Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distribution of the Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) in Woodlands of the Protected and Urban Areas (North of Ukraine)

Abstract The assemblages of ground beetles of forest areas of the northern part of Ukraine were studied: Polisky Nature Reserve (PNR) and urban parks of Kyiv City. In general, 88 species of carabids of 29 genera were observed in the studied areas. Thirty-one forest species were found in the studied territories, of which 22 species were registered in urban parks, and 17 species within the PNR. In all investigated areas, the number of forest species was lower, than open-habitat species and generalists species. Today, based on data on the occurrence and abundance of carabid species, forests in urban areas can be considered as refugia for many forest species, in particular, protected and endangered species — Abax parallelus, Carabus glabratus, Carabus menetriesi and Cychrus caraboides. The results of cluster analysis, non-metric multidimensional scaling and detrended correspondence analysis showed the difference between the forests of the PNR and the urban parks. In addition, the species richness of the PNR were lower than in urban parks. The results of the study showed that urban parks can be considered as important elements for the future management and conservation of landscapes.
Long‐standing environmental conditions, geographic isolation and host–symbiont specificity influence the relative ecological dominance and genetic diversification of coral endosymbionts in the genus Symbiodinium

Aim This study examines the importance of geographic proximity, host life history and regional and local differences in environment (temperature and water clarity) in driving the ecological and evolutionary processes underpinning the global patterns of diversity and distribution of symbiotic dinoflagellates. By comparing and contrasting coral–algal symbioses from isolated regions with differing environmental conditions, we may assess the potential of coral communities to respond to significant changes in climate.
A Conditional Multifactor Analysis of Return Momentum

Although the Fama-French three-factor model captures most CAPM anomalies, it still fails to explain return momentum. This paper shows that the incorporation of conditioning information into an asset-pricing model is one way to capture return momentum. Results from the conditional regression with linear exposures in the instruments show clear evidence that both SMB and HML risks are time varying and that momentum and reversal return patterns have different time-varying risk characteristics. The conditional Fama-French regression model seems, however, to remain misspecified. Conversely, when the linearity assumption is relaxed and cross-sectional restrictions are imposed, the conditional pricing model appears to capture both short-term momentum and long-term reversal. Key words: Conditional Asset Pricing, Conditioning Information, Multifactor Model, Return Momentum, Return Reversal
Intensive Milling Practices in the Romano-British Landscape of Southern England: Using Newly Established Criteria for Distinguishing Millstones from Rotary Querns

Abstract This paper investigates how common intensive milling practices were in southern England during the Romano-British period, by analysing the distribution of millstones, based on an extensive corpus of almost 4,500 querns and millstones compiled by the author. In order to do this, it was necessary to establish criteria for distinguishing millstones from rotary querns, the details of which are set out in an accompanying appendix; this is something which has hitherto not been published. Using the guidelines thereby defined, the distribution of millstones is considered and described by stone type. The resulting data are then used to discuss the following key points: How frequently did mills occur? What types of mills were in use, and when? What were those mills used for?
The Instrumental Activity of Daily Living Profile in Aging: A Feasibility Study.

BACKGROUND Dysfunctions in complex activities of daily living (ADLs) are a normal part of the aging process. However, differentiating functional decline associated with healthy aging from the subtle decline experienced by individuals with mild cognitive impairment and early dementia constitutes a challenge. Finding an appropriate tool that can capture these subtle but important functional changes represents a priority. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were to evaluate the feasibility of using the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Profile (IADL Profile) with elderly participants and to describe their level of difficulty encountered in each task. METHODS The tool was administered to a group of 40 elderly participants living in the community. RESULTS The IADL Profile was found to be feasible to use in older individuals; the tool also showed sensitivity to the difficulties experienced by this population in everyday functioning. CONCLUSION The IADL Profile is a promising ecological tool to evaluate independence in aging and may help to identify individuals with MCI. This tool may also contribute to the development of tailored interventions to enhance everyday functioning in the older population.
Evaluation of the BD Max Enteric Parasite Panel for Clinical Diagnostics

ABSTRACT We compared the performance of the BD Max enteric parasite panel to routine microscopy and an in-house PCR for the detection of Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba histolytica, and Cryptosporidium spp. The enteric parasite panel showed good specificity for all targets and good sensitivity for E. histolytica and Cryptosporidium spp. Sensitivity for G. intestinalis with the BD Max enteric parasite panel was equivalent to that with microscopy.
Modelling Speech Dynamics with Trajectory-HMMs

