Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the contribution of aestivation to the persistence of malaria mosquitoes through the Sahelian dry season using stable isotopes

Data suggests the malaria vector Anopheles coluzzii persists in the Sahel by dry-season aestivation though evidence is scant. We have marked Anopheles mosquitoes using deuterium (2H) to assess the contribution of aestivation to persistence of mosquitoes through the seven-month dry season. If local aestivation is the only way A. coluzzii persists, the frequency of marked mosquitoes should remain stable throughout, whereas finding no marked mosquitoes would be evidence against aestivation. Larval sites were spiked with 2H at the end of the 2017 wet season in two Sahelian villages in Mali. We monitored 2H-enriched populations until the onset of rains. By the end of the enrichment period, 33% of A. coluzzii mosquitoes were clearly marked. Expectedly, 2H levels in marked mosquitoes degraded over time, resulting in a partial overlap of the marked and non-marked 2H distributions. We utilized three methods to estimate the fraction of marked mosquitoes in the population. Seven months after enrichment, 7% of the population had 2H values above the highest pre-enrichment value. An excess of 21% exceeded the 3rd quartile of the pre-enrichment population. A finite mixed population model showed 2.5% represented a subpopulation of marked mosquitoes with elevated 2H, compatible with our predictions. We provide evidence that aestivation is a major persistence mechanism of A. coluzzii in the Sahel, contributing at least 20% of the adults at the onset of rains, suggesting A. coluzzii utilizes multiple persistence strategies enabling its populations rapid buildup, facilitating subsequent malaria resurgence. These may complicate vector control and malaria elimination campaigns. Significance statement Here we estimated the contribution of aestivation to the persistence of mosquitoes through the seven-month long dry season, by marking a known fraction of the adult population through larval site 2H-spiking by the end of the wet season and assessing the change in this fraction through the dry season, until after the onset of the first rain of the subsequent wet season. In a mark-release-recapture study using stable isotopes, we provide compelling evidence that the primary Sahelian malaria vector Anopheles coluzzii aestivates on a population-scale, contributing at least 20% of the adults which reestablish the population of the subsequent wet season. The capacity to use multiple strategies of persistence in time and space might complicate vector control and elimination campaigns.
A large scale, multiple genome comparison of acidophilic Archaea (pH ≤ 5.0) extends our understanding of oxidative stress responses in polyextreme environments

Acidophilic Archaea thrive in anaerobic and aerobic low pH environments (<pH 5) rich in dissolved heavy metals that exacerbate stress caused by the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), hydroxyl radical (•OH) and superoxide (O2 •−). ROS react with lipids, proteins and nucleic acids causing oxidative stress and damage that can lead to cell death. Herein, genes and mechanisms potentially involved in ROS mitigation are predicted in over 200 genomes of acidophilic Archaea with sequenced genomes. These organisms can be subjected to simultaneous multiple stresses such as high temperature, high salinity, low pH and high heavy metal loads. Some of the topics addressed include: (1) the phylogenomic distribution of these genes and what can this tell us about the evolution of these mechanisms in acidophilic Archaea; (2) key differences in genes and mechanisms used by acidophilic versus non-acidophilic Archaea and between acidophilic Archaea and acidophilic Bacteria and (3) how comparative genomic analysis predicts novel genes or pathways involved in oxidative stress responses in Archaea and possible Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) events.
A Personalized Acoustic Interface for Wearable Human–Machine Interaction

Communication and interaction with machines are changing our ways of life. However, developing an acoustic interface that simultaneously features waterproofness, wearability, high fidelity, and high accuracy for human–machine interaction remains a grand challenge. Herein, a waterproof acoustic sensor (WAS) as a wearable translation interface to communicate with machines is reported. Owing to the sound‐response ability of internal microparticles, the WAS holds a significantly broad frequency response range of 0.1–20 kHz, covering almost the entire human audible range. The WAS is stable against human perspiration, shows omnidirectional response, and displays an excellent frequency detection resolution of 0.0001 kHz. With a collection of compelling features, the WAS can serve as a wearable acoustic human–machine interface and a high‐fidelity auditory platform for music recording. Moreover, the WAS‐based acoustic interface holds a remarkable 98% accuracy for speech recognition with the assistance of an artificial intelligence algorithm. Finally, the WAS‐based acoustic interface demonstrates speaker verification and identification for implementation in highly secure biometric authentication systems and wireless control of an intelligent car using speech recognition. Such a WAS‐based acoustic interface represents the advancement of high‐fidelity translation platforms for human–machine interactions toward practical applications, including the Internet of Things, assistive technology, and intelligent recognition systems.
Trajectory planning and control of one‐legged hopping robot at thrusting phase

