Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Partitioning net ecosystem exchange of CO2 on the pedon scale in the Lena River Delta, Siberia

Abstract. Arctic tundra ecosystems are currently facing amplified rates of climate warming. Since these ecosystems store significant amounts of soil organic carbon, which can be mineralized to carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), rising temperatures may cause increasing greenhouse gas fluxes to the atmosphere. To understand how net the ecosystem exchange (NEE) of CO2 will respond to changing climatic and environmental conditions, it is necessary to understand the individual responses of the processes contributing to NEE. Therefore, this study aimed to partition NEE at the soil–plant–atmosphere interface in an arctic tundra ecosystem and to identify the main environmental drivers of these fluxes. NEE was partitioned into gross primary productivity (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (Reco) and further into autotrophic (RA) and heterotrophic respiration (RH). The study examined CO2 flux data collected during the growing season in 2015 using closed-chamber measurements in a polygonal tundra landscape in the Lena River Delta, northeastern Siberia. To capture the influence of soil hydrology on CO2 fluxes, measurements were conducted at a water-saturated polygon center and a well-drained polygon rim. These chamber-measured fluxes were used to model NEE, GPP, Reco, RH, RA, and net primary production (NPP) at the pedon scale (1–10 m) and to determine cumulative growing season fluxes. Here, the response of in situ measured RA and RH fluxes from permafrost-affected soils of the polygonal tundra to hydrological conditions have been examined. Although changes in the water table depth at the polygon center sites did not affect CO2 fluxes from RH, rising water tables were linked to reduced CO2 fluxes from RA. Furthermore, this work found the polygonal tundra in the Lena River Delta to be a net sink for atmospheric CO2 during the growing season. The NEE at the wet, depressed polygon center was more than twice that at the drier polygon rim. These differences between the two sites were caused by higher GPP fluxes due to a higher vascular plant density and lower Reco fluxes due to oxygen limitation under water-saturated conditions at the polygon center in comparison to the rim. Hence, soil hydrological conditions were one of the key drivers for the different CO2 fluxes across this highly heterogeneous tundra landscape.
ChIP-seq and In Vivo Transcriptome Analyses of the Aspergillus fumigatus SREBP SrbA Reveals a New Regulator of the Fungal Hypoxia Response and Virulence

The Aspergillus fumigatus sterol regulatory element binding protein (SREBP) SrbA belongs to the basic Helix-Loop-Helix (bHLH) family of transcription factors and is crucial for antifungal drug resistance and virulence. The latter phenotype is especially striking, as loss of SrbA results in complete loss of virulence in murine models of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA). How fungal SREBPs mediate fungal virulence is unknown, though it has been suggested that lack of growth in hypoxic conditions accounts for the attenuated virulence. To further understand the role of SrbA in fungal infection site pathobiology, chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by massively parallel DNA sequencing (ChIP-seq) was used to identify genes under direct SrbA transcriptional regulation in hypoxia. These results confirmed the direct regulation of ergosterol biosynthesis and iron uptake by SrbA in hypoxia and revealed new roles for SrbA in nitrate assimilation and heme biosynthesis. Moreover, functional characterization of an SrbA target gene with sequence similarity to SrbA identified a new transcriptional regulator of the fungal hypoxia response and virulence, SrbB. SrbB co-regulates genes involved in heme biosynthesis and demethylation of C4-sterols with SrbA in hypoxic conditions. However, SrbB also has regulatory functions independent of SrbA including regulation of carbohydrate metabolism. Loss of SrbB markedly attenuates A. fumigatus virulence, and loss of both SREBPs further reduces in vivo fungal growth. These data suggest that both A. fumigatus SREBPs are critical for hypoxia adaptation and virulence and reveal new insights into SREBPs' complex role in infection site adaptation and fungal virulence.
Rate, Energy, and Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Multicast: Network Coding versus Routing

We build on the framework of joint scheduling and network coding optimization. The formulation is extended to include rate, energy, and delay in network coding and routing paradigms. We then study energy-rate and delay-rate relationships to see how minimum energy and delay change as functions of multicast rate demand. The main observation is that as the rate demand approaches maximum achievable rate, the solution tends to increasingly use more diverse, longer paths. This translates into non-linearly higher energy and delay for higher input rates. In the case of energy, we are also able to show that network coding provides more benefits (when compared to routing) at higher rates. Another observation is related to the scheduling over maximal independent sets (MISs). We present results on comparing the performance of scheduling over all, exponentially growing MISs and small randomly selected subsets of MISs. Our results point to the effectiveness of the latter in achieving near-optimal rate and energy while reducing the complexity of the problem.
Effects of Ordered Access Lists in Firewalls

