Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling and mapping the potential productivity of Sitka spruce from site factors in Ireland.

The main objective of this study was to quantify the potential productivity of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis (Bong.) Carr. ) in Ireland. Productivity data from 201 Sitka spruce stands were used to relate general yield class (GYC) to low resolution digitised data (climate maps, soil and subsoil maps), and easily assessable site quality variables (site and vegetation classifications). Three models were derived that explained 45-52% of the variation in GYC. A spatial model was used to derive spatial predictions of productivity and map the potential productivity of Sitka spruce throughout Ireland in a Geographical Information System (GIS). This model predicted that 73% or 5.103 million ha of the total land area in Ireland was capable of producing Sitka spruce growth of yield class 14 or greater. Furthermore, 62% of the total land area could potentially result in GYC 20 or higher yields. The results of the analysis indicated that significant potential exists for forestry development on marginal agricultural land where forestry expansion may not necessarily be in conflict with the achievement of growth targets from other agricultural subsectors (e.g. dairy and beef). A practical model was also developed, which may serve as a guide to evaluating the potential productivity of suitable sites for afforestation. Typically the confidence limits for fields with wet or dry grassland were ± 2.0 to 2.8 m3ha-1yr-1 and blanket bog was ± 2.4 to 2.9 m3ha-1yr-1. A forecasting model, developed to derive predictions of productivity on forested land, might also be used to forecast timber yields.
Gradient gel electrophoresis of human plasma lipoproteins.

A rapid and simple method for separating and identifying plasma lipoproteins is described. The technique utilizes the "molecular sieving" properties of continuous concave gradient electrophoresis on a slab of polyacrylamide (4 to 26%) gel. Gradient gel electrophoresis is particularly suitable for separating lipoproteins according to their molecular weight. The technique can be used to demonstrate the major lipoprotein classes in normal plasma and to identify abnormalities of lipoprotein metabolism. Components of a sample are better resolved by gradient gel electrophoresis than by electrophoresis on paper or cellulose acetate. The results obtained compare favorably with those achieved by preparative ultracentrifugation. The technique is easily and rapidly performed in a routine clinical laboratory.
CATdb: a public access to Arabidopsis transcriptome data from the URGV-CATMA platform

CATdb is a free resource available at http://urgv.evry. inra.fr/CATdb that provides public access to a large collection of transcriptome data for Arabidopsis thaliana produced by a single Complete Arabidopsis Transcriptome Micro Array (CATMA) platform. CATMA probes consist of gene-specific sequence tags (GSTs) of 150–500 bp. The v2 version of CATMA contains 24 576 GST probes representing most of the predicted A. thaliana genes, and 615 probes tiling the chloroplastic and mitochondrial genomes. Data in CATdb are entirely processed with the same standardized protocol, from microarray printing to data analyses. CATdb contains the results of 53 projects including 1724 hybridized samples distributed between 13 different organs, 49 different developmental conditions, 45 mutants and 63 environmental conditions. All the data contained in CATdb can be downloaded from the web site and subsets of data can be sorted out and displayed either by keywords, by experiments, genes or lists of genes up to 100. CATdb gives an easy access to the complete description of experiments with a picture of the experiment design.
Introducing the Differentiated All-Pole and One-Zero Gammatone Filter Responses and their Analog VLSI Log-domain Implementation

The scope of this paper is to introduce two particular filter responses which closely resemble tuning curves at specific set of places on the basilar membrane (BM) of the biological cochlea. The responses are termed Differentiated All-Pole Gammatone Filter (DAPGF) and One-Zero Gammatone Filter (OZGF) and their form suggest their implementation by means of cascades of N identical two-pole systems, which makes them excellent candidates for efficient analog VLSI implementations. The resulting filters can be used in a filterbank architecture to realize cochlea implants or auditory processors of increased biorealism. In addition, their simple parameterization allows the use of conventional automatic gain control (AGC) schemes to model certain important features of the biological cochlea (e.g. level-dependent gain) that are observed physiologically. To illustrate the idea, we present preliminary simulation results from a 4th-order OZGF using novel high dynamic range log-domain biquads in CMOS weak inversion (CMOS-WI). All circuits were designed in Cadence® Design Framework, using the commercially available AMS 0.35¿m CMOS process. The reported OZGF structure has a simulated input dynamic range of 122.8dB, while dissipating 3.7¿W of static power.
Storage and search in dynamic peer-to-peer networks

