Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Germination of photoblastic lettuce seeds is regulated via the control of endogenous physiologically active gibberellin content, rather than of gibberellin responsiveness

Phytochrome regulates lettuce (Lactuca sativa L. cv. Grand Rapids) seed germination via the control of the endogenous level of bioactive gibberellin (GA). In addition to the previously identified LsGA20ox1, LsGA20ox2, LsGA3ox1, LsGA3ox2, LsGA2ox1, and LsGA2ox2, five cDNAs were isolated from lettuce seeds: LsCPS, LsKS, LsKO1, LsKO2, and LsKAO. Using an Escherichia coli expression system and functional assays, it is shown that LsCPS and LsKS encode ent-copalyl diphosphate synthase and ent-kaurene synthase, respectively. Using a Pichia pastoris system, it was found that LsKO1 and LsKO2 encode ent-kaurene oxidases and LsKAO encodes ent-kaurenoic acid oxidase. A comprehensive expression analysis of GA metabolism genes using the quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction suggested that transcripts of LsGA3ox1 and LsGA3ox2, both of which encode GA 3-oxidase for GA activation, were primarily expressed in the hypocotyl end of lettuce seeds, were expressed at much lower levels than the other genes tested, and were potently up-regulated by phytochrome. Furthermore, LsDELLA1 and LsDELLA2 cDNAs that encode DELLA proteins, which act as negative regulators in the GA signalling pathway, were isolated from lettuce seeds. The transcript levels of these two genes were little affected by light. Lettuce seeds in which de novo GA biosynthesis was suppressed responded almost identically to exogenously applied GA, irrespective of the light conditions, suggesting that GA responsiveness is not significantly affected by light in lettuce seeds. It is proposed that lettuce seed germination is regulated mainly via the control of the endogenous content of bioactive GA, rather than the control of GA responsiveness.
The capacity region for two classes of product broadcast channels

We establish a new outer bound for the capacity region of product broadcast channels. This outer bound matches Marton's inner bound for a variety of classes of product broadcast channels whose capacity regions were previously unknown. These classes include product of reversely semi-deterministic and product of reversely more-capable channels. A significant consequence of this new outer bound is that it establishes, via an example, that the previously best known outer-bound is strictly suboptimal for the general broadcast channel. Our example is comprised of a product broadcast channel with two semi-deterministic components in reverse orientation.
Radar CFAR Thresholding in Clutter and Multiple Target Situations

Radar detection procedures involve the comparison of the received signal amplitude to a threshold. In order to obtain a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR), an adaptive threshold must be applied reflecting the local clutter situation. The cell averaging approach, for example, is an adaptive procedure. A CFAR method is discussed using as the CFAR threshold one single value selected from the so-called ordered statistic (this method is fundamentally different from a rank statistic). This procedure has some advantages over cell averaging CFAR, especially in cases where more than one target is present within the reference window on which estimation of the local clutter situation is based, or where this reference window is crossing clutter edges.
Background to the MODIS Weekly Maximum-NDVI Composites for Canada South of 60°N

Canada’s agriculturally important lands include lands that are currently used for agricultural purposes (e.g. croplands, rangeland, pastures) as well as those that show potential for future agricultural development (e.g. natural grasslands). However, because these lands generally cover large geographical extents, their assessment by conventional ground survey techniques are often time-consuming and costly (Asrar et al. 1986; Bakhtiari and Zoughi 1991; Tucker 1980; Weiser et al. 1986). Thus, other monitoring approaches must be utilized. One possible approach is the use of satellite remote sensing systems.
Temporal and Spatial Properties of a Yeast Multi-Cellular Amplification System Based on Signal Molecule Diffusion

We report on the spatial and temporal signaling properties of a yeast pheromone-based cell communication and amplifier system. It utilizes the Saccharomyces cerevisiae mating response pathway and relies on diffusion of the pheromone α–factor as key signaling molecule between two cell types. One cell type represents the α–factor secreting sensor part and the other the reporter part emitting fluorescence upon activation. Although multi-cellular signaling systems promise higher specificity and modularity, the complex interaction of the cells makes prediction of sensor performance difficult. To test the maximum distance and response time between sensor and reporter cells, the two cell types were spatially separated in defined compartments of agarose hydrogel (5 × 5 mm) and reconnected by diffusion of the yeast pheromone. Different ratios of sensor to reporter cells were tested to evaluate the minimum amount of sensor cells required for signal transduction. Even the smallest ratio, one α–factor-secreting cell to twenty reporter cells, generated a distinct fluorescence signal. When using a 1:1 ratio, the secreted pheromone induced fluorescence in a distance of up to four millimeters after six hours. We conclude from both our experimental results and a mathematical diffusion model that in our approach: (1) the maximum dimension of separated compartments should not exceed five millimeters in gradient direction; and (2) the time-limiting step is not diffusion of the signaling molecule but production of the reporter protein.
A QR-code based audio watermarking technique for tracing traitors

