Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Melatonin in Plants and Plant Culture Systems: Variability, Stability and Efficient Quantification

Despite growing evidence of the importance of melatonin and serotonin in the plant life, there is still much debate over the stability of melatonin, with extraction and analysis methods varying greatly from lab to lab with respect to time, temperature, light levels, extraction solvents, and mechanical disruption. The variability in methodology has created conflicting results that confound the comparison of studies to determine the role of melatonin in plant physiology. We here describe a fully validated method for the quantification of melatonin, serotonin and their biosynthetic precursors: tryptophan, tryptamine and N-acetylserotonin by liquid chromatography single quadrupole mass spectrometry (LC-MS) in diverse plant species and tissues. This method can be performed on a simple and inexpensive platform, and is both rapid and simple to implement. The method has excellent reproducibility and acceptable sensitivity with percent relative standard deviation (%RSD) in all matrices between 1 and 10% and recovery values of 82–113% for all analytes. Instrument detection limits were 24.4 ng/mL, 6.10 ng/mL, 1.52 ng/mL, 6.10 ng/mL, and 95.3 pg/mL, for serotonin, tryptophan, tryptamine, N-acetylserotonin and melatonin respectively. Method detection limits were 1.62 μg/g, 0.407 μg/g, 0.101 μg/g, 0.407 μg/g, and 6.17 ng/g respectively. The optimized method was then utilized to examine the issue of variable stability of melatonin in plant tissue culture systems. Media composition (Murashige and Skoog, Driver and Kuniyuki walnut or Lloyd and McCown's woody plant medium) and light (16 h photoperiod or dark) were found to have no effect on melatonin or serotonin content. A Youden trial suggested temperature as a major factor leading to degradation of melatonin. Both melatonin and serotonin appeared to be stable across the first 10 days in media, melatonin losses reached a mean minimum degradation at 28 days of approximately 90%; serotonin reached a mean minimum value of approximately 60% at 28 days. These results suggest that melatonin and serotonin show considerable stability in plant systems and these indoleamines and related compounds can be used for investigations that span over 3 weeks.
X-ray imaging spectroscopy of Abell 1835

We present detailed spatially-resolved spectroscopy results of the observation of Abell 1835 using the European Photon Imaging Cameras (EPIC) and the Reflection Grating Spectrometers (RGS) on the XMM- Newton observatory. Abell 1835 is a luminous (10 46 ergs s 1 ), medium redshift (z =0 :2523), X-ray emitting cluster of galaxies. The observations support the interpretation that large amounts of cool gas are present in a multi-phase medium surrounded by a hot (kTe =8 :2 keV) outer envelope. We detect O VIII Ly and two Fe XXIV complexes in the RGS spectrum. The emission measure of the cool gas below kTe =2 :7 keV is much lower than expected from standard cooling-flow models, suggesting either a more complicated cooling process than simple isobaric radiative cooling or dierential cold absorption of the cooler gas.
Ecohydrology—a Challenging Multidisciplinary Research Perspective

Ecohydrology is the science that studies the mutual interaction between the hydrological cycle and ecosystems. Such an interaction is especially intense in water-controlled ecosystems, where water may be a limiting factor, not only because of its scarcity, but also because of its intermittent and unpredictable appearance. Soil moisture is the key variable modulating the complex dynamics of the climate-soil-vegetation system and controlling the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation. In this note the authors' perspective to the field is discussed and some open questions are outlined. Ecohydrologie: une perspective stimulante de recherche multidisciplinaire Résumé L'écohydrologie est la science qui étudie l'interaction mutuelle entre le cycle hydrologique et les écosystèmes. Cette interaction est particulièrement intense dans les écosystèmes contrôlés par l'eau, où l'eau peut être un facteur limitant, non seulement en raison de sa rareté mais aussi à cause de sa disponibilité intermittente et imprévisible. L'humidité du sol est la variable clef dans la modulation des dynamiques complexes du système climat-sol-végétation et dans le contrôle des répartitions spatiales et temporelles de la végétation. Les auteurs discutent dans cet article de leurs perspectives dans le domaine et abordent quelques questions ouvertes.
Compromised Gut Microbiota Networks in Children With Anti-Islet Cell Autoimmunity