The conditional independence assumption imposed by the hidden Markov models (HMMs) makes it difficult to model temporal correlation patterns in human speech. Traditionally, this limitation is circumvented by appending the first and second-order regression coefficients to the observation feature vectors. Although this leads to improved performance in recognition tasks, we argue that a straightforward use of dynamic features in HMMs will result in an inferior model, due to the incorrect handling of dynamic constraints. In this thesis I will show that an HMM can be transformed into a Trajectory-HMM capable of generating smoothed output mean trajectories, by performing a per-utterance normalisation. The resulting model can be trained by either maximising model log-likelihood or minimising mean generation errors on the training data. To combat the exponential growth of paths in searching, the idea of delayed path merging is proposed and a new time-synchronous decoding algorithm built on the concept of token-passing is designed for use in the recognition task. The Trajectory-HMM brings a new way of sharing knowledge between speech recognition and synthesis components, by tackling both problems in a coherent statistical framework. I evaluated the Trajectory-HMM on two different speech tasks using the speaker-dependent MOCHA-TIMIT database. First as a generative model to recover articulatory features from speech signal, where the Trajectory-HMM was used in a complementary way to the conventional HMM modelling techniques, within a joint Acoustic-Articulatory framework. Experiments indicate that the jointly trained acoustic-articulatory models are more accurate (having a lower Root Mean Square error) than the separately trained ones, and that Trajectory-HMM training results in greater accuracy compared with conventional Baum-Welch parameter updating. In addition, the Root Mean Square (RMS) training objective proves to be consistently better than the Maximum Likelihood objective. However, experiment of the phone recognition task shows that the MLE trained Trajectory-HMM, while retaining attractive properties of being a proper generative model, tends to favour over-smoothed trajectories among competing hypothesises, and does not perform better than a conventional HMM. We use this to build an argument that models giving a better fit on training data may suffer a reduction of discrimination by being too faithful to the training data. Finally, experiments on using triphone models show that increasing modelling detail is an effective way to leverage modelling performance with little added complexity in training.
Corynebacterium halotolerans sp. nov., isolated from saline soil in the west of China.

A halotolerant, non-spore-forming actinobacterium was isolated from a soil sample from the west of China. The strain, designated YIM 70093(T) (=CCTCC AA 001024(T)=DSM 44683(T)), comprised Gram-positive, non-motile, diphtheroid and irregular rods. It grew in 0-25 % KCl (KCl could be substituted by NaCl or MgCl(2). 6H(2)O), with optimum growth at 10 % KCl, and its optimal pH and cultivation temperature were 7.2 and 28 degrees C, respectively. On the basis of its morphological, physiological and phylogenetic characteristics, strain YIM 70093(T) should be classified in the genus CORYNEBACTERIUM: However, it is sufficiently different from hitherto described Corynebacterium species to be considered as a novel species, for which the name Corynebacterium halotolerans sp. nov. is proposed.
Where's the Evidence? Debates in Modern Medicine

William A Silverman Oxford University Press, £39.50, pp 278 ISBN 0192629344 ! [][1] Rating: ! [Graphic][2] ! [Graphic][3] ! [Graphic][4] At first glance, a collection of short essays originally published under the nom de plume “Malcontent” in an unfamiliar journal— Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology —with the intention of allowing the author the opportunity to vent his spleen whenever he felt the need does not seem promising material for a book intended for general readers. However, preconceptions are soon set aside. This book reminds me of Alastair Cooke's classic radio broadcasts “Letter from America. ” Like Cooke, Bill Silverman has the ability to select a topic that you didn't know you were concerned about, capture your interest with an intriguing introduction, and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif [2]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif [3]: /embed/inline-graphic-2.gif [4]: /embed/inline-graphic-3.gif
Linguistically motivated models for lightly-supervised dependency parsing

Today, the top performing parsing algorithms rely on the availability of annotated data for learning the syntactic structure of a language. Unfortunately, syntactically annotated texts are available only for a handful of languages. The research presented in this thesis aims at developing parsing models that can effectively perform in a lightly-supervised training regime. In particular we focus on formulating linguistically aware models of dependency parsing that can exploit readily available sources of linguistic knowledge such as language universals and typological features. This type of linguistic knowledge can be used to motivate model design and/or to guide inference procedure. We propose three alternative approaches for incorporating linguistic information into a lightly-supervised training setup: First, we show that linguistic information can be used in the form of rules on top of standard unsupervised parsing models to guide inference procedure. This method consistently outperforms existing monolingual and multilingual unsupervised parsers when tested on a set of 6 Indo-European languages. Next, we show that a linguistically aware model design greatly facilitates crosslingual parser transfer by leveraging syntactic connections between languages. Our transfer approach outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual transfer parser across a set of 19 languages, achieving an average gain of 5.9%. The gains are even more pronounced – 14.4% – on non-Indo-European languages where existing transfer methods fail to perform. Finally, we propose a corpus-level Bayesian framework that allows multiple views of data
Satellite Data Collection System at Ku-Band

