Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Habitat Use of Fox Squirrels in an Urban Environment

Abstract Tree squirrels are one of the most familiar mammals found in urban areas and are considered both desirable around homes and, conversely, a pest. We examined fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) habitat use in inner city and suburban areas using radiotelemetry. We estimated habitat selection ratios at differing scales by season and fox squirrel activity. Telemetry data suggests that during periods of inactivity radiocollared fox squirrels (n = 82) selected 1) areas with greater tree canopy, 2) live oaks (Quercus fusiromis and Q. virginiana), and 3) trees with larger diameters and canopies. When inactive during the winter and spring, fox squirrels also preferred, within their core areas, to use the inside of buildings, and during periods of activity in the autumn and spring, fox squirrels preferred grassy areas. During periods of activity, fox squirrels avoided using pavement but did not exclude it from their core-area movements. Fox squirrels' ability to use buildings and to tolerate pavement in core-area movements make vast areas of the urban environment available to fox squirrels. In evaluating habitat variables that increased fox squirrel activity in urban areas, we found the number of large and medium trees, amount of pavement and grassy areas, canopy cover, number of oaks, and the area covered by buildings were all important factors in predicting fox squirrel activity in an urban environment. Our data suggests urban planners, animal damage control officials, wildlife managers, and landscapers who want to control urban fox squirrel populations through habitat manipulation should consider the reduction of oaks trees, a reduction of the canopy cover, and restricting the access of fox squirrels to buildings. Alternatively, home owners and squirrel enthusiasts hoping to bolster fox squirrel populations in urban areas should consider increasing the number of large mast–bearing trees and canopy cover and providing nest boxes.
Effect of Egg Weight Categories, Storage Time and Storage Temperature on Incubation Length in Duck Eggs ( Cairina moschata L. and Anas platyrhynchos domestica L. )

The effect of storage time (3, 7 and 14 days), storage temperature (18±1°C and 15±1°C) and egg size (average weight -2*std.dev., -1*std.dev., +1*std.dev., and +2*std.dev.) on the incubation length of Muscovy and Pekin duck eggs was studied. Incubation was carried out in a commercial multi-stage incubator and the eggs were daily sprayed from the 10th to the day of egg transfer. Pekin duck results showed that storage from 3, through 7, to 14 days, significantly prolonged the incubation time either at 15°C or 18°C (15°C : 27.92, 28.11 and 28.31 days ; 18°C : 27.89, 28.08 and 28.25 days ; Hatch-time=27.82+0.0343storage). Similarly, egg size influenced the incubation time (27.89, 28.02, 28.11, 28.18 days, for 72.2g 77.4g, 77.5g 82.8g, 82.9g 88.1g and 88.2g 93.5g, respectively). Muscovy duck results showed that storage prolonged the incubation time : at 18°C, 33.74, 34.18 and 34.60 days, for 3, 7 and 14 days of storage, respectively ; at 15°C, 35.20 and 33.91-34.00 for 14 days and 3-7 days, respectively, (P<0.05) Hatch-time=33.48+0.097 storage. Egg size influenced the incubation time but significant differences (p<0.05) were observed only between the lighter eggs (70.4-76.2g) compared to all the other categories : 4h and 35’ less than in the reference category (76.3g-82.1g). Since optimum hatchability and duckling quality can only be achieved when chicks hatch contemporaneously, in commercial duck hatcheries the correction for the storage length and for lighter eggs in Muscovies and lighter and heavier eggs in Pekins is strongly advised.
Biochemical indicators and iron index for the appraisal of the mineral status in leaves of cucumber and tomato

Abstract The precision and usefulness of various foliar techniques in making valid diagnoses of mineral imbalances in plants have seldom been critically evaluated. This paper compares the classical critical value approach with the newer Biochemical Indicators Index (BI) in evaluating diagnoses from the same sets of data. The critical value and sufficiency range norms for various crops are presented and the Biochemical Indicator Index and Iron Index are calculated for comparative purposes. Although the norms for both approaches begin at similar reference points, the BI approach is able to make more meanigful diagnoses over a range of plant ages and can classify the order in which nutrients limit yield. Comparisions of diagnostic precision between the two systems are made using data from various greenhouse experiments with cucumber (Cucumis sativus L. cv. Pepinex) and tomato (Licopersicum esculentum Mill cv. Sarky). All plots received year the some rates of fertilizers consisting of 75 gm‐2 iO gm‐2, 20 gm‐2.
Cytomorphological study of lymph node lesions: a study of 250 cases