The gut microbiome is suggested to play a role in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes. Evidence of anti-islet cell autoimmunity in type 1 diabetes appears in the first years of life; however, little is known regarding the establishment of the gut microbiome in early infancy. Here, we sought to determine whether differences were present in early composition of the gut microbiome in children in whom anti-islet cell autoimmunity developed. We investigated the microbiome of 298 stool samples prospectively taken up to age 3 years from 22 case children in whom anti-islet cell autoantibodies developed, and 22 matched control children who remained islet cell autoantibody–negative in follow-up. The microbiome changed markedly during the first year of life, and was further affected by breast-feeding, food introduction, and birth delivery mode. No differences between anti-islet cell autoantibody–positive and –negative children were found in bacterial diversity, microbial composition, or single-genus abundances. However, substantial alterations in microbial interaction networks were observed at age 0.5 and 2 years in the children in whom anti-islet cell autoantibodies developed. The findings underscore a role of the microbiome in the pathogenesis of anti-islet cell autoimmunity and type 1 diabetes.
An Evaluation of the Contextual Spelling Checker of Microsoft Of fi ce Word 2007

Microsoft Office Word 2007 includes a “contextual spelling checker” that is intended to find misspellings that nonetheless form correctly spelled words. In an evaluation on 1400 examples, it is found to have high precision but low recall — that is, it fails to find most errors, but when it does flag a possible error, it is almost always correct. However, its performance in terms ofF is inferior to that of the trigrams-basedmethod ofMays, Damerau, and Mercer (1991). 1 Real-word spelling correction Most spelling checkers attempt to detect and correct only misspellings that result in a presumed nonword — a word that is not listed in the system’s dictionary — and they therefore cannot deal with an error that just happens to form a real word in the dictionary, albeit not the word that the user intended. There has been much research in recent years on methods for detecting and correcting such real-word errors or malapropisms (we use the two terms interchangeably); for a review, see Hirst and Budanitsky (2005) and Wilcox-O’Hearn et al (2008). The recently released Microsoft Office Word 2007 includes a “contextual spelling corrector” that attempts to detect and correct real-word errors (Microsoft 2006). A word that the system believes to be in error is flagged with a wavy blue underline, in contrast to Word’s regular red underline for non-word errors, and suggested corrections are available in a pop-up menu or in the ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window. This system operates not only on content words but also closed-class words (e.g., too and to). It can detect cases where a word has been wrongly split into two (e.g., through out for throughout), and missing or spurious apostrophes (e.g., corporations for corporation’s). It is not limited to a predefined set of frequently confounded words. Here we report an evaluation of this system that was carried out in order to compare it with the word-trigram method of Mays et al (1991) and the lexical cohesion method of Hirst and Budanitsky (2005). (A detailed evaluation of the Mays et al method and a comparison with the lexical cohesion method is given by Wilcox-O’Hearn et al (2008). ) ∗This research was supported financially by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Amber Wilcox-O’Hearn for comments and assistance.
Fuentes ESP in Spain : Goals , achievements and prospects

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Using contrapositive law in an implication graph

Implication graphs are used to solve the test generation, redundancy identification, synthesis, and verification problems of digital circuits. We propose a new "oring" node structure to represent partial implications in a graph. The oring node is the contrapositive of the previously used "anding" node. An n-input gate requires one oring and one anding nodes to represent all partial implications. This implication graph is shown to be more complete and more compact compared to the previously published (n+1) anding node graph. Introduction of the new oring node finds more redundancies using the transitive closure method. The second contribution of the present work is a set of new algorithms to update transitive closure for every newly added edge in the implication graph associated with anding and oring nodes. For the ISCAS'85 benchmark circuit c1908, the new graph identifies 5 out of a total of 7 redundant faults. The best known previous implication graph procedure could only identify 2 redundant faults. We analyze the unidentified redundant faults and suggest a possible improvement.
Parameter-free motif discovery for time series data

