Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Height-Diameter Allometry for Tree Species in Tanzania Mainland

Total tree height (H) and diameter at beast height (D) are important independent variables in predicting volume, biomass, and other forest stand attributes. However, unlikeDmeasurement, which is easy to measure with high accuracy,Hmeasurement is laborious. This study, therefore, developedH-Drelationships for ten different forest types in Tanzania Mainland. Extents in which climate and forest stand variables explain the variation inH-Dallometry were also assessed. A total of 31782 sample trees covering miombo woodlands, humid montane, lowland forests, bushlands, grasslands, mangroves, cultivated land, wetlands forests, and pines andEucalyptusspecies plantations were used for model development. TheHestimating model without climate and forest stand variables referred herein as “base model” was first developed followed by “generalized model” which included climate and stand variables. All the data were fitted using nonlinear mixed effect modelling approach. Results indicated that generalizedHestimating models had better fit than the base models. We therefore confirm a significant contribution of climate and forest structure variables in improvingH-Dallometry. Among the forest structure variables, basal area (BA) was far more important explanatory variable than other variables. In addition, it was found that the mean treeHtends to increase with the increase of mean precipitation (PRA). We therefore conclude that forest specific generalizedHmodel is to be applied when predictingH. When forest type information is not available, generalized regional model may be applied. Base model may be applied when forest stand or climate information are missing.
Validation of the Criteria for Initiating the Cleaning of Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) Ductwork Under Real Conditions

Dust accumulation in the components of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is a potential source of contaminants. To date, very little information is available on recognized methods for assessing dust buildup in these systems. The few existing methods are either objective in nature, involving numerical values, or subjective in nature, based on experts’ judgments. An earlier project aimed at assessing different methods of sampling dust in ducts was carried out in the laboratories of the Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail (IRSST). This laboratory study showed that all the sampling methods were practicable, provided that a specific surface-dust cleaning initiation criterion was used for each method. However, these conclusions were reached on the basis of ideal conditions in a laboratory using a reference dust. The objective of this present study was to validate these laboratory results in the field. To this end, the laboratory sampling templates were replicated in real ducts and the three sampling methods (the IRSST method, the method of the U.S. organization National Air Duct Cleaner Association [NADCA] and that of the French organization Association pour la Prévention et l’Étude de la Contamination [ASPEC]) were used simultaneously in a statistically representative number of systems. The air return and supply ducts were also compared. Cleaning initiation criteria under real conditions were found to be 6.0 mg/100 cm2 using the IRSST method, 2.0 mg/100 cm2 using the NADCA method, and 23 mg/100 cm2 using the ASPEC method. In the laboratory study, the criteria using the same methods were 6.0 for the IRSST method, 2.0 for the NADCA method, and 3.0 for the ASPEC method. The laboratory criteria for the IRSST and NADCA methods were therefore validated in the field. The ASPEC criterion was the only one to change. The ASPEC method therefore allows for the most accurate evaluation of dust accumulation in HVAC ductwork. We therefore recommend using the latter method to objectively assess dust accumulation levels in HVAC ductwork.
Population structure and spatial distribution of porbeagles (Lamna nasus) in Irish waters

Porbeagles throughout the North Atlantic have experienced severe population decline through overfishing, with the northeastern population listed as critically endangered. Management of this population is constrained by the paucity of data on porbeagle population structure, distribution and behaviour in this region. Here we use a long-term (47 year) Irish capture-mark-recapture dataset to investigate the population structure, spatial distribution and seasonal movements of this species. From 1970–2017, a total of 268 sharks (9 recaptures) were ID tagged, with most individuals likely being juvenile based on length at maturity estimates (mean total length = 143.9 cm, SD = 35.4). Almost all captures were recorded at three distinct locations near angling hubs along the south, west and north coasts with catches peaking in August. Long-term trends in capture date indicated a shift towards earlier capture dates in the northern site (n = 153). Our findings suggest Irish waters may act as a persistent summer aggregation site for juveniles, which show evidence for seasonal site fidelity, returning to nearby locations between years. These findings demonstrate the utility of such programmes, which can be implemented, with minimal expense by engaging with the angling sector, to elucidate the population structure and distribution of wide-ranging fish species.
Avian retrovirus‐induced surface antigens and their cross‐reactivity with chemically‐transformed cells and primary embryonic cells of Japanese quails

