Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Response of vegetation phenology to urbanization in the conterminous United States

The influence of urbanization on vegetation phenology is gaining considerable attention due to its implications for human health, cycling of carbon and other nutrients in Earth system. In this study, we examined the relationship between change in vegetation phenology and urban size, an indicator of urbanization, for the conterminous United States. We studied more than 4500 urban clusters of varying size to determine the impact of urbanization on plant phenology, with the aids of remotely sensed observations since 2003–2012. We found that phenology cycle (changes in vegetation greenness) in urban areas starts earlier (start of season, SOS) and ends later (end of season, EOS), resulting in a longer growing season length (GSL), when compared to the respective surrounding urban areas. The average difference of GSL between urban and rural areas over all vegetation types, considered in this study, is about 9 days. Also, the extended GSL in urban area is consistent among different climate zones in the United States, whereas their magnitudes are varying across regions. We found that a tenfold increase in urban size could result in an earlier SOS of about 1.3 days and a later EOS of around 2.4 days. As a result, the GSL could be extended by approximately 3.6 days with a range of 1.6–6.5 days for 25th ~ 75th quantiles, with a median value of about 2.1 days. For different vegetation types, the phenology response to urbanization, as defined by GSL, ranges from 1 to 4 days. The quantitative relationship between phenology and urbanization is of great use for developing improved models of vegetation phenology dynamics under future urbanization, and for developing change indicators to assess the impacts of urbanization on vegetation phenology.
Lionel Penrose, F.R.S. (1898–1972) and eugenics: Part one

Lionel Penrose was born in London. His father, James Doyle Penrose a portrait painter, and his mother, Elizabeth Josephine (née Peckover) Penrose, were both members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) as their ancestors had been for 200 years. As Dr Harry Harris F.R. S. , a colleague and author of Penrose's memoir in Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society, observes, Lionel and his three brothers ‘were brought up strictly according to the religious principles of the Society of friends . in later life though he remained a member of the Society of Friends he was not particularly zealous about religious meetings. However, his Quaker upbringing no doubt played an important part in determining his extreme dislike of show and pretensiousness and his pacifist outlook. Also he never acquired a taste for fiction’.
Autophagy‐related gene Atg5 is essential for astrocyte differentiation in the developing mouse cortex

Astrocyte differentiation is essential for late embryonic brain development, and autophagy is active during this process. However, it is unknown whether and how autophagy regulates astrocyte differentiation. Here, we show that Atg5, which is necessary for autophagosome formation, regulates astrocyte differentiation. Atg5 deficiency represses the generation of astrocytes in vitro and in vivo. Conversely, Atg5 overexpression increases the number of astrocytes substantially. We show that Atg5 activates the JAK2‐STAT3 pathway by degrading the inhibitory protein SOCS2. The astrocyte differentiation defect caused by Atg5 loss can be rescued by human Atg5 overexpression, STAT3 overexpression, and SOCS2 knockdown. Together, these data demonstrate that Atg5 regulates astrocyte differentiation, with potential implications for brain disorders with autophagy deficiency.
Nasal Drug Delivery Systems: An Overview

Since ancient times, drugs have been administered via the nasal route for therapeutic and recreational purposes. The interest in, and importance, of the systemic effects of drugs administered through the nasal route, have expanded over recent decades. Intra-nasal administration of drugs offers an interesting alternative for achieving systemic therapeutic effects of drugs that are comparable to the parenteral route, which can be inconvenient at times or oral administration, which can result in unacceptably low drug bioavailability. So, it is important to understand the potential and limitations of various nasal drug delivery systems. Therefore, the aim of this review article is to discuss the various pharmaceutical dosage forms that have the potential to be utilised for local or systemic drug administration. It is intuitively expected that this review will help to understand and further to develop suitable intra-nasal formulations to achieve specific therapeutic objectives.
Veganism, Identity and the Quest for Authenticity

Abstract Identifying as a vegan is a public declaration of one's identity, morals and lifestyle. Veganism is more than a diet; it is a philosophy and ethic. However, not all vegans hold the same norms and values. The differences are often determined by the reasons why one chooses to become a vegan. Using Coffman's theory of impression management and the presentation of self, this qualitative study examines how sixteen self-defined ethical vegans negotiate contradictions in their ethics and behavior. The vegans construct a sense of authenticity through accommodating strategies when they feel inauthentic. This is a two-prong process. They present a narrative of themselves in relation to the “other”-those they define as health vegans-and in relation to other ethical vegans. Through these narratives, this paper explores how these vegans negotiate the difficulties of living in an animal-based consumer-driven society in a manner that preserves their ethics. Additionally, this paper observes how they cope when their behavior contradicts their identity as authentic vegans.
Sequence-specific DNA Recognition by the Myb-like Domain of Plant Telomeric Protein RTBP1*

