Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantifying landscape change as a consequence of plantation forestry expansion: a case study of the Koala Zone in south-west Victoria

ABSTRACT As the global trend of habitat fragmentation and plantation establishment continues to rise, the amount of habitat that can be provided by plantations for native forest-dwelling fauna becomes increasingly pertinent. Potential benefits of plantation establishment for fauna are often dependent on the vegetation they replace, as converting native forest or natural non-forest ecosystems to plantation forest is detrimental to biodiversity. However, establishing plantation forests on previously cleared land may increase landscape heterogeneity by providing movement corridors and complementary forest habitat. Here, we present a case study of the expansion of plantation forestry in south-west Victoria, Australia, and discuss implications for koalas and other forest-dwelling fauna. Using the Hansen Global Forest Change v1.4 (2000–2016) dataset and Google Earth Engine, we quantified the amount of recent landscape change (forest cover gain and loss) attributed to plantations in south-west Victoria from 2000 to 2016 and determined the area of plantations established adjacent to native forest. We observed high levels of landscape change during the study period, with harvested plantations accounting for 70.5% (81 490 ha) of all forest lost and established plantations accounting for 75.4% (98 388 ha) of all forest gained. Of those plantations established, 34% (13 056 ha) occurred within 1 km of native forest, while only 2.8% (690 ha) occurred within 100 m of native forest. Our analysis highlights the importance of planting and harvesting regimes that consider overall landscape configuration as well as the spatial arrangement of plantations adjacent to native forest. Such considerations may increase plantation value to wildlife and overall biodiversity by enabling higher levels of functional connectivity, limiting habitat isolation and facilitating the movement of wildlife within and beyond plantation forests.
A 0.7-V 870- W Digital-Audio CMOS

This paper introduces a power-efficient, chopper-sta- bilizedswitched-capacitorsigma-delta modulatorthatcom- bines delayed input feedforward and single-comparator tracking multi-bit quantization to achieve high-precision, low-voltage analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion. An experimental prototype of the proposed architecture has been integrated in a 0.18- m CMOS technology. The prototype operates from a 0.7-V supply voltage with a sampling rate of 5 MSamples/sec and consumes only 870 W of total power. The converter achieves a dynamic range of 100 dB, a peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 100 dB and a peak signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of 95 dB for a 25-kHz signal bandwidth. Index Terms—Analog-to-digital conversion, chopper stabiliza- tion, CMOS analog integrated circuits, digital audio, input feed- forward, low-voltage low-power analog circuits, oversampling A/D converters, sigma-delta modulation, switched-capacitor circuits.
Variation of cow’s milk composition across different daily milking sessions and feasibility of using a composite sampling

ABSTRACT: This study vised to detect possible changes in chemical and cellular composition of cow’s milk at different milking sessions and to test if proportional or composite milk sampling can be used instead of separate milk analysis. Two experiments were conducted: one in cows milked thrice daily and the other one in cows milked twice daily. In both experiments, three milk samples were collected from each cow in each milking session in order to determine milk composition at each milking; to have a composite sample, i.e., a single sample from the same aliquots of milk from each milking session; and to have a proportional sample, i.e., a single sample from each milking session in a volume proportional to milk volume yielded. Fat content and fat to protein ratio were higher in the afternoon on both experiments. Protein content was larger in the afternoon on cows milked twice daily, but not on cows milked thrice daily. Lactose level was not different across the milking sessions in any of the experiments. The urea level was higher in the afternoon and evening milking on cows milked thrice daily, and in the morning milking on cows milked twice daily. Somatic cell count did not differ between milking in any experiment. No difference in milk composition was noted between proportional and composite samples on cows milked thrice or twice daily. The collection of proportional and composite samples is recommended in twice or thrice daily milking sessions so that the analysis of milk components becomes more easy and cheap.
Diagnostic study of Toxoplasma gondii in students of Thi-Qar university-Iraq by Real-Time PCR