Handling a great number of users and surviving different types of attacks present fundamental challenges of the majority fingerprinting systems in the tracing traitor field. In this paper, the proposed technique consists in embedding a fingerprint, a QR code in the audio stream extracted from the media release. Using the QR-code provides several advantages as supporting a large amount of information in a compact format end damage resiliency. This paper proposes to encode the identifier which is a parallel concatenation of two tracing codes: Boneh Shaw and Tardos codes into QR-code. The proposed approach should not only improve the two-stage tracing strategy by reducing the complexity computation, but also enhance the secure side of the proposed technique by the preprocessing treatment before generating the QR-code.
Saussure and his Interpreters

Reviews of the First Edition 'In a very readable study, Roy Harris examines the mis/representation of Saussurean ideas by certain linguists and by French thinkers of a Structuralist and post-structuralist persuasion. This is therefore essentially a study in intellectual history dealing with the thorny question of "influence" of one thinker's ideas on another ! Harris has done us a favour by bringing his critical eye to bear on a range of (mis)interpreters of the Cours who had hitherto largely been considered in isolation. ' - Modern Language Review This book is the first major reassessment of the reception of Saussure's ideas in the academic world of the twentieth century. It is well known that Saussure's work profoundly influenced developments in such diverse fields as linguistics, anthropology, psychology and literary studies. But what exactly were Saussure's views taken to be by his interpreters? How well were Saussure's ideas understood by those who took them up? Or how badly misunderstood? And why? The answers to these questions address central issues in the history of Western culture. Each chapter focuses on one particular interpreter of Saussure's work, but many others are mentioned in context for purposes of comparison, and attention is drawn to connections and disparities between their interpretations. Those whose interpretations are examined in detail include Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Chomsky, Barthes and Derrida. In an important supplement to the new edition, account is taken of recently found notes in Saussure's hand. The discovery re-opens the whole question of the extent to which the Cours de linguistique generale, posthumously published in 1916, accurately reflects the stage that Saussure's thinking about language and communication had reached by the time of his death. It suggests a new interpretation of Saussure that differs significantly from any of those previously advanced. Features: *The only comprehensive survey of this field *Up-to-date coverage of recent developments in Saussurean studies *Analysis by one of today's leading authorities on Saussure.
A cross-linguistic investigation of locus equations as a phonetic descriptor for place of articulation.

A previous study [H. Sussman, H. McCaffrey, and S. Matthews, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 1309-1325 (1991)] of American English CV coarticulation showed a remarkably linear relationship between onset frequencies of F2 transitions, plotted on the y axis, in relation to the F2 midvowel "target" frequencies, plotted on the x axis, for CVC tokens with initial [b d g] and ten medial vowel contexts. Slope and y-intercept values of regression functions fit to these scatterplots ("locus equations") were shown to serve as statistically powerful phonetic descriptors of place of articulation. The present study extends the locus equation metric to three additional languages--Thai, Cairene Arabic, and Urdu--having both two and four place contrasts for syllable-initial voiced stops. A total of 14 speakers (Thai = 6, Arabic = 3, Urdu = 5) produced 1740 CVC tokens that were acoustically analyzed using MacSpeech Lab II. Strong linear regression relationships were found for every stop category across all speakers. Slopes and y intercepts systemically varied as a function of place of articulation. Cross-language comparisons of stop place categories were performed but variability of slope and y intercept means tempered conclusions concerning the existence of CV "phonetic hot spots. "
Religious Development: How (and Why) Does Religiosity Change from Adolescence to Young Adulthood?

