Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influences of tree age and tree structure on the macrolichen Letharia vulpina: A case study in the Italian Alps

Abstract Tree age and tree structure are important determinants for epiphytic lichen communities, affecting substrate stability, light availability, and propagule dispersal. However, little is known about the relative importance of these 2 factors on many species. This work aims to evaluate the importance of tree age and tree structure in explaining the within-stand frequency of the macrolichen Letharia vulpina. The study was carried out in 2 larch–stone pine forests in the Eastern Italian Alps. The frequency of Letharia was evaluated using a standard sampling method. To explain the within-stand frequency of Letharia, tree age and several variables related to tree structure were considered. Multiple ordinary least square regression was applied to clarify the influence of the set of variables. Several partial regressions were then computed to evaluate the relative importance of each significant predictor. The frequency of Letharia increases with increasing tree age, tree diameter, and first branch height. Tree age is the most important variable, accounting for one third of the total explained variation, although tree structure also has a significant effect on lichen frequency. Due to its dispersal limitations and old-tree dependence Letharia is proposed as a suitable indicator of forest continuity. The results may be of interest for conservation purposes, since the frequency of Letharia may be enhanced by protecting old trees. Nomenclature: Nimis & Martellos, 2003.
Accounting Quality: Differences before and after IFRS-adoption in Europe Master-thesis in Accounting

This thesis examines the differences in the change in accounting quality after IFRS-adoption in Europe. In Europe there are mainly two sorts of countries to distinguish, namely common-law countries and code-law countries. Because the sorts of law differ from each other in the way they deal with accounting, firms and financial reports, it is expected that the effect of IFRS on the accounting quality will differ in those countries. In this thesis the model of Barth et al. (2008) is used, which measures accounting quality with several earnings management metrics. A sample of IFRS-adopters in the common-law countries is composed and a matched sample of firms from code-law countries is created to compare the changes in accounting quality. The results show that in the pre-adoption period the accounting quality of firms in codelaw countries differs significantly from the accounting quality of firms in common-law countries, although the significance is not applicable for every metric. In the post-adoption period the differences are not significant for every metric. This tells us that after IFRS-adoption the accounting quality is more on the same level within the examined countries. Furthermore, the results show that, in contrast to what several other papers show, the accounting quality does not increase after IFRS-adoption.
Victimisation and fear of crime among a sample of police detainees

National victimisation and social attitudes studies, such as the Australian component of the International Crime Victimisation Survey (ICVS) and the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), play an important role in criminological research by providing an essential complement to the administrative records of the police, courts and departments of corrections (Davis & Dossetor 2010; Johnson 2005; Weatherburn & Indermaur 2004). In particular, victimisation surveys sometimes show different details about the nature and extent of victimisation, especially for those crimes that are not regularly reported to the police.
Plasmid curing in bacteria

Plasmids are extrachromosomal pieces of double-stranded circular DNA which have the capability to replicate independently of the host chromosome, yet coexist with it [1]. To date, many species of bacteria isolated from diverse habitats are known to contain plasmid DNA [2,3]. Some plasmids are stable and can be maintained through successive generations by being partioned to each daughter cell during cell division. This allows each cell to receive at least one plasmid copy. In recent years, plasmids have been observed in a wide variety of bacteria. In part, this is due to the development of new procedures that allow the detection, isolation, and molecular characterization of plasmid DNA. When working with some plasmid-containing bacteria, it is often desirable to obtain a plasmid-cured derivative. This allows a direct comparison to be made between the plasmid-containing and plasmid-cured cells. Some plasmids undergo spontaneous segregation and deletion. However, the majority are extremely stable, and require the use of curing agents or other procedures (elevated growth temperature, thymine starvation), to increase the frequency of spontaneous segregation [4]. The usefulness of curing agents is unpredictable in many bacterial strains, as there are no standard protocols applicable to all plasmids. However, there are some procedures that have provided good results with certain species. The aims of this manuscript are to summarize and review plasmid curing agents and procedures. In view of the importance of plasmids in specifying antibiotic and metal-resistance; metabolic properties; pathogenicity; host specificity and nodulation ( Rhizobium spp.); conjugal properties, and replication-maintenance properties [2], reproducible procedures for obtaining plasmid-cured derivatives are necessary.
Towards Self-Supervised Semantic Representation with a Viewpoint-Dependent Observation Model

