Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Frugivory by Small Vertebrates Within a Deforested, Dry Tropical Region of Central America

Small vertebrates were inventoried within three habitat types in a degraded dry forest region of Panama. Animals were classified as frugivorous if they were observed foraging on fruit or if fecal samples contained mostly or exclusively seeds. Overall, we found that eight bat species and 21 bird species consumed fruit. The greatest numbers of birds were observed within live fences and bird species richness was greatest within riparian forests. Bat assemblages were not significantly different between habitats. The implication is that ecosystem services such as seed dispersal may still be functional in this landscape.
Functional food properties of non-digestable oligosaccharides

We were very interested to read the papers by Gibson et al. (1999) and the ENDO project group (Van Loo et al.1999) in the February issue of the British Journal of Nutrition. They give a useful introduction to the field and list over a dozen different potential health advantages of altered gut bacteriology. When we last attempted to prepare a list of physiological actions of fermentable substrates on the hindgut we gave up after thirty. One of these actions, which was not mentioned in the two papers, was the stimulation of cell proliferation in the intestinal mucosa by the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA). There is substantial confusion on the actions of the SCFA, as in vitro studies have shown them to be powerful stimulators of differentiation and apoptosis; however, in vivo they are clearly powerful mitogens (Goodladet al. 1989), moreover there is poor evidence for pro-apoptotic effects in vivo. The implications of this significant proliferative effect are as yet still unclear, but increased proliferation is traditionally regarded as a potential risk factor in the development of carcinogenesis (Wasanet al. 1996). Fermentation in the colon also has other biological–cellular actions on the process of crypt fission (McCulloughet al.1998), which we have implicated as a critical event in the initiation–development of colorectal carcinogenesis (Wasan et al. 1997). It would appear that this consensus paper is somewhat biased towards the positive evidence, and one must be clearly aware that most clinical dietary interventions have not had the intended beneficial outcomes. This is especially worth stressing in light of the unanticipated results of most of the randomized human b-carotene studies, vitamins C and E and fibre-polyp prevention studies. In these human clinical trials, either no benefits were seen or, more worryingly, detrimental, (i.e. pro-carcinogenic) effects were observed, which led to the early closure of some of the studies (ATBC, 1994). Thus no prospective human clinical study has ever confirmed the purported theoretical benefits. Indeed, worryingly, a fair proportion of dietary fibre studies in animals have also shown pro-carcinogenic effects (Hill et al. 1996). A further complication may be that the addition of fermentable substrate supplements to a ‘Western’ diet may result in a feast or famine pattern of fermentation (McBurneyet al.1987) in which there are sudden surges in bacteriological activity followed by a lack of substrate, in which case the colonic flora must either ferment each other (cannibalism) or the colonic epithelial mucosa and mucins. We therefore agree with the ENDO group that there is a great need for more in-depth research, but would caution against over enthusiasm in instigating human trials based on the currently available scientific data.
Structural Health Monitoring via Measured Ritz Vectors Utilizing Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract: A pattern recognition approach for structural health monitoring (SHM) is presented that uses damage‐induced changes in Ritz vectors as the features to characterize the damage patterns defined by the corresponding locations and severity of damage. Unlike most other pattern recognition methods, an artificial neural network (ANN) technique is employed as a tool for systematically identifying the damage pattern corresponding to an observed feature. An important aspect of using an ANN is its design but this is usually skipped in the literature on ANN‐based SHM. The design of an ANN has significant effects on both the training and performance of the ANN. As the multi‐layer perceptron ANN model is adopted in this work, ANN design refers to the selection of the number of hidden layers and the number of neurons in each hidden layer. A design method based on a Bayesian probabilistic approach for model selection is proposed. The combination of the pattern recognition method and the Bayesian ANN design method forms a practical SHM methodology. A truss model is employed to demonstrate the proposed methodology.
Supporting Security and Privacy Decisions With Data

