Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arthropods and other Biota associated with the Azorean Trees and Shrubs : Juniperus brevifolia

This work aims to characterize the arthropods and other biota (lichens, bryophytes, vascular plants and birds) associated with the Azorean endemic tree, Juniperus brevifolia. This is the first of a series of publications that will (i) provide a comprehensive list of all the biota associated with the main Azorean endemic trees and shrubs, (ii) describe in detail the diversity, abundance and spatial patterns of canopy arthropods, and (iii) whenever possible, to extend biodiversity assessments to communities of bryophytes, lichens, vascular plants and vertebrates. We use standardized sampled data from BALA project for canopy arthropods and for the remaining taxa we surveyed literature data and the Herbarium of University of Azores. Juniperus brevifolia occurs in a wide range of elevation belts in Azores and accommodates a remarkable large number of taxa: besides canopy arthropods (161 species) it is also an important substrate to other vascular species (six species), bryophytes (105 species), lichens (106 species) and also birds (four species). In addition, the species richness and particularly the abundance of endemics are dominant, and the number of conservation concern species for bryophytes is noteworthy (30 out of 70). The complexity of the tree and the high diversity of micro-habitats created the conditions for epiphytic species to easily colonize all parts of the tree, from the bottom, trunk and branches. The communities associated with the Azorean cedar are consequently of a high conservation value and should be further investigated in their ecological dynamics.
Information Exploration Using Mobile Agents

This paper presents a distributed knowledge-based system that explores sentences containing specific term related types of information from a network. The system uses a linguistic knowledge base including linguistic patterns and word lists representing expressions of the language for a specific type of information. The system is implemented with a mobile agent software environment in order to reduce the network traffic by moving the computations to the server side. It includes a set of processing tools which allow a specialized mobile agent to migrate in the network, process texts on the hosts, extracts relevant sentences that are matched to linguistic patterns and then returns the results to the client. The system has been used to search for information in a local area network. The natural language engineering aspects of the approach, the system architecture and the implementation are discussed in this paper. Key-Words: Natural language engineering, contextual exploration, knowledge-based system, mobile agents, linguistic pattern, matching algorithm.
Compact Ultra-Wideband Bandpass Filter Using Dual-Line Coupling Structure

This letter presents a novel compact ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip bandpass filter with spurious response suppression. A dual-mode ring resonator is constituted to allocate its first two resonant frequencies in the UWB band, and the dual-line parallel-coupled structure is used in this compact UWB filter, which is expected to achieve much tighter coupling degree. Simulated and measured results are found in good agreement with each other, showing a wide passband from 4.9 to 10.9 GHz, 15 dB return loss bandwidth of about 5 GHz, minimum insertion loss of 0.49 dB at 7.3 GHz, and wide upper stopband with more than 20 dB attenuation up to 20 GHz.
An Economic Welfare Analysis Of Agricultural Subsidies And Inventory Holdings: An Application To The Hazelnut Industry1

This study presents an industry model developed to analyze the link between targeted production subsidies and excess inventory holdings by using equilibrium displacement modelling. A major question to be investigated is whether a targeted production subsidy can be effective at reducing excess inventory while providing welfare gains to the domestic producers. Monte Carlo simulation results suggest that the policy is expected to achieve its objectives as it improves the welfare of targeted producers and reduces government inventories. The average cost of an increase in the production subsidy to taxpayers would have been 22 percent higher had treasury gains from reduced inventories not been taken into account in the welfare analysis.
Types for Progress in Actor Programs ∗ Minas

Properties in the actor model can be described in terms of the message-passing behavior of actors. In this paper, we address the problem of using a type system to capture liveness properties of actor programs. Specifically, we define a simple actor language in which demands for certain types of messages may be generated during execution, in a manner specified by the programmer. For example, we may want to require that each request to an actor eventually results in a reply. The difficulty lies in that such requests can be generated dynamically, alongside the associated requirements for replies. Such replies might be sent in response to intermediate messages that never arrive, but the property may also not hold for more trivial reasons; for instance, when the code of potential senders of the reply omit the required sending command in some branches of a conditional statement. We show that, for a restricted class of actor programs, a system that tracks typestates can statically guarantee that such dynamically generated requirements will eventually be satisfied.
Genome size variation and polyploidy in the geographical range of Juniperus sabina L. (Cupressaceae)

