Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carrying a logger reduces escape flight speed in a passerine bird, but relative logger mass may be a misleading measure of this flight performance detriment

The recent boost in bird migration studies following the development of various tracking devices raised awareness of how detrimental attaching devices can be for animals. Such effects can occur during migration, but also immediately post‐release if the device impairs escape flight performance and, consequently, the bird's ability to evade predators. In this study, we investigated the effect of carrying a device on the escape flight speed and aerodynamic force production in a migratory passerine. We recorded upward‐directed escape flights of 15 male blackcaps. Each individual was tested without a tag, and when equipped with three different leg‐loop dummy tags with masses representing around 3%, 5%, and 7% of their body mass. The experiment was designed such that all individuals passed through all treatments in a randomized order. We found that two factors affected flight speed in roughly equal amounts: first, tagged escape flights had lower flight speeds compared to the control flights, irrespective of tag mass. Second, we found an effect of the total mass, that is, the sum of the masses of the individual bird and of the tag, with heavier birds being slower. In contrast, flight speed was not correlated with relative tag mass in percentage of body mass, the metric commonly used in ethical guidelines for tag attachment. Aerodynamic flight force production also depended on total mass, with heavier birds producing higher forces. But these flight forces did not differ between flights with or without a tag. We conclude that, when tagging birds, it is misleading to choose heavy individuals for tagging in order to minimize the tag mass as a percentage of body mass. This is particularly relevant in species for which body mass is not necessarily related to size, like migratory birds that accumulate large fat reserves. The lower escape speed in “tagged” flights could not be explained by differences in net flight force production, because these did not differ between flights with and without a tag. This suggests that the tag also affected pre‐flight take‐off dynamics, possibly due to a leg harness‐induced reduction in leg push‐off performance.
The implementation of EU cohesion policy in Greece, 2007-2013: A mid-term assessment

Το παρόν άρθρο eπιχeιρeί να eντοπίσeι τους παράγοντeς που eπηρέασαν την υλοποίηση των Προγραμμάτων που eντάσσονται στο Eθνικό Στρατηγικό Πλαίσιο Αναφοράς (EΣΠΑ) της Eλλάδας και, ακολούθως, να eρμηνeύσeι και να αποτιμήσeι τις πρόσφατeς αναθe- ωρητικές απόπeιρeς. Η σχeτική ανάλυση eμπνέeται από την προσέγγιση του ιστορικού θeσμισμού και θeμeλιώνeται σe ένα eρμηνeυτικό σχήμα το οποίο βασίζeται στη διπλή διάκριση ανάμeσα σe συγκυριακούς και σe συστημικούς παράγοντeς αφeνός και ανά- μeσα σe eξωγeνeίς και eγχώριους παράγοντeς αφeτέρου.
Trends in penaeid shrimp landings by sona boats at Visakhapatnam Fishing Harbour, Andhra Pradesh

Sona boats operate mostly in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal up to sand heads. The boats (13-15 m OAL) worthy to conduct voyage fishing for 10-20 days exploit resources upto a depth of 100 m. The present study analysed the trends in penaeid shrimp landings by sona boats at Visakhapatnam Fishing Harbour, for the period from 2001 to 2010. During the period, annual fishing effort ranged from 4,77,710 to 16,31,507 h with an average of 10,15, 230 h. Annual penaeid shrimp catch varied from 1,409 to 7,496 t, average being 4,892 t. Average catch per hour (CPH) was estimated at 4.81 kg. Annual penaeid shrimp contribution from the sona boats to the total fish landings was 10.2 to 22% (average 15.9). Both fishing effort and penaeid shrimp catch showed increasing trend during the period. Penaeid shrimp fishery was supported by 14 genera/species dominated by Metapenaeus monoceros followed by M. dobsoni. Mean annual species composition and CPH for each species were computed for two span, first being 2001-2005 and the second during 2006-2010. The CPH for the penaeid shrimps increased by 1.5% from span-1 to span-2. CPH for smaller shrimp species declined whereas increased for commercial species. Expected catch for each year estimated by Schaefer production model (CEDA; r2=0.72) showed underexploitation during 2001 and 2004; optimum state of exploitation for four years during 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 and overexploitation for four years during 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2010. In terms of total fish landings, 2001 and 2002 showed underexploitation, optimum state during six years i.e., 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010; while overexploitation during 2004 and 2005. Considering the exploitation rate of both penaeid shrimps and total fish, by sona boats, the study suggests restriction of fishing effort at the 2009-2010 level to ensure sustainability of the resources.
Multi-Rate Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev Time Stepping for Parabolic Equations on Adaptively Refined Meshes