Despite decades of research into developing abstract security advice and improving interfaces, users still struggle to make security and privacy decisions. In particular, users often make security and privacy decisions that they are unsure about, that are based on misunderstandings of reality, or that do not reflect their preferences. Prior work suggests that a major cause of these problems is that users do not have the necessary contextual information about themselves and about greater ecosystems to make decisions. To better support users’ decisions, I propose building just-in-time data about a user’s own behaviors and situations into security and privacy interfaces. When considered relative to data about greater ecosystems, a single user’s own data can help the user make decisions that are objectively more secure or private, that he or she feels more confident about, that reflect a greater awareness of risks, and that better match the user’s preferences. I will examine this premise through one security case study and two privacy case studies. First, I will test the effectiveness of giving users feedback on precisely what they are doing wrong in creating a password. This approach leverages data I have collected through detailed analyses of both the semantic structure and guessability of large data sets of passwords, in addition to my studies of password-strength meters. Second, to counteract users’ privacy misunderstandings related to online tracking and help them make privacy decisions that better match their preferences, I will examine the impact of visualizing different abstractions of how a user’s own web browsing has been tracked. These visualizations rely on “tracking the trackers,” but also build on my qualitative understanding of how users perceive privacy tradeoffs in the context of online behavioral advertising. Third, I will provide average consumers an interactive database that merges data I have collected about over 6,000 U.S. financial institutions’ privacy practices with data about those institutions’ branch locations. Using this interactive database, I will test whether surfacing this large-scale, comparative privacy information impacts users’ willingness to consider switching banks, as well as how a willingness to find a more privacy-protective bank interacts with the logistical barriers of actually switching. Thesis statement : The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate how integrating just-in-time data about a user’s own behaviors and the state of the greater ecosystem into security and privacy interfaces can better equip users to make security and privacy decisions. I demonstrate this idea through case studies in helping users create more secure passwords, make privacy decisions about thirdparty online tracking, and compare the privacy practices of financial institutions.
Effects of internal and relational capabilities on outsourcing: an integrated model

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of relational capability compared to that of internal capability on outsourcing, and the influence of relational capability as a moderating variable between outsourcing and internal capabilities. The paper aims to integrate the internal and relational perspectives in a single model of strategic evaluation.Design/methodology/approach – This work analyses the outsourcing process in a representative sample of firms operating in a region of Spain. To accomplish the research objectives, a personal survey was conducted using a questionnaire to evaluate 13 activities of the order distribution process in the supply chain.Findings – The results indicate that internal capabilities have a negative effect on outsourcing while relational capabilities have a positive effect. They also show that, the greater the relational capabilities of an operation are, the less significant the relationship between internal capabilities and outsourcing will be.Practical imp.
Micro-concentrated silicon heterojunction solar cells: Basic concept, device simulation, and system modeling

We propose a micro-concentrated silicon heterojunction silicon (MC-SHJ) solar cell design that integrates a microlens array into the traditional heterojunction solar cell structure. Device simulation shows that the photocurrent increases in the wavelength region of 1000-1200 nm. With superb infrared light harvesting and enhanced photocurrent gain, MC-SHJ cells are promising to improve the performance of silicon-based solar cells under normally incident light. However, system modeling shows that inefficient collection of diffuse radiation is a big challenge for real-world application. Several approaches to overcome this difficulty are briefly discussed.
Effect of cultural conditions on the concentrations of metabolic intermediates during growth and sporulation of Bacillus licheniformis

Intracellular concentrations of adenine nucleotides and intermediates of the Embden-Meyerhof pathway and the tricarboxylic acid cycle have been determined during growth and sporulation of Bacillus licheniformis in a variety of different media. The ATP pool was independent of growth rate and nitrogen source, but the use of glucose as a carbon source resulted in a twofold elevation in the ATP pool during exponential growth. The intracellular phosphoenolpyruvate pool was at least twofold higher during gluconeogenesis than during glycolysis. The finding that the use of glutamate as the sole nitrogen source resulted in at least a fivefold elevation of the alpha-ketoglutarate pool suggests a role for alpha-ketoglutarate in the repression of the enzymes of the tricarboxylic acid cycle responsible for alpha-ketoglutarate synthesis. Not one of the metabolites assayed appears to function as a signal of the nutrient deprivation which accompanies the initiation of sporulation.
Slow-Wave Quad-Band Printed Inverted-F Antenna (IFA)

Quad-band slow-wave (SW) printed inverted-F antennas (IFA) for 0.9 GHz, 1.57 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2.45 GHz are proposed. Multi-band behavior is achieved by combining L-loaded printed-IFA and two printed radiators. Each of the four radiators has a small effect on the performance of the other radiators. Compact printed-IFA antennas are realized using SW structures such as saw-tooth, meander lines, first fractal iteration and high impedance wire (HIW). A size reduction of 40% is achieved. The proposed antennas maintain the same far-field radiation patterns of the conventional printed-IFA. They also possess the properties of good performance, compact size, low profile, and low cost. Hence, they are suitable for implementation in wireless applications.
Whole brain analysis of T2* weighted baseline FMRI signal in dementia