Introduction: Lymph node enlargement is frequent presentation in all age groups with a wide spectrum of diseases, ranging from infections to malignancy. Therefore, management of cases depends on lymph node pathology, which can be studied by collecting material through fine needle aspiration method that can be used as an outpatient procedure. Objectives: The study was undertaken to assess the cytomorphological features and incidence of various lymph node diseases on fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) and to analyze the utility and diagnostic importance of FNAC in lymph node diseases. Materials and Methods: In the study, total of 250 patients were selected who had presented with lymph node enlargement at Department of Pathology in our Tertiary Care Centre. Results: In this series of FNAC, cervical lymph nodes were involved in majority of 171 (68.4%) cases. The age of patients ranged from 6 months to 92 years with slight male preponderance. Tubercular lymphadenitis comprised the majority (50.8%) followed by reactive lymphoid lesions (20.8%), metastatic malignancies and acute suppurative lymphadenitis (8.8%) each, granulomatous lymphadenitis (8.4%), chronic nonspecific lymphadenitis (1.2%), necrotizing lymphadenitis (0.8%) and lymphoma (0.4%). Conclusion: FNAC is a simple, safe, reliable, inexpensive and the most diagnostic tool in early detection of lymph node lesions.
Production of Omega-3 Triacylglycerol Concentrates using a New Food Grade Immobilized Candida antarctica Lipase B

Triacylglycerol concentrates of eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic omega-3 fatty acids were synthesized either via transesterification or esterification of glycerol with the corresponding ethyl ester or free fatty acid concentrates, respectively. A newly developed food grade immobilized Candida antarctica lipase B system using an Amberlite FPX-66 hydrophobic matrix, was compared with a commercially available non-food grade commercial system, for their ability to catalyze these reactions. For either system, the transesterification required higher temperature (90°C) than esterification (70°C) to achieve maximum triacylglycerol yields. The newly developed immobilized system efficiently catalyzes the esterification of free fatty acids with glycerol and differs from the existing commercial system in that it is food grade and has a more uniform and larger particle distribution. The new system significantly improves flow in a packed bed reactor, enabling multiple reuse of the catalyst for up to 80 repeats.
Unsupervised Depth Learning in Challenging Indoor Video: Weak Rectification to Rescue

Single-view depth estimation using CNNs trained from unlabelled videos has shown significant promise. However, the excellent results have mostly been obtained in street-scene driving scenarios, and such methods often fail in other settings, particularly indoor videos taken by handheld devices, in which case the ego-motion is often degenerate, i.e., the rotation dominates the translation. In this work, we establish that the degenerate camera motions exhibited in handheld settings are a critical obstacle for unsupervised depth learning. A main contribution of our work is fundamental analysis which shows that the rotation behaves as noise during training, as opposed to the translation (baseline) which provides supervision signals. To capitalise on our findings, we propose a novel data pre-processing method for effective training, i.e., we search for image pairs with modest translation and remove their rotation via the proposed weak image rectification. With our pre-processing, existing unsupervised models can be trained well in challenging scenarios (e.g., NYUv2 dataset), and the results outperform the unsupervised SOTA by a large margin (0.147 vs. 0.189 in the AbsRel error).
New observations on diet of the South American two-striped forest-pitviper Bothrops
 bilineatus smaragdinus (Hoge, 1966)

