Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The temperate bryophyte Syntrichiaruralis var . arenicola grows morecompactly upon enhanced UVBradiation , but does not producemore UVB absorbing compounds

In recent decades, stratospheric ozone depletion has resulted in higher levels of UVB radiation reaching the Earth's surface. Despite the fact that bryophytes cover large areas of terrestrial ecosystems, most research on the effects of and adaptations to UVB radiation has been performed on higher land plants.We investigated the response of the bryophyte Syntrichia ruralis var. arenicola, inhabiting open dune areas in the Netherlands, to ambient and enhanced levels of UVB radiation, during a 13 months study under semi-natural outdoor conditions. Net growth was reduced upon enhanced UVB radiation. At the end of the experiment, total plant length was significantly decreased by UVB exposure, while there were no significant differences in branching pattern or length of the side branches among the different treatments. Since total dry weight was not affected by the treatments, plants under enhanced UVB exposure tended to be more compact. The concentration of phenolic compounds was significantly increased by UVA exposure, but was not affected by enhanced UVB radiation. In contrast to vascular plants, but in common with other bryophyte studies, there were no significant differences in concentrations of UVB absorbing compounds among the different treatments. However, the levels of UVB absorbing compounds changed significantly within a growing season, independent of UV exposure levels.This indicates that these substances are constitutively abundant and that UVB exposure (alone) does not affect the amount of UVB absorbing compounds in this bryophyte.This suggests that no or another UVB defence mechanism might be acting in bryophytes than in higher plants. Since both UV exposure and desiccation may lead to oxidative stress, we hypothesise that possible protection of bryophytes against UVB radiation might be linked with their desiccation tolerance mechanism.
The Becker-Coase Theorem Reconsidered

We reconsider the well-known Becker–Coase (BC) theorem according to which changes in divorce law should not affect divorce rates. We do that in a context of households that consume public goods in addition to private goods. For the Becker–Coase theorem to hold in this setting, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs to be invariant in marital status. We show that if divorce alters the way some goods are consumed (either because some goods that are public in marriage become private in divorce or because divorce affects either the marginal rate of substitution between public and private goods or even the cardinalization of a spouse’s utility), then the Becker–Coase theorem holds only for very specific preferences. We conclude that, in general, divorce laws will influence the divorce rate, although the impact of a change in divorce laws can go in either direction.
Translation in the predicative element of a sentence: category switiching, aspect and diathesis

To translate collocations such as prendre une décision, prendre l'habitude, perdre l'habitude, avoir soif, most MT systems include bilingual rules as prendre ( — décision ) --> make, prendre ( — habitude ) --> get into, perdre ( — habitude ) --> get out of, soif (avoir — ) --> thirsty (be — ). These numerous rules, which are lexically context-sensitive, are costly, be they used in a rationalist or empiricist approach. This paper presents a solution where they are avoided. This solution is based on linguistics notions such as "predicative element", "aspectual variant", "diathetic variant" which allow us to use only the unavoidable simple bilingual rules such as décision --> decision, habitude -•> habit, thirsty --> soif. This solution, which has been successfully implemented in a rule-based transfer system, i.e. the Eurotra system which handles nine languages, requires a lot of monolingual lexical information, but we will show that this lexical information should be easily extracted from tagged corpora.
Adolescent Self-Organization Predicts Midlife Memory in a Prospective Birth Cohort Study

Childhood and adolescent mental health have a lasting impact on adult life chances, with strong implications for subsequent health, including cognitive aging. Using the British 1946 birth cohort, the authors tested associations between adolescent conduct problems, emotional problems and aspects of self-organization, and verbal memory at 43 years and rate of decline in verbal memory from 43 to 60–64 years. After controlling for childhood intelligence, adolescent self-organization was positively associated with verbal memory at 43 years, mainly through educational attainment, although not with rate of memory decline. Associations between adolescent conduct and emotional problems and future memory were of negligible magnitude. It has been suggested that interventions to improve self-organization may save a wide range of societal costs; this study also suggests that this might also benefit cognitive function in later life.
Physiological and Psychological Effects of a Forest Therapy Program on Middle-Aged Females

