Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seedling quality and short-term field performance of three Amazonian forest species as affected by site conditions

High quality seedlings are essential for the successful establishment of forest stands. Seedling quality can be assessed by the morphological attributes ( e.g. , height, diameter, dry mass, Dickson’s quality index) measured in the nursery phase. The defining, producing, and handling of seedlings can be based on specific characteristics suited to a site, as proposed by the Target Plant Concept. However, a target plant concept is an important research gap for Amazonian tree species. Here, we explore the associations between morphological attributes of seedlings in the nursery and determine the combined effect of the seedling quality attributes and site preparation methods on one-year field performance to define a range for nondestructive morphological attributes that can be associated with successful establishment for Amazonian commercial forest species – Bertholletia excelsa, Dipteryx odorata and Tachigali vulgaris . We measured morphological attributes in the nursery and analyzed the correlations to detect better predictors of destructive attributes. Then, we related these initial morphological attributes to survival and growth one year after planting in two site conditions: manual holing preparation and mechanical site preparation (subsoiling plus harrowing). We represent growth using different metrics: one-year size, absolute and relative growth rates in height and root collar diameter. Site conditions were assessed by soil physical properties. For all species, root collar diameter was a good predictor of destructive attributes that evaluated seedling quality, such as Dickson’s quality index. Site preparation methods resulted in different site qualities. Mechanical site preparation improved the total porosity and reduced the bulk density and resistance to penetration. Survival was not affected by initial attributes or site preparation methods. The initial attributes were poor predictors of field growth for D. odorata and T. vulgaris . The field performance of B. excelsa seedlings was affected by initial attributes, site, and the combination of both. The definition of a range for operational attributes according to site conditions is true only for B. excelsa . These results are important to help fill research gaps related to technical procedures to establish large-scale reforestation projects using Amazonian tree species.
Where in the world is Carmen BitDiego? And who is she, anyways..

Peer-to-Peer (or Client-to-Client) systems such as Gnutella and BitTorrent have recently attracted the interest of the Internet audience because of their ability to share content at remarkably high speeds while lowering the burden on the initial data owner. Besides optimizing the transfers, researchers have been focusing on issues like robustness, scalability, and high tolerance to faults. All these aspects are inextricably linked with the location and social behavior of the users. In this study we analyze a large BitTorrent data set covering over 40 million direct observations made for over 100 different media streams. Our analysis offers three unique views of the location and social behavior of the BitTorrent community: geographical, geopolitical and organizational. We show that these views yield non-trivial results and that their use could greatly benefit the world of P2P systems.
Employee Engagement: A Literature Review

Employee engagement is an important issue in management theory and practice. However, there are still major differences in the concept, theory, influencing factors and outcomes of employee engagement, and there is still no authoritative standard. This paper attempts to review and summarize previous research results on employee engagement. Two kinds of definitions of employee engagement are identified: employee engagement as a multi-faceted construct (cognition, emotions and behaviors) and as a unitary construct (a positive state of mind, a dedicated willingness, the opposite of burnout). Three theoretical frameworks are used to explain the varying degrees of employee engagement: Needs-Satisfaction framework, Job Demands-Resources model and Social Exchange Theory. The influencing factors of employee engagement are divided into three categories: organizational factors (management style, job rewards, etc.), job factors (work environment, task characteristics, etc.) and individual factors (physical energies, self-consciousness, etc.). Employee engagement is found to have a positive relationship with individual performance (organizational commitment, positive behavior, etc.) and organizational performance (customer satisfaction, financial return, etc.) The research findings show that there are three shortcomings in previous studies: lack of research on demographic variables, personality differences and cross-cultural differences in employee engagement, lack of research on the mediating or moderating role of employee engagement, and lack of intervention mechanism for employee engagement.
Load-adaptive control of a single-link flexible manipulator

An adaptive control scheme for the tip position control of a single-link flexible manipulator handling unknown changing loads and its experimental verification are presented. The scheme essentially comprises a least-squares identification algorithm and a self-tuning pole-placement controller. The controller uses a novel recursive algorithm which constrains the control signal not to respond immediately to any sudden changes in the control gains due to changes in the parameter estimate vector. Another salient feature of the present work is the observation of a 'ringing effect' transient during payload release and its resolution. This was achieved by a resetting of the parameter estimate vector to its no-load value, prior to payload release. A performance comparison of the new adaptive control with a constant-gain pole placement controller as well as a standard self-tuning pole placement controller clearly demonstrates its superior ability in handling unknown changing loads. >
THE NUCLEAR PERMEABILITY, INTRACELLULAR DISTRIBUTION, AND DIFFUSION OF INULIN IN THE AMPHIBIAN OOCYTE