The arboreal, nocturnal and widely distributed snake Bothrops bilineatus smaragdinus has a registered diet that consists in frogs, lizards, birds and rodents; items that were, with some exceptions, rarely identified to species level. In this work we report three new items for its diet consisting in an adult frog Dendropsophus marmoratus (Anura, Hylidae), an adult lizard Thecadactylus solimoensis (Reptilia, Phyllodactylidae) and an adult bat Carollia brevicauda (Chiroptera, Phyllostomidae) which is the first record of predation on Chiroptera by this species.
Chemical potential, microstructures and phase transition of the Schwarzschild-AdS black hole

In the AdS/CFT correspondence, a variable cosmological constant $\Lambda$ in the bulk corresponds to varying the number of colors $N$ in the boundary gauge theory, with chemical potential $\mu$ as its thermodynamic conjugate. In this work, within the context of $AdS_5 \times S^5$ and its dual $\mathcal{N}=4$ SUSY Yang-Mills theory at large $N$, we investigate the nature of microstructures and phase transitions by studying the Ruppeiner curvature $R$. We find that the large black hole branch is associated with purely attractive microstructures and its behaviour bears some qualitative similarities with that of an ideal Bose gas ($R<0$ and $\mu <0$). It is seen that as the system's fugacity approaches unity in the large black hole branch, $R$ takes increasingly negative values signifying long range correlations and strong quantum fluctuations. The small black hole branch on the other hand, is attractive at low temperatures and repulsive at high temperatures with a second order critical point which roughly separates the two regions. The scaling behaviour associated with the specific heat and the thermodynamic curvature around this second order critical point is obtained.
Coastal Flood Risk in the Mortgage Market: Storm Surge Models' Predictions vs. Flood Insurance Maps

Prior literature has argued that flood insurance maps may not capture the extent of flood risk. This paper performs a granular assessment of coastal flood risk in the mortgage market by using physical simulations of hurricane storm surge heights instead of using FEMA's flood insurance maps. Matching neighborhood-level predicted storm surge heights with mortgage files suggests that coastal flood risk may be large: originations and securitizations in storm surge areas have been rising sharply since 2012, while they remain stable when using flood insurance maps. Every year, more than 50 billion dollars of originations occur in storm surge areas outside of insurance floodplains. The share of agency mortgages increases in storm surge areas, yet remains stable in the flood insurance 100-year floodplain. Mortgages in storm surge areas are more likely to be complex: non-fully amortizing features such as interest-only or adjustable rates. Households may also be more vulnerable in storm surge areas: median household income is lower, the share of African Americans and Hispanics is substantially higher, the share of individuals with health coverage is lower. Price-to-rent ratios are declining in storm surge areas while they are increasing in flood insurance areas. This paper suggests that uncovering future financial flood risk requires scientific models that are independent of the flood insurance mapping process.
Mental health care in Egypt: Review of current state, policy, and needs

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyze the new Egyptian mental health law from a rights perspective in order to measure its compatibility with established human rights principles and the international standards that guide the practice of the mental health care. At the same time, the study considers the status of psychiatric care and basic mental health services for people with mental disorders in Egypt after several recent national upheavals along with the national prevalence of psychiatric disorders in the country. It will address the needs and the challenges facing current practice, with a discussion of some suggestions for improvements. Relevant data bases were searched (Medline, PubMed, and Cochrane library of systemic reviews and clinical trials) with the following Mesh terms: “mental disorders,” “substance-related disorders,” “Egyptian Mental Health systems,” and “Egyptian Mental health laws. ” Articles published since 2000 were prioritized. In the latest years, a considerable gap between mental healthcare needs and available services in Egypt has been documented. There is comprehensive mental health legislation to enforce the rights of persons with mental disorders; but there is a lack of firm policy for implementation of interventions. The transformation of hospital-based to community-based mental health and the building of accessible services are necessary. Egypt urgently needs a national assessment of the deficiencies of its mental health system. The assessment would provide evidence and reliable information on existing needs and the barriers to accessing mental health care. The outputs of such an assessment will be helpful in finding locally and culturally sensitive solutions to reduce the mental health gap and can then be used in lobbying public opinion to rectify these conditions.
Rotation Curves in z ∼ 1–2 Star-forming Disks: Evidence for Cored Dark Matter Distributions