The natural environment is increasingly recognized as an effective counter to urban stress, and “Forest Therapy” has recently attracted attention as a relaxation and stress management activity with demonstrated clinical efficacy. The present study assessed the physiological and psychological effects of a forest therapy program on middle-aged females. Seventeen Japanese females (62.2 ± 9.4 years; mean ± standard deviation) participated in this experiment. Pulse rate, salivary cortisol level, and psychological indices were measured on the day before forest therapy and on the forest therapy day. Pulse rate and salivary cortisol were significantly lower than baseline following forest therapy, indicating that subjects were in a physiologically relaxed state. Subjects reported feeling significantly more “comfortable,” “relaxed,” and “natural” according to the semantic differential (SD) method. The Profile of Mood State (POMS) negative mood subscale score for “tension–anxiety” was significantly lower, while that for “vigor” was significantly higher following forest therapy. Our study revealed that forest therapy elicited a significant (1) decrease in pulse rate, (2) decrease in salivary cortisol levels, (3) increase in positive feelings, and (4) decrease in negative feelings. In conclusion, there are substantial physiological and psychological benefits of forest therapy on middle-aged females.
A Shadow Detection and Removal from a Single Image Using LAB Color Space

Due to obstruction by an object light from a source cannot reach the area and creates shadow on that area. Shadows often introduce errors in the performance of computer vision algorithms, such as object detection and tracking. Thus shadow detection and removal is a pre-processing task in these fields. This paper proposes a simple method to detect and remove shadows from a single RGB image. A shadow detection method is selected on the basis of the mean value of RGB image in A and B planes of LAB equivalent of the image and shadow removal method is based on the identification of the amount of light impinging on a surface. The lightness of shadowed regions in an image is increased and then the color of that part of the surface is corrected so that it matches the lit part of the surface. The advantage of our method is that removing shadow does not affect the texture and all the details in the shadowed regions.
Failure Importance Analysis and Adjustment Based on Bayesian Networks

Importance measures in reliability engineering are used to find the weak areas of a system. Traditional importance measures for binary systems and multi-state systems mainly concern reliability importance of an individual component, and seldom consider the reliability importance of the causal components. This paper constructs the failure importance analysis Bayesian networks (FIABN) to describe the causality system firstly. Then we present the failure importance measures models for binary and multi-state systems based on FIABN. Finally, the adjustment methods of the failure importance are given. The numerical simulations show failure importance measures models and adjustment methods are effective.
Combining Textual and Visual Features to Identify Anomalous User-Generated Content

Anomaly detection has extensive use in a wide variety of applications, such techniques aim to find patterns in data that do not conform to expected behavior. In this work we apply anomaly detection to the task of discovering anomalies from user-generated content of commercial product descriptions. While most of the other works in literature rely exclusively on textual features, we combine those textual descriptors with visual information extracted from the media resources associated with each product description. Given a large corpus of documents, the proposed system infers the key features describing the behavioral traits of expert users, and automatically reports whenever a newly generated description contains suspicious or low quality textual/visual elements. We prove that the joint use of textual and visual features helps in obtaining a robust detection model that can be employed in an enterprise environment to automatically mark suspicious descriptions for further manual inspection.
Coordination of Expectations in Asset Pricing Experiments (Revised June 2003)

We investigate expectation formation in a controlled experimental environment. Subjects are asked to predict the price in a standard asset pricing model. They do not have knowledge of the underlying market equilibrium equations, but they know all past realized prices and their own predictions. Aggregate demand of the risky asset depends upon the forecasts of the participants. The realized price is then obtained from market equilibrium with feedback from individual expectations. Each market is populated by six subjects and a small fraction of fundamentalist traders. Realized prices differ significantly from fundamental values. In some groups the asset price converges slowly to the fundamental price, in other groups there are regular oscillations around the fundamental price. In all groups participants coordinate on a common prediction strategy. The individual prediction strategies can be estimated and correspond, for a large majority of participants, to simple linear autoregressive forecasting rules.
DESIGN AN EFFICIENT BIGDATA ANALYTIC ARCHITECTURE FOR RETRIEVAL OFDATA BASED ON W EB SERVER IN CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

Cloud has been a computationaland storage solution for many data centric organizations . The problem today those organizations are facing from the cloud is in data searching in an efficient manner. A framework is required to distribute the work of searching and fetching from thousands of computers. The data in HDFS is scattered and needs lots of time to retrieve. The major idea is to design a web server in the map phase using the jetty web server which will give a fast and efficientway of searching data in MapReduce paradigm . For real time processing on Hadoop, a sear chable mechanism is implemented in HDFS by creatinga multilevel index in web server with multi-level index keys and indexing in DataNode. The web server uses to handle traffic throughput. By web clustering technology we can improve the application performance. To keep the work down, the load balancer should automatically be able to distribute load to the newly added nodes in the server.
The Earliest Optical Observations of GRB 030329