ABSTRACT Polyploidy and natural hybridization are considered as two major evolutionary processes involved in plant speciation and diversification. In conifers, natural hybridization has been noticed to be more frequent than polyploidy. Nevertheless, a few cases of polyploidy have been reported in the genus Juniperus. In this genus, a new variety Juniperus sabina var. balkanensis has been postulated to have arisen from an ancient hybridization between the tetraploid species Juniperus thurifera and the diploid species Juniperus sabina var. sabina. The genome size variation and the ploidy level of two J. sabina taxa were estimated by flow cytometry in a panel of 29 populations. All 13 populations of J. sabina var. sabina were diploid, with genome sizes ranging from 22.09 to 25.03 pg/2C, while the 16 populations of J. sabina var. balkanensis were tetraploid, with genome sizes ranging from 41.99 pg to 51.33 pg/2C. These findings open new venues towards the discovering of the polyploidization pathway of J. sabina var. balkanensis and to understand historical and ecological factors that explain its current geographical distribution.
Differential alterations in metabolic pattern of the spliceosomal uridylic acid‐rich small nuclear RNAs (UsnRNAs) during malignant transformation of 20‐methylcholanthrene‐induced mouse CNCI‐PM‐20 embryonic fibroblasts

Differential alterations of the spliceosomal Uridylic acid rich small nuclear RNAs (UsnRNAs) (U1, U2, U4, U5, and U6) are reported to be associated with cellular proliferation and development, but definitive information is scarce and also elusive. An attempt is made in this study to analyze the metabolic patterns of major spliceosomal UsnRNAs, during tumor development, in an in vitro carcinogenesis model of 20‐methylcholanthrene (MCA)‐transformed Swiss Mouse Embryonic Fibroblast (MEF), designated as CNCI‐PM‐20. MEF cells, after treatment with 20‐MCA, progressed through a sequence of passages with distinct and heritable changes, finally becoming neoplastic at passage‐42 (P42). A differential expression pattern of major UsnRNAs was observed during this process. The abundance of U1 was 20% below control (P1) at passage‐20 (P20), followed by a gradual increase up until P42 (∼12% above the P1 value). The abundance of U2 was more or less constant during the cellular transformation. U4 showed a trend of increase, with above 30% abundance than control at P20, followed by a significant increase at P36 and P42 (1.5‐ and 2‐fold, respectively, P‐value <0.01). U5 also followed an identical pattern, with an increase of 70% compared to control (P‐value <0.05) at P42. Interestingly, U6 gradually decreased from P20 onwards up until P42, with 22% at P20 and 67% at P42 (P‐value <0.01). An overall significant quantitative alteration in abundance of U4, U5, and U6, observed in our study, contributes to the understanding of the fact that, the metabolism of major spliceosomal UsnRNAs is differentially regulated during the process of neoplastic transformation. Mol. Carcinog. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Dipole and quadrupole moments of 73 – 78 Cu as a test of the robustness of the Z = 28 shell closure near 78

R. P. de Groote,1,* J. Billowes,2 C. L. Binnersley,2 M. L. Bissell,2 T. E. Cocolios,1 T. Day Goodacre,3 G. J. Farooq-Smith,1 D. V. Fedorov,4 K. T. Flanagan,2 S. Franchoo,5 R. F. Garcia Ruiz,2 Á. Koszorús,1 K. M. Lynch,6 G. Neyens,1,6 F. Nowacki,7 T. Otsuka,1,8,9,10 S. Rothe,2,3 H. H. Stroke,11 Y. Tsunoda,10 A. R. Vernon,2 K. D. A. Wendt,12 S. G. Wilkins,2 Z. Y. Xu,1 and X. F. Yang1 1KU Leuven, Instituut voor Kernen Stralingsfysica, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium 2School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom 3Engineering Department, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland 4Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, 188350 Gatchina, Russia 5Institut de Physique Nucléaire d’Orsay, F-91406 Orsay, France 6Physics Department, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland 7Institute Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, 23 rue du Loess, F-67037 Strasbourg Cedex 2, France 8Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan 9RIKEN Nishina Center, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan 10Center for Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan 11Department of Physics, New York University, New York, New York 10003, USA 12Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, D-55128 Mainz, Germany (Received 27 May 2017; revised manuscript received 3 August 2017; published 4 October 2017)
Livia Queues : An implementation of message passing queues using specialized architecture