—In the context of semantic SLAM, we propose to represent the semantic information attached to objects (or generally, scenes) as continuous vectors in a latent space induced by a learned predictive observation model. We propose two observation models relating spatial changes in semantic measurements of an object to the latent object representation, and show how they can be used for joint inference of geometry and semantics free of discrete variables by maintaining a posterior over robot trajectory, geometric object and environment properties, and the learned object latent semantic representation. Both models relax assumptions on ground truth required to learn them w.r. t. existing analogues. In particular, one of the models is a residual-style formulation which can be learned in a weakly-supervised manner, under relatively mild assumptions of locally correct odometry and data association between some object detections in consecutive frames, not requiring prior knowledge of candidate object categories, or an object coordinate system to be deﬁned.
UsingVirtual Environments to Test the Effects of LifelikeArchitecture on People

U SIR is a digi t al collec tion of t h e r e s e a r c h ou t p u t of t h e U nive r si ty of S alford. Whe r e copyrigh t p e r mi t s, full t ex t m a t e ri al h eld in t h e r e posi to ry is m a d e fre ely availabl e online a n d c a n b e r e a d , dow nloa d e d a n d copied for no nco m m e rcial p riva t e s t u dy o r r e s e a r c h p u r pos e s . Ple a s e c h e ck t h e m a n u sc rip t for a ny fu r t h e r copyrig h t r e s t ric tions.
Application of A GMMV-based Multi-frequency Inversion Method to 3-D Half-space Inverse Scattering Problems

As is well known, the inverse scattering theory is confronted with severe ill-posedness and huge computational burden when applied to 3-D half-space cases. In this paper, a GMMV-based multi-frequency inversion method is applied to solve 3-D half-space inverse scattering problems by exploiting the joint sparsity of the contrast sources with a multi-source multi-frequency measurement configuration. The computational complexity is acceptable, for the direct scattering problem is solved for just one time. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that this method is able to recover the location, shape and posture of 3-D targets with several frequency components, which is a promising attempt to extend the inversion theory to 3-D half-space inverse scattering problems.
Out-of-Pocket expenditure for diagnosis of lung cancer: A significant pretreatment financial burden – Study from a tertiary care cancer center in North India

Background: The incidence of catastrophic expenditure due to health-care costs is growing and is estimated to be one of the major contributors to poverty. The need to pay out-of-pocket can also mean that households do not seek care when they need it. The total economic burden of cancer therapy amounts to the mean of 36,812 Indian National Rupee (INR). Out of this, 40% comprises expenditure incurred before coming to the hospital. Objectives: This study assessed the total out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) of lung cancer patients before they seek services for treatment at a tertiary care center. Materials and Methods: This was an institution-based cross-sectional survey in newly diagnosed and registered lung cancer patients > 18 years old. Self-designed, pretested, semi-structured questionnaire for sociodemographic details and direct costs incurred under various subsets was used. Data were analyzed using Epi Info version 7.2. 0.1. Results: Out of 91 patients registered, 73 (80.2%) were male. The median OOPE was 19000 INR (range: 8000–40,000). We found that the total mean expenditure (19,516.48 ± 6488.22) was almost ten times their per capita income (2012.444 ± 1283.09). The total mean direct medical costs incurred were 8974.73 ± 5252 INR and direct nonmedical costs incurred were 10,574.73 ± 4414 INR. This study further showed that the direct nonmedical costs incurred were significantly higher (P = 0.02) than the direct medical costs. Similarly, the costs incurred on diagnostics were significantly higher (P < 0.001) as compared to the cost incurred on medicines. Conclusion: Lung cancer patients face the burden of OOPE at every stage, starting from the initial visit to a local health facility till the final diagnosis and treatment at a tertiary health-care facility. More measures are warranted to curtail preregistration and pretreatment expenses such as preventing people from traveling long distances just for imaging and diagnostic facilities and hence curtailing nonmedical cataclysmic expenditure.
Understanding Very Deep Networks via Volume Conservation

Recently, very deep neural networks set new records across many application domains, like Residual Networks at the ImageNet challenge and Highway Networks at language processing tasks. We expect further excellent performance improvements in different fields from these very deep networks. However these networks are still poorly understood, especially since they rely on non-standard architectures. In this contribution we analyze the learning dynamics which are required for successfully training very deep neural networks. For the analysis we use a symplectic network architecture which inherently conserves volume when mapping a representation from one to the next layer. Therefore it avoids the vanishing gradient problem, which in turn allows to effectively train thousands of layers. We consider highway and residual networks as well as the LSTM model, all of which have approximately volume conserving mappings. We identified two important factors for making deep architectures working: (1) (near) volume conserving mappings through x = x+f(x) or similar (cf. avoiding the vanishing gradient); (2) Controlling the drift effect, which increases/decreases x during propagation toward the output (cf. avoiding bias shifts);
Context-aware Cost Shaping to Reduce the Impact of Model Error in Receding Horizon Control