Toxoplasma gondii is a unique intracellular parasite, which infect a large proportion of the world, population, but clinically un commonly causes significant disease. The present study was performed for the first time in Thi-Qar province to estimate the prevalence of toxoplasmosis among university students . Venous blood samples were collected from 319 (111 males and 208 females) apparently healthy students ,they have ages between (18-42) years attended from different colleges of Thi-Qar university-Iraq, during the period from October 2013 to April 2014. Enzyme linked Immunosorbant Assay (ELISA), was used to evaluate the presence of anti-Toxoplasma IgM and IgG antibodies and detection of B1 gene of T.gondii DNA by Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction(RT-PCR). The results indicated that 70 (21.94%) of students were exposed positive for anti-Toxoplasma antibodies,17 (5.33%) of them had IgM,38 (11.91%) had IgG, and 15 (4.70%) had both IgM and IgG. Statistically, significant difference between them. The results showed significant difference between males and females in rate of positive for antiToxoplasma antibodies, which recorded 24 (7.52%) and 46 (14.42%) respectively . Besides the serological diagnosis of T.gondii Real-Time PCR (RT-PCR) technique was used to confirm the infection with T.gondii by detection B1 gene of T.gondii DNA in the blood of students. out of 319 students only 6.26% showed positive toxoplasmosis among those 8(2.50%)were males and 12(3.76%) were females. The positive result in RT-PCR analysis were distributed on the patterns of the antiToxoplasma antibodies by ELISA test , it was no found any positive blood samples with IgM,IgG and both IgM and IgG respectively whereas 20 positive cases of no anti –Toxoplasma antibodies. Real-Time PCR test in blood of students has advantages in detection of recent or active toxoplasmosis.
THE SEPARATION OF THE RARE EARTHS BY PARTITION CHROMATOGRAPHY WITH REVERSED PHASES. PART III. THE USE OF BATCH EXTRACTIONS TO OBTAIN DISTRIBUTION DATA

The distribution of the elements neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, and erbium between aqueous perchloric acid and a solid phase consisting of di(2-ethylhexyl) hydrogen phosphate retained on a poly (vinyl chloride/vinyl acetate) copolymer was investigated by a batch extraction technique. The dependency of distribution ratio on hydrogen ion concentration of the aqueous phase and total quantity of rare earth partitioning was determined and the apparent capacity of the solid phase found. Results are compared with figures obtained from elutions when the rare earths are eluted chromatographically from a column of the solid phase. (auth)
Model-based approach with adaptive bounds of robust controllers for robot manipulators

This paper presents a dynamic compensation methodology for the robust trajectory tracking control of uncertain robot manipulators. To improve the tracking performance of the system, a full model-based feedforward compensation with continuous VS-type robust control is developed in this paper. Since possible bounds of uncertainties are unknown, the adaptive bounds of the robust control is used to estimate the uncertainty bounds. The stability and robustness issues of the proposed control algorithm are investigated via the Lyapunov method. The control algorithm presented guarantees that all system responses are uniformly and ultimately bounded. Thus, it is shown that the control system is evaluated to be highly robust with respect to significant uncertainties. <<ETX>>
Orthographic Case Restoration Using Supervised Learning Without

One challenge in text processing is the treatment of case insensitive documents such as speech recognition results. The traditional approach is to re-train a language model excluding case-related features. This paper presents an alternative two-step approach whereby a preprocessing module (Step 1) is designed to restore case-sensitive form to feed the core system (Step 2). Step 1 is implemented as a Hidden Markov Model trained on a large raw corpus of case sensitive documents. It is demonstrated that this approach (i) outperforms the feature exclusion approach for Named Entity tagging, (ii) leads to limited degradation for semantic parsing and relationship extraction, (iii) reduces system complexity, and (iv) has wide applicability: the restored text can feed both statistical model and rule-based systems.
In situ Analysis of Mucus Residing Bacterial Community Reveals an Ecological Niche Key for Gut Microbiome Stability

