Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vertebrate community composition and diversity declines along a defaunation gradient radiating from rural villages in Gabon

Summary Anthropocene defaunation is the global phenomenon of human-induced animal biodiversity loss. Understanding the patterns and process of defaunation is critical to predict outcomes for wildlife populations and cascading consequences for ecosystem function and human welfare. We investigated a defaunation gradient in north-eastern Gabon by establishing 24 transects at varying distances (2–30 km) to rural villages and surveying the abundance and composition of vertebrate communities. Distance from village was positively correlated with observations of hunting (shotgun shells, campfires, hunters), making it a good proxy for hunting pressure. Species diversity declined significantly with proximity to village, with mammal richness increasing by roughly 1·5 species every 10 km travelled away from a village. Compared to forest far from villages, the wildlife community near villages consisted of higher abundances of large birds and rodents and lower abundances of large mammals like monkeys and ungulates. Distance to nearest village emerged as a key driver of the relative abundance of five of the six taxonomic guilds, indicating that the top-down force of hunting strongly influences large vertebrate community composition and structure. Several measures of vegetation structure also explained animal abundance, but these varied across taxonomic guilds. Forest elephants were the exception: no measured variable or combination of variables explained variation in elephant abundances. Synthesis and applications. Hunting is concentrated within 10 km around villages, creating a hunting halo characterized by heavily altered animal communities composed of relatively small-bodied species. Although the strongest anthropogenic effects are relatively distance-limited, the linear increase in species richness shown here even at distances 30 km from villages suggests that hunting may have altered vertebrate abundances across the entire landscape. Central African forests store >25% of the carbon in tropical forests and are home to 3000 endemic species, but roughly 53% of the region lies within the village hunting halo. Resource management strategies should take into account this hunting-induced spatial variation in animal communities. Near villages, resource management should focus on sustainable community-led hunting programmes that provide long-term supplies of wild meat to rural people. Resource management far from villages should focus on law enforcement and promoting industry practices that maintain remote tracts of land to preserve ecosystem services like carbon storage and biodiversity.
2 Korean Diaspora in the Making : Its Current Status and Impact on the Korean Economy

Today, the notion of a diaspora is often used casually in a way of describing a dispersion of people of a common national origin. However, is it correct to say that there is a Korean diaspora just because there are many Koreans living outside the Korean peninsula? The concept and definition of a diaspora have changed over the years and are still being studied and debated by many scholars and experts. It is helpful to examine the concept and definition of a diaspora before discussing the Korean diaspora and its impact on the Korean and world economies.
CHARACTERIZATION OF FATTY ACID PROFILE, POLYPHENOLIC CONTENT AND ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY OF COLD PRESSED AND REFINED EDIBLE OILS FROM MACEDONIA

Fatty acid profile, polyphenolic content and resulting antioxidant activity of the most consumed edible oils on Macedonian market were studied. The levels of total polyphenolics were estimated spectrophotometically by extraction with 60 % aqueous methanol using Folin-Ciocalteau reagent. A common method for determination of the antioxidant activity of edible oils is the 2,2-azinobis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) radical cation (ABTS •+ ) method. This method was used for testing the oils (six cold pressed oils from olive, sunflower, pumpkin, rapeseed, flaxseed and four commercial refined sunflower oils available on Macedonian market). The levels of total polyphenolic of cold pressed oils were in the range from 1.82 to 34.21 mg per 10 g of oil and corresponding antioxidant activity from 0.01 to 4.12 expressed as mmol Trolox per liter of oil. Furthermore, GC-MS analyses were performed for determination of fatty acid profile of the oils. The percentage of 9, 12 linoleinic acid was predominant in comparison with other fatty acids in examined oils.
A Privacy Framework for Games & Interactive Media