In this thesis, we develop an explicit multi-rate time stepping method for solving parabolic equations on a one dimensional adaptively refined mesh. Parabolic equations are characterized by their stiffness and as a result are usually solved using implicit time stepping schemes [16]. However, implicit schemes have the disadvantage that they can be expensive in higher dimensions or complicated to implement on adaptive or otherwise non-uniform meshes. Moreover, for coupled systems of parabolic equations, it can be difficult to achieve the expected order of accuracy without using sophisticated operator splitting techniques. For these reasons, we seek to exploit the properties of stabilized explicit methods for parabolic equations. In particular, we use the Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev (RKC) methods, a family of explicit Runge-Kutta methods, with numerical stability regions that extend far into the left half plane [12, 15, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28]. A central goal of this thesis is to use a second order RKC scheme to numerically solve parabolic equations on a one dimensional adaptively refined finite volume mesh. To make our implementation efficient, we design a time stepping algorithm in which time step sizes are chosen to respect the local mesh widths. This time stepping process requires communication between the RKC stages on different refinement levels. By linearly interpolating in time between the stage values, we obtain the ghost cell values for the finite volume scheme on each level. To our knowledge, this approach to adaptively refining in time, commonly referred to as a “multi-rate v time stepping” strategy, combined with RKC time stepping method has not been previously implemented. We develop our multi-rate algorithm on a one dimensional statically refined mesh using the second order finite volume scheme to numerically solve the heat or diffusion equation on each grid stored in a hierarchy of meshes. Using the “method of manufactured solutions”, we demonstrate that our method is second order accurate, and for our test problem, the multi-rate scheme requires only about 20% of the computational work required by the uniformly refined mesh at the same resolution. The algorithm we develop manages the time stepping between the refinement levels only, and so extends directly to higher dimensional problems. Future work in this direction includes applying the new multi-rate RKC time stepping scheme to biological pattern formations or crystal growth in the 2D ForestClaw code [7] on parallel machines.
Hypoallergenic and immunomodulatory prospects of pepsin-educed soy protein hydrolysates

Article history: Received: September 28, 2017 Accepted: July 9, 2018 Consumption of soy protein and its products has increased significantly due to the increasing costs of animal proteins, esoteric supplement requirements, and several functional health benefits. Recently, the need to upgrade the functional features of soy protein led to new technologies including chemical and enzymatic processes. Hypoallergenic formulas and other immunomodulatory products are crucial targets of enzyme technology. Several proteases are used to achieve varying physiological properties and degrees of hydrolysis of soy protein, but reports on the use of pepsin are few, whereas it is among the paramount digestive proteases in the gastrointestinal tract of man. Bitterness and digestibility of soy protein hydrolysates have always been of concern, and there are ways of evading them. This review examines the potentials of pepsin-educed soy protein hydrolysates in relation to immunomodulatory and functional food products.
Correlation between the parameters quantified by chest low-dose CT scan and airflow limitation examined by spirometry

