Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Airborne and Grain Dust Fungal Community Compositions Are Shaped Regionally by Plant Genotypes and Farming Practices

ABSTRACT Chronic exposure to airborne fungi has been associated with different respiratory symptoms and pathologies in occupational populations, such as grain workers. However, the homogeneity in the fungal species composition of these bioaerosols on a large geographical scale and the different drivers that shape these fungal communities remain unclear. In this study, the diversity of fungi in grain dust and in the aerosols released during harvesting was determined across 96 sites at a geographical scale of 560 km2 along an elevation gradient of 500 m by tag-encoded 454 pyrosequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences. Associations between the structure of fungal communities in the grain dust and different abiotic (farming system, soil characteristics, and geographic and climatic parameters) and biotic (wheat cultivar and previous crop culture) factors were explored. These analyses revealed a strong relationship between the airborne and grain dust fungal communities and showed the presence of allergenic and mycotoxigenic species in most samples, which highlights the potential contribution of these fungal species to work-related respiratory symptoms of grain workers. The farming system was the major driver of the alpha and beta phylogenetic diversity values of fungal communities. In addition, elevation and soil CaCO3 concentrations shaped the alpha diversity, whereas wheat cultivar, cropping history, and the number of freezing days per year shaped the taxonomic beta diversity of these communities.
Unfolding large-scale online collaborative human dynamics

Significance This paper uncovered a universal double–power-law distribution of interupdate times for articles in Wikipedia and unfolded the seemingly complex collaborative patterns into three generic modules related to individual behavior, interaction among individuals, and population growth. The model is analytically solved and fully supported by the real data. As this model does not depend on any specific rules of Wikipedia, it is highly applicable for other online collaborative systems like software development and email communication. Similar scaling properties and models were reported for earthquake recurrence times, suggesting that interacting natural and social systems share universal collective mechanisms. Large-scale interacting human activities underlie all social and economic phenomena, but quantitative understanding of regular patterns and mechanism is very challenging and still rare. Self-organized online collaborative activities with a precise record of event timing provide unprecedented opportunity. Our empirical analysis of the history of millions of updates in Wikipedia shows a universal double–power-law distribution of time intervals between consecutive updates of an article. We then propose a generic model to unfold collaborative human activities into three modules: (i) individual behavior characterized by Poissonian initiation of an action, (ii) human interaction captured by a cascading response to previous actions with a power-law waiting time, and (iii) population growth due to the increasing number of interacting individuals. This unfolding allows us to obtain an analytical formula that is fully supported by the universal patterns in empirical data. Our modeling approaches reveal “simplicity” beyond complex interacting human activities.
INCREASING SINGLE IMAGE RESOLUTION AND DENOISING USING COMBINATION OF BICUBIC INTERPOLATION AND SPARSE REPRESENTATION

Today is the era of technical advancement. As the technology is advancing people want more and more of it. So is with images, people desire more information and details out of images. More information and details implies better image resolution. There are two possible ways for better image resolution (i) use expensive and complex camera components for image capturing or (ii) post processing of captured images to convert it into high resolution image. Method (ii) is computationally easy and relatively inexpensive. This thesis represents a new approach to generate a high resolution image from a low resolution image. Earlier various techniques were proposed to convert low resolution image into a high resolution image but we are utilizing a combination of bicubic interpolation and sparse representation for super resolution. In sparse image patches can be well represented as a combination of few atoms of an appropriately chosen over-complete dictionary. The sparse representation for each patch of the LR input is used to generate the HR output. Though bicubic interpolation is fast and easy to implement but usually yield overly smooth images, edge blurring and jagged artifacts. On the other hand super resolution using sparse representation yields better results in terms of finer details, sharper edges and visual effectiveness, but the only limitation of this method is the speed of recovering high-resolution images from low resolution one. So, we proposed a method in which both bicubic interpolation and sparse representation are used for super resolution to provide results better results and require less computation time. Key wordsimage resolution, bicubic interpolation, sparse representation and super resolution.
Organic carbon and total nitrogen stocks in soils of the Lena River Delta

