Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Chemical Composition, Bioactive Compounds and Antioxidant Activity of Three Olive‐Waste Cakes

The objectives of this study were to determine the physicochemical composition, phenolic, tocopherol, flavonoid, flavanol, dietary fiber and β-carotene contents, as well as the antioxidant activity of three olive-waste cakes from varieties Picual, Frantoio and Arbequina. Frantoio presented the highest dietary fiber content and Arbequina showed the highest β-carotene content. Results indicated that total phenolic content followed the sequence (Frantoio > Picual > Arbequina). Picual presented the highest free phenolic and flavonoid contents (3499.11 mg gallic acid equivalent/100 g dry weight (DW) and 1331.45 mg CTE/100 g DW, respectively) showing the highest antioxidant capacity. The identified free phenolic compounds of the three varieties were gallic acid, 3-hydroxytyrosol, rutin hydrate, tyrosol and p-coumaric acids. The α-tocopherol was the predominant for the three varieties. Practical Aplications Olive oil processing produces significant amount of waste that can be utilized for the production of high value-added ingredients for various industrial applications. Therefore, the information here reported may stimulate engineers to re-evaluate these wastes, with the possibility to recover significant amounts of bioactive compounds with high antioxidant capacity and dietary fiber in order to produce food additives in the scenario of functional foods.
The research and application of data mining in power plant operation optimization

As the development of electric industry, more and more real-time data are sent to database by DAS and DCS and large amounts of data are accumulated. Abundantly valuable knowledge exists in the history data and it is hard to find and summarize them in traditional way. This paper proposes the operation optimization based on data mining in power plant. The basic structure of the operation optimization based on data mining is established and the fuzzy association rule mining is introduced to find the optimization target value from quantitative values of the equipments in power plant industry process. Based on the history data of a 300MW unit, the optimal values of the operating parameters are found out by data mining techniques. The optimal values are provided to the operators to guide the operation online and the excellent performance is achieved in the power plant.
Jolly Perspective Parental Influences on the Academic Motivation of Gifted Students : A Self-Determination Theory

The home environment that parents provide their gifted children can have a significant impact on academic motivation, yet limited research has focused on this topic. Self-determination theory, a comprehensive framework of motivation, was used in the current study to explore two research questions: (a) What attitudes do parents of gifted students have toward the academic motivation of their children? (b) What approaches do parents of gifted students use at home to develop academic motivation? Interviews with 30 parents of gifted children from across the United States revealed three higher order themes including Parents as Experts, Scaffolding, and Behavior Modification. From a self-determination theory perspective, results suggest that despite good intentions, the parents of this study were inconsistent in providing home environments that support their children’s development of internalized forms of academic motivation.
A Hybrid Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Depth Prediction in the Underwater Environment

Depth estimation is an important task that can be used in many applications such as scene reconstruction, virtual and augmented-reality, scene understanding and autonomous robots. Although several methods exist and perform well above water, for the underwater environment this task is undermined by challenging water properties. In this paper, we propose a framework for obtaining partial depth map supervision using a Structure From Motion (SfM) framework, and then train a deep neural network for real-time depth map estimation. Additionally, we estimate the model’s uncertainty in the predictions, allowing us to filter out uncertain predictions and improve performance in all evaluated metrics. By estimating the model’s uncertainty, the accuracy score A1 improved from 92.0% to 94.5%, and the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) reduced from 0.120 to 0.107.
Strong effect of pubertal status on metabolic health in obese children: a longitudinal study.