One of the most important events for hopping robots is lift‐off (the end of thrusting phase) since hopping motions often become unstable during the lift‐off. Therefore, we focus on the thrusting phase. In this research, we propose a new controller, which combines two controllers. We also propose a trajectory planning so that a hopping robot follows command value of the vertical velocity. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is confirmed by simulation and experiments. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 169(2): 29–36, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20831
Identification of CO and NO2 using a thermally resistive microsensor and support vector machine

Levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide in air are currently monitored using two different thick-film resistive gas sensors. The resultant high power consumption of thick-film-based gas sensors is problematic for portable multi-gas monitors. The use of a single low-power thermally-modulated resistive gas sensor to monitor simultaneously both gases is reported. The silicon micromachined Substrate not only reduces the DC power consumption to 100mW Lit 300degreesC but also permits AC temperature modulation through a small thermal mass. Uniquely, a Support vector machine is employed to classify the wavelet coefficients of the AC resistive signal. This simple method permits the rapid classification of CO/NO2, gas mixtures with a high level of confidence (94% or better) using just one low-power gas microsensor. Thus demonstrating the potential application of a single low-power thermally-modulated resistive gas sensor in portable multi-gas monitors.
Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society/ Deutsch-Britische Stiftung für das

Through its work in Germany and in the United Kingdom, the Anglo-German Foundation seeks to foster dialogue and cooperation between the two countries. It supports research projects, seminars and conferences promoting the exchange of experience and ideas in the social, political and economic areas. Die Deutsch-Britische Stiftung möchte mittels ihrer Tätigkeit in Deutschland und Grossbritannien den Dialog und die Zusammenarbeit der beiden Staaten fördern. Sie unterstützt gemeinsame Forschungsprojekte, Seminare und Konferenzen und setzt sich dabei besonders für den Erfahrungs-und Ideenaustausch im sozialen, politischen und wirtschaftlichen Bereich ein.
Tackling “Wicked Problems” in Planning Studio Courses

Planning practitioners encounter both “tame” and “wicked” problems in the workplace. Conventional planning studios generally prepare students for the less complex or tame problems, but politically contentious studios fraught with uncertainty will simulate a more realistic, if not more challenging, studio experience. In this study, I use content analysis of university syllabi to determine the degree to which planning studios are preparing students to tackle “wicked problems” upon graduation. Then, based on the lessons learned from a workshop pertaining to natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, I offer guidance to instructors of studio-type courses who wish to introduce their students to complex problem solving.
VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY AND ITS USE IN BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION

: Today, we live in information age because of advances in information & computer technology (ICT). Increasing concern over personal information in computer system has increased interest in data security. This paper reviews and applies the visual cryptography on the biometric authentication. The concept of visual cryptography is divide the secrete images into random shares. Here the encryption technique divide the image into a number of parts i.e., k-n secret sharing schema is used. Decryption is used to decrypt the shares into the secret image. In this paper, I have purposed a new k-n secret sharing schema for black & white image and apply them to biometric data such as finger print image for the purpose of user authentication.
Offering a Model to Increase the Efficiency of M-learning with Approach to Evaluating Iranian Information Society

Nowadays, lifestyle has changed by increasing daily growth of communications technology, telecommunications and networking. These changes have had impacts on training; so thatby the help of these advances, training is not just limited to the classroom. Therefore, learning style has shifted toward M-learning by the use of mobile systems. The objective of this article is to develop M-learning with minimal restrictions by considering the limitations in the Iranian educational system. Utilizing from WiFi network has been among the features of this system, it develops education process by the use of mobile services; finally, short message service (SMS), sending notifications, assignments and testing services are provided with the ability to send feedback to learners and mobile-learning system will be considered as a complete system.
Does Regional Hydroclimate Change Scale Linearly With Global Warming?

Many aspects of climate change scale linearly with global warming. However, nonlinear changes are possible, especially in the context of hydroclimate, and under emissions scenarios with stabilized global temperature, as aspired to by current climate targets. In CMIP5 and 6, a progressively larger land area shows nonlinear changes as a function of global warming when considering precipitation, evaporation, and soil moisture, with the latter showing nonlinearity over ∼50% of global land. Using ensemble simulations with the Community Earth System Model 1, in which individual forcing factors are held constant, we illustrate how nonadditive responses to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and industrial and fire‐related aerosols can yield complex soil moisture changes in certain regions. This complexity contributes to uncertainty in regional soil moisture projections and suggests that the timing of, as well as model response uncertainty to, future aerosol reductions will have significant impacts on regional hydroclimate change as global temperatures stabilize.
Robust identification of temporal biomarkers in longitudinal omics studies

