe will continue to generate more and more data traffic within the IoT network. Hence, it will increase device battery usage that may reduce the battery life expectancy limits. Thus, End Devices (EDs) within the IoT network in the near future will rise up to billions of devices operating in public, industry, and personal networks, generating a necessity for more correct and reliable energy conservation technology. This prompted the research work on an optimized low-powered wide area network within IoT. This paper focuses on three different strategies: LoRa power consumption model design, simulation of IoT wireless sensor networks, and implementation of SF allocation across the wireless sensor network and results analysis. The experiment has been carried out in various stages: firstly running a simulation over a wireless sensor network without optimization using MATLAB Simulink and obtaining the following result of 6.3997e-17 joules power consumption. Secondly, the authors test the network with power optimization using particle swarm optimization algorithms and obtained a better result of 2.5230e-17 joules. The LoRa energy consumption is reduced by 60%. Lastly, different simulation tests of LoRaWAN protocols with respect to throughput, packet loss, delay, data transmission, buffer size, and network density. The results presented on the graph showed that the proposed model outperforms the existing models. Hence, appropriate spreading factor allocation has increased the power efficiency of LoRa end device battery.
The relative importance of various environmental exposures to nickel in causing contact hypersensitivity.

Nickel sens1t1zation and detergents were reccntly discussed by Malten et al. in this journal ( 1 o) and the present paper should be considered in conjunction with that study. The present investigation dcals with somc clinical and epidemiological aspects of cnvironmental exposures to nickel. Nickel contact hypersensitivity ranges high among the increasing group of con­ tact eczemas. At the outand in-patient clinic of the Nijmegen University positive nickel patch tests are found in 4 % to g % of those suspected to be suffering from contact eczema (table 1). This observation is similar to experiences of clinics in other countries of the world (1, 4, 12, 18) though in Munich nickel hypersensitivity is re­ ported to be rare (2). This may be related with hitherto unknuwn differences in ex­ posure to nickel betwecn the Federal Re­ public of Germany and other countries. Approximately two th1rds of the nickel patients are fcmales. This preponderance may be a consequence of peculiarities of female skin metabolism or it may be con­ nccted with a greater relative exposure to nickel by femalcs. In former years exten­ sive cxposure to nickel by femalcs could perhaps be ascribed to garment appliances and to non-precious ornaments. Long last­ ing contact with nickel meta! brought about by rubbing action on a possibly sweating skin incited in many cases nickel hypersens1t1v1ty; only secondarily a nickel con­ tact cczema manifested itsclf on the hands (7 ). Nowadays garment appliances are, however, coated with or bcing replace<l by plastic material and the primary localiza­ tion of thc eczema has gcnerally changed ro the hands. To appreciate this hand lo­ calization it is rt>called that in non-occupa­ tional every-day life thcrc may be two principal sourccs of nickel: (i) nickel com­ modities and (ii) nickel containing deter­ gent solutions. (i) In recent years Amcrican-stylc stain­ less steel kitchcns have become popular in the Nethcrlands rcsulting in a changc of hand contact from ceramics and aluminium to nickel-plated commoditics. This increase of the use of nickel in the Netherlamls is similar to that in other Western countrics. lt is estimated that the overall use of nickel has increosed by obout 10 'l'o per year ( 1 s). Coins arc also among new nickel commodi­ ties. Dutch houscwives arc far more fre­ quently cxposed to hand contact with coins than family fathers who generally use moncy orders for payments. In 1958 Samitz and Pomerantz ( 17) dcmonstrated nickel leaching from Amcrican coins by the action of swcat or by swcat in combination with sodium lauryl sulfate, the range being from I : 1000 to r : 100 (equalling to about 20,000 11M Ni + -11 sweat). ' Positive results by patch testing with coins were obscrved
Studies on correlation and path coefficient analysis in rice crop as influenced by nitrogen fertilizer and sunnhemp green manuring

Yield is the result of interaction between genotype and environment (G x E). It is closely associated with many growth and yield attributing characters. This relation may be positive or negative. It can be studied through correlation. In other words, the systematic inter-relationship between the variables can be understood by using correlation (Rangaswamy, 2005). Path coefficient analysis helps in separating the direct effect from indirect effect by partitioning the correlation coefficients. The information on correlation and path coefficient studies in regular agronomic experiments is meagre. Hence, the present investigation was undertaken to assess and measure the magnitude of relationship between grain yield of rice and other characters.