CONTEXT The concept of metabolic healthy obese (MHO) status has been proposed also for children. However, it is unclear whether this is a stable status in childhood. OBJECTIVE The aim was to analyze the changes of MHO status over time. DESIGN AND SETTING This is 1-year longitudinal analysis of our obesity cohort. PARTICIPANTS All obese children of our outpatient obesity clinic with 1-year follow-up were included. INTERVENTIONS Standard care intervention was used. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES We examined body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, pubertal stage, blood pressure, fasting lipids, glucose, and insulin resistance index homeostasis model assessment (HOMA). MHO status was defined by absence of cardiovascular risk factors. RESULTS A total of 2017 obese children (mean age, 11.6 ± 2.8 y; 45% male; BMI, 28.5 ± 5.3 kg/m(2); BMI-z score, 2.4 ±0.5) were enrolled onto the study, and 49.3% of the children were MHO at baseline. After 1 year, the majority of the MHO remained MHO (68.0%). MHO children were significantly younger, more frequently prepubertal, and less overweight compared with metabolic unhealthy obese (MUO) children (all P < .05). In the longitudinal analyses, entering into puberty (OR, 1.9; 95% confidence interval, 1.3-2.8]; P = .004) doubled the risk for switching from MHO to MUO, whereas changing from mid to late puberty nearly tripled the likelihood for switching from MUO to MHO (OR 3.1 [2.1-4.5], P < .001) in multiple logistic regression analyses adjusted for age, sex, and changes of body mass index standard deviation score (BMI-SDS). CONCLUSIONS MHO is a stable status in childhood obesity as long as pubertal status remains stable. Due to the strong association between puberty and MUO status, the concept of MHO is questionable, at least in pubertal children.
Harki Autobiographies or Collecto-biographies? Mothers Speak through their Daughters

Abstract Several recent important events in the history of the Algerian war and Franco-Algerian relations have prompted the publication of autobiographies written by women of the second generation of Harkis (Fatima Bescani-Lancou, Hadjila Kemoun, Dalila Kerchouche, and Zahia Rahmani). The military role of their fathers as auxiliary soldiers in the French army during the Algerian War of Independence has meant that this postcolonial population has previously only been examined from a male viewpoint, both in the French media and in academia. However, this article proposes to investigate issues of gender in these generally little-studied works, both in terms of their authorship and their subject matter. It will first examine the multiple origins of this forty-year silence in both generations of Harki women, addressing such issues as colonial violence, the stereotyping of Maghrebi women, and French postcolonial visions of migrant populations. How have the daughters of Harkis sought through their writing to shatter this silence and give a voice to their mothers? How have they extended the traditional ego-centric form of the autobiography to write collecto-biographies, which also focus on the lives of their family? Equally, to what extent have these authors used the stylistic tools of female Maghrebi culture, especially the sacred and secular oral traditions, in their work? Finally it will reflect on the echoes of these new voices in the contemporary Harki political movement.
Imagined Visual Representations as Multimodal Embeddings

Language and vision provide complementary information. Integrating both modalities in a single multimodal representation is an unsolved problem with wide-reaching applications to both natural language processing and computer vision. In this paper, we present a simple and effective method that learns a language-to-vision mapping and uses its output visual predictions to build multimodal representations. In this sense, our method provides a cognitively plausible way of building representations, consistent with the inherently re-constructive and associative nature of human memory. Using seven benchmark concept similarity tests we show that the mapped (or imagined) vectors not only help to fuse multimodal information, but also outperform strong unimodal baselines and state-of-the-art multimodal methods, thus exhibiting more human-like judgments. Ultimately, the present work sheds light on fundamental questions of natural language understanding concerning the fusion of vision and language such as the plausibility of more associative and re-constructive approaches.
Absorption Characteristics of ${\rm GaAs}_{1-x}{\rm Bi}_{x}/{\rm GaAs}$ Diodes in the Near-Infrared

The absorption properties of a series of GaAs<sub>1</sub><sub>-</sub><sub>x</sub>Bi<sub>x</sub> layers with ~ 6% Bi have been systematically investigated by measuring photocurrent spectra in p-i-n diode structures grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The GaAs<sub>1</sub><sub>-</sub><sub>x</sub>Bi<sub>x</sub> layers varied in thickness from 50 to 350 nm and showed a photoresponse in the near-infrared up to almost 1.3 μm. The absorption coefficients of the layers were obtained from the responsivity data. Below the band gap, the absorption coefficients showed an exponential dependence on the photon energy (Urbach tailing).
Economic operation of distribution networks with distributed generation and quality of service

