Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proliferation of Levanderina fissa and Polykrikos hartmannii (Dinophyceae: Gymnodiniales) in Bahía de La Paz, Gulf of California, Mexico

On 19–20 August 2014, a moderate proliferation of dinoflagellates was detected in the southwestern part of Bahia de La Paz. The phytoplankton community within this red tide was composed of 60 microalgae taxa and was characterized by the presence of unarmored dinoflagellates such as Levanderina fissa and Polykrikos hartmannii . The proliferation occurred during low tide after a period of windy and rainy days. Densities of L. fissa varied from 163 to 265 × 10 3 cells L –1 and for P. hartmannii varied from 16 to 33 × 10 3 cells L –1 . Low densities were estimated on September and October samplings. Both species showed a great variation both in size and form. As part of the phytoplankton species composition during this proliferation, two taxa of dinoflagellates are new records for the Pacific coast of Mexico ( Ankistrodinium semilunatum and Sclerodinium calyptroglyphe ), one in the Gulf of California ( Pronoctiluca acuta ), and one in the Bahia de La Paz ( Prorocentrum robustum ). Cyanobacteria were an important group observed during this proliferation. The symbiotic association between a cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. , the stramenopile protist Solenicola setigera , and the diatom Leptocylindrus mediterraneus was observed for the first time in this bay. Proliferacion de Levanderina fissa y Polykrikos hartmannii (Dinophyceae: Gymnodiniales) en Bahia de La Paz, Golfo de California, Mexico Se detecto una proliferacion moderada de dinoflagelados en la porcion suroeste de la Bahia de La Paz del 19 al 20 de agosto de 2014. La comunidad del fitoplancton dentro de este florecimiento estuvo compuesta de 60 taxa y se caracterizo por la dominancia de Levanderina fissa y Polykrikos hartmannii . La proliferacion ocurrio durante la marea baja y despues de dias lluviosos. La abundancia de L. fissa vario de 163 a 265 × 10 3 cels L –1 y P. hartmannii vario de 16 a 33 × 10 3 cels L –1 . Densidades bajas fueron estimadas durante los muestreos de septiembre y octubre. Ambas especies mostraron una gran variacion en su forma y su tamano celular. Como resultado de la composicion especifica del fitoplancton encontrado durante esta proliferacion, dos taxa de dinoflagelados fueron nuevos registros para la costa Pacifica de Mexico ( Ankistrodinium semilunatum y Sclerodinium calyptroglyphe ), un taxon para el Golfo de California ( Pronoctiluca acuta ) y un taxon para la Bahia de La Paz ( Prorocentrum robustum ). Las cianobacterias fueron un grupo importante durante esta proliferacion. La asociacion simbiotica entre una cianobacteria Synechococcus sp. , el protista stramenopiles Solenicola setigera y la diatomea Leptocylindrus mediterraneus se observo por primera vez en la bahia.
A Novel LC Resonant Based Partial Booster Scheme for Improved Efficiency and Reduced Cost of Transformerless Photovoltaic Inverters

Traditionally, efficiency has been a top priority for photovoltaic inverters. However, another driving factor in photovoltaic inverter research has been cost reduction. Non isolated three phase inverters have come into the competition mainly to address this issue of cost reduction. This paper presents a new resonant based DC/DC converter control strategy for three phase PV inverter systems, in the sub 25 kW range. The proposed scheme has advantages of easy control and high efficiency. Further, cost reduction can also achieved, as the proposed topology can be efficient even at switching frequencies near to 50 kHz.
Microinvertebrate and plant beta diversity in dry soils of a semiarid agricultural wetland complex

