Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A MOTIVATED METHOD FOR DETECTION OF DISTORTED TRAFFIC SIGN BOARD IMAGES

:In human general activities the movement from one place to another place is an important aspect. The use of vehicles is a main resource for the movement of the humans from one place to other place. It requires the person who is driving must be capable of handling the vehicle and also should have the knowledge regarding road driving rules. In accordance with this , traffic sign boards are displayed across the road side to avoid the collision on the roads. Detection of these sign board meaning is an important aspect in the maintenance of the road collision. If the user who is driving understands the sign , than the collision can be reduced significantly. Hence a traffic sign recognition system is introduced for the user who doesn’t know the meaning of sign exactly. The system detects the sign board based on the features like shape and colour and later classifies the sign based on the Multilayer perception (MLP) classifier to give the result to user after interpretation.
Sodium and Potassium Accumulation by Greasewood and Hopsage Leaves

During their annual leaf-retention periods in 1963, greasewood and hopsage leaves accumulated large amounts of sodium and potassium, respectively. Hopsage leaves abscised in mid-July after soil moisture in the upper meter of soil profile became depleted. Leaf drop was preceded by about 6 weeks of lowered leaf moisture content. Greasewood leaves persisted throughout the summer months without gross changes in leaf moisture content, indicating that greasewood was obtaining water from a deep water table. Mineral uptake, leaf abscission, and the subsequent decay of leaves resulted in increased sodium and potassium content in the soils beneath greasewood and hopsage, respectively. Cheatgrass plants growing adjacent to greasewood canopies had a higher sodium content than those growing adjacent to hopsage canopies or in adjacent intershrub areas
A New Dasineura Species (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) Associated with Symplocos cochinchinensis (Loureiro) (Symplocaceae) in Japan

Recently, a gall midge induces leaf bud galls on Symplocos cochinchinensis (Loureiro) (Symplocaceae) was found on Tanegashima Island, Kagoshima, Japan. Based on morphological observation, the gall midge (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) was clarified to be an undescribed species of the genus Dasineura Rondani (Lasiopteridi, Dasineurini). The species is distinguishable from other congeners by its unique undivided female 8th tergite, which is shorter than the 7th, in contrast with other Dasineura species possess longitudinally divided 8th tergite longer than the 7th. The new species, Dasineura symplocos Elsayed and Tokuda n. sp. , is the first example of Dasineura species associated with Symplocaceae.
Substrate binding to mononuclear metallo‐β‐lactamase from Bacillus cereus

Structure and dynamics of substrate binding (cefotaxime) to the catalytic pocket of the mononuclear zinc‐β‐lactamase from Bacillus cereus are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. The calculations, which are based on the hydrogen‐bond pattern recently proposed by Dal Peraro et al. (J Biol Inorg Chem 2002; 7:704–712), are carried out for both the free and the complexed enzyme. In the resting state, active site pattern and temperature B‐factors are in agreement with crystallographic data. In the complexed form, cefotaxime is accommodated into a stable orientation in the catalytic pocket within the nanosecond timescale, interacting with the enzyme zinc‐bound hydroxide and the surrounding loops. The β‐lactam ring remains stable and very close to the hydroxide nucleophile agent, giving a stable representation of the productive enzyme‐substrate complex. Proteins 2004;54:000–000. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Ab initio and density functional theory studies on selected thioaldehydes and thioketones

Ab initio and Density functional theory with three basis sets have been used to study seventeen isomers comprising of six thioaldehydes and eleven thioketones, relative stabilities of the isomers and electronic properties of the molecules are reported. The results revealed that there is an increase in C=S bond length as the number of carbon atoms increases, although C=S bond lengths for thioaldehydes are shorter than that of the corresponding thioketones analogues. Generally, thioketone isomers are more thermodynamically stable than that of the corresponding thioaldehydes. The rearrangement of thioaldehydes to thioketones would be feasible and exothermic since both ∆G ̊ and ∆H ̊ have negative values. C NMR of thiocarbonyl carbon atoms and UV-visible absorption (λmax) showed similar trend when plotted against C=S bond length, thus the electronic properties and chemical reactivities of the molecules would be predominantly governed by C=S group. © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved ARTICLE INF O Artic le h istory: Received: 8 August 2013; Received in revised form: 10 May 2014; Accepted: 20 May 2014;
A High Performance Adaptive Clustering Scheme with a non-Handshake Size Control Mechanism in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), different from mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), has characteristics including the high mobility of nodes (vehicles), the frequent changes of network topology especially under highway scenarios, the delay sensitivity and so on. Consequently, the clustering scheme proposed in MANETs is not always suitable for VANETs. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive clustering scheme for VANETs (ACSnH), focusing on three important aspects: 1) the exchange period of Hello packet; 2) the cluster head selection; 3) the size control of cluster member during cluster formation process. We adaptively adjust the period for the Hello packet according to vehicle state and link lifetime to reduce the overhead of clustering management and the probability of packet collision; we formulate the metric of cluster head selection by a weighted sum of contributions from the relative distance, relative velocity, and link lifetime; we optimize the formation process of clustering by a non-handshake size control mechanism which can directly control the size of cluster member without the help of cluster head. By comparing our ACSnH with other algorithms under different scenarios, we find that our ACSnH can realize an outstanding performance in terms of the cluster stability, re-clustering delay and clustering overhead.
Evaluate the timing of resumption of business for the states of New York, New Jersey and California via a pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission model of COVID-19