By testing spleen cells from avian leukosis (ALV) and avian sarcoma virus (ASV)‐injected Japanese quails in a microcytotoxicity assay against various target cells, we have demonstrated the existence of several target antigens. With non‐transformed ALV‐infected Japanese quail cells used as target cells, an avian retrovirus subgroup‐specific destruction was obtained when spleen cells from animals infected with either avaian sarcoma or leukosis virus of the same subgroup were employed. This reaction is probably due to the virus envelope glycoproteins (Ve‐gp) expressed on the cell surface. Apart from this subgroup‐specific reaction, avian retrovirus group‐specific destruction of ASV‐trans‐formed cells was demonstrated by means of effector cells immunized with ASV of a different subgroup. This reaction is restricted to transformed cells and not due to the virus envelope glycoprotein because the same effector cells are not cytotoxic to ALV‐infected non‐transformed cells but cytotoxic to sarcoma‐virus‐transformed cells which lack Ve‐gp. Quail methylcholanthrene‐tumor cells which show a transformation phenotype similar to that of ASV‐transformed cells but which are free of detectable endogenous and exogenous retrovirus were also destroyed by the spleen cells from ASV tumor bearing animals. The same effector cells also exerted a weak cytotoxic effect on uninfected primary embryo cells but not to embryo cells after several passages.
Differences between British and Japanese perspectives on forensic mental health systems: A preliminary study

AIM To clarify the differences in views on forensic mental health (FMH) systems between the United Kingdom and Japan. METHODS We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with six leading forensic psychiatrists. Based on a discussion by the research team, we created an interview form. After we finished conducting all the interviews, we qualitatively analyzed their content. RESULTS In the United Kingdom the core domain of FMH was risk assessment and management; however, in Japan, the core domain of FMH was psychiatric testimony. In the United Kingdom, forensic psychiatrists were responsible for ensuring public safety, and psychopathy was identified as a disease but deemed as not suitable for medical treatment. On the other hand, in Japan, psychopathy was not considered a mental illness. CONCLUSION In conclusion, there are considerable differences between the United Kingdom and Japan with regard to the concepts of FMH. Some ideas taken from both cultures for better FMH practice were suggested.
Optimal stimulus scheduling for active estimation of evoked brain networks

Objective. We consider the problem of optimal probing to learn connections in an evoked dynamic network. Such a network, in which each edge measures an input–output relationship between sites in sensor/actuator-space, is relevant to emerging applications in neural mapping and neural connectivity estimation. Approach. We show that the problem of scheduling nodes to a probe (i.e., stimulate) amounts to a problem of optimal sensor scheduling. Main results. By formulating the evoked network in state-space, we show that the solution to the greedy probing strategy has a convenient form and, under certain conditions, is optimal over a finite horizon. We adopt an expectation maximization technique to update the state-space parameters in an online fashion and demonstrate the efficacy of the overall approach in a series of detailed numerical examples. Significance. The proposed method provides a principled means to actively probe time-varying connections in neuronal networks. The overall method can be implemented in real time and is particularly well-suited to applications in stimulation-based cortical mapping in which the underlying network dynamics are changing over time.
On the vulnerability of FPGA bitstream encryption against power analysis attacks: extracting keys from xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs

Over the last two decades FPGAs have become central components for many advanced digital systems, e.g., video signal processing, network routers, data acquisition and military systems. In order to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud, e.g., by cloning a design embedded into an FPGA or manipulating its content, many current FPGAs employ a bitstream encryption feature. We develop a successful attack on the bitstream encryption engine integrated in the widespread Virtex-II Pro FPGAs from Xilinx, using side-channel analysis. After measuring the power consumption of a single power-up of the device and a modest amount of off-line computation, we are able to recover all three different keys used by its triple DES module. Our method allows extracting secret keys from any real-world device where the bitstream encryption feature of Virtex-II Pro is enabled. As a consequence, the target product can be cloned and manipulated at the will of the attacker since no side-channel protection was included into the design of the decryption module. Also, more advanced attacks such as reverse engineering or the introduction of hardware Trojans become potential threats. While performing the side-channel attack, we were able to deduce a hypothetical architecture of the hardware encryption engine. To our knowledge, this is the first attack against the bitstream encryption of a commercial FPGA reported in the open literature.
Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV Infection