Objective The purpose of the current study was to deternmine the correlation between the parameters quantified by chest low-dose CT scan (LDCT) and airflow limitation examined by spirometry.Methods This study included 48 patients above 40 years old and with smoking history who underwent LDCT and spirometry on the same day.The regression model was generated on the base of the LDCT value which correlated best to airflow limitation using ROC curve.Results With age,gender and body mass index adjusted,EV and El significantly correlated negatively with FEV1,FEV1％predieted,FEV1/FVC and TLC％ predicted (P＜0.05),but had no correlation with RV/TLC％ predicted ( P＞0.05). The regression model were FEV1/FVC％=94.17+25.31 X＜gender-0.58×age-10.84×In (EI (％)),FEV1％predicted=141.76-0.78×age-14.07×In (EI(％)). The best LDCT value for airflow limitation estimation was EI.Conclusions El may be used to estimate whether airflow limitation exited and to calculate its severity by regression model.LDCT might be a new way for early detection of COPD. Key words: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Chest low-dose CT scan; Emphysema index
Role of conspecifics and personal experience on behavioral avoidance of contaminated flowers by bumblebees

Abstract Pollinators use multiple cues whilst foraging including direct cues from flowers and indirect cues from other pollinators. The use of indirect social cues is common in social insects, such as honeybees and bumblebees, where a social environment facilitates the ability to use such cues. Bumblebees use cues to forage on flowers according to previous foraging experiences. Flowers are an essential food source for pollinators but also pose a high risk of parasite infection through the shared use of flowers leading to parasite spillover. Nevertheless, bumblebees have evolved behavioral defense mechanisms to limit parasite infection by avoiding contaminated flowers. Mechanisms underlying the avoidance of contaminated flowers by bumblebees are poorly understood. Bumblebees were recorded having the choice to forage on non-contaminated flowers and flowers contaminated by a trypan osome gut parasite, Crithidia bombi. The use of different treatments with presence or absence of conspecifics on both contaminated and non-contaminated flowers allowed to investigate the role of social visual cues on their pathogen avoidance behavior. Bumblebees are expected to use social visual cues to avoid contaminated flowers. Our study reveals that the presence of a conspecific on flowers either contaminated or not does not help bumblebee foragers avoiding contaminated flowers. Nevertheless, bumblebees whereas gaining experience tend to avoid their conspecific when placed on contaminated flower and copy it when on the non-contaminated flower. Our experiment suggests a detrimental impact of floral scent on disease avoidance behavior.
Comparison of dinical efficacy of femoral sultrochanteric fractures using PHILOS and TEN approaches in children

Objective To investigate the radiographic and functional outcomes of PHILOS and TEN in treatment of subtrochanteric femur fractures in children.Methods Between Aug 2004 and Aug 2009,42 children aging 8 to 15 years associated with subtrochanteric femur fractures underwent therapy.Among them 17 cases were treated using PHILOS and 25 cases were tremed with TEN approach respectively.Results All patients were followed up for 24 to 72 months,in which PHILOS approach follow up was averagely 37.5 months and TEN was 44.8 months.The fracture healing time、early radiological outcomes ( evaluated by Beaty criterion),late radiological outcomes ( evaluated by Theologis criterion) and Sanders scoring were presented similar results between two groups (P＞0.05),while significant difference could be seen in operation time and blood loss (P＜0.05 ). Conclusions Both PHILOS and TEN approaches can bring better clinical efficacy to children with femoral subtrochanteric fractures and no differences are found in them.The exact approach that is employed in practice should be referred to the fracture type,expectation of children and their parents,as well as the proficiency by surgeon. Key words: Subtrochanteric fractures; Internal fixators; Fracture fixation, internal; Child
Modification of the existing design of a car jack