The United States has the highest numbers of confirmed cases and death of COVID-19, where confirmed cases took up nearly half in the hot spot states of New York, New Jersey and California. The workforce in these states was required to work from home except for essential services to minimize the risk of the spread of COVID-19. Premature reopening of economy will lead to broader spread of COVID-19, while the opposite situation would cause greater loss of economy. We proposed an epidemic compartmental model in considering the pre-symptomatic transmission and asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19, to estimate the numbers of unidentified infected cases and simulate the possible outcomes of resumption of economy at different forthcoming Mondays. The states of New York and New Jersey were not recommended to reopen the economy before May 18 since it may increase 22.44% and 60.18% for the numbers of cumulative confirmed cases if the second wave of the infection would happen, respectively. While that may be feasible for California to reopen business on May 11 if appropriate control measures for prevention of the second wave of the infection are implemented, because of the less benefit for delaying reopening the economy and the relatively smaller magnitude of Outbreak of COVID-19.
Psoriasis is associated with elevated gut IL-1Î± and intestinal microbiome alterations: results of a cross-sectional study from Central Asia.

Objective: Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory condition that predominantly affects the skin and is associated with extracutaneous disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease and arthritis. Changes in gut immunology and microbiota are important drivers of proinflammatory disorders and could play a role in the pathogenesis of psoriasis. Therefore, we explored whether psoriasis in a Central Asian cohort is associated with alterations in select immunological markers and/or microbiota of the gut. Setting: We assessed correlates of psoriasis in a community from Kazakhstan. Participants: Outpatients, aged 30-45 years, of a dermatology clinic presenting with plaque, guttate or palmoplantar psoriasis (n=20), and age-sex matched subjects without psoriasis (n=20). Design: We undertook a cross-sectional study of stool samples. Stool supernatant was subjected to multiplex ELISA to assess the concentration of 47 cytokines and immunoglobulins and to 16S rRNA gene sequencing to characterize microbial diversity in both psoriasis+ participants and controls. Results: The psoriasis+ group tended to have higher concentrations of most analytes in stool (29/47=61.7%) and gut IL-1 was significantly elevated (4.19-fold, p=0.007) compared to controls. Psoriasis was associated with alterations in gut Firmicutes, including elevated Faecalibacterium and decreased Oscillibacter and Roseburia abundance, but no association was observed between gut microbial diversity or Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratios and disease status. Conclusions: Psoriasis may be associated with gut inflammation and dysbiosis. Studies are warranted to explore the use of gut microbiome-focused therapies in the management of psoriasis in this under-studied population.
Elemental concentrations in aerosol samples determined by Artificial Neural Networks from PIXE spectrum

An application of artificial neural networks, ANN, has been performed to determine elemental concentrations in atmospheric aerosol samples. A feed-forward ANN was used in the learning phase. The network was trained with a back propagation algorithm in order to obtain the elemental concentrations in these samples. The inputs to the ANN analysis were experimental data obtained from the PIXE irradiations plus one from each element in the spectrum obtained directly in real time. The ANN output was the elemental concentration. A set of thirty seven PIXE spectra from aerosols collected in Santiago, Chile, provided the raw data which were used in the ANN application. Following a random selection, thirty spectra were used in the training phase, while the rest was used to test the ANN capability in the determination of unknown concentrations. Several networks of similar topology were independently trained for each one of the five elements considered in this study, Al, Si, S, K, and Fe. These networks operated in parallel, thus allowing a simultaneous determination of the elemental concentrations. The results were in good agreement with those obtained by standard PIXE analysis. This ANN application to the study of atmospheric aerosols has proved to be reliable and easy to extend to a large number of samples of similar characteristics.
Contributions to music semantic analysis and its acceleration techniques