We have identified a rice gene encoding a DNA-binding protein that specifically recognizes the telomeric repeat sequence TTTAGGG found in plants. This gene, which we refer to asRTBP1 (rice telomere-binding protein 1), encodes a polypeptide with a predicted molecular mass of 70 kDa. RTBP1 is ubiquitously expressed in various organs and binds DNA with two or more duplex TTTAGGG repeats. The predicted protein sequence includes a single domain at the C terminus with extensive homology to Myb-like DNA binding motif. The Myb-like domain of RTBP1 is very closely related to that of other telomere-binding proteins, including TRF1, TRF2, Taz1p, and Tbf1p, indicating that DNA-binding domains of telomere-binding proteins are well conserved among evolutionarily distant species. To obtain precise information on the sequence of the DNA binding site recognized by RTBP1, we analyzed the sequence-specific binding properties of the isolated Myb-like domain of RTBP1. The isolated Myb-like domain was capable of sequence-specific DNA binding as a homodimer. Gel retardation analysis with a series of mutated telomere probes revealed that the internal GGGTTT sequence in the two-telomere repeats is critical for binding of Myb-like domain of RTBP1, which is consistent with the model of the TRF1·DNA complex showing that base-specific contacts are made within the sequence GGGTTA. To the best of our knowledge, RTBP1 is the first cloned gene in which the product is able to bind double-stranded telomeric DNA in plants. Because the Myb-like domain appears to be a significant motif for a large class of proteins that bind the duplex telomeric DNA, RTBP1 may play important roles in plant telomere function in vivo.
Meaningful learning in the cooperative classroom

Meaningful learning is based on more than what teachers transmit; it promotes the construction of knowledge out of learners' experience, feelings and exchanges with other learners. This educational view is based on the constructivist approach to learning and the co-operative learning approach. Researchers and practitioners in various countries and settings seek ways to incorporate these approaches to create meaningful learning in the multicultural classroom and in the co-operative learning classroom. This article presents some of the ideas, studies and methods that signal a major shift of emphasis in education from product to process.
Combining TQM, SQM and TOE to attain Educational Excellence

Ronald Chikati, Nkosinathi Mpofu Abstract: Many institutions of higher education have recently been subjected to a lot of competition for students and government funding to the extent that to survive and successfully thwart the competition, sound strategic decisions have to be made from an informed position. The heat of the competition could be withstood through strategically aligning organisational core processes with current and dynamic management paradigms like Total Quality Management (TQM), Strategic Quality management and Total organisational excellence approach. Several excellence models world-wide could be the source of internal and external requirements analysis. Some of these renowned models are the Japanese Deming application Prize, the US Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), the ISO 9000 standards and the European Quality Award (EQA). The right portfolio mix of these together with the TQM initiatives will enable any tertiary institution to achieve its dreamt vision and mission and become a world-class education provider. However, this calls for everyone to share a collective sense of purpose that is in sync with the strategic objectives of the institution. Top management must show this commitment first and then cascade this value down to all the operational staff. TQM principles are founded from manufacturing industry and hence there is need to adapt them to the service sector like tertiary education. We therefore propose an integration of several TQM frameworks to help institutions to self-assess themselves in order to perform better and survive the tormenting turbulent times in the education landscape.
SoCaST: Exploiting Social, Categorical and Spatio-Temporal Preferences for Personalized Event Recommendations

In event-based social networks, an event recommender helps users to discover events that align with their preferences from a large number of upcoming events. In this paper, we propose a personalized event recommender called SoCaST based on the geographical, categorical, social and temporal influences of events on users to provide event recommendations. SoCaST uses an adaptive Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to model the personalized two-dimensional geographical location. The categorical influence indicates how an event category is relevant to a user and its popularity, while the social influence is modeled as the relevance of a group to a user and her friends. Furthermore, geographical, categorical, and social influences are fused with the temporal influence which is modeled through the KDE method to generate event recommendations. Performance evaluation of SoCaST is conducted by using two large-scale Meetup.com data sets. Experimental results show that SoCaST provides better event recommendations than the state-of-the-art recommendation techniques.
Possession System: adaptation support middleware for collaborative multimedia applications in Java