We study robust and efficient distributed algorithms for searching, storing, and maintaining data in dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. P2P networks are highly dynamic networks that experience heavy node churn (i.e., nodes join and leave the network continuously over time). Our goal is to guarantee, despite high node churn rate, that a large number of nodes in the network can store, retrieve, and maintain a large number of data items. Our main contributions are fast randomized distributed algorithms that guarantee the above with high probability even under high adversarial churn. In particular, we present the following main results: 1. A randomized distributed search algorithm that with high probability guarantees that searches from as many as n - o(n) nodes (n is the stable network size) succeed in O(log n )-rounds despite O(n/log1+δn) churn, for any small constant δ > 0, per round. We assume that the churn is controlled by an oblivious adversary (that has complete knowledge and control of what nodes join and leave and at what time and has unlimited computational power, but is oblivious to the random choices made by the algorithm). 2. A storage and maintenance algorithm that guarantees, with high probability, data items can be efficiently stored (with only θ(log n) copies of each data item) and maintained in a dynamic P2P network with churn rate up to O(n/log1+δn) per round. Our search algorithm together with our storage and maintenance algorithm guarantees that as many as n - o(n) nodes can efficiently store, maintain, and search even under O(n/log1+δn) churn per round. Our algorithms require only polylogarithmic in n bits to be processed and sent (per round) by each node. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithms are the first-known, fully-distributed storage and search algorithms that provably work under highly dynamic settings (i.e., high churn rates per step). Furthermore, they are localized (i.e., do not require any global topological knowledge) and scalable. A technical contribution of this paper, which may be of independent interest, is showing how random walks can be provably used to derive scalable distributed algorithms in dynamic networks with adversarial node churn.
Building a talking baby robot A contribution to the study of speech acquisition and evolution

Speech is a perceptuo-motor system. A natural computational modeling framework is provided by cognitive robotics, or more precisely speech robotics, which is also based on embodiment, multimodality, development, and interaction. This paper describes the bases of a virtual baby robot, which consists in an articulatory model that integrates the non-uniform growth of the vocal tract, a set of sensors, and a learning model. The articulatory model delivers sagittal contour, lip shape and acoustic formants from seven input parameters, which characterize the configurations of the jaw, the tongue, the lips and the larynx. To simulate the growth of the vocal tract from birth to adulthood, a process modifies the longitudinal dimension of the vocal tract shape as a function of age. The auditory system of the robot comprises a “phasic” system for event detection over time, and a “tonic” system to track formants. The model of visual perception specifies the basic lips characteristics: height, width, area and protrusion. The orosensorial channel, which provides the tactile sensation on the lips, the tongue and the palate, is elaborated as a model for the prediction of tongue-palatal contacts from articulatory commands. Learning involves Bayesian programming, in which there are two phases: (i) specification of the variables, decomposition of the joint distribution and identification of the free parameters through exploration of a learning set, and (ii) utilization which relies on questions about the joint distribution. Two studies were performed with this system. Each of them focused on one of the two basic mechanisms, which ought to be at work in the initial periods of speech acquisition, namely vocal exploration and vocal imitation. The first study attempted to assess infants’ motor skills before and at the beginning of canonical babbling. It used the model to infer the acoustic regions, the articulatory degrees of freedom and the vocal tract shapes that are the likeliest explored by actual infants according to their vocalizations. Subsequently
Hierarchical least squares conformal map

A texture atlas is an efficient way to represent information (like colors, normals, displacement maps) on triangulated surfaces. The LSCM method (Least Square Conformal Maps) automatically generates a texture atlas from a meshed model. For large charts (over 100k facets), the convergence of the numerical solver may be slow. It is well known that the conformality criterion, minimized by LSCM, also corresponds to a harmonically condition, meaning that barycentric coordinates are locally preserved through the parametization. This has two different consequences: cascadic multigrid methods (coarse to fine) are well adapted to this criterion, and dramatically speed up the convergence of the numerical solver; the obtained parametization naturally minimizes texture swimming when used to texture-map a progressive mesh. In this paper, we introduce HLSCM (Hierarchical LSCM), a cascadic multigrid version of LSCM. As an example of possible applications, the paper shows how normal maps and simplified models can be automatically generated from large scanned meshes, the visual appearance of the model can be preserved even when 90% of the vertices are removed from the initial model.
Sparse Force Mapping System Based on Compressive Sensing

This paper reports the development and application of a reconstruction method based on differential evolution (DE) to solve an underdetermined tactile sensing system with quasi-distributed fiber sensors. The reconstruction relies on the coupled responses from eight fiber Bragg grating-based transducers. The sensing system is capable of locating and quantifying up to three loads simultaneously applied to a metallic plate divided into 16 regions. The signal reconstruction is performed using compressive sensing methods to infer the spatial distribution of the applied forces. A comparison between the implemented method based on DE and traditional sparse signal recovery schemes (LASSO, OMP, Robust-SL0, and CoSaMP) showed the better performance of the proposed algorithm in the demonstrated application.
Constructing Reference Sets from Unstructured, Ungrammatical Text