This paper presents a method to enable a robot using stochastic Model Predictive Control (MPC) to achieve high performance on a repetitive path-following task. In particular, we consider the case where the accuracy of the model for robot dynamics varies significantly over the path–motivated by the fact that the models used in MPC must be computationally efficient, which limits their expressive power. Our approach is based on correcting the cost predicted using a simple learned dynamics model over the MPC horizon. This discourages the controller from taking actions that lead to higher cost than would have been predicted using the dynamics model. In addition, stochastic MPC provides a quantitative measure of safety by limiting the probability of violating state and input constraints over the prediction horizon. Our approach is unique in that it combines both online model learning and cost learning over the prediction horizon and is geared towards operating a robot in changing conditions. We demonstrate our algorithm in simulation and experiment on a ground robot that uses a stereo camera for localization.
Packet Classification Algorithms and Methods: A Critical Review

: Packet classification is process of Categorization of packets interested in flows. It holds a significant role in network applications like network security, firewalls, virtual network, Quality of service (QoS) and some other network services. To facilitate these services, a predefined set of rules are used for classification of data packets. It can be done either hardware or software means. The procedure encompasses the usage of database of rule sets. In the High speed networks with wire links, the reliability of software based classification is uncertain. In general, packet classification on multiple fields is a difficult problem. The systematic problem handling is dependent on how well the protocol and multiple fields are analyzed. Also it is quite challenging to attain high throughput with wire-speed classification which depends on rule set characteristics. The fore coming classification procedures are in great need of hardware implementation, which is limited by the need of abundant power and memory utilization. This paper aims at delivering many state of art in methods developed in the recent past on packet classification. These methods are focused on various parameters like throughput, latency, power consumption, memory utilization, update of rule set, etc. The significance and flaws of these methods are critically reviewed.
Effect of cassava-sweet potato intercrops patterns and weed control methods on weed suppression

Type: Research Field trials were conducted to investigate complementary weed control potential of sweet potato on cassava in 2015, 2016 and 2017 cropping seasons at the National Cereal Research Institutes’ farm, (NCRI), Amakama (07 ̊29′N latitude and 05 ̊28 ́E longitude), South Eastern Nigeria. The study was laid out in a split plot arrangement in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replicates. The main plots consisted of intercrop patterns which included two populations of sweet potato (10,000 and 20,000 plants ha-1) between rows of cassava, planted at 0, 4 and 8 weeks after planting cassava (WAP), sole cassava (SC) and sole sweet potato (SS), The sub-plots were four weed control treatments viz pre-emergence application of S-metolachlor+atrazine at 1.16+1.48 kg a.i ha-1 alone (P), S-metolachlor+atrazine at 1.16+1.48 kg a.i ha-1 followed by supplementary hoe weeding at 8WAP (PHW1), three hoe weedings at 4, 8 and 12 WAP (3HW) and a weedy check (0W). Results indicated that Cassava intercropped at the same time with sweet potato at 20,000 plant ha-1 (CS200) significantly reduced weed density and dry matter compared with SC which gave the poorest weed control. Weed density and dry matter were higher with cassava+sweet potato introduced at 8 WAP at both populations (CS108 and CS208) comparable to SC. There were statistically significant differences in weed growth between the different weed control methods. PHW1 significantly suppressed weed growth as effectively as 3HW when compared to 0W. The weedy check (0W) and P recorded the poorest weed control and performance of these crops at harvest. Although weed density and drymatter was significantly reduced by CS200 and PHW1 independently, results from this study suggested that CS200 combined PHW1 could provide a sustainable integrated weed management system than sole cassava, introducing the sweet potato at 8 WAP or herbicide treatment alone in the study area. Accepted: 29/01/2020
Introducing a New Co-polymeric Adsorbent with Fast Sorption Rate and High Sorption Capacity in Removal of Heavy Metal Ions: a Thermodynamic and Kinetic Study

Heavy metal ions have been recognized as the most hazardous contaminants of water sources. In this study, a novel polymeric adsorbent based on 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA), acrylic acid (AA), and 1,4-butanediol dimethacrylate (BDDMA) was successfully synthesized and its efficiency in removal of selected heavy metal ions (Pb2+ and Cd2+) were investigated. The role of significant parameters such as pH, contact time, adsorbent dose, metal ions concentration and temperature on removing harmful metal ions were logically studied. Results showed that the amount of pH, contact time and polymer adsorbent dose had direct relation in adsorption of metal ions. While increasing metal ion concentrations have no significant effect in metal ions adsorption and that was fixed up to 15 mg/L. Adsorption isothermal process of the new polymeric adsorbent was studied by several selected models and also maximum values of adsorption capacities of the introduced adsorbent for Pb2+ and Cd2+ ions were characterized. Adsorption /desorption cycles of synthesized polymer adsorbent were around 15 times. According to the modeling of adsorption data, the pseudo-second-order kinetic equation could best describe the adsorption kinetics. According to the intra-particle diffusion studies adsorption of heavy metal ions might be dominated by external diffusion mechanism.
Investigation of Anthocyanin Localization in Various Parts of Impatiens Balsamina L.