Longitudinal studies increasingly collect rich ‘omics’ data sampled frequently over time and across large cohorts to capture dynamic health fluctuations and disease transitions. However, the generation of longitudinal omics data has preceded the development of analysis tools that can efficiently extract insights from such data. In particular, there is a need for statistical frameworks that can identify not only which omics features are differentially regulated between groups but also over what time intervals. Additionally, longitudinal omics data may have inconsistencies, including nonuniform sampling intervals, missing data points, subject dropout, and differing numbers of samples per subject. In this work, we developed a statistical method that provides robust identification of time intervals of temporal omics biomarkers. The proposed method is based on a semi-parametric approach, in which we use smoothing splines to model longitudinal data and infer significant time intervals of omics features based on an empirical distribution constructed through a permutation procedure. We benchmarked the proposed method on five simulated datasets with diverse temporal patterns, and the method showed specificity greater than 0.99 and sensitivity greater than 0.72. Applying the proposed method to the Integrative Personal Omics Profiling (iPOP) cohort revealed temporal patterns of amino acids, lipids, and hormone metabolites that are differentially regulated in male versus female subjects following a respiratory infection. In addition, we applied the longitudinal multi-omics dataset of pregnant women with and without preeclampsia, and the method identified potential lipid markers that are temporally significantly different between the two groups. We provide an open-source R package, OmicsLonDA (Omics Longitudinal Differential Analysis): https://bioconductor.org/packages/OmicsLonDA to enable widespread use.
Analysis of Waveguiding Structures Employing Surface Magnetoplasmons by the Finite-Element Method (Short Paper)

The dispersion relation and electromagnetic field distributions for a gyroelectrically loaded waveguiding structure are obtained utilizing finite-element techniques. The structure considered consists of two layers, one a dielectric and the other a semiconductor, bounded by two perfectly conducting planes. The finite-element solution for the lowest real branches in the dispersion spectrum was compared against a numerical solution of the exact dispersion equation, and excellent agreement was found between the two. The structure, exhibiting nonreciprocal behavior, provides a suitable canonical model for the design of circuit components such as circulators, isolators, and phase shifters.
Simple theory of a Malone engine

Practical liquid engines called Malone engines use a regenerative or recuperative cycle, like the Stirling cycle. A theoretical model of the Malone engine that is realistic enough for comparison to experiment, yet still simple enough for intuitive grasp of the engine's features, is presented. The principal results obtained with the model are the time-averaged heat and work resulting from each of the most important effects taking place in the engine. It is shown that Rankine heat pumps and Malone heat pumps with equal heat-pumping capabilities require compressors of comparable volumetric flow rates and hence of comparable complexity and size, but the heat exchangers for the Malone heat pump are expected to be orders of magnitude smaller than those for the Rankine-cycle heat pump. <<ETX>>
A Hybrid of two Homomorphic Encryption Schemes for Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Data

Data confidentiality and privacy has been one of the major challenges in cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) deployment. There are different techniques to help provide enhanced security and data confidentiality. In this paper, a hybrid of two different Ho-momorphic encryption schemes is proposed to further enhance security and data confidentiality of ERP data. The Paillier and RSA Cryptosystems are modified and applied to form a two-layer encryption scheme. A successful implementation of the proposed hybrid of two homomorphic encryption scheme without sharing keys with the cloud is realised. The security of the Cloud ERP Data is enhanced by the modification of the Paillier Cryptosystem with the introduction of a new parameter g f to the Paillier Cryptosystem. The scheme also introduced a random parameter r g to help generate the value of g f . The simulation results reveals that the proposed scheme achieved improvement in the encryption time, decryption time and better throughput when compared with other schemes. The proposed scheme achieved six (6) percent improvement on encryption time,about thirty-two (32) percent improvement in decryption time as well as seven (7) percent improvement on throughput.
A compensation strategy for two-stage CMOS opamps based on current buffer

The compensation with current buffer overcomes the typical drawbacks of the compensations based on nulling resistor or voltage buffer, but it is not as straightforward as the other two approaches. Indeed, a constraint on the current-buffer input resistance has to be met in order to achieve frequency compensation, since complex conjugate poles arise in the loop transfer function. Design equations for an optimized compensation strategy with current buffer are determined. They allow a high gain-bandwidth product to be achieved avoiding the drawbacks which arises with voltage buffer and nulling resistor approaches.
Satisfaction With Family Life Scale: Adaptação e Evidências de Validade e Precisão