This paper analyzes the modification of the existing motor screw jack by incorporating an electric motor in the screw in order to make load lifting easier. In this modified design, the power screw is rotated through its connecting gear with the pinion gear when electrical power flows through the cigarette lighter receptacle connected to the motor, plugged to the automobile 12 V battery source to generate power for the prime mover (motor), which transmits its rotating speed to the pinion gear meshing with the bigger gear connected to the power screw to be rotated with required speed reduction and increased torque to drive the power screw. The significance and purpose of this work is to modify the existing car jack in order to make the operation easier, safer and more reliable in order to reduce health risks especially back ache problems associated with doing work in a bent or squatting position for a long period of time. The modified car jack is easy to use by pregnant women or whoever had problem with the vehicle tyres along the road. The designed motorised jack will also save time and requires less human energy to operate. The design when adopted will effectively curb the problems associated with Ergonomics - which is a fundamental concept of design process.
EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF A MEAN PRESSURE GRADIENT ON TURBULENT WALL PRES- SURE FLUCTUATIONS

Wall-pressure fluctuations beneath a turbulent boundary layer have been measured in a closed wind tunnel with an inclined upper wall, in order to impose an external mean pressure gradient. Three flow configurations have been studied : the classical zero pressure gradient case (ZPG), and the case of favorable and adverse pressure gradients (noted FPG and APG, respectively). The input mean velocity was varied from 10 to 70m/s (10 to 100m/s for ZPG). A specially designed rotating linear array of 63 remote microphones and a reference pinhole microphone have been used for unsteady wall-pressure measurements. Point-spectra and cross-spectra between the microphones of the array have been measured. 2D wavenumber-frequency spectra have then been deduced from a spatial Fourier transform of the cross-spectra. Typical results for frequency spectra and 1D and 2D wavenumber spectra are shown, illustrating the effect of an external mean pressure gradient.
Interaction of Two-Level Atoms and Photons in a One Dimensional Cavity Containing a Slab of Metamaterial

Since the realization of metamaterials in 2000, much interest has been devoted to the study of light propagation in the presence of such materials. In the previous treatments the light is taken as a classical entity and its quantum nature has been suppressed. In the present article, therefore, a quantum mechanical investigation of the behavior of light (photons), emitted by a two-level atom inside an ideal one dimensional cavity which includes slab of metamaterial is reported. Spontaneously emitted photons inside the cavity form patterns of interference which indicate the presence of metamaterial. Effects of metamaterial on the patterns are also reported.
Disking and prescribed burning for loblolly pine regeneration

-Disking and three summer prescribed burn­ ing series were compared in the Virginia coastal plain on the ba�is of cost and effectiveness in regenerating loblolly pine (Pi nus taeda L.). Disking cost about four times more than the longest and most expensive series of summer prescribed burns. Seedling stocking was ade­ quate for all site preparation treatments at 2 years, but significantly fewer seed were needed to produce one seedling in the three-summer-burn treatment than in any of the other treatments. The same treatment was also best in holding down crown coverage and size of the small hardwood competition. None of the treatments appeared to have a lasting effect on the shrub component of the understory vegetation. LOBLOLLY PINE (Pinus taeda L.)-the top-ranking commercial timber species in the Southern United States and the second most important timber species in the world-is probably the South's greatest renewable resource. Because of its excellent regenerative charac­ teristics, its competitive ability, its rapid growth, and its steady market demand, loblolly pine lends itself to intensive management, making it the leading tree in the South in this respect (13). Consequently, landown­ ers managing this species are continually seeking cul­ tural methods that either reduce costs, increase pro­ ductivity, or perhaps do both. This paper reports on a study designed to evaluate several site treatment mea­ sures used in regenerating loblolly pine in the Virginia and Carolina coastal plain. Past research has shown that seed germination of loblolly is best with a mineral soil seedbed ( 4, 8), and that loblolly stands in the coastal plain require some seedbed preparation for consistently successful natural regeneration (11 ) . Reducing the size of shrubs and THE AUTHORS are, respectively, silviculturist and principal sil­ viculturist, Southern Forest Expt. Sta. , Forest Service, U. S. Dept. Agric. , Charleston, S. C. 548 small and large hardwoods also lessens early competi­ tion and promotes rapid pine seedling growth (14). In the mid-1950's heavy equipment (largely heavy-duty disks) was widely and successfully used in the Virginia coastal plain to prepare sites for seeding and planting, but prescribed burning was not practiced in that area. Work in South Carolina by Chaiken (2) and Lotti (5, 6) showed that a series of fires-a winter fire fol­ lowed by a succession of annual summer fires before the harvest cut-was effective in reducing understory hardwoods and shrubs and in preparing seedbeds for natural regeneration at a very low cost per acre. This suggested the need in Virginia for comparing disking and burning on a scale large enough to compare costs and the effectiveness of the two methods.
Tal: A Synchronised Multi-Speaker Corpus of Ultrasound Tongue Imaging, Audio, and Lip Videos