Firewalls are hardware and software systems that protect a network from attacks coming from the Internet. Packet filtering firewalls are efficient, fast and provide a good level of security and have withstood the test of time. Firewalls based on packet filtering provide protection through granting or denying access to passing packets. Each individual incoming or outgoing packet is inspected against a number of rules in an access list. The result of this inspection determines the decision to be made. The great expansion in communication and the increased number of users on the Internet place more pressure on firewalls to provide greater security at higher performance levels without being the bottleneck of communication. This enforces the search for better or more efficient methods of implementing firewalls. In this paper we examine the affects that ordering of the rules in access lists has on the performance of packet filtering. This is done through simulation of a network device performing packet filtering. Simulation enables more experiments to be carried out under exact repeated conditions allowing comparisons to be made which otherwise may not be possible.
RF Impact of Intercostal Structure on the Rear-Shell Performance of a DGR Antenna

A modeling and analysis approach is presented to accurately predict the RF impact of intercostal structure on the rear-shell performance of a dual gridded reflector (DGR) antenna. Hybrid physical optics method of moments (PO-MoM)-based electromagnetic analysis capability has been effectively utilized. The intercostal ribs have been identified as the main cause of copolar gain degradation and pattern distortion with smaller contribution from the intercostal ring.
Seeking professional help for mental health problems, among New Zealand secondary school students

Objective: Our aim was to investigate whether secondary school students with mental health problems sought help from general practitioners and to investigate whether mental illness type, socio-demographic variables, family, school and community factors were associated with seeking help. Method: A randomly selected sample of 9699 secondary school students from across New Zealand participated in the Youth2000 Health and Wellbeing Survey. Data analysis included uni-variate and regression analyses. Results: Having symptoms of anxiety (p<0.0001), depression (p<0.0001), and suicidal thoughts (p<0.0001) were associated with help seeking. However, 82%of students who had significant mental health problems had not sought help from a general practitioner. Rates of help seeking increased with age for girls and decreased with age for boys. Seeking help for mental health problems was also associated with living in a single parent family (p<0.0001), living in an over-crowded house (p=0.0006), and being well known by a teacher (p=0.0004). Conclusions: The majority of New Zealand secondary school students with mental health problems do not obtain the help they need from general practitioners. Given the prevalence of mental health problems, it is important to find ways of identifying adolescents with difficulties and encouraging them to seek help.
Experimentally constrained CA1 fast-firing parvalbumin-positive interneuron network models exhibit sharp transitions into coherent high frequency rhythms

The coupling of high frequency oscillations (HFOs; >100 Hz) and theta oscillations (3–12 Hz) in the CA1 region of rats increases during REM sleep, indicating that it may play a role in memory processing. However, it is unclear whether the CA1 region itself is capable of providing major contributions to the generation of HFOs, or if they are strictly driven through input projections. Parvalbumin-positive (PV+) interneurons may play an essential role in these oscillations due to their extensive connections with neighboring pyramidal cells, and their characteristic fast-spiking. Thus, we created mathematical network models to investigate the conditions under which networks of CA1 fast-spiking PV+ interneurons are capable of producing high frequency population rhythms. We used whole-cell patch clamp recordings of fast-spiking, PV+ cells in the CA1 region of an intact hippocampal preparation in vitro to derive cellular properties, from which we constrained an Izhikevich-type model. Novel, biologically constrained network models were constructed with these individual cell models, and we investigated networks across a range of experimentally determined excitatory inputs and inhibitory synaptic strengths. For each network, we determined network frequency and coherence. Network simulations produce coherent firing at high frequencies (>90 Hz) for parameter ranges in which PV-PV inhibitory synaptic conductances are necessarily small and external excitatory inputs are relatively large. Interestingly, our networks produce sharp transitions between random and coherent firing, and this sharpness is lost when connectivity is increased beyond biological estimates. Our work suggests that CA1 networks may be designed with mechanisms for quickly gating in and out of high frequency coherent population rhythms, which may be essential in the generation of nested theta/high frequency rhythms.
Climate forcing due to optimization of maximal leaf conductance in subtropical vegetation under rising CO2