The relationship between environmental features and the β diversity of the propagule bank of dry soils of temporary wetlands has relevance to ecological theories of community structure and to the conservation of wetland biodiversity. The correlation of β diversity of microinvertebrates and macrophytes derived from propagules in dry soils with wetland habitat characteristics, catchment land-use, and the distance between wetlands in a remnant pond complex in central Spain was assessed. Redundancy analyses showed that β diversity of both groups correlated with habitat characteristics, whereas associations with catchment agricultural practices were weaker. Nestedness analyses showed that species-poor communities from degraded sites tended to form nested subsets of less degraded ponds with higher species richness. Distance between the ponds had no significant association with community similarity, suggesting that fragmentation did not shape β diversity at the scale of our study area. To maintain high β diversity in this area, ponds with species-rich propagule banks should receive conservation priority. Given the functional dependence by much wildlife on these propagule banks once these wetlands rewet, conservation of this hidden biodiversity is crucial for providing ecosystem services to humans and wildlife.
Employee Satisfaction: Mediator of Organizational Service Orientation and Employee Retention

The paper seeks to evaluate the relationship between organizational service orientation, employee satisfaction and employee retention, using cluster and simple random sampling. A sample of 346 teachers was drawn from Kampala District Uganda. The paper reveals that consideration of organizational service orientation and employee retention is crucial for employee retention in public primary schools in Uganda. This was a cross-sectional study that naturally had problems of common method biases. Replication of the study using a longitudinal approach would reduce such biases. The paper emphasizes the need for public primary schools to adapt policies that promote service orientation in order to improve employee satisfaction and retention. The study also takes a cross-sector approach. No wide cross-sector study has appeared before in an investigation of organizational service orientation and employee retention in the education industry in Uganda.
Strategic, Tactical and Operational Decisions in Family Businesses: A Qualitative Case Study

Previous studies of family businesses have no common agreement on what should be the most effective and efficient approach for making decisions at different managerial levels to solve business issues. Accordingly, the main objective of this study was to understand the nature of decision-making by family members who are involved in a business in different capacities such as owners, owner managers, and managers. Locating the research in the interpretivist paradigm, and utilizing qualitative case study methods (Yin, 1994), we interviewed 24 respondents from 12 well-known family firms from different districts in Sri Lanka. Thematic analysis indicated that the consultative approach is mostly used by family members in operational, functional, and top level management decisions. Yet, family members’ decisions in the business as owners, owner-managers, and managers have not shown a common decision-making process. Owner-managers’ roles in the business decisions are highlighted as they make rational, risk averse, and deliberate business decisions which would assist to run the business. In comparison, owners and managers have followed the consultative decision-making approach to shape business decisions in line with family requirements.
Erratum: Les parasites de l'éperlan d'Amérique (Osmerus mordax) anadrome du Québec et leur utilité comme étiquettes biologiques

Distribution of smelt parasites Glugea hertwigi, Diphyllobothrium sebago, and Echinorhynchus salmonis support previous hypotheses that three groups of anadromous smelt occur in Quebec waters. These groups are associated with three geographical areas: the Saguenay fjord, the south shore of the St. Lawrence estuary, and Chaleur Bay. Furthermore, the presence of two parasites almost exclusive to the smelt sampled in Forestville and Baie Comeau confirms the existence of a fourth group.
Promoting the Research of Health Behavior Change in Chinese HCI Community

Unhealthy lifestyles largely contribute to many chronic diseases, which makes the research on health behavior change crucial for both individuals and the whole society. As an interdisciplinary research field, health behavior change research in the HCI community is still in the early stage. This research field is notably less developed in Chinese HCI community. In this position paper, we will first illustrate the research of health behavior change in the HCI community based on our previous systematic review. According to the unique properties of Chinese society, we will then discuss both the potential advantages and challenges of conducting health behavior change research in China. Lastly, we will briefly introduce the SMARTACT project in Germany to provide a reference for future related research. This paper aims to draw more attention to this research field and promote its development in China.
Positive curvature and bosons