We present the earliest optical imaging observations of the gamma-ray burst GRB 030329 related to SN 2003dh. The burst was detected by the High Energy Transient Explorer 2 satellite on 2003 March 29, at 11:37:14.67 UT. Our wide-field monitoring started 97 minutes before the trigger, and the burst position was continuously observed. We found no precursor or contemporaneous flare brighter than V = 5.1 (V = 5.5) in the 32 s (64 s) timescale between 10:00 and 13:00 UT. Follow-up time series photometries started at 12:51:39 UT (75 s after position notice through the GRB Coordinates Network) and continued for more than 5 hr. The afterglow was RC = 12.35 ± 0.07 at t = 74 minutes after burst. Its fading between 1.2 and 6.3 hr is well characterized by a single power law of the form f(mJy) = [1.99 ± 0.02 (statistic) ± 0.14 (systematic)](t/1 day)-0.890 ± 0.006 (statistic) ± 0.010 (systematic) in the RC band. No significant flux variation was detected, and upper limits are derived as (Δf/f)rms = 3%-5% in minute-to-hour timescales and (Δf/f)rms = 35%-5% in second-to-minute timescales. Such a featureless light curve is explained by the smooth distribution of the circumburst medium. Another explanation is that the optical band was above the synchrotron cooling frequency where the emergent flux is insensitive to the ambient density contrasts. Extrapolation of the afterglow light curve to the burst epoch excludes the presence of an additional flare component at t < 10 minutes as seen in GRB 990123 and GRB 021211.
Web Services based on the C2IEDM - Data Mediation and Data Storage

This paper shows how the ideas of web services and Model-Based Data Management (MBDM) are merged in two “C2IEDM Web Service” families realized by the VMASC team within the Battle Management Language (BML) group. Although being developed within the team for the prototype, the services can be used in other systems and projects easily, as they can be adapted and configured to serve alternative needs. To support unambiguous definition of data element for information exchange, the ideas of MBDM have been implemented, resulting in a data mediation service based on the use of the Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM) as a common reference model. Generally, data engineering includes four parts: data administration, data management, data alignment, and data transformation, of which data management, alignment, and transformation are of particular interest within the BML group. Applying MBDM, results are documented for data alignment using a commercial tool to map, aggregate, and disaggregate data, and remove/create duplicated data. This results in software products and configuration, that are directly used for data transformation: The commercial solution supports XSLT and Java-based mapping methods to set up transformation layers between both XML and database approaches. In BML, this is used to set up a C2IEDM based data mediation service speaking C2IEDM as well as the language to be mediated (in our case BML). The second service family contains C2IEDM based information exchange and storage services, which use the tag set of the coalition name space of the US DoD XML Repository to store, retrieve, and exchange information based on the C2IEDM. These services can be source and target of simple C2IEDM data replications. When combined with the C2IEDM based data mediation service, the C2IEDM based information exchange, and storage service can be used to store and exchange information of every mediated language. The two service families can be used in M&S infrastructures, such as Extensible M&S Framework (XMSF) prototypes, the Joint National Training Capability (JNTC), or the Distributed Continuous Experimentation Environment (DCEE), as well as in Global Information grid (GIG) infrastructures, hence, connecting both worlds effectively and efficiently.
Examining the Performance Impact of NoC Parameters for Scalable and Adaptive FPGA-Based Network-on-Chips

In this paper we propose a methodology for investigating the impact of basic Network-on-Chip (NoC) parameters and self-adaptive scheme in the context of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). With our proposed methodology that is based on the Bayesian networking model we examined the effects of flit buffer depth, flit data width and virtual channel parameters through an extensive experimentation and simulation for scalable and adaptive NoC on Xilinx Virtex7 FPGA device. To demonstrate the flexibility and extensible design space coverage of our methodology, we design and present hardware synthesis results of 96 different NoCs configurations. We used a cycle accurate simulation system and drive the NoCs with four different traffic patterns and varying number of virtual channels (VCs) and show the resulting load-delay curves. Our results show that, for scalable and adaptive NoC, the flit data width and flit buffer depth parameters have the largest impact on FPGA area and clock frequency. We show that these parameters need to be properly adjusted for better run-time performance of the FPGA. Moreover, the neighbor traffic pattern with 4 VCs offer the best performance with 95% throughput, low latency and efficient silicon area in both Mesh and Torus networks.
Extending human induced pluripotent stem cell technology to infectious diseases: new model for viral myocarditis.