Brain activation in studies using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) FMRI is associated with an increase in T2* weighted signal between baseline and an active condition. This BOLD technique is often applied to study differences in brain activation between patients and healthy controls. However, the baseline T2* signal itself may also be different between groups, as shown in the hippocampus in Alzheimer's disease using the resting oxygen or ROXY approach (Small et al. [2002]: Ann Neurol 51:290–295). In the current study, we analyzed whole brain, voxel‐wise T2* weighted signal of averaged baseline scans of a BOLD FMRI experiment in 41 healthy elderly controls and 46 patients with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. In each subject, T2* weighted images were normalized to the CSF signal of the same image. Additionally, gray matter probability maps of high‐resolution structural scans were also compared between groups to assess atrophy. T2* signal was decreased in dementia in the hippocampus, insula/putamen, posterior and middle cingulate cortex, and parietal cortex. Most of these regions also showed decreased gray matter, except insula/putamen. Hippocampal and posterior cingulate gray matter differences were significantly larger than T2* differences. Therefore, decreased T2* signal in most regions are likely to be caused by gray matter atrophy, although decreased metabolism or perhaps iron deposition are also factors that may contribute. We conclude that in FMRI studies of dementia, not only the dynamic BOLD signal (activation and deactivation) but also the average baseline signal is diminished in certain regions. The method we applied may also be used in task‐related BOLD FMRI and add to the understanding of the mechanism of task‐related group differences. Hum Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Biomechanics of the columnar cactus Pachycereus pringlei.

We report the longitudinal variations in stiffness and bulk density of tissue samples drawn from along the length of two Pachycereus pringlei plants measuring 3.69 and 5.9 m in height to determine how different tissues contribute to the mechanical stability of these massive vertical organs. Each of the two stems was cut into segments of uniform length and subsequently dissected to obtain and mechanically test portions of xylem strands, stem ribs, and a limited number of pith and cortex samples. In each case, morphometric measurements were taken to determine the geometric contribution each tissue likely made to the ability of whole stems to resist bending forces. The stiffness of each xylem strand increased basipetally toward the base of each plant where stiffness sharply decreased, reaching a magnitude comparable to that of strands 1 m beneath the stem apex. The xylem was anisotropic in behavior, i.e., its stiffness measured in the radial and in the tangential directions differed significantly. Despite the abrupt decrease in xylem strand stiffness at the stem base, the contribution made by this tissue to resist bending forces increased exponentially from the tip to the base of each plant due to the accumulation of wood. A basipetal increase in the stiffness of the pith (and, to limited extent, that of the cortex) was also observed. In contrast, the stiffness of stem rib tissues varied little as a function of stem length. These tissues were stiffer than the xylem in the corresponding portions of the stem along the upper two-fifths of the length of either plant. Tissue stiffness and bulk density were not significantly correlated within or across tissue types. However, a weak inverse relationship was observed for these properties in the case of the xylem and stem rib tissues. We present a simple formula that predicts when stem ribs rather than the xylem strands serve as the principal stiffening agents in stems. This formula successfully predicted the observed aspect ratio of the stem ribs (the average quotient of the radial and tangential dimensions of rib transections), and thus provided circumstantial evidence that the ribs are important for mechanical stability for the distal and younger regions of the stems examined.
Optimal synthesis of circularly symmetric aperture sources with shaped patterns

The problem of the optimal power pattern synthesis of shaped beams by means of circularly symmetric continuous aperture sources is addressed and solved. In particular, a necessary and sufficient existence criterion is provided to test a priori (i.e., without solving the overall synthesis problem) if a non-superdirective continuous aperture source of given size can radiate or not a circularly symmetric power pattern lying in a given arbitrary mask. In the affirmative case, the proposed approach guarantees the achievement of the global optimum by using local optimization techniques, and a number of equivalent aperture distributions are determined in a straightforward fashion. Numerical examples concerning applications of actual interest support the given theory and confirm the effectiveness of the developed approach.
Determination of the non-starch polysaccharides in plant foods by gas-liquid chromatography of constituent sugars as alditol acetates.

A method is reported for the measurement of non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) from plant foods. NSP are the major components of “dietary fibre. ” The polysaccharides are divided into cellulose and non-cellulosic material and the constituent sugars are determined by gas-liquid chromatography. Starch is removed, after gelatinisation, by incubation with hog pancreatic α-amylase together with pullulanase. The enzyme preparations are shown to be specific for the hydrolysis of α-1,4- and α-1,6-glucosidic bonds, and not to affect NSP. The starch-free material is then analysed by three separate but complementary procedures: (A) hydrolysis with 1 M sulphuric acid after solubilisation of cellulose with 12 M sulphuric acid; (B) hydrolysis with 1 M sulphuric acid; and (C) extraction with phosphate buffer at pH 7 and 100 °C, solubilisation of cellulose with 12 M sulphuric acid and then hydrolysis with 1 M sulphuric acid. Neutral sugars are measured by gas-liquid chromatography as alditol acetates and uronic acids by a colorimetric method. Starch made resistant to α-amylase digestion by food processing is identified by additional steps in procedure B, and measured as “resistant starch. ” Procedure A gives total NSP and procedure B neutral non-cellulosic polysaccharides. A value for cellulose is obtained as the difference between glucose measured in procedures A and B. Procedure C gives NSP insoluble in phosphate buffer at pH 7. Soluble NSP is the difference between total NSP and insoluble NSP. Results for the NSP analysis of selected foods are given.
3D electromagnetic modeling and design flow in system level