[3H]Inulin (mol wt ≈ 5,500) solutions are microinjected into the cytoplasm of mature oocytes of Rana pipiens and the subsequent movement of the solute recorded by quantitative ultralow temperature autoradiography. The autoradiographs show transient cellular diffusion gradients, the influence of the nucleus on these gradients, and the nuclear:cytoplasmic distribution of inulin. Analysis leads to the following conclusions: (a) Inulin diffuses in cytoplasm at about 3 x 10-6 cm2/s, or one-fifth as rapidly as in water. Most of this decrease is attributable to the increased tortuosity of the diffusional path due to the presence of inclusions and macromolecules. (b) The nuclear envelope is very permeable to inulin; its resistance to inulin's passage is similar to that of cytoplasm. The envelope appears to play a negligible role in regulating the nucleocytoplasmic movement of solutes smaller than macromolecules, (c) Inulin concentrates in the nucleus to four times its cytoplasmic level; this is attributed to solute exclusion from cytoplasmic water. Evidence is presented that among hydrophilic solutes the degree of exclusion increases with molecular size. The potential significance of cytoplasmic exclusion processes to understanding secretion and the intracellular movement of macromolecules is briefly discussed.
Using eye-tracking to assess different image retargeting methods

Assessing media retargeting results is not a trivial issue. When resizing one image to a particular percentage of its original size, some content has to be removed, which may affect the image's original meaning and/or composition. We examine the impact of the retargeting process on human fixations, by gathering eye-tracking data for a representative benchmark of retargeted images. We compute their derived saliency maps as input to a set of computational image distance metrics. When analyzing the fixations, we found that even strong artifacts may go unnoticed for areas outside the original regions of interest. We also note that the most important alterations in semantics are due to content removal. Since using an eye tracker is not always a feasible option, we additionally show how an existing model of prediction of human fixations also works sufficiently well in a retargeting context.
Cyanide Insensitive Oxidase Confers Hydrogen Sulfide and Nitric Oxide Tolerance to Pseudomonas aeruginosa Aerobic Respiration

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and nitric oxide (NO) are long-known inhibitors of terminal oxidases in the respiratory chain. Yet, they exert pivotal signaling roles in physiological processes, and in several bacterial pathogens have been reported to confer resistance against oxidative stress, host immune responses, and antibiotics. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen causing life-threatening infections that are difficult to eradicate, has a highly branched respiratory chain including four terminal oxidases of the haem-copper type (aa3, cbb3-1, cbb3-2, and bo3) and one oxidase of the bd-type (cyanide-insensitive oxidase, CIO). As Escherichia coli bd-type oxidases have been shown to be H2S-insensitive and to readily recover their activity from NO inhibition, here we tested the effect of H2S and NO on CIO by performing oxygraphic measurements on membrane preparations from P. aeruginosa PAO1 and isogenic mutants depleted of CIO only or all other terminal oxidases except CIO. We show that O2 consumption by CIO is unaltered even in the presence of high levels of H2S, and that CIO expression is enhanced and supports bacterial growth under such stressful conditions. In addition, we report that CIO is reversibly inhibited by NO, while activity recovery after NO exhaustion is full and fast, suggesting a protective role of CIO under NO stress conditions. As P. aeruginosa is exposed to H2S and NO during infection, the tolerance of CIO towards these stressors agrees with the proposed role of CIO in P. aeruginosa virulence.
Seasonal Freezing Drives Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Dissolved Organic Matter (DOM) and Microbial Communities in Reclaimed Water-Recharged River

Although reclaimed water (RW) has become a promising alternative source for alleviating water shortage in arid and semiarid regions, the ecological risks it poses to the receiving water bodies remain largely unknown. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is crucial for affecting the quality of RW and strongly influences bacterial communities (BCs) in aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we aimed to unravel the role of DOM signatures on the spatiotemporal composition of microbial communities (MCs) in a seasonally ice-sealed urban river that had been chronically replenished by RW. We found that discharging RW resulted in elevated DOM levels in the receiving river. Notably, an increase of 10% in protein-like substances was revealed. The differences between compositional characteristics of DOM and the abundance of riverine BCs between freezing and non-freezing periods were revealed. In the freezing season, humic-like components, aromaticity, and hydrophobicity of DOM were more significant, and bacterial taxa such as Bacteriodetes and Flavobacterium were increased, while Proteobacteria was decreased. Similarly, co-occurrence network analysis revealed an enhanced interplay between DOM and BCs at the same time. However, Klebsiella pneumoniae markedly decreased during the ice-sealed period. These results suggest that variations in DOM characteristics have remarkable impacts on the dynamics of aquatic BCs, which points to the need for a DOM−oriented RW quality monitoring strategy.
A decentralized infrastructure for query answering over distributed ontologies