The HIV/AIDS is now twenty five years old and, in these 25 years, more than 60 million people have been infected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). As on December 2006, nearly 39.5 million people globally are living with HIV/AIDS1. During this period, lot of efforts have gone into understanding the structure of viruses, its molecular biology and the pathogenesis of disease. The information thus obtained has led to development of a number of antiretroviral drugs and treatment strategies. The results from meta-analysis of various trials involving these drugs have changed the world’s outlook towards HIV/AIDS from a ‘virtual death sentence’ to a ‘chronic manageable disease’. Zidovudine (AZT, ZDV) was the first drug to be approved in 1986 for treatment of HIV infection. For many years, Zidovudine was the only drug available for the treatment of HIV infection. During early nineties, the results from use of dual therapy showed significant benefits in terms of delaying the disease progression, clinical improvements and increase in CD4 counts, but, it was restricted mainly to the developed world due to high costs. In the year 1996, another class of drugs known as ‘Protease Inhibitors’ were shown to reduce the viral load significantly. The triple drug combination therapy reduced the hospitalization rates of HIV infected individuals and opportunistic infections were reduced significantly. Presently, we have 24 anti-retroviral agents approved by US FDA, of which 15 are currently available in India. The efficacy of drugs is well documented, options available are several and large numbers of patients are on antiretroviral therapy (ART). As we are treating more and more patients with ART, issues about availability of monitoring facilities like viral load, drug resistance testing, availability of pediatric formulations and second line ARV drugs are becoming increasingly important.
Behavioral Adjustment Mediating Links Between Maternal Childhood Trauma and

Structural equation modeling was used to simultaneously examine maternal psychological distress and social support as mediators linking maternal childhood trauma (MCT) to both maternal and child-reported behavior at 9 years of age in 231 birth mother-child dyads, who were primarily poor, urban, and African American. One half of the mothers (n = 116) reported a history of childhood abuse and neglect. Although MCT was associated with both increased maternal psychological distress and limited social support at 6 years, the pathway to child behavior ratings at 9 years was informant dependent. MCT influenced maternal ratings of her child’s behavior, with some effects mediated through psychological distress. MCT indirectly influenced children’s self-perception of behavior through maternal experience of social support. Maternal ratings and child self-ratings of child behavior problems were moderately correlated. Article at OhioLink on January 16, 2014 jiv.sagepub. com Downloaded from 832 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28(4) No significant gender interaction was found. Findings suggest a need for understanding trauma histories in the lives of mothers who seek assistance for parenting and child behavior problems, especially in urban low income communities. Interventions targeting both increasing maternal social support and reducing psychological distress may promote competency and resiliency among children for whom MCT poses a risk to optimal development.
Socio-cognitive profiles for visual learning in young and older adults

It is common wisdom that practice makes perfect; but why do some adults learn better than others? Here, we investigate individuals’ cognitive and social profiles to test which variables account for variability in learning ability across the lifespan. In particular, we focused on visual learning using tasks that test the ability to inhibit distractors and select task-relevant features. We tested the ability of young and older adults to improve through training in the discrimination of visual global forms embedded in a cluttered background. Further, we used a battery of cognitive tasks and psycho-social measures to examine which of these variables predict training-induced improvement in perceptual tasks and may account for individual variability in learning ability. Using partial least squares regression modeling, we show that visual learning is influenced by cognitive (i.e., cognitive inhibition, attention) and social (strategic and deep learning) factors rather than an individual’s age alone. Further, our results show that independent of age, strong learners rely on cognitive factors such as attention, while weaker learners use more general cognitive strategies. Our findings suggest an important role for higher-cognitive circuits involving executive functions that contribute to our ability to improve in perceptual tasks after training across the lifespan.
The Role of Project Managers as Improvement Agents in Project-Based Organizations

We propose that the project manager is implicitly expected to participate in and contribute to continuous improvement in project-based organizations (PBOs). This article explores how project management literature treats the project manager in relation to improving overall PBO performance. The results, supported by case study insights, indicate implicit expectations of the project manager to contribute to organization-level PBO improvement. We argue that if organization-level improvement should be part of project management practice in PBOs, as promoted in project management literature, the role of improvement agent needs to be formalized for the project manager.
A Bayesian Divergence Prior for Classiffier Adaptation