In this paper the aspects of system level modeling are discussed. We present a possible procedure that treats numerical modeling and measurement procedure as a similar process. Another topic in this paper is geometric model used as an input for electromagnetic (EM) analysis. We have shown implementation of geometric models for electromagnetic analysis in a design frame, and how separate design steps could be combined. The focus of this paper is to use common geometric models in all design process in order to reduce the number of transformations for the geometry. A new method for design flow is shown.
The M-polynomials and topological indices of toroidal polyhex network

The M -polynomial of different molecular structures helps us to calculate many topological indices. A topological index of graph G is 1,2 Corresponding authors 306 Muhammad Ajmal et al. a numerical parameter related to G which characterizes its molecular topology. The theoretical properties of the chemical compounds and their molecular topological indices such as the Zagreb indices, Randić index, Symmetric division index, Harmonic index, Inverse sum index, Augmented Zagreb index, etc are correlated. In this report, we computed closed form of the M -polynomial of toroidal polyhex network. From the M -polynomial we recover some degree-based topological indices for this network. Mathematics Subject Classification: 05C90
Extractive summarization of multi-party meetings through discourse segmentation

Abstract In this article we tackle the problem of multi-party conversation summarization. We investigate the role of discourse segmentation of a conversation on meeting summarization. First, an unsupervised function segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the transcript into functionally coherent parts, such as Monologuei (which indicates a segment where speaker i is the dominant speaker, e.g., lecturing all the other participants) or Discussionx1x2, . , xn (which indicates a segment where speakers x1 to xn involve in a discussion). Then the salience score for a sentence is computed by leveraging the score of the segment containing the sentence. Performance of our proposed segmentation and summarization algorithms is evaluated using the AMI meeting corpus. We show better summarization performance over other state-of-the-art algorithms according to different metrics.
An Effective Method for Image Matching based on Modified LBP and SIFT

Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is a very powerful and popular descriptor for image registration, which is commonly used in feature matching. However, there is still a need for improvement with respect to the matching accuracy of SIFT. In this paper, we present a combination of modified LBP and SIFT method for more reliable feature matching. The main idea of the proposed method is to extract spatially enhanced image features with modified Local Binary Pattern (LBP) from the images before implementation Differenceof-Gaussian (DoG) in SIFT. The proposed method is also robust to illumination changes, rotation and scaling of images. Experimental results show significant improvement over original SIFT.
Does osteoporosis therapy invalidate FRAX for fracture prediction?

Ten‐year fracture risk assessment with the fracture risk assessment system (FRAX) is increasingly used to guide treatment decisions. Osteoporosis pharmacotherapy reduces fracture risk, but the effect is greater than can be explained from the increase in bone mineral density (BMD). Whether this invalidates fracture predictions with FRAX is uncertain. A total of 35,764 women (age ≥50 years) and baseline BMD testing (1996–2007) had FRAX probabilities retroactively calculated. A provincial pharmacy database was used to identify osteoporosis medication use. Women were categorized as untreated, current high adherence users [medication possession ratio (MPR) ≥0.80 in the year after BMD testing], current low adherence users (MPR <0.80), and past users. Fractures outcomes to 10 years were established form a population‐based health data repository. FRAX and femoral neck BMD alone stratified major osteoporotic and hip fracture risk within untreated and each treated subgroup (all p‐values <0.001) with similar area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. In untreated and each treated subgroup, a stepwise gradient in observed 10‐year major osteoporotic and hip fracture incidence was found as a function of the predicted probability tertile (all p‐values <0.001 for linear trend). Concordance (calibration) plots for major osteoporotic fractures and hip fractures showed good agreement between the predicted and observed 10‐year fracture incidence in untreated women and each treated subgroup. Only in the highest risk tertile of women highly adherent to at least 5 years of bisphosphonate use was observed hip fracture risk significantly less than predicted, though major osteoporotic fracture risk was similar to predicted. In summary, this work suggests that the FRAX tool can be used to predict fracture probability in women currently or previously treated for osteoporosis. Although FRAX should not be used to assess the reduction in fracture risk in individuals on treatment, it may still have value for guiding the need for continued treatment or treatment withdrawal. © 2012 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.