We report high-quality, Hα or CO rotation curves (RCs) to several Re for 41 large, massive, star-forming disk galaxies (SFGs) across the peak of cosmic galaxy evolution (z ∼ 0.67–2.45), taken with the ESO-VLT, the LBT and IRAM-NOEMA. Most RC41 SFGs have reflection-symmetric RCs plausibly described by equilibrium dynamics. We fit the major axis position–velocity cuts using beam-convolved forward modeling generated in three dimensions, with models that include a bulge and turbulent disk component embedded in a dark matter (DM) halo. We include priors for stellar and molecular gas masses, optical light effective radii and inclinations, and DM masses from abundance-matching scaling relations. Two-thirds or more of the z ≥ 1.2 SFGs are baryon dominated within a few Re of typically 5.5 kpc and have DM fractions less than maximal disks (median 〈 f DM ( R e ) 〉 = 0.12 ). At lower redshift (z < 1.2), that fraction is less than one-third. DM fractions correlate inversely with the baryonic angular momentum parameter, baryonic surface density, and bulge mass. Inferred low DM fractions cannot apply to the entire disk and halo but more plausibly reflect a flattened, or cored, inner DM density distribution. The typical central “DM deficit” in these cores relative to Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) distributions is ∼30% of the bulge mass. The observations are consistent with rapid radial transport of baryons in the first-generation massive gas-rich halos forming globally gravitationally unstable disks and leading to efficient build-up of massive bulges and central black holes. A combination of heating due to dynamical friction and AGN feedback may drive DM out of the initial cusps.
Palatability and nutritive value of some common plant species from the Aqaba Gulf area of Sinai, Egypt

Abstract The Sinai Peninsula includes rangeland with highly palatable plant species. Many physical and chemical factors influence palatability of plant species, of which animal behaviour and chemical composition are the most important. Average digestible crude protein (DCP) in the study area was 4·6%, which almost meets the requirements of the grazing animals. Average total digestible nutrients (TDN) was 66·5%. Average gross energy (GE) was 4100 kcal kg −1 , digestible energy (DE) was 2650 kcal kg −1 and metabolisable energy (ME) was 2200 kcal kg −1 . The energy content in the study area was equal 0·66 Scandinavian feed units. Therefore it appears that animals feeding on Sinai pasture receive most of their requirements.
Feedback Mechanisms for Self-Organization to the Edge of a Phase Transition

Scale-free outbursts of activity are commonly observed in physical, geological, and biological systems. The idea of self-organized criticality (SOC), introduced back in 1987 by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld suggests that, under certain circumstances, natural systems can seemingly self-tune to a critical state with its concomitant power-laws and scaling. Theoretical progress allowed for a rationalization of how SOC works by relating its critical properties to those of a standard non-equilibrium second-order phase transition that separates an active state in which dynamical activity reverberates indefinitely, from an absorbing or quiescent state where activity eventually ceases. The basic mechanism underlying SOC is the alternation of a slow driving process and fast dynamics with dissipation, which generates a feedback loop that tunes the system to the critical point of an absorbing-active continuous phase transition. Here, we briefly review these ideas as well as a recent closely-related concept: self-organized bistability (SOB). In SOB, the very same type of feedback operates in a system characterized by a discontinuous phase transition, which has no critical point but instead presents bistability between active and quiescent states. SOB also leads to scale-invariant avalanches of activity but, in this case, with a different type of scaling and coexisting with anomalously large outbursts. Moreover, SOB explains experiments with real sandpiles more closely than SOC. We review similarities and differences between SOC and SOB by presenting and analyzing them under a common theoretical framework, covering recent results as well as possible future developments. We also discuss other related concepts for “imperfect” self-organization such as “self-organized quasi-criticality” and “self-organized collective oscillations,” of relevance in e.g., neuroscience, with the aim of providing an overview of feedback mechanisms for self-organization to the edge of a phase transition.
Formation of massive black holes in ultracompact dwarf galaxies: migration of primordial intermediate-mass black holes in N-body simulation