Time series motif discovery is an increasingly popular research area in time series mining whose main objective is to search for interesting patterns or motifs. A motif is a pair of time series subsequences, or two subsequences whose shapes are very similar to each other. Typical motif discovery algorithm requires a predefined motif length as its parameter. Discovering motif with arbitrary lengths introduces another problem, where selecting a suitable length for the motif is non-trivial since domain knowledge is often required. Thus, this work proposes a parameter-free motif discovery algorithm called k-Best Motif Discovery (kBMD) which requires no parameter as input, and as a result returns a set of all “Best Motif” that are ranked by our proposed scoring function which is based on similarity of motif locations and similarity of motif shapes.
From RGB-D Images to RGB Images

Mining object-level knowledge, that is, building a comprehensive category model base, from a large set of cluttered scenes presents a considerable challenge to the field of artificial intelligence. How to initiate model learning with the least human supervision (i.e., manual labeling) and how to encode the structural knowledge are two elements of this challenge, as they largely determine the scalability and applicability of any solution. In this article, we propose a model-learning method that starts from a single-labeled object for each category, and mines further model knowledge from a number of informally captured, cluttered scenes. However, in these scenes, target objects are relatively small and have large variations in texture, scale, and rotation. Thus, to reduce the model bias normally associated with less supervised learning methods, we use the robust 3D shape in RGB-D images to guide our model learning, then apply the properly trained category models to both object detection and recognition in more conventional RGB images. In addition to model training for their own categories, the knowledge extracted from the RGB-D images can also be transferred to guide model learning for a new category, in which only RGB images without depth information in the new category are provided for training. Preliminary testing shows that the proposed method performs as well as fully supervised learning methods.
A biophysical model of the human cochlea for speech stimulus using STFT

This paper presents a new approach to an auditory model which matches closely the response patterns in physiological data for single tone inputs. Including the biophysical complexity of the wave motion in the cochlea and considering all terms of the motion equation, the new model can evaluate the auditory spectrum using the Basilar membrane (BM) displacement and the inner hair cells' (IHCs) firing rate for all input signals, including speech. We employ the partial differential motion equations of the BM and its parameters measured for the human auditory system, and design an algorithm which uses short time Fourier transform (STFT) to compute the output for speech stimulus. The idea is to isolate the input signal in the vicinity of a time-window and try to follow the changes in its frequencies and their influences on the signal perceived by the auditory system. The new model includes the nonlinearity action of outer hair cells (OHCs) and provides a new auditory spectrum for speech inputs in the real time domain which reflects a proper view of propagating signal in the cochlea. Despite most of the previous models this model can track the effects of high formant frequencies in the human cochlea as well. This model is a new signal processing tool for studying the response of the auditory system to transient signals which is highly demanded in various speech enhancement and audio coding algorithms
Multiple instrument tracking based on reconstruction error, pitch continuity and instrument activity

We present an algorithm for tracking individual instruments in polyphonic music recordings. The algorithm takes as input the instrument identities of the recording and uses non-negative matrix factorisation to compute an instrument-independent pitch activation function. The Viterbi algorithm is applied to ﬁnd the most likely path through a number of candidate instrument and pitch combinations in each time frame. The transition probability of the Viterbi algorithm includes three diﬀerent criteria: the frame-wise reconstruction error of the instrument combination, a pitch continuity measure that favours similar pitches in consecutive frames, and the activity status of each instrument. The method was evaluated on mixtures of 2 to 5 instruments and outper-formed other state-of-the-art multi-instrument tracking methods.
Cooperative Distributed Sensors for Mobile Robot Localization

This paper presents a probabilistic algorithm to collaborate distributed sensors for mobile robot localization. It uses a sample-based version of Markov localization—Monte Carlo localization (MCL), capable of localizing mobile robot in an any-time fashion. During robot localization given a known environment model, MCL method is employed to update robot’s belief whichever information (positive or negative) attained from environmental sensors. Meanwhile, an implementation is presented that uses color environmental cameras for robot detection. All the parameters of each environmental camera are unknown in advance and need be calibrated independently by robot. Once calibrated, the positive and negative detection models can be built up according to the parameters of environmental cameras. A further experiment, obtained with the real robot in an indoor office environment, illustrates it has drastic improvement in global localization speed and accuracy using our algorithm.
The Use of a Finite Mixture of Beta Distributions in the Analysis of Microarray Data