Uncertainties in distributed generation with renewable sources, and load fluctuations due to demand response, require the Distribution System Operator to have tools to coordinate supply and demand with an adequate quality of service. A cost optimization method is proposed for this purpose, based on two time-scales: a slow scale were topology changes and transformer taps are varied with their operation costs, and a fast time-scale based on an optimal power flow, in which costs of power supply and quality of service are incorporated. To solve the latter we rely on convex relaxations to the DistFlow model, which allow an efficient solution in radial topologies. We also develop a detailed model in DistFlow of wind and photovoltaic generators operating as subnets of the Distribution network. The method is demonstrated with data from a real network in Uruguay.
Channel Capacity of an Array System for Gaussian Channels With Applications to Combining and Noise Cancellation

A closed-form expression for the capacity of an array of correlated Gaussian channels is derived. It is shown that when signal and noise are independent, the array of observables can be replaced with a single observable without diminishing the capacity of the array channel. Examples are provided to illustrate the dependence of channel capacity on noise correlation for two- and three-channel arrays.
Nodamura virus B2 amino terminal domain sensitivity to small interfering RNA

Nodamura virus (NoV) B2, a suppressor of RNA interference, binds double stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) corresponding to Dicer substrates and products. Here, we report that the amino terminal domain of NoV B2 (NoV B2 79) specifically binds siRNAs but not dsRNAs. NoV B2 79 oligomerizes on binding to 27 nucleotide siRNA. Mutation of the residues phenylalanine49 and alanine60 to cysteine and methionine, respectively enhances the RNA binding affinity of NoV B2 79. Circular dichroism spectra demonstrated that the wild type and mutant NoV B2 79 have similar secondary structure conformations.
La Importancia de la Opción por Omisión en los Sistemas de Pensiones de Cuentas Individuales

En un sistema de capitalizacion individual uno de los principales riesgos que se enfrentan se refiere al de inversion de los fondos. En este contexto, se analiza el sustento de optar por estrategias de inversion de ciclo de vida como mecanismo mitigador del riesgo de las inversiones. Sobre esta base se analiza la importancia de la opcion por omision a la luz del comportamiento economico de los afiliados, caracterizado por un bajo conocimiento financiero, inercia y miopia en la toma de decisiones. La evaluacion de estas estrategias se discute utilizando una metodologia que reconoce como medida de riesgo adecuada aquella que toma en cuenta los riesgos relevantes del afiliado y el horizonte de inversion de los fondos, es decir, considera una medida de riesgo de pension de largo plazo.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation improves the high incidence of neutralizing allo-antibodies observed in Hurler’s syndrome after pharmacological enzyme replacement therapy

Background Mucopolysaccharidosis type I is caused by deficiency of α-L-iduronidase. Currently available treatment options include an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant and enzyme replacement therapy. Exogenous enzyme therapy appears promising but the benefits may be attenuated, at least in some patients, by the development of an immune response to the delivered enzyme. The incidence and impact of alloimmune responses in these patients remain unknown. Design and Methods We developed an immunoglobulin G enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay as well as in vitro catalytic enzyme inhibition and cellular uptake inhibition assays and quantified enzyme inhibition by allo-antibodies. We determined the impact of these antibodies in eight patients who received enzyme therapy before and during hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. In addition, 20 patients who had previously received an allogeneic stem cell transplant were tested to evaluate this treatment as an immune tolerance induction mechanism. Results High titer immune responses were seen in 87.5% (7/8) patients following exposure to α-L-iduronidase. These patients exhibited catalytic enzyme inhibition (5/8), uptake inhibition of catalytically active enzyme (6/8) or both (4/8). High antibody titers generally preceded elevation of previously described biomarkers of disease progression. The median time to development of immune tolerance was 101 days (range, 26–137) after transplantation. All 20 patients, including those with mixed chimerism (22%), tested 1 year after transplantation were tolerized despite normal enzyme levels. Conclusions We found a high incidence of neutralizing antibodies in patients with mucopolysaccharidosis type I treated with enzyme replacement therapy. We also found that allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation was an effective and rapid immune tolerance induction strategy.
Molecular characterization of arginine deiminase pathway in Laribacter hongkongensis and unique regulation of arginine catabolism and anabolism by multiple environmental stresses.