Infections by viruses, such as adenoviruses, enteroviruses, or parvoviruses, can affect the heart, resulting in myocardial inflammation.1 Viral myocarditis encompasses a wide spectrum of clinical presentations, ranging from oligosymptomatic infections to the rapid development of terminal heart failure. Article, see p 556 Clinical diagnosis of viral myocarditis remains a challenge. Although modern imaging modalities, such as late gadolinium enhancement MRI, can be used to estimate the likelihood of viral heart disease in suspected cases, the definite diagnosis still requires histopathologic examination of endomyocardial biopsies.2 Viral heart disease seems to account for a relevant proportion of otherwise unexplained dilated cardiomyopathies. In large series of patients with this diagnosis who underwent endomyocardial biopsy, myocarditis was found in ≈10% of cases.3,4 Because of the unavailability of specific noninvasive tests, the exact prevalence of viral myocarditis is unknown, and it is likely that many cases remain undiagnosed.5 One of the most prevalent and most intensively studied myocarditis-causing viruses is coxsackievirus B3, a member of the enterovirus genus of unenveloped single-stranded positive-sense RNA viruses. The entry of coxsackieviruses into cardiomyocytes depends on surface expression of the coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor, a transmembrane protein with 2 extracellular immunoglobulin domains that is highly expressed on the cell membrane of cardiomyocytes.6 Upon replication in the host myocardium, a protein called enteroviral protease 2A is synthesized, which was demonstrated to cleave the sarcolemmal protein dystrophin specifically, disrupting the cytoskeletal integrity of the cardiomyocytes.7 Much of our knowledge of the …
A stereo six-band motion picture capturing using 4K digital cinema camera

In digital archiving for cultural heritage preservation, in the medical field, and in some industrial fields, the high-fidelity reproduction of color, gloss, texture, three-dimensional (3-D) shape, and movement is very important. Multi-spectrum imaging can provide accurate color reproduction. Although several types of multi-spectral camera systems have been developed, all of them, except for the six-band HDTV camera system developed by Ohsawa et al [Ohsawa et al. 2004], are multi-shot and none can take still images of moving objects and moving pictures. However, Ohsawa et al.'s system requires very complex and expensive customized optics whose optical elements must be arranged precisely, which makes it far from practical. In order to make multi-spectrum video systems pervasive, the equipment costs must be reduced by ensuring they have as much compatibility with existing video camera systems as possible. To meet this requirement, several stereo one-shot six-band still image capturing systems that also combine multi-spectrum and stereo imaging techniques have been proposed [Tsuchida et al., 2010; Shrestha et al., 2011]. In this paper, we propose a system that applies their concept to existing 4K digital cinema cameras and show the possibility using the proposed system for cinematography.
Theoretical and empirical issues in tourism demand analysis

The majority of empirical studies of tourism analysis use a static single equation approach to model the demand for tourism of one origin for one or more destination countries. The examination of such studies generally shows that the economic interpretation and policy implications drawn as conclusions are based on mis-specified models, invalid estimation and inference procedures, inconsistent estimates and poor forecasting performance. Static single equation models of tourism demand tend to neglect interdependencies among destinations, ignore nonstationarity, overlook dynamics and, generally, disregard economic theory. Empirical specifications constrained by these flaws are bound to generate biased and inconsistent estimates upon which no reliable economic analysis or policy implication can be based. In an analytical context that focuses on the UK tourism demand for France, Spain and Portugal in the period 1969-1997, the main objective of this thesis is to demonstrate that consistent elasticities' estimates and reliable forecasts can be obtained from empirical models which are based on the principles of economic theory, and specified and rigorously tested within the rules of sound econometric methodology. The alternative models estimated in chapters 4 to 7 include error-correction autoregressive distributed lag models (ARDL), static and dynamic almost ideal demands systems (AIDS) and cointegrated vector autoregressive models (VAR). The main findings that emerge from the study are as follow. The battery of diagnostic tests applied to the dynamic error-correction ARDL models provide sufficient evidence to classify them as statistically robust, structurally stable and well-defined specifications. The evidence obtained for the AIDS and VAR systems indicates them as data-coherent and theoretically-consistent models, complying with the utility maximisation hypotheses. The similarity, across models, of the estimates of the long-run structural parameters and the accuracy of the forecasts they provide further support the reliability of these models for explaining and predicting the UK tourism demand behaviour, in contrast to the static single equations estimated in chapter 3. The specifications of chapters 4 to 7 can easily be extended, without loss of generality, to more origins and destinations and can be adapted to alternative contexts such as the demand for specific regions within a country, specific resorts within a region or even specific types of tourism products such as accommodation or leisure facilities, within a local area.
Exploiting passage retrieval for n-best rescoring of spoken questions

Speech interfaces using LVCSR system have promise for improving the utility of Open-domain Question Answering, in which natural language questions about diversi ﬁ ed topics are used as inputs. In this paper, we propose a method to improve both speech recognition and question answering performance by incorporating the passage retrieval, which is a component common to many QA systems, with respect to the target documents that the input question asked about. In the QA process, the passage that has the high similarity to the question has the high possibility to have the correct answer in it. Conversely, this similarity can be used to select the appropriate candidate from N-best list of speech recognition results. From language modeling perspective, this process can be seen to capture the semantic consistency of spoken question in sentence level as compared with conventional n-gram language models. We show the effectiveness of our method by means of experiments.