Privacy is a concept that is intertwined with data security, but its scope is significantly broader. Often considerations of privacy in the context of consumer devices are limited to a consideration of the security of the data stored in those devices. In this work a broader perspective taken and privacy is defined in terms of new classes which consider the wider context of individuals and groups of persons. The implications for games & interactive media (G&IM) devices and systems is discussed. Finally, some ideas for an improved privacy framework for G&IM are outlined and explained in the context of the literature and current state-of-art.
Software Heritage: Why and How to Preserve Software Source Code

Software is now a key component present in all aspects of our society. Its preservation has attracted growing attention over the past years within the digital preservation community. We claim that source code—the only representation of software that contains human readable knowledge—is a precious digital object that needs special handling: it must be a first class citizen in the preservation landscape and we need to take action immediately, given the increasingly more frequent incidents that result in permanent losses of source code collections. In this paper we present Software Heritage, an ambitious initiative to collect, preserve, and share the entire corpus of publicly accessible software source code. We discuss the archival goals of the project, its use cases and role as a participant in the broader digital preservation ecosystem, and detail its key design decisions. We also report on the project road map and the current status of the Software Heritage archive that, as of early 2017, has collected more than 3 billion unique source code files and 700 million commits coming from more than 50 million software development projects.
Graph Sampling Approach for Reducing Computational Complexity of Large-Scale Social Network

The online social network services provide platform for human social interactions. Nowadays, many kinds of online interactions generate large-scale social network data. Network analysis helps to mine knowledge and pattern from relationship between actors inside the network. This approach is important to support predictions and decision-making process in many real-world applications. The social network analysis methodology, which borrow approach from graph theory provides several metrics that enabled us to measure specific properties of the networks. Some of metrics calculations were built with no scalability in minds, thus it is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose graph sampling approach to reduce social network size, thus reducing computation operations. The performance comparison between natural graph sampling strategies using edge random sampling, node random sampling and random walks are presented on each selected graph property. We found that the performance of graph sampling strategies depends on graph properties measured.
Error-Profile-Aware Correction of Next Generation Sequencing Reads

In this thesis we develop an error-correction-toolkit for de novo (without a reference genome) DNA sequencing which takes into account technology-specific error profile and coverage bias information. By splitting error profile learning, G/C coverage bias correction and k-mer classification into separate modules, the error correction algorithm itself can remain technology-agnostic. We develop multiple variants for each of these modules. We evaluate the performance of each module separately by isolating it from the remaining framework modules. The separate isolation shows that especially the coverage bias estimation, the k-mer classification, the context-free error profile estimation (which infers only overall error probabilities) and the sequence-specific error profile estimation (which infers the influence of short sequences up to 6 bases surrounding an erroneous position in a read) already show satisfying results. However, our machine learning variant for estimating the full-context-specific error profile (which takes the complete information into account, this is, the current base in the read, its quality score, the read length, and surrounding bases) still requires further improvements. We implement an example error correction algorithm for showing how to combine the modules provided by our framework. We briefly compare its performance with current state-of-the-art error correction tools on genome re-sequencing datasets from Illumina and PacBio sequencers, using both simulated and empirical data. Our comparison shows that our example error correction algorithm still demands further work before being able to compete with current state-of-the-art error correction approaches. Deutsche Zusammenfassung Diese Masterarbeit handelt von der Korrektur von de novo (d.h., ohne ein bekanntes Referenzgenom) DNA-Sequenzdaten unter Berücksichtigung von technologiespezifischen Fehlerprofilen. Durch die Aufteilung des dazu nötigen Programms in separate, untereinander austauschbare Module wird u. a. ermöglicht, dass der FehlerkorrekturAlgorithmus leichter benutzbar und erweiterbar ist. Wir entwickeln mehrere Varianten für die jeweiligen Module unseres Frameworks und entwickeln einen beispielhaften Korrekturalgorithmus, um das Zusammenspiel der einzelnen Frameworkmodule zu zeigen. Wir evaluieren die einzelnen Module des resultierenden Fehlerkorrekturframeworks, wobei wir sowohl reale Datensätze von Illumina und Pacific Biosciences als auch simulierte Datensätze betrachten. Unsere Experimente zeigen, dass die meisten Frameworkmodule zufriedenstellende Resultate zeigen. Jedoch benötigen insbesondere der hier entwickelte FehlerkorrekturAlgorithmus sowie der hier entwickelte Maschinelles-Lernen-Ansatz zur Erfassung des gesamten technologiespezifischen Fehlerprofils weiteren Entwicklungsaufwand, um konkurrenzfähig zu sein.
Severity of Disability and Income as Predictors of Parents' Satisfaction with Their Family Quality of Life during Early Childhood Years