The betaproteobacterium Laribacter hongkongensis is associated with invasive bacteremic infections and gastroenteritis. Its genome contains two adjacent arc gene cassettes (arc1 and arc2) under independent transcriptional control, which are essential for acid resistance. Laribacter hongkongensis also encodes duplicate copies of the argA and argB genes from the arginine biosynthesis pathway. We show that arginine enhances the transcription of arcA2 but suppresses arcA1 expression. We demonstrate that ArgR acts as a transcriptional regulator of the two arc operons through binding to ARG operator sites (ARG boxes). Upon temperature shift from 20°C to 37°C, arcA1 transcription is upregulated while arcA2, argA2, argB2 and argG are downregulated. The transcription of arcA1 and arcA2 are augmented under anaerobic and acidic conditions. The transcription levels of argA1, argA2, argB1, argB2 and argG are significantly increased under anaerobic and acidic conditions but are repressed by the addition of arginine. Deletion of argR significantly decreases bacterial survival in macrophages, while expression of both arc operons, argR and all five of the anabolic arg genes increases 8 h post-infection. Our results show that arginine catabolism in L. hongkongensis is finely regulated by controlling the transcription of two arc operons, whereas arginine anabolism is controlled by two copies of argA and argB.
Fault Tolerant Scheduling in Mixed Critical Systems: A Case Study

The fundamental target of real-time scheduling is to execute the task set, such that their deadlines are never missed. The major concern in safety-critical and mixed criticality real-time systems is that correct output should be generated before deadline even in the presence of faults. With the advent of low cost COTS there is rise in the transient faults. This lay off can be met by using fault tolerant techniques to make the system reliable. The empirical evaluation and simulation of partitioned and global approaches of scheduling for the avionics task set gives an insight of issues in achieving reliability.
Depleting endogenous neurotrophin‐3 enhances myelin formation in the Trembler‐J mouse, a model of a peripheral neuropathy

The heterozygous Trembler‐J (TrJ/+) mouse, containing a point mutation in the peripheral myelin protein 22 (Pmp22) gene, is characterized by severe hypomyelination and is a representative model of Charcot‐Marie‐Tooth 1A (CMT1A) disease/Dejerine‐Sottas syndrome (DSS). Given that the neurotrophin‐3 (NT3)‐TrkC signaling pathway is inhibitory to myelination during development, we investigated the role of the NT3‐TrkC pathway in myelination and manipulated this pathway to improve myelin formation in the CMT1A/DSS mouse model. Injection of NT3 to the TrJ/+ mice decreased the myelin protein P0 level in the sciatic nerves. Suppressing the NT3‐TrkC pathway with TrkC‐Fc, an NT3 scavenger, enhanced myelination in vitro and in vivo in the TrJ/+ mouse. Furthermore, we found that full‐length TrkC was expressed in adult TrJ/+ mouse sciatic nerves but was not detected in the wild‐type adults, suggesting that the full‐length TrkC is a potential target of treatment to enhance myelination in the TrJ/+ mouse. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Improved Hydraulic Cylinder Model for the Virtual Decomposition Control Approach

This study designs improved hydraulic actuator control with an adaptive feedforward compensation for the virtual decomposition control (VDC) approach. Compared to previous VDC-based hydraulic actuator controls, the study removes the assumption that a piston cannot reach the actuator ends. This is achieved by incorporating the chamber dead volumes and the internal leakage in the actuator control with guaranteed control system stability. The proposed method is directly applicable for multiple degrees-of-freedom (n-DOF) manipulator control due to the VDC’s novel concept of virtual stability, and its inherently modular control design. The advancement of the method is experimentally verified with an n-DOF manipulator.
Improving the reliability and energy-efficiency of high-bandwidth photonic NoC architectures with multilevel signaling

