Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Indicators for relational values of nature’s contributions to good quality of life: the IPBES approach for Europe and Central Asia

ABSTRACT Relational values are values of desirable relationships between people and nature and among people (through nature). We report on the approach to capture relational values of nature’s contributions to people in the regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). We present a framework considering indicators along four relational value dimensions about people’s relationships with nature: security and sovereignty; health; equity and justice; and heritage, social identity and stewardship. The framework has been operationalized for three nature’s contributions to people (NCP): regulation of freshwater quality and quantity, food and feed, and physical and psychological experiences derived from nature. We identify ways to empirically assess relational values of nature’s contributions to people at regional and continental scales with social-ecological indicators and proxies, ranging from biophysical indicators to indicators that intersect socio-economic with biophysical data. We conclude that many of the identified indicators can be considered as useful proxies of relational values in a quantitative way. The analysis shows that relational values are essential to consider at the science-policy interface as they are an important set of values that people hold about nature and that go beyond instrumental relations.
MarkUs: Drop-in use-after-free prevention for low-level languages

Use-after-free vulnerabilities have plagued software written in low-level languages, such as C and C++, becoming one of the most frequent classes of exploited software bugs. Attackers identify code paths where data is manually freed by the programmer, but later incorrectly reused, and take advantage by reallocating the data to themselves. They then alter the data behind the program’s back, using the erroneous reuse to gain control of the application and, potentially, the system. While a variety of techniques have been developed to deal with these vulnerabilities, they often have unacceptably high performance or memory overheads, especially in the worst case.We have designed MarkUs, a memory allocator that prevents this form of attack at low overhead, sufficient for deployment in real software, even under allocation- and memory-intensive scenarios. We prevent use-after-free attacks by quarantining data freed by the programmer and forbidding its reallocation until we are sure that there are no dangling pointers targeting it. To identify these we traverse live-objects accessible from registers and memory, marking those we encounter, to check whether quarantined data is accessible from any currently allocated location. Unlike garbage collection, which is unsafe in C and C++, MarkUs ensures safety by only freeing data that is both quarantined by the programmer and has no identifiable dangling pointers. The information provided by the programmer’s allocations and frees further allows us to optimise the process by freeing physical addresses early for large objects, specialising analysis for small objects, and only performing marking when sufficient data is in quarantine. Using MarkUs, we reduce the overheads of temporal safety in low-level languages to 1.1× on average for SPEC CPU2006, with a maximum slowdown of only 2×, vastly improving upon the state-of-the-art.
A non-parametric re-assessment of the trade effects of the euro using value added data

This work presents an original contribution to the debate on the trade effects of the euro, recently revamped by Glick and Rose (2016). It provides a re-assessment of the effects of the euro by focusing on trade in value added and applying non-parametric matching techniques that control for non-linearity-with-self-selection. In line with Persson (2001), we show a less positive post-assessment of the euro effect on intra-EMU trade flows. However, we detect a robust positive impact of the euro on trade shares in selected value added components net to the single market effect. These results are robust to a large set of sensitivity checks.
The bacterial phleomycin resistance gene ble as a dominant selectable marker in Chlamydomonas

A chimeric gene composed of the coding sequence of theble gene from Streptoalloteichus hindustanus fused to the 5′ and 3′ untranslated regions of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii nuclear gene RBCS2 has been constructed. Introduction of this chimeric gene into the nuclear genome of C. reinhardtii by co-transformation with the ARG7 marker yields Arg+ transformants of which approximately 80% possess the ble gene. Of these co-transformants, approximately 3% display a phleomycin-resistant (PmR) phenotype. Western blot analysis using antibodies against the ble gene product confirms the presence of the protein in the PmR transformants and genetic analysis demonstrates the co-segregation of the ble gene with the phenotype in progeny arising from the mating of a PmR transformant to wild-type strains. Direct selection of PmR transformants was achieved by allowing an 18-h period for recovery and growth of transformed cells prior to selection. This work represents the first demonstration of stable expression and inheritance of a foreign gene in the nuclear genome of C. reinhardtii and provides a useful dominant marker for nuclear [. ] STEVENS, David R. , ROCHAIX, Jean-David, PURTON, Saul. The bacterial phleomycin resistance gene ble as a dominant selectable marker in Chlamydomonas. Molecular and General Genetics, 1996, vol. 251, no. 1, p. 23-30 DOI : 10.1007/BF02174340
Numerical Simulation of the Effect of Different Number Leading Edge Winglets on the Fan-Wing Aerodynamic Characteristics