ABSTRACT Impatiens balsamina L. is an annual herbaceous plant of Balsamineaceae family and is cultured as a decorative plant in parks and gardens. Since it contains a large amount of minerals, calcium oxalate crystals and secondary metabolites (coumarin derivatives, scopoletin, isofraxidin), it is examined as both dangerous and medicinal plant. The aim of this study is to determine in which parts (node, internode, petiole, leaf, pedicel, petal) of I. balsamina L. the pigment anthocyanin accumulates and to measure its amount in the tissues by spectrophotometer. It was seen that the pigment accumulates more in the upper parts of the nodes on the stem, and that the amount of anthocyanin was significantly less in the internodes than in the nodes. The anthocyanin is responsible for the red color of flower petals was found in high amount in almost all vacuoles of the papillate epidermal cells.
Predator-prey model of Holling-type II with harvesting and predator in disease

A modified predator-prey model is introduced with Holling -type II. Including a constant rate of harvesting in both infected predators by prey, and predators who are prone to disease. An existence of positive biological equilibrium and uniformly boundedness of the present system are obtained as well. Furthermore, the local stability conditions are defined based on Routh-Hurwitz criteria. Finally, an effective Lyapunov function was performed to check the global asymptotic stability of the interior equilibrium point.
Drag Force on a Confined Particle: Particle Transport

The hydrodynamic interaction between a channel confinement and a suspended body is an important class of hydrodynamic problems. In this paper, we point out a quantitative study of the effects of the channel boundaries on the drag force exerted by the fluid on the particle surface. As results, we can obtain the drag coefficient as well as the flow in the channel due to the presence or the motion of the particle. We consider a channel with a periodic variation in diameter in which an axisymmetric particle is translating along its axis. Our numerical resolution is performed using the boundary integral formulation of Stokes flow which is solved using a boundary elements method. The numerical results are presented for the cases of spherical and ellipsoidal particles. Different geometric effects like the curvature of the channel, the particle geometry, and the channel size to particle size ratio are handled. Using the second law of Newton, these results enable us to study the existence and kinds of the mechanisms allowing the transport of the suspended particle and experienced by the computed drag force. Key-Words: Spherical and ellipsoidal particle; Periodic channel; Confined geometry; Drag force; Boundary elements method; Singular integrals.
Current pattern of primary aldosteronism diagnosis: Delayed and complicated

BACKGROUND Primary aldosteronism is the most common specifically treatable and potentially curable cause of hypertension. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to analyse the referral pattern and disease characteristics of patients with hypertension and suspected primary aldosteronism. METHODS We prospectively collected clinical data from patients who attended the Endocrine Hypertension Service (EHS) at Monash Health from May 2016 to May 2017. RESULTS Of 87 patients, 69.2% had indications for primary aldosteronism screening in the primary care setting, although only 3.7% were actually screened. At the time of referral to the EHS, 61% had hypertension for over 10 years and 42% of the patients with primary aldosteronism had associated end-organ damage. Targeted treatment of primary aldosteronism led to biochemical and clinical improvement in all patients. DISCUSSION The diagnosis of primary aldosteronism is currently delayed and associated with significant end-organ damage. Increased awareness of primary aldosteronism and its screening indications in primary and tertiary care is needed for earlier diagnosis and improved outcomes.
Performance Optimization Viewing Wawotobi Irrigation Network

Many countries continue to struggle hard to face water scarcity, water scarcity, and availability in Indonesia very much depending on climate conditions, local and global weather. The irrigation system development and management program in Indonesia in the field of food sovereignty is a leading sector enshrined in NAWA CITA through economic independence. The problem of optimizing water use more effectively and efficiently is often an indication of the low performance of water distribution efficiency and the lack of maintenance operating costs. Wawotobi irrigation has great water potential but there are still areas that do not get water according to their needs. The results of research on optimizing the Wawotobi irrigation network system on the performance of the hydrological conditions and hydraulic conditions are quite optimal, the Optimization index between the existing conditions and the performance value of CSI = 0.52 is quite optimal. Based on SEM analysis that the estimated value for performance is positive, for volume analysis (VE) in good condition. As for the coefficient of efficiency (CE) = 0.84 optimization is very efficient, with Hydraulic performance of Wawotobi irrigation system 62.46% less optimal performance index. The optimization model of the Wawotobi irrigation network system to the performance and the existing condition of the KR model is 0.129. KJ + e, the better the existing conditions, the better the service performance.