Summary Colonic mucus bacterial communities are critical for determining disease pathology and promoting colonization resistance. Yet the key ecological properties of mucus resident communities that make them crucial for maintaining homeostatic microbiome function remain poorly defined. Using an approach that combines in situ hybridization, laser microdissection and 16s rRNA sequencing of spatially distinct regions of the mouse gut lumen, we discovered that the microbial community embedded in the mucus layer is structurally and compositionally distinct and drives stability of the gut microbiome. Structurally, the mucus residing microbial community had a higher density of bacteria than in the lumen and formed a biofilm-like structure whose integrity was dependent on Gram-positive commensals. Compositionally the dense mucus community excluded bacteria belonging to phylum Proteobacteria. Additionally, the dense bacterial community in the mucus was significantly more diverse and consisted of bacterial species that were unique to it. Upon antibiotic treatment, the species-rich and dense bacterial community in the mucus lost fewer Firmicutes and showed smaller bloom of Proteobacteria compared to the lumen. Taken together our work discloses a crucial role for the mucus layer in promoting stability of the gut microbiome in the perfused intestinal ecosystem by spatially entrenching unique and diverse bacterial species.
Independent Component Analysis Applied in Biomedical Signal Processing

The EEG is composed of electrical potentials arising from several sources. Each source (including separate neural clusters, blink artifact, or pulse artifact) projects a unique topography onto the scalp-'scalp maps'. These maps are mixed according to the principle of linear superposition. Independent component analysis (ICA) attempts to reverse the superposition by separating the EEG into mutually independent scalp maps, or components so that the method used is the study is independent component analysis (ICA). The Polysomnogram (PSG), a complex of more signals recorded over night for the patients with respiratory problems contains also redundant information that can be removed using the ICA.
Ilamycin E, a natural product of marine actinomycete, inhibits triple-negative breast cancer partially through ER stress-CHOP-Bcl-2

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death among women in the worldwide. Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has a poor clinical outcome. The antitumor efficacy of Ilamycins, natural products with anti-tuberculosis activity isolated from deep sea-derived Streptomyces atratus, in TNBC has not been investigated, and the mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we demonstrated that Ilamycin-E, but not -F, decreases cell viability, inhibits G1/S cell cycle progression, and promotes apoptosis in the TNBC cell lines HCC1937 and MDA-MB-468. Ilamycin E promotes apoptosis via activation of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, increasing the expression of CHOP, and down-regulating the expression of anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2. Depletion of CHOP or overexpression of Bcl2 significantly rescued Ilamycin E-induced apoptosis. These findings indicate that Ilamycin E has anti-cancer activity in TNBC.
SEEWAVE, A FREE MODULAR TOOL FOR SOUND ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS

ABSTRACT We review Seewave, new software for analysing and synthesizing sounds. Seewave is free and works on a wide variety of operating systems as an extension of the R operating environment. Its current 67 functions allow the user to achieve time, amplitude and frequency analyses, to estimate quantitative differences between sounds, and to generate new sounds for playback experiments. Thanks to its implementation in the R environment, Seewave is fully modular. All functions can be combined for complex data acquisition and graphical output, they can be part of important scripts for batch processing and they can be modified ad libitum. New functions can also be written, making Seewave a truly open-source tool.
A Semi-Automated Tool Flow for Roofline Anaylsis of OpenCL Kernels on Accelerators

We propose a tool-flow methodology that can be applied to analyze and track the performance of OpenCL applications on heterogeneous platforms. Using a case study on a datacenter representative workload, we evaluate our tool flow on three distinct heterogeneous platforms and demonstrate how it can be employed more widely to provide insight and track attainable performance of OpenCL applications. Our methodology is motivated by the need for a common set of metrics that can characterize the performance and power efficiency of OpenCL applications on the increasingly diverse range of emerging heterogeneous platforms now relevant to both HPC and the datacenter market.
Interactions between ecological, evolutionary and environmental processes unveil complex dynamics of insular plant diversity