In this paper we describe an infrastructure for query answering over distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web. This infrastructure addresses (i) the coordination of multiple nodes using metadata about the provided resources managed in a decentralized registry and (ii) the mediation between heterogeneous ontologies via an expressive mapping formalism along with corresponding reasoning algorithms for query answering. Our approach is based on a virtual integration that exhibits a semantics as if all ontologies were integrated locally. Practically, the distributed ontologies still reside on the remote peers, and only the parts relevant for answering the query need to be retrieved to the local node. Experimental evaluations with the implementation in KAONp2p show that the approach is very promising, as the performance of query answering is essentially dominated by the size of the data, and only slightly affected by the degree of distribution and heterogeneity.
Extracting Features from Ratings: The Role of Factor Models

Performing effective preference-based data retrieval requires detailed and preferentially meaningful structurized information about the current user as well as the items under consideration. A common problem is that representations of items often only consist of mere technical attributes, which do not resemble human perception. This is particularly true for integral items such as movies or songs. It is often claimed that meaningful item features could be extracted from collaborative rating data, which is becoming available through social networking services. However, there is only anecdotal evidence supporting this claim; but if it is true, the extracted information could very valuable for preference-based data retrieval. In this paper, we propose a methodology to systematically check this common claim. We performed a preliminary investigation on a large collection of movie ratings and present initial evidence.
Revisitation patterns in World Wide Web navigation

We report on users’ revisitation patterns to World Wide Web pages, and use these to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed 6 weeks of usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial browser. We found that 58? 10of an individual’s pages are revisits, and that users continually add new web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history mechanisms, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLS with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. Our results suggest new approaches to managing history in browsers.
Is Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) Meaningful for Artificial Agents?

The progress of artificial intelligence is reaching a point that some research questions that were only relevant for human and other animal agents are becoming relevant for artificial agents as well. One of those questions comes from human intelligence research and is known as Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR). Charles Spearman, the father of factor analysis and the g factor (a dominant factor explaining most of the variance in cognitive tests for human populations), observed that when the analysis was restricted to the subpopulation of most able subjects, the relevance of this dominant factor diminished, as if the power of general intelligence were saturated or not fully used by the most able individuals. In about a century, there have been numerous theoretical explanations and experiments to confirm or reject Spearman's hypothesis. However, all of them have been based on human or animal populations. In this paper, we analyse for the first time whether the SLODR makes sense for artificial agents and what its role should be in the analysis of general-purpose AI. We use a synthetic scenario based on modified elementary cellular automata (ECA) where the ECA rules work as tasks and the population of agents is generated with an agent policy language. Different slices of the population by ability and of the tasks by difficulty are analysed, showing that SLODR does not really appear. Indeed, even if very slightly, we find the reverse, i.e., that more correlation takes place for more able subpopulations, what we conjecture as the Universal Law of Augmenting Returns (ULOAR).
Weakening of the biennial relationship between Central American and equatorial South American rainfall in recent decades

Abstract There is a rainfall variability biennial relationship between Central America (CA) and equatorial South America (ESA) over the tropical western hemisphere, which is known to have arisen due to the combined effects of ENSO and tropical North Atlantic (TNA) SST. Here, the authors report that this biennial rainfall relationship between CA and ESA has weakened remarkably since 2000, with weakening in both in-phase and out-of-phase rainfall transitions. The observed decadal changes in the biennial relationship between CA and ESA rainfall can be attributed to changes in the effects of ENSO and TNA SST since 2000, which may be associated with more frequent occurrences of the central Pacific or ‘Modoki’ type El Niño. The weakening of the association with ENSO for CA rainfall since 2000 might have given rise to the weakening of the in-phase rain transition from CA rainfall to the following ESA rainfall. The weakened linkage between boreal-winter ESA rainfall and the subsequent boreal-summer TNA SST since 2000 may have resulted in the weakening of the out-of-phase rainfall transition from boreal-winter ESA rainfall to the subsequent boreal-summer CA rainfall.
Colorimetric Calibration of a Digital Camera