A common data structure in parallel computations is message passing queues. Thus, any decrease in the latency of message passing queues can result in large increases in performance. In this paper, we provide an implementation of message passing queues that provides a significant increase in performance of message passing queues. The implementation makes use of a specialized architecture that permits for the fast execution of functions near data.
A Fuzzy C-means Type Clustering Algorithm on Triangular Fuzzy Numbers

Fuzzy number type data is a typical class of fuzzy data, and it can be regarded as a general form of the interval data and the crisp data. This paper studies fuzzy clustering algorithm for triangular fuzzy numbers. First of all, we give a novel distance between triangular fuzzy numbers by using three parameters interval number, and prove that the proposed distance is a complete metric on the set of triangular fuzzy numbers. And then, based on this novel distance, we propose two fuzzy c-means type clustering algorithms for dealing with triangular fuzzy numbers. Finally, some numerical examples are provided to illustrate the algorithm’s effectiveness.
Open Vocabulary Learning for Neural Chinese Pinyin IME

Pinyin-to-character (P2C) conversion is the core component of pinyin-based Chinese input method engine (IME). However, the conversion is seriously compromised by the ambiguities of Chinese characters corresponding to pinyin as well as the predefined fixed vocabularies. To alleviate such inconveniences, we propose a neural P2C conversion model augmented by an online updated vocabulary with a sampling mechanism to support open vocabulary learning during IME working. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms commercial IMEs and state-of-the-art traditional models on standard corpus and true inputting history dataset in terms of multiple metrics and thus the online updated vocabulary indeed helps our IME effectively follows user inputting behavior.
The Art of Repression: Digital Dissent and Power Consolidation in El-Sisi’s Egypt

Imprecise measurement tools impede the study of protest mobilization. Mobilization proxies, such as counting protesters and protest events, result in significant outliers and variance while ignoring sociocultural, cybernetic, economic, legal, and other features that relevant academic literature considers essential to understanding mobilization dynamics. Without accurate empirical models, researchers’ and policymakers’ investigations of autocratic repression have little explanatory power. This thesis proposes a methodological addition to the mobilization literature: Two three-level scales distinguish an event’s potential to attract an audience from the protest’s actual output relative to similar episodes. I employ the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project to demonstrate the measurement’s utility. Afterwards, I apply these models to conduct an impact assessment of recent Egyptian cyberregulatory laws. Controlling for the grievances of protesters and performing other robustness checks, the time series demonstrates a strong, statistically significant relationship between the policies and the reduction of low-level potential mobilizational capacity of Egyptian dissidents, but fails to identify an expected relationship between police pressure and the decline of mobilizational capacity. These findings contribute to the theoretical frameworks of mobilization scholars and policymaker discussions regarding the value of internet censorship tools for curtailing oppositional political action.
Reinforcement Compiler Fuzzing

To enforce the correctness of compilers is important for every computing system. Fuzzing is an efficient way to find security vulnerabilities by repeatedly testing programs with randomly modified input data. However, in the context of compilers, fuzzing is challenging because the inputs are pieces of codes which are supposed to be both syntactically and semantically valid to pass frontend checks. Moreover, the fuzzed inputs should be distinct to trigger abnormal crashes, memory leaks or failing assertions that not being detected before. In this paper, we proposed an automatic code synthesis framework called FUZZBOOST based on reinforcement learning. By adopting testing coverage information collected from runtime traces as the reward, we propose a learning system with the state-of-the-art deep Q-learning algorithm that optimizes this reward. In this way, the fuzzing agent learns the actions to perform to fuzz a seed program that achieves an overall goal of testing coverage improvement. We have implemented this new approach and preliminary evidence shows that reinforcement fuzzing can outperform baseline random fuzzing on production compilers (i.e. GCC).
Experimental study on the electrical characteristic of a GaN hybrid drain-embedded gate injection transistor (HD-GIT)