Adaptation of statistical classifiers is critical when a target (or testing) distribution is different from the distribution that governs training data. In such cases, a classifier optimized for the training distribution needs to be adapted for optimal use in the target distribution. This paper presents a Bayesian “divergence prior” for generic classifier adaptation. Instantiations of this prior lead to simple yet principled adaptation strategies for a variety of classifiers, which yield superior performance in practice. In addition, this paper derives several adaptation error bounds by applying the divergence prior in the PAC-Bayesian setting.
An Approach for Web Service QoS Prediction Based on Service Using Information

With the increasing numbers of Web services and service users on World Wide Web, predicting QoS (Quality of Service) for users will greatly aid service selection and discovery. Due to the different backgrounds and experiences of users, they have different QoS experiences when interacting with the same service. Even two users who have similar experiences on some services can have diverging views when considering services. This paper proposes an approach to predict QoS based on other users' QoS experiences. This method employs similarity mining and prediction from users' experience by firstly selecting a set of web services that have the highest degree of similarity with the target service by comparing the target service with the others services used by target user. Secondly, the missing value can be calculated through the data of similar services. On the basis of that, we calculate the user similarity and predict QoS data for target user. Experimental results show that it can improve the prediction accuracy of QoS for Web service by using this method.
Strain relevance on the improvement of the 3T1D cell performance

3T1D-DRAM cell has been stated as a valid alternative to be implemented as a L1 memory cache and substitute 6T-SRAM, highly affected by variability. While scaling down capacitor-less DRAM cells is a challenging trend, in this paper we show how it can be compensated the scaling drawbacks through the channel strain of the cell devices and the proposal of new cell configurations to further enhance the circuit behavior.
Two Regions within the Amino-Terminal Half of APOBEC3G Cooperate To Determine Cytoplasmic Localization

ABSTRACT APOBEC3G limits the replication of human immunodeficiency virus type 1, other retroviruses, and retrotransposons. It localizes predominantly to the cytoplasm of cells, which is consistent with a model wherein cytosolic APOBEC3G packages into assembling virions, where it exerts its antiviral effect by deaminating viral cDNA cytosines during reverse transcription. To define the domains of APOBEC3G that determine cytoplasmic localization, comparisons were made with APOBEC3B, which is predominantly nuclear. APOBEC3G/APOBEC3B chimeric proteins mapped a primary subcellular localization determinant to a region within the first 60 residues of each protein. A panel of 25 APOBEC3G mutants, each with a residue replaced by the corresponding amino acid of APOBEC3B, revealed that several positions within this region were particularly important, with Y19D showing the largest effect. The mislocalization phenotype of these mutants was only apparent in the context of the amino-terminal half of APOBEC3G and not the full-length protein, suggesting the existence of an additional localization determinant. Indeed, a panel of five single amino acid substitutions within the region from amino acids 113 to 128 had little effect by themselves but, in combination with Y19D, two substitutions—F126S and W127A—caused full-length APOBEC3G to redistribute throughout the cell. The critical localization-determining residues were predicted to cluster on a common solvent-exposed surface, suggesting a model in which these two regions of APOBEC3G combine to mediate an intermolecular interaction that controls subcellular localization.
Preparation of Thermosensitive Gel for Controlled Release of Levofloxacin and Their Application in the Treatment of Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria

Levofloxacin is a synthetic broad-spectrum antibacterial agent for oral or intravenous administration. Chemically, levofloxacin is the levorotatory isomer (L-isomer) of racemate ofloxacin, a fluoroquinolone antibacterial agent. Quinolone derivatives rapidly and specifically inhibit the synthesis of bacterial DNA. Levofloxacin has in vitro activity against a broad range of aerobic and anaerobic Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. However, formulation of combined poloxamers thermoregulated (as Pluronic® F127) and levofloxacin for use in multiresistant bacterial treatment were poorly described in the current literature. Thus, the aim of the present work is to characterize poloxamers for levofloxacin controlled release and their use in the treatment of multidrug bacterial resistance. Micelles were produced in colloidal dispersions, with a diameter between 5 and 100 nm, which form spontaneously from amphiphilic molecules under certain conditions as concentration and temperature. Encapsulation of levofloxacin into nanospheres showed efficiency and enhancement of antimicrobial activity against Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Klebsiella pneumoniae when compared with only levofloxacin. Furthermore, all formulations were not cytotoxic for NIH/3T3 cell lineage. In conclusion, poloxamers combined with levofloxacin have shown promising results, better than alone, decreasing the minimal inhibitory concentration of the studied bacterial multiresistance strains. In the future, this new formulation will be used after being tested in animal models in patients with resistant bacterial strains.