The analysis of microarray data from designed experiments are used to illustrate the application of finite mixtures of Beta distributions. Instead of the usual log-transformed ratio of Cy5 and Cy3 intensities in a two-colour microarray experiment we use the proportion of Cy5 of the total light intensities - possibly normalised by a covariate to allow differences in microarray slides. By using finite mixtures - in combination with treatment effect - we overcome the problem of multiplicity as encountered with testing by ANOVA or t-test for each gene separately. We motivate our alternative choice of response variable by looking at the kinetics of the binding of free mRNA to the spots on the slide. For the analysis of one colour designs, e.g., Affymetrix TM slides, we propose a similar response variable and analysis - using both the perfect matches and the mismatches for each gene. In the end each gene is assigned a posterior class membership probability (under- or overexpressed) while allowing the use of a threshold value to set aside genes for which no decision could be made yet.
High-resolution radio observations of the black hole candidate GX 339-4

We present radio observations of the black hole candidate X-ray binary GX 339-4 with the Australia Telescope compact array. Mapping of the highest resolution 3.5 cm data reveals a jet-like extension, which if confirmed would be the first detection of a radio jet from a persistent black-hole candidate system. No evidence is found for associated structures such as bow shocks or jet lobes on larger scales. The spectral energy distribution from 22 - 3 cm is relatively flat, suggesting emission is dominated by a compact absorbed core.
Finite Horizon Optimal Investment and Consumption with Transaction Costs

This paper concerns continuous-time optimal investment and the consumption decision of a constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) investor who faces proportional transaction costs and a finite time horizon. In the no-consumption case, it has been studied by Liu and Loewenstein [Review of Financial Studies, 15 (2002), pp. 805-835] and Dai and Yi [J. Differential Equations, 246 (2009), pp. 1445-1469]. Mathematically, it is a singular stochastic control problem whose value function satisfies a parabolic variational inequality with gradient constraints. The problem gives rise to two free boundaries which stand for the optimal buying and selling strategies, respectively. We present an analytical approach to analyze the behaviors of free boundaries. The regularity of the value function is studied as well. Our approach is essentially based on the connection between singular control and optimal stopping, which is first revealed in the present problem.
Random Forest for Reliable Pre-classification of Handwritten Characters

In many real world applications, the cost of a wrong decision may be much higher than the benefit of having a high classification rate. This kind of classification problems represent very challenging tasks, because they require highly reliable systems and may benefit of introducing a reject option. To this purpose, many classification systems have been proposed, among which classifier ensembles represent a successful example. This approach aims at combining classifiers making uncorrelated errors. In this framework, the Random Forest (RF) represents a case of special interest. A RF is made of a suitable ensemble of decision trees and has proved to be very effective in several fields. In this paper, the RF classification reliability is experimentally analyzed with reference to the case of handwriting recognition. The aim is to verify if such reliability can be effectively used to introduce a new reject option, which considers, for each unknown sample, a subset of few classes including with high probability the correct one. The whole system operates as a pre-classification stage and the reject option should allow us to obtain a low error rate without significantly affecting the recognition rate. Experiments, carried out on two real world datasets, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Adaptive clip limit for contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) of medical images using least mean square algorithm

Automated detection of abnormalities in human body is a critical application medical image computing. Preprocessing of medical image is of great need as the image quality of the captured images is highly attenuated due to several factors. In this work, we propose a novel idea of using the concepts of adaptive processing (LMS algorithm) for the estimation of clip limit for CLAHE. Statistical metrics like AMBE and PSNR are used for optimum window size selection for CLAHE. The algorithm proposed in this paper has been implemented on TMS320C6713T DSP for real time application and 60 images from STARE, DDSM and OASIS databases have been tested and analyzed. All the tested images show a better result in terms of SSIM index.
Translation, book history and the transnational life of “street literature”

ABSTRACT Translation studies has exposed the transnational dimension of literature by thoroughly investigating translation as a vehicle for cross-cultural textual transmission and for the formation of internationally shared literary repertoires. So far, investigations have largely been restricted to literature in the traditional book form. This article stresses that ephemeral street literature in the chapbook and broadside format also has an interesting transnational life and proposes the complementarity between the histories of translation and of the book as an optimal framework for exploring it. The article's rationale is underpinned by the assumption that research into translated street literature can lead to more accurate representations of the cross-cultural life of printed matter, as well as of translational practices and relations.