We present the Tongue and Lips corpus (TaL), a multi-speaker corpus of audio, ultrasound tongue imaging, and lip videos. TaL consists of two parts: TaL1 is a set of six recording sessions of one professional voice talent, a male native speaker of English; TaL80 is a set of recording sessions of 81 native speakers of English without voice talent experience. Overall, the corpus contains 24 hours of parallel ultrasound, video, and audio data, of which approximately 13.5 hours are speech. This paper describes the corpus and presents benchmark results for the tasks of speech recognition, speech synthesis (articulatory-to-acoustic mapping), and automatic synchronisation of ultrasound to audio. The TaL corpus is publicly available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Robustness to Missing Features using Hierarchical Clustering with Split Neural Networks

The problem of missing data has been persistent for a long time and poses a major obstacle in machine learning and statistical data analysis. Past works in this field have tried using various data imputation techniques to fill in the missing data, or training neural networks (NNs) with the missing data. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach that clusters similar input features together using hierarchical clustering and then trains proportionately split neural networks with a joint loss. We evaluate this approach on a series of benchmark datasets and show promising improvements even with simple imputation techniques. We attribute this to learning through clusters of similar features in our model architecture.
Towards Learning Controllable Representations of Physical Systems

Learned representations of dynamical systems reduce dimensionality, potentially supporting downstream reinforcement learning (RL). However, no established methods predict a representation's suitability for control and evaluation is largely done via downstream RL performance, slowing representation design. Towards a principled evaluation of representations for control, we consider the relationship between the true state and the corresponding representations, proposing that ideally each representation corresponds to a unique true state. This motivates two metrics: temporal smoothness and high mutual information between true state/representation. These metrics are related to established representation objectives, and studied on Lagrangian systems where true state, information requirements, and statistical properties of the state can be formalized for a broad class of systems. These metrics are shown to predict reinforcement learning performance in a simulated peg-in-hole task when comparing variants of autoencoder-based representations.
KCWI Observations of the Extended Nebulae in Mrk 273

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) represent a critical stage in the merger-driven evolution of galaxies when active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity is common and AGN feedback is expected. We present high-sensitivity and large field-of-view integral field spectroscopy of the ULIRG Mrk 273 using new data from the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KWCI). The KCWI data capture the complex nuclear region and the two extended nebulae in the northeast (NE) and southwest (SW) to ∼20 kpc scales. Kinematics in the nuclear region show a fast, extended, bipolar outflow in the direction of the previously reported nuclear superbubbles spanning ∼5 kpc, two to three times greater than the previously reported size. The larger-scale extended nebulae on ∼20 kpc show fairly uniform kinematics with FWHM ∼ 300 km s−1 in the SW nebula and FWHM ∼ 120 km s−1 in the NE nebula. We detect for the first time high-ionization [Ne v] 3426, [O iii] 4363, and He ii 4684 emission lines in the extended NE nebula. Emission line ratios in the nuclear region correlate with the kinematic structures, with the bipolar outflow and the less collimated “outflow regions” showing distinct line ratio trends. Line ratio diagnostics of high-ionization emission lines reveal a nontrivial contribution from shock plus precursor ionization in the NE nebula and the nuclear region mixed with AGN photoionization. These data are highly constraining for models of cool ionized gas existing 20 kpc from a galactic nucleus.