The generation of lift and thrust mainly depends on the formation of low-pressure vortices above the arc groove on the leading edge of the Fan-wing, which makes the lift and thrust have a strong coupling relationship. How to decouple and control the lift and thrust is the key to further engineering application of the Fan-wing. Normally, the geometric parameters of the Fan-wing airfoil were determined; the leading edge opening angle has the greatest influence on the aerodynamic performance. Therefore, the method of installing leading edge winglets on the leading edge of a base Fan-wing airfoil was considered to change the opening angle of the leading edge of the Fan-wing. Through numerical simulation, the effects of single, double, and triple leading edge winglets on lift and thrust of the Fan-wing at different installation angles, inflow velocities, and angles of attack were compared and analyzed. The results show that by controlling the angle of the leading edge winglet, not only the lift and thrust of the fan can be improved but also the strength and position of the low-pressure vortices can be controlled, so as to meet the active control requirements of the aerodynamic moment of the Fan-wing, and then the attitude of the Fan-wing aircraft can be controlled.
Providing criterion to automatic evaluation of the accuracy of distribution of tack coat and prime coat pavement roads

The coating is one of the most important components that affect the efficiency of the pavements. parameters are effective in the proper implementation of the coating such as the type of coating, the application time, the rate of application, temperature, uniformity of application, etc. The uniformity of application requires field control in the project implementation, is currently used to control the spreading weight of the tray. This test has many errors due to the lack of continuity. The issue of uniform distribution of coating has become less attention. In this study, the automatic system is presented based on image processing using a camera, GPS, microcontroller board and . , which can analyze the uniform distribution and provide a good, moderate and poor classification for coating distribution evaluation. Image quality has improved with image processing and compression and noise reduction have been done. The thresholding was used to separate the coating from the background. After the thresholding, various properties such as the area of the coating, coefficient of variation, local maximum, and minimum, etc. are obtained from the images, and used to evaluate the coating distribution. used categorization algorithms for select effective features in categorizing images. A comparison of the results of the classification of images by a confusion matrix. Finally, the results showed that the presented system has a precision of 86%. Also, using the effective parameters in the model, the uniform distribution index was presented. This index has a value between0 and 100, which indicates the best and worst distributions.
Participatory demonstration of concentrate based Arsi-Bale sheep fattening technology at Dodola and Kofele districts in West Arsi-Zone, Oromia regional state, Ethiopia

Concentrate feed based yearling Arsi-Bale sheep fattening demonstration was conducted at Keta-Bareda and Wabe Gefersa kebeles of Dodola and Kofele districts, respectively. The objectives of the study were to demonstrate concentrate based rams fattening technology and to evaluate of its economic profitability at on-farm level. Two youth and one women research extension groups were formed purposely with collaboration of development agents. Seventy yearling Arsi-Bale rams were purchased from the surrounding markets and tagged with animal identification number. The experimental rams were then provided with anti-parasite treatments before commencing feeing. All rams were supplemented with a fattening ration of wheat straw +65% wheat bran +35% cotton seed cake for seventy five days. The body weight of rams was taken in fifteen days interval. Finally a mini field day was organized.
A COMPARISON BETWEEN STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION AND TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING FOR DERIVING SURFACE ROUGHNESS: A CASE STUDY ON A SANDY TERRAIN SURFACE

* Corresponding author Structure-from-motion (SfM) is a useful technique for acquiring the topographic information of terrain surfaces for a wide range of geoscience applications. Due to its easy mobilization and cost-effective implementation, the SfM technique may be considered as a favourable alternative to the laser scanning technique in some applications. To this end, it is essential to understand how point cloud data derived using these two different surveying techniques affect the geographic information system (GIS) outputs such as local surface roughness of a terrain surface. In this case study, a small sandy terrain surface was surveyed using a terrestrial laser scanner and the digital camera of a mobile phone, respectively. Analyses were carried out to check the measurement quality of the SfMderived point cloud and to explore the differences in local surface roughness calculated using the SfM-derived point cloud and that from the scanner, respectively. In addition, it looked into how those differences were affected by different surface roughness descriptors and the associated input parameters (mainly window sizes). Two commonly used methods for describing local surface roughness were considered, consisting of root mean square height and standard deviation of slope.
Evaluation of Stormwater System Influence on the River Using Algae

One of the widespread sources of river pollution is the wastewater coming from both wastewater treatment plants and the stormwater system. Wastewater can vary significantly in composition and concentration of substances introduced into water bodies. Municipal effluents may contain significant amounts of organic matter and ammonia. Storm drains are diverse in composition and depend on the nature of the surface from which the water collects, but carry more suspended solids and less nutrients. The research was aimed at assessing the effect of surface runoff collected by the stormwater system from the territory of the city of Lublin on the Bystrica River using popular environmental indices, calculated on the basis of periphytonic algae species abundances: species number, Shannon’s H, rarefied species number, Pielou’s evenness, trophic diatom index (TDI). It was observed that the correspondence between a species diversity and the quality of the environment is not always straightforward. Therefore, the periphytonic algae diversity increases under the influence of runoff, as evidenced by the Shannon index. Nevertheless, pronounced changes are noted in the structure of the algal community, as shown by the Pielou index and NMDS. However, these changes in the structure are invisible if the trophic diatom index (TDI) is relied upon.
Exact Outage Probability of Two-Way Decode-and-Forward NOMA Scheme with Opportunistic Relay Selection