Researchers have argued for longitudinal studies that focus more attention on how religious attitudes and behaviors change during adolescence and, especially, as adolescents make the transition to young adulthood. Therefore, the authors use growth curve modeling to examine the infuence of parents and peers on adolescent religious service attendance and belief in the importance of religion using five waves (eight years) of the National Youth Survey (1979–1987). The results suggest adolescents who live with both of their biological parents have higher initial levels of religious service attendance, but their religious service attendance decreases more rapidly over time. The pattern of results for peer attachment is similar. Compared to adolescents with low peer attachment, adolescents with high peer attachment are more likely to attend religious services initially and to believe that religion is important, but their religious service attendance and belief in the importance of religion decreases more rapidly over time.
Ethnicity and Aboriginality: Case Studies in Ethnonationalism

Ethnicity and Aboriginality: Case Studies in Ethnonationalism Michael Levin, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. xiii + 179 pp. $50.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper) Reviewer: Deirdre Meintel Universite de MontrealThis collection is based on a conference, held in late 1990, that took as its point of departure the propositions about ethnicity and nationalism made in a 1973 article by Walker Conner. The articles focus on groups having some claim to aboriginal status, by virtue of a historical tie to a given territory and, in most cases, a cultural distinctiveness from surrounding groups. A wide range of cases are presented from Canada, Malaysia, Kenya, Nigeria and Australia.One interesting issue that emerges from several articles is the international dimension of ethnonationalism in the present day. Audiences and reference groups beyond the border of the nation-state are likely to affect how identity and nationalist claims are played out, as Tanner notes in his article on the Inuit of Labrador. This theme is central to Nagata's article on Malays, whose aboriginal status (so unlike that of other groups described in the book) is privileged in the national context but irrelevant to their identification with Muslims from the central Islamic states of the Middle East.This collection also shows that the process of naturalizing language and culture, in order to assert "self-evident" claims to ethnic jurisdiction (to paraphrase Levin, p. 164), is fraught with political risks and contradictions, whether these claims be based on historical priority or on sheer numbers. For example, an ethnonationalist claim based on historical depth may be challenged by another group with still older roots. As Nagata shows, some Chinese and Indian families have been present on the Malay peninsula longer than some who claim Malay identity. One is reminded of Native Peoples' responses to certain historical justifications for sovereignty invoked by Quebec nationalists. Moreover, as Nagata notes, privileging one group on the basis of aboriginal status means discriminating against immigrants, not always a feasible or acceptable alternative.Furthermore, as Levin points out in his study of the Bette (Nigeria), ethnonationalism in one group can intensify the group identities of others in the same nation or region. This was the case for the Bette, a small group in relation to their Igbo neighbours, whose efforts to secede led to the short-lived state of Biafra. …
Dataset Augmentation for Pose and Lighting Invariant Face Recognition

The performance of modern face recognition systems is a function of the dataset on which they are trained. Most datasets are largely biased toward "near-frontal" views with benign lighting conditions, negatively effecting recognition performance on images that do not meet these criteria. The proposed approach demonstrates how a baseline training set can be augmented to increase pose and lighting variability using semi-synthetic images with simulated pose and lighting conditions. The semi-synthetic images are generated using a fast and robust 3-d shape estimation and rendering pipeline which includes the full head and background. Various methods of incorporating the semi-synthetic renderings into the training procedure of a state of the art deep neural network-based recognition system without modifying the structure of the network itself are investigated. Quantitative results are presented on the challenging IJB-A identification dataset using a state of the art recognition pipeline as a baseline.
Chance Constrained Network Design

When designing or upgrading a communication network, operators are faced with a major issue, as uncertainty on communication demands makes it difficult to correctly provision the network capacity. When a probability on traffic matrices is given, finding the cheapest capacity allocation that guarantees, within a prescribed level of confidence, that each arc can support the traffic demands peaks turns out to be, in general, a difficult non convex optimization problem belonging to the class of chance constrained problems. Drawing from some very recent results in the literature we highlight the relationships between chance constrained network design problems and robust network optimization. We then compare several different ways to build uncertainty sets upon deviation measures, comprised the recently proposed backward and forward deviation measures that capture possible asymmetries of the traffic demands distribution. We report results of a computational study aimed at comparing the performance of different models when built upon the same set of historical traffic matrices.
Kismet: parallel speedup estimates for serial programs

Software engineers now face the difficult task of refactoring serial programs for parallel execution on multicore processors. Currently, they are offered little guidance as to how much benefit may come from this task, or how close they are to the best possible parallelization. This paper presents Kismet, a tool that creates parallel speedup estimates for unparallelized serial programs. Kismet differs from previous approaches in that it does not require any manual analysis or modification of the program. This difference allows quick analysis of many programs, avoiding wasted engineering effort on those that are fundamentally limited. To accomplish this task, Kismet builds upon the hierarchical critical path analysis (HCPA) technique, a recently developed dynamic analysis that localizes parallelism to each of the potentially nested regions in the target program. It then uses a parallel execution time model to compute an approximate upper bound for performance, modeling constraints that stem from both hardware parameters and internal program structure. Our evaluation applies Kismet to eight high-parallelism NAS Parallel Benchmarks running on a 32-core AMD multicore system, five low-parallelism SpecInt benchmarks, and six medium-parallelism benchmarks running on the finegrained MIT Raw processor. The results are compelling. Kismet is able to significantly improve the accuracy of parallel speedup estimates relative to prior work based on critical path analysis.
A snapshot : South African university students' attitudes, perceptions and knowledge of HIV / AIDS