Understanding how biodiversity emerges and how it varies in space and time requires integration of the underlying processes that affect biodiversity at different levels of ecological organization. We present BioGEEM (BioGeographical Eco‐Evolutionary Model), a spatially explicit model that integrates theories and processes understood to drive biodiversity dynamics. We investigated the necessary degree of mechanistic complexity by exploring simulation experiments to evaluate the relative roles of the underlying processes across spatio‐temporal scales and ecological levels (e.g. populations, species, communities).
A REVIEW ON VIDEO INPAINTING TECHNIQUES

The problem of video completion whose goal is to reconstruct the missing pixels in the holes created by damage to the video or removal of selected objects is critical to many applications, such as video repairing, movie post production, etc. The key issues in video completion are to keep the spatial-temporal coherence, and the faithful inference of pixels. A lot of researchers have worked in the area of video inpainting. Most of the techniques try to ensure either spatial consistency or temporal continuity between the frames. But none of them try to ensure both of them in the same technique with a good quality. Although the amount of work proposed in video completion is comparatively less as that of image inpainting, a number of methods have been proposed in the recent years. The methods can be classified as: Patch-based methods and object-based methods. Patch-based methods use block-based sampling as well as simultaneous propagation of texture and structure information as a result of which, computational efficiency is achieved. Hence, the researchers have extended the similar concept in video inpainting. The texture synthesis based methods doesn’t contain structural information while, PDE-based methods leads to blurring artifacts. Patch based methods produces high-quality effects maintaining consistency of local structures.This paper is based on a survey in the area of video inpainting.
Drosophila Aop imposes a delay on E(spl)-mediated repression of Ato during R8 specification

Drosophila retinal patterning requires the expression of Atonal (Ato) through coordinated regulation of 5’ and 3’ enhancer modules. ato-3’ directs initial expression of Ato which then directs autoregulation via 5’-ato. Notch (N) signaling also regulates 5’-ato, first enhancing Ato expression and later repressing Ato by inducing E(spl) bHLHs. N signaling balances these opposing functions by directing its obligate nuclear transcription factor, Suppressor of Hairless (Su(H)), only in repressing 5’-ato. In this study, we reveal a novel and more nuanced role for Su(H) in its regulation of 5’-ato. During retinal patterning, Su(H) is required for the expression Anterior open (Aop), which, in turn, promotes 5’-ato activity. We demonstrate that Aop is induced early in retinal patterning via N pathway activity, wherein Aop is required cell-autonomously for robust Ato expression during photoreceptor specification. In aop mutants, expression from both ato enhancers is perturbed, suggesting that Aop promotes the Ato autoregulation through maintenance of ato-3’ activity. Clonal analysis indicates that Aop indirectly opposes E(spl)-mediated repression of Ato. In the absence of both Aop and E(spl), Ato expression is restored and the founding ommatidial photoreceptors, R8s, are specified. These findings suggest that N signaling, through a potentially conserved relationship with Aop, imposes a delay on ato repression, thus permitting autoregulation and retinogenesis. Author Summary The eye of the fruit fly has served as a paradigm to understand tissue patterning. Complex intercellular signaling networks cooperate during retinal development to allow cells to become specialized visual-system precursor neurons at a specific time and place. These neurons are precisely spaced within the developing retina and later recruit other cells to form the repeated units that comprise insect eyes. The exact placement of each precursor cell precipitates from the precise regulation of the atonal gene, which is first expressed in a cluster of (10-20) cells before becoming restricted to only one cell from each cluster. The Notch signaling pathway is required for both aspects of atonal regulation, first permitting up-regulation within each cluster, and then the subsequent down-regulation to a single cell. However, the connection between these two modes of Notch signaling had remained unclear. In this report, we have identified that the anterior open gene is required to impose a delay on the restrictive mode of Notch signaling, permitting the initial up-regulation of atonal to occur freely. In flies mutant for anterior open, atonal bypasses its own up-regulation and proceeds directly to its singled-out pattern but with significantly diminished robustness than occurs normally.
An interoperable and secure architecture for internet-scale decentralized personal communication