Plant physiological adaptation to the global rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration (CO2) is identified as a crucial climatic forcing. To optimize functioning under rising CO2, plants reduce the diffusive stomatal conductance of their leaves (gs) dynamically by closing stomata and structurally by growing leaves with altered stomatal densities and pore sizes. The structural adaptations reduce maximal stomatal conductance (gsmax) and constrain the dynamic responses of gs. Here, we develop and validate models that simulate structural stomatal adaptations based on diffusion of CO2 and water vapor through stomata, photosynthesis, and optimization of carbon gain under the constraint of a plant physiological cost of water loss. We propose that the ongoing optimization of gsmax is eventually limited by species-specific limits to phenotypic plasticity. Our model reproduces observed structural stomatal adaptations and predicts that adaptation will continue beyond double CO2. Owing to their distinct stomatal dimensions, angiosperms reach their phenotypic response limits on average at 740 ppm and conifers on average at 1,250 ppm CO2. Further, our simulations predict that doubling today's CO2 will decrease the annual transpiration flux of subtropical vegetation in Florida by ≈60 W·m−2. We conclude that plant adaptation to rising CO2 is altering the freshwater cycle and climate and will continue to do so throughout this century.
The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal

Preventive use of force may be defined as the initiation of military action in anticipation of harmful actions that are neither presently occurring nor imminent. This essay explores the permissibility of preventive war from a cosmopolitan normative perspective, one that recognizes the basic human rights of all persons, not just citizens of a particular country or countries. It argues that preventive war can only be justified if it is undertaken within an appropriate rule-governed, institutional framework that is designed to help protect vulnerable countries against unjustified interventions while also avoiding unacceptable risks of the costs of inaction. The key to ensuring the fairness of rules governing the preventive use of force is accountability. This essay proposes a scheme that would make those promoting and those rejecting the preventive use of force more accountable. The proposal contains the following crucial features: States proposing preventive war are required to enter into a contract with a diverse body of states as a condition for authorization of their actions; Prior to taking preventive action, states must make an evidence-based case to the UN Security Council, and agree in advance to submit themselves to an evaluation by an impartial body after the preventive action occurred; Both proponents of action and those opposing it will be held accountable ex post for the accuracy of their prior statements and the proportionality of their actions; Sanctions will be imposed against intervening states or states that opposed preventive action, respectively, depending on the findings of the ex post evaluation. If preventive action were blocked in the Security Council, states seeking to engage in preventive action could then present their case in a different body–a coalition of democratic states–with its own ex post and ex ante accountability procedures.
Network loss inference with second order statistics of end-to-end flows

We address the problem of calculating link loss rates from end-to-end measurements. Contrary to existing works that use only the average end-to-end loss rates or strict temporal correlations between probes, we exploit second-order moments of end-to-end flows. We first prove that the variances of link loss rates can be uniquely calculated from the covariances of the measured end-to-end loss rates in any realistic topology. After calculating the link variances, we remove the un-congested links with small variances from the first-order moment equations to obtain a full rank linear system of equations, from which we can calculate precisely the loss rates of the remaining congested links. This operation is possible because losses due to congestion occur in bursts and hence the loss rates of congested links have high variances. On the contrary, most links on the Internet are un-congested, and hence the averages and variances of their loss rates are virtually zero. Our proposed solution uses only regular unicast probes and thus is applicable in today's Internet. It is accurate and scalable, as shown in our simulations and experiments on PlanetLab.
Hardware/software partitioning with iterative improvement heuristics

The paper presents two heuristics for hardware/software partitioning of system level specifications. The main objective is to achieve performance optimization with a limited hardware and software cost. We consider minimization of communication cost and improvement of the overall parallelism as essential criteria. One of the heuristics is based on simulated annealing and the other on tabu search. Experiments show the superiority of the tabu search based algorithm.
Collaborative Mobile Edge Computation Offloading for IoT over Fiber-Wireless Networks

Mobile edge computing is envisioned to be a promising paradigm to address the conflict between computationally intensive IoT applications and resource-constrained lightweight mobile devices. However, most existing research on mobile edge computation offloading has only taken the resource allocation between the mobile devices and the MEC servers into consideration, ignoring the huge computation resources in the centralized cloud computing center. To make full use of the centralized cloud and distributed MEC resources, designing a collaborative computation offloading mechanism becomes particularly important. Note that current MEC hosted networks, which mostly adopt the networking technology integrating cellular and core networks, face new challenges of single networking mode, long latency, poor reliability, high congestion, and high energy consumption. Hybrid fiber-wireless networks integrating both low-latency fiber optic and flexible wireless technologies should be a promising solution. Toward this end, we provide in this article a generic fiber-wireless architecture with coexistence of centralized cloud and distributed MEC for IoT connectivity. The problem of cloud-MEC collaborative computation offloading is defined, and a game-theoretic collaborative computation offloading scheme is proposed as our solution. Numerical results corroborate that our proposed scheme can achieve high energy efficiency and scales well as the number of mobile devices increases.
Morphological convergence in ‘river dolphin’ skulls