This article presents the findings of a survey conducted in August 2004 of students' attitudes, perceptions and knowledge about sexually transmitted infections, HIV/ AIDS and sexual practices at an Institution of Higher Education. The study was set against the backdrop of the 2004 South African national survey, conducted by the Reproductive Health Research Unit, University of Witwatersrand, which identified the worrying trend that although South African youths acknowledged HIV/AIDS as the biggest problem facing them and 45 per cent personally knew someone who had died of AIDS, the vast majority of those who engaged in risk behaviour did not think they were personally at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. A representative sample of students in the age range 17 to 25 completed a confidential, anonymous questionnaire. In spite of high-risk sexual behaviour, that is, multiple partners and inconsistent condom use, most students believed that they were not at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. A review of students' sexual behaviour is followed by recommendations. The findings of this survey are relevant for management of higher education institutions. Information on students' attitudes and perceptions will enable Higher Education management to review their present strategies and policies on HIV/AIDS. This will facilitate the implementation of the most effective methods of responding to an epidemic that is increasingly more visible on campuses in South Africa (Higher Education HIV/AIDS Programme 2004). South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 20 (2) 2006: 299-317
Hardware synchronization for embedded multi-core processors

Multi-core processors are about to conquer embedded systems — it is not the question of whether they are coming but how the architectures of the microcontrollers should look with respect to the strict requirements in the field. We present the step from one to multiple cores in this paper, establishing coherence and consistency for different types of shared memory by hardware means. Also support for point-to-point synchronization between the processor cores is realized implementing different hardware barriers. The practical examinations focus on the logical first step from single- to dual-core systems, using an FPGA-development board with two hard PowerPC processor cores. Best- and worst-case results, together with intensive benchmarking of all synchronization primitives implemented, show the expected superiority of the hardware solutions. It is also shown that dual-ported memory outperforms single-ported memory if the multiple cores use inherent parallelism by locking shared memory more intelligently using an address-sensitive method.
Nap1-mediated actin remodeling is essential for mammalian myoblast fusion

Myoblast fusion is crucial for the formation, growth, maintenance and regeneration of healthy skeletal muscle. Unfortunately, the molecular machinery, cell behaviors, and membrane and cytoskeletal remodeling events that govern fusion and myofiber formation remain poorly understood. Using time-lapse imaging approaches on mouse C2C12 myoblasts, we identify discrete and specific molecular events at myoblast membranes during fusion and myotube formation. These events include rearrangement of cell shape from fibroblast to spindle-like morphologies, changes in lamellipodial and filopodial extensions during different periods of differentiation, and changes in membrane alignment and organization during fusion. We find that actin-cytoskeleton remodeling is crucial for these events: pharmacological inhibition of F-actin polymerization leads to decreased lamellipodial and filopodial extensions and to reduced myoblast fusion. Additionally, shRNA-mediated inhibition of Nap1, a member of the WAVE actin-remodeling complex, results in accumulations of F-actin structures at the plasma membrane that are concomitant with a decrease in myoblast fusion. Our data highlight distinct and essential roles for actin cytoskeleton remodeling during mammalian myoblast fusion, provide a platform for cellular and molecular dissection of the fusion process, and suggest a functional conservation of Nap1-regulated actin-cytoskeleton remodeling during myoblast fusion between mammals and Drosophila.
Culture in the Sanctioned Classroom Practices of Elementary School Teachers Serving Low-Income African American Students

This study examined whether culture mediated teachers' reported classroom behaviors. Teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire with items that depicted a traditional classroom behavior or activity performed under specific cultural orientations. Reports of culture-based classroom behaviors were ascertained as a function of teacher cultural group and classroom cultural practice type. Classroom cultural practice was measured through a scale developed to assess typical classroom activities carried out in fundamental culture-specific manners. After teachers initially responded to how often they endorsed the culture-based classroom practices, an inference was made of the degree to which teachers maintained classroom behaviors specific to either individualistic, competitive, communal, or vervistic cultural orientations. Because teachers' practices are believed to be guided by mainstream European cultural values, it was predicted that they would report higher levels of such classroom practices. Patterns of relationships among the endorsement levels of the reported classroom behaviors were also examined.