In this paper, we propose a two-way relaying scheme using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology. In this scheme, two sources transmit packets with each other under the assistance of the decode-and-forward (DF) relays, called as a TWDFNOMA protocol. The cooperative relays exploit successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique to decode sequentially the data packets from received summation signals, and then use the digital network coding (DNC) technique to encrypt received data from two sources. A max-min criterion of end–to–end signal–to–interference–plus-noise ratios (SINRs) is used to select a best relay in the proposed TWDFNOMA protocol. Outage probabilities are analyzed to achieve exact closed-form expressions and then, the system performance of the proposed TWDFNOMA protocol is evaluated by these probabilities. Simulation and analysis results discover that the system performance of the proposed TWDFNOMA protocol is improved when compared with a conventional three-timeslot two-way relaying scheme using DNC (denoted as a TWDNC protocol), a four-timeslot two-way relaying scheme without using DNC (denoted as a TWNDNC protocol) and a two-timeslot two-way relaying scheme with amplify-and-forward operations (denoted as a TWANC protocol). Particularly, the proposed TWDFNOMA protocol achieves best performances at two optimal locations of the best relay whereas the midpoint one is the optimal location of the TWDNC and TWNDNC protocols. Finally, the probability analyses are justified by executing Monte Carlo simulations.
Open-Source Neural Network and Wavelet Transform Tools for Server Log Analysis

Open-source Java tools are used to implement a server log analysis application, which combines neural network algorithms and wavelet transform techniques to give better predictions. Wavelet transforms are used to denoise the log data, extracting relevant information from the noisy data. The ﬁltered data are then fed into a multi-layer neural network which learns to identify patterns of errors and problematic issues. Experiments conducted on the log datasets of a virtualized cloud platform at CSUSB show that this approach makes better predictions as compared to a stand alone neural network. The application predictions can help server administrators better manage the server platform by taking preventive actions before serious damages have oc-curred.
Секція 5. Автоматизація та комп’ютерно-інтегровані технології 9 73-я Науково-технічна конференція професорсько-викладацького складу, науковців,

Simplified dynamics model of the gas turbine power generator unit was developed to represent its main variables change in time. It’s shown that the developed model can be used for control system design and simulation purposes in close to process normal conditions state. In order to design a gas turbine control system, we need a dynamics model of the gas turbine. The development of a gas turbine dynamics model requires the use of some existing works [1, 2]. Most commonly used mathematical models for simulating dynamics of gas turbine use model structure and main equations that were proposed by W.I. Rowen. Such models take in account load frequency, temperature control and the thermodynamic dynamic for gas turbine. Structure of a gas turbine and process of Brayton cycle are as follows: Figure 1. Schematic view of a gas turbine Figure 2. Brayton cycle Figure 2 shows a typical standard Brayton cycle in temperature-entropy frame. Air is drawn from point 1 in ambient condition and is compressed by the compressor in an irreversible process to point 2. Input heat in the combustor will increase the temperature to point 3 where the combustion product and compressor discharge air will enter the turbine and expand to point 4. [5] Under some reasonable assumptions, the following formula can be obtained. (1) (2) Figure 3 shows the developed gas turbine model structure. Figure 3. Model of GTU for dynamic studies. Секція 5. Автоматизація та комп’ютерно-інтегровані технології 10 73-я Науково-технічна конференція професорсько-викладацького складу, науковців, аспірантів та студентів In the isentropic process of 1-2s,[3, 4] (3)
A Comprehensive Survey On Soft Computing Based Optical Character Recognition Techniques

: Character recognition has been one of the most interesting and challenging research areas in field of image processing and pattern recognition in the recent years. This paper describes the techniques for better character recognition in document into machine readable form. Several techniques like OCR using Feature extraction and OCR using neural networks are reviewed in this paper. Before going to future research work, analyze and update recognition techniques in detail which are implemented previously. The purpose of this paper is to discuss various algorithms, techniques, processes, and achieve direction towards research work to improve the problems faced by existing systems to get more recognition rate.
“There’s no cloud of shame on me”: Māori men’s experiences of prison-based psychological rehabilitation-Part II