Convergent evolution can provide insights into the predictability of, and constraints on, the evolution of biodiversity. One striking example of convergence is seen in the ‘river dolphins’. The four dolphin genera that make up the ‘river dolphins’ (Inia geoffrensis, Pontoporia blainvillei, Platanista gangetica and Lipotes vexillifer) do not represent a single monophyletic group, despite being very similar in morphology. This has led many to using the ‘river dolphins’ as an example of convergent evolution. We investigate whether the skulls of the four ‘river dolphin’ genera are convergent when compared to other toothed dolphin taxa in addition to identifying convergent cranial and mandibular features. We use geometric morphometrics to uncover shape variation in the skulls of the ‘river dolphins’ and then apply a number of phylogenetic techniques to test for convergence. We find significant convergence in the skull morphology of the ‘river dolphins’. The four genera seem to have evolved similar skull shapes, leading to a convergent morphotype characterised by elongation of skull features. The cause of this morphological convergence remains unclear. However, the features we uncover as convergent, in particular elongation of the rostrum, support hypotheses of shared feeding mode or diet and thus provide the foundation for future work into convergence within the Odontoceti.
Multigrid solution strategies for adaptive meshing problems

Abstract : This paper discusses the issues which arise when combining multigrid strategies with adaptive meshing techniques for solving steady-state problems on unstructured meshes. A basic strategy is described and demonstrated by solving several inviscid and viscous flow cases. Potential inefficiencies in this basic strategy are exposed and various alternate approaches are discussed some of which are demonstrated with an example. Although each particular approach exhibits certain advantages, all methods have particular drawbacks, and the formulation of a completely optimal strategy is considered to be an open problem.
Emotional controller (BELBIC) for positive output Luo converter

The positive output Luo converter (POLC) is a DC-DC converter with a simple structure and can decrease or increase input voltage with low ripples suitable for renewable energy production. One of the vital problems of such converters is their high nonlinearity which degrades the performance with conventional controls. Design a high performance control, especially when high accuracy application is needed, is essential. The controller should have a simple structure to achieve a low cost DC-DC converter. This paper proposes a brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (BELBIC) for POLC with fixed frequency. The output voltage is the only signal which is taken as feedback. The proposed controller is realized in a laboratory setup. Experimental results are obtained for both PI control and proposed control to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Distributed object computing platforms

ability among DBMSs is the multidatabase approach [11]. A multidatabase system resides unobtrusively on top of existing database systems and presents a single database illusion to its users. In particular, a multidatabase system maintains a single global database schema against which its users issue queries and updates. It is suggested that this is the approach that should be preferred over gateways [5]. One restriction of multidatabase systems has been that they cannot handle repositories that do not have DBMS capabilities. The introduction of object-oriented technology into data management [3] has lifted this restriction. Object-orientation, with its encapsulation and abstraction capabilities, enables the development of wrappers that encapsulate a particular repository and provide a common DBMS-like interface to the rest of the system. The components of the interoperable system may be DBMSs, other types of repositories, or legacy systems [1]. Fundamentally, interoperability of systems does not imply distribution. However, in practice, systems that interoperate are usually distributed. A common and current example is the interoperation among data repositories on the World-Wide Web. In such a distributed environment, capabilities and functionality of the distributed object management [9] platform have to be taken into account when designing the architecture of multidatabase systems. Here we discuss the role of distributed object computing platforms, in particular Object Management Group’s (OMG) Object Management Architecture (OMA) [12] in providing an interoperability platform. We report our experiences in developing a distributed multidatabase system over such a platform.
LOW COMPLEXITY DESIGN OF NON-BINARY LDPC DECODER USING EXTENDED MIN-SUM ALGORITHM

Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, is a linear block code having the decoding performance closer to Shannon’s limit. Non-binary LDPC is the class of binary LDPC, which works on the higher order Galois field. The decoding performance of non-binary (NB) LDPC is better than binary LDPC for moderate code lengths. The increased computation with the increased order of field is the major challenge in hardware realization of NB-LDPC. The extension of conventional sum-product algorithm, known as extended Min-Sum (EMS) algorithm, with reduced computational complexity is used in this paper. However, a tradeoff exists between computational complexity and decoding performance. This paper aims at reducing the computational complexity by focusing on the Parity Check Matrix (PCM) modifications. The bottleneck of the design is large memory requirement and more computation intensive. The modification in the EMS algorithm can be incorporated to design low complexity hardware architecture of NB-LDPC decoder.