PAGE Interpersonal network communications, including Voice over IP (VoiP) and Instant Messaging (1M), are increasingly popular communications tools. However, systems to date have generally adopted a client-server model, requiring complex centralized infrastructure, or have not adhered to any VoiP or IM standard. Many deployment scenarios either require no central equipment, or due to unique properties of the deployment, are limited or rendered unattractive by central servers. To address these scenarios, we present a solution based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard, utilizing a decentralized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mechanism to distribute data. Our new approach, P2PSIP, enables users to communicate with minimal or no centralized servers, while providing secure, realtime, authenticated communications comparable in security and performance to centralized solutions. We present two complete protocol descriptions and system designs. The first, the SOSIMPLE/dSIP protocol, is a P2P-over-SIP solution, utilizing SIP both for the transport of P2P messages and personal communications, yielding an interoperable, single-stack solution for P2P communications. The RELOAD protocol is a binary P2P protocol, designed for use in a SIP-using-P2P architecture where an existing SIP application is modified to use an additional, binary RELOAD stack to distribute user information without need for a central server. To meet the unique security needs of a fully decentralized communications system, we propose an enrollment-time certificate authority model that provides asserted identity and strong P2P and user-level security. In this model, a centralized server is contacted only at enrollment time. No run-time connections to the servers are required. Additionally, we show that traditional P2P message routing mechanisms are inappropriate for P2PSIP. The existing mechanisms are generally optimized for file sharing and neglect critical practical elements of the open Internetnamely link-level security and asymmetric connectivity caused by Network Address Translators (NATs). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce a new message routing paradigm, Adaptive Routing (AR}, and using both analytical models and simulation show that AR significantly improves message routing performance for P2PSIP systems. Our work has led to the creation of a new research topic within the P2P and interpersonal communications communities, P2PSIP. Our seminal publications have provided the impetus for subsequent P2PSIP publications, for the listing of P2PSIP as a topic in conference calls for papers, and for the formation of a new working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), directed to develop an open Internet standard for P2PSIP. To my wonderful wife Marcia and my son Alexander
A molecular model for self-assembly of synaptonemal complex protein SYCE3

The synaptonemal complex (SC) is a supramolecular protein assembly that mediates homologous chromosome synapsis during meiosis. This zipper-like structure assembles in a continuous manner between homologous chromosome axes, enforcing a 100-nm separation along their entire length, and providing the necessary three-dimensional framework for crossover formation. The mammalian SC is formed of eight components - SYCP1-3, SYCE1-3, TEX12 and SIX6OS1 - arranged in transverse and longitudinal structures. These largely α-helical coiled-coil proteins undergo heterotypic interactions, coupled with recursive self-assembly of SYCP1, SYCE2-TEX12, and SYCP2-SYCP3, to achieve the vast supramolecular structure of the SC. Here, we report a novel self-assembly mechanism of SC central element component SYCE3, identified through multi-angle light scattering and small-angle X-ray scattering. SYCE3 adopts a dimeric four-helical bundle structure that acts as the building block for concentration-dependent self-assembly into a series of discrete higher order oligomers. This is achieved through staggered lateral interactions between self-assembly surfaces of SYCE3 dimers, and their end-on interaction through intermolecular domain-swap between dimer folds. These mechanisms combine to achieve potentially limitless SYCE3 assembly, which particularly favours formation of dodecamers of three laterally associated domain-swap tetramers. Our findings extend the family of self-assembling proteins within the SC and provide novel means for structural stabilisation of the SC central element.