Recent observational studies of ultracompact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) have discovered the massive black hole (MBH), with masses of more than ${10^6~\rm M_\odot }$, in their central regions. We here consider that these MBHs can be formed through the merging of intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH), with masses of (103–105) M⊙, within the stellar nuclei of dwarf galaxies, which are progenitors of UCDs. We numerically investigate this formation process for a wide range of model parameters using N-body simulations. This means that IMBH growth and feedback is neglected in this study. We find that only massive IMBHs of $10^5~\rm M_\odot$ sink into the central regions of their host dwarf ($\approx 10^{10}~\rm M_\odot$) to be gravitationally trapped by its stellar nucleus within less than 1 Gyr in most dwarf models. We also find that lighter IMBHs with $(1\! -\! 30) \times 10^3~\rm M_\odot$ sink into the centre in low-mass dwarfs ($\approx 10^{9}~\rm M_\odot$) due to more efficient dynamical frictionitionally, we show that the IMBHs can form binaries in the centre and, rarely, before they reach the centre, which may lead to the IMBHs merging and thus emitting gravitational waves that could be detected by LISA. Finally, we discuss the required number of IMBHs for the MBH formation in UCDs and the physical roles of stellar nuclei in IMBH binaries and mergers.
Look Locally Infer Globally: A Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing Approach

State-of-the-art presentation attack detection approaches tend to overfit to the presentation attack instruments seen during training and fail to generalize to unknown presentation attack instruments. Given that face presentation attack detection is inherently a local task, we propose a face presentation attack detection framework, namely Self-Supervised Regional Fully Convolutional Network (SSR-FCN), that is trained to learn local discriminative cues from a face image in a self-supervised manner. The proposed framework (i) improves generalizability while maintaining the computational efficiency of holistic face presentation attack detection approaches (<4 ms on a Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU), and (ii) is more interpretable since it localizes the parts of the face that are labeled as presentation attacks. Experimental results show that SSR-FCN can achieve TDR = 65% @ 2.0% FDR when evaluated on a dataset, SiW-M, comprising of 13 different presentation attack instruments under unknown attacks while achieving competitive performances under standard benchmark datasets (Oulu-NPU, CASIA-MFSD, and Replay-Attack).
Using Fingerprint Authentication to Reduce System Security: An Empirical Study

—Choosing the security architecture and policies for a system is a demanding task that must be informed by an understanding of user behavior. We investigate the hypothesis that adding visible security features to a system increases user confidence in the security of a system and thereby causes users to reduce how much effort they spend in other security areas. In our study, 96 volunteers each created a pair of accounts, one secured only by a password and one secured by both a password and a fingerprint reader. Our results strongly support our hypothesis— on average. When using the fingerprint reader, users created passwords that would take one three-thousandth as long to break, thereby potentially negating the advantage two-factor authentication could have offered.
Studies on the morphs, life history and behaviour of green apple aphid, Aphis pomi DE GEER on apple host in India

The mOl-phs of green apple aphid occurring on apple host in Himachal Pradesh, which is the main apple growing state of India, were ascertained and their life history was studied on the apple nursery plants from 2002 to 2006 in Mashobra locality (3I o l'N latitude, Ttl'E longitude and altitude 2286 m above sea level) ofShimla district and Ner Chowk locality (31 0 32'N latitude, 76 Q 54'E longitude and altitude 878 m above sea level) of Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Only two kinds of parthenogenetic morphs i.e. apterous and alate parthenogenetic viviparous females occur in this state. Biological characteristics, life history and behaviour of these morphs werc studied in different seasons Heavy infestations of green apple aphid prevent the terminal growth ofthc plants which show distorted growth, This aphid pest builds up big colonies on twigs, leaf petioles and the underside of the leaves. Its settling behaviour on apple plants allows accommodating large number of aphids in a small area on shoots and leaves. Maximum alate morphs were produced from May to August and number of alates 'was also more in crowded colonies. The alate aphids infest new plants and build up new colonies there. The populations of this insect pest increase in early May and reach high peaks in July. The effect of aphids' feeding on the growth of nursery plants was also measured.