Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physiological Adaptations of Crayfish to the Hypoxic Environment

Synopsis. Crayfish routinely encounter waters of reduced oxygen ten? sion, resulting in a broad array of behavioral and physiological responses. Many animals when faced with this stress will simply remove themselves from the irritating environment through voluntary migration. When an animal, either by choice or through physical constraints remains in a hypoxic environment it must compensate for the reduction in 02 avail? ability. Many crayfish have the ability to maintain oxygen consumption independent of water Po2 down to some critical level; below this the animal can no longer maintain normoxic levels of aerobic metabolism. Regulation of oxygen uptake is thought to be due to a hypoxia-induced hyperventilation along with an increase in hemocyanin 02 affinity and an improvement in the ability of the respiratory surfaces to transfer 02. Crayfish exposed to a reduction in water oxygen also show a strong brad? ycardia, which is compensated for by an increase in stroke volume, result? ing in a maintenance of cardiac output. The adaptive advantage of this response is uncertain. As water Po2 drops crayfish have been shown to redistribute cardiac output, presumably through the action of the cardioarterial valves. Hemolymph is shunted to the anterior end of the animal, resulting in a greater perfusion of nervous tissue. The animals' ability to detect changes in water Po2 appear to result from 02 sensitive receptors located on the gills or in the branchiocardiac veins. The integrated physiological response toward environmental hypoxia allows the crayfish to not only deal with the stress but to maintain activity.
Theoretical limits of Virtual Reality

In recent years there has been a strong development of the concept of virtual reality (VR) which from the first video games developed in the 60s has reached the current immersive systems. VR and the consequent deception of perception pose an interesting question: is it possible to deceive the mind to the point of not being able to recognize whether the perceived reality is real or simulated? In addition to this question, another question arises spontaneously: is it possible to simulate a non-reality in which the physical laws do not apply? The answer to the first question is that it would theoretically be possible to deceive the mind to the point of not being able to recognize whether the perceived reality is real or simulated, furthermore it is also possible to simulate a non-real, i.e. magical, world. However, this possibility is based on hiding degrees of freedom from the observer, therefore it requires the complicity of the observer to be realised. It can be said that a VR system can simulate both a real and non-real experience. For an observer, a virtual reality experience is still an experience of reality. This experience can be exchanged for a different experience, that is, for a different reality that can be real or not real.
Modification on Design Equation of Facultative Stabilization Ponds Due to Egyptian Circumstances

Stabilization ponds are established in various cities and villages in Egypt there are about 38 ponds covering almost all the regions of the country some of these ponds are working with low efficiency some of them are over designed and some are under designed One of the main problems is the plants are not fenced properly which maximize the wind effect and cause disturbance in the pond performance, some ponds are designed to receive a certain flow but actually it receives much less flow which increases the retention time . In this study, Eight working WSPs in different locations all over Egypt were monitored and their performances were evaluated with respect to ponds retention time and prevailing climate temperature, wind and humidity conditions. These locations had covered regions presented in (Al Beheira, Fayoum, New Valley, Luxor, Hurghada, Sharm El Sheikh, Areesh & Abu Rudies) Each location had been visited during season's winter, spring, summer & autumn to obtain the different weather conditions and several samples were collected during the day over three days in each season. It was found that reduced pond retention time could work perfectly with climate conditions in Egypt. Conclusions were drawn to suggest a modification on the design equation of the facultative stabilization ponds to meet Egyptian circumstances that minimize the required area for such technology in Egypt application.
IDEA AND PERSPECT IVE The geography of spatial synchrony

Jonathan A. Walter,* Lawrence W. Sheppard, Thomas L. Anderson, Jude H. Kastens, Ottar N. Bjørnstad, Andrew M. Liebhold and Daniel C. Reuman* Abstract Spatial synchrony, defined as correlated temporal fluctuations among populations, is a fundamental feature of population dynamics, but many aspects of synchrony remain poorly understood. Few studies have examined detailed geographical patterns of synchrony; instead most focus on how synchrony declines with increasing linear distance between locations, making the simplifying assumption that distance decay is isotropic. By synthesising and extending prior work, we show how geography of synchrony, a term which we use to refer to detailed spatial variation in patterns of synchrony, can be leveraged to understand ecological processes including identification of drivers of synchrony, a long-standing challenge. We focus on three main objectives: (1) showing conceptually and theoretically four mechanisms that can generate geographies of synchrony; (2) documenting complex and pronounced geographies of synchrony in two important study systems; and (3) demonstrating a variety of methods capable of revealing the geography of synchrony and, through it, underlying organism ecology. For example, we introduce a new type of network, the synchrony network, the structure of which provides ecological insight. By documenting the importance of geographies of synchrony, advancing conceptual frameworks, and demonstrating powerful methods, we aim to help elevate the geography of synchrony into a mainstream area of study and application.
New species of Eschweilera (Lecythidaceae) from southern Brazil