The Lena River Delta, which is the largest delta in the Arctic, extends over an area of 32 000 km 2 and likely holds more than half of the entire soil organic carbon (SOC) mass stored in the seven major deltas in the northern permafrost regions. The geomorphic units of the Lena River Delta which were formed by true deltaic sedimentation processes are a Holocene river terrace and the active floodplains. Their mean SOC stocks for the upper 1 m of soils were estimated at 29 kg m −2 p 10 kg m −2 and at 14 kg m −2 ± 7 kg m −2 , respectively. For the depth of 1 m, the total SOC pool of the Holocene river terrace was estimated at 121 Tg ± 43 Tg, and the SOC pool of the active floodplains was estimated at 120 Tg ± 66 Tg. The mass of SOC stored within the observed seasonally thawed active layer was estimated at about 127 Tg assuming an average maximum active layer depth of 50 cm. The SOC mass which is stored in the perennially frozen ground at the increment 50–100 cm soil depth, which is currently excluded from intense biogeochemical exchange with the atmosphere, was estimated at 113 Tg. The mean nitrogen (N) stocks for the upper 1 m of soils were estimated at 1.2 kg m −2 ± 0.4 kg m −2 for the Holocene river terrace and at 0.9 kg m −2 ± 0.4 kg m −2 for the active floodplain levels, respectively. For the depth of 1 m, the total N pool of the river terrace was estimated at 4.8 Tg ± 1.5 Tg, and the total N pool of the floodplains was estimated at 7.7 Tg ± 3.6 Tg. Considering the projections for deepening of the seasonally thawed active layer up to 120 cm in the Lena River Delta region within the 21st century, these large carbon and nitrogen stocks could become increasingly available for decomposition and mineralization processes.
The Price Elasticity of Demand for Pharmaceuticals amongst High Income Older People in Australia: A Natural Experiment

This paper estimates the price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst high-income older people in Australia. It exploits a natural experiment by which some people gained entitlement to a price reduction through the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card (CSHC). To the author’s knowledge, this is the first study of the price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst older people that draws on a natural experiment with a control group. The preferred model is a nonlinear Instrumental Variable (IV) difference-in-difference regression, estimated on nationally representative repeated cross sectional survey data using the Generalised Method of Moments. No significant evidence is found for endogenous card take-up, and so cross-sectional estimates are also considered. Taking all of the results and possible sources of bias into account, the ‘headline’ estimate is -0.1, implying that quantity demanded is not highly responsive to price
Effects of hydrogen sulfide on inducible nitric oxide synthase activity and expression of cardiomyocytes in diabetic rats

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) on the activity and expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in the myocardial tissue of type 1 diabetic rats. Rats were divided randomly into four groups: Normal control (NC), diabetes mellitus (DM), DM+DL-Proparglygylcine (DM+PAG) and DM+sodium hydrosulfide (DM+NaHS) groups. Type 1 diabetes was induced in the respective groups by a single intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of streptozotocin. Rats in the DM+PAG and DM+NaHS groups were injected with PAG and NaHS (i.p.) once a day, respectively. The level of fasting blood glucose (FBG), the heart-weight to body-weight (HW/BW) ratio and the ventricular hemodynamic parameters were measured. The activities of serum total NOS (tNOS), iNOS, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), creatine kinase (CK) and creatine kinase MB isozyme (CK-MB), and the content of nitric oxide (NO) were detected. The contents of myocardial malondialdehyde (MDA) and NO, and the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), tNOS and iNOS were determined. The myocardial tissue was examined for histological and ultrastructural alterations. The expression level of iNOS at the transcriptional and translational levels in the myocardial tissue was estimated. The level of FBG was increased in the DM group compared with the NC group, verifying the diabetic condition of the rats. The function of the left ventricle, the myocardial histological alterations and ultrastructures were damaged in the DM group. The DM group additionally demonstrated an increase in the serum NO content and tNOS, iNOS, LDH, CK and CK-MB activities. The myocardial MDA, NO content and tNOS levels were additionally increased in this group. The iNOS activity was increased significantly whereas the myocardial SOD activity was decreased. The increase in the iNOS activity was supported by an enhanced expression level of myocardial iNOS mRNA and protein in the DM group. In the DM+PAG group, in the absence of H2S, the dysfunction of the left ventricle and the oxidative stress injury were increased compared with the DM group. The activity and the expression of tNOS and iNOS were increased significantly. However, the rats in the DM+PAG group demonstrated the opposite effects. In conclusion, H2S exhibits a protective effect on the myocardium in type 1 diabetic rats, which may be associated with the suppression of iNOS activity and expression, a decrease in the NO content and the inhibition of oxidative stress injury.
Get Off My Prefix ! Using Gerontocratic Policies to Improve the Security and Stability of Internet Routing