The hybrid drain-embedded gate injection transistor (HD-GIT) is a well-developed structure of GaN-based power transistor which solves the issues of current collapse and negative gate threshold voltage. In this paper, the electrical characteristic of a HD-GIT-based GaN power transistor is investigated with experimental study. Based on the gate I-V relationship, the design of the gate driver circuit is discussed. The gate driving losses as well as the switching waveforms of the HD-GIT under hard-switching operations are analyzed. Besides speeding up the switching operation, the reduction in the gate voltage and gate charge saves the gate driving power. These features substantially increase the maximum operating frequency of the HD-GIT-based power converter. The current collapse free operation allows the device working at a wide range of voltage and duty cycle without notable degradation of the dynamic on-state resistance.
Interference of humic acids and DNA extracted directly from soil in detection and transformation of recombinant DNA from bacteria and a yeast

A two-step protocol for the extraction and purification of total DNA from soil samples was developed. Crude DNA extracts (100 microliters from 5 g of soil) were contaminated with humic acids at concentrations of 0.7 to 3.3 micrograms/microliters, depending on the type of soil extracted. The coextracted humic acid fraction of a clay silt was similar to a commercially available standard humic acid mixture, as determined by electrophoretic mobility in agarose gels, UV fluorescence, and inhibition assays with DNA-transforming enzymes. Restriction endonucleases were inhibited at humic acid concentrations of 0.5 to 17.2 micrograms/ml for the commercial product and 0.8 to 51.7 micrograms/ml for the coextracted humic acids. DNase I was less susceptible (MIC of standard humic acids, 912 micrograms/ml), and RNase could not be inhibited at all (MIC, > 7.6 mg/ml). High inhibitory susceptibilities for humic acids were observed with Taq polymerase. For three Taq polymerases from different commercial sources, MICs were 0.08 to 0.64 micrograms of the standard humic acids per ml and 0.24 to 0.48 micrograms of the coextracted humic acids per ml. The addition of T4 gene 32 protein increased the MIC for one Taq polymerase to 5.12 micrograms/ml. Humic acids decreased nonradioactive detection in DNA-DNA slot blot hybridizations at amounts of 0.1 micrograms and inhibited transformation of competent Escherichia coli HB101 with a broad-host-range plasmid, pUN1, at concentrations of 100 micrograms/ml. Purification of crude DNA with ion-exchange chromatography resulted in removal of 97% of the initially coextracted humic acids. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The Staphylococcus aureus Opp1 ABC transporter imports nickel and cobalt in zinc‐depleted conditions and contributes to virulence

Metals are common enzymatic cofactors, and their acquisition must be assured under the various conditions encountered in the host. Although some strategies for acquisition of common metals such as iron and manganese have been elucidated, little is known about the conditions and mechanisms used to capture trace metals. Nickel is a transition metal required as a cofactor for several bacterial enzymes, including urease. Staphylococcus aureus does express a nickel ABC transporter, Nik, which functions in metal‐replete medium and is necessary for nickel urease activity and urinary tract colonization. In this work, we identified a novel cobalt and nickel transporter, which we named Cnt (previously annotated Opp1), in the major opportunistic pathogen S. aureus. Metal transport activity was revealed by growing cells in a chemically defined medium devoid of metals. Zinc specifically inhibits Cnt‐mediated nickel and cobalt uptake, on both functional and transcriptional levels. Mortality due to S. aureus cnt mutant in systemic infection and colonization of the bladder and kidneys in ascending urinary tract infection model were reduced compared to the parent strain. This study identifies a novel S. aureus trace metal transporter and its restricted conditions of activity, and establishes its role in infection.
Better late than early: delayed translation of intron‐encoded endonuclease I‐TevI is required for efficient splicing of its host group I intron