Digitalized music production exploded in the past decade. Huge amount of data drives the development of effective and efficient methods for automatic music analysis and retrieval. This thesis focuses on performing semantic analysis of music, in particular mood and genre classification, with low level and mid level features since the mood and genre are among the most natural semantic concepts expressed by music perceivable by audiences. In order to delve semantics from low level features, feature modeling techniques like K-means and GMM based BoW and Gaussian super vector have to be applied. In this big data era, the time and accuracy efficiency becomes a main issue in the low level feature modeling. Our first contribution thus focuses on accelerating k-means, GMM and UBM-MAP frameworks, involving the acceleration on single machine and on cluster of workstations. To achieve the maximum speed on single machine, we show that dictionary learning procedures can elegantly be rewritten in matrix format that can be accelerated efficiently by high performance parallel computational infrastructures like multi-core CPU, GPU. In particular with GPU support and careful tuning, we have achieved two magnitudes speed up compared with single thread implementation. Regarding data set which cannot fit into the memory of individual computer, we show that the k-means and GMM training procedures can be divided into map-reduce pattern which can be executed on Hadoop and Spark cluster. Our matrix format version executes 5 to 10 times faster on Hadoop and Spark clusters than the state-of-the-art libraries. Beside signal level features, mid-level features like harmony of music, the most natural semantic given by the composer, are also important since it contains higher level of abstraction of meaning beyond physical oscillation. Our second contribution thus focuses on recovering note information from music signal with musical knowledge. This contribution relies on two levels of musical knowledge: instrument note sound and note co-occurrence/transition statistics. In the instrument note sound level, a note dictionary is firstly built i from Logic Pro 9. With the musical dictionary in hand, we propose a positive constraint matching pursuit (PCMP) algorithm to perform the decomposition. In the inter-note level, we propose a two stage sparse decomposition approach integrated with note statistical information. In frame level decomposition stage, note co-occurrence probabilities are embedded to guide atom selection and to build sparse multiple candidate graph providing backup choices for later selections. In the global optimal path searching stage, note transition probabilities are incorporated. Experiments on multiple data sets show that our proposed approaches outperform the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and recall for note recovery and music mood/genre classification.
Modeling species distributions by breaking the assumption of self‐similarity

Species distributions are commonly measured as the number of sites, or geographic grid cells occupied. These data may then be used to model species distributions and to examine patterns in both intraspecific and interspecific distributions. Harte et al. (1999) used a model based on a bisection rule and assuming self-similarity in species distributions to do so. However, this approach has also been criticized for several reasons. Here we show that the self-similarity in species distributions breaks down according to a power relationship with spatial scales, and we therefore adopt a power-scaling assumption for modeling species occupancy distributions. The outcomes of models based on these two assumptions (self-similar and power-scaling) have not previously been compared. Based on Harte's bisection method and an occupancy probability transition model under these two assumptions (self-similar and power-scaling), we compared the scaling pattern of occupancy (also known as the area-of-occupancy) and the spatial distribution of species. The two assumptions of species distribution lead to a relatively similar interspecific occupancy frequency distribution pattern, although the spatial distribution of individual species and the scaling pattern of occupancy differ significantly. The bimodality in occupancy frequency distributions that is common in species communities, is confirmed to a result for certain mathematical and statistical properties of the probability distribution of occupancy. The results thus demonstrate that the use of the bisection method in combination with a power-scaling assumption is more appropriate for modeling species distributions than the use of a self-similarity assumption, particularly at fine scales.
Experimental evidence of 'floaters' in two isolated populations of an Afrotropical forest bird

We studied the presence of 'floaters', i.e. non-territorial individuals roaming occupied territories awaiting future breeding opportunities, in two separate White-starred Robin (Pogonocichla stellata) populations at the Taita Hills, Kenya, using a removal experiment. Previous vegetation analyses at this site had showed that 'population Ngangao' occupied a high-quality forest fragment, and 'population Chawia' occupied a low-quality one. Using a combination of radio telemetry, dawn calls, visual observations and targetted playbacks in one 16ha plot per fragment, 52 individuals of different territorial status were identified. Ngangao hosted 14 resident and 13 floating males, while Chawia hosted eight residents and two floaters. Population Chawia (but not Ngangao) hosted unmated territorial males. Floating males in Ngangao took over three of seven (i.e. 43%) vacated territories within a few days of the residents' removal. In both populations, no resident neighbouring males expanded their territories or moved to take over the vacant territories following experimental removal of resident males. These results suggest that (1) territorial behaviour is an important factor limiting the number of breeders in Population Ngangao; (2) other factors such as poor habitat quality and female scarcity, most likely associated with the lower bird densities in Population Chawia, can limit numbers of breeders before territorial exclusion becomes a concern.
An Evaluation of Techniques Commonly Used to Quantitatively Determine the Bacterial Population on Chicken Carcasses

Abstract FIVE techniques are currently in use for the quantitative determinations of bacterial numbers on the surface of chicken carcasses. These methods are the cotton swab, alginate swab, spot plate, tissue sample and carcass rinse techniques. Gunderson et al. (1954) compared the cotton swab and spot plate techniques and found them to be quantitatively similar. Ayres et al. (1956) found that there was a consistent relationship between the bacterial numbers removed by the cotton swab technique and those recovered from the rinse technique. These workers made the assumption that either method was acceptable but preferred the cotton swab method because it was more convenient and did not give underestimates. Mallman et al. (1958) reported that cotton swab and rinse counts paralleled each other at the various levels of contamination but the cotton swab counts were more variable. From these results Mallman et al. concluded that the rinse technique is a more …
Measuring the Relationship between Transformational Leadership and Employees' Job Engagement in Hotels