Satisfaction with Family Life Scale: Adaptation and Evidence of Validity and Reliability This study aimed to adapt the Satisfaction with Family Life Scale (SWFLS) to Brazilian Portuguese, supported by factorial validity and internal consistency evidence. Study 1 included 216 respondents, aged between 18 and 92 years (M=38.43; SD=15.90), of whom 71.6% were female, who answered to the SWFLS and sociodemographic questions. The exploratory factorial analysis indicated a one-factor structure with 70% of Total Variance Explained and a Cronbach's alpha of . 89. In Study 2, the sample was composed of 214 respondents, aged between 18 and 77 years (M=29.8; SD=11.65), the majority female (69.6%), who answered the same instruments as Study 1. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis confirmed a single-factor structure, presenting a Cronbach's alpha of . 89. It was concluded that the instrument has adequate psychometric properties, representing a valuable tool for use in future research with families.
SEGMENTATION OF VARIOUS IMAGES USING ENTROPY BASED METHOD AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION WITH OTSU METHOD

: - Image segmentation quality is usually governed by two main parameters associated with a particular segmentation method: threshold selection and seed-point selection. Various methods such as the histogram method, entropy based method, busyness measure methods, etc. are well known for threshold selection in the image segmentation problems. In this thesis, threshold selection is done on the basis of different entropy measures on both grayscale and color images. Study of the Shannon and non-Shannon entropies (Renyi, Havrda-Charvat, Kapur and Vajda) with Otsu Method is done to obtain image segmentation. We classify these methods according to their evaluation criteriaviz. PRI (Probabilistic Rand Index), VOI (Variation of Information) and GCE (Global Consistency Error). These underlying metrics and combination methods help in determining the performance of an evaluation measure. It is observed through the simulation experiments performed on images, that the position of the smallest minima obtained in the entropy versus gray-level plot is different for each entropy measure. For a particular definition of the entropy plots are generated and the threshold values obtained from these plots possess the segmentation results. It is observed that Havrda-Charvat entropy measure is better matched with Otsu Method than other entropy measures.
A sea ice dynamics model for the Gulf of Riga

A model for simulating and forecasting the drift of sea ice in the Gulf of Riga, Baltic Sea, is presented. The basin size and ice thickness scale to 100 km and 30 cm, respectively. The model is based on the conservation and momentum laws of ice with a three-level ice state and viscous-plastic rheology. The steady-state momentum equation is employed; the ice state levels are open water, undeformed ice, and deformed (ridged) ice, together with a dynamic constraint controlling the redistribution process. The model parameters have been estimated by comparing the model outcome with the database of ice charts. Ridging was allowed for ice thicker than 10 cm and thinner ice rafting in compression.
The role of perceptual and cognitive load on inattentional blindness: A systematic review and three meta-analyses

The inattentional blindness phenomenon refers to situations in which a visible but unexpected stimulus remains consciously unnoticed by observers. This phenomenon is classically explained as the consequence of insufficient attention, because attentional resources are already engaged elsewhere or vary between individuals. However, this attentional-resources view is broad and often imprecise regarding the variety of attentional models, the different pools of resources that can be involved in attentional tasks, and the heterogeneity of the experimental paradigms. Our aim was to investigate whether a classic theoretical model of attention, namely the Load Theory, could account for a large range of empirical findings in this field by distinguishing the role of perceptual and cognitive resources in attentional selection and attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli. As this model has been mostly built on implicit measures of distractor interference, it is unclear whether its predictions also hold when explicit and subjective awareness of an unexpected stimulus is concerned. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analyses of inattentional blindness studies investigating the role of perceptual and/or cognitive resources. The results reveal that, in line with the perceptual account of the Load Theory, inattentional blindness significantly increases with the perceptual load of the task. However, the cognitive account of this theory is not clearly supported by the empirical findings analysed here. Furthermore, the interaction between perceptual and cognitive load on inattentional blindness remains understudied. Theoretical implications for the Load Theory are discussed, notably regarding the difference between attentional capture and subjective awareness paradigms, and further research directions are provided.
The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology

Problem – Such dissolution of the “hard problem” is very demanding for researchers. It invites them to leave their position of neutral observers/thinkers, and to seek selftransformation instead. It leaves no room for the “hard problem” in the field of discourse, and rather deflects it onto the plane of attitudes. As a consequence, it runs the risk of being either ignored or considered as a dodge. How can we overcome this obstacle and restore the argumentative impact of neurophenomenology?
A Comparative Study between ARIMA Model, Holt-Winters – No Seasonal and Fuzzy Time Series for New Cases of COVID-19 in Algeria

Background: Coronavirus disease has become a worldwide threat affecting almost every country in the world. The spread of the virus is likely to continue unabated. The aim of this study is to compare between Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, Fuzzy time series and Holt-Winters - No seasonal for forecasting the COVID-19 new cases in Algeria.