Possession System is middleware which realizes a simple framework to deal with the adaptation of collaborative multimedia applications. The system is based on Possession Model which provides users with a consistent view of application components, networked sensors, and distributed devices by introducing two separated abstractions: Body and Soul. The adaptation is achieved through the changes of relationships among Bodies and Souls with a simple operation named possession. The adaptation actions can be invoked both manually and automatically by monitoring the changes of the environment underlying the applications. The middleware is applicable to adaptive systems in mobile and ubiquitous computing environments where unpredictable changes in available computing resources, device configuration, and geographics location frequently occur. We describe how collaborative multimedia applications using our middleware adaptively behave.
MorphoTrees of Arabic and Their Annotation in the TrEd Environment

TrEd — the general-purpose tree editor being used within the two leading dependency treebanking projects in Czech and Arabic — has recently been extended with the MorphoTrees annotation context. On the case of Arabic, the novel concept of turning unorganized sets of complex morphological analyses into intuitive hierarchies is presented. Efficiency of disambiguation of MorphoTrees is discussed, and so is the independence of the idea on the language and the implementation.
Autonomic SLA-Driven Provisioning for Cloud Applications

Significant achievements have been made for automated allocation of cloud resources. However, the performance of applications may be poor in peak load periods, unless their cloud resources are dynamically adjusted. Moreover, although cloud resources dedicated to different applications are virtually isolated, performance fluctuations do occur because of resource sharing, and software or hardware failures (e.g. unstable virtual machines, power outages, etc.). In this paper, we propose a decentralized economic approach for dynamically adapting the cloud resources of various applications, so as to statistically meet their SLA performance and availability goals in the presence of varying loads or failures. According to our approach, the dynamic economic fitness of a Web service determines whether it is replicated or migrated to another server, or deleted. The economic fitness of a Web service depends on its individual performance constraints, its load, and the utilization of the resources where it resides. Cascading performance objectives are dynamically calculated for individual tasks in the application workflow according to the user requirements. By fully implementing our framework, we experimentally proved that our adaptive approach statistically meets the performance objectives under peak load periods or failures, as opposed to static resource settings.
Bandpass filter with tunable bandwidth using triple-mode H-type resonator

A reconfigurable bandpass filter (BPF) with independently adjustable passband edges is demonstrated. The filter is formed by a H-type multi-mode resonator (MMR) loaded with varactor diodes. The equivalent even- and odd-mode circuits of the proposed varactor loaded MMR are analyzed. The bandwidth reconfigurability is achieved by using varactor diodes to individually relocate the even-mode resonant frequencies of the resonator. The measured results show the BPF has 23.7% and 26.4% tuning capabilities for the lower and upper passband edges.
Quality Improvement in Higher Education: implications for student retention

Abstract The complementarity between two critical issues in higher education are explored: adoption of a quality improvement philosophy and student retention. Key elements of quality improvement as practised in higher education are described briefly, and a conceptual framework is presented, which clarifies the hypothesised link between quality improvement and student retention. Student persistence is examined within the context of a theoretical model of student retention, and found to be consistent with the critical elements of quality improvement. The authors conclude that student retention is a relevant measure of academic quality improvement efforts and suggest areas in which empirical research might usefully be undertaken to explore the nature of this relationship.
Web services automatic composition with minimal execution price

Web services composition has gained a considerable momentum as a means to create and streamline business-to-business collaborations within and across organizational boundaries. The composition approach proposed in this paper can enable user to generate a composite Web service with minimal execution price dynamically. After modeling Web services with rules and eliminating semantics conflicts among parameters of Web service models, we can compute a deduced network with inputs given by user. Based on the deduced network, a set of composition plans for every output can be obtained with a backward deduction approach. In order to get the composition plan which has the minimal execution price, all the output's composition plan sets should be joined by Cartesian product.
ELVES: Ein computergestütztes Diagnostikum zur Erfassung der Effizienz von Teilprozessen des Leseverstehens