The field of early intervention has recognized a growing need to study contributing factors of family outcomes such as family quality of life (FQOL). This study of 130 fathers and 234 mothers of families in early childhood programs explores the associations between family income and severity of disability, and fathers' and mothers' satisfaction with their FQOL. The results reveal that severity of disability is a significant predictor of fathers' and mothers' satisfaction ratings of FQOL; that family income is a significant predictor of mothers' satisfaction ratings of their FQOL, but not of fathers; and that there is no interaction effect of family income and severity of disability with respect to fathers' and mothers' satisfaction ratings of FQOL.
A Review Paper on Space Time Scheme for MIMO System

Communication system with multiple transmitter and receiver architecture is called MIMO(Multiple input and multiple output). Capacity-wise, bit-rate wise and reliability – wise MIMO has many advantages as compared to the SISO(Single input and single output). MIMO can be classified in three different categories I.e. Spatial diversity, Spatial multiplexing and Beam Forming. Spatial multiplexing is used to get the higher data rate while spatial diversity is used to reduce the bit error rate. Here in this literature review paper authors are mainly focused on space time coding technique. In this paper various techniques channel coding, space time coding for frequency flat fading channels, MIMO, MIMO OFDM channel were discussed Keywords— SISO(Single input single output), MIMO(Multiple input Multiple output), ML(Maximum Likelihood), STC (Space Time Coding)
Adrenergic b 2 Receptor Activation Stimulates Anti-Inflammatory Properties of Dendritic Cells In Vitro

Vagal nerve efferent activation has been shown to ameliorate the course of many inflammatory disease states. This neuromodulatory effect has been suggested to rest on acetylcholine receptor (AChR) activation on tissue macrophages or dendritic cells (DCs). In more recent studies, vagal anti-inflammatory activity was shown involve adrenergic, splenic, pathways. Here we provide evidence that the adrenergic, rather than cholinergic, receptor activation on bone marrow derived DCs results in enhanced endocytosis uptake, enhanced IL-10 production but a decreased IL-6, IL-12p70 and IL-23 production. In antigen specific T cell stimulation assays, adrenergic b2 receptor activation on bone marrow DCs led to an enhanced potential to induce Foxp3 positive suppressive Treg cells. These effects were independent of IL10-R activation, TGFb release, or retinoic acid (RA) secretion. Hence, adrenergic receptor b2 activation modulates DC function resulting in skewing towards anti-inflammatory T cell phenotypes. Citation: Nijhuis LE, Olivier BJ, Dhawan S, Hilbers FW, Boon L, et al. (2014) Adrenergic b2 Receptor Activation Stimulates Anti-Inflammatory Properties of Dendritic Cells In Vitro. PLoS ONE 9(1): e85086. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0085086 Editor: Stephen J. Turner, University of Melbourne, Australia Received May 31, 2013; Accepted November 21, 2013; Published January 22, 2014 Copyright: 2014 Nijhuis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: SD, FWH and WdeJ were funded by a grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO-VIDI). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have the following interests. Dr Louis Boon is Chief Scientific Officer at Bioceros, Utrecht, The Netherlands. This does not alter their adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. * E-mail: w.j.dejonge@amc.nl
Nonlinear Evolution and Breakdown of Azimuthally Compact Crossflow Vortex Pattern over a Yawed Cone