Eschweilera tetrapetala Mori andE. alvimii Mori are described and compared withE. compressa (Vellozo) Miers, the only other species of this genus known to have four petals. It is concluded that this small group of species probably evolved from a common ancestor whose range was fragmented by climatic and vegetational changes in the Pleistocene. The distributions ofE. compressa andE. alvimii support the hypothesis that moist forest refuges existed around Rio de Janeiro and southern Bahia/northern Espírito Santo throughout the Pleistocene.
Double-Emitter Source (DES) for Irrigation Experiments in Salinity and Fertilization

A double-emitter source (DES) irrigation system was designed, using trickle instead of sprinkler irrigation. Two trickle laterals and their emitters connected to two tanks of stock solutions are coupled together to form a double-joint lateral. Tbe emitters of the two lines have different and varying discharges to obtain various mixings between the two stock solutions while maintaining constant application rates. The layout produces a sequence of intermediates between maximal and minimal concentrations. The method was tested for a salinity experiment on globe artichoke (Cynara scolymus L.) and a fertilization experiment for amaryllis (Hippeastrum hybrid). Average electrical conductivity (EC) of the fresh and saline laterals was 1.5 and 6.2 dS m -1 , respectively. The N and K concentrations in the stock solution were 13.12 g L -1 and 9.38 g L -1 , respectively, for a mixed and diluted maximum of 777 and 556 mg L -1 N and K at the irrigation solution. Artichoke yield declined by 60% due to salinity when EC increased from 1.5 to 6.2 dS m -1 . Hippeastrum bulb diameter and weight increased 35% with high N and low K application. We condude that the double-emitter source can be used for precise application of varying salts or nutrients in multivariable experiments. Advantages include prevention of canopy wetting by saline water, precise distribution of the factor to be evaluated, and small experimental plots (reducing time, area, and labor requirements).
Safety Evaluation of Robot Systems via Uncertainty Quantification

In this paper, we present an approach for quantifying the propagated uncertainty of robot systems in an online and data-driven manner. Especially in Human-Robot Collaboration, keeping track of the safety compliance during run time is essential: Misclassifying dangerous situations as safe might result in severe accidents. According to official regulations (e.g., ISO standards), safety in industrial robot applications depends on critical parameters, such as the distance and relative velocity between humans and robots. However, safety can only be assured given a measure for the reliability of these parameters. While different risk detection and mitigation approaches exist in literature, a measure that can be used to evaluate safety limits online, and succinctly implies whether a situation is safe or dangerous, is missing to date. Motivated by this, we introduce a generalizable method for calculating the propagated measurement uncertainty of arbitrary parameters, that captures the accumulated uncertainty originating from sensory devices and environmental disturbances of the system. To show that our approach delivers correct results, we perform validation experiments in simulation. In addition, we employ our method in two real-world settings and demonstrate how quantifying the propagated uncertainty of critical parameters facilitates assessing safety online in Human-Robot Collaboration.
Supervised Pun Detection and Location with Feature Engineering and Logistic Regression

Puns, by exploiting ambiguities, are commonly used in literature to achieve a hu-morous or rhetorical effect. Previous approaches mainly focus on machine learning models or rule-based methods, however, they have not addressed how and why a pun is detected or located. Focusing on this, we propose a system for recognizing and locating English puns. Regarding the fact of limited training data and the aim of measuring how relevant a predictor and its direction of the association is, we compile a dataset and explore different feature sets as input for logistic regression, and measure their inﬂuence in terms of the assigned weights. To our best knowledge, our system achieves better results than state-of-the-art systems on three subtasks for different types of puns respectively.
A Comparative Analysis of Neural Networks Implemented with Reduced Numerical Precision and Approximations

Machine Learning belongs to a class of computational problems that are resilient to noise and approximations. This is recently being explored in efﬁcient implementations of these algorithms which aim to reduce resource consumption (like memory and energy) while retaining the application performance or trading off some acceptable degradation for the beneﬁts. This paper compares precise and approximated implementations of Artiﬁcial Neural Networks, trained with the same architecture and parameters and applied to well known benchmark problems. Results show that direct conversion to more efﬁcient and approximated structures does not always work ﬂawlessly when simpliﬁcations are applied not only to the network but also to the training calculations.
Deduplicating Virtual Machine Checkpoints for Distributed System Simulation