Inter-domain routing in today’s Internet is plagued by security and reliability problems such as prefix hijacking and route oscillation. These issues arise for both accidental (e.g., misconfiguration) as well as deliberate (e.g., conflicting interests, malicious or Byzantine entities) reasons. We propose a simple family of dynamic route selection policies which can be adopted unilaterally by any autonomous system without major infrastructural requirements. Unlike static policies, which prefer one route to another regardless of the dynamics of the routing protocol, our policies are gerontocratic: they take into account observed route lifetimes and can combine them with static preferences, if necessary. We empirically demonstrate that our policies would be as effective at avoiding prefix hijacks as other solutions while yielding significantly more stable routes. Furthermore, we formally prove that gerontocratic policies are both necessary and sufficient to guarantee route convergence in the presence of Byzantine participants.
SPHERE eXtreme AO control scheme: final performance assessment and on sky validation of the first auto-tuned LQG based operational system

The SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetry High-contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument is an ESO project aiming at the direct detection of extra-solar planets. SPHERE has been successfully integrated and tested in Europe end 2013 and has been re-integrated at Paranal in Chile early 2014 for a first light at the beginning of May. The heart of the SPHERE instrument is its eXtreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) SAXO (SPHERE AO for eXoplanet Observation) subsystem that provides extremely high correction of turbulence and very accurate stabilization of images for coronagraphic purpose. However, SAXO, as well as the overall instrument, must also provide constant operability overnights, ensuring robustness and autonomy. An original control scheme has been developed to satisfy this challenging dichotomy. It includes in particular both an Optimized Modal Gain Integrator (OMGI) to control the Deformable Mirror (DM) and a Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control law to manage the tip-tilt (TT) mirror. LQG allows optimal estimation and prediction of turbulent angle of arrival but also of possible vibrations. A specific and unprecedented control scheme has been developed to continuously adapt and optimize LQG control ensuring a constant match to turbulence and vibrations characteristics. SPHERE is thus the first operational system implementing LQG, with automatic adjustment of its models. SAXO has demonstrated performance beyond expectations during tests in Europe, in spite of internal limitations. Very first results have been obtained on sky last May. We thus come back to SAXO control scheme, focusing in particular on the LQG based TT control and the various upgrades that have been made to enhance further the performance ensuring constant operability and robustness. We finally propose performance assessment based on in lab performance and first on sky results and discuss further possible improvements.
Characterization of Hardwood Soda-AQ Lignins Precipitated from Black Liquor through Selective Acidification

In the development of integrated biorefinery process alternatives to produce value-added by-products, various black liquors from sulfur-free pulping processes offer potential feedstocks for recovering their main chemical constituents, lignin and aliphatic carboxylic acids. In this study, lignin fractions were obtained from silver birch (Betula pendula) soda-anthraquinone black liquor by carbonation (pH to about 8.5) or by acidification (pH to about 2) with H2SO4 after carbonation or directly. These fractions were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), ultraviolet (UV), energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED XRF), and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (13C NMR) spectroscopy. In addition, the molecular weight distributions of these lignin fractions were determined. All the experimental data clearly suggested that only small differences between the precipitated lignins existed, and thus, their equal chemical utilization seems possible.
Highway in TDM NoCs

TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) is a well-known technique to provide QoS guarantees in NoCs. However, unused time slots commonly exist in TDM NoCs. In the paper, we propose a TDM highway technique which can enhance the slot utilization of TDM NoCs. A TDM highway is an express TDM connection composed of special buffer queues, called highway channels (HWCs). It can enhance the throughput and reduce data transfer delay of the connection, while keeping the quality of service (QoS) guarantee on minimum bandwidth and in-order packet delivery. We have developed a dynamic and repetitive highway setup policy which has no dependency on particular TDM NoC techniques and no overhead on traffic flows. As a result, highways can be efficiently established and utilized in various TDM NoCs. According to our experiments, compared to a traditional TDM NoC, adding one HWC with two buffers to every input port of routers in an 8×8 mesh can reduce data delay by up to 80% and increase the maximum throughput by up to 310%. More improvements can be achieved by adding more HWCs per input per router, or more buffers per HWC. We also use a set of MPSoC application benchmarks to evaluate our highway technique. The experiment results suggest that with highway, we can reduce application run time up to 51%.
The role of ECoG magnitude and phase in decoding position, velocity, and acceleration during continuous motor behavior