In this paper, we introduce a novel - physico-chemical - approach for calibration of a digital camera chip. This approach utilizes results of measurement of incident light spectra of calibration films of different levels of gray for construction of calibration curve (number of incident photons vs. image pixel intensity) for each camera pixel. We show spectral characteristics of such corrected digital raw image files (a primary camera signal) and demonstrate their suitability for next image processing and analysis.
Fuzzy-UCS: preliminary results

This paper presents Fuzzy-UCS, a Michigan-style Learning Fuzzy-Classifier System designed for supervised learning tasks. Fuzzy-UCS combines the generalization capabilities of UCS with the good interpretability of fuzzy rules to evolve highly accurate and understandable rule sets. Fuzzy-UCS is tested on a set of real-world problems, and compared to UCS and two of the most used machine learning techniques: C4.5 and SMO. The results show that Fuzzy-UCS is highly competitive to the three learners in terms of performance, and that the fuzzy representation permits a much better understandability of the evolved knowledge. These promising results allow for further investigation on Fuzzy-UCS.
Impacts of uncertain cloud-related parameters on Pacific Walker circulation simulation in GAMIL2

Abstract To investigate the impacts of uncertain parameters on simulated Pacific Walker circulation (PWC), a large number of perturbed parameter simulations are conducted using GAMIL2 (the Grid-point Atmospheric Model of IAP/LASG, version 2), and three different PWC indices are selected. The results show that the influences of some parameters on PWC are dependent on the selected index – a finding supported by the inconsistent responses of different indexes to these parameters. Among the nine parameters, the RH threshold for deep convection (RHCRIT) is the most sensitive in simulating PWC. Increased RHCRIT weakens deep convective heating and stratiform cooling, and strengthens shallow convective heating. Further analysis reveals that uncertain parameters affect the simulated PWC through changing the diabatic heating and vertical motion.
Quantum money from knots

Quantum money is a cryptographic protocol in which a mint can produce a quantum state, no one else can copy the state, and anyone (with a quantum computer) can verify that the state came from the mint. We present a concrete quantum money scheme based on superpositions of diagrams that encode oriented links with the same Alexander polynomial. We expect our scheme to be secure against computationally bounded adversaries.
Gain-scheduling control of T-S fuzzy systems with actuator saturation

This paper presents a gain-scheduling output feedback control design method for T-S fuzzy systems with actuator saturation. Different from existing control design methods for T-S fuzzy systems, the basic idea of the proposed approach is to transform the T-S fuzzy model with saturation nonlinearity into the form of linear fractional transformation (LFT). Instead of commonly used fuzzy controllers, a gain-scheduled output feedback controller in the LFT form is introduced to stabilize the saturated T-S fuzzy system with guaranteed H 1 performance. The problem of establishing regional stability and performance of the closed-loop nonlinear system are tackled by using robust control techniques. As a result, the conservatism introduced by dealing with the quadratic terms of normalized fuzzy weighting functions can be avoided. The proposed controller synthesis problem is cast as a convex optimization in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and can be solved efﬁciently. An example of balancing the inverted pendulum with bounded actuation is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.
Coordinative aerobic exercise does not enhance attention and concentration in college students

There is a historic and recently growing body of research that shows physical activity and fitness both have a positive effect on cognitive function, improved memory, and learning. The purpose of this study was to determine whether acute moderate to vigorous coordinative aerobic activity carried out prior to taking the d2 Test of Attention positively affected attention and concentration measures in a sample of college students at the University of Montana. The results of this investigation found no acute physical activity effect on the test scores. The results did demonstrate that there was a significant learning effect to the d2 Test of Attention when repeated after a short time span and that even after a week, participants maintained the improved ability to complete the d2 test. Thus all d2 test improvements were the result of the order they completed the d2 Test of Attention and could not be attributed to the intervention. Before future experimental studies are carried out in a similar manner, there is a need to determine an appropriate wash-out period for the d2 Test of Attention.
First record of Bourret’s Horseshoe Bat Rhinolophus paradoxolophus (Mammalia: Chiroptera: Rhinolophidae) from Myanmar with a review of the taxonomy, distribution and ecology of the species

Two specimens of Bourret’s Horseshoe Bat, Rhinolophus paradoxolophus, were recently collected from near Kalaw, western Shan State, Myanmar. They represent the first country record of the species as well as a considerable western range extension. A brief discussion of the taxonomic history of R. paradoxolophus is included along with a summary of its known ecology. The distribution is mapped and shows a correlation with areas of limestone karst.