This paper examines the relationship between transformational leadership dimensions and employees' job engagement in Cairo five- star hotels. It explores how participants of employees deem transformational leader and how this leader helps them to keep vigorous, dedicated, and absorbed at work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of supervisors spending time teaching, coaching, developing their employees, and how this makes the employees more willing to dedicate extra effort and be more engaged in the job performance with the aim of producing world class levels of innovation, enhancing service quality and generating competitive advantage.
A TAXONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL STUDY OF DIATOMS FROM FRESHWATER HABITATS IN THE FALKLAND ISLANDS, SOUTH ATLANTIC

1. The diatom flora of the Falkland Islands was investigated by sampling twenty-eight representative lake, pond and stream habitats. Diatom assemblages were moderately diverse and dominated by benthic taxa characteristic of oligotrophic soft waters. 2. Particularly the Fragilarioid and Achnanthoid taxa possessed unusually small valves and this condition is thought to be favoured by the prevailing harsh environmental conditions. 3. Eleven new diatom taxa are described and several new combinations are proposed but it is likely that further research will show that at least some of the new taxa will co-occur, in Patagonia and elsewhere, rather than be endemic in the Falklands archipelago. 4. Taxon richness varied strongly between sites but only weak trends were indicated between total number of taxa, number of regional endemic taxa, or rare taxa and habitat complexity, habitat size or water pH (diversity models were not used because dispersal and immigration rate data are lacking). 5. Cosmopolitan taxa were most common but a significant portion (approximately one third) of the assessed flora was attributed to taxa with regionally restricted distributions. Southern South American, Subantarctic and North American elements were present but probably very few taxa are entirely restricted to the Falkland Islands. 6. Macro- and microecological factors determine both the composition and numbers of taxa in a diatom sample. The species assemblages recorded are thought to reflect near pristine aquatic conditions at all the Falkland sites (palaeolimnogical techniques are nevertheless required to test hypotheses about native and non-native taxa). 7. Irrespective of difficulties in fitting diatom data to species diversity models, the occurrence and abundance of diatom taxa in these representative samples provide a unique site-specific biological signature that reflects water quality and physical habitat as well as regional flora attributes. 8. Routine diatom analysis for ecological purposes requires accurate taxonomy and consistency is of paramount importance but, compared with biogeographic and systematic studies, a lower level of precision is probably adequate. 9. Monitoring diatom communities offers one way of perceiving environmental change and global warming is thought to pose the greatest threat to the biological integrity of the inland waters of the Falkland Islands.
Top NOTCH targets: notch signaling in cancer

The evolutionarily conserved Notch signaling pathway controls diverse events such as cell fate determination, proliferation, apoptosis, and stem cell maintenance. Dysregulation of this pathway has been implicated as a causative event in multiple cancers, including T‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T‐ALL), where mutation of Notch1 occurs in >50% of patients. Although mutation has not been observed in solid tumors, changes in expression of ligands and receptors, as well as pathway modulators, may play a role in pathogenesis. More recent evidence suggests that Notch signaling is also critical in tumor angiogenesis. We review the data that support the development of therapeutics to target the Notch pathway for the treatment of cancer. Drug Dev Res 69:319–328, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Association of an Anti-inflammatory Cytokine Gene IL4 Polymorphism with the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Korean Populations

Chronic inflammation has been implicated as one of the important etiological factors in insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). To investigate the role of anti-inflammatory cytokines in the development of T2DM, we conducted a case-control study to assess the association between IL4/IL4R polymorphisms and disease risk. We firstly identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) at IL4 and IL4RA loci by sequencing the loci in Korean participants. Case-control studies were conducted by genotyping the SNPs in 474 T2DM cases and 470 non-diabetic controls recruited from community-based cohorts. Replication of the associated signals was performed in 1,216 cases and 1,352 controls. We assessed effect of IL4-IL4RA interaction on T2DM using logistic regression method. The functional relevance of the SNP associated with disease risk was determined using a reporter expression assay. We identified a strong association between the IL4 promoter variant rs2243250 and T2DM risk (OR=0.77; 95% CI, 0.67∼0.88; p=1.65×10 －4 in the meta-analysis). The reporter gene expression assay demonstrated that the presence of rs2243250 might affect the gene expression level with ∼1.5-fold allele difference. Our findings contribute to the identification of IL4 as a T2D susceptibility locus, further supporting the role of anti-inflammatory cytokines in T2DM disease development.