Vast amounts of text on the Web are unstructured and ungrammatical, such as classified ads, auction listings, forum postings, etc. We call such text "posts. " Despite their inconsistent structure and lack of grammar, posts are full of useful information. This paper presents work on semi-automatically building tables of relational information, called "reference sets," by analyzing such posts directly. Reference sets can be applied to a number of tasks such as ontology maintenance and information extraction. Our reference-set construction method starts with just a small amount of background knowledge, and constructs tuples representing the entities in the posts to form a reference set. We also describe an extension to this approach for the special case where even this small amount of background knowledge is impossible to discover and use. To evaluate the utility of the machine-constructed reference sets, we compare them to manually constructed reference sets in the context of reference-set-based information extraction. Our results show the reference sets constructed by our method outperform manually constructed reference sets. We also compare the reference-set-based extraction approach using the machine-constructed reference set to supervised extraction approaches using generic features. These results demonstrate that using machine-constructed reference sets outperforms the supervised methods, even though the supervised methods require training data.
Neural Dynamics Underlying Event-Related Potentials

There are two opposing hypotheses about the brain mechanisms underlying sensory event-related potentials (ERPs). One holds that sensory ERPs are generated by phase resetting of ongoing electroencephalographic (EEG) activity, and the other that they result from signal averaging of stimulus-evoked neural responses. We tested several contrasting predictions of these hypotheses by direct intracortical analysis of neural activity in monkeys. Our findings clearly demonstrate evoked response contributions to the sensory ERP in the monkey, and they suggest the likelihood that a mixed (Evoked/Phase Resetting) model may account for the generation of scalp ERPs in humans.
Automating Open Science for Big Data

The vast majority of social science research uses small (megabyte- or gigabyte-scale) datasets. These fixed-scale datasets are commonly downloaded to the researcher’s computer where the analysis is performed. The data can be shared, archived, and cited with well-established technologies, such as the Dataverse Project, to support the published results. The trend toward big data—including large-scale streaming data—is starting to transform research and has the potential to impact policymaking as well as our understanding of the social, economic, and political problems that affect human societies. However, big data research poses new challenges to the execution of the analysis, archiving and reuse of the data, and reproduction of the results. Downloading these datasets to a researcher’s computer is impractical, leading to analyses taking place in the cloud, and requiring unusual expertise, collaboration, and tool development. The increased amount of information in these large datasets is an advantage, but at the same time it poses an increased risk of revealing personally identifiable sensitive information. In this article, we discuss solutions to these new challenges so that the social sciences can realize the potential of big data.
CimS – The CIS and IMS joint submission to WMT 2014 translating from English into German

We present the CimS submissions to the 2014 Shared Task for the language pair EN! DE. We address the major problems that arise when translating into German: complex nominal and verbal morphology, productive compounding and flexible word ordering. Our morphologyaware translation systems handle word formation issues on different levels of morpho-syntactic modeling.
Approach to the blade technology analysis of the Upper Palaeolithic site of “Tajos de Marchales” (Granada, Spain)

The study of the Upper Palaeolithic in the South of the Iberian Peninsula is usually addressed from a few stratigraphic sequences recognized in the region. We can say that the upper Palaeolithic in Andalusia is one of the worse known stages of regional prehistory. On the other hand, its development has just surpassed the description of the typological formal characterization. In some cases, recent contributions in the central region of the Baetic Mountain range, confined to the province of Granada, appeared during the last century. In this sense, the present study has two objectives. On one hand, to present the site of the rockshelter 3 of the “tajos de Marchales” (Colomera, Granada, Spain), as a new Magdalenian site in the mountainous area of Sub-Baetic Andalusia. On the other hand, through the application of diacritic analysis on cores, unretouched material and tools recognisable, we present the technological characterization of different chaine operatoire from the production supported by the main idea of different typological objectives (domain of burins, scrapers and to a lesser extent with backed edge blades). We distinguish the different operational sequences aimed at the generation of the artefactual set. All of this will allow us to obtain a global comprehension of the lithic assemblages from the site, and to define the beginning of its chaine operatoire . The work presents and discusses the distinctive traits of the different technical elements, focused on laminar production (blades and bladelets) and knapping methods.
Drain contact boundary specification in windowed Monte-Carlo device analysis

To accurately analyze hot-carrier transport in a reasonable CPU time, a device analysis algorithm has been developed to couple the drift-diffusion model and the Monte Carlo (MC) method. In this algorithm, since the MC method is applied only in a portion of the device which is called the window, where to place the window boundaries in the device is extremely important for accurate simulations. To overcome the difficulties of window drain contact specification, the criterion of equivalent current collection has been defined, and an expression for calculating the drain contact length has been derived. The approach has been verified by good agreement between the simulation results and the experimental measurements. <<ETX>>
Surgical thyroid disease in northern Thailand. A study in geographic pathology.