Bi-cultural practice is of paramount importance for New Zealand-based practitioners. In Part I, we presented an overview of the circumstances surrounding bi-cultural practice in the broader context of colonisation and correctional policy. We briefly reviewed some of the literature which currently informs treatment approaches within prisons. We identified an over-reliance on quantitative research and a lack of studies of Māori men’s lived experience of treatment regimes. In Part II we make a modest effort to address this lack by presenting a study of three Māori men who underwent the Special Treatment Unit – Rehabilitation Programme (STU-RP) in a New Zealand prison. Bi-cultural practice was of particular importance to these men. Amongst their many reflections, they explained how a specific bi-cultural therapy intervention played a prominent part in each of their treatment experiences, most notably in the development of a robust therapeutic alliance. We follow this up by drawing upon our collective encounters as Pākehā (New Zealand European and first generation European immigrants respectively) working in bicultural settings to outline some considerations which may assist other practitioners in reflecting upon and developing their own bi-cultural awareness.
QoE-Based Mobility-Aware Collaborative Video Streaming on the Edge of 5G

Today's Internet traffic is dominated by video streaming applications transmitted through wireless/cellular interfaces of mobile devices. Although ultrahigh-definition videos are now easily transmitted through mobile devices, video quality level that users perceive is generally lower than expected due to distance-based high latency between sources and end-users. Mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm is expected to address this issue and provide users with higher perceived quality of experience (QoE) for latency-critical applications, deploying MEC servers at edges. However, due to capacity concerns on MEC servers, a more comprehensive approach is needed to meet users’ expectations applying all possible operations over the resources such as caching, prefetching, and task offloading policies depending on the data repetition or memory/CPU utilization. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel collaborative QoE-based mobility-aware video streaming scheme deployed at MEC servers. Throughout the article, we demonstrate how the proposed scheme can be implemented so as to preserve the desired QoE level per user during entire video sessions. Performance of the proposed scheme has been investigated by extensive simulations. In comparison to existing schemes, the results illustrate that high efficiency is achieved through collaboration among MEC servers, utilizing explicit window size adaptation, collaborative prefetching, and handover among the edges.
A Methodology for Classifying Search Operators as Intensification or Diversification Heuristics

Selection hyper-heuristics are generic search tools that dynamically choose, from a given pool, the most promising operator (low-level heuristic) to apply at each iteration of the search process. The performance of these methods depends on the quality of the heuristic pool. Two types of heuristics can be part of the pool: diversification heuristics, which help to escape from local optima, and intensification heuristics, which effectively exploit promising regions in the vicinity of good solutions. An effective search strategy needs a balance between these two strategies. However, it is not straightforward to categorize an operator as intensification or diversification heuristic on complex domains. Therefore, we propose an automated methodology to do this classification. This brings methodological rigor to the configuration of an iterated local search hyper-heuristic featuring diversification and intensification stages. The methodology considers the empirical ranking of the heuristics based on an estimation of their capacity to either diversify or intensify the search. We incorporate the proposed approach into a state-of-the-art hyper-heuristic solving two domains: course timetabling and vehicle routing. Our results indicate improved performance, including new best-known solutions for the course timetabling problem.
FGF9 induces functional differentiation to Schwann cells from human adipose derived stem cells

Rationale: The formation of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) into spheres on a chitosan-coated microenvironment promoted ASCs differentiation into a mixed population of neural lineage-like cells (NLCs), but the underline mechanism is still unknown. Since the fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9) and fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFRs) play as key regulators of neural cell fate during embryo development and stem cell differentiation, the current study aims to reveal the interplay of FGF9 and FGFRs for promoting peripheral nerve regeneration. Methods: Different concentration of FGF9 peptide (10, 25, 50, 100 ng/mL) were added during NLCs induction (FGF9-NLCs). The FGFR expressions and potential signaling were studied by gene and protein expressions as well as knocking down by specific FGFR siRNA or commercial inhibitors. FGF9-NLCs were fluorescent labeled and applied into a nerve conduit upon the injured sciatic nerves of experimental rats. Results: The FGFR2 and FGFR4 were significantly increased during NLCs induction. The FGF9 treated FGF9-NLCs spheres became smaller and changed into Schwann cells (SCs) which expressed S100β and GFAP. The specific silencing of FGFR2 diminished FGF9-induced Akt phosphorylation and inhibited the differentiation of SCs. Transplanted FGF9-NLCs participated in myelin sheath formation, enhanced axonal regrowth and promoted innervated muscle regeneration. The knockdown of FGFR2 in FGF9-NLCs led to the abolishment of nerve regeneration. Conclusions: Our data therefore demonstrate the importance of FGF9 in the determination of SC fate via the FGF9-FGFR2-Akt pathway and reveal the therapeutic benefit of FGF9-NLCs.