Hypersonic boundary-layer flows over a circular cone at moderate angle of incidence can support strong crossflow instability in between the windward and leeward rays on the plane of symmetry. Due to the more efficient excitation of stationary crossflow vortices by surface roughness, a possible path to transition in such flows corresponds to rapid amplification of the high-frequency secondary instabilities of finite amplitude stationary crossflow vortices. In the present paper, the previous analyses of crossflow instability over a 7-degree half-angle, yawed circular cone in a Mach 6 free stream have been extended to the nonlinear evolution of azimuthally localized crossflow vortex packets and the amplification characteristics and nonlinear breakdown of high-frequency secondary instabilities associated with those packets. A comparison between plane marching PSE and direct Navier-Stokes simulations (DNS) reveals favorable agreement in regard to mode shapes, most amplified disturbance frequencies, and N-factor evolution. In contrast, the quasiparallel predictions are found to result in severe underprediction of the N-factors. The direct numerical simulations also indicate that the breakdown of secondary instabilities in a 3D hypersonic boundary layer shares certain common features with the previous computations of crossflow transition over subsonic swept wings
A novel high-performance thin layer chromatography method for quantification of long chain aliphatic hydrocarbons from Cissus quadrangularis

Context: A high-performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) is an analytical technique, which can be used for the determination of constituents or marker components in various parts of the plants. Earlier studies have estimated phytoconstituents from the stem and other aerial plant parts of Cissus quadrangularis Linn. Estimation of hydrocarbons can also be successfully done using HPTLC technique using suitable derivatization. Aims: To develop and validate a simple and rapid method for the estimation of long chain aliphatic hydrocarbons from the leaves of C. quadrangularis using HPTLC technique. Methods: Precoated silica gel 60 F254 plates were used as stationary phase. The mobile phase used was hexane (100 %). The detection of spots was carried out using berberine sulphate as detecting reagent. Results: The method was validated in terms of linearity, sensitivity, accuracy, and precision. Linearity range was found to be 2-10 µg/mL, limit of detection 0.127 µg/mL, and limit of quantification 0.384 µg/mL. Conclusions: A novel, simple, accurate, precise and sensitive HPTLC method has been developed and validated for the estimation of long chain aliphatic hydrocarbons obtained from the leaves of C. quadrangularis Linn.
Exterminate ? - who Influences IT Alignment and Digital Business Strategy

Extant strategy concepts are challenged due to an increasing demand for agility in highly digitized markets. Concepts relying on separate constructs for IT and business, such as IT alignment, are well researched and applied in practice. The ongoing process of digitization developed digital infrastructures which fundamentally change conditions for all market participants, culminating in business models completely based on IT. This research gives first insights for a comparison of the concept of IT alignment with the recently introduced “digital business strategy” (DBS), which describes a cross-functional and agile fusion of business and IT strategy. Based on an online survey among 255 IT decision makers in IT-intensive industries in the U.S., this exploratory study measures DBS and IT alignment within one quantitative structural equation model. We especially focus on how organizational leaders from both the IT and business side influence the two different strategy concepts: The results reveal a total absence of an influence of the IT leader on DBS directly, whereas a high impact on IT alignment is still given. Business leaders in turn impact more on DBS than on IT alignment. We thus contribute to IT strategy literature and provide impulses for discussing future role definitions of CIOs.
Type II ancient compact solutions to the Yamabe flow

We construct new type II ancient compact solutions to the Yamabe flow. Our solutions are rotationally symmetric and converge, as $t \to -\infty$, to a tower of two spheres. Their curvature operator changes sign. We allow two time-dependent parameters in our ansatz. We use perturbation theory, via fixed point arguments, based on sharp estimates on ancient solutions of the approximated linear equation and careful estimation of the error terms which allow us to make the right choice of parameters. Our technique may be viewed as a parabolic analogue of gluing two exact solutions to the rescaled equation, that is the spheres, with narrow cylindrical necks to obtain a new ancient solution to the Yamabe flow. The techniques in this article may be generalized to the gluing of $n$ spheres.
Torque and Flux Ripples Minimization of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor by a Predictive-Based Hybrid Direct Torque Control