STUDIES in geographic pathology provide exceptional opportunities to examine familiar diseases in special environments in which there may be significant local differences in important variables. Particularly fertile fields for inquiry are found in some developing countries in which geographically limited populations often represent a stage of health care no longer extant in other parts of the world. Northern Thailand is an area in Southeast Asia in which iodine deficiency goiter is endemic. 1 Iodized salt was not made available to the population of this region until late 1965, and then only in very limited areas. 1 In addition, the affected population is not geographically mobile and patients with thyroid disease tend to reside in areas in which they were born. Diseases of the thyroid are an unusually good example of changing patterns of health: thyrotoxicosis 2,3 and nodular colloid goiter are declining 4 while there is an increasing incidence of
CTFFIND4: Fast and accurate defocus estimation from electron micrographs

CTFFIND is a widely-used program for the estimation of objective lens defocus parameters from transmission electron micrographs. Defocus parameters are estimated by fitting a model of the microscope’s contrast transfer function (CTF) to an image’s amplitude spectrum. Here we describe modifications to the algorithm which make it significantly faster and more suitable for use with images collected using modern technologies such as dose fractionation and phase plates. We show that this new version preserves the accuracy of the original algorithm while allowing for higher throughput. We also describe a measure of the quality of the fit as a function of spatial frequency and suggest this can be used to define the highest resolution at which CTF oscillations were successfully modeled.
Forearm and leg amino acid metabolism in the basal state and during combined insulin and amino acid stimulation after a 3‐day fast

Aim: Fasting is characterized by a progressive loss of protein, but data on protein kinetics are unclear and few have studied the effects of re‐feeding. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that a combined infusion of insulin and amino acids after fasting would induce compensatory increases in protein synthesis and reductions in protein breakdown at the whole body level and in muscle.
RRED: robust RED algorithm to counter low-rate denial-of-service attacks

The existing Random Early Detection (RED) algorithm and its variants are found vulnerable to emerging attacks, especially the Low-rate Denial-of-Service (LDoS) attacks. In this letter we propose a Robust RED (RRED) algorithm to improve the TCP throughput against LDoS attacks. The basic idea behind the RRED is to detect and filter out attack packets before a normal RED algorithm is applied to incoming flows. We conduct a set of simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed RRED algorithm. The results show that, compared to existing RED-like algorithms, the RRED algorithm nearly fully preserves the TCP throughput in the presence of LDoS attacks.
The association between values and performance in a mining corporation. Empirical study and insights for Managing by Values (MBV) model

The paper presents result of an empirical study in which presence of values among workers of two mining squads characterized by different level of work performance has been compared. Values have been measured by two scales: Mining Values Scale (MVS) and Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). The squad with higher performance had significantly higher level of five out of nine values measured by (MVS); while none of the values measured by OCAI have been differentiating the squads with a statistical significance. The results suggest that Managing by Values (MBV) model for a mining corporation should rather be based on values specific for the mining industry rather than general management value set proposed by OCAI. Research results suggest also an association between presence of certain values and work satisfaction among workers.
Birth weight as an independent predictor of ADHD symptoms: a within-twin pair analysis.

BACKGROUND Studies have found an association between low birth weight and ADHD, but the nature of this relation is unclear. First, it is uncertain whether birth weight is associated with both of the ADHD dimensions, inattentiveness and hyperactivity-impulsivity. Second, it remains uncertain whether the association between birth weight and ADHD symptom severity is confounded by familial factors. METHOD Parents of all Swedish 9- and 12-year-old twins born between 1992 and 2000 were interviewed for DSM-IV inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive ADHD symptoms by the Autism - Tics, AD/HD and other Comorbidities (A-TAC) inventory (N = 21,775 twins). Birth weight was collected prospectively through the Medical Birth Registry. We used a within-twin pair design to control for genetic and shared environmental factors. RESULTS Reduced birth weight was significantly associated with a mean increase in total ADHD (β = -.42; 95% CI: -.53, -.30), inattentive (β = -.26; 95% CI: -.33, -.19), and hyperactive-impulsive (β = -.16; 95% CI: -.22, -.10) symptom severity. These results imply that a change of one kilogram of birth weight corresponded to parents rating their child nearly one unit higher (going from "no" to "yes, to some extent" on a given symptom) on the total ADHD scale. These associations remained within pairs of MZ and DZ twins, and were also present when restricting the analyses to full term births. CONCLUSIONS There is an independent association between low birth weight and all forms of ADHD symptoms, even after controlling for all environmental and genetic confounds shared within twin pairs. These results indicate that fetal growth restriction (as reflected in birth weight differences within twin pairs) and/or the environmental factors which influence it is in the casual pathway leading to ADHD.