The paper describes a system dedicated to the collection of low-rate data by small, unattended and inexpensive remote earth stations operating through conventional satellite transponders at Ku-band. The high phase noise and frequency drift environment has been the limiting factor in introducing this kind of system. A system using trellis coded 4-FSK modulation on the inbound link (300 bits/s) and BPSK modulation (2400 bits/s) on the outbound link together with a SHF PLL converter chain, solves these problems. Using dual-shaped off-set Gregorian antennas with diameter 55cm or 90cm, a low-cost and robust system is established.
Influence of transfer conductance on power system stability with excitation control

The non-zero transfer conductance appearing in multi-machine power systems during classical reduction of network has significant impact on the control schemes that enhance power systems stability. This paper gives a detailed discussion on the impact of transfer conductance in a specific energy-based controller developed by the authors. In particular, it investigates the effect of taking into account the transfer conductance in the construction of the closed-loop energy function for the general control scheme. Detailed numerical simulations on a 3-machine power system are used to illustrate these issues
Electronic Supplementary Material : “ Goals as Reference Points in Marathon Running : A Novel Test of Reference Dependence ”

We solicited participants through marathon organizers, organized running groups, marathon training programs, message boards, and athletic shops. The study was advertised as “a study on the relationship between marathon performance and satisfaction. ” Over the course of three years (2007-2009), we recruited prospective marathon runners for our targeted marathons, specifically Boston, 2008; Chicago, 2007-2009; Grandma’s, 2008; Los Angeles, 2008; Marine Corps, 2007-2009; New York City, 2009; Portland (OR), 2007; Rock ‘n’ Roll (San Diego), 2008; and Twin Cities, 2007-2009. Each of these marathons was one of the 15 largest U.S. marathons of its year, ranging from 6,875 finishers for the 2008 Grandma’s Marathon to 38,557 finishers for the 2007 New York City Marathon. The number of total finishers and number of survey participants for each marathon is given in Table A.1. Participants registered online for our study by providing their name, email address, and the marathon that they were planning to run. They were then randomly assigned to one of 6 conditions in a 3 (Premarathon survey: goal-not-asked vs. early goal-asked vs. late goal-asked) × 2 (post-marathon survey: early vs. late) design. Participants were entered into a random drawing for prizes. The prizes included one grand prize (a prize worth approximately $300 USD, such as a GPS watch, an iPod, or a Bose SoundDock), three second prizes (a prize worth approximately $100 USD such as a running jacket, an iPod Shuffle, or a heart rate monitor watch), and 10 third prizes (a prize worth approximately $10 USD such as running socks, running gloves, or a winter hat). A unique drawing was conducted for each marathon. The number of participants in each condition is presented in Table A.2. Tables A.3 and A.4 contain the wording and order of all of preand post-marathon survey questions.
Knotting of the guide wires: A rare complication during minimally invasive procedure on kidney-Lessons learnt

Guide wires are frequently used in various endourologic procedures to access the upper as well as lower urinary tract. Flexible guide wires have lesser complication rate of tissue injury as compared to stiff guide wires. Flexible guide wires are however more prone to bending and kinking due to their mechanical properties. We report an unusual complication of knotting of flexible guide wires during endourologic procedure and the trick to remedy this problem. We have also discussed the structural design and mechanical properties of commonly used guide wires.
RVM-Based Human Action Classification in Crowd through Projection and Star Skeletonization

Detection of abnormal human actions in the crowd has become a critical problem in video surveillance applications like terrorist attacks. This paper proposes a real-time video surveillance system which is capable of classifying normal and abnormal actions of individuals in a crowd. The abnormal actions of human such as running, jumping, waving hand, bending, walking and fighting with each other in a crowded environment are considered. In this paper, Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) is used to classify the abnormal actions of an individual in the crowd based on the results obtained from projection and skeletonization methods. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed system is robust and efficient. A comparative study of classification accuracy between Relevance Vector Machine and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification is also presented.
Effects on the “self-organization- satisfaction” relationship of changes in the economic context

ABSTRACT Noting increasingly independent traveling by tourists, as well as changes on the tourist activity worldwide due to the 2008 economic crisis, this study analyzes the relationships between an economic crisis, tourist’s self-organization in trip planning, and tourist’s trip satisfaction. Data from a panel (2006–2011) on how residents in Spain complete their accommodation and transport bookings are used, including data on their trip satisfaction. The study identifies a negative relationship between the 2008 economic crisis and trip satisfaction, a positive relationship between self-organization and satisfaction, as well as positive moderating effects of the crisis on the relationship between self-organization and satisfaction.
Screening for Prostate Cancer : U . S . Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement DRAFT Summary of Recommendation and Evidence