Full system simulation suers – due to its increased complexity – from amuch lower execution speed than hardware-accelerated virtualization, resulting in a slowdown of over 1000. To close this performance gap, SimuBoost aims at increasing full system simulation’s execution speed by performing parallelized distributed simulations, which are started using checkpoints from a hardware-accelerated virtualization. To reach an optimal degree of parallelization, checkpoints have to be taken at an interval of 1–2 s, which minimzes the overhead of the checkpointing. In this thesis, a checkpointing mechanism that meets the requirements for SimuBoost – minimized data amount and downtime – is proposed. To meet these requirements, the checkpointing mechanism performs incremental checkpointing of virtualized systems in QEMU and deduplicates both memory and block device data via a hash-based cache. e checkpoints are saved in a NoSQL database for a simplied distribution. e evaluation shows that the hash-based cache greatly decreases the data amount, especially by reusing data that was already checkpointed in the past: Up to 42% of memory pages can be saved through deduplication. However, the evaluation also shows that the overhead caused by database queries is too high and that it is responsible for 40–60% of the total downtime. erefore, this approach needs to be optimized by combining it with CoW to reach a suitable downtime.
Lidar-based surface following control for unmanned aerial vehicles

A simulation study is performed on a quadcopter which uses a LIDAR sensor to allow a quadcopter to navigate along and maintain a set distance from an unknown vertical surface. The dynamic equations of a quadcopter are linearized about the hovering equilibrium. For the purpose of design, all surfaces are assumed to be flat and any variations in shape are considered to be disturbances. The design process begins with the development of a potential field control design to allow the quadcopter to autonomously follow a flat surface, while maintaining a desired distance from the surface. To allow the quadcopter to follow a curved surface, the potential field technique is modified to maintain the xb axis parallel to the surface. Finally a wall following technique that directly uses the minimum range measurement to maintain the distance from the surface is developed. To simulate the control designs, a non-linear quadcopter model is used along with a model of a 2D scanning LIDAR sensor. The potential field control technique tracks flat surfaces with no steadystate error, though when curved surface following is added, a tracking error problem occurs due to measurement noise. The wall following design proves to be the superior surface following technique with greater robustness to steady-state error and results in relatively small tracking errors when navigating sinusoidal surfaces and corners.
The Role of JAZ10 in the Regulation of Jasmonate Signaling

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.02 Table of contents-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.03 Common abbreviations---------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.03 I. Hypotheses and specific aims-----------------------------------------------------------------Pg.04 II. Background and significance----------------------------------------------------------------Pg.05 III. Research design and preliminary data---------------------------------------------------Pg.11 IV. Research summary----------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.19 V. Tentative timetable-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.19 VI. Potential funding sources--------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.19 VII. References-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Pg.19 Common abbreviations amiRNAs – artificial microRNAs ChIP – Chromatin Immunoprecipitation COI1 – CORONATINE INSENSITIVE1 D1 – Domain1 EAR – ETHYLENE RESPONSIVE FACTOR-associated amphiphilic repressor JA – Jasmonic acid JA-Ile – (+)-7-iso-Jasmonoyl-L-isoleucine JAZ – Jasmonate ZIM-domain MeJA – Methyl-jasmonate NINJA – NOVEL INTERACTOR OF JAZ SCF – Skp/Cullin/F-box TF – Transcription factor TPL – TOPLESS WT – Wild Type ZIM Zinc-finger Inflorescence Meristem
The precision of otolith radiometric ageing of fish and the effect of within-sample heterogeneity

Ageing of fish using radiometric methods applied to otoliths is a widely accepted and valuable technique for validating annulus counts. Initially, whole otoliths were analysed, but it is now more frequent, and requires less stringent assumptions, to analyse otolith cores. Data from published studies were used to calculate typical ageing errors, assuming linear growth in otolith mass. These errors increase with increasing age, are much smaller if an improved method for measuring 226Ra is used, and, for older ages, are greater when cores are used (nevertheless, the use of cores, rather than whole otoliths, is recommended because the stronger assumptions required for the latter are hard to justify or verify). It is common to use more than one otolith per sample (sometimes more than 100) so as to provide sufficient sample mass, and to assume no within-sample heterogeneity in otolith age and mass-growth rate. A simulation experiment was carried out to determine whether any violation of this assumption was like.
Do Employee Engagement Practices Affect Job Performance: A Study of Telecommunication Companies in Jordan

This study aims at investigating the impact of employee engagement practices on job performance of telecommunication companies in Jordan. The population of the study consists of the employees working at the centers of telecommunication companies in Jordan counted (468). A convenience sample estimated (300) employees. A questionnaire was used as a major tool for data collection adopted from the previous studies, to answer the study questions, and test the hypotheses
Risky Behaviors among HIV Serodiscordant and Seroconcordant Couples in Yaounde-Cameroon