Zusammenfassung. Lesekompetenz beruht auf der effizienten Bewaltigung von Teilprozessen des Leseverstehens, wie sie in hierarchischen Modellen der Textverarbeitung unterschieden werden. ELVES (Effizienz des Leseverstehens bei Erwachsenen nach dem Strategiemodell) ist ein computergestutztes Instrument zur Messung von Lesefahigkeiten bei geubten erwachsenen Lesern/innen. Die 7 Subtests des Instruments erfassen uber die simultane Berucksichtigung von Antwortrichtigkeit und Antwortlatenz die Effizienz hierarchieniedriger (mikrostruktureller) und hierarchiehoher (makrostruktureller) Teilprozesse des Lesens nach van Dijk und Kintsch (1983). Vier Untersuchungen mit studentischen Probanden/innen (N = 232) dienten einer ersten Konstrukt- und Kriteriumsvalidierung. Anhand der Skaleninterkorrelationen und der Ergebnisse einer konfirmatorischen Faktorenanalyse lies sich die angenommene Trennung hierarchieniedriger und hierarchiehoher Teilfahigkeiten belegen. Die Subtests des Instruments korrelierten mit der Leistung .
Extending Real-Time Challenge Balancing to Multiplayer Games: A Study on Eco-Driving

Multiplayer games are an important and popular game mode for networked players. Since games are played by a diverse audience, it is important to scale the difficulty, or challenge, according to the skill level of the players. However, current approaches to real-time challenge balancing (RCB) in games are only applicable to single-player scenarios. In multiplayer scenarios, players with different skill levels may be present in the same area, and hence adjusting the game difficulty to match the skill of one player may affect the other players in an undesirable way. To address this problem, we have previously developed a new approach based on distributed constraint optimization, which achieves the optimal challenge level for multiple players in real-time. The main contribution of this paper is an experiment that was performed with our new multiplayer real-time challenge balancing method applied to eco-driving. The results of the experiment suggest the effectiveness of RCB.
'Who's Got the Look?' Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes.
Weak and Habitat-Dependent Effects of Nutrient Pollution on Macrofaunal Communities of Southeast Australian Estuaries

Among the impacts of coastal settlements to estuaries, nutrient pollution is often singled out as a leading cause of modification to the ecological communities of soft sediments. Through sampling of 48 sites, distributed among 16 estuaries of New South Wales, Australia, we tested the hypotheses that (1) anthropogenic nutrient loads would be a better predictor of macrofaunal communities than estuarine geomorphology or local sediment characteristics; and (2) local environmental context, as determined largely by sediment characteristics, would modify the relationship between nutrient loading and community composition. Contrary to the hypothesis, multivariate multiple regression analyses revealed that sediment grain size was the best predictor of macrofaunal assemblage composition. When samples were stratified according to median grain size, relationships between faunal communities and nitrogen loading and latitude emerged, but only among estuaries with sandier sediments. In these estuaries, capitellid and nereid polychaetes and chironomid larvae were the taxa that showed the strongest correlations with nutrient loading. Overall, this study failed to provide evidence of a differential relationship between diffuse nutrient enrichment and benthic macrofauna across a gradient of 7° of latitude and 4°C temperature. Nevertheless, as human population growth continues to place increasing pressure on southeast Australian estuaries, manipulative field studies examining when and where nutrient loading will lead to significant changes in estuarine community structure are needed.
On-line self-learning PID controller design of SSSC using self-recurrent wavelet neural networks

Conventionally, FACTS devices employ a proportional-integral (PI) controller as a supplementary controller. However, the conventional PI controller has many disadvantages. The present paper aims to propose an on-line self- learning PI-derivative (PID) controller design of a static synchronous series compensator for power system stability enhancement and to overcome the PI controller problems. Unlike the PI controllers, the proposed PID controller has a local nature because of its powerful adaption process, which is based on the back-propagation (BP) algorithm that is carried out through an adaptive self-recurrent wavelet neural network identier (ASRWNNI). In fact, the PID controller parameters are updated in on-line mode using the BP algorithm based on the information provided by the ASRWNNI, which is a powerful and fast-acting identier thanks to its local nature, self-recurrent structure, and stable training algorithm with adaptive learning rates based on the discrete Lyapunov stability theorem. The proposed control scheme is applied to a 2-machine, 2-area power system under dierent operating conditions and disturbances to demonstrate its eectiveness and robustness. Later on, the design problem is extended to a 4-machine, 2-area benchmark system and the results show that the interarea modes of the oscillations are well damped with the proposed approach.