The td group I intron interrupting the thymidylate synthase (TS) gene of phage T4 is a mobile intron that encodes the homing endonuclease I‐TevI. Efficient RNA splicing of the intron is required to restore function of the TS gene, while expression of I‐TevI from within the intron is required to initiate intron mobility. Three distinct layers of regulation temporally limit I‐TevI expression to late in the T4 infective cycle, yet the biological rationale for stringent regulation has not been tested. Here, we deleted key control elements to deregulate I‐TevI expression at early and middle times post T4 infection. Strikingly, we found that deregulation of I‐TevI, or of a catalytically inactive variant, generated a thymidine‐dependent phenotype that is caused by a reduction in td intron splicing. Prematurely terminating I‐TevI translation restores td splicing, full‐length TS synthesis, and rescues the thymidine‐dependent phenotype. We suggest that stringent translational control of I‐TevI evolved to prevent the ribosome from disrupting key structural elements of the td intron that are required for splicing and TS function at early and middle times post T4 infection. Analogous translational regulatory mechanisms in unrelated intron‐open reading frame arrangements may also function to limit deleterious consequences on splicing and host gene function.
Structural Chemistry of Akdalaite, Al10O14(OH)2, the Isostructural Aluminum Analogue of Ferrihydrite

As part of an effort to characterize clusters and intermediate phases likely to be encountered along solution reaction pathways that produce iron and aluminum oxide-hydroxides from Fe and Al precursors, the complete structure of Al10O14(OH)2 (akdalaite) was determined from a combination of single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SC-XRD) data collected at 100 K to define the Al and O positions, and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and neutron powder diffraction (NPD) data collected at room temperature (~300 K) to precisely determine the nature of hydrogen in the structure. Two different synthesis routes produced different crystal morphologies. Using an aluminum oxyhydroxide floc made from mixing AlCl3 and 0.48 M NaOH, the product had uniform needle morphology, while using nanocrystalline boehmite (Vista Chemical Company Catapal D alumina) as the starting material produced hexagonal plates. Akdalaite crystallizes in the space group P63mc with lattice parameters of a = 5.6244(3) Å and c = 8.8417(3) Å (SC-XRD) and a = 5.57610(2) Å and c = 8.77247(6) Å (NPD). The crystal structure features Al13O40 Keggin clusters. The structural chemistry of akdalaite is nonideal but broadly conforms to that of ferrihydrite, the nanomineral with which it is isostructural.
Frequency, Acceptability, and Selection: A case study of clause-embedding

We investigate the relationship between the frequency with which verbs are found in particular subcategorization frames and the acceptability of those verbs in those frames, focusing in particular on subordinate clause-taking verbs, such as "think", "want", and "tell". We show that verbs' subcategorization frame frequency distributions are poor predictors of their acceptability in those frames---explaining, at best, less than 1/3 of the total information about acceptability across the lexicon---and, further, that common matrix factorization techniques used to model the acquisition of verbs' acceptability in subcategorization frames fare only marginally better. All data and code are available at this http URL.
University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Using the semantic web as background knowledge for ontology mapping Conference or Workshop Item

While current approaches to ontology mapping produce good results by mainly relying on label and structure based similarity measures, there are several cases in which they fail to discover important mappings. In this paper we describe a novel approach to ontology mapping, which is able to avoid this limitation by using background knowledge. Existing approaches relying on background knowledge typically have one or both of two key limitations: 1) they rely on a manually selected reference ontology; 2) they suffer from the noise introduced by the use of semi-structured sources, such as text corpora. Our technique circumvents these limitations by exploiting the increasing amount of semantic resources available online. As a result, there is no need either for a manually selected reference ontology (the relevant ontologies are dynamically selected from an online ontology repository), or for transforming background knowledge in an ontological form. The promising results from experiments on two real life thesauri indicate both that our approach has a high precision and also that it can find mappings, which are typically missed by existing approaches.