This paper proposes a hybrid control strategy for a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive based on a finite-set predictive control (FS-PC). The most efficient mode of the control algorithm is found for the minimum torque and flux ripple in a steady state, with fast dynamic responses, as well as the conventional direct torque control (DTC), following the selection of an optimum voltage vector. The rationale of the proposed control method is that it is composed of DTC and a FS-PC. On the other hand, the optimization process is carried out using a combination of DTC and FS-PC. Compared with the conventional model predictive control methods, the proposed method adopts a measure like that of DTC to reach the optimal switching state of the inverter by minimizing the cost function. However, the method has a simple computational function for such a purpose. Taking into account the simulation and experimental results, it can be stated that the proposed method, which uses hybrid strategy, has high dynamic responses to the lower torque and the flux ripples with a simple structure and implementation, indicating the validity of this method for PMSM drive.
Biology on Sounding Rockets: History, Requirements, Results and Scientific Interpretation

Biology on sounding rockets began in Europe in 1985 to complement the longer-duration experiments on the Shuttle, later as an autonomous branch of research. Since then, sounding rockets have been playing an eminent role in investigations on gravisensing in plants, protists, in vitro cell cultures and sub-cellular systems. Biology on sounding rockets comes with biologyspecific technical requirements which often include a reference centrifuge to provide 1g during the flight. The short duration of microgravity offered by the sounding rocket sets constraints on the experiment design but on the other hand helps to provide a correct interpretation of the biological effects that are observed. A significant bonus of the sounding rocket missions for biologists is the fast turn-around time: samples can be delivered just before the launch, to be returned to the scientists shortly after landing. This enables the investigators to expose freshly-prepared samples to microgravity and to start the post-flight analysis that same day.
INTERNATIONAL EFFICACY OF OKUN’S LAW

This paper re-explores the validity of the Okun’s Law using annual data over 1970-2013 across selected 19 developed countries. The pooled data on real GDP growth and unemployment rate are largely nonstationary as well as these two variables are found cointegrated. The estimates of panel vector error-correction model by dynamic OLS unveil a much weaker relationship than what was originally observed in Okun (1962) in the US context only. JEL Classifications: E60, E61
A comparative study on the colonization of Salmonella enteritidis hilA mutant and its parent strains in laying hens

BACKGROUND: Several regulatory proteins are involved in Salmonella invasion. The key regulator of SPI-1 (Salmonella pathogenicity island 1 ) is hilA, a transcriptional activator encoded on SPI-1 that regulates the expression of the SPI-1 secretion system. OBJECTIVES: Importance of hilA mutation on S. enteritidis colonization and shedding in layer hens was evaluated in a long-term experiment. METHODS: Two groups of layer hens were orally inoculated with 1010 CFU of hilA and parent strains of S. enteritidis, consequently. At days 2, 7, 14, 21 and 35 post-inoculation samples were taken from cloaca and different parts of digestive and reproduction systems of euthanized birds. RESULTS: In the birds infected with parent strain, the higher numbers of colonizing bacteria in the liver, spleen, caecum, small intestine and cloaca-vagina were observed. Fecal shedding in this group was also higher than the hilA group. However, no significant differences were observed for the colonization of bacteria in magnum, isthmus and infundibulum of both groups. Using PCR method, hilA gene was only detected in tissues of parent group hens. CONCLUSIONS: This study has shown that the hilA mutant is able to colonize in internal organs; an implication of this is the possibility that genes other than hilA, or at least other mechanisms, might be involved in the invasion of S. enteritidis to the internal organs of birds.