Note: This draft Recommendation Statement is not the final recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. This draft is distributed solely for the purpose of pre-release review. It has not been disseminated otherwise by AHRQ. It does not represent and should not be interpreted to represent an AHRQ determination or policy. This draft Recommendation Statement is based on an evidence review that was published on October 7, 2011 (available at http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf12/prostate/prostateart.htm). The USPSTF makes recommendations about the effectiveness of specific clinical preventive services for patients without related signs or symptoms. It bases its recommendations on the evidence of both the benefits and harms of the service, and an assessment of the balance. The USPSTF does not consider the costs of providing a service in this assessment. The USPSTF recognizes that clinical decisions involve more considerations than evidence alone. Clinicians should understand the evidence but individualize decisionmaking to the specific patient or situation. Similarly, the USPSTF notes that policy and coverage decisions involve considerations in addition to the evidence of clinical benefits and harms. This draft Recommendation Statement is available for comment from October 11, 2011 until November 8, 2011 at 5:00 PM ET. You may wish to read the entire Recommendation Statement before you comment.
ISSR Analysis for Determination of genetic diversity in 29 olive (Olea europaea L.) cultivars

Olive tree is one of the most important oleaginous crops in the world, and known for having large genetic variability. Application of molecular markers is a suitable tool to investigate the genetic pool in crops. Therefore, in the current study 29 olive cultivars were tested by ten primers constituted by inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR). Plant materials were obtained from the collection of Tarom Agricultural Research Center in 2015. Genomic DNA was extracted from fresh leaves of 29 cultivars by a modified CTAB method. Ten ISSR primers were used and obtained data were scored. An analysis of primer informativeness showed that all primers were productive and effective in separating olive cultivars. Nevertheless, some of them were more effective such as UBC 855 and UBC 825 primers. According to cluster analysis and genetic distance, the olive cultivars were separated into three major clusters. Majority of the cultivars from southern and central Mediterranean such as; Italian, Spanish and Grecian olive cultivars clustered in one group. Results of the current study suggest that Mediterranean olive germplasm were structured into two main gene pools, which strongly matched two distinct geographic areas, i.e. western and central as well as eastern Mediterranean regions.
The Transcription Factor ZNF683/HOBIT Regulates Human NK-Cell Development

We identified ZNF683/HOBIT as the most highly upregulated transcription factor gene during ex vivo differentiation of human CD34+ cord blood progenitor cells to CD56+ natural killer (NK) cells. ZNF683/HOBIT mRNA was preferentially expressed in NK cells compared to other human peripheral blood lymphocytes and monocytes. During ex vivo differentiation, ZNF683/HOBIT mRNA started to increase shortly after addition of IL-15 and further accumulated in parallel to the generation of CD56+ NK cells. shRNA-mediated knockdown of ZNF683/HOBIT resulted in a substantial reduction of CD56−CD14− NK-cell progenitors and the following generation of CD56+ NK cells was largely abrogated. The few CD56+ NK cells, which escaped the developmental inhibition in the ZNF683/HOBIT knockdown cultures, displayed normal levels of NKG2A and KIR receptors. Functional analyses of these cells showed no differences in degranulation capacity from control cultures. However, the proportion of IFN-γ-producing cells appeared to be increased upon ZNF683/HOBIT knockdown. These results indicate a key role of ZNF683/HOBIT for the differentiation of the human NK-cell lineage and further suggest a potential negative control on IFN-γ production in more mature human NK cells.
Improved seeding of chondrocytes into polyglycolic acid scaffolds using semi‐static and alginate loading methods

Cell seeding and attachment in three‐dimensional scaffolds is a key step in tissue engineering with implications for cell differentiation and tissue development. In this work, two new seeding methods were investigated using human chondrocytes and polyglycolic acid (PGA) fibrous mesh scaffolds. A simple semi‐static seeding method using culture plates and tissue flasks was developed as an easy‐to‐perform modification of static seeding. An alginate‐loading method was also studied, using alginate hydrogel as an adjuvant for entrapping cells within PGA scaffolds. Both the semi‐static and PGA–alginate methods produced more homogeneous cell distributions than conventional static and dynamic seeding. Using 20 × 106 cells, whereas the seeding efficiency for static seeding was only 52%, all other techniques produced seeding efficiencies of ≥ 90%. With 40 × 106 cells, the efficiency of semi‐static seeding declined to 74% while the dynamic and PGA–alginate methods retained their ability to accommodate high cell numbers. The seeded scaffolds were cultured in recirculation bioreactors to determine the effect of seeding method on cartilage production. Statically seeded scaffolds did not survive the 5‐week cultivation period. Deposition of extracellular matrix in scaffolds seeded using the semi‐static and PGA–alginate methods was more uniform compared with scaffolds seeded using the dynamic method. The new semi‐static and PGA–alginate seeding methods developed in this work are recommended for tissue engineering because they provide substantial benefits compared with static seeding in terms of seeding efficiency, cell distribution, and cartilage deposition while remaining simple and easy to execute. © 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 2011