Positive curvature and bosons Compact positive curvature Riemannian manifolds M with symmetry group G allow Conner-Kobayashi reductions M to N, where N is the fixed point set of the symmetry G. The set N is a union of smaller-dimensional totally geodesic positive curvature manifolds each with even co-dimension. By Berger, N is not empty. By Lefschetz, M and N have the same Euler characteristic. By Frankel, the sum of dimension of any two components in N is smaller than the dimension of M. Reverting the process N to M allows to build up positive curvature manifolds from smaller ones using division algebras and the geodesic flow. From dimension 6 to 24, only four exceptional manifolds have appeared so far, some of them being flag manifolds and related to the special unitary group in three dimensions. We can now draw a periodic system of elements of the known even-dimensional positive curvature manifolds and observe that the list of even-dimensional known positive curvature manifolds has an affinity with the list of known force carriers in physics. Positive mass of the boson matches up with the existence of of two linearly independent harmonic k-forms on the manifold. This motivates to compute more quantities of the exceptional positive curvature manifolds like the lowest non-zero eigenvalues of the Hodge Laplacian L=d d*+d* d or properties of the pairs (u,v) of harmonic 2,4 or 8 forms in the positive mass case.
Data augmentation versus noise compensation for x-vector speaker recognition systems in noisy environments

The explosion of available speech data and new speaker modeling methods based on deep neural networks (DNN) have given the ability to develop more robust speaker recognition systems. Among DNN speaker modelling techniques, x-vector system has shown a degree of robustness in noisy environments. Previous studies suggest that by increasing the number of speakers in the training data and using data augmentation more robust speaker recognition systems are achievable in noisy environments. In this work, we want to know if explicit noise compensation techniques continue to be effective despite the general noise robustness of these systems. For this study, we will use two different x-vector networks: the first one is trained on Voxceleb1 (Protocol1), and the second one is trained on Voxceleb1+Voxveleb2 (Protocol2). We propose to add a denoising x-vector subsystem before scoring. Experimental results show that, the x-vector system used in Protocol2 is more robust than the other one used Protocol1. Despite this observation we will show that explicit noise compensation gives almost the same EER relative gain in both protocols. For example, in the Protocol2 we have 21% to 66% improvement of EER with denoising techniques.
Genética humana na susceptibilidade à hanseníase

Dados de investigações familiares, de estudos com gêmeos e da genômica do Mycobacterium leprae, bem como observações sobre a epidemiologia da hanseníase, têm apontado a importância da genética humana como determinante do curso da doença desde a resistência à dicotomia imunológica que definem os pólos tuberculóide e virchowiano. Nesse contexto, estudos de varredura genômica e de associação têm apontado algumas regiões genômicas cujas variações são candidatas a fatores de risco para a doença. Entretanto, as associações já descritas são discretas e não se replicam em todos os estudos, o que evidencia a distinção entre os fatores de risco para diferentes populações, além de divergências nos desenhos destes estudos, como causadores destas controvérsias. Assim, esta revisão tem o propósito de compilação dos dados já descritos para as diversas regiões genômicas humanas que devem participar do controle genético da hanseníase.
A method of fundamental solutions for doubly-periodic potential flow problems using the Weierstrass elliptic function

In this paper, we propose a method of fundamental solutions for the problems of two-dimensional potential flow past a doubly-periodic array of obstacles. The solutions of these problems involve doubly-periodic functions, and it is difficult to apply the conventional method of fundamental solutions to approximate them. The method that we propose gives approximate solutions which is expressed by a linear combination of periodic fundamental solutions constructed using the Weierstrass elliptic functions, and it satisfies the periodicity that we expect. Numerical examples show the effectiveness of our method.
Generalizable Cone Beam CT Esophagus Segmentation Using In Silico Data Augmentation