Introduction: Serodiscordant HIV couples are an important source of HIV spread in sub-Saharan Africa. To limit the transmission of HIV within couples, UNAIDS has defined many strategies, including unconditional treatment of the infected partner, systematic condom use, assisted reproduction, regular screening of the negative partner. In Cameroon, there is little information on the follow up of HIV serodiscordant and seroconcordant couples. The purpose of this work was to describe risky behaviors within serodiscordant couples. Method: This cohort study was conducted in five health facilities. The data were collected using a survey form and the blood collected was used to test consenting participants for HIV, HbsAg, HCV, syphilis, and chlamydia. Data were analyzed using the GraphPad Prism 6 software. Results: Eighteen seroconcordant and fifty tree serodiscordant couples agreed to participate in the study, where women were predominantly infected (56.66%). Serodiscordance was known for 64 months on average. Among serodiscordant couples, 86.79% infected partners were on ARV treatment, among them 10/46 (15.22%) stopped treatment. Sexual relationship existed in 50/53 couples, with non-systematic use of condom in 44 couples (83.01%). Extramarital relationships were reported in 10 of the 23 serodiscordant couples (56.60%) with libido disorders. HBsAg was most present in HIV infected women (11.32 %) while, HIV-uninfected men were most infected with viral hepatitis C (7. 55 %). Conclusion: This work has highlighted many risky behaviors in serodiscordant couples. It remains essential to provide continuous counselling to serodiscordant couples and to associate systematic STI screening in all cases of HIV/ AIDS serodiscordance.
Cultural Dimensions Origins: Measures for Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance

This study seeks to develop a measure method of national culture based on cultural origins. Two cultural dimensions are studied; power distance (POWD) and uncertainty avoidance (UAV). Methodology used is SEM method under LISREL approach. Findings show that environmental factors are able to determine cultural dimensions studied in our sample countries. Nevertheless, we found that cultural dimensions indicators’ have evolved and are no longer the same identified in prior researches suggesting that environment evolution’ sleeds to the creation of new subsistence means and new cultural needs.
Reducing AVX-Induced Frequency Variation With Core Specialization

Recent Intel server processors temporarily reduce their frequency when many AVX2 or AVX-512 SIMD instructions are executed. The frequency change is only reverted two milliseconds after the system has stopped executing such instructions. Before this time, any non-vectorized (and potentially unrelated) code which could execute at higher frequencies is slowed down. The effect on overall performance depends on the specific workload and is hard to predict. We describe a scenario where vectorizing one component with AVX-512 instructions improves performance by 10% for one workload and reduces performance by 10% for another workload. If only some of the cores of a system execute such vectorized code, the frequency effect is limited to those cores. We propose a scheduling algorithm as well as a mechanism to intercept problematic code sections so that threads executing vectorized code are transparently migrated to a small subset of the cores. While our work is still in progress, we describe a partial implementation which is able to reduce the negative performance impact of AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions by over 70%.
Treatment of Childhood Obesity Based on Brazilian Dietary Guidelines Plus Energy Restriction (PAPPAS HUPE Study): Protocol for a Randomized Clinical Trial (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The Food Guide for the Brazilian Population relies on natural or minimally processed foods mainly of plant origin such as beans and rice with low oil, salt, and sugar content and limited consumption of ultraprocessed foods. Reduction of ultraprocessed foods improves diet quality and energy consumption. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention for the treatment of obesity in children, with counseling based on the Brazilian Food Guide plus control of total energy intake. METHODS A parallel, randomized clinical trial will include children aged 7 to 12 years. Randomization will be performed in blocks of 10 individuals using computer-generated random sequence numbers. Both the control and intervention groups will participate in 6 standardized educational activities based on the 10 steps of the Brazilian Food Guide. These activities will be conducted at the University Hospital Toy Library, located in the pediatric outpatient clinic. For the intervention group, in addition to the educational activities, an individualized food plan based on the nutritional recommendations of the Brazilian Society of Pediatrics will be prescribed and discussed with the mothers and fathers. The primary outcome of the study will be variations in body mass index, and secondary outcomes will include analysis of insulin resistance, blood pressure, body fat percentage, and waist and neck circumference. RESULTS This project was funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development in December 2017 (grant no 408333/2017-0). Recruitment began in August 2018 and by September 2019, we had enrolled the 101 participants. In addition to the patients referred by the national system of regulation, recruitment was made by medical outpatient referral and external indication. This is an ongoing study. We expect the results to be published in November 2020. CONCLUSIONS At the end of the project, in case of a positive result, a protocol for the treatment of obesity based on the Brazilian Food Guide will be proposed to the Unified Health System. A successful method to reduce childhood obesity is expected. CLINICALTRIAL Brazilian Registry of Clinical Trials RBR-3st5sn; http://www.ensaiosclinicos. gov.br/rg/RBR-3st5sn INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT DERR1-10.2196/16170