In neuronal population signals, including the electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocorticogram (ECoG), the low-frequency component (LFC) is particularly informative about motor behavior and can be used for decoding movement parameters for brain-machine interface (BMI) applications. An idea previously expressed, but as of yet not quantitatively tested, is that it is the LFC phase that is the main source of decodable information. To test this issue, we analyzed human ECoG recorded during a game-like, one-dimensional, continuous motor task with a novel decoding method suitable for unfolding magnitude and phase explicitly into a complex-valued, time-frequency signal representation, enabling quantification of the decodable information within the temporal, spatial and frequency domains and allowing disambiguation of the phase contribution from that of the spectral magnitude. The decoding accuracy based only on phase information was substantially (at least 2 fold) and significantly higher than that based only on magnitudes for position, velocity and acceleration. The frequency profile of movement-related information in the ECoG data matched well with the frequency profile expected when assuming a close time-domain correlate of movement velocity in the ECoG, e.g., a (noisy) “copy” of hand velocity. No such match was observed with the frequency profiles expected when assuming a copy of either hand position or acceleration. There was also no indication of additional magnitude-based mechanisms encoding movement information in the LFC range. Thus, our study contributes to elucidating the nature of the informative LFC of motor cortical population activity and may hence contribute to improve decoding strategies and BMI performance.
Novel strategy for designing antimicrobial peptides: an answer to the development of drug resistance.

N. B. Iannucci 1, , R. Gonzalez , O. Cascone 1 and F. Albericio 3, 4, . 1 School of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2 Therapeutic Peptides Research and Development Laboratory, Chemo-Romikin, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 3 Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona Science Park, Barcelona, Spain. 4 CIBER-BBN, Networking Centre on Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine, Barcelona Science Park, Barcelona, Spain. 5 Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
A field-deployable, chemical ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer: application to the measurement of gas-phase organic and inorganic acids

Abstract We report a new ﬁeld-deployable chemical ionization time-of-ﬂight mass spectrome-ter (CI-TOFMS) for the direct measurement of trace gases in the atmosphere. Weapply the technique to the measurement of gas-phase inorganic and organic acids via 5 negative-ion proton transfer, using acetate as the reagent ion. A novel high pressure in-terface, incorporating two RF-only quadrupoles is used to eﬃciently focus ions throughfour stages of diﬀerential pumping before analysis with a compact TOFMS. The highion-duty cycle ( > 20%) of the TOFMS, coupled to eﬃcient production and transmissionof ions in the high pressure interface results in a highly sensitive ( > 300 ions s −1 pptv ) 10 instrument capable of the fast measurement of atmospheric gases at trace levels. Wedemonstrate the eﬃcient transfer and detection of both bare ions and ion-moleculeclusters, and characterize the instrument during ﬁeld measurements aboard the R/V Atlantis as part of the CalNex campaign during the spring of 2010. The in-ﬁeld short-term precision is better than 5% at 1pptv (pL/L), for 1-second averages. The detection
The Effects on Waiting Times of Expanding Provider Choice: evidence from a policy experiment

Long waiting times for inpatient treatment in the UK National Health Service have long been a source of great popular and political concern, and therefore a target for policy initiatives. One such is the London Patient Choice Project, under which patients at risk of breaching inpatient waiting time targets were offered the choice of an alternative hospital with a guaranteed shorter wait. This paper uses a difference in difference econometric methodology to infer the impact of the choice project on ophthalmology waiting times. In line with our theoretical predictions, it finds that the project led to lower average waiting times in the London region and a convergence in waiting times amongst London hospitals.
Primary Adrenal Insufficiency (PAI): A Major Teaching Hospital Experience, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI) in children is an uncommon, but potentially fatal and life-threatening condition. The clinical symptoms of adrenal insufficiency include weakness, fatigue, anorexia, abdominal pain, weight loss, orthostatic hypotension, salt craving and characterized by hyperpigmentation. It comprises a heterogeneous group of both congenital and acquired disorders [1-6]. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia, is a group of autosomal recessive disorders resulting from the deficiency of one of the enzymes required to synthesis cortisol, was the commonest [7, 8]. Auto-immune induced adrenal insufficiency either isolated of as a part of autoimmune polyendocrine syndromes have been described, but the frequency of these occurrence in children with PAI has not been determined. Various mutations in genes, and autoantibodies to gland-specific target antigens such as 21-hydroxylase have been well described [9, 10].
Using IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) in the Internet of Things (IoT): Problem Statement

This document describes the environment, problem statement, and goals for using the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol of IEEE 802.14. 4e in the context of Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). The set of goals enumerated in this document form an initial set only.
Segmentation of histological images using a metaheuristic-based level set approach

This paper presents a two-phase method to segment the hippocampus in histological images. The first phase represents a training stage where, from a training set of manually labelled images, the hippocampus representative shape and texture are derived. The second one, the proper segmentation, uses a metaheuristic to evolve the contour of a geometric deformable model using region and texture information. Three different metaheuristics (real-coded GA, Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution) and two classical segmentation algorithms (Chan & Vese model and Geodesic Active Contours) were compared over a test set of 10 histological images. The best results were attained by the real-coded GA, achieving an average and median Dice Coefficient of 0.72 and 0.77, respectively.