Photonic network-on-chip (PNoC) architectures employ photonic waveguides with dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) for signal traversal and microring resonators (MRs) for on-off-keying (OOK) based signal modulation, to enable high bandwidth on-chip transfers. Unfortunately, the use of larger number of DWDM wavelengths to achieve higher bandwidth requires sophisticated and costly laser sources along with extra photonic hardware, which adds extra noise and increases the power and area consumption of PNoCs. This paper presents a novel method (called 4-PAM-P) of generating four-amplitude-level optical signals in PNoCs, which doubles the aggregate bandwidth without increasing utilized wavelengths, photonic hardware, and incurred noise, thereby reducing the bit-error-rate (BER), area, and energy consumption of PNoCs. Our experimental analysis shows that our 4-PAM-P signaling method achieves equal bandwidth with 4.2× better BER, 19.5% lower power, 16.3% lower energy-per-bit, and 5.6% less photonic area compared to the best known 4-amplitude-level optical signaling method from prior work.
Welfare Consequences of Omitting Beak Trimming in Barn Layers

Beak trimming is used worldwide as a method of reducing the damage to feathers and skin caused by injurious pecking in laying hens. However, beak trimming also causes some welfare issues as trimming the beak results in pain and sensory loss. Due to this dilemma, there is an ongoing discussion in several European countries about whether to ban beak trimming. In this study, we investigated the welfare consequences of keeping layers with intact beaks and examined for links between injurious pecking damage and keel bone damage on an individual level. A study was conducted on 10 commercial farms housing laying hens in the barn system. Each farm participated with a flock of beak-trimmed hens (T) and a flock of non-trimmed (NT) hens that were visited around 32 and 62 weeks of age. During visits, the condition of plumage, skin, feet, and keel bone of 100 hens was assessed. Mortality was recorded by the producers. NT flocks had a lower prevalence of hens with good plumage condition around 32 weeks of age (94.1 vs. 99.6%, P < 0.001) and a higher prevalence of hens with poor plumage condition at 62 weeks of age (63.6 vs. 15.2%, P < 0.001) compared with T flocks. The prevalence of hens with keel bone deviations, with both keel bone fractures and deviations and with body wounds, was higher in NT flocks compared with T flocks at both ages (P < 0.001). Accumulated mortality from placement to end of production tended to be higher in NT flocks compared with T flocks (14.2 vs. 8.6%; P = 0.06). The prevalence of keel bone damage was higher among hens with poor plumage condition than hens with moderate/good plumage condition (31.5 vs. 22.2%; P < 0.001). Thus, omitting beak trimming had negative consequences for the condition of plumage, skin, and keel bone, and tended to increase mortality, highlighting the risk of reduced welfare when keeping layers with intact beaks. In addition, injurious pecking damage was found to be positively linked to keel bone damage. The causal relation is unknown, but we propose that fearfulness is an important factor.
Real-time path planning in a dynamic 3-D environment

We propose a real-time algorithm for path planning in a dynamically changing 3-D environment where the motion of the obstacles cannot be predicted. The method represents everything in the environment (an arbitrarily shaped robot and static/dynamic obstacles) with an octree that makes no distinction of the movability of objects. A collision free path for a robot with arbitrary motion (translation and rotation) in a dynamic 3-D environment is efficiently sought by using the real-time A* algorithm and the potential field generated from each black cell of the octree. Parallel computation is used to speed up the generation of the potential field. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed path planning method for a dynamically-changing 3-D environment with arbitrary motion.
Tree trunk diameter and species estimation using a stereo camera, deep learning and image processing technique

Tree trunk diameter and tree species are two of the most important parameters in investigating trees in urban spaces and forests. The parameters have been conventionally measured and judged by tree caliper and our eyes, which is tedious and time-consuming. It would be preferable if a method based on deep learning techniques which directly conduct the regression is available. However, a large number of training data will be needed because the tree skin and its background are widely varied. Further, it is difficult to obtain huge amount of the agricultural-relevant data. Therefore, a method which can be done with a few data will be desired. In this study, a stereo camera was used for the image acquisition and the scale of the target was determined. Then, the tree trunk diameter and tree species could be estimated using image processing and depth information, then its GUI was constructed. This work can contribute to labor-less and effective tree investigation.