Lung cancer radiotherapy entails high quality planning computed tomography (pCT) imaging of the patient with radiation oncologist contouring of the tumor and the organs at risk (OARs) at the start of the treatment. This is followed by weekly low-quality cone beam CT (CBCT) imaging for treatment setup and qualitative visual assessment of tumor and critical OARs. In this work, we aim to make the weekly CBCT assessment quantitative by automatically segmenting the most critical OAR, esophagus, using deep learning and in silico (image-driven simulation) artifact induction to convert pCTs to pseudo-CBCTs (pCTs$+$artifacts). Specifically, for the in silico data augmentation, we make use of the critical insight that CT and CBCT have the same underlying physics and that it is easier to deteriorate the pCT to look more like CBCT (and use the accompanying high quality manual contours for segmentation) than to synthesize CT from CBCT where the critical anatomical information may have already been lost (which leads to anatomical hallucination with the prevalent generative adversarial networks for example). Given these pseudo-CBCTs and the high quality manual contours, we introduce a modified 3D-Unet architecture and a multi-objective loss function specifically designed for segmenting soft-tissue organs such as esophagus on real weekly CBCTs. The model achieved 0.74 dice overlap (against manual contours of an experienced radiation oncologist) on weekly CBCTs and was robust and generalizable enough to also produce state-of-the-art results on pCTs, achieving 0.77 dice overlap against the previous best of 0.72. This shows that our in silico data augmentation spans the realistic noise/artifact spectrum across patient CBCT/pCT data and can generalize well across modalities (without requiring retraining or domain adaptation), eventually improving the accuracy of treatment setup and response analysis.
Testing non-minimally coupled BEC dark matter with gravitational waves

We study the phenomenology associated to non-minimally coupled dark matter. In particular, we consider the model where the non-minimal coupling arises from the formation of relativistic Bose-Einstein condensates in high density regions of dark matter [1]. This non-minimal coupling is of Horndeski type and leads to a local modification of the speed of gravity with respect to the speed of light. Therefore we can constrain the model by using the joint detection of GW170817 and GRB170817A. We show that the constraints obtained in this way are quite tight, if the dark matter field oscillates freely, whereas they are substantially weakened, if the oscillations are damped by the non-minimal coupling.
Interactive Deep Refinement Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep learning techniques have successfully been employed in numerous computer vision tasks including image segmentation. The techniques have also been applied to medical image segmentation, one of the most critical tasks in computer-aided diagnosis. Compared with natural images, the medical image is a gray-scale image with low-contrast (even with some invisible parts). Because some organs have similar intensity and texture with neighboring organs, there is usually a need to refine automatic segmentation results. In this paper, we propose an interactive deep refinement framework to improve the traditional semantic segmentation networks such as U-Net and fully convolutional network. In the proposed framework, we added a refinement network to traditional segmentation network to refine the segmentation results.Experimental results with public dataset revealed that the proposed method could achieve higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods.
Mapping Topic Evolution Across Poetic Traditions

Poetic traditions across languages evolved differently, but we find that certain semantic topics occur in several of them, albeit sometimes with temporal delay, or with diverging trajectories over time. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to poetry corpora of four languages, i.e. German (52k poems), English (85k poems), Russian (18k poems), and Czech (80k poems). We align and interpret salient topics, their trend over time (1600--1925 A.D.), showing similarities and disparities across poetic traditions with a few select topics, and use their trajectories over time to pinpoint specific literary epochs.
The Genus Tremella (Basidiomycota, Tremellales) in Finland

Sixteen species of Tremella Pers. are currently known from Finland. Fifteen of them are illustrated and described, and a key to all Finnish species is given. Tremella cetrariicola Diederich & Coppins, T. cladoniae Diederich & M.S. Christ. , T. giraffa Chee J. Chen, T. globispora D.A. Reid, T. phaeophysciae Diederich & M.S. Christ. , T. polyporina D.A. Reid and T. ramalinae Diederich are reported as new to Finland.
ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP). I. Detection of New Hot Corinos with the ACA

We report the detection of four new hot corino sources, G211.47–19.27S, G208.68–19.20N1, G210.49–19.79W, and G192.12–11.10, from a survey study of Planck Galactic Cold Clumps in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex with the Atacama Compact Array. Three sources had been identified as low-mass Class 0 protostars in the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey. One source in the λ Orionis region is first reported as a protostellar core. We have observed abundant complex organic molecules (COMs), primarily methanol but also other oxygen-bearing COMs (in G211.47–19.27S and G208.68–19.20N1) and the molecule of prebiotic interest NH2CHO (in G211.47–19.27S), signifying the presence of hot corinos. While our spatial resolution is not sufficient to resolve most of the molecular emission structure, the large line width and high rotational temperature of COMs suggest that they likely reside in the hotter and innermost region immediately surrounding the protostar. In G211.47–19.27S, the D/H ratio of methanol ([CH2DOH]/[CH3OH]) and the 12C/13C ratio of methanol ([CH3OH]/[13CH3OH]) are comparable to those of other hot corinos. Hydrocarbons and long-carbon-chain molecules such as c-C3H2 and HCCCN are also detected in the four sources, likely tracing the outer and cooler molecular envelopes.
Predictive resource allocation for flexible loads with local QoS

Loads that can vary their power consumption without violating their Quality of service (QoS), that is flexible loads, are an invaluable resource for grid operators. Utilizing flexible loads as a resource requires the grid operator to incorporate them into a resource allocation problem. Since flexible loads are often consumers, for concerns of privacy it is desirable for this problem to have a distributed implementation. Technically, this distributed implementation manifests itself as a time varying convex optimization problem constrained by the QoS of each load. In the literature, a time invariant form of this problem without all of the necessary QoS metrics for the flexible loads is often considered. Moving to a more realistic setup introduces additional technical challenges, due to the problems' time-varying nature. In this work, we develop an algorithm to account for the challenges introduced when considering a time varying setup with appropriate QoS metrics.
Abnormal activity capture from passenger flow of elevator based on unsupervised learning and fine-grained multi-label recognition

We present a work-flow which aims at capturing residents' abnormal activities through the passenger flow of elevator in multi-storey residence buildings. Camera and sensors (hall sensor, photoelectric sensor, gyro, accelerometer, barometer, and thermometer) with internet connection are mounted in elevator to collect image and data. Computer vision algorithms such as instance segmentation, multi-label recognition, embedding and clustering are applied to generalize passenger flow of elevator, i.e. how many people and what kinds of people get in and out of the elevator on each floor. More specifically in our implementation we propose GraftNet, a solution for fine-grained multi-label recognition task, to recognize human attributes, e.g. gender, age, appearance, and occupation. Then anomaly detection of unsupervised learning is hierarchically applied on the passenger flow data to capture abnormal or even illegal activities of the residents which probably bring safety hazard, e.g. drug dealing, pyramid sale gathering, prostitution, and over crowded residence. Experiment shows effects are there, and the captured records will be directly reported to our customer(property managers) for further confirmation.
DDPG++: Striving for Simplicity in Continuous-control Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as long as the overestimation bias is controlled. This is contrast to existing literature which creates sophisticated off-policy techniques. Second, we pinpoint training instabilities, typical of off-policy algorithms, to the greedy policy update step; existing solutions such as delayed policy updates do not mitigate this issue. Third, we show that ideas in the propensity estimation literature can be used to importance-sample transitions from the replay buffer and selectively update the policy to prevent deterioration of performance. We make these claims using extensive experimentation on a set of challenging MuJoCo tasks. A short video of our results can be seen at this https URL .
CLADISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE NEARCTIC CHECKERED BEETLE GENUS AULICUS SPINOLA (COLEOPTERA: CLERIDAE: CLERINAE)

Abstract The results of a computerized cladistic analysis of the Nearctic checkered beetle genus Aulicus Spinola (Coleoptera: Cleridae: Clerinae) are presented. Seventeen adult morphological characters (7 multistate, 10 binary) were used to investigate the cladistic relationships of the fifteen valid species of Aulicus. Two Nearctic species of the genus Trichodes Herbst were used as outgroup taxa. Cladistic analysis with the parsimony computer program NONA yielded three equally parsimonious trees, each with thirteen nodes supported by unambiguous character optimizations, and having length 64, consistency index 50, and retention index 52. The strict consensus of these three trees has eleven resolved nodes.